The dead husband and wife were in the living room of their four-room condominium. Both victims had been beaten, their bodies slashed by a knife, and cruelly mutilated. Blood had pooled on the floor around them.
Sergeant Greene, a twenty-year Miami Police veteran, tall, lean, and with a bristling mustache, told Frankel to secure the scene, then urgently looked around the office for someone to send.
Standing up and surveying all of Homicide, he could see that every other detective’s desk was empty. The room was large, with a half-dozen rows of small, bureaucratic metal desks, set side by side and separated by shoulder-high dividers. Each desk contained a multiple-line phone, several file trays, overflowing, and in some cases a computer terminal. Every detective had his or her own desk, and most had tried to personalize their drab conformity with family photos, drawings, or cartoons.
In the entire room the only other people were two harried secretaries, busily answering phones. Today, as every day, the calls were from citizens, news media, members of victims’ families asking for information about relatives’ deaths, politicians looking for answers to the sudden rise in shootings, and countless other sources, rational and otherwise.
Greene knew that all available detectives were out working and, for most of the summer, Homicide headquarters had looked the way it did today. His own team of four was investigating eight murders, and other teams were under similar pressure.
He would have to go to Pine Terrace himself, Greene decided. Alone and quickly.
He looked down at the paperwork piled on his desk—two weeks’ arrears of crime records and other reports that Lieutenant Newbold was urging him to complete—and knew he must put the work aside yet again. He slipped on his jacket, checked his shoulder holster, gun, and ammunition, and headed for the elevator. From his unmarked car he would radio one of his units and have someone join him, but, knowing everyone’s workload, he doubted it would happen soon.
As to the burdensome, never-ceasing paperwork, Greene reasoned gloomily he would have to come back and move some more tonight.
Some fifteen minutes later Detective-Sergeant Greene arrived at Pine Terrace condominium number 18, where the condo and the surrounding area were cordoned off by official yellow display tape—POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Greene approached a uniform officer standing between the condo entrance and a small, curious crowd.
“Officer Frankel? I’m Sergeant Greene. What do you have?”
“Me and my partner were here first, Sergeant,” Frankel reported. “We haven’t touched a thing.” He motioned to a heavily built, bearded man standing off to one side. “This is Mr. Xavier. He’s the neighbor who called nine-one-one.”
The bearded man joined them. He told Greene, “When I saw those bodies through the window I just broke down the door. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“Forget that. There’s always a chance someone might be alive.”
“The Urbinas sure weren’t. Didn’t know them well, but I’ll never forget—”
Frankel interrupted. “Two things Mr. Xavier did—he used the phone inside to call nine-one-one, and he turned off a radio.”
“It was so loud,” Xavier said, “I couldn’t hear on the phone.”
Greene asked, “Did you do anything else to the radio, like change the station it was set to? Or touch anything else at all?”
“No, sir.” Xavier looked crestfallen. “Do you think I messed up any fingerprints?”
Everybody’s a crime expert, Greene thought. “Too early to tell, but we’d appreciate your letting us take your prints so we can separate them from any others. The print record will be returned to you.” Greene told Frankel, “Stay in touch with Mr. Xavier. We’ll need him later today.”
When Sergeant Greene entered the Urbinas’ condo, he knew at once that what he was seeing was no routine homicide, but a dire and crucial development in what was surely a sequence of ghastly serial killings. Greene, like most Homicide supervisors, kept himself informed of other teams’ cases and was familiar with the Coconut Grove murders in January of Homer and Blanche Frost. He knew, too, of the Hennenfeld case in Fort Lauderdale almost three months ago that was so similar to the Frosts’. Now here—horribly and unmistakably—was a third matching atrocity.
Greene acted fast, reaching for his portable police radio secured to his belt, and made several calls.
First he called for an ID crew, the most pressing need in a case like this, where another serial killing could occur at any time. Every scrap of evidence had to be gathered fast, examined and assessed without delay. But a dispatcher informed Greene that all the ID crews were tied up on other cases, and one would not get to him for at least an hour. Pablo Greene seethed, knowing the delay might cause some evidence to deteriorate. But abusing the dispatcher would accomplish nothing, so he kept quiet.
He was far less patient when he made his second call, summoning a medical examiner to view the victims. No ME was available, he was told, though one would be sent “when possible.”
“That’s not good enough,” he said, trying not to shout, but knowing there was nothing he could do. The next call yielded similar results: no state attorney was available; one presently in court would try to arrive within an hour.
So much was changing for investigators, he brooded. Not long ago, any summons to a murder scene produced immediate action, but obviously no more. He supposed it was all part of society’s declining values, though certainly not declining murders.
Greene did manage to reach Lieutenant Newbold by radio and, while choosing his words carefully since others would be listening, conveyed the urgency for fast action at the Pine Terrace scene. Newbold quickly promised to do some phoning himself.
Greene also suggested that Sergeant Ainslie and Detective Quinn be notified, which Newbold agreed to do, adding that he would come to the scene himself within the next half hour.
Greene returned his attention to the two murder victims and the sadistic violation of their bodies, continuing the notes he had been scribbling since entering the building. Just as in the other two cases he had heard described, the man and woman had been positioned facing each other, bound and gagged. It seemed likely that each had been forced to watch in silent terror while the other was tortured.
Sergeant Greene sketched their positions, without disturbing anything before the ID crew’s arrival. On a side table he observed an incoming addressed envelope from which a letter had been removed and left open. Moving the letter carefully with a penknife to avoid touching it, he was able to learn the Urbinas’ full names, which he added to his notes.
On a small bureau near the bodies Greene spotted a portable radio—clearly the one that Xavier had switched off. Peering at the tuning dial, Greene noted the setting: 105.9 FM. He knew the station: HOT 105. Hard rock.
Then, still moving meticulously, stroking his mustache as he considered what he saw, he viewed the other rooms.
In both bedrooms the drawers had all been opened, presumably by an intruder, and left that way. The contents of a woman’s purse and a man’s wallet had been emptied onto a bed. There was no money, though some minor jewelry remained.
Each bedroom had a separate bathroom and toilet, and though the ID crew would go over both thoroughly, Greene saw nothing of significance. In what appeared to be the main bathroom, the toilet seat was raised, and there was urine in the bowl. Greene added both facts to his notes, even though he knew that neither urine nor stool could be linked to an individual for identification.
He returned to the living room and smelled something new—an addition to the putrid odor resulting from open wounds on dead bodies. As he moved closer to the victims, the smell grew stronger. Then he saw it. Alongside one hand of the dead woman was a bronze bowl containing what appeared to be human excrement, partly immersed in what was obviously urine.
There were occasional moments in his work when Pablo Greene wished he had chosen some other profession.
As he drew back, he reminded himself it was not unknown for c
riminals to defecate at crime scenes—usually during break-ins at well-to-do homes, presumably as a gesture of contempt for the absent owners. But he could not recall ever having seen this before at a homicide scene, especially given the nature of the awful killing of two old people. Greene, a good, decent family man, thought fiercely of the perpetrator: What kind of vile piece of human garbage are you?
“What was that, Pablo?” a voice from the outer doorway inquired. It was Newbold, who had just arrived, and Greene realized he had spoken aloud.
Still caught up by emotion that he rarely felt or showed, Greene gestured toward the two bodies, then pointed to the bowl he had just surveyed.
Leo Newbold stepped forward and inspected it all.
Then he said quietly, “Don’t worry. We’ll get the bastard. And when we do, we’ll put this case together so goddam tight, we’ll make sure the son of a bitch burns.”
Newbold was also remembering Major Yanes’s words, spoken not long ago: Make sure there’s nothing undone that should have been done. Go over every detail—and look especially hard for connections between cases.
Well, Homicide knew of a probable connection between the Frosts’ killings and the Hennenfelds’ in Fort Lauderdale, and now, with this new double slaying so clearly aligned with those other two, inevitably the question would be asked: Could more have been achieved by combining the two earlier inquiries, accepting them as serial killings? Might they even have found a suspect?
Newbold didn’t think so. Just the same, he was sure there would be some second-guessing, to which the media would contribute, almost certainly resulting in further pressure on Homicide and the Police Department generally.
But most essential at this moment was intensive focus on this latest case, coupled with reexamination of the other two. There was no question that Homicide was combating a bona fide serial killer.
“Were you able to get Ainslie and Quinn?” Greene asked.
Newbold nodded. “They’re on their way. And I told Quinn to call his contact in Lauderdale.”
A few minutes later an ID crew of four technicians arrived, followed almost at once by the ME, Sandra Sanchez. Whatever phoning Newbold had done after Greene’s urgent call from the crime scene, he’d evidently pulled out all stops, probably by going much higher in the department.
Through the next five hours work progressed swiftly. Near the end of that time the remains of Lazaro and Luisa Urbina were placed in body bags and conveyed to the county morgue, where, later that night, they would be autopsied. Sergeant Greene would attend the autopsy, again putting off the paperwork on his desk for at least one more day, by which time still more would have been added.
While detailed study and analysis needed to be done on much of the evidence collected by the ID crew, one disappointment emerged early.
“Pretty certain the perp wore gloves,” the fingerprint technician, Sylvia Walden, told Sergeant Greene. “There are quite a few smudges, the kind made by latex surgical gloves—same as we had at the Royal Colonial. Also, I think whoever did this knows enough to wear two pairs of latex gloves, because with one pair a print will come through after a while. There are some prints around, of course, and we’ll check those out, but they’re probably not the perp’s.”
Greene shook his head and mumbled, “Thanks.”
“For nothing,” Walden added.
Several hours earlier, Ainslie and Bernard Quinn had arrived at Pine Terrace and agreed with Newbold and Greene that a single serial killer was now their quarry.
On his way out, Ainslie walked around the scene a second time before the victims’ bodies were removed, lingering over the bronze bowl still close to the dead woman’s hand. There was something about that container and its contents that stirred an idea, a vague memory, an incomplete image he could not define. Ainslie returned to the object twice, hoping the elusive notion in his mind would clarify.
Maybe there was nothing at all, he decided, nothing except his own weariness with scenes of tragic death, and perchance some wishful searching for new leads. Perhaps what he needed now was to go home and spend an evening with his family … laugh around the dinner table … help Jason with his homework … make love to his wife … and possibly, by morning, some answers would have sprung to mind.
As it turned out, the next morning produced no new thoughts. It took four more days, when he least expected it, for Ainslie’s memory to awaken with dramatic, shocking clarity.
4
Four days after the Pine Terrace murders, Lieutenant Leo Newbold held a formal Homicide Department conference. It included supervisors and detectives involved with the serial killings, ID technicians, a medical examiner, and a state attorney. Senior police officers were informed of the conference; two attended. It was at that conference, as Ainslie thought about it later, that the drama broadened and, like a Shakespearean plot mutation, a new cast of characters entered the scene.
Among the new characters—though not new to Homicide—was Detective Ruby Bowe, a member of Sergeant Ainslie’s investigative team. Ruby, a petite, twenty-eight-year-old black woman with a penchant for glittering earrings and stylish clothes, was liked and respected, worked as hard as anyone in Homicide, sometimes harder, and expected no concessions because of her sex. She could be tough and tenacious, even ruthless. But at lighter times she displayed a sense of fun and mischief appreciated by her colleagues.
Ruby was the youngest of nine children born to Erskine and Allyssa Bowe, all of whom were raised in the crime-ridden ghetto of Miami’s Overtown area. Erskine Bowe was a police officer who had been shot and killed by a fifteen-year-old neighborhood boy on drugs and in the process of robbing a local 7-Eleven store. Ruby was twelve at the time, devastatingly young to lose her father, but old enough to remember their special closeness.
Erskine Bowe had always believed there was something extraordinary about Ruby, and had said to his friends, “She’s going to do something important. You just wait.”
Ruby, even so long after her father’s death, still missed him terribly.
Ruby had attended Booker T. Washington elementary school and Edison High, where she was a diligent student and volunteered for extracurricular activities, most aimed at social justice and change. She had fought especially hard against drug abuse, knowing it had been the real killer of her father.
Armed with an academic scholarship, Ruby attended Florida A&M University, majoring in psychology and sociology. She graduated with honors and, fulfilling a lifelong dream, immediately joined the Miami Police Department. Her father had been on the force for seventeen years; maybe in some positive way she could redress his death while “changing the world.” And if not the world, perhaps in some significant way her own neighborhood.
No one was unduly surprised when Ruby graduated from the police academy at the top of her class. What did raise eyebrows was a decision by Lieutenant Newbold to accept Ruby immediately as a Homicide detective. The move was unprecedented.
Homicide, in any police force, was an apex. Homicide detectives were considered to have the best brains and the greatest resourcefulness, and their prestige made them the envy of most colleagues. Because of this, Ruby’s appointment left a few older officers, who had hoped to join Homicide themselves, disappointed and resentful. But Newbold had a gut feeling about Ruby. “There are times,” he confided to Malcolm Ainslie, “when you can just smell a good cop.”
Ruby had now been a Homicide detective for four years, with an official rating of “outstanding.”
As a member of Sergeant Ainslie’s team, Ruby would automatically attend today’s 8:00 A.M. conference, but while others were filing in, she was on the telephone, surrounded by a file of official papers. Newbold, walking past, called, “Wind it up, Ruby. We’ll need you in there.”
“Yes, sir,” she acknowledged, and moments later she followed him, adjusting the large gold ear clip she had removed for the phone call.
Adjoining the general Homicide office were interview rooms for witnesses and suspe
cts, a room with more comfortable couches and chairs where families of victims were sometimes received, a large file room with crime records going back ten years, and, beyond all of these, the conference room.
Malcolm Ainslie sat at the conference room’s large, rectangular table along with two other sergeant supervisors, Pablo Greene and Hank Brewmaster, as well as Detectives Bernard Quinn, Esteban Kralik, José Garcia, and Ruby Bowe.
Garcia, born in Cuba, had been a Miami police officer for twelve years, including eight as a Homicide detective. Stocky and balding, Garcia looked ten years older then his actual thirty-three, prompting colleagues to refer to him as Pop.
The Homicide regulars were joined by the youthful Sheriff-Detective Benito Montes, who had driven to Miami from Fort Lauderdale in response to a phoned invitation from Bernard Quinn. In the matter of the Hennenfeld murders, Montes reported, there had been no progress since his previous visit to Miami Homicide.
The others included Dr. Sanchez, the medical examiner, ID technicians Julio Verona and Sylvia Walden, and an assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles.
Knowles, who headed the state attorney’s homicide division, had a formidable reputation as a criminal trial prosecutor. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered man who dressed modestly in off-the-rack suits and knitted ties, he had once been compared to an unassuming shoe clerk. During court trials, while cross-examining uncooperative witnesses, he was sometimes hesitant, conveying an impression of uncertainty when in fact nothing was further from the truth. Many such witnesses, believing they could lie with impunity while answering this unimpressive lawyer’s questions, suddenly found they had been coaxed into a spider’s web and had incriminated themselves before realizing it.
His disarming manner and razor-sharp mind were reasons why Knowles, during fifteen years with the state attorney’s office, had achieved a remarkable eighty-two percent conviction rate at murder trials. Homicide detectives were always grateful to have Curzon Knowles handling their cases, just as Newbold and the others were pleased to see him now.