Retribution (21 page)

He kissed her once more softly, gently on the lips. And for the first time in a long while, she felt safe, right here in this man’s arms.

29

She was at her desk, coffee in hand, by 7:00 in the morning, leafing through the piles of papers that had managed to accumulate in just one afternoon out. Despite the sweet good-night kiss, sleep had not come last night without dreams – horrible blood-soaked dreams. The clown’s mask was gone – replaced with the handsome, chiseled smile of William Rupert Bantling. It was his face that laughed now at her, his Rolexed hand that slashed her skin to ribbons. She was not even sure if they were dreams she had experienced or maybe it was that she had never even gone to sleep at all, and these tortured images in her head were simply memories come back to play a midnight encore. One thing she’d known for certain was that when she finally opened her eyes, she would not make the same mistake twice and close them again that night. At 4:00 A
.M
. she wandered out on to her balcony and sat, her body wrapped in the thin sheet from her bed, and watched as the sun came up over Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach.

After Dominick had left last night, she’d tried to think. To think about what she could do, should do with the Cupid case. Should she tell Tigler that she had a conflict, or perhaps silently hand the case off to another prosecutor without explanation? One final solution played again and again in her mind that she knew would probably be impossible: Should she go forward and say nothing?

If she told the State Attorney, then the whole
State Attorney’s Office would have to conflict out of the prosecution and give it to the State Attorney’s Office of another circuit, who would, in turn, assign a new prosecutor. That could be very bad – especially in a case so complex and one that was centered all on Miami. Other circuits were not as seasoned as the Eleventh, and so neither were their attorneys. Some circuits had only three or four prosecutors altogether, and had never had a serial homicide even occur in their jurisdiction. And in those old Florida circuits, Miami was considered the armpit, the black sheep of the circuits that no one wanted to visit, much less work a case there.

On the other hand, C.J. was familiar with the facts of each murder. She had been to practically every crime scene, had seen every body, had interviewed every girl’s parent, friend, loved one, had spoken to the medical examiner on each case, and had written all the warrants. She had lived, breathed, and worked this case for a year. No one knew the facts as well as she. She doubted anyone could.

If she handed it off silently to another Major Crimes prosecutor in her office, she still had the problem of the new prosecutor not being up to speed with the facts of all the murders. Then she had the added problem of explaining her motivation for doing so. Why would she suddenly give up the most career-defining case of her life? A case any other lawyer only dreamed of getting? The act would raise more questions than she cared to answer. Ever.

As for the last solution, she could go forward for the time being and say nothing. Nothing until she verified beyond a shadow of all doubt that it had been Bantling in New York. Until she made completely sure that it was
him. She still had to speak with McMillan from the Cold Case Squad in New York. Maybe by some weird chance someone had looked at her case in the past ten years since she had stopped calling the detectives every day. Maybe they had retested her sheets, her pink pajamas, her panties, her rape kit from that night and found bodily fluids where none had been found before. Maybe they had by some fluke then indicted Bantling by his DNA strand. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

She wanted to do this right, but she wasn’t sure what that meant. She wanted to bring Bantling to justice. She sighed and looked out the window of her office down on to Thirteenth Avenue, where street vendors were already setting up their umbrella carts of Sabrett sausages and sodas when it was barely 9:00
A.M
. On another, fresh mangos, papayas, bananas, and pineapples dangled from the underside of a red-and-white umbrella, its owner moving to the beat of the Latin music that played on his boom box as he set up his cart.

So last night she had sat on her balcony and thought all these thoughts over in her head a million times. And, of course, she had thought about Dominick. Of all times in her life, this was not the moment for romance or passion. But here it was, and she had not turned it away. She raised her fingers absently to her lips, and remembered what his mouth had felt like on hers. She could still smell the sweet peppermint of his breath, and see the deep concern in his eyes. He had simply held her by the front door, his hand caressing her back, his breath warm by her ear, and the feeling of being safe, of being protected, if only even for five minutes, was an amazing feeling.

She had not been with a man in a long time. The last
one had been in a drunken stupor with a stockbroker named Dave whom she had dated casually for a couple of months. She thought he was funny and sweet until he stopped calling. Which happened, coincidentally, right after they had finally slept together. When she asked him why the relationship had ended so suddenly, he only said she had ‘too many hang-ups’. That had been a few years ago, and she hadn’t looked back. Intimacy with a man frightened her, and it presented too many issues, opened too many wounds. So in the time since, there had been a few dates, but nothing serious and definitely nothing intimate. Dinner out and a kiss here and there.

But then there was last night, and there was Dominick.

It had only been a kiss, nothing more, and he had left when she asked him to. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said, and how he had said it. He sounded so sincere, and she wanted so much to feel safe again, even for just another five minutes. But he was too involved in this case to be told the truth, and how far could a relationship go without the truth? How many thin stories and lies would she have to tell to keep him from it? And even if the truth were a possibility, could she ever even bring herself to tell a man about that night? About the reason her body looked the way it did when the bedroom lights were turned on?

The stack of pink phone messages on her desk was enormous. She was going to have to have the Public Information Officer for the State Attorney’s Office return the calls from almost every newspaper and television station in the country. On the top one Marisol had scribbled in large uppercase letters: ‘THIS IS THE
3 MESSAGE!! WHY HAVE YOU NO CALLED HIM?!!’

The wooden in-box on top of her desk was full of new mail. In addition to the Cupid case, C.J. also had ten other murders she was handling, two of which were set for trial within the next two months. She had a crucial Motion to Dismiss set next week, depositions scheduled through the next two weeks, and next-of-kin meetings. None of these could be neglected just because of Cupid. She would just have to juggle them all and hope she didn’t drop anything.

She stared at the back of Bantling’s three-page pink arrest form. The names of about twenty-five people, all of them cops, were listed. First initial, last name, department, and badge number. Witnesses. The cop who pulled Bantling over, the first cops on the scene, the K-9 units, the cops who did the search of the trunk and found Anna Prado’s body, the investigating detectives, Special Agent D. Falconetti, FDLE #0277.

She had twenty-one days from the date of his arrest to get Bantling indicted for first-degree murder by the grand jury. That meant she had to interview all the witnesses and get their statements and prepare a grand jury memo for Tigler’s Chief Assistant, Martin Yars. Yars was the only prosecutor in the entire office who presented cases before the grand jury. And it would be Yars who would then seek the indictment on Bantling, probably with Dominick Falconetti’s testimony, as the lead investigator on the case. And the grand jury only met on Wednesdays. Today was already Thursday. That gave her only two Wednesdays to work with. If she couldn’t get before the grand jury by then, she would have to at least file a felony Information – a sworn document of
charges – for second-degree murder within twenty-one days. Then she’d indict him on first degree when Yars could take it to the grand jury. And to do that, she still needed to take the sworn testimony of all the necessary witnesses in the case, those who could supply the facts to support the charge of murder. In either event, twenty-one days was the magic number and it wasn’t much time at all.

Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock.

She slugged down the rest of her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and rubbed her temples with her fingers. Her head was pounding again. She needed to make a decision on how she was going to proceed. On
if
she was going to proceed. Time was a major factor here, and she wouldn’t be able to just ‘mull it all over’ for a few days. All the cops had to be brought in, their testimony taken, and that would, at the least, take a few days to arrange and complete.

She looked down at her watch. It was already 9:30. She picked up her purse and sunglasses and hurried out the door, past the secretarial pool and a sulking Marisol, today clothed head-to-toe in purple Lycra.

She vowed to make a decision, one way or the other.

After she got back.

30

The two-story small house on Almeria Road in Coral Gables, an affluent Miami suburb, was pretty. An old Spanish style, probably built sixty or seventy years ago, it was perfectly square, the stucco painted a deep, spicy-brown mustard yellow with an orange S-barrel tiled roof. Beautiful flowers, bursting in colors of white, red, and yellow, filled terra-cotta flower boxes that hung suspended from every windowsill, and full flower beds lined the brick walkway to the rounded brown oak door with the wrought-iron handles. It certainly didn’t look like a psychiatrist’s office. A small sign hung next to the door, just above the terra-cotta mailbox. It read
GREGORY CHAMBERS, M.D.

C.J. opened the door and stepped inside. The waiting room was done in Mexican tile, the décor a light yellow and pale blue. Peaceful, calming colors. Large palms fanned out in each of the four corners of the room, and rich, leather chairs lined the two walls. Magazines of every sort were spread out on the beautiful, oversized mahogany table, and Sarah Brightman sang Franz Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ softly overhead. Peaceful, calming music. Let’s not get the rich loonies too excited, too anxious, on their visit to the nice doctor.

The secretary, Estelle Rivero, was seated behind the pale yellow wall that separated the sane from the ‘needs help’ section. Through the small glass window, she could see the top tufts of Estelle’s autumn-sunrise-colored red
hair that was teased at least three inches off the top of her head.

There was no one else in the waiting room. C.J. tapped gently on the metal bell that sat outside the window. A light ding rang out, and Estelle slid open the glass and smiled through fireball red lips.

‘Hello, Ms Townsend! How are you today?’

I thought the office staff wasn’t supposed to ask that question without a doctor in the room.

‘Fine, Estelle. How are you?’

Estelle stood up. Her hair cleared the window but her chin didn’t. She stood about five foot one.

‘You look good, Ms Townsend. I saw you on the news last night. That is a sick man, no? What he did to those poor women?’ She shook her head.

More than you know, Estelle. More than you know.

‘Yes, he’s definitely disturbed.’ C.J. shifted, her heels clicked on the Mexican tile. Estelle brought both her wrinkly hands, complete with two-inch bright nails, up to her cheeks and shook her head. On every finger was a gold bauble. ‘It’s terrible. Such beautiful girls. Beautiful girls. He looks so normal, too. Like such a nice-looking, decent man. You can never tell about someone.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I hope you put him away, Ms Townsend. Where he can’t hurt any more women.’

Where h’’s going Estelle, except for maybe Lizzie Borden, women won’t have to worry anymore.

‘I’ll do my best, Estelle. Is Dr Chambers in?’

She looked flustered. ‘Oh – yes, yes. He’s expecting you. Please go right on in.’ The door buzzed and the ‘needs help’ crossed over into the world of the sane. At the end of the hall, Gregory Chambers’s office door
sat open. C.J. could see his figure hunched over the huge mahogany desk. He looked up with a smile as she approached, her heels clicking softly on the tile.

‘C.J.! Good to see you. Come in, come in.’

The office was painted a robin’s-egg light blue. A blue-and-yellow floral-print valance decorated the top of the two floor-to-ceiling round windows. Wooden blinds let soft slivers of sunlight into the room, spilling in neat stripes across the Berber carpet and comfortable blue leather wing-backed chairs.

‘Hello, Dr Chambers. I like what you’ve done with the office. It looks nice.’ She stood just inside the doorway.

‘Thanks. We had it redone about three months ago, I guess. It’s been a while since you’ve been here, C.J.’

‘Yes. Yes. I’ve been busy.’

There was a brief pause, and then he stood up and came out from behind the great desk. ‘Well, please. Come in,’ he said, closing the door behind her. ‘Have a seat.’

He motioned for her to sit in one of the wing-backed chairs and he sat across from her in the other, leaning slightly forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. It was all very casual, so informal; C J. was not sure if he was like that with all his patients, or if she was special, given their long-term relationship. Greg Chambers always made her feel as if her problems with the world were nothing that could not be handled.

‘I see they arrested a suspect in the Cupid murders. I caught a bit of the hearing on the eleven-o’clock news last night. Good job, C.J.’

‘Thanks. Thanks. We’ve still got a long way to go, though.’

‘Is this guy the real McCoy?’

She shifted in the chair and crossed her legs. ‘It looks like it. If Anna Prado’s body in the trunk wasn’t enough, from what they found at his house last night, there’s no doubt.’