CUTTING ROOM -THE- (20 page)

Daria's relationship with her dad had always been different. He'd taught her how to ride a bike, fix a toilet, shoot a deer, make handmade mozzarella. Growing up, he didn't care if she wore ‘boy' pants to her aunt's house or an ugly-ass dress that cost way too much anyway. On Sunday mornings, they'd slip out of the house before Lena was up, kayak into the ocean and meet the sunrise with a Thermos filled with orange juice spiked with Asti Spumante. He sat front row for her law school graduation and her first trial, both of which were missed by her mother, who'd conveniently developed a splitting migraine right before both events — the only two migraines she'd ever had in her life. Even when Daria had grown out of pigtails and princess dresses, she was still her daddy's baby. And throughout her childhood and super-rebellious teens, it was her father who had been her ally in that crazy, scream-infested house — always attempting to negotiate the dangerous, spike-covered fence that existed between his wife and his only daughter. When diplomacy failed and her mom's destructive comments and wooden spoon beatings and weird temper tantrums for which she should have been medicated became too much for Daria to take, with the pounding of his fist on a table her dad would command, ‘Enough is enough, Lena! Let her be!' and that would temporarily end it. Her parents were Italian, after all, and her mother had been programmed by her own off-the-boat parents to listen to her husband. But he couldn't order his wife to not be jealous of their daughter. And he couldn't force Lena to go to the doctor or get help for her temper, not that he even tried — psychiatrists and the like were tantamount to witch doctors to a red-blooded Italian male from the old school.

Now, though, her father was trapped in a body that no longer worked the way it should, facing down a disease that had ravaged his muscles and put him in a wheelchair within two years of being diagnosed. It also put him at the complete mercy of her mother, who he was now physically and emotionally dependent on. The rules of the game had changed. He no longer demanded that Lena behave herself. He no longer demanded or ordered or commanded anything. He had a particularly aggressive type of Parkinson's, and the prognosis was very grim. It was only a short matter of time before he'd be in a nursing home, his mind functional and his body useless. When he was no longer able to breathe, they'd vent him and that would be the last time her dad would ever speak. It would be the last time Daria would hear his voice. It was a day she couldn't imagine, but one that would be here soon enough. Then she would be left with her mother.

She wiped her eyes and looked over at the kitchen counter. The slices of ice-cream cake were still sitting there, melting into shiny piles of white and brown goo.

Careful, now. I don't have … a good feeling …

Her dad's cryptic warning applied to so many facets of her life. Anger swelling inside her, she threw the cake plates on a metal cookie sheet and pushed open the swing door that led to the dining room. ‘Not so fast, everyone! Who wants
ice-cream
cake?' she asked as she strode back inside and the dining room erupted into tiny, enthusiastic cheers of ‘Me! Me! Me!'

Sometimes we don't see what it is we don't want to see. Always remember that, Manuel, and maybe you won't go completely blind …

Manny's uncle Cesar, a seasoned Miami-Dade homicide detective with twenty-nine years on the force before he died, had shared that slice of wisdom with him the day Manny was sworn in. Uncle Ces was like that — always throwing out these deep quotes that you never quite got right away, like he was the Dalai Lama or something. It wasn't until Manny was promoted to detective himself and cracking mysteries became his own life's work that he finally understood half the shit his uncle was trying to say. He was still waiting on the other half.

Manny sipped at his beer while he stared at one of the twenty-seven TVs in the crowded sports bar, a plate of spicy chicken wings in front of him. The Marlins were actually winning a game. Norman's Tavern was not an establishment he normally frequented, but it was close to home and the food was good. Plus, he wasn't much of a cook and the house was lonely. Though he didn't want to be alone, he didn't want company either. Tonight, all he wanted was to eat some wings and a burger, down a brew and think about all the deep shit his uncle had prophesized so many years ago …

It was a cold and rainy night in Miami on January 21, 1999 when the decomposed body of Cupid's first victim was discovered in an abandoned supermarket in southwest Miami-Dade County. Twenty-five-year-old Andrea Gallagher was Bill Bantling's first victim. No one knew at that time that the gaping hole in the center of her chest would soon come to be recognized around the world as the signature of a serial killer. Less than three months later, Manny himself would be called out to the homicide scene of Hannah Cordova, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring singer who'd disappeared weeks earlier from Penrods, a nightclub on Miami Beach. Her body was found in a shuttered-up crack den in Liberty City, a neighborhood within the City of Miami's jurisdiction. Her chest, too, had been cracked open, her heart removed, her body perversely staged. It didn't take long after that to realize that the two very brutal murders were related. And the identical traumatic injuries also made it clear that it was a serial. A third victim was discovered in a shack on Miami Beach six weeks after that. Three victims, three different police jurisdictions, three different police agencies investigating. Not a good scenario. A task force was formed, headed by Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Special Agent Dominick Falconetti, and everyone moved across town to the new command center at FDLE headquarters.

For the next two years Manny would eat, sleep and breathe the Cupid case — ultimately reporting to the homicide scenes of eight more young, pretty blondes. As the body count continued to rise and the leads fizzled out, the case grew more and more frustrating. The man was a ghost — snatching beautiful girls from busy nightclubs, all under the watchful eyes of their friends, and surveillance cameras, and a thousand witnesses who never seemed to see a thing. There was no rhyme or reason as to why he selected his victims — other than their being blonde, young, and comely — or how it was he chose them. There was never any physical evidence left behind at staged crime scenes that were so horrific Manny had seen veteran detectives lose their cookies in front of everyone. Not a drop of semen. Not a single hair. Not a speck of blood that didn't belong to a victim. After a year and a half of chasing their tails, the body count was nine dead, two missing and the task force of elite detectives still without a bona fide description of Cupid. He was a phantom, walking among his prey, possibly brazen enough to mingle with his hunters, as many serials do. And Miami's Finest had not a clue where to find him or how to stop him.

Then a routine traffic stop had changed everything. A rookie cop named Victor Chavez ended Cupid's eighteen-month reign of terror when he pulled over furniture salesman William Rupert Bantling for speeding on the MacArthur Causeway. A subsequent search of the vehicle led to the discovery of gruesome evidence in the trunk — namely the body of model Anna Prado, one of the two missing girls. Over the next few months the task force pushed to ready the case for what the international press was already calling ‘The Trial of the Century'.

The prosecution was headed by C.J. Townsend, one of the state's most accomplished attorneys. A Major Crimes prosecutor, C.J. had been assigned to the Cupid task force since its inception. Dogged and determined, she labored to put Bantling on death row for the murder of Anna Prado, all in front of the rolling cameras and the international press. It was only after Bantling was convicted that Manny had learned of the enormous emotional pressure that C.J. had been working under. Right after the jury had announced its verdict, but before the reporters had the chance to tell the world, Bantling had started screaming in open court that he had raped C.J., back when she was a law student in New York. Claiming C.J. knew he was not guilty of murder, charging she'd destroyed and covered up evidence in the Cupid case because a murder conviction was the only way she could make him pay for what he had done to her. It was the only way to get him sentenced to death.

Manny remembered the chaotic scene as if it were yesterday. C.J. had denied the allegation, but she'd then been forced to make a painful and personal admission in open court, and simultaneously to the whole world: she
had
been violently raped in law school by a stranger. Her rapist had never been caught. Her rapist was not Bill Bantling.

Manny had felt so bad for her, standing there, so small and pale and thin, telling everybody what some creep had done to her when he broke into her apartment. And then salacious details of her assault had run for days and days in the paper as reporters did exactly what Bill Bantling had done and dug up the girl's past. In light of what she'd once been through and what she had put aside to prosecute Bantling, Manny was even more appreciative of all she'd done to put the son of a bitch behind bars. So were the rest of the boys on the task force. C.J. was one of Manny's favorite people in the world — down to earth, honest, hard-working and a ball-busting bitch when she needed to be. And if his buddy Dom hadn't been sweet on her, Manny might've tried a shot at the big leagues himself, instead of ending up with her insane secretary, which cost him a couple of years of his life, untold amounts of money, and almost another walk down the aisle.

Realizing justice, though, can be a long process. Especially when you're talking about a death sentence. Ten years had gone by and the case wasn't over. Bill Bantling was still breathing. And with the current state of his appeals, there was no end to his miserable life in sight.

Manny ordered another Corona and watched for a while as the Marlins inevitably screwed up their lead. But all the while his eyes were on the game he was hearing that warning from Uncle Ces:
Sometimes we don't see what it is we don't want to see
. When William Bantling told him about a snuff club, had he dismissed it because he couldn't face re-examining all the irritating details that didn't tie together and the strange coincidences that were too coincidental? Or was it something worse than laziness — a condition Manny had never been accused of in all his years on the force — that kept him from resolving the lingering questions that surrounded the Cupid case?

Had he kept his mouth shut and his eyes closed to save a friend?

The Cupid case was a lot more troubling than he'd let on to Daria. Shortly after Bantling was convicted, there had been a violent attempt on C.J.'s life by Dr Gregory Chambers, a state forensic psychologist — someone C.J. said she had considered a friend as well as a colleague. Turned out Chambers had also been Bantling's shrink. Listening to his client's sick fantasies must have flipped some switch, turned him into a wannabe Cupid, obsessed with C.J. If she hadn't managed to grab a pair of scissors and put a hole in his chest, he'd have cut one in hers. There was no question but that she'd killed him in self-defense, and there was no evidence to link him with any of the other murders so Manny had closed the case, and Bantling had been shipped off to death row, but …

In 2004, three of the cops who had worked Cupid were murdered, including Chavez, the traffic cop who pulled Bantling over for speeding. Since pretty much everyone in law enforcement had assisted in the Cupid manhunt in some capacity, it wasn't grounds for launching an investigation, but it was thought-provoking, nonetheless. Then the judge died in a car accident, and Bantling's old attorney, Lourdes Rubio, was found with her throat slit in her Colorado office, days before she was scheduled to fly home to Miami to testify in Bantling's appeal. It was then that Bantling told Manny he was part of a snuff club organized by none other than the deceased Dr Chambers. And with this information, Manny did …

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And now there were more murders happening with possible connections to Bantling. And Daria, the state's prosecutor in those murders, was being harassed, possibly stalked. He pushed his half-eaten plate away.

Sometimes we don't see what it is we don't want to see, Manuel.

Like a hologram turned just the right way, he was seeing it all now. Manny chugged the rest of his beer, almost wishing the alcohol would hit him hard enough to stop this forced self-revelation crap. If it was true that he'd turned his back on the facts a decade ago because it was inconvenient, or too mind-boggling to fathom, or because he was looking away in order to save a friendship that, sadly, was no more, anyway, or because Bantling was getting what he deserved even if it might not be for the exact crime he was convicted of, would that make him responsible for the deaths that followed? The Black Jacket cops, they were dirty, they could be reasoned away. But Holly Skole, Gabriella Vechio, Cyndi DeGregorio, Jane Doe, Kevin Flaunters — would they be alive today if Manny had acted on his gut when it told him there was more to the snuff-club story than just a desperate pack of lies?

He lined up the empty bottle of Corona next to the other three he'd finished off. The problem with alcohol was that it worked like a truth serum. He'd drunk too much tonight, and yet not enough to forget what he'd been thinking about. He'd discovered the hologram, and he would forever see the picture that he hadn't wanted to see all along. It was right there in front of him. Now it was impossible to miss.

Manny's only hope at this point was that he was wrong. That when he got to see that manipulative psychopath Bantling on Tuesday, he'd ask a few questions that he should've asked long ago and finally be satisfied that Bantling's story of retribution and snuff clubs was just that — a story. A story that could not be corroborated and could never be proven because it simply wasn't true. It was a tall tale concocted to get Bantling's ass off death row. Then Manny could get back to building the case against Talbot Lunders — a budding psychopath himself, if ever Manny had seen one — track down his possible accomplice or accomplices and put Pretty Boy in a cell right next to Bantling.