Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  “Brendan! Shelley!” Lance cried.

  “Why’d you do it, Dad?” they chanted. “Why’d you do it, Dad?”

  They continued to chant, shrugging off his attempts to hug them.

  “My God, Renee.” Lance turned helplessly toward a woman carrying a sign that said, NO MARGIN OF ERROR!

  In her late thirties, she had a deep tan, crystal-blue eyes, and raven-black hair beginning to gray. She wore sandals, a khaki skirt, and a forest-green shirt.

  “Own up to it, Lance!” She brandished her sign at him, the way a believer would brandish a cross at a vampire.

  He peered around it, trying to reason with her.

  Each time he attempted to speak, shattering blasts from the air horns drowned him out.

  He backed off for a moment, rejoining Norman and me. Others from the movie crew had gathered.

  “What the hell?” Van Ness cried, hands over his ears.

  This must be the first Mrs. Westfell, I thought.

  “My first wife—and my kids,” Lance confirmed. He looked stricken.

  “I thought they were in Brazil.”

  “So did I.”

  EARTH SCREAMERS, I later learned, had evolved into an ecological SWAT team, swooping into hot spots, wherever there was a threat to the planet.

  Several TV trucks and radio news cars pulled up. Fear replaced arrogance in Van Ness’s eyes.

  Hodges stepped out of the motel room where they had been setting up shots. He wore a baseball cap over his curly hair and blinked in the sunlight. “We’re going to need quiet, people,” he announced. “We’re making a movie here,”

  The shouts and blasts nearly knocked him off his feet.

  “People of Dade County,” Renee Westfell said into a bristling bouquet of microphones. “Before this disastrous fire, Miami’s mold and pollen count had hit a ten-year high. Mount Trashmore, your garbage dump, is full and leaking lethal amounts of ammonia into Biscayne Bay. Seeping landfills are threatening your drinking water. The chemical plants and phosphate mines upstate are creating toxic clouds of poisonous gas, clouds of ammonia.” The woman was a pro, her delivery superb.

  “Ozone damage is killing the amphibians.” Her voice rose. “The sea grass is dying. Mercury is poisoning the fish, and red tide is killing the manatees. And now the moviemakers who expose and inure your children to violence are despoiling your most precious natural resource for their own greedy motives.

  “Your politicians sold out to the filmmakers and allowed them to build on environmentally sensitive national parkland, and it now appears clear that careless smoking and reckless behavior by the star is responsible for the fire now ravaging this treasure essential to our future well-being.”

  Damn. She’s right on target, I thought, about everything but Lance. I saw what was about to happen, too late to warn him. The cameras swung toward Lance and Van Ness, as reporters sought a response.

  “That is not true. I swear I did not start that fire,” Lance said. But nobody else heard him. The chants—“No Margin of Error!”—and the air horns drowned him out.

  17

  Her lips and fingers were blue, throat slashed, clothes savaged, chest cavity open. Rib cartilage exposed. Blood everywhere. Big eyes half open in a lifeless stare.

  The corpse was perfect, except that she had to keep getting up to go pee, apparently a symptom of her pregnancy.

  Ziff had done a helluva job. He spilled blood, spattered gore, and dripped body fluids with an artist’s precision and top-of-the-line technique. He and Angel had hit it off from the start as he measured and studied her. Then he had fashioned a mold of her chest, using latex and clay.

  McDonald was there, in plain clothes. So was Sam Bliss, and Lottie with her camera. Lance and Niko were there too, free at the moment because the filmmakers had been forced into court for an injunction to stop Earth Screamers from further disrupting their shooting schedule.

  “How come, in those movies, you never run out of bullets?” Angel asked Lance as he signed autographs for her children, who were then whisked away. A rookie policewoman had endured six months of calisthenics, torment, and survival training at the police academy to qualify for this assignment, baby-sitting Angel’s kids for the afternoon.

  “Yeah,” said Lottie, “and why isn’t the movie ever as good as the book?”

  “Because they don’t read the books,” he said. “Sam Goldwyn was once shooting a big movie based on a best-seller and was asked if he’d read it. He said, ‘A book that good, you don’t need to read.’ “

  I was glad to see Lance smile. We both felt ragged and looked it. I had seen his eyes as he watched Angel and her children and knew he was thinking of his own. After the encounter with Renee and the Earth Screamers, he had spent lunch muttering, “It was always me, always my fault. That’s how it always was.” I got the impression he had spent the night on the phone with Silverman, his LA therapist.

  Ziff had reported morale among the crew as “lower than a snake’s belly,” adding that a Cubanborn cameraman was actually blaming a Castro plot for the company’s misfortunes.

  The fire, still sweeping south, had closed both U.S. 1 and Card Sound Road, cutting off the only land routes to the Keys, traveled by more than twenty thousand cars a day. With the roads dosed, the paper had to hire a cargo plane to deliver the Miami News to Key West Tourists were fleeing Miami and its haze, and the Department of the Interior had launched an inquiry, not of the fire but into how permission was granted the movie company to build the reactor in the ‘Glades.

  “Margin of Error is turning into a budget-blaster,” Lance told Lottie and me over coffee in Angel’s spacious new kitchen. “Every day is money on location, and we’re so far behind schedule now…” He shook his head.

  Being out, away from the filmmakers, was healthy for him, a good idea, I thought.

  McDonald and Bliss were even civil, and their anticipation was contagious. We all shared the same goal, nailing the bad guy.

  “Well, what do you think of Angel?” I asked Lance privately.

  “She’s like Demeter,” he said, “the ripe and fertile earth mother in Greek mythology. Always pregnant, bountiful breasts always filled with milk. She wandered the planet in search of her lost daughter, Persephone, who was stolen and spirited into the underworld by Hades.”

  “Fertile, yes,” I conceded. “But her daughter wasn’t stolen. She starved.”

  What we were doing, I realized, could, in effect, orphan Angel’s children. If we were successful, the father could go to jail for life, the same sentence Angel faced if convicted in her baby’s death. Justice for all but the children.

  Ziff worked on Angel in the sunny Florida room, as a crime-scene technician video taped the entire process. Supine, on a large worktable, lying on a backboard borrowed from a rescue unit, Angel seemed in surprisingly good spirits for a woman in such a sobering situation.

  She and Ziff giggled, whispered, and shared secrets. She must be relieved that the police believe her, I thought, and that if everything worked as planned Darnell would soon be out of circulation. And she had every reason to be happy about her living arrangements. I know I was impressed.

  After whisking Angel and her kids out of their bullet-riddled, low-cost housing-project apartment, the cops had moved her into a spacious $375,000 five-bedroom Miami Beach home seized by the federal government from a drug dealer. This was an example of the tools the feds were providing to local cops battling domestic violence.

  “Do you believe this?” I whispered to Lottie, as we strolled through the dining room with its crystal chandelier, delivering coffee to the others. “If we were homeless, Jimmy Carter would build us houses; if we had husbands trying to kill us, the government would put us up in luxury. But no, we’re just working stiffs.”

  “Where did we go wrong?” Lottie wondered.

  “The kids hated that apartment by the Orange Bowl,” Angel was saying, staring at the ceiling as Ziff m
atted her pale hair with fake blood, a mix of corn syrup and food coloring. “We were the only ones in the neighborhood who didn’t speak Spanish.”

  The big backyard, overgrown since the prior owner’s arrest, was the perfect place to shoot the pictures. Angel’s mutilated body was slid gently off the backboard into weedy centipede grass, amid a wild outcropping of Surinam cherry bushes.

  “Geez, think it was a good idea to put her in the poison ivy?” Niko quipped, prompting giggles from the corpse.

  “You play dead now,” Ziff demanded, smearing gore on the surrounding leaves with a spatula. “This is serious.”

  Her carotid artery appeared to be cut just left of center so that blood had gushed over her shoulder. Crimson spurts and droplets stained the weeds and leaves.

  The effect was horrifying. Unconsciously, we all began to speak in the hushed tones used in the presence of the dead. Most chilling was knowing that this grisly tableau was what Darnell wanted for real.

  “Anybody who glances over that fence will have a heart attack,” I warned. We all had seen real corpses who looked more alive than Angel did now.

  “It’s high enough that there shouldn’t be a problem,” McDonald said.

  The cops shot tape, to document the scene, and snapped the Polaroids for Darnell. If they did not convince him, nothing would. Lottie fired off pictures as well, probably too gory for use in the News once the story broke, but Ziff wanted prints for his scrapbook.

  Bliss lightened the mood as the photo session ended. “Okay,” he said, “get the shovel. We can bury her now.”

  Back inside the house, Ziff helped Angel remove the phony chest cavity and much of the gore; then we all ate sandwiches while she showered. The kitchen was stocked with boxes and boxes of plastic forks, spoons, tiny packets of powdered milk, sugar, mustard, mayo, and relish. The former owner was apparently big on convenience.

  “These are great hurricane supplies,” I noted.

  “The only hurricane supply I would need, honey, is enough gas,” Ziff said, “to get out of town.”

  Bliss and Santangelo, the gang unit detective, already had their tickets to Orlando. Santangelo had been recruited into the unit right out of the police academy. He looked seventeen, baby-faced and slightly built. Posing as a PLO member, he and Omar would deliver the pictures to Darnell and pick up the incriminating cash. I called the News and had Gloria put me on the same flight, which left in a few hours.

  Lance wanted to go along.

  The cops were not crazy about it. Our deal had included me only. But McDonald called the chief, who surprised everybody by agreeing as long as nothing compromised the case.

  Niko booked two first-class tickets aboard the same flight.

  As Lottie and I left Angel’s, McDonald called me aside.

  “I learned patience years ago,” he said, his expression serious, “when I was a rookie in robbery, waiting in the bushes for twelve hours for somebody to rob a Seven-Eleven.”

  What was this man talking about?

  “But I’ve almost lost it,” he said. “You’re falling for this guy’s pitch. I can see the stars in your eyes.”

  “What pitch?” What was he talking about?

  “Fertile earth mother, my ass.”

  “You were eavesdropping!” I said, surprised at him. “Don’t you worry about me, I know what I’m doing.”

  Skies were clear, once our flight ascended above the smoke. I switched seats with Niko and joined Lance in first class as soon as we were airborne.

  The flight attendants, who usually only acknowledge my existence by flinging tiny packets of peanuts, fawned all over us.

  “Not bad.” I sipped the complimentary champagne. “A pity the flight’s too short for a movie.”

  “Wish we could keep going.” He sighed and leaned back in the comfortable seat. “Hawaii, Paris, Mexico…”

  “I thought you were the man who loved Miami at first sight.”

  “I do.” He took my hand. “It’s just everything that’s been going down … You know.”

  The flight was too short.

  Omar, a gangly kid with tattooed arms, was wired for sound.

  The high-tech police surveillance van equipped with video and audio tape equipment was crowded: Bliss, in his blue suit, two Orlando detectives, a patrolman in uniform, Lance, and me. Niko nursed coffee and a burger in the McDonald’s while we parked outside the Econo Lodge.

  Omar had called Darnell to set up the meet. “Need to see you.” Every word was monitored.

  “Can’t it wait till morning?” Darnell grumbled.

  “No, man, you don’t wanna talk about this on the job site. You got cause to celebrate. Somebody just came up from Miami with some pictures you’re gonna like. Bring the cash.”

  It was growing dark when Omar drove into the lot in a battered blue Camaro accompanied by Santangelo. He had said that Darnell drove a white Ford pickup, so we nearly missed him when he pulled up alongside in what must have been his wife’s car, a dark blue Nissan.

  “There he is! There he is!” Bliss said urgently.

  Adrenaline pumped. As we all stared out the tinted glass, Lance’s hand crept beneath my skirt and up my thigh. I flexed my thigh muscles, trapping his fingers.

  “Shit!” exploded the Orlando detective monitoring and recording the wire.

  Omar had tested the wire while they waited, and we had heard him loud and clear. Now there was interference, a low steady buzz, and static.

  Slightly shifting position, I brushed my right breast against Lance’s forearm.

  The interference vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Who’s this?” we heard Darnell ask. The three were standing between the Camaro and the Nissan now. Darnell was husky, with light hair. Good-looking, except for a slight overbite.

  “Buddy a mine from Miami,” Omar said. “You don’t wanna know his name.”

  “Right, right,” Darnell said. His voice bore traces of a southern accent and sounded tinny.

  Lance, his fingers still caught between my thighs, was scrutinizing me in the semidarkness instead of the scenario unfolding half a parking lot away. Slowly, I licked my lips.

  “We handled everything,” Santangelo said.

  “Hope it went better than last time.”

  “It went perfecto. We got the job done. Just the way you wanted it.”

  “So how do I know?” Darnell sounded suspicious. “You got something to show me?”

  A slim sliver of skin showed between the back of Lance’s shirt and the waistband of his jeans as he crouched in the van.

  “You bring the cash?”

  “Come on, come on,” Bliss muttered.

  I put my index finger in my mouth, as though in suspense, then casually removed it and smeared the wet digit across that bare sliver of skin.

  I felt him shiver.

  “I wanna see proof, first. Did the bitch buy it this time?”

  “Here we go,” Bliss chortled. “Here we go.”

  “Do it, do it,” the Orlando detective next to him coaxed softly.

  “Lookit this.” Santangelo removed the two Polaroids from his shirt pocket. He handed one to Darnell, then the other.

  “Jesus,” Darnell said. He took a step back, holding the pictures up to better see them in the twilight. “You really did her. She’s outa my hair permanently now. How come I ain’t heard nothing from Miami?”

  “Nobody even knows who she is yet. They just found the body.”

  “You really did it,” Darnell repeated softly. “She suffer?”

  “Whadda you think?”

  Scribbling notes, I wondered if Darnell was feeling remorse or experiencing second thoughts. He wasn’t.

  “This picture is worth to me ten times what I’m paying you,” he crowed.

  My thighs released their grip on Lance’s hand. His fingers advanced.

  “She gives me any trouble, maybe we can do my mother-in-l
aw next.” Darnell was talking his way into a prison cell.

  The cops in the van were grinning. So was Lance. His probing fingers had reached first base. I wondered if my notes would make any sense when I tried to read them later.

  “Get the money,” Bliss whispered. “Get the money.”

  “Here you go,” Darnell said. “It’s all here.”

  “Here we go,” Bliss said.

  “Nice doing business with you.”

  That line was the prearranged signal.

  “Let’s take ‘im!” The van’s door burst open as the cops jumped out and ran.

  “I wanna jump you. Right here,” Lance muttered in my ear.

  “We can’t.” I jumped out and ran after the cops.

  Marked police cars raced out of nowhere, blocking all the parking lot exits. An Orlando P.D. SWAT team scrambled out of another van across the street and charged into the lot in full gear. The police presence was overwhelming, overkill if you ask me, especially since they knew Darnell’s name and where he lived.

  Santangelo was struggling with Darnell, who had stuffed the pictures in his mouth. Omar was walking away, looking skyward, hands apart, pretending he was not involved.

  Darnell found it difficult to chew and swallow two three-by-five Polaroids with a policeman gripping his throat.

  He coughed them up.

  He knew he had been had.

  Head down, handcuffed, he sneaked a peek up at Lance, who had followed me out of the van.

  “You’re him.” He squinted.

  “Who?” Lance said.

  “Him, you’re him!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you hire people to kill the mother of your children?” I asked.

  He mumbled that he had nothing to say.

  Bliss and Santangelo would return home with their prisoner in the morning. The Orange County state attorney had granted permission for the charges, solicitation to commit first-degree murder, to be transferred to Miami.