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Prologue, Part One
Four a.m., May 23, 1992
Long legged and nearly naked, the reclining woman stared into the night, her huge eyes blank and soulless, her long hair barely covering her voluptuous breasts.
She saw everything, and nothing.
The deserted street was dark.
Her expression never changed as the sleek car on the street below turned left into a Dumpster-lined alley and crept to a halt. The driver killed the lights. He and another man in dark clothes emerged and quietly approached a steel-plated door. The passenger carried a small suitcase.
In this silent hour before dawn, they could hear the sea pounding the sandy shore four hundred yards away and smell the salt in the air. The driver punched the buzzer beside the door as his passenger nervously scanned the street outside. He looked up at the reclining woman, who smiled seductively.
"Yeah?" The static-distorted voice was almost a bark.
"It's me," the driver said.
"About time."
"Sorry about that. You know how it is."
"Who the hell's that with you?"
"My cousin, from out of town. I want you to meet him."
The buzzer sounded, locks disengaged. The driver swung the door open and gestured for his companion to follow.
On the stairs, the driver appeared preternaturally calm, his steps light as his companion stumbled hesitantly along behind him.
The nervous man reacted at the sound of a second buzzer that unlocked a heavy door at the top of the stairs.
A handsome, muscular man in his late thirties sprang up to greet them with such enthusiasm that his thick, padded leather chair continued to rock behind his massive mahogany desk.
His face was pink-cheeked, his eyes and hair dark and shiny. His watch was Rolex, his suit expensive, his winking pinky ring a diamond. He clenched a fine, unlit cigar between his teeth.
"Hey, hey, Buddy." He playfully punched his visitor's shoulder, caught him in a hearty bear hug, then stepped back to scrutinize the stranger.
"Who's this, your cousin? He could be your fucking brother. I see the family resemblance."
"Meet my cousin Michael."
"So," Chris said, "didn't know you had a cousin." He turned to the stranger, "Me and your cousin Buddy, we go way back, all the way to high school."
Chris shook Michael's hand. "So which side a the family you from?"
The stranger hesitated.
"My father's," Buddy said quickly. "His father was my father's brother."
"So where you from?"
Michael licked his lips and glanced at Buddy before replying. "Milwaukee," he said.
Chris's hooded eyes became thoughtful and he returned to sit behind his desk. A top drawer was slightly open, just a few inches. "Did you bring what I asked for?"
"Don't I always?" Buddy jerked his head toward the suitcase on the floor beside Michael. "How's about I fix you two a drink first?"
Chris nodded. "Sure."
"I'll get it, don't get up." With the familiarity of a man who had been there many times, Buddy moved smoothly behind the desk to the custom, built-in bar. "The usual, Chris?"
"Right."
"What about you, Michael?"
"Scotch, if you have it."
"Siddown," Chris told him.
Michael sat tentatively on the edge of a red plush sofa.
Ice rattled into a heavy crystal glass.
Buddy left the glass on the marble-topped bar, stepped two feet to Chris's desk, and slid a 9mm silencer-equipped Luger out of a shoulder holster. As Chris turned to take the glass, Buddy shot him in the face at close range.
Chris jerked back in his chair, his head at an awkward angle, mouth open in surprise at the geyser of blood spurting onto the front of his white shirt.
It showered onto the desk blotter as he slumped sideways in his chair. Stepping back so he would not be spattered, Buddy stretched his arm full length and pumped another slug into the back of the convulsing man's head.
The spasms stopped.
"Hated to do that, but it's the way it's gotta be," Buddy said regretfully. He turned to Michael, who sat frozen on the red plush couch, eyes wide.
"Come on, come on! It's right over here." Buddy opened the concealed bookcase safe, which was not locked.
His shaken companion, still staring at the corpse, looked up and swallowed. Hands shaking, he opened the suitcase and removed a folded supersize duffel bag.
"Fill 'em up! Fill 'em up!" Buddy demanded.
Galvanized into action by the still-smoking gun in Buddy's hand, Michael began to stuff cash into the suitcase.
"How much you think is in here?" He looked in awe at the big bills stacked tightly on floor-to-ceiling shelves.
"Maybe two million," Buddy said calmly. "Make sure you pack it --- " Both men's eyes widened at a small explosion of sound, a toilet flushing in the next room.
"You said nobody else would be here!" Michael's whisper was ragged.
The door to the private bathroom opened.
"Honey? Chris, honey?"
Smile tentative, she stepped into the room. A stripper from the club downstairs, the new girl.
She looked young, still wearing her scanty work clothes, glittery pasties and a G-string. Sparkly angel dust accented her eyelids and décolletage.
She approached them, shaky on strappy stiletto heels. One more step and she would see Chris, his blood spilling down the side of the chair, soaking into the thick carpet.
Buddy cursed. Who knew Chris would be indulging in his own private after-hours lap dance?
"Bring her over here," he told Michael.
"Ma'am," Michael said apologetically, and reached for her elbow. She took the fatal step, her painted face puzzled. She screamed, a high, shrill shriek.
"Over here!" Buddy demanded, face flushed.
Once she was dead, they filled the bags. When they were unable to cram another greenback into the duffel bag or the suitcase, Buddy yanked out a deep desk drawer, dumped the contents, and filled it with bills. He also removed the dead man's gun from the slightly open top drawer.
"What about the camera hooked up to that intercom?" Michael said.
"Doesn't record," Buddy said confidently. "Nothing to worry about."
They took the night's receipts, still stacked on the desk, put them in the safe, locked it, wiped down all they had touched, and left the way they came.
Michael was hyperventilating, breathing hard and trembling. "You didn't tell me --- "
"Be cool," Buddy warned him, as they carried the bags down the stairs.
The street was still deserted.
Buddy dumped the cash out of the desk drawer into the trunk of their car. A block away he had Michael toss the wiped-down drawer and Chris's gun into the backseat of an unlocked, beat-up Chevy convertible. As Michael darted back to the car, heart pounding, he looked up for a moment at the distant figure of the reclining woman, long yellow hair aglow in the warmth of neon. She stared back, her wet, red smile seductive.
Prologue, Part Two
Later That day
High-pitched screams and ear-splitting shrieks shattered the air. What must the neighbors think? Joan wondered.
Grinning, she closed one eye and peered through the video camera's viewfinder, slowly panning the front yard.
A bouquet of bright balloons bobbed above the mailbox, marking the party's location. Two picnic tables adorned with festive paper tablecloths stood in the shade of a huge black olive tree. The paper plates, napkins, and party favors were all in red, white, and blue rocket ship patterns. A sweating galvanized copper tub held soda cans and juice cartons nestled in an icy slush. Puffy white clouds sailed across a serene blue sky above while happy chaos reigned below.
HoHo the Clown twisted squeaky balloons into animal shapes as a rent-a-pony, led by a handler wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, plodded docilely around the circular old Chicago brick driveway. "Giddeup! Giddeup!" bawled the rider, an impatient third grader.
The loudest shrieks came from children rebounding wildly off the bright, inflatable walls of the rented Bounce House. They sprang and ricocheted off the floors and even the ceiling in daredevil imitations of superheroes, Olympic gymnasts, and human flies.
Joan focused on her husband. Red-faced and perspiring, he manned the grill, an unruly shock of curly dark hair plastered across his forehead. Stan wore sunglasses, oven mitts, a bib apron over his grill sergeant
T-shirt and khaki Bermuda shorts as he flipped burgers and plump hot dogs that sputtered juice into the fire.
Stan winked at her and the camera, then addressed the crush of partyers around him. "How many want burgers? Two, three, that's four. How many want cheese on their burgers? Okay. How many hot dogs?"
"Both. I want both," Lionel demanded. The husky eight-year-old was built like a gap-toothed pit bull with freckles.
"Coming right up!" Stan adjusted his chef's hat to a jaunty angle.
Lionel screwed up his face in disdain. "My dad doesn't do it that way."
"Who invited Lionel?" Stan muttered to his wife. "You know he's a troublemaker. His own mother calls him Lying Hell."
"Sssshhh. Honey." Joan rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. "He might hear you. Sally's my best friend."
"But she doesn't call her son Lying Hell for nothing. Look." He cut his eyes at Lionel, who was up to his dimpled elbows in a huge bowl of Cheez Doodles.
"Just keep an eye on him," Joan urged. "I already briefed Consuela, if she ever gets here." She checked her watch. "Where'd you put the cake?"
"On the pantry counter, still in the box from the Cuban bakery. You sure it's safe to feed them more sugar?"
As though on cue, Ryan, the birthday boy, scrambled around the side of the house. In hot pursuit were Sookie, the golden retriever, and half a dozen guests. Half of Ryan's face was painted blue, his legs churned, his cardboard crown was askew.
Joan focused on her firstborn on the occasion of his eighth birthday. It seemed only yesterday that she was being rushed into surgery for an emergency C-section. Could it really be eight years? Given his exuberance, no one would ever guess that last night Ryan had fretted, pouted, even threatened to boycott his own party. He wanted fireworks. For days he had nagged, pleaded, and cajoled. His third-grade buddies expected fireworks, he'd argued. He intended to be an astronaut, speeding in swaths of fire across the galaxy. His party theme was rockets. He wanted fireworks.
His five-year-old sister's birthday theme had been The Little Mermaid. Her party favors, he pointed out, included real live goldfish in clear water-filled plastic bags. "She always gets everything she wants," he'd howled.
Joan and Stan had nearly caved. A boy is only eight once. But with memories of the barbecue debacle involving Lionel last Fourth of July, it was not going to happen.
Ryan would be king for a day, with a crown, a clown, a rocket-shaped cake --- but fireworks? No. Not even a sparkler.
Consuela materialized and helped Joan refill bowls of chips and Cheez Doodles. Half-empty sodas and half-eaten food were everywhere.
Stan served up Lionel's hot dog and burger with a flourish.
"Eewwuuh. What's that?" The child poked a grubby finger at the cheese.
"Cheese. You wanted cheese," Stan said pleasantly.
"You don't have bleu cheese?"
"Nope, only American."
His freckled nose wrinkled.
"Right." Stan tossed another burger on the grill. "I'll fix you one without cheese."
Before he could reach for the boy's plate, Lionel was feeding his cheeseburger and hot dog to the golden retriever.
"Sookie likes it." Lionel beamed a cherubic smile, then frowned at the fresh burger Stan offered.
"My father doesn't do it that way." Sookie's plumed tail began to wag expectantly.
"Oh?" Stan's eyebrows arched.
"No. He puts the catsup on both sides of the bun first, then the hamburger." Lionel folded his arms and scowled.
"Here, Lionel, you can do the honors."
Lionel reached for the catsup bottle and scrutinized the label, his expression sour. "You don't have Heinz?"
Stan bared his teeth and made an evil monster face.
Lionel fled.
• • •
Blue-green horseflies dive-bombed the baked beans. Joan waved them away, eager to finish feeding the kids before the semitropical sun fried their little brains. Some of the smaller ones already glowed pink despite slathers of sunscreen. She hurried inside for the pièce de résistance.
In the cool quiet of the pantry, she savored the moment away from the clamor. Comforting rows of canned goods and food cartons stood like soldiers at attention, arranged precisely by date on plastic-lined shelves. Humming "Happy Birthday," she opened the pristine white box from the Cuban bakery --- and gasped.
Screams had elevated to an even higher pitch at party central. Lionel had discovered the box of matches intended to light the candles. Striking them one by one, he was throwing the flaring matches at little girls who fled shrieking.
"Stop that, Lionel!" Joan snatched away the box and confronted her husband. "I thought you were watching him!"
"I'm just trying to get them to sit down for HoHo's magic tricks --- and watch the grill at the same time." Stan's long-suffering expression was that of an overburdened and misunderstood man.
"What's wrong, honey?" He removed his chef's hat and mopped his forehead.
"The cake." She studied him. The moment was tense. "Did you happen to check it when you picked it up?" The words were ominous.
"No," he said cautiously. "I still had to pick up the balloons and the hot dogs. The box was tied up and ready. Our name was on it. I have the receipt."
"Follow me." She sounded close to tears. "Why can't anything ever be just right?" She steered him into the pantry. "I described it twice. They said they understood. A rocket, I told them, with 'Happy Birthday to Ryan, Future Astronaut.' "
"Right." Stan nodded.
She lifted the lid, wrists curled as though unveiling a snake.
The words spun out in sugary blue frosting were correct: "Happy Birthday to Ryan, Future Astronaut."
But the cake was not rocket-shaped.
"A racquet," Stan finally said. "It's a tennis racquet."
"Thank you," Joan said. "I guess I'm not losing my mind."
They laughed and clung to each other until their eyes watered.
"We should get out there," she said, wiping her face on his sleeve. "Before Lionel kills the dog or burns the house to the ground."
"You don't think he'd really hurt Sookie, do you?"
"One never knows, though nothing can top this."
Most of the children were seated on the lawn watching HoHo's repertoire of tricks. Lionel was tying a dachshund-shaped balloon to Sookie's collar as though expecting it to lift the big, affable dog into the air à la Mary Poppins.
Consuela, short and compact in her white uniform, gently placed the birthday cake center front on the picnic table, then stepped back to scrutinize it. She cocked her head, puzzled, then shrugged. Long ago she'd stopped trying to understand the people who employed her. She tucked the matchbox in her pocket and turned to see what Lionel was up to now.
The boy had actually paused to watch HoHo. The clown displayed an empty glass. With a flourish, he filled it with water from a plastic pitcher. Suddenly he upended the glass. Not a drop spilled.
"That's not magic!" Lionel screeched, above squeals and applause. "I know how he did it! He had powdery stuff in the bottom of the glass. It makes the water hard, like Jell-O!"
HoHo ignored his heckler. He waved a red silk scarf above his head like a banner, faster and faster. The scarf was redder than his spiky hair and painted cheeks, as red as his shiny, oversized shoes.
Suddenly he balled the scarf in his fist. Then threw his hands open, palms outstretched. It had vanished.
HoHo's triumphant bows were interrupted by a hacking cough. He coughed again and again, then opened his mouth wide and reached down his throat. With a grand, theatrical gesture he slowly withdrew the long red scarf from way down below his tonsils.
A loud whoosh! punctuated the cheers and applause.
Joan glanced up from the camera's viewfinder, startled, her anxious eyes instinctively seeking out her son.
Ryan stood at HoHo's elbow, face shining.
"Fireworks!" He threw his arms in the air, victorious. "Yes! I got the fireworks!"
Across the street, the garage erupted. Smoke spiraled. Flames leaped. The children cheered. The garage door exploded outward. The pony bolted. It gave a terrified whinny, then galloped down Mariposa Lane toward the golf course, empty stirrups swinging. His handler chased him, losing his Stetson in the middle of the block. Chunks of burning wreckage catapulted high into the air and began to fall in slow motion onto
the Walkers' lawn between the balloon bouquet and the circular drive. Sookie fled, tail tucked between her legs.
Car and house alarms wailed. Towering tongues of red and orange flame danced high into a brilliant blue sky. Sparks showered and sizzled amid black smoke.
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" Lionel's pudgy legs churned, pounding the pavement toward home.
The cheers had stopped. The children stood silent and wide-eyed, jaws dropped.
"Mom?" Ryan's voice sounded high-pitched and querulous.
"¡Dios mío!" Consuela fell to her knees and crossed herself, eyes to heaven.
"Mommeee!" "Mommeee!" children began screaming.
"Vanessa wet her pants!" a tattler bawled.
"Joanie, get all the kids inside! Call nine-one-one." Stan sprinted toward the burning garage. The heat forced him back. He peeled off his apron as he dashed to the side of the house for his garden hose.
"No, Stan! No!" Joan and Consuela were herding frightened children inside. "Don't go there! I'm calling the fire department!"
The first fire company arrived in six minutes. To Joan and Stanley Walker it seemed forever. Adrenaline-charged children shrieked at the sirens and cheered the rescue truck, the engine, the pumper, and the first squad card.
Firefighters dragged a blitz line off the pumper. They ran a second line from a hydrant. The garage was fully involved. Flames roared through a wall, engulfing the kitchen. Tendrils of orange danced along the roof line.
Firemen in self-contained breathing apparatus knocked down flames, battling to save the house. At the end of the street, police officers shouted but were unable to stop a midnight blue Jaguar that hurtled crazily around their barricades. Brakes squealing, it swerved to a stop on the next-door lawn. Leaving her baby strapped in a car seat, the young woman driver, her black hair flowing long and loose, stumbled out into the dense smoke that roiled down the street.
"My husband! My husband!" she screamed. "Where is he? He was working on his car! Where is he?"
Firefighters held her back. Suddenly she stopped struggling and sagged in their arms as the smell of something terrible wafted across the street. Something burned.
HoHo the Clown threw up on the lawn.
Chapter One
Twelve Years Later
Like all things good and bad in the world, it began with a woman.
She was a blonde, with a complaint about her ex-husband. She saw him everywhere she went. Turn around and there he was. She knew he was trying to send her a message, she said.
Problem was, the man was dead, gone from this earth for twelve long years.
Some guys just don't know when to let go.
My name is Craig Burch, a sergeant on the Miami Police Department's Cold Case Squad. My assignment is relatively new. I worked homicide for eighteen years, mostly on the midnight shift. I fought like hell to land this job. Why not? It's every big-city homicide cop's wet dream. This squad is armed with a detective's most powerful weapon: time. The luxury of enough time to investigate old, unsolved cases without interruption. I wanted that. I wanted the change. I wanted to see the faces of murderers who suddenly realize their pasts and I have caught up with them. The job has other perks as well. No daily dealing with fresh corpses or, worse yet, corpses less than fresh. No more stepping cautiously through messy crime scenes in dark woods, warehouses, or alleyways, trying to avoid stepping in blood, brains, or worse. No more trying to forget the pain-filled screams of inconsolable survivors whose unearthly cries will scar your soul and echo in your dreams asleep or awake. No more watching autopsies that suddenly and unexpectedly replay in your mind's eye at inopportune moments. And no more throwing my back out when lifting dead weight. Real dead weight.
This job also reduces my chances of being rocked, bottled, and/or shot at by the unruly Miamians who cluster bright-eyed and belligerent at every nasty crime scene in neighborhoods where trouble is a way of life and violence is contagious.
I quit confronting new deaths. Instead, I breathe new life into old, cold cases and track killers whose trails vanished long ago like footprints on a sea-washed beach.
Loved the concept. Still do. And I yearned for what came with it --- mostly regular, daylight hours, giving me the chance to spend more time with my family before the kids are grown and gone. Made sense to me. It was long overdue. I looked forward to it. Connie couldn't have been happier --- in the beginning. What's not to like? Weekends off together for the first time? The man in the mirror suntanned instead of wearing a prison pallor from sleeping days and working nights?
Now I know why people say: Be careful what you wish for --- you might get it. At the moment, I live alone. Last time I called home, one of the kids hung up on me. Every job in my line of business has a downside.
This one has ghosts.
My detectives are hand-picked self-starters. They don't hear the screams, see the blood, or feel the moral outrage cops experience at fresh murder scenes. Instead, they dissect dusty files and stacks of typewritten reports as cold and unemotional as a killer's heart.
Our standard operating procedure is to reread the case files of old, unsolved murders, pass them around, and brainstorm on which have the most potential. We also field tips on old homicides from our own cops, other agencies, confidential informants, prison inmates, and the friends and families of victims.
She was one of the latter: a walk-in. Our team had just voted on whether to pursue the high-profile triple homicide of a man, his pregnant wife, and their toddler. Murdered nearly twenty-five years ago, they were presumed casualties of the time --- collateral damage in the drug wars of the eighties. But one of my guys suspects another motive, something more personal. Two of my detectives, Sam Stone and Pete Nazario, were still arguing about it when the secretary steered a stranger their way.
Her hair was feathery, tousled in an expensive, wavy style intended to look natural, the kind that costs more to look as though it was never touched by professionals.
Stone sprang to his feet when the secretary brought her past my desk, directly across from theirs. He grew up in Miami's bleakest, blackest, toughest neighborhood. Sharp, edgy, young, and focused, he has a passion for high technology and is as aggressive as hell. Sometimes he's a runaway freight train and you have to hold him back.
Well dressed in blue that matched her eyes, she was your typical soccer mom with a little mileage on her.
Nazario offered her a chair. He came to Miami alone as a small child, one of the thousands of Pedro Pan kids airlifted out of Cuba and taken in by the Catholic church when Castro refused to allow the parents to leave the island. Nazario never saw his parents again and grew up a stranger in a strange land, shuttled to shelters and foster homes all over the country by the archdiocese. Maybe because he lived with strangers who didn't speak his native language or maybe he was born with it, but Nazario is blessed with an uncanny talent --- it's invaluable to a detective, even though it's not admissible in court or probable cause for a warrant: He knows, without fail, when somebody is lying to him. Stone and Nazario are among the best, and I don't say that just because they work for me.
The woman in blue chewed her lower lip, her face pinched with apprehension. She looked to be in her late thirties, but it's tough to tell the age of most women. Her name was April Terrell, she said. A plastic tag identifying her as a visitor to the building was clipped to her short, crisp jacket. Her summery dress flared at the hip and quit just above a nice pair of knees. She held a little purse demurely in her lap while apologizing for showing up unannounced. I listened, trying not to look up and be obvious.
"It's about my husband," she said, then corrected herself, "my ex-husband."
They married in college, she said. She quit and worked as a legal secretary to put him through pharmaceutical school. "I thought I knew him. The divorce caught me off guard. Our children were two and three. That was almost fourteen years ago."
She gave the guys a sad-eyed, self-deprecating smile. "He found someone else, younger, his second year in business. He remarried right away and started a new family."
The guys itched to hear the point. I know I did.
"It's funny." Her lower lip quivered, indicating the opposite. "All of a sudden, after all this time, he's there. I see him everywhere I go."
Nazario frowned. "He's stalking you?"
"Our domestic violence unit has a felony stalking squad." Stone reached for the phone on his desk. "You need to talk to one of them. We're homicide. Cold cases. I'll call downstairs and find you someone."
"Wait." She spoke briskly. "Obviously I haven't made myself clear. I know who you are. You investigate old deaths. That's why I'm here. Charles was killed twelve years ago."
I looked up. Nazario and Stone exchanged glances.
"Oh," Stone said accommodatingly. "And you say you've seen him lately?"
"Yes." Her voice held steady.
"On what sort of occasions?" Stone steepled his long fingers in front of him, his liquid eyes wandering to a window, past the grimy streaks to a patch of innocent blue sky above the neighborhood where he was born.
She raised her voice and her right hand slightly, as though to recapture his attention. "You know what I mean. Like at the bank yesterday . . . I saw another customer, his back was to me. He looked so much like Charles that for a moment I forgot he was dead and almost called out his name. The man turned around later and, of course, he didn't look like Charles at all." She shrugged. "You know how it is. You catch a glimpse of someone familiar but it turns out not to be them. It's happening to me more and more. He's in my dreams almost every night now."
"When did this start?" Nazario asked, his face solemn.
"Last year. I keep asking myself why, after all this time? Why?" She leaned forward, speaking clearly, voice persuasive. "The only explanation is that Charles is trying to tell me something."
Her shoulders squared, head high in a regal pose, reacting to something in their eyes. She shot me a quick glance, suddenly aware that I was listening, too.
"I'm not crazy," she said quickly. "Please don't think that. It's just that it's made me realize that I never felt right about what happened to him. I think I always suspected, but I had two little children to raise alone, a boy and a girl."
"Did you seek grief counseling at the time?" Nazario asked softly.
The blond waves bounced as she tossed her head. "Who had time for that?" She opened her hands in a helpless gesture, pale palms exposed. "I had to take care of business and get on with life because of the children. How could I allow myself the time to obsess, to cave in to anger, bitterness --- or grief? You've heard people say, 'If I only had the time, I'd have a nervous breakdown'? Our children worshiped their dad. The divorce was tough enough on them, on all of us. He and his new wife had a baby. Their dad's death was the final crushing blow. They'd never see him again, call him on the telephone, or spend another weekend or vacation together. Now that they're older and asking questions, I realize there are no answers. The whole thing didn't make sense . . ."
"Sometimes," Nazario gently interjected, "when you suppress a traumatic incident and don't deal with it, it comes back to trouble you later, when you least expect it."
She shook her head forlornly, staring down at her naked fingers for a moment. She wore no rings.
"Can you at least look into it?" she said, raising those blue eyes.
"Into what?" Stone's brow furrowed.
Lieutenant K. C. Riley, our boss, suddenly appeared, slamming an office door, lean and mean, a folder in hand, expression impatient.
"He burned to death." April Terrell's voice rose, quavering slightly. "In a flash fire. It was horrible. They had to have a closed casket. There wasn't enough . . ."
Talk about timing.
K. C. Riley reacted as though slapped.
This can't be good, I thought.
"My ex-husband, the father of my children," April told the lieutenant without introductions. "His death was no accident. I'm sure he was murdered."
"When did this happen?" Riley's pale lips were tight, arms crossed.
"Twelve years ago, May 23, 1992. It happened on a Saturday." Charles had confided the last time he'd dropped off their children that he and their new stepmother of just a year were not getting along. The brief marriage, a bumpy ride, was already off track. Natasha, wife number two, spent extravagantly. And there was, of course, a big life insurance policy.
She had since lost track of the widow, she said.
"That sort of accident was totally out of character for Charles. He was skilled and competent, precise and careful about everything he did."
Riley lapped it up, never missed a beat. "Thanks for coming in, Ms. . . . ?"
"Terrell, April Terrell."
"I'm K. C. Riley."
The two women shook hands.
"It's certainly worth looking into," Riley said. "My detectives will get right on it. Right, Sergeant?"
Three jaws dropped as one: mine, Stone's, and Nazario's.
Chapter Two
"Charles Terrell is no candidate for us!" Stone fumed. "Riley knows that. We don't investigate accidents. We solve murders."
"We've got enough ghosts to deal with," Burch said.
"Bad timing," Nazario said.
"The lieutenant should have stayed in her office, red-eyed and brooding with the door closed, as usual. You know the reason she dumped this on us," Stone said. "No doubt about it."
"She's got her own ghost, and she's taking it out on us," Nazario said.
"I'll try to talk to her," Burch said.
Stone and Nazario beat it out of the office. Stone viciously jabbed the elevator button as Nazario gave Burch a soulful glance back over his shoulder.
• • •
"That woman and our lieutenant are both nuts." Stone continued to vent, striding toward their unmarked Plymouth deep in the dimly lit police parking garage.
Brilliant shafts of sunlight pierced the gloom, descending wandlike through ornamental cut-outs high in the concrete walls.
Nazario rolled his eyes. "The lady wasn't lying."
"You're right," Stone agreed. "She obviously believed every damn thing she said, just like all the others who hobnob with apparitions and hear voices we can't. They are absofuckinglutely true believers."
"She's no lunatic," Nazario said mildly. "Her story should be easy to check out. Gimme the keys."
"No way, my turn to drive, amigo."
"Like hell," Nazario said. "You're the one who's nuts."
"Maybe, but insane or not, drunk or sober, I drive better."
"What the shit you talking about?"
"Admit it, Naz. If you weren't wearing a badge, they'da yanked your license like a bad back tooth years ago. You always drive like something is chasing you."
"Maybe something is."
"Cubans are lousy drivers." Stone shook his head and slid smoothly behind the wheel.
He put on his Foster Grants as Nazario settled reluctantly into the passenger seat. Squinting in the glare, they rolled out onto sun-blasted North Miami Avenue. Nazario called their sergeant, hoping they'd caught a break.
Fat chance. Burch said he'd tried to reason with Riley. No luck. Charles Terrell's fire death was top priority. Burch had checked for the police file but found only a case number. The paperwork on accidental deaths is purged after seven years.
With a grunt of disgust, Stone wrenched the wheel into a sharp U-turn.
"Meadows is your problem." Nazario was glum. "That case has you so wound up that it pisses you off to take five minutes to go to the bathroom. Meadows can move to a back burner for a day. Her case is already twenty-four years old."
"My point precisely." Stone jabbed an index finger in emphasis. "That's exactly why it shouldn't get any older. The son of a bitch is still out there, stalking somebody else's grandmother.
"You know why Riley's doing this," he said again, as they left the unmarked outside the Miami River front building that houses fire headquarters.
"Sí." Nazario was stoic.
Riverside Center sprawls in the stark shadow of an expressway overpass. Dark-tinted windows stare down at the river like blind eyes.
"She was always hard to work for," Stone said. "And that temper doesn't help."
"She's hurting."
"Not our fault. Why does that shit always run downhill in our direction? I like her better locked in her office nursing her hangover."
"I don't remember her drinking before it happened."
"Right. What we need is a shrink and a support group for her and that Terrell woman." Stone flashed his badge at lobby security.
• • •
Arson investigator Jack Olson's tenth-floor office overlooked the slick, silver ribbon that snaked below. The Miami River is a working waterway, alive with pleasure boaters, foreign freighters, illicit cargos and smuggled immigrants. Beneath its surface lie sunken secrets and the constant cross currents of international intrigue.
Olson drew a blank on the name, but seeing the file sparked a memory rush.
"Oh, yeah." His bushy eyebrows lifted and he licked his lips. "I remember that one. Was out there that day. Nice neighborhood. Relatively young guy, tinkering with his Thunderbird. The primo, 'fifty-seven hardtop, you know, with the portholes. Super V-8, double acting shocks, Fordomatic drive. Classic. Love a set of those wheels myself. Though nobody 'ud recognize it by the time we saw it. What a waste. But I digress."
He scanned the original report. "Here we go. Yeah. Couple hours before it happens, the victim borrows a line wrench from his neighbor across the street. Repairing a faulty fuel line, he says. Those T-babies are prone to that. Flakes of rust off the gas tank clogging the fuel lines. My brother-in-law restored one of 'em. Paid ten g's for it, spends a couple years on the project, and sells it for fifty."
He thumbed through supplements to the final report. "Here's how we figure it goes down. He's under the car using a portable trouble light when Bingo! The car slips off the jack and pins 'im to the garage floor. Bad news. Worse, when the car drops on 'im, the jack stand punctures the gas tank. Poor bastard's hurting, busted ribs. Probably conscious, but even if he sucks up enough breath to yell, nobody's home to hear 'im.
"He's trapped, and leaking gasoline is splashing onto the hot bulb of his work light. Poof! Damn thing ignites. Instant inferno. He's ground zero. The fuel feeds the flames until the tank explodes. Fatal freaking accident."
Olson nodded in recollection.
"We were lucky to save the house. Hadda jack up the car to free 'im --- what was left of 'im. Here, see for yourself."
He spilled the eight-by-ten scene photos out of a manila envelope onto his desk.
Nazario winced.
"Damn." Stone picked one up.
In the gutted garage, beneath the car's blackened shell, were the charred remains of a man, his fists clenched in a pugilistic position. Devoid of flesh, muscle, and tendons, the exposed leg bones resembled broomsticks. His jaws were wide open as though frozen in a silent, agonal scream.
"His own mother wouldn't have recognized 'im," Olsen said. "What's up? What's your interest in this one now?"
"Somebody thinks it was no accident," Nazario said.
"After all these years?" The arson investigator looked skeptical. His voice rose in indignation. "How come they didn't speak up sooner?"
Stone ignored the question. "Anything strike you as suspicious at the time?"
Olson raked his fingers through bristly salt-and-pepper hair, then shook his head. "Looked cut and dried to me. One a your guys was out there. Didn't spot no red flags. Homicide detective, medical examiner, a fire inspector, and me --- we all came to the same conclusion.
"You're welcome to a copy a the report." He shuffled papers. "Next of kin, the wife, said he's in the garage working on his car when she leaves to go shopping and run errands. She's gone a couple a hours. We're already on the scene when she gets back. A real babe, beautiful girl, shook up big time. Had an infant in the car."
"Who called it in?" Stone asked.
Olson's thick index finger roamed down the fact sheet. "Dispatch history shows a flurry a nine-one-one calls right after the garage door blows off. Whole neighborhood musta called in. But looks like we listed the reporting persons as the neighbors across the street. The Walkers, 424 Mariposa Lane. Hadda kid's birthday party in progress. Yard fulla rugrats saw the whole thing.
"Nobody seen leaving the garage. No strangers, no getaway cars. Accidental. This kinda thing'ud be pretty damn hard to rig." The arson investigator shrugged. "You can't believe all the crazy ways people manage to accidentally off themselves.
"Then again, you probably can. You guys see it all the time. Rescue Seven caught a doozy yesterday. Guy wants his Hungry Man TV dinner. His microwave oven won't work. He tries to fix it and gets zapped. Missed his last meal --- it was the one with the roast beef, potatoes, and gravy. Poor guy died hungry."
• • •
"Lookit that." Nazario pointed to the river below and a rusting freighter limping toward open sea while they waited for Olson to copy the file. The top deck was stacked with hundreds and hundreds of bicycles.
"So that's where they all go. Been a rash of bicycle thefts in my neighborhood, off front porches, outta garages, driveways, backyards. Thieves snipping the locks of bikes chained outside the gym and the shopping center."
"They're headed for Haiti now," Stone said.
• • •
"Told you," Nazario said in the car. "This Terrell caper ain't gonna take us a whole lot of time."
"From your lips to God's ears." Stone swung into the parking lot at their next stop.
The imposing three-building complex straddled three acres. With its raspberry-colored furniture, potted palms, and smiling receptionist, strangers might mistake the softly lit lobby for that of a resort hotel --- unless they read the mission statement above the front desk at One Bob Hope Road.
"To provide accurate, timely, dignified, compassionate and professional death investigative services for the citizens of Miami–Dade County . . ."
Every year more than three thousand people arrive there too late to read the words. They're unable to appreciate the photos and paintings of scenic Florida. Dead eyes can't see the images of golden dawns, blood-red sunsets, and turquoise blue water displayed throughout a building that neither looks nor smells like a morgue. Electronic air scrubbers erase the odors of formaldehyde and decomposing bodies, a concept borrowed from airports that never smell like jet fuel.
A bronze cannon guards the entrance. The ancient weapon salvaged from the Santa Margarita, a Spanish galleon sunk with all aboard by a killer hurricane off the Florida coast nearly four hundred years ago.
"He had broken ribs where the car was resting on him." The chief medical examiner had pulled Terrell's file for the detectives. "No evidence of other trauma, no drugs or alcohol in his system."
The chief didn't sign off on the case himself. He'd been out of the country at the time, keynote speaker at a conference in Zurich. A deputy medical examiner, Dr. Vernon Duffy, handled the autopsy.
"The victim had a lethal level of carbon monoxide in his blood, evidence of smoke inhalation, consistent with death by fire."
The chief squinted at handwritten notations. "Hmmm, interesting. Normally, identification would have been made through dental records. It wasn't in this case."
"How's that?" Stone asked.
"This fellow had no dental X-rays. Apparently he had perfect teeth, no caries. No reason for X-rays if you never have any restorations." He continued through the report. "The jaw was badly burned. The upper front teeth were flaked apart due to the heat."
Stone read over his shoulder. "The doctor noted that the victim had an unusually fatty liver. Isn't that a sign of chronic alcoholism?"
The chief nodded. "A prime candidate for cirrhosis, had he lived long enough."
"So how did they positively identify him?" Nazario asked.
The chief medical examiner readjusted his reading glasses. "It appears that the victim had lost his right ring finger in his youth. In a water-skiing accident, it says here. The fellow who died in the fire was missing the same finger. In addition, the victim was last seen by his wife, working on his car, alone in the garage. He was also seen there by a neighbor and the regular letter carrier, who knew him by sight. The deceased was wearing the victim's wedding ring."
Stone snorted. "So much for Charles Terrell, precise and careful, skilled and competent. Isn't that what the first wife said? Proof again that love is blind. The guy was really a hard drinker who lost a finger and blew up his car. Man was an accident waiting to happen. Must have been a thrill a minute having him around."
"DNA wasn't in extensive use then." The medical examiner pondered the pages and frowned. "Today I would have run it. As a precautionary measure, just to be sure."
"Come on, Doc, don't give us heart attacks here." Nazario shifted uneasily in his seat.
"You're not saying you doubt his identity, are you?" Stone asked.
The medical examiner shook his head and closed the file. "But one can't be too careful. In a case out west a few years ago, the crew of a passing freight train reported seeing a burning car on top of a hill. The police found a charred body, presumably the owner, in the still-blazing vehicle. But an hour later a seriously burned man showed up at the local emergency room. He gave the doctors a cock-and-bull story about how he was injured. Investigators soon learned that he owned the car, was deeply in debt, and had taken out a big life insurance policy. Pathologists decided to take another look at the burned body found in the car and noticed gas bubbles indicating that at the time of the fire, the body had already begun to decompose.
"The car's owner had picked up a bum somewhere and locked him in the trunk, where the man suffocated. The next day he drove the car to the hilltop and propped the dead man behind the wheel. He doused the corpse and the driver's seat with gasoline. His plan was to ignite it, then roll it down the hill to crash into the passing train. It would look like a spectacular, fiery accident.
"But as he sat in the passenger seat waiting for the train, he absentmindedly lit a cigarette. The gasoline fumes ignited and the car burst into flames. By the time the train arrived, he'd fled, badly burned."
"Mighta worked if he hadn't been a smoker," Stone said.
The chief nodded. "Had he not shown up at the hospital seeking treatment for his burns, no one might have looked more closely at the microscopic slides from the charred corpse."
"Why didn't they see it the first time?" Stone said.
"Because," the chief said, "too often, our observations are based on what we expect to see due to our training and experience. Expectations modify our observations. In other words, we see what we preconceive. The indications that the body was beginning to change due to decomposition were there. Initially they saw them, but failed to observe them. They observed the fire instead."
"We see what we preconceive," Stone echoed.
• • •
Uncharacteristically quiet en route back to headquarters, Stone didn't even protest when Burch told them it would take more to satisfy K. C. Riley and April Terrell.
"You don't have to be a shrink to figure this one out," Burch said.
"Right." Nazario shuffled through messages on the receptionist's desk. "Hey, Sarge, you got a stack over here. Call your wife."
"Toss 'em in the round file," Burch said casually.
"You sure? You got one at one-thirty, another one at one thirty-seven, another one at one forty-two . . . could be important. Here's one at two-thirty. The --- "
"I get the picture," Burch said coldly. "My voice mail is full, too."
" --- last one at four-twenty."
"Look, I already talked to Connie three times today," Burch said, "but there ain't no talking to her. She's really pissed. I think it's hormones. She just wants to bust my chops. And I'm no glutton for punishment."
"Ain't love grand?" Stone said.
"God bless America," Nazario said.
"Look," Burch said. "It ain't like she wants me back between the sheets or to join her for tea. All she wants to know is where I'm staying, so she can come over and cut up what's left of my raggedy clothes."
He sighed. "I'm calling it a day. You pick up and it's her, don't let it slip where I'm staying. I'm lucky to find the place I got and I don't need her coming over to trash it."
He left, but reemerged from the elevator fifteen minutes later. Nazario was on the phone. Stone glanced up from his computer keyboard. "What, you checking up on us, Sarge? Thought you left."
"So did I. Could one of you guys gimme a lift?"
"Sure, Sarge." Nazario hung up. "Where's your car at?"
"Who knows?" He sank wearily into his desk chair, his expression resigned.
Stone whipped his chair around and lowered his voice. "Repossessed?"
"Nah, the Chevy's paid for."
"Somebody steal your Blazer?" Nazario said, voice rising. "Outta the police garage?"
Emma, the middle-age secretary at her desk outside Riley's office, glanced up curiously.
"Keep it down, would ya?" Burch muttered.
"You report it?" Stone asked.
"Nah. I know who copped it."
"Not Connie," Nazario said. "She wouldn't steal your wheels."
"Hadda be. This is guerrilla warfare and Connie is the guerrilla queen. And don't say it," he warned them. "I've tried talking sense to her. Won't listen. Turned the kids against me, too. Wouldn't be surprised if my oldest wasn't the wheel man. Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old drama queen, just got her license. My big mistake was teaching that kid to drive. Connie didn't have the patience."
"What does she want?" Stone said.
"Me, miserable. So far she's doing a helluva job. I saw Maureen Hartley again when we solved her daughter's case and Connie blew it all outta proportion. Wish to hell I was having the party times she thinks I am."
"Let's go look for it, Sarge," Nazario offered. "We're detectives, ain't we? We can find your wheels. You always tell us to think dirty, like the perp. Who knows this suspect better? Think dirty. Where you think she'd park it?"
"In her state of mind? The bottom of the bay."
"You in, Stone?"
"Sure," the tall black detective said, as he keyed his radio to somebody trying to raise him.
"Hey, Stone." It was unit 236, Homicide Detective Ron Diaz. "You wanted a heads-up on elderly women murdered in their bedrooms? We just caught one, over in Morningside. I'm headed there now."
"She live alone? Any sign of forced entry?"
"Keep your shirt on, I ain't even there yet."
"What's the address?" Stone waved off Burch and Nazario, who left without him.
"That I can tell you. Two seventy-two Northeast Sixty-third Street."
"Meet you there."
• • •
Stone often wished he had investigated the Meadows murder from jump. Would this be his chance, at last, to follow the killer's fresh tracks, instead of hunting a shadow from a twenty-four-year distance?
He had pursued the case of Virginia Meadows with initial optimism, intent on finding the man who killed the seventy-seven-year-old widow. What he found, instead, were nine identical murder cases in cities across America.
Meadows was no isolated killing, as he first believed. In Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, Cleveland, and Paterson, New Jersey, there had been other lonely elderly women. Like Virginia Meadows, they lived alone. Like her, they were strangled and tucked into bed. All looked strangely peaceful in death, as though sleeping. How many others, he wondered, had been wrongly classified as natural causes?
The killer was still active. Stone had found the most recent case in Paterson, seventeen months ago. After linking the cases, he had been temporarily assigned to an FBI task force formed to find the serial killer. But the task force became an early casualty of the war on terrorism. One by one the federal agents were pulled off the pursuit for assignments involving national security.
Only Sam Stone was left.
As he drove, he noted the time, the weather conditions, and the traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, in the neighborhood. The scene, a typical South Florida home, one-story CBS construction, painted white, with green shutters. The wooden front door in the center of the house was also painted green. It stood open.
Two patrol cars and a detective unit were parked out front. The crime scene van was arriving, just turning the corner.
The front yard, bordered by a hibiscus hedge, was slightly overgrown. A uniform was stringing yellow crime scene tape between two palm trees.
A heavyset woman in a housecoat, her hair in big pink curlers, stood in a side yard with a patrolman. One hand covered her eyes.
Make the scene talk to you, Stone thought, as he always did, then stepped into the house.
The living room was unremarkable, a comfortable couch on the east wall, a television set on the west wall. To the north, through the living room, was the dining room. There he turned left, following the voices to the bedroom.
Diaz was pulling on a pair of latex gloves. "So, whattaya think, Stone, she one of yours?"
The room was a bloodbath.
The frail victim lay supine on a queen-size bed, a halo of blood around her head. She wore only a nightgown, which had been pulled up around her neck. Blood had spattered across the headboard and the wall. Her wrists and hands were covered with congealed blood, probably from defense wounds she had suffered. A bed sheet was wrapped around her left leg. There appeared to be bite marks on her buttocks and right shoulder.
A trail of blood led from the bed to the bathroom. Streaks and spatters were on the walls, sink, and medicine cabinet and bloody shoe prints tracked the white tile floor. The tub was half full of water.
"Musta happened this morning," Diaz said.
It appeared as though she had been about to bathe when surprised by the killer, who attacked her there, then dragged her into the bedroom and onto the bed.
On the wall between the bathroom and the bed, a picture frame hung askew. An old wedding photo was visible behind the cracked, blood-smeared glass. The woman petite, the man tall and handsome in uniform, circa World War II. Someone injured had fallen against it during a struggle.
"No," Stone said quietly. "This is too messy. Way too messy. It's not him."
"Hell, I was hoping you'd want to take it off our hands."
"Got anything?" Stone asked.
"She's a widow. Neighbors say there's a grandson, late teens or early twenties, might be into drugs. A new handyman did some repairs around the house last week. The victim's car, ten-year-old blue Ford Taurus, is missing. We put out a BOLO."
"Did you find the knife?" Stone asked. "Is it from her kitchen? Any burglaries, rapes, or attempts in the neighborhood lately?"
"I just got here," the detective said.
Stone's eyes roved the room one more time. The clothes she had planned to wear, a dress and fresh undergarments, were draped across a chair back, freshly polished shoes placed neatly in front. She had plans, he thought, somewhere to go, people to see.
"Looks like you've got his DNA, footprints, probably even fingerprints. Hope you find him fast."
"I'm on it," the detective said. "Good luck with yours."
Stone left, relieved that the elusive killer he was seeking hadn't struck again. Frustrated, that like the killer in this new case, he was still unknown and free out there somewhere.
• • •
The photo lab was deserted after 6:00 p.m. Stone spread the eleven-by-fourteen enlargements he'd ordered across a long conference table, studied them, reread the reports, then studied them some more.
Most of the images were in color. Each crime scene had been photographed repeatedly from different angles.
Stone peeled off his jacket, loosened his tie. Arranging each set of photos in sequence, he posted the most similar shots from each scene on a large cork bulletin board that ran the length of one wall.
All spinsters or widows, the victims ranged in age from seventy-two to ninety-three. All were scrupulously clean, as though washed. Their hair had been trimmed, their nails clipped. The earliest victims were dressed in fresh nightgowns, the more recent were wrapped in white sheets. The killer had posed them in similar fashion, face up, sheets covering their bodies, hands positioned as though in prayer. The only contradictory clue was a small amount of dirt, less than a handful found under their heads, in their hair, on their pillows. Analyzed, it matched nothing in or around their homes. It did not appear to have come from their own yards. No evidence of forced entry into their homes. None had been raped. The killer had left no DNA or fingerprints.
The first victim, Tessie Bollinger, age seventy-four, died in Paterson. So did the most recent, Margery DeWitt, age eighty-seven.
He killed Gertrude Revere, ninety-one, in Cleveland. Jean Abramson, of Chicago, was ninety-three. He strangled Estelle Rudolph, age seventy-seven, in Detroit, and Patricia Lenoy, age seventy-two, in Boston. Erna Dunn, in Philadelphia, was seventy-nine. Della Golden died in Memphis at seventy-two.
Their homes had not been ransacked. Nothing seemed to be missing. All the killer took was their lives. A sick son of a bitch, Stone thought, but so clever that it took all these years before anyone became aware that the cases were linked and the work of a single serial killer. He was unique. Few serial killers successfully continue their deadly odysseys for so long. Time will mellow a murderous rage. But this man was still killing. If he began in his teens he'd be in his forties by now. He could be older. He could be anybody.
Geographic profiling didn't work. The man was a shadow. He covered the map, his victims separated by many miles, jurisdictions, and years. There wasn't even proof he was a man. But female serial killers are most often black widows or baby killers.
Stone opened his notebook to read again his list of what the victims shared in common. Alone, they were lonely. Trusting and too friendly to strangers. The task force had discovered little else. There seemed to be a breakthrough when they learned that the late husbands of two of the women were retired military. But no others had military ties except for one who had lost her only son in Vietnam.
Bollinger, in Paterson, was first, Meadows in Miami was second. Number nine, the most recent, was again in Paterson. What if the killer was retracing his steps, repeating his pattern? Miami would be his next stop. He could be here now, Stone thought.
Energized by a sense of urgency, the detective paced back and forth in front of the pictures, studying them.
He finally took them down and posted the next set.
He liked working alone, or with Pete Nazario. He had never felt comfortable with the FBI. And they clearly weren't comfortable with him. He'd been given the courtesy because he had linked the cases. But the agents mistrusted Miami Police, disliked sharing information, and showed little respect for him because he was only twenty-six and lacked experience.
The lack of respect was mutual. He'd been skeptical of their famous profiling techniques. Of course the murderer was a loner. Serial killers don't operate in crowds, not successful ones anyway. Of course he had problems with women. He was killing them.
What do you expect, he thought, from bureau profilers who had described the Beltway Sniper as a lone white man, when the shooters proved instead to be two blacks?
Stone found a coffeemaker on a corner table. Bitter dregs in the bottom. He discovered cups and supplies in a cabinet, brewed a fresh pot, and filled a flowered mug with janice painted on it. He restudied the pictures and reread the reports as he drank.
He'd even researched the phases of the moon in search of a ritualistic link. Nothing. The timing seemed random. He had killed on every day of the week but Saturday.
Head aching after his third cup of coffee, Stone felt a nagging yet elusive hunch, something he couldn't quite put his finger on.
He switched photographs again, to long shots from across the victims' bedrooms. He walked by them, paused to look back at the Paterson picture on his right, then at the Detroit photo to his left. He set the coffee cup down harder than intended. A wave of the scalding brew slopped over the edge and onto the counter. He didn't notice. He was checking the bedroom shots in Cleveland, Boston, and Miami.
"Damn. Why didn't I see that?" He reached for the telephone. "Hey, Naz, it's me. I need you to come down here and look at something."
"What time is it?" Nazario sounded fuzzy, as though he'd been asleep.
"I don't know." Stone glanced impatiently at his watch. "Three o'clock?" He sounded surprised.
"Oh, Jesus. Where're you at?"
"The photo lab at the station."
"Did you go home? You still there? Up early? Out late? What the hell are you do --- "
"How quick can you get here?"
"That's me behind you, walking in the door."
• • •
Nazario was wearing khakis and a rumpled white guayabera.
Stone looked startled. "How'd you get here so fast?"
"Not much traffic at this hour, and I floored it."
"No doubt something chasing you again. You find the sarge's car?"
"Yeah. Just in time. He's embarrassed, so don't broadcast it. Looks like Connie took the FOP symbol off the tag and parked it in a loading zone. So they were about to tow it. Hope you didn't wake me up to ask that." He squinted at Stone. "What the hell are we doing here?"
"Look. Look at these." Stone motioned to the photos. "Tell me if you see what I see."
The nine enlargements were shot from across the rooms toward the foot of each victim's bed.
Arms folded, Nazario studied each in turn, thick brows furrowed.
His eyes narrowed on the third pass. "I'll be damned. I see it! ¡Dios mío!"
Excerpted from COLD CASE SQUAD © Copyright 2004 by Edna Buchanan. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
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