Cold Case Squad (19 page)

Stone sighed. "I tried ducking Padron. Didn't answer his messages,
but then he griped to the chief, who called Riley. She said to
cooperate with PIO as long as it doesn't compromise the case. Isn't it
compromised when I'm not working on it?"

"The chief catches me in the lobby today, shakes my hand, and says,
'Nice job.' The man didn't know I was alive until yesterday. Riley said
he's impressed."

"You bet your ass he's impressed," Burch said. "You got your picture
and his in the newspapers—without robbing, raping, or shooting anybody.
You didn't get arrested. You came across like a goddamn Eagle Scout.
That's a breath of fresh air in this outfit."

Their cell phones sounded almost simultaneously.

"Uh-oh, Padron," Stone said, and answered his.

"I feel left out," Nazario said.

"Who the hell is this?" Burch was saying into his. "What are you,
some kind of freak? You son of a bitch. You got the wrong goddamn
number." He hung up and shook his head. "Second one today. Musta got
their lines crossed."

He drained his coffee cup and pushed his chair back. "Gotta make a
pit stop before we go get the Blazer."

"Wait." Nazario put a restraining hand on his arm. "Don't go in
there, Sarge."

"What the hell you talking about?" Burch said.

"Hold on," Stone told Padron. "I wouldn't go in there if I were
you," he said, one hand over the mouthpiece.

"You crazy? What's going on?"

"Must be that permanent Magic Marker," Stone said.

"I spoke to the owner," Nazario said. "They're gonna paint over it
after the lunch hour."

Burch stared in dismay at the graffiti on the men's room wall:

MIAMI POLICE SGT. CRAIG BURCH WEARS PANTYHOSE.

"I hear from Cookie, the cute waitress, the little one with the big
butt, that the same thing's on the wall in the ladies' room," Nazario
said.

"I thought she'd mellowed out," Burch said.

Horns blared as they hurtled across NW Twelfth Avenue, Nazario at
the wheel. "Maybe somebody else did it. You arrest anybody who knows
you eat there? Maybe somebody with a grudge just got outta jail."

"Nah. Connie knows it's my favorite place. That other cops go there.
Trying to embarrass me. And I can recognize her printing. Dotting the i
with that little heart is a dead giveaway. It's gotta be her."

"Shoulda sent her flowers or something. Sure your car is ready?"

"They said it was."

Leon wiped his hands on a rag, shoved it in his back pocket, and
squinted through his thick, grimy glasses. "Never had this before," he
said. "Come 'ere, I wanna show you something."

"When a mechanic says that," Nazario muttered, "it's never good
news."

The Blazer sat in the dusty lot outside, the hood up.

Leon displayed the source of the problem.

"What the hell?" Burch said. "Is that what…"

"Oh, Jesus," Nazario said.

"Somebody had to put it in the gas tank," Leon said. "Dang thing
expanded, eventually worked its way into the fuel line, plugged it up."
He regarded them solemnly, his pale eyes questioning. "Hell of a thing.
Couldn't have been an accident. Sorry the bill is so high, but this was
a tough one."

"Holy shit," Burch said, as Leon disappeared with his credit card.
"Do you really think that Connie… ?"

"Face it, Sarge. Who else would drop a Tampax in your gas tank?"

The mountain of messages had grown prodigiously in the hour he'd
been gone. A stack of new leads had come in from Crime Stoppers, and
his phone rang incessantly. As he spoke to callers, Stone tried to
organize. He set aside an alarming number of messages from other law
enforcement agencies nationwide, all with unsolved murders they hoped
to link to the same serial killer. He'd return those calls later. He
eliminated tips from psychics and those from callers who named suspects
too young to be linked to a series of murders that began twenty-five
years ago.

"I'm sure it's not your son-in-law," he assured a fearful woman.
"He's only twenty-seven now."

A tearful elderly woman whimpered that she was so relieved to hear
his voice. A man had stared at her in the supermarket, she said. Former
President Richard Nixon was the killer, swore a man with a shaky voice.
His television set had told him so.

A man who insisted on remaining anonymous whispered that the murders
were a CIA conspiracy designed to "thin out the herd. There are too
many people in the world now. They're starting to eliminate the sick
and the weak."

"The killer is living under the Sunny Isles Bridge disguised as a
pirate," a caller said.

"Thank you, Lieutenant Riley," Stone muttered bitterly. His phone
rang again.

"You're the one who was on television. In the newspapers. You know
nothing. It's all a sham. For publicity. What can you know about him?"
the caller asked persistently.

"More than he thinks," Stone said, irritated.

"Such as?"

"I can't divulge specifics at this point in the investigation," he
said, as Emma, the secretary, handed him another fistful of messages.
"But we're moving forward."

"Tell me one thing…" the man persisted.

Stone felt almost relieved to see Padron arrive, to spirit him away
for more prearranged interviews.

"Have to go now. There's a new development. Thanks for calling." He
hung up.

The interviews were phoners with out-of-state media. Stone sat in
Padron's comfortably padded leather chair growing increasingly
uncomfortable with each telephone encounter. He hated repeating himself
over and over to each one. Every reporter he spoke to tried to elicit a
promise that Stone would tip him or her off exclusively when he broke
the case. As if his top priority, he thought disdainfully, would be to
dial a total stranger in New Jersey or Ohio. He soon stopped
remembering their names.

Stone thought about Burch's warnings regarding the press. It
reminded him of the time Gran took him to a petting zoo. He was nine
years old, happily feeding the goats and llamas sacks of food pellets
from a vending machine. Then his grandmother had no more quarters for
the machine. The animals were friendly, cuddly and cute, until he ran
out of food. Then they rushed him, pushy and demanding until he lost
his balance and fell. A huge llama stepped on his foot, holding him in
place as it ripped the empty food sack from his hands with huge yellow
teeth. He screamed until his grandmother rescued him.

Padron was still feeding the llama. How long, Stone wondered, would
it stay friendly?

The PIO officer bounced back into his office with word that Nell
Hunter, a reporter for the morning paper, wanted to write a profile on
Stone.

Stone remembered her from the press conference. A small, nicely
built girl with blond hair and a friendly smile. She'd worn a peasant
skirt and sandals and asked her questions in a chirpy little voice that
reminded him of a cartoon character. He hadn't heard any of the guys
gripe about her. Burch was right about developing a relationship with a
trusted reporter. Maybe she was the one. He'd liked that savvy female
reporter who'd worked on the Ricky Chance case. Females are more
sensitive to victims, he thought, and way more interesting to talk to.
They also smell better.

Most male reporters, except for the slick TV guys who wore makeup,
appeared nerdy and uninteresting. The one from the
News
sprayed saliva when he talked, had crumbs in his beard, and never let
anybody finish an answer before blurting out another question.

He called Nell Hunter and set up an appointment.

As he left PIO, Detective Ron Diaz was putting together a brief
press release on his case, the elderly widow's brutal murder.

"Got 'em," he told Stone with a grin. "Just booked the guy."

"Good deal, who was it?"

"The handyman. Paroled six weeks ago on a sexual battery conviction.
Did a day's work for the victim last week. She was nice enough to fix
him a sandwich for lunch. Well, no good deed goes unpunished. He asks
to use the bathroom and while he's in there, he steals her antique
watch. She misses it after he leaves, calls and tells him that if he
doesn't bring it back, her next call is to the cops. It's already
pawned and he's on parole. So he goes back there the other morning.
Says he knocked but she didn't answer the door. Musta been in the
bathroom with the water running. He gets into the house and one thing
leads to another. Patrol pulled him over. He was driving her car."

"Nice work."

"Thanks, but no rest for the weary. Just caught another one. Bar
shooting in Little Havana. A crazy thing. Guy leans over a pool table
to line up his shot and all the other players see his underwear. He's
wearing pink boxer shorts. Believe that? They all start hooting,
cracking jokes, ragging on the guy. Insults fly. He goes out to the car
for his gun and walks back in shooting. Kills one, wounds two. Who'da
thought pink underwear 'ud get three people shot, one an innocent
bystander."

Stone had never been to the newspaper office before. When he stepped
off the elevator she was waiting, big brown eyes and a smattering of
freckles across her nose. He sat next to her desk while she asked him
questions and typed his answers into a computer terminal.

He balked at certain personal questions. Yes, he was single. He
listed the schools he'd attended, revealed that his grandmother had
raised him. Nell laughed a lot. She seemed to take no offense when he
said, "I'm not answering that, it's too personal," as when she asked
about his parents.

She listened to his war stories from patrol. He waxed enthusiastic
about police work, cold cases, and how he had persistently applied
until he landed a berth on the squad.

She pried for more details about the Meadows investigation but he
refused to elaborate. When they took a break and went to the employee
cafeteria for coffee and oatmeal cookies, she insisted on paying.

She was from Long Island, she said, had worked on two other
newspapers, and had won an award while working in Akron, Ohio, for a
series on abused women.

They took the elevator back to the newsroom. It wasn't what he had
expected. He had imagined it noisier, more crowded and convivial.
Instead, each reporter labored alone in a little gray-walled cubicle
with a telephone and a computer terminal. It was much like police
headquarters, but unlike headquarters, this seemed to be a very boring
place to work.

She had brightened her drab cubicle with photos, cartoons, and a
pink paper flower in a plastic vase.

"Will your story be in tomorrow's newspaper?" he asked.

She laughed heartily, as though he'd told a joke.

"No, silly." Her shiny little white teeth flashed. "I have lots more
work to do. Maybe it'll run next weekend, or maybe not." Feature
writers, she explained, had more time to work on stories than reporters
who cover breaking news.

They talked easily and she seemed enthusiastic when he hinted at
possible collaboration in the future. What was it that Burch said? One
hand washes the other. That's when it occurred to him to ask the favor.

Maybe she could help out his team, he said. He explained that they
were trying to identify a corpse in an old case. The man was a drinker,
between thirty-five and forty-five years of age, and approximately six
feet tall. He had been missing since 1992. There might have been
something in the newspaper then. Was there a way to look it up?

"Sure," she said lightly, and demonstrated.

The paper's information retrieval system fascinated him. Type in a
word or a phrase, pick a year, and the computer would instantly spit
out a list of all the stories in which that word or phrase appeared.

"It only goes back as far as 1981, the year our library
system—formerly known as the morgue—was computerized," she said
cheerfully. "For stories prior to that we have to pull the old files
and search the hard clips by hand, but everything since then is in the
system."

She typed in "missing man," then selected a year, 1992. The archives
reported forty-seven stories. Stone noted the names of men who fit
Terrell's general description and had vanished during the right time
period. Nell typed them into the system to see if they had been
reported as found in later stories. Time-consuming, but faster and more
all-encompassing than could be done through Miami police records. No
wonder reporters often can get ahead of detectives, he thought.

The disappearance of the man whose identity they were seeking may
not have been immediately reported, Stone told her. If he vanished
after a move to Miami or arriving in South Florida on vacation, he
might not have been missed for some time.

Stone would have liked to continue searching the system—in fact, his
fingers itched to command the keyboard—but Nell insisted on continuing
their interview, to the point of silliness, he thought.

What sports did he play in high school? Who was his prom date? His
favorite foods? "You're not going to put that in the story," he
objected.

"I won't know until I write it," she said. "Too much information is
better than not enough."

She walked him down to the lobby when he was leaving, and promised
she'd continue the computer search for his missing man later.

"I have to tell you," she said. "Your description is so vague it
fits half the population. I mean, you didn't even give me the hair or
eye color. What about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, clothes, jewelry, or
other identifying characteristics?"

"Sorry, that's all we've got."

"What you're saying is that he's just bones. He must be a skeleton
you found."

"I didn't say that."

"Mr. Bones." She winked mischievously. "Sure you don't want to tell
me everything?"