Painted Beauty (2019 Edition)

by J. M. LeDuc

  Captain Rand nodded and a brisk wind blew off the water. “The smell of that paint is making me sick,” he said as he waved his hand in front of his face in an attempt to dissipate the fumes. “Lunch sounds like a plan,” he added. Turning away from the body, he began to head back up the beach.

  “Captain, do you mind if I stay at the scene a while longer?”

  “Mind? I insist. I am a man short as of tomorrow. I need you on this case until the clock strikes midnight.” Rand scratched his head and walked back toward his car, mumbling, “I will never understand why a young man with such potential would leave the FDLE to go back to some podunk town.”

  “Podunk town?” Dr. Howard said. “Where you headed?”

  “The Keys. I grew up there,” Troy answered. “The police chief’s position has been vacant for the past eight months, and after a lot of soul searching I’ve decided to take it.”

  He thought of Sin and the argument they had over the phone when he’d told her of his plans. They had become close after the case they had worked together where they took down an international slave ring and a corrupt politician. Unfortunately, her job as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t give them a lot of time to cultivate a deeper relationship. She was out of the country most of the time working directly for the Director of the agency: Frank Graham. On the flip side, when she was in town, their chemistry was so hot it was damn near combustible.

  She had helped him get the job with the FDLE and didn’t understand his decision. She, like the chief, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to go back to Tumbleboat to live.

  As much as Troy missed her, he was glad she was somewhere on assignment.

  Taking in the scene, he couldn’t help but wonder what Sin would think.

  “So, Doc,” he said, “what are your first impressions?”

  “Call me Quincy,” Dr. Howard said. “All my friends do.”

  “Quincy it is.”

  “First impressions?” Quincy repeated Troy’s question. “My first impression is that we are dealing with a nut job. Other than that, I don’t have a clue. I’m a man of science, and I let the facts dictate my impressions. How about you? Any thoughts?”

  Troy shook his head. “Nah,” he said. Sin’s last words to him flooded his mind. He looked at Quincy and said, “I’m just a small town cop trying to find my way back home.”

  Quincy seemed a little perplexed and placed his hand on Troy’s shoulder. “I hope you don’t mind a word of advice from an old man because I’m going to give it either way.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “This isn’t Oz, son. Home is where you make it.”

  Troy was silent until one of Quincy’s assistant’s came running up to him. “What do you want to do with the envelope, Doc?”

  “Envelope? What envelope?” Troy was back in the moment.

  “We found an envelope taped to the chair, a linen envelope of fine quality. If I had to guess, I would say it was handmade stationary.”

  “What was on the inside?”

  Quincy shrugged. “Don’t know. I don’t want to take the chance of opening it and destroying possible evidence. I’ll open it when I get back to the lab.” He addressed his assistant, “Bag it, tag it, and place it with the other evidence.”

  “I’d like to be present for the autopsy,” Troy said.

  “No problem,” Quincy said, “just give me enough time to clear the scene and set up the lab. Say, three hours?”

  Troy noted the time and set his mind to further investigate the scene.

  Troy turned his attention to the couple who found the body. Sitting on a stretcher next to an ambulance, he witnessed a distraught elderly woman. She held an oxygen mask to her face with trembling hands. The woman looked scared to death. She stared at nothing—wide-eyed, a slight twitch on her left side. Troy couldn’t help but think that if it hadn’t been for what appeared to be numerous facelifts and Botox treatments her look may have been less severe.

  He asked the paramedic tending to her if the woman was able to answer a few questions. The medic squinted from the morning brilliance and gently touched the woman’s hand. “I don’t see why not. Just try to be as brief as possible. Mr. and Mrs. Leibowitz have been through quite a…memorable morning.”

  Troy pulled out his notebook, flipped it open, and squatted in front of the woman. “Mrs. Leibowitz, I’m Agent Troy Stubbs with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

  The woman removed the mask from her face and offered a half-hearted smile. “I haven’t had this much male attention in years,” she said with a heavy New York accent. “If I knew a dead person would bring me two good looking young men, I would have killed my husband, Stanley, years ago.”

  Troy gazed at the woman with a tentative smile. It seemed her humor was a way of dealing with the considerable shock that a beautiful Florida morning had just delivered. “I’m not big on formality,” he said, “so how about you call me Troy and I will call you—?”

  “Lorraine,” Mrs. Leibowitz said.

  “Thank you. Can you tell me your address, Lorraine?”

  “Of course I can tell you my address, what kind of stupid question is that?”

  The corner or Troy’s mouth rose in appreciation of her quick comeback. “Let me rephrase the question,” he said. “What is your local address?”

  Lorraine told him and he spent the next few minutes gathering her background information. Finished, he took a breath and got to the meat of the questions. “Lorraine, please tell me what you saw when you first approached the area this morning.”

  “Stanley and I were taking our morning walk. He pointed to something on the beach when we were still down by the condo.” She pointed to a white, ten story building located about thirty yards up the beach and placed the oxygen mask back on her face, inhaling deeply.

  “It’s okay,” Troy said, “take your time.”

  She took one more breath, removed the mask, and pursed her already swollen, collagen-filled lips. “Time? Do I look like I have time? I have a busy life I want you to know. I’m missing my mahjong game because of this”—she threw her arms up in the air—“this crazy business.”

  Frustrated, he regrouped. “Lorraine, I don’t mean to be rude, but if you can just answer a couple more questions, I promise to leave you alone so you can get back to your busy life.”

  Mask pressed up against her face, she nodded.

  “When you approached the volleyball nets, what did you witness? What did you see?”

  Again, she removed the aid from her face. “Stan and I saw this white sheet draped over a statue, or what we thought was a statue. I figured the city was putting up some sort of display. I wanted to get a look at what was under the sheet, but Stanley told me to leave it be.” She gazed at the crime scene and then back at Troy. “I wish I’d listened to him.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I shooed him away and lifted the bottom of the sheet. As soon as it got about this high,” she placed her hand about three feet from the sand, “the wind picked it up like a sail and jerked it out of my hand. It flew off the body like a kite.”

  Troy momentarily looked up from Lorraine and spotted one of Quincy’s assistants. “Excuse me,” he said, “did the team recover the sheet that was concealing the body?”

  The young woman nodded.

  With Troy’s attention back on Lorraine, he noticed her lips quivering. He felt a stab of guilt for the poor woman, but he needed to continue with his questioning.

  “Did you know what you were looking at?”

  “Not at first,” Lorraine said. “I still thought it was a statue until Stanley grabbed his chest, fell back, and yelled, ‘call 911.’ My poor Stanley,” she muttered; her voice barely a whisper.

  She seemed to stare through Troy as the words leaked from her lips. He directed her mask back to her face so she could place it over her nose and mouth, and called for the paramedic. “She�
��s very upset about her husband,” Troy said. “Can you tell me what happened to him?”

  “The shock of seeing the body caused a heart attack. He’s stable. We were waiting for you to finish speaking to Mrs. Leibowitz, so we can transport both.”

  “Same ambulance?” Troy said. “Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

  “Big accident on the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Besides,” the medic said, “he refuses to be transported without his wife. Signed all the forms. Our hands are tied.”

  Troy stepped back and watched as the medics loaded Lorraine onto the ambulance and pulled out with both aboard.

  “Mt. Sinai Hospital,” he wrote. At least they’ll be easy to find.

  He spent the next hour talking to the CSI team and Quincy. He left with a notebook full of information, a smartphone full of pictures to pass off to his replacement, and a sick feeling creeping through his soul.

  3

  Troy stood next to Quincy and a lab tech as the victim was laid out on the autopsy table, and the sheet pulled back.

  Pressing the record button on a video camera, the doc began his monologue: “The victim is an unidentified female whose dental findings estimate her age to be in her early twenties.” He pointed to a set of dental x-rays that were displayed on a digital monitor behind him. “The films of the victim’s teeth show wear and eruption that would be indicative of a female in that age range.”

  Using a swiping motion, his arms traced the body of the young woman—head to toe. “The difficult part will be to remove all the layers of paint while preserving the skin. I took some small tissue samples from the face and leg earlier in order to gauge the type of materials that were used. I’ve also begun a tox-screen.

  “The toxicology report will not be back for a few days, but the tissue samples as well as the blood samples did divulge some rather peculiar findings.” Quincy took a quick breath before continuing, “The deceased has been dead longer than we first assumed, and she has been embalmed.”

  Troy reached over and paused the video camera. “Embalmed,” he said, “doesn’t that require special equipment?”

  “Indeed,” Quincy answered. “The body only underwent the process of arterial embalming—”

  “Meaning?” Troy interrupted.

  “Meaning, the cardiovascular system was filled with embalming fluid being pumped into the right carotid artery while blood and interstitial fluids were drained through an incision made in the right jugular vein. It’s a process called ‘single point injection.’ ”

  Troy nodded and made a mental note. The killer wanted to keep the body around for a while.

  Troy cleared his throat to get Quincy’s attention. “Would it be okay if we took a short break,” he asked.

  “Not a bad idea.”

  The men left the operating suite and gathered in Quincy’s office.

  “Your use of videotaping,” Troy asked, “is that something you always do?”

  Quincy grinned, pouring Troy a glass of water. “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I find it helpful when I go to write my report. Attorneys have become so quick to object to anything these days, I find it best to dot my ‘i’s’ and cross my ‘t’s’ far ahead of time.”

  “Are you ready to proceed?” he asked.

  Setting down the glass, Troy stood up. “Lead the way,” he said, taking a deep breath.

  …It was the last deep breath he would take for the next couple of hours.

  Troy and Quincy stared—speechless—at the body, as the layers of paint and shellac washed away.

  “Wow,” Troy finally vocalized.

  “Indeed,” Quincy echoed his surprise.

  The doc motioned to his tech to shut off the camera.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Troy said, “but it doesn’t even look like the same girl.”

  “Someone went to great pains to make a plain girl look beautiful,” Quincy added.

  “Someone with a lot of talent,” Troy said.

  When the autopsy was finished, the two once again congregated in Quincy’s office. Troy was anxious to see what was inside the mystery envelope.

  Gloved up, the doc held the plastic bag containing the envelope. “CSI dusted but they found nothing.” He opened the evidence bag and slid the envelope from its confinement with a pair of tweezers.

  Troy stared at the envelope. “It looks fancy.”

  Quincy eyed it with scrutiny. “It appears to be handmade; linen. It’s not rare, but—”

  “Somebody can trace which stores in the area carry them,” Troy finished. “Might help narrow down the suspects.”

  Quincy nodded. “Are you sure about leaving the department? You would make a good replacement for Jonathan.”

  Troy’s chest rose up and down as he laughed. “I’m sure, now how about we open the envelope.”

  Quincy took a scalpel and sliced along the bottom seam. He gently slipped a piece of paper from its cocoon and laid the lone sheet on a sterile lining on top of his desk.

  Troy glared at the few words written on the paper, but they were difficult to read from his vantage point. What he did observe was the elegant style of calligraphy that’d been used, a penmanship that spoke yet again of the artistic. “You have a better angle,” he said, “care to read it?”

  Quincy cleared his throat.

  “Cruelty has a human heart.”

  Troy stood and ran his hand through his hair. “That’s it? One line? What the hell does that mean?”

  Quincy simply stared at the paper and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like he’s finished. I have a very disturbing feeling that there will be more to come.”

  4

  Troy and Quincy sat in plastic, pastel, art-deco chairs at the Sand & Street Café on Collins Avenue, South Beach—both checking their watches. Troy glanced at his phone and started tapping out a text message.

  “Don’t bother,” Quincy said, “I sent Jonathan an email and voicemail. He is a stickler for being on time. He’d be here if something important hadn’t held him up.”

  As Quincy was talking, his voice was drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle’s exhaust. The corner of Troy’s mouth turned upward at the same time that he lowered and shook his head. That particular exhaust noise was coming from a 1952 Harley Davidson Panhead and not just any Panhead. From his peripheral vision, he watched the people in the crowded café turn their collective attention toward the noise.

  Troy knew that flashy bikes and expensive cars were nothing unusual in South Beach, so there was only one thing that could have drawn and kept the crowd’s attention—the rider. “I have a feeling Captain Rand’s distraction just arrived,” he said without turning around to see who it was.

  Quincy’s attention had veered from what he was talking about to the person who had stepped off the bike.

  “Let me guess,” Troy said, looking at Quincy, “you’re staring at a five-foot, four-inch, raven haired bombshell, moving with a confident swagger.”

  Quincy’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. He glanced at Troy for an explanation and then back at the view in front of him. “How did you know?”

  Troy was about to answer when a shirtless valet, wearing white overalls, stomped past the table and headed toward the rider.

  “You’re parked illegally, sweetie,” Troy heard him say, “move the bike or get towed.”

  Troy waited for a response, but all he heard was the clicking of heels on the pavement.

  Troy held up a finger. “Wait for it, this should be good,” he uttered.

  “Fine,” the valet puffed, “I’ll just call the tow truck.”

  Sin flashed a badge, peered over her designer sunglasses, and snarled at the valet. “Fuck off, John-boy, or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to the farm.”

  The valet glanced at the badge, his lips twisted in a look of feigned disgust, and he strutted off in the opposite direction.

  “Be careful, Doc,” Troy laughed, “in this case—her bit
e is worse than her bark.”

  The rider sauntered over to the table—Quincy’s eyes never straying from her form—and sat in an empty chair next to Troy.

  “I hate when a guy can wiggle his ass better that I can,” she commented, watching the valet storm away.

  Without warning, she slid the cloth napkin off Troy’s lap, dipped it in his water glass, and emitted a soft, satisfying moan as she wiped the icy cloth across the back of her neck. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend, Stubbs?”

  Sin watched the older man blink and veer his focus elsewhere.

  Troy leaned over and kissed Sin on the lips. “Damn, you’re sexy when you’re sassy.”

  “See what you’re going to miss,” she mouthed, biting his lower lip and moving away.

  “Eh, hem,” Quincy cleared his throat and glared at Troy.

  “Sorry, Doc,” Troy said. “Dr. Melvin Howard, known to his friends as Quincy, I would like to introduce you to FBI Special Agent Sinclair O’Malley, known to her friends as Sin.”

  Quincy, a bit tongue-tied, managed to extend his hand and grunt a hello.

  Sin slid her shades from her eyes and peered at Quincy as she shook his hand.

  “I don’t think I have ever seen eyes as jade green as yours,” Quincy said as he continued to hold Sin’s hand.

  Sin arched a playful brow. “Most men don’t concentrate on my eyes. So I’ll consider that statement a commentary on your strong moral character.”

  Quincy laughed as he let go of her hand and sat back. “In that case, I better alter my thought process before you change your mind.”

  Sin and Quincy were soon bantering back and forth in comfortable conversation, and she soon had him eating out of the palm of her hand. They were entwined in small talk when the three of them heard the voice of a man bellow behind them.

  “That’s a state vehicle and I’ll park wherever I goddamn want,” he barked. “I walked a beat on this street when it was nothing but Hasidic Jews and Mariel refugees.”