by Andrew Mayne
“Anybody could have broken in,” he replies.
Smart minds think alike. I turn to the technician. “I’m not asking directly. But hypothetically, if someone reviewed the footage those cameras recorded . . . are we talking local talent?”
“In every port of call,” he replies.
“So Game Boy was probably paying them out of the stash in the back. Which means everybody knows about this safe. That certainly doesn’t narrow things down. Assuming it’s not the crew or the three gentlemen they stopped. Any word on that?”
“I’ll call Solar,” says Hughes.
“Okay. Let’s go have a look at something else.”
We walk back down the corridor and onto the deck of the boat. At the far end is a set of steps that leads to the wet locker, the large, garagelike room on the back of the boat that opens up to the diving platform.
Inside the room there are three Jet Skis, an inflatable raft, a small powerboat that can pull a water-skier, and a bunch of pool toys and life jackets. Fishing gear hangs from one wall. On the other, racks of scuba equipment.
Hughes and I use our flashlights to probe into the dark spaces. As we do this, I hear sounds on the steps and turn to see a Palm Beach detective.
“We already searched down here,” she says. “But you’re welcome to it. There’s also storage lockers under your feet.”
Hughes nods. “I was here.”
“Oh, this is your second time?” I ask. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Another pair of eyes is another pair of eyes. Maybe you notice something we didn’t.”
“That hasn’t been working out so well lately for me.” I inspect the diving BCs, tanks, and regulators. All the kind of equipment you’d buy if you walked into a dive shop and flashed a bunch of money. It’s not bad stuff, but it’s not what I’d use. The masks are pretty good. The fins aren’t bad. Although I’ve been trimming mine down for inshore diving.
I run my light along the gear and inspect the lockers. Inside one of them I find five pouch weights that you slide into the vests to adjust buoyancy. I go back and inspect the vests.
Hughes walks over and aims his light at the vests as I count them. There are eight total.
Eight buoyancy compensators and only five weights. Each vest holds at least two. Plus there should be some weighted dive belts.
“What’s up?” asks Hughes.
“Tell them not to let the crew leave.” I call to the detective, “When you searched the boat, did you search the water below it?”
“Did we put a diver in the water?” she asks. “Negative. We thought that’s what you did.”
“You bring your gear?” I ask Hughes.
He nods.
Thirty minutes later, we’re surfacing and handing two duffel bags to George and Captain Buckley on the dive platform.
“You’ve almost redeemed yourself,” says George.
“Almost? We got the New River Bandits,” I reply as I strip off my gear.
“No. I think we caught a couple of opportunistic crew members who were hoping we would blame the New River Bandits. But still, good work.” He weighs the bag. “That’s at least eight million dollars between the two of them.”
“Great. Then I want more time on the van case.”
George looks around at the other police and Hughes. “Are you”—he bites back a curse—“effing kidding me?”
“Nope. While I was down there, I had a realization.”
“While you were underwater and your brain was starved of oxygen, you had a realization?”
“To-mah-to, tomato, but yeah. Just give me one more day. If I’m wrong, I’ll never mention it again.”
“I doubt that. I really doubt that.”
I don’t. Because this time I’m really, really sure I’m not wrong.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
RESIDUE
Dr. Felix Aguilló’s wife, a short, trim older woman with bleach-blonde hair, answers the door in a bathrobe and stares at me for a moment, trying to figure out who the hell I am. It’s almost ten p.m., not the most unreasonable hour to talk to somebody in my opinion. But my judgment can be suspect.
I tracked the doctor to a suburb of Miami and decided talking to him at home was the best approach, given the limited time George allowed me. And to be honest, I wanted to catch him a little off guard.
I show her my badge. “I work with your husband. I wanted to ask him something.”
“Felix, one of your work friends is here.” She doesn’t let me step inside.
A moment later, Aguilló comes to the door in an untucked collared shirt and shorts, holding an iPad at his side. He locks eyes with me. “You . . .” Over his shoulder, he says, “It’s okay, honey, I have this.”
His wife walks away, mumbling something about his working hours. Aguilló regards me for a moment, then holds up his iPad.
“I just saw the news about the bust. Please tell me it’s about that.”
“No. It’s about the van.”
“You come to my house at . . .” He realizes his watch is missing, so he checks his iPad screen. “At ten o’clock at night to bother me about that? Case closed. Or rather, it is as far as we’re concerned.”
“I understand that. It’s just that . . . I had some more questions.”
“I should call your boss right now and complain. But, to be honest, I’m impressed you’re here this late. I can’t get the people in my lab to stay late without them complaining about overtime.” He steps away from the door. “All right, come in.”
I follow Aguilló to the kitchen table, where various scientific journals are spread around. I stop to look at them.
“I take my work home too,” he says.
“And then some.” I take the seat he indicates. “Listen, forget for a moment about our departments.”
“You barely have one, so that’s not hard,” he replies.
He sounds like Marquez. “Forget about that. Forget we’re police. Forget what we’ve determined.”
“That’s a lot of forgetting.”
“I’m trying to frame this,” I explain.
“Poorly.”
“I know we stepped on some toes. But can we put aside the politics for a moment and just think about those kids? I don’t know what Marquez wanted you to write, but when I went through your report, it was much more thorough than the summary. It felt like there were conclusions you held back on because . . . well, I don’t know. My point is . . .”
“Please get to it.” He yawns.
“I pull odd things out of the water all the time. Evidence. Bodies. Weapons. Just give me your honest opinion. Forget there was a van. If I brought you the bodies of Grace and Caitlin and only told you that they were found in a canal, what would your assumption be?”
“They died from traumatic injury and were dumped there,” he replies.
“No. That’s not what your report would say.”
“Excuse me? Who’s writing this?”
“The same guy who made a note that their underwear was on inside out and ripped in a manner implying someone tried to redress them. I’ve looked at other cases you’ve handled. Good ones, where your evidence got convictions. I’ve even read courtroom testimony where you’ve called similar discoveries ‘emphatic evidence of sexual assault.’”
Aguilló’s eyes narrow as he realizes I’ve trapped him with his own words. “So what?”
“So what? Your final report didn’t mention that. Not even a hint. Just a clinical description. You wanted to say something, but you didn’t. Instead you just reported all the facts you thought were suspicious but without interpretation. I thought that was because you wanted someone like me to find them. Now I realize it was a matter of ego. You didn’t want us to take the bodies elsewhere and have someone else call you out for missing it.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions there. But let’s play this game for a moment. Let’s say that it looks like the girls were raped before they died. Then what? Their rapists are dea
d too.”
“Are they? It sounds like you’re assuming Tim and Dylan assaulted the girls. Maybe someone else did. Like, at the concert.”
“And then we’re back to where we started,” he replies.
“No. We’re not. Then we have a rapist who may have killed them but didn’t die in the van.”
“And no DNA evidence. And no case. We can’t prove rape. We can’t single out a suspect.”
“But what about a murderer?” I reply.
“What?”
I take a pair of X-rays from my bag and set them on the table. “Both boys had neck fractures, not just the one driving, right? What’s this on the back of Dylan’s head?” I point to a small fracture.
“Probably caused in the accident.”
“Okay. What about here on Tim’s temple?” I point to a fracture on the left side of his head.
“Another fracture from the accident.”
I shake my head and peel a label off the bottom of Tim’s X-ray. It reads, “B. Guillaum.” I pull a label off the other and reveal the name T. Ridden.
Both of these victims came from other cases Aguilló handled. They were taxi drivers who were assaulted and, in Ridden’s case, killed by a robber.
I showed the doctor images he identified in another case as clear examples of a fracture from impact with a blunt object, not trauma from a car accident.
Aguilló realizes my trick. “Clever.”
“Tim and Dylan had almost the exact same injuries. That’s why you confused them. Both had the same fatal injuries. It’s impossible to tell which one was driving—or if either was behind the wheel at all.”
“Okay, Ridden and Guillaum were assaulted with a blunt object, but the van was clean,” he says.
“Yes. The van was clean.” I reach into my bag and pull out a large plastic evidence bag and let it fall on the table with a clang.
The tire iron.
“I found this near where the van came to rest. I didn’t think much of it until another case triggered something. If we’d just found Tim’s and Dylan’s bodies floating in the canal, we would have looked for these injuries. Same with Caitlin and Grace. The van was a self-contained package. We didn’t care what was on the outside, because we assumed the whole story was inside. It wasn’t.”
“Caitlin and Grace didn’t have similar injuries,” he replies.
“Because they were drugged. Did you do a chemical analysis of the beer cans?”
“No. I didn’t need to.” Aguilló looks out the window and into his own reflection. “Item number sixty-three on the list. It’s listed as a metal alcoholic container.”
“A beer can?”
“No. A flask. We found residue,” he replies.
“What kind?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Cut the bullshit!” I snap.
“It could have been Rohypnol. Or not. It was thirty years old,” he says weakly.
“Two girls are drugged and violated. Two young men are killed or knocked unconscious, and their vehicle is driven into the water. What does that look like to you?”
“Marquez said it was too tenuous.”
“You ran this by her?”
A nod. “I didn’t know about the tire iron. I only suspected the possibility that there was another assailant, but to be brutally honest, I convinced myself that Dylan and Tim did it.”
I’m about to tell him that his insight would have saved me a trip into the alligator den looking for a fifth victim. But there wasn’t a fifth victim. There was a murderer who covered his tracks and got away.
“I can’t believe I let her convince me to drop it,” he says after a long pause. “I used to be better than that.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“No. You don’t. Hold on a moment.” He leaves the table and goes to a different part of the house.
I try not to judge Aguilló too harshly. He has tons of cases to handle and isn’t free to choose which to pursue. If his bosses tell him to drop it, he doesn’t have much choice—especially in a case this old.
Aguilló returns with a thick folder. “If you mention me in connection to this, I’ll deny everything. I won’t testify for you. You’ll get nothing. Understand?”
I shrug. “Fine.”
“You don’t understand. This is my reputation on the line.”
“I said fine. I get it.”
He slides a photograph across the table of the body of a young woman lying in the grass near a thick copse of trees. Her clothes are torn, and there are ligature marks around her neck.
“October 1990. Sia Krimmer. She was a student at Miami-Dade Community College. She went missing at seven p.m. She was found like this four days later.” He pulls another photo from the folder. This one shows a red-haired young woman on a floor with a wire around her neck. “Amanda Wiseman. She and her boyfriend were killed in 1992. I have eight others like this, going through 1997.”
“Okay . . . ? Florida has over a thousand murders a year. What’s the connection?”
“This doesn’t leave this room,” he says softly. “At least my involvement. I can’t be attached to the theory.” He pulls several typewritten sheets from the folder. “This is the evidence inventory. Either from what was found near the body or at the scene of an abduction.”
I scan through the sheets and find that he has highlighted certain words and phrases:
instant film casing
Polaroid film cartridge
box tab from instant film package
“You saw the inventory from the van?” he asks.
“Yeah. Hughes actually noticed the cartridge.”
I flip through the pages of other items found in relation to the murders. In total, they number in the thousands. That’s why the film-related items weren’t obvious.
“I even checked to make sure this wasn’t material left behind by our own forensic team,” he explains.
“All these cases . . .”
“We had suspects in some. But no convictions. All are unsolved.”
“So you think that there is some serial killer taking Polaroids of his victims?”
“Nope. That’s what you’re saying. But if it were true, then our victim zero would be the kids in that van.”
“And our killer stopped in 1997?”
“Could be. Or maybe he went digital.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
WALL OF SHAME
“Here we go,” says George as he walks into our headquarters and sees the large map of Florida I’ve stuck to the wall, alongside a grid of twenty mug shots. “I’m going to guess this has nothing to do with the New River Bandits?”
“Um, no.”
“Not even tangentially?”
“Not a chance. I didn’t know our policy was one crime at a time.”
He looks at my map. “You know they only do this in movies. It’s the kind of thing a crazy person does to convince everyone else they’re not crazy.” He takes a seat by the table facing my map. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“Where’s Hughes?”
“Following some leads on the New River Bandits. Where I should be. Where you should be.”
“If you’re not convinced, then that’ll become one hundred percent of my focus. But remember, you gave me one more day.”
“And apparently you spent it making the biggest damn map of Florida I’ve ever seen. Anyway, proceed.”
I walk up to the map and point to Pond 65. “This is where we found the victims.”
“You mean the crashed van?” says George, trying to steer the conversation.
“I mean the four murder victims.”
George’s posture tightens, but his face remains inscrutable. “So it’s murder now?”
“Tim and Dylan both had neck fractures and injuries consistent with blows to the head. And Hughes pointed out that Dylan lacked the kind of facial injuries a driver usually gets in a crash.” I pull the tire iron out of a cardboard box. “I found this where the van was recovered.”
>
“An angry motorist threw it,” says George, challenging me.
“Okay. Possible. This is a Chevrolet L-bar that came in a standard tire-repair kit. There’s nothing special or rare about it—except for the fact that the Chevy van we pulled from the water that was supposed to have been intact was missing exactly one thing from the tire kit in back.”
George nods and leans in. I have his attention now. The skull fractures were compelling, but the weapon missing from the van and found outside the vehicle is the clincher for him. Not that he’s convinced by a long shot, but now it’s too much for him to ignore.
I step to the table to retrieve the folder with my other evidence. It’s circumstantial, but it might be enough.
“I get it,” says George.
“Well, I have something else to show you.”
“Sure. But I believe you. I believe you’re not insane . . . at least about this. Something fishy is going on here. We need to look into this.” He points to the mug shots. “Who are those assholes? Suspects, I assume?”
“Suspects in other murders. Possibly related to this one.”
“Other murders?” He shakes his head, not in disbelief but trying to change his point of reference, I assume. “Those dots on the map? More murders?”
“Yes. I think there’s a connection. The last one was well over a decade ago, but I think there are probably more, because the evidence connecting them is . . . well . . . you’ll see.”
“Hold up,” says George. “You’re telling me you think this is a serial killer case?”
“Active,” I reply. “I think there’s an active serial killer.”
“And what part of that is underwater?”
“Pond 65 is where it started. You think the FBI will take this on? Or any of the local departments?”
“No. We’ll need to brief them, but they won’t make a move on it unless we get some heat.”
“Then great. If we can make a case, I’m all for handing it off to some other agency. But we can’t ignore it.”
“No, we can’t. Okay, walk me through what happened.”
“What I think or what I know?”
“What your gut tells you.”
I smile. “Okay, I think Tim, Dylan, Grace, and Caitlin went to that concert. I think they met someone there. Maybe someone they knew peripherally. Not necessarily a close friend, but maybe someone who had their trust. Probably someone the girls already knew. They hung out. They all went back to the van to get high or to drink. That’s when our fifth person drugged the girls with something in a flask. Check the lab report on that. There might have been an argument with Dylan and Tim. Maybe not. At some point our fifth person struck the boys with the tire iron. Possibly in the parking lot. Maybe at another location. Then he took the van to another location, and that’s where the girls were undressed. Possibly violated before drowning.