Midnight Rambler

CHAPTER SIX

I parked at the end of Julie Lopez's driveway, my wipers furiously beating back the rain. The neighborhood had always been marginal but had slipped further since my last visit, with cars parked on lawns and black security bars on most windows.

Two police cruisers were parked in front of me. The cops were not going to be happy to see me, but it was a free country. I told Buster to lie down, and he shot me a disapproving look. Aussies are bred for herding, and my dog would have liked nothing better than to spend every waking moment by my side.

I got out and within seconds was soaked to the bone. I trudged up the driveway to the wooden privacy fence that enclosed Julie's backyard. When I stepped through the gate, my feet went ankle-deep in water. If lightning hit nearby, I would be history, yet I continued to slosh ahead. Four uniformed cops and a plainclothes detective were huddled in the backyard. They were looking at something, and I wanted to see what it was.

Carmella Lopez had been my last case as a cop. She and her sister were both prostitutes. Carmella turned tricks in a massage parlor, Julie through a live-in pimp named Ernesto. When Carmella went missing one day, Julie called and asked me to find her. I took the case and during my investigation stumbled across Simon Skell, whom I linked to Carmella's disappearance as well as to seven other missing women in the sex business. There wasn't much hard evidence, just a lot of circumstantial threads that pointed to a rampaging sociopath. The district attorney bought my theories and took Skell to trial. The judge threw out everything but Carmella's case, so the DA tried that. We won, and Skell was sent to Starke.

Yellow police tape lay on the grass. Ignoring it, I sneaked up behind two uniforms and peeked through the gap between their broad shoulders. They were standing beside a coffin-shaped hole. A decomposed woman's body rested at the bottom of the hole. Dressed in a red bikini, she clutched an object between two hands propped on her stomach.

Something in my chest dropped. Even though the woman's face was gone, I knew who it was. Carmella.

Lightning crashed nearby, rocking the ground. None of us flinched. We'd all stood in this shit before. I started backing up. This was the last place on earth I should've been. Suddenly a voice roared my name.

“Carpenter!”

Plainclothes detective Bobby Russo broke from the group and rushed toward me. The head of Broward Homicide, his meaty Irish face resembled a four-alarm blaze. Around his neck hung a necktie painted to look like a dead fish. It was Russo who'd coined the phrase “My day starts when your day ends.”

Russo threw me to the ground and started kicking me. He was out of shape, and the kicks lacked sting. He shouted my name as if he'd already looked into the future and seen what a nightmare I'd created for him and the other detectives who'd helped put Skell away. It was hard to believe that I'd ushered at his wedding and that we were once friends.

The uniforms pulled Russo back. I got in a sitting position and assessed the damage. Nothing felt broken, and I stood up and faced him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Russo shouted.

“She called me,” I answered.

“Who?”

“Julie Lopez. She called me. What happened?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Come on, Bobby. It was my case.”

Russo cocked his fist as if he was going to take my head off. Instead of throwing the punch, he spoke to one of the uniforms.

“Arrest him.”

“On what charge?” I asked incredulously.

Russo pointed at the police tape lying on the ground.

“Trespassing on a crime scene.”

“This is bullshit,” I said.

“Welcome to my world,” Russo said.

The uniform patted me down and handcuffed me. Together we walked down the driveway. He pulled my wallet from my hip pocket, then got into a cruiser and called in my driver's license on his radio. He knew I wasn't wanted for anything, just as Russo knew. They just wanted to harass me. Another crash of lightning shook the ground.

“I'm going to get killed out here,” I yelled.

The uniform's face appeared in the driver's window. His eyes were lifeless, his face the same. I cursed, and saw him flash a smile.

The rain continued to drench me. I had planned to go swimming later, and I told myself that standing in a downpour accomplished the same thing. This was another of my daughter's maxims. I'm supposed to look on the bright side of things.

The uniform took his sweet time, and I let my eyes roam. A cable company repair truck sat on the street with two workers inside. Trenching equipment was in the truck, and I imagined the workers running a line across the backyard and happening upon Carmella's grave.

“Jack, is that you?” Julie Lopez stood inside the open garage, her face ravaged from crying. Shaped like an hourglass, she wore ragged cutoffs and a Miami Heat athletic shirt.

“Hey, Julie,” I said.

“It's Carmella's body, isn't it?” she asked.

I nodded, and Julie stifled a sob. She had clung to the hope that her sister Carmella would turn up alive one day, even though Skell had been put away for her murder. A false hope, but sometimes those are the ones that keep us going.

“They took Ernesto away,” Julie said. “What am I going to do, Jack? Will you tell me what I'm going to do?”

During the trial, Simon Skell's defense attorney had tried to paint Ernesto as Carmella's real killer. Ernesto was no angel, but I'd never pegged him for a killer, and neither had any of the homicide detectives who'd worked the case.

“I don't know,” I told her.

“Please come inside and talk to me,” she said.

“I can't.”

“You don't want to talk to me?”

I showed her my cuffed wrists.

“I'm under arrest.”

“What did you do?”

I took a deep breath. My brain was on overdrive trying to come up with a way to tie the body in Julie's backyard to Simon Skell. Only I couldn't make the connection. My case against Skell had just gone up in flames.

“I fucked up,” I replied.

Julie shut the garage door in my face. My shoulders sagged. As a cop I had never left a stone unturned. When I was hunting for Carmella, I had the sheriff 's office search Julie's property. The backyard was searched several times, including after Simon Skell was arrested. There had been no body.

The uniform climbed out of the cruiser and shoved my wallet into my hip pocket. The look on his face said I checked out. I showed him my handcuffs.

“Let me go, will you?”

“I need to get permission from Russo,” the uniform said.

“Come on. I'm going to get struck by lightning.”

“It's Russo's call,” he said.

“That's horseshit and you know it.”

“Sorry,” he said.

A CSI van appeared on the street and parked behind the cable truck. A two-man forensic crew got out, griping about the weather. The uniform escorted them past me and into the backyard.

I'd reached my boiling point. I opened the driver's door of my car, and Buster stuck his head out and licked my fingers.

“Get the keys,” I told him.

Buster's previous owners had done a helluva job training him.

He pulled the keys out of the ignition with his teeth and dropped them on my palm. I carried a cigar punch on the ring, which was the same size as a handcuff key. I quickly freed myself.

If there's one thing that's gotten me in trouble, it's my temper. I walked down to the street and located Russo's car, a black Suburban. I tossed the cuffs onto the hood, causing a sizeable dent. Russo would go ballistic when he saw it.

Climbing into my car, I hugged my dog and drove away.