Cold Case Squad

by Edna Buchanan

  “I’ll try to get you help to sift through them. Hopefully the right one will come in. You and Nazario, keep working Terrell.

  “Get your thoughts together,” she told Stone. “Go talk to Padron. He’s waiting for you in PIO. Everybody will be at the conference. The chief, the deputy chief, the major, the captain, ASA Jo Salazar, your sergeant, and me. So do it right. You’ll be representing all of us—including the victims.

  “That’s all.” She avoided their angry stares, returned to her chair, and gazed out her window, eyes following a sleek, silver jetliner as it pierced the clouds high above the state building.

  Chapter Twelve

  The detectives clustered at Stone’s desk, where they couldn’t be heard from Riley’s office. Corso joined them.

  “The woman’s crazy. She’s always had it in for me.” Stone paced wildly. “I can’t do it. What the hell can I say?”

  “She’s lost it,” Corso said. “Never had it. No good reason for the bitch to turn on you like this.”

  “I don’t know what she’s thinking, or if she’s thinking at all,” Burch said. “But, Sam, my man. If you want to work on this squad, you gotta do it. She’s the boss. Whatever the hell is going on, it, too, will pass. Now, whacha got new in Meadows?”

  “Nothing releasable.” Stone collapsed into his desk chair as though crushed by a heavy weight. He stared at the floor. “There is a chance,” he muttered, “that the killer is Jewish, could be Orthodox.”

  “I’m not even gonna ask at this point how you came to that conclusion,” Burch said. “Let’s see, we got about five million Jews in the U.S. Half a them are doctors and lawyers. That narrows it down. How many suspects does that leave us?”

  “Gimme a break,” Stone muttered. “I’m dying over here.”

  “Do it,” Burch said. “Get through it the best you can. What else you gonna do? Try not to hurt the case, what there is of it. We’ll go do some follow-up on Terrell.” He promised to be back before the conference.

  April Terrell and her children lived in Morningside, an old neighborhood of burgeoning redevelopment and spiraling real estate values just north of downtown Miami. The address was just east of Biscayne Boulevard, about four blocks from the bay, a charming, older building with bicycle racks out front and a pool out back.

  A girlish voice answered the buzzer. “Sergeant Burch! I wanted to meet you. Come up. My mother will be home any minute.”

  A girl about seventeen opened the door to the third-floor apartment. Wholesome and fresh scrubbed, with blue eyes and blond hair like her mother, she reminded Burch of his own daughter, not in looks or coloring but in her manner, the way she had about her. He could see the same hopeful exuberance, the innocent energy of girls exploded into puberty, about to blast off into the world like unguided missiles. Jennifer’s hunger for experience, her eagerness for adulthood, scared him. Was she all right? He missed her.

  “My mom told us about you both,” Joy Terrell said, inviting them in.

  Girls were not that poised and self-assured when he was young, Burch thought.

  The mother’s influence, he decided.

  “Charlie? Come say hello.”

  The boy, who appeared to be a few years younger, glanced up from his video game, barely acknowledging his sister or the visitors.

  “They’re real police detectives!” she said enthusiastically.

  “We like to think so,” Burch said.

  The boy, about fifteen, became more interested, wandering over to join them as they settled on a comfortable couch and armchair in the warm, inviting living room. “You ever shoot anybody?” he asked Nazario.

  “Nope.”

  “Anybody ever shoot you?”

  “Charles!” the girl admonished. She and Burch exchanged knowing glances, a meeting of the minds on the crass nature of younger brothers.

  “It’s not like you see on TV,” Burch explained. “Most cops work an entire career, then retire without ever shooting at anybody.” He didn’t say that those cops probably didn’t work in Miami. “I’ve only got nine years to go myself.”

  “The job is actually ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent sheer panic,” Nazario explained.

  Disappointed, the boy returned to his video game.

  When they declined the girl’s offer to fix them coffee, she pulled a chair up to within a few feet of where they sat, then gazed at both men, expression expectant. She wore pink barrettes in her hair, blue jeans, and a frilly little cotton blouse with bows on the shoulder.

  “We were so excited when my mom went to see you,” she said happily. “She thought about it for a long time.”

  Burch wondered how much the mother had told them.

  “Charlie doesn’t remember much about my dad. But I do. I really miss him. Want to see his picture?” She sprang to her feet without waiting for an answer.

  She moved with the same coltish grace as Jennifer, Burch thought, as the girl returned from another room with a framed photo.

  And like Jennifer, she, too, was chatty and outgoing. “This is my favorite.” She handed Burch the picture. “It was his birthday. Wasn’t he handsome?” She peered over their shoulders to study it with them.

  Tall, blond, and rugged, with pale eyes and strong features, Charles Terrell wore a huge grin. He stood at a dining room table, a cake in front of him.

  “Nice,” Burch said.

  “Once when I was little, he took me shopping to buy a Christmas present for my mom. He held my hand. He took me to the circus, too. I remember him holding me way up high so I could feed peanuts to the elephant. He was really neat.”

  Charles made sneery sounds from his video game.

  “Don’t pay attention to him.” She rolled her eyes at her brother. “He hardly remembers anything. Once when we went to see my dad, my mom dropped us off at the house. But Dad wasn’t there, and Natasha made us wait outside until he came home. It got dark. We were hungry. Charlie was crying and had to go to the bathroom.”

  “Shut up,” Charlie muttered.

  “It’s tough growing up without him.” She fixed serious blue eyes on Burch.

  “My mom hasn’t even dated all these years. She wants to wait till we’re both in college. I’m afraid nobody will even ask her then.”

  “I’ve seen your mom.” Nazario winked. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  She smiled. “You can talk to her about most things, but sometimes, you know, it would be more comfortable to talk to your dad. Especially Charlie.” She lowered her voice. “It’s hard to be the only boy in the family. But I think dads are really important for girls, too. I started dating last year.” She smiled shyly. “Some of my friends with fathers or stepfathers say they hate it when their dads insist on meeting their dates and telling them what time to bring the girls home. But I think it’s kind of nice. Don’t you? Do you have any children?”

  Nazario shook his head.

  “Three,” Burch said.

  “Do you live with them?”

  “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “Sorta.” Was the guilt he felt because he lied to this sweet, sad kid? Or because he wasn’t living with his own children?

  “They’re lucky,” she said. “A lot of kids in my class come from one-parent homes, like ours.”

  “My oldest is a girl about your age.”

  “What’s her name? Where does she go to school? Maybe—”

  A sound interrupted. A key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  “Somebody, help.” April Terrell juggled bags of groceries.

  “Did you get the ice cream?” Charlie said.

  She was surprised to see the detectives, hoped that Joy hadn’t talked their ears off, and wondered aloud why the visitors had no coffee. With the kids in the kitchen, unpacking the grocery bags, she confirmed that Charles drank little, if at all. And that he had lost his right ring finger in a teenage accident.

  “Gruesome,” she said. “Water-skiing. His finger got tangled in the tow line.”

>   “Any medical problems, liver, anything like that?” Nazario asked.

  “No, not at all. Charles was obscenely healthy, he worked out six days a week, rain or shine.”

  “The condition of his teeth?”

  “Excellent.” She smiled. “He must have used every product that came into the store. He flossed, had a Water Pik, an electric toothbrush, a toothbrush sanitizer. He watched his diet, took vitamin supplements, and—”

  “Dental work?”

  She frowned and looked from one to the other, puzzled. “Right after it happened, an investigator from the medical examiner’s office called to ask the same thing. Charles saw a dentist a few times in college, mostly for cleanings. He never had any major work done.”

  “Where was Charles buried?” Nazario said.

  “He wasn’t.” April Terrell sighed. “Natasha had him cremated. I knew that wasn’t what he wanted, but she was in charge. I guess under the circumstances it didn’t make much difference, but it would have been nice to have a place…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I had such mixed emotions about bothering you,” she said after a pause. “I know you’re busy with more important things, but this haunts me so.”

  “We’re looking into it,” Burch said. “Right now we’re interested in learning more about Natasha, her background.”

  “You have to ask her, I guess. She’s supposedly from the Midwest somewhere. I was always good at that, but never could place her accent. Have you met her?”

  They nodded.

  “Is she still as beautiful?” She sounded wistful.

  Burch paused, as though he hadn’t really noticed. “An attractive woman.” He shrugged.

  “What was the problem involving the weight-loss clinics?”

  April’s hand flew to her mouth. “You don’t think that could have had anything to do with it?” she asked. “It was terrible. He and a business partner, Martin Asher, opened the clinics. Asher used the title doctor, but wasn’t really a physician. They originated a regimen that combined diet, exercise, and over-the-counter diet pills, which were basically herbal supplements.

  “They seemed to be successful until a housewife with small children collapsed and died suddenly after a month or two on the program. Her husband blamed the combination of pills and sued. Charles’s lawyers argued that she must have had some undetected heart abnormality. She was also on birth-control pills and medication for a chronic condition. Asthma, I think. Maybe what she was taking wasn’t compatible with the diet pills.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. The husband was obsessed. He’d lost his wife, the mother of his children. The clinics went bankrupt to avoid a judgment. Much later, after Charles died, a rash of cases came to light. A class-action suit was filed against the manufacturers, but I think it was too late for that family. I don’t believe they ever collected anything.”

  Burch borrowed the photo of Terrell and promised to keep her posted.

  “Please give my best to Lieutenant Riley,” April said, as they rose to leave. “She’s so thoughtful and understanding.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Burch said. “One of a kind.”

  “You’re not leaving yet?” Joy burst from the kitchen, dismayed. “I’m making cookies, chocolate chip. They only take ten minutes to bake!”

  “Next time,” Burch promised.

  “Please, please, please!” She clasped her hands together prayerfully.

  She looked genuinely disappointed when they couldn’t stay.

  “Nice kid,” Nazario said, as they left the building.

  “Yeah,” Burch said. “Got a smile that could break your heart.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Something ain’t right here,” Burch told the chief medical examiner in his third-floor office on Bob Hope Road.

  “For a start, the fatty liver in the autopsy doesn’t jibe with this guy’s lifestyle.”

  “Any history of severe malnutrition, or obesity?” the puzzled doctor asked.

  “He was a physical fitness aficionado. Did a forensic odontologist examine the teeth?”

  “Without X-rays to match them to, probably not. But the doctor on the case would have taken a look at the jawbone.”

  “No indication on the chart.”

  “No problem,” said the chief medical examiner. “We can do it.”

  “No way,” Nazario said. “He was cremated.”

  “But in cases of that sort, we keep the jawbones. We can examine them now if you like.”

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves filled the windowless room deep in the bowels of the decomposition morgue, the smallest building in the medical examiner’s complex. Cardboard boxes labeled with case numbers lined the long shelves. The contents were mostly unidentified skeletal remains, bones excavated by builders, human remains found scattered along canal banks, in barrels, in woods, underwater, or in the Everglades. Police confiscated some skulls and long bones from ngangas, the large metal cauldrons used in the practice of Santería. Complete or partial skeletons were packaged in larger boxes, while others contained just bits and pieces of still-unidentified human beings, Miami’s forgotten John and Jane Does, or fragments of them, some unearthed as long ago as the 1950s.

  “The ones with rotting flesh still attached are boiled clean before storage,” the doctor explained. “We use meat tenderizer in the water.

  “Let’s see here. If I remember correctly, jawbones are over in this section.” The chief medical examiner meandered among the shelves like a librarian in search of an elusive book.

  The detectives trailed him through the rows of numbered boxes.

  “We could be eating homemade chocolate chip cookies with normal people,” Nazario said mournfully.

  “You’d want to miss this?”

  The chief double-checked the case number on the file in his hand. “Here we are,” he said cheerfully. “Ninety-two-four-seventy-six.”

  The contents rattled as he took down a container the size of a shoebox.

  In the lab, under bright overhead lights, the doctor used a scalpel to sever the tape sealing the box.

  “It all seems to be here.” He lifted the lid and carefully placed the contents on a small examining table beneath a large magnifier.

  He didn’t need the magnifier to see the obvious.

  He paused to recheck the case number on the box.

  A number of the teeth had been loose and glued back into place. He examined one of the jawbones carefully, then put it down.

  “These are the teeth and the jawbones of an individual with remarkably poor dental care. A great amount of decay is visible. There is evidence of several old, poorly maintained silver fillings, abscesses, and a buildup of dental plaque.”

  Dr. Vernon Duffy, the assistant medical examiner who signed Terrell’s autopsy report, had left the job shortly after handling the case.

  “Went back to New Hampshire,” the chief medical examiner said. “A good man, but he never could take the heat down here. As I recall he had other problems. His wife was very ill.”

  Burch remembered Duffy. Stooped and pale, with rimless spectacles, he would arrive at death scenes wearing a shapeless sports jacket and carrying his equipment in a foam-lined camera case. The detectives he’d worked with relied on his expertise and held him in high regard.

  They called New Hampshire from the chief medical examiner’s office.

  “Vern,” the chief greeted him. “How’s the wife? Sorry to hear that. I have a couple of homicide detectives here in my office. A problem with an old case.”

  Not a prayer that the man will remember after twelve years, Burch thought, as he and Nazario picked up extensions.

  He was wrong.

  “What a day that was,” Duffy said, from the kitchen of his home. “Hell on wheels. That was the last weekend I worked in Miami. Had to take my wife to the emergency room at four o’clock in the morning, another small stroke. I was still there when they paged me. A county car with two code enforcement officers ran a red light in the Grove, set off a three-c
ar crash with two dead. That was top priority, until the double murder was discovered over on the beach. An organized crime figure, a mobster, killed in his strip club, along with a young dancer who worked there.”

  “I remember—the Club Montmartre, right?” Burch said.

  “That’s the one. Then your victim dies in a flash fire and two toddlers in North Miami manage to drown themselves in a neighbor’s pool.

  “You have to understand, I was the only doctor on duty. Solo, and we were short on technicians. The county manager and risk management were all over me about the traffic fatalities. They wanted chapter and verse. I was up to my neck in hysterical families. Miami Beach detectives wanted answers, and every reporter and news crew in town was camped out in the lobby. They refused to leave until we confirmed the identities of the strip club victims. That was a big, high-profile story at the time.

  “That’s no excuse, mind you. But in your case, witnesses confirmed that the man was working on his car, alone in his own garage. I believe there was another identifying characteristic present—a missing finger. When next of kin said the victim had no dental records, I was careful to establish that the burned man was missing the same finger, at the same digit. The identification seemed adequate at the time.”

  “Do you recall taking a close look at the jawbones?” the chief said.

  “He was all burned up, charred and messy. I probably asked one of the techs to clean it up and take a look. I couldn’t swear to it. Phones were ringing off the hook. TV crews pushing and shoving at the front desk. No way to even go take my wife home from the hospital. No days like that up here. Sorry if there’s a problem. You know where I am if you need me.”

  “Where the hell is this thing taking us?” Burch said.

  The chief medical examiner’s only response was to take two labels from his desk drawer. He wrote Unidentified on one and used it to replace Charles Terrell’s name on the file. Then he replaced the color-coded yellow ACCIDENT label with a red one. It said HOMICIDE.