84
June 12
Ten minutes into Thursday, huddled below on Baby, Cal heard the trill of his cell phone.
He knew without looking that it was her, because no one else ever called.
He shrivelled at the thought of hearing Jewel’s voice.
Yet in another way he longed to talk to her.
Pitiful.
‘Hello, Mother.’
‘What the fuck have you been doing, Jerome?’ asked Roxanne Lucca.
Cal felt his blood turn to ice, because she truly was a witch, otherwise how would she know? And then that overwhelming need descended on him, the need for confession, the need for her help, because what he’d done was way too much for him, he realized that now. The thing was, he didn’t know what to do next, and up until now he’d thought he mightn’t care if he got caught, but that wasn’t true, not at all, because the things he’d done were so terrible, and now he was more scared of what they’d do to him on Death Row and after than he was of Jewel and her brand of punishment.
‘Who the fuck,’ she went on, ‘is stupid enough to blackmail a cop’s family?’
Which meant she didn’t know the half of it.
‘I need you, Mom,’ he said, already quaking.
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and he wasn’t sure that he did need her, knowing she was poison, knowing she was the root of all his evil, but he’d said it now and there was no pulling it back, no magic rewind.
‘Tell me where you are,’ she said, ‘and I’ll come to you.’
Don’t tell her.
‘I’m in Miami,’ he told her.
‘Me too,’ Roxanne said. ‘Now tell me the fuck where?’
She was still at the goddamned airport, waiting in line in the hot, humid night air for a cab.
Going to see her idiot son.
On the fucking run.
85
Sam was back home on the island.
Two crazed parents now under one roof.
Outside, the stars and moon had disappeared again behind the dark weight of another brewing June storm, but almost everyone in the semi-circle of their street was up and about now; startled, shocked, well-meaning people checking their back yards and garages, allowing the police to move in and out of their houses.
Sam went with Grace out on to their deck, trying not to let her realize that he was scanning the dark water out back.
‘Do you think I haven’t done that fifty times already?’ Grace said tightly.
They both turned, came close together, clung on for a moment, then stepped apart again.
‘If anything happens—’
‘Hush.’ Sam raised two fingers, held them against her lips.
Grace stared into his eyes, waited till his hand dropped away.
‘If anything bad has happened to Joshua,’ she went on – ‘worse than this, I won’t blame you if you kill me.’
‘You fell asleep,’ Sam said. ‘You thought he was OK and you fell asleep.’
‘How could I do that?’ Grace asked, bewildered.
‘You woke and checked on him.’ Sam knew he sounded more rational than he felt, knew he had to do this for her. ‘Like the patrol checked on the house, and he still came in.’ He shook his head. ‘Shall we kill those officers too?’
‘They’re not his mother.’
‘I’m his father,’ Sam said. ‘I installed that damned door for the dog.’ His first lost son, Sampson, came into his mind as he had many times since he’d heard Grace’s first cry, and he gritted his teeth and sent him away again. ‘I’m his daddy,’ he said, ‘and I wasn’t here.’
‘Because of my family,’ Grace said.
Sam took hold of her hands, gripped them tightly, felt how cold she was. ‘Shall we go on with this, go on punishing ourselves? Or shall we go and help get our son back home?’
‘You already lost one son.’ She couldn’t seem to stop.
‘Which is why I’m not going to lose another,’ Sam said.
‘You trusted me with Joshua.’
His grip was tighter than ever, his eyes darker, fiercer.
‘And I always will,’ he said.
86
It was almost one thirty when Roxanne reached Flamingo Marina.
Another five minutes before she found the boat.
She saw him on board, hunched down at the dock side, waiting for her.
He stood up.
‘Well blow me down,’ she said. ‘Captain Cooper.’
‘Hello, Mother,’ Cal said, and put out a hand to help her aboard.
‘Very gallant,’ Roxanne said. ‘My son, the failed blackmailer.’
And then she slapped him, as hard as she could, across the face.
‘How do you know about that?’ Cal’s eyes and cheeks were stinging, but he didn’t care, it was what he wanted. ‘How did you know I was in Miami?’
‘Your stepsister Claudia told me,’ Roxanne said. ‘Paid me a visit to complain about you. Like that’s what I needed in my miserable life.’
‘But that’s part of why I was doing it,’ he said. ‘For you. So you could leave the old man, come away with me.’
‘Bullshit,’ Roxanne said. ‘You’re almost pissing yourself now, you’re so scared of me.’
‘I think,’ Cal said slowly, ‘I’m more scared of me.’
Even in the dark, his mother’s eyes were like knives.
‘What the fuck else have you done?’
‘You have to help me,’ Cal said.
A night heron circled overhead and called.
‘I’m your mother,’ Roxanne said. ‘Now tell me.’
The bird’s raucous cry came again, was buried beneath a rumble of thunder.
‘Come below,’ Cal said. ‘And I will.’
87
Martinez arrived at the house, his face strained with a mixture of dismay and staunch determination to keep it together.
He came out back with Sam on to the deck while Grace was upstairs, helping Saul persuade David to rest a while in Cathy’s room. No rain was falling yet, but the sky flashed and flickered with an almost phosphorescent shimmer and thunder rolled around somewhere over to the east.
‘Biggest manhunt on the Beach since Cunanan,’ Martinez said.
Which most law enforcement officers considered a failed manhunt because Gianni Versace’s killer had committed suicide before he could be arrested. Which both Sam and Martinez felt, in their souls, Jerome Cooper was more than welcome to successfully attempt.
After they had Joshua safely back home.
Martinez had only one piece of half-good news.
‘Mildred’s in Miami General.’
‘I thought you said he killed her,’ Sam said.
‘Not quite.’
Sam had thought his hate quota for Jerome all maxed out.
‘What did he do to her?’
‘Stabbed her,’ Martinez said. ‘On her bench sometime last evening.’ He paused. ‘They don’t know yet if she’s going to make it.’
Sam took another moment to absorb that and to regroup.
‘So what are we doing hanging around here?’ he said.
‘You have to stay here,’ Martinez told him.
‘Not while my son is out there with a goddamned killer.’
‘Grace needs you, man.’
‘What Grace needs,’ Sam said, ‘is for me to bring Joshua home.’
88
Cal could see that it was a lot for any mother to take in.
Even Jewel.
The fact that her son was a multiple murderer.
And now a kidnapper, too.
Of the baby son of a policeman.
‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You did this for money?’
Cal saw incredulity and something else, something darker, richer, that made his insides quake.
‘Not for money,’ he said. ‘Not this. For payback.’
They were below now on Baby, and he wished he could at least sit down, but she
was still standing, stooping a little too, since she was as tall as he was. And maybe not quite as physically strong, but with a viciousness deep within her soul that he doubted he could ever really beat.
Not that he’d ever tried.
‘Where is the baby?’ Roxanne asked.
‘If I tell you,’ Cal said, ‘you have to promise—’
She backhanded him, a silver ring on her right hand cutting his nose.
‘What did you do with that goddamned baby?’
‘What do you think I did?’ he said.
Still standing, not cowering, and this was something new, at least, something left to be proud of, after all.
‘You killed a baby?’
Not just knives in her eyes now, daggers.
‘You killed their baby?’
And not the same height as him, after all, taller.
And Cal knew what was coming now.
‘Lie down,’ his mother said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do it,’ she told him.
And she shoved him with both hands, palms out towards him, so hard that he struck the door to the head and Baby rocked.
‘Do it,’ Jewel-the-white-witch-bitch ordered him.
And Cal had believed that was what he wanted, her punishment, to be flayed, for his flesh to be ripped and burned.
He knew different now.
And the knife was still in his waistband under his T-shirt.
‘Lie the fuck down, imbecile,’ his mother screamed at him.
‘You lie the fuck down,’ Cal the Hater told her.
And pulled out the knife.
And stuck it through her ribcage and into her heart.
89
Martinez had already been to the office, had worked some Adobe magic to turn Cooper’s photograph into a version that transformed him into the probable silver dude of Mildred’s description. Hard evidence and a real lead on the sonofabitch’s possible whereabouts were what they most needed to consolidate the manhunt – to which end he and Sam were now in his Chevy heading to Hot-Hot-Hot and Menagerie, the two clubs most likely to have been where Cooper had picked up the man Mildred had seen him with. Because maybe their killer was a regular, and maybe someone knew him, and maybe, just maybe, this kind of plain, slogging detective work might get them someplace.
Helpful people at the first club, but not so much as a whisker of recognition.
Menagerie was winding down, no one exactly unfriendly, but most people too drunk or stoned or just too tired to tax their brains. The bartender not the guy who would have been on duty in the early hours of yesterday morning.
It took time to rustle up the manager to find the off-duty bartender’s address.
‘But you won’t find him there,’ the guy told them. ‘He’s on vacation, told me he was going home for two hours’ sleep, then heading out to the airport.’
‘Where’d he go?’ asked Martinez.
Sam was already on his way out the door, knowing a dead-end when he saw one, not willing to waste one more minute.
Black-and-whites were everywhere, cruising slowly, Miami Beach’s finest all looking for Cooper, for any thin young guy, drab or silver, on foot, in a car, on a bus or on a tandem, all galvanized by their most urgent and earnest desire to find Joshua Becket alive and well.
‘Where next?’ asked his partner, joining him on the sidewalk.
The first splashes of rain began to mark the concrete, striking the car roof with enough clatter to promise heavier stuff to come.
Sam’s brain felt like it was dying, but he willed it to kick-start.
Enough cops out here already, aimlessly searching.
Direction still what they needed.
‘Back to Satin.’ The nightclub where Adani’s boyfriend had worked. ‘Maybe our guy was a regular there.’
‘Then let’s go wake up Lopéz,’ Martinez said, getting back in the car. ‘Show him the photos, just in case.’
90
Three in the morning, and nothing left here in Flamingo Marina for Cal.
Except horror.
Nothing for him any other place either. Not now that he had committed the worst crime in the world.
Matricide.
He’d probably use that word in the Epistle some day, he thought, liking the sound of it inside his head, but he’d left his writings in the dump in the alleyway, and there could be no going back there ever again.
Cal supposed that ultimately the cops – and maybe their shrinks too, maybe even some FBI profiler – would pore over his words, and that was fine with him. He had, he guessed, always half wanted the Epistle to be read, his writing analysed, maybe even admired.
Maybe one day, if he survived this, he’d start over, write some more.
But for now, all he could do was sit on top of the steps on Baby, raindrops falling on his sinful head, trying not to think about his dead mother down below.
Wondering which would be worse.
Going to hell right off, or being sent there via a fucking lethal injection for being a multiple killer.
And don’t forget the baby.
Cop’s baby.
‘Imbecile,’ Jewel had called him.
Not altogether wrong.
He hadn’t shown her the kid, had balked at that.
Hell, he figured, was maybe the one thing stopping him from killing himself right away.
Though maybe he ought to at least start planning how to do it.
Not quite yet though.
Things to do.
91
There were still police officers in the Beckets’ kitchen, ready to monitor and trace phone calls. Mary Cutter was with them now, Sam’s colleague sent over by Alvarez to help support Joshua’s mom, but for the time being Cutter was feeling redundant and useless.
Grace was alone, huddled on the couch in the den, the phone beside her.
Joshua’s favourite little blue stuffed bear was clutched in her right hand, close to her face, up against her nose, her son’s scent on it, so that if she shut her eyes . . .
She’d been rocking herself, back and forth, back and forth.
Just enough self-control left to stop that when people came in to check on her, to offer her cups of tea, shoulders to cry on, a listening ear, something to eat.
‘No, thank you,’ she’d say, then ask them to shut the door.
As soon as they’d gone, she started rocking again.
Not that it comforted her, yet she felt compelled to do it.
The storm seemed to be making it even worse, magnifying her fears with each successive thunder roll, her baby out there in that, with a man whose appearance had been utterly ordinary, but who had turned out to be worse than a blackmailer or even a kidnapper, who was almost certainly a killer, a beast . . .
Claudia had called a while ago, but Grace had asked Saul to speak to her.
She just couldn’t do that herself.
Not that she blamed Claudia for what had happened.
She mustn’t do that, must not . . .
She just couldn’t speak to her or anyone else, neither Claudia nor Mary Cutter nor Cathy, who would probably call from California in the morning and, who Grace was determined would remain in blissful ignorance until it was over.
Until Sam came home with Joshua.
92
Satin was closed, and Eddie Lopéz was not home.
‘No point trying to hunt him down tonight,’ Sam said.
They went to Lummus Park, to Mildred’s home, now a crime scene.
Her bench was gone, had been removed from its base and taken to the ME’s office, the area around cordoned off, two officers keeping watch.
Nothing here to help them find Joshua.
No word, either, on the whereabouts of Roxanne Lucca.
‘You need to go home,’ Martinez told Sam.
‘Not yet,’ Sam said.
Despair felt like ice-cold iron squeezing his heart.
‘We got no place to look,’ his friend said.
‘We need to look everywhere,’ Sam said.
‘Plenty of people doing that already,’ Martinez said. ‘You gotta go home, man. You need to be with Grace.’
‘Boats,’ said Sam.
Two bodies, two boats. Stood to reason.
‘We should be searching boats,’ he said.
‘All kinds of people on that too,’ Martinez said patiently, though he knew he’d told Sam that earlier. ‘Every marina, every anchorage, every mooring. It’s going to take time.’
Sam wanted to go out and personally rip apart every last boat in Florida.
Frustration rose like sickness in his chest.
‘One more thing before I do go home,’ he said.
He wanted to see Mildred.
93
Cal woke with a jolt a little after four.
Still sitting on top of the steps on Baby.
Human remains below.
The storm was closer than it had been, rain falling steadily, no deluge yet; the sounds the drops made as they tumbled on to the water in the quiet marina were almost comforting, the cruiser rocking, bumping against . . .
Sirens.
In the distance.
Not for me.
Not yet.
Things to do.
Miles to go before I sleep.
He thought that came from a poem, one he’d come across a long time ago during one of his reading periods when he’d devoured poems, newspapers, Bible stories, Playboy, cereal packs, Jewel’s National Enquirer and Readers Digest, TV Guides, whatever was there . . .
He stood up and cracked his head on the door frame.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
Time to sharpen up.
Things to do.
94
Mildred was in the Critical Care Unit, the same place in which Sam had spent a whole lot of hours last year.
A nurse told him that Mildred was holding her own.
She looked very different in the bed, in the hospital gown. So much smaller without her layers yet, despite her fragility, somehow not really as diminished as she might have been.
Strong lady, God willing.
Sam wondered how she would react, if she made it through, to being in this place, to being inside, being cared for. He remembered her telling him that since Donny’s death she had not been able to endure walls around her.
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