The assistant stepped aside to observe from a distance, far enough away so that Jack and Dr. Flynn could talk without being overheard by a government employee. Flynn adjusted the spotlight and took hold of the corner of the sheet.
“Now, be forewarned,” he told Jack. “As you know, the body was hidden in the Everglades before it was discovered and given a proper burial. According to the autopsy report, there were no internal organs, very little of the shell of the torso remaining. Much of that was lost to predators. We are now adding to that the natural effects of almost three years of decomposition in the grave.”
“So . . . what remains?”
“Bones. Hair. Teeth.”
He pulled back the lower corner of the sheet. Dr. Flynn’s powers of concentration were such that his bushy gray eyebrows had pinched together and formed one continuous caterpillar that stretched across his brow. Whatever he was examining did not even resemble a human body part to Jack, which made him uneasy. The fact that these remains were those of a child made it that much worse.
“What do you see?” asked Jack.
The doctor took a step back and sighed deeply. “The first thing you have to understand,” said Dr. Flynn, “is that even when the corpse is fresh, drowning cannot be proven by autopsy. It is a diagnosis of exclusion, based on the circumstances of death.”
“Emma Bennett’s death has some pretty vague circumstances.”
“Yes, it does. And her remains are indeed minimal.”
“So in your process of diagnosis by exclusion, what does that tell you, Doctor?”
“Not much. There is really not enough for me to rule out every other possible cause of death. But we do have something to hang our hat on.”
The doctor laid his iPad on the table and motioned Jack toward him. The image on the screen was right next to the actual remains—to what appeared to be the bones of a small foot.
“This photograph is from the autopsy report,” said Flynn. “It’s the right foot, the remains of which you see here on the table. Do you see this?” asked Flynn, adjusting the size of the image on the screen.
“I see it, but I don’t really know what I’m looking at.”
“As I mentioned, the lungs and internal organs decomposed or were eaten by scavengers while the body lay in the weeds. But as of the time of this photograph, the bottom of one foot was relatively well preserved. The extremities are away from the internal organs, slower decomposition.”
“I still don’t know what I’m supposed to see.”
“This photograph shows a rough patch of skin on the bottom of her right foot. And I believe that those striations,” Flynn said as he zoomed the image, “are abrasions.”
“Caused by what?”
“That’s where my professional opinion comes in. To me, that’s a sign of drowning.”
“I’m not following you,” said Jack.
“Abrasions of this sort can be a critically important fact if you think about what happens when you drown. Your normal reaction when the head goes underwater is to hold your breath. Eventually, you can’t do it any longer, and your body is forced to gasp for air. That presents a major problem if you can’t reach the surface.”
“Or if you panic.”
“Exactly. The victim starts gulping water into the mouth and throat, literally inhaling water into the lungs. This, of course, sends the victim into an even more frenzied panic, and the struggle becomes more desperate. If she doesn’t break the surface, her lungs continue to fill, struggling and gasping in a vicious cycle that can last several minutes, until breathing stops.”
“And these abrasions tell you what?”
“Again, the final moments of a drowning are utter terror and panic. The victim may sink and propel herself up from the bottom in the struggle. Her legs may be churning. The feet come in contact with whatever surface is below. If the surface is rough, her feet will show abrasions.”
“But Sydney’s version of events is that Emma drowned in the family swimming pool. That’s a smooth surface.”
“No, it’s not. You’re thinking of the standard white or colored plaster surfacing, which is smooth, almost slippery. The Bennett family pool has a textured, nonslip surface. My neighbors have the same thing. My kids come home with raw feet every time they swim over there. Multiply that by a factor of a thousand when a child is struggling for her life, not merely playing around in the pool.”
Jack focused his gaze on the remains, then on the photograph.
Dr. Flynn asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” said Jack. “I’m fine.”
What he wanted to say was that he was embarrassed for a moment, put off by the way his job made him stand beside the remains of a child, put all emotion aside, and slap on a label like “death by drowning.”
“That’s where your examination leads? Death by drowning?”
The doctor nodded once, but firmly. “It would be nice if we had lungs or some other body tissue to examine for traces of chlorine from the pool water, but we don’t. The medical examiner didn’t even have that three years ago, when the body was recovered. So, yes: Based on what remains, it is my expert opinion that the abrasions on the bottom of her feet as shown in the autopsy photos are consistent with death by drowning. Nothing I see in these remains contradicts that opinion.”
“Abrasions. That’s really all you got?”
“That’s more than you got now.”
The doctor had him there. “How soon can you get a written report for us?” asked Jack.
“A week. The cost of that is included in my retainer. But you should know that I charge four hundred dollars an hour if I have to testify at trial.”
“You realize that my client is indigent, right? The law allows me to submit a formal request to the Justice Administrative Commission to pay more than the guidelines specify, but even in a capital case, realistically we’re looking at about half that amount. I may end up asking you to cut your fee.”
“I don’t cut anything. My rate is four hundred dollars an hour. Period.”
Jack considered it. The battle of experts had always seemed like a game, but as his gaze drifted back to the sheet that was draped over Emma’s remains, the game seemed hardly worth playing.
“You know,” said Jack, “based on the way the state attorney has prosecuted this case, I might actually get you four hundred bucks an hour. On a net-net basis, it seems only fair.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m beyond confident that the state of Florida will hire two whores to call my one whore a quack.”
“Jack, come on back.”
He looked up and saw Andie standing in the open doorway.
“Have you spoken to Celeste’s parents?” he asked, rising from the couch.
“It’s not Celeste,” said Andie.
Jack felt a wave of relief . . . then trepidation. “Who is it?”
“We don’t know. We were hoping you could tell us.”
Chills ran the length of his spine. Jack followed her down the hallway. She walked quickly, as if eager to be done with this, and he had to hurry to keep up.
“You think it’s . . . somebody I know?”
“Possibly,” said Andie. “About my age. Female. Blond. Pretty.”
Jack continued to follow, his heart in his throat, fearing the worst.
“She had no identification,” said Andie. “A landscaper found her body, naked, next to the canal along Tamiami Trail.”
Rene would have crossed the Tamiami Trail to get from the hospital to the coffee shop in Little Havana. It took all his effort, but finally Jack managed to get a few words out. “How did it happen?”
Andie opened the door to the morgue. “Strangled,” she said.
Jack followed her inside. A wall of stainless steel drawers was before him. One to the right, three drawers from the bottom, was open. Andie led him to it. An assistant medical examiner pulled the drawer farther from the wall, drawing the sheet-covered body into the room. Jack held his
breath. With a nod from Andie, the examiner lifted the white sheet.
Jack’s knees nearly buckled. Her hair was mussed, her color was flat and lifeless, but there was no mistaking that classically beautiful face.
“Her name is Rene,” said Jack.
“Then you do know her?”
“Yes. Rene Fenning. She’s a doctor at Jackson.” He paused, then added, “We used to date.”
The assistant draped the white sheet back over her face.
Jack was suddenly puzzled. “If she had no identification, no clothes, how did you know to call me to make the ID?”
On Andie’s cue, the assistant lifted the sheet again, this time from the middle, exposing Rene’s torso.
Jack froze. Below the navel, about two inches above her pubic hair, was a handwritten message in black marker:
SOMEONE YOU LOVE.
It chilled Jack, and he could almost hear the voice of his attacker as he read those three words to himself.
“That’s the reason I called you,” said Andie.
The examiner replaced the sheet. Jack was still trying to comprehend that Rene was dead, and it hit him that much harder to think that it could have been Andie under that sheet. He looked at her, speechless.
Andie seemed to be staring right through him. “When is the last time you saw her, Jack?”
“Last night,” he said, and he immediately felt Andie do a double take. “At the hospital,” he added. “Andie, this is not what you think it—”
She raised a hand, which silenced him.
“Let’s go outside, Jack. Sounds like you and I need to talk.”
Chapter Twenty-One
He called himself Merselus. It was the surname of his best friend in high school back in Paterson, New Jersey. Ironically, it was his math teacher—recognizing his tenacity, pegging him as a rare Eastside High success story—who had dubbed the two of them Merselus and Merciless. If she only knew.
Three weeks before the start of the Sydney Bennett trial, he’d used another name entirely to lease a one-bedroom apartment on the Miami River, just minutes away from the courthouse. William Teague was a week-to-week tenant in his third month of occupancy, which practically made him the mayor of a decaying village of drug addicts and prostitutes who came and went from the riverfront like water rats.
Merselus entered with a turn of the key and locked the door—lower deadbolt, upper deadbolt, and then the chain. The venetian blinds were drawn, though it was superfluous; the lone window in the apartment was boarded over from the inside, iron bars on the outside. The only light in the room was the glow from a laptop computer, which he’d left open and running on the desk. The Google satellite image was still on the screen, displaying the result of his last search: Little Havana/Tamiami Trail. His eyes narrowed as he studied it again. The slope from the highway to the brown canal. The knee-high brush along the shoreline. The perfect place to drop a warm body that Merselus wanted the police to find quickly, before his handwritten message fell to decomposition. All of it, as captured in the satellite image, was virtually identical to the actual place he’d visited a little later in the day. He gave a thin smile of appreciation to the technocrats in Silicon Valley who had made it so easy to plan.
He wondered if any of them even remembered him, ever wondered what he was up to these days.
Merselus sat on the edge of the bed, dropped his backpack between his feet on the floor, and opened it. First, he removed the essential tools of his mission—latex gloves, which left no fingerprints; a nylon cord, in case he met with resistance; the serrated diving knife, in case he met with even greater resistance. He laid each of them neatly on the bed, side by side. Deeper inside the pack, in a separate pouch, was his latest acquisition. He unzipped the pouch and carefully, almost lovingly, collected his prize. A “trophy” was what one of those self-proclaimed geniuses in criminal profiling would have called it, like the panties, jewelry, and other keepsakes that serial killers took from their victims in order to relive their fantasy, over and over. Collecting such objects was part of the sociopath’s compulsive personality. So said the experts, whom Merselus had watched repeatedly on BNN and the Faith Corso Show, all of whom uniformly overlooked one crucial fact: Their profiles were based on the assholes who got caught. Merselus didn’t consider himself a serial killer, though his work could be measured in more than one victim. He didn’t think of himself as a sociopath, either, though that term was thrown around pretty loosely these days. And he was definitely no trophy hunter.
He just thought Rene Fenning’s necklace was cool.
It was made of polished copper, the kind of necklace that kept its shape and didn’t collapse like a chain when taken off. He put his hand through the necklace, which made the opening seem small. Like Rene’s gentle neck. It almost fit his wrist like a bracelet, a testimony to the size and strength of his hands. He reached over and switched on the lamp to get a better look.
The glass bead on the front of the necklace was most intriguing. It opened with a tiny latch. Inside were three pebbles, each about the size of a BB. It was unlike anything Merselus had ever seen. He laid it on the white bedsheet and took a photograph. He took several more until he got the right lighting, a pristine image. Then he went to his computer and uploaded the image. He wasn’t certain that his image-recognition software would find a match on the Internet, and it wasn’t at all crucial. But he was curious—not just to check out the trinket, but more to test the limits of the software. This kind of search tool wasn’t something the average person on the street could have walked into the Apple Store and purchased. In the private sector, only the most elite security firms could get their hands on it. It was a trade secret still in development. A stolen trade secret.
Merselus hit SEARCH.
It took a couple of minutes to populate the results, another minute for him to eliminate the extraneous hits. Then he found a match, though the one pictured on the computer screen appeared to be larger than the one fastened to Rene’s necklace.
“A gris-gris,” he read aloud. “An amulet originating in Africa which is believed to protect the wearer from evil or brings luck.”
That brought a smirk to his face. Not very lucky for the good doctor.
He closed the software program, impressed by its performance—and pleased, as always, to be one step ahead of the good guys on the technology curve.
With great care, Merselus carried the necklace across the room and opened the closet. Taped to the back of the door, right below a coat hook, was an eight-by-ten photograph. It was the image of Sydney Bennett that the prosecution had shown the jury at trial—the one of Sydney laughing off the effects of tequila, the hands of at least three different men pawing her tight body, her clingy white halter unable to hide her protruding nipples.
Of all his Sydney photographs, this one was Merselus’ favorite.
“For luck,” he said as he hung the necklace on the coat hook above the photograph. “See what good care I take of you?”
He closed the closet door and lay on the bed. Not nearly enough rest last night, with all the preparation. He could have nodded off in a moment and slept through till the next morning, but he forced himself to set an alarm: six thirty P.M. Barely time for a catnap.
There was more work to do. Tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rene’s death changed everything. Almost everything.
“This won’t change us,” said Jack. He had wanted to sound sure of it, but it probably hadn’t come across that way. “We can’t let it,” he added.
They were in Andie’s car, driving to Jack’s house on Key Biscayne. For five minutes and without a single interruption, Andie had listened to Jack’s full explanation—how Rene had contacted him after Celeste was admitted to Jackson, how she’d been his source for the Laramores’ lawsuit against BNN, how their coffees in Little Havana had had nothing to do with rekindling a romance. Jack was certain that Andie had heard it and understood, but whenever there was work to be done, Andie�
��s ability to put personal moments on hold was unmatched. At her behest, a couple of FBI agents were already on the way to Jack’s house—a tech guy, a surveillance expert. She was in full-fledged FBI mode, focused on stopping a killer.
“Jack, I don’t have it in my head that you were chasing an old girlfriend two minutes after I said we should take a step back, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She reached across the console and brushed the back of her hand against his face, a proxy for not looking him in the eye while driving. “I know you better than that.”
“Thank you.”
Her attention was on the road, and Jack’s gaze locked onto her profile. It was little more than a silhouette in the dark car, but against the sparkling Miami skyline in the distance, it was like a work of art. The views of downtown Miami and the financial district were killer from the causeway to Key Biscayne, especially at night—the south Florida version of Manhattan as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I also know the mind-set of Rene’s killer,” said Andie. “He didn’t leave that message because he thought Rene was ‘someone you love.’ He’s like a shark. He draws closer and closer to his prey, tighter and tighter circles. Each one of those circles allows him to live out the perfect fantasy he has created in his head. Eventually, he’ll move in for the ultimate kill, the fulfillment of the fantasy.”
“Someone I love?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“My take is that he probably believes all the BS on BNN that you and Sydney couldn’t wait to rip off each other’s clothes the minute she got out of prison. Yeah, he threatened to hurt someone you love, which could be anyone from me to an old girlfriend. But if you ask my professional opinion, he isn’t taunting you just because he thinks you know where Sydney is hiding. He could threaten her parents, if that’s all he wanted out of this. His anger—his hatred for you—is driven by his belief that you’ve actually had your way with Sydney.”
“Someone he loves.”
“Someone he’s obsessed with. Got nothing to do with love.”
Blood Money Page 12