The Dead Detective

by William Heffernan

  Vicky got in, slipped on her sunglasses, and looked at him over the tops. “That’s good, Harry. I don’t want your feminist side to start running amok.”

  The Brooker Creek Preserve is 8,000 acres of raw Florida land, a mixture of sandy pine forest and cypress swamp that sits on the northern edge of Pinellas County in a densely populated and pricey residential community known as East Lake. A series of wetlands in neighboring Hillsborough County flow lazily across fifteen miles, constantly feeding the preserve, and only a three-building environmental education complex and two and a half miles of hiking trails mar a landscape that was once prime hunting grounds for Seminole Indians.

  Harry pulled up to the preserve’s open iron gates, stopping at a sign that listed the hours it was open to the public. He jotted them down in his notebook—Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Thursdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday. It was now five-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. Harry studied the gate. It was electronic, run from a keypad so it would have to be opened each morning and closed each night by someone who either knew the code or had an override key like the ones police, fire, and rescue personnel carried. He turned to Vicky.

  “We won’t know until the autopsy, but if our victim was killed here, or dumped here right after the park opened, whoever was in charge of this gate may have seen our perp entering the preserve. We need to find out who that was.”

  Vicky stared into the forest that spread out from the gate. “Sure is a lot of cover for a dirty deed.”

  Harry started to laugh. “A dirty deed?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Harry shook his head. “What’s next, ‘Curses, foiled again’?” “I’m saving that for when Nick Benevuto kicks me out of his bed,” Vicky quipped. “Nicky the pimp has never kicked anyone—or thing—out of his bed,” Harry said. “Well it’s true then,” Vicky snapped back. “God is good.” Harry put the car in gear and started down the mile-long macadam road that led to the Environmental Education Center. Two hundred yards in he pulled off to the right behind two sheriff’s patrol cars that had been parked on each side of a partially overgrown hiking trail leading into the forest. A uniformed deputy stood guard at the head of the trail.

  Harry left his coat on the front seat, walked to the rear of the car, and opened the trunk. He took out the small crime scene case he carried to all homicides, then removed a pair of rubber boots and slipped them on. He glanced at Vicky, who had come to the rear of the car and was watching him intently.

  “You should get a pair of these boots, or something similar,” he said. “We can have the size and sole prints on file with forensics. It’ll save time eliminating your footprints at crime scenes. It’ll also save you from replacing three or four pairs of ruined shoes every year.”

  Vicky grinned at him. “I’ll do it.” She glanced at his rubber boots. “But something a bit more stylish, I think.”

  Harry smirked. “Whatever,” he said, as he turned and walked toward the deputy guarding the head of the trail, looking him up and down as he did.

  The deputy was tall and lanky with a country boy’s raw-boned strength, but behind a pair of intense blue eyes a good amount of intelligence looked back. Harry was certain they had never met before and made a mental note of the man’s name tag, which read, Morgan.

  “What’s your first name, Morgan?” he asked as he came up beside him.

  Morgan’s eyes drifted to the detective’s badge attached to Harry’s belt. “Jim,” he said.

  Harry extended his hand. “Harry Doyle. I’m with homicide.” He tilted his head toward Vicky. “This is my partner, Vicky Stanopolis. I understand you’ve got a body for us.”

  “Sure do,” Morgan said. “Back up that trail about a quarter of a mile at the edge of a cypress swamp. It’s a weird one for sure.”

  “How so?” Harry asked.

  “Lady’s all posed … sexually posed. And she’s wearing a mask and all. Like one of those they wear at Mardi Gras.”

  Harry nodded and studied the ground. Fresh tire tracks ran off into the trail. “You guys drive in there?” he asked.

  The deputy shook his head. “No way. I was the first one here and I saw the tracks right off. I asked the ranger who called us if he drove in, but he said he didn’t. Said they never do unless they’re running a work crew. He said they haven’t worked on this particular trail since last spring. After I heard all that I made sure nobody else drove in.”

  They’d lucked out, Harry thought. Morgan was sharp, much more so than a good percentage of deputies.

  “Okay,” Harry said, “when the crime scene boys get here, tell them I want photographs and casts on those tracks. Tell them I want all four tires if they can get them. They’ll probably have to do it on a curve in the trail, but they’ll know that. Anybody else going in, you tell them to keep to the sides of the trail. And no smoking, no candy bars, no anything that’ll screw up my crime scene. You got all that?”

  “I got it.”

  Harry looked Morgan in the eye. “One more thing, Jim. You did a nice job. Thanks.”

  Harry and Vicky slipped on latex gloves and started in, each one using a different side of the eight-foot-wide trail, which was little more than heat-hardened earth, covered in dry, matted grass. A heavy growth of pines rose on each side, obscuring much of what lay beyond …

  The deputy called after them: “Be careful when you get to that cypress swamp. There’s a nine-foot gator back there thinks it’s his.”

  “Thanks again,” Harry called back.

  They walked in slowly, checking the trail for any discarded items that might have been left by the killer, finding only three scattered cigarette butts, a chewing gum wrapper, and a number of shoe impressions. Close to where the tire tracks ended they found an empty book of matches advertising a topless bar in Tampa. Harry made a note of the name. All in all the items they found could have been dropped by anyone too lazy to stick them in a pocket to discard later. But every item had to be checked, so they took their time, placing small orange marking flags next to each one. This was only preliminary, an effort to save them time. The crime scene unit would do a far more thorough job; they would literally sweep the area around each flag that Harry had left and comb the entire area in much greater depth, carefully looking for hair, clothing fibers, anything that might be linked to the crime. Still, Harry gave the trail a reasonably thorough search. He didn’t want to wait several hours for the CSI unit to give him an obvious clue.

  It took them twenty minutes to reach the cypress swamp where the land and vegetation suddenly changed. There was a long, narrow pool at the swamp’s center, dotted with water lilies, and it forced the hiking trail, which now turned into black, loamy earth, to veer to the left. A green heron strutted along the bank of the pond hunting frogs, its sharp dagger beak and snakelike neck poised to strike. Harry saw no sign of the gator he had been warned about. Thirty yards ahead, where the trail skirted the pond, he could see two uniformed deputies standing guard over something unseen. He motioned Vicky to his side of the trail, away from the edge of the pond.

  “Don’t wanna use me as gator bait, huh?” she said.

  “I’ll wait for gator season,” Harry shot back.

  “That’s my new partner. Just a sweet, sensitive guy.”

  “Always,” Harry said.

  When they reached the deputies they could just make out one leg of the body. It extended out past a rotting cypress stump located ten feet off the trail.

  The deputies were a Mutt and Jeff combination, one tall and slender, the other short and beefy. Harry introduced himself. Vicky did the same, as Harry studied the ground leading to the body. It was soft and spongy and there were footprints leading in and out. He counted four or five sets, some appeared to be the same size, making the exact number hard to determine on first glance. He turned back to the deputies.

  “How many of you went in there?” he asked Jeff, who seemed to have the sharper eyes of the pair.

&n
bsp; “Let’s see,” Jeff said, counting mentally. “We went in.” He nodded toward the other deputy. “So did Morgan, the deputy you met coming in. And so did the park ranger. He was first. He went straight in after the bird watcher told him there was a body out here. Then he called us.”

  “What about the bird watcher?” Harry asked. “Do you know if she went in?”

  “When Morgan questioned her, she told him she didn’t. Just saw the leg stickin’ out and went for the ranger. But she’s still up at the preserve office with another deputy if you want to talk to her.”

  “The deputy at the office, did he go in?”

  Both deputies shook their heads. “He came later—after us; after the crime scene was set up. He was sent to guard the witness; never got out here at all.”

  Harry nodded. “Okay, good work. Now, I’d like one of you to call the office and make sure our witness stays put. I’m also gonna need to get the shoe sizes of everyone who went in to the body, and later, when the crime scene techs gets here, I’m going to want casts and photographs of the soles of everyone’s shoes. We’ll have to eliminate all of you from any prints the perp might have left. Also, I need to know if anyone touched the body.”

  This time it was Mutt, shaking his head. “None of us,” he said. “Morgan was the first one here and he made sure no one did. The park ranger said he felt her wrist for a pulse. I don’t know why he bothered. Her throat’s cut back almost to her spine. Same as O.J.’s wife.” Mutt shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by the comparison he had just made; then added: “At least that’s what they said at Simpson’s trial.”

  Vicky looked away and rolled her eyes. “Morgan told us she’s wearing a mask. Did anybody touchit?” she asked, turning back to the two deputies.

  “Not after we got here,” Jeff said, taking over again. “Morgan got here first and made sure nobody touched anything. I can’t swear about the ranger, but he says he only touched her wrist.”

  “Okay,” Harry said. “We’re going in to check the body, but we’ll circle wide to avoid adding our footprints to the mix.”

  “Watch where you step,” Jeff warned. “There’s a few cottonmouths around these swamps.”

  Vicky wrinkled up her nose and gave a small shudder. “Snakes, alligators, and a dead woman in a Mardi Gras mask—I’m really starting to love this case.”

  Harry studied her for several moments. The toughness was well established behind her eyes, and that charnel house humor was a definite plus, a necessary survival tool for a cop working homicide. Yeah, he thought, she’ll do just fine. He gave her an amused smile. “Tomorrow we get vampires,” he said.

  “I’ve got to wait until tomorrow?”

  “They only show themselves on Thursdays.”

  What about werewolves?” Vicky said.

  “Never saw one in Florida—too hot for all that fur.”

  “Damn. And I could’ve sworn I’d dated a few.”

  They moved toward the body in a wide circle, looking not only for the snakes the deputy had warned of, but also for any evidence the killer might have tossed out into the thick undergrowth from the immediate crime scene. The walk in proved uneventful, but a more thorough, wider search would be made later. Right now they needed to learn all they could from the body.

  The body lay on its back on a rich, dark bed of rotting vegetation. The woman had been clothed in a straight black dress that would have stopped just above the knees had someone not used a knife to slice open the entire front. Black thong underwear was the lone undergarment and it had been pulled aside exposing a neatly trimmed blond pubis, the same shade as the woman’s hair. Her breasts were also exposed and they were full and round and pointed rigidly up.

  “Implants,” Harry observed.

  “You betcha,” Vicky said. “Even when all the muscles go soft and slack, these boobs will not sag or lose their shape. Plastic surgeons should use that line in their advertising.”

  “I thought they already did,” Harry said.

  The flip words didn’t carry to their eyes. Each pair remained grim and focused. It was the charnel house humor again, two detectives forced to witness daily human carnage, trying to maintain their personal sanity.

  Harry took a Polaroid camera from his crime scene case and took two photos of the body in situ. He took another of the woman’s feet, which were shoeless and relatively clean except for a dusting of beach sand, indicating both that she had been carried into the swamp and had recently visited a beach. Then he took a minute to study the area around them. It seemed peaceful and threatening at the same time, the way only a primal forest can, and except for the intrusion of the body of a young, modernly dressed woman he might have been standing in a place that had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. He let his eyes roam. Spread out before him were several large cypress stumps, like the one that stood next to the body, each one rotting with age; each probably there since the turn of the last century when loggers scoured Florida lands searching out and cutting all the mature cypress they could find. To the left were several Southern live oaks, their boughs heavy with Spanish moss. Between the oaks were small groupings of young pond cypress, many with butterfly orchids and resurrection ferns attached to their trunks. Larger patches of swamp fern grew in dense clusters across the black, spongy ground, their toothed edges providing protective shelter for small animals, and as Harry watched a cotton rat scurried from one patch to another, scaring up a pair of common yellowthroat, the small birds darting off in search of safer cover. In the distance he could hear the gooselike grunts of tree frogs and the high-pitched chirping of cicadas, and up in the trees he could see several parula warblers and white-eyed vireos flying from tree to tree.

  He felt a hand on his arm and turned back. Vicky was staring at him strangely.

  “You lost in thought, or just enjoying a Discovery Channel moment?” she asked.

  Harry ignored the question and asked one of his own. “Why bring her here? We can be reasonably sure the killer drove a car in, at least as far as the swamp. But why risk it? Why risk being seen? He could have been spotted by a park ranger driving on a trail, or by any number of hikers. Why risk any of it when there are so many places to dump a body? The beaches, at night; all the thick pine forests in the middle of the state. He obviously didn’t kill her here. He brought her body here and posed it in this setting. Why? Why was that part of the overall plan, or does this place have some special significance?”

  Vicky looked back at the body and the area around it. It was as the deputy had said. The woman’s throat was cut so deeply that the head was nearly severed from the body. It told her that the killer was either very powerful or very angry to use that degree of cutting force. But there was no blood splatter on the cypress trunk or the cluster of swamp ferns that grew beside it. Somewhere there was a large pool of blood that had pumped from her body when the carotid arteries had been severed, and had kept on pumping until her heart stopped beating. When they found that pool of blood—if they found that pool of blood—they would have the real crime scene. Harry’s voice brought her back.

  “You’re the sex crimes expert. You see any indication she was raped?”

  Vicky looked at the body more closely. “I see what looks like a small amount of dried semen in her pubic hair. But I don’t see any signs of violence. There’s no bruising or cuts or scratches.” She pointed to the woman’s right hand. “She’s got two broken fingernails, but that could have happened while she was being killed. I’m just not seeing what’s usually there when somebody’s raped. Maybe the autopsy will tell us more.”

  Harry nodded. He was squatting next to the body, studying the Mardi Gras mask that covered the woman’s face. He took out the Polaroid again and took two more photos. Vicky squatted on the other side, joining him. The mask was a deep iridescent purple, with highlights of silver. There were cat’s ears at the top and whiskers sprouting from the cheeks and small, dark red plumes rising from high on the forehead. Clouded green eyes looked out blindly through t
he holes in the mask, giving the only hint of the face that lay beneath. The mask was not held in place by any band. It had simply been placed on the face, so Harry carefully lifted it, using one finger of each hand, and laid it on the woman’s chest.

  When the woman’s face was exposed an audible gasp escaped Vicky’s throat and Harry’s head snapped back. They knew this woman. Like most of the people in the United States they had seen her picture countless times in newspapers and magazines and television screens, although now the exquisitely beautiful face had been altered. A single word had been carved in her forehead with a very sharp knife—the word EVIL. The mutilation jolted Harry, his mind immediately flashing to the small silver crosses his mother had placed on his and Jimmy’s foreheads; the way she had covered their eyes with towels.

  “It’s really her,” Vicky said, bringing Harry back to the present. There was no trace of a question in her voice.

  “Yeah, it’s her.” Harry felt his fists tighten into balls.

  Vicky rose slowly, shaking her head. “Holy shit, it is gonna be a circus out here. We better call the captain. If this gets out we’re gonna have media moving through here like Sherman through Georgia.”

  “Back out the same way you came in,” Harry said. “Try to step in your own footprints where you can.”

  Vicky started to move carefully away. Harry stood there for a moment, staring down at the body of Darlene Beckett. He picked up the camera and took two more photos with the mask removed. Even then he didn’t move. He could almost feel the killer standing next to him, the last person to see her without the mask. He continued to stare at the body, bringing back the last image he had of the woman. She was standing before the TV cameras, giving them that slightly sly, very self-absorbed little smile she had displayed so often when appearing in court. Slowly, almost imperceptively, Harry nodded his head. Evil, he thought. Yes, you were definitely that. But somebody finally got to you. Somebody finally presented the bill and told you it was time to pay. He continued to stare at the woman’s face, uncontrolled words racing through his mind. The word religion kept returning, but he couldn’t tell if it came from Darlene Beckett or memories of his mother. He drew a long, steady breath as he took in the look of disbelief on her face—a disbelief that had begun to change into abject terror as the life rushed from her body. Then it all stopped—that mix of disbelief and terror frozen on her face as her life ended. He stared into her eyes. They had begun to cloud, but it was still there as well, that same mixture. Who was it you saw and why did it surprise you so? He drew another deep breath. It was all there in her eyes, but it was fading fast. He crouched down, still staring into her eyes, thinking about what the woman had done. The word evil played over and over in his mind and the image of a cross began to form. Was that it? he wondered. He continued to stare into her eyes. “Talk to me, Darlene,” he whispered. “It’s alright. You belong to me now.” He closed his eyes and drew a long breath. Now it’s my job to find out who put that disbelief and that fear in your eyes. And I’ll find him. I promise you I’ll find him. His jaw tightened and he opened his eyes and once again stared at her beautiful face. And when I find him, Darlene, maybe I’ll give the son of a bitch a medal.