I looked at her, and then at Duarte, and my discomfort grew and mixed with frustration. “How?” I said.
Duarte shrugged. “She says you’re like some kind of amateur profiler,” he said.
I was surprised, and a bit upset, that Debs had shared that with Duarte. My so-called profiling talent was highly personal, something that grew out of my firsthand experience with sociopathic individuals like myself. But she had shared it; that probably meant she trusted him. In any case, I was on the spot. “Ah, well,” I said at last. “Más o menos.”
Duarte shook his head. “What is that, yes or no?” he said. I looked at Debs, and she actually smirked at me. “Alex doesn’t speak Spanish,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Alex speaks French,” she said, looking at him with hard-edged fondness.
I felt even more uncomfortable, since I had made a social blunder by assuming that anybody with a Cuban name who lived in Miami would speak Spanish—but I also realized that this was one more clue to why Debs liked her new partner. For some reason, my sister had taken French in school, too, in spite of the fact that we grew up in a city where Spanish was used more widely than English, and French was no more useful than lips on a chicken—it didn’t even help her with the city’s growing Haitian population. They all spoke Creole, which was only slightly closer to French than Mandarin.
And now she had found a kindred spirit, and clearly they had bonded. I am sure a real human being would have felt a warm glow of affectionate satisfaction at my sister’s newly happy work situation, but this was me, and I didn’t. All I felt was irritation and discomfort. “Well, bonne chance,” I said. “But even speaking French to a judge won’t get him to unseal a juvenile record—especially since we don’t even know which record.”
Deborah lost her annoying fond look. “Well, shit,” she said. “I can’t just wait around and hope I get lucky.”
“You may not have to,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to do it again.”
She just looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he will.” She shook her head, looked at Duarte, and walked out of the room. He followed right behind her, and I sneezed.
“Gesundheit,” I told myself. But it didn’t make me feel any better.
EIGHT
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I PICKED UP THE PACE OF MY Honda hunt. I stayed out a little later each evening, trying to squeeze in just one more address, driving when it was too far to walk. I went home only when it was too dark to see any longer, trudging past the family tableau in the living room and into the shower without speaking, a little more frustrated every evening.
On the third night of my enhanced search, I walked in the front door, very sweaty, and realized that Rita was staring at me, her eyes running over me as if she was searching for a blemish, and I stopped in front of her. “What?” I said.
She looked up at me and blushed. “Oh,” she said. “It’s just late, and you’re so sweaty, I thought— It’s nothing, really.”
“I was jogging,” I said, not sure why I felt like I was on the defensive.
“You took the car,” she said.
It seemed to me that she was paying far too much attention to my activities, but perhaps this was one of the little perks of marriage, so I shrugged it off. “I went over to the track at the high school,” I said.
She looked at me for a very long moment without saying anything, and there was clearly something going on in there, but I had no idea what it might be. Finally, she just said, “That would explain it.” She stood up and pushed past me into the kitchen, and I went to my hard-earned shower.
Perhaps I just hadn’t noticed it before, but each evening when I came in after my “exercise,” she would watch me with that same mysterious intensity, and then head into the kitchen. On the fourth night of this exotic behavior, I followed her and stood silently in the kitchen doorway. I watched as she opened a cupboard, took out a bottle of wine, and poured herself a full glass, and as she raised it to her lips I backed away, unobserved.
It made no sense to me; it was almost as if there was a connection between my coming home sweaty and Rita wanting a glass of wine. I thought about it as I showered, but after a few minutes of musing I realized that I didn’t know enough about the complex topics of humans and marriage, and Rita in particular, and in any case I had other worries. Finding the right Honda was far more important, and even though it was something I did know a lot about, I wasn’t getting that done either. So I put the Mystery of Rita and the Wine out of my mind as just one more brick in the wall of frustration that was forming all around me.
A week later my cold was gone, and I had crossed many more names off my list, enough of them that I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t a waste of precious time. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and a growing urgency to do before I was done to, but that got me no closer to finding my Witness than anything else I tried. I was more jittery with each day, and with each dead-end name I crossed off my list, and I actually began to bite my fingernails, a habit I had dropped in high school. It was annoying, and added to my frustration, and I began to wonder whether I was starting to fall apart under the strain.
Still, at least I was in much better shape than Officer Gunther. Because just when Marty Klein’s brutal murder had settled into a kind of background hum of nervousness on the force, Officer Gunther turned up dead, too. He was a uniformed cop, not a detective like Klein, but there was no doubt at all that it was the handiwork of the same killer. The body had been slowly and methodically pounded into a two-hundred-pound bruise. Every major bone had bee broken with what looked like exactly the same patient routine that had been so successful with Klein.
This time the body was not left in a police cruiser on I-95. Officer Gunther had been carefully placed in Bayfront Park, right beside the Torch of Friendship, which seemed more than a little ironic. A young Canadian couple on their honeymoon had found the corpse as they took a romantic early morning stroll: one more enduring memory of a magical time in Our Enchanted City.
There was a feeling of something very close to superstitious dread running through the small knot of cops when I got there. It was still relatively early in the day, but the air of quiet panic on-site had nothing to do with the lack of coffee. The officers on the scene were tense, even a bit wide-eyed, as if they had all seen a ghost. It was easy to see why: To dump Gunther here, so publicly, did not seem like something a human being could get away with. Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami is not the kind of private and secluded spot where y
our average psychotic killer might normally stroll by and drop a stiff. This was an amazingly public display, and yet somehow the body was here, and apparently it had been here for several hours before it had been discovered.
Cops are normally oversensitive to that kind of direct challenge. They take it as an insult to their manhood when someone flaunts the law with such flamboyant exhibitionism, and this really should have stirred up all the righteous wrath of an angry police force. But Miami’s Finest looked like they were filled with supernatural angst instead of fury, almost as if they were ready to throw away their weapons and call the Psychic Hotline for help.
And I admit it was a bit disturbing, even to me, to see the corpse of a cop so carefully puddled on the pavement beside the Torch. It was very hard to understand how any living being could stroll through one of the city’s busiest streets and deposit a body that was so clearly and spectacularly dead, without being seen. No one actually suggested out loud that there were occult forces at work—at least, not that I overheard. But judging by the look of the cops in attendance, nobody was ruling it out, either.
My real area of expertise is not the Undead, though; it’s blood spatter, and there was nothing in that line here. The killing had obviously happened somewhere else and the body had merely been dumped at this lovely and well-known landmark. But I was sure my sister, Deborah, would want my insight, so I hovered around the edges and tried to find some obscure and helpful clue that the other forensics wonks might have missed. There wasn’t a great deal to see, aside from the gelatinous blob in the blue uniform that had once been Officer Gunther, married, father of three. I watched Angel Batista-No-Relation crawl slowly around the perimeter, searching meticulously for any small crumb of evidence and, apparently, finding none.