A False Dawn

FORTY-FOUR

It was two days before I called Leslie. There was a pleasant smile in her voice, but more businesslike than I wanted. But then what did I want? I wanted to take her to lunch, to be with her, to meet, and dine with her near the water. The way the sun comes through a bent Venetian blind, her light broke through the tiny slants in my armor even though I tried to shield her from my darkest corners.

Leslie met me at the Lighthouse Restaurant, a block from the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and fifty feet from the Halifax River. A life-sized pirate, made from stone and painted in primary colors, stood next to a rusted galleon anchor in the parking lot. The restaurant was a blend of cracker Florida inlaid with Key West T-shirt tackiness.

Outside, a wooden deck was built around a large live oak tree. There were a dozen tables and chairs scattered across the deck. Some of the lunch crowd sat in a replica of a shrimp boat docked and attached to the deck.

Leslie and I took a table in a far corner of the deck with a nice view of the river. I watched a sailboat motor toward the pass. One man at the helm. I could see him opening the jib, a gust of wind pulling the bow in the direction of the sea.

Leslie said, “Nice spot. Do you bring guests here often?”

“Guests?”

“I thought I’d hear from you the next day. Then, when I didn’t, I thought it was something I said.”

“No, Leslie. It’s not you. It’s me. I have had a lot of closed curtains opened suddenly. It’s just that this light pouring in has caught my house in sort of a mess.”

“I don’t want to change your world or redecorate your house. All I want is to feel comfortable when I’m in it. To feel welcome, maybe even special.”

“You are.”

She looked out across the water and was silent. Then she changed the direction of the conversation. “The DNA sample we got from Richard Brennen didn’t match the hair from the duct tape. Got to be ice water in that man’s veins.”

“There’s something cold-blooded in him.”

“Okay, now to Silas Davis. Dan Grant and I grilled him at headquarters. Interrogated him for more than three hours.”

“What’d you get?”

“Probably capable of murder, but I don’t think he’s the perp.”

“Why?”

“You even said that his skin under her fingernail doesn’t make him the killer.”

“But I want to hear why you think he may not have killed her.”

“Davis is cocky, but he’s scared, too. We reminded him that his skin cells were under the vic’s fingernail, which is enough hard, indisputable evidence to take it to the DA. Sean, the guy wouldn’t crack. He insists that she slapped him, cut his face with her nails, and the last time he saw her was when she got in a van to be driven to another work location.”

“Talk with the other girls that night in the van. Who was driving?”

“Hector Ortega. Dan and I questioned him and Juan Gomez at that slum trailer park they run. Gomez said he pays his workers cash and doesn’t know the vic’s real name. Said he called her pájaro, Spanish for bird. Ortega says the last time he saw her was when she bolted from his parked van while he was urinating off the side of the road. And where he happened to make his unscheduled stop to pee is what turned your world around. He was less than a half-mile from your home. The vic allegedly ran toward the river where she was assaulted and left for dead. You stumbled onto her the morning after it happened. Ortega says some backwoods redneck probably did it.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Did the pathologist find anything on both victims that might have the any remote similarity?”

“Are you having short-term memory?” She laughed. “Remember, we couldn’t find so much as a speck of hair, carpet fibers, blood, latent prints, semen or anything physical that link the two. Although the second vic was raped, no foreign pubic, no sperm, and no condoms tossed in the bushes. Outside of the rape, and what we know linking them — gender and ethnicity — the common link seems to be the way they were murdered, and the fact the bodies were found less than twenty miles from each other. Ortega and Gomez say they didn’t know and had never seen the second vic.”

“You believe them?”

“No, but then we don’t have a lot to go on either.”

My mind raced down a long black tunnel and an image flashed. It was a dead body. A girl. Broken. Beaten. Smashed like a bird that hit a car windshield. Legs spread. Bloody. Panties torn off. The headlights from a parked squad cruiser illuminated her face in a theatrical spotlight of white. I was kneeling by her body looking at her open eyes. Eyes locked on horror. Her nose was the only part of her face showing color. Both nostril passages had tiny circles of blood encrusted like rings on the outside.

“Sean, where were you? Your eyes were so intense.”

Now I remembered what I’d seen on the girl I’d found. “The girl I found by the river was almost killed by strangulation and then stabbed. She had blood on her nostrils. If a guy hunting for frogs hadn’t been shinning a light near the area, I believe her neck would have been broken, too. The second girl also was strangled and found with a broken neck.”

“Right. And your point?”

“Leslie, the coroner couldn’t determine the exact cause of death, strangulation or a broken neck, right?”

“The psycho did both within seconds. ME’s report said the second vic could have died from either. The perp probably strangled her then broke her neck as a parting gift.”

I looked at the bay and inlet for a moment. “What if she didn’t die from a broken neck or strangulation?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if she died from asphyxiation?”

“Sorry, I don’t follow you, Sean.”

“What if she wasn’t strangled? What if she was asphyxiated? Toyed with…brought to the point of passing out. Brought to near death and then allowed to breathe again. Given mouth-to-mouth by her attacker until he tired of it and killed her.”

“I don’t know if a human can go to the level of cruelty,” she said. “Almost kill a woman, resuscitate her only to kill her the next minute. I’ve never seen evil like that.”

“I have.”