Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

16

  THE YOUNG DETECTIVE

  Detective Andrea Shaeffer greeted the dawn from her desk.

  She had tried sleep, only to find it elusive, then fitful. Rising in the compressed black of the early morning, she had discarded an awful dream of blood and torn throats, dressed, then driven to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department homicide substation in Key Largo. From where she sat in the second-floor offices, she could stare through a window and see a pinkish ridge of light painted on the edge of the night. She imagined the slow disintegration of the darkness out on the Gulf Stream, where the razor-sharpness of morning seemed to carve shapes onto the tossing waves and finally, with a great slash, cut the horizon free from the ocean.

  For a moment she wished she were out on her stepfather’s fishing boat, rigging hooks in the near-black, her legs spread against the bounce and shock of the swells, her hands, slippery from handling bait, rapidly twisting wire leaders and tying knots in monofilament. The fishing would be good today. There would be big thunderheads lurking far out over the water and the heat would stir up narrow waterspouts that would show even blacker and more terrifying against the sky. But the fish would rise toward the surface, hungry, anticipating the storm, eager to feed. Dance around on the edges of the gathering winds and keep the baits moving, she thought. Fast baits, for kings and wahoos and especially billfish. Something that scratches and slaps at the waves, furrowing through the dark Gulf Stream waters, irresistible to the big fish searching for sustenance.

  That was what I always liked about fishing, she thought: not the fight against the hook and line, no matter how spectacular; nor the last impetuous panic at boatside; nor the back-slapping accomplishment or the beery congratulations. What I liked was the hunt. Her eyes stared through the homicide office window while her mind churned over what she knew and what she didn’t know. When the light finally seemed to have succeeded in its daily battle, she turned away, back to the spread of papers that were strewn about her desk.

  She glanced at the summary report she’d prepared after questioning the neighbors on Tarpon Drive. No one had seen or heard anything of note. Then she fingered the report from the medical examiner’s office. Proximate cause of death in both subjects was the same: abrupt severing of the right carotid artery leading to sudden massive loss of blood. He was left-handed, she thought. Stood behind them and drew the blade across their throats. Skin around the wounds was only mildly frayed. A straightedge razor, maybe a carbon steel hunting knife. Something real sharp. Neither victim showed any signs of significant postmortem injury. He killed them and left. Premortem injuries included bruising around each victim’s arms, which was to be expected. The killer had tied them savagely, the rope cutting into the skin. A strip of duct tape had gagged them. The male victim had a contusion on his forehead, a split lip, and a fractured pair of ribs. The knuckles on his right hand were skinned with trace residue of paint, and the chair legs had scratched the linoleum kitchen floor. At least he fought, if only for an instant. He must have been second, jamming his hands against the frame of his chair as he struggled, fighting to get free until he was slammed across the chest and in the head. There was no sign of sexual trauma to the woman, although she had been found naked. Humiliation. Shaeffer remembered seeing the old woman’s nightclothes folded neatly in the kitchen corner. Folded carefully. By whom? Victim or killer? Fingernail scrapings were negative. Both victims had been body-printed at the morgue, but without success.

  Shaeffer tossed the papers onto the desktop. No help, she thought. At least no obvious help.

  She picked up the crime-scene preliminaries, struck with the language of the documents she was reading. Death reduced to the most clipped, unevocative terms. Things measured, weighed, photographed, and assessed. The rope that had been used to bind the elderly couple was quarter-inch nylon clothesline, available in any hardware store or supermarket. Two pieces, one measuring forty-one inches, the other thirty-nine and one-half, had been cut from a twelve-foot length discovered by the back door. The killer had made a slipknot, looped that over his victims’ wrists, then doubled and tripled it, ending with a simple square knot to hold it all together.

  An ordinary, nondistinctive knot, temporary, improvised at the scene. Strong enough for the moment of killing but one that, given time, could have been worked loose. That suggested something to her: not a local, someone from somewhere else. Keys folks for the most part knew their knots; they’d have tied something sturdier, nautical.

  She nodded. Middle of the night. He broke in. Subdued them, tied them, gagged them. They thought they were going to be robbed and acquiescence would save their lives. No chance. He simply killed them. Maximum terror. Quick. Efficient. No extra time. A silent knife. No gunshot to arouse nosy neighbors. No robbery. No rape. No slamming door, race-away panic.

  A killer who arrives, murders, and exits, pausing only to open a Bible on the table between his victims, unseen, unheard by everyone except his victims. She thought, All murders leave a message. The drug dealer’s body found decomposing in the mangroves with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head, gold watch and diamond jewelry still dangling from his wrists, sends one sort of message. The young woman who thinks it’s okay just this once to hitchhike home from the restaurant where she waits on tables and ends up three counties away, naked, dead, and violated, sends another. The old man in the trailer who finally tires of tending his wife’s degenerative cancer and shoots her and then himself and dies clutching a fifty-five-year-old wedding album is telling a different story.

  She looked down at the crime-scene photos. The glossy eight-by-ten pictures summoned up her memory of the oppressive heat in the death room and the nauseating smell of the bodies. It always made it worse when nature had had time to work on a murder scene; any residual dignity left over from their lives had dissipated swiftly in the soaring temperatures. It also played havoc with the investigative process. She had been taught that every minute that passed after a homicide made a successful resolution less likely. Old, cold cases that get solved get headlines. But for every one that results in an indictment, a hundred remain behind, each a tangled knot of suppositions.

  Two old people who helped bring into the world and deform a mass murderer are themselves murdered. What the hell sort of crime is that?

  Revenge. Maybe justice. Possibly a perverse combination of the two.

  She continued looking through the crime-scene reports. There were two partial footprints outlined in blood, lifted from the linoleum floor. The chain tread of the soles had been identified as coming from a pair of hightop Reebok basketball shoes, sized between nine and eleven. The soles were of a style manufactured within the past six months. Some cloth fibers had been uncovered sticking to the swatch of blood that had littered the old man’s chest. They were of a cotton-polyester blend commonly associated with sweat clothes. Entry to the house had been accomplished through the rear door. Old, rotting wood had torn apart at the first touch of a steel screwdriver or chisel. She shook her head. This was commonplace in the Keys. The sun, wind, and salt air destroyed door frames, a fact with which every two-bit burglar frequenting the hundred and sixty miles between Miami and Key West was well familiar.

  But no two-bit burglar had performed this crime.

  She grabbed a pen and made some notes to herself: Canvass the hardware stores, see if anyone purchased a knife, rope, and screwdriver or small crowbar. Talk to all the neighbors again, see if anyone saw a strange car. Check the local hotels. Did he bring the Bible with him? Check the bookstores.

  She did not hold out much hope for any of this.

  She continued: Cheek the crime lab with samples of the skin where the throats were sliced. Perhaps a spectrographic examination would show some metal fragments that might tell her something about the murder weapon. This was important. She ordered her thoughts with a military precision: If a killer leaves nothing of evidentiary value, no part of himself, like seme
n or fingerprints or hair, then to place him in that room, one must find what he took with him—the murder weapon, blood residue on his shoes or clothes, some item from the house. Something.

  Shaeffer rubbed her eyes for an instant, letting her thoughts turn toward Cowart. What is he hiding? she asked herself. Some piece of the crime that means something to him. But what?

  She drew a portrait of the reporter in her head, sketching in the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice. She did not know much about reporters, but she knew that they generally wanted to appear to know more than they did, to create the illusion that they were sharing information rather than simply seducing it. Cowart did not fit this profile. After their initial confrontation at the crime scene, he had not asked her a single question about the murders on Tarpon Drive. lnstead, he had done his worldly best to avoid being questioned.

  What does that tell you? That he already has the answers.

  But why would he hide them from her? To protect someone.

  Blair Sullivan? Impossible.

  He needs to protect himself.

  But that still didn’t get her anywhere. She doodled on the empty pad in front of her, drawing concentric circles that grew darker and darker as she filled in the space with ink.

  She remembered a lecture from her police academy days: Four out of five killers know their victims.

  All right, she told herself. Blair Sullivan tells Matthew Cowart that he arranged the killing. How can he do this from Death Row?

  Her heart sank. Prisons are worlds unto themselves. Anything can be obtained, if one is willing to pay the price, even a death. And everyone inside knows the mechanics of prison barter and exchange. But for an outsider to penetrate the machinations of those worlds was difficult, sometimes impossible. The ordinary leverages of life that a policeman so depended on—the fear of social or legal sanctions, of being held accountable—didn’t exist within a prison.

  She envisioned her next step with distaste: questioning all the prison people who had come in contact with Sullivan. One of them should be the pipeline, she thought. But what does he pay with? He didn’t have any money. Or did he? He didn’t have any status. He was a loner who went to the chair. Or was he?

  How does he pay that debt?

  And why does he tell Matthew Cowart?

  A thought jumped into her head suddenly: Perhaps he’d already paid.

  She took a deep breath.

  Blair Sullivan contracts for a killing and we assume that payment is due upon completion of the contract. That is natural. But—turn it around. Shaeffer warmed suddenly, feeling her imagination trip like so many switches. She remembered the explosive excitement she felt when her eyes picked out the broad, dark shape of the billfish rising through the green-black waters to strike at the bait. A single moment, electric, exhilarating, before the battle was joined. The best moment, she thought.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed a number. It rang three times before a groan slid over the line.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mike? It’s Andy.”

  “Christ. Don’t you even want to sleep?”

  “Sorry. No.”

  “Give me a second.”

  She waited, hearing a muffled explanation to his wife. She made out the words “It’s her first big case . . .” before the conversation was obscured by the sound of running water. Then silence, and finally the voice of her partner, laughing.

  “You know, dammit, I’m the senior detective and you’re the rookie. I say sleep, you’re supposed to sleep.”

  “Sorry,” she apologized again.

  “Hah,” he replied. “No sincerity. Okay, what’s on your mind?”

  “Matthew Cowart.” When she spoke his name, she made up her mind: Don’t play your hand quite yet.

  “Mister I’m-Not-Telling-You-Everything Reporter?”

  “The same.” She smiled.

  “Boy, that sonuvabitch has me frosted.”

  It was easy for her to envision her partner sitting at the side of his bed. His wife would have grabbed his pillow and jammed it over her head to drown out the noise of conversation. Unlike many detective partnerships, her relationship with Michael Weiss was businesslike and impersonal. They had not been together long—long enough to share an infrequent laugh, but not long enough to care what the joke was. He was a sturdy man, unimaginative and hotheaded. Better at showing pictures to witnesses and thumbing through insurance company records. That he’d acquired ten years of experience to her few months was a thought she dismissed rapidly. Leaving him behind was easy for her.

  “Me, too.”

  “So what do you have in mind?”

  “I think I ought to work him a bit. Just keep showing up. At his office. His apartment. When he goes jogging. When he takes a bath, whenever.”

  Weiss laughed. “And?”

  “Let him know we’re going to sit on him until we learn what he really has to tell us. Like who committed that crime.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “But someone’s got to start working the prison. See if someone there knows something, like maybe that guard sergeant. And I think somebody’d better go through all Sullivan’s possessions. Maybe he left something that’ll tell us something.”

  “Andy, couldn’t this conversation have waited until, say, eight A.M.?” Exhaustion mingled with wry humor in Weiss’s voice. “I mean, hell, don’t you want to sleep a bit?”

  “Sorry, Mike. I guess not.”

  “I hate it when you remind me of myself. I remember my first big case. I was breathing fire, too. Couldn’t wait to get on it. Trust me. Take it slow.”

  “Mike . . .”

  “Okay. Okay. So you’d rather muscle the reporter than start interviewing cons and guards, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “See,” Weiss laughed, “that’s the sort of intuitiveness that will get you ahead in this department. All right. You go bother Cowart, I’ll go back to Starke. But I want to talk. Every day. Maybe twice a day, got it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She had no idea if she intended to comply. She hung up the telephone and started to straighten her desk, sliding documents into files, organizing reports into neat stacks, clipping her own notes and observations onto the folders, placing pens and pencils into a cup. When she was satisfied with the order imposed on her working surface, she allowed herself a small surge of anticipation.

  It’s all mine, she thought.

  * * *

  She headed back to Miami beneath a midday sun that burned off the hood of the car, humming to herself, snatches of Jimmy Buffett tunes about living in the Florida Keys, daydreaming as she drove fast.

  She was new to homicide work, only nine months out of a patrol car and three months from working burglaries, elevated by ability and an equal opportunity suit brought on behalf of all the women and minorities in the department. She was consumed by ambition, filled with energy and the belief that she could defuse her lack of experience with hard work. That had been her solution to almost all problems, since she had been a lonely child growing up in the Upper Keys. Her father had been a Chicago police detective, killed in the line of duty. She had often reflected upon the phrase “the line of duty,” thinking how impoverished a concept it truly was. It pretended to give some sort of military importance to what she had come to understand was a moment of extraordinary mistake and bad luck. It was as if something necessary had been achieved by his dying, when she knew that to be a lie. Her father had worked bunco, usually dealing with cheapskate scam artists and confidence men, trying to stem the never-ending tide of retirees and immigrants who thought they could get rich by investing in one bizarre idea after another. He and his partners had raided a boiler-room operation one morning. Twenty women and men at desks working the telephones, calling folks up with a gold-i
nvestment scheme. Neither the scheme nor the raid was anything unusual, just part of daily business for both the criminals and the police. What had been unforeseen was that one of the men working the phones was a hotheaded kid with a concealed gun, who’d never taken a fall before and so never learned that the criminal justice system was going to let him go with nary a whimper. A single shot had been fired. It’d penetrated a partition made out of cheap wallboard and struck her father in the chest on the other side, where he’d been writing down the phony names of the people being arrested.

  Useless, she thought. Just useless.

  He’d died with a pencil in his hand.

  She had been ten, and her memories were of a burly man who’d roughhoused with her incessantly, treating her boyishly when she was young, then taking her on trips to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox as she grew older. He’d taught her to throw and catch, and to appreciate physical strength. Life had seemed extraordinarily ordinary. They’d lived in a modest brick house. She’d gone to the neighborhood parish schools, as had her older brothers. The short-barreled pistol her father wore to work had seemed somehow less important than the jackets and loud ties that he affected. She had kept only one picture of the two of them, taken outdoors after a snowstorm, standing next to a snowman they’d constructed together. They had flung their arms around the snowman as if he was their friend. It had been early April, when the Midwest was trying to shake the long winter, only to be rewarded with a final blast of cold. The snowman had had a baseball hat, and rocks for eyes, broken branches for arms. They’d tied a scarf around its neck and sculpted a goofy smile on its face. It had been a terrific snowman, almost alive. It had melted, of course. The weather had turned rapidly and within a week it was gone.

  They had come to the Keys a year after his death.

  Miami had actually been the target; there were relatives there. But they had slid south when her mother had gotten a job managing a restaurant next to a sportfishing dock. That was where her stepfather had come from.