“No. There weren’t any reports made before they disappeared, no,” I said.
The slightest tremor had set up in her chin. Scared? Disappointed? Heartbroken? I couldn’t tell. She looked vulnerable for the first time, but I am not beyond taking advantage of vulnerable.
“Tell me about Kyle, Marci,” I said, looking straight into her eyes.
“He’s a cop,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’ve been dating him.”
I let her eyes look past me again.
“You two have a drug thing going, him supplying, you selling to the customers over the bar?” I said.
“No,” she said instantly. “Shit, no. Kyle doesn’t do drugs. Neither do I. No.”
But she was putting him somewhere.
“Then why are you so scared, Marci?” I said. She was shaking her head and despite her effort to stop it, moisture was coming into her eyes.
“You think Kyle did it, that he killed those girls?” she said.
I shook my own head.
“No one’s sure of anything,” I said. Marci had made the jump, suspecting Kyle, for some reason. And I did not peg her as a simple, paranoid woman.
“Why? Do you think he could have?”
I was watching her eyes to see if she was working back on days or nights or conversations with Morrison, putting him in a context that she had never before imagined.
“The guy we’re talking about went out with these girls several times, knew where they lived and had some access to their apartments so he could cover up afterward,” I said.
I knew I was leading her. But I didn’t care. If my drug theory was out, I had to find something to get this Morrison guy off the list.
“Jesus,” she said and her head dropped and she slowly shook it, letting strands of her hair swing loose. After a few seconds her chin came up and it was set, back teeth tightened down.
“Kyle,” she said and nothing more.
“Do you think he’s capable?”
“Goddamn right he’s capable,” she said, now letting the anger into her voice.
“Why? Did you see anything? Did he say anything that makes you believe that?”
She shook her head.
“Too smart,” she said, again with the look over my shoulder, seeing him and all his motives and moves through a whole different looking glass. “He’d be way too smart for that.”
I still didn’t know for sure where she was coming from, but I did know there was something under the surface. Even if your boyfriend has jerked you around and done you wrong, you don’t accept the accusation that he’s a killer this easily.
“But he wasn’t smart enough with you,” I said, hoping it would come.
“No, he wasn’t,” she said, and the anger she was holding flashed into her eyes. “He raped me. And I let him.”
Christ, I thought. As a cop, I had heard the accusation of rape fly from the mouths of a lot of women. The word still stung, just the thought of it, even when it had a ring of untruth. But this wasn’t an accusation. It was an admission. Marci turned her face away from me. Some guy at the other end of the bar banged his glass on the wood. I looked down at him and the expression on my face made him return his attention to the bottom of his glass for further study.
Marci did not move, no sobs, not even a snuffle. The blonde ponytail, for Christ’s sake, made her look like a college girl. I put my hand on her shoulder and she did not flinch, just rotated the stool back to me and her eyes were dry.
“So what do you need to know?” she said.
The rape had taken place two nights before. She had not gone to the hospital, so there was no rape kit. She had come home and scrubbed herself in the shower after throwing up in the gutter. She had slept with Morrison several times over the last couple of months and it wouldn’t make any difference, she said. They’d call it consensual, she said: “And they’d be right. I let it happen.”
I kept shaking my head no. She was turning on herself, giving him a way out. I needed the strong side of her.
“Don’t go there, Marci. Husbands get convicted of raping their wives. Don’t go there,” I said. “You can file charges against him.”
I tried to make my voice sound convincing, even while she kept shaking her head no, no, no.
“Where did this happen, Marci?” I said, still thinking evidence, evidence.
“Out in the Glades,” she said. “Way out past the toll booth on the Alley.”
“All right. Do you think you could find it again, this place out in the Glades?”
She shook her head, still facing the length of the bar away from me and the other men now began to take notice.
“There’s no way I would recognize it. It was dark when he took me there. It’s an unmarked turnoff.”
“Had he taken you there before?” I asked. Every human has a pattern, does what he does in a way or in a place that he considers a comfort zone. The bars, the women running the show in those bars, the night as cover.
She nodded her head and turned away, picked up the empty shot glass but did not move to fill it.
“You’ll never find it,” she said.
I looked across at myself in the mirror. I knew I could take this all to Richards. God knows she’d be all over Morrison if she thought she could substantiate another officer raping a woman. She’d shot and killed the last one.
But I also knew the system, the PBA lawyers, the disparagement of the victim, the drawn out court process with filings and cross- filings. My own mother had taken a more direct route to justice and I’d praised her for it. If there were other victims, they too would be buried forever in the paperwork. If Morrison was our guy, it might be the best chance to come up with evidence to give those girls and their families some justice. If Morrison wasn’t our guy, at least we’d have the chance to nail his ass.
I knew I was freelancing on this. I’d have to tell Richards in either case, but not yet.
“All right. Then there’s another way,” I said. “But it would involve some risk—to you.”
She turned around and her eyes were dry and hard.
“Then I’m in.”
CHAPTER 25
I set up surveillance on Kim’s across the street in the movie house parking lot. I could see the west side door to the bar and the two south exits of the shopping center. O’Shea had borrowed an unmarked Camaro from the security firm he worked for and was on the other side with a sight line to the front door of the bar and the east and north exits. Marci was inside, setting up her boyfriend.
As far as O’Shea knew, we were tagging Morrison and the girl with the chance of finding a drug connection. That’s what I’d told him when I recruited him, but I wasn’t dumb enough not to think he was stringing the pieces together. But I’d convinced myself that even if I was wrong, I wasn’t giving him any outs. O’Shea would still be there, and the fact that he was willing to spend this much time with me was easing my doubts that he was the man Richards thought he was.
We had sketched out a plan that was simple and believable because the bulk of it was true. I’d learned a long time ago that the trick to getting confidential informants to lie well was to give them enough truth to sell it.
All I wanted Marci to do was to call Morrison, tell him that she had gotten a personal visit from the tall guy who’d been with the woman detective. When he asked her what I’d talked about, she needed to convince him she was too scared to tell him over the phone. That she needed to see him. I didn’t need to instruct her to sound scared. She was tough, she was angry, but her fear was real. She did exactly as we had planned and Morrison told her he’d be by before the end of her shift. She called me. I called O’Shea.
O’Shea brought a couple of Nextel cell phones from his job so we could stay instantly connected. It was the way business was done. A high tweet came from the cell. I clicked back.
“Your boy is here,” O’Shea’s voice came over the Nextel. “And this one’s got some balls, Freeman. He’s
in his goddamn squad car.”
“You’re sure?”
“Same guy I snapped the picture of. He parked the unit over on the other side of the lot and is walking into the front door of the bar now.”
“He’s in uniform?”
“No. Plainclothes.”
“What’s the number on the car?” I asked, and when O’Shea read it off I matched it to the number I’d scribbled down when watching the cop car in the parking lot, thinking it was security, knowing now that it was no such thing.
“When he comes back out, you’re on him; if he leaves on your side, I’ll follow and we can switch up the line.”
“I know how to work a two-man tail, Freeman.”
“Yeah, all right,” I said. I was nervous. A two-tail was not a difficult technique, but South Florida was not a big urban city like Philly where parallel streets are a common layout and traffic moves like patterned waves that rush and stop at lights. But if I was correct, or better, lucky, most of this tail was going to be on the highway leading out to the western part of the county to the Glades.
If I’d read Marci right, she would be in Kim’s now, down in front of the last seat, telling Kyle that I was a private investigator working for the family of some bartender from up north who’d disappeared down here months ago. In a way, it was a truth.
She would tell him that I had worked a theory that the girl had been picked up by someone who had dated her, killed her and then dumped her body. Another truth, and when I had gone over this part with Marci she had again blanched and the look on her face was exactly the look I hoped she was using now.
“And if he asks you why I think that, you tell him that I’ve found evidence, DNA evidence, and all I need to do now is find corroborating witnesses to set up a time line so the authorities will take the cases seriously.”
The tricky part, I told her, would be if he didn’t ask about where I got DNA. Then she was going to have to offer up the lie about my finding a body in the Glades. She had nodded at the instructions, said she could do it. But this wasn’t some drunk she would be trying to convince. There was something raw about the way she used his name. I could not dismiss the feeling that she was too anxious to hurt this guy and if that showed through, no way was this going to work.
“Whatever you do, Marci,” I’d said, “don’t go with him.” She’d tightened her mouth and I repeated my instruction. “Don’t go with him or it’s off.”
Morrison was inside for forty-five minutes. O’Shea buzzed me when he came out.
“Guy’s marchin,’ Freeman,” he said into the cell. “Looks like a man on a mission and hasn’t looked left or right yet.”
I started my truck, figuring his pattern would be the same and he would exit the center through the road in front of me just like he had the night his headlights had caught me on the stakeout.
“Headin’ your way, Freeman,” O’Shea said. “I’ll fall in behind.”
I pressed my head against the driver’s side window, using the frame strut to partially hide behind and watched as the cruiser swung around the corner and onto the street. Morrison pulled a rolling stop through the first stop sign and I had to come out fast to stay within a reasonable distance. Either he was so focused he wasn’t paying attention, or he was just arrogant. Both were good things. He wouldn’t be thinking of a tail.
We were heading west through a residential area, then he took a right back toward Sunrise Boulevard to catch a light. It was the same way I would have gone to get on the main strip west toward the expressway.
“O’Shea, head up the back way to the park so you can get in behind him,” I said into the Nextel. “I’m going to have to stop at the light with him and he’s going to get a good look at my truck and I’ll have to fall back to keep him from getting familiar.”
“Roger that, big man.”
“If he keeps westbound to I-95 you’ll fit in with the rest of the traffic heading that way. I’ll stay back a couple of blocks.”
“We got this one, Max. Not a problem.”
Christ, I thought. I’m partnered with Colin O’Shea. I could only hope he wouldn’t hold to form and somehow screw this one up.
Morrison stopped at the light. It was difficult to see his silhouette through the dark glass of his back window in the daylight. The advantage to police cars in Florida was that they almost all had tinted windows so they were obscured from the outside. The treatments used to scare the shit out of us as patrol officers, pulling over some van or tricked out ghetto cruiser when you couldn’t see if some banger inside was sighting up a shotgun at the window. Now law enforcement had followed the trend themselves. I again leaned into my driver’s door behind the strut, hung my elbow out of the open window like I was a tired worker going home for the evening. I didn’t think Morrison could have gotten much of a look at me when he slipped out of Kim’s that first time I glimpsed him, but I was trying not to underestimate the guy.
He took a left at the light change as I expected and I followed but fell back. We were heading into a setting sun, the flare of orange spraying strong up into the clouds, and there was enough white light left to cause everyone to drop their visors a couple of inches. It was past commuter time, but South Florida traffic never seemed to ease. It was good for cover, bad if Morrison got nervous and made any quick moves.
“I’m in behind him coming up on the Sears curve,” O’Shea reported over the Nextel.
“I’m three blocks back,” I answered.
I had to think that Morrison would believe most of what Marci had reported to him. I wasn’t exactly going out on a limb with this but maybe we could get lucky. If he wasn’t our guy, he’d go home, or to the station, or to some poker game for all I knew. But if he was our guy, I was betting the mention of somehow finding a woman’s body in the Glades would spook him. He wouldn’t believe it, but the thought of it would get into his head and twist it. If he was as careful as we made him out to be, he would have to confirm it. I was betting on the Glades. Marci had just added to it with her description of someplace off Alligator Alley. Dumping bodies in the Everglades was a tradition in South Florida. The Indians had done it to early explorers, the ruthless farm bosses to slave labor. The mob had done it with their enemies in the twenties and the myriad criminals from dope runners to child abductors had done it in the modern era. Two and a half million acres of open land, shifting water, canals and sawgrass and plenty of reptiles to eliminate all traces: a perfect disposal site. I figured he’d head straight for the Alley and use the failing daylight to his advantage.
But maybe I thought wrong.
“Freeman, I’m losing him up here,” O’Shea snapped into the Nextel. “Some asshole is trying to make a left over two lanes and I’m trapped and your boy just put his blue lights on and went up around everybody in the right lane.”
I immediately pushed up my speed and moved to the right, passing through a crosswalk, forcing a hulking black man with a shopping cart to yank his load back and spit a string of tobacco at my pickup. I was sitting high enough in my cab to see the flashes of blue from Morrison’s light bar and kept pushing. I cut off another driver moving too slow over the railroad tracks and gained another half a block. I saw O’Shea twisting his wheel and cursing out to my left as I went by and gave him a hand sign that I was chasing now.
I blew a red light at Ninth Avenue by barely a second and picked up Morrison’s cruiser a block and a half in front. I sped up to get in the same traffic herd so we wouldn’t get separated by another light, and exhaled. No big deal. This was why you did two-mans. It was the old way before every metro P.D. had helicopters and the undercover guys hid locators in their cell phones.
I was watching Morrison’s light bar and was anticipating his shift into the left lane when he suddenly went right without a signal onto Thirteenth heading north. Shit. Where the hell was he going? An SUV and a sedan made the same turn and I swung behind them and watched the squad car making distance on me and I punched up O’Shea.
“
Our guy just took a north route on Thirteenth. If he makes a couple more turns he’s going to make me,” I said.
“I’ll cut up on Twelfth and try to catch him parallel,” O’Shea answered.
I was trying to keep my speed but the sun was now on the left side of my face, glancing off my hood, and before I could adjust my focus I realized Morrison had slowed, and when the fat SUV between us swerved around him into the left lane, only the small car was a buffer. The squad car kept its speed and rolled on and I was too far back to see if Morrison was checking his side mirrors. We were on our way up to Oakland Park and I started thinking about what we could do if he simply went home. I was prepared to just sit on him. But tailing him out to some spot in the Glades would be even tougher at night. Out there in the flat expanse you could see headlights for more than a mile. I was grinding and watching the next traffic light burn green when Morrison’s car slowed a little more than normal and then suddenly cut over to the far left and took a hard turn into the sun. I had to make a decision: O’Shea was still east, he wouldn’t be able to tag on and Morrison was heading west, the direction I’d wanted him to go. Should I call it off or take a chance?
“He’s going west on Twenty-eighth,” I barked into the Nextel and I went left, caught a horn from an oncoming taxi driver, cussed under my breath and was then partially blinded by the streaming light of sunset.
I caught a glimpse of the police lettering on Morrison’s back bumper as he cut another left turn and when I hooked onto the same street I slammed on the brakes. There were two patrol cars parked nose-to-nose blocking the street and Morrison’s brake lights beyond them. When I stopped I took a futile look into my rearview and another cruiser was crossing the T behind me. The Nextel tweeted.
“Sorry brother, you know I can’t take a chance gettin’ into that beehive,” O’Shea said from somewhere back there. “Call me when you can. Out.”
I tossed the cell under the seat like you might roll an empty beer bottle after getting pulled over. If they wanted to find it bad enough, they would. The three officers in front seemed to climb out of their cars at the same time, like it was choreographed. The fourth, behind me, stayed behind the wheel. Classic drug stop. Don’t ever try to tail a cop without installing a police scanner, I thought. You miss that call for backup, you’re screwed.
A Killing Night Page 21