CHAPTER 32
“I’m bringing the evidence back,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“At Kim’s,” Richards said. “She’s back.”
“What?”
“Marci, she’s back and I’ve got her working.”
I was in the truck, driving, fast, for the city. It had taken me half the time to get back to the roadway. I stayed in the middle of the two-track to keep from messing up any tire prints for the impression techs but there wasn’t anything else to look for. With what we had, Morrison’s documented trip to the burial spot, a trace of a police tarp and obvious property belonging to the missing girls, we could squeeze the hell out of this guy. And that was before the crime scene guys got out there to match his tire tracks and go through the forensics at the site. In daylight there was no telling what they might find. The son of a bitch had gotten cocky. That had been his mistake.
When I got back to my truck I’d used a marine rope from my truck and strung a barrier across the entrance just in case someone should come along. When I got Richards on her cell phone I told her what I’d found and she’d gone quiet long enough to make me think I’d lost the connection again. Then she came back.
“I’ll call the Florida Highway Patrol and have them put a trooper out there to secure the scene,” she said.
“You’re still on Morrison, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve been checking with dispatch. They’ve been in touch with him by radio and have been sending him out on regular assignments,” Richards said.
“So what’s with Marci? Where the hell was she?”
Richards lowered her voice.
“She won’t say. When I asked her she just said, ‘Wait and see.’
“I was still in the office working the phones and the computer using her social security number to trace her folks in Minnesota but they’d both died—her mother when Marci was young and her father of a heart attack three years ago. Then Laurie called me and said she’d just shown up for work, begging to make up her time on the night shift.”
Instead of sounding relieved, maybe even giddy over Marci’s safety and my report on what we’d gotten from the Glades site, Richards sounded wary.
“So where are you now?” I said, slowing as I moved into a more populated section of Broward County. I didn’t need to get stopped now.
“I’m at Kim’s. I pulled a stool back into the hallway and I’m watching her work. She keeps answering the phone and looking out the windows,” Richards said. “I’m not letting her out of my sight and if Morrison comes in here I’m going to arrest his ass myself.”
“Look, Sherry,” I said. “If that happens, call for backup first, OK?”
“Right,” she said, and the phone clicked off.
It was one in the morning when I got to the bar. My jeans were wet up to the middle of my thighs from the swamp. My shirt was smeared with muck and I thought I could still smell the stench of death in the material. I parked in a spot on the back side of the shopping center and walked through the pool-room entrance. Richards was still sitting in the hallway that linked the two rooms, her back up against the wall. Another patron was making his way to the men’s room and said to her: “Hey, honey. You still here? I told you I’d be glad to give you a ride home.”
“My boyfriend will be here any minute,” she answered.
“That’s what you said an hour ago, sweetheart.”
“I was being polite,” she said and then noticed me walk in. “And I still am.”
The guy shrugged and slid by me.
“What’s up?” I said, looking beyond Richards to see Marci behind the back bar, working at the register, closing out the paper tabs that were piled there.
Even here in the shadows I could see the gray in her eyes. She’d let this whole mess boil too long in her head.
“I woke up the damn prosecutor and he said the evidence is circumstantial,” she said, the bitterness snapping off the words. “He said we’ll have to take it to a grand jury if we want to go after a cop.”
I put my back to the wall opposite her and leaned into it. I was tired.
“He said if forensics comes up with a blood match out there in the morning, maybe. If we run a photo spread past some other women who pick him out as trying to take them out there, maybe. The fact that he might have driven his squad car out there to look at the stars isn’t criminal. Even if you’re right and those are my girls out there, it’s still circumstantial. No judge will order an arrest warrant.”
Everything she said, I’d heard before and she had probably heard every time she’d gone to the same prosecutor’s office for the last several months on her disappearing girls. She was looking at the floor, trying to hide her tears. I was looking down, trying to think of something to say.
“He raped me.”
We both looked up at Marci. She’d come out from behind the bar and was standing in the hallway opening. Her arms were folded across her chest. Her chin was up and she did not try to wipe the tears from her cheek.
“He raped me out there in the Everglades, where he goes. I went to the sexual assault treatment center today. That’s where I was. I thought they would just go and arrest him but they didn’t.”
Richards and I looked at each other but let her continue.
“They taped an interview and made me sign a sworn statement and when I asked them what they were going to do they said they had to send everything to some internal office because it was a cop and that they’d get back to me. I thought that meant a couple of hours so I stayed away from my place all day and they never called but he did,” she said and a tremble was setting up in her voice and a paleness I had seen before when I had first told her of Morrison’s motives.
“So I came to work because I was afraid and he’s still calling and he’s still out there and he’s going to be out there when I get off and…”
This time when she stumbled, Richards jumped forward and caught her. She reached under the girl’s elbows to support her and this time Marci did not wave off the help and instead leaned into Richards and sobbed, and then they wrapped their arms around each other and Sherry looked up at me and her eyes were filled with tears.
“We’re going to arrest his ass now, right now,” Richards barked into the cell phone. “We’ve got a witness to an attack perpetrated by him, the same witness that your office has had all goddamn day and sat on your hands with for the sake of goddamn protocol. We also have evidence of at least one other homicide at the same site where this witness was attacked and we’re picking him up. You can meet us out there if you’re fast but we’re not waiting.”
We were in my truck, Richards in the passenger seat, Marci in between us. When Richards had called dispatch, they told her Morrison was helping to set up a perimeter on the east side of the city park. Another officer was in foot pursuit of an aggravated battery suspect. She had pulled out her police radio and switched channels to the Fort Lauderdale P.D. frequency and we were following their call out directions.
Richards had asked if the battery was of a woman and the dispatcher had answered, “No, it’s a, uh, Ms. O’Kelly, out in front of her home in Victoria Park. She reported that someone threatened her with a baseball bat.”
The name set a lump in my chest and I asked Sherry to turn the radio up.
“Description of the suspect, four-eighteen?” dispatch asked.
“White male…heavy, six-foot…wearing, wearing gray cutoff sweatshirt…uh…dark pants…”
“Four-eighteen? Four-eighteen, what’s your location?” the dispatcher said, worry now sneaking into her voice.
I turned off from Sunrise Boulevard into the main entrance of the park and could see other spinning cop-car lights coming in from two other directions.
“Four-eighteen. Suspect in custody,” the winded cop on the radio said.
“Ten-four, four-eighteen. Location?” said the dispatcher.
“On the soccer field, north end of the park.”
We followed th
e patrol cars and came to a stop in the parking lot of the soccer field. Richards held her door handle and we both scanned the squad cars, looking for Morrison’s number or someone in uniform that looked like him. When we couldn’t spot him, we got out.
“Stay inside for right now, OK, Marci? We need you to point him out, give us a positive identification. Just wait here,” Richards said and reached out and touched the girl on the leg before closing the door.
We walked over to the line of cars together, looking in both directions, closely. The officers had aimed their headlights out onto the field and then gotten out. There were six of them.
The rain had stopped and the grass out in front of us was glistening in the low trajectory of the headlights and then someone yelled, “There they are.”
Out on the field two figures were walking and appeared to be half dragging a third.
We stood and looked out along with the rest of the arriving cops and as the three came closer I recognized two of them.
They were twenty yards away when Morrison stopped, jerking the whole procession to a halt. He was staring at me with my stained shirt and jeans soaked to the thigh, and then at Richards and then farther to her left. Marci had walked up and stood beside her.
At first his face looked confused and then tightened like a fist into anger. He dropped the man I knew as David Hix and pointed his finger at Richards.
“What’s that bitch doing here?” he yelled, to no one in particular.
The officers around us seemed to stop moving.
“Yo, Kyle,” someone next to us started but Morrison stopped him.
“No,” he yelled. “I want to know why these fucking people are here!”
A few of the cops looked at us, at least one recognized Richards.
“Hey chill, Kyle. It’s command, man.”
Richards turned and said something I could not hear to Marci. The girl nodded yes and Richards stepped forward.
“We need to talk with you, Morrison. It’s as simple as that. Let your colleagues handle this arrest and come with us.”
She took another step forward and I matched her.
“No. I don’t think so,” Morrison said, looking down at Hix and over to the running cop who seemed to be frozen by the turn of events. “You don’t order me around, bitch.”
I heard a jostle behind me and then a large, broad-chested man in uniform with sergeant stripes on his arm pushed through.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Richards as he passed her and then turned. “Goddammit, Officer Morrison, you are screwin’ this up for everyone. Now surrender your weapon. I call the goddamn shots on this shift.”
The collection of uniforms, polished leather, bristling chrome and brushed-steel weaponry was uncharacteristically caught up in indecision. One of their own was freaking. One of their own was way out of line, right in front of them. There was no standard procedure for it. No chapter in the manual.
Off to one side and behind Morrison, a figure came out of the dark and then stopped. I could tell by his size and shape it was O’Shea, on foot. But he too froze at the sight before him and no one on the line seemed to notice him.
They must have been watching as Morrison used his right hand to deliberately and slowly unsnap the leather guard on his holster.
“Officer Morrison,” the sergeant said again, thinking it was a calming voice, thinking the cop’s beef had to be with Richards for some reason. “I gave you an order, son. I’m the officer in charge here.”
No one on the line said a word, but I saw the cop next to Morrison move away and I heard the clicks of several holster snaps behind me.
“No sir,” Morrison said. “I beg to differ.”
He pulled his 9mm and raised it, barrel first, and pointed it in our direction and just as every cop is trained, and just as every one on the line knew, it was a death sentence that Morrison now controlled.
At least a dozen rounds exploded from behind and to the side of us, many of them hitting their mark only twenty feet away and Morrison went down without once pulling his trigger.
Marci screamed and turned away. David Hix yelped and curled up into a ball on the grass. I looked down the line at Richards and she had not moved to draw her own weapon.
CHAPTER 33
It was early morning and the sun had broken white and molten like a heavy bubble stretching up and then off the horizon. I was in my beach chair, sipping my coffee, watching the sky and water absorb the blue light of refraction over the rim of my cup.
There was not a ripple of breeze and the ocean lay flat like a hot sheet of glass. The black-footed terns were working the shoreline, pecking and dancing. I would have at least another hour before the electrician came to install a new light over the dining room table. I had not been able to sleep on the couch with the smell of fresh paint in my nose so I had camped out on the beach since long before dawn.
Billy had called me late last night, amusement in his voice over the receipt of official notice informing him as the legal representative of Colin O’Shea that all charges had been dropped against his client. It had been weeks.
“The wheels of justice and paperwork,” he’d said and left it to me to fill in whatever ending I wished.
David Hix had been arrested and charged in both the assault on Rodrigo and attorney Sarah O’Kelly. Our Filipino friend stayed in the hospital for several days but neither Billy nor I could convince him to stay. He went home to Manila with his wife, who had accepted the cruise line’s money to come to America and retrieve him.
“I thank you with my life, Mr. Max,” he had said when we had gone to see him in the hospital. “But your America is not a safe place. All I wanted to do was work and bring money to my family.”
He was holding his wife’s hand when we left and in the parking lot Billy stood at the window of my truck while I got in. I had been beating myself up over the man’s injuries, one heaped on top of the other, because no one had been there to protect him.
“You are not r-responsible for the world, my friend,” he said. “Even though you may think it is so.”
I had stared out past him into the vision of the taped-off crime scene out at the end of a desolate road in the Glades where technicians and assistants from the medical examiner’s officer were meticulously sorting out what would turn out to be the partial remains of four young women, including Amy Strausshiem and Suzy Martin.
The cause of Morrison’s death had been ruled a suicide by cop. His choice. But I was not displeased with the ending. As far as the families of those young women were concerned, their daughters’ killer was just as dead, and perhaps more forgettable without the drawn out process of law.
Billy’s statement about responsibility and who carried it had stuck in my head for days afterward. We had all met a man in Colin O’Shea whose shoulders had been widest.
Colin had kept up his surveillance of Marci for nearly twenty hours until she had gone to work. There he recognized Morrison’s squad car in the parking lot and was trying to move to another position when Morrison suddenly accelerated out toward the park. He tailed him. He was following on foot, crossing the field when he saw the line of cops open fire. From his distance and with Morrison’s back to him, it had looked, he said, like a firing squad.
“Even the brotherhood of blue gotta break at some point, Freeman,” he said later while we both sipped our whiskeys at Kim’s and neither of us, with our histories, was smiling. O’Shea said he had never been a part of the sex games his fellow officers had played with Faith Hamlin. It had in fact disgusted him. “But I didn’t have the guts to turn them in,” he said.
But he knew the girl and her adoptive family. She had told him that her stepfather, an Irishman himself, had labeled her a whore when IAD began snooping around the case. “And I also knew the married redheaded son of a bitch who fathered Jessica,” he said. “Her life would’ve been hell there. So I took her away.”
He had helped support and counsel Faith Hamlin ever since and had ne
ver looked back “until you came along and partnered up with me again, Freeman.”
His rescue of the girl had been an act of redemption for him. Of his own volition, he’d stepped over the line more than a few times as a cop; his decision this time was to save her and let the pieces fall where they may. There was a look of resignation in his face when I told him there was no way Richards could keep it a secret. She’d have to report the discovery of a missing person to the Philadelphia department. He’d have to go back and face it.
“Guess your ex-wife ain’t gonna get those captain’s bars after all,” he said, smiling as he thought about it.
“She’ll find a way,” I answered, trying not to.
It would be a media circus when the news broke. Someone would get a photo of the little girl. Someone else’s life was going to crash. We were both quiet for a few drinks.
“It’s a hell of a thing to do, lad,” Colin suddenly said, using his old Irish brogue. “Goin’ home again.” We both drank to that.
Now I was thinking about sleet and spitting snow while the sun traveled higher in front of me and a sheen of sweat began to form on my chest. Beside me I picked up a movement of bright yellow and green in the corner of my eye. The young boy with the blue eyes was standing beside me, his sand bucket and shovel in hand.
“Josh,” a woman’s voice called from behind me. “Go down to the water, honey, and wash your bucket.”
The boy turned and skipped toward the ocean and I looked up as a pair of legs stepped into his place.
“Good morning,” the woman said.
I had to shield my eyes to see her face. She was young and very tanned and her dark hair was tucked through the back of a baseball cap.
“It is,” I said.
“You know,” she said, dropping down to face level, her knees resting in the sand, “you have my son infatuated.”
I raised my eyebrows and pointed out to the boy. While she nodded I glanced at her left hand.
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