by J. A. Kerley
14
The FCLE comprised two floors in Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center. Though it was the hub of municipal government, I suspected the politically attuned and sporadically Machiavellian Roy McDermott was the reason our agency had been allocated such prime airspace. The admin and upper-level investigative and legal types occupied the twenty-third floor, with the one below the province of pool investigators, support, and record-keeping.
When Roy had moved Ziggy Gershwin from the tight back room of my office to his own space, he’d kept the kid on the twenty-third floor, claiming there was no room downstairs, but I knew it was because Roy figured Gershwin was a future star, proving himself in the cases we’d closed.
Gershwin’s office was small and windowless and down a long hall past the legal team. He was at his desk, tipped back in his chair and studying reports. We’d spent a lot of time together and he seemed to have adopted some of my traits, trading in the former skate-punk garb for summer-weight jackets over T-shirts and jeans, and wearing dark running shoes, which beat the hell out of hard soles on the occasions when you had to chase lowlifes down alleys and over fences.
He looked up and grinned. “S’up, Big Ryde?”
“I need a listing of sex offenders in a fifty-mile radius, Zigs, especially those recently released from prison. Got a couple trainees you can use?”
My worst fear was that the perp had settled an old score with Sandoval, but had more scores to settle. We needed to take this monster down fast.
“Uh, no problem.”
“You sound hesitant.”
“Just thinking who I can put on it. Roy’s got me on the Menendez case, kind of on the QT.”
“Menendez? Like what?”
“The lady’s a saint, right? So no one’s looking past that. Roy wanted me to take a tiptoe through her history.”
Meaning dig into Menendez deeper than others were doing, but leave a light footprint, if any. All cop agencies have biases toward their own, and it was best outsiders handle such things.
“Understood,” I said.
“But no problem with checking the pervs,” Gershwin assured me, picking up his phone. “I’ll put Wagner and Brazano on it. They’re new, but good.”
“Gracias, amigo.”
I was thinking about Menendez as I returned to my office. It was the worst type of case: a beloved and talented public figure killed for apparently no reason, knifed down in her prime in her own home, not a shred of evidence to be found. I was pitying every MDPD detective when my cell rang: Belafonte.
“Good morning,” I said, trying for jovial to balance out my dark musings on Menendez. “How’s my favorite MDPD liaison today?”
“She just heard about a body found in the waterway in Golden Glades,” Belafonte said quietly. “She’s hearing ‘wrapped in a burnt sheet’.”
So much for starting the day on a high note. With siren and flashers pushing aside traffic, I raced there in fifteen minutes, a retiree-oriented neighborhood shaded by palms and garnished with tropical foliage. The street was blocked by a white-and-green MDPD patrol car and I continued to a brick home fronted by another cruiser, an ambulance, and mobile units from the Medical Examiner’s office and the Forensics team. Anxious residents stood at the curb and beyond them I saw Belafonte beside the canal a hundred feet behind the house, part of a highway of water running from the glades to Biscayne Bay.
The body had been bobbing at the water’s edge, but was now ashore, a charred husk shaped like a mummy. Belafonte was talking to a distraught-looking elderly guy holding a Chihuahua to his breast. I figured he’d found the horror. The scene tech was a friend, Deb Clayton.
“This no place to leave a corpse, Carson,” Deb said. “The perp would have to cross the yard, set off a half-dozen yappy dogs. Seems more likely it was dumped upriver.”
I looked upstream and saw Dixie Highway bridging the canal, the traffic a line of fast metal. I heard the roar of heavy trucks and motorcycles. Belafonte saw where I was looking.
“Even at night, there’s a lot of traffic on Dixie. Better would be Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just past Dixie. Traffic’s lighter. But she could have been dumped anywhere above here.”
“Wonder what the flow rate is?” I said, studying the waves.
Belafonte bent to the water’s edge and found a sodden cigarette butt. She flipped it into the canal and watched it float lazily away.
“The water’s moving a quarter-mile an hour, give or take.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”
“First we got a date at Missing Persons.”
The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.
I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.
“We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”
“Four a.m.?”
“The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”
The mother lived in Allapattah, on a decent street in a blue-collar community. The house was small and well-kept, with a blue Kia in the flower-bordered drive beside several bags of fertilizer, a coiled hose and a wheelbarrow holding a rake and shovel. The yard was ablaze with blooms and I figured Mother Mailey was something of a gardener.
I knocked and a stout woman with graying hair and anxious eyes appeared at the door carrying a drowsy child. I’m poor at judging ages on kids, but it looked fairly fresh. We displayed IDs.
“The man at the police station …” Mailey said, confused. “He said nothing could be done for twenty-four hours.”
“Officer Belafonte and I are sort of a special team. We want to get right on these things.”
“Thank God. Please come in.”
We sat in a small but tidy living room with inexpensive furniture, K-Mart Colonial.
“Has this happened before?” I asked. “Teresa not showing up?”
She swallowed hard. “It was drugs. Teresa was in and out at all hours. Then she ran away three years ago. I-I didn’t know it at the time, but the man I lived with, I thought him a fine and honorable man, a hard worker, good Catholic ways, devoted to his m-mother …” She broke down.
“He abused Teresa,” I said.
“I worked two jobs, happy he could be there to care for Teresa. She ran away, got trapped into selling herself.”
I looked at Belafonte: prostitution. We had a link to Kylie Sandoval, small, perhaps circumstantial, but at least a path to walk.
“Then, seven months back, Teresa showed up at the door, pregnant, filthy, sick, lice in her hair. But I made her well. She got her GED and then a job at the Publix last year. They’re going to make her full time.”
Belafonte stepped up. “When Teresa was on the streets … do you know where, Ms Mailey?”
“She never speaks of it, though I think she traveled to Orlando.”
“How do you know that?”
“We never went up there until four months ago. We got low on gas. Teresa told me to turn off the highway at the next exit, that there was a Marathon station there.”
I put it in my notebook: Teresa – familiarity with Central FL? Orlando region?
Before we left I asked to borro
w one of Teresa’s hairbrushes, assuring Ms Mailey it was just a precaution. She handed over a little pink thing with ample hair for a DNA test. We assured Ms Mailey we’d do all we could and started for the door. The kid awakened and his grandmother bobbed him in her arms, cooing and kissing his forehead.
“The child,” Belafonte asked quietly. “Bobby. Do you know who the father is?”
“It was a man Teresa spent very little time with. The boy knows nothing of his mother’s lost time, will never know. His road will be perfect.”
“The boy’s not a link to … Teresa’s difficult past?” I asked, taken with her love for the child.
“Every soul is a fresh soul. Bobby is clean. Please find my baby.”
It was a difficult trip to the hastily scheduled postmortem. Either the victim was Teresa Mailey, a terrible thing, or it was another young woman, an equally terrible thing. But we now knew Teresa’s situation: a comeback from drugs and prostitution, a child, a loving mother, a future, and both Belafonte and I were hoping someone else was dead, a disconcerting feeling to have.
I told Ava to start the dance without us, and she was in the belly cavity when we arrived, the medical and forensics techs having delicately removed the strips of cloth doused in accelerant and set ablaze.
Ava looked up and saw us. She flicked off the audio recording system so the transcriptionist wouldn’t have to wade through chit chat. The eyes went to Belafonte.
“Hello, Holly.”
I turned to Belafonte. “You two know each other?”
She cleared her throat. “I, uh, took your advice and …”
“Officer Belafonte was here at six thirty this morning,” Ava said. “She wanted to see a postmortem.”
“Six-freaking-thirty?” I said, looking at my temporary partner.
“I didn’t know when business commenced, and didn’t want to miss anything.”
“How’d it go?”
“To begin with my knees felt weak, the left, especially. But soon the procedure became extremely engaging.”
Ava set aside a kidney and turned to me. “I sent you additional forensics reports on the wrapping and accelerant. I take it you haven’t seen them yet?”
I shook my head. “Probably in my email.”
“It’s fascinating reading, Detective Ryder. The wrapping is strips of wool. The accelerant appears to be a mixture of naphtha and olive oil.”
“Wool? Naphtha? Olive oil?” I’d expected strips of bedsheet and gasoline.
“How’s that for an odd trinity?” Ava said.
“Does wool burn well?” Belafonte asked.
Ava shook her head. “It’s actually a poor choice. Difficult to light and burns slowly. But naphtha burns fast and hot.”
“And the olive oil?”
“Olive oil ignites at 435 degrees Centigrade. It would burn, but …”
“A can of motor oil would do a much better job,” I finished.
“Olive oil. It’s a riddle.”
Belafonte and I stayed until the end. Though fire had eradicated the fingertips, tissue DNA had been sent to the new “instant” DNA analyzer in Forensics. A forensics tech entered the suite as Ava was stitching the belly shut.
“We have a match from follicles on the brush. It’s Teresa Mailey.”
“Bloody hell,” Belafonte said, walking to the far end of the room.
“There’s more,” Ava whispered.
“What?”
“The lungs have heat damage, Carson.”
Mailey had also been alive when she’d been set ablaze. I saw an image of a Medieval witch burning, a woman tied to a post as flames devoured even her screams, and forced the sight from my mind.
I took a deep breath. “How about trauma sites beneath the char?”
“Looks the same as Sandoval: Randomly distributed injuries inflicted before death.”
“Locations?”
Ava held up a page holding anterior and posterior outlines of a body. She’d inscribed X’s at sites she found or suspected she’d find trauma. I saw nine marks: Two on the head, three chest or left side, four upper back or right side.
“Note there are as many posterior strikes as anterior.”
“Usually when someone beats a woman, it’s from the front.”
Ava nodded concordance. “Unless she was surrounded by assailants. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. And I’ve seen a lot of beatings.”
“Got a conjecture, Dr Davanelle?” I said.
She stared between the actual body and the X-marked outlines as her brow furrowed in thought.
“Offhand, Carson, it looks like she ran a gauntlet.”
15
A cobalt-blue Towne Car with smoked windows entered the drive of the house behind the Schrum residence The owner was a retired timber baron from Vancouver who occupied the home November through March, leasing it out the remainder of the year. The spacious home was now the province of a half-dozen administrative workers from the Crown of Glory network, those in the public relations department, mainly, and several of the upper-level financial and accounting types essential to a business deriving the bulk of its operating expenses from donations.
The vehicle stopped behind the impromptu operational center for the COG network and a powerfully built driver exited to open the rear door. A man in a smoke-gray suit emerged, slipping on sunglasses against the raw morning sunlight. His name was Hayes Johnson, and though the most fervid viewers of the network would not have recognized Johnson’s name, it often crossed the lips of network employees, though rarely louder than a whisper.
Another man emerged from the other side of the vehicle, small and round, his blue suit rumpled, brown eyes squinting against the sudden sunlight. He patted his balding head and sneezed, stopping to dab his nose with a tissue. He frowned as if forgetting something, then reached back into the vehicle to retrieve a slender briefcase.
“Got everything, Cecil?” Johnson called across the roofline. “The numbers?”
The round man nodded, lifted the briefcase, and sneezed again. Hayes Johnson bent to the passenger window to address his driver, Hector Machado, now cleaning his nails with a knife, the five-inch switchblade looking like a penknife in Machado’s huge and tattooed hands.
“Get coffee if you want, Hector. I’ll be a while.”
Hector Machado’s eyes scanned up and down the street, taking stock of the neighborhood. “If you’re here, Jefé, I’m here.”
Johnson nodded and angled toward the back yard leading to the Schrum house, crossing the yards with surprising litheness for a man of his size, the round man trudging several steps behind, the briefcase tucked to his chest.
Hayes Hayworth Johnson was the CEO of COG Enterprises and credited with turning the network into a conservative broadcasting powerhouse. Johnson was fifty-five, an ex-college lineman, and ducked to enter most doors, the only person in the network taller than Amos Schrum. An ordained minister, Johnson had failed at several businesses before creating a line of vitamins and herbal supplements in a tiered distribution system often derided as little more than a pyramid scheme, but heavily promoted in the Bible Belt as a way to create a second income. He’d sold the business after eighteen years for a profit of eleven million dollars.
The round man, Cecil Brattson, was Johnson’s half-brother, different mothers producing sons of surprisingly different physiognomy. Brattson was the accountant at Hallelujah Jubilee, a Christian theme park near Lakeland, Florida. Listed as a non-profit “educational” entity, Hallelujah Jubilee had been started by Amos Schrum and was overseen by the Crown of Glory network. Brattson had held the job since Hayes Johnson took the helm of the network.
The door was opened by Roland Uttleman, gesturing the men to the expansive main room, a light and airy space with high ceilings.
“Good to have you here, Hayes. Where you staying?”
“I’ll be keeping a suite at the Marriott until this, uh, event is over. Cecil has the latest numbers. He’s heading back to the park this afte
rnoon.”
Uttleman raised a questioning eyebrow at Cecil Brattson’s briefcase. “Good month?” he asked the accountant.
“Donations are up thirty-seven per cent. I attribute it to the Reverend’s illness.”
Hayes Johnson took the briefcase from his half-sibling. “I’ll take it to the Reverend in a bit, Cecil. Could you give Roland and me some time to discuss, uh, health matters?”
Cecil sniffled away, muttering about pollen. When he was out of earshot, Hayes Johnson turned to Uttleman. “You look worried, Roland.”
“It’s Amos. He’s—”
Uttleman broke off as a trio of young staffers at the network, arms piled with work materials, entered from the front door. When the newcomers saw Uttleman and Johnson they stopped in their tracks, eyes wide. “Sorry,” one woman whispered, a mortal in the presence of Titans. “We didn’t mean to disturb you.”
Johnson crossed to the woman, pretty. His hand took hers as the other found the small of her back, his finger tracing a line down her spine.
“Not a problem, young lady,” Johnson said. “We were about to pray for Reverend Schrum. Let’s bow our heads and lift our words to God.”
“We never stand so tall as when we bow to God,” the woman said, awed at being allowed into a prayer circle with the man one step below Amos Schrum at the Crown of Glory network.
The prayer over, the staffers continued to the solarium to meet and work. Johnson’s eyes following the young woman as she walked away. “A lovely child,” he said, turning back to Uttleman. “Is she from the park?”
“I don’t know, Hayes,” Uttleman said, irritation creeping into his voice. “It’s not big on my mind right now.”
“What were you about to say about Amos?”
“He’s morose, peeking out the window and muttering to himself.”
“He’s got himself to blame. Have you tried to talk to him about—”
“Eliot Winkler was here this morning. He’s staying in Key West. He’s not happy.”
Johnson grimaced. “And?”
“Amos told Eliot he couldn’t handle the project. He was too old and sick.”