The Whole Truth (8 page)

That is why on the morning that the child's body was found, Detective Flanck slowly paced a wide perimeter, beyond the police barricades. At that very early point in the investigation, none of the officers at the scene knew about Mrs. Noble's call to 911 a little over seven hours earlier. Nor did they know about Sergeant Crouse spotting a Checker Crab at this bridge, from his helicopter.

Paul was thinking about the possible avenues of access and exit for the killer. By car, it would be easy to drive up, drop the body on the fishing line over the bridge, drive away. By water it would be difficult, but still possible. He wondered if there was more than one person involved, perhaps one to hold a boat steady and at least one other to affix the fishing pole to the bridge. It was conceivable that there was someone in a car and somebody else in a boat. Paul didn't want to limit his imagination when considering the way it might have happened; he let his mind play with as many possibilities as he could think of, staying open to the persuasions of logic, experience, intuition, and good old common horse sense.

"I saw," he explains in his tough guy growl, "that there was really only one place down on the water to tie up a boat, and that was on the east side of the bridge." To Paul, that meant if the killer or killers came by boat alone, it had to have been from the east because until only a couple of hours earlier the water would have been too high for anyone to get from the west side of the bridge to the east, and the child was dangling from the east side.

On the east side only, there was a boat tied up to a dock. It was a big, beautiful Hatteras, Paul observed, estimating it (correctly) to be forty-seven feet long. The boat's name was scrawled across the back in flashy silver letters: Overboard. Paul smiled to himself when he read that. Did that mean the owners felt they'd been a bit extravagant— gone overboard—to buy it? It had a flying bridge all decked out for deep sea fishing. The gleaming, immaculate fishing yacht was tied up to a well-maintained cement dock at the rear of a private backyard from which you could climb a short but rather steep little grassy hill to the street and the bridge.

Paul saw that a boater could have stopped beside the Hatteras, tied up to one of the big metal cleats on her deck, and then used her swim platform and ladder to climb onto the aft deck. He could have walked right across her gleaming white fiberglass deck, climbed out of the Hatteras onto the cement dock, and then made his way up to the bridge, streetside.

In his imagination, Paul pictured a shadowy, anonymous figure doing just that . . . carrying a fishing pole, propping it between the railing of the bridge so the line hung down . . .

"No," Paul corrected himself. "The killer would have cast the line out, snagging his own boat with the hook, because how else was he going to get hold of the line again to wrap it around her neck?"

In the imagined scene, the killer then retraced his steps back onto the deck of the Hatteras, down into his own boat, where he grabbed the dangling fishing line, wrapped it several times around his victim's throat, and then lowered her into the water, letting the inflowing tide carry the body on the line toward the west, a bit under the bridge, until the line grew taut.

"Of course," says Paul, "my ideas were all bull if he arrived by car, or had an accomplice in a car."

But if the killer (he or she, at this point) had arrived by water, Paul worked it out that meant the killer had to have entered the canal from the east, or Intracoastal Canal side, because of the tide. (Later, that idea would connect with the fact that the Checker Crab Company was located only two and a half miles west of the Intracoastal Canal.)

No one else at the crime scene had looked at the private yacht behind the house yet. Paul saw two people standing in a Florida room, peering out at all of the commotion around the bridge.

He walked close enough to call out to them, "That your boat?"

In Florida, just because there is a boat docked at a house doesn't automatically mean it belongs to the home-owners. Many of them rent out dock space to other people. But a man in shorts and no shirt, appearing to>be in his sixties, opened the screen door, and yelled back, "Yeah!"

Within minutes, Paul had from them a signed consent-to-search form. They were a retired couple from Oklahoma City, in their sixties, and visibly upset by the nature of the crime at their back door. They hadn't heard a thing, they told the detective. "What a terrible thing," the wife said, with tears in her eyes. She told Paul they had moved to Bahia Beach to be near their own grandchildren. Whatever they could do to help, they were glad to do. And so, he was soon on his way down their backyard to their dock to look at their yacht. He stood on the dock to which it was snugged, and gave it the once-over.

Nice, he thought, as who wouldn't?

A saltwater fisherman, himself, he couldn't help but think how great it would be to steer a beauty like this down around Government Cut on a Sunday morning, throw out a live crab on the end of a line, drop it into 150 feet of water, and hope for about a seventy-pound tarpon, maybe some kingfish and barracuda. It was hard not to be envious in a place with more than thirty thousand boats, some of them big enough to accommodate their own helicopters. But Paul figured he could have a decent retirement, or a big boat, but not both. Anyway, a man could catch a damn big fish off an eighteen-foot ketch, and it was the size of the fish that mattered to him, not the size of the boat.

Almost at once, he noticed a dark smudge on the otherwise pristine white fiberglass deck of the Overboard. Paul removed his own shoes and stepped onto the boat for a closer look.

The smudge looked to him like a large cigarette ash, flattened by someone walking on it.

If the killer had been smoking, maybe had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he could have dropped an ash onto the deck without realizing it. If the crime happened at night, as Paul assumed, the killer might not have seen the fallen ash, even if the white deck was illuminated by the moon or by lights. The smallest shadow would hide an ash, or this smudge. Standing there in his stocking feet, Paul noticed something else that gave his heart an excited jolt.

At the edge of the deck, right where someone boarding from another boat might have first set down a foot, there was the print of the toe of a shoe. Plain as day. With a distinctive V pattern sliced irregularly with the sort of individualistic "wear marks" that delight an investigator's soul, because they're so simple to match with the shoe that made them. If you can find the shoe, that is. If there was even a little water and dirt in the bottom of the killer's boat (this was still assuming the killer came by boat), and if the killer stepped into it before boarding the Overboard, then he would leave this imprint.

Paul backed carefully away.

He got off the yacht and pulled his shoes back on, before heading over to his colleagues to report his possibly important discoveries. They might be nothing, have no relationship to the crime. Or . . .

Sometimes, it pays to take the long view.

Paul Flanck's imaginings about a lone killer in a boat turned out to be almost exactly what had happened in the earliest hour of Tuesday morning.

Detective Robyn Anschutz says she did only one useful thing that morning at the crime scene, and that was to cater to a couple of her own idiosyncratic convictions. Having been trained with a generation of young cops who were fed FBI statistics and psychological profiles along with more traditional training, Robyn firmly believes two weird but verifiable ideas:

One: Murderers not only return to the scene of their crime, but they like to watch the investigation of it.

And, two: Many killers are infatuated with police work.

They like to hang around cops, in other words.

And they really like to watch those cops work at the scene of the crime they committed. They like to be "helpful," and may volunteer in a search, for instance, and they enjoy the feelings of secret superiority they may experience while watching the "dumb" cops go down blind alleys or commit investigative errors.

Because she believes in the likelihood of both of those implausible events, Robyn took a good long look at every face in the growing crowd that morning. Cops. Media. Citizens. Everybody.

"I don't get to go to all that many murder scenes," she says, "which may surprise you. But I'm always bugging our still photographers and our video guys to include the spectators in their shots. I always want to see who was there."

She admits that she had never yet been able to match a spectator's face with the eventual suspect's—or convicted killer's— face, but she kept thinking that one day she would. Robyn likes to look over "spectator pictures" early in a case, so that she may recognize a suspect if she comes across him (or her) later.

"It was just this nutty hobby, you might say," she says, "until the Natalie Mae McCullen murder."

At that scene, that morning, indulging her heretofore unproductive hobby, Robyn noticed a wealth of typical south Florida faces. There were tanned, elderly women turned out in Lilly Pulitzer pinks and greens, and there were guayabera-shirted men in summer shorts or slacks. She noticed women in swimming suits, sundresses, shorts, halter tops, or tees. She saw bare-chested men. It was the usual mix of tourists, retirees, and hard-working residents, plus a sprinkling of the homeless men who sometimes haunted even the most posh boulevards. And her eye was definitely caught that morning by a figure she originally mistook for a boy. Dressed in an outrageously garish mix of yellow and pink, topped by a green baseball cap, he looked as if he had been wildly overdressed for the beach by his mother.

But on second glance, Robyn decided that the skinny, boylike body was more mature than that. It was a youngish man, Robyn decided then. She couldn't see his face under the bill of the cap, but she sensed how intently he stared at the busy activities of the police, and how very alone he appeared even while standing in the middle of a band of gawkers beyond the police barricades.

Robyn not only filed him away in her memory, she also sauntered over to the crime scene unit photographer and directed him to get a picture of "the fashion plate in the dirty pink."

"Maybe it was intuition," Robyn says. "Or, maybe it was experience. But if somebody told me that I had to pick the murderer out of the crowd, or die, I'd have pointed to him."

And she was right.

Locating and arresting the suspect turned out to be almost as fast and easy as identifying the victim had been.

"We should have known it was all too easy," Paul Flanck says, bitterly. "I should have known it was all bound to get more complicated down the line." But then, he's an admitted cynic and pessimist. "Protective coloration" Robyn calls it. She claims that some cops need that kind of attitude to protect themselves from overwhelming disillusionment. When Paul hears that, he laughs and retorts, "Oh, come on, Robyn, I'm a realist, that's all."

He adds, "The world can always prove to me that it's a better place than I think it is. In the meantime, I'll just go ahead and continue to expect the worst of it."

Robyn Anschutz remembers the exact pieces of the puzzle that came together with such amazing speed to point an arrow sharply at the Checker Crab Water Transit Company.

"We have a veteran chopper pilot, Broyle Crouse," she explains. "And when Broyle heard which bridge we found the body at, he remembered the water taxi he'd seen there the previous night. He didn't really think it was connected to the murder, but he called my partner anyway. They're old buddies from way back. They like to fish and fly together.

"So, Crouse tells Paul about how he saw the number six Checker Crab right up next to the big Hatteras parked— docked—on the northeast side of the bridge and how he saw one person in it. He thought it was a guy, he said. So Paul puts that together with the footprint he found on the deck of the yacht and the cigarette ash. And then we had the unbelievable break of that 911 call from the old lady who saw a black-and-white checked boat right at the McCullens' dock. And the other 911 call from the boatyard owner. Bing, bing, bam, everything came together all at once. It was the 911 operator who took it on herself to tell us.

"It was like everybody was upset about this little girl getting killed and how her little body was left like that to hang in public, and so everybody went on hyperalert and remembered the things they needed to."

Detectives Anschutz and Flanck obtained a search warrant.

Water taxis are a lot of fun. Tourists love them, and they're cheaper than cabs. Locals use them sparingly for special treats, like children's birthday parties, and for out-of-town guests. In Bahia Beach, there are three licensed companies that putter along the water routes, competing for hotel and restaurant business, and carrying tourists to attractions such as Ocean World down in Lauderdale, or even to shopping malls.

It's a wonderful ride, day or night.

During the day, tourists get a water's eye view of the fascinating boat traffic that rides the Intracoastal, and they can ogle the backyards of the mansions that line the canals. At night, they get a glamorous tour with all the glittering lights reflected in the black water. As the mayor of Bahia Beach says, "If I had a dollar for every time a tourist took a ride in a water taxi and said, 'Gee, I wish I lived here,' I could afford to run for governor."

At the time of Natty's abduction and murder, Checker Crab was the smallest and least successful of the water taxi businesses in Bahia. The other two operated out of tidy, attractive docks right on the Intracoastal. But the detectives traced Checker up a swampy little backwater bay off the New River. They drove into its gravel parking lot no more than three hours after Natalie's body was found at the bridge.

The developments in the case were moving very fast.

"What a dump," was Paul's verdict on the boatyard.

"Atmospheric," said Robyn, with wry diplomacy.

They were going in alone, but there was backup close by. "We didn't know if we'd turn up a suspect," Paul explains. "But we were definitely after the boat."