Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  “What are the other indicators?”

  She paused, knowing what I was asking for: the signature. Much had been reported in the media about Cutter, the killer who mutilated his victims with a cane cutter’s machete and dumped their bodies in the cane fields. But law enforcement always held back something in serial killer investigations, a key characteristic of the crimes that was so unique that it served as the killer’s signature.

  “Facial markings,” she said. “But we are going to have to do some serious searching to confirm that.”

  “Searching for what?”

  Santos glanced in the direction of the medical examiner’s van, where the remains of the victim lay beneath a white sheet on a gurney. Then her gaze swept the acres of saw grass along the roadside, as if to measure the daunting task before them.

  “We’re still looking for the victim’s head.”

  I breathed in and out. Those trial exhibits for my jury just got more gruesome.

  The assistant medical examiner called Santos over. I followed her to the van. The FBI might have been in charge of coordinating the Cutter investigation from an administrative standpoint, but homicides were generally local matters, and the Miami-Dade County medical examiner’s office was my territory.

  “I wanted to point out one major deviation from the Cutter profile,” the assistant ME said.

  “Tell me,” said Santos.

  “We’re a long way from a positive ID, and the accelerated decomposition we get in the Everglades can make it more difficult than you might think to determine a victim’s race. But I can say this much with confidence: If this was Cutter, it would be his first victim who isn’t Caucasian.”

  I glanced at the gurney, then up at the cloudless blue sky, my eyes drawn by the whirring sound of a helicopter. The first media helicopter was over the crime scene, and I could feel the pointed questions about to rain down on us.

  “A victim’s race is usually a key component of the killer’s psychological profile,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t telling Santos anything she didn’t already know. “Does that change your thinking about whether this was Cutter?”

  She thought for a moment before answering. “Do you have time to take a ride up to Palm Beach County with me?”

  I had just plea-bargained a death penalty case down to life without parole, so my trial calendar was unusually clear. “Sure. What for?”

  “I’m a big believer in a fresh set of eyes on the evidence,” she said. “Would love to hear you answer your own question.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “But do me just one favor before we go.”

  “What?”

  She glanced at my muck-covered shoes. “Lose the Gator Man from Okefenokee look.”

  “Yeah. I can do that.”

  Chapter Two

  We drove toward the smoke, thick clouds that rose from the fields and blackened the crisp blue sky. I closed the AC vent on the passenger side of Agent Santos’ car.

  “I can smell the smoke,” I said.

  “A little like roasted corn, isn’t it?”

  “Too roasted.”

  “Be glad you don’t live around here,” said Santos.

  Smoke from controlled fires was a familiar part of the winter landscape in the vast and privately managed sugarcane fields of the Florida Everglades. Only after the leaves and thick undergrowth had been burned away could the blades of men or machine get at the base of the twelve-foot sugarcane stalks.

  Nobody was quite sure how it was discovered that burning a cane field would facilitate the harvest without reducing the yield. But I knew from my father-in-law that National Sugar Corporation had been doing it since at least 1941, when Luther and the other “recruits” had shipped down from Memphis. After beating the Justice Department’s criminal indictment for slavery, National and the other growers gave up on Americans and hired only foreigners for seasonal labor under the H-2 visa program. Jamaicans, Haitians, and Dominicans perfected the burns—and the cutting. Each season for the next fifty years, ten thousand men would leave their families in the islands, live on top of each other in cheerless barracks, ride buses to fields before dawn, pull on protective caps and boots, and fasten aluminum safety guards on their shins, knees, and hands. Armed with machetes, they’d march onto the soot-covered fields like black gladiators. One in every three would cut himself or be cut by another worker, puncture an eye or an eardrum on the sharp spear of a cane top, or lose a day’s pay to heat stroke, snakebite, or an attack of angry fire ants. They raced to cut a ton of cane per hour, and with a proper burn, they were expected to cut it low. “No stubble, mon,” the better-paid Jamaicans, the ones who had curried favor with the company, would tell the newbies. “You leave a inch o’ stubble, National lose a ton o’ cane. Bend yo’ bok, mon.”

  By the mid-1990s, machines had taken over. But the fires endured.

  “It’s a pretty amazing sight,” said Santos, her gaze fixed on the road. “Forty acres will go up in fifteen minutes.”

  I was staring out the passenger-side window, transfixed by the fire’s intensity. The orange wall of flames reached thirty feet or more above the cane tops. Bursts of heat pushed the ashes even higher into the sky. Thousands of birds took flight, escaping with their lives. It was like a scene out of Bambi, and I wondered about the rabbits, raccoons, and other critters that had made the thick cover of cane their home.

  “Victim number one was burned pretty badly,” said Victoria.

  “You don’t mean burned alive, do you?”

  “No,” said Santos. “I’ll show you. It’s just ahead.”

  We were suddenly beyond the burn zone. Long tongues of fire and blinding orange heat gave way to leafy waves of sugarcane. The reeds were taller than the saw grass fifty miles to the south, but they were similarly beautiful, which made sense: sugarcane is a grass.

  Santos steered onto the shoulder of the road and parked. The thick brown field outside my door looked impenetrable. The other side of the road, however, was a postharvest wasteland. Machines had taken all that the land could offer. Tons of cane had been cut and hauled away. All that remained was the blackened stubble of a burned and harvested field.

  “This way,” said Santos.

  I followed her across the deserted two-lane road and into the field. I could still see the fire in the distance, but a cool breeze carried the smoke in the other direction. The ground was soft, but it wasn’t the thick soup that had nearly swallowed me whole in Shark Valley. Mostly it was covered with shredded brown debris left by machines, but occasionally a puff of ash and gray dust rose up from my footfalls, the remnants of the preharvest burn. It was easy to see where long, orderly rows of cane had once stood, and beyond it was another field, yet to be cut. I thought of Samantha’s father, sixteen years old, standing out in this field with a machete in his hand and wanting to go home to Memphis, waves of sugarcane as far as the eye could see. It was a little like handing a kid a teaspoon and telling him to empty the ocean.

  Santos stopped and pointed to a clearing several rows over. “Victim one was there.”

  “Who found her?”

  “One of the burners. They spray the perimeter with water to prevent jump fires and then go into the field with firepots to light it up. There is a standard walk-through before the burn, but they don’t find everything. They do another walk-through after the burn to clear away things that might clog the machines, which could be anything from a cooked alligator to an old washing machine dumped by one of the neighbors. That’s when they found the body.”

  Santos squatted, sifted through the debris on the ground, and gathered a small amount of ash. She worked it into her fingertips as she rose, blackening the skin.

  “This is Cutter’s signature,” she said.

  “Ash?”

  “White female victims, their faces blackened with ash.”

  I glanced again toward the clearing, where victim number one had been found. “How were you able to ascertain that with a charred body?
”

  “We have an ID on the victim. Charlotte Hansen. We know she’s white.”

  “I understand that much. But if the body was burned, how were you able to tell she had ash smeared on her face?”

  “We weren’t. Cutter put her too deep into the cane field. I believe that’s why victims two, three, and four were so much easier to find. Cutter left them on the perimeter, where the cane is watered to contain the burn. He learned from the first drop and corrected his mistake. He wanted us to see his signature.”

  I reached down and gathered some ash. I was already into the mind of the killer, already had my own theory, but I wanted to hear it from Santos. “What does it mean, his signature?”

  “All four women dated black men.”

  The Cutter profile was writing itself in my head. White female victims. Black boyfriends. Angry sexual assault. Brutally violent death. You want to be black? Okay, bitch, I’ll make you black.

  “So we have a definite aberration in Miami-Dade,” I said. “A black victim.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “My guess is you didn’t see that coming.”

  “Nope.”

  “And if it turns out that the black victim had ash smeared on her face, what does that tell you?”

  “The ash on the face was something the task force never shared with the media. So if it’s there, we’ll need to rethink our profile of the angry white racist killing white women who date black guys.”

  “And if there’s no ash on the black victim’s face?”

  Santos brushed the ash from her fingers. “Then we may have two killers.”

  “A copycat?”

  She didn’t answer my question, but she didn’t have to. She dug her car keys from her jacket. “Let’s wait to hear what the medical examiner has to say.”

  Chapter Three

  At 3:00 p.m. I was on my third pair of pants for the day. Pinstripes. It was the oldest suit in my closet that still fit, and I wore it to court whenever I needed luck. Lots of luck.

  “State of Florida versus Jayden Tayshawn Vine,” said the bailiff, calling the case.

  Criminal Courtroom 9 of the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building was familiar territory to me. It was where I’d cut my teeth as a “pit assistant,” a C-level prosecutor in my first year of adult felonies, working sixty-hour weeks under my supervising attorneys, earning the astronomical sum of forty thousand dollars a year. But this was the first time I’d stood on the defendant’s side of the courtroom.

  Jayden Tayshawn Vine was Samantha’s older brother.

  “What do we do now?” J.T. asked, whispering.

  “Have a seat,” I said in a soft voice. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Every family has baggage. In Samantha’s family that baggage was J.T. Another widower might have walked away after Samantha’s death, but I was J.T.’s rock. He had no one else. And I didn’t want to see him end up homeless. Again.

  “Mr. Beckham, it’s good to see you,” the judge said. “A familiar face in an unfamiliar place.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I said, rising.

  “What did she mean by that?” J.T. asked me, some urgency in his whisper.

  “The judge is just being polite,” I whispered back. “It’s going to be okay.”

  The prosecutor on J.T.’s case was Leslie Highsmith, a young pit assistant who was getting the opportunity to serve as first chair on what was a fairly routine sentencing. Simple assault normally would have landed J.T. in misdemeanor court with a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, the victim was a transit worker, a bus driver, which was right up there with taking a swing at a police officer. A prior conviction from J.T.’s days of living on the street didn’t help.

  Highsmith rose from her chair—my chair, once upon a time—and addressed the court. “Your Honor, the state is willing to accept a plea of no contest with thirty days’ house arrest.”

  The judge checked the case file before her. “Refresh me, Counsel. This is all over a passenger wanting to get off a bus?”

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  The question had been directed at the prosecutor, but I intercepted it. Not that I didn’t trust Highsmith; in an office of three hundred plus attorneys, I hardly knew her. But J.T. had his own version of everything he’d ever done in his life, and he didn’t react well to strangers who mischaracterized one step of reality as he knew it.

  “Abe, you’re not the prosecution this time,” the judge said, smiling at me. “Let’s hear from Ms. Highsmith first.”

  The prosecutor thanked the judge and continued. “Mr. Vine was reportedly walking up and down the aisle of the bus and bumping into other passengers. When the driver asked him to take a seat, he refused and continued pacing. The walking intensified, and eventually he started skipping.”

  “Skipping?” asked the judge.

  J.T. grabbed my sleeve. “Not true!” he said, angry, but managing to keep his voice low.

  “Yes,” said Highsmith. “Mr. Vine then demanded to get off the bus. The driver told him that he would have to wait until the bus came to a stop. Mr. Vine then raised his voice, saying that he needed to get off immediately, and he ignored the driver’s repeated requests to take a seat. When the bus stopped at a red light, Mr. Vine ran to the door. The driver explained that it was not a bus stop. Mr. Vine started to pound on the door. The driver got up to stop him from breaking the glass and injuring himself. Mr. Vine then pushed him, and several passengers came forward to restrain him.”

  “Abe, she’s a liar!” said J.T., his voice just above a whisper. But it was too loud for a courtroom.

  “Alcohol or drugs involved here?” asked the judge.

  “We don’t believe so,” said Highsmith.

  “They were not involved,” I said.

  The judge glanced in my direction. “Something you’d like to add, Mr. Beckham?”

  “Mr. Vine does not drink alcohol or take drugs. He went off his prescribed medication, and what the prosecution just described is what happens when he doesn’t follow his course of treatment.”

  “That’s why we are accepting the plea of no contest on the condition of house arrest for thirty days,” said the prosecutor. “That will allow time for the medication to restore Mr. Vine to a less agitated state. Mr. Beckham has agreed to monitor the defendant and take him to his regular doctor visits during that time period.”

  “Fine,” said the judge. “But I do see several prior arrests for public intoxication.”

  She was referring to J.T.’s homeless period. “That was years ago,” I said.

  “That may be,” said the judge. “But I want Mr. Vine’s monitoring to be done through a SCRAM bracelet.”

  SCRAM—Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor—was an ankle bracelet that detected the wearer’s alcohol intake through perspiration. The judge was talking about the two-in-one device that included traditional house-arrest radio-frequency monitoring.

  “The state has no objection,” said Highsmith.

  J.T.’s eyes were like saucers. SCRAM wasn’t the end of the world, but it was a deviation from what I had laid out for J.T. before the hearing. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Really, it will be okay.”

  “No objection,” I told the court.

  “Very well,” the judge said. “Thirty days, house arrest. The court is extending you a very generous second chance, Mr. Vine. Don’t blow it.”

  The transcript wouldn’t reflect it, but the judge had been looking straight at me as she spoke.

  The state attorney’s office was right across the street from the criminal courthouse, but it took me two hours to get there.

  The fitting for the ankle bracelet had gone as expected. Too tight, too loose, do you have another color? I drove J.T. home, laid out his medications in the daily pill dispenser, and made him promise me on Samantha’s grave that he would take them. I was seated behind my desk, reviewing a transcript from a suppression hearing in a murder case set for trial in two weeks, when my phone rang. It was Victor
ia Santos.

  “You sound stressed,” she said, thirty seconds into our conversation.

  My desk phone rang. Caller ID told me it was J.T. I let it go to voice mail, though it was probably full from the six previous messages he’d left, each one longer than the last.

  “Me? Stressed? Nah.”

  “I just wanted to touch base,” said Santos.

  “Thanks. How close are we to an ID on Jane Doe?”

  “Search is ongoing to recover the victim’s head. Decomposition is complicating the fingerprint analysis. Forensic team is working around the clock, so hopefully soon.”

  I grabbed a pencil to take notes. “What do you have so far?”

  “Not much more than you already know. African-American female. Early thirties. Five feet, six inches tall. Factoring in the average weight for a human head, total body weight is estimated at one hundred twenty pounds. Red nail polish on fingers and toes.”

  My pencil point snapped. It was a total overreaction on my part, but I missed Santos’ next question.

  “Abe, you still there?”

  “Sorry. I had . . . a little distraction.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Can you meet me at the medical examiner’s office tomorrow at seven? Doc Hernandez is going to do wound comparisons on the victims for me, and I’d like you to be there.”

  “Sure. I know Doc well.”

  “He’s the best, and it gives me a good feeling that he’s on it. We are going to catch this guy.”

  “I know.”

  “One other thing,” she said. “I’m pushing the Miami-Dade investigation hard and fast. No offense to Palm Beach County, but I like the team we’re putting together here. If this latest victim is another Cutter killing, my preference is to prosecute in Miami first. And I want you to take the case to trial.”

  “That’ll be the state attorney’s call.”

  “I understand. I’m asking for your permission to request you by name.”

  I didn’t need to think long. “Permission granted.”