A False Dawn (17 page)

FORTY-THREE

 Leslie said, “I have some Grand Marnier a friend gave me, but I haven’t had a reason to have an after-dinner drink.  Now I do, because you’re here.  One nightcap?”

“Just one,” I said.

She poured the Grand Marnier and raised her glass. “To the night, may this one be the first of many.” 

We toasted and sipped the liqueur.  She set her glass down on the counter and touched my cheek with the tips of her fingers.  She was trembling slightly, her eyes probing mine.  She stepped closer, pressing her body gently against me.  I could feel her warmth, the scent of her hair, and a lingering perfume somewhere on her long neck.

“I don’t think…” I heard myself say.  Her lips seemed to move to mine with no measurement in space and time.  They were just there.    

  The kiss was like a feather at first, gentle, searching.  Her mouth was soft, tasting of the Grand Marnier, lipstick and vanilla.  In less than a half minute, the kiss became one of a buried passion erupting.  She was sensuous and receptive.  I could feel a strong arousal, a heat building in my loins.  I wanted to pick her up and take her into the bedroom, but I pulled back a moment, then kissed one of her closed eyes.

“I can’t stay the night,” I whispered. 

“Then stay as long as you can,” she said, rising to kiss me again.

#

IN THE BEDROOM
, we undressed each other, eyes locking on eyes, hands discovering.  I held her close, backing her onto the bed.  The light from the patio broke through the partially opened blinds, illuminating Leslie’s beauty.  Her body was sculpted from good genes and exercise.  I touched her hair and face.  Our bodies moved in a rhythmic motion of discovery, and then moved as one.  Our fingers locked, and I held her arms beside her head, soft brown hair cascading on the pillow, her eyes searching, finding me.  Within a few minutes, we both were climaxing, in long powerful couplings.

I leaned back, but Leslie’s right hand stayed laced in mine, holding me, refusing to let me lean too far up.  She reached and entwined her fingers in my other hand.

“Sean…just breathe…say nothing.  You’re here now.  Nowhere else.”             

#

IT WAS AFTER 3:00 A.M
. when I got back to
Jupiter.
  The cockpit door showed no sign of entry.  I unlocked it, got a beer from the galley, climbed up into the fly bridge and sank into the captain’s chair.  A breeze stirred across the river and lagoon, bringing with it the damp smell of rain.  It was the darkness before dawn.  Fog drifted through glowing orbs of light cast from security lights down by the charter boats and at the end of the five long docks lined with boats. 

The marina was eerily quiet, only an occasional strain from
Jupiter’s
bowline, the tide moving silently between the boats and pilings.  I sipped the beer and turned my collar up in the cool of the morning.  I was exhausted, but my thoughts bounced from Leslie to Sherri and then to the dead girl.  But Sherri was dead.  DEAD.  As a former homicide detective, death was my shift.  The eternal night shift.  I had clocked in again.

I watched the gray daybreak rise over the boats in a cloak of diffused light, enveloping the marina with an ethereal tint of an aged photograph.  The dawn arrived unannounced, like the ghost of the ancient mariner.  It was a black and white world, devoid of warmth and colors.  A light rain began to fall as soft as a whisper.  Its gentle rhythm was the last thing I heard as my eyes closed.  I wanted to dream in warm colors, to turn away the cold edge of shadows.

FORTY-FOUR

It was two days before I called Leslie.  There was a pleasant smile in her voice, but more businesslike than I wanted.  But then what did I want?  I wanted to take her to lunch, to be with her, to meet, and dine with her near the water.  The way the sun comes through a bent Venetian blind, her light broke through the tiny slants in my armor even though I tried to shield her from my darkest corners.  

Leslie met me at the Lighthouse Restaurant, a block from the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and fifty feet from the Halifax River. A life-sized pirate, made from stone and painted in primary colors, stood next to a rusted galleon anchor in the parking lot.  The restaurant was a blend of cracker Florida inlaid with Key West T-shirt tackiness.

Outside, a wooden deck was built around a large live oak tree.  There were a dozen tables and chairs scattered across the deck.  Some of the lunch crowd sat in a replica of a shrimp boat docked and attached to the deck.

Leslie and I took a table in a far corner of the deck with a nice view of the river.  I watched a sailboat motor toward the pass.  One man at the helm.  I could see him opening the jib, a gust of wind pulling the bow in the direction of the sea.

Leslie said, “Nice spot.  Do you bring guests here often?”

“Guests?”  

“I thought I’d hear from you the next day.  Then, when I didn’t, I thought it was something I said.”

“No, Leslie.  It’s not you.  It’s me.  I have had a lot of closed curtains opened suddenly.  It’s just that this light pouring in has caught my house in sort of a mess.”

“I don’t want to change your world or redecorate your house.  All I want is to feel comfortable when I’m in it.  To feel welcome, maybe even special.”

“You are.”

She looked out across the water and was silent.  Then she changed the direction of the conversation.  “The DNA sample we got from Richard Brennen didn’t match the hair from the duct tape.  Got to be ice water in that man’s veins.”

“There’s something cold-blooded in him.”  

 “Okay, now to Silas Davis.  Dan Grant and I grilled him at headquarters.  Interrogated him for more than three hours.”

“What’d you get?”

 “Probably capable of murder, but I don’t think he’s the perp.”

“Why?”

“You even said that his skin under her fingernail doesn’t make him the killer.”

“But I want to hear why you think he may not have killed her.”

“Davis is cocky, but he’s scared, too.  We reminded him that his skin cells were under the vic’s fingernail, which is enough hard, indisputable evidence to take it to the DA.  Sean, the guy wouldn’t crack.  He insists that she slapped him, cut his face with her nails, and the last time he saw her was when she got in a van to be driven to another work location.”

“Talk with the other girls that night in the van.  Who was driving?”

“Hector Ortega.  Dan and I questioned him and Juan Gomez at that slum trailer park they run.  Gomez said he pays his workers cash and doesn’t know the vic’s real name.  Said he called her pájaro, Spanish for bird.  Ortega says the last time he saw her was when she bolted from his parked van while he was urinating off the side of the road.  And where he happened to make his unscheduled stop to pee is what turned your world around.  He was less than a half-mile from your home.  The vic allegedly ran toward the river where she was assaulted and left for dead.  You stumbled onto her the morning after it happened.  Ortega says some backwoods redneck probably did it.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it.  Did the pathologist find anything on both victims that might have the any remote similarity?”

“Are you having short-term memory?”  She laughed. “Remember, we couldn’t find so much as a speck of hair, carpet fibers, blood, latent prints, semen or anything physical that link the two.  Although the second vic was raped, no foreign pubic, no sperm, and no condoms tossed in the bushes.  Outside of the rape, and what we know linking them—gender and ethnicity—the common link seems to be the way they were murdered, and the fact the bodies were found less than twenty miles from each other.  Ortega and Gomez say they didn’t know and had never seen the second vic.”

“You believe them?”

“No, but then we don’t have a lot to go on either.”

My mind raced down a long black tunnel and an image flashed.  It was a dead body.  A girl.  Broken.  Beaten.  Smashed like a bird that hit a car windshield.   Legs spread.  Bloody.  Panties torn off.   The headlights from a parked squad cruiser illuminated her face in a theatrical spotlight of white.  I was kneeling by her body looking at her open eyes.  Eyes locked on horror.  Her nose was the only part of her face showing color.  Both nostril passages had tiny circles of blood encrusted like rings on the outside.

 “Sean, where were you?  Your eyes were so intense.”

Now I remembered what I’d seen on the girl I’d found.  “The girl I found by the river was almost killed by strangulation and then stabbed.  She had blood on her nostrils.  If a guy hunting for frogs hadn’t been shinning a light near the area, I believe her neck would have been broken, too.  The second girl also was strangled and found with a broken neck.”

“Right.  And your point?”

“Leslie, the coroner couldn’t determine the exact cause of death, strangulation or a broken neck, right?”

“The psycho did both within seconds.  ME’s report said the second vic could have died from either.  The perp probably strangled her then broke her neck as a parting gift.”

I looked at the bay and inlet for a moment. “What if she didn’t die from a broken neck or strangulation?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if she died from asphyxiation?”

“Sorry, I don’t follow you, Sean.”

“What if she wasn’t strangled?  What if she was asphyxiated?  Toyed with…brought to the point of passing out.  Brought to near death and then allowed to breathe again.  Given mouth-to-mouth by her attacker until he tired of it and killed her.”

 “I don’t know if a human can go to the level of cruelty,” she said.  “Almost kill a woman, resuscitate her only to kill her the next minute.  I’ve never seen evil like that.”

“I have.”

FORTY-FIVE

Three bikers, straddling Harleys, roared into the oyster shell parking lot next to the deck.  I watched them park their bikes, trudge into the restaurant, and sit at the bar.  

Leslie reached across the table, softly touching my hand.  “Tell me about it.  What happened?”

“Miami.  About four years ago.  It’s one of the cases I still relive.  You don’t forget investigating a crime scene where women have been beaten, raped, and left with a plastic bag over their heads.”

“What?”

“We never solved them.  I never solved them and I think about it often.  For some reason, the killings stopped.  My partner, Ron Hamilton, and I thought they’d stopped.”

“What are you saying?”

“The perp killed at least seven women, probably more.  He’d pick out vics that usually wouldn’t be missed by family or friends.  Prostitutes.  Runaways.  The killer would attack his victims, slap them into submission, place a clear plastic bag over their heads and begin the asphyxiation.  All the time raping them.  When they’d lose consciousnesses, he’d push up the plastic bag and give them mouth-to-mouth.  Once they regained consciousness, he’d do it again.  He’d even kiss them through the plastic bag he’d pulled back over their faces.  We believe he’d time his climax as they died looking at him.”

Leslie touched her throat, her eyes looking toward the water.

“One woman managed to survive, barely.  She was attacked in a park, near South Beach at night.  The perp was surprised by two high school kids making out in a car about two hundred feet away from where the assault happened.  They turned on their headlights, and the perp got up and ran.  They couldn’t get a good look at his face.”

“Could the vic ID him?”

“She said he was very strong.  Dark features, but she was so traumatized, all she could remember was his eyes.  Called them ‘wildcat devil eyes.’  And now I think those eyes could have resembled that of a jaguar.  After she recovered, at least recovered physically, she looked at hundreds of photos.  Couldn’t pick out one.  Something inside her died, though.  She left Miami and moved in with her mother.  I think they’re in Jacksonville.”

Leslie pushed her plate away from her and wiped her hands a long time on a napkin.  “Sick.  Diabolical, evil bastard.  You think these murders might be related?’

“Now I do.”

“None of our vics were found with plastic bags over their heads.”

“What did the pathologist’s report say about the vic’s noses?”

“Noses?  Nothing.  Their noses weren’t beaten or broken.”

“Inside their noses.  The nostril cavities.”

“I don’t recall anything.”

“Can you check?

“Sure.  I can call Dan, have him take a look.”

“Do it.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

Leslie flipped open her cell and punched in the numbers.  “Dan, are you at your desk?”  She nodded.  “Good, I need a quick favor.  Look at the ME’s report on the two vics and see if he found anything inside their nostrils.”

She paused and nodded.  “Yes, okay.  Call me back.  Thanks.”  

#

THE WAITRESS DELIVERED
fresh coffee to our table and left as Leslie’s cell rang.  She flipped it open.  “Whatcha got?”  She pulled a pen from her purse and began writing on a napkin.  She thanked Dan Grant, closed the phone, and looked across the table at me.  Her eyes distressed.  “ME’s report for both vic’s says…I’ll read the exact words…‘broken capillaries found inside the nasal cavities consistent with trauma...or pressure.’  Why didn’t I pick up on this before?”

“Because you weren’t looking for it.  With all of the other wounds on the bodies, combined with the rape, strangulation marks, broken neck, et cetera, a few broken vessels inside the nose normally wouldn’t raise a red flag.”

“What are you thinking?”

I sipped the coffee and watched a squirrel dart off with a piece of bread.  “I’m thinking that the killer held his hand over the vics’ mouths or used duct tape and then held their nostrils.  When they passed out, he’d revive them.  Then he’d cover their mouths, pinch their nostrils, and continue raping them as they died.  In the case of the vic that I found, the duct tape may have been used to cover her mouth.  Could have happened with the second vic, too.  But the tape, evidence, wasn’t found.”

“I was hoping for a DNA hit from the duct tape hair from the feds, but nothing.”

“You wouldn’t because no one was ever charged, let alone convicted in the Miami cases.  However, DNA was taken from the perp’s salvia on the last plastic bag.  It’s been stored.  It wouldn’t have been included in the database because there’s no ID attached to it.  I’ll call Ron Hamilton at Miami-Dade PD.  The three of us need to collaborate on this.  You can send the DNA profile from the hair to him.”

“And if we get a match…”

“We have the most prolific serial killer in Florida, maybe the entire nation, four years later.  We just don’t have a name.”