“Why not? Coco could be turning Mize onto his targets. Or vice versa.”
Drummond frowned, glanced in the mirror at me. “A woman serial killer? Isn’t that rare?”
“You’ve got multiple killings here, but it doesn’t feel serial to me. In every case, effort was made to cast the deaths as suicides. Most serial killers delight in being blatant about their acts. So a woman could be our killer or an accomplice.”
“Motive?”
“Money.”
The Aston Martin was two cars and almost a block ahead of us as it rolled to the stop sign. Instead of taking a left toward Mize Fine Arts, the Aston Martin turned right and headed toward the ocean.
Drummond stayed well back now, unwilling to risk being noticed, while Johnson and I craned our necks to see the roadster take a left onto Ocean Boulevard just as the rain came on hard. When we turned after it, less than a minute later, we couldn’t see where Mize had gone.
Then Johnson saw brake lights in the shadows beyond a gate set in a wall that surrounded a two-story Mediterranean. The house was mostly shielded from the road by a riot of plants and towering palms. We circled the block to make sure Mize hadn’t gone somewhere else and returned feeling that he must have been allowed in by someone who lived or worked there. Edwin and Pauline Striker were listed as owners in the county records Johnson pulled up on his iPad.
“Is Pauline a candidate for Coco?” I said.
Johnson shook his head. “Both owners are in their late sixties. But maybe Coco’s a daughter or something.”
Drummond parked where we could see the gate and then drummed his fingers on the wheel. Even though his face remained expressionless, I was learning to read his other nonverbal cues. He was frustrated, and I sensed why.
The various links we’d established connecting the victims, Mize, and Coco were weak, at best, and some were unproven. We didn’t even know, for example, if the Coco who’d painted the portraits was the same woman who worked for Mize. And the only thing that tied Mize to any of it was the fact that he’d employed Francie Letourneau and had been called by the maid just before she’d been killed.
That certainly wasn’t enough to warrant us going into Mize’s home or even, for that matter, into the Strikers’ place. For all we knew, the Strikers were old and dear friends of the art dealer, and he was over for a late visit.
But what if—
Drummond said, “I’m sitting here wondering if Mize is in there alone with Pauline Striker.”
“Or with Coco and Pauline Striker.”
“Call the house,” I said. “Make it sound as if you’re checking in with people who used Francine Letourneau as a maid or a woman named Coco as a portrait painter. See if that flushes him out.”
Johnson looked up the number, called it, heard it ring into voice mail. He left a message identifying himself and asking that someone give him a call back on his cell phone regarding an ongoing investigation.
When he hung up, I doubted we’d get a call anytime soon and I yawned, glanced at my watch. It was nearly ten.
Then Johnson’s phone rang.
“The Strikers,” he said, and he put the phone on speaker and answered.
Chapter
70
In a hallway off the master suite upstairs, Jeffrey Mize became Coco. He got control of himself and affected a crotchety voice, saying, “This is Pauline Striker. I am looking for Detective Johnson.”
“You got him,” Johnson said. “Thanks for the quick callback.”
“What’s this about?” Coco said.
“An investigation I’m a part of,” Johnson said. “I’m trying to find out if you or your friends employed a Francine Letourneau as a maid in the past four or five years.”
“The answer for me is no,” Coco said. “We’ve been lucky and haven’t had a turnover in staff in ten years. Both our girls are part of the family. As far as the staff at other houses, I couldn’t say.”
“Right,” Johnson said.
“Is that all? My husband and I are entertaining.”
“Sorry to interrupt, but just one more question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you ever had a portrait of yourself done by an artist named Coco?”
For a moment, the cloud that was Coco lifted, and Mize felt panic surge through him. But in the next instant, Coco reasserted control and said, “The only formal portraits of me and my family are photographs. What’s this about? I have guests to entertain.”
“Just running down leads, ma’am,” Johnson said. “Again, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening.”
The line clicked dead.
Coco set the phone back in the cradle, feeling like an immediate danger had been averted. But he stood there several long beats also feeling like the police were closing in.
The Mize circuitry in his brain broke through: Johnson has met Coco and me. Johnson was pounding on the front door at the house this afternoon. He’ll go back to the shop in the morning. You should run now. Take all you can and run.
But these days, Coco was dominant. He pushed aside the thought of leaving just as easily as he’d pushed aside what his house looked like and hid every other thing that might mar his appearance to the outside world.
This was all that mattered. Appearance. This night. This moment.
One last time?
Dressed only in La Perla black panties and a gorgeous Chantal Thomass blush-and-black corset, Coco padded back into the master bedroom, where Pauline Striker, naked, was gagged and lashed to a chair, clearly terrified.
“What do you think?” Coco asked, running his fingers down the sides of the corset. “Slimming. And sensual. Why, Pauline, in my wildest moments I didn’t imagine you and Edwin as the merry-widow type, but I suppose what happens behind closed doors just happens and evolves. And then one day I’m here playing in your kinky side, and you’re…you’re there.”
Coco was transfixed by Pauline’s fear and didn’t move for several moments. Then he grabbed a pair of fine black silk hose, fresh from Paris, and sat in a chair at the vanity. He rolled them on over his toes and up his calves and thighs. Coco loved that sensation. It never got old.
“Have you ever had the sense there were two of you living inside your brain?” Coco asked Pauline, and then he gestured to the corset. “Finding this in your drawer tells me you have. So in case you were wondering, that’s what we’re doing here, exploring our personalities, acting out fantasies, you know?”
Pauline Striker’s eyes were glued on Coco.
As Coco went by her, he ran the fingernails of his left hand over her cheek softly, saying, “Tonight there’s someone else playing in your head, Pauline. Her name is Miranda. She’s a wild child, and I love her.”
Pauline’s brow was knit with confusion when Coco came around the other side of the chair and faced her.
“Miranda’s a wild child, and I love her,” he said again and felt himself harden. “But she’s also my mother, and I hate her.”
Coco slapped Pauline across the face so hard it left a palm print.
Over Pauline’s cries and whimpers of pain, Coco said coldly, “Gloves are off, Mummy. No more making things look like suicide for Jeffrey’s sake. There’s just nothing fulfilling in that anymore.”
Chapter
71
“I’m telling you, Sarge, some of the time it sounded like Coco,” Johnson said. “She had this distinctive cadence when she talked, and so did that lady.”
“Cadence?” Drummond said, skeptical.
“Yeah, like where the word emphasis was,” Johnson said. “My wife’s a speech pathologist. She knows about this stuff, so I know about this stuff. Did you notice how the voice broke every so often? Old and then kind of younger?”
I’d never heard Coco’s voice, so I couldn’t say, but there had been something odd about the way Johnson’s questions had been answered.
“We can’t go in on the basis of you saying one woman sounded like another one on a cell phone,” Dru
mmond said.
“But maybe I can,” I said.
“What?” the sergeant said, swiveling in his seat to look at me.
“You’re on the job,” I said. “You’re handcuffed by the law, but right here, right now, I have no jurisdiction. I am a private citizen with information that suggests a woman might be in danger in that house. Acting on that suspicion, I go into the compound. I look in a few windows. If there’s a party going on with Edwin, Pauline, Mize, and others, I slip out. If I see probable cause, I call you.”
“You could get shot,” Drummond said.
“If I do, you’ll be the first to know,” I said, getting out of the car.
“How’re you getting in?” asked Johnson.
“The straightforward way,” I said, and I shut the door.
It was pouring when I ran across the boulevard, which was lightly traveled at that hour. There was no one in the western lane at all when I accelerated at the gate and then jumped up like I was going for a rebound.
Both my hands found the top of the gate and hung on. I kicked and shimmied and pulled until I’d gotten my belly over it. I straddled the gate, pivoted, and then hung down off it and let go. I landed and moved fast into the shadows.
The driveway was done in some kind of mosaic tile and was slick and puddled everywhere as I moved past the vegetation that blocked the house from the road. There were lights on in the inner yard, revealing a lawn that looked like a putting green at Augusta; beds of blooming annuals ringed the house.
There were lights on at every corner. Tinier lights lit an arched trellis that framed the main entrance. But unless the Strikers were using blackout curtains, there were no lights on in the lower part of the house.
I could see at least three rooms on the second story that were lit up, however. And the drumming rain made hearing anything impossible. I wondered whether this had been another impetuous act, the kind of all-in move Bree had been concerned about.
But more often than not, I’ve found it pays to be all-in. I ran across the lawn to the walkway and up under the trellis to the door. For a moment I stood there, trying to hear inside. Figuring my scouting trip was likely about to be over, I nevertheless reached for the door handle, because, well, you never know.
The handle moved down, and the locking mechanism gave. The door swung open. You never know.
I was torn at that point, because even though the door had been left unlocked, I was still breaking and entering. I hesitated, and then decided to just step inside and listen. If I heard nothing of alarm, I’d be gone.
I stepped into a dark, air-conditioned foyer, eased the front door shut behind me, and strained to hear. The distant hum of a refrigerator compressor. The closer ticking of a clock. A drip, drip that I realized was me leaving puddles on the entryway floor.
Then I heard a woman’s muffled voice somewhere in the house above me. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught the odd rhythm of her speech. Was that what Johnson had been talking about?
A smacking noise. A cry. A whimper.
I locked in on the sounds, not sure what to do. What if Mize or Coco was torturing her? But what if the Strikers and Mize and Coco were into bondage or something, and this was all between consenting adults?
The cop in me told me to get the hell out. But when I heard another smack and more crying, the mystery lover in me drove me toward a spiral staircase that rose off the foyer.
I climbed the stairs quietly, moving as fast as I dared. On the landing, I heard the woman’s voice again, clearer but still not intelligible. After kicking off my shoes, I drew the Ruger from my ankle holster and snuck down the hall, where I saw a wafer of light coming through a door at the far end; thankfully, no floorboards creaked or—
“What did you expect, Miranda?” a woman said cruelly. “You dress a little boy in silk and lace all the time, this is what you get.”
Smack. A moan.
A moan of pain? Or pleasure?
“You did teach me a classic sense of style, though, I’ll give you that,” the woman went on in that odd rhythmic voice. “But you denied yourself nothing.” There was a pause before she shouted, “Nothing!”
Smack.
“Anything you wanted, when you wanted it, Mother!”
Smack! Smack! Smack!
Each blow sounded louder and more furious than the previous one. If this was some kind of sex act, it was full-on S&M. Whatever it was, home invasion or not, I was going to see who was doing the hitting and who was being hit.
“How will it go for you this time, Miranda? Shall we stick with the tried? The true? The erotic? You know what asphyxia does to your orgasm.”
That stopped me right outside the door, and I didn’t know what to do. If I burst in and it was something consensual, I could kiss a lot of things good-bye.
The woman said, “Once it’s over, I’ll put a toy in you, complete your method, your scenario.”
Then the whimpering turned to whining amplified by what sounded to me like terror, and I didn’t care about anything but stopping it.
Gun up, I pushed the door inward, saw an older woman, naked, bound to a chair and gagged. There was some kind of wide sash or gold cord biting into her neck. Standing up behind her on the bed, straining to tighten the cord, was a very pale, very pretty bald woman wearing makeup and an outfit that would have made a trucker blush.
I panicked and was stepping backward when the naked older woman’s bulging eyes caught mine and she nodded wildly.
“Let go!” I yelled, moving deeper into the room, aiming right at the bald woman. “Let go or I will shoot you!”
Chapter
72
The bald woman started, stepped back, let go of the rope, and stared at me and the gun before raising her trembling hands and saying hoarsely, “What is this?”
I grabbed a robe off a chair, tossed it over the older woman I assumed was Pauline Striker, and came around behind her, still aiming at the bald woman.
“Get down on your knees, Coco, then facedown on the bed, hands behind your head,” I said.
She seemed even more frightened now that she realized I knew her name, and she started to lower herself to her knees while I worked the gag off Mrs. Striker. She spit it out, choked, and cried, “He—”
“Are you the police?” Coco asked from one knee.
“The next best thing,” I said, pulling out my cell phone. “Just need to know one thing, Mrs. Striker. Was that consensual? Or was your life in danger?”
Before the older woman could speak, Coco said in a deep male voice that startled me, “Of course it was consensual. Pauline, tell him. You can’t have our interlude coming out in the Palm Beach Post. Not with Edwin’s new thing just around the corner. It would be everywhere.”
I gaped for a second, realizing that Coco had to be Jeffrey Mize. But even though the person in front of me was bald, my brain was having trouble with the idea that she was a he. If not for the lack of hair, Mize could have been an aging supermodel.
“Mrs. Striker,” I said, feeling unsure now. “Please answer my question.”
The older woman seemed less upset than before, and she looked at me, then over at Mize, who was on all fours, gazing at her.
“Tell him, Pauline,” Mize said. “Whoever he is.”
Mrs. Striker swiveled her head to look at me, choked out, “Who are you?”
“A Good Samaritan,” I said. “I’m here to help and to contact the police if you need them.”
“Wait,” Mize said, pushing up into a kneeling position. “You’re not a cop?”
“How did you get in here?” Mrs. Striker asked, sounding angry.
“That’s not important; what’s important is whether this was consensual or not,” I said, feeling the situation slipping away from me.
“It was consensual,” she said emphatically. “But I most certainly did not consent to having you in my house holding me and my guest at gunpoint. Who are you and what are you after?”
“Who I am does
n’t matter,” I said, trying to figure out a way to exit gracefully and anonymously. “What matters is that Mr. Mize has been linked to the murders of three Palm Beach socialites.”
“That’s not true,” Mize snapped.
“He painted their portraits. Lisa Martin. Ruth Abrams. Maggie Crawford. Is there a portrait of you here in the house, Pauline? Were you about to become number four?”
Mrs. Striker looked bewildered for a moment and then said, “I don’t know anything about that.”
“See?” Mize said, smiling and straightening.
It was time to either cut and run or do something audacious. I chose audacious.
“Then I apologize and I’ll be going,” I said, lowering the gun. “But I’d rather see you free of your bonds before I go.”
“That’s not necessary,” Mize said.
“I insist,” I said.
Taking my eyes off Mize, I squeezed my phone, then crouched and set it on the carpet behind the ladder-back chair at the foot of the bed. With my left hand, I began working at the knots. My right thumb found the latch on the Ruger and I pressed it before I moved the gun to my left hand.
I made a sound of frustration, set the pistol on the bedspread, and set to work in earnest on the knots. I’d undone two and was stepping around Mrs. Striker when Mize dove on his belly, grabbed the Ruger, and aimed it at me, point-blank.
“I don’t know who you are, but I am going to enjoy killing you,” Mize said in Coco’s voice. “And don’t you move now, Pauline. We have unfinished business, you and I.”
“No, Jeffrey, I—”
Mize slammed the butt of the gun backward, hitting the side of Mrs. Striker’s head and opening up a rectangular cut that bled as she moaned.
“Why’d you do that?” I demanded.
“I needed her out of the way so you and I could have fun,” he said, coming off the bed, gun three feet from my chest. “Who are you?”
My mind was on overdrive, spinning through the little pieces of what I knew about Mize and the murders and what I’d heard coming up the stairs.
Cross Justice Page 21
