CUTTING ROOM -THE- (14 page)

‘You mean, was she using? Nah, she was an accountant,' Schrader replied. ‘No evidence of that.'

‘I mean in her blood. Was she doped up? Did the guy dope her? Shoot her with any weird household cleaners or anything?'

‘Is that what you got going on down where you're at?' the detective asked as he leafed through his case file. ‘Not that I can see here. I don't think the ME looked, to be honest, because he won't look for some toxins unless we have a reason to go looking. I know he ain't looking for Clorox if no one tells him to.'

Manny lit a cigarette. In the humid air, the plume of smoke he exhaled hung around his head like a dust cloud. ‘Can I get the crime-scene photos and the police reports sent down to me? Are your detectives who investigated still on the job?'

‘Sure. I'll scan the photos and the reports and send 'em right now. If you need actual prints, I can do that, too. I'll also send the ME's report along. And yeah, Rick Narbi is still here, so you can talk to him if you need to. Now it's my turn to ask questions. First one is, can I get a copy of that video you referred to in the NCIC alert? Second, how'd you come to possess this video and this picture? Is this related to a case you're working? Do you have a suspect? 'Cause it would be great to close this one out up here.'

‘It's related, but I'm not sure how. I got a defendant charged with murdering a college girl. His mom approached me with this video, claims someone anonymously emailed it to her. Initially, I wasn't sure what I was looking at—' Manny cut himself off. Now it was pretty clear what he'd been looking at over and over and over again. It was a clip — a trailer — of Gabriella Vechio's murder. A snuff video made just hours, maybe even minutes, before the girl got raped and whacked on camera. ‘You gotta see it, that's all,' he finished, taking a final, long drag on his cigarette.

After exchanging emails, Manny hung up and got in his car. He sat there for a few minutes, staring out the windshield on to busy 8th Street. Gray-haired, umbrella-toting
abuelas
making their way to their apartments, pushing metal handcarts from which hung grocery bags from the Presidente supermarket; hot
mamis
in tight pants and three-inch heels pushing babies in folding strollers; men in business suits scrambling back to their offices and cars after stopping off, like Manny had, for an afternoon pick-me-up. The two boys must have been successful in their attempt to make breakfast, because they were high-fiving each other as well as an old man who was standing there watching, puffing on a cigar and grinning with the one or two teeth he still had left in his head.

While he was happy to have gotten an ID on his Jane Doe and to have gotten it only a couple of weeks after putting Dickerson on the job, he was worried about what this other homicide was going to mean for the case he was trying to make against Talbot Lunders. Finally finding the answer to the question that'd bugged him ever since he'd watched that sick video had only spawned a half-dozen more questions:
Was the Vechio murder related to the Skole murder? If so, how? Could he possibly have the wrong person in custody? Or could there be another mope involved in Holly's murder? A partner, perhaps?

He wasn't gonna get answers sitting in his car, digesting coffee and
croquetas
and reminiscing about sweltering afternoons gone by when catching baseballs and hanging with pals was the only thing he had to do all day long. He headed back to the office, his mind racing from the caffeine and the adrenaline rush. Detective Schrader's email was waiting for him in his inbox. He opened the attachment marked
Vechio Crime Scene, Raceway: 11/10/06
first. A thumbnail-sized photo montage popped up on the screen. Manny clicked through the gruesome pictures one by one. Something kept gnawing at him.

Then he clicked on the second attachment:
D. Vechio Autopsy: NC07-9876. 11/11/06
.

The thumbnail pictures of Gabriella Vechio's autopsy popped up on the screen.

Manny sat back in his chair, with his hand over his mouth. The puzzle pieces were coming together now. The terrifying picture was almost complete.

The body of what was once probably a pretty blonde woman lay crumpled on her side in a dirt pit. From the looks of it, someone had tossed some landfill on the body, but not enough to have done a good job hiding her — her pallid, white skin glowed under the sprinkle of earth like a night-light under a thin blanket. Maybe Gabby Vechio's killer had run out of time when he dumped her and hoped that the cranes and bulldozers would finish the job. Or perhaps, as Detective Schrader had suggested, whoever had strangled her was actually hoping someone would find the body when they showed up on site in the morning for work.

The crime-scene photographers had taken close-ups of all visible injuries while the body lay in its shallow grave: bruises on the wrists; choke marks on the throat; and, what appeared to be flogging lacerations on the buttocks and thighs. But it must not have been until the body was transported to the Nassau County ME that her other injuries were discovered.

In the series of autopsy photos, Gabby's nude body was positioned face down on a steel gurney with her long blonde hair pushed up atop her head, exposing the back of her neck for the camera. Right below the hairline in the shape of a circle was a raw, dark crimson burn — measuring 1¾ inches in diameter, per the ruler held up alongside it. Enclosed in the circle was a squiggly line that resembled the letter ‘Z'.

Manny whipped out the autopsy photos of Holly Skole from his file. The physical resemblance between the two women was chilling. He wondered why he really hadn't seen that until now.

Sometimes people just don't see what they don't want to see.

He found the close-up photo of Holly's neck wound and held it up alongside the computer screen. To his eye, it was the same injury — a circle with a distorted zigzag through it, seared into the flesh of both girls' necks.

Both women had been branded.

In Gabby's instance, the skin was red and raw, but the flesh intact. It appeared that the branding had been done with a hot metal instrument pressed for a few seconds on the skin, causing a nasty third-degree burn. Had she lived, scar tissue would've formed and built up and the wound would've been raised into a three-dimensional scar, like a cattle brand. But with Holly, the metal was left long enough on the skin so that it had actually seared through flesh and muscle, almost to the bone, like a hot knife through butter, severely damaging all the surrounding tissue. When her body was placed in the dumpster, dinner was served for the zillion insects, rodents, and raccoons that liked to hang out in dark garbage bins. By the time Holly was removed from the dumpster, blowfly maggots had already made a comfortable home in the gaping wound, along with God knows what other vermin that'd come to chow. It had been difficult at the time to see the injury for what it was.

But Manny saw it now. And there was no denying that the two murders were in fact related. The killer had left his unique signature on both women.

He sat back in his chair and stared off at the squad-room corkboard with its missing persons, wanted suspects, NCIC/FCIC alerts. Every day an analyst came in and tacked new information and new pictures up, right over the old. Being a cop in Miami sometimes felt like you were playing a bad video game — no matter how many zombies you took out, there were always more coming at you. Faster and faster. Meaner and hungrier.

On November 7, 2006, a then twenty-three-year-old Talbot Lunders was in the hospital mourning the loss of his appendix; Manny'd already confirmed that. If these two murders were committed by the same psycho, then who had killed Gabby Vechio? And who had held the shaking video camera while she was being assaulted and murdered? If there was a second killer out there somewhere, partnering up to kill Gabby, and then working with Talbot Lunders to kill Holly, then who the hell was he? And who had he partnered up with to kill Gabby? How many madmen were involved? And were there more victims to find?

Manny rubbed his eyes and reached for a cigarette.

How many fucking zombies were there out there?

‘We've gotta talk,' Manny began as he followed Daria into her office. He plopped down in a chair in front of her desk.

‘I figured you had something on your mind since you've been lurking around the courthouse all morning,' she replied as she closed the door behind him with her foot, threw her purse on top of her file cabinet and kicked off her platform heels. They were an impulsive online purchase, and were pinching her toes something awful. She pulled a pair of ballet flats out of her desk drawer and slipped them on. ‘What? Did you and Raul have a spat? You're no longer welcome in the cafeteria or something? I don't have connections there, sorry.'

He stared at her wide-eyed, as if she were buck-naked. ‘Damn, girl, you are freaking short. Are you even five foot?'

She wagged a finger at him. ‘I warned you already; no comments about my height. I don't call you a freak of nature for being seven-fucking-feet tall.'

‘Six-five.'

‘Same difference. It's nothing but hot air up there after six.'

‘Let me ask ya something: can you reach the doorknob without help?'

She glared at him. ‘Time for you to go, Detective,' she replied, sitting down at her desk and dismissing him with a wave of her hand.

‘Not till we talk. That your dad?' he asked, pointing at a picture on her desk of Daria and her father together at her law school graduation. ‘You don't look nothing like him.'

‘Thanks, I guess. Yes, that's my dad.'

Manny glanced down under her desk. ‘Does he have little feet, too?'

‘Enough. Now I see how you get people to confess. You pick at them until they explode in anger.'

‘I'm just joking with ya, Counselor. He's a good-looking man, your pops. He makes good-looking kids. Tell him I said that,' he added with a wink. ‘It's always smart to get in good with an Italian father, I hear. Make a nice impression. Maybe he'll put in a good word for me when this case is over.'

She rolled her eyes. ‘You're nothing if not an optimist. And you don't know Italian fathers. Forget about putting in a good word, you'll be lucky he doesn't kill you for insulting his little girl.'

‘That your brother?' Manny asked, picking up another picture. ‘He don't look like you, neither. He looks like your dad. Now don't tell me it's a boyfriend. That would be fucked up on a couple of levels. First of which was having a short boyfriend who looks like your dad …'

‘What is this? Are you working on some genealogy project here? What is it that you've been waiting all morning to tell me, Manny?' She reached across the desk and pulled the frame from his hands and set it down on the desk. ‘You're like a toddler.'

‘Okay. Chit-chat's over. I found the girl in the Lunders video.'

Daria raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?'

Manny sighed. ‘She's dead.'

Daria sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap. Her face grew dark. ‘That's unfortunate.'

He frowned. ‘I know you want to know her name, Counselor. It was Gabriella Vechio. She was a twenty-nine-year-old accountant from New York City who turned up dead in a construction ditch on Long Island five years ago. Three days after that video was made, actually. She'd been raped, bound, whipped, tortured, and strangled to death,' Manny replied.

‘Okay,' she answered slowly.

Her inflection made it sound as though what she really meant to say was,
And why should I care?
That pissed him off. He could feel his blood pressure begin to rise. This Vechio girl had died a horrible death and no one had been held accountable. And it sounded to him from his relatively short conversation with Detective Schrader that nobody had worked all that hard to develop a suspect up in NY — just shoved her into Cold Case after enough time had passed and moved on to the next dead body. Now Cold Case wanted a name and a Florida death penalty sentence so they could move her off their desks, too. It didn't happen with many victims, but for some reason Manny felt a connection to poor, pretty Gabby the accountant — an obligation to care.

‘That video that Hot Mami Lunders gave us was a snuff video, Counselor,' he replied testily. ‘Based on the date the video was taken and the date this Vechio girl's body was discovered, it was most likely shot right before she was killed. Probably finished with her being offed.'

‘Okay again, Manny. That's terrible. And it also seems to be very valuable information that the police in New York would like to have. Why don't you forward them the video?'

‘The two murders are related: Vechio and Skole. The same killer, most likely. Or killers.'

She shook her head. ‘Wait a second. How'd you make that jump?'

‘They were both branded, Counselor. Same mark. An elongated “Z” surrounded by a circle. Branded like a goddamn cow. Same spot — nape of the neck. I had Trauss enhance the pictures and take a look. He matched them up using a forensic overlay tool and confirmed that's what it is.' Manny slid the autopsy pictures of both women across the desk. ‘It's a signature.'

‘Branded, Jesus …' Daria said quietly. ‘Is it a gang, maybe? Miami and New York both have branches of the same street gangs …'

Manny stared at her. ‘Talbot Alastair Lunders running with the brothers in the Crips? Come on, Daria, be real. Gangs don't randomly target nice white accountants and they don't have privileged, male model heirs as their members. Neither girl had any known gang involvement. There were no illicit drugs involved that we know of. Both disappeared from popular nightclubs, willingly leaving with men. In Holly's case, it was Talbot Lunders. In Gabby's case, it was a tall white male with dark hair, which not only doesn't match Lunders, but I've already checked and Hot Mami Lunders was right — Talbot was in the hospital at the time Gabby was murdered. So it wasn't him. That's why I think there may be two killers working here. Maybe more.'