‘Where’s Flamingo?’ Grace wanted to know.
‘South of Belle Island,’ Martinez said. ‘If it’s him, the bastard could have been cruising right by us when he called.’
Right under their noses, maybe, beneath Broad Causeway or even closer, beneath Kane Concourse, heading under Collins Avenue through Haulover out into the Atlantic.
‘He might have gone south, not north,’ Grace said.
Sam shook his head. ‘He’d never go through Government Cut, not with the Coast Guard Station right on top of him.’
They heard the sound then.
Raucously loud and welcome.
‘Chopper.’ Martinez looked skyward.
‘How did Miller say I make this goddamned boat go real fast?’ Sam called over his shoulder.
‘Just push the throttle forward.’ Martinez leaned forward, pointed at the lever. ‘Further you push it, the faster we go.’
Grace shut her eyes and said a swift prayer.
Sam pushed the throttle all the way.
The Windswept roared into life.
102
The helicopter sounded to Cal like the wrath of God.
Not long now.
He didn’t know how it would go from here on, just that it would go.
The terror had receded again, because some things were meant to be, and there was no fighting them.
Some people were meant to die.
And if his hell was going to be Jewel, at least Cal knew it probably wouldn’t be that much worse than too much of his life had been.
Not going back to jail – that much he’d decided.
No way.
103
The waters in Haulover were rougher than they’d anticipated, Sam riding the powerboat too fast, Grace and Martinez both hanging on as waves pounded and rocked the Windswept, but the three friends on board were way beyond caring for themselves, their goal, they hoped and prayed, somewhere out in that ocean up ahead, the expanse of darkness now starting to become more easily definable from the lighter grey, early dawn sky.
They could hear two choppers up there now, both getting louder, their lights visible, one ahead to the east, the other still farther north.
The radio began to crackle again, and Martinez jammed it tight against his right ear, struggling to hear.
‘They’ve seen the cruiser,’ he yelled.
‘Where?’ Sam yelled back as they roared out into the open Atlantic waters.
‘What’s that?’ Grace had let go of the rail, was straining now to see through the binoculars, leaning forward, her heart thumping hard, her body wedged tightly against the side of the boat to give her better balance. ‘Straight ahead.’
‘That’s it,’ Martinez shouted. ‘Has to be.’
They all saw it. A small white cruiser a couple of miles ahead, due east.
Motionless, it seemed, rocking in the water.
Windswept still pounding on.
‘Need to start slowing down, man,’ Martinez told Sam.
‘Sam, slow down,’ Grace yelled.
He was already throttling back, the boat responding swiftly.
Coming to get you, Joshua.
He was aware of other boats on their way, coming from north and south, aware of light and sound and movement on the waters, everyone coming to help, and the crackle from the radio was constant now.
‘Maybe we should leave it to the Coast Guard,’ Martinez yelled.
Knowing, sure as snakes spat, that Sam would not do that.
104
B aby was dead in the water now.
Going nowhere.
This old cruiser had seen a lot of living, Cal figured.
And dying, too.
No place left to go.
Time.
105
They were about a quarter of a mile away now, and Sam had the Windswept all the way down to a crawl.
‘Al, take over,’ he called, dragging off his shoes.
‘What the fuck you doin’, man?’ Martinez stepped up and grabbed the wheel.
‘Going to get our son.’ Sam was already at the side, clambering up.
‘Sam, I don’t know.’ Grace grabbed at his arm.
And then she let it go again, her thoughts suddenly crystal clear, knowing damned well that if he weren’t heading overboard, she would be.
‘Please be careful,’ she told him. ‘I need you both back.’
Martinez glanced up at the chopper, could see its green and white markings, almost overhead now. ‘Better get off if you’re going, man.’
And Sam took his dive.
He was halfway there when the world erupted.
He felt the shockwaves pound his body and reverberate in his head, ripping through ocean and air, dragging him under for too many long, horrible moments, and then he came up again, choking and coughing up salt water.
He could see stars in the sky, fiery stars everywhere.
Not stars at all.
‘Joshua!’ he screamed.
Too deafened by the explosion even to hear his own voice.
‘Sam!’ Grace screamed.
‘Jesus,’ Martinez said, feeling Windswept rocking and rolling beneath them, wondering abruptly if there might be more to come, if he should be taking Grace away from here.
And then the powerboat began to settle.
A curious kind of silence hung heavily in the air.
‘I can’t see anything!’ Grace cried, because the smoke was like thick fog.
‘Sam!’ Martinez yelled.
The smoke cleared a little, shifted by the breeze.
They were both at the side, close together, peering through, struggling to see.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Martinez said, quite softly.
Because the Baby had gone.
Fragments and shards and atoms of Lord knew what else were still descending in an eerie slow kind of rain, settling on the surface of the water.
‘Joshua!’ Grace screamed. ‘Sam!’
She moved suddenly, scrambling up, trying to get a hold, wanting to get over the side and into the water.
‘No!’ Martinez grabbed her round the waist.
‘Let me go!’
‘I can’t do that.’
And then he saw.
‘There!’ he yelled. ‘Sam’s there!’
Grace froze, seeing him too, his dark head there one minute, mouth open, gulping air, then diving again.
Realization hit Martinez first.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.
Because there was nothing left to dive for.
‘Joshua,’ Grace said, her voice very quiet, just before she folded at the waist and started to go down.
Martinez caught her.
It had been a long while since he had wept.
Sam, coming up for the fifth time, his heart exploding with grief and rage, saw it before the radio dispatcher reported the sighting from the helicopter.
‘Dinghy north-east.’
Baby Moses.
He trod water for a moment, gasping for air, rubbing salt out of his eyes, lost his bearings, frantically twisted and turned in the water.
‘Where’d it go?!’ he yelled.
‘There!’ Martinez’s voice was hoarse but loud enough, just reaching Sam over the noise of the chopper and the waves. ‘To your left, man!’
On board the Windswept, Grace heard his voice, dragged herself up off the deck, shook away the dizziness, saw the dinghy, saw Sam almost there.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Oh, please God.’
Sam’s eyes were stinging and the wounds on his chest were burning up.
Best pain he’d ever felt in his life.
Almost there. Two more strokes of his arms and his right hand touched rubber, then a kind of handle, grabbed hold.
‘Joshua, I’m here, son.’
He began to haul himself up, knowing he had to be careful, terrified of causing a capsize, started to slide off again, heard Grace’s voice cry out in fear, managed to hold on, get a firmer grip.
He saw the wicker basket.
With Joshua inside.
Best sight he’d ever seen.
His son’s dark eyes were wide open, gazing calmly at his father.
‘Thank you, sweet Jesus,’ Sam said.
And scrambled into the dinghy.
106
‘Tough little kid,’ one of the doctors at Miami General told Sam and Grace with something like admiration.
They kept him in the hospital for observation – and because Dr David Becket, whose opinions they respected, had made a forceful request that they err on the side of caution – yet Joshua, remarkably, seemed little the worse for his ordeal, picking up quickly despite the antihistamine that Cooper had put into his system and the time – however long it had been – that he had spent in that dinghy.
His parents had never been so grateful for the warmth of Florida nights.
Jerome Cooper was gone, along with Baby, the most likely theory, shared by all concerned in the hunt, that he had probably chosen to end his lousy life along with the cruiser, possibly inspired by the youthful Bang Gang, by stuffing a rag in the boat’s gasoline tank and igniting it.
One grisly piece of evidence had been swiftly found in the debris: human remains still to be officially identified. Part of a woman’s finger with a white-polished nail, yielding the strong probability that Roxanne Lucca – who they now knew had flown from Chicago to Miami just a little ahead of Sam – had been on board with Cooper when Baby had exploded.
Mother and son both missing, presumed dead.
No one on earth, so far as the Beckets knew, mourning their loss.
‘I’m so glad Jerome’s dead,’ Grace told Claudia on the phone on Thursday evening, calling her from the paediatric floor. ‘I’d be afraid, otherwise, of what Sam might want to do to him.’
Miami General calling Westlake Hospital in Melrose Park, where Claudia was still doing what little she could for their father.
‘I’m sure Sam would leave it to justice,’ Claudia said.
‘Maybe it’s me then I’m not so sure about,’ said Grace.
‘I wish I was back there with you,’ Claudia said.
‘Don’t you think it’s about time you went back home, sis?’
‘If Dan still wants me.’
‘Just get back there and find out,’ Grace said.
107
June 20
Mildred was doing much better.
Sam had been doing his best to visit with her most days, his father standing in for him when his son couldn’t make it in.
‘She’s a very special lady,’ David agreed with Sam.
‘She seems quite taken with you, too,’ said Sam.
Eight days had passed since the abduction, and Grace had roasted two chickens in honour of Friday night, Saul taking his turn – Becket family style – to light the Sabbath candles. And right now, dinner over, Saul was in the kitchen, washing up, while Grace was upstairs in the nursery, checking up on Joshua for the fifth time since they’d sat down at the table.
The older father and son were out on the deck, Woody – given the all-clear less than a day after his own ordeal – lying contentedly at Sam’s feet on the planks.
‘Has Mildred mentioned her plans after she’s discharged?’ David wanted to know. ‘She surely can’t go back to living rough.’
‘I think we’ll have a tough time talking her out of it,’ Sam said.
‘Maybe it’s up to us then,’ his father said, slowly, ‘to come up with some kind of workable alternative.’
Sam was intrigued. ‘What kind of alternative?’
‘Give me time,’ said David.
108
June 23
Elliot Sanders gave Sam a call at the office the following Monday morning.
‘I thought I should tell you myself,’ he said.
‘What now?’ Much as he appreciated the doc, Sam had found over the years that he seldom had cause to enjoy calls from medical examiners.
‘There was only one body on the Baby,’ Sanders said. ‘There’s a whole lot of stuff it’s going to take a long time to sift through and analyse, but every piece of flesh and bone and tooth spared by that explosion belonged to the mother.’
‘No trace of Cooper at all?’ Sam asked.
It wasn’t the first frustration to grate on the detectives since the killer’s probable death. Martinez had uncovered, just days ago, a rap sheet for Cooper that had been misfiled because of someone’s spelling mistake – and if Sam had found that prison record right after Jerome’s visit to their house, he’d have gotten an arrest warrant then and there, and the second victim might have been saved and Joshua would not have been taken.
‘Human fucking error,’ Martinez had said.
‘Has to happen once in a while,’ Sam had said, more calmly than he’d felt.
‘Yeah,’ Martinez had said. ‘Shit happens.’
Cold, hard proof of Cooper’s guilt in the killings was still in maddeningly short supply. They had established that Baby had been sold to him in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the witness who had reported the disturbance on the cruiser had also identified the man he’d seen a few times at the marina as Jerome Cooper.
‘There’s no real doubt,’ Sanders continued now on the phone, ‘that Cooper was on the boat prior to the blast, but we simply have nothing to prove that he was still on board when it went up.’
Spectres danced before Sam’s mind’s eye.
Silver angels of death.
‘But this isn’t the final word, right?’ he asked.
‘Not officially, no,’ Sanders said, ‘but as good as.’ The ME paused. ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I wish I had something more conclusive for you.’
‘Me too,’ Sam said.
109
June 29
‘The sonofabitch has gotta be dead,’ Martinez said almost a week later.
Not certain, even as he spoke, that it was the truth.
Just wanting it to be so.
Missing, presumed drowned.
Cooper had been seen taking the Baby out of Flamingo Marina, was almost certainly the individual who’d stuffed the rag into the gasoline tank – and the chances of his diving overboard at that point and escaping were remote, given that the explosion would have occurred as soon as the naked flame had hit the fumes from the open tank. The consensus of opinion, therefore, was that if he had by chance survived, with so many boats out there at the time, someone would surely have spotted Cooper swimming away. And if he’d tried coming ashore in the first several hours after that, chances were that he’d have been caught and charged.
Chances.
‘What we need,’ Sam said now, ‘is a body.’
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d said that.
Not just for them. For the Adani family and the second victim, still nameless.
‘Ocean’s a big place, man,’ said Martinez.
‘Not good enough,’ said Sam. ‘Not nearly good enough.’
110
July 1
Still no second body, but there had been a major breakthrough in the homicide investigation, after one José Ricardo, the manager of a bed and breakfast on Collins Avenue in South Beach, had discovered that one of his employees had been renting out a space at the back of his building.
No name for the tenant, cash changing hands, his employee since fired.
But the occupant had left a small stack of notebooks filled with writing.
‘I was going to throw them in the trash,’ Ricardo had told the MBPD officers who’d first responded to his phone call, ‘but then I took a closer look and figured you might be interested.’
Sam Becket and Alejandro Martinez had been more than interested.
The writings of the killer had filled five and a half books, all with the same title.
‘The Epistle of Cal the Hater’.
An all but unrecognizable individual, hard for the most part to reconcile with the weak young man who’d shown up at the Beck
et house that morning three weeks ago, but still Jerome Cooper beyond a shadow of a doubt – his sadistic, racist mother referred to as ‘Jewel’ most of the time, but identified as Roxanne or Roxy once or twice.
Sam Becket mentioned, too.
And the hate that ‘Cal’ had felt for him.
The ‘epistles’ would be studied for a long time to come.
Which would – that much was abundantly, sickeningly clear to Sam and Martinez – have pleased the madman himself.
111
July 5
Claudia and Daniel had been in Chicago for three days, staying at the Hyatt Regency, when Sam and Grace flew into O’Hare.
The Brownleys had come because Frank would soon be ready to leave hospital, and neither Claudia nor Daniel, having been reconciled, had wanted any more time apart. A nursing home had already been chosen, and the Melrose Park house – no longer a crime scene – was to be put up for sale.
Grace and Sam had come down in time for the Fourth, joining them at the hotel and watching the fireworks together at the Navy Pier.
David and Saul were back home, taking fine care of Joshua, and David was in dogged ongoing negotiations with Mildred Bleeker, trying to persuade her to come stay with him for a period of convalescence after her discharge from Miami General.
‘Negotiating Middle East peace might be easier,’ David had told Sam last week.
‘No pushover, our Mildred,’ Sam had said. ‘I did warn you.’
‘She’s a proud lady. I respect that.’
‘Which just might be the one thing that lets her give in,’ Sam had said.
‘Pride?’ His father had looked dubious.
‘I meant your respect,’ Sam had said.
It was the first time Grace had seen Frank in more than seven years.
Some of the old hatred melting away beneath pity for his helplessness.
‘Not such a bad feeling,’ she told Sam afterwards. ‘Shedding a little bitterness.’
‘Poor old guy,’ said Sam.
‘Let’s not go overboard,’ Grace said.
They all went together to close up the house.
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