Palm Beach Predator

by Tom Turner

Thirty-Seven

  They had plenty of manpower on the streets of Lake Worth and neighboring Lake Clarke Shores, Palm Springs, Lantana, Greenacres, and West Palm Beach. Crawford had even gotten the okay to use the PBPD helicopter to perform visual sweeps of the streets. Still, it was a lot of area to cover, and Crawford was sure that Johnny Cotton would be lying low, definitely not joyriding around town.

  And the guy in the white pickup wouldn’t be making himself easy to find.

  In the meantime, Crawford and Ott had split up and gone back to Palm Beach. They were going around to the various real estate agencies with big blowups of the photo of Cotton, which they left behind, while urging agents to insist on meeting at their office if an unfamiliar man called and asked to see a house. In case they recognized Cotton from the photo, the agent should try to stall him and call the police right away.

  So far, all the agents seemed to be taking their warning seriously, though none had apparently ever seen Cotton before.

  One job that Crawford had pawned off on Ott was a call to Stark Stabler. It was partly motivated by the fact that Stabler had also threatened to sue Crawford, Ott, and the Palm Beach Police Department for harassment and, in so many words, accusing him of murder. The last thing Crawford needed was another frivolous suit in addition to Johnny Cotton’s, never mind the threatened leak to the newspaper by Dennis Shaw about the Holly Pine incident.

  Crawford got a call from Ott between Realtor visits.

  “Guy wasn’t very gracious in accepting my apology,” Ott said, referring to his recent call to Stabler.

  “Why, what did he say?”

  “’Bout time you jokers figured out I was innocent. You don’t go around harassing a man who’s on the Board of Governors of the Poinciana Club and past president of the Toastmasters Club.’”

  “‘Jokers’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Troy Price calls us ‘clowns’ and Stark Stabler calls us ‘jokers.’ Which is it?”

  Ott chuckled. “Personally, I prefer jokers. It’s got a little more…I don’t know, substance to it.”

  Crawford laughed. “Meantime, I got something more on Johnny Cotton. Got a psych profile from Malpaso Correctional. My friend the assistant warden emailed it to me.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Buckle your seat belt. So, according to some shrink somewhere along the way, Cotton apparently went to a Catholic school when he was a kid. Claimed that when he was eight years old he got molested by a nun.”

  “A nun? That’s a first. I mean priests, yeah, okay, but I never heard of a nun before.”

  “Thing is, we have no idea any of this really happened,” Crawford said. “All that matters is Cotton said it did. Guy told the prison people a lotta stuff, and some of the details are pretty scary.”

  “Like what else?”

  “Married his high school sweetheart at age eighteen. Came home from work one day, about six months after they got married, and found his bride in bed with his brother.”

  “Shit, man, so far he’s got to have a pretty high opinion of the opposite sex.”

  “Exactly the point,” Crawford said. “So he got divorced, and after that it looks like he had himself a pretty steady diet of strippers and hookers. One of them charged him with throwing a frying pan full of scalding bacon grease on her ass when she was in bed.”

  “Jesus, wonder what she did to deserve that.”

  “No clue. Another thing, when he was a kid, he went around with a BB gun, shooting alley cats and stray dogs. Pulling the wings off of butterflies, fun shit like that.”

  “Normal kid’s stuff, huh?” Ott said, shaking his head. “What a sick fuck. Sounds like he basically just ratcheted up everything later on. Instead of a BB gun, a Glock; instead of throwing grease, strangling ’em.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking. We gotta get this guy, Mort.”

  “We will.”

  “I mean before he goes after someone else. No telling how many women he’s killed. Like that art teacher, Luna Jacobs. No proof it was him, but it was him.”

  Crawford’s call waiting clicked in. “Got an incoming,” he said. “Stay there.” He clicked over. “Hello, this is Crawford.”

  “Hey, Charlie, it’s Bob Shepley” —a Palm Beach uniform cop— “I just made that black Corolla you been looking for. Plate number REM441, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Where are you?”

  “Mid-block Dolphin Circle, Palm Springs.”

  “Hang on,” Crawford said, programming the street name into his GPS. “You’re driving an unmarked, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “All right, stay close but not too close, and be careful,” Crawford said, stepping on the accelerator. “The guy’s armed and extremely dangerous. Put your phone on speaker and keep giving me locations. Me and Ott are on our way.”

  “Roger that,” Shepley said.

  Crawford clicked back to Ott. “All right, here we go,” he said. “Cotton’s car sighted at Dolphin Circle, Palm Springs. Bob Shepley’s on him, he’ll keep us apprised of where he goes next.”

  “Roger that. I just GPSed that location.”

  “We don’t need to get anyone else on it. Between you, me and Shep, we oughta be enough to take him down.”

  “You don’t want to call in the helicopter maybe?”

  “Nah, what I’m afraid of is a chase. Anything could happen. Don’t want any civilian casualties.”

  “I hear you. I’m about ten minutes away.”

  Crawford heard the sudden roar of Ott’s Crown Vic Police Interceptor engine through his cell phone. Ott yearned for any opportunity to drive like a bat out of hell.

  “Put your phone on speaker. I got Shep on it too. He’ll tell us where he is. You hear me all right, Shep?”

  “Loud and clear. He just turned onto Luzon Avenue.”

  “Ideally, we want to triangulate him,” Crawford said. “Come at him from three different directions, rather than all from the same one.”

  “All right, Charlie, you quarterback it and I’ll just stay behind him,” Shepley said. “I just worry about him making me.”

  “Yeah, me, too. But we’re gonna be there soon.”

  Shepley gave them a few more street names and reported that the black Corolla seemed to be driving randomly and without a destination.

  “Where you now, Mort?” Crawford asked as his cell phone rang.

  He looked down and saw it was Rose. He let it go to voicemail.

  “Coming at him from the east,” Ott said.

  “Good. I’m a block away, coming from the west,” Crawford said, reaching back in the back seat for a bullhorn.

  “Half a block behind him now,” Shepley said.

  “All right, let’s take him,” Crawford said just as the black car came into view up ahead.

  “Roger that,” Shepley said.

  “I got him,” Ott said, and he pulled out of a side street, steered in front of the Corolla and jammed on his brakes. He raised his gun and pointed it at the Corolla’s windshield.

  Crawford screeched to a stop twenty-feet from the driver’s door and quickly raised the bullhorn. “All right, Cotton,” he said. “Out of the car, hands in the air, flat on the pavement.”

  Shepley had gotten out of his car, opened his door and was positioned behind it, his pistol pointed at the driver’s side of the Corolla.

  Ott had slid down in his seat, gun aimed at the Corolla, waiting.

  There was no movement from the Corolla.

  “Get the hell out of that car!” Crawford shouted into the bullhorn.

  The Corolla’s door opened a crack, then all the way.

  “All right, down on the pavement,” Crawford said.

  A blonde woman slid out and went facedown on the pavement.

  The three cops approached her, guns pointed.

  “Who are you?” Crawford asked, ten feet away.

  “Barbara,” the woman said.

  “Where’s Cotton?”

  �
��Who?”

  “Johnny Cotton,” Crawford said.

  “I don’t know who that is,” Barbara said. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Crawford knew she was innocent.

  “Okay, ma’am. You can get up,” he said as he heard his cell phone ring again.

  Ott went to the passenger side door, opened it, and slid inside. He found what he was looking for in the console. “Her plate number is actually AS7313,” he said to Crawford, reading from her registration.

  Crawford shook his head and frowned. He slipped his Sig Sauer into his shoulder holster. Then to Barbara, “You have no idea who Johnny Cotton is?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Go ‘round and look at the license plate number,” Crawford pointed to the front of the car, “and tell me if it’s yours or not.”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “Okay to—”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  She walked up to the front of the car, looked at her plates, then shook her head. “That’s not mine. Like he said, mine starts with A-S. Don’t know what’s after that.”

  “Give us your full name, address and phone number, please.” Crawford said.

  She did.

  “We’re sorry this happened,” Crawford said. “We’re looking for a car like yours with that license plate, but obviously someone switched them.”

  The woman shrugged. “Who would do that?”

  A man with a long list of homicides on his resume, Crawford chose not to say.

  Thirty-Eight

  Crawford, Ott, and Bob Shepley were seated at the Dunkin’ Donuts on South Congress Avenue in Lake Worth.

  “Yet another person who can sue us,” Ott said referring to the woman named Barbara.

  “Not funny,” Crawford said, taking a sip of his extra-dark, one-sugar coffee.

  “So, you think Cotton’s using her plates?” Shepley asked.

  “Yup,” Crawford said. “But by now he could have swapped ’em again or gotten another car.”

  “Or just garaged it, staying inside ’til we give up,” Ott said.

  “We need to take his picture around,” Crawford said. “Door-to-door.”

  “Christ, you’re talking thousands of houses,” Ott said.

  “You got a better way?”

  Ott stuffed half a donut with pink sprinkles in his mouth and shrugged. “I don’t. It’s just…even if we knock on the door of the house he’s in, he’s not gonna answer.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Crawford said. “Ideally what we’re looking for is a neighbor who recognizes him. Says to us, ‘Oh yeah, guy just moved in next door.’”

  Ott nodded and took a sip of coffee.

  “When you started out in Cleveland, wasn’t it all about wearing out shoe leather? Getting leads talking to people?”

  Ott nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, good ol’ beat cop days. Don’t remind me.”

  “But it got the job done, right?”

  Ott shrugged. “Yeah, it did.”

  “And you got your guy?”

  Ott shrugged again. “Once in a while.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  Shepley leaned back in his orange plastic chair. “Maybe you could borrow guys from West Palm. Seeing how this is their turf. You’re tight with Red Noland, right?”

  Crawford nodded. “That’s a good idea.”

  He looked down and saw he had three voicemails. Two from Rose and one from Norm Rutledge. He wanted to talk to Rose more than Rutledge but figured he’d better see what the chief wanted. Plus, he could take the opportunity to suggest that Rutledge call the West Palm police chief to borrow some men. Red Noland was high up but wasn’t the chief. It was better to go chief to chief.

  “Okay, I’m gonna head back to the station,” Crawford said, standing. Then to Ott, “Rutledge called. I don’t know what he wanted.”

  “Probably to say he tracked down Cotton single-handedly.”

  “Yeah, right,” Crawford said. “Hey, Shep, thanks for helping out; sorry it was a false alarm.”

  Shepley nodded. “Thanks for the coffee and good luck with this thing. I’ll keep pounding the pavement.”

  “Appreciate it,” Crawford said.

  Rose had just gotten a call from Vera, unofficially the oldest cleaning lady in Palm Beach. Still going strong in her mid-seventies. Vera told her the water was running in an upstairs bedroom at Rose’s listing on Angler. Rose started to tell her how to fix it but decided that was a job well above Vera’s pay grade. She thanked her and started to call Leon the plumber. Then she thought, Screw it, so he can charge me a hundred fifty bucks for ten minutes worth of work? She’d do it herself.

  And while she was at it, she decided to “make her rounds.” That was what she called something she did religiously every week: go from the north end of the island to the south end giving her fifteen listings their weekly checkup. Making sure the windows didn’t need to be cleaned, or a dead stinkbug hadn’t breathed its last atop a bathroom vanity, or a palm frond hadn’t fallen on the driveway. It was normally a pretty quick process. Just a fast walk-through of a house, guesthouse, and the property. Usually she didn’t need to do a thing because her chosen landscapers and cleaning people had already performed their appointed tasks. Rose didn’t know of any other agent who put as much house-care time into their routine as her, which was probably part of the reason she was the only agent who averaged more than $250 million in annual sales.

  Part of her success was doing everything she possibly could to make a house look the best it could. In ninety percent of the cases, she recommended a buyer make certain improvements to enhance the house’s desirability and salability. Sometimes, if a job was too big for Vera, that meant bringing in her “Brazilian SWAT team”—five young cleaning women who bustled around a house, yakking away in Portuguese for a few hours, then left it spotless and gleaming. For other houses, Rose often had a long list of things she urged a seller to remedy. Sometimes it could get costly, too. Replacing tired, outdated kitchen cabinets or tearing up carpets stained by countless cats, dogs, and an exotic bird or two. Relandscaping the front of a house frequently made her list. She insisted that a potential buyer’s initial impression was almost as important as the appearance of the kitchen and master bathroom. If a buyer frowned as they drove in the front driveway or even had a neutral response, it made selling the house much more difficult. It was like starting in a hole and having to climb out of it.

  She had hastily calculated the risk that the killer might be cruising the streets of Palm Beach looking for his next victim and decided the odds were, worst case, so minimal as to be virtually nonexistent. One in a million, or thereabouts, especially given the fact that the cops were out in force, making Palm Beach look like it was a police state. Her guess was that the killer had fled and was no longer within a hundred miles of her beloved little island. She even had a theory, which she had called Charlie Crawford about and was eager to run by him. It was based on an article in the Daily Mail—okay, maybe not the most reliable paper around—about a serial killer who had hit Savannah a year ago, then Jacksonville six months back. She theorized that the same man, working his way south, had gone on to terrorize Palm Beach next but, because it was a small, island town, had since moved on. Her guess was he was now on his way down to Miami, or maybe the Keys.

  Plus, she had recently taken the COBRA self-defense course, could clean and jerk a hundred fifty pounds and could outrun most twenty-five-year-old men, so what guy in his right mind would ever mess with her? Not only that, she had a can of high-powered pepper spray that would drop a man to his knees and make him cry out for mercy.

  Combine that with how restless she had become. And bored. She didn’t play tennis or garden or belong to a book club…selling houses was all she knew. She’d had seven clients cancel showings and it was driving her crazy. Because if she couldn’t show, she couldn’t sell. And selling was her lifeblood, the same way catching killers was Charlie’s.

  Speaking of Charlie…she wo
ndered why hadn’t he called her back. She really wanted to share her killer theory with him.

  Oh, well, he’ll check in when he can, she thought as she walked out of her office and got into her Jag, headed to her listing on Indian Road. Her listings came in all shapes, sizes and conditions. Several looked as though they had been decorated by a team of top interior designers, several others were vacant, some looked as if no one had spent a dime on them in the last twenty years. But they all had one thing in common: they were in Palm Beach. And whether the house was a teardown or exquisitely maintained and furnished, it was sure to find a buyer sooner or later. Homeowners hired Rose Clarke because she had a reputation for hastening that process.

  She drove up North Ocean Boulevard, almost to the end of the island, and took a left onto Indian. She got out, walked up to the porch and unlocked the door of the white-brick colonial.

  She went through the house quickly and efficiently. No stinkbugs, no palm fronds in the driveway…this sucker was ready to be sold! She locked up and headed down to her listing on Arabian. It was a house she’d had under contract three weeks ago, but it had fallen through because the buyer didn’t like the results of the home inspection. She just figured he had used that as an excuse because the house was so far north.

  As she drove south, she didn’t notice the black car parked a few houses down on Indian. It pulled away from where it was parked as Rose took a right on North Ocean Boulevard and went one block south to Arabian. She took another right and stopped in front of 215 Arabian Road, a two-story house with four square columns. It had been on the market longer than any of her other listings. Part of the reason was that many buyers had a reluctance to buy a house that far north. Having a twenty-five-minute round trip to get your daily bagel did not appeal to many buyers.

  Rose got out of her white Jag and walked inside.

  The driver of the black car pulled over to the side of the road three houses past 215 Arabian and looked back in his rearview mirror. He opened the car door and started to get out but saw a tan Lexus pull into the 215 Arabian driveway. He slid back inside and shut the car door.