Miami, It's Murder

by Edna Buchanan

  Harry, still flushed, looked uncertain, wary, and out of his element in the newsroom. A good street cop, he had no experience in dealing with the hostile editors of Florida’s largest newspaper and its lawyer. He had to be relieved to see me. “Britt?” he said gruffly.

  “Here it is,” I said, indicating the envelope and smiling in what I hoped he would perceive as a friendly manner. Antonio had changed to a wide-angle lens and was now shooting my entire desk and the people milling around it. “But what’s this all about? I had a couple of others like it and threw them away.”

  “We can discuss it later,” Harry said, scanning the expectant faces around him. I nodded. Crowds at crime scenes always make me uncomfortable—and we were now surrounded by some of Miami’s most aggressively curious people, my colleagues.

  Warren, the crime-lab tech, put his case, which looked like a fishing tackle box, on my chair and opened it, revealing four meticulously arranged rows of compartments. From one he removed a pair of tweezers. Gingerly, he lifted the envelope off my desk by one corner and dropped it into a semi-opaque glassine envelope.

  Warren’s job is to collect and preserve evidence, establishing the chain of custody for future courtroom presentation. We had crossed paths at many crime scenes. Next, he took out what looked like a pad of plain white paper with thin but rigid pages and tore off the top two sheets. With one he carefully scraped the minute residue from the top of my desk onto the other, which he held like a dustpan. Then he folded it into a mini-envelope, enclosing the collection of particles, and placed it in another glassine bag.

  Harry and Warren Forester invited me to ride along to headquarters with them. I was tempted by the chance to pry loose some answers along the way but felt more comfortable in my T-Bird. If things went sour with the lieutenant, at least I’d have a getaway car.

  We met at the rape squad office, where Harry ushered me in to see Lieutenant Riley. His manner was strangely formal and somewhat distant, apparently influenced by the intervention of the News’ lawyer and his chief.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Riley demanded.

  “Hey,” I said, hoping to exonerate myself at the start. “I’m only one of the troops. I had to tell ’em somebody was coming over to pick up the letter. You know what a pain in the ass editors can be.”

  She nodded grimly as if she really did know. Harry sat gingerly on the edge of the only other available chair. He was boasting for his boss’s benefit how he had been poised to effect mass arrests at the News when, to his utter dismay, he was called off. I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Not totally anyway.

  “If there is something obvious about this letter and the first two like it, I wish you had told me,” I said ruefully. “Then I would have been informed enough to recognize it and give you a call.” No response, so I forged on. “Everybody at the paper with a byline or a name on the masthead receives crank letters. This is probably just another fruitcake.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Riley snapped, then blossomed into a wide, radiant smile. For a moment I was dazzled, then realized it was not intended for me.

  Lieutenant Kendall McDonald had just stuck his head in the door. He nodded in my direction. “Everything okay, Kathy?”

  She could not have looked more pleased. “Thank you much, Ken.”

  Kathy? This smiling woman coyly batting her lashes and suddenly tossing her hair was once poised to smash both my kneecaps if I so much as breathed her given name.

  McDonald closed the door behind him, and her eyes dropped to me, smile fading. I attempted to concentrate on the subject at hand. “Why,” I asked, leaning forward, “do you suspect that the rapist wrote this letter?”

  She stood up, staring pensively out her window, lean and trim-looking in man-tailored navy slacks, her blouse unadorned except for a gold sharpshooter’s badge strategically placed over one breast. “The deal is that you print no new information until we say it’s okay?”

  “No new info that I get from you guys.” I thought it best to clarify the ground rules.

  She sat down again at her desk, looking restless, eyes thoughtful, tapping a pencil on the firing pin of her hand grenade. “We’ve analyzed powder left on the victims’ skin.”

  I looked up. “Talcum from the gloves?”

  “No. I’m surprised you haven’t been told. My detectives seem to leak everything else to you.”

  Harry squirmed beside me. I refrained from glancing his way and tried to appear innocent. He probably looked guilty as hell. Cops are not good at concealing their own transgressions.

  Her expression was sardonic. I wondered if McDonald found her attractive. I bet he did. They’d have lots to talk about—multiple murders, serial rapes—secrets and shoptalk he would never share with me.

  “After the rapes,” she said, “he likes to powder his victims’ skin, their faces, their bodies.”

  I cringed at the sick vision. “What kind of powder?” My voice was hushed.

  “Cheap white dusting powder, perfumed, called Midnight Jasmine, comes in round hot-pink boxes with big fluffy powder puffs. A brand you can find in almost any discount drugstore, Kmart, the five-and-dime.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  “Why does he do anything? Maybe he’s living out a fantasy. Remember the scumbag who liked rubbing Wesson Oil on his victims? Maybe he likes the smell or the feel.” She shrugged. “We’ll ask when we nail him.”

  “Any other details you’re withholding?”

  “Always, but nothing we’re ready to discuss.”

  I sighed. “Where did my letter go?”

  “Warren took it to the lab,” Harry said.

  “Can I watch?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “That’s the deal,” I said.

  “You take her, Harry.” The lieutenant picked up her phone as she waved us out. I saw her punch in a four-digit number, an inside extension. From the softened line of her cheek, I would have bet a stone-crab dinner that Kathy was calling Ken.

  Chapter 11

  I’d been to the department’s state-of-the-art crime lab only once before, on an official media tour when the new station opened. Ceilings are high, lights bright. A shiny counter that borders both walls is broken into little islands for chemists, criminalists, and technicians. Each work station has a window with a view; on one side of the building a training field, on the other a parking lot.

  Another floor up, on the roof, is a ventilated drying room for wet evidence. That’s where they store the smelly stuff, the blood-soaked garments or other items found on decomposing bodies. Technicians snip samples to test for blood types, chemicals, and powder burns, then lock the rest up on the roof.

  Warren greeted us. He was a small man with light curly hair, glasses, and a neat mustache. Like most crime techs, he relished the job, I knew, because he was able to perform his police work without enduring the petty politics of the department and without dealing with the public. The crew in the lab was keen on puzzle solving, piecing clues together and decoding riddles from the dark side. They played on the A-team with the homicide cops, major crimes prosecutors, medical examiners, and high level courts, all the varsity stars from the legal, medical, and law enforcement professions.

  “I already briefed the latent fingerprint expert, the document expert, the trace analyst, and a serologist,” he told Harry.

  “Serologist?” I asked.

  He nodded, looking pleased. “We can do a DNA profile if he licked the envelope. See if it matches up with the semen samples taken from the victims.”

  Terrific, I thought. If one body fluid doesn’t give him away, another will. “How long will that take?”

  “Quick DNA procedures will tell us in two or three days if the sample is consistent with our guy. The complete profile takes four to six weeks.”

  Warren plugged in a small canister-type vacuum cleaner and hit the switch. It began to hum. Carefully he vacuumed the envelope, then w
ithdrew the folded letter with tweezers and vacuumed it as well.

  “So that’s what those machines are for,” I joked. He didn’t smile. “I always wanted to meet a man who could vacuum. You do windows?”

  “The sophisticated feature is the uniquely designed trap on the end of the canister,” he told me, obviously in love with his gadgetry. “That’s where we capture the particles.”

  “Let’s see what he wrote,” I said impatiently. Painstakingly, he opened the letter and spread the paper out flat. Drifts of powder had collected in the folds, and he sucked them up neatly with the vacuum.

  “Hummmm,” said Warren, as Harry and I peered over his shoulder.

  The writer had pressed so hard that his red pen had torn the paper in several places. Not a good sign, I thought.

  Say Britt Montero,

  You don’t listen. You have offended me.

  Signed with the same symbol, which seemed to be a bow with three arrows.

  Short and to the point, but not terribly original. I tried to picture the writer and how his mind worked. Was it my description of him as diseased and dysfunctional that had him ticked? Would he be as offended if a man had written the same stories?

  “I’ve see that before,” Harry said, studying the signature symbol. “Tattoos on some of the Marielitos.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at it again. “I think it’s a Santería symbol for one of the gods.” I know who can tell me more, I thought.

  Warren selected a handbook from his desk and began leafing through police training papers detailing the myriad religions whose practitioners have set up housekeeping in Miami during the past two decades. Voodoo from Haiti, Obeah from Jamaica, Yahwehs who call themselves black Hebrew Israelites: you name it, we’ve got it.

  Santería, I knew, was the worshiping of saints, a mingling of Catholicism and an African religion brought to Cuba by slaves from Nigeria, imported to work in Cuba’s sugarcane fields two hundred years ago. Forced into Catholicism, the tribesmen clung to their old religions, tricking their captors by substituting the image of Catholic saints for their African deities and continuing their former practices, which included animal sacrifice.

  “Here we go,” Warren said, thumbing through the section on Santería.

  In between the black iron cauldron, symbol of the god Oggun, who is the patron of war, employment, iron, and steel, and the double-headed stone ax of the god Chango was the same drawing of a bow and arrows.

  “ ‘Symbol of the god Ochosi,’” Warren read, “ ‘the patron of hunters, owner of the birds and animals. Likes offerings of roosters and rum. When angry he can cause problems with the law.’ ”

  “If the rapist is really practicing this stuff, he probably thinks he’s invincible,” I said.

  “Let’s hope he keeps on thinking that,” Harry said grimly.

  Warren took pictures before other tests could disturb the handwriting or lettering. He laid the letter flat on a stainless steel tabletop using a sophisticated Polaroid and a 35-millimeter Minolta. The letter next went to criminalist Andy Eckberg.

  Andy had wavy salt-and-pepper hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a toothy smile, and degrees in biology and chemistry. When he retired from the FBI lab after twenty years, he moved to Florida for the sun and a job with the Miami police lab.

  I learned all this when Warren introduced us and we shook hands. His grip was pleasantly firm, though his hand was callus-free and as soft as that of a woman.

  Andy illuminated the letter and envelope with an oblique light to reveal the shadows of any prior tracings on the paper. It would have been nice to discern the imprint of a previously written note, preferably bearing a name and home address, but no such luck.

  The envelope, paper, and ink were common and inexpensive. He dusted metal filings across them to bring up fingerprints. No prints on the letter, but a really good right thumbprint on the envelope.

  Before announcing cause for jubilation, Andy brought out an ink pad and a cardboard fingerprint chart, then firmly rolled my fingers one by one onto the designated squares. I hated being printed, but it was necessary for elimination purposes. The little loops and whorls were a perfect match. The print on the envelope was mine.

  “He was probably wearing those surgical gloves,” I said, rubbing my ink-stained fingers with a soapy gel. I rinsed them in the stainless steel sink and dried them on a paper towel. “How come this guy wears them but not a condom?”

  “Why would a rapist wear a condom?” Harry sniffed, as though it was a dumb question.

  “Why would he wear gloves?”

  “Sounds like somebody unclear on the concept,” Warren said, gathering his gear to go out to another crime scene.

  A stereo microscope that magnifies up to a hundred times confirmed that the powder on the letter was an inorganic compound with added fragrances.

  “Let’s take it to the polarizing microscope and see if we can match it up to the other powder,” Andy said. “The basic component of talc is just a mineral extracted from the ground and processed. The identifying characteristics in a commercial product are absorbents, fragrances, and brighteners added to give it a more silky appearance and texture. The polarizing microscope shows us the crystalline content. And the FTIR, Fourier Transfer Infrared, will tell us the chemical analysis.”

  “How’d you ever identify the manufacturer?” I asked.

  “Fragrance and cosmetic manufacturers all have associations. They can identify their own product and tell us if it’s exclusively theirs.”

  “The same way you can identify the paint and the tire specs on cars?”

  He nodded. “We have the standards on Dupont, Pittsburgh, and Glidden in our computer library.”

  It turned out that Andy had worked a homicide case I had covered, a whodunit in which the only clue was a partial tire impression left at the desolate site where the body was dumped. The tire trade association revealed, based on the impression and the track width, that Goodyear had manufactured the tire in 1989.

  The auto manufacturers’ association spec list was intended as a resource for the engineers and architects who determine such things as turning radius when developing parking garages. In this case it provided the information that the tire that left the impression at the murder scene fit only a Checker or a special-model Cadillac, both relatively rare vehicles.

  Only one person in the victim’s circle of acquaintances drove such a car—the Caddy. Detectives zeroed in, built a case, and won a conviction. Andy knew what he was doing.

  I began visualizing a story on the unsung heroes in the crime lab. It would be fun to write, and maybe I’d develop some sources in the lab for future reference. The Scientific Detectives, their high-tech investigations and their most fascinating cases, I thought. Perfect for Outlook, our Sunday magazine section. Once this rape case was closed I would propose the story to Pete Sanchez, the Outlook editor.

  Andy came up with only one possible clue. Mingled with the powder vacuumed from the letter was a single microscopic particle. “It could have fallen from somewhere in his environment, or off his skin, or out of his hair as he wrote the note.”

  The mass spectrometer identified it as a minute trace of paint. “Lead-based,” Andy said.

  “Where would you find that?”

  “Few occupations use lead-based paint anymore,” he said. “You find it in marine products, in shipyards where they scrape the bottom of boats.”

  “Not much help in a city surrounded by water, marinas, boatyards, and a Coast Guard base,” Harry grumbled, turning to me. “Maybe you should lay off, Britt, and have some other reporter write about the rapist in the future.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Just thought I’d make the suggestion. Makes sense.”

  Not to me. He shrugged and turned away from my withering gaze.

  From home, I called my Aunt Odalys. Happy to hear from me, as always, she asked about my eating habits, my love life, and my j
ob. I asked about Ochosi.

  “Sí,” she whispered, her voice silky. “Saint Norberto. What is it, Britt, that you wish to know?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He is the hunter. The god of hunting and traps, the protector of those who seek to avoid confinement. His symbols are the bow and arrow, the antlers of the deer, and beads of green and brown. An Aguan can be prepared to honor him with Eleggua the trickster, Oggun, the owner of the knife, and Oshun, protector of private parts.”

  “Oshun? Is that the one…?”

  “A chalice filled with beads and powders and, on top, a rooster’s head.”

  My own head began to ache. I wondered if I had any aspirin.

  “For the Aguan, you must have meat and honey, rice, fruit, and eggs—and animals, for the blood.”

  I thanked my aunt and promised to see her soon.

  The hunter, I thought, and shuddered as I put down the phone.

  Chapter 12

  The next day started with a bang, leaving me little time to think about either the rapist or the Mary Beth Rafferty case. A Chevy van caught fire, bursting into flames on the expressway at the height of rush hour. The driver managed to extricate himself, leaving behind two cases of .44 Magnum bullets. In the heat from the blaze the ammunition began to explode, and firefighters and motorists who had stopped to help ran for their lives, dodging stray bullets. The bursts sounded like sporadic machine-gun fire. Both sides of the highway were closed to traffic, and cops and firemen took cover in a ditch until it was over. Each time the gunfire died down and it seemed that all the bullets had been expended, a new barrage began, exploding in clusters like popcorn in a microwave. It sounded as if war had been declared at 8 A.M. as the horns of irate commuters blared in the distance.

  Lottie was happy for the opportunity to wear the flak jacket she kept with the other extensive and essential gear in the trunk of her Chrysler.