Shadows (7 page)

The wooden floor groaned and creaked in protest; sounds rustled all around them, and something else, a sort of faint whispering.

“Jesus. This place could use some Feng Shui,” Burch said.

Small creatures scurried as their flashlight beams picked up shadowy images, a large armoire, a heavy dining table, and several other oversized pieces of forgotten furniture.

There was a large eat-in kitchen, a dining room, living room, and what appeared to be numerous bedrooms clustered at the rear of the house.

“A fireplace in every room,” Stone noted as they fanned out.

“Look at this.” Burch shined his light onto a pine beam above the front door. The words carved there were difficult to make out.

He read them aloud, playing his light across the letters: “‘Health and Wealth and the Time to Enjoy Them.'”

“Too bad Nolan didn't get his wish.”

“Neither did his father. I have a bad feeling about this place,” Nazario said softly. He paused at the foot of a wooden staircase with an ornate banister. “Too many secrets.”

“Cubans are too superstitious, always full a conspiracy theories,” Corso complained.

“That's Italians,” Stone said.

“No wonder you feel bad vibes. There was a murder here,” Burch reminded them.

Corso wheeled to aim his flashlight at the source of a sudden frantic scrabbling. Something furry skittered into a corner. “Shit! What the hell is that?”

Beady eyes glowed red in the flashlights' glare. Ratlike tails, long pink snouts, and rows of sharp, pointy teeth.

“Ahhh, possums,” Kiki cooed. “A family.”

A mother with nearly a dozen babies blinked at their lights in alarm. But the tiny toylike faces of the babies looked like they were smiling.

“Wish we had some pet food,” Kiki said. “They love it.”

“Yeah,” Stone said. “They used to come to my grandmother's back door at night to eat the food she put out for the cat.” He hadn't seen the possums lately, he realized, not for years.

“Maybe,” Kiki said, thinking aloud, “we could call the Audubon Society, the Wildlife Federation, or PETA and persuade them to seek a protection order for the wildlife on this property. I think sea turtles used to nest here. If we can spread the news and rally enough animal lovers to block the bulldozers—”

“There you go again,” Corso said. “One-track mind. Always scheming.”

“I'll try anything to buy us enough time for a response from the National Heritage Trust and their lawyers—”

“Let's check upstairs,” Burch interrupted.

“Think they'll hold us?” Corso demanded.

“Sure, as long as you don't practice the polka on your way up,” Burch said.

“I'll go first,” Kiki offered. “I weigh the least.”

Burch handed her his flashlight and they followed her up the creaking stairs.

“It's a Belvedere!” she exclaimed from the top. “Look! This is how they built houses before air-conditioning. The second floor is all one huge room with four-way exposure. Windows all around.”

The only furniture left was the remnants of an old double bed.

“Wonder why the widow and kids cleared out so fast after the murder,” Stone said on the way back downstairs.

“Probably scared,” Nazario said.

“Can't blame 'em,” Burch said.

“You know, this is one of the few South Florida houses with a cellar,” Kiki said.

“You're kidding me,” Burch said. “You sure?”

“Yep, that was where the captain hid his booze. The house sits on a natural ridge above the water table. One of the pictures taken during that 1925 raid showed the basement. It's connected to a tunnel they cut, angled down to the water where the
Sea Wolf
was docked. The smugglers could move contraband in and out without being seen.”

“Where's the door to the cellar?” Nazario asked.

“Concealed,” she said. “Most likely under the stairwell here, or in one of the fireplaces. That would be the most logical.”

“Let's see,” Stone said.

He stepped beneath the stairwell, crouched, and pulled up a rotting piece of carpet, exposing a trapdoor. “It's here!”

He yanked at the rusted iron ring. “It's coming loose.” With a last mighty heave and a scraping, clanking sound, it yawned open. What lay beneath was as black as a well.

“Looks like it hasn't been used for years.” He shined his light down into the opening. “There are stone steps.”

“Wouldn't it be something if we found the murder weapon or some new evidence after all this time?” Burch said. “The detectives didn't mention this in their original reports. Maybe they never knew about it. Let's take a look.”

The others followed.

Nazario turned to Kiki, who lagged behind. “Come on.” He reached for her hand.

“No. I'm not going down there.” Her voice sounded thin and nearly inaudible. “I'll wait outside.”

He paused but she was already gone. He shrugged and went after the others.

“This is like one a them horror movies.” Corso's voice boomed too loud in the cramped space. “You know, where a girl holds a flickering candle and slo-o-owly goes down into the dark cellar, where the homicidal maniac is waiting with a bloody axe. The audience screams, ‘No! Don't go down there!' But the dumb bitch always does.”

“If Nolan's killer is waiting down there, he's got a cane and a long gray beard,” Burch said.

Ten limestone steps descended into the cellar. Old kerosene lanterns stood in niches on each side. The underground room, only about six feet high, seemed to extend almost the length of the house.

The sighs and whispers had grown louder. Obviously they came from here. The floor sloped toward a hatchlike door at the east end.

“Looks like the tunnel,” Burch said.

Stone and Nazario labored together to inch the door open.

“I hope,” Nazario said, grunting, “that when it does open, the bay isn't on the other side.”

“If it is, let's hope it's not high tide,” Stone said.

The door began to give way, releasing the smells of dank air and decaying greenery. “Damn thing does lead down to the water. You were right,” Stone said to Kiki. But she wasn't there. He turned. “Where is she?”

“Chickened out,” Nazario said. “She's waiting upstairs.”

“Scared of the dark all of a sudden?” Corso said skeptically.

“I'll see where this goes.” Stone disappeared into the tunnel of sighs and whispers. Crouching, he moved east along the downward slope, stumbling several times over intrusive tree roots that had forced their way through the limestone over the years. Thick cobwebs and trailing roots caught on his clothes and brushed across his face and shoulders. During the descent, he came upon several steplike landings. The tunnel smelled chalky, and of dead fish, leaves, and wet rocks.

“Hey, dawg, let us know what you find down there,” Corso called after him.

He was gone for what seemed to be a long time.

“Stone, you okay down there?” Burch finally called into the mouth of the tunnel.

They heard the muffled sounds of his return.

“Sure enough.” Stone panted as he emerged. “It goes right down to the bay. But you can barely see daylight down there. I could hear the wind, the water, and the birds, but it looks like the opening is blocked by fallen trees and overgrown mangroves. They'd have to be cleared away before it could be used.”

“Too bad they're tearing this joint down,” Corso said. “It'd make a helluva Halloween haunted house. We could sell tickets. Make a fortune.”

The detectives continued to explore the cellar, their flashlight beams illuminating old wooden shutters, a few rusted tools hanging from pegs, and a pine plank shelf built into the far west wall. The wide shelf, about three feet off the floor, held a wooden chest.

“Look at this,” Burch said.

“Maybe it's booze!” Corso's words rang out of the total darkness behind his flashlight beam. “The rumrunner's stash! Think it's still drinkable?”

“Might be.” Burch trained his light on the wooden chest. “Doesn't look like a toolbox.”

“What do you think?” Stone said.

“It's padlocked,” Nazario said.

“You heard Edelman. The man said, ‘Help yourself.' The whole place is coming down in a couple days, anyhow,” Burch said. “Open it.”

Stone used an old hammer to break away the rusted padlock. The hinged lid protested with a groan.

“Something's in here, wrapped in old newspapers.” He reached inside.

“Oh Lordy! Oh my God!” He recoiled. His flashlight clattered to the floor. Eerie kaleidoscopes of light and shadow splashed off the walls, floor, and ceiling as it rolled away.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” He gasped for breath. “Oh shit!”

“What is it? What the hell's in there?” Burch demanded.

“No,” Stone groaned. “Oh, no.” He scrambled to retrieve his flash-light and, from a distance, trained the beam on the wooden chest.

The light spilled inside, exposing a row of small, neatly wrapped bundles. One was disturbed. From it protruded a tiny, dark, and shriveled human hand.

“Sorry, Sergeant.” The chief medical examiner switched off his flashlight. “You're right. This does appear to be mummified human flesh, not a doll.”

Burch sighed in the dark.

“The other bundles are suspiciously similar in size and shape, one row on top of the other. There appear to be at least six or seven.”

“You don't think…”

“No way to know until we get them to the office.”

“Son of a bitch.” Stone's voice echoed eerily off the walls. “What the hell went on in this house?”

“Told you I had a bad feeling,” Nazario mournfully reminded them from the stairs.

“Fetus or full term?” Burch asked.

“Impossible to say. We'll have a better look in the lab.”

The medical examiner flicked his light back on, skimming it along the walls of the passageway descending to the bay. “Fascinating. Hear this place has quite a history.”

“Which just became a helluva lot more interesting. Let's get organized,” Burch said as they climbed the stairs and emerged from under the stairwell. “Naz, call out an ASA. Try to reach Salazar, she's the best. We need a search warrant ASAP. As soon as she draws it up, get it to a judge. Even with the owner's permission, we need to be on the safe side till we know exactly what we've got. God forbid that box arrived here recently.

“Best-case scenario is that it's been collecting dust since the twenties,” he said hopefully. “Even if it's homicide, or multiple homicides, nobody'ud be left alive to prosecute.

“Stone, call Donaldson at fire, tell 'em we need a generator and high-intensity work lights down here. And get Ed Baker and the A-team from the crime lab.”

“I'll ask for an alternate light source as well, the Poly Light,” Stone said as they gathered on the front porch, “to check for hairs and fibers. Doubt if they can lift anything off those limestone walls, but maybe they can get something off the box and the shelf.”

“Hey, where the hell is she?” Burch blinked into the sticky summer haze, eyes readjusting to the light.

Kiki Courtelis was nowhere in sight.

“Yeah.” Nazario stepped to the porch railing to scan their surroundings. “Our sweet little tour guide is MIA.”

“The chick with the briefcase?” The husky uniform officer was tying yellow crime scene tape to a tree. “She just split, took off in a taxicab.”

“Go get her,” Burch said quietly. “Bring her ass back here! Now!”

The officer ran for his squad car, wheeled it around, then swerved to let the lieutenant's approaching unmarked pass.

“He was in a big hurry,” K. C. Riley said, as she joined them.

“Yeah, to bring back Kiki, your new best friend. The M.E. just confirmed the bad news in the basement, we don't know how bad yet. But we turn around and she's gone. Hope you don't mind,” he said, “since your grannies go way back and were such good buds.”

“I don't care who the hell her grandmother was.” Riley's face reddened. “Do what you have to do.”

 

Nazario and Assistant State Attorney Jo Salazar returned in near record time, an hour flat, with a search warrant.

When developer Jay Edelman returned to the site of “the most exciting new project in South Florida,” police and crime scene vehicles, a fire department truck, the medical examiner's car, and a morgue wagon crowded the winding driveway. Forced to leave his silver Navigator, he hiked up to the house, skirting parked vehicles, stumbling over tree roots, rocks, and branches. He wasn't smiling now.

“Fellas, fellas!” he cried, breathing hard and sweating. Damp circles ringed the armpits of his sea-foam silk shirt; his linen trousers were wrinkled and stained by bushes and brambles.

He waved his arms. “Okay!” he shouted over the din of the generator. “Everybody out!”

“Sir!” An irate uniform patrolman waved him back. “Did you see that crime scene tape across the driveway? Get off the property!”

“I'm the owner! Where the hell is Sergeant Burch?” Edelman stood his ground, red-faced and panting.

Burch and Corso stepped out onto the front porch.

“Fellas, fellas,” Edelman greeted them. “What is all this? When I said help yourself, this wasn't what I had in mind. You went way overboard. You have to clear all this out of here.

“Goddammit. Look what all those fucking stones and bushes did to my Ferragamos.” He lifted one foot to examine his scuffed shoe.

“Enough is enough!” he bawled as Lieutenant Riley and Assistant State Attorney Jo Salazar joined the detectives.

“What's this?” He held the papers Salazar handed him out at arm's length, then fumbled for his reading glasses.

“A search warrant.” Salazar introduced herself.

“Look, lady.” Edelman mopped his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief. “I don't care who you are. These people have all got to go. I have heavy equipment coming in first thing in the morning.”

“Sorry,” she said sweetly. “That won't be possible.”

 

In stifling heat, under portable floodlights fueled by a fire department generator, crime scene photographers documented the interior and exterior of the wooden chest without disturbing the bundles inside.

Hoping to find transfer evidence from whoever placed them there, technicians swabbed the parts of the box that might have been handled, seeking fingerprints and possible DNA evidence. They also processed the shelf that held it and the wall behind it. Due to the intense heat buildup, they were forced to take frequent breaks.

Finally, rubber-gloved techs carefully lifted the box, secured it inside a huge zippered pouch, and transported it to the medical examiner's office. Photographers and technicians continued to process the space where the chest had been.

“Stay with it,” Burch told Nazario. “Let's just hope they find a date on some a those newspapers they're wrapped in and that it's not recent.”

Like a mourner following a hearse, Nazario trailed the morgue wagon to One Bob Hope Road, the Miami–Dade County medical examiner's complex. An attendant logged in the wooden box and assigned a case number to the tiny known occupant.

The detective watched them shoot more photographs, then followed the wooden box to the X-ray room.

The old X-ray machine had recently been replaced by a new top-of the-line, computerized, digital scanning X-ray machine with excellent resolution and a twenty-one-inch display screen.

The moment of truth, Nazario thought as the chief medical examiner hit the switch.

Nazario held his breath as the outline of the box appeared on the screen. The image revealed the metal hinges on the lid, the broken lock, and inside, rows of tiny skulls, rib cages, femurs, and arm bones.

“We have multiple bodies here,” the chief medical examiner told his assistant. “We need six more case numbers, consecutive to the first, for a total of seven.”

Nazario sighed.

The process was painstaking.

Each wrapped bundle yielded the image of a tiny human being.

Technicians reexamined the lid of the makeshift coffin again, for fingerprints and DNA. The box's interior was photographed again before the first bundle was removed. Still wrapped, the infant was x-rayed individually, then repositioned several times for X-rays from multiple angles.

Lost children, Nazario thought, watching the procedure followed again and again, seven times over.
Whose babies are you? How long did you stay alone down there in the dark? Who left you there?

Laid out on two autopsy tables, each infant appeared to have been wrapped first in cloth, then in several layers of now-yellowed newspaper.

“You see a date on any of that newsprint?” Nazario asked.

“I want to wait for a forensic anthropologist before unwrapping them all,” the chief said. “Dr. Helmut Newberger over at Florida International University said he'd be here first thing in the morning.”

With tweezers, tongs, and careful gloved fingers, the stained wrappings were gently peeled away from the first bundle, revealing the tiny, shriveled, blackened face of the shrunken cadaver.

“Infants dry out faster,” the chief explained. “That's why an infant left in a hot parked car will die when an adult would not. The smaller the body, the more rapidly it dehydrates. Since these infants were wrapped in porous materials that allowed the escape of water vapor, they dehydrated and mummified.”

“Can you determine race and sex?” Nazario asked.

“That may take a little time,” the chief said, delicately stripping away a four-inch-by-four-inch section of yellowed newspaper.

“Let's have a better look at this.” He placed the delicate scrap beneath a bright magnifying light.

“Well,” the chief said. “No mistaking this.”

The detective peered over his shoulder. A partial headline included the initials
JFK
in twenty-four-point type.

“That rules out the twenties,” the chief said grimly. “A paragraph on the reverse side mentions a n event that occurred in April 1961. Isn't that the year Pierce Nolan was killed? The plot thickens.”

“Were these infants born alive?”

“Hard to say. We should be able to determine their maturation by the contents, if any, of their stomachs and the condition of their umbilical cords. We'll take tissue from around the navels, place it in a softening compound, then process it to make microscopic slides of the umbilical cord attachments.”

“Will it work with remains this old?”

“They do it with two-thousand-year-old mummies. No sign of trauma so far. The X-rays revealed no fractures.”

The cloth used to wrap the remains would be sent to the crime lab for possible identification.

 

“Don't close that door!” Kiki yelped from inside a small interview room.

Corso swung it shut behind him.

“How's she doing?” Burch asked.

“Pretty pissed,” Corso said. “Freaks out when you close the door. Wants to go home.”

“Don't we all?” Burch said grimly.

“Bingo!” Stone sat at his computer terminal. “Kiki's got a rap sheet.”

“I knew she was guilty of something the minute I laid eyes on her,” Burch said, irritated. “I knew it!”

“Had me fooled,” Corso said. “She seemed normal.”

“Everybody seems normal, till you get to know them,” Burch said.

“No major felonies,” Stone said. “Trespassing, failure to follow a police order, disorderly conduct, demonstrating without a permit, and resisting arrest without violence. Kiki also has an alias, Lisa Court.”

“How 'bout that.” Burch stepped into the small interrogation room.

“Okay, Kiki. You've got some 'splaining to do.”

She hugged herself as though cold, as he sat down opposite her.

“Would you leave that door open please, Sergeant?”

Her eyes and body language looked odd.

“What's your problem?”

“Open the door.”

She wore the expression of a trapped animal. Burch leaned back in his chair, unlatched the door, and left it ajar.

“Happy? Now talk to me.”

“Why am I here? I have to leave. Where's Lieutenant Riley? Who had that officer stop my taxicab? What right—”

“I ask the questions.” He sighed. “But for your information, when the officer radioed me that you were uncooperative, unwilling to return to the Shadows, I instructed him to bring you here.”

“But why? Did Edelman—”

“Edelman had nothing to do with it, Kiki. Tell me everything you know about what we found in the basement.”

Her stare was wide-eyed and innocent. “What did you find?”

“Kiki. It's been a long day. Level with me. You knew what we were going to find down there, didn't you?”

She blinked as though puzzled. “No.”

“Gimme a break. You insisted we go out there. Why?”

“You know why. To save the Shadows.”

“Oh. And you just happened to have information about a secret cellar, and knew where the door to it was located, and then you just happened to decide not to go down there with us because you knew we were about to find a goddamn dead body!”

“A body!” Her mouth dropped, her eyes widened. “Was it a homeless person?”

“No, Kiki. A body that appears to have been there for a hell of a lotta years.”

“Captain Cliff Nolan?” Her posture changed and her eyes lit up. “You solved his disappearance? After nearly eighty years! Was he there all along?”

“Kiki, I'm not gonna play games with you,” he warned.

“I'm not playing games.” She checked her Swatch watch. “For Pete's sake, I have to go home!”