Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  We approached across the vast dark of the Everglades; then came the lights of the sprawling city below and a semicircle, swinging out over endless black sea broken only by occasional flickering lights on the water.

  It felt good to be back in Miami, to hear the sounds of Spanish and experience the raucous chaos of MIA, with Lance’s bodyguards running interference. Niko was not waiting as planned on the lower level. Pauli went upstairs to see if he might be there.

  “Damn,” Lance checked his watch impatiently. “This is not like him.”

  Traffic poured through the fume-filled terminal as we searched the oncoming stream for the Town Car, the surging crowd for the familiar ponytail.

  “Call ‘im,” Lance told Dave. “Find out where the hell he is. If he broke down somewhere, we can hop a cab.”

  No answer at the house or in the car.

  We wound up in a station wagon taxicab that could hold all of us and our bags. The night was hot, the air conditioner didn’t work, and the driver had the news in Creole turned up full blast.

  Dave sat up front and directed him. A fire truck rumbled slowly off Star Island as we approached. No one spoke, but the look on the guard’s face as he opened the gate sent my stomach into a free fall.

  Police cars, fire trucks, and a crime-scene van ringed the house, cluttering the courtyard. They appeared to be mopping up, finishing reports, awaiting some final detail before leaving.

  Lance was halfway to the house as Dave paid the driver and the others got the bags. As I stepped out of the cab to follow him, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the medical examiner’s wagon approaching over the bridge.

  22

  Lance swept past the patrolman at the door. “Niko! Niko!”

  The cop moved to stop him, but a Miami Beach detective lieutenant inside signaled that it was all right.

  “Where is he? Where’s Niko?” The lieutenant, Greg Wallace, jerked his head toward the stairs. Lance took them two at a time. The walls at the top of the stairs had been discolored by smoke. The electricity was off and a fire department generator hummed, their lamps providing the light.

  I followed Lance. The detective behind me nearly ran me over when I stopped suddenly, frozen in place, halfway up title stairs. The smoky smell of burned wood and insulation had given way to the unforgettable odor of charred flesh.

  “Oh, please don’t let it be him,” I whispered. The detective wore the expressionless poker face that cops affect when they are not sure what is going on and trust no one.

  Voices rose and fell behind us, expressions and expletives of shock and disbelief: Dave, Al, Pauli, and Frank, hearing bad news from somebody down below. Flashes of light from upstairs, camera flashes. Lance should not walk blindly into some terrible sight. Somebody had to explain first.

  “Lance!” I rushed after him. “Wait!”

  A fuel can lay discarded in the hall. A drip torch, marked with the Forestry Service emblem. The second of the two stolen from the ‘Glades.

  “Lance!” Too late, he was in the room.

  A loud, almost immediate, crash followed, as though he had fallen or passed out.

  Taking a deep breath, I burst inside. Lance had not fallen. The crash came when he had spun away from what was on the bed and slammed both fists into the wall at eye level. His pain was a terrible sight. As terrible a sight as Niko’s body.

  “You should have told him first!” I turned on the detective. “They were lifelong friends!”

  “I didn’t tell him to barge in here.” The detective shrugged.

  Lance looked numb, eyes wet, breathing deeply. “What happened?” he muttered between breaths. “What the hell happened?”

  The body, drawn into a fetal position, was almost unrecognizable, charred like the mattress, the floor around it, and part of one wall. He looked as though he had been wearing Lance’s burgundy-colored bathrobe, part of a sleeve still intact. His ponytail and part of his scalp remained.

  “Let’s talk downstairs.” The detective herded us into the hall.

  “We can’t leave him alone up here, like … like this.” Lance’s voice cracked. “Somebody has to stay with him.”

  “He won’t be alone,” I murmured. The removal crew from the medical examiner’s office passed us on the stairs. “They’ll take care of him,” I whispered.

  A neighbor had accommodated the cops by allowing them to use her brightly lit kitchen as a command post. We talked there, around a glass table.

  “We thought it was you, at first,” the detective said, almost jovial, “smoking in bed.” He raised an eyebrow as if that would be the only logical conclusion.

  “He didn’t smoke,” Lance muttered. “I’m the smoker.”

  “But your house, your room. That is your room, right?”

  Lance nodded, heavy-lidded eyes shrouded in misery.

  “You usually share your bedroom with this guy?”

  “No.” Lance shook his head, bewildered.

  “What do you think he was doing there?”

  “He knew I was coming back. Might have been getting the room ready … He had the run of the place. Whatever.”

  “What is it you said this guy did for you?”

  “Security, personal trainer, assistant.”

  “We shot down the smoking-in-bed theory when we found that can of accelerant,” Wallace said. “Then a dispatcher said she seen you on TV, at something in Hollywood last night. Security at the gate said this guy told ‘im he was s’posed to pick you up at the airport. You just get in?”

  He wanted to know why we had taken a later flight, why we had been delayed, what time we had landed.

  Lance, staring at the floor, raised his eyes. “Stephanie!” The way he said it chilled my heart.

  I stood next to his chair, my hand on his shoulder, fighting my own tears, remembering Niko at the hospital when Lance was hurt, Niko exasperated at Cape Florida, racing me to the airport, ready to lock Stephanie in a closet or dump her in the drink. Did he try? Did it backfire?

  “We know who did this.” Lance got to his feet, slowly nodding, fists clenched.

  We told the detective everything, then referred him to McDonald and the Miami fire investigators on Trent Talon’s case.

  “So you’re saying that this case, the stuntman’s murder, and the ‘Glades fire may be related?”

  He wore the unhappily incredulous look of a man who likes things simple and tidy, a man just beginning to realize that they were about to turn messy and complicated.

  “Hopefully,” he said, “the post will tell us a lot. What, if anything, he had on board at the time. Whether he was dead or alive when the fire started.”

  “Post?” Lance said.

  “Postmortem, the autopsy,” I said.

  He closed his eyes.

  I turned to the detective. “What about the press?” How had they missed all this? Where were they?

  “Been and gone. Had us a riot scene for a while. They were all over us before we knew what we had. Lost interest when they heard Westfell was out of town and it was just some guy who worked for ‘im.”

  How nice of him, I thought bitterly, to phrase it that way. Thankfully Lance, lost in thought, did not seem to notice.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Oh, we had us quite a day,” the detective said. Niko was already dead before we left LA. While we were on the freeway to LAX Miami Beach fire had two calls, almost simultaneous, one from the alarm company monitoring station, reporting that a smoke detector had activated at the Star Island house, the other from a neighbor who saw smoke.

  The fire department had worked fast to contain the blaze. Smoke had damaged the entire second floor, but the actual fire had been confined to Lance’s room.

  We spent what remained of the night at my apartment. Pauli slept on my living room couch. The other guys went to a nearby motel.

  Silent, angry, grieving, Lance did not want to be held. H
e kept getting out of bed to use the phone in the kitchen. He talked for a long time to Niko’s married sister in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. A longer time with Silverman. I heard him weeping.

  He took a suite at the Fontainebleau in the morning. We both had to go back to work. The movie was so far behind schedule there was no way to take more time. And Lance was presented with pages and pages of new dialogue to learn, written by the latest imported scriptwriter. The story line had changed so much that it was totally unrecognizable and incomprehensible. Hodges and Van Ness were fighting bitterly about it Wendy was on medication, and Lexie had turned into a raging prima donna, showing up late on the set and throwing tantrums.

  The only good news was that the cops were now seriously searching for Stephanie.

  She had been released about an hour after I was, according to LAPD. Airline records showed her aboard the next flight to Miami, probably because she heard me tell the cops that we planned to fly out first thing in the morning.

  The Star Island gate guard picked Stephanie from a photo lineup as the woman he had seen and reported to Niko. Niko had been right when he told Lance that she had been sighted. She was in the neighborhood. Soon after, he was dead.

  Miami detectives had dug into her past and learned that as a troubled preadolescent she had set fire to her family’s summer home in Cape Cod. Her only arrest unrelated to stalking Lance was for teenage shoplifting nothing violent. But she had dropped out of college for a semester to strike out on her own after a dispute with her parents. During that time she had worked briefly for Western Electric, reading diagrams and wiring telephone company components.

  Not enough for an arrest warrant but enough to elevate her to number-one suspect in Trent Talon’s murder, as well as the ‘Glades fire. Police issued BOLOs with her picture. Watch orders were placed on my apartment, the Star Island house, and the movie locations. LA forwarded the proper paperwork to hold her on the stalking violations once she was picked up. But where the hell was she? Suddenly scarce, she looked all the more suspicious.

  Lieutenant Wallace shared with us the results of the medical examiner’s initial repent. The doctor had seen a trace of congealed blood at the scene, and his suspicions had been confirmed. X-rays showed a bullet still lodged in the occipital region, at the base of the skull. Though Niko had been shot first, the incineration had not been postmortem. Soot in his larynx and trachea meant he had been alive, if just barely, when sprayed with gasoline and set afire.

  He had been fully dressed, down to shoes, socks, and wristwatch. Lance’s robe still hung in the closet. Niko had one the same color. The big house was often chilly. He must have thrown it on over his T-shirt and trousers.

  Wallace said the fatal shot was fired from the balcony, along with two others. Two slugs were lodged in the wall. The killer, hiding in Lance’s room, must have slipped out the French doors, then fired through the glass when Niko approached to investigate a noise or for some other purpose.

  “She thought it was me,” Lance said. “It was me she wanted to kill. She thought we had come back earlier; it was my room; we looked alike.”

  After seeing me in LA, she caught the first plane out, then beelined for his Miami home, lying in wait to ambush Lance when he arrived.

  It made sense, in the obsessive world of a single-minded stalker, but something nagged at me. I had nearly believed Stephanie’s sad sincerity in LA. Was my judgment that bad? She was talented at convincing people. Everybody believed her. That was how she had been able to get away with so much for so long. Like the slick swindlers who bilk thousands with ease from the same bank tellers who invariably question my fifty-dollar check.

  It had to be her. If not Stephanie, who?

  In the days that followed, I did my job but never relaxed. The gun in Iggy Zee’s possession when he was arrested was the murder weapon in the Fairborn case and one of the guns fired at Angel and me. Cops had picked up the other shooter and three more gang members. One flipped, agreeing to testify against the others in the homicide and attempted murder cases. All were being held without bond.

  My eyes constantly searched crowds and traffic for Stephanie. I startled easily. Grew more edgy and cautious. Put my gun back in the car and carried it with me into my apartment, even though I felt queasy handling it. I double-checked my smoke alarm and bought extra batteries. Something new had been added to my bad dreams. I kept waking up smelling smoke.

  Lance had asked the first night if I wanted to join them at the Fontainebleau. I didn’t, but almost wished I had when two pushy tabloid reporters appeared on my doorstep. Our picture had appeared in the Enquirer. WESTFELL STEPS OUT WITH NEW LOVE WHILE BODYGUARD IS SLAIN IN MIAMI. Lance was furious. I was heartsick. My mother was thrilled and said the dress looked great.

  I said nothing to the reporters. Just got into my car, as one of them snapped pictures, and drove to the office. Even a word would only encourage them. It felt so bizarre to be on the wrong side of a press frenzy. The entire world seemed topsy-turvy.

  I went to meet Lance for breakfast at the Fontainebleau and was surprised to encounter Lexie, just leaving. She brushed by me angrily, without a word. She looked as though she’d been crying.

  “She’s upset about Niko,” he explained. He had been ever-present when they were married. “She’s also jealous and mad as hell at you.”

  “Jealous?”

  “She saw your picture in the tabloids. That’s intruding on her turf. She has to be Queen Bee.”

  He hated hotel living. The day after the police released the crime scene, he dispatched a platoon of workmen and painters. Two days later, he moved back in, though not to his old room, which was kept closed. The faint smell of smoke lingered, but he went there only to sleep.

  Niko’s sister kept calling, wanting to claim his body. The delay was that the ME office was having trouble obtaining his dental records from LA, the final formality in such cases.

  “The kids saw you on TV,” Angel said cheerfully, as I worked on a story about the latest chupacabra sighting. But what she had really called to say was “We’re in the movie! Do you believe it?”

  Angel and her kids had been hired as extras on Margin of Error, thanks to Ziff. Their big scene was in a shopping center, as Lance, pursued by the bad guys, raced through the mall, bullets flying. They played a mother and her children ducking for cover. A plucky teenage girl, played by Misty, strolling by with friends, screams and runs.

  Not much of a stretch there, I thought.

  I hated to be negative but had to ask. “Aren’t the kids just getting over the trauma of the real shooting?”

  “Nah, they’re fine. They’re having a ball. And we get paid!”

  She was thinking about registering as a group, with a talent agency. The model family. The hearing in her manslaughter case was coming up and she was optimistic.

  “Have they caught that awful woman yet?” she said, asking about Stephanie.

  Life is strange. I could not believe I was having a friendly chat with Angel Oliver about some other awful woman.

  An intern was filling in for Gloria, taking messages. She approached my desk as I said goodbye to Angel. “Somebody was trying to reach you,” she said brightly.

  “Who was it?”

  “Some woman.” She glanced down at the message she had scrawled. “Said her name is Stephanie. Said it’s important.”

  “Why didn’t you signal me to get off the phone? Do you realize who that was?”

  The intern cocked her head to one side and blinked, her mouth open.

  “Do you read the paper?”

  The answer to both was an obvious no.

  Stephanie had left no number. If only I had not been on the phone with Angel. If only Gloria had not been on her break. If only.

  The message was on my machine at home that night. She sounded hysterical.

  “Britt, make them stop saying those terrible things about me! You know they’re not true. I’ve got to talk to
Lance. To make him listen. He’ll believe me … Don’t force me to do things I don’t want to do.”

  She called Lance numerous times as well. She got Dave, Pauli, Frank, and their voice mail, but Lance was never in when she called. Police and the telephone company installed a trap on the line, but she always hung up before they could trace her call.

  I covered Angel’s hearing on the fourth floor of the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building. Braced and invigorated by the cool, breezy weather, cops, lawyers, victims, and witnesses in suit coats and shades trotted briskly up the sun-dappled front steps. The pace of the place picked up as the temperature went down.

  Bliss, in his blue suit, conferred with the prosecutor outside the courtroom. He shook his head at me as the attorney went inside. “She’s gonna skate,” he said.

  “What…?”

  “See for yourself.” He held the door open for me.

  Angel was already inside with her attorney, smiling like the belle of the ball. For the first time since I had known her she wore a dress, a navy blue number with a little white collar.

  Her public defenders had worked vigorously. Their presentation was impressive. This was the first time I ever heard of intestinal atresia. The criminal charges were based on the police investigation and the findings of the chief medical examiner who had determined that Cynthia did indeed appear starved, body wasted, stomach empty, at the time of her death.

  Detective Bliss had found that her bed was a blanket in a cardboard box and that a sister, a child herself, was often the caregiver, with the mother away.

  The defense had countered by hiring a noted pediatric pathologist to study Cynthia’s entire record, with revealing results. A premature baby who weighed only three pounds at birth, Cynthia suffered from a number of medical problems, including serious neurological deficits. Nurses had made several unsuccessful attempts to bottle-feed little Cynthia. She had trouble sucking and gaining weight, they noted, describing her condition as “floppy,” as “limp as a rag doll.” Hospitalized for two and a half months, the baby was tube-fed until the day doctors sent her home with Angel, who was referred to a high-risk clinic for follow-up.