Miami, It's Murder (19 page)

“Look,” I said, sounding upbeat and sensible, though I wanted to cry myself. “You've got to get yourself some help. You've got to stay together so when they catch this guy you can help convict him.” God forbid if he isn't caught, I thought.

“I don't want him convicted!” she screamed. “I want him dead for what he did to me!”

“I know,” I said bleakly.

“He's after you, you know.”

“You'll get over this,” I said quietly. “You and Ben should see a counselor together.”

“Would you call him for me?”

“Ben? I think it's better if you call. The last person he wants to hear from is a reporter.”

“But I threw his things out in the street. I told him I never want to see him again. Why don't you put this in a story?” she sobbed. There was a crash as she dropped the phone.

“Marianne? Are you all right?”

She did not pick it up again, but I could hear her weeping and muttering.

After several minutes I hung up, called the rape squad, and left a message for Harry, asking him to call her, that she needed help.

I have had better days at the office, I thought, staring at my telephone as though it were the enemy. I left alone, cautiously scanning the parking lot, glad to see a security guard. I waved to her, unlocked the car, checked the interior, and watched to make sure I wasn't followed as I drove out of the lot, toward home.

The world sparkled in the morning, washed by an overnight storm. Alamandas bloomed on their white wooden trellis, a brilliant pink against a sky so blue and grass so green they hurt my eyes. I showered, shampooed my hair with great delight, then went to the office. A surprise waited on my desk, a large manila envelope. Inside, a glossy eight-by-ten of a handsome, smiling Captain Curt Norske, shot aboard the
Sea Dancer
. He leaned against the railing, skyline behind him, relaxed and laughing, probably at something the photographer had said. Lottie must have dug back in her old negatives to find it. Attached was a note in her distinctive left-hand scrawl:
Don't miss the boat!

Even frozen on film, his engaging grin made me smile in return. I slid the photo back into its envelope and dialed Lottie's extension.

“Thanks for making it up for me, Lottie. What a neat way to start the day.”

“Did you see it?” she asked.

“It was on my desk.”

“The editorial.” Her voice sounded flat.

“What?” Though I had glanced through the morning paper over orange juice and coffee, I hadn't read the editorial page. I rarely do. It's usually boring, sometimes embarrassing.

“We endorsed Fielding today.”

I went to the city desk and picked up a copy. The editorial writer extolled Fielding's sterling qualities, enthusiastically recommending him as best choice for governor. I wondered if Dan had seen it yet and suddenly decided what I wanted to do today if I could avoid being captured by some other story.

I bustled out of the newsroom as though headed out on my beat. The Center for Forensic Pathology is a block-long structure that will accommodate as many as 350 corpses at a time. It is not listed among the Chamber of Commerce attractions designed to draw tourists, but Miami does have the world's best morgue.

I stated my business to a disembodied voice piped from somewhere inside the imposing edifice, and the security gate opened. I parked between a shiny black hearse and an unmarked homicide car and skirted the building to the front entrance, guarded by an ancient bronze cannon salvaged from a shipwrecked Spanish galleon.

The
Santa Margarita
sank with all aboard during a hurricane off the Florida coast three hundred and seventy years ago. The chief medical examiner selected the cannon when given the option of choosing the art for his new $12 million complex. The politically appointed committee on art in public places was appalled. Members argued that a big gun, even a big gun crafted by fifteenth-century artisans, is no work of art. They prefer incomprehensible abstracts created by expensive modern artists. One critic denounced the cannon as a militaristic symbol of death.

The barrel is leveled at the inner city, where the last riots broke out. I think it's appropriate.

The chief investigator was at his desk. Records here date back to 1955 and are never disposed of. Common practice is to withhold the files on unsolved murders, assumed to be still under investigation, from the press. Reporters are referred to the police detective on the case. But a twenty-two-year-old homicide is a cold case, and I anticipated no problem unless someone was aware of the link to Fielding. Then it might be considered a political hot potato. I was glad the chief medical examiner was lecturing to students and unaware of my presence.

The investigator, a tough and savvy former police detective, was agreeable, and I tagged along to one of the storage rooms where he dug through several cardboard cartons for the file on Mary Beth Rafferty.

“Just let me know when you're through with it,” he said, and returned to his office.

I settled down at a conference table. The pictures were attached, with color slides in a separate envelope.

In the scene pictures, Mary Beth looked like a broken and discarded doll. No wonder the case haunts Dan, I thought. I closed my eyes and pushed them aside to read the autopsy report, noting that the chief had done the cut himself.

The body is that of a well developed, well nourished female measuring 49½ inches and weighing 55 pounds. The appearance of the deceased is consistent with the stated age of eight years
.

The hair is brown, wavy, and shoulder length, the irises are brown, and the pupils each measure .5 centimeter. Numerous petechiae are present over the conjunctiva
.

Petechiae are little broken blood vessels in the eyes, and I knew enough to understand that their appearance indicates some choking or smothering.

The dentition is in good repair
.

Her teeth were good.

The frenulum is torn, lacerated, and contused
.

The little tag of skin between her lip and gums was torn and bruised.

Examination of the neck reveals multiple linear to regular partially confluent abrasions with scattered contusions
.

Scrapes and bruises on her neck.

I imagined Fielding posing for television in a classroom full of eager children and shivered.

The next line set my heart to thumping.
On the left shoulder there is a bite mark measuring 3.5 by 2.5 centimeters in cross dimension. The abrasions caused by the teeth marks are red and dried. There are underlying subcutaneous purple-red contusions of the soft tissue
.

The redness and bruising under the skin indicated that the bite was inflicted before she died, that her heart was still pumping and blood vessels were crushed. If the bite had occurred after death the underlying tissue would have been bloodless.

What interested me was the bite mark itself. I reached for the pictures and shuffled through them.

Some graphically revealed what the reporters meant when they wrote that Mary Beth was “sexually molested” and “sexually mutilated.”

She had been raped with a tree branch.

Revolted, I tried not to look at those, searching quickly for what I wanted. Taken in the morgue, the naked child, pitifully small on the autopsy table. The close-up of the bite marks. Yes, I thought.

The chief always documented pattern injuries meticulously, even before the science of forensic odontology came afield. There were several closeups, shot from various angles. In each, the marks on Mary Beth's shoulder were placed in perspective by an L-shaped millimeter ruler.

The copy I made of the best photo on the office Xerox was not as clear as I would have liked, even though I fiddled with the contrast controls, making it first lighter, then darker. I folded it into my notebook and walked out with it.

Dr. Everett Wyatt's office is at my favorite old historic downtown address. The Ingraham Building is not all neon, smoke and mirrors, or clever Architectonica, it is one of Miami's jewels, a neo-renaissance revival building finished in 1927. In those days ten stories was ambitious. The lobby ceiling is gold-plated, with one-of-a-kind bronze chandeliers, and the elegant bronze elevator doors are engraved with early Florida wildlife scenes.

The building was named for Miami pioneer James Ingraham, who arranged the historic meeting between Henry Flagler and Julia Tuttle, the mother of Miami, in 1895. The railroad came south as a result, a watershed event that changed the face of Miami forever.

The lobby, with its high ceilings and all that marble, has the kind of echoing acoustics that make me want to yodel.

I sat waiting in a comfortable leather chair in Wyatt's private office, looking west out the windows behind his desk, over a city and expressways undreamed of when the building was new.

An ebullient fast-talking man with an intense curiosity and quick intelligence, Dr. Wyatt has a thriving practice among both living patients and the dead. He expanded his interests into forensic dentistry about a dozen years ago, using his expertise to identify the dead through dental charts. It takes a special kind of dentist to work with skeletons and decomposed, burned, or disfigured bodies. He then expanded into bite-mark analysis.

His expert testimony has been responsible for numerous murder convictions, two of which ended in the electric chair. Bite-mark comparison can be more damning than fingerprint evidence. A suspect might be able to explain his fingerprints found at a crime scene, but it is pretty damn hard to convince a jury that he innocently left his tooth marks in a murder victim.

A room full of patients, most probably unaware of his second specialty, waited. The fact that Wyatt is also my personal dentist won me almost instant access. He remembers me because we always discuss cases, and when in his chair I constantly beseech him to remember, “I'm alive! I'm alive!”

He entered the room with his usual speed, wiry and intense, with brilliant blue eyes. “What's up, Britt? You say it's important?” He glanced at my file, which his receptionist had placed on his desk, and frowned. “When's the last time you had your teeth cleaned?”

“Dr. Wyatt, could you still match the bite mark left on a murder victim twenty-two years ago with the teeth of the man who left it?”

“Twenty-two years!” His bright eyes sparkled with enthusiasm at the idea. “I'll be testifying soon in the case of Archie Greene.”

Greene is a laborer believed to have killed a dozen prostitutes over a number of years.

“He bit one in 1984 and we got his impressions in 1992 and were able to match it up. But never a case twenty-two years old. The killer would have to have some kind of unusual—”

I whipped out the copy of the picture from the medical examiner's file. He took it and frowned. “I'd need to see the original, of course, and have it enhanced.”

“Enhanced?”

“Computer enhancement. Is this from the medical examiner's file?”

I nodded.

“Good, that means we'll have a slide. We'll print the slide and get the computer to bring it up. Amazing what they can do to enhance it.”

He squinted at the copy.

“A classic bite ring,” he exclaimed cheerfully, turning the copy sideways. “Look here, even on this lousy copy you can see marks on the skin from sharp uppers, looks like the drag pattern of an eyetooth.

“The killer would have to have some kind of unusual arrangement of the teeth, a gap or a space that would remain for twenty-two years.” He pondered, thinking aloud. “Any unusual individual characteristics of the teeth themselves would be worn away by now.”

I tried not to betray my growing excitement.

“What would rule out a comparison, extensive dental work?”

“If he had braces, or had his teeth capped or pulled out, forget it.”

“Capped,” I echoed with concern, picturing Fielding's perfect politician's smile.

“Right, capped teeth are man-made.”

“Barring any of that, you think it can be done?”

“I would go after it with enthusiasm,” he said.

“What would you need for the comparison?”

“Ideally, an impression of the suspect's mouth. But we've done it many times from something else the individual has bitten. I just made a match with the tooth marks a guy left when he bit into a moon pie. The best is bologna or cheese, or a candy bar, though those tend to melt. An apple or a cookie would be good.”

He leaned back in his chair.

“Remember when they were trying to get impressions from Bundy in prison? They kept giving him fruit, apples, but he was smart; he knew what they were up to and he ate them right down to the core. They sent me a chewed-up apple core once. Nothing left to get impressions from; he ate it up completely.”

Mind racing, I half listened to Wyatt's Bundy story. Finding Fielding's dentist should be no problem, and though the same bond of confidentiality exists between dentist and patient as with a doctor, lawyer, or member of the clergy, there had to be a way. Maybe justice could be won for Mary Beth Rafferty after all.

“Too bad this didn't happen today,” Wyatt was saying. “Now they swab bite marks for saliva samples that can reveal alpha amylase and the presence of antigens that could help identify the biter through blood grouping.”

I wrote down the case number, and he promised he would pull the file and examine the photos at the ME office by the end the week.

Dr. Wyatt returned to his patients and I asked his receptionist for the rest-room key on the way out. If this works, I thought, it could nail Fielding. What a hell of a story! These are the ones you look for after writing about the same events time after time: the drug murder, the love triangle, the jealous rage, the holiday tragedy. They happen over and over on my beat. But this story was different.

My skin felt flushed and my body quick and light, buoyed by the intensity that throbs through every reporter hot on the trail of a big one. Rarely had I felt so alive, so full of purpose.

The old-fashioned rest room was small compared to those in newer buildings, but immaculate and well kept, with the original black and white tiles. There were four stalls, two sinks on pedestals, and a mirrored wall. My entrance startled a woman standing at one of the sinks in front of the mirror, digging into her large bag. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and smiled at my own face, animated and flooded with color above the string of red and white beads.

It was not quite time to tell my editors, I thought. I had to be sure. Despite Fred's warning and Mowry's intimidation, there would be no resistance from my bosses if I could produce this story. It was still only a possibility, but the prospect electrified me.

In the mirror something about the woman just a few feet away caught my eye. She was tall and slim, with tanned bare legs in sandals, a wraparound skirt, long-sleeved shirt, and dark hair, long and shiny. Beads. Had to be her beads. Similar to mine, but multicolored and longer, worn under one armpit and across her chest like a bandoleer. She must know my Aunt Odalys, I thought, slightly giddy. Our eyes met in the glass. I looked away quickly and entered a stall.

I sighed as I went about my business. I had to be the only woman in the world who excreted more fluid than she took in. Did I really drink that much tea and coffee?