The Ice Maiden

by Edna Buchanan

  Burch pawed through the box, then thrust a file folder at me. A photograph was stapled to the cover. Ricky and Sunny, smiling shyly in front of a brightly lit Christmas tree, moments before embarking upon their first and last date.

  “I kept that one out, to remind me,” Burch said, his intensity so electric that it charged the air around us.

  The slender sweet-faced girl smiling from the photo in no way resembled the icy young woman I’d met, bundled up against the cold of her freezer.

  The Hartleys and Ricky appeared in other photos aboard the Sunshine Princess. The teens, her parents, and little brother, Tyler, all wore holiday colors and smiles of anticipation. Sunny’s father, the distinguished physician, wore a jaunty red Santa hat with a white pom-pom. Their faces, illuminated by bursts of flashbulb brilliance, were painful to see, knowing that before the next sunrise young Ricky would lie dying in a field and life, for the others, would never be the same. Official crime-scene photos displayed from all angles the lanky boy-man body of Ricky Chance, battered and blood-soaked in the dirt.

  Nazario’s dark eyes glistened as he studied them.

  “Que linda,” he murmured at Sunny’s picture.

  “A stand-up kid,” Burch said. “Got more cojones than half the people we got wearing badges. Shoulda seen the way she worked with us—no tantrums, no tears, polite—even when she was hurting, after all she’d been through. Well brought up, everything anybody could want in a daughter. Those people are damn lucky they didn’t lose her that night.”

  “Her folks,” Stone said thoughtfully, “might persuade her to cooperate. Maybe you or Britt should talk to them.”

  “Worth a try,” I said. “I’d like to meet the boy’s family, too.”

  “Haven’t heard from the parents in years.” Burch looked wistful. “Was a time we talked every day.”

  “Musta figured they hadda get on with their lives,” Corso said.

  The elevator doors opened, spilling out Lottie and the same public information officer who had escorted me. He no longer wore his stern no-nonsense expression. They were laughing like old friends. Leave it to Lottie, I thought. Even the detectives perked up in her presence. Her red hair wild and frizzy from the ever-present humidity, she wore her usual faded blue jeans, hand-tooled leather cowboy boots, and western-style shirt, expensive cameras dangling like accessories from leather straps around her neck.

  “Hey!” she greeted Corso, her freckled nose wrinkled, teeth flashing in a wide grin. “You sure look a damn sight better. First time I made your picture you were horizontal, being loaded into the air-rescue chopper, headed for the trauma center. Bet that’s a Kodak moment you’d like to forget.”

  We had both covered the bank robbery in which Corso was wounded.

  “Damn straight.” He grinned. “All I was thinking about was staying alive.”

  “What don’t kill you makes you stronger,” she said. “Heard you went to jolly ol’.”

  “Couldn’t wait to get back here,” he said. “No decent Italian food in that whole damn country, no pasta, no pizza, no pasta e fagioli. And those people drive on the wrong side of the road. I almost got wiped out half a dozen times in London traffic. Kept looking the wrong way when I stepped off the curb.”

  “Did you book the Jack the Ripper tour?” I asked. “Takes you to the crime scenes, shows you where he left the bodies.”

  “Why’d I want to see that? We ain’t got enough crime scenes here? That bastard only killed about eight; we got guys on the loose here that put him to shame.”

  “Jack the Ripper.” Stone leaned back in his chair. “Now that’s a cold case.”

  “Bite your tongue,” said Burch, still digging through his box of old files. “Lieutenant hears about it, she’ll give us that one too. Bad enough she wants us to solve Meadows, more than twenty years old.”

  “Some people believe Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family,” Stone said.

  “Speaking a them,” Corso said, sipping from a coffee mug bearing the advice DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN, “I seen the Queen Mother herself. I’m standing on a street corner, and she passes right by on some local holiday, gives me the royal wave.”

  “Hah.” Lottie wrinkled her nose. “Don’t tell me you buy into that.”

  “Inta what?”

  “That whole Queen Mum scam. Hell-all-Friday, I made pictures of that woman two–three times when I was based over there. What is she now, a hundred? Out there in high heels, spry as a mountain goat, posing for photographers. That ain’t her, can’t be. No way. That woman was old during World War Two. The original musta bought the ranchero years ago. Like Lassie.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I said.

  “How many Lassies have there been?” she drawled, cutting her eyes at me. “Some-a those collies weren’t even females. Or Morris the cat. There’ve been a couple dozen Morris the cats.”

  “No way,” I protested. “It makes worldwide headlines when a royal dies.”

  “Think about it.” She plopped into a desk chair on wheels, rolled back several feet, and continued. “Today’s royal family is a joke. Too damn much inbreeding screwed ’em all up. Cost the country a fortune. An embarrassment in the scandal sheets, a drain on the economy. The Queen Mum is the most popular one-a the bunch. They got to keep her for public-relations purposes. There’ll always be a Queen Mum. Count on it. She’s all that’s keeping the monarchy alive. Without her, the Brits would’ve abolished it a long time ago.”

  She pouted at our hoots of derision. “Okay, be naive. Think it can’t be done? What about Fidel?”

  Nazario and I reacted, as all Cubans do, to the mere mention of the name.

  Lottie smiled archly, now the undisputed center of attention. “You think he really survived all them assassination attempts, outsmarted ten presidents, the CIA, and the Eyetalian mob? God knows how many Fidels’ve been used up.”

  We stared at her in amazement as she casually picked up a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white pictures from Nazario’s desk.

  “Where’d you git these?” she said, squinting at them. “Didn’t know you still used black-and-white.”

  “We don’t,” Stone said. “We use video, living color, digital cameras, and three-D. We even have virtual reality that re-creates crime scenes for juries. Those, unfortunately, are circa 1981, the Meadows case.”

  I peered over her shoulder as Lottie turned a picture sideways, frowning at an elderly woman, dead in her bed. She appeared to be sleeping, pink plastic curlers in her thinning hair, the sheet and a flowered bedspread tucked up neatly beneath her chin.

  “Virginia Meadows,” Burch said. “Age seventy-nine. None of us were even on the department yet when that case went down.”

  “But what do you want to bet that we solve this sucker?” Stone replied, pacing the small office. His lean body exuded energy. “I feel it in my bones. The son-of-a-bitch is out there somewhere. Thinks he got away with it. Thinks his secret’s buried deep in the past. Well, his worst bad dream is about to come true. We’re coming for him.”

  “Nice to see you thinking positive,” Burch said. “But it ain’t gonna be easy. We got a helluva lot better shot at the Chance case.”

  Lottie snapped candids of the detectives at their desks, on the phones, and poring through old reports while I studied the Chance files and Burch located addresses for the victims’ parents.

  “Any physical evidence that could tie Coney to the rape?” I asked, thumbing through a supplemental report. “DNA?”

  “Nada,” he said. “All they focused on at the hospital was trying to save her life. It was clear what happened, but nobody did a rape kit or collected evidence. DNA wasn’t in the picture yet. If we had her clothes they could be tested, but no chance of finding them now.”

  We dined on pizzas the detectives ordered in as they filled us in on the Meadows case.

  “Another sad story,” Nazario warned.

  Widowed and childless, lonesome after her
husband died, Virginia Meadows, age seventy-nine, befriended strangers who seemed lonely too. She took in runaways, AWOL servicemen, and other lost people. A stranger she met on the bus or in the park would be invited for a home-cooked dinner. Sometimes she lent money to these new friends, who neglected to pay her back. Neighbors said later that she often appeared depressed. Some of them warned her, and for a time she listened. But loneliness took over. She began to take in strangers again.

  At about 10 P.M. on an October night in 1981, a neighbor dropped her off at her house after a trip to the supermarket. She was found dead at about five the following afternoon by a boarder. He was a man she’d met in Bayfront Park. He’d asked her for a dime and she’d invited him home for dinner. He had lived there for about three weeks. He passed a polygraph.

  The killer had arranged her body in a sleeping position after strangling her, so as not to arouse suspicion. He took nothing else, only her life.

  “The original detectives spent a whole lotta time on the case,” Burch said, reaching for another slice of pizza. “Kids who had crashed there were traced to Tampa, Panama City, Key Largo. Most didn’t know she was dead. Every last one asked the same question.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, wiping mozzarella off my chin.

  “Why would anybody kill her when all she did was help people down on their luck?”

  “She’d be a hundred years old if she were still alive,” I said.

  “Like the Queen Mum,” Lottie said, eyebrow lifted.

  “Would have been nice if she’d had the chance,” Nazario said solemnly.

  “Sad,” I said, “what loneliness can do.”

  Thoughts of loneliness and the faces in the photo in K.C. Riley’s office almost overwhelmed me as I drove back to the office.

  In the library, Onnie had hit pay dirt. She’d found a News file on Ronald Stokes, aka Mad Dog. An enterprising reporter covering courts back then had featured him in a project on juvenile justice, documenting a violent felony record that began at age nine. I checked the dates. Stokes had been released from a youth detention center just two days before Ricky and Sunny’s abduction.

  Beginning to share Burch’s excitement, I faxed a request to the Department of Corrections. This investigation could be the centerpiece in my Sunday magazine project. I’d follow it from the start, a minute-by-minute account, then be there for the arrests. Lottie could shoot the suspects being handcuffed. This story would be bigger and better than I anticipated. I needed to work on it full time.

  I asked Fred, the city editor, for comp time. Howie Janowitz could cover my beat. I promised to be available if all hell broke out and I was needed, and to follow developments in the Gomez case, which was related, but otherwise I’d be off the schedule.

  “When do you want to start?” Fred asked doubtfully.

  “Now,” I said. “Eight o’clock.”

  He checked his watch. “It’s already nine.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He gave the nod and I nearly danced out of his office, free from the city desk and daily deadlines. I confirmed a visit with the Department of Corrections by phone, checked a map for the most direct route to the prison, and went home.

  Next morning I slathered a toasted bagel with cream cheese, dropped it in a sandwich bag, and filled a thermos with Cuban coffee. Provisions for the long drive north on I-95, then west through West Palm Beach to Belle Glade, a farm community of migrant workers on the fringe of the Everglades. The detectives might not be able to take the time now, but I could. And Lieutenant Riley could never accuse Burch of putting me up to it, because he didn’t know.

  My car radio reported news of war, shadowy enemies far away and among us, and smoke rising like the souls of the lost from still-smoldering wreckage. I tried to focus on the mysteries at hand. What became of the killers’ white van sought by police for so long? Probably rusting, I thought, at the bottom of some deep Everglades canal or rock pit. Most mystifying was how such youthful killers had successfully kept their secret without cracking throughout the long high-profile investigation.

  I still had some coffee left when the prison gates loomed before me, a world of concertina wire, steel mesh, and low-slung buildings surrounded by farmland and Everglades swamp.

  The population here was adult male, a mix of high-, medium-, and low-risk inmates. Mad Dog spent most of his time in “closed management,” due to disciplinary problems, according to the captain who checked my ID and had me sign the logbook.

  The veteran guard who frisked me even checked my shoes to ascertain whether I was smuggling any contraband into the facility. He made no attempt to conceal his disapproval that out of 70,000 inmates in Florida’s prisons I had chosen to visit this one.

  As we awaited Mad Dog’s arrival, the guard loosened up enough to discuss a recent controversy that arose when state officials decided to cut costs by eliminating recreational television in prisons. Inmates were there for punishment, not entertainment, the state said. However, the decision was swiftly reversed when it became clear how many more corrections officers would have to be hired. Prison officials use twenty-one-inch ceiling-mounted sets the same way many parents use the tube—as a baby-sitter. TV keeps their charges occupied and out of mischief. The most-watched shows here, the guard said, were Cops and America’s Most Wanted.

  The sounds of automatic locks and the clanging of steel doors heralded Mad Dog’s arrival. Two keepers accompanied him. I hadn’t seen the shackle shuffle done with a swagger before. With his thick neck, broad chest, and bulging biceps, his muscles had muscles. He looked as though he worked out daily with his own personal trainer. Perhaps he did.

  Several cigarettes and a Snickers bar, prison currency, were casually displayed in his shirt pocket, the way a player on the street would flash a roll of cash. Something behind the surface of his oil-slick eyes made me grateful for the sturdy wooden table between us. I wouldn’t have minded bulletproof glass.

  Slowly and deliberately casual, he eased himself down into the chair facing me, cocking his head first to check out my legs.

  “Whu’s up, mama?” He showed off a few decorated gold teeth with his grin.

  I refrained from explaining that I was not his mama.

  “A man was killed the other day,” I said. “An old friend of yours.”

  Mildly interested, he nodded casually.

  “Yeah.” He rocked back in his chair, as though he found it humorous. “Heard ol’ Andre bought it. Dude got hisself fried. Always warned him ’bout those nickel-and-dime burglaries. Dude never listened.”

  “Lots of things get people in trouble.” I smiled sweetly. “Look at you.”

  “A-live,” he said, relishing the word. “I’ll be walking free, outa here one day. Never shoulda been here to start with. Police framed me. You looking at an innocent man.”

  “Interesting,” I said, “but I understand you were caught at the scene and they had DNA evidence against you.”

  “DNA don’t mean nothing,” he crowed. “Look at O.J.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I’m not here about that. I’m interested in something that happened on a Christmas Eve—”

  “Right, right.” He sounded impatient, nodding like one of those little doggies in the back window of a car. “You don’t have to ’splain it to me, mama. I know all about it. When they tol’ me ’bout the reporter, they didn’t say you looked so sweet.”

  “So you remember the case?” My heart thudded.

  “Sure.” His eyes fixed on mine. “Some blond bitch and her boyfriend. Everybody knew about it. People talk.”

  “I heard it was you there that night, with Cubby Wells, Andre, Parvin, and some other guy.”

  Something sparked in his eyes, as though about to ignite, but then it was extinguished, as quickly as it had appeared. He wagged his head, curling his lips in a beatific smile.

  “Other guy? You think you know something, but you don’t know shit. Tell me a name.”

  “You tell me.”
<
br />   He clapped his palms together, a sharp retort that startled his guards and made me blink. His laugh was a rude high-pitched bray. An officer shifted uneasily on his feet. “Hear that?” Mad Dog said, turning to him. “Woman thinks she knows it all but don’t know shit.”

  “Four out of five is a good start,” I said serenely. “It’s just a matter of time. Murder has no statute of limitations. And this will probably be a death-penalty case, a minimum of life without parole. So I thought, if you really want to walk away from here one day, you might like to talk about it. Somebody will tell the truth, and the one who does first might catch a break.”

  He laughed again, an unpleasant sound, too loud and long, his smug glee conveying that he knew much more than I did.

  “No way they can prove we did it, now or ever,” he sang out. His words echoed off the dreary walls as he leaned forward, eyes bold. “Cuz I didn’t shoot nobody that night; they didn’t shoot nobody; we didn’t shoot nobody. I’m an innocent man. We’re all innocent men. But thanks for stopping by.” He jerked his head at the guard, as though the man were his personal chauffeur, and stood up.

  As he was led away, he turned back to me. “Say hello to the blond girl,” he said. “Tell her she be seeing me again. Look forward to it.” He nodded again, his grin bone-chilling. Then the metal door clanged closed behind him.

  Burch was surprised and not thrilled to hear where I’d been. “He as much as admitted it,” I told him, via cell phone, as I rode my wave of indignation back to Miami. “But he’s so hard-core, he’ll never cooperate. Mad Dog still insists the police framed him in his last case.

  “I’m telling you, Craig, this guy is the poster boy for capital punishment. Thank God he still has years to serve on his last conviction. You should see the shape he’s in. Looks like he’s in training.”

  “Maybe he is,” Burch said grimly. “Look, don’t tell Sunny about this. He thinks he’ll see her again? Hell, when we make this case, he’ll never see daylight again.”