Now it was Ziegler who looked confused. “You said he needed to admit to being involved in the crime before we could officially offer immunity.”
“But you know how it is. If the crime is murder, and if the person is a conspirator, everything’s very uncomplicated. But if it’s murder and the person is actually involved in the killing, a participant to the murder, everything gets a little sticky.”
“Look, we’ve wasted a lot of time on this thing, Jack,” Ziegler said. He was frustrated and not afraid to hide the fact. “What’s the bottom line?”
Watson turned around and faced the detective. “We can offer immunity, but I need to clear it through the judge.”
“Fine. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is the judge will most likely assign Spider a public defender. And if that happens, you and Mr. Brown won’t be allowed back in for any questioning.”
Ziegler slumped backward in his chair. “I get it,” he said. “And if we can’t talk to Spider, good luck finding the boys. Right?”
“Right.”
So much for feeling festive, Bob thought to himself. Out loud he said, “Let’s say the judge assigns him an attorney. Can’t we continue to ask questions as long as the attorney is present?”
“You can try,” Watson said. “But in a possible double murder? Where the state’s witness is personally involved? I sure wouldn’t bank on it.”
AN HOUR LATER, CIRCUIT COURT JUDGE WARREN H. Cobb of the Seventh Judicial Court in Volusia County was provided information regarding the request to grant partial immunity to Earl Lee Smith regarding his role in a possible double murder.
Judge Cobb signed the request and without hesitation issued an order stating that Spider Smith receive immediate public counsel.
Deputy Ziegler and Bob Brown were still waiting in the courthouse when Watson found them and gave them the news.
“He’ll be represented by Dick Kane,” Watson said. Bob could tell from his tone of voice that what he was about to say was not good news. “Kane’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. Needless to say, he doesn’t want his client to undergo any more questioning until further notice.”
And with that, the unofficial questioning of Spider Smith came to a complete and sudden end.
THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER ZIEGLER HAD TEMPORARILY REturned his entire emphasis to other cases and after Bob had returned to his office, Mike was finishing a preliminary investigation into the lead he had received earlier that day. Now, he was at the Texan Motel about to find out the truth.
A kind-looking elderly man had been sitting behind the front desk reading a book when Mike walked in. “Can I help you?” he said, smiling as he stood to greet the tall, young man.
“Yes, I’m looking for a couple of missing teenagers,” Mike said. He spoke with a gentle voice that had come from years of working with Bob Brown. He pulled out the pictures of the teens and placed them on the counter.
The man stared at the pictures and raised his eyes in surprise. “Why, that picture looks just like one of the boys staying here!” He picked up the photograph of Daryl Barber and stared at it closely.
Mike felt his heart beat faster. “We took an anonymous call this morning from a man who said he saw someone who looked like Daryl Barber staying at this motel. He thought there might be some kind of problem.” Mike searched for the right words. “Maybe the boy was being held against his will.”
The man looked puzzled and he shook his head. “I don’t think it’s anything like that, son,” he said. “The boy I’m thinking of goes by the name Jeff Houser. He stays here, but he’s not a guest. Works for me, in fact.”
Mike listened carefully. “How long has he been working for you, sir?”
“Oh, about three months. Something like that. But like I said, his name’s Jeff Houser.”
Mike nodded. If the boy had only been at the motel for three months there was still a chance he might actually be Daryl Barber. “Would it be possible for me to meet Jeff Houser. Maybe that way I could clear this whole thing up and be on my way.”
The man smiled amicably. “Why, certainly,” he said. “Follow me. He should be out back washing down the patio chairs.”
The two men walked through the office and onto a cement patio behind the motel where a small swimming pool was surrounded by a cement brick fence. They could see the back of a teenage boy who was washing chairs as if his life depended on it.
“Jeff, there, doesn’t have any family,” the elderly man whispered. “He takes his job here real serious-like. Does a great job and always treats the customers with respect. Not like a lot of those long-hair teenagers on the beach. You know the type.”
Mike nodded. He was anxious to stop the conversation and talk with the boy. “Can we talk to him a minute?”
“Sure.” The man raised his voice. “Jeff! Come here a minute.”
The boy turned around and Mike was stunned. He was the mirror image of Daryl Barber.
“Howdy,” the boy said, coming up quickly and tipping his head politely. “Y’all have more work for me, sir?”
Mike’s heart sank. The boy’s southern accent was so obvious there was no way he could be from Michigan.
The owner smiled at Mike. “See what I mean. All manners, this one.” He turned to the teenager. “This man has a few questions for you.”
Instantly, the boy’s face clouded with fear. “Somethin’ wrong?”
Mike shook his head quickly. “No, no. Just wanted to ask you a few questions. That all right?”
“Sure.” The boy shrugged and again Mike was struck by how much he looked like Daryl.
“First I’ll need your name.”
“Jeff. Jeff Houser.”
Mike looked up and stared into the boy’s eyes. “That your real name, Jeff?”
“Why, yes, sir. Sure is.”
“Okay, then. How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And where’d you live before you started working here at the Texan Motel.”
“Louisiana, sir. Shreveport.”
Mike looked up again. This line of questioning seemed pointless unless there was something the boy was hiding. “Just one more question, Jeff. Ever heard of a guy named Daryl Barber?”
“No, sir. Never hearda him.”
“You sure about that?”
The boy shrugged. “Never hearda him.”
Mike watched the boy’s face, looking for any signs that he was nervous or uneasy. Like Bob, Mike prided himself on being able to tell if a person was lying. There was always something: a twitch or an inability to make eye contact. He stared at the boy now, almost hoping he would see some sort of sign.
There was none.
He thanked the teenager and his boss and headed back for Orlando.
TWO DAYS LATER, AMIDST TEARS AND PHONE CALLS FROM family and friends, Ron and Marian Barber remembered Daryl’s twentieth birthday. By the end of the day, Marian knew that Faye had been right. There was no way to describe the pain of living through the birthday of a son with no idea whether that son was even alive. It was something a person had to go through to understand. And although the detectives and Bob Brown knew the boys were very likely dead they were waiting for concrete facts before telling the boys’ parents.
Before they went to bed that night, Marian began to cry and Ron pulled her into a hug.
“We’ve got to have some answers soon,” Marian said. “I can’t take this, Ron.”
“I know, Marian.” Ron smoothed his wife’s hair. “None of us can.”
That night, like others before it, Marian had nightmares about her missing son. But this time they were more vivid, more terrifying. And sometime in the wee hours of the morning she sat straight up in bed and screamed the words that were on her mind day and night—the words she could never quite rise above, no matter how hard she tried. That night the words echoed through the silence of the morning, shattering any image of peace in the home.
“Daryl!” she screamed. “Where are you?”
• • •
DRIVEN BY THE SAME QUESTION, BOB BROWN SPENT Daryl’s birthday in an entirely different manner. After waiting three very long, very frustrating weeks, the time had come to visit the trucking company again. Snake was on his way back to Tampa. And Bob was willing to wait days if necessary to see that he got a proper welcome home.
CHAPTER 34
The stakeout had been going on for thirty-six hours and Bob was beginning to lose track of what day it was. He and Mike had parked in the trucking company parking lot late Saturday, December 9—Daryl’s birthday. There they had set up their watch from two separate cars and already each had taken several sleeping shifts.
In the past week Bob had not only talked to Snake’s wife but had also compiled every bit of information he could about Snake and Spider from arrest records, paid informants, and interviews with Spider. Now, as he sat waiting for Snake’s return, he was more familiar with the men than he’d ever hoped to be. And while their childhood and teenage years had been anything but ideal, Bob did not feel sorry for them. They had made their own choices, and if somehow they had harmed those boys, then they deserved to be punished to the full extent of the law.
Bob opened the file that contained the background information on Snake and Spider and read through it once more.
Earl Lee Smith had been conceived twenty-two years earlier in a violent manner which now seemed less than surprising. When his mother was only a teenager, she had been out late one night, as she often was, with friends nearly twice her age. After midnight, when the fun was over, she walked home by herself through a tenement section of town known for its violence. Suddenly she turned a corner and at once was grabbed by a masked man who shoved a gun into her ribs.
“Get down or I’ll kill you.” He seethed the words, hatred spewing from every part of his face.
Terrified for her life, she had no choice but to obey.
“Get over there,” the man said, kicking the young girl behind a Dumpster. When she followed his orders, he ripped her clothes off and raped her again and again, leaving her unconscious and naked body tossed in a heap like a discarded piece of trash. Passersby found her the next morning and called police, who ordered an ambulance for the young woman and rushed her to the hospital.
Three weeks later the doctor who had treated her in the emergency room gave her a pregnancy test. The result was positive.
The teenage girl believed in her heart that the child was not at fault for the horrible crime committed against her. And so she decided to carry the baby to term and make a home for the baby. Naturally, her parents were mortified over their daughter’s predicament and were unable to accept her decision and the idea of having a rapist’s child in their home. Angry with their attitude, the girl ran away, deciding she would have to survive on her own.
But all of her well-meaning ideas about raising the baby and forgetting about how the child had been conceived disappeared as soon as she went into labor. She had never felt such pain before and could compare the experience to just one thing—her violent rape. She named the little boy Earl and when the nurse tried to set the child in her arms she turned away, appearing to be suddenly nauseous.
“I don’t want to hold him,” she said, sounding as if something inside her had died. “Just take him away. Please.”
The nurses were puzzled, not having known her background or the way in which the pregnancy had come to be. But they took the child away as the young woman had asked and for the next three days the nurses took turns playing mother to him. When the time came for the mother and child to go home, each of the nurses whispered her fears about what kind of life the little boy would have living with a mother who seemed to have no ability to love.
The nurses’ fears had been founded.
Earl Smith’s existence was meager, the love he received next to nothing. His mother got married not long afterward and her husband became the only father Earl would ever know. But from his earliest memories the man was an abusive alcoholic who treated Earl and eventually his younger brother as if they were unwanted and more trouble than they were worth.
It seemed to Earl that the man wanted a lifestyle that did not involve small children. But as cruel a blow as that might be to most children, Earl never seemed to care. He never seemed to feel anything at all. Not even about his mother, whose attitude toward him grew over the years from indifference to obvious dislike.
Perhaps living with such an abusive man caused her to grow increasingly angry over a number of aspects involving her life. Because she must have had no other place to take out her anger, she took it out on her son. One day, when she had berated him at length over a relatively minor issue, she suddenly turned toward him, fire blazing in her eyes, and said the one thing she had sworn she would never say.
“You’re no better than your father, the piece of trash,” she shouted at her six-year-old son. “Do you hear me? You’re no better than the man who raped me. If he hadn’t raped me you wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t have to deal with you!”
“What’s rape?” Earl asked, showing no signs of being hurt by his mother’s comments.
“Rape!” she screamed at him. “Don’t you understand? Your father was a dirty old dog who beat me up and forced himself on me. He left me in the streets for dead. I don’t even know his name.”
After that, Earl wrestled with what his mother said to him that afternoon. He never forgot her words. And if he didn’t quite grasp their meaning as a six-year-old, then he certainly understood the truth about his conception as he grew older.
The single place where Earl received love was in the home of his grandparents. Although they had been upset about their daughter’s situation, they grew to love their brown-haired grandson as if he were their own. They cared for him much of the time when his mother or stepfather were either too uninterested or too caught up in their own troubles to spend any time with him. Earl’s grandparents enjoyed being with the boy and did all they could to steer the child right.
But whether it was the boy’s upbringing or something bred in him during his violent conception, Earl never once responded to his grandparents’ love. He showed no emotion whatsoever, whether he was being loved or ignored, helped or beaten. It didn’t matter. The child had flinty eyes from the time he could talk, and by the time he was twelve years old he began doing what seemed absolutely natural to those who knew him. He began breaking the law.
At age twelve, Earl Smith had finally found the group where he fit in. It was a group many people feared and others tried desperately to eliminate from society. His place was among the city’s youthful delinquents. By then Earl had allowed his hair to grow long and scraggly. He had a mustache and a face that never smiled or even looked somewhat happy. If the way Earl walked—shoulders stooped, feet dragging—didn’t tell a person something about his character, his cold eyes did. Earl had dead eyes, black and hard with no life whatsoever behind them. He wore the same lifeless look that year, the winter of 1968, when he stole his first car and his grandparents tried to bail him out of jail.
“Oh, Earl, honey, how could you have gotten yourself into this trouble?” his grandmother cried that evening.
But Earl only looked at her with those cold, dead eyes. No remorse whatsoever, no anger. Nothing. And because he seemed to own no emotions, he was unable to understand hers. Why was she upset? He had no car of his own so he had taken one that belonged to someone else. No big deal. Nothing to get upset over.
By then Earl’s soul and spirit were apparently dead because of more than his upbringing or his innate nature. He was also well on his way to becoming a drug addict. In his circle of friends marijuana was easily available. So were the mind-altering drugs which everyone knew could burn a person’s brain up after only three or four uses. Earl didn’t care about that bit of information any more than he cared about anything else. He did drugs to pass the time. And the only people he ever intera
cted with were people he wanted something from. Drugs, money, sex. Once his needs were met he discarded the people who met them much the same way his mother had been tossed aside after her rape years earlier.
After the car theft, there were other crimes: felony thefts and charges of possessing drugs or deadly weapons. Each time, Earl continued to show no emotion and nothing even close to remorse about his actions.
Naturally, some people, especially court-appointed defense attorneys, blamed Earl’s actions on his childhood. But no one could ever really be certain if Earl was truly a product of a disastrous upbringing. More likely, some people reasoned, Earl was just a very, very bad seed, someone who would inevitably spend his adult years in a state prison somewhere.
By the time he was eighteen, Earl moved to Daytona Beach and immediately decided to stay. Everywhere he looked there were teenagers hungry for adventure and thrills they could purchase. Earl figured most of them were probably looking for something that could be smoked or snorted or popped. And not long after arriving in Daytona Beach, he hooked up with someone so like himself it was uncanny.
John Carter Cox, Jr.
If it were possible, John was even more unfeeling, more sociopathic than Earl. At the age of twelve he had left home and moved to Daytona Beach where he took up residence at a group flophouse. In those days there were fewer such houses but those that existed did so under the leadership of local drug dealers. Largely, their illegal efforts went unabated by police, who, although aware of what was happening at the houses, were unable to catch the occupants publicly breaking the law. Police were careful to watch for young runaways during school hours, hoping to pick some of them up for truancy. But for the most part the runaways were careful to stay inside until the afternoon and evenings. And John was even more careful than most.
By the end of that first year, John was running drug deals for the house leader and establishing himself as the “candy-man” of the beach. He made a tidy profit for the work he did and in turn developed a heavy addiction to several drugs.