Alarm bells rang in Cynthia’s head. Clearly, in the short time she had been away a great deal had changed—changes unforeseen. Her mind was in turmoil. She had to update quickly.
“You said there were differences about my parents’ murders. What did you mean?”
“First thing, whoever the perp was, he left a dead rabbit behind. Malcolm thinks it doesn’t fit, though I’m not sure I agree.”
Cynthia waited.
Brewmaster continued, “At those other crime scenes, everything fitted in with Revelation and the theory that the killer is some kind of religious freak. But according to Malcolm, the rabbit isn’t specific, the way the other symbols were. But as I said, I’m not so sure.”
Leaving a rabbit, Cynthia thought bleakly, had been her own idea. At the time no one, even in Homicide, had the slightest notion what any of those earlier symbols meant, and it was still that way when she left for Los Angeles.
“Something else really different is the time frame,” Brewmaster went on. “Between each of the other serial killings there was a gap of about two months—never less than two. But between the Urbinas and the Ernsts—sorry, your folks—just three days.” He shrugged. “Of course, it may mean nothing. Serial killers don’t operate on logic.”
No, Cynthia thought, but even serial killers had to plan, and as little as three days from one double killing to the next was not convincing … Goddam! Of all the wrong timing and bad luck! Her careful calculations had been totally thrown off by the extra Clearwater case. She remembered Patrick’s words at Homestead: Cyn, I think we’re trying to be too clever.
“Those fourth killings,” she asked Brewmaster. “What did you say the names were?”
“Urbinas.”
“Did the case get much attention?”
“The usual. Front pages of the newspapers, plenty on TV.” It was Brewmaster’s turn to be curious. “What makes you ask?”
“Oh, I didn’t hear anything in L.A. Guess I was too busy.” It was a weak response, Cynthia knew, and realized she must be wary when dealing with super-sharp Homicide detectives. Brewmaster’s answer, though, suggested Patrick must have known about the Urbina murders; therefore, somehow, he ought to have postponed the Ernst killings. But most likely Patrick had no way to get in touch with the Colombian, and the die was cast …
Brewmaster broke in on her thoughts. “There were other things right in line with the serial killings, ma’am.” His tone was respectful, as if half apologizing for his query moments ago. “All of your father’s cash was taken, but your mother’s jewelry was untouched; I checked that carefully. And something else, though I don’t like mentioning this …”
“Go on,” Cynthia said. “I think I know what’s coming.”
“Well, the wounds inflicted were pretty much like the ones in the earlier cases … are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I have to know sometime. It might as well be now.”
“The wounds were real bad; the MO says a bowie knife was used again. And the victims …” Again Brewmaster hesitated. “They were bound and gagged and facing each other.”
Cynthia turned away and applied a handkerchief to her eyes. On it were still a few grains of salt from a previous application; she used them before turning back, coughing slightly.
“One more thing that was like those other cases,” Brewmaster added, “is that a radio was left on—loud.”
Cynthia nodded. “I remember that. At those two first scenes, wasn’t it rock?”
“Yes.” Brewmaster consulted a notebook. “This time it was WTMI—classical and show-biz music. The butler said it was your mother’s favorite station.”
“Yes, it was.” Silently, Cynthia cursed. Despite her precise instructions to Patrick, his Colombian killer had turned the radio on, but failed to change the station to rock music. Maybe he didn’t get the full instructions; either way, it was too late. At this moment, Brewmaster didn’t seem to think the difference was important, though others in Homicide might when making a thorough study; Cynthia knew how the system worked.
Goddam! Suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt a shiver of fear run through her.
7
Cynthia did not sleep well during her third night back in Miami, still nervous after learning of developments—unexpected yet significant—during her brief absence. Now, she wondered, what else could go wrong?
Also on her mind was the fact that she needed to meet with Malcolm Ainslie—especially since Ainslie was head of a special task force set up to deal with the current series of serial murders, in which her parents’ deaths were included. Thus, while Hank Brewmaster remained in immediate charge of the Ernst investigation, the overall responsibility was Ainslie’s.
Though uneasy about a meeting with Ainslie at this point, she knew it had to happen. Otherwise it might appear as if she was avoiding him, leaving her motives open to question, particularly by Ainslie himself.
What it came down to, Cynthia realized in a moment of private honesty, was that Ainslie was the Homicide investigator she feared the most. Despite her bitter anger when he broke off their affair, and her determination to keep the promise she had made—You’ll regret this, Malcolm, for the rest of your miserable life—she had never for one moment changed her view that, of all the detectives she had known, Ainslie was the best.
She was never sure exactly why. Somehow, though, Malcolm had an ability to look beyond the immediate aspects of any investigation and put his own mind inside the minds of both the victims and suspects. The result was—and Cynthia had seen it happen—he often reached the right conclusions about Homicide cases, either alone or ahead of everyone else.
The other detectives in Homicide, particularly the younger ones, had sometimes looked on Malcolm as an oracle and sought his advice, not only about crimes but about their own personal lives. Detective Bernard Quinn, now retired, had made a collection of what he called “Ainslie Aphorisms” and tacked them up on a notice board. Cynthia remembered a few. One or two seemed appropriate now:
We catch people because no one is ever as clever as he or she thinks.
Mostly, small mistakes don’t matter. But with murder, it only takes a tiny mistake to leave a hole for someone to peer through and learn the truth.
Educated people think they have an edge in cleverness, but sometimes that extra education makes them overreach and get caught.
All of us do foolish things—sometimes the most obvious—and we wonder later how we could have been so stupid.
The most skillful liars sometimes say too much.
Criminals seldom remember Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will. Which is a big help to detectives.
Ainslie’s background, Cynthia supposed—the priesthood and his erudition—contributed to all that, and clearly, from what Hank Brewmaster had described, that same facility solved the linkage between those bizarre objects left at the serial crime scenes.
Cynthia pushed the memories away. Until the present she had never thought of Malcolm’s intellect as affecting her personally. Now she did.
She decided not to delay a meeting, but to stage it immediately, on her own terms. Early in the morning after her restless night, Cynthia arrived at Homicide, where she commandeered Lieutenant Newbold’s office and left word that Sergeant Ainslie should report to her as soon as possible. He arrived soon after, having stopped at the Ernst house on his way.
Having made clear the difference in authority between them—a major was three ranks higher than a sergeant—and that no shred of a personal relationship remained, Cynthia had posed sharp questions about her parents’ murders.
Even while probing and listening to answers, she was aware of Malcolm’s appraisal and welcomed it. From the way he looked at her, she knew he had noticed her especially red-rimmed eyes. His facial expression reflected sympathy. Good! So her grief at her parents’ deaths was evident, and Malcolm did not doubt it; therefore objective number one had been achieved.
A second objective was to make her of
ficial authority so strong and demanding, with insistence on a speedy solution to her parents’ killings, that it would simply not occur to Ainslie that she could be involved in any culpable way. As the interview progressed, Cynthia knew she had succeeded.
Toward the end she was conscious of a wariness on Malcolm’s part when she questioned him about the symbols he had linked to Revelation. She also suspected that he did not intend to keep her as fully informed about all special task force developments as she demanded. But she decided not to press too far, having handled what could have been an uneasy confrontation with so much advantage to herself.
Finally, as the door closed behind Ainslie, Cynthia reflected that perhaps she had overestimated his talents after all.
The elaborately formal funeral for Gustav and Eleanor Ernst, with all the trappings of officialdom, was preceded by a wake the day before, lasting eight hours and attended by an estimated nine hundred people. The entire two-day observance was something Cynthia knew she had to go through, though she longed for it all to be over. Her role was to behave as a bereaved daughter, yet maintain a composure and dignity befitting her senior police rank. From overheard remarks, and condolences addressed to her, she knew at the end she had succeeded rather well.
One conversation occurring during the wake would, she hoped, have an ongoing effect. It was with two people whom she knew well: Miami’s Mayor Lance Karlsson and City Commissioner Orestes Quintero, one of the two remaining commissioners. She had met both frequently before. The mayor, a retired industrialist, normally jovial, spoke sadly of Cynthia’s father, adding, “We shall miss Gustav greatly.” Quintero, younger and heir to a liquor fortune, nodded agreement. “It will be difficult to replace him. He understood the city’s workings so well.”
“I know,” Cynthia replied. “I only wish there were some way I could pick up where he left off.”
She saw the two men glance at each other. A thought clearly struck both; the mayor gave the slightest of nods.
“I should talk to some other people; please excuse me,” Cynthia said. As she moved away, she knew she had effectively planted a seed.
At both the wake and the funeral she saw Ainslie several times. He was second-in-command of the police honor guard and looked smart in dress uniform, something she had not seen him in before. Gold aiguillettes and white gloves heightened the ceremonial impact. She learned from another honor guard officer that at every free moment, in a rear room, Ainslie was on the radio, communicating with his special task force surveillance teams, now maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch on six possible suspects in the serial killings.
After their earlier meeting, Cynthia was unsure how to treat Ainslie, and simply ignored him.
A day after the funeral, Cynthia was at her desk in Community Relations when she received a phone call that the caller described as confidential. She listened for a few moments, then answered, “Thank you. My answer is yes.”
Twenty-four hours later the Miami City Commission, headed by Mayor Karlsson, announced that, as permitted by city charter, Cynthia Ernst had been named to complete the remaining two years in her father’s elected term as a commissioner.
The next day Cynthia announced her resignation from the Miami police force.
As more days passed, and Cynthia assumed her new responsibilities, she felt increasingly secure. Then, two and a half months later, one of the suspects who had been under special task force surveillance, Elroy Doil, was arrested and charged with murder. The arrest was at the murder scene of Kingsley and Nellie Tempone, with “Animal” Doil’s guilt conclusive, and from additional evidence it was believed by police, the media, and the public that he was guilty of all the preceding serial killings.
Only one factor clouded the successful end to the task force’s operation. That was a decision by State Attorney Adele Montesino that Doil would be tried for only one double murder—the Tempones’—where, in Montesino’s words, “we’ll have a cast-iron prosecution” and an “airtight certain case.” In the remaining cases, she pointed out, the evidence, while strong, was less conclusive.
The decision had provoked protests from the families of other serial killing victims, in which Commissioner Cynthia Ernst joined, wanting Doil to be convicted of her parents’ murders, too. But in the end it made no difference. Doil denied doing any of the murders, including the Tempones’, despite his presence at the murder scene. A jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair—a process speeded up by Doil’s own decision not to exercise his rights of appeal.
During the seven months between Animal Doil’s sentencing and his scheduled execution, something happened to provide an unnerving shock to Cynthia Ernst.
Amid the increasing activity of her new life as a city commissioner, a thought occurred to her one day—out of nowhere, it seemed—that a task she had intended to complete a long time ago had never been done. Incredibly, she had forgotten the box of evidence, put together the same night that Patrick admitted having shot and killed Naomi and Kilburn Holmes. What she needed to do, Cynthia now realized—in fact, ought to have done long ago—was dispose of that box and its contents, completely and forever.
She knew exactly where the box was stored. After carefully taping and sealing it at her own apartment, she had taken it to her parents’ house and her private room.
Although, since her parents’ deaths, the Ernst house had been mostly unoccupied, Cynthia had left it pretty much as it was, waiting until Gustav’s and Eleanor’s wills were finally probated before deciding whether to sell it or even, perhaps, move into Bay Point herself. In the end she alone would decide because she was the major beneficiary under both her parents’ wills. Occasionally, Cynthia used the house for entertaining and continued to employ the butler, Theo Palacio, and his wife, Maria, as caretakers.
Cynthia chose the following Wednesday to take the action so long overdue. She told her secretary, Ofelia, to reschedule her appointments for that day and not to make any others. At first she considered moving the box to a public incinerator, then learned that many had closed for environmental reasons, and at the few remaining it was no longer possible for an individual to throw an object in a furnace personally. Unwilling to trust anyone else, she returned to her original idea of deep-sixing the box.
She knew a charter boat owner who had done jobs for her father in the past—a closemouthed, surly ex–U.S. Marine with the reputation of operating on the borders of legitimacy, but who was reliable. Cynthia phoned him, learned he was available on the chosen date, then instructed, “I shall want your boat all day and will be coming with a friend, but there’s to be no crew except you.” After grumbling about having to do everything himself, the boat owner agreed.
The statement about a friend was a lie. Cynthia had no intention of bringing anyone, and she would only retain the boat for as long as it took to reach deep water, throw the box overboard—by then inside a metal trunk—and return to shore. She would pay for a full-day cruise, however, which would keep the owner quiet. She also knew of an out-of-the-way store where she could buy a suitable trunk, paying with cash the day before.
Having made her decisions, Cynthia drove to Bay Point and went to her room. Remembering exactly where she had left the box, she moved other items to get to it. To her surprise, it wasn’t there. Obviously her memory was faulty, she decided. She continued to move everything, finally emptying the entire cupboard, but—no question about it—the sealed box was gone. Her concern, which she had deliberately suppressed, suddenly escalated.
Don’t panic! It’s somewhere in the house … has to be … it’s natural not to find it immediately after all this time … so stop, think, consider where else to look … But after searching through other rooms and cupboards, including what had been her parents’ rooms, she was no further ahead.
Eventually she used an intercom and summoned Theo Palacio to the top floor. He appeared quickly.
When she described the missing box, Palacio responded at once. “I remember seei
ng it, Miss Ernst. The police took it, along with a lot of other things. It was the day after …” He stopped and shook his head sadly. “I think it was the second day the police were here.”
She said, “You didn’t tell me!”
The butler spread his hands helplessly. “So much was happening. And it being the police, I thought you’d know.”
The facts emerged piecemeal.
As Theo Palacio explained, “The police had a search warrant. One of the detectives showed it to me, said they wanted to go through the house, look at everything.”
Cynthia nodded. It was normal procedure, but something else she had not foreseen despite her careful planning.
“Well,” Palacio continued, “among what they found were boxes and boxes of papers—a lot of it your mother’s—and from what I understood, the detectives couldn’t look at it all here, so they took the whole lot away to go through somewhere else. They went around the house, piling up the boxes and sealing them, and one of the boxes was yours. It was already sealed; I think that’s why they took it.”
“Didn’t you tell anyone the box belonged to me?”
“To tell the truth, Miss Ernst, I didn’t think of it. As I said, a lot was going on; Maria and I were so upset. If I did wrong, I’m—”
Cynthia cut him off. “Leave it!” Her mind was calculating swiftly.
A year and two months had passed since her parents’ deaths; therefore the crucial box had been removed for that long. So whatever had happened to it, one thing was certain: it had not been opened, or she would have heard. Cynthia was also pretty sure that she knew where the box was.
Back in her City Commission office, after canceling arrangements for the boat, she willed herself to be objective. There were occasions when ultra-calm was needed, and this was one. For a moment at the Bay Point house she had almost given way to despair—provoked by horror at the incredibly foolish thing she had done, or rather had failed to do. One of Ainslie’s Aphorisms came back to her: All of us do foolish things—sometimes the most obvious—and we wonder later how we could have been so stupid.