A Killing Night (20 page)

CHAPTER 23

H
e’d pushed the patrol car up to eighty on the freeway and blown through the toll plaza to Alligator Alley, and hadn’t said a word since he’d slapped her.

She didn’t know where the hell he was going, but she did know that if she pushed it the wrong way it was only going to make it worse. They’d done this dark stretch of straight road before at night. She remembered the turnoff that he’d taken, up a hard-scrabbled path that was barely a road at all and ended up in some kind of woods he called a hammock.

They’d done some necking and then screwed in the backseat of the squad car. She’d thought it was actually pretty cool at the time. When they were getting dressed she clicked on the switch for the swirling blue lights and it made him yell at her at first and then he’d smiled that goddamn smile.

“You are a pistol, girl.”

He wasn’t smiling now and she knew she didn’t have a choice.

“Come on, Kyle. What’re we doing?”

Nothing.

She was using a soft voice and brushed the hair off her face.

“Look, I’m sorry. Really. I just get tired sometimes and, you know, I say stuff I don’t really mean.”

He was still quiet, but in the dim light from the dash she could see that his jaw was loosening, the marbles of muscle settling. At this point she didn’t trust what the hell he might do. She’d witnessed that anger and speed when he’d done it to others and now it was on her and she didn’t know how far he might take it. And Jesus, look where they were now, way the hell out here where nobody was going to hear her scream and no way was she going to jump out and run if he ever slowed the hell down or stopped.

She’d been out here during the daytime when they’d taken a drive to Naples on the west coast of the state. The sawgrass and open land went on like a damn meadow for miles and miles and she knew enough about the Everglades to know that most of it was hip deep in water.

But she’d also had plenty of practice getting pissed-off men to calm down. When you’re in the bar you use what you’ve got. Sometimes it’s a free drink. Sometimes a smile. Sometimes a promise of something to come later. It was a small price to pay.

“Come on, baby. I wasn’t trying to order you around,” she said. “I was just thinking about going home and relaxing and being with you instead of driving.”

Christ, she thought. Just like her father when he’d start crying about mom and saying how it wasn’t worth carrying on and where was the Lord when you were the one in need, and she’d sit down on the floor in front of his chair and take his big thick hands in hers and tell him how strong he’d always been and how much she loved him and as long as they were together they’d be a family and everything would be all right.

She hadn’t believed any of those words, either. But it got both of them through. It was the same thing, she told herself now while she forced back the bile that came up while she was apologizing for nothing. But this time she was scared and only trying to get herself through.

“Kyle. Come on, baby. I can’t stand it when you ignore me. It makes me feel alone and you know I need you to talk with me.”

She straightened up in her seat and squared her shoulders against the seat back, still watching his face, watching that right hand on the wheel, waiting for him to slap her again.

He cocked his head and tightened his lips and she reached out, slowly, thinking she’d try to touch him.

“You don’t know how close you come, Marci,” he said.

Yes, she did, she thought.

“You know I try to give you everything I can. And then you turn on me like that and how the fuck do you think that makes me feel?”

You’re insane, she thought.

“I know, baby. I know and I’m sorry,” she said.

He was easing off the speed and she thought that was good. They’d already passed the few cars and a tractor-trailer that had probably gone through the toll before them and now there weren’t any taillights out ahead of them. Across the divided highway she saw some headlights going east, but only a couple of pairs. She reached out farther and touched his thigh and forced herself not to flinch when she felt the muscle in his leg quiver.

“I really am sorry, Kyle.”

This time he turned his head and looked at her. The expression on his face said “you poor pitiful little girl” and she absorbed it and bit the side of her lip and swallowed it and let him repeat himself: “You don’t know how close you come sometimes.”

He slowed nearly to a stop and then pulled onto what felt like that same dirt road and now they were moving into the trees and into the dark. When they came to a stop, she let him kiss her. She got out of the car with him and looked up at a smear of stars and thought “Where’s my goddamn fairy godmother when I need her?” and then she let him undress her and said she was sorry again, but this time she was apologizing to herself.

She heard the leather of the gun belt creak and then drop to the ground. He pushed himself against her and she let him take her on the back bumper. She picked a spot out in the darkness and focused on it, watched it, wished she was in it. Was this her fault? she thought. Did I do this to myself again?

When he was finished he backed off and she started to relax. She could take this. She could get through this, she thought.

But then he held her by the shoulders and turned her and pushed her chest down on the trunk of the car and she let him take her again. She closed her eyes and silently vowed: Last Time.

On the ride back home he sipped at the flask and actually asked her if she had liked the movie. She forced herself to say yes, especially the part when the SWAT team came in and cleared out the room of foreign terrorists without firing a shot. He’d just nodded. She tried to concentrate on the moon and remembered a storybook from when she was a child about a boy with a purple crayon and how the moon walked with him.

When they got a block from her apartment he parked and got out and opened the door for her. She stepped out and then stood facing him, looking into his face, her eyes as dry as parchment.

“I gotta go. I’ll call you,” he said, and she nodded and he leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

She watched him get back into the car and pull out onto the street and she stayed still until the red glow of the taillights disappeared around the corner. And then she turned and threw up into the gutter over and over and over until her throat was raw.

CHAPTER 24

I
walked into the bar late afternoon and the darkness and the odor of stale beer and a subtle hint of mildew stopped me. I took two steps in and waited until my eyes adjusted, pupils spiraling down from the brilliance of the sun outside.

There were three humped backs at the bar, men with their shoulders turned in as though the light that came through the door was a cold wind. There was a blonde head moving beyond them. Her hair was pulled back tight. Marci, working the day shift just as Laurie had told me over the phone. The manager had offered quickly that the girl had just asked to switch her shifts and get off the eight-to- two for a few weeks. Laurie became even more suspicious when I said I needed to talk with the girl and would rather do it in private.

“She came in with the strangest look. Said there was nothing wrong but I knew there was. Is she in some kind of trouble with the police?”

I told her again that I wasn’t a cop and that I was only a consultant when detective Richards and I had met with her.

“But you didn’t say that then, did you?” she reminded me.

I apologized for leading her on.

“It’s OK,” she said, brightly, like she meant it. “You get used to liars in this business.”

I let the dig sit.

“So can I talk with Marci?” I asked.

“You don’t need my permission. She’s on four-to-eight all this week.”

I made my way down the bar and took the end seat on purpose. I had called Richards the same day I’d given her the picture. I knew she would look up his name. Pissed as she was, she was too good a cop to turn away from it. What I was surprised at was that she gave me the rundown. Maybe it was in the form of an apology, maybe she was intrigued. It was hard to read her over the phone.

Kyle Morrison. Three years on the Fort Lauderdale Department. Came in from a small department in North Florida. Since he’d been here there were a handful of complaints in his file. Most of them gripes from arrestees about use of force, but not one that had stuck. Like most metropolitan departments, Fort Lauderdale had a strong union. They dealt with most complaints internally and even if they did think Morrison was heavy-handed, there wasn’t much they would do unless he knocked around someone prominent and it went public. He was assigned to a night prowl car shift in the Victoria Park area. The only odd thing Richards said she noticed was that despite his experience Morrison had never taken the sergeant’s exam. He seemed to be satisfied with what he had, which does not always endear you to the powers that be. Supervisors are wary of those who don’t aspire to management like they did. It makes them second-guess themselves.

I complimented Richards on her thoroughness and her sources.

“I’m sorry for this morning, Freeman,” she’d said and hung up.

Marci looked twice at me when I sat down and then she reached into the cooler. She brought out a Rolling Rock and pried the cap off.

“Hi,” she said when she put the bottle in front of me and then stood back, waiting.

“How you doing?” I said, my tone conversational.

She stared at my face a couple of moments too long. Her eyes had a color like rainwater on a concrete slab and had about the same amount of emotion in them. She looked older than the last time, and not just by days.

“You on the job?” she said, like an accusation.

I took a sip of beer and couldn’t hold her look.

“Used to be. Now I’m working as a private investigator,” I said.

The other men at the bar were too far down the rail to hear me. I had the feeling it was as intimate a setting as I was going to get with her.

“But you were with that cop the other day, the woman with the hair?”

“Yeah. She’s looking into a case that I was trying to help her with.”

“What kind of case?” she said, all subtlety gone from her voice. I had the feeling she’d given up on subtlety.

“The disappearance of some women,” I said. “Women who were all bartenders.”

She actually stepped back, though I was sure she was aware of it.

“From here?”

“One from here,” I said. “The others from a couple of places in the area that are pretty much like this. Small bars. Relatively quiet. Regular customers.”

“What happened to them?”

“No one has been able to find out,” I said. “They never turned up. They just vanished. No notes. No argument with family. No damage to their apartments. It was almost like they went out on a date and never came back.”

When I said it I watched her face. I thought she was looking at the mirror on the wall behind me but I could see a paleness spread down her face like the blood was sliding down out of her cheeks, leaking somewhere below her throat. She stumbled like she’d suddenly fallen off a pair of high heels and I came off the stool and reached out for her.

She put up her palm.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, regained her balance and then turned and poured herself a shot of brandy from the back of the bar. When she tossed it back one of the boys down the way picked up on the movement and raised his tumbler of dark liquid.

“Cheers,” he croaked in a raspy voice, downed the drink and went back to studying the wood grain on the bar top.

I waited for a hint of color to come back into her skin but I wasn’t going to waste my advantage.

“You know a guy named Morrison, Marci? A Kyle Morrison?”

“Yeah,” she said and I could see a flicker of fear in her eyes. “Why? Does he have anything to do with this?”

“It’s possible,” I said, using the fear. “How well do you know him?”

Now she was looking down into her empty shot glass.

“Maybe not as well as I should, huh?”

She motioned for me to take a stool down around the corner of the bar, behind the electronic poker machine, and we talked for an hour, breaking on occasion so she could tend to the others when they tapped their glasses on the African mahogany. At first she just listened while I described the cases that Richards thought were more than just disappearances. I gave her the details about the girls, all from places far away with no local family connections and not a lot of close friends outside the bar business. They had all lived alone. They were all single. She waited until I’d given as much detail as I was going to give and then she poured herself another brandy.

She hadn’t known any of the women. She had heard some of the other bartenders gossiping, but hadn’t given it much thought. Trading in rumor was all part of the business.

“So, you don’t know if any of them was raped?” she asked, the question coming far too quickly.

“No. There weren’t any reports made before they disappeared, no,” I said.

The slightest tremor had set up in her chin. Scared? Disappointed? Heartbroken? I couldn’t tell. She looked vulnerable for the first time, but I am not beyond taking advantage of vulnerable.

“Tell me about Kyle, Marci,” I said, looking straight into her eyes.

“He’s a cop,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been dating him.”

I let her eyes look past me again.

“You two have a drug thing going, him supplying, you selling to the customers over the bar?” I said.

“No,” she said instantly. “Shit, no. Kyle doesn’t do drugs. Neither do I. No.”

But she was putting him somewhere.

“Then why are you so scared, Marci?” I said. She was shaking her head and despite her effort to stop it, moisture was coming into her eyes.

“You think Kyle did it, that he killed those girls?” she said.

I shook my own head.

“No one’s sure of anything,” I said. Marci had made the jump, suspecting Kyle, for some reason. And I did not peg her as a simple, paranoid woman.

“Why? Do you think he could have?”

I was watching her eyes to see if she was working back on days or nights or conversations with Morrison, putting him in a context that she had never before imagined.

“The guy we’re talking about went out with these girls several times, knew where they lived and had some access to their apartments so he could cover up afterward,” I said.

I knew I was leading her. But I didn’t care. If my drug theory was out, I had to find something to get this Morrison guy off the list.

“Jesus,” she said and her head dropped and she slowly shook it, letting strands of her hair swing loose. After a few seconds her chin came up and it was set, back teeth tightened down.

“Kyle,” she said and nothing more.

“Do you think he’s capable?”

“Goddamn right he’s capable,” she said, now letting the anger into her voice.

“Why? Did you see anything? Did he say anything that makes you believe that?”

She shook her head.

“Too smart,” she said, again with the look over my shoulder, seeing him and all his motives and moves through a whole different looking glass. “He’d be way too smart for that.”

I still didn’t know for sure where she was coming from, but I did know there was something under the surface. Even if your boyfriend has jerked you around and done you wrong, you don’t accept the accusation that he’s a killer this easily.

“But he wasn’t smart enough with you,” I said, hoping it would come.

“No, he wasn’t,” she said, and the anger she was holding flashed into her eyes. “He raped me. And I let him.”

Christ, I thought. As a cop, I had heard the accusation of rape fly from the mouths of a lot of women. The word still stung, just the thought of it, even when it had a ring of untruth. But this wasn’t an accusation. It was an admission. Marci turned her face away from me. Some guy at the other end of the bar banged his glass on the wood. I looked down at him and the expression on my face made him return his attention to the bottom of his glass for further study.

Marci did not move, no sobs, not even a snuffle. The blonde ponytail, for Christ’s sake, made her look like a college girl. I put my hand on her shoulder and she did not flinch, just rotated the stool back to me and her eyes were dry.

“So what do you need to know?” she said.

The rape had taken place two nights before. She had not gone to the hospital, so there was no rape kit. She had come home and scrubbed herself in the shower after throwing up in the gutter. She had slept with Morrison several times over the last couple of months and it wouldn’t make any difference, she said. They’d call it consensual, she said: “And they’d be right. I let it happen.”

I kept shaking my head no. She was turning on herself, giving him a way out. I needed the strong side of her.

“Don’t go there, Marci. Husbands get convicted of raping their wives. Don’t go there,” I said. “You can file charges against him.”

I tried to make my voice sound convincing, even while she kept shaking her head no, no, no.

“Where did this happen, Marci?” I said, still thinking evidence, evidence.

“Out in the Glades,” she said. “Way out past the toll booth on the Alley.”

“All right. Do you think you could find it again, this place out in the Glades?”

She shook her head, still facing the length of the bar away from me and the other men now began to take notice.

“There’s no way I would recognize it. It was dark when he took me there. It’s an unmarked turnoff.”

“Had he taken you there before?” I asked. Every human has a pattern, does what he does in a way or in a place that he considers a comfort zone. The bars, the women running the show in those bars, the night as cover.

She nodded her head and turned away, picked up the empty shot glass but did not move to fill it.

“You’ll never find it,” she said.

I looked across at myself in the mirror. I knew I could take this all to Richards. God knows she’d be all over Morrison if she thought she could substantiate another officer raping a woman. She’d shot and killed the last one.

But I also knew the system, the PBA lawyers, the disparagement of the victim, the drawn out court process with filings and cross- filings. My own mother had taken a more direct route to justice and I’d praised her for it. If there were other victims, they too would be buried forever in the paperwork. If Morrison was our guy, it might be the best chance to come up with evidence to give those girls and their families some justice. If Morrison wasn’t our guy, at least we’d have the chance to nail his ass.

I knew I was freelancing on this. I’d have to tell Richards in either case, but not yet.

“All right. Then there’s another way,” I said. “But it would involve some risk—to you.”

She turned around and her eyes were dry and hard.

“Then I’m in.”