A False Dawn (16 page)

FORTY-ONE

When Leslie opened her front door, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.  She looked stunning in a natural way.  Her long brown hair was down, very little make-up, the skin on her face radiating a healthy glow, her eyes dancing in the light.  She wore black designer jeans, three-quarter length that fit her like paint. 

“Hi,” I said. 
Nice open pal.

“Come in,” she said, beaming.

“Hope you like this.  The cab ought to go well with the steaks.”

She took the bottle and glanced at the label.  “Perfect.  Let’s open it.  It can catch its breath, and then we’ll have a glass.”

Her home was small, but decorated in bright tones.  Lots of green plants and furniture that Hemingway might have brought home from Burma or Africa.  It had the look of an Asian-African fusion of the arts.

I said, “Looks like you have the Far East and the Dark Continent well represented.  Sort of feel like I’m on safari here.”

“That’s the idea.  I love Africa.  Or maybe I love the idea of Africa since I haven’t been there.  Friends who have been there told me you feel it’s where life on the planet began.  I’d like to touch the soil.  There’s something very old and earthy about the land.”

“I felt that way in Texas trying to drive across it.”

She smiled.  “Never been to Texas.  Think I’d like to see Africa first.”

“I’d like to start in Ireland.  Begin my trip in a pub, work my way over to Africa.”

“You may not ever make it out of the pub.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

She laughed and stepped around the kitchen counter, handing me a corkscrew.  “If you do the honors, I’ll finish the salad.  We can toast Ireland and Kenya and then put the steaks on the grill.” 

I poured the wine, handed her a glass, and said, “To the Dark Continent and to the place that makes the darkest beer, Dublin.”

She closed her eyes, savoring the wine’s aftertaste for a moment.  “Very nice.”  

Her lips were full, wet with the taste of wine.  She simply looked at me, waiting for me to respond, a subtle coyness in her expression

“Glad you like it,” I finally said. 
Dumb.
  “What can I do to help?”

“Salad’s made.  Steaks have been marinating in the fridge.  I started the grill when I heard you drive up.  Potatoes are in the oven.”  She opened the refrigerator, took the steaks out, and removed the foil from the top of the glass dish.  “Let’s go tell stories around the fire.”

“After you.”

The outdoor table was set with cutlery and two candles burning in the center of it all.  Nice touch.  I sipped my wine and watched Leslie turn the steaks on the grill.  She was a pro, working the meat just close enough to the flames to sear it, but not scorch it.

“I can tell you’ve done this.”

“I like to cook, especially steaks.  How do you like yours?”

“Medium.”

“Me, too.  Used to like them with a cool center.  Then along came mad cow and I went to medium.”

“Those cows weren’t mad, just misunderstood.”

Leslie laughed.  Her smile was as warm as the fire.  She sipped her wine, the flames playing in her eyes.  She said, “I cook with hickory and mesquite.”

“You sure you’ve never been to Texas?”

“Positive.”

“That’s where mesquite began.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.  Cattle coming up from Mexico ate the mesquite bushes.  They couldn’t completely digest all the seeds, so on cattle drives across Texas, the seeds were scattered.  Fertilized at the same time, too.”

Leslie made a puckering motion with her mouth and cut her eyes up to me.  “So that’s where mesquite gets its rich flavor.  Comes from a long line of cow pies across Texas, or is this a little bit of O’Brien bullshit?”

“That’s where it began, in bullshit, but I’m sure today’s mesquite harvest is a few generations removed.”

“You’re quite the historian.”

“I’m full of needless information.”

“Watch the steaks, I’ll get the plates.”

Even though the steaks didn’t need turning, I yielded to the call of a hundred thousand year old carnivore gene, speared the meat, and flipped the steaks.

We refilled wine glasses and ate slowly, tasting, talking and laughing.  The more I got to know Leslie, the more I liked her.  She told me about her childhood, the fights her mother and father had, especially as she was in her early teens.  The battles escalated to the point that she saw her father draw back his fist to hit her mother, stopping before he did, but more angry with himself than her.  The next day, when Leslie got home from school, she found a note on the kitchen counter.  It was a two-sentence goodbye he had written to Leslie’s mother.  Two years later her father had remarried and moved to Seattle, completely severing contact with Leslie.

 She said, “Maybe it’s why I got into criminal investigation.  Learn how to track down my father to ask him why he never called me.  Not even on my birthdays.  Then I got to the point where I didn’t care anymore.”  She sipped the wine, her voice disconnected, like it came from a documentary film flickering against her heart.  “At least he’s alive.  When you told me the other day that your father had been murdered, I could feel your pain.”

I was silent.

“Want to talk about it?” she asked.

“On routine patrol, he radioed in that he’d pulled over a car with a burned out taillight.  The driver opened fire on my father.  Dad was shot in the stomach.  He died trying to crawl back to the car to call for help.”

“I’m so sorry.  Was the perp caught?”

“He’s doing life at Starke.”

“Why’d he shoot?  Couldn’t have been the taillight.”

“Investigators told my mother they found drugs, cocaine, and about a grand in loose bills near my father’s body.  Press had a field day.  The next thing we knew is that people were not quite so sorry that a cop was killed in what some believed was a drug deal gone bad.  Many officers in his department didn’t attend his funeral.” 

“Dear God…and your mother was suffering from depression, and you became her caregiver.  Your childhood—”

“More wine,” I said, interrupting her.

She sipped the remaining bit of wine from her glass, closed her eyes for a long moment, and then looked straight into my eyes and said, “Sean, stay the night.”

FORTY-TWO

I thought about my swim in the ocean earlier in the day.  Thought about Sherri’s voice in the soft roll of the breakers. 
Sean, find your peace.

Mesquite crackled in the grille.  I said to Leslie, “A pop and a hiss, and you thought the mesquite cow pie story was all bull.”

We both laughed, and she sipped more wine.  Then the look on her face was of concern.  Compassion.  She swirled the wine in her glass, her face filled with thought. “Your childhood was robbed.”

“Maybe.”

“Things that happen to us as children, those of a traumatic nature, such as sexual abuse, the suicide of a parent, can be the stuff of nightmares for a long time.”

“That’s why the Irish invented whiskey.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“About how all of that tragedy at such a young age can leave scars.”

“When you bury something, it’s not smart to keep digging it up.”

“Maybe,” she said softly, “but sometimes things just don’t stay buried until you understand all the circumstances and come to terms with them.  You were only a child and there was absolutely nothing you could do.”

“This isn’t the time or place to resurrect old ghosts.  My demons are my private demons.  Just like the first Gulf War, did what I had to do.  Not much of a topic for a dinner conversation, though.” 

Leslie smiled and inhaled deeply.  She moistened her lower lip, searching for the right words.  “As corny or presumptuous as this might sound, Sean, I only want you to know I’m a pretty darn good listener.  I’m here if you ever feel like talking to someone…someone who cares.”  She looked at the coals glowing in the grille, the flames iridescent in her wide pupils.  “Maybe, in an odd sort of way, your circumstances made you a good detective.”

“I’m not sure how good of a detective I really was.”

“What do you mean?”

“The criminal mind is an insane place to enter.  To hunt them, I had to program myself to become like them, at least in terms of motive.  What’s the line between justice and retribution?  It was always clearly marked for me, until one night I’d tracked down a serial killer.  The guy was a pedophile who started off by giving his oldest daughter a pair of high heels and lipstick when she was seven.  She killed herself at age twelve when her father sold her a few times to pay for his gambling depts.”

“Oh my God.  Where was her mother?”

“She was there, in denial.  Her senses short-circuited on pills and cheap wine.  The perp had gone way beyond his daughter, and left a string of bodies.  When I found him in an abandon warehouse on Miami’s eastside, he had just killed his seventh victim.  A little nine-year-old-girl he’d taken from her bedroom.  Her bloody body lay there on the cold concrete floor of a former banana import company.  The perp got up and off her when he saw me approaching.  I’ll never forget his lurid face, the blood on his hands, his eyes mocking me like a hyena rocking its head above dead prey.  ‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ he yelled.  I told him he was right.  Then I charged, knocking him to the floor, and I beat his head senseless against the same concrete where the child lay dead.  There was an open freight elevator shaft a few feet away.  I dragged him to it and dropped him down the shaft.  I don’t know if I beat him to death or whether he died when he hit the floor below.  In the report, I wrote we’d fought, he lost his balance and fell.”        

Leslie was quiet, the pop of firewood the only sound.  “Sean, you stopped a child killer.  I’m not going to try to justify what you did.  You’ve gone though that over and over in your mind.  But anybody can understand it.”

“Doesn’t make it right.  If every man has a breaking point, I’d reached mine, and I didn’t like what I saw.  I’d promised Sherri I would try to regain whatever it was in me she found and loved unconditionally.  I’m still struggling with it.  And now I’m chasing another serial killer.  The question that haunts me is what will I do when I find him?”

She touched my hand.  “You’ll do what you have to do.  You’ll arrest him, and in a few years the state of Florida will do the killing.”

Over hot apple pie, vanilla ice cream and coffee, the conservation turned to the murders and the DNA linked to Silas Davis.  She said, “Although the DNA on the toothpick is a definite match for the traces found under the vic’s fingernail, there’s no DNA match between that and the hair on the duct tape you found.  We didn’t get a hit from CODIS on duct tape hair.  We’ll pick up Silas Davis tomorrow.”

“What kind of backup are you taking?”

“You worried?”

“Silas Davis, Juan Gomez, and Hector Ortega come from another planet.  These are labor contractors who traffic in human beings.  Worried?  Nah, you can handle them.”

“I believe Dan and I can handle the arrest, but we’ll take back-up.”  She paused, slightly tracing the tip of her spoon around the ice cream.  “Dan’s not a fan of Slater’s, either.  Slater’s been watching me like a hawk.  I was trained to work in forensic crime scene investigations, not to keep looking over my shoulder for a bad cop.”

“That turns your job into a covert mission.”

She smiled.  “We’ll question Davis tomorrow and see if we can get him to talk.”

“Davis is big and cunning.  Not a dumb guy.  He abuses the workers because the system allows him to.  He actually works for Juan Gomez and Hector Ortega.  And they’re as indifferent to farm workers as Davis, maybe more so.  They speak the language, bring in the workers from other countries, slap false debt on them, and hold them.  I believe Gomez, Ortega, and Davis are all involved in the killings in some capacity.  Davis might have killed the girl I found, and the other victim, but I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t fit the profile for the kind of killings, at least on the surface he doesn’t.  He’s no scout leader.  Mean as they come, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to kill these women.  Also, don’t see many black serial killers.”

“Maybe the victims were going to the police.”

“That’s possible, but doubtful.  They don’t trust a system that allows this to happen.  Davis is a vile guy, a criminal, but even though we got an exact DNA match, that doesn’t make him the killer.  That tells me she scratched him.  Could have occurred the day of the murder.  Maybe sometime before it happened.  Whoever is killing these women, and it may be Davis, is a psychopath of the worst kind.  He can’t feel guilt because he can’t feel love.”

“Can he feel hate?”

“His type can’t form intimate relationships.  He might not hate in the vengeful kind of way that most people understand.  There is a banality to his killing.  Which makes this guy the most frightening kind.  You can’t see him coming until he’s there.”

“And you believe these last two girls are not the first of his victims?”

“He’s killed before.  Could be responsible for the nine unsolved that fit the MO and profile.  And I bet there are more that we don’t know exists.” 

She was silent, her thoughts somewhere else, and then she looked up at me, a smile as tender as the night.

“I really should be going,” I heard myself say.

“Why?”

“I don’t have a good answer, only an honest one, but not a good one.”

“Then stay the night,” she said again, reaching across the table and touching my hand.