“Sorry,” she said, losing the grin.
The cameraman raised his fingers—“Three, two, one”—and we were on the air.
“Good evening,” said the reporter, taking the cue from the anchorwoman in the local studio. “Tonight, law enforcement is looking to help one of its own. I’m standing outside the home of Abe and Angelina—”
“Leena,” I said. “Angeleena.”
“Abe and Angelina Beckham,” she continued, “where a search is under way . . .”
The entire spot lasted thirty seconds. Apart from the mispronunciation, I had no memory of it. I just prayed that they’d managed to put up the right picture on television screens across south Florida. I did three more interviews—bang, bang, bang—for the other network affiliates. They promised to air it again on the eleven o’clock broadcasts.
“Good job,” Sloane told me.
I was in such a daze that I hadn’t even noticed her standing on the sidewalk, watching the television interviews. Several other friends of Angelina were with her, all wearing comfortable shoes and toting flashlights. Some daylight was remaining, but they looked ready to search all night, if that was what it took.
“Thanks for coming out,” I told her. I expressed the same gratitude to each of Angelina’s friends, which went smoothly enough, until one of them sniffled back tears and hugged me, saying, “I’m so sorry, Abe.” I thanked her, even if it was premature for sympathies and condolences, and I could hear the others taking her to task after I turned away.
The investigators had already confirmed that Angelina’s running shoes were in her closet, but it still seemed worth a shot to trace her route. Maybe she’d caught on to the barefoot running craze. Who knew? Checking somewhere was better than standing around. I didn’t know Angelina’s jogging route, but Sloane was able to lead me, a handful of volunteers, and one of the MDPD officers on a walk from start to finish. I held my breath a couple of times, but it turned out to be a milk carton in the ditch and the remains of a flattened raccoon on the road. Darkness was falling by the time we finished. I needed a break, but another shot of adrenaline kicked in. I called my mother-in-law at the hotel and offered to bring dinner.
“I’ll just order room service,” said Margaret.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, but even her one-word response cracked. “Abe, I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“This serial killer wasn’t news in New York, so I haven’t been following the story. But this sounds like it could be—”
“Margaret, don’t go there. We don’t know anything yet.”
“Exactly. We don’t know anything. That’s what has me so worried. They sent a detective over here to the hotel to get some information on Angelina. He told me that there’s been no activity on her cell since late last night. It was her text to me. It’s funny, even after a child is all grown up and married, a mother worries. When Angelina dropped me off at the hotel, I told her to text me to let me know she got home safely. So she did. She texted me and said . . . she said ‘I’m home. Love U.’”
She was starting to unravel. “Margaret, I can come by the hotel.”
“No, no. That’s not necessary. But I can’t understand this. It’s as if Angelina has fallen off the map. The last person to see her was you, and that was eighteen hours ago.”
Last person to see her. Santos had made the same point while following me out of the house, right up until I’d jumped in the car to go hunt for Angelina.
“Let’s stay close on this,” I said. “We’ll call each other as soon as we hear anything. Deal?”
“Okay, deal. Jake is flying down later tonight. He’ll stay with me here at the hotel.”
Jake was Angelina’s father. “That’s good.”
“Are Joe and Sandy on their way down?”
My parents. I’d called earlier to tell them there was nothing they could do, which was true. They truly liked Angelina, but things had been awkward between us since Samantha, and I don’t mean her death. My parents were too well mannered to be obnoxious about their disapproval, and they had actually smiled and behaved themselves through the wedding. The tipping point didn’t come until about six months later, when Samantha and I visited them in Charlottesville and spent the night in their guest room. All was well until we left. Five miles down the road I realized that I’d forgotten my sunglasses. I drove back and found that my mother had not only stripped the bed that Samantha and I had slept in but also thrown the sheets into the garbage. And it wasn’t because we’d had sex on them.
“Not yet,” I said. “They may come later.” Like when, the funeral? Dumb-ass thing to say. “Let me know if Jake needs a ride from the airport.”
“He’ll be fine. You should just keep doing what you’re doing. I saw the piece you did on the news. That was a . . .”
Her voice faded. I could hear her swallow back her emotions. “Margaret?”
“Sorry. That interview for the news channel that you did was a good idea.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come by until Jake gets in?”
“No, that’s not the best use of your time. Besides, one of your friends is coming to see me. I won’t be alone.”
“One of my friends? Or one of Angelina’s?”
“Yours. Agent Santos.”
It was like an ice bath, and I hated that it made me feel that way. The FBI should have been “a friend.”
“Is that what Agent Santos told you, that she was my friend?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I just assumed. The police officer already took my statement, so I figured she was just being nice and checking on me. Why, is she not your friend?”
That was complicated. “She’s fine.”
“Would you rather I not talk to her?”
The last thing I needed was for my mother-in-law to tell the FBI that I’d instructed her not to talk to the agent who was investigating Angelina’s disappearance. “Not at all,” I said. “Just let me know how it goes.”
“Okay, I will. Thank you again, Abe. And stay positive.”
I promised I would, said good-bye, and hung up.
“Stay positive” was good advice. We had the media involved. The community was activated. All afternoon I’d been fielding calls of support from cops I’d worked with over the years, some of whom had long since retired. Carmen had the entire state attorney’s office at my disposal. The Eyewitness News reporter had gotten one thing right: local law enforcement was mobilized to help “one of its own.” With one apparent exception. Agent Santos. And it was starting to make me crazy.
I needed to get to the bottom of it.
It was Saturday night, but Carmen had told me to call anytime. I reached out to her. She picked up the phone, but she was attending a banquet at the Four Seasons and was minutes away from accepting another community service award, this one from the Cuban American Bar Association. She promised to stop by my house afterward, which prompted my next move. I started up the sidewalk to check with the crime scene investigators. They seemed to be wrapping things up, but this was taking way too long. If the domestic crime investigator wasn’t running the show, she was at least one of its executive producers.
I was stepping onto the front porch when I saw Rid’s car pull into the driveway. He jumped out quickly, and the expression on his face as he crossed the lawn gave me concern. I went to him, meeting him halfway, my heart pounding.
“It’s okay,” he said. “This is not the final piece of bad news that no one wants to hear.”
My anxiety level dropped a notch, but it was still high.
“We found Angelina’s cell phone.”
I caught my breath. “Where?”
“On the side of the road. Scuffed up, scratch marks, the glass is shattered. It looks like it was tossed out of a moving car.”
I went cold. I knew the statistics; I’d attended the police lectures. Never get in the car. Never, never, never. Kick, scream, punch, squirm, spit, claw—do whatever it take
s, but don’t get in that vehicle. A woman’s chances of survival plummeted.
“What road?” I asked.
“Calle Ocho,” he said, then paused. “West end. Just before it becomes the Tamiami Trail.”
The road into the Everglades. I felt my knees buckle. “Dear God,” was all I could say.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Victoria was at the Ritz-Carlton having a talk with Angelina’s mother when the phone call came from Detective Riddel. She broke things off and drove straight to the recovery scene. Her advice to Margaret was to wait at the hotel.
Their conversation had been moving along exactly as Victoria had expected. The last thing the mother of a missing daughter wants to believe is that her model son-in-law is in any way responsible. Difficult questions, at this early stage, were bound to draw a defensive posture, perhaps even indignation. Extremely difficult questions, like those about the broken beer bottle, could wait for round two. The goal in round one had been simply to open Margaret’s mind to possibilities, however unthinkable.
It was a twenty-minute drive to the Everglades, giving her time aplenty to replay the predictable responses of a distraught mother—and to analyze a few surprises.
“When did Angelina ask you to come down from New York?”
There were three women in the hotel room. Margaret sat in the armchair by the window. Victoria took the edge of the bed, facing her. Detective Reyes from the Miami-Dade domestic crimes section was seated in the desk chair. Margaret was the seventy-year-old version of Grace Kelly, and the strong resemblance between mother and daughter made it plain to see how Angelina had become such a classic beauty. The unimaginable stress, however, was already taking a toll. Margaret was holding it together, but barely. A week of this, Victoria knew, and the worry lines would be carved in stone.
“Sometime Friday morning was when she called,” said Margaret.
“When did you get on the airplane?”
“Friday afternoon.”
“What was the rush?”
“No rush.”
“Sounds to me like you got on the first flight available.”
“One of the first, I guess.”
“Was Angelina upset about something?”
“Of course she was upset. Angelina is a newlywed. She and Abe had just had their first argument as a married couple. These things happen. I needed to be there for her.”
“Did she tell you what the argument was about?”
Margaret sighed deeply. Her hand shook as she sipped from a glass of water. “Abe’s brother-in-law, J.T.”
“What about him?”
Her voice tightened. “He scares Angelina. Frankly, he scares me a little, too.”
“Why does he scare you?”
“Why?” asked Margaret. “Have you ever met him?”
“Briefly. At his apartment.”
“Well, that’s not his apartment. That’s where Abe used to live. I don’t know all the details, but I understand J.T. was homeless for a while. You know, he practically ruined Angelina’s whole wedding.”
“How?”
“He stood up at the reception and made this bizarre toast about Abe being a true brother now because he went from an African-American wife to a blonde. He’s a very strange person. Abe needed to be more sensitive about that.”
“Do you think Abe is insensitive?”
“No, not in general. Just about this.”
“Do you think J.T. could have anything to do with Angelina’s disappearance?”
She considered the question for quite some time, as if not ruling it out. “I don’t know. But I don’t really see how. Isn’t he under house arrest?”
“Do you think Abe could?”
“Do I think Abe could what?”
Victoria paused long enough to let Margaret know that she couldn’t make the tough questions go away by pretending not to understand them. Then she asked again.
“Do you think Abe could have had something to do with Angelina’s disappearance?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, no. You can’t be serious.”
Victoria drove west on Southwest Eighth Street, past Florida International University, until the lights of strip malls were behind them and the darkness of the Everglades lay ahead. A night trip on the Tamiami Trail was like a midnight drive across the plains of Kansas, only the drop-off from civilization was more sudden. The Everglades marked the abrupt end of westward development and city lights, and the chain of headlight beams along the Trail stretched like a stray filament into utter blackness.
It was the GPS chip in Angelina’s smartphone that had led to its recovery. The night search for Angelina was focused on the north side of the Trail, the side on which the cell had been found. The staging area for law enforcement’s search and recovery mission was the same gravel parking lot used by crews working on the new bridge. Victoria parked beside a colossal earthmover and walked along the shoulder of the road. Detective Reyes was with her. Traffic wasn’t any heavier than usual, but it was beginning to back up in both directions. A team of traffic cops kept rubberneckers from bringing the Trail to a standstill.
Victoria spotted Riddel at the center of activity near a portable tree of vapor lights. A pair of noisy generators powered six trees in all, setting the flat waters of the Everglades aglow, but only for a distance of twenty-five yards or so. A police helicopter whirred overhead, the sweep of its searchlight reaching deeper into the saw grass. Rescue workers on pontoons trolled slowly across the canal, the beams from high-powered navigation lights crisscrossing in the night. In the darkness beyond, countless pairs of alligator eyes caught just a hint of the artificial light and glowed like fireflies in the darkness.
The north side of the Trail was for law enforcement only. Police tape stretched for a hundred yards along the shoulder. On the other side of the highway, behind a secondary perimeter, stood Abe Beckham. Swirling police beacons turned his face alternating shades of red and orange. Beckham didn’t seem to notice Victoria or Detective Reyes as they passed beneath the tape, and they didn’t try to get his attention. They went straight to Riddel.
“How goes it?” asked Victoria.
Riddel stepped toward her, away from the noisy generator. “Nothing but her cell phone so far.”
“How far are we from the recovery site for Tyla Tomkins?”
“I clocked it. Tomkins was a mile and two-tenths due west. It makes a big difference. More shoulder area and dry ground here.”
“Any tire tracks or footprints?”
“Yeah, a million of them. The work crews walk from the construction staging area to the bridge and back every day. But there’s nothing closer to the water. Not a footprint, not a tire track, not a broken weed. Honestly, I don’t see this being a recovery site.”
“How do you think the phone got here?”
“My take is that the guy got this far down the Trail and suddenly remembered that smartphones have GPS tracking chips. He panicked, tossed it out the window, and kept right on going. You can check out the phone for yourself, but it looks like it was thrown from a moving vehicle. I’m hoping that’s the case. Never a good scenario for a woman to be in the car of her abductor on the way to who knows where. But she could still be alive.”
“She could be,” said Victoria.
Riddel glanced farther down the road. “Worse case, he drove halfway to Naples before stopping to dispose of the body in the middle of the Everglades. Or he drove to Naples and just kept driving north, maybe with her still alive.”
Victoria glanced in Abe’s direction, then back at Riddel. “Anything is possible at this point.”
“I just issued a BOLO for the west coast, from Collier County on up,” said Riddel.
“I issued one six hours ago,” said Santos.
“I know. It’s consistent with yours.”
“I don’t care if it is. You need to coordinate with me. Exactly what did you tell them to be on the lookout for?”
“Here, look for yourself.” He pulled up
the BOLO on his phone, and Victoria read from the screen.
“No better than mine,” she said. “No worse.”
“The situation is what it is,” said Riddel. “Other than a photograph of Angelina and your criminal profile of Cutter—white male in his thirties—what else can we say? Angelina’s car is still parked in the driveway, so we don’t even know what kind of vehicle to look for, unless again we go with the stereotypical serial killer profile and hunt down commercial vans with no windows.”
“Any thoughts on how to find out what vehicles crossed the Trail in the last twenty-four hours?”
Riddel shook his head. “There aren’t any toll booths on the Tamiami Trail, so no cameras checking plates. I asked Collier County sheriffs to visit service stations around Naples. They’re talking to sales clerks, checking security cameras. People often stop for gas after a ride across the Trail. Maybe something will turn up.”
A commotion in the westbound lane caught Victoria’s attention. A media van was trying to force its way closer to the crime scene, and traffic cops were doing their job. Many more vans were sure to follow.
“We need to work out a press release,” said Victoria.
“I got it covered,” said Riddel.
“I’d like to see it.”
He hesitated.
“Before you issue it,” she said. “Unlike the BOLO.”
Riddel glanced over his shoulder, toward his friend Abe, then gave Victoria a stern expression. “Let me say this up front. We all know the statistics on married women murdered by their husbands, and I felt a certain vibe coursing through Abe’s house tonight. But at this point, I won’t say a damn thing to even hint that Abe Beckham is in any way, shape, or form under a cloud of suspicion. Period.”
Victoria neither agreed nor disagreed. “Communication with the media is a task force function. I need to see it.”
He locked eyes with her a moment, as if to reemphasize that certain things were not negotiable. “It’s in my car. I’ll get it.”
Victoria waited on the side of the road with Detective Reyes, both women watching the search and rescue team at work. Reyes broke the silence.
“I agree with Riddel,” she said. There was almost an apologetic quality to the detective’s voice.
Cane and Abe Page 14
