Cold Case Squad (2 page)

In the cool quiet of the pantry, she savored the moment away from
the clamor. Comforting rows of canned goods and food cartons stood like
soldiers at attention, arranged precisely by date on plastic-lined
shelves. Humming "Happy Birthday," she opened the pristine white box
from the Cuban bakery—and gasped.

Screams had elevated to an even higher pitch at party central.
Lionel had discovered the box of matches intended to light the candles.
Striking them one by one, he was throwing the flaring matches at little
girls who fled shrieking.

"Stop that, Lionel!" Joan snatched away the box and confronted her
husband. "I thought you were watching him!"

"I'm just trying to get them to sit down for HoHo's magic tricks—and
watch the grill at the same time." Stan's long-suffering expression was
that of an overburdened and misunderstood man.

"What's wrong, honey?" He removed his chef's hat and mopped his
forehead.

"The cake." She studied him. The moment was tense. "Did you happen
to check it when you picked it up?" The words were ominous.

"No," he said cautiously. "I still had to pick up the balloons and
the hot dogs. The box was tied up and ready. Our name was on it. I have
the receipt."

"Follow me." She sounded close to tears. "Why can't anything ever be
just right?" She steered him into the pantry. "I described it twice.
They said they understood. A rocket, I told them, with 'Happy Birthday
to Ryan, Future Astronaut.'"

"Right." Stan nodded.

She lifted the lid, wrists curled as though unveiling a snake.

The words spun out in sugary blue frosting were correct: "Happy
Birthday to Ryan, Future Astronaut."

But the cake was not rocket-shaped.

"A racquet," Stan finally said. "It's a tennis racquet."

"Thank you," Joan said. "I guess I'm not losing my mind."

They laughed and clung to each other until their eyes watered.

"We should get out there," she said, wiping her face on his sleeve.
"Before Lionel kills the dog or burns the house to the ground."

"You don't think he'd really hurt Sookie, do you?"

"One never knows, though nothing can top this."

Most of the children were seated on the lawn watching HoHo's
repertoire of tricks. Lionel was tying a dachshund-shaped balloon to
Sookie's collar as though expecting it to lift the big, affable dog
into the air à la Mary Poppins.

Consuela, short and compact in her white uniform, gently placed the
birthday cake center front on the picnic table, then stepped back to
scrutinize it. She cocked her head, puzzled, then shrugged. Long ago
she'd stopped trying to understand the people who employed her. She
tucked the matchbox in her pocket and turned to see what Lionel was up
to now.

The boy had actually paused to watch HoHo. The clown displayed an
empty glass. With a flourish, he filled it with water from a plastic
pitcher. Suddenly he upended the glass. Not a drop spilled.

"That's not magic!" Lionel screeched, above squeals and applause. "I
know how he did it! He had powdery stuff in the bottom of the glass. It
makes the water hard, like Jell-O!"

HoHo ignored his heckler. He waved a red silk scarf above his head
like a banner, faster and faster. The scarf was redder than his spiky
hair and painted cheeks, as red as his shiny, oversized shoes.

Suddenly he balled the scarf in his fist. Then threw his hands open,
palms outstretched. It had vanished.

HoHo's triumphant bows were interrupted by a hacking cough. He
coughed again and again, then opened his mouth wide and reached down
his throat. With a grand, theatrical gesture he slowly withdrew the
long red scarf from way down below his tonsils.

A loud
whoosh
! punctuated the cheers and applause.

Joan glanced up from the camera's viewfinder, startled, her anxious
eyes instinctively seeking out her son.

Ryan stood at HoHo's elbow, face shining.

"Fireworks!" He threw his arms in the air, victorious. "Yes! I got
the fireworks!"

Across the street, the garage erupted. Smoke spiraled. Flames
leaped. The children cheered. The garage door exploded outward. The
pony bolted. It gave a terrified whinny, then galloped down Mariposa
Lane toward the golf course, empty stirrups swinging. His handler
chased him, losing his Stetson in the middle of the block.

Chunks of burning wreckage catapulted high into the air and began to
fall in slow motion onto the Walkers' lawn between the balloon bouquet
and the circular drive. Sookie fled, tail tucked between her legs.

Car and house alarms wailed. Towering tongues of red and orange
flame danced high into a brilliant blue sky. Sparks showered and
sizzled amid black smoke.

"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" Lionel's pudgy legs churned,
pounding the pavement toward home.

The cheers had stopped. The children stood silent and wide-eyed,
jaws dropped.

"Mom?" Ryan's voice sounded high-pitched and querulous.

"
Dios mio
!" Consuela fell to her knees and crossed herself,
eyes to heaven.

"Mommeee!"

"Mommeee!" children began screaming.

"Vanessa wet her pants!" a tattler bawled.

"Joanie, get all the kids inside! Call nine-one-one." Stan sprinted
toward the burning garage. The heat forced him back. He peeled off his
apron as he dashed to the side of the house for his garden hose.

"No, Stan! No!" Joan and Consuela were herding frightened children
inside. "Don't go there! I'm calling the fire department!"

The first fire company arrived in six minutes. To Joan and Stanley
Walker it seemed forever. Adrenaline-charged children shrieked at the
sirens and cheered the rescue truck, the engine, the pumper, and the
first squad car.

Firefighters dragged a blitz line off the pumper. They ran a second
line from a hydrant. The garage was fully involved. Flames roared
through a wall, engulfing the kitchen. Tendrils of orange danced along
the roof line.

Firemen in self-contained breathing apparatus knocked down flames,
battling to save the house. At the end of the street, police officers
shouted but were unable to stop a midnight blue Jaguar that hurtled
crazily around their barricades. Brakes squealing, it swerved to a stop
on the next-door lawn. Leaving her baby strapped in a car seat, the
young woman driver, her black hair flowing long and loose, stumbled out
into the dense smoke that roiled down the street.

"My husband! My husband!" she screamed. "Where is he? He was working
on his car! Where is he?"

Firefighters held her back. Suddenly she stopped struggling and
sagged in their arms as the smell of something terrible wafted across
the street. Something burned.

HoHo the Clown threw up on the lawn.

Like all things good and bad in the world, it began with a woman.

She was a blonde, with a complaint about her ex-husband. She saw him
everywhere she went. Turn around and there he was. She knew he was
trying to send her a message, she said.

Problem was, the man was dead, gone from this earth for twelve long
years.

Some guys just don't know when to let go.

My name is Craig Burch, a sergeant on the Miami Police Department's
Cold Case Squad. My assignment is relatively new. I worked homicide for
eighteen years, mostly on the midnight shift. I fought like hell to
land this job. Why not? It's every big-city homicide cop's wet dream.
This squad is armed with a detective's most powerful weapon: time. The
luxury of enough time to investigate old, unsolved cases without
interruption. I wanted that. I wanted the change. I wanted to see the
faces of murderers who suddenly realize their pasts and I have caught
up with them. The job has other perks as well. No daily dealing with
fresh corpses or, worse yet, corpses less than fresh. No more stepping
cautiously through messy crime scenes in dark woods, warehouses, or
alleyways, trying to avoid stepping in blood, brains, or worse. No more
trying to forget the pain-filled screams of inconsolable survivors
whose unearthly cries will scar your soul and echo in your dreams
asleep or awake. No more watching autopsies that suddenly and
unexpectedly replay in your mind's eye at inopportune moments. And no
more throwing my back out when lifting dead weight.
Real
dead
weight.

This job also reduces my chances of being rocked, bottled, and/or
shot at by the unruly Miamians who cluster bright-eyed and belligerent
at every nasty crime scene in neighborhoods where trouble is a way of
life and violence is contagious.

I quit confronting new deaths. Instead, I breathe new life into old,
cold cases and track killers whose trails vanished long ago like
footprints on a sea-washed beach.

Loved the concept. Still do. And I yearned for what came with
it—mostly regular, daylight hours, giving me the chance to spend more
time with my family before the kids are grown and gone. Made sense to
me. It was long overdue. I looked forward to it. Connie couldn't have
been happier—in the beginning. What's not to like? Weekends off
together for the first time? The man in the mirror suntanned instead of
wearing a prison pallor from sleeping days and working nights?

Now I know why people say: Be careful what you wish for—you might
get it. At the moment, I live alone. Last time I called home, one of
the kids hung up on me. Every job in my line of business has a downside.

This one has ghosts.

My detectives are hand-picked self-starters. They don't hear the
screams, see the blood, or feel the moral outrage cops experience at
fresh murder scenes. Instead, they dissect dusty files and stacks of
typewritten reports as cold and unemotional as a killer's heart.

Our standard operating procedure is to reread the case files of old,
unsolved murders, pass them around, and brainstorm on which have the
most potential. We also field tips on old homicides from our own cops,
other agencies, confidential informants, prison inmates, and the
friends and families of victims.

She was one of the latter: a walk-in. Our team had just voted on
whether to pursue the high-profile triple homicide of a man, his
pregnant wife, and their toddler. Murdered nearly twenty-five years
ago, they were presumed casualties of the time—collateral damage in the
drug wars of the eighties. But one of my guys suspects another motive,
something more personal. Two of my detectives, Sam Stone and Pete
Nazario, were still arguing about it when the secretary steered a
stranger their way.

Her hair was feathery, tousled in an expensive, wavy style intended
to look natural, the kind that costs more to look as though it was
never touched by professionals.

Stone sprang to his feet when the secretary brought her past my
desk, directly across from theirs. He grew up in Miami's bleakest,
blackest, toughest neighborhood. Sharp, edgy,
young, and focused, he has a passion for high technology and is as
aggressive as hell. Sometimes he's a runaway freight train and you have
to hold him back.

Well dressed in blue that matched her eyes, she was your typical
soccer mom with a little mileage on her.

Nazario offered her a chair. He came to Miami alone as a small
child, one of the thousands of Pedro Pan kids airlifted out of Cuba and
taken in by the Catholic church when Castro refused to allow the
parents to leave the island. Nazario never saw his parents again and
grew up a stranger in a strange land, shuttled to shelters and foster
homes all over the country by the archdiocese. Maybe because he lived
with strangers who didn't speak his native language or maybe he was
born with it, but Nazario is blessed with an uncanny talent—it's
invaluable to a detective, even though it's not admissible in court or
probable cause for a warrant: He knows, without fail, when somebody is
lying to him. Stone and Nazario are among the best, and I don't say
that just because they work for me.

The woman in blue chewed her lower lip, her face pinched with
apprehension. She looked to be in her late thirties, but it's tough to
tell the age of most women. Her name was April Terrell, she said. A
plastic tag identifying her as a visitor to the building was clipped to
her short, crisp jacket. Her summery dress flared at the hip and quit
just above a nice pair of knees. She held a little purse demurely in
her lap while apologizing for showing up unannounced. I listened,
trying not to look up and be obvious.

"It's about my husband," she said, then corrected herself, "my
ex-husband."

They married in college, she said. She quit and worked as a legal
secretary to put him through pharmaceutical school. "I thought I knew
him. The divorce caught me off guard. Our children were two and three.
That was almost fourteen years ago."

She gave the guys a sad-eyed, self-deprecating smile. "He found
someone else, younger, his second year in business. He remarried right
away and started a new family."

The guys itched to hear the point. I know I did.

"It's funny." Her lower lip quivered, indicating the opposite. "All
of a sudden, after all this time, he's there. I see him everywhere I
go."

Nazario frowned. "He's stalking you?"

"Our domestic violence unit has a felony stalking squad." Stone
reached for the phone on his desk. "You need to talk to one of them.
We're homicide. Cold cases. I'll call downstairs and find you someone."

"Wait." She spoke briskly. "Obviously I haven't made myself clear. I
know who you are. You investigate old deaths. That's why I'm here.
Charles was killed twelve years ago."

I looked up. Nazario and Stone exchanged glances.

"Oh," Stone said accommodatingly. "And you say you've seen him
lately?"

"Yes." Her voice held steady.

"On what sort of occasions?" Stone steepled his long fingers in
front of him, his liquid eyes wandering to a window, past the grimy
streaks to a patch of innocent blue sky above the neighborhood where he
was born.