My heart was thumping loudly as I gently grabbed the receding doorknob and followed it inward. In my cop days, I would have had my gun drawn. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the apartment, my heart almost stopped. Mia was lying motionless on the pale linoleum. Her naked petite body was covered in blood. I scrambled to her, dropped to my knees and checked for life signs. There was an irregular and feathery heartbeat. Her face was battered; her eyes swollen shut. But she was breathing—barely. I checked for any severe bleeding. Any lacerations had coagulated. No arteries severed. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that some very sick prick had methodically raped and beaten her. A long stemmed broken green wine bottle covered in blood was lying nearby. I had seen a few rape and assault victims like this a number of years ago, but none of them had been this bad. I looked for her phone. Someone had torn it and its jack from the wall. There was dried blood on the handset. There was the sound of a shower running from the bathroom.
For a second, I thought the guy might still be here. I slipped into the kitchen and picked up a sharp carving knife from an empty tomato juice can that held Mia’s few kitchen utensils. I listened for another second. I wanted the guy to be there. I wanted him to pay big time for what he had done. The shower was still running. I couldn’t hear any movement. I was also acutely aware that Mia was dying right there on the floor. I moved carefully down the short hall, paused at the closed door. No steam was seeping beneath it. There were no sounds other than the water running. I threw open the door. Nothing!
I pulled out the cell phone Max had given me and dialed 911—“Ambulance and police to—fuck—what’s the address? I rushed to the front and read off the apartment number. The woman is in a bad way. She might die; hurry! I was back at Mia’s side quickly.
It was probably only four or five minutes before I heard sirens approaching. It had seemed like a lifetime. While I waited, I had covered Mia with an almost clean throw rug that I found on her couch. I tried to comfort her. I talked to her. She didn’t hear me. She was deeply unconscious. Her swollen face looked oddly collapsed. I knew that at some level she was fighting for her life. I knelt beside her and called on any god handy to do something—anything. At one level, as I knelt beside her, I was trying to comfort her, but at the old cop level, I was trying to make sense of this crime scene. There was the broken long stemmed wine bottle covered in blood. That spoke for itself. There was a blood soaked kitchen chair set in the middle of the room with adhesive and duct tape balled up off to the sides of it. There was a bloodied strip of a torn bed sheet that may have been used as a blindfold. And the shower water was still running. The cops would piece it together. With the exceptions of the front door handle, the bathroom door handle and the kitchen knife, I had not touched anything else. I’d even left the damp red blindfold in place beside Mia’s head.
As I saw it, at sometime after she had decided to come to the apartment, she phoned someone—a friend and told that person she was going to be there in the morning. The person she had talked with or someone else that person had told, had got to the apartment and waited for Mia to show up. That someone—and I would find out who—had known from the outset what he was going to do. He had probably stripped down to his shorts in the bedroom to keep his clothing clear of his working space. He had ripped a sheet or pillowcase to create a blindfold. When he was finished with her, he showered and got back into his clothing and left. Pretty methodical, pretty cold blooded. When he had taken off, he had left behind my beautiful Mia. He had tortured and raped her. He had left her to die. I think I was still crying when the first uniformed cop came through the door.
The rest of the night was an absolute blur. I was escorted politely, but with no option, to the locked back seat of a police cruiser. The crime scene was secured. People emerged from their homes or stopped their cars to see if they could hone in on someone else’s misery. Detectives arrived in their unmarked but easily recognizable cars. I sat there and watched as other emergency response vehicles arrived and then left. I sat in the back of the cruiser and watched helplessly as Mia’s battered and covered body was rushed from her apartment to a waiting ambulance. The evident concern on the faces of the medics and the speed of their departure reinforced my fear. I sat helplessly and tried to figure out why this had happened. Who would want to inflict this amount of pain on anyone?
I remembered the three kids and the drunk on the night Mia and I had stopped here. Maybe, my read of the crime scene had been totally wrong. Maybe, in her rush to get into her apartment, Mia had not closed the front door securely and one or more of those kids, or ones just like them, had followed her into her apartment. But why inflict that amount of torture? I had seen and felt the rage that must have been present.
I wondered if Billy Ray or Sammy had done this. Not likely. Then I remembered what I had read about the murder of Mia’s sister. Vickie had been strangled; Mia had been beaten. Still, there had to be a connection. Nothing was making sense to me.
Finally, a young uniformed officer arrived with an older detective. The younger cop opened the back door of the cruiser and asked me to step outside. The detective was an older guy. He looked as if he’d been around since just after the crucifixion of Christ and had slept only four hours during that time. He introduced himself to me as Sergeant Fred Cooper. He thanked me for calling 911. His name rang a bell, but for the life of me at that moment I couldn’t immediately place it. He was polite, and he seemed sincere. He asked me how I came to find Mia. I gave him the fast version of why I had come to the apartment. The young uniformed cop nodded and left just after I mentioned working at the condo and my visit to the Clearwater Beach IHOP. Sergeant Cooper listened patiently. He asked for my driver’s license as part of an identity check. After commenting that I was a Canadian and making some innocuous comment about how cold the winters were in Canada, Cooper wrote my name, current address and phone number in a little black spiral wire hinged notebook. The uniformed cop returned and gave a quick head nod to Cooper. I guessed that he had confirmed my story and that had taken me off the hook as a suspect. Cops are fanatics for detail. From personal experience, I already knew that.
Cooper had recognized my name when I was released from the back seat of the cruiser, but he had remained silent until the young cop had indicated that I was in the clear. “You’re the ex-cop from Toronto who old Stu Langdon asked me to run a check on with your Metro boys, right?”
I nodded and the penny dropped. Langdon had told me that Cooper was his pal on the force who was as close as this to Chance Kemp—a fact that still didn’t mean anything to me. “Yeah.”
The guy was a good cop, and I already found myself liking and respecting him.
“You have any idea why anyone would want to do this to your lady friend?” Sergeant Fred Cooper asked already knowing I wouldn’t.
“Not really,” I replied, “unless it’s tied up in some way to the death of her sister, Vickie Doulton. If it is, you will want to talk with your pal, Langdon.”
“Stu?” the rumpled old detective asked unable to hide the surprise in his voice. “Why would that old fart be involved in this?”
“Langdon knows Mia. He was investigating the murder of her sister, Vickie, in the time before he retired. We—meaning Mia and I—contacted him a few days ago, trying to see if he would help us with a few details around Vickie’s death. It was after we first talked with him that he contacted you to find out about me.” I went a bit vague there because I didn’t want to put Langdon in harm’s way with his past employer. To divert Cooper’s attention, I asked, “What did Langdon tell you he needed the information on me for?”
“He gave me some bullshit story about you dating the daughter of a friend of his. He wanted to know if his friend and the guy’s daughter could trust you. He said that he thought you might be a cheap Canadian scam artist down here on a vacation.”
I smiled. “Langdon’s a piece of work eh?”
Cooper smiled too. “It’s true. You Canadians say “eh”
a lot. Stu was a hell of a cop in his day. I’ll tell you that much.”
A few of the uniformed police were leaving in their cruisers—back to handing out traffic tickets and pulling over drunks. The excitement was over. The curious sightseers that always arrive when there are cops or firemen involved were returning to their apartments or cars. The crime scene in and around Mia’s apartment building would be preserved until the investigators had scoured for all possible traces of physical evidence and photographed everything from as many angles as possible. The search for fingerprints had probably already started.
“Would you mind coming back to the station with me, Joe?” Fred Cooper asked courteously as he returned his spiral-writing pad to his inside jacket pocket. “You are not under arrest, and to be honest, you don’t even have to talk with me. But maybe you can shed some more light on this. Maybe help us find out who did all he did to the little lady?”