Retribution (16 page)

In another guest bedroom, technicians carefully vacuumed the carpet with a specially sanitized steel cylindrical container, collecting each tiny fiber, each piece of lint, each strand of hair. The drapes had been removed from the windows and bagged as evidence.

Dominick found MDPD Detective Eddie Bowman and Special Agent Chris Masterson sitting on the floor
in Bantling’s master bedroom, going through stacks and stacks of videotapes that sat piled in a large decorative wicker trunk. Both detectives had been on the task force since its inception. In the massive oak armoire behind them, a big-screen television played loudly.

‘Hey, Eddie. How’s it going with the search? You guys find anything yet?’

Eddie Bowman looked up from his stack of tapes. ‘Hey, Dom. Fulton has been trying to reach you. He’s downstairs in the shed.’

‘Yeah, I just talked to him. I’ll head down there in a minute.’

On the TV screen, a well-endowed redhead dressed in a plaid Catholic school uniform and garters was bent over the lap of a naked man whose head had been chopped off by the video recorder. Dominick noticed that the uniform was missing an awful lot of fabric in all the wrong places. Especially for Catholic school. The redhead’s bare ass was pushed up high in the air and the headless man was swatting it with a metal paddle as she screamed. It was hard to discern if it was in pain or in pleasure or in both that she cried out.

‘How’d it go in court?’ Eddie asked, apparently unmoved by the screams.

‘Good. The judge found pc and denied bond,’ said Dominick, distracted, staring at the crying redhead on the screen. He looked down into the wicker trunk. There were what looked like at least a hundred black tapes. He could see the white label on one that read
BLOND LOLITA
4/99.

Manny followed Dominick into the room just then, still breathing hard from the flight of stairs and the short walk down the hall. ‘Ah – you never tell the whole story,
Dom. What fun are you, anyway?’ He turned in Eddie Bowman’s direction, leaning on the side of the armoire while he tried to catch his breath. ‘Bantling totally freaked out. Started crying like a woman to the judge that he can’t go to jail. Oh no, not him.’ He chuckled. ‘Boo-fuckin’-hoo.’

A few seconds passed before Manny noticed the disturbing image on the screen that everyone else was staring at. ‘What the fuck are you watching, Bowman?’ He sounded disgusted.

‘Is that why you’re breathing heavy, Bear?’ Bowman returned.

‘Fuck you. I need a cigarette, that’s all, but Dommy Boy here won’t let me smoke on his crime scene.’ He turned his attention back to the TV screen and crinkled his nose at Eddie Bowman. ‘Now, what is this sick shit I’m looking at? That’s not your wife, is it, Bowman?’

Eddie ignored the remark and gestured toward the television. ‘This is what our Mr Bantling liked to watch on his boob tube. Not exactly PBS. He’s got stacks and stacks of what looks like homemade video. I’m no prude, but some of what Chris and I have seen today is just wild. Looks like it’s consensual, but it’s hard to say.’

A king-sized dark oak bed with a tremendous chocolate-colored leather headboard took up most of Bantling’s masculine-looking bedroom. The bed had already been stripped down. Besides the bed, the trunk and armoire were the only pieces of furniture in the room.

A high-pitched scream came out of the TV. The redhead seemed to be crying uncontrollably now, telling the man something in Spanish.

‘Hey Manny, what’s she saying to him?’ asked Dominick.

‘“Stop, please. I’ll be good, please stop. It hurts so much.” This is some sick shit, Bowman.’

‘I didn’t make it, Bear. I just found it.’

The headless man paid no heed. The paddle made a loud thwack as it hit her skin which was, by now, red and raw-looking.

Dominick watched the disturbing image play out on the screen. ‘How many have you looked at, Eddie?’

‘Only three so far. There’s gotta be over a hundred videos here, though.’

‘Any of them have the girls from The Wall?’

‘Nope, no such luck. Not yet anyways. Some have labels with dates, others just a girl’s name, others, there’s no label at all. He’s got a collection of regular movies, too, that Chris found in the bottom cabinet of the armoire. Probably fifty or more of those.’

‘Take them. He might have taped over
Kiss the Girls
with his own version for all we know. We’ll have to watch them all. Maybe we can track down some of the stars on that homemade crap.’ The sound of thwacks continued, as did the crying. Dominick’s stare was again drawn back to the TV. ‘Is that Bantling with the paddle?’

‘Don’t know. He doesn’t say much, and I haven’t recognized any of the rooms from this house in the shots. I would think so, but, then again, I haven’t seen Bantling naked.’

What happened in the other three tapes?’ asked Dominick.

‘Same sort of shit. Very sadistic, but it may be consensual. It’s hard to tell. Likes ‘em young, but I think the girls are of age. Another tough call. Might be the same
man in each video, but his face is always cut off, so it’s hard to tell. We’re hoping, of course, to hit pay dirt and come up with him screwing one of the dead girls.’

‘You’re twisted, Bowman.’ Manny had moved to the walk-in closet now. ‘Hey, you guys didn’t search the closet yet?’

‘No. Crime Scene already photographed, videoed, vacuumed, and dusted. Chris was gonna bag the closet and the shoes after we inventoried the tapes. They’re gonna luminol in here and the master bathroom tonight.’

‘Mister Psycho has some nice taste in clothes, I’ll tell ya,’ Manny called out from the closet. ‘Look at this: Armani, Hugo Boss suits, Versace shirts. Why the fuck did I ever become a cop? I could have been a fruity furniture designer and made a mint.’

‘A
salesman
for a fruity furniture designer,’ corrected Eddie Bowman. ‘He was just a salesman. You should see the fruity furniture designer’s closet.’

‘Great. Now I feel a whole lot fuckin’ better about my life, Bowman. I should have been a salesman. Do they really make that much money, or was psycho getting some help on the side?’

Dominick entered the master bath, which was right off the master bedroom. Italian marble was everywhere – the floors, the dual vanities, the shower. Fine black dust covered every surface, making the coffee cream marble look very dirty. He called back into the bedroom, ‘According to his boss, Tommy Tan, his commissions last year alone put him at a hundred seventy-five thou. No kids, no wife – that’s all play money.’

‘No kids, no
ex-wives,
you mean. It’s those exes that suck the dollars from your paycheck.’ Spoken from experience: Manny had three ex-wives. ‘Jesus! He’s gotta
have ten suits in here that each cost what I make in a month! And it’s all so neat.’ He stuck his head out of the closet again. ‘Bowman, check this out – he’s got his shirts all lined up in a row according to color, and a color-coordinated tie matched to each shirt. Fuckin’ weirdo neat-freak.’

Yeah, go figure, Manny. A guy with a matching tie that doesn’t have a cartoon character or a football player on it. Now that’s suspicious, alright.’ Bowman kept his spot by the TV.

‘Hey, what can I say? I’m a loyalist. Besides, Bowman, you’re the one who wanted to borrow my Bugs Bunny tie, and everyone in this room heard you ask.’

‘That was for Halloween, you moron. It was a joke. I was going dressed as Oscar from
The Odd Couple.?

Dominick pulled out the latex gloves from his pants pocket and opened the wood vanity doors under one of the sinks. Neat rows of shampoo and conditioner, racks of Dial soap, toilet-paper rolls, a hair dryer. In the next, a basket of combs and hairbrushes, more rolls of toilet paper, a box of condoms. ‘Hey, Eddie, Chris,’ he called out. ‘What has Crime Scene done in the master bath so far? They haven’t bagged anything yet, have they?’

Chris Masterson called back, ‘Just prints. After the tapes I was going to do the closet and the bath. Fulton said he was coming up after the shed to help out, but I haven’t heard from him in a while.’

Manny stuck his head out of the closet again. ‘You two lazy shits. We’ve been working long and hard all day to put this fucking nut job behind bars, and you’re sitting around watching pornos. Let me ask ya: Did you
both
need to inventory the tapes, or could that have been
handled by Larry, while Moe did something else besides wait for Curly?’

‘Give me a break, Bear,’ Bowman yelled back. ‘We took a commercial break from the porno and watched the hearing live on TV, so we know it was all of twenty minutes. You were probably at the Pickle Barrel for the last hour and a half having a
café con leche
and getting the phone number of Señora Alvarez number four.’

‘Alright, kids, let’s not fight now,’ Dominick yelled from the bathroom. He opened the medicine chest. Bottles of Advil, Tylenol, and Motrin stood in neat rows alongside a jar of Vicks VapoRub, a tube of K-Y jelly, and a bottle of Mylanta. Tweezers, toothpaste, mouthwash, dental floss, shaving cream, and razor blades lined the next two shelves. All the labels were turned facing out, perfectly straight and aligned, like a pharmacy display shelf. Two slim brown prescription containers faced out. Nothing too interesting, though. One was written in February of 1999 for the antibiotic Amoxicillin by a doctor in Coral Gables. The other was from the same doctor in June of 2000 for the nasal decongestant Claritin.

Dominick pulled out the vanity drawer. A small brown basket filled with cotton balls sat next to lined-up tubes of facial cleanser and moisturizer. Neatly folded washcloths placed in stacks of cream and black lined the back of the drawer. He reached his hand in back behind the washcloths and pulled them out. There, underneath the two neat stacks was yet another clear brown prescription bottle. This one was more than half filled.

‘Pay dirt,’ Dominick whispered aloud, cradling the brown bottle containing William Rupert Bantling’s prescription of Haldol in his gloved palm.

22

She slipped quietly out of the elevator and across the dull pink-and-gray lobby of the Graham Building, the home of 240 prosecutors and now crowded with people at the start of lunch hour. Other Assistant State Attorneys milled about, chatting and waiting for friends and associates to return from court so they could go to lunch. It was all C.J. could do to nod in their direction as she passed them on the way to the parking lot.

She hoped that she looked normal, that some of the color that had washed away from her face that morning in court had returned. She also hoped that if she did look outwardly different – anxious, nervous, or God-knows-what-else – that people would blame it on lack of sleep and the stress of the Cupid case, and not speculate, as lawyers loved to do. Gossip and rumor ran rampant down every hall in the five-story building, and news of divorces and pregnancies often made the office rounds before the intended divorcée was served with papers or the lines on the EPT test turned purple. She hoped that it was only Dominick’s probing eyes that had seen her fear that morning; that it was not otherwise apparent to all around her that something had just gone suddenly, terribly wrong in her life. She flipped on her sunglasses as she rushed out, heading into the bright sunshine. No one seemed to notice a thing. Several prosecutors waved to her as she left, then, just as quickly, resumed their conversations.

She climbed in the Jeep Cherokee, threw the file boxes and her purse on the passenger seat, and desperately searched her glove compartment for the emergency pack of stale Marlboros that she kept hidden behind useless stacks of road maps and packs of Kleenex tissues. A cigarette had never before been as welcome. Or as necessary. Today, of all days, was not the day to have run out. She had then been foolish enough to think, when she stubbed out her last one at 5:00
A.M
., that maybe she should just try quitting again.

The flame on the match head danced and jumped in her fingers, which had yet to stop shaking. Finally, the fragrant snippets of brown tobacco kissed the match and the tip burned a smoldering orange, and the familiar and comforting smell filled the car. C.J. leaned back in the driver’s seat, still in the Graham Building parking lot, closed her eyes, and inhaled the smoke deep into her chest, exhaling slowly. The nicotine found her lungs and raced quickly through her bloodstream, finally reaching her brain and her central nervous system, and, like magic, immediately relaxing all those frayed, tense nerves it had met along the way. It was a sensation that non-smokers would never – could never – understand, but, she imagined, other addicts could. The alcoholic who tasted his first scotch of the day, the junkie who finally got his fix. And even though her hands still shook, for the first time that morning, a sense of calm came over her. She blew a smoke ring through the steering wheel and realized, once again, that she would never be able to quit smoking. Never. She pulled out of the parking lot and turned the Jeep on to the 836 West ramp toward I-95 and Fort Lauderdale.

Dominick. She saw his face at her door, the crease
lines from the worried frown he wore etched deep across his brow. She remembered his hand, hesitant on hers, then the surprised look of hurt that had briefly flickered in his eyes when she tensed at his touch, and his intuitive final words to her. I
think there’s more than what you’re telling me.

She had turned him away. Unintentionally, but it was still a fact. And she didn’t know how to feel about that. Since the moment she had first recognized Bantling in court, an emotional shock wave had washed over her and left all of her feelings numb. Welcoming Dominick’s touch in her office seemed wrong at that moment, out of place. Time had stopped again. It was almost like it had been twelve years ago: a dull and exciting and wonderfully normal life with a dull and exciting and wonderfully normal future ahead and then bam! – an instantaneous repositioning of life’s priorities. Bantling had robbed her yet again. In one tiny slice of time in that bedroom, in that courtroom, her world was no longer the same.

Twelve hours earlier she would not have moved away from Dominick’s touch. Perhaps she would have even moved closer, or met his touch with her own. For the past few months, when they worked together on task force matters, there had existed between them this unspoken flirt, this potential for something more. A sweet, delicious tension that seemed to grow, and no one knew when or where or how or even if it would manifest itself. She noticed that he had called her a few times more than was necessary on legal matters and she had, in turn, called him a few more times than was necessary on police matters. Some pro forma question would be asked, and then the conversation would turn light and airy and a little more personal each time. She had felt the
attraction, the strong chemistry that existed between them, and had wondered ‘what if more than a few times. And if she had been unsure before of his feelings for her, she certainly knew now. The look of alarm on his face in the courtroom, and then concern in his voice when she had returned from court, the probing questions, and the touch at the door.