At two o’clock Harry and Vicky were back in Rourke’s office.
“First the good news,” Rourke said. “We’re getting a task force. Four detectives from this squad, and six uniforms we’re bringing up to work in plainclothes.” He paused and stared at Harry for a long moment. “Harry, you’ll be lead detective. But I gotta tell you, the brass didn’t want you as lead. You’re not popular upstairs, which is something you know. And it’s mainly due to your big mouth.” He raised a hand, stopping any comment before it could be made. “They wanted Nick Benevuto. Their argument was that he’s senior to you in homicide, which is true. I said I wanted you. So my ass is on the line. You screw up and I lose a big chunk of it; you’ll wish you were never born.”
Again, he held up his hand. “Now the bad news. Tarpon Springs P.D. is screaming that we came in and snatched a major case from them.”
“That’s bullshit,” Harry said. “Vicky and I already had the case. They know that.”
“Sure they do. But their chief sees all the media the sheriff is getting, while he’s just standing around with his dick in his hand.” He glanced at Vicky. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay, cap, I’ve met the chief. It’s a lovely image. The man’s a fourteen-karat asshole.”
Rourke gave her a long look. “Yeah, well anyway, the sheriff agreed to put two of his detectives on the task force and hold a little press conference this afternoon to announce the joint operation. It’s all politics, but we have to live with it.”
“Should be a great press conference,” Vicky said. “Sort of a two-man circle jerk.”
Rourke stared at her again, longer this time. “You’re talking about the sheriff, you know. Our sheriff.”
“Goodness, what came over me,” Vicky answered.
“How long have you worked with Doyle?” Rourke snapped. “Two days? And already I got this?”
Harry fought off a smile. “Who are the two Tarpon dicks we’re supposed to take on?” he asked.
Rourke looked at a note on his desk. “Bob Davis and Jerry Deaver.”
“I know them,” Harry said. “The other cops call them the two D’s.” He offered up a small shrug. “They have the rep of not being very imaginative, but very thorough, so it could be worse.” Harry took out his notebook and wrote down the names of the Tarpon Springs detectives. “Who are the uniforms?” he asked.
Rourke rattled off six names, the last of which was Jim Morgan, the deputy who had done such a good job at the Brooker Creek crime scene. Rourke noticed Harry nodding approval at the mention of Morgan’s name.
“I picked Morgan based on what you put down in your report,” Rourke said. “You wrote that he’d done an excellent job. He also pushed hard for the assignment and I thought you could use an eager beaver on the team.”
“Meaning that the rest of us aren’t?” Vicky teased.
Rourke leveled a finger at her. “Don’t start with me. I get enough from your partner.” He turned back to Harry. “I just sent word out on their new assignments about an hour ago, so they should be learning about it as we speak. They’re all due in here at three on a ‘forthwith’ to get their specific assignments from you, so you’ve got an hour to figure out who you want doing what. Your team can work out of the conference room next to my office.”
At three o’clock Harry stood before the team and began handing out assignments. It was basically grunt work for now, much of it going over ground already covered in the initial investigation, looking for anything that might have been missed. Nick Benevuto and John Weathers were sent to interview Darlene’s parents and Clint Walker’s friends and family. Uniforms were assigned to verify the husband’s and boyfriend’s alibis. Others were sent out to interview the men whose cars were parked in Darlene’s driveway in the months leading up to her death. Jim Morgan was told to do another canvass of Darlene’s neighbors. The Tarpon Springs detectives, the two D’s, were sent to canvass the residences around Frank Howard Park, where the “cowboy’s” body had been found. Vicky, because of her background in sex crimes, was told to dig up whatever information she could about the boy Darlene had molested, his family, his friends, along with any psychological treatment he may have received. Harry would take on the unpleasant task of Darlene’s autopsy, as well as reviewing all forensic evidence that had been collected. The following day he was scheduled to meet with Jasmine, the dancer from the Peek-a-Boo Lounge, to view driver’s license photos of men who had visited Darlene’s apartment. It was a massive amount of work, but Harry was convinced he had the manpower to get it done quickly and efficiently. It was now a question of finding that one key piece of evidence that would break the case open.
Darlene’s autopsy was scheduled for four p.m. It was originally planned for early that morning, but had been delayed when Mort Janlow, the assistant M.E. assigned to the case, was sent out to the Tarpon Springs crime scene. Now Janlow stood before the body, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. Harry stood across from him, watching a grin spread across the medical examiner’s face.
“Still don’t like these slice-’em-and-dice-’em jobs, eh, Harry?”
Harry gave Janlow a flat stare and held it until the assistant M.E. was forced to look away. “Not my favorite part of the day,” he finally said. What he didn’t say was that it made him think of his six-year-old brother Jimmy lying on a similar autopsy table twenty years ago. He had never seen his brother then, of course, but that had been the overriding image he’d had as a young deputy witnessing his first autopsy, and it was one that rushed back at him each succeeding time. He believed then, as he believed now, that no one who had ever witnessed an autopsy would want one performed on someone they loved.
He stared into Darlene Beckett’s dead face, the slightly opened eyes, the parted lips. But most of all he stared at the single word that someone had carved into her forehead, denouncing her as evil. Was she? Or was she a woman fighting her own inner demons. He wondered if he’d ever know the answer, or any part of it.
“Let’s get to it,” Janlow said, picking up a scalpel for the initial cut. Then he paused and looked at the body. “She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, wasn’t she?” The question wasn’t directed at Harry, even though he was the only other person in the room. Now Janlow looked at Harry as if embarrassed by the comment. “Most people, even the ones who are extremely attractive in life, don’t carry their looks to this table. The muscle tone is gone; the clear, glowing complexions have turned pale and gray, the eyes are clouded. It makes you realize that it’s not the superficial exterior that we all work so hard at getting right, it’s that spark of life that makes people truly appealing.” He paused. “But every so often there’s one who’s beautiful even in death.”
“Maybe it’s because that’s all they ever had,” Harry said.
Janlow inclined his head to one side. “Never thought of it that way. Maybe you’re right, Harry. Maybe you’re right.”
Janlow reached up and turned on the overhead microphone that would record his observations. He gave the date and time, followed by routine statements. “We are about to begin the postmortem examination of Darlene Beckett, a twenty-six-year-old white female. The body is well developed, and shows no identifying scars or tattoos. There is bruising about the arms and shoulders indicating that she struggled before death. There is only one exterior wound, a deep cut across the throat that severed the thyroid cartilage, the trachea, and the right carotid artery, causing a massive loss of blood, which would have continued until the heart stopped beating. The wound appears to have been administered from behind in a right-to-left motion, indicating the killer used his left hand.”
Harry noted Janlow’s caution. He had avoided stating flatly that the killer was left-handed. Several years earlier Janlow had performed an autopsy on another of Harry’s cases. It involved a young woman who was beaten to death with a metal softball bat owned by her husband. The blows had come from left to right, and Janlow had declared during the autopsy that the direction of the blows indicated that the killer was left-handed. At trial the defense ripped into Janlow’s report, demonstrating beyond doubt that the husband-the man Harry had arrested-was right-handed. The case seemed certain to fail, until Harry went back into the field and came up with several softball teammates of the accused, each of whom testified on redirect that the husband, though signing his name and throwing a ball with his right hand, always batted left.
“The wound goes back to the spine and caused a nick in the third vertebrae, indicating a heavy-bladed knife, possibly a hunting knife,” Janlow continued. He paused again, thought over what he had said and then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s open her up,” Janlow said, bringing himself and Harry back as he began the Y-shaped incision that went from each shoulder to the sternum, then ran in a straight line to the pubis.
Harry always handled the early stages of an autopsy well. The opening of the body cavity never bothered him. There was Vicks to dab under the nostrils to keep the odor of putrefaction at bay, and the inner organs, when explored and removed, never seemed quite real to him. His difficulties came later when the craniotomy was performed. It began with the sound of the scalp being ripped away from the skull; then pulled down over the face, followed by the buzz of the small electric saw as it cut around the skull; then the popping sound as the skull cap was pulled away, exposing the brain. It was at this point that Harry was always forced to think about what he had just witnessed. And he always came away with the same conclusion: it was the final indignity one human being could force upon another, not much more than a cruel joke, a stripping away of the last vestige of humanity, even if it’s done with a noble intention, a search for the final truth of that person’s life.
Darlene Beckett’s autopsy took an hour and a half to complete. There would still be microscopic analyses of various organs, and subsequent toxicology reports, but the initial evidence was fairly clear. She had died because someone slit her throat.
As he prepared to leave the autopsy suite, Harry paused and looked back at the body. It was the last time he would see Darlene Beckett. He would see her in photographs, of course. They would fill his office until the case was solved. But this was the last time he would see her. He stared at her face. The look of surprise and terror were gone now, as if washed away by the autopsy, and Harry again realized how little sympathy he felt for this woman; how much he truly disliked her, even in death. But as he stared at her profile he offered an unspoken promise, just as he had to all those who had come before her: to find her killer and bring that person to trial. It’s what I do, he thought. It’s what I am, what I was made to be. He continued to stare at Darlene Beckett for several drawn-out moments until he realized that Mort Janlow was watching him. Then he turned and briskly walked away.
Harry returned to headquarters and went immediately to the CSI lab. He found Sergeant Marty LeBaron in his office, and dropped into a chair facing his desk.
“So…” Harry began.
LeBaron grinned at him. “Believe it or not, Harry, I was going to call you.”
“No need. I’m here.”
“I was trying for sarcasm,” LeBaron said.
“Yeah, I know. Sarcasm accepted. So what have you got?”
“On the cross?”
“Especially the cross.”
“The engraving is barely readable, but we were able to bring it up a bit with an acid bath. It’s a line from the Lord’s Prayer. It says: And deliver us from evil… ”
“For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, ” Harry finished.
“Harry, I didn’t know you were religious.”
“I’m not.” Harry stared at him across the desk. “Anything else?”
“Just confirmation of what we already knew. Tire tracks were all standard over-the-counter all-season tires. One set of Firestone; couple of sets of Bridgestone just like the ones we use on our police vehicles. Nothing that was special order, nothing that’s going to help us identify a particular car, just common treads. In Tarpon Springs that software salesman parked his car off the road and carried the blanket and booze onto the beach. But the killer drove around the gate and in to where they were-like he knew he was going to need the car to load up the body.”
“Or he parked on the road, followed them in, killed them, and then drove in to pick up Darlene’s body,” Harry said.
“Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, one thing more. The killer, we think, wears a size eleven shoe.”
“Just like I do,” Harry said. “And half the people who were at the crime scene,” he added as an afterthought.
LeBaron lifted one foot and placed it on the edge of his desk. “Join the club,” he said.
At seven o’clock the team was gathered in the conference room. Harry knew that cops were quick to feel slighted if they thought their work was being pushed aside for someone else’s. So to keep everyone happy he advised the group that he’d be taking reports by order of seniority. That put Nick Benevuto first up. He and his partner, John Weathers, had checked out the alibis of Darlene’s ex-husband, Jordan Beckett, and her high school boyfriend, Billy Smithers.
“The ex was out on his sailboat with his new girlfriend,” Benevuto began. “The marina where he keeps the boat said he filled it up with diesel in the late afternoon on the day of the murder, and told the guy who filled it that he was heading south in the gulf for a few days. The girlfriend confirms that she was with him every minute right up to the time he got the call that Darlene was dead. His office also confirms that he took the time off from work.” He gave Harry a shrug. “Of course, there’s no way of being certain he didn’t have a car stashed somewhere along the route, where he could get back, do his ex-wife, and return to the boat. So I checked for any traffic citations or parking tickets he might have gotten between here and Venice, along with the area north of the marina in case he lied about where he took the boat. I also checked car rentals for him and his girlfriend. Nada. If it went down that way the girlfriend would have to be in on it, and she honestly doesn’t seem the type. She comes across as pretty much of a straight arrow.”
“What did you find out about her?” Harry asked.
“She’s an emergency room nurse at Tampa General. They’ve got nothing but good things to say about her-dedicated, caring, all the usual bullshit. I thought I was listening to a goddamn commercial.”
“Did you have time to check his credit cards to see if he made any gasoline purchases on land at the same time he was supposed to be on the boat?”
“Not yet, but I planned to do that in the morning.”
Benevuto said it a bit sheepishly and Harry knew he had caught him out. “Okay, let’s leave Jordan Beckett for now. What about the old boyfriend, Billy Smithers?”
“Same story,” John Weathers chimed in. “He’s got three buddies who say he was at a Rays game at Tropicana Field the night of the murder. All of them said they stayed to the end then went to a bar for a few beers before heading home. It was at least one a.m. before they left St. Petersburg, so that puts him about thirty miles from the crime scene until well after Darlene was iced. Oh, and Smithers also has his ticket stub from the game. It was still in his wallet.”
“Why would he keep the ticket stub?” Harry asked.
“These guys buy reserved seats near the Rays’ dugout. The attendants check tickets every time you go out and try to come back in. So he just stuck the stub in his wallet. It was still there.”
“Okay, we’ll cross Mr. Smithers off the list for now. When you get a chance check out the bar they were at. Take a driver’s license picture with you and see if the bartender can confirm their story.” Harry turned to the Tarpon Springs detectives, the two D’s, Bob Davis and Jerry Deaver. “What did you guys come up with at the murder sight?”
Davis and Deaver looked like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. They were the same height, about five-ten; both had the same blocky builds, with thick necks and square faces, and each had out-of-date crew cuts. If they had worn fedoras they would have fit into a 1940s detective flick, Harry thought.
Davis took the lead: “Our canvass of the neighbors around the park pretty much drew a blank. One guy,” he paused to consult his notebook and rattle off a name and address, “he was out walking his pooch a little before midnight and he remembers two cars being parked near the entrance to the park. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to them because kids park there sometimes and walk into the park to fool around. The work crews claim they pick up a lotta used condoms around the picnic areas, especially on weekends.”
“At least your local kids are practicing safe sex,” Vicky offered.
“Yeah, there’s that,” Davis said. “But it doesn’t make me want to eat my lunch on one of those picnic tables.”
“Did this neighbor remember the make and model of either of the cars?” Harry asked.
“No. He’s so used to seeing cars there, he didn’t pay much attention. He just noticed they were there. He did remember that both of them looked pretty new for kid’s cars. But other than our dog walker nobody saw anything or heard anything unusual. It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood. On work nights most people are in bed by the time our murder went down. One thing that’s curious is that a car did drive around the gate. CSI has casts of the tires, but there doesn’t seem to be anything special about them. And we can’t be certain it happened around the time of the murder. Could have been earlier, or later. All we know for certain is that they’re Bridgestone tires. Same tread as the car that drove into Brooker Creek.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I already got a report from Marty LeBaron on that. I think we can lean toward the idea that this was the killer’s car. That he drove it in to pick up Darlene’s body. So I’d like you to stay on it. If the cars are new they probably have factory tires on them. So check and see what makes and models came out of the factory with those treads, or better yet what dealers might offer those tires as options.”
“You got it,” Davis said.
Harry turned to Vicky. “What did you come up with on the abuse victim and his family?”
Vicky opened her notebook. “The kid’s name is Billy Hall, but that’s something we can’t let out to the media. His identity is still protected as a juvenile. He’s fifteen years old-he was barely fourteen when Darlene abused him.”
Nick Benevuto let out a snort. “I wish somebody like Darlene had abused me when I was fourteen.”
Soft laughter filled the room.
Vicky inhaled and let out a long breath. “Alright, guys, let’s get something straight. It is abuse whether it’s done to a male or female. And it does cause harm. Trust me. I saw enough of it in sex crimes.” She could tell she wasn’t getting through to most of them. “Look, I know it’s hard for all you macho guys not to think that what Darlene did wasn’t all that terrible. I’ve heard the Who did she hurt? argument over and over in cases like hers. But try to think of it as a male teacher doing what she did to a fourteen-year-old girl. Trust me, it’s the same power trip and it’s just as damaging. This kid is shell-shocked from all the notoriety. He just wants it to go away and he wants a hole to hide in until it does. His parents are two hardworking, blue-collar types, and they just want the same thing. They’ve got friends and neighbors who have turned their backs on them because they refused to let the kid testify. And it doesn’t matter that they did that based on a psychologist’s recommendation. The friends and neighbors are salt-of-earth types themselves, and they all wanted Darlene hung out to dry. When she was allowed to cop a plea, so the kid wouldn’t have to testify, they took it out on the parents. The parents told me that even the people in the church they attended turned their backs on them.”
“So there had to be a lot of resentment toward Darlene,” Harry suggested.
“A ton of it,” Vicky said. “The boy’s mother flat out said she was glad Darlene was dead-that she’d like to thank whoever killed her.”
“They have alibis for the night of the murder?” Harry asked.
“Just each other,” Vicky said. “They all claim they were home that night, that they watched a little television, then went to bed around eleven. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t rule out that another member of their family, a neighbor or friend, or somebody from their church, won’t qualify as a suspect. There’s a lot more checking to do there.”
“I agree,” Harry said. “It’s a promising lead. Let’s talk about it some more later.” Harry now turned to the uniforms, taking them one at a time, starting with those who were checking out the owners of cars seen parked in Darlene’s driveway. The one person who had visited most often was her probation officer. He had visited her like clockwork every Thursday night. Her other visitors all seemed to have alibis, some stronger than others, but they still had to be checked out. Harry told the deputies to keep at it until they had all the alibis nailed down one way or the other.
The last man he called on was Deputy Jim Morgan, who had been asked to recanvass Darlene’s neighbors.
“I just came up with one new thing, but I think it could be important,” Morgan began. “The elderly neighbor, the one who kept track of the cars in her driveway, Joshua Brown, well, it seems he withheld two plate numbers when he gave you the list he compiled.”
Harry cocked his head to one side, surprised by the information. He couldn’t understand why the old man would do that and he was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t pressed him enough to draw that information out during his initial interview. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“Well, it was all his doing.” Morgan was obviously uncomfortable that he had put Harry on the spot. “He just threw it out while I was talking to him-that he was surprised we didn’t already have all the plate numbers since we were watching her so closely. When I asked him what he meant, he told me he had seen two unmarked cars in front of her house and figured we were watching her pretty close.”
“How did he know they were unmarked police cars?”
“He said he saw the radios through the windows. He had already written down the license numbers, but he didn’t include the cars on the list after he saw the police radios.”
“But he kept the numbers,” Harry said.
“Sure did. All the numbers were in a small notebook he carried when he took his dog out for walks. Then he transferred the numbers to the list he gave you. These two numbers were still in his notebook with lines drawn through them.”
Harry couldn’t help but smile. A notebook, transferring plate numbers to another list. The old coot had embarrassed him, but thank God he had so much time on his hands. “So did you run those new plates?”
“Yes, I did. And here’s the kicker. Both cars are registered to us, to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department. And according to the motor pool there’s no record of who took either of those cars out.” Morgan paused. “And there should be.”
“Sounds like we have some more work to do,” Harry said, then turned to Vicky. “I’d like you to work with Jim on this. I’d also like one of you to run a computer check on past murders-local and federal. See if you can come up with anytime where the victim’s face was covered by a mask or where words were carved in the flesh. And don’t limit the check to this county or even to Florida.”
Vicky’s eyebrows rose. “You thinking serial killer here?”
“No. But I don’t want to overlook the possibility either, and then get second guessed about why we never checked. While you’re doing that I’ll pick up where you left off with the kid and his family. Everybody else just keep working on what you’ve got.” He looked back at Morgan. “Helluva nice job.”
Morgan tried to suppress a grin. Harry took it in and decided that the young deputy, like most cops, had an oversized ego. And he likes it fed with as much praise as he can get.
Harry was back at his desk jotting the information Vicky had gathered into his notebook, while she dictated it from hers.
“Why do you want me working with Morgan?” she asked when they had finished.
“This is new for him,” Harry said. “I just want to make sure he follows through on it. I have no reason to believe he won’t, but then I don’t know how he feels about investigating other cops, and I just want to make sure I’ve got somebody more experienced looking over his shoulder.” He gave Vicky a long look. “This is something that could come back and bite us if it’s not handled right. Even if it doesn’t prove to be part of the case, we’ve got to be able to show we investigated it thoroughly. I also want you to check out Darlene’s probation officer. Find out why he spent so much time at her town house and what the hell she was doing without her ankle monitor-”
The phone on Harry’s desk rang, interrupting him.
“Doyle,” he said as he answered it.
“Harry, it’s Walter Lee Hollins, over at the prison.”
Harry’s stomach tightened and seemed to rise toward his throat. It had to be news about his mother, and news about her was never good. “Hey, Walter Lee, something going on?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid there is. Your mama just got notified that she’s been put up for a parole hearing. I wanted to make sure you heard about it, in case those assholes on the parole board or in the state’s attorney’s office forget to tell you. It’s happened before.”
“When will it be?” Harry’s voice had gone dead cold and most of the color had left his face. He could feel Vicky staring at him, but refused to look at her.
“They ain’t set a date yet, far as I know. But it could be as soon as next week. If she don’t make the list for that parole hearing, it’ll probably be the next one. I’m not sure how close they’re scheduling them right now. There’s a lot of pressure from Tallahassee to parole as many as we can to ease up on overcrowding. I never thought it would affect your mama though. Not with what she’s in here for.”
“No, I didn’t either. Thanks for the information.”
“No problem, Harry. You take care, hear?”
When Harry ended the call Vicky was still staring at him. “Bad news?” she asked.
“Just some personal stuff.”