by Unknown
“I’ll know when I get the trap up,” the CSU guy said. “He used the shower after, we know that. There’s blood marks behind the grab bar. Maybe we’ll get some hairs.” More clanking, a muffled curse. “We found one thing, near the baby. I gave it to Cletis already.”
“What?”
“Probably nothing. Looks like a sliver of black plastic or glass. Doesn’t match anything I could see in the room.”
Paz went back to the bedroom. Barlow had not moved.
“So what do you think, Cletis?”
“Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils.”
“Besides that, Cletis. Do we have anything?”
“Well, she’s fresher than Deandra. Look, the blood’s just about done setting up. He couldn’t have finished more than half an hour before Vargas got home. He says he was at a Marlins game with some clients, which I guess we’ll check out just to dot the i’s. This here’s his wife, Teresa, age twenty-four. There’s a housekeeper, too, who you need to talk to. Her English ain’t that hot. Amelia Ferrer, we’re keeping her in her room downstairs. You also need to talk to the people in the other two houses on this strip, maybe they saw or heard something.”
“Obviously Amelia didn’t or she would’ve called the cops.”
“You’ll find out. Let me handle the scene and you go talk the language to these people.”
“What about this piece of glass CSU found?”
Barlow took an evidence bag from his pocket and held it up to the light. In it was a fragment a little larger than a fingernail clipping, and with nearly the same crescent shape.
“That’s not as good as a rare nut, is it?”
Barlow said nothing and put the bag back in his pocket. Paz said, “Well, I got to admit you called it right. We’re deep in it now. The bosses are all over this already. Did Posada or Mendés have anything to say?”
“Oh, yeah. The department called the Feebs already. Guy’s flying down from Quantico, the expert on serial killers. It’s butt-covering time. Meeting Monday morning in the chief’s office.”
“Mendés’s?”
“No, the chief. Of police. Horton. This is going to be high-level right down the line. The big boys’ll be looking over our shoulders from inside of our suit jackets from now on. You better go talk to them people now.”
Barlow returned to his silent contemplation of the eviscerated Teresa, or maybe he was praying for guidance. Paz went out of the death-stinking room, down the stairs to the maid’s room near the kitchen, and found the housekeeper, a stocky, thirtyish woman a shade or two darker than Paz, wearing a tan uniform and apron. A policewoman was keeping an eye on her. Amelia Ferrer had been crying and dabbed at her reddened eyes with a wad of paper towel while he conducted the interview. She had last seen her employer alive at just before eight that evening. Mrs. Vargas had been watching television in her bedroom and Mrs. Ferrer had gone up as she usually did to see if anything was wanted before she herself settled down to watch her favorite program ( Wheel of Fortune) in her own room. She had not left her room until she heard Mr. Vargas’s horrified shriek at shortly after ten, while E.R . was playing. Yes, her door had been slightly ajar, as always. Yes, she had heard Mr. Vargas enter the house. No, she had not heard anyone else come in, but she recalled dozing off for a few minutes. No, the elaborate alarm system had not been turned on; they did not turn it on, usually, until the family was ready for bed.
Mr. Vargas was in his living room, with a stiff drink. He wanted someone to blame, and it was Paz. After some shouting and raving, which Paz did not allow to affect him, he took Vargas through his day, in English. He’d worked the morning (he was in real estate, office in Coral Gables) and then gone out for a spin in the boat (a big Bayliner, docked behind the house). Then he’d had supper with his wife (here he broke down briefly) and picked up a trio of heavy investors at the Biltmore in the Gables and driven them up to Joe Robbie Stadium for the game, using his firm’s skybox. He wouldn’t have gone off with his wife just about to have a baby had it not been a major deal. He had called her on his cell phone during the seventh-inning stretch, about eight-fifty. She had been fine. The game was over at nine-twenty, he had dropped his clients at their hotel, making excuses when they invited him for drinks. He had hurried home, arriving just past ten, and found … Another breakdown.
Now there was a bustle outside the living room, voices raised. It was the family, the famous Cuban family?Vargas’s father, mother, two sisters, their husbands, the victim’s father. By the book, Paz should have isolated all these people and interviewed them separately, but it was so hideously clear that this thing wasn’t a domestic that he let them come in for a shrieking-and-comfort-fest with Alex Vargas. He did not, however, avoid a dirty look from the victim’s father, and an angry spurt of Spanish to his son-in-law?”That’s the detective? What, we don’t pay enough taxes, they stick you with a nigger?”
Paz went out through the rear of the house, through the French doors that led to a broad terrace, which included a long lit-up pool and a little palm-thatched bar. He stood and breathed salt-scented air until his gut stopped roiling. He didn’t really blame the gusanos, who were hopeless; he blamed himself for still, still, after all these years, letting it get to him.
He walked off the terrace out onto the dock, and determined that no one was lurking in the Bayliner, nor had the murderer left any obvious clues on it. Beyond the boat there was nothing but the dark bay and beyond that the lights of Key Biscayne. There were cops all around the place kneeling, squatting, looking for evidence. Paz did not think they would find much.
He checked out the other two houses on the cul-de-sac. One was closed up for the summer. The other was occupied by a frightened family who had seen and heard nothing. No cars, no boats. They would have heard. They asked Paz what had happened, and Paz told them they were investigating a homicide. Paz agreed with them that it was awful for something like this to happen in a neighborhood as nice as this one.
As Paz arrived back at the Vargas house, he was buttonholed by Arnie Mendés. The homicide chief was a burly man, of the size and shape characteristic of football tackles, with a broad, humorous, fleshy face decorated by a brush mustache and sideburns. Mendés was not a Cuban at all, but a third-generation Spaniard, who barely spoke the language. His people had come over from Segovia in 1894 to roll cigars. His name, however, had clinched him the job.
“Solve it yet, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir. We’re pretty sure it was a mentally retarded itinerant Negro person. I’m just about to drive along under the expressway and pick him up out of his refrigerator carton. I’m sure he’ll confess.”
“It may come to that,” said Mendés, laughing. “Do you have any idea who these people are?” He gestured broadly to the house and grounds.
“Rich Cubans?”
“You could say that. The husband’s daddy is Ignacio Vargas. Owns the Southeast Company. You’ve seen their ads?”
“Developers.”
“Gigantic fucking developers, hence dear friends of every politician in the state. The dead girl’s father is Hector Guzman, the founder and president of Hemisphere Bank, which is that great big black glass thing on Brickell. What they call a dynastic marriage, and the little heir to it all is lying in that fucking yellow bathroom with his head sliced open. As of this moment, the total detective resources of the Miami PD are on this case and will remain on it until it goes down, or we give up hope of putting it down, in which case all of us will be looking for employment. So what do you have for me?”
“Boss, we just got here. We haven’t got an autopsy yet, we haven’t looked at the crime-scene stuff …”
“I mean is it what it looks like?”
Paz paused. Of course the man would’ve already spoken with Cletis. So Paz said, “What it looks like, subject to revision, is a ritual murder similar in all obvious respects to the murder of Deandra Wallace and her unborn baby. That means a ritual serial killer, and this guy is very smart,
very sneaky, and he seems to move around without anyone seeing him.”
“A black, I understand. I mean seriously.”
“There are some indications, Chief.”
“Perfect. The icing on the cake. Cletis tell you we’re bringing the Bureau in?”
“Yes, sir.” In a perfectly flat tone.
“Yeah, you’re as enthusiastic as I am, but the boss and the mayor want them in on it. As far as I’m concerned, they can advise, but you and Cletis are the point guys on this business. I want you to understand you have my total support. You can absolutely count on me.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Right. Up to the point where you fuck up or it becomes politically inconvenient to support you, in which case you’re both shit-canned.”
Paz couldn’t help smiling. “Please, sir, I don’t need a pep talk. Give it to me straight.”
Mendés smiled, too, but Paz knew he was serious. A bright man, and honest according to his lights, but ambitious as Lucifer. He leaned forward a little, placing his head a little closer to Paz’s face. “Okay, you said ritual killings. Did you mean something like a psychotic ritual or a ritual from some actual cult?”
“Unclear, at the moment. There’s some kind of African connection, with African fortune-telling, in the Wallace case. And I’ve got people checking to see whether the situation, the pregnant woman, the cuts, the parts taken from the corpses, the drugs involved, are connected to anything in the anthropological record. I was just going to get with the family and ask them if the vic had any interest in that stuff.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t you let Cletis handle that end of things,” said the homicide chief.
“Any particular reason for that?” asked Paz, an edge in his voice. “My interview technique not quite polished enough?”
“Oh, fuck it, man!” the chief snapped. “The whole fucking department knows you have a beef with upper-class Cubanos. You just let the preacher talk with the family, and you find something else useful to do. Supervise the goddamn canvass. This guy must’ve got here somehow, and every one of these fucking piles has a guard dog and a proximity alarm. People must have heard something. Oh, and Jimmy? You’re both off all other unrelated cases, off the chart entirely. And you’ll both report directly to me on this one, from now on, until further notice.”
“What about Lieutenant Posada?”
“You let me worry about Posada. We’ll need a high-level liaison with the Bureau, and that ought to be right up Romeo’s alley.”
“Yes, sir,” said Paz, and walked off to find the patrol sergeant in charge of the local canvass.
So the hours passed. Paz kept busy, interviewing cops, interviewing neighbors who had told the cops he interviewed that they might have seen something, talking to the crime-scene guys, in hopes of picking up something obvious, some lead besides a tiny piece of fractured black glass. The results were thin. Two people walking dogs on Cocoplum Boulevard had seen a man go by on a bike at about the right time, but the guy was white, with blond hair. Nobody closer to the murder scene had seen this person. The crime-scene techs had picked up some grains of soil off the rug near the French windows leading to the terrace and there was an indentation from a bike tire in the dirt under one of the big palms that lined the driveway. Hooray, a clue. The CSU people took a plaster impression.
At about midnight, Paz decided to pass on some of the misery and called Manny Echiverra at home, told him what had happened, and suggested that it would be a smart career move for him to get down to the morgue and autopsy Mrs. Vargas, forgetting about normal procedure and schedules or any other bureaucrap, because he was the pathologist who had done the work on Deandra and did he want someone to maybe miss a significant similarity? And blame it on him?
He had just folded away the cell phone when a familiar voice said, “I hope you’re not avoiding me.” He turned to see Doris Taylor standing there in her famous grass-green pantsuit.
“Can’t talk to you now,” he said, covertly looking around to see if anyone was observing them together. “Also, you need to get behind the barrier with the other press.”
“Oh, I’m moving along, like the cops are always telling us to do. I just wanted to let you know there’s a young woman sitting in your car. A real interesting young woman. I didn’t realize you had such good taste. Me and Willa, why, we just talked and talked. In fact, I might even do a piece on the after-hours life of Miami’s hardworking dicks, how they bring their girlfriends to crime scenes so as not to lose a minute …”
Paz grabbed the woman’s arm and backed into the dense shadow of a ficus tree. “What do you want, Doris?”
“Everything. This is the biggest murder in a decade. I hear it’s bloody. Is it the same guy?”
“Looks like it.”
“Any clues about who it is?”
“Not as yet. It’s early days.”
“It’s a black man, though. The same as with Wallace?”
“We don’t know that. We have no ID, no witnesses …”
“Oh, please! White boys don’t kill black girls in Overtown in the middle of the night and then just stroll away. It’s the same guy here, so he’s black. What did the murder scene look like?”
He told her, and answered all her avid questions, omitting and changing some small details, as always. He left her full of sucked blood, a happy woman.
They buttoned the place up at about one, the crime-scene lights packed away, the cop cars gone, and the press vans, the corpse now down at the morgue, the rest of the extended family still in the house, unbuttoned and wailing loudly enough for the noise to reach Paz where he stood with his partner on the street.
“He come on a bike, huh?” Cletis ventured.
“He could’ve,” said Paz. “He sure didn’t come by car. If he came by bike, then according to our witnesses he turned himself white, which should be right up this guy’s alley. Or maybe he walked on water. And someone let him in there, like before. Any luck with the family?”
“Some. The sister-in-laws say the victim was talking to someone about a lucky charm thing for her baby, but they didn’t know much more than that. I got a bunch of stuff I took out of the victim’s room, address books, handbags. I’ll study it some and see if there’s any good for us there.” He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. “Whyn’t y’all take this glass splinter, seeing as how you’re in with the boys at the U. See what it is, what it come off of.”
Paz put it away. They spoke briefly about arrangements for the morrow. Barlow was heading for the morgue, where he would observe the autopsy and generate zeal among the toxicologists. Paz walked back to his car, where he found Willa dozing. He got in and drove off. She awoke, stretched.
“Well, was it as exciting as you dreamed?” he asked sourly.
“Yes,” she replied, “it was like watching an anthill poked with a stick. And I had a real interesting conversation with Doris Taylor. She told me all about your exploits.”
“I bet she did. But because she spotted my car and you, and you spilled your guts, instead of, for example, saying you were a witness, she now has me by the balls. She’ll pump me dry on this goddamn case.”
Willa looked genuinely remorseful. “Gosh, Jimmy, I’m sorry. She seemed so friendly, and like she really liked you.” She paused and slid closer. “Would it make it up a little if I got you by the balls and pumped you dry?”
“To an extent,” said Paz.
An hour later, upon her hard futon, this had been accomplished, and they were back at it again, she on top, he solidly engulfed, she not moving very much, her little breasts occasionally brushing his face, and chatting away as she generally did during the second act. This feature of Willa Shaftel’s sex life was not actually one he would have ordered off a menu, but he had grown used to it. Every so often, she would pause and utter a pleasant small cry, and shudder, her face and chest would flush, her eyes would roll back in her head, and there would be a delightful spasm in the moist flesh that gripped him, and
then she would take up where she left off.
“Gosh, that was a lovely one,” she said huskily after one of these caesuras, “and I can hardly bear it that this is our penultimate fuck.”
“Penultimate?”
“Unless you’re not staying over. I was planning on a lazy one tomorrow morn, plus the usual shower encounter.”
“I have a gigantic day tomorrow. A serial killer who whacked someone important is about the worst thing that can happen to a police force, and I’m in the bull’s-eye. Sorry.”
“The ultimate, then. This will have to last you all the lonely nights, or all the lonely twenty minutes before you find someone superior to me in every way, with even more gigantic tits, if your imagination can encompass that. Unless you contrive to visit Iowa City. Do you think you ever might?”
“Every weekend.”
A chortle. “Yeah, we could meet in the airport Marriott. Ah, Jimmy, you know even though I’ve realized these many months that you were fucking everything above room temperature, I guess in my little girl’s heart I still wished that you’d say, ‘Willa, love of my life, you’re the best pony in the stable, so stay, stay, stay and be my tender bride, and spawn delightful Judeo-Afro-Cubano babies, each with your blazing intelligence and my preternatural beauty.’ Like in the movies.”
Paz said, “Would you, if I did?”
She stopped her slow grinding and looked him in the face. “Oh, wait a minute, I have to consider this. Here’s a good-looking man, a body from heaven, luscious skin, smart, good steady job, sensitive but not a wuss, a penis of adequate size and function …”
“Adequate?”
“A great kisser, at both ends, too, a lover who, while slowing down a bit with approaching middle age, can still fuck one’s brains out, a great dresser, polite, decent, generous to a point, not anything of a pig. A catch, you would say, and so I ask myself, why is there hanging over his head a forty-foot state highway sign with yellow flashers that reads ‘Heartbreak Ahead! Do Not Get Serious!’? Why is that, Jimmy? No quick answers? I’ll leave you to consider it while I work up another one, and I believe I’ll ask you to join me here.”