by Tom Lowe
I was silent.
“Will you help?” Her eyes searched mine.
“Detective Moore—”
“Please, it’s Leslie.”
“All right, Leslie…I’m Sean. Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way and we’re on a first-name basis, I’ll help. But it’s got to be a two-way street. You give me what you have and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Okay, what’s first?”
“The physical evidence near the scene. What were the results?”
“The blood on the stick came from the victim. No match from the DNA database with the hair on the duct tape, but we do know it didn’t come from the vic. We found skin under her fingernails, but it didn’t match DNA found in the hair from the tape.”
“Meaning she was raped by two different men, or she was in a fight with someone before the last perp raped and killed her.”
I retrieved the Ziploc bags. One contained the soil I’d collected from the girl’s shoe. The other had the thread Joe Billie spotted on the thorn. I handed them to Leslie.
“What’s this?”
“Run an analysis on this soil. See what’s in it, where it might have come from.”
“Is this why you mentioned agricultural interests?”
“Maybe. It could wind up being pay dirt. The thread was hanging on a palm thorn. I’m betting it came from the killer’s clothes, probably a shirt. Find any commonality you can on the two victims. If we can find that, we’re on the trail of this guy. I believe he’ll keep killing until he’s caught. Give me your cell number.”
I reached in a drawer and found the sealed envelope with the single follicle of hair. I opened the envelope, took a pair of scissors off the table, cut the hair in two pieces, placed one in an envelope, and gave it to Leslie. She watched as I put the second half in a separate envelope, sealing it.
“What’s that?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Is that the vic’s hair?”
“Your forensics ought to tell us. I found it on my boat. Someone planted it."
“Planted it? I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with this.”
“Somebody did.”
“You still don’t trust me, do you?”
“No, but I’m willing to take a risk.”
“I’m taking a risk just coming here.”
“Have you ever been on my boat?” I watched her eyes.
“What?”
“My boat at Ponce Inlet Marina. I noticed a few things out of place.”
“I wouldn’t board a boat without a warrant. I was there, though, with Slater.”
“Did Slater board her?”
“No. We questioned a few people about your coming and going. Everyone there, from the bartender to the dock master, seems to like and respect you.”
“If you told them you were investigating a murder, there is now a marina full of people wondering if I might slit their throats in the dead of night.”
She pushed a strand of hair behind her right ear and smiled awkwardly. “I’m sorry. Sometimes the innocent get bruised. I should go now.”
I followed her to the door. She started to say something, hesitating for a moment. “Can I ask you why you quit as a homicide detective? According to the people I’ve talked to, you have some ability, maybe a rare gift, to really read suspects. To tell if someone is lying the first few seconds you talk with them.”
“Sometimes I got lucky, that’s all.”
Leslie smiled. “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it. It’s the kind of thing the FBI tries to teach in its behavioral profile classes. Not everyone can learn it, ever. Was it a skill you developed?”
I wanted to change the subject. “Don’t let your research into my background skew your judgment. I made mistakes...so many I quit.”
“You don’t seem like a quitter. Maybe one day you’ll tell me about it.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“Somehow I don’t quite believe that.” She smiled and opened the door. “I’ll have the results of these samples soon.”
Watching her get in the unmarked patrol, car I thought of an unmarked grave. It was then that I planned to attend a funeral.
TWENTY-ONE
The next morning I drove to the Volusia County Cemetery, a potter’s field. I parked and stood under a lone water oak tree and waited for the crew to finish. A blackbird alighted on one of the limbs not far above my head. There were only two men, the backhoe operator and a man with a shovel. When the grave was deep enough, the men slid the wooden coffin out from a county truck.
They held opposite sides and carried it like carrying a junk sofa to the curb for pick up. They lowered it by hand, then I heard one of them say, “Hold it! On three. One…two…three.” The coffin dropped the hole with a two thuds, body against wood.
“Show some respect!” I yelled, stepping from the water oak. The man working the shovel stopped and stood erect. He was tall, well over six feet, Viking stock with dirty blonde hair gelled in a flattop. He held the shovel with one hand, resting it against his wide shoulder. The other man, light-skinned black and overweight, shirttail hanging out, climbed on the backhoe and turned over the diesel, ignoring me.
I stepped to the open grave and looked at the pine box at the bottom of the hole.
“What are you doing? The casket could splinter.”
“Don’t matter,” said the man with the shovel. “They’s nobodies.” He lit a cigarette. He inhaled the smoke, flipped an ash into the grave and said, “Ashes to ashes.”
“Her grave isn’t your ash tray!”
“You related to her?”
“I didn’t have a lot of time to get to know her.”
“Fuckin’ nut.” He shoveled in dirt.
The man on the backhoe shrugged his shoulders and began scrapping the dirt in the grave. The man with the shovel was angry, tossing in dirt like someone covering up a hole that didn’t produce buried treasure.
Within a few minutes they were done. Eighteen years of life covered in twenty minutes of work. The man with the shovel tossed his cigarette into the grave and covered it up with dirt.
I grabbed the wooden end of the shovel with one hand, catching him off guard. “Dig it out!”
“Kiss my ass!” he shouted above the noise from the backhoe. He jerked the shovel out of my hand and swung the blade at my head. It missed my nose by inches, the grit and sand spraying my eyes, blinding for a moment. He hit me with the wooden handle. The blow landed on my jaw. There was the instant taste of blood in my mouth.
The backhoe man turned off the diesel and shouted. “Bust his ass, Lonnie!”
The blackbird sounded right above me. I dove in the opposite direction of the man’s shadow. Dropping, spinning and tackling him to the ground. We rolled across the fresh grave, the grit of sand in my nose and mouth. He swung at my face. I smelled stale cigarette smoke, sweat, and beer though the man’s pores. I closed one eye to focus. I hit him hard on the jaw. The sound was like sheet rock smacked with a hammer. He flayed at my head, a gurgling sound coming from his throat. The man on the backhoe slid out of his seat. I picked up the shovel and held it like a baseball bat.
“Don’t take another step!” I ordered. The man lying across the grave tried to stand. He was dazed. His threats sounding synthesized, as if the weak voice was coming from an animated character. I heard, “Gonna bury you.”
“Pack up your backhoe, get in your truck and leave. Now!” My head pounded.
The black man loaded the backhoe on a flatbed behind the pickup truck.
“Come on, Lonnie,” he said. “Leave this crazy shit in the graveyard.” The man called Lonnie limped to the truck. He pulled himself in the cab and slammed the door. A half-minute later they were gone.
I was alone in a field without flowers. What do you say at a funeral that no one attends? Nothing but the sound of a blackbird in the lone water oak. The hot sun licked the back of my neck.
I knelt in the dirt
staring at a county-issued cross at the head of a fresh grave. I smoothed out the warm soil with my trembling hands and looked up at the water oak.
The blackbird was silent.
TWENTY-TWO
I wasn’t sure how long my cell phone had been ringing when I finally rolled over and lifted it from the nightstand. I felt like I was awakening from surgery. My jaw was swollen. I managed to utter a sound into the receiver that was similar to “hello.”
“Sean? Is that you?” questioned Detective Leslie Moore.
“Yeah.”
“Are you still in bed?”
“Not now.”
“It’s almost noon.”
“That means the drugs have worn off, and I don’t have to feed Max breakfast. We can just dive into the mid-day snack.” I sat on the edge of the bed.
“You sound different.”
“I feel different.”
“Did something happen?”
“I don’t do funerals well.” I stood and took the phone into the bathroom. I squinted looking into the mirror. My left jaw was the color of a ripe plum, swollen. I could see a halo coming from the bathroom light.
“Are you okay, Sean?” Leslie’s voice sounded alien and far away.
“Yeah, I’m all right.” I headed toward the kitchen to fix an icepack.
“I have some information from the lab.”
“Shoot.”
“The soil didn’t match any of the surrounding soil where the body was found or where the shoe was found.”
I steadied myself on the bathroom counter and listened. “The soil had traces of three commercial grade fertilizers and a fungicide.”
“What else?” I asked, wishing I had taken more aspirin last night.
“The single cloth thread was silk. Probably came for an expensive shirt. Maybe Italian. If we could find it, we’d match it.”
“And if we could find the bastard that left hair in the duct tape, we’d nail him, too. Trouble is, we have no one.”
“We have more hard evidence than suspects. I’ll get the DNA results on the long black hair, the one from your boat, in a day or two.”
“What big agriculture interests are within a hundred miles of the crime scene?”
“What do you mean by big agriculture?”
“Those using migrant help.”
“Oh, I see where you’re going. Could explain why no one has reported the girl missing, the soil samples you asked for, and why no one claimed the body.”
“The Brevard murder,” I said, starting to feel blood moving through my bruises. “Anyone identify the body?”
“Not yet. Autopsy indicates she was raped and her neck broken. Both vics could have been employed by any of the big farms. Most of those farms are owned by old money, old Florida families. Multinational companies own some of the others.”
“Much trouble on these farms? Any reports of beatings? Human trafficking?”
She was silent for a few seconds. “Our files are full of missing person reports. Hispanics and lots of others tossed in the mix. And with all the lakes, swamps, and hundreds of miles of coastline, it would be easy to dispose of bodies.”
“I did some cross-checking with my old homicide partner, Ron Hamilton, at Miami-Dade PD. In the last five years, there have been nineteen known homicides involving young Hispanic women. All were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Out of that, four men were arrested and charged in four separate killings. Fifteen of the murders remain unsolved, now cold cases. The women died the same way. Rape, necks broken.”
“If it’s the same perp, how has he stayed under the radar so well?”
“Selective kills. Covers his tracks well, if it’s the same perp, but he didn’t finish what he began with the girl I found. I think something caused him to cut and run.”
“No witnesses, of course, have come forth.”
“Leslie, you’d mentioned that Slater has political ambitions, connected to old Florida money. How?”
“Lawyers, developers and agriculture.”
“Any specific farmers?”
“He’s been seen at a few fund-raisers for Richard Brennen, the heir apparent to the family farming business, which is a very big business.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s running for a state senate seat. Brennen’s family is SunState Farms. Been in the family for generations. They’ve got thousands of acres in three counties.”
“Where’s the headquarters?”
“Polk County.”
“What else do you know about Brennen?”
“What I read and see in the new media. He’s confident, charismatic and rich.”
“Run a check on him all the way back to first grade, if you can.”
“Okay. What are you going to do?” Leslie’s voice was softer.
“I’m going on a field trip.”
“Without a badge, I don’t know how far you can get with these people before they have you arrested, or worse. Be careful, Sean.”
I chased two aspirins with orange juice two weeks beyond its expiration date. As I started for the shower, the phone rang. It was Nick. “You sound like I woke you.”
“Someone else beat you to it.”
“What’s wrong, man?”
“I hate funerals.”
“Know what you mean. Hey, some people were hanging by your boat.”
“Who? You talk with them?”
“Kim saw them.”
“What’d she see?”
“They weren’t messin’ with your boat. They were asking questions about you?”
“They? Who? What kind of questions?”
“Don’t know. Kim told me to tell you if I saw you. Been tryin’ to call you. Thought somebody killed you and tossed you in the river. Almost got on my bike and run out to your place, but I’d had too much Greek wine.”
“How did Kim describe these people? Was one bald?”
“It was a he and a she. Two of ‘em. And they were from the FBI.”
The throb above my left eye became more pronounced. I popped a beer, sipped it on one side of my mouth, and thought about taking another aspirin.
TWENTY-THREE
After resting my jaw for three days, I was becoming anxious to do what I knew in my gut I had to do. It was the feeling I got before combat during the first Gulf War. It was the mood that came over me when the hunt was closing in on a suspect in the streets or corporate offices of Miami.
I made arrangements for my neighbor to take care of Max while I was away. I didn’t know if I’d be gone a few hours or a few days. I did know that the FBI was interested in me, but why? The stories were now being carried by the national wire services. There were rumblings of a serial killer loose in the sunshine state, the land of Mickey and Shamu. The feds were being more reactive than proactive.
My immediate decision was whether to let them come find me, or go to them. I thought about it for less than a second before turning south on Highway 27. I wedged the Glock out of sight between my seat and the gearshift console.
I unzipped all of the windows on the Jeep and invited the wind along for the ride. The air was cool and mixed with smells of fresh plowed earth and orange blossoms. I drove through cattle country, sliced by drainage canals and dotted with orange and grapefruit trees. It was a cloudless morning, the sky deep blue, almost as if a bottomless indigo blow was covering the earth.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw a car following about a quarter of a mile behind me. I accelerated from fifty to sixty-five. My cell rang. I didn’t recognize the number. I did recognize the man’s voice.
Floyd Powell, the commercial fisherman, said, “I run into my nephew this morning. We got to talkin’ about that killin,’ you know, the one with the girl. He told me he was frog giggin’ near there that night. Had his light on the bank where the frogs is at, and he says he seen what he thought was two people having sex higher up on the bluff. Says it wasn’t but a few seconds later when he saw a car headin’ down the dirt road toward
State Road 44. Bobby said he thought it was odd ‘cause the driver never turned on his lights until he was on blacktop.”
“Can your nephew identify the guy?”
“Says he was too embarrassed to look good when he caught ‘em in this light.”
I thanked Floyd Powell and hung up. Now I knew why the girl I’d found hadn’t suffered a broken neck. The perp was frightened by the boat lights and fled the scene.
The approaching car in my rearview window caught my attention, but the driver kept his distance. Then I kicked the Jeep up to more than eighty miles an hour. It didn’t take a full mile for me to be certain that I was being followed.
The driver was good. Staying far enough behind to appear that he or she had lost me. I tapped my brakes, slowing back to about sixty. The car drifted at a distance behind me. The image grew smaller in my rearview mirror. The driver suddenly whipped off the paved road, the car kicking up a long rooster tail of dust, speeding in another direction, going down a dirt road.
I dialed Leslie Moore’s number. “Leslie, you mentioned that the chemical analysis found in the vic’s shoe isn’t used to grow citrus. What does it grow?”
“Primarily tomatoes, at least in the concentrations we found.”
“What does SunState Farms grow?”
“They’re also one of the largest growers of tomatoes in Florida.”
“Text the directions to SunState for me. I’m two miles north of Lake Wells.”
“Okay. I got the DNA results back from the black hair you found in your boat.”
I was silent.
“The hair came from the vic you found. Sean, someone is trying hard to set you up.”
“Wonder who that might be? Is Slater there?”
“I haven’t seen him in a couple of hours. Why?”
“Nothing. Just wanted to see if the pit bull was out of his yard.”
“Slater met with two agents from the FBI. They showed up yesterday right after I arrived for work. Asked to meet with Slater. They met behind closed doors for about a half hour. Slater didn’t say anything to me about what went on.”
