Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

She leaned back in her desk chair, rested one hand-tooled leather cowboy boot on her knee, reached inside, and scratched her ankle. “Hell-all-Friday,” she mused aloud, “how do these horny bad boys even think these things up? That’s worse than the ones who like guns pointed at them while they’re doing it.”

  “You know about them!”

  “Not from personal experience, a-course.” She winked and looked sly. “If I did, I sure wouldn’t admit it.”

  Chapter 5

  The story of Emerson Creech’s demise was not reported in the newspaper. Many of the most fascinating never are. Since we had never identified Uncle Dirty as the prime suspect in the murder of his niece, his death was not deemed newsworthy by my bosses. I proposed a feature on autoerotic deaths. “Not in this newspaper, not ever,” said Fred Douglas, the city editor.

  As I read Creech’s routine obit published in agate type in the DEATHS column the next day, I wondered about the others listed last name first in precise alphabetical order, and if any of them had gone to meet their maker in such bizarre fashion.

  I still needed to connect with Riley, the rape squad lieutenant who had been off duty by the time I departed the Creech house. This time I called first. The lieutenant was in, terse as usual, and reluctantly agreed to spare me a few minutes if I got there fast. When I arrived, everybody in the outer offices was focused diligently on work, none of that relaxed atmosphere or camaraderie that permeates most detective bureaus. The lieutenant, I thought, must be in one of those infamous bad moods. Again.

  When I breezed by, saying I was expected, the secretary lifted her eyes with a warning look that said, Lots of luck.

  Taking a deep breath, hoping not to catch one of Lt. Riley’s notorious temper tantrums, I tapped first, then walked in. The lieutenant slammed down the phone and brusquely motioned me into a chair.

  “What’s on your mind, Montero?”

  “The Downtown Rapist,” I said.

  Pale eyes guarded beneath colorless lashes, she scrutinized me carefully. “Had any calls with information on him?”

  “No.” I could see my window of opportunity close as she dismissed me as useless. “But I was hoping we might get some, if I did a story about him for the Sunday newspaper.”

  “Nobody’s stopping you,” she said, pointedly consulting her watch. Why is it, I wondered, that everywhere I go, people begin checking their watches and steering me toward the door? “You already made our investigation public, destroying whatever advantage we had in that respect.” The coldness in her eyes told me she was not the person to turn to for sympathy should I ever be raped.

  “I need your help on the story.”

  She leaned back in her chair, wearing an amused expression. Her dark-blond hair was almost straight, shoulder length, with a slight natural wave. Her leathery skin reflected too much time spent in the sun.

  Women cops must be tough and ambitious to achieve promotion. She was both. Even to the extent of using only her first two initials, K.C. Kathleen Constance Riley was a perfectly good name, which I had once used in print when she shot the right kneecap off a deranged gunman who was determinedly battering her wounded partner. The story made her look professional, even heroic. Yet her anger at me was wild enough to make my own kneecaps tingle. She had warned me never, ever, to use her full name in a story again.

  Women have made more progress in police work than in any other formerly exclusive male profession. They stand shoulder to shoulder with men in uniform—and, like Francie, share space on the memorial plaque in the lobby.

  K.C. Riley had fought for rank and respect and won both. I appreciated the obstacles she had overcome but was fed up with her Dirty Harry imitation. Acting muy macho doesn’t prove you are as good as a man.

  “My help?” She exuded sarcasm, sucking in her cheeks and pursing her lips. “My help? After you’ve turned this investigation into a three-ring circus, putting the mayor, the chief, and all of us on the hot seat?”

  I refrained from announcing that I was just doing my job. I love saying that to cops, because that is what they always claim while doing unpleasant things to you. But this was not the moment.

  “You have a limited number of detectives, lieutenant. If half a million people learn more about the rapist on Sunday, we have a good chance of coming up with something.”

  “Yeah.” She leaned forward, eyes pitiless. “Dozens of crank callers, spiteful women turning in ex-husbands and boyfriends, and hundreds of false leads for my overburdened detectives to check out. This investigation is already like a string tied to an elephant. The more we follow it, the bigger it looks.”

  “But the right lead might be among them. We both want the same thing, lieutenant.”

  “No, we don’t,” she said heatedly. “I want to catch me a rapist; you want to sell newspapers and make a name for yourself.”

  “This story won’t affect the paper’s circulation or my job, one way or the other. Nobody reads bylines. Don’t forget, lieutenant, I’m a woman too. I love Miami. I was born here. The people I care about live here. I want justice in this city as much as you do.” I paused. “Maybe even more.”

  Her head jerked up at that.

  I’d heard the lieutenant had bought a house in Hollywood, just north of the county line. Cops used to move up to Broward when housing costs, property taxes, and the crime rate were all lower. That’s no longer true, but Dade cops still tend to settle on the far side of the county line. Beats me; maybe they like to distance themselves from their work.

  “I live in Dade County,” I said. “A whole lot of police officers go home to Broward. They don’t even live here.” I was pushing the envelope now and knew it.

  Her tongue touched her upper lip as she sat studying me, probably wondering how, or if, I knew where she lived. I had landed a low blow, I knew. Why, I asked myself, did this woman and I always butt heads when we should be on the same side? I took a deep breath and made my move. “I understand you have a composite drawing of the rapist and a psychological profile. I’d like to use them in my story.”

  “Who told you we had them?” Suspicion edged her voice, but I sensed less hostility.

  “I guessed,” I lied, protecting my source. “It’s only logical that you would have them by now.”

  “Then guess the rest. If I cut that information loose, it would compromise the integrity of our investigation. Everybody would know, including the bad guy. He’d change his habits, his appearance, he might move—”

  “Even if he tries, he can’t change who and what he is. He’s been hitting every two weeks.” I lowered my voice. “How many more women will you let this happen to, to preserve the integrity of your investigation?” Leaning forward, I met her steely gaze. “Is it more important to stop him or to hope for an arrest, someday, on your terms?”

  She tossed her head back and stared at me, chewing her upper lip and fiddling with a metal paperweight in the shape of a hand grenade.

  I flipped open my notebook, took out my pen, and looked up expectantly.

  She sighed, placing both hands on the desk blotter in front of her. She considered her fingernails, short and unpolished, without adornment. “We believe he’s Cuban,” she said. “He may have served time in prison there.” Her expression remained unchanged as she removed a file from the squat metal cabinet behind her chair and opened it. The face in a composite drawing stared up at her.

  She slid it across the desk. High cheekbones, cleanshaven, wavy hair, prominent nose, eyes close together.

  “Lean and muscular build, a skinny little son of a bitch, but he’s strong. Mid to late thirties, five-eight or five-nine, approximately a hundred and sixty-five pounds, nice even teeth, hairless chest. Probably started stealing panties from clotheslines or laundry rooms and worked his way up. Probably has a record for minor sex crimes, like wienie waving. He’s still escalating. He didn’t hurt anybody more than he had to, at the beginning. Now he’s deliberately frightening his victims mor
e. He’s pricking them with the knife. Their fear and humiliation excites him. He’s becoming more dangerous. He could be working up to murder.”

  She paused, as though lost in thought. “All but one has happened before four in the afternoon. He may be fitting this in with his own schedule. He could be a maintenance man who starts somewhere at four and likes to go to work happy.

  “The first was only an attempt, because he couldn’t get an erection. Now he makes the victims perform oral sex so he can. Then he does it from the back, seems to have trouble having sex from the front. Can’t maintain his erection.”

  “Why do you think that is?” I asked, scribbling furiously.

  She paused, toying again with the paperweight. “I don’t know how much of this you can put in the newspaper. He probably does it from the rear because he won’t see the victim as a person if he’s not looking at her face. When he tries from the front, nothing.”

  “He’s got problems.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What about lab work on him?”

  “He’s a secretor.”

  Eighty percent of us secrete our blood type into our body fluids, our tears, sweat, mucus, semen, vaginal secretions, and saliva. Sometimes a suspect can be typed off a cigarette butt. The best legal proof of sex between two people is a used condom with the man’s semen inside and the woman’s vaginal secretions on the outside. “Good, what type is he?”

  “O positive, the universal donor.” She smiled sardonically. “You wouldn’t want to get too close to this guy.”

  I put on my curious face, not wanting to let on that Harry had told me. “Does he have AIDS?”

  “Nope, gonorrhea, the bad one, penicillin resistant.”

  “Think he knows it?”

  She shrugged. “Do me a favor. If you do mention that, don’t be specific. Just say that he has something wrong with him. That he’s diseased and dysfunctional. Maybe he’ll see a doctor or go to a clinic and we can get a line on him.”

  “Does he ever wear condoms?”

  She shook her head. “These guys are smarter than they used to be, they know all about the serology work, but we still don’t see condoms much with serial-type rapists. We are seeing them more with gang bangs.” She looked quizzical.

  “Maybe it’s all the safe sex warnings they get in the public schools now.” I was thinking out loud. “Be nice if they warned them against committing rape too. So you’ve got DNA?”

  “It’s being run.” Her pale eyes brightened at the prospect. “Eventually, every sex offender will have to provide blood for a Florida bank of DNA prints. We’ll have them on file, like fingerprints.”

  “Will it be national? So if we get some serial rapist from Seattle you can identify him?”

  “You’ve got it. The FBI developed the software that runs the program, and it’s being shared with police crime labs.”

  “Can’t be soon enough,” I said.

  “Just pray we get the funding.”

  “How has this guy been able to stalk women in these buildings without being seen by anyone else?”

  “We’re still trying to figure that one out, checking personnel records, cabbies who work the area.” She ran her hand through her straw-colored hair. “We did a grid run of other crimes in the vicinity, in case he was exposing himself or pulling robberies before he turned to rape.”

  “Hear anything from informants?”

  “Rape is not the kind of crime guys brag about in bars,” she said, her voice sharp. “Usually if you get information from somebody, it’s not because they were told, it’s because they noticed something.”

  “Think he’s married?”

  She sighed. “Some of these guys are. They have a wife, kids, a sex life—the marriage may not be the best but the spouse doesn’t notice anything.”

  “What does he wear?”

  “T-shirt and blue jeans, nothing distinctive, except—” She caught herself and stopped. Apparently she had decided to hold something back.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “At last, Britt, something my detectives haven’t already whispered in your ear.”

  The woman is good, I thought, and wondered how far she would have gone in the department had she been a man. “Excuse me?” I said, in what I hoped was a tone of bewildered innocence.

  The lieutenant smiled, showing her teeth. There was no humor in it. If I worked for her I would not want her to smile like that at me. I tried to guess what curious fact she might be withholding.

  “Anything printed on his T-shirts?”

  “Like his name and the firm he works for? We wish. We had one like that once. Wore a shirt with his name sewn over the pocket. The name of the plumbing company he worked for on the back.” She smiled bitterly. “A brain the size of a ball bearing and a penis to match.”

  “Does he bring anything with him besides the knife?”

  “A couple of victims saw something like a duffel bag before he blindfolded them. He may carry the knife in that.”

  “What does he use to tie them up and blindfold them with?”

  “Duct tape.”

  “Have you been able to get prints off it?”

  Her eyes dropped again to her own hands. “The man wears latex surgical gloves, the ones with talcum inside to make them more comfortable, easier to slip on and off.”

  Somehow that detail chilled me more than all the rest. A rapist cold and calculating enough to don rubber gloves before touching his victims, like a dentist or a brain surgeon.

  “Where do you think he gets them?”

  She shrugged. “He could buy or steal them from any one of a thousand places.”

  “Does he say anything unusual or have any distinctive body odor? Remember the one who smelled like the fast food restaurant where he worked?”

  “Like greasy French fries, onions, and hamburgers?” She nodded. “No odor on this guy—and he says the usual. ‘Don’t scream, I will kill you. Keep quiet. Open your legs. Oh, baby, oh,’ the usual shit.”

  We exchanged a wary handshake. My cautious little dance with the lieutenant had worked—this time.

  “By the way, how’s Dan Flood doing?”

  I must have looked startled.

  “Saw you with him at the memorial ceremony.”

  “He’s okay, under the circumstances. I know he misses the job.”

  “Tough, he was a good man. But when you can’t hack it physically anymore, it’s time to turn in the badge before you endanger yourself or somebody else.” Her words echoed the department line. “Don’t screw us on this one, Britt. It’s too important,” she said in parting. “Make sure you put our number in there. We’ll set up a hot line, manned by a detective. Recorded, of course.”

  I nodded, wondering if she was alone when she got home to her new house in Broward County.

  I knew how I felt. I wanted to go home and soak in a hot bath. After the last three days, I didn’t care if I ever fell in love again. Memories of Kendall McDonald and his warm body next to mine were fading fast. Was he the last of an endangered species? Doesn’t anybody do normal sex anymore?

  Chapter 6

  It was nearly midnight Friday when I finished the Downtown Rapist story. I drove home through the mother of all thunderstorms. Whirling wind and rain, whipped almost horizontally, beat against my windshield. Lightning spiraled across the sky, cosmic-sized sparks, setting off high-voltage pyrotechnic fireworks followed by violent cracks of thunder. Sporadic flashes illuminated palm trees bent and twisted by the storm’s ferocity and deserted streets flooded by the deluge. The good news was that my late night at the office saved the ophthalmologist and me from each other and our mothers’ good intentions.

  To make amends, I made an appearance at the fashion show Saturday. My mother seemed pleased, and it made me giddy to mingle even briefly in a world of music, pink linen tablecloths, and lavish centerpieces surrounded by happy, well-dressed people whose ch
ief concerns revolved around the length of fall hemlines. My mother looked ultra chic in soft flowered silk, exquisitely cut. She beamed, whispering eagerly in my ear as we ogled the fall line of evening wear, gorgeous glittery satins and shimmery silks. Unfortunately, my nights out in Miami are usually spent at shootings, fires, or other disasters. Sequins are out. Rubber boots and hard hats are in. I slipped away from the luncheon to make my routine checks at Miami police headquarters, which lacked the same ambience.

  The young cop on duty did a double-take and raised an approving eyebrow. My luncheon garb, a bright yellow blazer over a black silk shell and matching slacks, was the best dressed he’d ever seen me. A persistent signal from my beeper, clipped to my purse, interrupted my check of the overnight log and reports. The city desk was calling. Six inches had to be trimmed from my weekender on the Downtown Rapist in time for the street edition. I went back to the office, eager to do the cutting myself rather than have an editor hack at my story.

  I took a look when the first copies of the early edition came up to the newsroom. The story ran out front, though the composite did not appear until the jump, on page 12 A. As I scanned the copy, my heart skidded downhill. The last graf, with the police hot-line number for readers to call with information about the rapist, was missing. Obviously it had not been dropped due to a lack of space, because there was a short, a tiny one-paragraph story, in its place.

  HAVANA—Tunnels dug beneath Havana to provide shelter in the event of an enemy attack are also being used to grow edible mushrooms, the Communist Youth Weekly Juventud Rebelde reported Saturday.

  Mushrooms?

  I charged the city desk like a maddened animal.

  “I removed it,” Gretchen acknowledged placidly. She pursed her lips, looking righteous. “We don’t work for the police. Why should we publish their number? They just want to use us.”

  No wonder people hate the press. Nobody wins an argument with Gretchen unless they outrank her on the corporate chart, so I didn’t argue.