Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  I was cruising down the turnpike, south of cane country, but my thoughts drifted back to the Cortinas family. I was trying not to run too fast with Ed’s theory about 1986. He was, after all, the ponytailed crusader who had taken on the sugar industry in a twelve-year legal battle, with nothing to show for it but an office full of archive boxes and ten thousand Jamaicans out of work. But a day trip to Kingston wasn’t a huge investment on my part, and if we could actually find Vernon Gallagher, the payoff could be huge, and not just from the standpoint of law enforcement. If Tyla’s phone calls to me did in fact prove to be a genuine crime tip, it might soften some of Angelina’s anger over my decision to attend the memorial service with Carmen. Of course, there were still the dinner photographs from Orlando. For that, I would simply have to beg for Angelina’s forgiveness.

  Flowers? But not a bouquet. I could send her one long-stemmed rose at a time. The first time we’d moved in together, I’d told Angelina to choose her side of the walk-in closet, select the dresser drawers she wanted, and mark off the “Angelina only” section of the shared master bathroom. After she fell asleep, I got up and placed a single red rose in each drawer, each cabinet, and every space she’d chosen, so that she’d find them when she woke. We’d both missed work that morning. That would evoke a nice memory. Or would it?

  It occurred to me that I was again reaching back to the pre-Samantha days of Abe and Angelina.

  My cell rang through the Bluetooth. I checked the digital display on the dashboard, which alerted me to two facts: that I was doing eighty-five, and that the call was from a New York area code. My hope was that Angelina was calling me on her mother’s phone. I cut my speed and answered on speaker. It was my mother-in-law.

  “Abe, do you know where Angelina is?”

  It was a strange question—not because I didn’t know the answer, but because they were supposed to be at the spa together. “No, I’ve been in Palm Beach all day.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  The strangeness was giving way to a certain urgency in her voice. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes. No. I mean—I don’t know. When did you see her last?”

  “Just before midnight. I spent the night at J.T.’s apartment. Margaret, what is going on?”

  “We were supposed to meet at my hotel two hours ago. Angelina never showed up. I’ve been calling her on her cell, and no one answers.”

  “I tried, too,” I said. “Has anyone gone by the house?”

  “Yes, I’m standing on the front porch right now. That’s what has me so worried. Her car is here in the driveway, but no one answers the door.”

  It was premature for this to be a missing person case under normal protocol, but those photographs she’d received—possibly from a serial killer—changed everything.

  “Margaret, I want you to stay calm, okay? There have been extra patrol cars in our neighborhood since Thursday night.”

  “Oh, my God, Abe. What is going on?”

  “Help will be there soon,” I told her. “I’m going to hang up and dial nine-one-one right now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I felt like a switchboard operator on the ride home, dialing numbers, taking callbacks, making follow-ups.

  My first call was to Carmen, who got right on it, and then to Rid. Two minutes later, Carmen called back to let me know that a pair of first responders had forced their way into our house. The good news was that the police hadn’t found Angelina hurt, or worse.

  “The concern is that no one knows where she is,” said Carmen.

  “What about the extra patrol officers in our neighborhood? Did any of them see her come or go from the house?”

  “No.”

  I recalled my drive home Thursday night, when I’d spotted the extra officer sitting in his squad car, texting. “Is Angelina’s car still in the driveway?”

  “Yeah. That’s one of the confusing things.”

  “She’s a jogger. Did anyone see her out running this morning?”

  “No, Abe. But they’re interviewing neighbors as we speak.”

  We agreed that the FBI should be involved. Santos had made her mark at the bureau as a pioneer of what was then known as the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. Despite the recent tension between Santos and me, it seemed like a godsend that she was at our disposal. Even so, my next call was to Rid, who conferenced in the other MDPD lieutenant overseeing the investigation, which was centered at my house. I shared everything I thought it was important for them to know about Angelina’s habits, hangouts, and friends. Explaining why I hadn’t been home with my wife last night was awkward, but I had to get everyone to move past it.

  “You guys need to keep checking the neighborhood, checking her phone, her iPad. There must be something.”

  “We’re on it,” said Rid.

  I wanted to be right on the scene, but I fully trusted that Rid was indeed “on it.” I knew that every neighbor in the area would be interviewed, every emergency room in the county contacted, and that everything from Angelina’s cell phone to her Facebook page would be tracked and monitored. Any activity on her credit cards would be an immediate red flag. But I needed to do something. I had only a mental list of names for Angelina’s girlfriends and coworkers. Dialing 411 was something I could do from my car, and I called everyone I could think of. Some were good friends who could be trusted to act responsibly. But some of the names that came to mind were fringe friends, ex-friends, or coworkers I’d never met. There were bound to be a few gossips who might start rumors that Angelina was shacking up with an old boyfriend and would show up eventually. This was no time to be concerned about what others might think. To a point. I tempered the message with people I didn’t really know, striking the right balance of urgency without feeding the salacious grapevine.

  “Have you spoken to Angelina today?”

  “No. Is something wrong, Abe?”

  “I don’t know. We’re afraid she may have gotten into an accident or something.”

  I knew that was a lie, even before I came speeding down the street and spotted Angelina’s car still in our driveway. I’d run three stop signs and two red lights since leaving the turnpike. On the grassy swale outside the house were several squad cars parked beside a green-and-white van from the MDPD crime scene investigation unit. My car skidded to a stop behind the flashing beacons. Our front door was wide open, and I took it as a positive sign that no ambulance or medical examiner’s van was on the scene, confirmation of Santos’ earlier report of no body inside. Still, you don’t have to be in law enforcement to recognize a cadaver-sniffing dog, and the canine unit was on the scene.

  “Please, please, God,” I said softly as I jumped out of the car.

  My heart was pounding, and I sprinted up the sidewalk, stopping at the yellow police tape in the doorway. Santos was standing in the living room, on the other side of the tape, watching over one of the investigators.

  “Has anyone heard from Angelina?” I asked, breathless. I had tried Angelina’s cell several times from my car with no answer. Santos came one step closer and then stopped, leaving a good ten feet between herself and the open doorway.

  “No,” she said.

  “Where’s her mom?”

  “One of the officers drove her back to the hotel. We wanted her by the telephone in case Angelina calls her room.”

  That made sense. I glanced around the doorjamb and noticed another investigator on his hands and knees with a penlight, combing through the carpeting between the couch and the front door.

  The broken beer bottle. I had forgotten all about it in my conference call from the car with Rid, and I’d made no mention of it.

  “I can explain that,” I said.

  “Good, but don’t come in. I’ll be right there. Oh, while I’m thinking of it, can you toss me your car keys?”

  “What for?”

  “I need to have one of the investigators go through your car. Just standard procedure. You don’t mind, do
you?”

  If it hadn’t come up immediately after the beer bottle, I probably would have minded less. “That’s fine.” I tossed her the keys.

  Santos headed for the kitchen, our back entrance, and I waited on the front porch for her to walk around the house. My anxiety level was already high, but the thought of having to explain a broken beer bottle sent my stress level skyrocketing. I may have come across as a bit too defensive, but I wanted to address the bottle up front. I stepped down from the porch and met Santos halfway across our front yard.

  “That broken bottle is not from an intruder,” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s mine.”

  Her expression cut right through me. “Is this a tradition in your house? Angelina smashes her wineglasses, you smash your beer bottles?”

  My mouth fell open. I had forgotten about the broken wineglass Santos had found by the photographs. “This must look really bad,” I said.

  Santos was deadpan, no response.

  “We’re not a violent couple,” I said. “Throwing bottles across the room is not what we do. It’s important for you to know that.”

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  “Angelina came home around eleven last night. I was on the couch, half asleep. Somehow we got into an argument about J.T.”

  “What about J.T.?”

  “Looking after him. It’s more of an ongoing discussion and disagreement than an argument. What really set her off was when she found out that I went to Tyla’s memorial service.”

  “You didn’t tell her before you went?”

  Her tone was much calmer than Angelina’s had been, but it sounded worse coming from an FBI agent. “No. Carmen asked me to go with her, and I decided at the last minute.”

  “So you told Angelina when she got home?”

  “Well, actually, she saw Carmen and me on television.”

  “So you never even intended to tell Angelina?”

  “No, that’s not right.”

  “But she obviously thinks you slept with Tyla.”

  “That’s not right either,” I said. “In fact, the opposite is true. Angelina told me—”

  “She told you what?”

  “The night the photographs came, she told me that she believed me when I said nothing happened between Tyla and me. But now that you say it, and seeing how she reacted, maybe that’s what Angelina took away from my decision to go to Tyla’s memorial service. She lost her temper, told me to get out, and slammed the door. I was outside on the porch when I heard the bottle smash.”

  “Did she hit you at any point?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hit her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did she threaten you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you threaten her?”

  “No way.”

  “Did she push you?”

  That question was more difficult. “I wouldn’t say she pushed me. She took me by the arm, sort of hurrying me to the door.”

  “Did you push back?”

  “Not at all. Look, can we stop making this a domestic violence investigation, please? We know that a serial killer was standing on my front porch two days ago, delivering an ash-covered photograph of his latest victim, and now my wife is missing.”

  “I’m not convinced those photos came from Cutter.”

  “But you are convinced that Angelina and I were throwing beer bottles and wineglasses at each other, is that it?”

  “I’ve seen the broken glass. In Cutter’s case, I have yet to see a white victim who wasn’t dating a black man.”

  “I was married to a black woman. Who knows how this killer’s mind works? And the white woman/black man paradigm isn’t ironclad anyway. Tyla was a black woman.”

  “It hasn’t been confirmed that Tyla was one of Cutter’s victims.”

  My head was starting to spin. “Okay, no disrespect to Tyla or any of the other victims, but what the hell is going on here? The clock is ticking, and all we’ve done so far is talk about a broken beer bottle and the psychological nuances of the Cutter profile. You were the first person Carmen and I agreed we should turn to when Angelina went missing because we thought the FBI would ramp up the search immediately. Are you on board, or not?”

  She was about to say something, but one of the investigators walked over and interrupted. “Agent Santos, could you come inside a moment?”

  I recognized the investigator. Early in my career I had prosecuted a case with her. “Mirna, are you working homicide and missing persons now?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m still with the domestic crimes section.”

  “I recommended the involvement of several units,” said Santos. “We’re covering all bases.”

  I could see which one was first base.

  “Excuse me,” said Santos.

  It wasn’t clear that I was invited to join them, but my wife was missing, this was our house, and I didn’t like the way this was turning. I followed Santos and the investigator up the driveway. We walked right past my car. The trunk was open, the doors open, the hood up. The “standard” investigation apparently involved everything but turning the car upside down and shaking it. We entered the house through the garage and continued down the hall into the living room. Another crime scene investigator held a small piece of broken green glass on an evidence tray, her penlight illuminating the find.

  “Looks like blood to me,” said the investigator.

  Santos examined the specimen more closely. Then her head turned, and her gaze fixed right on me. “Looks like blood to me, too.”

  It chilled me, but in addition to being a concerned husband, I was a prosecutor who understood how the criminal justice system worked. I felt compelled to say something in my own defense. “Maybe Angelina cut herself trying to clean up the broken glass. You know, after I was gone.”

  Santos nodded, but not because she was buying my explanation. It seemed more like the mere expression of her expectation that I would have one.

  “Let’s get it out to the lab.”

  Her directive had been to the investigator, but Santos had locked eyes with me. “And we’ll need a cheek swab from you, Mr. Beckham. We need to be able to determine whether this blood or any other DNA we find here belongs to a stranger.”

  It was a standard request in a missing person case, but her timing made it seem otherwise. “That’s fine,” I said. One of the technicians had her kit ready and came right at my mouth. It took just a few seconds. I looked at Santos and asked, “What’s next?”

  “I want to continue our discussion outside, with Detective Reyes’ involvement,” she said, meaning the domestic crimes investigator.

  “We’re wasting way too much time talking,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No offense to the team you’re assembling, Santos. Domestic crime investigations have their place. But if you’re so damned determined to make this into something it’s not, I have a ton of things on my to-do list.”

  “Beckham—” She stopped me as I reached the hallway. “There’s something I find very curious,” she said, stepping toward me.

  “Curious?”

  She nodded, looking me in the eye. We were standing close, and she spoke low enough that no one else could hear.

  “Now that Angelina has gone missing, you’re gripped with fear that Cutter is out there stalking your neighborhood like the bogeyman. But fourteen hours ago you left your wife in this house, all alone. How do you explain that?”

  I didn’t like the implication, and I could feel her studying me, gauging my reaction, taking my criminological pulse. But worse than that, it was a level of guilt I wasn’t sure I could ever come to terms with.

  “That’s quite a bedside manner you’ve got there, Dr. Santos. Is this how you talk to every husband with a missing wife?”

  “No,” she said, her gaze tightening. “Just certain ones.”

  I tried not to flinch, b
ut I was locking eyes with a pro who had studied far more crime scenes than I ever would.

  “I need to find my wife,” I said, then turned and left through the garage, avoiding the broken glass at our front door. I was halfway down the driveway when another investigator stopped me.

  “Before you leave, we need to check your hands for gunshot residue. It’s standard procedure.”

  I glanced back toward the house. Agent Santos was watching through the window.

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I borrowed our neighbor’s car—mine was still being searched—and hit the road.

  I knew most of Angelina’s local hangouts—restaurants, coffee shop, fitness center, and favorite places to shop. I mapped out the circuit in my head, checking each location off, one by one. I talked to waitresses, manicurists, personal trainers, and even random patrons who happened to be inside when I got there. It took two hours. No sign of Angelina, but I did link up with her best friend, Sloane, who promised to pull together teams to work the grassroots angle, both in the virtual world of social media and the real world of old-fashioned legwork. By late afternoon we had twenty volunteers outside my house. I also worked a few connections to bring out the local news stations.

  “How do you pronounce your wife’s name again?” the reporter asked. “Is it Ange-lie-nuh, like North Carolina?”

  We were standing on the sidewalk in front of our house, thirty seconds from going on camera. The squad cars were still parked in the driveway. Crime scene investigators crisscrossed the yard behind us, coming and going from the house. A line of media vans was parked across the street.

  “No, it’s Angeleena, like Lena Horne.”

  The cameraman was ready. The reporter fixed her hair for the fifteenth time and smiled.

  “Not so toothy,” the cameraman said. “The poor guy’s wife is missing.”

  I was starting to feel like I wasn’t even there.