Detective

1

Orlando Cobo, a middle-aged security guard at Coconut Grove's Royal Colonial Hotel, was tired. He was ready to go home when he entered the eighth floor a few minutes before 7:00 A.M. on routine patrol. It had been an uneventful night, with only three minor incidents during his eight-hour shift.

Security problems relating to youth, sex, or drugs rarely occurred at the "Royal Colostomy," as it was sometimes called. The clientele comprised mainly middle-aged, staid, well-to-do people who liked the hotel's old-fashioned quiet lobby, its indoor profusion of tropical plants, and an architectural style once described as "brick wedding cake."

In a way the hotel matched its Coconut Grove locale a sometimes jarring mix of past and present. Within the Grove, decrepit frame houses nudged once-exclusive, stylish homes; mom-and-pop trivia shops stood cheek-by-jowl with upscale galleries and boutiques; fast-food takeouts abutted gourmet restaurants; everywhere, poverty and wealth rubbed shoulders. Florida's oldest settlement a historic village established twenty years before Miami Coconut Grove seemed to have not one character but many, all untidily competing.

None of this troubled Cobo as he left an elevator and walked along the eighth-floor corridor. He was neither a philosopher nor a Coconut Grove resident, but drove to work each day from North Miami. At the moment nothing seemed amiss, and he began to anticipate the relaxing journey home.

Then, nearing a fire-exit stairway at the corridor's end, he noticed that the door of room 805 was slightly ajar. From inside he could hear the loud sound of a radio or TV. He knocked, and when there was no response, he inched open the door. leaned inside, then gagged in disgust at an overwhelming odor. Holding a hand over his mouth, Cobo moved forward into the room, and at the sight of what faced him, his legs weakened. Directly ahead, in a pool of blood, were the bodies of a man and a woman with dismembered parts of their bodies around them.

Cobo hastily closed the door, composed himself with an effort, then reached for a phone clipped to his belt. He tapped out 911.

A woman's voice answered, "Nine-one-one emergency. Can I help you?" A beep indicated the call was being recorded.

* * *

At Miami Police Communication Center, a complaint clerk listened while Orlando Cobo reported an apparent double murder at the Royal Colonial Hotel.

"You say you're a security guard?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Where are you?"

"Right outside the room. It's 805.'' As the complaint clerk spoke, she was typing the information on a computer, to be read moments later by a dispatcher in another section.

"Stay there," the complaint clerk told the caller. "Secure the room. Let no one in until our officers arrive."

A mile and a half away, a young uniformed policeman, Tomas Ceballos, in patrol unit l 64, was cruising the South Dixie Highway when he received a dispatcher's urgent call. Immediately he swung his car hard right, tires screaming, and, with flashing lights and siren, headed for the Royal Colonial.

Minutes later, Officer Ceballos joined the security guard outside room 805.

"I just checked with reception," Cobo told him, consulting a note. "The room's registered to Mr. and Mrs. Homer Frost from Indiana; the lady's name is Blanche." He handed over the note and a room key-card.

Inserting the card, Ceballos cautiously entered 805. Instantly he recoiled, then forced himself to take in the scene, knowing he would need to describe it later.

What he saw were the bodies of an elderly man and woman, gagged and bound and seated facing each other, as if each had been witness to the other's death. The victims' faces had been beaten; the man's eyes and face were burned. Both bodies were a maze of knife cuts. In the background a radio was playing hard rock.

Tomas Ceballos had seen enough. Returning to the corridor, he used a portable radio to call Dispatch; his unit number would appear automatically on the dispatcher's screen. His voice wavered. "I need a Homicide unit on Tac One."

Tactical One was a radio channel reserved for Homicide use. Detective-Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie, unit number 1310, was on his way to work in an unmarked police car and had already checked in with Dispatch. Today Ainslie and his team were the on-duty hot unit.

The dispatcher alerted Ainslie, who switched to Tac One. "Thirteen-ten to one-sixty-four. QSK?"

"Two bodies at the Royal Colonial Hotel," Ceballos responded. "Room 805. Possible thirty-one." He swallowed, steadying his voice. "Make that a definite thirtyone. It's a bad one, real bad."

A 31 was a homicide, and Ainslie answered, "Okay, on my way. Secure the scene. Don't allow anyone in that room including yourself."

Ainslie spun his car around on a two-way street and pushed hard on the accelerator. At the same time he radioed Detective Bernard Quinn, a member of Ainslie's team, instructing Quinn to join him at the Royal Colonial.

His remaining detectives were handling other murders and for the time being unavailable. The past few months had been rife with homicides; investigations were piling up. Today. it seemed, the grim reaping was continuing.

Ainslie and Quinn arrived at the hotel within moments of each other, and together headed for a bank of elevators. Quinn, with graying hair and a seamed, weathered face, was impeccably dressed in a navy sports jacket, immaculate gray slacks, and a striped tie. A Britisher by birth and an American by adoption, he was a Homicide veteran, his retirement at age sixty not far away.

Quinn was respected and liked by colleagues, in part because he was never a threat to anyone's ambitions. After becoming a detective and doing his job well, he had not sought promotion. He simply did not want to be responsible for others, and had never taken the sergeant's exam, which he could have passed easily. But Quinn was a good man to have as lead investigator at any crime scene.

"This will be your case, Bernie," Ainslie said. "I'll stay to help, though. Get you started."

As they passed through the spacious, foliage-lined hotel lobby, Ainslie saw two women reporters near the registration desk. Media people sometimes cruised the streets, listening to police radio, and got to crime scenes early. One of the two, recognizing the detectives, hurried toward an elevator they had boarded, but the door slid closed before she reached it.

As the elevator rose, Quinn sighed. "There must be better ways to begin a day."

"You'll find out soon enough," Ainslie said. "Who knows? You might even miss this in retirement."

At the eighth floor, as they emerged, the security guard, Cobo, stepped forward. "Do you gentlemen have business " He stopped on seeing the Miami Police ID badges that Ainslie and Quinn had clipped to their jackets.

"Unfortunately," Quinn said, ''we do."

"Sorry, guys! Sure glad you're here. I've been stopping everyone who has no "

"Keep it up," Ainslie told him. "Stay on it. Lots of our people will be arriving, but don't let anyone by without identification. And we'll want this corridor kept clear."

"Yes, sir." With all the excitement, Cobo had no intention of going home.

From the doorway of room 805, Officer Ceballos approached, treating the Homicide detectives with respect. Like many young policemen, his ambition was to shed his uniform one day for a detective's plain clothes, and it did no harm to create a good impression. Ceballos handed over the security guard's note identifying 805's occupants, and reported that apart from the two brief inspections by Cobo and himself, the crime scene was undisturbed.

"Good." Ainslie acknowledged. "Remain on the scene and I'll get a two-man unit to assist you. The press is already in the hotel and pretty soon they'll be swarming. I don't want a single one on this floor, and don't give out any information; just say a PI officer will be here later. Meanwhile, no one else gets even close to room 805 without seeing me or Detective Quinn. You got all that?"

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Okay, let's see what we have."

As Ceballos opened the door of 805, Bernard Quinn wrinkled his nose in disgust. "And you think I'll miss this?"

Ainslie shook his head dismally. The odor of death was a sickening, rancid smell that permeated every homicide scene, especially where there were open wounds and seeping body fluids.

Both detectives recorded in notebooks their time of entry. They would continue making notes about every action taken until the case was closed. The process was burdensome, but necessary in case their memories were later challenged in court.

Initially they stood stock-still, surveying the awful scene before them twin pools of partially dried blood and the mutilated, already decomposing bodies. Homicide detectives learn early in their careers that once a human body has ceased to live, the process of decay is extraordinarily swift; when heartbeats stop and blood no longer flows, armies of microbes soon turn flesh and body liquids into rotting offal. Ainslie remembered a veteran medical examiner who was given to proclaiming, "Garbage! That's all a human corpse ever is, and once we've learned what we need to, the sooner we dispose of it the better. Burn cadavers! That's the best way. Then if somebody wants to spread the ashes over some lake, fine, no harm done. But cemeteries, coffins, they're all barbaric a waste of good land."

Apart from the bodies in 805, the room was in a state of wild disorder, with chairs turned over, bedding disarrayed, and the victims' clothes scattered around. The radio, on a windowsill, continued to play. Quinn turned to Ceballos. "That was on when you came in?"

"Yes, and when the security guy got here. Station sounds like HOT 105."

"Thanks." Quinn made a note. "My son listens. I can't stand the noise."

Ainslie was beginning a series of calls on his, portable police phone. Room 805's telephone would not be used until after a fingerprint check.

His first call was to summon a Crime Scene ID detail identification technicians who were part of a civilian arm of the Miami Police Department. The ID team would photograph the crime scene and all evidence, including minuscule items that untrained eyes might miss. They would seek fingerprints, preserve blood samples, and do whatever else the detectives needed. Meanwhile, until the ID crew arrived, the crime scene would remain "frozen in time" exactly as when discovered.

One single blundering individual, merely walking or touching, could destroy a vital clue and make the difference between a crime being solved and a criminal going free. Sometimes even senior police officers, visiting a murder scene out of curiosity, compromised evidence; that was one reason why a Homicide lead investigator had total authority at any scene, no matter what his or her rank.

More calls by Ainslie: a report to Homicide's commander, Lieutenant Newbold, already on his way; a request for attendance of a state attorney; a plea to Police Headquarters for an information officer to handle the media people.

As soon as the ID team was finished with the victims' bodies, Ainslie would summon a medical examiner, whose first inspection should take place as soon as possible after death. ME's were touchy, however, about being called too soon and having to wait while the ID people completed their work.

Later still, after the medical inspection and the bodies' removal to the Dade County morgue, an autopsy would follow, which Bernard Quinn would attend.

While Ainslie was telephoning, Quinn used a rubber glove to unplug the loud radio. Next he began a detailed study of the victims' bodies their wounds, remaining clothing, articles nearby all the while still making notes. He observed several pieces of expensive-looking jewelry on a bedside table. Then, turning his head, he exclaimed, "Hey, look at this!"

Ainslie joined him. Incongruous and bizarre laid out on the far side of the dead persons, and initially out of sight, were four dead cats.

The detectives studied the inert creatures.

At length Ainslie said, "This is meant to tell us something. Any ideas?"

Quinn shook his head. "Not offhand. I'll work on it."

In the weeks and months to come, every brain in Homicide would conjecture reasons for the dead cats' presence. While numerous exotic theories were advanced, in the end it was conceded that none made sense. Only much later would it be realized that an important matching clue was present at the Frost came scene, within a few short inches of the cats.

Now Quinn leaned down, viewing more closely the crudely severed body parts. After a moment he gulped. Ainslie glanced across. ''You all right?''

Quinn managed to say, "Back in a minute," and headed for the outer door.

In the corridor outside, Cobo pointed to an open doorway down the hall. "In there, Chief!''

Seconds later, Quinn disgorged into a toilet bowl the breakfast he had eaten an hour before. After rinsing his mouth, hands, and face, he returned to the murder scene. "Long time since I've done that," he said ruefully.

Ainslie nodded. The experience was one that Homicide officers shared from time to time, and no one criticized. What was unforgivable was vomiting at a murder scene and contaminating evidence.

Voices in the hall signaled the arrival of an ID crew. A lead technician, Julio Verona, stepped inside, followed by an ID technician grade one, Sylvia Walden. Verona, short, stocky, and balding, stood still, his piercing dark eyes moving methodically over the scene confronting him. Walden, younger, blond, and leggy, whose specialty was fingerprints, carried a black box resembling a weekend suitcase.

Nobody spoke while the two surveyed the room. Finally, Verona shook his head and sighed. "I have two grandkids. This morning we were having breakfast and watching this TV news story about a couple of teenagers who murdered their mother's boyfriend. So I tell the kids, 'This world we're handing you has become a pretty rotten place,' then right at that moment I got this call." He gestured to the mutilated bodies. "It gets worse every day."

Ainslie said thoughtfully, "The world's always been a savage place, Julio. The difference now is there are a lot more people to kill, and more who do the killing. And every day news travels faster and farther; sometimes we watch the horror while it's happening."

Verona shrugged. "As always, Malcolm the scholar's viewpoint. Either way's depressing."

He began photographing the dead couple, taking three photos of several groupings: an overall shot, a medium, and a close-up. After the bodies he would photograph other areas of room 805, the corridor outside, stairwells, elevators, and the building exterior, the last including entrances and exits a criminal might have used. Such photos often revealed evidence originally overlooked.

As well, Verona would make a detailed sketch of the scene, to be transferred later to a specialized, dedicated computer.

Sylvia Walden was now busy, searching for latent fingerprints, concentrating on the doorway first, inside and out, where a perpetrator's prints were most likely to be found. When entering, intruders were often nervous or careless; if they took precautions about prints, it was usually later.

Walden was dusting wood surfaces with a black graphite powder mixed with tiny iron filings, and applied with a magnetic brush; the mix adhered to moisture, lipids, amino acids, salts, and other chemicals of which fingerprints were composed.

On smoother surfaces glass or metal a nonmagnetic powder was used, of differing colors to suit varied backgrounds. As she worked, Walden switched from one type of powder to another, knowing that prints varied depending on skin texture, temperature, or contaminants on hands.

Officer Tomas Ceballos had reentered the room and briefly stood watching Walden at work. Turning her head, she told him, smiling, "Finding good prints is harder than people think."

Ceballos brightened. He had noticed Walden the minute she arrived. "It always looks easy on TV."

"Doesn't everything? In real life," she explained, "it's surfaces that make the difference. Smooth ones like glass are best, but only if they're clean and dry; if there's dust, prints will smear they're useless. Doorknobs are hopeless; the area's not flat, too small for good prints, and just turning a knob smears any prints made." Walden regarded the young officer, clearly liking what she saw. "Did you know fingerprints can be affected by what someone ate recently?"

"Is this a joke?"

"No joke." After another smile, she went on working. "Acidic foods cause extra skin moisture and clearer prints. So if you're planning a crime, don't eat citrus fruits beforehand oranges, grapefruit, tomatoes, lemon, lime. Oh, and no vinegar! That's the worst."

"Or the best, from our viewpoint," Julio Verona corrected.

"When I make detective," Ceballos said, "I'll remember all that." Then he asked Walden, "Do you give private lessons?"

"Not normally." She smiled. "But I can make exceptions."

"Good, I'll be in touch." Officer Ceballos left the room looking pleased.

Malcolm Ainslie, who had overheard, commented, "Even at a murder scene, life goes on."

Walden grimaced, glancing toward the mutilated bodies. "If it didn't, you'd go crazy."

Already she had located several prints, though whether from the killer or killers, or the dead couple, or belonging to hotel employees on legitimate business would be determined later. For now the next step was to "lift" each print onto a transparent tape that was placed on a "latent lift card." The card, dated, signed, and the print's location noted, would then become evidence.

Julio Verona asked Ainslie, "Did you hear about our zoo experiment?"

Ainslie shook his head. ''Tell me."

"We got permission from MetroZoo and took fingerprints and toeprints of their chimpanzees and apes, then studied them." He gestured to Walden. "Tell him the rest. "

"Everything was exactly the same as with human prints," she finished. "The same characteristics ridges, whorls, loops, arches, identical points, no basic difference."

"Darwin was right," Verona added. "We've all got monkeys in our family tree, eh, Malcolm?" The comment was pointed. Verona knew of Ainslie's priestly past.

There was a time when Ainslie though never a fundamentalist accepted the Catholic skepticism of Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin had, after all, scoffed at divine intervention and denied mankind's superiority to the rest of the animal world. But that was long ago and Ainslie answered now, "Yes, I believe we came that route."

What they were all doing, he knew Walden, Verona, Ceballos, Quinn, even he himself was distracting themselves, however briefly, from the ghastly horror that faced them. Outsiders might have viewed their behavior as coldblooded; in fact, it was the reverse. The human psyche even a conditioned Homicide crew's had limits on how much sustained revulsion it could handle.

Another male technician had appeared and was working on blood samples. Using small test tubes, he collected sarnples of the pooled blood around each victim. Later these would be compared with blood taken at autopsy. If the blood groups differed, some of the pooled blood might be from the attacker or attackers. From appearances, though, it seemed unlikely.

The technicians took fingernail scrapings from the Frosts, in case one of them had scratched an assailant, causing minuscule fragments of skin, hair, cloth fibers, or other materials to lodge under their nails. The scrapings were placed in containers for lab technicians to examine later. Then the victims' hands were bagged for preservation, so that before autopsy they could be fingerprinted, and the bodies examined, too, for alien fingerprints.

The Frosts' clothing was inspected carefully, though it would remain in place until their bodies reached the morgue. Then, before autopsy, it would be removed, with each item sealed in a plastic bag.

By now, with the additional people, a buzz of conversations, and continuous phone calls, room 805 had become crowded, noisy, and even more malodorous.

Ainslie glanced at his watch. It was 9:45 A.M., and he suddenly thought of Jason, who, at that moment, would be in the school auditorium with the rest of his third-grade class, waiting for a spelling bee to begin. Karen would be in the audience with other parents, feeling anxious and proud. Ainslie had hoped to join her briefly, but it hadn't worked out. It so seldom did.

He turned his mind back to the homicide scene, wondering if the case would be solved quickly, hoping the answer was yes. But as the hours wore on, the biggest impediment emerged: despite a multitude of people moving within the hotel, no one had even glimpsed a possible suspect. Somehow the murderer or murderers had managed to get in and out of the room, and probably the hotel, without any attention being paid. Ainslie had police officers question all the guests on the eighth floor, as well as on the two floors above and below. No one had seen a thing.

During the seventeen hours Ainslie was at the murder scene that first day, he and Quinn considered motives. Robbery was possible; no money whatever was found among the victims' possessions. On the other hand, the jewelry left at the scene (and later appraised at twenty thousand Dollars) could have been removed easily. And certainly a cash robbery could have been achieved without two people being murdered. Nor was the awful savagery explained, or the enigma of the dead cats. So a prime motive remained as elusive as a prime suspect.

Initial information about Homer and Blanche Frost, resulting from calls to police in South Bend, Indiana, their hometown, revealed them as well-to-do but innocuous people with no apparent vices, family problems, or unsavory connections. Even so, to make on-the-spot inquiries Bernie Quinn would fly to South Bend within the next few days.

Some facts and opinions did emerge from the medical examiner, Sandra Sanchez, who inspected the Frosts' bodies at the scene and autopsied them later.

After the two victims had been subdued, then gagged and bound, she believed they had been placed so that each could see the other suffer. "They were tortured while conscious," Sanchez suggested. She believed the bodily assaults were done "methodically and slowly."

While no weapon was found at the murder scene, the autopsies showed deep knife cuts on both bodies, producing distinctive flesh and bone markings. And a terrible detail: flammable liquid had been poured into Mr. Frost's eyes, then set alight, leaving charred cinders where the eyes had been and blackened skin around them. Beneath the woman's gag, part of her tongue had been bitten off, probably a reaction to her agony.

Dr. Sanchez, in her late forties, had a reputation for directness and an acid tongue. She dressed conservatively in navy or brown suits; her graying hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Among her scholarly interests as Bernard Quinn knew was Santer~a, the Afro-Cuban religion that flourished in Dade County, Florida, with an estimated seventy thousand adherents.

Quinn had once heard Sandra Sanchez affirm, "Okay, I'm not saying I believe in the orishas the gods of Santena. But if you believe those other tall tales Moses parting the Red Sea, the virgin birth, Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, and a whale regurgitating Jonah there's at least equal logic in Santeria; And what it does is offer soothing voodoo for troubled minds."

Quinn, aware that animal sacrifice was part of some Santer~a rites, wondered if the four dead cats were Santeria-related.

"Positively not," Sanchez told him. "I've looked at those cats; they were killed by hand almost certainly brutally. Santeria animal-killing is done with a knife and with devotion, and dead animals aren't abandoned like those cats. They're often eaten at a feast, and cat is never on the menu."

Ainslie and Quinn concluded that initial results were far from promising. As Ainslie reported to Leo Newbold, "It's a classic whodunit."

A whodunit which, oddly enough, was exactly what detectives called it was the kind of murder Homicide teams liked least. It implied a total absence of information about an offender, and sometimes about the victim, too. In such cases there were neither witnesses nor anyone to suggest paths of inquiry. The two opposites of whodunits were an "easy rider" a case in which a murder suspect was quickly apparent, along with evidence to convict; and a "smoking gun," easiest of all where the guilty party was still at the murder scene when police arrived.

In the end, long after the tragic saga of Homer and Blanche Frost, it was a smoking-gun homicide that would provide an apparent solution and close the case of the Frost murders.

2

Shortly before eight o'clock on Friday morning, three days after the Royal Colonial Hotel murders, Bernard Quinn walked from the Homicide offices to the civilian-staffed Identification Unit, also on the fifth floor of Police Headquarters. In an interior office where a half-dozen ID technicians worked amid computers and printout-laden desks, Quinn approached the young fingerprint specialist who had searched for latent prints at the Royal Colonial crime scene. Sylvia Walden was tapping at a keyboard in front of a large computer screen and looked up as he approached. Her long hair, he noticed, was damp, perhaps from the heavy rain shower that had also caught Quinn on his way to work.

"Good morning, Bernard,'' she said, smiling.

"It isn't good so far," he told her glumly. "Maybe you can improve it."

"A shortage of clues from Tuesday?" Walden's voice was sympathetic.

"More like none. Which is why I'm here, mostly to ask why in hell a fingerprint report is taking so long."

"Three days isn't long," she answered sharply. "Not when I had a fistful of prints to check out and identify as you should know."

"Sorry, Sylvia," Quinn said penitently. "This sick case has turned me into an ass. Manners out the window."

"Don't worry”, he said. "We're all pretty frazzled over this."

"So what have you got?"

"Some prints came through this morning from New York. They belong to the guy who stayed in the hotel room just prior to the Frosts."

"Were they on file there?"

"No, no. He agreed to be fingerprinted by the NYPD to help us out. I'm just comparing them with those we found."

The computer that Walden faced was a state-of-the-art AFIS model shorthand for Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The machine, after scanning a fingerprint from a crime scene, could accomplish in less than two hours what it would take a human being an estimated one hundred and sixty years to complete a search through hundreds of thousands of fingerprints on record across the United States and provide a matching print, with identification, if one existed. Fingerprints in the system were stored and retrieved by a digital code that worked at lightning speed. AFIS was often an instant crime-solver; also, since its arrival, many old investigations had been reopened, with bygone fingerprints identified and criminals charged and convicted. Today, though, Walden's task was simpler comparing the set of prints from New York, transferred by modem, with unidentified prints she had lifted from room 805 of the Royal Colonial.

The computer did not take long to provide an answer. The New York prints matched those from 805.

Sylvia Walden sighed. "Not good news, I'm afraid, Bernie.'' She explained that the only fingerprints she had found at the murder scene proved to be from the dead victims, a hotel maid, and now the room's previous occupant.

Quinn ran his fingers through his tousled hair and grunted unhappily. There were days when he felt his retirement could not come soon enough.

"I'm not too surprised about the prints," Walden said. "I noticed some smudges in places where there might have been fingerprints smudges that latex gloves leave. I'm pretty sure the killer wore them. I do have something, though."

Quinn's brows shot up. "What?"

"An unidentified palm print. It's only a partial, but it doesn't match palm prints from any of those people whose fingerprints we've identified I asked for their palm prints specially. There's also a Police Department register of palm prints, but no match there, either." Walden, crossing to a desk, leafed through computer printouts and passed a single sheet to Quinn: it bore a black-and-white partial handprint. There it is."

"Interesting." He turned the sheet around, viewing it sideways and upside down, then handed it back. "Nobody I recognize,'' he said laconically. "So what can you do with it?"

"What I can do is this, Bernie: If you locate a suspect and get his palm prints, I'll tell you pretty close to a certainty if he was at the murder scene."

"If we ever get that far,'' he told her, "I'll be here like a rocket.''

Walking through the fifth-floor corridors on his way back to Homicide, Quinn felt slightly heartened. At least the palm print was a minor start.

From the outset there had been an unusual lack of evidence in the Frost case. The day after the murders were discovered, Quinn had returned to the Royal Colonial scene armed with a lengthy list of questions. First he took a fresh overview of the scene, then he and Julio Verona, the lead technician, discussed each item of discovery to assess its value. One of those items among others already removed as evidence was a torn envelope from the First Union Bank. Later that day, Quinn visited First Union branches in the area and learned that the morning before their deaths, the Frosts had cashed eight hundred Dollars in traveler's checks at a Southwest 27th Avenue branch near the hotel. The bank teller who had served them remembered the two older people well and was sure no one else was with them. Also, neither he nor the other tellers had noticed anyone following the Frosts when they left the bank.

Quinn ordered a further fingerprint search of room 805, in darkness, using fluorescent powder and laser lighting. The process sometimes revealed prints missed when a normal fingerprint powder was used. Again, nothing was found.

He obtained from the Royal Colonial manager a list of guests at the time of the murders, plus a second list of those who had stayed in the hotel during the preceding month. Each guest would be contacted by police, either by phone or in person. If anyone seemed suspicious or hostile, a closer follow-up would be made by an officer, or perhaps Quinn himself.

A sworn statement was taken from Cobo, the security guard. Quinn pressed hard with questions, hoping to jog Orlando Cobo's memory in case something small but significant had been overlooked. Other hotel staff who had known the Frosts also made sworn statements, but nothing new emerged.

Phone calls to and from room 805 during the victims' stay were checked by police. The hotel had a record of outgoing calls; the phone company was subpoenaed to provide a log of incoming calls. Again, no leads.

Quinn contacted several known informers, hoping for street gossip about the murders. He offered money for information, but there was none.

He flew to South Bend and inquired at the police department there if any police record existed involving the Frosts; the answer was no. To the victims' family members Quinn expressed condolences, followed by questions about the backgrounds of Homer and Blanche Frost. In particular, was there anyone who did not like the Frosts and might want to harm them? All responses were negative.

Aback in Miami, both Ainslie and Quinn were surprised by the absence of phoned-in tips following the extensive media coverage of the murders. The main facts were released through Public Information, though a few were held back, as was normal with homicides, to ensure that certain details were known only to the investigators and the murderer. Those details, if alluded to by a suspect, either inadvertently or in a confession, would strengthen the prosecution's case at trial.

Among the information not released was the presence of dead cats, and that Homer Frost's eyes had been set on fire.

Thus, as time began to slip by one week, two weeks, three any solution seemed increasingly remote. In a homicide investigation the first twelve hours are most critical. If by then a strong lead or suspect has not emerged, the likelihood of success diminishes with each passing day.

A trio of essentials with any homicide are witnesses, physical evidence, and a confession. Without the first and second, the third was unlikely. But in the Frost investigation there continued to be a glaring absence of all three. Inevitably, as other new homicides occurred, the Frost case lost its priority.

Months went by as crime in Florida kept on escalating. Every police force in the state, including homicide departments, was overwhelmed, many of their personnel exhausted. Part of the pressure was an unceasing Niagara of paper external mail, internal mail, Teletypes, fax messages, local police reports, protocol reports, crime reports, lab reports on blood and drugs, reports and requests from other jurisdictions, BOLOs . . . the list seemed endless.

Out of necessity, priorities emerged. Urgent local matters came first, and other paper was supposedly handled in order of importance; sometimes it wasn't. Some reports or requests were glanced at, then put aside, becoming an evergrowing pile for later reading. At times it could be three, six, or even nine months before certain papers were dealt with, if at all.

Bernard Quinn had once dubbed those papers the Tomorrow Pile, and the name stuck. Typically, he'd quoted Macbeth:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . . "

All of which was why a Teletype from the police department of Clearwater, Florida, dated March 15 and addressed to all police agencies in the state, received only cursory attention at Miami Homicide, then remained in the Tomorrow Pile until five months after its arrival.

The Teletype was from a Detective Nelson Abreu, who, stunned by the brutality of a recent Clearwater double murder, asked for information about any similar murders that might have occurred elsewhere. Included in the Teletype was a note that ''unusual items" were left at the murder scene, the victims' home. These were not described because Clearwater Homicide was limiting knowledge of that evidence for the same reason Miami Homicide had withheld information about the Frosts' murder scene.

Clearwater had a large population of elderly people, and the murder victims were a husband and wife, Hal and Mabel Larsen, both in their seventies. They had been bound and gagged, then, while facing each other, had been tortured, finally dying from loss of blood. The torture included a savage beating and mutilation by severe knife wounds. Inquiries revealed that the Larsens had cashed a thousand-Doilar check a few days earlier, but no money was found at the crime scene. There were no witnesses, no unaccounted-for fingerprints, no murder weapon, no suspects.While Detective Abreu received several replies to his Teletype, none proved helpful, and the case remained unsolved.

* * *

Two and a half months later, another scene:

Fort Lauderdale, May 23.

Again, a married couple, the Hennenfelds, in their midsixties and living in an apartment on Ocean Boulevard near 21 st Street. Again the victims were found bound and gagged, and in seated positions, facing each other. Both had been beaten and stabbed to death, though their bodies were not discovered for an estimated four days.

On the fourth day a neighbor, aware of a foul odor coming from the adjoining apartment, called police, who made a forced entry. Broward Sheriff-Detective Benito Montes was sickened at the sight and stench.

At this crime scene no "unusual items" were left. However, a two-burner electric space heater had been lashed by wire to the feet of Irving Hennenfeld, then plugged into an electric outlet. The space heater's red-hot bars had burned out before the bodies were found, though not until the man's feet and lower legs were reduced to cinders. In this crime, too, any money the victims may have had was apparently taken.

Once more, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no weapon.

But this time Sheriff-Detective Montes remembered reading about the Coconut Grove murders of an elderly couple some three months earlier, which seemed similar. Following a phone call to Miami Homicide, Montes drove to Miami the next day, where he met with Bernard Quinn.

In contrast to the veteran Quinn, Montes was young, in his mid-twenties, with neatly trimmed hair. Like most Homicide detectives he dressed well that day in a navy blue suit with a striped silk tie. During a two-hour discussion the detectives compared notes of the Frosts' and Hennenfelds' murders and viewed photos of both crime scenes. They agreed that the manner of the victims' deaths seemed identical. So did other factors, including placement of the bodies, and the killer's barbaric cruelty.

One small detail: When the bodies were found, a radio was playing loudly, presumably having been left that way by the killer.

''Do you remember what kind of music?" Quinn asked.

"Sure do. Rock, so goddam loud you couldn't hear yourself speak."

"Was the same way at the Frost scene." Quinn made a note.

"It's the same guy," Montes declared. "Has to be."

Quinn quizzed him. ''You're sure it's a man one man?"

"Yep. And the bastard's big, strong as an ox, and smart. "

"Educated smart?"

"My instinct says no."

Quinn nodded. "Mine, too."

Montes added, "He enjoys it, wallows in it, slavers over it. We're looking for a sadist."

"Any thoughts about the dead cats at our scene?"

Montes shook his head. "Only that this prick loves killing. Maybe he did the cats to pass the time, and brought them along for kicks.''

Quinn said, "I still think it's a message in some code we haven't deciphered."

Before Sheriff-Detective Montes left, Bernard Quinn apologized for the absence of his sergeant. Quinn explained that Malcolm Ainslie would have liked to be present at their meeting since he, too, was involved. However, Ainslie was committed to attend a one-day police management seminar in another part of town.

Benito Montes said, "That's okay there's time. I think what we've seen is only the beginning."

3

During the spring and summer of that year, the residents of South Florida wilted in exceptionally high temperatures and steamy humidity, sustained by daily thunderstorms and drenching rain. In Miami itself a series of electrical outages, caused by heavy power demand, brought those who had air conditioning into the sticky world of those who did not. Another problem, exacerbated by heat-induced irritability and carelessness, was crime. Gang fights, crimes of passion, and domestic violence all flourished. Even among normally peaceful people, patience ebbed and tempers flared; in streets or parking lots, trivial disagreements resulted in total strangers coming to blows. With more serious disputes, anger turned to rage and even murder.

At Homicide headquarters, an entire wall was occupied by a white glazed board known to detectives as the "People-Dying-to-Meet-Us Board." Divided by neat lines and columns, it recorded the names of all murder victims during the current year and the year preceding, along with key details of investigations. All possible suspects were named on the board. Arrests were recorded in red.

At mid-July of the preceding year, the board showed seventy murders, of which twenty-five still remained unsolved. By mid-July of the current year, there had been ninety-six murders, with the unsolved figure a highly unsatisfactory seventy-five cases.

Both upward trends pointed to an increase in homicides accompanying otherwise routine robberies, carjackings, and everyday street holdups. Everywhere, it seemed, criminals were shooting and killing their victims for no apparent reason.

Because of wide public concern about the numbers, Homicide's commander, Lieutenant Leo Newbold, had been summoned several times to the office of Major Manolo Yanes, commander of the Crimes Against Persons Unit, which combined Robbery and Homicide.

At their last meeting Major Yanes, a heavily built man with bushy hair and a drill sergeant's voice, wasted no time after his secretary ushered Newbold in.

"Lieutenant, what the hell are you and your people doing? Or should I say not doing?"

Normally the major would have used Newbold's first name and invited him to sit down. This time he did neither, and simply looked up, glaring, from his desk. Newbold, suspecting that Yanes had received his own castigation from higher up, and knowing the down-through-the-ranks drill, took his time before answering.

The major's office was on the same floor as Homicide, and a large window overlooked downtown Miami, bathed now in brilliant sunshine. The desk was gray metal with a white plastic top, on which piles of folders and pencils were laid out in neat military order. Facing him was a conference table with eight chairs. As in most police offices, the effect was austere, relieved slightly by a few photographs of Yanes's grandchildren on a side table.

"You know the situation, Major,'' Newbold responded. "We're swamped. Every detective is working sixteen-hour days or more, following every lead we've got. These guys are near exhaustion."

Yanes waved an arm irritably. "Oh, for Christ's sake! Sit down."

When Newbold was seated, Yanes declared, "Long hours and exhaustion are part of this job and you know it. So however much work you're getting from everyone, drive 'em harder. And remember this when people are exhausted they're apt to miss things, and it's our job to make damn sure they don't. So I'm telling you, Newbold, take a good, hard look at every case, right now! Make sure there's nothing undone that should have been done. Go over every detail and look especially hard for connections between cases. If I learn later that something important has been overlooked, I promise you'll regret ever having told me your men are tired. Tired! For Christ's sake!"

Newbold sighed inwardly but said nothing.

Yanes concluded, "That's all, Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir." Newbold rose from his chair, turned smartly and went out, deciding that he would do exactly what Manolo Yanes urged.

It was less than a month after this confrontation that as Leo Newbold would describe it later "the whole goddam roof fell in."

* * *

The series of events began on August 14 at 11:12 A.M., when the temperature in Miami was ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity eighty-five percent. DetectiveSergeant Pablo Greene was heading that day's Hot Team when a radio call to Homicide headquarters, from a uniform patrol officer named Frankel, reported an apparent murder at Pine Terrace Condominiums on Biscayne Boulevard at 69th Street.

The victims were a Hispanic couple in their sixties named Urbina, Lazaro and Luisa. A male neighbor, after knocking on their door and getting no response, peered in through a window. Seeing two bound figures, he forced the door open, then moments later used the Urbinas' phone to call 911.

The dead husband and wife were in the living room of their four-room condominium. Both victims had been beaten, their bodies slashed by a knife, and cruelly mutilated. Blood had pooled on the floor around them.

Sergeant Greene, a twenty-year Miami Police veteran, tall, lean, and with a bristling mustache, told Frankel to secure the scene, then urgently looked around the office for someone to send.

Standing up and surveying all of Homicide, he could see that every other detective's desk was empty. The room was large, with a half-dozen rows of small, bureaucratic metal desks, set side by side and separated by shoulderhigh dividers. Each desk contained a multiple-line phone, several file trays, overflowing, and in some cases a computer terminal. Every detective had his or her own desk, and most had tried to personalize their drab conformity with family photos, drawings, or cartoons.

In the entire room the only other people were two harried secretaries, busily answering phones. Today, as every day, the calls were from citizens, news media, members of victims' families asking for information about relatives' deaths, politicians looking for answers to the sudden rise in shootings, and countless other sources, rational and otherwise.

Greene knew that all available detectives were out working and, for most of the summer, Homicide headquarters had looked the way it did today. His own team of four was investigating eight murders, and other teams were under similar pressure.

He would have to go to Pine Terrace himself, Greene decided. Alone and quickly.

He looked down at the paperwork piled on his desk two weeks' arrears of crime records and other reports that Lieutenant Newbold was urging him to complete and knew he must put the work aside yet again. He slipped on his jacket, checked his shoulder holster, gun, and ammunition, and headed for the elevator. From his unmarked car he would radio one of his units and have someone join him, but, knowing everyone's workload, he doubted it would happen soon.

As to the burdensome, never-ceasing paperwork, Greene reasoned gloomily he would have to come back and move some more tonight.

* * *

Some fifteen minutes later Detective-Sergeant Greene arrived at Pine Terrace condominium number 18, where the condo and the surrounding area were cordoned off by official yellow display tape POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Greene approached a uniform officer standing between the condo entrance and a small, curious crowd.

"Officer Frankel? I'm Sergeant Greene. What do you have?"

"Me and my partner were here first, Sergeant," Frankel reported. "We haven't touched a thing." He motioned to a heavily built, bearded man standing off to one side. "This is Mr. Xavier. He's the neighbor who called nine-one-one."

The bearded man joined them. He told Greene, "When I saw those bodies through the window I just broke down the door. Maybe I shouldn't have."

"Forget that. There's always a chance someone might be alive."

"The Urbinas sure weren't. Didn't know them well, but I'll never forget "

Frankel interrupted. "Two things Mr. Xavier did he used the phone inside to call nine-one-one, and he turned off a radio."

"It was so loud," Xavier said, "I couldn't hear on the phone."

Greene asked, "Did you do anything else to the radio, like change the station it was set to? Or touch anything else at all?"

"No, sir." Xavier looked crestfallen. "Do you think I messed up any fingerprints?"

Everybody's a crime expert, Greene thought. "Too early to tell, but we'd appreciate your letting us take your prints so we can separate them from any others. The print record will be returned to you." Greene told Frankel, "Stay in touch with Mr. Xavier. We'll need him later today."

When Sergeant Greene entered the Urbinas' condo, he knew at once that what he was seeing was no routine homicide, but a dire and crucial development in what was surely a sequence of ghastly serial killings. Greene, like most Homicide supervisors, kept himself informed of other teams' cases and was familiar with the Coconut Grove murders in January of Homer and Blanche Frost. He knew, too, of the Hennenfeld case in Fort Lauderdale almost three months ago that was so similar to the Frosts'. Now here horribly and unmistakably was a third matching atrocity. Greene acted fast, reaching for his portable police radio secured to his belt, and made several calls.

First he called for an ID crew, the most pressing need in a case like this, where another serial killing could occur at any time. Every scrap of evidence had to be gathered fast, examined and assessed without delay. But a dispatcher informed Greene that all the ID crews were tied up on other cases, and one would not get to him for at least an hour. Pablo Greene seethed, knowing the delay might cause some evidence to deteriorate. But abusing the dispatcher would accomplish nothing, so he kept quiet.

He was far less patient when he made his second call, summoning a medical examiner to view the victims. No ME was available, he was told, though one would be sent "when possible."

"That's not good enough,'' he said, trying not to shout, but knowing there was nothing he could do. The next call yielded similar results: no state attorney was available; one presently in court would try to arrive within an hour.

So much was changing for investigators, he brooded. Not long ago, any summons to a murder scene produced immediate action, but obviously no more. He supposed it was all part of society's declining values, though certainly not declining murders.

Greene did manage to reach Lieutenant Newbold by radio and, while choosing his words carefully since others would be listening, conveyed the urgency for fast action at the Pine Terrace scene. Newbold quickly promised to do some phoning himself. '

Greene also suggested that Sergeant Ainslie and Detective Quinn be notified, which Newbold agreed to do, adding that he would come to the scene himself within the next half hour.

Greene returned his attention to the two murder victims and the sadistic violation of their bodies, continuing the notes he had been scribbling since entering the building. Just as in the other two cases he had heard described, the man and woman had been positioned facing each other, bound and gagged. It seemed likely that each had been forced to watch in silent terror while the other was tortured.

Sergeant Greene sketched their positions, without disturbing anything before the ID crew's arrival. On a side table he observed an incoming addressed envelope from which a letter had been removed and left open. Moving the letter carefully with a penknife to avoid touching it, he was able to learn the Urbinas' full names, which he added to his notes.

On a small bureau near the bodies Greene spotted a portable radio clearly the one that Xavier had switched off. Peering at the tuning dial, Greene noted the setting: 105.9 FM. He knew the station: HOT 105. Hard rock.

Then, still moving meticulously, stroking his mustache as he considered what he saw, he viewed the other rooms.

In both bedrooms the drawers had all been opened, presumably by an intruder, and left that way. The contents of a woman's purse and a man's wallet had been emptied onto a bed. There was no money, though some minor jewelry remained.

Each bedroom had a separate bathroom and toilet, and though the ID crew would go over both thoroughly, Greene saw nothing of significance. In what appeared to be the main bathroom, the toilet seat was raised, and there was urine in the bowl. Greene added both facts to his notes, even though he knew that neither urine nor stool could be linked to an individual for identification.

He returned to the living room and smelled something new an addition to the putrid odor resulting from open wounds on dead bodies. As he moved closer to the victims, the smell grew stronger. Then he saw it. Alongside one hand of the dead woman was a bronze bowl containing what appeared to be human excrement, partly immersed in what was obviously urine.

There were occasional moments in his work when Pablo Greene wished he had chosen some other profession.

As he drew back, he reminded himself it was not unknown for criminals to defecate at crime scenes usually during break-ins at well-to-do homes, presumably as a gesture of contempt for the absent owners. But he could not recall ever having seen this before at a homicide scene, especially given the nature of the awful killing of two old people. Greene, a good, decent family man, thought fiercely of the perpetrator: What kind of vile piece of human garbage are you?

"What was that, Pablo?" a voice from the outer doorway inquired. It was Newbold, who had just arrived, and Greene realized he had spoken aloud.

Still caught up by emotion that he rarely felt or showed, Greene gestured toward the two bodies, then pointed to the bowl he had just surveyed.

Leo Newbold stepped forward and inspected it all.

Then he said quietly, "Don't worry. We'll get the bastard. And when we do, we'll put this case together so goddam tight, we'll make sure the son of a bitch burns."

Newbold was also remembering Major Yanes's words, spoken not long ago: Make sure there's nothing undone that should have been done. Go over every detail and look especially hard for connections between cases.

Well, Homicide knew of a probable connection between the Frosts' killings and the Hennenfelds' in Fort Lauderdale, and now, with this new double slaying so clearly aligned with those other two, inevitably the question would be asked: Could more have been achieved by combining the two earlier inquiries, accepting them as serial killings? Might they even have found a suspect?

Newbold didn't think so. Just the same, he was sure there would be some second-guessing, to which the media would contribute, almost certainly resulting in further pressure on Homicide and the Police Department generally.

But most essential at this moment was intensive focus on this latest case, coupled with reexamination of the other two. There was no question that Homicide was combating a bona fide serial killer.

"Were you able to get Ainslie and Quinn?" Greene asked.

Newbold nodded. ''They're on their way. And I told Quinn to call his contact in Lauderdale."

A few minutes later an ID crew of four technicians arrived, followed almost at once by the ME, Sandra Sanchez. Whatever phoning Newbold had done after Greene's urgent call from the crime scene, he'd evidently pulled out all stops, probably by going much higher in the department.

Through the next five hours work progressed swiftly. Near the end of that time the remains of Lazaro and Luisa Urbina were placed in body bags and conveyed to the county morgue, where, later that night, they would be autopsied. Sergeant Greene would attend the autopsy, again putting off the paperwork on his desk for at least one more day, by which time still more would have been added.

While detailed study and analysis needed to be done on much of the evidence collected by the ID crew, one disappointment emerged early.

"Pretty certain the perp wore gloves," the fingerprint technician, Sylvia Walden, told Sergeant Greene. "There are quite a few smudges, the kind made by latex surgical gloves same as we had at the Royal Colonial. Also, I think whoever did this knows enough to wear two pairs of latex gloves, because with one pair a print will come through after a while. There are some prints around, of course, and we'll check those out, but they're probably not the perp's.''

Greene shook his head and mumbled, "Thanks."

"For nothing," Walden added.

Several hours earlier, Ainslie and Bernard Quinn had arrived at Pine Terrace and agreed with Newbold and Greene that a single serial killer was now their quarry.

On his way out, Ainslie walked around the scene a second time before the victims' bodies were removed, lingering over the bronze bowl still close to the dead woman's hand. There was something about that container and its contents that stirred an idea, a vague memory, an incomplete image he could not define. Ainslie returned to the object twice, hoping the elusive notion in his mind would clarify.

Maybe there was nothing at all, he decided, nothing except his own weariness with scenes of tragic death, and perchance some wishful searching for new leads. Perhaps what he needed now was to go home and spend an evening with his family . . . laugh around the dinner table . . . help Jason with his homework . . . make love to his wife . . . and possibly, by morning, some answers would have sprung to mind.

As it turned out, the next morning produced no new thoughts. It took four more days, when he least expected it, for Ainslie's memory to awaken with dramatic, shocking clarity.

4

Four days after the Pine Terrace murders, Lieutenant Leo Newbold held a formal Homicide Department conference. It included supervisors and detectives involved with the serial killings, ID technicians, a medical examiner, and a state attorney. Senior police officers were informed of the conference; two attended. It was at that conference, as Ainslie thought about it later, that the drama broadened and, like a Shakespearean plot mutation, a new cast of characters entered the scene.

Among the new characters though not new to Homicide was Detective Ruby Bowe, a member of Sergeant Ainslie's investigative team. Ruby, a petite, twenty-eightyear-old black woman with a penchant for glittering earrings and stylish clothes, was liked and respected, worked as hard as anyone in Homicide, sometimes harder, and expected no concessions because of her sex. She could be tough and tenacious, even ruthless. But at lighter times she displayed a sense of fun and mischief appreciated by her colleagues.

Ruby was the youngest of nine children born to Erskine and Allyssa Bowe, all of whom were raised in the crimeridden ghetto of Miami's Overtown area. Erskine Bowe was a police officer who had been shot and killed by a fifteen-year-old neighborhood boy on drugs and in the process of robbing a local 7-Eleven store. Ruby was twelve at the time, devastatingly young to lose her father, but old enough to remember their special closeness.

Erskine Bowe had always believed there was something extraordinary about Ruby, and had said to his friends, "She's going to do something important. You just wait."

Ruby, even so long after her father's death, still missed him terribly.

Ruby had attended Booker T. Washington elementary school and Edison High, where she was a diligent student and volunteered for extracurricular activities, most aimed at social justice and change. She had fought especially hard against drug abuse, knowing it had been the real killer of her father.

Armed with an academic scholarship, Ruby attended Florida A&M University, majoring in psychology and sociology. She graduated with honors and, fulfilling a lifelong dream, immediately joined the Miami Police Department. Her father had been on the force for seventeen years; maybe in some positive way she could redress his death while "changing the world." And if not the world, perhaps in some significant way her own neighborhood.

No one was unduly surprised when Ruby graduated from the police academy at the top of her class. What did raise eyebrows was a decision by Lieutenant Newbold to accept Ruby immediately as a Homicide detective. The move was unprecedented.

Homicide, in any police force, was an apex. Homicide detectives were considered to have the best brains and the greatest resourcefulness, and their prestige made them the envy of most colleagues. Because of this, Ruby's appointment left a few older of ricers, who had hoped to join Homicide themselves, disappointed and resentful. But Newbold had a gut feeling about Ruby. "There are times," he confided to Malcolm Ainslie, "when you can just smell a good cop."

Ruby had now been a Homicide detective for four years, with an official rating of "outstanding."

As a member of Sergeant Ainslie's team, Ruby would automatically attend today's 8:00 A.M. conference, but while others were filing in, she was on the telephone, surrounded by a file of of ficial papers. Newbold, walking past, called, "Wind it up, Ruby. We'll need you in there."

"Yes, sir," she acknowledged, and moments later she followed him, adjusting the large gold ear clip she had removed for the phone call.

Adjoining the general Homicide office were interview rooms for witnesses and suspects, a room with more comfortable couches and chairs where families of victims were sometimes received, a large file room with crime records going back ten years, and, beyond all of these, the conference room.

Malcolm Ainslie sat at the conference room's large, rectangular table along with two other sergeant supervisors, Pablo Greene and Hank Brewmaster, as well as Detectives Bernard Quinn, Esteban Kralik, Jose Garcia, and Ruby Bowel

Garcia, born in Cuba, had been a Miami police officer for twelve years, including eight as a Homicide detective. Stocky and balding, Garcia looked ten years older then his actual thirty-three, prompting colleagues to refer to him as Pop.

The Homicide regulars were joined by the youthful Sheriff-Detective Benito Montes, who had driven to Miami from Fort Lauderdale in response to a phoned invitation from Bernard Quinn. In the matter of the Hennenfeld murders, Montes reported, there had been no progress since his previous visit to Miami Homicide.

The others included Dr. Sanchez, the medical examiner, ID technicians Julio Verona and Sylvia Walden, and an assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles.

Knowles, who headed the state attorney's homicide division, had a formidable reputation as a criminal trial prosecutor. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered man who dressed modestly in off-the-rack suits and knitted ties, he had once been compared to an unassuming shoe clerk. During court trials, while cross-examining uncooperative witnesses, he was sometimes hesitant, conveying an impression of uncertainty when in fact nothing was further from the truth. Many such witnesses, believing they could lie with impunity while answering this unimpressive lawyer's questions, suddenly found they had been coaxed into a spider's web and had incriminated themselves before realizing it.

His disarming manner and razor-sharp mind were reasons why Knowles, during fifteen years with the state attorney's of lice, had achieved a remarkable eighty-two percent conviction rate at murder trials. Homicide detectives were always grateful to have Curzon Knowles handling their cases, just as Newbold and the others were pleased to see him now.

Major Yanes was also present, as was a high-ranking assistant chief, Otero Serrano, emphasizing the public importance of the new developments.

Lieutenant Newbold, at the head of the conference room table, opened the meeting crisply. "We are all aware that two of our pending cases and a third in Fort Lauderdale are now recognizable as serial double killings. It's possible we should have reached this conclusion before the third one, and we may take some heat for that as time goes on. But we'll deal with that later. Right now we have urgent business.

"What I want, here and now, is a complete review of all three double murders, leaving absolutely nothing out. We must find some connection that can lead us to "

Ruby Bowe raised a hand. Newbold stopped abruptly, frowning. "Whatever it is, won't it keep until I've finished, Ruby?"

Detective Bowe answered, "No, sir. I don't think so." Her voice was nervous but controlled. She held a paper in her hand.

"This had better be good." Newbold's annoyance was clear.

"You said three double murders, sir."

"So? You questioning my arithmetic?"

"Not exactly, sir." Ruby raised the paper in her hand; she glanced toward the others. "No one is going to like this, but you'd better make it four."

"Four! What do you mean?"

It was Ainslie, seated opposite, who asked quietly, "What have you found, Ruby?"

She shot him a grateful glance, then returned to Newbold. "Couple of days ago, sir, you were worried about the size of the Tomorrow Pile. You asked me to work on it."

There were smiles at the reference to the Tomorrow Pile, Quinn's droll name for the perpetual inflow and accumulation of official paper.

Newbold acknowledged, "Yes, I did ask that. Obviously you've discovered something."

"I read it just this morning, sir. A BOLO from Clearwater."

"Let's hear."

Ruby Bowe's voice cut clearly through the silence in the room.

"BOLO to all police departments statewide. Double homicide of elderly man and woman occurred this city March twelfth. Exceptional brutality. Victims tied and gagged. Stabbed repeatedly and beaten savagely head and torso areas. Mutilation involved. Cash believed stolen amount unknown. Fingerprints other evidence nonexistent. Unusual items left at scene by offender or offenders. If any similar crime or crimes on record request contact Detective N. Abreu, Clearwater Police Department Homicide with all possible information."

Across the ensuing quiet, Major Yanes asked, "That date again, Detective?"

Bowe consulted her paper. "The murders were March twelfth, sir. The BOLO is stamped 'Received March fifteenth.' "

There was a collective moan. "Jesus Christ!" Hank Brewmaster said. "Five months ago!"

They all knew it could happen shouldn't happen, but did. Some things slipped lower in the Tomorrow Pile and continued to escape attention. But this was an all-time disastrous example.

Besides official police communication, the Florida media often observed similarities in serious crimes separated by distance, and would note a resemblance and report it; such connections had proven helpful to police investigators in the past. But with so much crime happening everywhere, some similarities escaped attention all around.

Newbold covered his face with his hands, his anguish plain. Everyone knew the lieutenant would be held responsible for the communications breakdown that had resulted in Homicide's failure to deal promptly with the Clearwater BOLO. Yanes said tersely, "For the time being, I suggest we move on, Lieutenant." It was obvious there would be more discussion, probably in private, later.

"There's a little more, sir," Bowe offered.

Newbold nodded. "Go on."

"Just before we came in, I phoned Detective Abreu in Clearwater. I mentioned that we have similar cases. He told me he and his sergeant would like to fly here tomorrow and bring everything they have.''

"All right." Newbold had recovered his composure "Check their arrival time and send a car to meet them."

"Lieutenant," Ainslie injected. "I'd like to ask Ruby a question."

"Go ahead."

Ainslie faced Ruby across the conference table. "Did Abreu mention anything about the items left at the Clearwater scene?''

"I asked what they were. One was an old, beat-up trumpet, the other a piece of cardboard." She consulted her paper. "The cardboard was cut in the shape of a half-moon and colored red."

Ainslie was frowning, concentrating, searching his memory, recalling again the bronze bowl at the Pine Terrace condo. Addressing no one in particular, he asked. "Have there been objects left at every scene? I remember there were four dead cats in the Frosts' hotel room."

Without waiting, Ainslie turned to Bernard Quinn. "Was anything left at the Hennenfeld killings?"

Quinn shook his head. "Not to my knowledge." He glanced at Sheriff-Detective Montes. "Is that right, Benito?''

As a visitor Montes had remained quiet, but now, responding to Quinn's question, he said, "Well, there wasn't something left that the perp brought with him. But there was that electric space heater, though it belonged to the Hennenfelds. We checked on that."

Ainslie asked, "What space heater? What about it?"

"It had been fastened with wire to Mr. Hennenfeld's feet, Sergeant, then plugged in. When we found him, the space heater had burned out, but his feet were completely charred."

Ainslie said sharply to Quinn, "You didn't tell me that."

Quinn looked embarrassed. "Sorry. I guess it was a detail I forgot."

Ainslie let it go, then turned to Newbold and asked, "Lieutenant, may I go on?"

"All yours, Malcolm."

"Ruby," Ainslie said, "can we make a list of all the different objects found at the scenes?"

"Sure. You want it on the computer?"

Newbold cut in. "Yes, we do."

Ruby moved to a small separate desk containing a computer terminal. Since joining Homicide, she had become known to fellow detectives as "our computer whiz," and even in other teams' cases she was often asked to lend her skills. While Ainslie and the others waited at the conference table, Ruby touched switches and ran her fingers nimbly over the keyboard. "Okay, shoot, Sergeant."

Referring to an open file in front of him, Ainslie dictated, "January seventh, Coconut Grove. Homer and Blanche Frost. Four dead cats."

Ruby's fingers moved swiftly. When they stopped, Ainslie continued, "March twelfth, Clearwater."

"Hold it!" The voice was Quinn's. Heads turned toward him. "At Coconut Grove there were Mr. Frost's eyes. Something flammable was poured in them, then set on fire. If we include the Hennenfeld burned feet . . ."

Ainslie told Ruby, "Yes, add Mr. Frost's eyes." He turned his head with the hint of a smile. "Thank you, Bernie. I forgot. Happens to all of us."

They completed the Clearwater listing with the old trumpet and cardboard moon, added Fort Lauderdale with the space heater and the male victim's burned feet, afterward moving on to Pine Terrace condominium number 18.

"There was a bronze bowl," Ainslie said.

Ruby's fingers paused. She asked, "Was there anything in it?"

Pablo Greene said sourly from his seat at the table, "Yeah, piss and shit."

Looking around, Ruby inquired innocently, "Is it okay if I write that as 'urine and feces'?"

The room erupted with laughter. Amid it, someone said, "Ruby, we love you!'' Even Newbold, Yanes, and the assistant chief were laughing with the others. In an atmosphere where grisly death was an everyday occurrence, a sudden, unexpected flash of humor was like a cleansing rain. And then . . . as the laughter died . . . swiftly, clearly, plainly, Ainslie had it. Now he knew. All the pieces fit. It was as if an incomplete hypothesis, which had been forming tiresomely, vaguely in his brain, suddenly took shape. His excitement began to explode.

"I need a Bible," Ainslie said.

The others stared at him.

"A Bible," he repeated, his voice rising, its tone assuming the sound of a command. "I need a Bible!"

Newbold looked at Quinn, nearest the door. "There's one in my desk. Second drawer down, right side."

Quinn went to get it.

At Homicide the presence of Bibles was not unusual. A number of criminals, when brought in for arrest or questioning, asked for a Bible to read, some sincerely, others hoping their apparent religiosity might earn them a lighter sentence later on. There were precedents justifying that hope; certain offenders, notably white-collar criminals, had escaped heavy sentencing through religious "conversion" and claims of having been."born again." But at the investigating stage, Homicide detectives, while skeptical, were willing to oblige if a Bible would hasten a confession.

Quinn returned, Bible in hand. Reaching across the table, he handed it to Ainslie, who opened it near the back to the last book of the New Testament Revelation, or, for Catholics, the Apocalypse.

For Newbold, a light dawned. "It's Revelation, isn't it?" he asked.

Ainslie nodded. "Every one of those objects is a message."

He motioned to Ruby, still at the computer. "Here's the first." Then, glancing around the table, Ainslie read out, "Revelation, chapter four, verse six: 'And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts . . . ' "

Quinn breathed, "The cats!"

Ainslie flipped back two pages, searched with a forefinger, then read again, "Chapter one, verse fourteen: 'His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire. . .' " He glanced at Quinn. "Mr. Frost, right?"

Quinn added softly, "Those two things the cats and Frost's burned eyes were within inches of each other. But we never connected them . . . not in the way we should have." '

The room was silent. Assistant Chief Serrano had leaned forward in his seat and was listening intently. Major Yanes had been scribbling notes but now paused. Everyone was waiting as Ainslie turned more pages. He asked Ruby, "A trumpet at Clearwater, right?"

She checked the computer screen. "A trumpet and a cardboard half-moon painted red."

"Here's the first. Chapter one, verse ten: 'I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet. . .' "

Ainslie turned pages again. "And I believe I remember the red moon. Right here. Chapter six, verse twelve: 'And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake and the moon became as blood . . .' "

Looking at Benito Montes, Ainslie said, "Listen to this. Chapter one, verse fifteen: 'And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace . . .' "

"That's just the way Mr. Hennenfeld's feet were." Montes sounded awed.

Sergeant Greene spoke up. "How about the Urbinas, Malcolm?"

More page-turning. Then, "I think I have it. The dead woman was either touching that bowl or almost, wasn't she, Pablo?"

"One or the other, yes."

"Then this has to be it." Once more Ainslie read aloud from Revelation. "Chapter seventeen, verse four: 'And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness . . .' ''

A murmur of appreciation rippled around the table. Ainslie waved for silence, protesting, "No, no!" While the others watched, he put both hands to his face and held them there for several seconds. When he removed them his expression had changed from high excitement to chagrin. His voice, when he spoke, was halting. "I should have got to it, I should have figured out those symbols sooner, even at the beginning. If I had, some of those people might still be alive."

Sergeant Brewmaster asked, "How could you have got it sooner? The rest of us didn't get it at all."

Ainslie was about to respond: Because I have a doctorate in theology! Because for twelve interminable years I studied the Bible. Because all of those symbols stirred the past inside me, but I was slow and stupid, so it took until now to realize . . . Then he decided to leave the words unspoken. What good would they do? But shame and selfreproach seethed deep within him.

Leo Newbold detected it. And understood. From the head of the table, his eyes met Ainslie's. "What matters most, Malcolm," the lieutenant said smoothly, "is that you've given us our first break, and it's an important one. I'd like to hear how you interpret it."

Ainslie nodded and said, "First, it's narrowed the field of investigation. Second, we know roughly the type of person we're looking for."

"Which is?" Yanes asked.

"An obsessed religious freak, Major. Among other things, he sees himself as an avenger from God."

"Is that the 'message' you spoke of, Sergeant? Is that the meaning of those symbols?"

"Yes, it is, keeping in mind that each symbol has been accompanied by two violent deaths. Most likely, as the killer sees it, he's delivering God's message, and at the same time fulfilling God's vengeance."

"Vengeance for what?''

''We'll know that better, Major, when we have a suspect and can question him."

Yanes nodded approvingly. "It looks like you've given us something to work with. Nice going, Sergeant!"

Assistant Chief Serrano added, "I'll second that."

Newbold resumed control. "Malcolm, you know more than the rest of us about this stuff from Revelation. Can you brief us on what else we ought to know?"

Ainslie considered before speaking, aware that he must draw on an amalgam of knowledge and ideas his priestly past, his mindset since, his current role as a Homicide detective. Rarely, if ever, had all three overlapped as now.

He tried to keep his explanation simple.

"Revelation was originally in Greek, and is apocalyptic, which means it was written in code, with many symbolic words, so that only biblical scholars understand them. To many people it's a crazy hodgepodge of visions, symbols, allegory, prophecy mostly incoherent."

Ainslie paused, then went on. "At times it makes some Christians, who don't understand it, uncomfortable. And the fact that Revelation can be used to prove or argue anything is why it's always attracted lunatics and fanatics. As those people view it, there's a ready-made prescription for any evil they choose. So what we need to know is how the guy we're looking for got to Revelation and adapted it to suit himself. When we have that answer, we'll go get him."

Lieutenant Newbold surveyed the conference table. "Anyone have anything to add?''

Julio Verona raised a hand. Perhaps to offset his small stature, the ID lead technician sat stiffly upright in his chair. At a nod from Newbold he said, "The fact that we know the kind of person who is committing these crimes is good, and my compliments to Malcolm. But I should remind you that even if you find a suspect, we have very little evidence right now certainly not enough to convict." He glanced toward the assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles.

"Mr. Verona's right," Knowles said. "So we need to recheck every item collected at the murder scenes to be sure nothing has been overlooked or misinterpreted. Obviously we are dealing with a psychotic killer, and the smallest minute detail left behind could be the factor we need."

"We do have a partial palm print from the Frost murders," Sylvia Walden pointed out.

Knowles nodded. "But as I understand it, there's not enough of the palm for positive identification."

"We could match six points on the print we have. For positive ID we need nine at least. Ten is better."

"So the partial would be only circumstantial evidence, Sylvia."

Walden conceded, "Yes."

Dr. Sanchez intervened. As usual, she was wearing one of her dark brown suits, and her graying hair was fastened back into a ponytail. "As reported earlier, the knife cuts on four bodies the Frosts and Urbinas are identifiable," she stated. "They were made by the same bowie knife, ten inches long, with distinctive notches and serrations. I have photos of the wounds, showing in detail the notches on bones and cartilage."

Everyone in the meeting knew about a bowie knife, sometimes called an "Arkansas toothpick." The hunting knife, invented in the mid-nineteenth century by one of two Texas brothers, either James or Rezin Bowie, has been used widely ever since for hunting both animals and humans. The knife, distinctive and deadly, has a wooden handle and a strong, single-edge blade, the back of the blade straight for most of its ten-to-fifteen-inch length, then curving concavely to join the cutting edge at a single sharp point. For a century and a half the bowie knife has inflicted vicious wounds, often as an instrument of death.

"Dr. Sanchez," Knowles asked, "could you match those wounds to a particular bowie knife?"

"If someone produced the right knife, yes."

"And you'd testify to that?"

"If I'm telling you now, of course I'd testify." Sanchez added sharply, "That kind of evidence has been accepted before."

"Yes, I know. Just the same . . ." Knowles seemed indecisive. To those at the conference table who knew him well, he had slipped into the hesitant, unsure role he adopted so often in court. "Assume I'm a defense attorney and I ask you this question: 'Doctor, I have testimony certifying that knives of this type are manufactured in batches of several hundred at a time. Can you be absolutely sure that this one knife, among hundreds perhaps thousands of its kind, produced the wounds you are describing? And when you answer the question, Doctor, please remember that a man's life is at stake here.' "

Deliberately, Knowles turned away as Sanchez hesitated.

She began, "Well . . ."

The attorney turned back toward her. He shook his head. "Never mind."

Sanchez flushed, her lips tightening as she realized precisely the point that Knowles had skillfully made. Instead of answering with her usual confidence, she had hesitated, acknowledging there might be a doubt something that a jury would note and that a defense attorney would make the most of with succeeding questions.

Sanchez glowered at Knowles, who smiled. "Sorry, Doctor. Only a practice run, but better here than on the witness stand." "For a moment," she said ruefully, "I thought that's where I was."

The attorney turned to Julio Verona. "None of that means we won't make the most of the knife evidence if the opportunity arises. There could be a limit, though, as to how far I'd take it."

"We don't have the knife, of course," the ID lead technician said, "and whether or not we get it will depend on you guys." He motioned to the Homicide detectives, including Newbold. "And now that Sylvia and I know that two of the cases are connected, we'll go over every bit of evidence for similarities."

Dr. Sanchez said, "And I'll do the same with the medical records; maybe I can find an unsolved murder with similar wound patterns or some kind of religious connotation." She added thoughtfully, "There's always a possibility that what we're looking at now is a repeat of something in the past that's been overlooked. I heard once of a serial killer who waited fifteen years beforeoresuming his killing spree."

"All of that's good," Newbold said. "Now..." He glanced toward his superior, Manolo Yanes, commander of the Crimes Against Persons Unit. ''Major, would you like to add anything?"

"Yes." Typically, Yanes wasted no time with preamble. Steely-eyed and speaking with his usual sharp-edged voice, he declared, "Everyone here needs to make a much bigger effort an all-out effort. We've simply got to stop these killings before any more occur."

Yanes's eyes swung to Newbold. "For the record, Lieutenant, you and your people now have carte Blanche to take whatever measures are necessary, including creating a special task force. When you decide exactly what you need and what kind of task force, I'll get you extra detectives from Robbery. As to costs, you have my approval to charge whatever's needed, including overtime."

Yanes glanced around the room, then added, "So now, with those logistics in place, the objective of all of you is clear find this guy! I want results. And keep me informed."

"All of that noted, sir. As everyone heard, we will form a task force right now to work solely on these cases. Task force members will be relieved of other duties. I've already asked Sergeant Ainslie to head the team."

Heads turned toward Ainslie as Newbold told him, "Sergeant, you'll work with two teams of six detectives. I leave it to you to name another sergeant to head the second team."

"Sergeant Greene, " Ainslie said. "Assuming he's agreeable."

Pablo Greene waved a hand airily. "You betcha!"

Newbold told Greene, "You'll report through Sergeant Ainslie. That's understood?"

"QSL, sir."

Ainslie added, "For my team I'll definitely want Detectives Quinn, Bowe, Kralik, and Garcia. Pablo and I will decide on the rest later today." Ainslie faced Major Yanes. "We have a lot of ground to cover, sir, and a great deal of detail work. So we'll need at least two extra detectives from Robbery, probably four."

Yanes nodded. "Tell Lieutenant Newbold when you know exactly, and you'll have them."

Curzon Knowles intervened. "If that isn't enough, I can arrange for a couple of state attorney investigators. Either way, we'd like to stay in the picture."

"We want that too, Counselor," Ainslie said.

Newbold reminded everyone, "The task force, of course, will work closely with Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater; I want those detectives kept informed."

The talk continued for a few minutes more, after which Newbold turned to Assistant Chief Serrano. "Chief, anything you wish to add?"

Serrano, formerly a detective himself, and with a distinguished record on the Miami force, spoke clearly but quietly. "Only to say that all of you have the support of the entire Police Department in this matter. Obviously, as these serial killings become widely known, there will be tremendous publicity, which will generate a lot of public and political pressures. We'll try to protect you from that so you can continue doing whatever is needed to bring this maniac in. At the same time, work fast. And never stop thinking. Good luck to us all!"

5

As the Homicide conference broke up, the newly formed task force gathered around Ainslie, along with the assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles. Twenty years earlier Knowles had been a police officer himself the youngest sergeant on the New York City force. Later he had become a lieutenant, then resigned to study law in Florida. Knowles felt comfortable with detectives and they with him.

Now he asked Ainslie, "Since we'll be working together, Sergeant, do you mind telling me your first move?"

"A short one, Counselor to the computer. You're welcome to join me." Ainslie looked around him. "Where's Ruby?"

"Wherever you need her." Detective Bowe's bright voice emerged from a group.

"I need your dancing fingers." Ainslie motioned to the computer she had just used. "Let's search some records."

Seating herself, Ruby switched on and typed LOGON.

A query appeared: GIVE IDENTIFICATION.

Ruby asked Ainslie, "Yours or mine?"

He told her, "Eight-four-three-nine."

The screen responded: ENTER YOUR CODE.

Ainslie reached over and tapped in CUPCAKE, an affectionate name he sometimes used for Karen. The code name did not appear on the screen, but chicabbreviation for Criminal Investigation Center did.

As the other detectives and Knowles watched silently, Ruby said, "We're in the magic kingdom. Quo vadis?"

Someone murmured, "What in hell's that?''

" 'Whither goest thou?' " Bernard Quinn answered.

"Took Latin in kindergarten," Ruby quipped. "Us ghetto kids are smarter than you think."

"Prove it," Ainslie said. "Find 'Criminal Records.'After that, a category called 'Oddities.' "

A series of typed commands, then the heading ODDITIES appeared. "There's a whole raft of subfiles," Ruby announced. "Any ideas?"

"Look for 'Religion' or 'Religious.' "

Fingers moved swiftly. Then, "Hey, here's one: 'Religious Freaks.' "

Ainslie raised his eyebrows. "That should do the trick."

If they had been expecting a harvest of names, the result was disappointing. Only seven appeared, each accompanied by an abridged personal history, along with charges and convictions. Ainslie and Ruby read through names and information; the others peered over their shoulders.

"You can eliminate Virgil," Quinn said. "He's in prison. I put him there." The computer listing showed a Francis Virgil as imprisoned for the past two years with another six to serve. A similar status applied to two more of the seven names, leaving four.

"Strike Orneus," Ainslie said. "It says here he's dead." As the detectives knew, a deceased offender's criminal record was not removed until two years after death.

"I guess we can eliminate Hector Longo," Ruby suggested. The entry showed Longo as age eighty-two, almost blind, and with a withered right hand.

"Amazing what the handicapped can do these days," Ainslie said. Then, "Okay, delete."

The remaining two names were "possibles," but the search had produced neither the numbers nor choices they had hoped for.

Knowles asked, "How about trying 'Modus Operandi'?"

"We already did that with the individual cases," Ainslie said. "Came up with nothing." He added thoughtfully, "The further we get into this, the more I believe we're after someone who has no record."

It was Ruby who suggested, ''Why don't we try FIVOs?"

Ainslie was doubtful, but told her, "Why not? We've nothing to lose."

FIVOs Field Intelligence and Vehicle Occurrence reports contained information gathered by police officers who witnessed behavior in a public place that was peculiar, raunchy, or eccentric, though not illegal. A similar report was made if someone was seen in a suspicious circumstance, especially late at night, but was not breaking the law.

A FIVO report was supposedly written at the scene, on an official printed card. Officers were instructed to include as much information as possible, including a person's full name, home address, occupation, detailed physical description, facts about a vehicle if any, and the circumstances of the encounter. Most of those stopped and questioned were surprisingly cooperative, especially after learning they would not be arrested or ticketed. Anyone with a criminal record, however, usually didn't mention it.

The FIVO cards were turned in at Police Headquarters and eventually loaded into a computer bank. During the process an automatic cross-check added any criminal convietions to the FIVO report.

For a while FIVO records were in bad repute within the Miami force. It happened after several police officers clogged the system with bogus reports in hopes of gaining attention and perhaps promotion. Some FIVO cards even bore names copied from graveyard tombstones. Eventually, after a few officers were caught and disciplined, the practice ceased. But many in the force distrusted FIVOs long afterward, including Ainslie.

Computer procedure to access FIVOs was similar to Criminal Records, and Ruby quickly found ODDITIES within the new category, followed by REUGIOUS ~KS. Suddenly the screen came alive with names, dates, and paragraphs of information. Ainslie leaned forward, his attention sharpened. Behind him a voice said, "Hey, look at that!" Someone else emitted a long, low whistle.

As before, they reviewed the names and details, eliminating some, then added those that remained to a new computer file already containing the two possibles from criminal records. At the end, Ruby printed out a half-dozen copies of the combined list and passed them around.

The printout contained six names:

JAMES CALHOUN, w/m AKA ''Little Jesus." DOB 10 Oct 67. 5'11" 2001bs. LKA 271 NW 10 St, Miami. Has tango of a cross on upper chest. Talks about the coming end of world and claims to be Christ making second coming. Has a past for manslaughter, assault, armed burglary.

CARLOS QUINONES, I/m AKA "Diablo Kid." DOB 17 Nov 69. 5'6" 1801bs. Heavyset. LKA 2640 SW 22 St, Miami. Claims to be only Messiah and preaches the word of God. Has extensive violent past for assault, rape, armed robbery with violence.

EARL ROBINSON, b/m AKA "Avenger." DOB 2 Aug 64. 6'0" 1801bs. LKA 1310 NW 65 St, Miami. Lean build, former heavyweight boxer, very aggressive. Preaches on street corners, quotes from Bible, always Revelation, says he is God's judgment angel. Has extensive past for armed robbery, second degree murder, numerous assaults with a knife.

ALEC POLITE, him AKA "Messiah." DOB 12 Dec 69. 5'11" 1801bs. LKA 265 NE 65 St, Miami. Talks about the scriptures to anyone who will listen, says he talks with God. Gets aggressive if doubted, questioned. Could be violent but no record. Been in U.S. since 1993.

ELROY DOIL, w/m AKA "Crusader." DOB 12 Sep 64. 6'4" 2901bs. LKA 189 NE 35 St, Miami. Claims to be a disciple of God, knows God's wishes. Preaches in public. Not believed dangerous. Works as part-time truck driver.

EDELBERTO MONTOYA, I/m, DOB I Nov 62. 5'9" 1501bs. LKA 861 NW I St, Apt #3, Miami. Has thick dark mustache and beard. Claims to be a born-again Christian, quotes from Bible, prays for end of the world. Has past for rape, felonious assault and sexual assault.

As Ainslie, Knowles, and the others studied the names and descriptions, the sense of excitement grew.

Sergeant Greene expressed it. "Malcolm, I think we're on to something."

Detective Garcia looked up eagerly. "Robinson's our man! He has to be. Look at that stuff about Revelation! And he's known as Avenger; that fits. A boxer too, which means he's strong!"

Ruby Bowe added, "Not to mention the 'assaults with a knife.' "

"Okay, okay," Ainslie said. "Let's not jump to conclusions. We'll take a look at them all."

Sheriff-Detective Montes asked, "Will you pull anyone in?"

Ainslie shook his head. "Not enough to go on. We'll use surveillance."

Curzon Knowles cautioned, "Sergeant, you've got to be very, very careful that those people don't catch on.'' Knowles scanned the room, taking in all the detectives. "Please, everyone remember how very little evidence we have so far. And if one of those six is our man, and he suspects we're on to him, he could go totally inactive, leaving us nothing to use against him."

"A little inactivity would do no harm, though," Pablo Greene commented. "We sure as hell don't want him killing someone else."

"If your surveillance is tight, that won't happen." Knowles paused, considering. "The ideal thing would be to catch him in the act."

"Ideal for a prosecutor," Ruby Bowe said. "Risky for a victim."

Ainslie joined in the laughter, then quieted the group with a wave of his hand.

"Ruby's right, though," Quinn insisted. "Surveillance will pose a risk. We know this guy is smart, and he knows we're looking for him."

Ainslie turned to Leo Newbold, who had rejoined the group a few minutes earlier. "What do you think, Lieutenant?"

Newbold shrugged. "It's your call, Malcolm. You're the task force leader."

"Then we'll take the risk," Ainslie said. "And I assure you, Counselor, he'll never see us watching." He turned to Greene. "Pablo, let's plan a surveillance schedule now."

It was agreed that, to begin, Sergeant Ainslie's team would put surveillance on Earl Robinson, James Calhoun, and Carlos Quinones. Sergeant Greene's team would watch Alec Polite, Elroy Doil, and Edelberto Montoya. In every case the surveillance would be total, twenty-four hours a day.

Ainslie informed Newbold, "We need those extra bodies from Robbery right away, sir two to start with, and I'll work them into the schedule."

The lieutenant nodded. "I'll talk to Major Yanes."

Then, as the group prepared to leave, the conference room door was suddenly flung open. Sergeant Hank Brewmaster, who had left when the department conference officially broke up, stood breathlessly in the doorway, his face contorted with shock and disbelief. Brewmaster was heading that day's Homicide Hot Team, so they all knew what was coming.

Newbold stepped forward. "A bad one, Hank?"

"The worst, sir." Brewmaster drew in a breath. "It's City Commissioner Gustav Ernst. And his wife. Both dead, murdered. Call just came in. From the description, it's another just like "

Ainslie cut in. "Oh God! The kind we "

There was no need to finish as Brewmaster nodded. "Apparently it's exactly the same."

He turned back to Newbold. "My team is moving on it now, sir. I thought you should know." His gaze took in the others. "Thought all of you should know because the media's on the scene, and the way I hear it, all hell is breaking loose."

* * *

In the days to follow, media and public outrage blazed through the city like a three-alarm fire; the Ernst murders had become a cause ce'lebre.

As for the Police Department, the savage killing of a city commissioner and his wife was bad enough Commissioner Ernst was one of three commissioners who, along with the mayor, deputy mayor, and city manager, governed Miami. But for Ainslie, Newbold, and everyone else in the force, the crime hit even closer to home because the daughter of the dead couple was Major Cynthia Ernst, a senior Miami police officer.

When the murders occurred, Cynthia Ernst was in Los Angeles on a police business trip combined with a personal visit. She was contacted through the L.A. Police Department, then, "stunned and grieving," as the six o'clock news described her, was flown back to Miami, becoming the focus of attention in a tightly strung, tumultuous city.

6

The hasty first report that the slayings of Miami City Commissioner Ernst and his wife were apparently identical with the savage murders of three other elderly couples the Frosts in Coconut Grove, the Hennenfelds of Fort Lauderdale, and the Urbinasin Miami proved discomfitingly true. Meanwhile the matching killings of Hal and Mabel Larsen in Clearwater the subject of the five-month-old BOLO uncovered by Ruby Bowe were publicly added to the list.

The now-burgeoning investigation centered on the Ernsts' Mediterranean-style mansion in the exclusive Bay Point subdivision enclosed and security protected located on the western shore of Biscayne Bay.

It was there that the battered and bloody bodies of Gustav and Eleanor Ernst had been found by their maid. The maid had arrived before anyone in the house was stirring, and as usual she prepared morning tea, which she carried on a tray to the Ernsts' bedroom. On seeing the couple bound and facing each other in a pool of their own blood, she screamed, dropped the tray, and collapsed from shock.

The screams were heard by the Ernsts' elderly majordomo, Theo Palacio, who, with his wife Maria, managed the house and cooked. Both Theo and Maria had slept unusually late, having been out with their employers' approval until after 1:00 A.M. the night before.

On reaching the bedroom death scene, Palacio reacted quickly, going to the nearest phone.

When Sergeant Brewmaster arrived, uniform police were stationed outside the house and, inside, paramedics from Fire Rescue were treating the maid for shock.

Detectives Dion Jacobo and Seth Wightman from Brewmaster's Homicide team had preceded him. Brewmaster had named Jacobo his co-lead investigator, thereby giving Jacobo some extra authority, which, in view of the importance of the case, he was likely to need.

Jacobo, sturdy, heavily built, and with a dozen years of Homicide experience, had already instructed the uniform officers to cordon off the entire house and garden with yellow tape. Moments later Julio Verona and Dr. Sandra Sanchez arrived. Verona had traveled in a crime-scene van, accompanied by three colleagues. The chief of police was reportedly on the way.

The media, alerted by an exchange of urgent calls on police radios, were assembled in force outside the main gate of Bay Point, where they were being restricted from entering by security guards, also acting on Detective Jacobo's orders. Reporters were already debating how the murderer or murderers had penetrated Bay Point's security system and entered the Ernst house.

Brewmaster, on arrival, had been stopped briefly by three television reporters, holding microphones to the open window of his car while TV cameras shot closeups. The shouted questions overlapped. "Detective, are there any suspects yet?" ... "Is it true the Ernsts have been murdered in the same way as others?" . . . "Has their daughter, Major Ernst, been informed?" . . . "Is she on her way back to Miami?" But Brewmaster had shaken his head and continued driving, stopping outside the Ernst house to instruct a uniform officer, "Call PIO and tell them we need someone here to deal with the press."

In some police jurisdictions the murder of a prominent official or celebrity was categorized as a "red ball" homicide or, less officially, a "holy shit" case. Once given that label, the case received priority attention. In Miami, supposedly, no such category existed and all murders and murderers were deemed "equal under the law." But the slaying of City Commissioner Ernst and his wife was already proving this untrue.

Part of the proof was the immediate arrival of Chief of Police Farrell W. Ketledge Jr., in an official car, driven by his sergeant aide. The chief was in uniform, his four stars of rank clearly displayed the equivalent of a full general in the United States Army. As Detective Wightman observed quietly to one of the uniform men, "In any given year you can count the number of times the chief shows up at a homicide on the fingers of one hand."

Lieutenant Newbold, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, met the chief at the main doorway to the house, with Brewmaster beside him.

The chief ordered crisply, "Show me the scene, Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir. This way."

With Newbold leading, the trio climbed a broad stairway, then walked along a landing to a bedroom, the doorway open. Inside they paused as the chief looked around.

The ID technicians were already at work. Dr. Sanchez was standing to one side, waiting for a photographer to finish. Detective Jacobo and Sylvia Walden were discussing possible fingerprint sites.

"Who found the bodies?" the chief asked. "How much do we know?"

Newbold signaled to Brewmaster, who described the maid's arrival, her morning tea duty, and her screams, all of which he had learned about from the majordomo, Theo Palacio. Palacio had explained that he and his wife were away from late afternoon the day before until early that morning which happened every week when they visited Maria Palacio's invalid sister in West Palm Beach. The maid, too, had left the house at 5:00 P.M. the day before.

"We don't know the time of death yet," Newbold added, "but it seems pretty likely it happened when Mr. and Mrs. Ernst were in the house alone."

Brewmaster told the chief, "Of course, sir, we'll doublecheck the Palacios' whereabouts."

The chief nodded. "So we could be looking for someone who knew the house routines."

The conclusion was so obvious that neither Newbold nor Brewmaster made a comment. As both knew, Chief Ketledge had never been a detective and had risen to his high rank through police administration, at which he excelled. Occasionally, though, like everyone else in law enforcement, the chief savored a taste of the detective process.

The chief moved farther into the room to get a better view. He walked beside, then behind, the recumbent bodies on which the ID crew was working. Then, as he was about to move again, the voice of Dion Jacobo rang out.

"Stop! Don't go there!"

The chief wheeled, incredulity and anger in his eyes. In an icy voice he demanded, "And who "

Without waiting, Jacobo answered smartly, "Sir! Detective Jacobo, Chief. I'm co-lead investigator here."

The two men faced each other. Both were black. Their eyes met squarely. Jacobo volunteered, "Sorry to shout, sir, but it was urgent."

The chief was still glaring, clearly weighing his next move.

Technically, the peremptory order Jacobo had given was appropriate and correct. As co-lead investigator he had authority over everyone else at the scene, irrespective of rank. But it was an authority seldom pushed to its limits, especially when the officer being spoken to was seven ranks higher than the detective.

As the others watched, Jacobo swallowed. He knew that, correct or not, he had probably gone too far, and by this time tomorrow he could be back in uniform on a midnight walking beat in downtown Miami.

It was then that Julio Verona coughed discreetly and addressed the chief. "If you'll excuse me, sir, I think the detective was just trying to preserve what's here." He pointed to an area behind both bodies.

Lieutenant Newbold asked, "What is it?"

''A dead rabbit,'' Verona said, looking down. ''It may be significant."

Brewmaster looked up, startled. "Damn right, it's significant! It's another symbol. We need Malcolm Ainslie."

The chief asked Verona skeptically, "You're suggesting that Detective Jacobo knew the animal was there?"

"I don't know, sir," the ID supervisor said mildly. "But until we've searched the area we have to assume there's evidence everywhere."

The chief hesitated, plainly exercising control. He had a reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, but also for being fair.

"Very well." More composed, he regarded everyone at the crime scene. "I came here to make it clear how importent this case is. Right now a lot of eyes are watching us. Work hard. We need a solution soon."

Moving back to the doorway, Chief Ketledge paused before Newbold. "Lieutenant, see to it that a commendation is recorded in Detective Jacobo's file." The chief smiled slightly. "Let's say, 'for tenaciously preserving evidence in difficult circumstances.' "

A moment later the chief was gone.

About an hour afterward, as evidence was still being collected, Julio Verona reported to Sergeant Brewmaster. "There's a wallet among Mr. Ernst's effects with his driver's license and credit cards. No money, but the shape of the wallet looks like there usually was some."

Brewmaster promptly checked with Theo Palacio, who, with his wife, had been instructed to remain in the kitchen and not disturb anything in the house. The majordomo was close to tears and had trouble speaking. His wife, seated at the kitchen table, had clearly been crying too. "Mr. Ernst always had money in that wallet," Theo said. "Mostly big bills, fifties and hundreds. He liked having cash."

"Do you know if he recorded the numbers of those big bills?"

Palacio shook his head. "I doubt it."

After pausing to let Palacio compose himself, Brewmaster continued, "Let me ask something else." He flipped through several pages of his notebook, referring to notes made earlier. "You told me that when you came into the Ernsts' bedroom this morning, you realized there was nothing you could do to help Mr. and Mrs. Ernst, and you went immediately to a phone."

"That's the way it was, sir. I called nine-one-one."

"But did you touch anything in the bedroom? Anything at all?"

Palacio shook his head. "I knew that until the police got here, everything had to stay the same." The majordomo hesitated.

Brewmaster prompted, "What is it?"

"Well, there was one thing I'd forgotten until now. The radio was playing very loudly. I turned it off. I'm sorry if I- "

"Never mind. But let's go look at it."

In the Ernst bedroom, the two men walked toward a portable radio. Brewmaster asked, "When you turned this off, did you change the station?"

"No, sir."

"Has anyone used the radio since?"

"I don't think so."

Brewmaster slipped a rubber glove over his right hand, then turned the radio on. The song, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, filled the room. The detective peered at the radio's dial, set to 93.1 FM.

"That's WTMI," Palacio said. "It was a favorite of Mrs. Ernst. She often listened to it."

Soon afterward, Brewmaster took Maria Palacio to the murdered couple's bedroom to ask another question. "I advise you not to look at the bodies," he told her. "I'll stand between them and you. But there's something else I want you to see."

The "something else" was jewelry a sapphire and diamond ring with matching earrings, another gold ring, a pearl necklace with a pink tourmaline clasp, a gold bracelet set with diamonds all of it obviously valuable and left in plain view on a bedroom dressing table.

"Yes, that's Mrs. Ernst's," Maria Palacio said. "At night she never bothered to put it away, just left it out, then put it in the safe the next morning. I warned her once. . ." The woman's voice broke.

"That's all, Mrs. Palacio, thank you," Brewmaster said. "You've told me what I needed to know."

Still later, replying to another Brewmaster question, Dr. Sanchez affirmed, "Yes, essentially the facial and head beatings and body mutilations of Mr. and Mrs. Ernst are similar to those in the Frost and Urbina cases and probably, from reports I've received, in the Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater cases too."

"And the knife wounds, Doctor?"

"I won't be sure, of course, until after autopsy. But superficially I'd say the knife wounds on both bodies are from the same kind of bowie knife used on the others."

As to the dead rabbit, Dr. Sanchez asked the owner of a pet store, Heather Ubens, with whom she had worked before, to come to the Ernst house. Ubens, an authority on small animals, identified the creature by its commercial name, a Lopear rabbit. Many of them, she said, were sold locally as pets. Since there was no sign of injury to the rabbit, in Ubens's opinion it had been killed by asphyxiation simply deprived of air.

After the rabbit had been photographed, Dr. Sanchez had it sent to the medical examiner's office to be preserved in formaldehyde.

Sergeant Brewmaster checked with Theo Palacio to see if the rabbit had been a pet at the Ernst house. "Absolutely not. Mr. and Mrs. Ernst didn't like animals," the majordomo told him, adding, "I wanted them to have a guard dog because of all the crime; I even offered to take care of it myself. But Mr. Ernst said no, with him being a city commissioner, the police would always look out for his safety. But they didn't, did they?"

Brewmaster chose not to answer. Subsequently police made inquiries at other Miami pet stores, using crime-scene photos in an attempt to find the rabbit's purchaser. But since so many rabbits were sold, sometimes in litters of seven or eight, and since few stores kept detailed records, the search proved fruitless.

Hank Brewmaster told Malcolm Ainslie about the dead rabbit and asked, "Is there something in Revelation that fits the way those other things did?"

"There's no rabbit in Revelation, or in any other part of the Bible; I'm sure of that," Ainslie said. "It could still be a symbol, though. Rabbits as a species are very old."

"Any religious connotation at all?"

"I'm not sure." Ainslie paused, recalling a lecture series Life Origins and Geologic Time that he had attended soon after his religious faith began to wane. Details came back; he sometimes surprised himself by how much his memory retained. "Rabbits are Lagomorpha that's rabbits, hares, and pikes. They originated in North Asia near the end of the Paleocene." He smiled. "Which is fifty-five million years before the Genesis version of creation."

"You think our guy an obsessed religious freak, you called him knows all that?" Brewmaster asked.

"I doubt it. But who knows what he thinks, or why?"

That night at home Ainslie went to Karen's personal computer, on which he kept a King James version of the Bible. The next day he told Brewmaster, "I did a computer search for any Bible reference to 'lagomorph,' 'hare,' or 'pika.' No lagomorphs or pikes, but 'hare' appears twice once in Leviticus, once in Deuteronomy, though not at all in Revelation."

"Do you think our rabbit could have been intended as a hare, and that way be a Bible symbol?"

"No, I don't." Ainslie hesitated, then said, "I'll tell you what I do think, after a lot of thought last night. I don't believe that rabbit is a Revelation symbol at all. It doesn't fit. I reckon it's a fake."

As Brewmaster looked at him curiously, he went on, "All those other symbols left at murder scenes fitted something specific. Like the four dead cats 'four beasts' and the red moon 'the moon became as blood' and the trumpet 'a great voice, as of a trumpet.' "

"I remember." Brewmaster nodded.

"Oh, sure, a rabbit could be a 'beast' Revelation's full of beasts.'' Ainslie shook his head. "Somehow I don't think so."

"So what are you suggesting?"

"I guess it's mostly instinct, Hank. But I think we need to keep an open mind about whether the Ernst murders were really another serial killing, or whether someone else did them and tried to make them look that way."

"Aren't you forgetting? We withheld those earlier crime-scene details."

"But some were published. Reporters have sources; always happens."

"Well, all that's startling, Malcolm, and I'll try to keep it in mind. But I have to tell you, after seeing that Ernst scene, I reckon your thoughts are way out."

They left it there.

* * *

Soon afterward, Sandra Sanchez announced her findings following the autopsies of both victims. Yes, they had been killed by a bowie knife, as her first inspection of the wounds suggested. However, the distinctive notches and serrations in the bodies differed from those at the other killings, so a different knife was used which proved nothing, because bowie knives could be purchased readily and a serial killer might easily own several.

Thus, as days went by, and despite Malcolm Ainslie's doubts, it seemed increasingly certain that the Ernst killings had been committed by the same hand as the eight preceding unsolved murders. The basic circumstances were identical, and so were the supplementals: the dead rabbit, still possibly a Revelation symbol; removal of all money; the highly visible jewelry left untouched; and the loudplaying radio. Also, as with the earlier murders, there was no fingerprint evidence.

The investigators were troubled, however, by the speed with which the Ernst killings had followed the Urbina/Pine Terrace Condo murders only three days earlier. The previous killings had been spaced two to three months apart. The media and public were curious about that fact, and asked pertinent questions: Had the killer speeded up his deadly mission, whatever it might be? Did he have a sense of invincibility, of being "on a roll"? Was there special significance in a Miami city commissioner being a victim? Were other commissioners or officials in danger? And what were the police doing, if anything, to anticipate the killer's next moves?

While the last question could not be answered publicly, the special task force surveillance of six suspects had begun, with Sergeant Ainslie in charge.

The Ernst murders, too, were quickly assigned as a task force responsibility. Sergeant Brewmaster, while continuing to lead the Ernst investigation, became a task force member, reporting to Malcolm Ainslie, as did the detectives from Brewmaster's team Dion Jacobo and Seth Wightman.

But even before all task force duties were fully in effect, a meeting took place that Ainslie knew was inevitable.

7

At 8:15 A.M., two days after the mutilated bodies of Gustav and Eleanor Ernst were discovered, Malcolm Ainslie arrived at Homicide headquarters, having already met Sergeant Brewmaster at the murder scene for an update. Disappointingly, nothing more had emerged since the day before. A canvass of the neighborhood, during which residents were asked about recent strangers in the Bay Point area, had produced, as Brewmaster said, "Nada."

In Homicide, Lieutenant Newbold was waiting alongside Ainslie's desk. He pointed and said, "Someone's waiting for you in my office, Malcolm. You'd better hustle! "

Moments later, as Ainslie stood in the Homicide commander's office doorway, he saw Cynthia Ernst, seated in Newbold's chair.

She was dressed smartly in police uniform and looked stunning. How ironic, Ainslie thought, that severely cut masculine clothes could become so sexy on the body of a woman. The tailored, square-shouldered jacket bearing her gold oak leaves of major's rank only emphasized the perfect proportions of her figure. Dark brown hair, trimmed to the regulation inch and a half above the collar line, framed her pale, creamy skin and penetrating green eyes. Ainslie caught the scent of a familiar perfume and was suddenly overwhelmed by memories.

Behind the desk, Cynthia had been perusing a single sheet of paper and now glanced up, her face expressionless.

"Come in,' she said. "Close the door."

. Ainslie did so, noticing that her eyes were red, presumably from crying.

Standing before the desk he began, "I'd like to say how truly sorry I am "

"Thank you," Major Ernst said quickly, then continued, in a businesslike manner, "I'm here because I have some questions for you, Sergeant."

He matched her tone. "I'll try to answer them."

Even now, despite her coolness toward him, the sight and sound of Cynthia Ernst excited him, as it had so often when they were lovers. That erotic, arousing, provocative interlude now seemed long ago.

Their affair had begun five years earlier, while they were both Homicide detectives. Cynthia had been beautiful and desirable then, at thirty-three three years younger than Malcolm. Now, he decided, she was even more alluring. AISO7 in a strange way, her unyielding coldness since their breakup, a year after the affair began, made her seem even more tempting and exciting than before. Cynthia transmitted her sexuality like a beacon always had and to Ainslie's embarrassment he felt, even in this unromantic setting, an erection stirring.

She motioned to a chair that faced the desk and said, unsmiling, "You may sit down."

Ainslie allowed himself the slightest smile. "Thank you, Major."

He sat, realizing that already with their brief exchange, Cynthia had made their relationship clear a matter of relative ranks, with hers now much senior to his own. Well, fair enough. There was nothing wrong with knowing where you stood. He wished, though, that she would allow him to express his genuine sympathy over her parents' ghastly deaths. But Cynthia returned her gaze to the paper she had been reading, then, taking her time, she put it down and faced him.

"I understand you are in charge of the investigation of my parents' murder."

"Yes, I am." He began explaining the special task force and its reasons, but she cut him off.

"I know all that."

Ainslie stopped and waited, wondering what Cynthia was after. One thing he was sure of: she was deeply and genuinely grieving. Her red eyes proclaimed it and, to his personal knowledge, the relationship between Gustav and Eleanor Ernst and Cynthia, their only child, had been exceptionally close.

In different circumstances he would have reached out and put his arms around her, or simply touched her hand, but knew better than to do so now. Apart from their having gone their separate ways for four years, he knew Cynthia would instantly raise the inviolable, protective barrier she used so often, eliminating the personal while she became the impatient, hard-driving professional he had known so well.

Cynthia had also exhibited some less admirable traits while Ainslie was working with her. Her hard-line directness made her reject subtlety, even though subtlety could sometimes be a useful investigative tool. She favored shortcuts in police inquiries, even if it meant crossing a line to illegality making deals with criminals outside of official plea bargaining, or planting evidence to "prove" some known offense. While he was her Homicide supervisor, Ainslie occasionally questioned Cynthia's methods, though no one could quarrel with her results, which, at the time, reflected favorably on him as well.

Then there was the wholly unprofessional, intimate, abandoned, wildly sensual Cynthia the side of her he would not see today, or ever again. He pushed the thought away.

She leaned forward on the desk and faith "Get to the point. I want to hear what you're really doing, and don't hold anything back."

This scene, Ainslie thought, was a replay of so much that had gone before.

* * *

Cynthia Ernst had joined the Miami Police Force when she was twenty-seven, one year before Malcolm Ainslie. She had progressed rapidly some said because her father was a city commissioner, and certainly that connection did her no harm, nor did the fact that minorities' and women's rights were creating new priorities and opportunities. But the real reasons for Cynthia's success, as all who knew her well conceded, were her innate abilities and drive, coupled with hard work for as long as needed.

Right from the beginning, during the obligatory tenweek police academy course, Cynthia excelled, demonstrating a retentive memory and a quick mind when confronting problems. She was outstanding at weapons performance, described by the course firearms instructor as "remarkable." After four weeks, during which she fired with the proficiency of a marksman and was able to strip and reassemble her weapon at lightning speed, her score was never below 298 out of a possible 300.

Following the academy course, Cynthia proved herself a highly competent police officer, becoming valued by superiors for her initiative and ingenuity, and for her speed in making decisions the last an essential talent when enforcing law, and notable especially in a woman. All of those talents, plus a flair for getting noticed, prompted Cynthia's transfer to Homicide after only two years on uniform patrol.

In Homicide her record of success continued, and it was there she encountered Malcolm Ainslie, also a detective, with a growing reputation as an outstanding investigator.

Cynthia was assigned to the same Homicide team as Ainslie, then headed by a long-service detective-sergeant, Felix Foster. Soon after Cynthia's arrival, Foster was made a lieutenant and moved to another department. Ainslie, promoted to sergeant, took his place.

But even before that, Ainslie and Cynthia had worked together and were mutually attracted an attraction that simmered briefly, then exploded.

Cynthia was lead investigator in a triple murder, aided at times by Ainslie. While following several promising leads, the two of them flew to Atlanta for two days. The leads promised to pay off, and at the end of the first grueling but successful day, they checked into a suburban motel.

Then, over dinner that night in a small, surprisingly good trattoria, Ainslie looked at Cynthia across the table and, with instinct telling him what was coming, he asked, "Are you very tired?"

"Tired as hell," she answered. Then, reaching for his hand, "But not too tired for what you and I want most and it's not dessert."

In the car, as they drove back to their motel, Cynthia leaned over and brushed her tongue across his ear. "I'm not sure I can wait," she breathed. "Can you?" Then she teased him with her hand, causing him to groan and swerve.

At the door to his room, he leaned over and kissed her gently. "I gather you want to come in."

"Just as badly as you want me to," she answered playfully.

It was all Ainslie needed. Opening the door, he pushed her inside. The door slammed and the room was dark. Easing Cynthia against a wall, he let his weight press into her. He felt her breathing quicken, her body pulsate with eagerness. Breathing into her hair, kissing the back of her neck, Ainslie slipped his hand around her waist and into her pants.

"Oh Jesus," Cynthia whispered, "I want you now."

"Shhh," Ainslie said, his finger wet and tantalizing. "Don't say anything. Not a word."

She turned then quickly and without warning so she faced him but was still flattened against the wall. "Screw you, Sergeant," she said, breathless, then smothered him with her lips.

They struggled out of their clothes as the kissing grew more desperate. "You're beautiful," Ainslie muttered several times. "Christ, you're beautiful."

Finally Cynthia pushed him onto the bed and crawled on top of him. "I need you now, my love. Don't you dare make me wait one more second."

Afterward they rested, then made love again, continuing all through the night. Amid the chaos of his thoughts, it came to Malcolm that Cynthia had become their sexual leader and, surprising him, he had a sense of being dominated and possessed, though he didn't mind.

In the months to come, with Ainslie's promotion from detective to detective-sergeant, he was able to arrange duty schedules so that he and Cynthia were frequently to "ether both in Miami and on occasional overnight assignments outside the city. Either way their affair continued.

There were many moments when Ainslie reminded himself, with a semblance of guilt, of his marriage to Karen. But Cynthia's explosive hunger and his own wild pleasure in satisfying her seemed to eclipse all else.

Like their first sexual encounter, each subsequent romp began with the long, continuous kiss as they undressed and, as time went by, their magical, exhilarating game continued.

It was during one of their disrobings that Ainslie discovered a second gun Cynthia carried in an ankle holster beneath the trousers that, like most women detectives, she wore on duty. The usual police weapon both Ainslie and Cynthia carried was a 9mm Glock automatic with a fifteen shot clip and hollow-point bullets. But this small one Cynthia had purchased herself a tiny, chrome-plated Smith & Wesson five-shot pistol.

She murmured, "It's for anyone other than you who attacks me, darling." Then, inserting the tip of her tongue in his ear, "Right now yours is the only weapon I'm interested in."

The extra gun known on the force as a "throwdown" was legal for a police officer, providing it was registered and the owner had qualified in its use at the shooting range. In both cases Cynthia fulfilled the requirements.

Her extra gun, in fact, would be put to use in a way that Malcolm Ainslie remembered gratefully.

* * *

Cynthia Ernst was lead detective, Ainslie her supervising sergeant, in a complex whodunit investigation in which a male employee of a Miami bank was believed to have witnessed a murder, but had not come forward voluntarily. Cynthia and Ainslie had gone together to the bank a large downtown branch to question the potential witness and, upon entering, found a robbery in progress.

The time was near noon; the bank was crowded.

Barely three minutes earlier the robber, a tall, muscular white man armed with an Uzi automatic machine pistol, had confronted a woman teller and ordered her to put all the cash from her till into the cloth bag he pushed toward her. Few people knew what was happening until a bank guard noticed the man and rushed forward. With his pistol drawn, the guard commanded, "You at the counter! Drop that gun!"

Instead of obeying, the robber swung around, firing a burst from his Uzi at the guard, who fell to the floor. As panic and screams ensued, the intruder shouted, "This is a robbery! Nobody move, and no one else will get hurt!" Then he reached over, seized the teller by the neck, and, dragging her across the counter, caught her in a chokehold.

It was during this confusion, then sudden silence, that Cynthia and Ainslie walked into the bank.

Ainslie unhesitatingly reached into the holster beneath his jacket and produced his 9mm Glock. Using both hands, maintaining a steady stance, he aimed it at the robber, shouting in a strong voice, "I'm a police officer. Let the woman go. Put your gun on the counter and raise your hands, or I shoot!"

At the same time, Cynthia eased away from Ainslie, though making no sudden move that might attract the man's attention. Held casually in her hands was a small, inconspicuous purse.

The robber tightened his grip on the teller and pointed his gun at her head. He snarled at Ainslie, "You drop the gun, scumbag, or the broad gets it first. Do it! Drop it! I'll count to ten. One, two. . ."

The teller, her voice thin and stifled, called, "Please do what he says! I don't want " Her words were cut off as the choke-hold tightened.

The robber continued, "Three . . . four . . ."

Ainslie called out, "I tell you again, put the damn gun down and give up."

"Bullshit! Five . . . six . . . You drop the fucking gun, shitbag, or I nix this bitch at ten!"

Cynthia, off to one side, her mind cool and calculating, weighed the fields of fire. She knew that Ainslie would have guessed what she was doing and was trying to stall and gain time, though without much chance of success. The robber was a loser, knew he would never get away, and therefore didn't care . . .

His count continued. "Seven . . ."

Ainslie, unyielding, held his firing position. Cynthia knew he was relying on her totally now. There was no sound in the bank; everyone was still and tense. By this time, presumably, silent alarms had been tripped. But it would be several minutes before more police arrived, and even then, what could they do?

She could see there was no one immediately behind the robber. He now faced Cynthia almost directly, though seemingly unaware of her as his focus remained on Ainslie. The teller, with the gun still aimed at her head, was dangerously close, too close for safety, but there was no choice. Cynthia would get one shot only, and it had to be dead-on, a killing shot . . .

"Eight . . . "

With a single swift movement, Cynthia released a fallaway seam of her specialized purse a new, efficient substitute for an ankle holster. Letting the purse drop, she grasped the tiny Smith & Wesson pistol from inside, the chrome-plated gun gleaming as she raised it.

"Nine . . ."

Instantly taking aim, bracing herself, she fired.

The sharp sound of the shot caused heads to turn. Cynthia ignored the stares, her eyes locked on the man who slumped over as a single red hole near the center of his forehead began oozing blood. The woman teller quickly freed herself from the man's arm, then fell to the ground sobbing.

Ainslie, his gun still trained on the robber, walked toward him, looked carefully at the body, now motionless, then put the gun away. As Cynthia joined him, he said with a grin, "You cut it fine. But thanks.''

Within the bank a buzz of conversation rose; then, as realization dawned, applause broke out, changing almost at once to spontaneous cheers directed at Cynthia. Smiling, she leaned against Malcolm and, sighing with relief, whispered, "I think you owe me a week in the sack for that one."

Ainslie nodded. "We'll have to be careful. You're going to be famous." And over the next few days, as a widely acclaimed media heroine, she was.

* * *

Long after, when Malcolm Ainslie looked back on his affair with Cynthia, he wondered if his own unbridled lust was a delayed reaction to those long years he had spent in unnatural priestly celibacy. True or not, his priority throughout what he thought of still as Cynthia's Year was his personal, exquisite carnal satisfaction.

Occasionally during that time he had asked himself, Should my conscience trouble me? Then reminded himself there were aeons of precedents the year 1000 B.C., or thereabouts, as an example. His scholarly recall (would he ever escape it?) brought back the Bible's King David and the Second Book of Samuel, chapter 11:

In an eveningtide. . . David arose from off his bed . . . and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.

It was Bathsheba, of course, the wife of Uriah, who was away fighting as the Old Testament described it one of God's wars.

And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her. . . And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child.

Unfortunately for David, all of that was before condoms, which Ainslie used with Cynthia. Nor did Ainslie have a paramour's husband to contend with like the warrior Uriah, whom King David had ordered killed. . .

Surprisingly, through all of that time with Cynthia, Malcolm Ainslie's love for Karen did not diminish. It was as if he had two private lives: ode, his marriage, representing security and permanence, the other a wild adventure he always knew must one day end. Ainslie never seriously considered leaving Karen and their son Jason, then three and growing up into a delightful little guy.

Occasionally, during that period, there were moments when Ainslie wondered if Karen was aware of, or even suspected, the affair. A word or attitude could leave him believing uneasily that she did.

Meanwhile, as the Year of Cynthia progressed, some aspects of Cynthia's nature began to make Ainslie uncomfortable, at times professionally uneasy. She would periodically switch moods for no discernible reason from free-flowing, amorous warmth to sudden and icy coldness. At such moments Ainslie would wonder what had happened between them, then realize after several experiences that nothing had; it was simply Cynthia's way, a facet of her character, more visible and frequent as time went on.

But that mood shift was manageable, the professional unease less so.

Ainslie, throughout his police career, had believed in ethical behavior, even when dealing with habitual criminals who disregarded ethics totally. Sometimes minor tradeoffs were acceptable in exchange for information, but that was Ainslie's limit. Some in police work, though, held differing views and would make illegal deals with criminals, or lie when making statements, or plant evidence when there seemed no other way to get it. But Ainslie would have no part of such tactics, either for himself or those who worked with him.

Cynthia apparently had no such scruples.

As Cynthia's superior, Ainslie had suspected that some of her investigative successes might be morally questionable. But nothing came to his direct attention, and his questions about her rumored freewheeling methods produced strong denials from Cynthia, and once indignation. One matter did surface, though, in a way he could not overlook.

It concerned a con artist and thief named Val Castellon, recently released from prison on parole. Cynthia was lead investigator in a murder, and while Castellon was in no way a suspect, it was believed he might have information about another ex-con who was. Brought in for interrogation, Castellon denied any such knowledge, and Ainslie was inclined to believe him. Cynthia did not. In a subsequent private session with Castellon, Cynthia threatened to plant drugs on him if he failed to testify for her, then have him arrested, in which case his parole would be revoked and he would go back to prison, as well as face stiff new charges. Planting drugs in a suspect's pocket, then appearing to discover them, was a simple tactic for police and all too frequently used.

Ainslie learned about Cynthia's threat through Sergeant Hank Brewmaster, who had been told of it by one of his regular informants, a crony of Castellon's. When Ainslie asked Cynthia if the report was true, she admitted it was, though the drug plant had not yet been done.

"And it won't be," he told her. "I'm responsible, and I won't allow it."

"Oh, bullshit, Malcolm!" Cynthia said. "That prick will wind up back in jail anyway. I'd just be sending him there sooner."

"Don't you get it?" he asked incredulously. "We're here to enforce the law, which means we have to obey it, too. "

"And you're being as stuffy as this old pillow." Cynthia threw one at him from the bed of a motel where they had rented a room on a rainy afternoon. At the same time she fell back on the bed. She spread her legs wide and asked, "Is what you want legal? After all, we're both on duty." She laughed quietly then, knowing precisely what would happen next.

Ainslie's face changed. He went to her and threw his jacket and tie on the bed. Cynthia said suddenly, sharply, "Hurry, hurry! Slide your lovely big illegal cock inside me!"

As he had at other times, Ainslie felt powerless, melting into her, and yet diffident, even embarrassed by Cynthia's raunchy language. Yet it was part of her sexual aggressiveness, and each time made their coupling more exciting. By then they had abandoned the subject of Val Castellon, which Ainslie intended to bring up later, though he never did. Nor did he learn how the missing information in Cynthia's murder inquiry was supplied, except that she obtained it, resulting in one more investigative triumph for Cynthia and himself.

What Ainslie did make sure of was that Castellon was not charged with drug possession, and his parole was not revoked. In one way or another, it seemed, Ainslie's warning to Cynthia had been heeded.

* * *

Something else bothered Ainslie. Unlike most other police officers, Cynthia seemed comfortable, even happy, in the company of criminals, mingling with them at bars in an easy, friendly way. She and Ainslie also differed in their attitudes to lawbreaking. Ainslie viewed crime-solving, particularly of homicides, as moral high ground. Cynthia didn't, and once told him, "Face reality, Malcolm! It's a contest, with crooks, police, and lawyers elf competing. The winner depends on how clever each lawyer is and how rich the defendant is. Your so-called moral issues don't stand a chance in this game."

Ainslie was not impressed. Nor was he happy to learn eventually that a regular companion of Cynthia's at bars and restaurants was Patrick Jensen, a successful novelist and Miami bon vivant, but with an unsavory reputation, particularly among police.

Jensen, a former TV newsman, had written a succession of best-selling crime novels, published worldwide, and by the age of thirty-nine he had amassed what was rumored to be twelve million Dollars. Some said the success had gone to his head, and Jensen had evolved into a rude and arrogant womanizer with a violent temper. His second wife, Naomi, from whom he was divorced, made several spousal battery complaints to police, then withdrew them before of ficial action could begin. Several times after their divorce, Jensen tried to reconcile with Naomi, but she would have no part of it.

Then Naomi Jensen was found murdered, with a .38caliber bullet through her throat. Beside her lay a young musician, Kilburn Holmes, whom she had been dating, killed by a bullet from the same gun. According to witnesses, earlier that day Naomi and Jensen had had a bitter argument outside Naomi's house, during which she insisted he leave her alone and told him she intended to remarry.

Patrick Jensen was an obvious suspect, and inquiries by Miami Homicide showed he had opportunity and no alibi. A handkerchief near the bodies matched others owned by Jensen, though there was nothing on the handkerchief to prove it was his. However, a fragment of paper in Holmes's hand did match another fragment, found in Jensen's garbage. Detectives then discovered that two weeks before the murders Jensen had purchased a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, but he claimed to have lost the gun, and no murder weapon was found.

Despite intensive effort by Sergeant Pablo Greene's Homicide team, no other evidence was obtained, and what little they had was insufficient to take to a grand jury.

Patrick Jensen knew it, too.

Detective Charlie Thurston, the lead investigator, told Sergeants Greene and Ainslie, "I went to that arrogant dickhead Jensen today to ask a few more questions, and the fucker just laughed and told me to beat it." Thurston, a seasoned detective, normally mild-mannered and patient, was still burning from the encounter.

"The bastard knows we know he did it," he went on, "and he's telling us, 'So what, you'll never prove it.' "

"Let him laugh now," Greene said. "It may be our turn later."

But Thurston shook his head. "Won't happen. He'll put it all in a goddam book and make a pisspot full of money."

To an extent Thurston was right. Nothing more emerged to connect Jensen with the murders of Naomi and her friend Kilburn Holmes, and he did write a new crime story in which the homicide detectives were incompetent buffoons. But the book did not do well, nor did one more which followed, and it appeared that Patrick Jensen's bestseller days had ended, as so often happens when fresh young writers ascend into literary orbit and older ones decline. At the same time there were rumors that, through bad investments, Jensen had lost a major part of his millions and was looking around for other sources of income. Another rumor was that Jensen and Detective Cynthia Ernst had, for a long time, been having an affair.

Ainslie dismissed the second rumor. For one thing, he did not believe Cynthia would be so foolish, in view of Patrick Jensen's status as a murder suspect. Second, he found it inconceivable that she could conduct two intense affairs at the same time, particularly since Cynthia's relationship with Ainslie frequently left the two of them drained.

Just the same, Ainslie did raise Patrick Jensen's name with Cynthia, trying to make the reference casual. Cynthia, as usual, wasn't fooled.

"Are you jealous?" she asked.

"Of Patrick Jensen! That'll be the day." He hesitated, then added, "Do I have reason to be?"

"Patrick's nothing!" she asserted. "It's you I want, Malcolm and all of you. More of your time, all of your time! I don't want to share you, not with anyone." They were in an unmarked police car, Cynthia driving. The last few words rang out like a command.

He was startled and asked, scarcely thinking, "Are you saying we should get married?"

"Malcolm, get free. Then I'll consider."

The answer, he thought, was typical Cynthia; in the past year he had come to know her well. If he were free, the probability was that she would use him, squeeze him dry, and then discard him. No permanence for Cynthia; on that point she had made herself quite clear.

So there it was. Ainslie had known something like this was inevitable and that a moment of decision had arrived. He knew Cynthia would not like what he would say next, and knew too that her anger could erupt like Vesuvius.

For a moment, postponing the confrontation, he thought back again to David and Bathsheba, the lovers who married after Bathsheba's husband Uriah was disposed of in battle as King David prearranged. But God according to the Bible was personally upset by David's perfidy.

. . . the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. And the Lord sent Nathan unto David . . . And Nathan said to David. . . Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of shine own house, and I will take thy wives before shine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbor, and he shall lie with thy wives. . .

Like so much else in the Bible, it was as scholars saw it highly implausible folk legend, told around the campfires of semi-nomadic Israelites, then two hundred years later written down with a core of reality, plus myths from ten thousand retellings. But the extent of truth and fiction didn't matter; what did was that in human relations there was nothing new under the sun, but only variations of old themes. One variation now Ainslie wasn't going to marry Cynthia and didn't want to "get free" of Karen.

They had been driving on a quiet suburban street. As if anticipating what was to come, Cynthia pulled the car to the curb and stopped.

She looked at him. "Well?"

Reaching out to take her hand, he said gently, "My love, what's happened between us has been magical, wonderful. It's something I never expected, and as long as I live I'll be grateful. But I have to tell you I can't go on, we have to end it."

He had expected an outburst. But it didn't happen. Instead she laughed. "I presume you're joking."

"No," he answered firmly.

She sat silently for a few moments, staring out of the passenger window. Then, without turning, she said with eerie calm, "You'll regret this, Malcolm, I promise regret it for the rest of your miserable life.''

He sighed. "That may be true. I guess I'll have to take that chance."

Suddenly she looked at him with tears on her cheeks and rage in her eyes. Her fists were clenched and shaking. "You bastard!" she screamed.

From that point onward they saw little of each other. One reason was that Cynthia became a sergeant a few days later. She had taken the promotion exam a few weeks earlier and placed third on a list of six hundred.

Upon her promotion she was transferred from Homicide to Sexual Battery as a supervisor. She was put in charge of a team of five detectives investigating rapes, attempted rapes, sexual harassment, peeping toms; the coverage was wide, and Cynthia became outstandingly successful. As in Homicide, she proved adept at developing leads through a web of contacts and informants. A dedicated, natural leader, she worked her team hard, as well as herself, and early on made a notable arrest that resulted in the sentencing of a fifteen-count serial rapist who, over two preceding years, had terrorized women in the city.

In part because of this and an excellent rating in one more promotion exam, Cynthia was made a lieutenant two years later and moved to a new department Community Relations as second-in-command. There she liaised with the public, appeared at town meetings, lectured community groups and sometimes other police forces, and generally put forward a convincingly positive image of the Miami force.

All of this brought her to the attention of Police Chief Farrell Ketledge, and when Cynthia's department head died unexpectedly, the chief appointed her to take over. At the same time, because of the prominence and increasing importance of Community Relations, Chief Ketledge decided it should be headed by a police major. Thus Cynthia attained that senior rank without ever having been a captain.

Meanwhile, Ainslie was still a sergeant, to some extent penalized by the fact that he was a white male at a time when affirmative-action promotions of minorities and women were disproportionately and many thought unfairly large. However, he had passed the examination for lieutenant with distinction and expected to move up soon. From a practical point of view, a promotion would increase his annual sergeant's salary of $52,000 by a welcome $10,400.

With financial pressures eased, he and Karen would be able to travel more, go to more concerts they loved jazz and chamber music dine out more often, and generally improve the quality of their lives. Since he'd ended his affair with Cynthia a belated sense of guilt had grown, making Ainslie more determined then ever to be a loyal, devoted husband.

Then he received a call from Captain Ralph Leon, who was in Personnel Management. Ainslie and Leon had been recruits together, and in the same police academy class, where they became friends, frequently studied in tandem, and otherwise helped each other. Leon was black and well qualified and therefore affirmative action had not delayed his upward progress.

On the phone Leon merely said, "Malcolm, meet me for coffee." He named a day and time and a small cafe in Little Havana a long way from Police Headquarters.

Outside the restaurant they smiled at the sight of each other and shook hands warmly. Leon, who wore a sports jacket and slacks instead of his uniform, opened the door and led the way to a quiet booth. He was a trimly built man, studious and methodical, and becoming serious, he weighed his words before speaking. "Malcolm, this conversation is not taking place."

His eyes posed a question, to which Ainslie nodded. "Okay. I understand."

"There are things I hear in Personnel..." Leon stopped. "Oh, hell, Malcolm. Here it is. If you stay a Miami cop, you're never going anywhere. You'll never make lieutenant or any rank higher than you have now. It isn't fair, I hate it, but out of friendship I had to let you know."

Ainslie, stunned by what he had heard, sat in silence.

Leon's voice became more emotional. "It's Major Ernst. She's bad-mouthing you everywhere, blocking your promotion. I don't know why, Malcolm; maybe you do. But if you do know, don't tell me."

"Blocking it on what grounds, Ralph? My record's clean and officially . . . well, outstanding."

'`The grounds are trivial, and everybody knows it. But a major that one especially has a lot of influence, and in our shop, if you have a powerful enemy, you usually can't win. You know how it is."

Ainslie did know. But curiosity made him ask, "What am I accused of?"

"Neglect of duty, laziness, careless work habits."

In other circumstances, Ainslie might have laughed.

Leon said, "She must have searched through every goddam file." He spelled out some details. There was an occasion, for example, when Ainslie had failed to make a scheduled court appearance.

"I remember that. I was on the way to court when I got a radio call a freeway killing. There was a chase, we got the guy, and afterward a conviction. Later that day I saw the judge, explained, and apologized. He was fine about it and rescheduled."

"Unfortunately the court documents just show your absence. I checked." Leon pulled a folded paper from his pocket. "Several times you were late for work, missed meetings."

"Jesus! that happens to everybody. There isn't anyone in the Department who doesn't get that kind of stuff emergency calls, so you respond and let the office wait. I don't even remember."

"Ernst remembered and found the records." Leon looked at his paper. "I said it was trivia. Want more?"

Ainslie shook his head. Quick changes of plan, fast decisions, dealing with the unexpected, were a normal part of police work, especially in Homicide. Sometimes, administratively, the results were messy; it was part of the job. Everyone, including Cynthia, knew it. But he knew the answer, too; there was nothing he could do. Cynthia had the rank and the influence, and held all the cards. He remembered her threatening words to him. Well, she had kept her promise in spades.

"Damn it," Ainslie muttered, staring through a window at the street outside.

"I'm sorry, Malcolm. It's really a bum rap."

Ainslie nodded. "I appreciate your telling me, Ralph. And no one will ever know we talked."

Leon looked down at the table in front of him. "That doesn't seem so important now." He raised his eyes. "Will you stay on?"

"I think so." Mainly, he reasoned, because there were few alternatives.

And in the end he did.

* * *

Following the exchange with Ralph Leon, one other thought came back to Malcolm: the memory of a brief, unexpected conversation several months earlier with Mrs. Eleanor Ernst, Cynthia's mother.

Police sergeants normally do not meet city leaders or their spouses socially, but this happened at a small retirement dinner given for a senior officer with whom Ainslie had worked, and Commissioner and Mrs. Ernst attended. Ainslie knew Mrs. Ernst by sight; she had always seemed a demure woman, expensively dressed but slightly shy. Therefore he was surprised when, holding a wineglass, she approached him during the reception preceding the dinner.

Speaking softly, she asked, "You're Sergeant Ainslie, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"I believe that you and my daughter are no longer how shall I put it? meeting each other. Is that correct?"

Seeing Ainslie hesitate, she added, "Oh, don't worry, I won't tell anyone. But sometimes Cynthia isn't the most discreet person."

He answered uncertainly. "I rarely see Cynthia at all these days."

"This may seem strange, coming from a mother, Sergeant, but I was sorry to hear that. I think you were a good influence on her. Tell me, was the ending friendly or otherwise?"

"Otherwise."

"A pity." Mrs. Ernst lowered her voice still more. "I shouldn't do this, I suppose, but I want to tell you something, Sergeant Ainslie. If Cynthia thinks she's been wronged, she never forgets, never forgives. Just a warning you should bear in mind. Good evening.''

Still holding her wineglass, Mrs. Ernst melted away.

Thus, in due course, the predictive words of Eleanor Ernst were confirmed. Captain Ralph Leon had become the messenger, and Ainslie permanently it seemed had paid Cynthia's price.

* * *

Now, long after so many events, so much maneuvering, and so many changes for them both, Malcolm Ainslie and Cynthia Ernst faced each other in Leo Newbold's office.

"Get to the point," Cynthia had said about her parents' murders. "I want to hear what you're really doing, and don't hold anything back."

"We've compiled a list of suspects for surveillance. I'll have a copy sent "

"I already have it." Cynthia touched a file folder in front of her. "Is there anyone on that list who's number one?''

"Robinson seems a probability. Several things fit, but it's too early to tell. Surveillance should give us more information."

"Are you convinced the same person did all of the murders?"

"Just about everybody is." His own doubts, Ainslie thought, were unimportant.

More questions followed, and as far as he could, Ainslie tried to convey sympathy with his answers, despite Cynthia's coldness. At the same time he was very much on guard. Cynthia had that effect on him, knowing from experience that she would make use of any information in any way she chose.

Toward the end she said, "I understand you associated some things found at the murder scenes with Biblical references."

"Yes, mostly Revelation."

"Mostly?"

"Nothing is exact. As you know, it's impossible to be sure of a source, or of a criminal's reasoning, which can be inconsistent. What those references did was point us toward the group of people we're now watching."

"I want you to inform me of every new development. Daily reports by phone."

"Excuse me, Major, but you should clear that with Lieutenant Newbold."

"I already have. He has my instructions. Now I'm giving them to you. Please see that you follow them."

Well, he thought, Major Cynthia Ernst had the rank to get away with such instructions, even though, strictly speaking, they were outside her own departmental field. It didn't follow, though, that she should receive every last scrap of information, even about her parents' murders.

Standing, Ainslie moved closer to the desk and looked down at Cynthia. "Major, I will do my best to keep you informed, but as head of this task force my first duty is to solve the case." He waited until she looked up, then continued. "Nothing will come before that."

She seemed about to say something, then evidently thought better of it. Ainslie moved back, his gaze fixed on hers. Yes, she outranked him and could order him to do virtually anything in the line of duty. But on a personal level, he decided, he would not be pushed around by her. Ever.

The plain fact was, he didn't trust Cynthia and scarcely liked her anymore. He knew there were things she was not revealing, though what they were and how they might relate to the serial murder investigations, he had no idea. What he did know from his own sources in the Department was that Cynthia Ernst continued to cut corners, and to keep dubious company, especially with the author Patrick Jensen.

Jensen was still being watched by Miami police. There had been rumors of a connection between Jensen and a drug distribution gang, the same gang that was suspect in a Homicide investigation by Metro-Dade Police into what had become known as the Wheelchair Murder. The victim, a paraplegic and a valued police informant, had been wheeled at night, bound and gagged, into tidewater in a remote area south of Homestead. His wheelchair had been secured by a chain and weights to a lonely offshore islet, and the man left to drown as the tide rose.

Of course, it was all a long way from Major Cynthia Ernst . . .

She nodded slightly. "That will be all, Sergeant. You may go."

8

"Of all the jobs cops are asked to do," Detective Charlie Thurston said, "surveillance has to be the shittiest."

"It sure ain't my favorite," Bradford Andrews acknowledged. "And this damn rain's not helping, either."

Thurston from Homicide and Andrews from Robbery were sitting in a Florida Power & Light van, their temporary undercover vehicle. They were assigned to keep track of Carlos Quinones, one of the six computer generated suspects in the serial killings.

The Police Department owned a variety of vehicles for surveillance use. They included taxis, phone, gas, and electrical service trucks, store delivery vehicles, and even postal vans. Some were given or sold to police by the organizations that owned them. Others, confiscated during drug raids, were awarded through the courts. The type of vehicle used to watch any particular subject, such as Quinones, was changed from day to day.

The two detectives, both in their early thirties, had been parked for nearly two hours outside Quinones's apartment one of a series of squalid residences in the unofficially named Liberty City area.

The time was approaching 7:00 P.M., and Brad Andrews yawned with boredom. Andrews liked action. All detectives did, which is why many had become detectives. Yet, much of the time, surveillance was the reverse. It involved sitting in a vehicle for several hours, peering out the windows, with nothing happening. Even in good weather it was hard to concentrate on an assignment without thoughts turning to that night's dinner, sports, sex, an overdue mortgage payment. . .

The heavy rain had persisted for an hour, making it impossible for the detectives to see clearly what was going on outside, but to turn on the wipers would only advertise that someone was being watched. The patter of water droplets didn't help, either; it was like a soporific drumbeat, lulling the men to sleep.

Thurston, seeing Andrews yawn, cautioned, "Wake up, man! "

"I'm trying," Brad Andrews said, sitting up straight. A seasoned officer, he was one of the detectives borrowed from Robbery for surveillance duty. Andrews was formerly with Homicide, but in an effort to stabilize his family life, he had transferred to Robbery, where the hours were more reasonable. Now, temporarily, he was back.

The special surveillance force comprised twenty-four people: the two sergeants from Homicide, Ainslie and Greene, their two teams of four detectives, plus twelve other detectives from Robbery. Two investigators from the state attorney's office were also sharing the surveillance duty.

"Hey!" Andrews said. "Here's our guy, and would you believe he's combing his hair again?"

Quifiones, an olive-complexioned Hispanic, was tall and lean, with a narrow face and thick, wavy hair that he must have combed two dozen times during the two and a half days Thurston and Andrews had been observing him. Quinones's extensive criminal career included assault, rape, and armed robbery with violence.

Now, accompanied by an unknown bearded male, he entered a yellow, beat-up '78 Chevrolet and drove away. The two detectives, in their Florida P&L van, followed, with Andrews at the wheel.

Quinones went directly to Highway 836, a busy expressway. There, after heading west toward Miami International Airport, he began driving erratically, bumping several cars in the rear an obvious attempt to stop and rob them.

Watching, Thurston griped, "Shit! I'd love to arrest those two bastards."

Andrews nodded. "Yeah, well, maybe we'll have to."

They faced a dilemma, both detectives knew. Their mission was to observe Quinones as a possible serial killer, but if any of the bumped cars stopped, the detectives had a duty to protect their occupants from danger. None of the cars did stop, however, undoubtedly because of the many police and media warnings about that specific danger.

After a while, to the detectives' relief, the bumping ceased and Quinones appeared to have given up.

The yellow Chevy left the expressway at Northwest 57th Avenue, turned south into the western end of Little Havana, and stopped at a 7-Eleven store, where the bearded man got out. Quinones then drove on alone to the south campus of Miami-Dade Community College, at Southwest 107th Avenue and 104th Street. It was a long, tedious ride, taking most of an hour, and Andrews, still driving the undercover van, dropped back as much as possible without losing sight of the Chevy.

By now it was 8:30 P.M., and Quinones stopped in the college parking lot within sight of students walking to and from evening classes. The detectives saw some women students abruptly turn their heads as they passed Quinones's car. Apparently he had called out, though none of the women stopped.

Thurston leaned forward and muttered, "This dude has assaults and a rape on his sheet. You don't think . . ."

As he spoke, Quifloneslefthis car and began following a young blond woman to another portion of the parking lot.

"Let's go!" Thurston jumped from the van, with Andrews behind.

Quifiones was within twenty feet of the young woman when she reached her car a red Honda jumped in, started the engine, and pulled away. Quifiones ran to his own car, still unaware of the detectives, who were also darting back to their van.

As the blond woman's car passed Quifiones's, he drove out behind it. The detectives were now following both cars.

"Don't let that son of a bitch out of your sight," Thurston warned. "If this is our guy, we don't want another corpse."

Andrews nodded. He was staying closer to the yellow Chevy now, reasoning that Quinones's attention was focused on the red Honda ahead. The three vehicles moved north on Southwest 107th Avenue amid light traffic until, without warning, the Honda swung abruptly right onto Southwest Eighth Street, the Tamiami Trail. Quifiones, clearly not ready for a turn, braked, skidded well into the wide intersection, then turned sharply to follow.

"She's on to the bastard," Thurston said.

Quifiones's pursuit of the Honda was further delayed by another car about to turn out of Eighth Street. He reversed a few feet more, then, with tires squealing, made the right turn. Andrews, who had held back through the last block, followed. Then, as traffic cleared, the detectives saw the blond woman leave her car, which was now in a parking area of a high-rise apartment complex. She walked quickly to the lobby, using a key to open a main doorway. Almost at once she was inside, the door closed behind her.

Moments later, Quinones's yellow Chevy pulled up near the Honda. Andrews drove the van into the parking lot and pulled into a space where the detectives could both see Quinones, still seated in his car, and the apartment building directly ahead. After a few minutes they saw lights go on in one of the lower-floor apartments, with the blond woman clearly visible through a window. Only for a moment, though. Crossing the room, she pulled draperies across the window.

"She knows he's out there," Thurston said.

"Yeah, and he may have tailed her before. Probably knows the apartment."

Suddenly Thurston shouted, "Shit! He's gone." While they had been looking up at the window, Quinones had left his car and moved to the apartment building doorway, where he was entering behind another figure.

Both detectives flung their van doors open and raced to the door. Andrews wrenched at it, but it was securely closed. By now no one was visible inside. Thurston immediately started pressing buttons on the residents' speaker system. "Police officers!" he cried out. "We're chasing a suspect. Open the front door, please."

Many, he knew, would be suspicious, but someone might . . .

Someone did. A loud buzz sounded. Andrews called over, "It's open!" and they both rushed in.

"What floor was she on?" Andrews queried. "I'd say the third."

Thurston nodded. "Get up there!"

A hallway contained two elevators, both closed. Andrews hit a call button, then abruptly the doors of one opened and an elderly woman slowly emerged, with a Pekingese on a leash. The dog seemed reluctant to move. Thurston settled the matter by picking it up and dumping it outside. As the woman opened her mouth to protest, both detectives were already inside the elevator, Andrews jabbing the third-floor button, then a lower button to close the doors. But the machinery was unhurried; only after a pause, while the two men fumed, did the doors slide together.

At the third floor they hurried out, turning right toward where they judged they had seen the blond woman through her window. But the corridor was silent, and no door was open. Thurston knocked at two doors without response.

"Nothing here!" he pronounced. "Has to be the fourth floor. Use the stairs!" He headed for a doorway marked FIRE EXIT, Andrews following. They bounded up concrete steps, then through another door, emerging on a corridor matching the one below. A few yards away an apartment door was open, with part of the door splintered. At the same moment two loud blasts, clearly gunshots, sounded through the apartment doorway. As both detectives paused, drawing their guns, they heard four more shots in quick succession.

Thurston, his face set grimly, moved against the wall on the same side of the corridor as the open door. Motioning Andrews to stay behind him, he whispered, "I'll take this one. Cover me."

Small sounds could be heard through the open doorway light footsteps briefly, then several indistinct thuds while Thurston approached carefully. Then, with gun extended, he put his head cautiously around the doorway. Almost at once he lowered the gun and stepped inside. Beyond a small hallway, in what appeared to be a living room, Quiflones was facedown on the floor, unconscious, in a pool of blood. His right arm was extended, a sharpedged, gleaming knife close by. It was a pearl-handled switchblade, Thurston noted. The woman, who looked older than she had from a distance, was seated on a circular ottoman. She held a gun pointed downward; her body was slumped, hair a mess, face dazed.

Thurston approached her. Pointing to the gun, he said, "I'm a police officer. I'll take that." He observed it was a .22 Cal Rohn automatic pistol that held six shots, the number he had heard fired. Obediently she held the gun out to him. Taking a pen from his shirt pocket, he placed it in the trigger guard, handling the weapon so no contamination of fingerprints would occur, and, for the time being, put it on a table to the side.

Andrews entered cautiously, then went straight to Quiflones's body and checked for vital signs. "He's gone," he pronounced. Then, moving the body slightly, he asked Thurston, "Did you see this, Charlie?" He pointed to the trousers front, where the zipper was down and Quiflones's penis protruded.

"No, but it figures." As the detectives knew, rapists often exposed themselves, believing the sight would turn women on. Thurston added, "Better get Fire-Rescue here to confirm he's dead."

On his portable police radio, Andrews transmitted, "Nineteen-thirty-one to dispatcher."

"QSK. "

"Send me Fire-Rescue to 7201 Tamiami Canal Road, apartment 421, to check a possible forty-five. Also send a two-man unit for crowd control, and dispatch an ID unit, too."

"QSL."

Within less than a minute, approaching sirens could be heard outside as uniform police and Fire-Rescue medics responded to the call. An ID team, though traveling with less urgency, was undoubtedly on the way.

Thurston made a radio call to Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie, as head of the special task force, informing him of developments.

"I'm close by," Ainslie said. "Be with you in minutes."

Andrews, meanwhile, had begun crime-scene routine, making notes, then questioning the woman, still seated.

"Your name, miss, please?"

With an effort she seemed to collect her thoughts, though her hands were shaking. "Dulce Gomez."

She was single, she reported, thirty-six years old, and lived in this apartment. She had been in Miami ten years. She was attractive, Andrews thought, though with a certain hardness to her.

She was employed by Southern Bell as a phone-repair technician, Gomez told him. In the evenings she attended classes at Miami-Dade Community College, where she was majoring in telecommunications. "I want to get a better job."

Thurston, who had joined them, motioned toward Quinones's body. "Do you know this man, Dulce? Had you seen him before he followed you today?"

She shuddered. "Never!"

"We've been watching him. It's possible he might have done this before without your knowing."

"Well . . . now you ask, couple of times I did have a feeling someone was..." She stopped, remembering. "That pendejo sure knew the apartment number, must have come straight up."

Andrews prompted, "And broke down the door?"

She nodded. "He stormed right in like a crazed dog, his click hanging out, and swinging a knife."

Thurston said, "And that's when you shot him?"

"No. I didn't have the gun then, so I gave him a karate kick. He dropped the knife."

"You do karate?"

"Black belt. I let him have it to the head and torso and he went down. Then I got the gun and shot him."

"Where was the gun?"

"In another room. My bedroom, in a drawer."

Thurston was startled. "You mean you already had the guy down, but you still got a gun and shot him emptied it into him six shots?"

The woman hesitated. "Well, I wanted the shit to stay down. He had the knife and was wriggling around. That's why, even after I shot him, I kicked him in the head some."

It explained the sounds light footsteps and thuds that both detectives had heard while approaching the apartment. Andrews said, "But he wasn't wriggling after you shot him."

Gomez shrugged. "I guess not. But I was still pretty scared."

During the detectives' questioning, the paramedics had arrived; it took them only a few seconds to confirm that Quifiones was dead. And two uniform officers were now on duty in the corridor outside. They had sealed off apartment 421 with yellow POLICE LINE tape and were assuring a crowd of assembled tenants: "All the excitement's over, folks," and "Everything's being taken care of."

Malcolm Ainslie had arrived in time to hear the later stages of the questions. Now he said carefully, "Let's be clear about this, Ms. Gomez. You had the man down because you do karate, and he was still on the ground when you got back and put six bullets in him?"

"I already told you that."

"May I see your gun permit, please?"

For the first time the young woman seemed uneasy. "I don't have one. My boyfriend gave me the gun last Christmas. It was under my tree, gift-wrapped. I didn't think "

Thurston said softly as an aside, "Guy's gotta be in the NRA. Only that kind of mind would put a gun under a Christmas tree."

Among police officers, who saw so many deadly shootings and frequently faced death themselves from easily purchased assault weapons, the National Rifle Association did not rate highly.

Andrews asked, "What's your boyfriend's name, Dulce?"

"Justo Ortega. Except he isn't my boyfriend anymore."

Ainslie touched Brad Andrews's arm. "This is getting complicated. I think you should advise the lady of her rights."

"I was thinking that, too, Sergeant." Andrews faced the young woman. "Dulce, there's a Miranda law. Under it I have to advise you that you do not have to talk to me or answer questions. If you do talk from this point on, it's possible something you say might be taken down and used as evidence "

Gomez said testily, "I know all about my rights. None of it applies, because I didn't ask that shithead to break in, and what I did was self-defense."

"All the same, I'm required to finish telling you, so please listen."

When Andrews had concluded, Ainslie added, "We don't usually do this, Ms. Gomez, but I strongly recommend you call your lawyer now."

"Why?"

"I'm not saying it will happen, but someone might argue you didn't have to shoot this man, that you'd already protected yourself enough "

"That's bullshit!" Gomez shouted, then abruptly stopped. "Well, I guess I see what you're saying, even though ''

"We're simply advising you to get a lawyer."

"Look, I'm a working girl; I don't need a lot of big lawyer bills. Leave me alone for a while. I'll sit here and think about it."

Ainslie asked Thurston quietly, "Did you call for a state attorney?"

"Not yet."

"Get one here soon. We need a decision on this."

Thurston nodded and reached for his radio.

The ID crew had arrived and was working quickly. The .22 Cal Rohn pistol retrieved from Dulce Gomez had been sealed in a plastic bag after Thurston had noted the weapon's serial number. He used the apartment telephone, now cleared for use, to talk with Police Headquarters Communications. "I would like a gun check, please." He described the weapon and serial number, then, responding to a question, "Start with Dade County, then go wider if you have to." Communications had computer access to gun registrations locally, nationally, and, if need be, worldwide.

Thurston waited silently, then was suddenly alert. "No shit! Hey, give me that again." He wrote swiftly in a notebook. "Yeah, I got it all. Thanks a lot."

He made another call, this time to Miami Homicide; it lasted ten minutes. Throughout, Thurston's voice was low but excited. Afterward, he signaled Ainslie and Andrews. The trio huddled in a corner of the apartment living room.

"You won't believe this," Thurston said. "Remember an old case the Isham murder? Year and a half ago?"

Ainslie said thoughtfully, "Yes, I do. Victim was killed with a bullet from his own gun, but the gun was missing. It was Dion Jacobo's case. Dion had a suspect but, without a weapon, no proof. It's still unsolved."

"Not anymore. We just found the missing weapon."

"Hers?" Andrews gestured to Dulce Gomez.

Thurston nodded, looking pleased. ''Communications identified the gun, its original owner, everything. And guess the name of Dion's suspect in the Isham case."

It was Andrews who offered, "Ortega?"

"You got it one Justo Ortega, the idiot who gave a hot gun to his girlfriend, Dulce. Anyway, I just talked with Dion Jacobo. He knows where Ortega is, and he's getting a warrant to bring him in. With the gun, Dion says, that case is now solid."

"Win some, lose some," Ainslie said. "Nice going, Charlie." He pointed to the body of Quinones, now covered with a sheet, still lying on the apartment floor. "How do you guys feel about bringing in the girl?"

"Personally I'd hate to tangle with her," Thurston said. "She's as tough as old boots. Just the same, I wouldn't want to see her charged with killing Quinones. In my opinion the creep asked for what he got."

Andrews added, "I go with that."

"I mostly agree with you," Ainslie told them, "though we have to remember that a karate expert's hands and feet are considered deadly weapons. That's why some black belts which Gomez says she is are registered with police. So prosecutors might want to go for manslaughter, proving negligence. Anyway, we'll soon know." He nodded toward the outer doorway, where a short, doughty woman in her mid-fifties had just come in and was surveying the scene.

The newcomer, dressed casually in a blue linen skirt and bright yellow blouse, was Mattie Beason, an assistant state attorney and a favorite of Ainslie's. He respected her consistent toughness in court in support of good police work and testimony, though she could be cruelly severe with detectives prior to trial if their preparation and evidence were incomplete or sloppy.

Beason asked, "So what do we have?"

It was Thurston who laid out the details: his and Andrews's surveillance of Quinones, their quarry's pursuit of Dulce Gomez, the detectives' chase through the apartments, and the death scene discovered in apartment 421.

"Pretty slow in getting after him, weren't you?" Typically, the attorney put her finger on the crucial flaw in Thurston's statement.

He grimaced. "What else can I say except yes?"

"That's honest, anyway. And, fortunately for you, you won't be on trial."

Andrews asked, "Will anybody?"

Ignoring the question, the attorney glanced at Dulce Gomez, still seated by herself, apparently waiting for whatever would happen next. Beason turned to Ainslie. "I suppose you've weighed the karate deadly weapon postulate."

"We were discussing it when you came in."

"Always so thorough, Malcolm." She turned, confronting Andrews. "Before I answer your question, Detective, answer this one. If we charge this young woman with manslaughter in view of her karate skills, what do you see as being in her favor?"

"Okay, counselor." Andrews touched off points on his fingers. "She has a full-time job and attends night school to get ahead good-citizen stuff. She was minding her own business when that scumbagwith an assault and rape record stealthily tailed her. He trespassed in the apartment building and broke down the door to her place when she was alone. Then he came at her with his cock hanging out and a lethal knife in his hand. So what happened? She panicked and, in defending herself, went maybe legally too far. But tell all that to a jury and not only will they never convict, they'll fall over themselves to acquit her."

The state attorney permitted herself a smile. "Not bad, Detective. Maybe you should study law." She turned to Ainslie. "You concur?"

He nodded. "Makes sense to me."

"Sure does. So I have two words for you, Malcolm. Forget it! For the record excusable homicide."

* * *

One postscript followed the drama of Carlos Quifiones's death.

A search of his tenement apartment by police revealed he could not have been the serial killer, since he had been out of town when three of the killings occurred and there was nothing to connect him with the others.

Thus, Quinones was the first to be eliminated from the surveillance suspect list.

* * *

Detective-Sergeant Teresa Dannelly and Detective Jose Garcia did not have murder to contend with during their surveillance. It was the second duty week, and they were observing Alec Polite, a Haitian male living on Northeast 65th Street in Miami's Little Haiti.

Sergeant Dannelly, one of the Robbery detectives assigned temporarily to Homicide, was a tall, thirty-fiveyear-old brunette with ten years of service and considered a resourceful supervisor. She was sometimes known as "Big Mamma" because of her large bosom, a sobriquet she herself used good-naturedly. Dannelly and Jose Garcia of Homicide, usually called "Pop," had known each other for eight years and had worked together before.

As for Alec Polite, his FIVO card described him as a fervent Bible-quoter who claimed to talk with God. He was considered aggressive and sometimes violent, though he had no criminal record. His home, a two-story concreteblock house, was shared with four families, including six or seven children.

This was the first time during the surveillance duty that Dannelly and Garcia had been assigned to cover Polite. Until now they had been watching Edelberto Montoya, who had made no suspicious moves.

Their vehicle was parked close to the Northeast 65th Street house, and to the frustration of both detectives, it had already attracted the attention of people on the street as well as curiosity from several children gathered alongside.

As their supposedly "undercover" transport, Dannelly and Garcia had drawn a fancy, bright blue GM Lumina Minivan. The interior was crammed with technical gear, including cameras, telephones, sound recorders, and state-of-the-art transmitters and receivers, their antennae hidden in the van's paneling. The windows were tinted black, so it was impossible for anyone outside to see if the vehicle was occupied. The minivan was experimental and intended for specialized missions, but no other vehicles were available.

"For Christ's sake!" Garcia had groaned when he first saw the sparkling new Lumina and its high-tech contents. "I love the toys, but in Little Haiti we'll stick out like shit on a wedding cake."

Teresa Dannelly had laughed. "More likely the other way around, Pop. When I saw what we'd drawn, I tried to get it changed, but today there's nothing else. We take this or walk."

Now, at the surveillance site, even more attention was being directed at the Lumina as several people emerged from the two-story house and approached the bright blue vehicle.

"We're gonna have to take off," Garcia said. "This damn thing's like a beacon."

"Let's try something first." On her portable police radio Dannelly selected a secure channel set up for the surveillance operation, and called, "Thirteen-twenty-one to station."

At police headquarters a special dispatcher took the call. "QSK."

"Send a zone car to 265 Northeast Sixty-fifth Street. Instruct unit to stay low-key, no lights or siren, but disperse the small crowd assembled near the building. Ignore blue Lumina van parked nearby."

"QSL." And a moment later, "I am dispatching unit three-two-four to your location."

Two men who had come from the brick house peered in the van windows but obviously could see nothing.

Inside, Garcia whispered, "This is crazy!"

Outside, a third man, gaunt and balding, had joined the others. Dannelly checked an identification photo and announced, "That bald guy is our suspect."

Garcia muttered, "Trouble is, he's surveying us."

The first man who had reached the van tried the door handle. When it wouldn't open he reached into a pocket and produced a heavy screwdriver. His voice, muffled but audible inside, said, "Ain't nobody in there." All three men outside were grouped around the door; the children had moved back.

"I don't believe this," Garcia said. "They're gonna break in."

"If they do, they're in for a surprise." Dannelly had a hand on her service revolver.

It could have become the ultimate paradox if the man with the screwdriver had not looked around to make sure there were no witnesses. What he saw was an approaching police car.

Dannelly said triumphantly, "There's my zone car."

Simultaneously, all three men jumped back and moved away. The newcomer whom Dannelly had identified as their suspect, Alec Polite, slipped while leaving, but managed to support himself briefly on the minivan's hood. Then he, too, disappeared.

The police car stopped and two officers got out and walked around. As usual in Little Haiti when police appeared, everyone scrambled in different directions. One officer glanced at the blue Lumina, then looked away. Moments later the police car left.

"Are we staying or going?" Garcia asked.

"Tell you in a minute." Dannelly used her radio to reach an emergency number for direct contact with the head of the special task force. When Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie answered, she told him, "It's Teresa Dannelly. I have a question."

"Okay, Terry. Shoot. '

"At the first serial scene the Royal Colonial didn't you have a partial palm print, unidentified?" Typically, Dannelly had taken the trouble to read reports of the serial cases ahead of her surveillance duty.

"Yeah, and it still isn't matched."

"Well, we've got a palm print of Alec Polite, I think.

It's on the outside of our van, and it may rain here soon. If we drive somewhere fast, can you arrange to have it checked?"

"Sure can," Ainslie answered. "Drive to the Impound Area and get your van under cover. I'll have someone from ID meet you."

"QSL. Thanks, Malcolm." Then, to Jose Garcia, who was now seated behind the Lumina's wheel, "Let's get out of here!"

"Hooray for that."

* * *

The Miami Police Impound Area, located under the I-95 Freeway near Police Headquarters and protected by a high steel fence, was where vehicles seized by police in raids especially drug raids were impounded as evidence. On the way, Garcia said, "That was smart of you to think of the palm print. I didn't see it happen. Was it a good one?"

"I'm pretty sure." Dannelly pointed forward. "It's right about there."

At the Impound Area the detectives were joined by Sylvia Walden. "I took the partial palm print at the Royal Colonial scene," she said. "I understand you may have a match."

"Either that or we'll eliminate a suspect." Dannelly led the way to the parked Lumina and indicated the area she had seen Alec Polite touch. Walden produced her brushes and powders and began work.

An hour later Malcolm Ainslie received a phone call at Homicide headquarters.

"It's Sylvia Walden. I've compared the print from Sergeant Dannelly's van a good full palm print, by the way with the partial palm we have from the Royal Colonial scene. There is no resemblance whatsoever. Sorry."

"Don't be," Ainslie said. "It means we have one less suspect, which helps."

He telephoned Dannelly and reported the result, adding, "Good observation. So we'll stop the surveillance of Alec Polite. He was never a strong candidate anyway. Take a rest, Terry; we'll advise you and Jose of your next target later today."

* * *

Proving the belief held by detectives that surveillance duty was invariably a gamble, capable of producing results ranging from high drama to slapstick comedy, across town Detectives Hector Fleites and Ogden Jolly had an experience like no other.

Both were on loan from Robbery. Fleites, young and energetic, had ambitions to start a private security business after a few years of learning police work firsthand. On hearing of the special surveillance detail, he had immediately volunteered. Jolly was competent, but more laid-back and with a better sense of humor than Fleites.

The pair's surveillance subject was James Calhoun, known as "Little Jesus" because of a tattooed cross on his chest and his claim to be the second coming Christ, who would soon be heading back to heaven.

"Meanwhile he's been busy," Detective Jolly had joked. Calhoun had accumulated a criminal record for manslaughter, assault, and armed burglary, and had served two terms in prison. Now on parole, he lived in the Brownsville Projects one more unofficial name, for a mostly black and Hispanic community adjacent to the Northside Shopping Center. The area was outside the City of Miami and thus beyond the jurisdiction of Miami police. For undercover work, however, official niceties such as informing local police were ignored, which was why Detectives Fleites and Jolly were seated in a Southern Bell phone-repair truck outside a popular disco called the Kampala Stereophonic.

This was the third night they had trailed Calhoun to the same bar, where he apparently joined cronies and drank steadily through the evening. By 9:00 P.M. the detectives had finished their store-bought sandwiches and gulped down several cups of coffee, and were weary and bored, Fleites regretting having volunteered for what he now labeled "a fat-nothing waste of time."

Then they spotted several prostitutes sauntering up the street and looking provocatively around before entering the Kampala. Both detectives recognized the women from their days in uniformed patrol. At the same time a Cadillac quietly pulled into a dimly lit parking lot nearby; it was almost certainly occupied by a pimp who would keep an eye on his girls while farming them out for business. Prostitution rings changed locales and bars from night to night to avoid police interference. The pattern was familiar to detectives.

Evidently word had been sent out to would-be clients, since a series of cars soon arrived. The drivers would enter the Kampala, then reappear with one of the prostitutes, each pair moving to the nearest dark corner, where their shadows merged though not for long. Clearly this was no high-class boudoir operation.

"Shit!" Fleites said. "If those broads see us they'll go back in and blow our cover."

"Sit way back," Jolly advised. "They won't see us."

"I got to take a leak. Too much coffee, can't wait." Picking a moment when none of the couples was in sight, Fleites left the Southern Bell truck and went down an alley to the rear. When he was finished, he zipped up his trousers and headed out. At the same moment, approaching him in the alley, was a prostitute he had recognized, accompanied by her "trick." Fleites quickly turned back, but the alley dead-ended at a brick wall a few yards away.

Though there was little light, he spotted a Dumpster in the corner. Instinctively Fleites headed for it, pulled himself up, and dropped down inside. A second later, to his disgust, he discovered the Dumpster was filled with some kind of soggy, putrid mess. While he listened for the couple, who had stopped beside the Dumpster, he tried to scrape off what felt like wet potato peelings, fried chicken bones, banana skins, rotten tomatoes, and a soft, rancidsmelling, slimy substance he preferred not to attempt identifying.

Unlike the other couples, the two outside took their time, their sex accompanied by heavy breathing, theatrical "yes, yes"-es, some satisfied sounds, and finally soft conversation. Neither partner seemed in a hurry to move away, and knowing the ways of the business, Fleites guessed that whatever money had been paid by the man was more than usual. Seething with impatience, Fleites wondered if they would ever leave. Finally, after about twenty endless minutes, they did.

When Hector Fleites opened the phone truck door and climbed back in, Jolly looked up, then clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. "Jesus, man you stink! " Then, peering more closely and seeing the garbage clinging to his colleague from head to foot, Jolly broke into peals of laughter.

Fleites nodded unhappily about his condition, and knowing there were two things he could not change. First, there were still six hours of surveillance to be endured. Second, Ogden Jolly would forever recount to fellow detectives the story of Fleites going undercover.

* * *

At the beginning of the third week of surveillance, Detectives Ruby Bowe and Bernard Quinn met with Malcolm Ainslie at Homicide headquarters. Bowe and Quinn had shared, with two detectives from Robbery, the surveillance of Earl Robinson.

From the beginning Robinson had been a major suspect; everything about his record appeared to fit the nature of the serial killings. His FIVO card described him as "very aggressive." He was a former heavyweight boxer; he preached on streets always from Revelation and claimed to be God's judgment angel. His a.k.a. was "Avenger." Robinson's record included armed robbery, second-degree murder, and assaults with a knife.

It was therefore a surprise to Ainslie when Ruby Bowe announced, "All four of us think you should drop Robinson. We're convinced he's harmless. He spends all his free time helping out at a homeless shelter, the Camillus House."

"It's true," Bernard Quinn echoed.

As Bowe described it, all of Robinson's criminality occurred before his adoption of religion a year earlier. From then on he had become a peaceful citizen, holding a regular job and volunteering for civic and charitable causes.

Quinn continued, "In my experience most religious 'conversions' are phony. But I'm convinced this one is genuine."

"We talked to the director of the homeless shelter, David Daxman," Ruby Bowe reported.

"I know him," Ainslie said. "Good man."

"Daxman says he's known Robinson for years and that nowadays he's totally changed." Ruby glanced at her notes. " 'A gentle person who wants to help people' is how Daxman described him. He said Robinson is loved by all the guys at the shelter."

"Okay, cancel Robinson's surveillance," Ainslie instructed. "Scratch him from our list." He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

9

Looking back long afterward, Malcolm Ainslie remembered those three weeks of surveillance as a kaleidoscopic time when circumstances, most of them unforeseen, conspired to disrupt and complicate the work of everyone involved, especially Ainslie himself.

During the first day of group surveillance Ainslie learned that, as a member of the Miami Police Honor Guard, he was required to spend the next two days on duty at the wake and funeral of City Commissioner Gustav Ernst and his wife, Eleanor. The honor guard, commanded by Captain Warren Underhill, a twenty-year Police Department veteran and former U.S. Army major, comprised a roster of sixty handpicked officers men and women chosen for their exemplary police records, physical fitness, and outstanding deportment.

There was seldom a need to activate the honor guard, and the duty normally was not a burden. But for Ainslie it could not have come at a worse time. However, there was no escaping the obligation, as Captain Underhill told him on the phone. "I haven't called on you in quite a while, Malcolm, and I need a senior sergeant as my number two. Also I know you're in charge of the Ernst murder investigation, so it's appropriate for you to be there. Now, I'm sure you're busy as hell, but so is everyone else, and you won't waste your time or mine by offering a bunch of excuses, will you, Sergeant?"

Ainslie chuckled. "If you'd give me a clue, sir, as to which one would work, I'd sure give it a try."

"So you'll be there," Underhill answered crisply.

Ainslie said resignedly, "You know I will."

"Thank you, Sergeant; I appreciate your attitude. There will, of course, be overtime pay."

The Ernst wake, with both bodies in closed coffins, was held at the Klamerus Funeral Home in downtown Miami from noon until 8:00 P.M. Throughout that time six honor guard police in ceremonial uniforms stood at parade rest around the coffins; there were two shifts of guards, each relieved after two hours. Ainslie, who stood every other shift himself, was responsible for the changeovers. It was therefore impossible for him to leave the funeral home, but he kept in touch with surveillance developments as best he could by phone and police radio.

During the wake Ainslie periodically watched Cynthia Ernst as she moved among the flow of some nine hundred viewers throughout the day. She exchanged words with many people and accepted sympathy graciously. Cynthia, too, was in uniform, and must have seen Ainslie, but chose to ignore him.

When the wake finally ended, Ainslie changed out of uniform, then drove to Homicide, where he studied reports of that day's surveillance.

Through most of the next day he had even less time for the investigation.

At 9:00 A.M. the honor guard assembled at Klamerus Funeral Home, where, with military precision, guard members loaded the two coffins into motorized hearses. A procession led by two dozen police motorcycle units and accompanied by thirty patrol cars, all using flashing lights, wended its way to St. Mary's Church, where a funeral service was scheduled for 10:00 A.M.

The enormous church, at North Miami Avenue and 75th Street, was filled to capacity by 9:30 A.M., SO that latecomers were obliged to sit on chairs outside, where, through a PA system, they listened to eulogies from the mayor, the governor, Florida's senior U.S. senator, and the church's own archbishop.

Inside, Ainslie watched and listened with waning patience. Yes, he thought, traditionally a city commissioner received an opulent send-off, but surely enough was enough.

Following the service the procession re-formed and headed to Woodlawn Cemetery. By now the train of vehicles included innumerable mourners in limousines, plus additional escorts from other police departments in the county and the Florida Highway Patrol. The procession's total length was an estimated three miles.

At the cemetery the honor guard lowered the coffins into a common grave, to the accompaniment of Myers. Near the ceremony's conclusion, Cynthia Ernst was presented with the two American flags that had draped the coffins.

From beginning to end the funeral proceedings lasted seven hours.

Any Miami city commissioner who died while in office would, as a matter of course, be given an elaborate funeral. But in the case of Commissioner and Mrs. Ernst the occasion was, as a skeptic expressed it later, as if Hollywood, Disney World, and the Miami Police Department had combined to produce an extravaganza. And as for the large cale police involvement that created most of the spectacle, perhaps as a Miami Herald columnist theorized the next day the force had a consciousness of guilt for not having better protected Commissioner Ernst and his wife, plus a further culpability because the Ernsts' killer was still at large and apparently unknown.

The columnist echoed a query that was circulating widely: What are the police doing to solve what they now acknowledge to be serial killings, and why is it taking so long?

That last question was on Malcolm Ainslie's mind throughout the long hours of the wake and funeral. Each time his gaze drifted over the pair of coffins, he remembered the bodies inside, so cruelly mutilated, and asked himself somberly, Who? Why? Where next?

* * *

Two days after the Ernst funeral an announcement was made on behalf of the Miami City Commission, which, bereft of Gustav Ernst, now consisted of the mayor, the vice-mayor, and two commissioners. Under the city's charter, the announcement pointed out, in the event of the death of a city commissioner, the remaining commissioners would, within ten days and by majority vote, appoint a successor to serve out the ax-commissioner's remaining time. In the case of Gustav Ernst this was two years, half the full term.

The announcement further stated that by unanimous vote the commission had named the deceased's daughter, Cynthia Ernst, to complete her father's term. A second accompanying announcement reported that Major Ernst had accepted the appointment and would resign immediately from the Miami police force.

After completing her father's term, Ms. Ernst would have to stand, if she chose, for public re-election. But as Detective Bernard Quinn said, during a discussion within Homicide on the subject, "Of course she'll run. And how can she possibly lose?"

Ainslie had mixed feelings about Cynthia's status change. On the one hand he was relieved that in terms of police rank she would no longer have authority over him, nor would he report to her about the serial killings. But on the other, instinct told him that her influence in the Police Department could conceivably increase.

* * *

Ainslie knew better than to expect quick results from the surveillance program. By the beginning of the third week, however, he was concerned that the only progress if it could be called that, he mused gloomily was the elimination of suspects Carlos Quinones, Alec Polite, and Earl Robinson.

During the following week there was some doubt about the viability of Elroy Doil as a suspect. According to Detectives Dan Zagaki and Luis Linares, and confirming his FIVO report, Doil was working regularly as a free-lance truck driver; he appeared increasingly unlikely to be the serial killer. Zagaki had gone further and recommended that Doil be dropped as a suspect, but Ainslie had disagreed.

Beyond that there were James Calhoun and Edelberto Montoya, still possibles but not yet probables, the whole picture raising doubts among the increasingly bored detectives doubts that Ainslie silently shared. Was the computerized search for suspects, which originally seemed an excellent idea, actually a misguided waste of time? Eventually he shared the thought with Lieutenant Newbold, adding, "It's easy to give up now, maybe too easy, which is why I hate to do it. My inclination is to go one more week, then, if there's nothing conclusive, quit."

The lieutenant leaned back in his office chair, tilting it precariously, as he often did. "I've been backing you, Malcolm, because I trust your judgment and knew you'd come to me with any problems. You know I'll support you if you feel we really should go on. But I'm getting pressure from Robbery. They want their guys back."

Ainslie had twice seen Lieutenant Daniel Huerta, Robbery's commander, in Newbold's office, and the reason was easy to guess. It would be Christmas soon a time when robberies increased by as much as fifty percent and the Robbery Department's case load would be building. In Homicide, too, where, because of the surveillance program, every detective was working heavy overtime, there were similar pressures.

Between them, Ainslie and Newbold decided on a compromise. The third week of surveillance would continue, though because of the elimination of three suspects, four detectives from Robbery, including the two sergeants, would be released. Then, at the end of the third week, Ainslie would decide whether or not to go for a fourth, and whatever the decision, Lieutenant Newbold would support it. He told Ainslie, "Major Yanes committed the extra troops to us. If I have to, I'll beat down his door and remind him."

Those arrangements, as agreed, continued for two more days. Then an event occurred that swept everything else aside.

It began shortly before noon on Thursday.

At Coral Way and 32nd Avenue, outside a Barnett Bank branch, a Wells Fargo armored truck pulled into a parking lot alongside the bank to make a cash delivery. Moments later one of two security guards inside the truck opened the side door and was confronted by three males one black and two Hispanic, according to witnesses all armed with automatic weapons.

At that precise moment al Miami Police patrol car rounded a corner and directly faced the robbery scene. The robbers saw the police first and opened fire before the officers were even aware a crime was taking place. One police officer died instantly in the hail of bullets; the second, his gun partly drawn, was wounded as he attempted to leave the car. The robbers shot and killed the Wells Fargo security guard and grabbed a bag of money he was carrying. Then they rushed to their own car and sped away. The entire episode lasted less than a minute.

As the robbers left, a bystander named Tomas Ramirez a tall, athletic young man, no more than twenty rushed to the now-unconscious policeman. Observing a portable radio protruding from the wounded officer's gun belt, Ramirez grabbed it and pressed a button at the side.

In the police Communication Center his first message was received and logged.

"Hello, hello. This is Tom Ramirez. Is anybody there?"

A woman dispatcher responded calmly, "Yes, I am. Where did you get the police radio? Is everything all right?"

"No, my God, it isn't! There's been a robbery and shooting here at the bank. Two policemen are shot. Send some help, please."

"Okay, sir. Do not push the button at the side while I am talking. Where are you? Please give me your location.'' The dispatcher was typing into a computer while she talked, her report repeated on the computer screens of six other dispatchers in the communication center.

"Uh, I'm at Coral Way and Thirty-second Avenue, in the parking lot of the Barnett Bank. One policeman and the guard look dead, I think the other policeman's dying. Hurry, please."

Other dispatchers, reading their computer monitors, were already summoning help.

The first dispatcher replied, "Sir, we are on the way. Have the suspects left?"

"Yes, they jumped into their car a gray Buick Century. There were three of them. They all had guns. They really shot up the policemen. They look dead."

"Okay, sir. Try to calm down. We need your help."

Another dispatcher had turned switches, opening the way for a BOLO. It would reach all county and state police and every other law enforcement agency. The call was preceded by a five-second loud continuous tone, signaling its importance and priority. The tone and message following would override all other transmissions everywhere.

"Attention all units. A three-two-nine just occurred at Coral Way and Thirty-second Avenue, Barnett Bank. There are reports of at least two officers down. Suspects left the scene in a gray Buick Century."

The number "three" in the message indicated emergency; the "two-nine" was a signal code for robbery.

From every part of the city, police units began converging at high speed on the Barnett Bank at Coral Way. As a TV reporter commented soon after, "When a cop gets shot, everyone heads for the scene. There are no holds barred. All hell breaks loose."

By now another dispatcher had summoned Fire-Rescue ambulances and paramedics.

The first dispatcher: "Mr. Ramirez, are you still there?" "Yes. I can hear sirens. Thank God they're coming."

"Sir, were you able to get any description of the suspects?"

"I got the license. NZD six-two-one, a Florida plate."

The dispatcher, quickly transferring the information to her computer, thought, This guy is one good citizen!

Another dispatcher promptly sent a second BOLO, again preceded by the five-second priority tone, with the license number of the suspects' car.

"Mr. Ramirez, did you see what the suspects looked like?"

"I got a pretty good look. Yes, I can describe them."

"That's excellent, sir. Please stay there until a unit arrives, and give them that information."

"They're all arriving now. Thank God!"

* * *

Homicide's Lieutenant Newbold, driving with his radio on channel three, heard the Ramirez call for help. Newbold immediately switched his radio to the special surveillance channel and called Ainslie, whose voice, also from a car, came back promptly.

"QSK, Lieutenant."

"Malcolm, take all your people off surveillance. Get them to Coral Way and Thirty-second Avenue. Two policemen and a security guard have been shot in an armored truck robbery, one policeman and the guard reported DOA. I want you to handle it. Assign whoever you want to lead."

Ainslie permitted himself a silent Damn! knowing this unexpected new priority meant the surveillance program was going down the tubes. Aloud, he transmitted, "Okay, Lieutenant. I'll take my units."

The surveillance teams, monitoring the same channel, should have heard the exchange, but Ainslie called, "Thirteen-ten to all units. Did you hear that?"

"Thirteen-eleven to thirteen-ten. Heard it." The other teams on duty made identical reports.

"Then go to Coral Way and Thirty-second, guys. I'll meet you there."

Switching channels, Ainslie called, "Thirteen-ten to dispatcher. Ask any unit on the shooting scene to go to Tac One for me." Tac One was the Homicide channel.

A familiar voice responded from the Barnett Bank scene: "Thirteen-ten, this is one-seven-zero. QSK."

Ainslie asked, "Is this Bart?" Bartolo Esposito was a uniform patrol sergeant, but last names were never used on radio, mainly because the media was listening.

"Sure is, Malcolm. We got big trouble here. What do you want me to do?"

"Rope off the scene, as big an area as you can, and keep everyone away."

"It's being cleared now, except for Fire-Rescue. They're trying to stabilize the wounded officer before transporting."

"Thanks, Bart. I'll be there shortly."

Ainslie returned to channel three and asked the dispatcher to get ID to the scene.

"Doing that now, thirteen-ten."

On another channel Ainslie summoned a state attorney.

* * *

On arriving at the Barnett Bank, Malcolm Ainslie appointed Detective Ruby Bowe as lead investigator. She immediately began questioning several witnesses, including Tomas Ramirez, who supplied a surprisingly good description of the three gunmen, now widely sought fugitives. Despite that information, and the earlier description of the getaway car and license number, the suspects had not been seen, so it seemed likely they had gone into hiding, probably not far away.

Only minutes after Lieutenant Newbold reached the crime scene, Lieutenant Daniel Huerta of Robbery arrived, too. His first words to Newbold were, "I know this is now your scene, Leo, but I need all my people back immediately."

"You got 'em," Newbold told him.

They agreed that Robbery could probably help in identifying the suspects, who most likely had previous robbery records.

Though no one said so, there was always a competitive edge between Robbery and Homicide. Neither side, however, was foolish enough to let rivalry impede an investigation.

As all leads were followed, evidence and information accumulated, including positive identification of the three killers by several witnesses who had pored over mug shots from police files. The charges would now be triple murder, because the wounded second policeman had since died.

Tips from informants about possible hideaways resulted in raids unproductive until two of the offenders were spotted going into a first-floor apartment, part of an abandoned residential complex in the Deep Grove area, a seedy adjunct to Coconut Grove. Local residents who had seen the suspects called police.

Shortly before dawn on the third day after the robbery and murders, a SWAT team converged on the apartment, where all three men were sleeping. Though still heavily armed, the men were taken by surprise, handcuffed, and their weapons seized. The bag of money stolen from the armored truck was recovered, and the Buick Century used in the robbery was found two blocks away.

* * *

Ainslie now knew there was no chance of reviving the surveillance, and wasn't sure it was such a bad thing, given the disappointing results so far. Instead he concentrated on reviewing all the serial crimes. Contrary to his hopes, no leads or fresh ideas developed.

Then the unexpected happened.

Three days after the armored truck perpetrators were arrested, when routines in Homicide were beginning to return to normal, the Dade County assistant medical examiner phoned Malcolm Ainslie.

Sandra Sanchez said, "When we last met, Malcolm, I promised to look among old autopsy records for any unresolved deaths with similar wound patterns. Well, I have, and I'm sorry it took so long, but what I've been searching through is old stuff, papers that aren't computerized "

"Don't apologize," Ainslie said. "The point is, have you found anything?"

"Yes, I think so. It's in a file with a lot of other material, and I've sent the whole lot over to you by messenger. The case is an old, unsolved killing seventeen years ago, with two elderly victims named Esperanza Clarence and Florentina."

"Are any suspects named?"

"There's one. But look, I don't want to tell you any more because you must read through the file. Call me when you're finished."

The file arrived a short time later. As Sanchez had indicated, it contained a lot of paper. Without expecting too much, Ainslie opened the now-faded cover and began to read.

The Esperanzas were both in their early seventies and lived in the Happy Haven Trailer Park in West Dade. Their bodies, discovered by a neighbor, were gagged and bound and in seated positions, facing each other. Both the man and woman had been brutally beaten and had suffered deep knife cuts. The official cause of both deaths was exsanguination loss of blood resulting from wounds.

Ainslie skipped through the remaining medical papers, then found a copy of a police report that revealed the Esperanzas were comfortably off, though not wealthy. They had three thousand Dollars in a bank account and, according to a nephew who lived nearby, the couple usually had several hundred Dollars in cash on hand for their immediate needs. After the murders, no cash whatever was found.

At the back of the file, as Ainslie flipped more pages, he saw a familiar Form 301 a Homicide investigation report. It concerned a juvenile suspect who had been interrogated concerning the Esperanzas' deaths, then released for lack of evidence.

A name on the 301 leaped out at him. Elroy Doil.

10

In conformity with Florida law, Elroy Doil's juvenile crime record had been sealed when he reached the age of eighteen. At that point it became inaccessible to investigators except with a judicial order, which was rarely granted. Similar laws existed in most other states.

In Malcolm Ainslie's opinion, shared by many in law enforcement, the procedure was a legal anachronism, absurdly out of date, and a brazen disservice to law-abiding citizens. During a meeting with Lieutenant Newbold the morning after the discovery of Elroy Doil's name on the old Form 301, Ainslie spread out papers on the lieutenant's desk, his anger barely contained.

"This is insane! There are things here we should have known a year ago."

An hour earlier he had unearthed a file on the unsolved Esperanza killings from a storeroom containing old records. It was not a complete accounting because the crime occurred outside Miami, in Metro-Dade territory. But inquiries had extended across borders, and Miami Homicide opened its own Esperanza file, which included some Metro-Dade memos about the crime. It was among the latter that Ainslie found reference to the interrogation of Doil, which Sandra Sanchez had reported. But without the Sanchez tip there would have been no reason to disinter the long-ago file.

"Of course," Newbold pointed out, "Doil was never arrested or charged."

"Because his mother was smart enough not to let Elroy be fingerprinted. A knife was found near the murder scene with fingerprints on it, and both victims' blood. A bowie knife. Metro-Dade Homicide wanted to compare those prints with Doil's, and they were pretty sure they'd match. But because there wasn't enough evidence for an arrest, plus Elroy being a juvenile, it never happened."

Newbold agreed, "That's sure a lot of coincidence."

"Coincidence? The Esperanza MO at that trailer camp was the same as we're seeing now. The way the bodies have been found gagged, facing each other then the beatings, knife cuts, stolen money. If we'd had Doil's early records, those MO's would have been matched and we'd have been all over him long ago." Ainslie leaned forward staring fiercely. "Do you know how many lives we might have saved?"

Newbold stood up and glared back. "Hey, Sergeant, they're not my laws! Now back off!"

Ainslie slumped into the chair behind him and sighed. "Sorry. But, Leo, our whole juvenile system is crazy, not just in Florida but everywhere. There isn't just juvenile crime anymore; at whatever age, it's plain, simple crime you know it as well as I do. Every day we see murders committed by kids fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, for God's sake! Or younger. Of all weapons arrests, more than half involve teenagers. In Detroit a woman was murdered by boys of eleven and fourteen. Two twelve-year-olds in Chicago threw a kid of five from a high-rise. In England two ten-year-old boys killed a two-year-old. It's the same with robberies, assaults, rapes, carjackings, you name it. Yet here we are, policemen, law enforcers, handcuffed by this ridiculous, archaic system that should have been thrown out years ago."

"You're suggesting that juvenile records shouldn't be sealed at all?"

"Damn right I am! Every crime should go on record, stay there, and be available to investigators from that point on. If parents and the ACLU don't like it, screw 'em! You break the law, it goes on your record. That's the price to be paid that should be paid no matter what your age."

"There's been talk in the Department about petitioning state government along those lines," Newbold said. "Send me a memo with the details about Doil, plus your opinions, and I'll pass it on. Then, if there's a public hearing, I'll recommend you as a witness, and you can sound off all you want."

"I'll write the memo," Ainslie said. "But I doubt they'd want me to appear."

Newbold said sharply, "Don't write that off, or yourself, either." His eyes met Ainslie's directly. "My influence isn't as great as that of some other people we know. But I have friends, upstairs and upstate, who listen to me."

So, Ainslie thought, Newbold knew about Cynthia Ernst blocking his promotion, and had probably guessed the rest. None of it surprised Ainslie. The Police Department could be a small place, where rumors and gossip ran rampant, leaping departmental barriers and every rank.

"So what do you plan next?" Newbold asked. "You'll seek an order to have Doil's record opened, I presume."

"I'm working on that now. I've phoned Curzon Knowles; he's drafting the affidavit. I'll take it to Judge Powell. We don't want this talked about yet, and he won't ask too many questions."

"Your buddy Phelan Powell?" Newbold smiled. "As I recall, His Honor has obliged you often. If I asked what you've got on him, you wouldn't tell me, of course."

"I'm his illegitimate son," Ainslie deadpanned.

Newbold laughed. "That would mean he knocked up your mother when he was what? Twelve? So it's something else, but never mind. In this game we all accumulate our debits and credits."

On that score, of course, Newbold was right.

* * *

Many years before, when Detective Ainslie was new on plainclothes duty, he and his partner, Ian Deane, drove into an alley one night and saw a light blue Cadillac ahead. As they drew closer, a partially naked white male emerged from the driver's side, hurriedly pulling on trousers, and from the other side appeared a scantily dressed young black girl. The detectives recognized both. The girl was a prostitute named Wanda, the man a circuit court judge, Phelan Powell, before whom both detectives had appeared as witnesses on numerous occasions. Powell was tall and athletically built and normally had a commanding personality. This moment was an exception.

He and Wanda shielded their eyes from the headlights, trying desperately to recognize the figures emerging from the car behind them.

As Ainslie and Deane moved closer, momentarily blocking the lights, Wanda emitted a resigned, "Oh luck!'' The judge, in contrast, looked dazed. Then, slowly, the reality of his predicament crystallized.

"Oh my God! Detectives." His voice was desperate and strained. "I beg of you please, please overlook this! I've been an idiot. . . gave in to sudden temptation. This isn't my way, but if you report it, I'll be disgraced, finished!"

He paused and the three men exchanged awkward glances. "Officers, if you'll just let this pass, this one time, please! . . . I'll never forget . . . And whatever I can do for you, I will."

Fleetingly, Ainslie wondered how the judge would have responded to his own plea.

In fact, if an arrest had been made by Ainslie and Deane, or a citation issued, the charges against Powell would have been "soliciting a prostitute" and "loitering and prowling." Both were misdemeanors, for which, assuming this was a first offense, the penalty at most would be a fine; the charge might even be dismissed. But the judge's judicial career would be over.

Ainslie, who was the senior officer, hesitated. He knew the principle of law: justice should be blind, never drawing distinctions. On the other hand . . .

Without analyzing, or consciously debating a decision, Ainslie said to Deane, "I think I heard a radio call. We should get back to the car."

And so, the detectives left.

Over the years that followed, nothing was ever said, by Ainslie or Judge Powell, about that incident. Ainslie told no one, and Detective Ian Deane was killed soon afterward in a shootout during an Overtown drug raid.

But the judge kept his promise. Whenever Ainslie appeared before him as arresting officer or witness, he was treated with utmost courtesy and consideration. There were also times when Ainslie had gone to Judge Powell, seeking quick judicial action in a matter of investigative importance, and he invariably received it as he hoped to do now.

Before leaving Homicide, Ainslie phoned the judge's office. Across the years, Phelan Powell had advanced in the judiciary and was now a member of the Third District Court of Appeals. Ainslie explained the situation to a secretary and after a short wait was told, "The judge is about to begin a hearing. But if you come to the court he'll call a recess and see you in chambers."

* * *

On the way, Ainslie stopped at the state attorney's office, where Curzon Knowles had prepared the required form. When signed by Judge Powell, it would unseal the juvenile record of Elroy Doil. The whole procedure was complicated and time-consuming another reason why it seldom happened.

* * *

A bailiff in the Third District courtroom had obviously been given orders, and the moment Ainslie appeared he was escorted to a front-row seat. Judge Powell looked up, nodded, and almost at once announced, "Let us take a fifteen-minute recess. An urgent matter has come up that requires my attention."

Everyone in court then rose, the judge retired through a door behind him, and the same bailiff escorted Ainslie to the judge's chambers.

Judge Powell, already at his desk, looked up, smiling. "Come in; it's good to see you, Sergeant." He motioned Ainslie to a chair. "Let me guess Miami Homicide is still in business."

"For all eternity the way it looks, Your Honor." Seated, facing Phelan Powell, Ainslie described his mission. The judge was still an imposing figure, though over the years he had put on weight and his hair was almost white. Along with the signs of age were symptoms of strain; Ainslie supposed it went with the job. Appeal courts nowadays were heavily burdened, and even high rankers like Powell could be reversed by another appeal level above them supporting the view, some said, that little had changed since Dickens wrote, "The law is a ass."

At the end of Ainslie's spiel, Powell nodded. "Okay, Sergeant, happy to help you out. Just to make everything regular, I should ask why you want this juvenile record unsealed."

"The record was sealed twelve years ago, Your Honor. Mr. Doil is now a suspect in a serious crime, and we believe some earlier details will help our investigation."

"So be it. Let's break that seal. I see you've brought the papers."

Ainslie passed them across.

In front of any other judge, he knew, the answer he had given to the single question would be dismissed as inadequate. And there would be other questions, more intense, perhaps even combative. Judges loved their prerogatives; many insisted on a verbal fencing match before approving anything. But what Ainslie wanted was a minimal number of people to know that Elroy Doil was now a prime suspect in the serial killings. The fact that Ainslie had not had to explain more details meant there was less chance that the opening of Doil's record would be talked about, or that Doil himself would find out he was under suspicion.

"All this looks in order," Judge Powell said. "Now the ritual is, I have to swear you in, but since we've known each other so long, let's take that for granted. You know the terms of the oath, and I've sworn you in. Okay?"

"I'm duly sworn, Your Honor."

A fast signing by Powell and it was done.

"I'd like to stay longer and talk," the judge said, "but they're waiting for me out there, and the lawyers are on metered time. You know how it is."

"Yes, Judge. And thank you."

They shook hands. At the doorway Powell turned back. "Any other time you need my help, don't hesitate to come. You know I mean that any time."

As the judge disappeared through his private doorway to the bench, Ainslie heard the bailiff's call: "All rise!"

* * *

Criminal Records was in the Metro-Dade Police Department Building, west of Miami International Airport. There, after more form filling and signing, the juvenile file of Elroy Doil was produced and opened in Ainslie's presence. He was free to study the file in a private room down the hall. He could make whatever copies he needed, but not take any part of the file away.

The file was bulkier than he'd expected. When he examined the papers, it became evident that Doil's skirmishes with the law were far greater than even Ainslie had believed.

He counted thirty-two apprehensions by police (with juveniles the word "arrest" was not used), resulting in twenty misdemeanor convictions, undoubtedly a mere sampling of the total number of offenses Doil had committed in his young life.

The record began when Elroy was ten years old a charge of shoplifting a Timex watch. At eleven he was panhandling on a street corner, begging for money at his mother's instigation, and was taken home by police. At twelve he assaulted a woman teacher, inflicting bruises and a cut lip that required stitches. After questioning by the police, Elroy was released to his mother, Beulah Doil a pattern that continued for years and was common with juvenile offenders. A few months later, Elroy was involved with a street gang specializing in purse snatching; and again he was apprehended, then "released to mother." An other purse snatching at thirteen was accompanied by an assault on an elderly woman with the same outcome.

What the Doil file demonstrated, Ainslie thought, was that most juvenile crime was simply not taken seriously, either by police or the courts. He knew from his own experience that a police of fleer could "apprehend" a juvenile at 9:00 A.M. and before the officer went off duty at 3:00 P.M. the same offender would be back on the streets. In the meantime the parents would have been called to Police Headquarters, where the juvenile was released to their custody incident closed.

Even when a juvenile was taken to court, penalties were minor usually a few days' detention at Youth Hall, a notunpleasant place where the kids stayed in fairly comfortable rooms played video games, and watched TV.

Many believed the overall system, or lack of it, spawned lifelong criminals who became convinced, as minors, that crime was incredibly easy to get away with. Even the counselors of juveniles shared that belief and confirmed it in reports.

Counselors were assigned to juvenile offenders after two apprehensions. These were underpaid, overworked individuals with little or no special training, and of whom a college degree was not required. Each counselor, burdened with an impossibly large caseload, was expected to give advice to juveniles and parents advice that was largely ignored.

Elroy Doil apparently had the same counselor, one Herbert Elders, throughout his juvenile crime career. The file contained several single-page sheets headed TNFORMATION REPORT ONLY, all written by Elders, who seemed to have done his best in difficult circumstances. One report, written when Doil was "thirteen, but big for his age and very strong," warned of "a probability of long-term violence."

The same report noted "indifference" from Doil's mother when confronted with the problem.

Ainslie was especially interested in an episode in which Doil, then thirteen, was caught torturing a cat to death. He had cut off the cat's legs one by one, then its tail, using a knife that, according to the report, he habitually carried. He was caught watching the cat writhe in agony as it died. This produced a charge of "cruelty to an animal," resulting in a fine of a hundred Dollars. The record did not say who paid it.

Another "Information Report Only," also by Elders, referred to Elroy's involvement at age twelve in Operation Guidance, a city-sponsored program for underprivileged kids. Father Kevin O'Brien directed the program at Miami's Gesu Church; it included meals, sports, and Bible study every Sunday in the church's fenced-in grounds. Elders referred hopefully to Elroy's "awakening interest in religion and the Bible."

However, another report a year and a half later recorded dismally that religion had not curbed Doil's misdemeanors, nor had his religious-biblical fervor, which, according to Father O'Brien, was "erroneous and incoherent."

Ainslie scribbled down Father O'Brien's phone number and address.

Across the remaining years until Doil reached eighteen, the record showed an orgy of offenses, none of which had ever required Doil to be fingerprinted. A juvenile's fingerprints could only be taken after an arrest for a felony or with a parent's permission, which, according to the file, Beulah Doil consistently refused to give.

It was that absence of fingerprints that left Homicide hamstrung in the final report in the file, where Doil was a strong suspect in the murders of Clarence and Florentina Esperanza. But without prints or other supporting evidence, no charge was laid.

The Homicide detectives' frustration at that time was easy to envisage, Ainslie thought, as he closed the file and headed for a copy machine.

* * *

Using a phone at Metro-Dade headquarters, Ainslie called the number he had written down, and Father O'Brien answered personally. Yes, he told Ainslie, he remembered Elroy well, and would be willing to talk about him. In fact, if the sergeant wished to drive to Gesu Church now, the priest was in his office and available.

* * *

Father Kevin O'Brien, a bright-eyed Irishman, now middle-aged and balding, gestured to the wooden chair facing his desk.

Ainslie sat down, thanked the priest for seeing him, then briefly described his interest in Doil, adding, "I'm not here for evidence, Father. I simply wonder if you could tell me a bit about him."

O'Brien nodded thoughtfully. "I remember Elroy as if I'd seen him yesterday. I think, initially, he enrolled in our program because he needed the meals, but after a few weeks he seemed to become mesmerized by the Bible much more than any of the other kids."

"Was he intelligent?"

"Extremely. But in his own way. And a voracious reader, which surprised me, given his marginal education. Now that I think about it, I remember he had a fascination with crime and violence first in the newspapers, then later in the Bible." O'Brien smiled. "It was the Old Testament that absorbed him, with all its 'holy wars' and God's wrath, pursuit, revenge, and killing. Are you familiar with all that, Detective?"

Ainslie nodded. "Yes, I am." In fact, from memory, he thought, he could have put together the kind of passages that would have attracted Doil.

"I saw great possibilities in young Doil," O'Brien said, "and for a while I thought we had real communication, but in the end we didn't. We talked about the Bible, but he twisted words, including mine, to mean whatever he wanted. He lusted to be an avenger for God, though redressing, I suspect, what he saw as life's offenses against himself. I tried reasoning, pointing out God's love and forgiveness. He didn't listen; more and more he became incoherent. I wish I'd done better."

"I think you did all you could, Father," Ainslie said. "Do you think Doil has some mental disorder? Is insanity too strong a word?"

"Probably." The priest considered. "We all have aberrations; they come in differing packages, and experts decide where aberrations end and madness begins. Thinking back, one thing I'm sure of is that Elroy was a pathological liar. He lied when he didn't have to. He'd tell lies to me, for example, even when he knew I was aware of the truth. It's as if he had an aversion to the truth about anything, no matter how benign."

O'Brien concluded, "I'm not sure I can give you much more. He was simply a boy on the wrong track, and I gather, from the fact that you're here, he hasn't changed course."

"I'm not sure," Ainslie answered. "Father, I have one more question. Did you ever have reason to believe Doil carried a gun? Or any other weapon?"

"Yes," O'Brien said at once. "I remember that very well. Most of the boys in my program talked constantly about guns, though I forbade them to bring any here. But Doil disdained guns and said so. I don't know why, though I was told he did carry a knife something big, I believe, which he boasted about to his friends."

"Did you ever see the knife?"

"Of course not. I would have confiscated it if I had.''

Shaking hands with Father O'Brien as he left, Ainslie said, "Thank you for your help. Elroy Doil is an enigma, but you've helped put a few pieces in place."

* * *

Ainslie returned to Homicide headquarters in the early afternoon, having driven some thirty miles to various ports of call in his quest for information. He immediately summoned a meeting of selected members of the special task force for 4:00 P.M. that day. The list, which he handed to a secretary, comprised Sergeants Pablo Greene and Hank Brewmaster, as well as Detectives Bernard Quinn, Ruby Bowe, Esteban Kralik, Jose Garcia, Dion Jacobo, Charlie Thurston, Seth Wightman, Gus Janek, and Luis Linares. Each of them had been involved in the surveillance duty.

Dan Zagaki, another Homicide detective who had been part of the surveillance, was not included on the list. When Zagaki showed up in Homicide during the afternoon, Ainslie took the young detective to an empty office for a private talk. Zagaki was clearly uneasy as he sat down.

A comparative newcomer, Zagaki had been promoted to detective and assigned to Homicide two months earlier, moving up from uniform patrol duty, where his two-year record since recruitment had been excellent. He was from a distinguished military family, his father a U.S. Army general, an older brother a Marine lieutenant colonel. Since his Homicide arrival, Zagaki had demonstrated eagerness and energy perhaps too much of both, Ainslie reflected now.

"When we were doing our surveillance," Ainslie said, "you reported to me that Elroy Doil was probably not our killer. You recommended we eliminate him as a suspect and discontinue surveillance. Is that correct?"

"Well, yes, Sergeant. But my partner, Luis Linares, felt the same way."

"Not entirely. When I talked with Linares he said he agreed with you that Doil was an unlikely candidate, but he wasn't in favor of ending his surveillance. His words were, 'I wouldn't go that far.' "

Zagaki looked crestfallen. "I was wrong, wasn't I? I guess you're about to tell me that."

Ainslie's voice sharpened. "Yes, very wrong dangerously wrong, in fact. Recommendations by detectives are taken seriously here, though fortunately I didn't act on yours. Now I want you to read these." He handed Zagaki a sheaf of papers. They included the Form 301 from Sandra Sanchez, a report from the seventeen-year-old Homicide file on the Esperanza murders, with Doil named as the principal suspect, and three copied pages from Doil's juvenile file.

At length Zagaki looked up, his expression anguished. "Oh boy, how wrong can you get! What will you do, Sergeant have me thrown out of Homicide?"

Ainslie shook his head. "This is between us; it goes no further. But if you want to stay in Homicide, you'd better learn from what's happened. You've got to take your time making these kind of judgments; you can't come to conclusions solely on appearances. Be a skeptic always. Remember that most of the time, everywhere in life, things are seldom the way they seem."

"I sure will remember, Sergeant. And thanks for not taking this further.''

Ainslie nodded. "One other thing you should know: I've called a meeting this afternoon to revive the surveillance on Elroy Doil. You will probably hear about it, but I've taken you off the list."

Zagaki looked pained. "Sergeant, I may be out of line, because I know I'm getting what I deserve. But is there any way I could persuade you to give me another chance? I won't screw up this time, I promise."

Ainslie hesitated. His judgment told him to stay with his decision. He still had doubts about Zagaki. Then Ainslie remembered his own early days in the force when he had made mistakes, and he supposed there was a forgiveness factor a canon from his past that had never entirely left him.

"All right," he conceded. "Be here at four o'clock."

11

"I take it we all agree on our prime suspect," Ainslie said. There was a murmured chorus of assent from the twelve other members of the special task force crowded into Newbold's office. The lieutenant stood against the back wall, having told Ainslie to take over his desk and chair.

The task force of three sergeants, including Ainslie, and ten detectives sat in chairs or perched on window ledges and tabletops, or simply leaned against the wall. As the meeting progressed, Ainslie sensed the team's excitement, revived by the crucial information revealed through Sandra Sanchez and Elroy Doil's now-exposed juvenile crime record.

On hearing of Doil's criminal past, Sergeant Greene had exploded. "That goddam system! It's insane, a public menace "

Ainslie cut him off. "The lieutenant and I have been over that, Pablo. We agree with you; a lot of people do, and we hope to see some changes. But for the time being, we have to work with the system as it is. In any case, we have Doil's record now."

Greene, though still simmering, muttered, "Okay."

"The first thing," Ainslie informed the group, "is to resume the surveillance of Doil immediately. So I'd like you, Pablo, and Hank to make up a duty schedule. I suggest you work out the next forty-eight hours right here, so you can tell us before we leave. I'll take my turn with the rest of you. Pair me with Zagaki."

Brewmaster nodded. "Got it, Malcolm."

"We need to remember two things about the surveillance," Ainslie continued. "One is to be damn careful Doil doesn't catch on to us. At the same time, we have to stay close enough that we don't lose him. It'll be a balancing act, but we all know what's at stake here.

"Oh, one other thing," Ainslie instructed the sergeants. "Don't put Detective Bowe on the duty schedule. I have some other work for her."

He turned to Ruby Bowe, who was standing near the door. "I want you to check on Elroy Doil's employment record, Ruby. We know he's a truck driver and works for different companies. We want to know which ones. Also, who was employing him, where was he, and what was he doing during the days of each serial killing? You'll have to be low-key because we don't want anyone telling him we're asking questions."

"It will help," Ruby said, "if I can get all the information we have on Doil, including the surveillance reports so far."

"I'll have copies made for you right after this meeting." Ainslie faced the others. "Is there any discussion? Any questions?"

When there was none, he pronounced, "Then let's get on with it."

* * *

The surveillance of Elroy Doil lasted three weeks and two days. Much of the continuous twenty-four-hour vigil by detectives was, as always, uneventful and often boring. At other times it was challenging, particularly when they were trying not to be spotted by the suspect. And throughout that time the weather proved the most miserable of the entire year. Shortly before the watch program began, a cold front moved eastward from Texas into southern Florida and sat in place for two straight weeks. It brought high winds and intermittent, drenching rain that made the task of following Doil, who drove trucks much of the time, unusually difficult. If the surveillance vehicle stayed too close for too long, Doil might notice it in his rearview mirror. On the other hand, in heavy rain with poor visibility, there was an equal danger of losing him if he got too far ahead.

In part the dilemma was solved by using two surveillance vehicles, and occasionally three, each communicating with the others by radio. After staying close to Doil for a while, one vehicle would drop back while another moved forward, taking its place. In police parlance, leapfrogging.

The three-vehicle mix, usually a commercial undercover unit and two innocuous-looking cars, was used for several out-of-town journeys Doil made for trucking companies that employed him as a temporary driver. On a journey to Orlando the six trailing detectives, two in each vehicle, all lost sight of him just after entering that city amid pounding rain. The three vehicles scoured downtown streets, cursing the poor visibility. Finally Detectives Charlie Thurston and Luis Linares, using an undercover Postal Service van, caught up with Doil. They spotted him through the window of a pizza bar, where he was eating alone, his massive shoulders hunched over a plate of food. The truck was parked nearby.

After Thurston had reported to the others by radio, Linares grumbled, "Hell! This caper ain't getting us nowhere. Could go on for years."

"Tell you what, Luis," Thurston told him. "You walk over to old Doil and tell him that. Just say, 'Hey, stupid, we're tired of this shit. Stop fucking around and get on with the next killing.' "

"Funny, funny," Linares said. "You should be on switched-off TV."

Apart from the long journeys, most of the surveillance took place near Doil's home, and that, too, presented problems.

When Elroy Doil's mother, Beulah, was alive, the two of them had lived in a two-room wooden shack alongside the railroad tracks at 23 Northeast 35th Terrace, in the Wynwood area. Elroy still lived alone in the same dilapidated shack, and kept an ancient pickup truck for his own use in the front yard.

Because an unfamiliar vehicle might draw attention if parked for too long, surveillance trucks and cars were switched frequently, though less so after dark or during heavy weather. All the vehicles had tinted windows, so there was never a problem about the detectives being seen.

During some evenings the surveillance teams spent long hours outside Doil's favorite local haunts. One was the Pussycat Theater, a bar and strip joint, another the Harlem Niteclub. Both were well known to police as hangouts for drug dealers and prostitutes.

"Christ!" Dion Jacobo complained after three successive rainy nights parked across the road from the Pussycat. "Couldn't the bastard go to a movie just once? At least one of us could sit a couple rows behind." The detectives never followed Doil into bars or any other lighted place, aware that their faces might be known.

After nearly three weeks of round-the-clock surveillance, none of the detectives had spotted anything incriminating or even out of the ordinary. Ainslie, aware that most of his men were growing bored and frustrated with the assignment, tried to buoy their spirits with new information, most of which came from Detective Ruby Bowel

* * *

Bowe had begun her research at the Social Security office in downtown Miami, where she received complete access to Elroy Doil's work records. Concentrating on the preceding two years, she found that Doil had been employed by five Miami-area businesses: Overland Trucking, Prieto Fast Delivery, Superfine Transport, Porky's Trucking, and Suarez Motors & Equipment. Most of the employment was for short periods. Doil appeared to move back and forth among employers. Bowe visited the companies one by one, her umbrella and raincoat barely protecting her from the continual downpours.

She found Mr. Alvin Travino, owner of Overland Trucking, especially helpful. He was a tiny, wizened man in his late sixties who apologized several times for "my poorly kept records," when in fact they were impeccable. With no trouble at all he produced details of Elroy Doil's assignments for the past two years, including logs with dates, times, mileages, and expenses, covering each trip. To save Ruby Bowe the trouble of taking notes, he called in a secretary to make copies.

Travino also talked about Elroy Doil. "From things I heard, I reckoned he'd been in trouble, but figured it was no business of mine unless he got up to some malarkey here, and he never has. Oh, there was an incident or two, but nothing much that affected his work. The main point is, he's one helluva good driver. Can whip a tractor-trailer rig in and out of the tightest spots, never hesitating, and that ain't easy can't do it half as well myself. He's safe, too. Never had an accident, never brought back one of my rigs damaged."

"Those 'incidents' you mentioned," Bowe prompted. "What were they?"

Alvin Travino chuckled. "Weird stuff; almost sorry I mentioned 'em. Well, now and then we'd find a few things in the cab after he'd been driving maybe six or seven dead birds, another time a couple dogs, once a dead cat."

Ruby's eyes widened. "Wow, that is strange. What did you say to Doil?"

"Well..." The diminutive trucking boss hesitated. "We did have a real brawl one time."

"Really? What happened?"

"At first I thought those dead creatures might have something to do with religion, the way Haitians are with goats. Then I decided, hey, I don't want that crap in my cabs anyway, and I told Elroy."

"And?"

Travino sighed. "Wish I didn't have to tell you this, because I'm beginning to get an idea of what you're after. Fact is, the son of a gun went into a rage. Got red in the face, then pulled out this huge knife and waved it around, cursing like hell at me. Don't mind saying I was scared."

"Do you remember what the knife looked like?" Ruby asked.

Travino nodded. "The darned thing was sharp and shiny, with a long curved blade."

"Did he attack you?"

"No. Because I stood up to him, looked him straight in the eyes, and said loud and clear that he was through. Told him to get out and never come back. He put the knife away, and went."

"But he did come back?"

"Yep. Phoned after a week or two, said he'd like to work a bit. I let him. Had no trouble after that. As I said, he's a good driver."

The secretary returned with a pile of copied trip logs. Travino glanced through the pages, then passed them to Detective Bowel

"You've been very helpful," she said. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell Doil I was here."

A final chuckle. "Not a chance. If I did, he might pull out that knife again."

* * *

At Superfine Transport, Ruby Bowe talked with the general manager and two employees who knew Elroy Doil. There, as with all the companies she visited, they answered questions readily, making it clear they wanted no problems with police.

A thoughtful, articulate black supervisor named Lloyd Swayze expressed what seemed to be a general view of Doil. "The guy's a loner. Doesn't want friends. But leave him alone, let him do a job which he's mostly good at and everything's okay. Has a savage temper, though; saw it explode once when another driver tried to kid him. Doil was ready to kill the guy, I swear."

"Was there a fight?"

"Would have been, except we don't allow that stuff here. I sent the other guy back to work, then told Doil unless he cooled down he'd get his walking papers pronto. For a minute I was sure he was gonna hit me, then he thought better. But the guy could be dangerous, all right, if that's what you're asking."

"Thanks," Bowe said. "You saved me the question."

A burly, rough-tongued Superfine driver, Mick Lebo, confirmed most of Swayze's words, adding, "The guy's a louse. I wouldn't trust him for one goddam second."

Was there anyone among the other drivers, Bowe asked, whom Doil talked to a lot, or might have confided in? It was a standard question, because many murderers were caught after talking about their crimes to supposed friends who later informed or testified against them.

"The bastard never talks!" Lebo scoffed. "Not a word to nobody. If you stood beside him to piss, he wouldn't give you the time o' day 'course, he might piss on your foot." Lebo roared at his own joke, knocking Ruby's arm with his elbow.

As at Overland Trucking, Detective Bowe left Superfine Transport with copies of Elroy Doil's journey records covering the previous two years, and promises from each of her informants that their conversation would remain confidential.

* * *

Unlike the other companies on the list, Suarez Motors & Equipment was not in the trucking business, but repaired automobiles and small trucks, and sold automotive parts. Elroy Doil had been employed there from time to time as a mechanic. However, about a month before, he had quit suddenly and not come back, even to collect his last paycheck from the young owner, Pedro Suarez. When he showed Bowe the check, she asked for a copy.

"Is he a good mechanic?" she asked Suarez.

"Pretty good, and works fast, but what a troublemaker! Picks fights all the time. I was planning to fire him when he quit."

"Would you say Elroy Doil is smart?"

"Yeah. He's smart because he's a quick learner. Explain something or show him how to do it, and he's got it. But he can't control himself."

Suarez went on to explain that the business operated a local delivery service as a sideline. Some of the automotive parts trade was handled that way, and Suarez Motors used two panel trucks to make deliveries for several retail stores in the area with no transport of the own.

"Did Doil ever do those deliveries?" she asked.

"Oh, sure. Sometimes when one of the regulars was off."

"Do you have a record of when that was and where he went?"

Suarez grimaced. "Afraid you'd ask that. I guess we do, but it'll take some digging."

He led Bowe to a small, dusty room at the rear of the building, with overflowing shelves, a half-dozen file cabinets, and a copying machine. Suarez pointed to two of the cabinets. "You want to cover two years? It'll all be in there. 'Fraid you'll have to search through yourself."

"That's fine. If it's okay, I'd like to use the copier."

"Be my guest." Suarez grinned. "If Doil drops by for his check, shall I bring him in?"

"No, please!" Bowe quickly repeated the need for confidentiality.

The search, which involved checking and relating invoices, delivery records, vehicle service schedules, and payroll sheets, took her most of a day. But she left with a complete history of Elroy Doil's work at Suarez Motors.

* * *

Prieto Fast Delivery and Porky's Trucking were similarly cooperative, and the four combined visits revealed other facets of Doil's character, including the fact that he disliked regular work. When he felt like working, probably because he needed money, he would phone one of the companies, and if work was available, he was taken on temporarily. He was obviously smart enough not to cheat or steal at any of those places, but he clearly could not control his turbulent, aggressive nature.

For Ruby Bowe, the next step was to compare the information with dates of the various killings.

Back at her desk at Homicide, Bowe dealt with the outof-Miami murders first. On March 12, Hal and Mabel Larsen were murdered in Clearwater, 260 miles northwest of Miami. On that same day, while working for Overland Trucking, Elroy Doil drove a tractor-trailer load of furniture from Miami to Clearwater, where, according to a driving log and expense record, he arrived during midafternoon and stayed overnight at the Home Away From Home Motel. Bowe, her excitement growing, phoned the motel and learned that it was four blocks from the address of the murder victims. Doil returned to Miami the following day with a load of coiled steel and plastic pipe.

Also, Doil had made a previous trip to Clearwater for Overland only two weeks before and had stayed at the same motel. The first trip, Bowe reasoned, could have allowed him to pinpoint his victims, the second to murder them.

Next were the Fort Lauderdale killings of Irving and Rachel Hennenfeld, reported on May 23, though it was estimated the victims had died four days earlier, on May 19.

During May, Doil had made two trips to Fort Lauderdale, this time for Porky's Trucking, the first on May 2, and again on the nineteenth. A log for the second date showed he had left Miami at 3:30 P.M., made three deliveries in Fort Lauderdale, and returned a few minutes before midnight. Since the distance between the two cities was only twenty-five miles, eight and a half hours seemed a long time to be away. However, the earlier trip, on May 2nd, which included four deliveries in Fort Lauderdale, had taken only five hours. Again Bowe reasoned that finding the right victims probably took less time than the gory business of slaying them.

While the three Miami serial killings did not have quite the same close connections, each one displayed linkages too apposite to be dismissed as coincidence.

During the morning that preceded the killings of Homer and Blanche Frost in the Royal Colonial Hotel, Doil had made eight deliveries and four pickups in Coral Gables while working for Prieto Fast Delivery. Two of the deliveries were to businesses on Southwest 27th Avenue, the same location as the First Union Bank branch where the Frosts had gone that same morning to cash eight hundred Dollars in traveler's checks.

It was entirely possible, Bowe thought indeed probable that Elroy Doil saw the elderly couple, perhaps even in the bank, and followed them back to their hotel. It would then be a simple matter to ride with the Frosts in an elevator to their floor and, while appearing to be just another hotel guest, note the number of their room, then return late that night. All conjecture, of course, but combined with the previous crimes and linkages, it was too credible to ignore.

Then there were the additional Miami killings of Lazaro and Luisa Urbina at Pine Terrace Condominiums, and of Commissioner Gustav Ernst and his wife, Eleanor, at Bay Point. In both cases the records for both Prieto Fast Delivery and Suarez Motors & Equipment showed that Doil made deliveries near the victims' homes.

The Prieto records copied by Detective Bowe noted two Doil deliveries close to the Urbinas' on separate days and within the three weeks preceding the Urbina murders. As for the walled-in, security-guarded Bay Point subdivision, Doil had made two small deliveries there for Suarez Motors not to the Ernsts, but to other houses. The last occasion was more than a month before the Ernst killings, but that, Bowe reminded herself, could be because Suarez employed Doil as a mechanic and only occasionally used him as a driver. The two trips he had made into Bay Point, however, would have familiarized him with the security setup and probably enabled him to talk his way in again with phony delivery papers.

Something else caught Bowe's attention. Her copy of the Suarez Motors paycheck that Elroy Doil had not collected indicated that he had abruptly quit work the day after the murders of Gustav and Eleanor Ernst.

Did Doil quit, Bowe wondered, because he thought he might be a suspect in the serial killings by now and therefore wanted to disappear?

* * *

At the end of her research and analysis, an eager Detective Bowe communicated what she had learned to Sergeant Ainslie. He was buoyed by her news and, while holding a few details back, passed along most of the information to the special task force members, telling them, "Doil's our guy, no doubt of h, so be patient and stay alert despite this lousy weather. Sooner or later he'll slip up and we'll be there to grab him."

Ainslie also kept the assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles, informed. Knowles's reaction, though, was unenthusiastic.

"Sure, Ruby's been resourceful in getting all that stuff. And, yes, it tells us that Doil had the opportunity to knock off all those people and probably did. But proving it is something else, and among the whole schmeer there's not one scrap of solid evidence. You don't even have enough for an arrest warrant."

"I know that, counselor, but I simply wanted to keep you in the picture. There is a positive side, though. We're sure enough about Doil not to waste time on anyone else."

"Yes, I can see that."

"So we'll keep working at it," Ainslie said. "There'll be a break somewhere, soon. I truly believe it."

The attorney chuckled. "I perceive, Malcolm, that you are, after all, still in the faith business."

12

Along with the miserable weather accompanying the more than three-week surveillance of Elroy Doil, an intestinal flu epidemic swept through Miami. Many in the Police Department were affected, including two detectives from the special task force, Jose Garcia and Seth Wightman. Both men were sent home, with instructions to stay in bed, creating even more problems for the surveillance process.

As a result, Malcolm Ainslie and Dan Zagaki were now working a double shift. They had been on duty for nine hours; another fifteen lay ahead. It was 4:20 P.M. and they were parked in a Burdines Department Store delivery van on Northeast 35th Terrace, half a block from Elroy Doil's two-room wooden shack.

Again, it had been raining throughout most of the day. Now, accompanying the rain, the sky was darkening.

Earlier in the day, beginning at 7:00 A.M., Doil had driven an Overland Trucking tractor-trailer rig from Miami to West Palm Beach, then to Boca Raton, returning to Miami at 3:00 P.M. after an approximately 140-mile haul in difficult weather. A trio of surveillance teams, including Ainslie and Zagaki, had monitored Doil's journey. Apart from continuous rain, nothing out of the ordinary happened except for one observation Zagaki made during the drive: "There's something different about Doil today, Sergeant. Not sure what it is . . ."

"He's tense," Ainslie agreed. "You can see it in his driving, and every time he stops he seems restless, like he has to keep his body moving."

"Does it mean anything, Sergeant?" Ainslie shrugged. "Could be drugs, though he has no history of drugs. Maybe he's nervous. Only he knows why. "

"Maybe we'll find out."

"Maybe." Ainslie left it there, but was aware of his own tension, a familiar sense that events were somehow moving toward a climax.

Now, having followed Doil from Overland Trucking's Miami depot to his home, Ainslie and Zagaki were waiting for whatever happened next.

"Mind if I doze off for a while, Sergeant?" Zagaki asked.

"No. Go ahead." It made sense to take some rest if possible on a long double shift, particularly since Doil, after his eight-hour truck journey, was inside and probably sleeping.

"Thanks, Sergeant," Zagaki said as he leaned back and closed his eyes.

Ainslie, though, had no intention of sleeping. He was still not totally confident of the young detective, and the reason he had paired himself with Zagaki was to keep an eye on him throughout the surveillance. To be fair, though, Ainslie reminded himself, Zagaki's performance so far could not be faulted. He had done everything required of him, including long spells of driving. Just the same. . .

It was Zagaki's manner that made him uneasy, and while it was difficult to point to anything specific, Ainslie's finely honed instincts told him that Zagaki's studied respectfulness, which he overdid by saying "Sergeant" a few times too often, was wafer-thin and bordering on fawning.

Or was he himself, Ainslie wondered, being excessively critical?

"Thirteen hundred to thirteen-ten." The call came crisply through his portable police radio.

It was Lieutenant Leo Newbold.

Ainslie answered, "Thirteen-ten. QSK."

To help out during the task force personnel shortage, Newbold had filled in on several shifts, pairing with Dion Jacobo. The two served as backup to Ainslie and Zagaki, and were now positioned a few blocks away in an eightyear-old Ford sedan with dented fenders, peeling paint, and a supercharged engine that enabled it to keep up with anything on the road.

Newbold's voice came back, "Is anything happening?"

"Negative," Ainslie said. "Subject is " He stopped abruptly. "Hold on! He's just come out of the house, heading for his pickup." He reached over and shook Zagaki, who opened his eyes and sat up straight, then started the van's motor.

Outside, Doil lumbered across the yard, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans, his eyes downcast.

After a few moments Ainslie continued, "Subject now in pickup, pulling away, moving fast. We're following."

Doil's departure was unexpected. But Zagaki already had the Burdines delivery van in gear and was pulling out into the road, keeping the battered pickup truck in sight.

"We're rolling," Newbold responded. "Will be behind you. Advise direction of travel."

Ainslie transmitted, "Subject has reached North Miami Avenue, now turning south." And soon after, "He is crossing Twenty-ninth Street."

From Newbold: "We are on Second Avenue, parallel with you. Continue advising cross streets. Ready to cross and take over when you want."

Two surveillance vehicles traveling on parallel streets and switching periodically was a regular, though sometimes tricky, surveillance technique.

The rain was heavier now and the wind rising.

Newbold again: "This is your show, Malcolm. But do you think we should call in a third team?"

Ainslie answered, "Not yet. Don't believe he'll go out of town again . . . He is now crossing Eleventh Street; we are a block behind. Let's switch at Flagler."

"QSL."

Ainslie again: "Approaching Flagler Street. Subject continuing south. You take him, Lieutenant. We'll drop off."

Newbold: "We are on Flagler facing west, making a left turn onto South Miami Avenue . . . Yes, we see him. He's behind us . . . has now passed us . . . two vehicles between us; we'll keep it that way." A few minutes later: "Subject crossing Tamiami Trail, seems to know where he's going, probably west. Suggest we switch again at Bayshore. "

"QSL. Closing on you now."

Thus it happened that Ainslie and Zagaki were in the lead car when Elroy Doil's pickup truck, after driving briefly west on the heavily traveled Bayshore Drive, slowed near Mercy Hospital, then turned right into the wealthy residential area of Bay Heights.

Ainslie reported, "Subject has left Bayshore Drive, entered Halissee Street, driving north, very little traffic." He told Zagaki, "Stay well back, but be sure not to lose him."

It was becoming harder to see, though. While the rain had eased, the light was going, and it would soon be night.

Halissee, like most of Bay Heights, was a street of large, elegant residences, the whole area thickly wooded. A twoway cross street appeared ahead; Ainslie knew it was Tigertail Avenue, with similar style homes. But before reaching Tigertail, the pickup pulled over to the right and stopped under a large, overhanging ficus tree fronting one of the spacious houses. The pickup's headlights went out as Zagaki stopped the Burdines van and switched off his headlights, too. They were about five hundred feet behind, with several parked cars between, but were high enough to see over their roofs and observe the head and shoulders of Doil in the pickup, outlined by a streetlight.

"Subject has stopped on Halissee near Tigertail," Ainslie reported. "He is still in pickup cab. No sign of moving out. "

Newbold responded, "We are a block behind you. Have stopped, too."

They waited.

Ten minutes passed and Doil had not moved.

"He doesn't seem so restless anymore, Sergeant," Zagaki said.

After a few more minutes the police radio came alive and Newbold asked, "Anything going on?"

"Negative. Pickup still stopped, subject in cab."

"I've received a message, Malcolm. I need to talk to you. Can you walk back? If anything happens, we can get you back fast."

Ainslie hesitated. He was not happy about leaving Zagaki alone to watch Doil, and his inclination was to stay. But he knew the lieutenant would have good reason for wanting him.

"I'm coming now," he transmitted, then said to Zagaki,

"I'll be as fast as I can. Don't take your eyes off Doil, and use your radio to call me if he gets out or drives on, or if anything else at all happens. If he does move, follow him closely and above all keep in touch."

"Don't worry, Sergeant," Zagaki said brightly. "My mind will be on nothing else."

Ainslie left the van, noticing as he stepped down that the rain had stopped. In near darkness he walked briskly back the way they had come.

Watching him go, Dan Zagaki thought, Christ, what a Bucking bore you are, Sergeant, don't hurry back!

From the start, Zagaki had wished he was paired with someone more with-it and exciting. Ainslie, in Zagaki's opinion, was an overly cautious plodder, and not very smart. If he were, he'd be a lieutenant by now, maybe captain ranks that Zagaki had his eye on. He knew he had the smarts to go right to the top hadn't he made it quickly out of uniform to become a Homicide detective? The main thing in any kind of force, police or military, was to think promotion, promotion, promotion, remembering that advancement didn't just happen; you had to make it happen! Coupled with that, it was essential to be noticed, frequently and favorably, by the brass above you.

Dan Zagaki had absorbed those rules and tactics by watching his father get promotion after promotion in the U.S. Army, and then his big brother Cedric move up similarly in the Marines. Cedric, like their father, was going to be a general someday he made no secret of it. Cedric had also been contemptuous of young Dan's choice when he joined the Miami Police a ''pissant outfit,'' he had called it. The general hadn't been quite so blunt, but Dan sensed he was disappointed in his younger son's decision. Well, he would show them both.

He smiled, remembering how skillfully he, Detective Dauntless Dan, had buttered up Ainslie these past two weeks, calling him "Sergeant" with almost every other breath. and still the dimwit hadn't noticed. He'd even finagled his way back onto the serial killings caper by pretending to eat humble pie. And Ainslie ate it up. Fool.

"Oh damn," Zagaki muttered, still sitting in the driver's seat of the van. "I've gotta go again. How many times is that today?"

Like several hundred others in Miami, including the absent Detectives Wightman and Garcia, Dan Zagaki had intestinal flu. True, he didn't have an intense fever so far, but the other symptoms, especially an upset stomach and acute diarrhea, were very much in evidence. Unlike others, however, he had kept quiet about it, determined to soldier on at any cost. He just couldn't miss the chance to help break this case. He had managed to take care of his problem during several earlier stops today, but at this moment he had to, simply had to, find a sanctuary and he could see one, a clump of bushes over to the right where he could let nature take its urgent course.

Looking ahead, through the Burdines van windshield, he could still see the silhouette of Doil. If the bastard had stayed still this long, he sure as hell wasn't going to move in the few seconds he needed right now!

Should he call Ainslie by radio to let him know? Nuts to that! Dauntless Dan could make his own decisions.

Moving quickly, Zagaki got out from the van and, closing the door quietly, moved to the bushes. Moments later, Oh, what a relief! But hurry up! He didn't have all night.

* * *

"I'll make this quick, Malcolm," Leo Newbold said. Ainslie had reached the backup surveillance car moments earlier and slipped into the backseat. The lieutenant continued, "I just took a call from Homicide in Philadelphia. We put out a nationwide 'detain and hold' BOLO on a Dudley Rickins. Right?"

"Yes, sir, I okayed it. It's Bernie Quinn's case, and Rickins is the hot suspect. If we question him, we think we can close it."

"Well, they have Rickins in Philadelphia and can hold him seventy-two hours, but someone goofed by not calling us sooner, and there's only twelve hours left before they must let him go. I know you need all the bodies here . . ."

"Just the same, we should fly Bernie up immediately."

Newbold sighed. "That's what I thought."

As both knew, they could ill afford the loss of one more from the surveillance detail, but would have to manage somehow.

"Okay, Malcolm. I'll get word to Bernie and send him on his way. Thanks. Now, you'd better get back. Doil still hasn't moved?"

"Not yet. If he had, we'd have heard from Zagaki."

Ainslie left the backup car and returned the way he had come.

* * *

Goddammit! Zagaki thought, adjusting his clothes. That took too damn long! He hurried back to the van.

As he arrived, so did Malcolm Ainslie.

Ainslie said incredulously, "Where the hell have you been?"

"Well, Sergeant, I just had to "

Livid, Ainslie stormed, "Cut that crap out! Do you think I can't see through you? Didn't I tell you not to take your eyes off Doil, and if anything happened, to call me by radio?"

"Yes, Sergeant, but "

"But nothing! When we finish tonight, you are through with this detail."

Zagaki pleaded, "Sergeant, if you'll only let me explain. I wasn't well "

Ainslie was not listening, but looking around the vehicles ahead toward the pickup truck. Then he shouted, "Oh Jesus, he's gone!"

From the pickup's cab, Elroy Doil's silhouette had disappeared.

Briefly, confusion reigned. Ainslie ran toward the truck, peering into the darkness for any sign of Doil. There was none nor were there any pedestrians in sight. From the pickup he ran the short distance to Tigertail Avenue. The streets were only faintly lit. Doil, Ainslie realized, could easily hide out in any of the shadows.

Dan Zagaki ran up behind him, panting. "Sergeant, I'm "

Ainslie spun around. "Shut the fuck up!" He snarled at Zagaki, "How long were you away from the van?"

"Only a minute or two, I swear." "Don't lie to me, you little bastard!" Ainslie grabbed the younger man by his lapels and shook him. "How long was it?" Seething, he pulled Zagaki toward him until their eyes were close. "Was it the whole time I was gone?"

Zagaki, close to tears, conceded, "Most of it."

Pushing him away in disgust, Ainslie calculated that Doil's head start could be ten minutes, maybe twelve. Even assuming he had remained in the area, he could be anywhere, and there was no way of finding him without help, which left only one choice. He reached for his police radio.

"Thirteen-ten to dispatcher."

A woman's calm voice answered, "Thirteen-ten QSK."

"Send me several units into the area of Tigertail Avenue . . ." Ainslie paused to read the nearest street number.

"Number 1611. We have lost a white male who was under surveillance. Height six feet four, weighs about two hundred and ninety pounds, is wearing red shirt and dark pants. He is armed and dangerous."

"QSL."

Within seconds, Ainslie could hear the approaching sirens, responding to a swiftly transmitted 315 3 for "Emergency," 15 for "Officer needs help."

Newbold and Jacobo would have overheard his transmission, Ainslie knew, and would also be on their way. For the moment there was nothing he could do.

Then he received a radio phone call from the communications sergeant in charge of dispatchers and radio traffic who spoke quickly but calmly.

"Male, just caught your call. I have a boy on the phone who says his grandparents are being beaten and stabbed by a big man in their house."

"That's Doil, Harry! Give me the address fast."

"I'm getting it, hang on. Kid has to whisper." Ainslie could hear the communications sergeant asking patient questions, addressing the caller as "Ivan." The sergeant came back. "Says his grandparents' name is Tempone, their house is on Tigertail. Doesn't know the number, we're looking it up . . . We have it! It's 1643 . . . I've called for paramedics, Malcolm, and am changing that 315 to a 331." Meaning, "Emergency homicide in progress."

Ainslie scarcely heard. He was already running eastward down Tigertail Avenue. Dan Zagaki ran beside him, though Ainslie was long past caring.

As both drew near, they could see the number 1643 on the gate of a large two-story house fronted by several pillars and a wide paved path leading to a carved doorway. A high iron fence surrounded the entire property, with six foot-high shrubbery on both sides. The double gate in the fence provided access from the street; one side of the gate was slightly open.

As Ainslie and Zagaki arrived, two squad cars with flashing lights and fading sirens pulled up, tires screeching. Four officers leapt out, guns drawn. Two more squad cars were speeding down Tigertail from both directions.

Ainslie identified himself and quickly described Doil.

"We think he's inside, maybe killing right now." He ma ,,, tioned to two of the officers. "You two come with me." And to the others, "Gendry, take charge and set up a perimeter four blocks each way. Don't let anyone in or out until you hear from me." One of the officers called out, "Sergeant, over there!" He pointed to the side of the house, where a shadowy figure was creeping along a small path. Another officer directed a powerful flashlight. It lit up the back of a large man wearing a red shirt and brown pants. "That's him!" Ainslie shouted. With his own gun drawn, he raced through the gate and across the lawn, the others following fast behind him. Doil was running now, and Ainslie shouted, "Freeze, Doil, or I'll blow your fucking head off!"

The figure stopped and turned. Doil snarled, "Fuck you!" Moving closer, Ainslie could see a knife in Doil's right hand, and noticed that both of his hands were encased in rubber gloves. With his gun raised, Ainslie ordered fiercely, "Drop that knife. Now!" Then, as Doil hesitated, "And peel off those gloves. Let them fall beside the knife." Slowly, Doil complied. When he had done so, Ainslie bellowed, "Now down on your stomach, you son of a bitch, hands behind you. Move!"

Again slowly, Doil obeyed as Ainslie held his gun steady. Then Zagaki moved in and seized Doil's wrists, quickly handcuffing him behind his back. As he did so, a brief flash from behind lit up the scene.

Instinctively, Ainslie swung around, his gun still raised, but a woman's voice called out. "Sorry, Chief. But it's what the papers pay me for."

"Dammit," Ainslie muttered, lowering his gun. He knew the news media monitored police radio and moved fast with a breaking story, but he was still dismayed to see them so soon. He turned to the uniform officers. "One of you cordon off this area with tape about fifty feet around the entire house and keep everyone behind it."

The yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, which all squad cars carried, was promptly wrapped around anything handy trees, streetlights, fence posts, and the mirrors of two parked police cars creating a visual barrier between detectives and a fast-assembling crowd of spectators and media people.

Zagaki, kneeling beside Elroy Doil, called out, "This guy is covered in blood! So are the knife and gloves."

"Oh no!" Ainslie groaned, knowing instinctively that what he had feared most had happened. Composing himself for the moment, he addressed the increasing number of uniform officers. "Two of you strip this guy down to his underwear; shoes and socks off, too. Keep the clothes off the ground; don't smear any blood, and get everything in plastic bags as soon as possible especially that knife and the gloves. And don't let up; guard his every move. He's violent and dangerous."

The reason for stripping Doil was to preserve the blood on his clothing in its present state. If DNA testing showed it to be a victim's, any case against him could be conclusive. Within the past few minutes Leo Newbold and Dion Jacobo had appeared. The lieutenant asked Ainslie, "Have you been inside?"

"No, sir. Just going."

"We'll come, too, okay?"

"Of course."

Ainslie instructed one of the officers who had been early on the scene, "I want you to come with us. Walk where we do, and stay alert." To Zagaki he added curtly, "You stay right here. Don't move a fucking inch."

Led by Ainslie, the four moved toward the house.

A side door was open probably where Doil had come out. Inside was a dim corridor; Ainslie snapped lights on. They moved forward, the corridor connecting with a paneled hallway and, on the hallway's far side, a wide carpeted and balustraded stairway. Sitting on the bottom step was a small boy about twelve, Ainslie guessed who was staring blankly into space and trembling violently.

Ainslie knelt down and put his arms around the boy, asking gently, "Are you Ivan?" He told the others, "He called nine-one-one." The boy made the slightest movement of his head.

"Can you tell us where. . ."

The boy seemed to shrink into himself, but turned his body, looking up the stairway, then began shaking even more.

The uniform officer said, "Excuse me, Sergeant, he's in shock. I know the signs. We should get him to a hospital."

"Can you carry him out?"

"Sure can."

"Paramedics were called for," Ainslie told him. "They should be outside by now. If they take the boy to Jackson Memorial, go with him and report back where you are. Do not, on any account, leave the boy; we need to talk with him later. Is that clear?"

"All clear, Sergeant." The officer put out his arms and lifted the boy. "Let's go, Ivan." And as they moved away, "It's gonna be okay, son. Just hang on to me."

Ainslie, Newbold, and Jacobo ascended the stairs. As they reached the first landing they spotted an open door directly ahead, the room inside lighted. A few steps inside the room, the trio paused to view the scene they faced.

Dion Jacobo, a veteran who had seen many homicides, made a choking sound, then, with a loud groan, burst out, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"

It was, as Ainslie had feared the moment he saw Doil's bloodstained clothes, a reenactment of the earlier killings this time with an elderly black couple the tragic victims. The only difference was that Doil had obviously acted more hastily and less precisely, probably because he heard the approaching police sirens.

The dead couple were bound, gagged, and facing each other; they had also been brutally beaten around their faces and skulls. One of the woman's arms was twisted and broken; the man's right eye had been pierced by a sharp instrument, leaving the eyeball split. Compared with the earlier killings, the knife slashes on both bodies were more random and deeper. It was as if everything had been done hurriedly, with the killer aware that his time was limited.

Ainslie stood transfixed, fighting to control his deep, despairing anguish, knowing that as long as he lived he would never forget this scene or his own terrible guilt. He must have remained motionless for nearly a minute before being brought back to reality by Leo Newbold's voice. "Malcolm, are you all right?"

With an effort he nodded. "Yes. I am."

"I know what you're thinking," Newbold said softly, "and I'm not going to let you carry this alone. We'll talk about it soon, but for now, would you like to go home and sleep? You're exhausted. Dion can take charge here."

Ainslie shook his head. "I'll see this through, Lieutenant, though I'd like Dion to stay and help. But thanks."

He reached for his portable police radio, beginning the standard procedures.

* * *

It was a few minutes after 1:00 A.M. when Malcolm Ainslie at last reached home, where Karen, whom he had managed to phone a few hours earlier, was waiting up, wearing a pale green cotton robe. When she saw him, she held out her arms and hugged him tightly. After a while she eased back, looking upward, and touched his face.

"It's been bad, hasn't it?"

He nodded slowly. "Pretty much."

"Oh, sweetheart, how much more can you take?"

Ainslie sighed. "Not too many like tonight."

She snuggled closer. "It's so good to have you home. Do you want to talk?"

"Tomorrow, maybe. Not right now."

"Malcolm, dear, go straight to bed. I'll bring you something."

The "something" was hot Ovaltine, a drink from childhood that he liked at night. When he had finished it, and fallen back on his pillow, Karen said, "That should help you sleep."

"And keep the nightmares away?"

Climbing into bed beside him, she held him tightly again. "I'll take care of those."

But while Malcolm slept soundly and deeply, Karen lay awake thinking. How long, she wondered, could they survive this kind of life? Sooner or later Malcolm would have to choose between his home and family and the demons of his work. Like so many other wives, past and present, of Homicide detectives, Karen could not foresee indefinitely a harmony between their marriage and her husband's present career.

* * *

The next day brought an ironic postscript.

A professional photographer with ties to syndicated photo services lived in Bay Heights, a short distance from the Tempone murder scene. It accounted for her immediate presence at the house and the flash photo she had taken while Doil was being subdued.

The dramatic action shot showed Doil facedown and struggling, and Detective Dan Zagaki securing him with handcuffs. Distributed by the Associated Press, the picture appeared in major U.S. newspapers with the caption:

POLICE HERO

Following a dramatic chase, Detective Dan Zagaki of the Miami Police captures and subdues a suspect, Elroy Doil, who is charged with the murders of an elderly black couple and is being questioned about other senal killings. Asked about his work and its dangers, Zagaki replied, "It's risky sometimes. You just do the best you can." He is the son of General Thaddeus Zagaki, Commander, First Army Division, Fort Stewart, Georgia.

13

Elroy Doil was arrested, charged with the first-degree murders of Kingsley and Nellie Tempone, and imprisoned in Dade County Jail. As required by law, a bond hearing was held at the adjoining Metro Justice Building within twenty-our hours of his arrest. Doil was not required to plead; that would come at a preliminary hearing two to three weeks later. Instead, a court-appointed attorney perfunctorily asked for bail, which was just as perfunctorily refused.

Doil showed little interest in the proceedings, refused to speak with his defense attorney, and yawned in the judge's face. However, when he was due to be removed from court and a bailiff grasped his arm, Doil punched the man in the stomach so hard that he doubled up. Instantly two other bailiffs and a prison officer leapt on Doil, pummeled him, shackled him with chains, and removed him from the court. Outside, in the prisoners' holding cell, they hammered him again with their fists until he was gasping and subdued.

While official decisions in the case now rested mainly with state prosecutors, a team of ID technicians and Homicide detectives continued to accumulate evidence. The weapon a bowie knife which Elroy Doil had been holding when apprehended, had blood on the blade and handle that matched the blood of both murder victims. Further, Sandra Sanchez was prepared to testify that that particular knife, identifiable by distinctive notches and serrations, was the actual weapon that killed Kingsley and Nellie Tempone.

According to Sanchez, however, it was not the bowie knife used to kill the Frosts, the Urbinas, or, more recently, the Ernsts. The wound details from the Clearwater and Fort Lauderdale murders had not yet been received in for comparison.

Talking with detectives and the ID crew, the ME added, "That isn't to say Doil didn't do those other murders. Judging by the type of wounds, I think he did. But maybe he bought more than one of those knives, and you'll find others when you search his stuff."

But, to the disappointment of detectives and prosecutors, who had hoped for conclusive solutions to the earlier killings, no knives were found among Doil's skimpy possessions, nor, for that matter, was any other evidence.

Solid evidence in the Tempone case, though, continued to pile up. The blood found on Doil's clothing and shoes matched blood samples from both victims; so did blood on the rubber gloves he had worn obviously to avoid leaving fingerprints. Shoe prints discovered at the crime scene a few with traces of the victims' blood were identical with the sneakers Doil was wearing.

And then, on top of everything, there was the testimony of twelve-year-old Ivan Tempone. Having recovered from his shock, he proved a self-possessed, convincing eyewitness. First to Detective Dion Jacobo, and later to a state attorney, he described how, peering through a barely open door, he had seen Doil torture and kill his grandparents.

"We've simply never had a stronger case," State Attorney Adele Montesino declared when announcing her controversial decision to prosecute Doil for the Tempones' murders only.

* * *

While the prosecution took more than six months to review evidence and prepare for trial, within the Miami Police Department an evaluation moved more quickly. At issue was the bungled surveillance of Elroy Doil that had resulted in the Tempones' needless deaths, though full knowledge of those events was restricted as far as possible to a few high-ranking of ricers. Homicide detectives, in particular, were warned not to discuss the subject with anyone, including their families, and especially not with the media.

For several days following the Tempone killings the Police Department, in effect, held its breath, wondering if some enterprising reporter would dig deeper than the surface news, dramatic though it was. An added concern was that Kingsley and Nellie Tempone were black. Though there was nothing racist about the police blunder the v~ctims could just as easily have been white there were always activists eager to turn any opportunity into a racial confrontation.

Then, remarkably almost incredibly what had been feared did not happen; the information dam held. The media, including national newspapers and network TV, gave prominence to the grisly crime and concentrated on the fact that an apparent serial killer had finally been caught. Another factor helped. Young Ivan Tempone, who, as one news writer put it, "courageously summoned police at the risk of attracting the murderer's attention and being killed himself," became an instant folk hero. There was neither air time nor column inches for much more.

During it all, quietly and behind the scenes, penalties against the officers involved in what was privately described as "the homicide that shouldn't have" were being debated. Because of potential public-relations damage if the truth should ever emerge, the discussion went as high as the chief of police. Final decisions, though, were left to Major Mark Figueras, commander of the Criminal Investigations Section, which ruled all detective branches.

Figueras made his intentions clear: "I want to know everything, every last little detail, with not the smallest bit of fly-shit left out." The instruction reached Lieutenant Newbold, who conducted separate hour-long, taperecorded interviews with Malcolm Ainslie and Dan Zagaki.

Ainslie, while holding nothing back about Zagaki's actions, still blamed himself for reversing his original judgment about the young detective. He told Newbold, "I made a mistake. The responsibility was mine, and I accept it. No excuses."

Zagaki, on the other hand, tried to talk his way out of any wrongdoing, at one point accusing Ainslie of failing to issue explicit orders a statement that Newbold did not believe, and went on record to that effect.

Newbold delivered his report and tape recordings to Major Manolo Yanes, commander of the Crimes Against Persons Unit, who passed them upward to Major Figueras. A few days later the decisions were quietly announced.

Detective Zagaki would receive a reprimand for "neglect of duty," forfeit sixty hours of pay, and be removed as a detective and returned to uniform. Figueras commented to Yanes, "I'd like to throw the son of a bitch out altogether. Unfortunately, under Civil Service rules, neglect isn't a terminating offense."

Sergeant Ainslie would receive a reprimand for "poor judgment." When informed, Ainslie accepted it as his due, even though it would remain like an albatross on his record through the remainder of his police service.

Lieutenant Newbold, however, had other ideas.

Going to the office of Major Yanes, he requested an immediate interview with Yanes and Figueras.

Yanes looked up from his desk. "You sound pretty formal, Leo."

"This is formal, sir."

"Subject?"

"Sergeant Ainslie."

Yanes regarded Newbold curiously, then picked up a phone and spoke quietly. Replacing the phone, he nodded. "Okay, right now."

The two walked silently down a corridor and were escorted by a secretary into Major Figueras's of lice. The secretary closed the door as she left.

Figueras said sharply, "I'm busy, Lieutenant, so whatever's on your mind, make it short."

"I'm asking you, sir, to reconsider the reprimand of Sergeant Ainslie."

"Has Ainslie asked for this?"

"No, sir. I'm asking. Ainslie doesn't know I'm here."

"A decision has been made. I see no reason to change it. Ainslie was at fault."

"He knows that. He's his own biggest critic."

"Then why the hell are you here?"

"Because Sergeant Ainslie is one of our finest officers, Major. His record is exemplary, his crime solving and his leadership outstanding. You know that, I believe. So does Major Yanes. And. . ." Newbold hesitated.

Figueras snapped, "Get on with it!"

Newbold looked both senior officers in the eye. "Recently Ainslie has had a goddam unfair deal, as just about everybody in the PD knows. I think we owe him something."

There was a momentary silence as Figueras and Yanes looked at each other, understanding exactly what Newbold meant. Then Yanes said quietly, "I support the lieutenant, sir."

Figueras glared at Newbold. "What do you want?"

The lieutenant answered, "A ninety-day reprimand."

Figueras hesitated, then said, "Do it. Now get out!"

Newbold did.

What Ainslie would now receive was a reprimand that would go into his file for ninety days, after which the reprimand and all copies would be destroyed.

* * *

As succeeding weeks and months went by, Elroy Doil and the crimes attributed to him ceased to be at the forefront of either Homicide's concerns or public curiosity. For a while, during his trial, public attention came back when Ainslie, Dr. Sanchez, Ivan Tempone, and others appeared as witnesses, followed by a jury's guilty verdict and the judge's sentence of death. Several months later, there was some cursory interest as Doil's automatic appeal was rejected, followed by the news that Doil himself refused to allow further appeals, and an execution date was set.

Then, once more, Doil was almost forgotten until the night when Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie received a telephone call from Father Ray Oxbridge at Raiford prison.

The message was puzzling. Elroy Doil, who would go to the electric chair in eight more hours, had asked to see Malcolm Ainslie before he died.