Garden of Evil (27 page)

Keppie's story launched a media frenzy unlike any since the Versace case. Now, along with the police and the FBI, a rabid press trailed her wake.

Searchers found the body of Joey's dad with the help of dogs. They continued to search for the unidentified remains of the man she called Stanley. Mary Alice and Harland Travis, the aunt and uncle who had raised Keppie, were besieged, their modest upstate home surrounded by microphones, sound trucks, and network correspondents. I opted to remain in Miami, piecing together new developments for the main story each day.

A Navy plane en route to the torpedo testing range in the deep trough just east of Andros Island spotted a burning vessel adrift at sea. The burning boat was later identified as the
Playtime.
No sign of Keppie or the captain. However, a vacationing schoolteacher from Massachusetts and his fifty-two-foot sloop were reported missing a short time later from a nearby island.

I jumped each time the phone rang. It would never end for me until she was found, I knew that now.

My updated map had red pushpins all the way out into the Bahamas like the twisting path of some killer storm or other freak of nature. I painstakingly reconstructed our interviews and continued to anchor the breaking story.

The missing teacher reappeared, shot dead on the sandy beach of one of the small islands that freckle the Caribbean east of St. Martin, where a wealthy retiree and his forty-one-foot trawler were reported overdue by anxious relatives.

The big story I had wanted was all mine. But it had lost its appeal. Curiously repelled, too emotionally involved, I was loath to face the questions in the eyes and on the lips of other reporters.

When Keppie was finally arrested, using Sandy De
Witt's American Express Card in Barbados, the press corps descended on its capital city of Bridgetown. I was not among them. The News sent Janowitz.

Eager to escape the islands, where executions are by hanging and the steps to the gallows do not take twelve to fifteen years, she waived extradition. With jurisdictional problems in their cases, island authorities were willing to see her tried first in Florida. Brought back in manacles and leg irons, Keppie looked unperturbed at the airport, smiling flirtatiously and laughing intimately with her armed escorts. I watched her on TV and studied the newspaper photos.

Keppie had noted my absence from the media mob scenes and asked for me, Janowitz said.

Being back on the job was good for me. I turned my files and interview notes with Althea over to the justice team. They did not invite me to join their growing coverage of the crimes that resulted in her murder. I didn't blame them.

McDonald took me out to dinner after my annual evaluation by Fred. Both Althea's story and that of the Kiss-Me Killer figured prominently in Fred's analysis of my job performance at the News.

“I'm surprised he wasn't even harder on me,” I said, picking at my salad. “I never should have become so involved in the murder investigation. I should have reported the story, not become a part of it; that was my mistake. I didn't listen to people who knew better.”

“What did he write in the evaluation?” McDonald asked. “How tough was he?”

“He rated me high in initiative and enterprise and good in writing skills,” I said, “but flunked me as a team player. We agreed that I have to work harder to build a closer relationship with the desk, keep them informed, and remember that reporters do not work alone or make their own judgments. I have to check in with the desk several times a day and write memos about everything I'm work
ing on,” I said. “It's penance, even though, I swear, I've learned the lesson: Life is a team effort.”

“Been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said, his smile sly. I felt the sizzle as our eyes met.

“Don't try sweeping me off my feet,” I warned, as he poured wine into my glass. “You might succeed. And nobody knows better than me that it's not always good to get what you wish for.”

“I'll go slow,” he promised, “and sneak up on you.”

 

I dream of Joey often and still reel from the more important lesson that has forever changed me. Having seen it myself, I know now that evil is real, that some people are bom with a dark genetic defect, difficult to diagnose and impossible to fix. I believe in the murder gene.

My dreams about Joey are always the same. We are together, struggling to survive in a black sea where the sounds of the waves are screams, the smells are gunpowder and blood, and a battle rages. Dark angels engage in fierce combat against bright angels from the blue water. I awake with a prayer that the angels with wings of light will prevail.

 

Nearly a month after her return, Keppie's court-appointed lawyer called.

“Everybody wants to interview her,” he told me, “from Larry King to Geraldo to Barbara Walters. I've strongly advised her against it—but she wants to talk to you.”

I am too busy on other stories, I said. Weeks later, working late one night, I picked up my telephone and heard a familiar voice.

“Hey there, Britt. I've got a story for ya. When you comin' to interview me again?”

Her words sent a shudder through me. “I think we did enough interviewing,” I said.

“Look, I'd come out and meetcha somewhere, but we been there, done that, and I'm kinda tied up at the mo
ment.” She chortled. “Why don'cha come on over here? You know you miss me, babe. Said yourself you always have more questions. Come on,” she coaxed. “You're the only person I know in Miami, 'cept for that little prick of a lawyer they gave me. Dumb little son of a bitch. He's scared to sit in the same room with me. How the hell am I gonna get a fair trial? When you come,” she added confidently, “bring a coupla packsa Benson and Hedges.”

 

The jail was noisy, as always. Slams of metal on metal resounded like gunshots as electric locks were opened and closed from an elevated control room. They searched me, took my purse, and led me to a private visitor's cubicle divided by a wire mesh screen. I sat on a wooden chair, waiting for her to be brought in. Two corrections officers and a supervisor escorted her. Her face lit up when she saw me. She wore a pink jumpsuit, identifying her as a high-risk inmate, unlike the drab attire worn by other prisoners. Pink was a good color for her; it picked up her rosy complexion. She glowed.

“How ya been, babe?” She greeted me casually. “Looking good.” She leaned in close to the screen to peer at me. “Too bad there's no touchin',” she murmured, “but we had us some good ol' times, didn't we?” She smiled, with a lascivious wink at a corrections officer, a middle-aged woman who remained stoic.

Her restless energy, vivacious edge, and raw sexuality had not been dulled by captivity. Even the jail food she had dreaded seemed to agree with her. Her slim frame had filled out a bit.

“I gave them the cigarettes to give you,” I said.

“Thank you, ma'am,” she said cheerfully. “Thought you were dead, but you made it back. Little Joey, too. What'd I tell you? We could be sisters, you and me, we're so much alike. Survivors, that's us.”

“If I were you,” I said quietly, “I wouldn't count on
staying a survivor. You're looking at the death penalty from a dozen different directions.”

“Aww, Britt.” She shook her head at my silliness. “They won't 'lectrocute me. Who would sentence a pregnant woman, a young mother-to-be, to death?” She leaned back in her chair and fondly patted her stomach.

I stared.

“True fact. Can't wait to be a mama.”

“Who's the father?” I whispered.

“Damned if I know.” She gave an exaggerated shrug “Maybe Sonny. Coulda been Joey's daddy, or that pretty boy, that model on South Beach. Hell, doesn't matter.”

Another child, I thought, who will grow up without a father, with a mother behind bars.

“Nobody's gonna send the lovin' mother of a little baby to the 'lectric chair. And, if they do”—she shrugged again—“at least I've left somethin' behind. A little part of me will still be here. I can feel it,” she drawled. “It's a mother's instinct. I know it's a girl….

“I'll still be around,” she called as I left. “One way or the other, I'll be back.”

If You Enjoyed Garden of Evil,
Then Sample the Following Selection from

YOU ONLY DIE TWICE

The new Britt Montero Novel
by Edna Buchanan
Coming Soon in Hardcover from William Morrow

H
OT SAND SIZZLED BENEATH MY FEET.
A
N ENDLESS
turquoise sea stretched into infinity. Bright sailboats darted beyond the breakers, their colors etched against a flawless blue sky. Playful ocean breezes kissed my face, lifted my hair off my shoulders and ruffled my skirt around my knees. The day was to die for. Too bad about the corpse bobbing gently in the surf.

Her hair was long and honey colored, streaked by brilliant light as it swirled like something alive just beneath the water's glinting surface. She seemed serene, a full breasted, narrow waisted mermaid, with long slim legs, an enchanting gift from the deep.

I wondered if she had been caught by the rip current, that fast-moving jet of water racing back to the sea, or did she tumble from a cruise ship or a party boat? Perhaps she was a tourist unaccustomed to the sharp drop off only a few feet from shore. But if so, why was she naked?

She was no rafter drowned in a quest for freedom, a new life, or designer jeans. Her polished fingertips and toenails gleamed with a pearly luster, as though smoothed to perfection by the tides. She looked like a woman who had had a good life. None of the grotesqueries that the sea and its creatures do to dead bodies had happened yet. Obviously, she had not been in the water long.

I had heard the initial radio transmission on the “floater” while at the Miami Beach police public information office, where I had been plodding dutifully through a stack of computer printouts, compiling crime statistics zone by zone. The
Miami News
art department intended to create a locater map for Sunday's paper, to accompany my piece on the crime rate. A tiny black dot would pinpoint the scene of each rape, murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault.

I hate projects involving numbers. If words are my strength, decimal points are my weakness. Calculating the number of violent crimes per 100,000 population has always been problematic for me at best. Was it 32 crimes per hundred thousand, 320 or 3.2? A live story on a dead woman was infinitely more interesting. My statistic-loving editors would not agree. But a stranger's death fueled my imagination.

I identified with her, more than with most victims. We were close in age, and I had planned to body surf and sunbathe along this same sandy stretch today. Instead I had reluctantly agreed to finish this DBI (Dull, But Important) project on my day off. Now fate had brought me to the precise place I had yearned to be, sun on my shoulders, sea breeze in my hair—but this was not the day at the beach I'd had in mind.

I watched, along with a small crowd and two uniformed cops, as a detective trudged toward us across the sand. Emery Rochek was an old-timer, one of the few holdouts who had not opted for guayaberas when dress codes were relaxed. Unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, his white shirt was open at the throat, his tie loose, beneath a shapeless gabardine jacket that flapped in the breeze. Emery handled more than his share of DOAs, mostly routine deaths. Young cops wanted sexier calls, I knew, not reminders of their own mortality. Emery never seemed to mind the unpleasant tasks that came with a corpse.

“So, you beat me here, Britt,” he acknowledged, his voice a gravelly rumble.

“I was at the station working on a story about the crime rate. I heard it go out.”

Emery chewed his cigar. His smelly stogies came in handy to mask the odor of corpses gone undiscovered too long, though his colleagues fiercely debated which stench was worse. No need to light up here. This corpse was as fresh as the sea around her.

“Well, lookit what washed up.” He regarded her, his shaggy eyebrows lifted in mock surprise. “Whattaya waiting for, the tide to go out and take her with it?” he asked the cops.

“Thought maybe I should leave her the way she was 'til you guys took a look,” one said.

Rochek shook his head in disgust as the two cops left their shoes and socks on the sand, pulled on rubber gloves and waded gingerly into the sun-dappled shallows. They dragged her unceremoniously ashore, water streaming from her hair. Her pale, half open eyes stared at the sky with a hopeful almost prayerful look. Her only adornment, a single gold earring, the delicate outline of a tiny open heart.

An excellent clue, I thought. Distinctive jewelry always helped indentify the dead. But this woman's youth and beauty assured that she was no lost soul. I was sure her identity would be no mystery. I expected a frantic spouse, relatives, friends, to appear momentarily, frantic with grief, hearts breaking.

“A great body is a terrible thing to waste,” one of the cops muttered.

Emery straddled the naked woman, cigar still clenched between his teeth, tugging her one way, then the other, seeking wounds or identifying marks. I watched, painfully aware that the dead have no privacy.

“Hey, Red.” Emery glanced over my shoulder to ac
knowledge a newcomer, elbowing her way through the growing throng of gawkers.

Lottie Dane had arrived, the best news shooter in town, and my best friend. Her red hair whipped wildly in the wind as she strode across the sand in her hand-tooled cowboy boots, twin Canon EOS cameras, wide angle lens on one, a telephoto on the other, slung from a leather strap around her neck.

“Geez, who is she?” Lottie murmured, shutter clicking, camera whirring. “She's so young.”

The big eyes of a small boy were fixed on the dead woman's breasts. He was runty and pale, at the forward fringe of the crowd, wearing baggy swim trunks a size too large. Where is his mother? I wondered, as a beach patrolman brought the detective a yellow plastic sheet from his Jeep.

“What do you think?” I asked Emery, as he peeled off his rubber gloves.

“No bullet holes, or stab wounds,” he said. “We'll know more when we get a name on her. Most likely what we have here is an accidental drowning.”

“Is the ME coming out?”

He shook his head. “The wagon's on the way.” Medical examiners didn't normally go to drownings these days except in cases of mass casualties, obvious foul play or refugee smugglers who routinely dumped human cargo off shore—sometimes too far off shore.

“My Raymond saw her first!” The little boy's proud mother finally made her appearance. She wore big sunglasses, a bikini that exposed a hysterectomy scar on her glistening belly and pink hair curlers under a floppy sunhat. She smelled strongly of coconut scented suntan oil and spoke in a New York accent.

Raymond, pail and shovel forgotten, still stared at the sheet covered corpse.

“Unbelievable,” the mother told all who would listen. “Raymond kept trying to tell me, but I didn't pay atten
tion. That kid is always into something.” She shook her head smugly. “I shoulda known.”

She and Raymond's father, she said, had partied on South Beach 'til the wee hours. He was now in their hotel room, convalescing, nursing a hangover and yesterday's sunburn. She had brought Raymond to the beach, intending to nap and work on her tan, but her son gave her little rest.

“Mommy, mommy, there's a lady with no clothes on,” she quoted her pride and joy. “I was half asleep,” she said. “Thought it was another one of them damn foreign models, you know, stripping topless on the beach. Most got nothing to show anyhow. The worst are the ones with their nipples and belly buttons pierced,” she complained, snorting in disgust.

She had waved Raymond away, she explained, with a warning not to look. But the boy persisted. “He's tugging at me. ‘Mommy, mommy, it's a dead body!' Wouldn't gimme a break. Finally, I take off my little plastic eye shields, sit up, and, my God! It is a goddamn dead body! Ya can't even take your kid to the beach any more! His grandma is always nagging, saying the beach is bad for 'im, nagging about sun screen, the sand fleas and jelly fish. Now this! What the hell is going on?”

I approached the boy, aware that it would be tough to compete with the naked lady. “Raymond? My name is…” The child reluctantly took his eyes off the corpse and stared up at me.

“Does she have wings now?” he asked. “Can she fly? Like on TV?”

I swallowed. “I don't know. I hope so.”

His mother had used the cell phone in her beach bag to dial nine one one. But Rochek said she had not been the first to dial police. The initial call had come from a housebound resident on the twelfth floor of the Casa Milagro, a high-rise condominium, he said. A regular caller who liked to scan the horizon with high-powered binocu
lars, he had spotted the body riding the incoming tide facedown.

Murmurs suddenly swept the crowd. A sighting. Something floating just beyond the breakers, a hundred yards down the beach. A man broke into a run, pursued by several others who splashed into the sea in a race to retrieve the prize.

“Take it easy. Don't kill each other over it,” Rochek shouted after them.

A young Spanish-speaking man with a killer tan and astonishing pecs, flashed a triumphant smile as he waded out of the surf waving the trophy above his head like a banner. It was a rose red bikini bathing suit top.

The detective dangled it by its thin strap, then held it up for me to scrutinize. “Whattaya think, Britt. Her size?”

“Looks about right. Only one way to tell if a bathing suit fits.”

“We'll try it on Cinderella at the ME office. No sign of the bottom half. Some pervert probably thought it was a souvenir,” he said.

Lottie left for a feature assignment at the Garden Center. I knew I should go back to headquarters. Instead I walked the sand as far north as 34th Street, looking for an unattended beach towel or lounge chair the dead woman may have left, along with her personal belongings, but found nothing. That didn't mean they hadn't been there. It would not be unusual for them to have been stolen.\

Rochek was talking to a physical fitness buff in his late seventies when I got back. A local who had been around for years, the man jogged, did push ups and head stands on the sand each day, then swam miles along the beach, rain or shine. I occasionally encountered him in the supermarket. Slightly hard of hearing, he spoke loudly, with an eastern European accent.

“I saw her.” He nodded, gesturing broadly. “This morning. She vas svimming, right there.” His gnarly index finger indicated a deep blue spot in the water opposite a
row of pastel hotels and condos. “She looked like a good svimmer. It was early, vhen it looked like rain, before the sky cleared up. There vas almost nobody on the beach.”

“She was alone?” Rochek asked.

The man paused. “There vas another svimmer. A man in the vater. I thought he was vid her, but,” he shrugged, “maybe not.”

He had not seen her arrive or leave, could not describe the other swimmer, or even say for sure what color her bathing suit was.

“I was exercising,” he said. “I vastn't paying attention. I guess the guy vastn't vid her…”

“Why do you say that?'” Rochek asked.

“Vell, if he was vid her,” he shrugged and extended his hairy arms, “vhere is he now?”

“Good question.”

“You think they both got in trouble and there's another body out there?” I asked. I knew women have a higher fat-muscle ratio than men, whose leaner bodies are less buoyant. If both drowned, she would likely surface first.

We stared at the sea, valleys and troughs, rising and falling like the ebb and flow of life, with all its pain and joy.

“Terrible.” The old man shook his head. “A terrible thing. She was young, so attractive.”

Azure sea and sky normally refreshes my spirit. Instead, sadness washed over me as I walked back to my car, illegally parked at a bus stop, my press identification prominently displayed on the dash. Head throbbing in the blinding sun, I felt thirsty and dehydrated.

I sat in my superheated T-Bird, wondering if her car was parked nearby. If so, the meter must have run out by now. Expired, like its driver.

The woman's image haunted me all the way back to the
Miami News
building. What were her plans when she awoke this morning? Did she have a premonition, a bad
dream, any clue that this day was her last? How many hearts would break, how many lives change because this one ended prematurely?

Bobby Tubbs was in the slot at the city desk. His chubby face wore its perpetual scowl of annoyance. “Did you get the stax for the art department? They need them right away.”

“Sure,” I said. “I've a story for tomorrow. A drowning on the beach, an unidentified woman.”

“Keep it short,” he snapped, after I filled him in.

I double checked the figures, turned in the crime statistics, then went over my notes on the dead woman.

I made some calls. The beach patrol reported no other victims, no rescues and no evidence that rip currents were to blame.

My lead depended on who she was. I was sure she would be identified by deadline. But I was wrong. A medical examiner's investigator returned my call at six P.M. She was still Jane Doe, and would not be autopsied until morning. I called Rochek.

“Nuttin',” he reported grimly. “Do me a favor, would-ja, kid? Put her description in the newspaper.”

“That's why I called.”

“Good girl, you're a woman after my own heart.” I heard him flipping the pages of his notebook and imagined him adjusting the gold-rimmed reading glasses kept in his shirt pocket.

“Les' see. You saw 'er yourself, probably early thirties. Nice figure, good looking, Five feet, four and a half, weight 121. Hair blondish, a little longer than shoulder length. Eyes blue, bikini tan line. Nice manicure, good dental work. We'll know more after the post.”

“And the earring,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, we shot pictures,” he said. “Maybe you can put one in the paper if we don't have her ID'd by tomorrow.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “If you find out who she is
before our final, at one A.M., call me so we can change the lead.”

“You'll be home?”

“If I'm not, leave a message.”