by Alex Segura
“We think we can help you,” Pete said. “If we write this story, draw some more attention to your daughter, maybe someone will come forward with information. It’s the best thing we can offer you now, which isn’t a lot, I know. But information is key. If we get anything that could help the police or get someone to come forward, it’d be worth your time. We don’t want this to fall through the cracks.”
Odalys’s shoulders slumped in resignation.
“All right,” she said, turning around and heading toward her house. “Let me make some café and we’ll talk.”
***
The Morales home was small but welcoming; the furniture and decor reminded Pete of his own grandmother’s house. The lighting was low, to conserve whatever cool air the ancient air conditioner was still able to spit out, and the shelves were stacked with books two-deep. A quick scan showed various volumes focused on the plight of the exile community and many histories of Cuba—essential reading for any educated household this close to the epicenter. They sat in the cozy living room, Kathy and Pete on chairs brought over from the dining room, Odalys sitting across from them on a colorful couch that didn’t look very comfortable. She rubbed her palms on her black pants and nodded to Kathy, as if to say “Let’s go.”
Kathy took the cue and pulled out a notepad and tape recorder. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Not if it means you won’t misquote me,” Odalys said, no sign of humor in her voice.
Kathy clicked the record button on the tiny device and slid it toward Odalys, resting it on the long coffee table between them.
“Odalys, can you tell us a little about what Erica was like?”
Odalys cleared her throat and waited a few seconds before speaking.
“Erica was a good girl,” Odalys said. “She did well in school, she had good friends from around the neighborhood. She was well behaved, never talked back, never drank, didn’t do drugs…” She trailed off.
“Did she have a boyfriend?” Pete asked.
“No, not that I knew of,” Odalys said, hesitating. “But I would know. She was always on her phone, texting, tweeting, e-mailing. You know. Every kind of distraction. But she still managed to get her homework done and do her chores. She wasn’t away enough to have a boyfriend, I don’t think.”
“Did they recover her cell phone?” Pete asked.
Odalys’s face jerked at the word “recover.” It was a reminder that her daughter wasn’t just on a school trip—she was gone. She closed her eyes. A tear started to slide down her face before she wiped it away.
“No, they didn’t,” she said, her voice hoarse. “They didn’t find it.”
“I realize a lot of this you’ve already discussed with the police,” Pete said, choosing each word with care. “But it’s very helpful to us. Do you remember the last time you saw your daughter?”
Odalys covered her face with her hands and began sobbing. Quietly at first, but soon she was shaking. She pulled her hands away and Pete could see her face, splotched with tears and red. She wiped her eyes with her arm and spoke, her voice shaking.
“She wanted to go to the mall,” she said, gasping after every third word. “I thought she needed to do some stuff around the house—clean her room, help me in the yard. But she insisted. She wanted to see a movie, she wanted to meet her friends there. So I let her go. She’s such a good girl. She never asks for anything.”
Pete didn’t correct her tense when discussing her daughter. He motioned for her to continue.
“I forgot to ask her who she was meeting,” Odalys said. “She said she was going to take the bus and one of her friends was going to bring her back. I didn’t think anything of it. The one time I didn’t press her to tell me everything, and this happens.” She nearly yelled the last two words.
Pete looked down at his feet. He hated this.
“Did you talk to any of her friends?” Kathy said. “Did any of them know who she was meeting?”
“None of them were there, except this one girl, Silvia Colmas, Silvita,” Odalys said, spitting out the last word like it was sour.
“You don’t seem very fond of her,” Pete said.
“She’s not a good girl,” Odalys said. “She was a troublemaker. I didn’t like for Erica to hang out with her. But she did what she wanted when it came to Silvita.”
“So, she was with Erica at the mall when she went missing?” Kathy asked.
“Yes. Yes, I think so,” Odalys said. “The police have already questioned her. She didn’t know who Erica left with. She didn’t see her leave with anyone. She just ‘lost track of her.’ Maldita.”
Pete didn’t need to translate the word for Kathy to know what it implied.
“Did Silvita go to school with Erica?” Pete asked.
“Yes, they both went to Miami High,” Odalys said.
Pete looked at Kathy. “Do you have anything else to ask?”
Kathy seemed confused by Pete’s question. “Um, yes, actually, I do,” she said. “Did you have to be somewhere?”
Pete stood up and looked at Odalys. “Ms. Morales, did Erica have her own computer?”
Odalys seemed confused, but tried to focus. “No, no,” she said. “She used the computer in our office, next to her bedroom.”
“Do you mind if I give it a look?”
“Well, no,” Odalys said. “The police already looked it over. They thought Erica had run away until…until they found her.”
“You guys continue,” Pete said. “I’ll go to the other room and check the computer.”
“This is standard newspaper procedure?” Odalys asked.
Kathy frowned. “Not really,” she said. “Pete is a colleague, we used to work together. He’s also a private detective.”
Pete didn’t try to correct her.
Odalys wrung her hands together and looked at Pete, who was still standing in front of her. “Do whatever you need to do,” she said, looking down at her lap.
Pete nodded and headed to the office, which was off to the right from the small dining room. The room was a converted bedroom, and appeared to be where Odalys’s sister stayed. She’d escaped to the kitchen after meeting Kathy and Pete. Pete sat down in front of an outdated PC. He tapped the space bar and waited for the computer to wake up.
Pete moved the mouse and started the computer’s web browser—Internet Explorer. He checked the program’s history and found what he would expect to find on a computer used mainly by a teenager: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, celebrity gossip sites, Gmail. Nothing out of the ordinary. He expanded the search to go back a week and discovered a few Craigslist hits. It looked like Erica was also scanning the Miami apartment listings. But for what? Pete thought. The ads Erica had looked at were innocent—young girls looking for roommates.
Pete switched back to Erica’s Gmail account. Erica had been smart enough not to save her password on the computer, but it didn’t take Pete very long to find the light blue Post-it note in the desk drawer on the right with “GM PW” scrawled on it. He typed in the combination of letters and punctuation and logged in as Erica. He typed “craigslist” into the search field at the top of the page and waited. After a few seconds, the screen loaded up about a dozen e-mails, each with the same subject line, referencing low-rent housing for students. Pete read through the e-mail conversation. Erica had e-mailed one of the posters from Craigslist in reference to one of the ads and in the hopes that the poster would have more listings. But why did she want to move out?
Pete continued to read. The poster, “Steve,” seemed to be Erica’s age, but something struck Pete as odd. The notes were being hit too perfectly, he thought. The pop culture references came across as more forced than real. This “Steve” person seemed a half-step behind. Pete sent the e-mails to print from Odalys’s creaking LaserJet. As the pages cranked out of the old machine, Pete continued to read. “Steve” insisted he had a “great deal” for Erica. But they needed to talk in person, since he would have to have his “uncle” sign for he
r.
Erica’s reasons for wanting to move were vague, but it was clear she didn’t get along with her mother, feeling stifled by her conservative upbringing. Her plan, or at least what she relayed to “Steve,” was that she and her friend—Silvita, Pete assumed—were going to quit school, get easy jobs, and save money to move to LA and “start a new life.”
Pete frowned. Erica didn’t strike him as the flighty type. He grabbed the pages from the printer and folded them so they fit in his back pocket. Who was “Steve”? The e-mail address he used, [email protected], didn’t match the [email protected] e-mail of Alice Cline’s pen pal, but both were from e-mail services that required minimal identification to start an account. He shut down the computer and double-checked to make sure he had the pages in his pocket. When he returned to the living room, Kathy was hugging Odalys near the front door.
“I was just about to go get you,” Kathy said. “I’m done.”
“How’d it go?”
“Good, I hope,” Odalys said, looking more at peace than when Pete left the two of them. “I hope talking about my Erica will help find the monster that did this, wherever he is. Did you find anything useful on the computer?”
“A few things,” Pete said. He’d found it much harder to lie since he’d stopped drinking. It made moments like these a bit more difficult. “But I doubt it was anything the police didn’t find.”
Odalys nodded.
Pete stuck out his hand and was surprised when Odalys drew him in for a hug. She held onto him for a second or two longer than he’d expected.
“If you or la gringa need anything,” Odalys said, “please call me.”
“You got it,” Pete said, walking outside of the house with Kathy.
As they stepped down the porch and toward Kathy’s car, Pete looked back to make sure Odalys was out of earshot before speaking. “Well, she seemed to be in a much better mood.”
“We connected,” Kathy said, no sign of sarcasm in her voice.
“You what?” Pete asked, opening the car door and getting into the passenger side. “Connected?”
“Yes,” Kathy said, starting the car. “It turns out Erica wasn’t as good a girl as Odalys wanted us to initially believe. They were constantly at odds. Erica threatened to move out a number of times. She’d run away before, too, which is why the cops weren’t very responsive when Odalys reported her missing. I talked to her about my drama with my mom—and how, after a time, we started to get along again. I told her that it would have happened with them. That her death wasn’t her fault.”
Pete couldn’t think of anything to say. He waited for the car to start moving.
“Did you find anything?”
“Huh?”
“On the computer,” Kathy said. “Anything useful?”
“Yeah, actually,” Pete said. “But nothing you could really run in the paper.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much,” Kathy said.
“Well, she was e-mailing with someone via Craigslist,” Pete said. “The exchange was similar to Alice Cline’s, but whoever she was e-mailing with seemed…off. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with Alice’s e-mails, it seemed more formal, like two adults conducting a business transaction,” Pete said. “Here, it read to me like two teens, except one of them learned how to be a teenager by watching Saved by the Bell reruns.”
“Someone impersonating a teenager?”
“Just a feeling I got. The way he talked was…I dunno. Off,” Pete said.
Kathy hesitated before turning onto the street. “You think it’s the same guy, then?”
“Yeah, I don’t see any other explanation.”
“Well, people look for apartments via the Internet all the time,” Kathy said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This could be a really weird coincidence.”
“True, but do two of the people looking up apartments end up dead?” Pete said.
“You’re probably right,” Kathy said, accelerating down the street. “And if you are, then this could get very bad.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pete stepped up to the podium and felt a hundred degrees warmer. His black blazer wasn’t helping. He pulled out a few crumpled note cards from his jacket pocket. He scanned the small crowd that had gathered in the ballroom. Mike’s parents had planned the memorial, and they’d asked Pete to take point on reaching out to Mike’s friends and colleagues—people Mike’s parents were not very familiar with—to make sure the people Mike had cared about were present. They’d also asked Pete to speak, something he’d managed to avoid a year earlier at the funeral. Pete spotted Emily standing off to his right, near the front. She looked more curious than sad, her eyes on Pete. He met them and she smiled. His eyes drifted and landed on the glasses people were holding. Wine. Beer. Liquor. He tried not to think about it. He hadn’t been to a meeting in a few days and he was feeling on edge.
He noticed Kathy slipping into the ballroom and standing at the rear of the small crowd. She’d barely known Mike, Pete thought, but Pete had invited her anyway. Their fates had been intertwined.
“First off, I’d like to take a moment to thank Reed and Kelly for putting this together,” Pete said, his voice shaky. He hated public speaking. “Mike was important to all of us, and it’s a wonderful thing to take a moment to recognize, once again, what a great friend, brother, and person he was. I hope we can do it again as the years go by.”
Pete swallowed. He waited a second before continuing. He looked to Emily and saw her taking a deep breath.
“Mike was the best person I’ve ever known,” Pete said. “And I didn’t deserve a friend like him. That kind of sums up how I feel about this.” He paused and looked around the room. “He was there whenever I needed him. He was the rock that I never expected but always relied on. In a time where everyone is soaked with cynicism and sarcasm, where you have to think twice whenever anyone does something nice for you, Mike was a beacon of genuine good. He was a kind person. I regret every day that he can’t see me trying to be. Not just for him, but because of him.”
Pete felt his throat tighten. His eyes began to well up. He pushed the note cards farther away on the podium and held onto each side, trying to steady himself. He was almost done, he told himself. Almost there.
“I wake up most mornings and feel an aching emptiness,” Pete said. “And it’s because so many people that meant so much to me and defined what I am are gone. It’s easy to make this about me, but it isn’t. We’re here for Mike. Because of Mike. I miss him all the time. Losing my best friend was like losing a part of me that I used every waking moment, and now, moving forward, it’s like learning to walk and live all over again. I miss you, man.”
Pete saw his hands shaking as he collected the cards from the podium. It took him a moment to notice the applause, soft at first, then more pronounced as he reached the ballroom floor. Emily met him and took him by the elbow to a nearby corner. He felt her hand rubbing his back and her warm breath on his neck.
“That was good,” she said. “He would have been happy.”
“Thanks,” he said, his face turning to see hers close to his. They turned their attention to the next speaker. Her hand slid into his, gripping it.
He felt a poke at his shoulder. He and Emily both turned to find Kathy behind them.
“Sorry to interrupt the latest edition of Puppy Love Revisited,” Kathy said, her voice low, trying not to interrupt the proceedings. “It’s a pleasure to see you both again, really, especially in full Hallmark mode. But I need to talk to Pete here for a second about our…case—for lack of a better, more realistic term.”
“Case? What?” Emily said.
“The murders,” Pete whispered to Emily, hoping that would pacify her.
“You’re working on them? Like, officially?” Emily was not pacified.
“No, not really, I was just helping Kathy,” Pete said. He didn’t sound very convincing, he th
ought. “I can explain it all later.”
“Yeah, let’s try that,” Emily said, pulling her hand away from Pete and folding her arms. She turned to face the stage, signaling for Pete to handle whatever he needed to handle.
He followed Kathy outside. The ballroom was a reception area at the Rivero Funeral Home, where Mike’s funeral had been held. The parking lot was mostly full and even this late in the evening not much cooler than the packed ballroom.
“What’s up?” Pete said.
“Did I get you in trouble or something?”
“I’m not sure,” Pete said, annoyed. “I don’t know. Don’t worry about it.”
“Done and done,” Kathy said. “I figured you’d want to hear this.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, my sources in the police department tell me that they’re freaking the fuck out over the Morales case,” Kathy said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from her purse and lighting one up. “They’re worried this isn’t just two linked murders but two in a series—like, serial killer time. There are things that they’re holding back from the press that are proving they’re connected—things that only the killer would know, that are repeated. Not just the posing.”
“What else?” Pete asked.
“The girls were posed sexually, that we know and the press knows,” Kathy said, looking around as if she were about to share a deep secret. “But both scenes featured mirrors. Lots of them. Some in the bag underwater with Alice Cline—some placed around Erica Morales’s body in the lot, facing each other. That was also a trick Whitehurst used toward the end. When he was still in some control.”
“What do the police think all this means?”
“Well, it means that the killer is definitely the same guy,” Kathy said.
“That’s kind of what we were thinking, too.”
“Kind of, but hoping for the opposite,” Kathy said. “The fact that the murders resemble one of the last serial killers brought down in Miami isn’t helping matters.”
“So, what does that mean for us?”
“Nothing, really,” Kathy said, taking a long drag. “My story about Erica Morales ran today and I got a few calls, but nothing substantial, just your usual ranters and concerned geezers complaining.”
