Garden of Evil

by Edna Buchanan

  The doors were unlocked. They might have considered a joy ride but were distracted by swarms of flies buzzing in a nearby clearing. Miller had kept a yellow blanket in his trunk for weekend beach outings. Spread out beneath the live oaks as though for a picnic or romantic woodland rendezvous, the blanket was now saturated with the blood of a stranger, who sprawled atop it staring cross-eyed at the sky.

  Two hollow-point Black Talon nine-millimeter slugs had shattered his lower forehead and the bone structure around his eyes. With no anchor for the muscles that hold them in place, both eyes turned inward.

  The dead man, about forty-five years old, had been well dressed before removing his trousers and undershorts, folded neatly nearby. His genitalia had been mutilated by a close-range gunshot blast.

  According to Charlie Webster, crime scene technicians from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found the Taurus wiped clean of prints. How could she spend more than a day and a night in a car without leaving telltale evidence? Hair, fiber, the scent of her perfume? I had a hundred questions.

  Attempts were under way to construct a composite of the Kiss-Me Killer, based on the uncertain recollections of the coffee-stop waitress, who had been working a full counter at the time, and merchants with whom the killer had used her victims’ credit cards.

  The dead man’s pockets were empty, his vehicle, if any, missing. Technicians attempted to photograph a second set of tire impressions at the scene, but results were not promising due to the dry weather.

  Teams of lawmen from north and central Florida had coalesced into a task force. The FBI was working up a psychological profile, and the reward had grown to $100,000.

  The story, with its reports of Black Talon bullets kissed by the killer and the victims’ “sexual mutilation,” caught fire. The St. Pete Times and the Tampa and Lakeland papers assigned teams of reporters. Fred Francis did a report for NBC Nightly News, and CNN sent in a crew. TV in Miami was already following the case, and the News was allotting it more space on the state page.

  The speedy and all-out response from law enforcement and the media was interesting, I thought. Murdered women are frequently found along remote roadsides or in canals. Roving serial killers often achieve double-digit body counts before law enforcement begins to link cases and seriously question whether a monster is at large. Was the early and extraordinarily speedy mobilization in this case because the victims were men? Was there major media coverage because most publishers, executive editors, and news directors are men?

  Lottie had taken comp time to spend with Tex. The state of their rekindled relationship was so far so good, I learned, when I called her. They had gone parasailing and water-skiing and were planning to scuba dive under a full moon. I reported the latest on the killer and her most recent victim.

  “Hell-all-Friday, somebody sure has pissed her off. Maybe,” Lottie suggested, “a man infected her with AIDS and she’s getting even. ’Member that story a couple weeks ago? Four out of ten people infected with HIV don’t tell their sex partners—and two-thirds admit to not using condoms. Could be she’s positive and pissed.”

  “Could be anything,” I said. “The victims seem to be strangers unlucky enough to cross her path. Doesn’t sound like they look alike. Maybe they say or do something that triggers her. Or maybe she just wants to rob them and doesn’t like leaving witnesses.”

  “What about the sex?”

  “It can’t be at gunpoint,” I said. “Not many guys could perform under those circumstances.”

  “Unless they find it excitin’,” Lottie said cheerfully. “I once knew a guy who liked—”

  “Spare me,” I said. “Gotta go.”

  My destination was an Opa-Locka nursing home. The eastern horizon blurred beneath a reddish-brown haze that looked like smog as I drove the interstate north. The annual migration of red African dust had begun. A monster cloud five hundred miles wide had ridden trade winds and air currents more than three thousand miles from the coast of West Africa. The sky would be milky by tomorrow, with a whitish haze. People with respiratory problems would have breathing difficulty, and Miamians would find their cars coated with a thin rougelike red powder.

  Detectives were still interviewing employees at the Golden Sunset Nursing Home. Two elderly patients, one suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, the other a helpless stroke victim, had been wheeled as usual to a remote spot on the landscaped grounds at 9 A.M., for a few minutes of fresh air and sunshine while an aide changed their beds. The temperature had already climbed to 96 degrees but the spot was shaded and the ritual brief. Today, unfortunately, their aide was interrupted by a telephone call. Her child’s grade school principal insisted that she pick up her sick youngster from school at once.

  The aide left in a hurry, harried and upset, assuming fellow staffers would look after her charges. Not until 4 P.M. did someone note that they were not in their room. A search was launched. By then, the shifting sun had done its brutal work. Still strapped in their chairs, their deaths were apparently due to heat exhaustion.

  I remembered Lottie’s words about what we have to look forward to and imagined how it felt to be helpless and forgotten in the merciless heat. If only it would rain, I thought. Life would return to normal. Instead, tempers frayed, motorists fought in traffic, and as I listened in my car, City Commissioner Sonny Saladrigas mouthed off on Spanish-language radio, branding the mayor, his former ally, a crook and a Castro spy.

  Three days and counting until Kendall McDonald returned. I stopped to shop on the way home. At a liquor store I spent too much on a bottle of good champagne. In Burdines’ lingerie department, I bought a frivolous new nightgown, short silky lavender trimmed with fine pale lace. The champagne in the fridge and the gown wrapped in tissue paper in a bedroom drawer, I awaited his call.

  The phone rang late. I was dozing.

  “Hi, love,” I breathed into the mouthpiece.

  “Didn’t know you cared.” The braying laugh came from Bobby Tubbs in the night slot.

  “What is this, an obscene call?” I grumbled, and checked the time: nearly 2 A.M.

  “Not unless you want it to be.” He sniggered. “Seriously, Britt, I’m just closing up shop and I know you’ve been keeping tabs on those killings upstate. There’s a development. Sorry, thought you’d still be up.”

  “They identify that last victim?” I felt suddenly alert and awake.

  “No, but they’ve got a new one.”

  “Where?”

  “They found this guy near Clewiston, up in Hendry County.”

  I visualized my map. Clewiston was near the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, closer to Miami than the last one. “Are they sure it was her?”

  “Cops seem to think so, same MO. Want to make sure you’ll be available if she shows up here. Heard you talk about taking comp time next week.”

  McDonald and I had discussed driving across state to Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico. The first place we had ever been truly alone together, it was away from Miami, far from our jobs. If the man planned to propose, that’s where it would happen.

  “Think she’s headed here?”

  “Who knows? They could nail that crazy bitch tonight, but I need to make sure we’re covered, just in case. This is turning into a major national story, and I need to get somebody working on a-matter in case it breaks here and you’re not available.”

  “I’ m available.” I spoke quickly, staring into the dark. “I think she’ll be here, Bobby. I have a feeling about this one.”

  “Me too.”

  What were the chances of the Kiss-Me Killer and McDonald showing up in Miami at the same time? I wondered, Remote, I told myself. I wanted McDonald; I wanted this story. Is this why you should always be careful what you wish for? How could I juggle both? But how nice it would be to break this professional drought and have a front page byline again. I switched on a light.

  “What play did my story on the nursing home fatalities get?”

  “Well,” he began
slowly, “you’re aware that we’ve got space problems again.”

  “It’s an incredible outrage story,” I said accusingly, sitting upright.

  “Yeah, I know, could be anybody’s grandmother, but we just don’t have the space. And we won’t know for sure that the heat killed them until after the autopsies tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sure! They just happen to die simultaneously of natural causes after being left out in the sun all day. It did make the paper, didn’t it?”

  “Sure. Six-B, the obit page.”

  Not even the local front.

  “So,” Bobby said, “we can count on you? Your plans won’t interfere if the Kiss-Me Killer story breaks in Miami?”

  “For sure,” I said bleakly. “Count on me.” Hell, McDonald hadn’t even called.

  I tossed and turned, waiting for the phone, then dreamed of endless ribbons of bloody highway streaming south beneath a hazy sky tarnished by African dust.

  McDonald called at 8 A.M. “Sorry, babe. Dozed off; by the time I woke up it was way too late. Didn’t want to call in the middle of the night and scare you.”

  “It’s never too late for you to call me,” I said softly. “Scares me more when you don’t.”

  “You sound so good,” he murmured. “Man, do I miss you. Two days to go. I’ll drive straight through. Then you’ll really have something to be scared of.”

  Coffee brewing, I ignored my story, buried with the obits, and focused instead on the story stripped across the top of the state page:

  BLOODY SIX-DAY THRILL SPREE LEAVES FOUR DEAD.

  Few details on victim number four. The story broke late, but Bobby had managed to fly in a new lead as presses rolled.

  The upstate sexploits of the Kiss-Me Killer led the radio morning news, followed by stories on the record-breaking heat and a shoving match between Commissioner Saladrigas and a valet car parker at the Inter-Continental Hotel.

  The valet asked Saladrigas not to leave his Mercedes on the hotel ramp. Sonny went into a tirade and, witnesses said, shoved the valet. When the valet shoved back, Sonny made threats and displayed a gun tucked in his waistband.

  Gone by the time police arrived, Sonny, reached at home, denied everything and blamed his political enemies, “the tools of Fidel Castro,” for trying to discredit him.

  I pitied the valet, who was expendable. Hotel management probably would not risk offending a powerful politician known for his long memory and his bad temper. Sonny, I thought, could get away with murder.

  A wave of heat washed over me as I stepped from my apartment. My damp skin felt coated with an invisible film of African dust before I slid into my ovenlike car. The police beat seemed relatively quiet so I beelined for the office, eager to find out more about the Lake Okeechobee murder. I read the wires and made some calls.

  Victim number four was young, a first-year college student on a football scholarship at the University of Florida. He was working for the summer in his father’s all-night service station, which answered motorist-in-distress calls from the nearby highway. An attendant who worked with him took the tow truck out on an emergency call at about 10:30 P.M. When he returned shortly before midnight, the door was locked and the office dark, though the exterior lights still burned. A late-model Cadillac he had not seen before was parked behind the station. The college football player’s red Trans Am was gone.

  As he wondered whether to call the owner, a local trooper drove in to buy a soft drink and write an accident report. He shined a flashlight through a barred side window and saw blood.

  She must have assumed he would not be found until morning. She was on the run in a red Trans Am, with little head start. The chase was heating up.

  The lime-green Cadillac was registered in Osceola County to the Reverend Jeremiah Truesdale, the wires said. Victim three, the man on the yellow beach blanket, had now been tentatively identified. An evangelical preacher, Truesdale had not been reported missing by his wife because he often disappeared for a day or two, she said, on missions to save the wicked, preach the gospel, or perform impromptu baptisms. It was unclear to me which of those he had been attempting on the yellow beach blanket when the killer sent him to meet his maker. Family and friends had not linked the preacher to descriptions of the unidentified corpse found dead at the sordid woodland scene. This was a man of God.

  I jabbed the fourth red pin into the map, studying the trail of the killer’s odyssey. She’d stuck mostly to main highways, with brief, deadly excursions into rural areas and small towns. It seemed doubtful she was from out of state; she knew the terrain too well. Settling at my terminal I checked anyway. No similar cases reported anywhere in the United States. Sheriff T. Rupert (Buddy) Brascom had apparently been the first. I focused on the map again, trying to think like her. She could have gone north or turned west to the Gulf. She might be halfway to Biloxi. In my heart I knew she was not. She was coming our way.

  Unconsciously toying with a red pushpin, I pricked my finger. It drew blood.

  Eager to clear the decks while I could, I asked the slot to beep me with anything new and drove to Miami Beach. I am no detective or social worker. Why, I wondered, was I wasting so much time on Althea Moran? If what she believed was true, it was an intriguing story. But was there a way to prove it? Was I that hard up for a story? Or curious? There was something about her. Did she remind me of my mother? Or was it just that I always want answers?

  Dr. Richard Moran and his second wife lived on swank La Gorce Island, where Cher had recently renovated a home. Moran’s landscaping, bright and lavish, appeared well watered, despite the restrictions. Some rules don’t apply to all of us. The water view was breathtaking, even with the milky haze that transformed large sailboats into mysterious sulfurous ghost craft, disappearing and vaguely retaking their shapes on the horizon. A racy cloud-colored Jaguar in the driveway looked as if it were doing sixty miles an hour standing still. No pink plastic flamingos here.

  A uniformed maid answered. The lady of the house was not far behind, an adorable infant in her arms. My jaw must have dropped. A sweet-faced blonde, the young mother was a dead ringer for 1973’s Orange Bowl queen. No wonder Richard didn’t miss Althea. He had found himself a younger version of the same woman.

  She wore a raw silk turquoise blouse, white linen slacks, and a wide leather belt that flattered her figure and her tan, both flawless. She stared, uncomprehending, as I introduced myself.

  “We already subscribe,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the Spanish-speaking maid who let me in.

  “No.” I smiled. “I write for the newspaper, I don’t deliver it.”

  “A reporter?” Curiosity crept catlike across her face and then blossomed into a welcoming smile. “You’re here about the Heart fashion show and winter gala!”

  Before I could deny it, she handed off the baby to the maid, who disappeared with her. “It’s a bit early for publicity,” Moira Moran said, leading me into a spacious great room. “We’re still nominating committee members, but I am chairman this year.”

  “How wonderful,” I said. “But I’m actually here about what’s been happening to the first Mrs. Moran.”

  “Althea?” She spoke the name as though it were something she had stepped in. “Oh my God! She went to the press!” she blurted out, then spun around, venting her frustration in a small frenzy. “That woman! She goes to the press because her goddamn check is late?”

  “That’s not it at all. It’s the other things.”

  “She even had the nerve to annoy our attorney just because of a few days, maybe a week…. What other things?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the intruder at her house, the attack on her.”

  “Attack?” Moira sneered. “The woman was mugged. My God, it happens. Happened to me once. A lowlife took the Rolex right off my wrist outside of Neiman’s in broad daylight. You get over it.”

  “I wondered if you or your husband might know of any reason someone might want to harm her.”

  She rolled her ey
es impatiently and checked the time on what had to be a gold replacement Rolex. “You’ll have to talk to my husband about that.”

  “I tried his office. They said he was in surgery all day.”

  Moira Moran’s response was to steer me toward the door. “The woman is a pain in the butt,” she said, “but I seriously doubt that anybody would waste the time and effort. She’s trying to make us look bad. She has the house. She has the car. I’ll see that she has her check. What she really needs is to get a life.”

  She had one before you came along, I thought.

  “It’s not easy being a second wife,” she said pitifully, as I left.

  Richard, I thought, not his trophy wife, was the culprit. How often, I wondered, did he call his new wife Althea? They deserved each other.

  I could have walked, but I drove half a shaded block and pulled into the old Chicago-brick driveway of a smaller but still impressive house, on the dry side of the street. Flowerbeds flourished; the status symbol in this driveway was a BMW.

  Jamie Moran Wagner answered the door herself. Petite, her wavy brown hair frosted with golden streaks, she looked less like her mother than Moira did. Her smile faded fast; I was obviously not the person she expected. A baby cried, comforted by someone in another room.

  Jamie sighed in distress at mention of her mother. She took me into the kitchen, where she was fixing a bottle for the baby.

  “It must be nice to live so close to your dad,” I said. She smiled again. “It’s grand,” she said. “It’s why I told Lawrence that, no matter what, we had to have this house. I didn’t see much of Dad when I was little, he always worked so hard. Now we have kids the same age, his wife is my best friend, and my husband his colleague. It’s a blast. We double-date and go to medical conventions and conferences together. Moira and I keep each other company when the guys are working.”