Cold Case Squad

by Edna Buchanan

  “That’s not magic!” Lionel screeched, above squeals and applause. “I know how he did it! He had powdery stuff in the bottom of the glass. It makes the water hard, like Jell-O!”

  HoHo ignored his heckler. He waved a red silk scarf above his head like a banner, faster and faster. The scarf was redder than his spiky hair and painted cheeks, as red as his shiny, oversized shoes.

  Suddenly he balled the scarf in his fist. Then threw his hands open, palms outstretched. It had vanished.

  HoHo’s triumphant bows were interrupted by a hacking cough. He coughed again and again, then opened his mouth wide and reached down his throat. With a grand, theatrical gesture he slowly withdrew the long red scarf from way down below his tonsils.

  A loud whoosh! punctuated the cheers and applause.

  Joan glanced up from the camera’s viewfinder, startled, her anxious eyes instinctively seeking out her son.

  Ryan stood at HoHo’s elbow, face shining.

  “Fireworks!” He threw his arms in the air, victorious. “Yes! I got the fireworks!”

  Across the street, the garage erupted. Smoke spiraled. Flames leaped. The children cheered. The garage door exploded outward. The pony bolted. It gave a terrified whinny, then galloped down Mariposa Lane toward the golf course, empty stirrups swinging. His handler chased him, losing his Stetson in the middle of the block. Chunks of burning wreckage catapulted high into the air and began to fall in slow motion onto the Walkers’ lawn between the balloon bouquet and the circular drive. Sookie fled, tail tucked between her legs.

  Car and house alarms wailed. Towering tongues of red and orange flame danced high into a brilliant blue sky. Sparks showered and sizzled amid black smoke.

  “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” Lionel’s pudgy legs churned, pounding the pavement toward home.

  The cheers had stopped. The children stood silent and wide-eyed, jaws dropped.

  “Mom?” Ryan’s voice sounded high-pitched and querulous.

  “¡Dios mío!” Consuela fell to her knees and crossed herself, eyes to heaven.

  “Mommeee!” “Mommeee!” children began screaming.

  “Vanessa wet her pants!” a tattler bawled.

  “Joanie, get all the kids inside! Call nine-one-one.” Stan sprinted toward the burning garage. The heat forced him back. He peeled off his apron as he dashed to the side of the house for his garden hose.

  “No, Stan! No!” Joan and Consuela were herding frightened children inside. “Don’t go there! I’m calling the fire department!”

  The first fire company arrived in six minutes. To Joan and Stanley Walker it seemed forever. Adrenaline-charged children shrieked at the sirens and cheered the rescue truck, the engine, the pumper, and the first squad card.

  Firefighters dragged a blitz line off the pumper. They ran a second line from a hydrant. The garage was fully involved. Flames roared through a wall, engulfing the kitchen. Tendrils of orange danced along the roof line.

  Firemen in self-contained breathing apparatus knocked down flames, battling to save the house. At the end of the street, police officers shouted but were unable to stop a midnight blue Jaguar that hurtled crazily around their barricades. Brakes squealing, it swerved to a stop on the next-door lawn. Leaving her baby strapped in a car seat, the young woman driver, her black hair flowing long and loose, stumbled out into the dense smoke that roiled down the street.

  “My husband! My husband!” she screamed. “Where is he? He was working on his car! Where is he?”

  Firefighters held her back. Suddenly she stopped struggling and sagged in their arms as the smell of something terrible wafted across the street. Something burned.

  HoHo the Clown threw up on the lawn.

  Chapter One

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  Like all things good and bad in the world, it began with a woman.

  She was a blonde, with a complaint about her ex-husband. She saw him everywhere she went. Turn around and there he was. She knew he was trying to send her a message, she said.

  Problem was, the man was dead, gone from this earth for twelve long years.

  Some guys just don’t know when to let go.

  My name is Craig Burch, a sergeant on the Miami Police Department’s Cold Case Squad. My assignment is relatively new. I worked homicide for eighteen years, mostly on the midnight shift. I fought like hell to land this job. Why not? It’s every big-city homicide cop’s wet dream. This squad is armed with a detective’s most powerful weapon: time. The luxury of enough time to investigate old, unsolved cases without interruption. I wanted that. I wanted the change. I wanted to see the faces of murderers who suddenly realize their pasts and I have caught up with them. The job has other perks as well. No daily dealing with fresh corpses or, worse yet, corpses less than fresh. No more stepping cautiously through messy crime scenes in dark woods, warehouses, or alleyways, trying to avoid stepping in blood, brains, or worse. No more trying to forget the pain-filled screams of inconsolable survivors whose unearthly cries will scar your soul and echo in your dreams asleep or awake. No more watching autopsies that suddenly and unexpectedly replay in your mind’s eye at inopportune moments. And no more throwing my back out when lifting dead weight. Real dead weight.

  This job also reduces my chances of being rocked, bottled, and/or shot at by the unruly Miamians who cluster bright-eyed and belligerent at every nasty crime scene in neighborhoods where trouble is a way of life and violence is contagious.

  I quit confronting new deaths. Instead, I breathe new life into old, cold cases and track killers whose trails vanished long ago like footprints on a sea-washed beach.

  Loved the concept. Still do. And I yearned for what came with it—mostly regular, daylight hours, giving me the chance to spend more time with my family before the kids are grown and gone. Made sense to me. It was long overdue. I looked forward to it. Connie couldn’t have been happier—in the beginning. What’s not to like? Weekends off together for the first time? The man in the mirror suntanned instead of wearing a prison pallor from sleeping days and working nights?

  Now I know why people say: Be careful what you wish for—you might get it. At the moment, I live alone. Last time I called home, one of the kids hung up on me. Every job in my line of business has a downside.

  This one has ghosts.

  My detectives are hand-picked self-starters. They don’t hear the screams, see the blood, or feel the moral outrage cops experience at fresh murder scenes. Instead, they dissect dusty files and stacks of typewritten reports as cold and unemotional as a killer’s heart.

  Our standard operating procedure is to reread the case files of old, unsolved murders, pass them around, and brainstorm on which have the most potential. We also field tips on old homicides from our own cops, other agencies, confidential informants, prison inmates, and the friends and families of victims.

  She was one of the latter: a walk-in. Our team had just voted on whether to pursue the high-profile triple homicide of a man, his pregnant wife, and their toddler. Murdered nearly twenty-five years ago, they were presumed casualties of the time—collateral damage in the drug wars of the eighties. But one of my guys suspects another motive, something more personal. Two of my detectives, Sam Stone and Pete Nazario, were still arguing about it when the secretary steered a stranger their way.

  Her hair was feathery, tousled in an expensive, wavy style intended to look natural, the kind that costs more to look as though it was never touched by professionals.

  Stone sprang to his feet when the secretary brought her past my desk, directly across from theirs. He grew up in Miami’s bleakest, blackest, toughest neighborhood. Sharp, edgy, young, and focused, he has a passion for high technology and is as aggressive as hell. Sometimes he’s a runaway freight train and you have to hold him back.

  Well dressed in blue that matched her eyes, she was your typical soccer mom with a little mileage on her.

  Nazario offered her a chair. He came to Miami alone as a small child, one of the thou
sands of Pedro Pan kids airlifted out of Cuba and taken in by the Catholic church when Castro refused to allow the parents to leave the island. Nazario never saw his parents again and grew up a stranger in a strange land, shuttled to shelters and foster homes all over the country by the archdiocese. Maybe because he lived with strangers who didn’t speak his native language or maybe he was born with it, but Nazario is blessed with an uncanny talent—it’s invaluable to a detective, even though it’s not admissible in court or probable cause for a warrant: He knows, without fail, when somebody is lying to him. Stone and Nazario are among the best, and I don’t say that just because they work for me.

  The woman in blue chewed her lower lip, her face pinched with apprehension. She looked to be in her late thirties, but it’s tough to tell the age of most women. Her name was April Terrell, she said. A plastic tag identifying her as a visitor to the building was clipped to her short, crisp jacket. Her summery dress flared at the hip and quit just above a nice pair of knees. She held a little purse demurely in her lap while apologizing for showing up unannounced. I listened, trying not to look up and be obvious.

  “It’s about my husband,” she said, then corrected herself, “my ex-husband.”

  They married in college, she said. She quit and worked as a legal secretary to put him through pharmaceutical school. “I thought I knew him. The divorce caught me off guard. Our children were two and three. That was almost fourteen years ago.”

  She gave the guys a sad-eyed, self-deprecating smile. “He found someone else, younger, his second year in business. He remarried right away and started a new family.”

  The guys itched to hear the point. I know I did.

  “It’s funny.” Her lower lip quivered, indicating the opposite. “All of a sudden, after all this time, he’s there. I see him everywhere I go.”

  Nazario frowned. “He’s stalking you?”

  “Our domestic violence unit has a felony stalking squad.” Stone reached for the phone on his desk. “You need to talk to one of them. We’re homicide. Cold cases. I’ll call downstairs and find you someone.”

  “Wait.” She spoke briskly. “Obviously I haven’t made myself clear. I know who you are. You investigate old deaths. That’s why I’m here. Charles was killed twelve years ago.”

  I looked up. Nazario and Stone exchanged glances.

  “Oh,” Stone said accommodatingly. “And you say you’ve seen him lately?”

  “Yes.” Her voice held steady.

  “On what sort of occasions?” Stone steepled his long fingers in front of him, his liquid eyes wandering to a window, past the grimy streaks to a patch of innocent blue sky above the neighborhood where he was born.

  She raised her voice and her right hand slightly, as though to recapture his attention. “You know what I mean. Like at the bank yesterday…I saw another customer, his back was to me. He looked so much like Charles that for a moment I forgot he was dead and almost called out his name. The man turned around later and, of course, he didn’t look like Charles at all.” She shrugged. “You know how it is. You catch a glimpse of someone familiar but it turns out not to be them. It’s happening to me more and more. He’s in my dreams almost every night now.”

  “When did this start?” Nazario asked, his face solemn.

  “Last year. I keep asking myself why, after all this time? Why?” She leaned forward, speaking clearly, voice persuasive. “The only explanation is that Charles is trying to tell me something.”

  Her shoulders squared, head high in a regal pose, reacting to something in their eyes. She shot me a quick glance, suddenly aware that I was listening, too.

  “I’m not crazy,” she said quickly. “Please don’t think that. It’s just that it’s made me realize that I never felt right about what happened to him. I think I always suspected, but I had two little children to raise alone, a boy and a girl.”

  “Did you seek grief counseling at the time?” Nazario asked softly.

  The blond waves bounced as she tossed her head. “Who had time for that?” She opened her hands in a helpless gesture, pale palms exposed. “I had to take care of business and get on with life because of the children. How could I allow myself the time to obsess, to cave in to anger, bitterness—or grief? You’ve heard people say, ‘If I only had the time, I’d have a nervous breakdown’? Our children worshiped their dad. The divorce was tough enough on them, on all of us. He and his new wife had a baby. Their dad’s death was the final crushing blow. They’d never see him again, call him on the telephone, or spend another weekend or vacation together. Now that they’re older and asking questions, I realize there are no answers. The whole thing didn’t make sense…”

  “Sometimes,” Nazario gently interjected, “when you suppress a traumatic incident and don’t deal with it, it comes back to trouble you later, when you least expect it.”

  She shook her head forlornly, staring down at her naked fingers for a moment. She wore no rings.

  “Can you at least look into it?” she said, raising those blue eyes.

  “Into what?” Stone’s brow furrowed.

  Lieutenant K. C. Riley, our boss, suddenly appeared, slamming an office door, lean and mean, a folder in hand, expression impatient.

  “He burned to death.” April Terrell’s voice rose, quavering slightly. “In a flash fire. It was horrible. They had to have a closed casket. There wasn’t enough…”

  Talk about timing.

  K. C. Riley reacted as though slapped.

  This can’t be good, I thought.

  “My ex-husband, the father of my children,” April told the lieutenant without introductions. “His death was no accident. I’m sure he was murdered.”

  “When did this happen?” Riley’s pale lips were tight, arms crossed.

  “Twelve years ago, May 23, 1992. It happened on a Saturday.” Charles had confided the last time he’d dropped off their children that he and their new stepmother of just a year were not getting along. The brief marriage, a bumpy ride, was already off track. Natasha, wife number two, spent extravagantly. And there was, of course, a big life insurance policy.

  She had since lost track of the widow, she said.

  “That sort of accident was totally out of character for Charles. He was skilled and competent, precise and careful about everything he did.”

  Riley lapped it up, never missed a beat. “Thanks for coming in, Ms….?”

  “Terrell, April Terrell.”

  “I’m K. C. Riley.”

  The two women shook hands.

  “It’s certainly worth looking into,” Riley said. “My detectives will get right on it. Right, Sergeant?”

  Three jaws dropped as one: mine, Stone’s, and Nazario’s.

  Chapter Two

  “Charles Terrell is no candidate for us!” Stone fumed. “Riley knows that. We don’t investigate accidents. We solve murders.”

  “We’ve got enough ghosts to deal with,” Burch said.

  “Bad timing,” Nazario said.

  “The lieutenant should have stayed in her office, red-eyed and brooding with the door closed, as usual. You know the reason she dumped this on us,” Stone said. “No doubt about it.”

  “She’s got her own ghost, and she’s taking it out on us,” Nazario said.

  “I’ll try to talk to her,” Burch said.

  Stone and Nazario beat it out of the office. Stone viciously jabbed the elevator button as Nazario gave Burch a soulful glance back over his shoulder.

  “That woman and our lieutenant are both nuts.” Stone continued to vent, striding toward their unmarked Plymouth deep in the dimly lit police parking garage.

  Brilliant shafts of sunlight pierced the gloom, descending wandlike through ornamental cut-outs high in the concrete walls.

  Nazario rolled his eyes. “The lady wasn’t lying.”

  “You’re right,” Stone agreed. “She obviously believed every damn thing she said, just like all the others who hobnob with apparitions and hear voices we can’t. They are a
bsofuckinglutely true believers.”

  “She’s no lunatic,” Nazario said mildly. “Her story should be easy to check out. Gimme the keys.”

  “No way, my turn to drive, amigo.”

  “Like hell,” Nazario said. “You’re the one who’s nuts.”

  “Maybe, but insane or not, drunk or sober, I drive better.”

  “What the shit you talking about?”

  “Admit it, Naz. If you weren’t wearing a badge, they’da yanked your license like a bad back tooth years ago. You always drive like something is chasing you.”

  “Maybe something is.”

  “Cubans are lousy drivers.” Stone shook his head and slid smoothly behind the wheel.

  He put on his Foster Grants as Nazario settled reluctantly into the passenger seat. Squinting in the glare, they rolled out onto sun-blasted North Miami Avenue. Nazario called their sergeant, hoping they’d caught a break.

  Fat chance. Burch said he’d tried to reason with Riley. No luck. Charles Terrell’s fire death was top priority. Burch had checked for the police file but found only a case number. The paperwork on accidental deaths is purged after seven years.

  With a grunt of disgust, Stone wrenched the wheel into a sharp U-turn.

  “Meadows is your problem.” Nazario was glum. “That case has you so wound up that it pisses you off to take five minutes to go to the bathroom. Meadows can move to a back burner for a day. Her case is already twenty-four years old.”

  “My point precisely.” Stone jabbed an index finger in emphasis. “That’s exactly why it shouldn’t get any older. The son of a bitch is still out there, stalking somebody else’s grandmother.

  “You know why Riley’s doing this,” he said again, as they left the unmarked outside the Miami River front building that houses fire headquarters.

  “Sí.” Nazario was stoic.

  Riverside Center sprawls in the stark shadow of an expressway overpass. Dark-tinted windows stare down at the river like blind eyes.