The Whole Truth (12 page)

Paul Flanck glanced over at Robyn Anschutz, both detectives thinking the same thing: If he didn't know what a pineal gland was, why would he want one? And why would he go to so much gruesome trouble to get it?

"Did you remove the pineal gland from Natalie McCullen's body?"

"Fuck no!"

The very speed and vehemence of his answer seemed to imply that his first answer had been a lie. If he didn't know what the organ was, why was he so quick to deny taking it?

"Did someone else remove the pineal gland from Natalie McCullen's body?"

"How would I know?"

"Who else would know, but you?"

"Is this, like, multiple choice?"

"Yeah, here's your choice, Ray: life in prison, or death in the electric chair. That multiple enough for you? It could depend on how well you cooperate with us. Who put a probe into her skull and took out the pineal gland?"

"Gross! Who would do a thing like that?"

"Is that your answer?"

"Are you deaf?"

"You got a thing about deaf people, Ray?"

The suspect cupped a hand to one ear. "What'd you say?"

Paul Flanck experienced such rage at that moment that he had to leave the interrogation room and go stand outside in the hall and take a few deep breaths.

The detectives attempted to ascertain what Ray had done with the pineal he claimed he hadn't taken. Robyn could hardly believe she was actually sitting in a room listening to somebody ask questions of this nature.

"Did you eat the pineal gland taken from Natalie McCullen's body?"

"No." But he licked his lips when he said it.

Robyn thought she had never seen such an obscene gesture.

"Did you store it somewhere?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Did you throw it away?"

"Waste not, want not."

Robyn said, "Did you feed the pineal gland to the fish, Ray?"

"Are you sick, or something?"

Their suspect actually looked shocked, Paul thought. Amazing what could shock a killer. He knew murderers who acted offended if anyone used the name of God in vain. Paul knew one killer who stabbed a woman because she said "goddammit" after he specifically told her not to. Bad guys, Paul thought, far from being truly tough, had about the thinnest skin of anybody. Their egos were not strong enough to withstand much beyond their own narrow limits on other people's behavior. You insulted them to your peril. And you could never predict exactly what would insult a really bad guy, so if you were smart, you avoided them altogether. Natalie McCullen, unfortunately, had been too young to know this, and far too little and vulnerable to be able to avoid a bad guy who really wanted to grab her.

"Did you give it to somebody else?"

"You can't give what you don't have." Ray looked smug.

Out of their suspect's line of vision, Robyn shook her head at Paul. It wasn't hard for him to read the expression on her face: This is too weird! He rolled his eyes, in heartfelt agreement with her.

"If you didn't give it away, did you sell it?"

"How, like in the Yellow Pages?"

When he was taken away, and they were all left in the room, Robyn exclaimed in frustration, "What the hell did he want it for?"

"We've forgotten to ask something," Paul said.

"What?"

He shot his partner a waspish look. "If we knew that, we wouldn't be forgetting it."

"He had to do something with it," Robyn said, stating the obvious.

But by the time of the trial, they still had not discovered what that was. And, although the jury would hear the grisly evidence, they wouldn't need to know all of his reasons in order to convict Ray of the murder.

If the marina of the Checker Crab Company looked a mess before the police searched it, that was nothing compared to how it appeared after they went in looking for the site at which Ray had performed his "surgery" on the body of the child. From Donor Miller's ratty desktop to the greasy dark corners of the maintenance sheds, to the interior and deck of every boat that was known to have been docked at the boatyard the night of her murder, it was all gone over with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, but to no avail.

"We left a hell of a mess for Donor to clean up," Paul Flanck says, not even trying to hide how much that pleases him, "but we didn't find what we were looking for. We thought we had something for a little while, but it was just the table where they cleaned their fish."

In fact, in spite of their best efforts to locate the place of surgery, they would come up empty-handed even by the time of the trial. The prosecutor, Franklin DeWeese, would be forced to enter the courtroom without any idea where Ray had taken the child's body between the time he picked her up and killed her, and the time he hung her from the Thirty-second Street bridge. It was frustrating, but, as the prosecutor would aver to the jury in his opening argument, "Let me tell you right off the bat, that we don't know where Ray Raintree went with Natty's body between the time he killed her and the time he abandoned her upon that bridge.

"Somewhere between her death and her hanging," State's Attorney DeWeese went on to say, "he did something terrible to that poor little body, but even as of this day, we don't know exactly where that event took place. The defense will try to tell you it matters. They'll try to tell you that you need to know what he did every minute in order to declare him guilty of these crimes. But I swear to you that's not true. It doesn't matter, not according to the law. It doesn't make any difference to this trial. In order to find him guilty, you don't have to know anything other than the fact that he killed her. Simple as that. While it matters to all of us in our hearts, it doesn't matter from a legal standpoint. He kidnapped and killed that child and mutilated her body. Period. End of statement. That's all you need to know in order to convict him, and to prevent the possibility that this man could ever commit a similar atrocity upon any other innocent child."

Even though the "surgery" was conducted postmortem, there had to have been a quantity of blood and tissue, but they didn't find much. There was some on a tarp, and microscopic examination turned up some in the boat, where they also found strands of her hair. They surmised that afterward he covered her body with the tarp in the bottom of the taxi. Eventually, based on the location of blood evidence, it was surmised that he hung her head over the side of the boat to perform his "surgery." However he did it, he kept most of the blood and tissue from getting on her or the boat, thus hiding the shocking truth inside her skull.

They couldn't point to a spot on a map where he had performed either the murder or the mutilation. They didn't know what he had done with the pineal gland after he had removed it, and they didn't know why he had taken it. And none of that mattered to the prosecutor, nor would it matter to the eventual jury.

As Franklin DeWeese would hammer home to them:

'The question is not, where did he kill her? It is not, how and where did he mutilate her body. It is not even, why did he do it? It is just: Did he do it? Did he kidnap her? Did he kill her? And the simple answer to those simple questions is: Yes, of course, he did! His own words convict him. The evidence in the boat convicts him. The eyewitness living across the canal convicts him. The testimony of the policeman in the helicopter convicts him. The footprint and the ashes on the Hatteras convict him. The footprints going up and down the bank beside the bridge convict him. The fingerprints on the fishing rod convict him, and a little girl's bloody handprint on his shirt convict him."

The prosecutor gazed from juror to juror.

"There is no reasonable doubt. No. Reasonable. Doubt. He did it. Nobody else did it. You will be so convinced of that indisputable fact that you will find it a straightforward matter to come to a straightforward verdict: Ray Raintree is guilty as charged in the first-degree felony kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Natalie Mae McCullen."

"And that's how it really was," individual members of the jury said afterward. "It really was that easy to convict him. We didn't bat an eyelash, not one of us. Guilty, guilty, guilty, twelve times, the first time we took a vote. We knew we didn't have a lot of the facts, and the defense tried to fool us into thinking that was important, but we knew better. Mr. DeWeese told us right, and we made the right decision, based on the law and the evidence."

It would not even matter that Ray's employer, Donor Miller, would not be available to testify at the trial. Three days into the investigation—after Ray had been arrested and arraigned, and following the intensive search of the premises of Miller's company—the chubby, grubby boatyard owner disappeared.

"We called him, and one of his employees answered the phone," Robyn remembers. "They said he hadn't been in that day, and nobody knew where he was, but they'd have him call us as soon as he got there. We didn't hear anything for a couple of hours, so finally we went back out there."

The detectives found everything just as they had left it: in an utter mess, which the young employees were still attempting halfheartedly to clean up. But they were slowing down their labors, as it was payday, and their boss wasn't appearing with their checks in hand. Flanck and Anschutz found Miller's ancient Oldsmobile convertible still parked in the marina lot, and his papers spread on his desk, as usual. Having learned where he lived, they stopped by a little condo where they found dozens of old movies on videotape, and musical instruments that looked even more ancient. The ratty place seemed to suit its owner well, but he wasn't in, and none of his neighbors reported having seen him since the day before.

"We figured he made a bunk," Paul Flanck says.

"A couple of the employees heard him arguing real loud with some man at the marina, and they figured it was a bill collector," Robyn adds, to explain the "bunk."

"Plus, he had made it clear he didn't want anything to do with this business," Paul adds. "He didn't want to get blamed for anything, or sued for anything, and we figured he just said the hell with it, and got himself a new used car, and left town."

Both detectives had been right there in front of Miller when he had seemed surprised to learn that his boat had actually been missing for a time from his boatyard.

They were convinced he had nothing to do with the crime, because why would he call to report his boat missing, if he were involved? Why summon cops to his marina, if he were guilty?

If Donor Miller had just upped and left, it meant that he had apparently abandoned a profitable, if not beautiful, little business. But they didn't spend a whole lot of time attempting to locate him, for the same reason that they didn't pursue the answers to some of the other mysteries of this case: They had their man, and enough evidence to convict him without any help from his employer.

Donor Miller was gone, vanished into thin air—or, rather, the thick, humid air of south Florida—but it didn't matter to anybody except the employees to whom he owed a week's pay. Nobody even bothered to tell Ray Raintree about it. Nobody cared where Donor Miller went, or what he did when he got there.

It just didn't seem to matter.

The furor over the autopsy results had not even begun to die down when the Bahia cops stopped hedging about inquiries and came out in public with the truth and a plea:

"Who is this man?"

It wasn't that their suspect didn't tell them anything. He did, increasingly and at length. Ray talked a lot of people's ears off, before he stopped talking altogether.

When Detectives Flanck and Anschutz asked him where he was from originally, he told them that he was born and raised in Brooklyn, to a family of barbers. He said that from the time he was big enough to sit up by himself in a barber's chair, he went to work with his dad and two of his uncles on Saturdays.

It sounded so normal, they nearly dozed off as they heard it.

"Biggest day of the week for barbers," he said, "'cause all the men were off work. Coming in for the trim they'd put off too long. Their wives were teasing them they looked like hippies. After they came to our barbershop, then they'd go get their cars washed and stop by the hardware store. Then they'd go home to watch a sports game on TV. Maybe barbecue for friends in the backyard that night, with their hair cut all nice, so their friends'd say, 'Hey, who's your barber?'"

Saturday sounded like an all-male, all-American day in Brooklyn to hear Ray tell it. He painted a word picture to the detectives of himself as a little boy listening pleasurably to all the man-talk.

"The women came in during the week," he said. "Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, with their little boys, after school. Monday's we were closed, of course. Barbershops and beauty salons are always closed on Mondays, you know."

"What was the name of the shop, Ray?"

"Ray's Barbershop," he said, as if that should be obvious. "My dad was Ray, Senior, and he was the oldest of the brothers, so it was only right to name it after him."

But then later, he told them the barbershop went back four generations, which would have placed its origins back around the Civil War, Robyn figured out. This genealogy made a certain gruesome sense to her, given the facts of the case.

Robyn said to Ray, "It seems to me that barbers used to be surgeons. Is that where you came by your interest in ... surgery . . . Ray? Sort of part of the family history, you might say?"

He laughed, which made her skin crawl.

"Wait a minute. I thought you said it was named after your father," Paul challenged Ray. "How could it be Ray's Barbershop if your grandfather and your great-grandfather owned it, too?"

"Oh, they were named Ray. Raymond. All the men, all the fathers in my family are named that."

"Your dad wouldn't have been a senior then, would he?"

The suspect shrugged, as if the complexity of naming the generations was beyond him.

"I hear you used to be a barber," Ray's public defender said to him the first time she met him. This was before Leanne English's law firm appeared on the scene.