“Where were you, Gran? I was really scared.”
“Sonny, you know that on the third Tuesday of the month I always work over at the Baptist church kitchen, making pies for the Wednesday night bake sale. I’ve been doing it since you were a teenager. I’m worried about you, boy.” She frowned again. “Your memory isn’t what it used to be.”
“Come on.” He opened his car door for her.
“I kin walk the rest of the way.”
“People are looking for you all over town. I’m embarrassed. Get in the car, please.”
The intruder had placed the note on her bed sometime after 7 A.M. when she left. She swore she’d locked the door. The cell phone was in her purse. She had never turned it on.
The crime lab took the note, printed on lined yellow paper.
Nothing was missing. Despite her protests, Stone packed her a bag and took her to stay at his apartment in North Miami. She hadn’t been there in some time.
“Sonny? When did you vacuum and dust this place last?”
“I’ve been busy, Gran.”
Despite her even more vigorous protests, he left her his off-duty gun. “You know how to use it, Gran. Point and shoot. If you do have to use it, don’t stop. Empty it.”
Stone was back at the office updating Riley about Yitzak Friedman when Emma interrupted, her expression odd.
“You need to take this call, Lieutenant.”
Riley picked up. “Nazario?” Her face changed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I can’t understand you.”
“Something wrong?” Stone said.
“Pete, Pete, slow down,” she said.
Nazario was gasping as though he’d been weeping.
“We got Terrell,” he said, voice breaking. “But he shot Burch.”
She gasped, the color drained from her face.
“How bad? Oh God. Where? Okay, okay.” She scribbled notes as he spoke. “All right. All right, I’ll handle everything. Hang in. The world is on the way.”
She buried her face in her hands for a brief moment, then took a deep breath.
“Burch was shot,” she said briskly.
“How bad?” Stone said.
Emma stood whimpering beside them, both hands over her mouth.
“Critical. Took two, in the chest and the head. He’s in surgery. I have to report to the chief and go tell Connie. I also have to let April Terrell know that it’s time to tell her kids.”
“What should I do?” Stone demanded.
“Exactly what you’ve been doing,” she said. “They’re in Maine, you’re here. You’re making headway on an important case. Don’t stop.”
She pulled on her jacket, then turned, frowning. “There is one thing. Nazario said something about a cat. Burch wanted you to feed it. It’s at the place where he’s been staying.”
“Sure.” He was stunned.
The news hit Homicide like a thunderbolt.
A deputy chief, the department’s chaplain, a captain, and Jo Salazar arranged to catch the next flight.
Connie Burch answered the door.
She had yellow spatters on her T-shirt and jeans and a paintbrush in her hand.
“Hey, K. C.” She stepped back and looked around her. “What do you think? They call it Monet yellow. You think it’s too bright for the foyer?”
Something she saw in Riley’s face made her stop, lips apart. Her eyes widened.
“Connie, I know you and Craig are on the outs and not together right now. But I wanted to tell you myself…”
“No.” Connie began to shake her head. “No. He’s all right. He’s coming home tonight.”
“No, Connie, he’s—”
She dropped the paintbrush and clamped both hands over her ears. She continued shaking her head.
“—been injured. It’s very serious. He’s critical.”
She yelped once, like a frightened puppy. “Where is he?”
“Still in Maine. He was shot.”
Connie took a deep breath and wiped her hands on her jeans. “How do I get there?”
“Are you sure?” Riley said, surprised.
“I love him.”
“Mom?” Jennifer stood in the hallway.
“Jenny, get the kids, we’re going to your dad.”
“All right,” Riley said. “Let me try to get you on the same flight as the assistant chief, Jo Salazar, and the others.”
The flight left in little more than an hour. The airport was half an hour away.
Riley worked the phone. Talked to the chief, to the airline.
“We have to go,” she said. They went as they were, with no time to pack anything. Connie had a credit card, but only forty dollars in cash. Riley emptied her wallet, gave Connie what money she had, then piled them into her car. She slapped the blue light on the dashboard and raced toward the airport.
A police escort, sirens screaming, picked them up at the entrance ramp to the Palmetto Expressway.
The last Riley saw of them, they were running down the concourse, hand in hand.
Riley intercepted April Terrell as she arrived home from work. They talked, seated on stone benches at a shaded round table in the courtyard of the apartment building where she lived.
“I’m so shocked and sorry about Sergeant Burch. He seemed like a wonderful man.” April wept. “To think that Charles is alive and did all these monstrous things. The kids…It breaks your heart all over again. You don’t know what it’s like to lose the man you love, first to another woman, then to death, and now to this new nightmare. You have no idea—”
“Actually,” Riley said, “I do. We share something in common.” She unloaded, blurted out the whole story. “You see, the man I loved didn’t love me, or maybe I’ll just never know if he did or not because I lost him to another woman, and then he was killed.
“McDonald gave his life,” she said at the end, “to save a little kid who will probably grow into a worthless drug user like his father. You’ve got your children. I have nothing.”
“That’s not true.” April wiped her eyes. “You have something positive to hold on to. You’re in a position to be a force for good in that child’s life, to help keep him from becoming a bad man like his father. If someone like your McDonald gave up everything to save him, that’s exactly what he’d expect you to do.”
Riley stared for a long moment. “You’re right, April. You’re absolutely right.”
The news was too much for Stone to process. Riley had appeared so cool, so professional, while he wanted to break things, to punch out walls. He had to do something. Take action. There was nothing.
Detective Ron Diaz called. “Helluva thing about Burch. He gonna make it?”
“We’re waiting on word from the hospital. I just called again and they won’t tell us a damn thing.”
“You still want a heads-up on the homicides of elderly females found at home in bed?”
“Definitely.”
“We just got us one. I’m en route. The uniform at the scene said it’s weird. She’s laid out on her bed wrapped in a white sheet. Looks like the mortician’s already been there. That’s what he says.”
The house was a faded peach color and in a state of disrepair.
“She was a nice lady, never bothered anybody,” a neighbor was telling a patrolman out front.
Stone knew. When he walked in the door, he knew. His mind flashed on the photographs of previous crime scenes. Interchangeable with this one.
Her faded, neatly trimmed hair was spread out across the pillow. Her nails had been clipped.
Evelyn Symons, eighty-one, a widow, had lived alone for almost two decades.
“This one’s mine.”
“Be my guest,” Diaz said. “Anything you want me to do before I split?”
“I need the chief medical examiner and Ed Baker from the crime lab. Nobody but Baker. Call him at home if you have to.”
Stone pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Gently he moved the woman’s head to one side. He knew they would be
there before he saw the particles of soil in her hair and on the pillow.
Baker, the crime lab chief, arrived, short, silver-haired, and no-nonsense.
“It’s him,” Stone said. “The one we talked about.”
Baker nodded and went to work. Using a mega brush, without bristles, he lightly dusted the dead woman’s bruised throat with magnetic fingerprint powder, then lifted the powder with tape.
“Anything?” Stone asked.
Baker studied the tape, then shook his head. “No ridge detail at all. Just a blurry smudge, the outline of a finger.”
Stone sighed. “Like the others. Okay, you know what I want now. We’ve talked about it enough. This is it. It’s time to try. They say it can be done.”
“I’ve been waiting for the chance,” Baker said.
He swabbed the dead woman’s throat to lift the remaining fingerprint powder.
“It’ll take a little time,” he told Stone.
“The sooner the better.”
He and the crime technicians worked long into the night examining firsthand what Stone had only seen before in photos.
Before going home at dawn, he asked for surveillance on Friedman. “Bring him in,” he urged, distributing his photo at roll call. “If he loiters, or lollygags, or spits on the sidewalk, bring him in. Better yet, if he does spit on the sidewalk, collect it and bring it to the lab.”
At several food establishments inspected by Friedman, Stone learned the mashgiach was not a popular man. Irate owners dreaded his visits. Nothing they did was good enough. He had them jumping through hoops to remain certified. “He finds violations no one else can see,” one complained. “You follow his rules and then, nu? He sees something else. I wouldn’t wish him to inspect my worst enemy.”
Stone took copies of Friedman’s printed forms and notices to document examiners. They called the printing extremely similar to that on the note left on his grandmother’s bed, but the experts could not swear to an absolute certainty that the same man wrote both. The note was brief. Handwriting would have been easier to identify.
Stone studied the surveillance reports and monitored Friedman’s habits. Which is what put him in an unmarked car outside a kosher deli on Forty-first Street in Miami Beach. Friedman ate lunch there as usual. He emerged drinking an orange soda. As usual, he dropped the bottle into a Dumpster as he approached the parking garage.
The Dumpster had been emptied that morning.
Friedman stepped into the parking garage elevator.
Stone went Dumpster diving.
He zipped the nearly empty bottle into an evidence bag for Baker, the crime lab genius.
When the results came back, Stone cheered. He handcuffed Friedman at a restaurant he was inspecting.
“What did he do? Take a bribe?” the manager asked. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“No,” Stone said, after informing Friedman of his rights. “He murdered ten women.”
“Ten?” the manager asked. “Where did he find the time?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Friedman said. “You know nothing. There are certain laws, religious laws…”
“How about the one in Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
Stone thought he had never felt better, but then came the icing on the cake, a call from Nell Hunter.
“Hey, Sam Spade. Heard you made your big arrest. Cool. Knew you’d do it. What’s the real story?”
As chirpy as ever, she sounded cuddly and cute, friendly and warm, then bewildered.
“What did you call me?” she demanded just before he hung up. “A llama?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
WEEKS LATER
I don’t mind the crying baby, or the kid kicking my seat back. I could do without the sneezing, coughing passenger blowing his runny nose a couple of rows back. But I love them all. I’m going home, the luckiest man alive.
The slug that slammed into my chest and tore through my lung made a bigger hole when it exited my back. It grazed a rib, which accounted for the burning sensation. The deformed bullet wound up lying on the rug. They said I was smart to drop and play dead. I didn’t say I wasn’t playing. The immediate ouch took me down for the count.
Terrell’s intended coup de grâce, the gunshot to the head, tore a hole in my scalp and actually left a groove in my skull. It bled like hell. A small contusion and some swelling of the brain cleared up. The doctors say that a mere fraction of an inch more, and I would have wound up permanently brain damaged or even more permanently dead. What can I say about trauma centers and their staffs? They are the reason the homicide rate has gone down. They drag people like me back from the brink every day.
Nazario stayed with me, so did Connie and my kids. They flew back to Miami just two days ago to get ready for my homecoming. Home.
“Look at that, Sarge,” Nazario says. The pilot is circling out over the ocean to approach the city from the east. I see Miami’s vast sprawl and unearthly light as we swoop down through the clouds toward home. Home.
I look for the sun and the shadows fall behind me.
Terrell is fighting extradition and the inevitable. I don’t know if he will be tried up in Maine or in Miami first. When they do bring him back, I hope to be part of the welcoming committee.
Life is good. Doctors say I can be back on the job in a matter of weeks. Riley says we’re still in the budget, at least until next year’s crisis. While I can’t wait to hug my kids again and watch them grow, my heart goes out to April Terrell and her children, and Natasha’s oldest, a virtual orphan at twelve. What can you say to a boy whose Mom wound up in a Dumpster and whose Dad has appointments on death row in two states, to say nothing of Granddad, the escaped war criminal? Milo Ross, the kid’s latest stepfather, has said he’ll raise the boy.
I said I didn’t want any fuss at the airport, but as Nazario and I walk down the concourse, there they are. Riley, Stone, Corso, even Emma and a dozen others.
I am welcomed by laughter, applause, and Miami’s warm, wet kiss. I don’t know why of all Terrell’s victims, I alone survived. There has to be a reason. Something I’m meant to do. I can’t wait to get back on the job.
After a skirmish with Nazario over the car keys, Stone drives me home. First we three swing by the Beach to pick up my stuff.
“So how’d you do it?” I ask. “You solved the Meadows case. Got the guy! I even saw you on the network news. How did you nail it?”
“As you know,” Stone says. “fingerprint residue consists of three main substancess that are exuded from glands all over the body. They are the apocrine, eccrine, and sebaceous glands. The sebaceous gland is usually associated with hair follicles and leaves the best residue for latent prints. Suspects pick it up on their hands as they touch their face, hair, beard, whatever, even their arms. And our suspect had a beard and lots of hair. I was worried at first because he washed the bodies, but I read in an article in the Forensic Journal that water alone won’t destroy fingerprints left by sebaceous residue.”
I am distracted, blown away by everything around me. The rapidly moving clouds and water. The familiar skyline I thought I might never see again. The voices of my detectives, the camaraderie.
“Hold on, genius. Gimme the Reader’s Digest version.”
“Yeah, Stone. Sarge’s brain is still healing.”
“Okay.” Stone grins. “Bottom line? You can extract DNA from a fingerprint—even an unrecognizable fingerprint. Some people doubted it could be done. They were wrong.”
“The mind is like a parachute,” I say. “It always works best when it’s open.”
“Then,” Stone says, “it was no problem to compare it to the DNA he left on the soda bottle. Voilà, a match. Simple.
“We got him, although his lawyers are considering an insanity plea based on some teenage trauma. But how can they convince a jury he was insane for decades, all while holding a responsible job?”
“I’d love to see him and Terrell in the same cell,” I say, as we turn
into the long, shaded driveway.
Stone took good care of everything, including the cat, who runs to greet me. Who says animals have short memories?
Stone carries my stuff down to the car while I call the owner. Adair is still in Italy. I don’t know what time it is there, but he sounds wide awake.
I report that everything is swell, including the cat.
“What cat? We don’t have a cat,” he insists.
In fact, he says, his young wife is allergic to cats.
I stare at the cat, purring on my lap at the moment. Is this a joke? I hand the phone to Nazario, who will be staying here to baby-sit his place because I am going home.
We swing by the nearest animal hospital to see if we have a match for any of the missing, wanted, or reward posters hanging from the waiting room bulletin board. Nothing. I show the cat’s puss to the staff, to see if they recognize his mug as somebody’s missing pet.
The receptionist lights up. “You’ve got one of the city cats.” She coos at him and scratches his head. “You can tell by the notch in his left ear.”
I thought he’d been maimed in a fight.
The city had too many strays, she says. So volunteers trapped them, to put a lid on the population explosion. They were spayed and neutered and put back out on the street to do whatever they were doing before, but without the same results.
“So what do I do with him?” I ask her.
She shrugged. “You can put him back where you found him.”
My heart beats faster as we turn onto my street. The last time I was here I was persona non grata, sneaking in the dark to check on my family.
Today the house is a splash of color. Hung with welcome-home signs and banners made by the kids. They run to meet me. Connie is waiting outside, crying, her arms open. Neighbors are waving and here I am, walking up to the front door under my own steam, carrying the cat carrier, my feet still on the planet, still vertical, the luckiest man alive.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to editor Mitchell Ivers, a writer’s dream. He inspires, conspires, and swoops out of the sky like a superhero. What a masterful accomplice! I am home at last.
Cold Case Squad Page 25
