Jilliane Hoffman (22 page)

47

A smug Mark Felding stood on the side of the Channel Six news van, smoking a cigarette and yukking it up with his chubby cameraman and a pair of Ft Lauderdale uniform cops. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Do you want to go to jail?’ Bobby yelled when he spotted him.

A surprised Felding held his hands up as Bobby rushed towards him, probably to defend himself from the punch he thought was coming. ‘You had me gagged, Agent Dees!’ he started. ‘No discussing what I saw in the paintings that were sent to
me
and any future paintings that are delivered to
me
. I got it, I got it. But nowhere in your gag order does it say I can’t talk about the news, thank you very much. You see, that’s my job. I’m a reporter. That’s what I do. Sorry you didn’t like my report.’

The cameraman and uniforms backed away. ‘You go live with this sort of bullshit before I’m even called out? Why the fuck didn’t you tell Fort Lauderdale PD I was working it?’

Felding’s eyes grew dark. ‘That’s not my job, now, is it? To tell people what
your
job is? It’s not my problem if the left hand doesn’t know what the right’s doing. I’m here to get information to the people. That’s what I do. That’s
my
job.’

‘Bobby!’ Zo called.

Bobby turned and walked away before he hit the man.

‘What about the car in the garage?’ Felding yelled after him. ‘A records check shows that it was purchased at CarMax. Is it true there may be a link between this scene and Lainey Emerson’s stepdad, Todd LaManna? Are you gonna arrest him soon?’

Bobby turned around and charged back over. The uniforms scattered. He brought his hand down over the ENG lens, lest the cameraman get any ideas that it was a good time to frame a shot. ‘Listen, Sherlock,’ he snapped at a suddenly pale-faced Felding, ‘I know you really want to be a cop. I can feel it. You couldn’t cut it in the academy, maybe didn’t pass the background check, whatever. But I know your type. And now this is your one really big chance to make a name for yourself and prove to everybody who thought you were a loser that
you
should’ve been the detective on this. But let me tell you – you don’t know shit. You are a two-bit, dime-a-dozen field reporter who for some fucked-up reason was singled out to be a madman’s messenger. You’re not a real reporter. You’re not a great detective. You’re nothing but a puppet in all this, and you are in way over your head. So do what the nice judge has ordered you to do and shut the fuck up, or so help me,
Mark
, I will come down on you like I should’ve weeks ago – with an iron fist and no mercy.’

He turned and walked past Zo and the yellow crime-scene tape that cordoned off the driveway and strode up to the house. As he passed the two chatty uniforms that had scampered off, he shouted, ‘Anyone gives that little shit so much as the time of day, you’ll be on midnights till you retire. Got that?’

In the backyard he found what looked a lot like chaos. Crime-scene techs were everywhere, as were uniform – crawling like ants all over the boat, stomping all around the backyard. Supervising the offload of a single black body bag from the sailboat was a jumbo-sized detective sucking on a death stick, dressed in khakis and a sweat-soaked white dress shirt with yellow pit stains.

‘Detective Lafferty? I’m Agent Robert Dees, FDLE. We spoke on the phone.’

‘You got here quick,’ Lafferty replied, exhaling a plume of gray in Bobby’s face.

‘That’s a good thing. Didn’t I ask you not to remove the bodies before I got here?’

‘You did. But these boys can’t wait around all day.’

‘It’s been twenty minutes. Do you mind?’ he asked, walking up to the body bag and unzipping it before the detective had a chance to respond. The picked-over face of what was once a human being stared up at a cheerfully blue sky. Almost completely skeletonized, only chunks of decomposed black flesh clung to the skull and neck, like a chicken wing nibbled down to the bone and left out in the hot sun beside a park trash can. Thick pieces of long blonde hair rested underneath her skull, where her scalp had slipped off. Around her neck was a bright neon pink heart within a heart necklace, which lay against the collar of a black
Got Milk?
T-shirt. Bobby looked down. Bony fingers rested at the body’s side, but the thumb on the right hand was missing its tip. He zipped her back up. Overhead, he could hear the buzz of a helicopter approaching. It was a news chopper. With a telephoto Bobby knew they could catch the tonsils in the back of his throat if they really wanted a picture of them. ‘Don’t move the next body,’ he said to Lafferty.

‘Now don’t be telling me what to do, son,’ Lafferty began in a testy voice, following Bobby’s stare and looking uneasily up at the sky.

‘This is an FDLE investigation now. I won’t need to tell you what to do any more, because you’re to do nothing but type up your report on how you fucked up my crime scene.’ He turned to the ME techs, who stood there looking uncomfortable. ‘Put her in the truck. Don’t transport her till I tell you. And don’t move the other one.’

Zo walked up just as Lafferty stormed off under a date palm and had a hissy fit on the phone with his chain of command. ‘Now that’s how you win friends and influence people. I’m sure glad I’m the boss.’

‘Who leaked it?’ Bobby asked.

‘Don’t know. It was all over the radio. It didn’t take a genius to pick it up off a scanner. To be fair, no one figured it for Picasso till your friend and his camera crew showed up.’

‘Did you call?’

‘Yup. Miami-Dade’s in and so is BSO. Two guys each. I think you can kiss off Fort Lauderdale, but the City of Miami is contributing one man, too. You officially have got yourself a task force, Shep.’

48

Years before NBC and handsome George Clooney romanticized the ER, Denzel Washington and Howie Mandel were making rounds on
St Elsewhere
. That was when LuAnn Briggs, a young and impressionable teenager in search of an exciting career after high school graduation, decided to become a nurse. And not just any ‘stick your tongue out and say “ah!”’ hand-holder in white, but a nurse that made a real difference every day – saving lives and running central lines and riding gurneys, pounding hearts till they started to beat again. Even back then, she knew that there was no way her daddy – who was watching the same medical drama she was on the same couch in Shreveport, Louisiana – would send her to med school, even if he could afford to. Her grades were stellar, but being a doctor was no job for a woman. Nursing, on the other hand, was a respectable profession and the best she should ever hope for. Except LuAnn didn’t just want respectable. She wanted exciting. She wanted death-defying. She wanted thrilling. She wanted to be one of the nurses in Boston’s St Eligius, hanging with Howie and Denzel as they smoothly and courageously put the humpty-dumptys back together again. So she picked emergency medicine and she picked crazy New York City to practice it. A city she had never even been to. Ten days out of Northwestern State University she found herself in the middle of hell.

Gunshot wounds at Jamaica Hospital were commonplace; stabbings were routine. There were no funny, tension-relieving jokes being exchanged inside the ER when things went from bad to terrible. No cute, young, carefree doctors hanging by the coffee machine. The patients weren’t nice and the hospital administration wasn’t forgiving. But for the two-year commitment and sign-on bonus, LuAnn would probably never have lasted even the week.

But then she never would have met Detective Bobby Dees.

Eighteen years had passed since that horrible night when Bobby had been wheeled into her ER on a blood-soaked gurney with a fading pulse, accompanied by about two dozen frantic NYPD officers. It was a twist of fate that had her working a double that day, another that sent a terrible rainstorm to prevent her from going out on break for a cigarette, and yet another that steered her future husband into her trauma room. LuAnn hadn’t expected the first real love of her life to come searching for her on a stretcher, covered in blood, his brachial artery shredded by a drug dealer’s bullet. She hadn’t expected that it would be
she
who had to save him. But maybe it was because she had met Bobby this way, maybe because something so powerful and so good had come out of working a double shift in hell that rainy day, that LuAnn had passed on the zillion opportunities since to go into other less pressurized areas of nursing.

Now, more than ever, she was thankful that she’d stayed put. Now the high stress of working in a chaotic Level 1 Trauma hospital thirty minutes outside of Miami was a welcome distraction from the rest of her life. And as selfish as it would sound if she said it aloud, right now she needed to be around people whose lives were more tragically devastated than her own.

So she worked as long and as hard as she could, and then signed up for double shifts and holidays – drowning herself in emotionally exhausting work, much as an alcoholic would with a bottle of booze. And just like a drunk the morning after a binge, she, too, felt bad. As if she had let everyone down once again. First her daughter had run away from the very home
she
had created, and now she wasn’t even looking for her every waking second of every day, like her husband was. Instead she was working again, pulling another double. But the truth was, she couldn’t do what Bobby did. In fact, LuAnn tried her hardest during the day not to even think of Katy, although she’d never tell Bobby that. Because to think about her only child, the little girl who once wanted to cheer for Florida State and go to vet school, and wonder under what bridge she might be resting her head at night, what crap she was shooting into her arms, what vile things she might be doing for money – it was just too painful. So she didn’t. Instead, like the lush with a bruising guilt hangover who heads for an open bar, LuAnn sought solace in accepting another shift and fixing somebody else’s tragedy.

She tossed her latex gloves and blood-splattered gown cover in the biohazard bin, finished up her cold coffee and stepped out into the packed waiting room. ‘Elbe Sanchez?’ she called. A frail-looking older woman stood up in the back of the room and, with the help of a walker, began to make her way over. On the overhead waiting-room TV that usually blared
Judge Alex
or
Dr Phil
or the girls from
The View
, LuAnn saw the news was on. She would never have paid it a second’s attention, but for the fact it was that same reporter from the other night on the TV, the one who had gotten Bobby all upset. Felding was his name. Mark Felding. He had reported on the runaway teenager from Coral Springs.

‘We don’t have a positive ID yet, but like I reported earlier, Sue, this is a developing story. FDLE is on scene. They’ve been here all day. Now they’re not releasing details other than what we learned this afternoon, but it’s definitely looking like those two sisters from Florida City. The biggest concern is this: Are we looking at a serial killer? Certainly, law enforcement doesn’t want a panic – Miami is still cringing from the notoriety that the brutal Cupid murders brought to the city a few years back. No one wants that publicity again, but two gruesome portraits, three dead bodies and multiple missing teens … No one can ignore what this is shaping up to look like.’

‘I’m Elbe Sanchez,’ said the little woman.

‘Do we have a serial killer …’ Felding continued, holding up a fistful of Runaway/Missing Children flyers and waving them around.

The room began to spin. Slow at first, then faster.

‘… that is targeting teens or, perhaps more particularly, teenage runaways?’

And faster.

‘If so, just how many victims might this Picasso have?’

‘Nurse? Can I see my son now? Is he all right?’

And faster.

‘Nurse? Are you OK?’ Elbe asked again.

Until it spun completely out of control.

‘Jesus!’ screamed someone in the waiting-room crowd.

‘Oh my God! Roger! Roger! I need a crash cart! LuAnn’s down!’

Then the voices faded off and the darkness mercifully settled in.

49

‘Miami, the city that forever made love synonymous with brutality, apparently has a new serial killer on the loose with another catchy nickname.’

He stared at the TV and thoughtfully rubbed the scruff on his face. No shit. MSNBC. He took a deep breath.
MSNBC
. He looked at the bottom of the screen.
MIAMI POLICE FIND BODIES OF TWO SISTERS BELIEVED TO BE VICTIMS OF SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER, PICASSO.
He was ticker-tape news on the bottom of the MSNBC screen …

He was ticker tape news in Times Motherfucking Square!

Cute anchor Chris Jansing was yapping about
him
, her pretty little pouty mouth trying so hard to look serious, yet he could see she was barely able to stifle a smile. And it wasn’t just MSNBC covering the story – although it was by far the biggest station he’d seen so far today. He was the top story at six on every local channel, too. People all around the country, from hokey Indiana to bustling LA, were standing around the water cooler right now, maybe, talking about
him
. Looking up at the bright lights of Broadway and reading about
him
. The magnitude of the situation was a bit overwhelming, but … the smile slipped out, taking over his whole face. It was easy to understand now the addictive, seductive appeal fame held. And why it was that starlets who complained the loudest about the paparazzi’s invasion of their precious privacy took it the hardest when the cameras weren’t camped outside their front door any more and their sweet faces weren’t gracing covers every week.

Picasso
. Not a bad comparison. Jeesh, he’d take that any day. Although anyone who knew anything about art knew that their two styles of painting couldn’t have been more different. Picasso was a surreal cubist – he painted choppy, abstract art that only mentals and geniuses professed they could understand. While he himself favored expressionism – a distortion of reality in art for emotional effect. But no matter – Pablo Picasso was more famous than Munch or Kandinsky anyway. As for nicknames, he hadn’t honestly given a thought as to what the press or the police might call him one day, or what his new moniker would sound like alongside other killers whose names lived in infamy: Jack the Ripper. Zodiac. The Green River Killer. The Boston Strangler. The Sunday Morning Slasher. Son of Sam. The Night Stalker. Cupid.

And now, Picasso.

Some men made an indelible impression on history. Some names you never, ever forgot. He wanted to be one of those names.

He was already feeling, however, the effects of notoriety. He’d brought it on himself, no doubt. He’d gone and stuck a stick into a hornet’s nest, and they were out in full force looking for him now. No matter if they were looking in all the wrong places, there were still thousands of dangerous pests out there looking, and he had to be very careful. But he’d never been away from his collection for this long before, and he hoped none of them had, well, expired. That would really suck. Unless they were real pigs and had scarfed down everything he’d left out for them already, they should be fine. But he was finding that raising his fragile, eclectic collection was a lot like tending a garden – some flowers required more TLC, while others pretty much took care of themselves. Some bloomed early; some fell apart like an orchid when you touched them. After all the nurturing, the feeding, the watering – after all the motherfucking loving care you showed them day in and day out – sometimes a puddle of pretty petals and an ugly, scrawny stem was all you had left to show for your efforts at the end of the day. He definitely didn’t want to come home to that. Especially since he’d have nobody to blame but himself if his precious petunias dropped dead; neglect was strictly his fault. He needed to get back to them by the weekend. No matter what, he had to find a way through the growing swarm of angry pests …

He was probably over-thinking his situation. By trying very hard not to underestimate his opponent he’d succeeded in giving them way too much credit; Miami’s finest were turning out not to be so exceptional after all. It took a homeless drunk to lead them to what they should have found with just a smidgen of due diligence, which most likely meant they weren’t picking up on any other clues, either. It was disappointing, no doubt about it. FDLE Special Agent Supervisor Robert Dees was supposed to be the crème de la crème. The Shepherd that everyone runs to whenever a lamb goes missing from the flock – so says
People
magazine about 2008’s Hero Among Us. Bobby Dees was the man who was supposed to make the hunt a little more interesting, a little more exciting because he was
sooo
good at what he did. Well, so far he wasn’t impressed. Not at all. It was like playing chess against the latest NASA computer and always winning. Either you were really, really smart, or the mythical, magical, all-powerful computer was a lot dumber than you’d given it credit for.

He dunked an Oreo into his warm milk and turned his attention back to the computer. He was feeling lonely, all dressed up with nowhere to go, with hornets buzzing right outside his door. It was time to see what mischief big-boned Shelley and her pretty pink butterfly were up to. With just a few clicks of the mouse, he opened the gates to the tank and surreptitiously swam out on to the internet, navigating past parental controls and protective firewalls. All around him, scrumptious little fishies were IMing and sending pictures and swapping OMGs. He could practically hear their squeaky chatter. Millions of excited young voices, screaming and squealing and yapping – spreading their new wings over the big, bad internet. Out to prove to Mom, Dad, Grandma and themselves that there was nothing to worry about on the World Wide Web. No sexual predators on their buddy lists; they’d be able to spot a poser a mile away. All they were looking for was to make some new friends and have a good time.

Within moments he’d found exactly who he was looking for. With invisible hands he unzipped her dress, unhooked her bra and slipped, undetected inside her computer, his skilled fingers probing through her applications till he found just the right switch. Then he sat back in his seat and finished his cookie just as sweet Shelley walked across his screen in her pink polka-dot Jenni jammies, her hair twisted in a towel turban, yapping away on a phone. Her bed was unmade and clothes were strewn all over her messy lilac bedroom. He picked crumbs out of the hair on his tummy and leaned over the keyboard.

A few seconds later he had her undivided attention.

He smiled. He just loved home movies.