Garden of Evil (28 page)

I led my story with a police appeal to the public for help in identifying the victim.

Lottie stopped at my desk, her turned up nose sunburned, hair frizzy from the humidity. “So who was she, the floater?”

“No clue,” I said.

Lottie frowned. “Think she just swam out too far?”

“Could be, or maybe she had a seizure.” One of my first stories at The News had been about a teenager from Brooklyn who drowned in a hotel pool in full sight of witnesses who thought he was playing. They didn't realize he was suffering an epileptic seizure. “Maybe she lives alone,” I mused, “and nobody will miss her until she fails to show up for work tomorrow. Then somebody will see the story in the newspaper and put two and two together.”

“She didn't look like the type who'd live alone,” Lottie pointed out. “Somebody who looks like her…”

“We live alone,” I reminded her.

“Damn it to hell, you never miss the chance to rub it in, do you?” She laughed.

“Don't knock it. With our jobs and the hours we keep,” I said wistfully, “maybe we're lucky.”

As I left the newsroom, I sw that some wag from the photo desk had posted one of Lottie's unused prints on the newsroom bulletin board. Skinny little Raymond, standing knock-kneed in the sand, clutched his pail, his little shovel in the other hand, the covered corpse lay in the foreground. A caption had been added, a Miami Beach tourist slogan:
Miami, see it like a native.
Not humorous, I thought, glaring around the newsroom. But the usual suspects were all hunched over their terminals. I yanked the photo off the board and locked it in my desk.

As I drove home through the twilight's tawny glow, I
wondered what the story would reveal about the dead woman tomorrow. That's the beauty of this job, I reminded myself, it's as though I live at the heart of an endlessly complex novel, rich with character, ripe with promise and rife with mystery.

I took Bitsy for a long walk, over the boardwalk. We sat in the moonlight for a time, watching the surf, then strolled home along shadowy streets.

No messages waited.

In the morning I called the Miami Beach detective bureau but Rochek was out, across the bay at the medical examiner's office they said. I took the MacArthur Causeway west, dodging the tourists in their careening rental cars as they eyeballed and photographed the cruise ships. The Ecstasy, the Celebration and the Song of Norway were all in port readying for departure to destinations such as Cozumel, Ocho Rios, Half Moon Cay, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, the ships and trips that dreams are made of.

The cheerful receptionist at Number One Bob Hope Road said Rochek was “with the chief, down in the autopsy room.” She called for permission, then waved me on.

I left the soothing pastel lobby through the double doors, descended the stairs, and went through the breezeway into the lab building, my footsteps echoing along the brightly lit hallway. Poster-size photos of the towering oaks and resurrection ferns along the Witlacoochee River in Inverness lined the walls. The chief medical examiner shot them himself in a place as unspoiled today as when Chief Osceola and his band of warriors holed up there during the second Seminole War. U.S. Army Major Francis Langhorn Dade led his troops into an ambush at the now historic battleground there. On bad days in the city I often wonder if Miamians brought themselves bad karma by naming the county for a leader whose sole claim to fame was being massacred.

I passed the photo imaging bureau, the bone and tissue
bank and found the three people I was looking for at an autopsy room station: the chief, known worldwide as “the titan of medical examiners” and the genius who masterminded this one-of-a-kind building, the scowling Miami Beach detective, and the star attraction, the woman who had brought us all here.

She lay supine, her body incandescent, bathed in the powerful light from sixteen overhead fluorescent bulbs. The wooden block positioned beneath her shoulders had tilted her head back, exposing her throat. Her internal organs had already been scrutinized under the glare of a high-powered surgical lamp on a stainless steel dissection table rolled up beside her.

The fiberglass and epoxy resin tray on which she lay was neutral gray for color photo compatibility and designed to facilitate X-ray transmission. Mounted on wheels, it was custom-built for minimal labor, guaranteeing that the bodies it transports need only be lifted twice: on arrival and departure.

The autopsy had been completed, the Y-shaped incision in her torso and the inter-mastoid cut that ringed her skull loosely sewn shut with a running stitch of white linen cord. Despite the procedure, every surface was scrupulously clean, no drop of blood spilled. Spotless instruments gleamed, and the chief's surgical scrubs and apron remained immaculate, a matter of pride with the man who acknowledged my arrival with a cheerful nod.

“Hey, kid,” the detective growled. He too, wore an apron. He stood near the woman's head, just outside the splash zone.

“Got an ID on her yet?” I slipped out my notebook.

“Not a single call. Not even the usual nut cases who wanna chat. Zip, zilch, nada.”

“Huh.” I was surprised. “Maybe she was a tourist…” I stepped closer, then stopped short. My jaw dropped.

“What happened to her?” I gasped. When I last saw her, the dead woman had been haunting, as ethereal as
Botticelli's Venus emerging from the sea. Today she looked like the loser in a nasty bar fight. It was not the autopsy incisions; I was accustomed to them. What shocked me was her nose, her knuckles and ears, all raw and scraped, and the ugly red-brown bruising on her wrists, forearms and legs.

“Nothing new.” The chief spoke briskly. “Abrasions and other injuries are almost invisible on moist skin and don't show up right away. They become noticeable after the body is dried off and refrigerated. Drying tends to darken wounds.”

“But her eyes,” I protested. Still slightly open, the whites had turned to black on either side of the irises.

“Tache noir,”
he said. “Black spot. Though to be literal, it's actually dark brown. Another part of the evaporation process. Common in sea water drownings.”

The changes in her appearance made me queasy.

“The water's five percent salt dehydrates the tissues causing
tache noir,”
he was saying. “Salt water, being hypertonic, draws out the moisture. When the tissue dries, it's dark brown.”

“But what are all those marks, fish bites?”

The chief shook his head. “I'm afraid not.”

“The news ain't good.” Emery nodded at the doctor.

“It appears our detective friend here has himself a homicide,” the chief said pleasantly. “She was murdered.”

“Why me?” Emery sighed.

I was not sympathetic. She, after all, was the one murdered.

“So,” I said, “you mean somebody attacked her, then dumped her in the water?”

“No,” the chief said. “As I was just apprising Detective Rochek, she was deliberately drowned.” The chief consulted his notes. “Those bruises on her wrists and upper arms were inflicted as she struggled, fighting against being submerged. See here?”

He turned her head to one side with a gloved hand.
“See the bruises on the back of her neck? That's where someone grabbed her from behind and slightly to her left, and pushed her head down. See the marks? His right hand was here,” he demonstrated, fitting his own fingers over the bruises, “on the back of her neck. Fingers on the right, thumb on the left. You can see some little horizontal, linear fingernail abrasions that also showed up after she was dry, where his nails penetrated the skin on the back of her neck as she twisted, trying to escape his grasp.”

Chills rippled across my skin, and the room, a constant seventy-two degrees, seemed colder. My heart thudded as I imagined her panic, her gasps, her snuggles to breathe as she inhaled water. I nearly drowned twice. Once in a dark Everglades canal in a car, later in the ocean, the bright lights of Miami in sight. Somehow I survived both experiences. But nobody had been deliberately holding my head under water.

The chief was pinpointing injuries to the woman's left arm, “…bruising beneath the skin, about a centimeter in diameter, three or four fingernail abrasions here, where he apparently grasped her wrist with his left hand to stop her from flailing and grabbing at him. There are visible bruises on the flexor, the underpart of her left wrist, and another fingernail mark.”

“None of them were visible at the scene,” Rochek said morosely.

“The guy swimming near her,” I said, “it had to be him.”

“Could be,” the detective said.

“How did he do it?” I asked. “A healthy young woman struggling to survive in the water had to be difficult. Why didn't anybody see them, or hear her scream?”

“Looks like he used a scissors grip from behind, wrapped his legs around hers, pinned her ankles together,” the chief said, “then he used his own body weight to submerge her. Her body supported his while he held her down.”

“How long does it take to drown somebody like that?” Rochek asked.

“Two to three minutes. She'd be struggling of course, choking and ingesting sea water. Most likely unable to scream out for help.”

The thought of this woman's terror, helpless in her last moments, both infuriated and saddened me. She had been savagely attacked in the ocean, like in the movie Jaws, but this savage predator was a man.

“All these bruises and abrasions,” the chief mused, peering thoughtfully, “makes it difficult to be certain what's post and what's anti mortem. Some are obviously the result of the wave action, as it swept her body back and forth on the sandy bottom.”

“What else?” Rochek peered over his little half glasses, notebook in hand.

“See here?” The chief pulled down her lower lip to expose pinpoint hemorrhages. “On the inside of her lip, a linear abrasion in the shape of a tooth. He apparently did it when he grabbed her face, to push it underwater or keep her from screaming.

“And on the earlobe here, a one millimeter tear where an earring was lost, ripped off with some force. She still wore the other when found.”

“What about the bathing suit?” I asked.

“That top could be hers. It fits. No way would a swimsuit simply fall off in the water,” the chief said. “The killer either deliberately removed it, or accidentally tore it off in the struggle.”

“Was she raped?” I asked.

“There was no trauma to the genitalia,” the chief said. “The rape workup was negative, but of course that doesn't rule out sexual battery.”

“What started out as a simple drowning,” the detective said, his voice resigned, “is now a whodunit and a whoisit.”

Our eyes met across the dead woman's body. Only we
three cared about what happened to her, I thought sadly, and only because our jobs demanded it.

I really do care, I thought, gazing at the empty shell of her rained body. You must have wanted to live as much as I do.

“You will catch the SOB who did this,” I said. “Right, Emery?”

“No way to find the motive and nail the perp 'til we know who got killed,” he said. “We need her name.” He turned to the chief. “Whatdaya say, Doc? Got anything else here to help me out?”

The chief frowned and picked up her chart. “Her dental work looks excel lent. Porcelain veneers on numbers eight and nine. Good work. Expensive, sophisticated. We'll have Wyatt take a look and do an impression. And we'll have a set of prints for you shortly.”

A thin, olive-skinned morgue attendant had joined us. He uncurled and stretched out the fingers of the corpse's right hand, inked them one by one, then pressed and rolled them into a spoon-like device lined with narrow strips of glossy fingerprint paper.

“She had a bikini wax,” I murmured out loud, “and her hair…when you release her description, be sure to mention that she has frosted highlights, probably done in some high-class salon. See those lighter streaks? They cost big bucks and half a day at a beauty salon. Somebody might recognize that.”

“So that ain't natural, from the sun? Humph.” The detective peered more closely at her hair. “What else? How was her general health, doc?”

“No signs of disease, prior injuries, surgeries or chronic conditions. But there is one other thing that might help. She was a mother.”

“She has children?” I was startled. “How can you tell?”

“She had some stria—stretch marks—on her abdomen,
and the cervix of her uterus showed an irregularity. The nipples tend to be a bit darker, as well.”

“How many kids?” the detective asked. “More than one?”

“No way to know.” The chief shrugged. “But she'd been through at least one pregnancy. Possibly more.”

A child, or children, were left somewhere out there without a mother. Why does no one miss her? I wondered, as we turned to leave.

Birds sang in the sunny parking lot outside and traffic thundered along the nearby expressway, as Rochek filled me in on what little he knew. Her condition indicated that she had died four to five hours before her body surfaced, setting the time of death at between 5:30 and 6:30
A.M.

“Probably closer to six, when that elderly guy said he saw her,” I told Rochek. “He's a good witness, a creature of habit, probably right on target about the time. I always see him when I run in the morning. You can set your watch by him.”

He gave me two photographs, black and whites, a close up of the earring, shot with a small ruler beside it to demonstrate scale, and a mug shot of the corpse.

“I'll try,” I promised, frowning at the second picture. My editors harbor an unreasonable prejudice against seeing dead people in the morning paper, when readers are at the breakfast table. “They probably won't go for it,” I warned.

Maybe it wouldn't matter, perhaps the right message waited in the newsroom. Just because Rochek had no calls didn't mean I wouldn't. Some people will talk to cops but not reporters—and vice versa.