by Wolf Riedel
“Nothing determinative,” said Mark. “We know when the wife and the girls entered the Magic Kingdom and have some very early surveillance shots of them but nothing as far as the exit is concerned at this time. They’ll provide us with the access to the disks but it will take some pretty heavy resources to see where they were and when and if anyone else shows up.”
“I’ll put some folks on that,” said Dunn. “We’ll concentrate on finding them exiting and then see who else might pop up at that time.”
“That’s good,” Mark continued. “I’ll give you the contact information and let you take it from there. The only other thing is that the family seemed to be having some cash problems. We got a pretty consistent picture that Lewis was trying to make extra money by volunteering for extra work and apparently doing some firearms buying and selling. Seems he was into doing custom upgrading before he sold them. I didn’t see any sign of any tools or machinery for that when I did a walk through of the house. How about you guys?”
Both Dunn and Anderson shook their heads. Anderson took out a pad and made a note. “I’ll do a run on their financials. Maybe I can get a trace on what type of money moved through their accounts as well as some contacts on vendors or rental for workshops or anything like that.”
“I got Sal working on that as well. You guys can share data,” said Mark.
A voice came from behind Mark.
“Good. You’re all here now. Ready to start?” Doctor Castaneda was already dressed up, the pale blue surgical gown on her short body almost brushing the floor. She pushed the door behind her open further with her butt and beckoned them in.
Alexandru Noica, the ME’s assistant who they had met at the scene, was already in the examining room preparing a tray of instruments on one of the stainless steel counters set against the wall. Two of the examining tables in the room were occupied by filled body bags.
“There are gloves and scrubs over there for anyone who wants them,” he said pointing at a stack of gowns and several boxes of disposable gloves.
“I’m not planning on getting that close,” said Dunn. “But thanks anyway.”
Mark walked over and picked out a set of gloves. One never knew when one needed to get up close and point something out. Like Dunn he didn’t plan to get close enough to the action where flying fluids and tissue staining his windbreaker or where the possibility of dropping trace evidence on the body was a likelihood.
“Everyone set?” asked Castaneda. Nods all around were her response. “Okay then. We’ll start with the male victim. Recorder on Alexandru?”
Noica threw a switch on the overhead mic and checked the recorder before giving her a thumbs-up.
Castaneda started the detailing of the examination.
“This will be District 5 case number 07 dash 00033. James Lewis of Ocala Florida and a staff sergeant in the Florida National Guard. The date of birth is June 14th, 1979 and the date of the examination is Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 0917 hours.
“The persons attending the examination are,” she looked down at a clipboard, “Sergeant Gary Dunn of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Tyron Anderson of the Ocala Police Department, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Mark Winters and Staff Sergeant Salvadore Watt both of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command.
“Okay then. The external investigation shows that the body was received in a body bag with a yellow locking zip tag bearing a seal from the Ocala Police Department.” She reached down and turned the seal. “Number 0924673 dated 4 March 2007. The seal is intact.
“The body bag was opened and the body was found clothed in an army uniform . . .” She looked up at Mark. “Is that correct? An army uniform?”
Mark was surprised. He’d never been asked a question like that at an autopsy. “Yeah. That’s correct,” he replied. “It’s an ACU—Army Combat Uniform.”
She nodded. “Clothed in an ACU. Pants are secured by a grey web belt. Shoes are tan hiking style boots with grey wool socks. Hands have been bagged.”
Castaneda paused a few moments while she scanned the body and motioned Noica to help her roll the body from side-to-side to let her view Lewis’s sides and back as well. The two went on to remove his clothing and carefully set it aside on a movable steel table.
“The clothing has been removed and set aside for further examination.
“On external examination, the body is that of a well-nourished, well-developed, white male appearing six foot one in height and weighing . . .
Noica looked at his notes. “One hundred eighty-two clothed.”
Castaneda continued, “Weighing one hundred and eighty-two pounds clothed and whose appearance is consistent with his reported age of twenty-eight years. Faint fixed red-purple livor mortis is present on the posterior dependent surfaces and rigor has developed in the large and small muscle groups. There is dried blood on the chest and abdomen and on the head. Injuries will be tabulated separately.
“The scalp is covered with brown hair in a normal distribution and is less than two centimeters in length throughout. There is no facial hair. Irides are brown. Pupils are round. Sclerae are white. There is dried blood which has issued from the left external auditory canal. The nose, nares, maxillae, lips, oral frenula, all appear atraumatic and appear natural.”
She went on for another ten minutes detailing all of the other observations of the body and its extremities before returning to a detailed examination of the injuries.
“There is a gunshot entrance wound on the left lower forehead centered approximately six centimeters left of the midline and two centimeters above the supraorbital ridge. The entry is an oval defect measuring one point two by zero point eight centimeters and has a zero point two circumferential pink-red marginal abrasion around it. There are signs of unburned gunpowder particles and stippling in an oval around the defect measuring four by seven centimeters. There is no sign of muzzle abrasion. There is no sign of an exit wound.
She went on to catalog three more entrance wounds to the thorax—the chest—two just above the nipple line, one just below; two to the right, one to the left. The examination of the ACU jacket later showed very faint and wide-spread gun powder stippling. Again there were no exit wounds but the entry wound diameters were again around .8 centimeters and therefore in the neighborhood of a .30 caliber round.
The subsequent internal examination recovered two relatively intact slugs and the fragments of two others. The head shot had penetrated the skull on entry, blown off a chunk of the interior skull, broken up and skimmed around the inside of the skull without breaking back out. One of the chest shots had hit a rib square on and shattered both the rib and the bullet into fragments that had shredded the left lung and part of the heart with metal and bone splinters. The two deformed rounds had merely glanced off ribs on the way in but had then tumbled and skewed around the internal thoracic cavity one moving downward into the abdomen ending up in the liver while the other had tracked upward coming to rest in the neck immediately to the front of the C6 Cervical Vertebra.
They’d broken for a quick lunch at the hospital cafeteria across the street and then resumed with Carlie Lewis’s autopsy. Everything backed up the initial observations; two rounds fired from a distance into her back, a third from close range into the back of her head. The hand had indeed been run over by a tire. Road grit was found embedded in the skin and the post mortem bruising showed a clear tread pattern. It would be left up to the tech to determine the make and potential model but Mark suspected it would be a match for the burned out Sonata found on the Greenway Trail.
They had finished in time for supper in town.
The Ramshackle Cafe had two dining areas: an inside area replete with wooden tables, chairs and booths, Florida vehicle tags on the ceiling’s wooden beams and other rustic paraphernalia covering the walls. A glass wall overlooked an outside area which also had bar tables, stools and chairs. The outside seating was covered, in part, by the roof’s wide soffit but mostly by a canvas awning and a wooden raili
ng that separated the guests by the width of a narrow sidewalk from six lanes of traffic that wound their way north and south on what was at this point a merged section of the US 441 and US 27 highways.
Dunn, Anderson, Sal and Mark occupied a table against the railing. A pre rush-hour surge in traffic seemed to be stalled just a few feet away. Two Yuenglings and two Landsharks and two pairs of bowls of pico de gallo and tortilla chips were placeholders for the four slabs of ribs which were still getting the finishing touches in the kitchen. The blades of the ceiling fans stood still; unneeded in the late afternoon sunlight.
“That was pretty simple and straight forward,” said Anderson. “Lewis gets ambushed as he walks in the door with three to the chest and a finishing shot to the head. Carlie tries to run, catches two in the back and one to the head and gets her hand driven over while the perps take the car.”
“And it was most probably at least two of them,” said Sal. “They had to get there somehow and then would need to have a second person to take their own car away. I can’t see anyone trekking into that neighborhood on foot without being noticed. That also jives with the Greenway Trail scene; a second vehicle, therefore, most probably, a second perp.”
“We’ll know better once our lab does the bullets and fragments,” said Dunn. “The stuff that she pulled out of the Lewises looked like it all came out of the same gun to me. We’ve got enough undamaged rounds from each body that we should be able to do a definitive comparison.”
Mark swirled his beer around watching the traffic. “Have you got anybody good yet on the sex predator side, Garry?”
“Nope,” Dunn shook his head. “We’ve got four that we’ve alibied out and another dozen that we’re still working on actively. Biggest trouble we have is that none of them are violent in this sense of the thing. Mostly guys who groom family or neighborhood kids or some chance encounter but nothing in the way of an abduction and certainly nothing with this type of planning or violence. I haven’t written it off yet but the more we dig into the files the less likely it looks like a local. We’re casting the net a bit wider to neighboring counties.”
“But you’re still certain the murders are the consequence of abduction?” asked Sal.
Dunn shook his head back and forth. “What else we got?” he asked in reply. “There’s no other motive. I mean if this was a break-in gone wrong then why take the girls instead of killing them? I mean even if they were just taking advantage of the situation to grab the girls then that would indicate that there’s still a child sex motive here.
Mark watched the waitress coming to their table with platters stacked high with ribs and fries.
Sal sat back to let the waitress put down a plate in front of him. “I still think that the burned car dump will end up taking this thing to Tampa,” he said.
CHAPTER 9
W Grace St., Tampa, Florida
Monday 05 Mar 07 1000 EST
Tuffy felt the energy surging through him as he walked up the narrow street; its asphalt cracked and sun-bleached. Just ahead was his destination, a rambling Spanish style bungalow. Its white stucco walls and red tile roof weren’t unusual for the neighborhood. Neither was the pillared front porch surrounded by flowering tropical bushes nor the security bars that covered the windows and doors. The half-inch steel plates that were sandwiched between the walls’ studs and the wallboard, however, were another matter. To Tuffy’s best knowledge there were no other buildings as heavily armored or defended in the area. And he should know; he’d lived here—well, just on the other side of the I-275’s N MacDill Ave underpass—all his life.
MacFarlane Park lay a few miles to the west of downtown Tampa. At one time the community had been one whole; a grid of lesser and smaller streets. With the building of the interstate system at the end of the 1950’s, however, many neighborhoods had received the dubious benefit of a multi-lane, high-speed road running through their midst. Efficiency had been the key planning feature; efficiency from the road’s point of view, not the people who lived in the area. One such area had been MacFarlane Park. By the mid-1960’s the I-4’s construction zone had torn the neighborhood into a large northern segment and a smaller southern one. Later, that portion of the I-4 had been renumbered and incorporated into the I-275 extension.
Physically, the southern portion of MacFarlane Park now had more in common with its southern neighbor, Oakford Park, than its northern namesake. Both had high concentrations of small residential houses and businesses spaced out along heavily treed streets. The north, however, was more Latino than the south. Perhaps predictably, the families in the south had higher family incomes than their northern neighbors. In the north over a quarter of the people lived below the poverty level. On the other hand, in a city whose crime rate exceeded the national average, they lived in a fairly secure area; as long as one took steps to protect oneself.
Long ago, Tuffy had done just so. Born seventeen years before as Antonio Armando Fierro Juárez—Fierro the surname of his father, an immigrant Mexican bricklayer, and Juárez that of his mother, a short-order cook—Tuffy had earned his nickname in the schoolyard for his tenaciousness. Small and wiry but with a mouth that wouldn’t quit, he’d had more than his fair share of fights, more often than not with someone bigger and stronger than him.
By the age of twelve he was being noticed by some of the older toughs as having potential. It was around this time that his father was critically injured when a pallet of concrete block—being lifted by an inexperienced HIAB loader operator—tilted and crashed. There had been no insurance and in many ways it was a blessing that his father had only lived for a week. His mother and older sister had managed to hold things together and, while Tuffy and his younger brother and sister didn’t thrive, neither did they starve nor lose their small house where all the girls shared one bedroom and the boys the other.
As the oldest son, the family’s situation weighed heavily upon him. The issue was the need to make money, the question was how. Tuffy had never lived under any illusions. He knew he was smart—he did surprisingly well in school despite his wise-ass attitude—but he knew that his future was limited. If he was lucky he might get to finish high school but he’d known that the odds of even that happening had been stacked against him.
There had been three street gangs at his school that had been interested in him. Only one of those had been a farm team for a bigger more established operation and, in Tuffy’s young eyes, that one had offered more hope for advancement to cash making opportunities. He’d found his place there: friends who respected him, safety in numbers, an identity and, most important for him, a way to eventually be able to support his family.
As it was he’d spent only two years hanging out as one of the organization’s pee wees; auto burglaries, tagging the neighborhood walls and running small drug packets down to the clica’s ghetto stars hanging out and doing their business along West Kennedy Boulevard. There hadn’t been much money in that but he’d become known for his dependability.
He remembered the day that things had changed; August 13th, 2004, the day that Hurricane Charlie had struck Cayo Costa less than a day after Tropical Storm Bonnie had hit the panhandle to the north. The event was noteworthy because that had been the day that the clica’s jefe—the gang’s boss—Luis “Gordo” Meraz had been at a meeting at Fort Meyers, less than twenty miles from the storm’s center, with a representative of the Mexican Gulf Cartel. The purpose of the meeting was a tentative overture by the Cartel for establishing American affiliates within the state. The Cartel’s influence and operations had been slowly but steadily marching in an arc eastward along the Gulf’s shores and was now progressing into Florida’s peninsula.
Meraz had not been the only candidate interviewed that week but he had been the only successful candidate from the Tampa area. The Cartel had seen things in the fledgling organization that they liked; firstly the organization had potential and secondly, Meraz was not adverse to the cartel parachuting someone in who would take overall charge
of the operation. The deal was done and Meraz was put in charge of immediately ramping up membership.
As Meraz had driven home to Tampa the next day winding his way northward through the nearby coastal towns that had been hammered by the category four storm, he had come up with a name for the gang; Mil quinientos XXVII. Mil quinientos—fifteen hundred miles—the rough distance from Tampa to Matamoros, the Cartel’s headquarters in Mexico. XXVII—the Roman numeral for the number twenty-seven—Florida, the twenty-seventh state. MQ-27 had a nice ring to it.
The hurricane also gave Meraz inspiration for the gang’s new motto; Nacido en una tormenta—Born in a storm.
The gang’s rebirth had also been Tuffy’s. With its need for manpower, a number of the barrio’s young cholos were immediately jumped-in to full soldier status. Barely fifteen years old at the time, Tuffy now had a career with a future ahead of him.
Tuffy had been the first one to arrive and the front door had been locked. At one time the bungalow had been Meraz’s home and headquarters; hence the armor plating. Since the affiliation with the Cartel, however, it had been handed down to a local lieutenant as his base of operations. Meraz himself, with his ever growing income, had moved on into an upscale, but not ostentatious waterfront home, on W Bay Way Drive in Tampa’s Beach Park Isles neighborhood. That house was for family—Meraz’s family—not for the business of the clica.
There had been no such change of scenery for Tuffy; he still lived with his mother and brother and sisters on the other side of the interstate. He was now making some modest money but pouring almost all of it into his family. His mother did not know what it was Tuffy actually did for the money; she didn’t really want to know. While he sensed her disapproval and her reluctance he also noted with some pride that his efforts resulted in better food on the table and better clothes on his siblings’ backs. In time maybe he’d be able to get them through some form of higher education. So far they at least had avoided following in his footsteps.