Detective (59 page)

We catch people because no one is ever as clever as he or
she thinks.

Mostly, small mistakes don't matter. But with murder, it
only takes a tiny mistake to leave a hole for someone to
peer through and learn the truth.

Educated people think they have an edge in cleverness, but
sometimes that extra education makes them overreach and get
caught.

All of us do foolish things sometimes the most obvious and
we wonder later how we could have been so stupid

The most skillful liars sometimes say too much.

Criminals seldom remember Murphy's Law: If something can go
wrong, it wilL Which is a big help to detectives.

DETECTIVE 497

Ainslie's background, Cynthia
supposed the priesthood and his
erudition contributed to all that,
and clearly, from what Hank
Brewmaster had described, that same
facility solved the linkage between
those bizarre objects left at the
serial crime scenes.

Cynthia pushed the memories away.
Until the present she had never
thought of Malcolm's intellect as
affecting her personally. Now she
did.

She decided not to delay a meeting,
but to stage it immediately, on her
own terms. Early in the morning after
her restless night, Cynthia arrived
at Homicide, where she commandeered
Lieutenant Newbold's office and left
word that Sergeant Ainslie should
report to her as soon as possible. He
arrived soon after, having stopped at
the Ernst house on his way.

Having made clear the difference in
authority between them a major was
three ranks higher than a sergeant
and that no shred of a personal
relationship remained, Cynthia had
posed sharp questions about her
parents' murders.

Even while probing and listening to
answers, she was aware of Malcolm's
appraisal and welcomed it. From the
way he looked at her, she knew he had
noticed her especially red-rimmed
eyes. His facial expression reflected
sympathy. Good! So her grief at her
parents' deaths was evident, and
Malcolm did not doubt it; therefore
objective number one had been
achieved.

A second objective was to make her
official authority so strong and
demanding, with insistence on a
speedy solution to her parents'
killings, that it would simply not
occur to Ainslie that she could be
involved in any culpable way. As the
interview progressed, Cynthia knew
she had succeeded.

Toward the end she was conscious of
a wariness on Malcolm's part when she
questioned him about the sym

498 Arthur Halley

hots he had linked to Revelation.
She also suspected that he did not
intend to keep her as fully informed
about all special task force
developments as she demanded. But
she decided not to press too far,
having handled what could have been
an uneasy confrontation with so much
advantage to herself.

Finally, as the door closed behind
Ainslie, Cynthia reflected that
perhaps she had overestimated his
talents after all.

The elaborately formal funeral for
Gustav and Eleanor Ernst, with all
the trappings of officialdom, was
preceded by a wake the day before,
lasting eight hours and attended by
an estimated nine hundred people.
The entire two-day observance was
something Cynthia knew she had to go
through, though she longed for it
all to be over. Her role was to
behave as a bereaved daughter, yet
maintain a composure and dignity
befitting her senior police rank.
From overheard remarks, and
condolences addressed to her, she
knew at the end she had succeeded
rather well.

One conversation occurring during
the wake would, she hoped, have an
ongoing effect. It was with two
people whom she knew well: Miami's
Mayor Lance Karlsson and City
Commissioner Orestes Quintero, one
of the two remaining commissioners.
She had met both frequently before.
The mayor, a retired industrialist,
normally jovial, spoke sadly of
Cynthia's father, adding, "We shall
miss Gustav greatly." Quintero,
younger and heir to a liquor
fortune, nodded agreement. "It will
be difficult to replace him. He
understood the city's workings so
well."

"I know," Cynthia replied. "I only
wish there were some way I could
pick up where he left off."

She saw the two men glance at each
other. A thought

DETECTIVE 499

clearly struck both; the mayor gave the
slightest of nods. "I should talk to
some other people; please excuse me,"
Cynthia said. As she moved away, she
knew she had effectively planted a
seed.

At both the wake and the funeral
she saw Ainslie several times. He was
second-in-command of the police honor
guard and looked smart in dress
uniform, something she had not seen
him in before. Gold aiguillettes and
white gloves heightened the
ceremonial impact. She learned from
another honor guard officer that at
every free moment, in a rear room,
Ainslie was on the radio,
communicating with his special task
force surveillance teams, now
maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch
on six possible suspects in the
serial killings.

After their earlier meeting,
Cynthia was unsure how to treat
Ainslie, and simply ignored him.

A day after the funeral, Cynthia was
at her desk in Community Relations
when she received a phone call that
the caller described as confidential.
She listened for a few moments, then
answered, "Thank you. My answer is
yes."

Twenty-four hours later the Miami
City Commission, headed by Mayor
Karlsson, announced that, as
permitted by city charter, Cynthia
Ernst had been named to complete the
remaining two years in her father's
elected term as a commissioner.

The next day Cynthia announced her
resignation from the Miami police
force.

As more days passed, and Cynthia
assumed her new responsibilities, she
felt increasingly secure. Then, two
and a half months later, one of the
suspects who had been

500 Arthur Halley

under special task force
surveillance, Elroy Doil, was
arrested and charged with murder.
The arrest was at the murder scene
of Kingsley and Nellie Tempone, with
"Animal" Doil's guilt conclusive,
and from additional evidence it was
believed by police, the media, and
the public that he was guilty of all
the preceding serial killings.

Only one factor clouded the
successful end to the task force's
operation. That was a decision by
State Attorney Adele Montesino that
Doil would be tried for only one
double murder the Tempones' where,
in Montesino's words, "we'll have a
cast-iron prosecution" and an "air-
tight certain case." In the
remaining cases, she pointed out,
the evidence, while strong, was less
conclusive.

The decision had provoked protests
from the families of other serial
killing victims, in which
Commissioner Cynthia Ernst joined,
wanting Doil to be convicted of her
parents' murders, too. But in the
end it made no difference. Doil
denied doing any of the murders,
including the Tempones', despite his
presence at the murder scene. A jury
found him guilty and he was
sentenced to die in the electric
chair a process speeded up by Doil's
own decision not to exercise his
rights of appeal.

During the seven months between
Animal Doil's sentencing and his
scheduled execution, something
happened to provide an unnerving
shock to Cynthia Ernst.

Amid the increasing activity of
her new life as a city commissioner,
a thought occurred to her one
day out of nowhere, it seemed that
a task she had intended to complete
a long time ago had never been done.
Incredibly, she had forgotten the
box of evidence, put together the
same night that Patrick admitted
having shot and killed Naomi and
Kilburn Holmes. What she needed to
do, Cynthia now

DETECTIVE 501

realized in fact, ought to have done
long ago was dispose of that box and
its contents, completely and
forever.

She knew exactly where the box was
stored. After carefully taping and
sealing it at her own apartment, she
had taken it to her parents' house
and her private room.

Although, since her parents'
deaths, the Ernst house had been
mostly unoccupied, Cynthia had left
it pretty much as it was, waiting
until Gustav's and Eleanor's wills
were finally probated before
deciding whether to sell it or even,
perhaps, move into Bay Point
herself. In the end she alone would
decide because she was the major
beneficiary under both her parents'
wills. Occasionally, Cynthia used
the house for entertaining and
continued to employ the butler, Theo
Palacio, and his wife, Maria, as
caretakers.

Cynthia chose the following
Wednesday to take the action so long
overdue. She told her secretary,
Ofelia, to reschedule her
appointments for that day and not to
make any others. At first she
considered moving the box to a
public incinerator, then learned
that many had closed for
environmental reasons, and at the
few remaining it was no longer
possible for an individual to throw
an object in a furnace personally.
Unwilling to trust anyone else, she
returned to her original idea of
deep-sixing the box.

She knew a charter boat owner who
had done jobs for her father in the
past a closemouthed, surly ex-U.S.
Marine with the reputation of
operating on the borders of le-
gitimacy, but who was reliable.
Cynthia phoned him, learned he was
available on the chosen date, then
instructed, "I shall want your boat
all day and will be coming with a
friend, but there's to be no crew
except you." After grumbling about
having to do everything himself, the
boat owner agreed.

The statement about a friend was a
lie. Cynthia had no intention of
bringing anyone, and she would only
retain

502 Arthur Halley

the boat for as long as it took to
reach deep water, throw the box
overboard by then inside a metal
trunk and return to shore. She would
pay for a full-day cruise, however,
which would keep the owner quiet.
She also knew of an out-of-the-way
store where she could buy a suitable
trunk, paying with cash the day
before.

Having made her decisions, Cynthia
drove to Bay Point and went to her
room. Remembering exactly where she
had left the box, she moved other
items to get to it. To her surprise,
it wasn't there. Obviously her
memory was faulty, she decided. She
continued to move everything, fi-
nally emptying the entire cupboard,
but no question about it the sealed
box was gone. Her concern, which she
had deliberately suppressed,
suddenly escalated.

Don't panic! It's somewhere in the
house. . . has to be . . . it's
natural not to find it immediately
after all this time. . . so stop,
think, consider where else to look
. . . But after searching through
other rooms and cupboards, iri-
cluding what had been her parents'
rooms, she was no further ahead.

Eventually she used an intercom
and summoned Theo Palacio to the top
floor. He appeared quickly.

When she described the missing
box, Palacio responded at once. "I
remember seeing it, Miss Ernst. The
police took it, along with a lot of
other things. It was the day after.
. ." He stopped and shook his head
sadly. "I think it was the second
day the police were here."

She said, "You didn't tell me!"

The butler spread his hands
helplessly. "So much was happening.
And it being the. police, I thought
you'd know."

DETECTIVE 503

The facts emerged piecemeal.

As Theo Palacio explained, "The
police had a search warrant. One of
the detectives showed it to me, said
they wanted to go through the house,
look at everything."

Cynthia nodded. It was normal
procedure, but something else she had
not foreseen despite her careful
planning.

"Well," Palacio continued, "among
what they found were boxes and boxes
of papers a lot of it your
mother's and from what I understood,
the detectives couldn't look at it
all here, so they took the whole lot
away to go through somewhere else.
They went around the house, piling up
the boxes and sealing them, and one
of the boxes was yours. It was
already sealed; I think that's why
they took it."

"Didn't you tell anyone the box
belonged to me?"

"To tell the truth, Miss Ernst, I
didn't think of it. As I said, a lot
was going on; Maria and I were so
upset. If I did wrong, I'm "

Cynthia cut him off. "Leave it!"
Her mind was calculating swiftly.

A year and two months had passed
since her parents' deaths; therefore
the crucial box had been removed for
that long. So whatever had happened
to it, one thing was certain: it had
not been opened, or she would have
heard. Cynthia was also pretty sure
that she knew where the box was.

Back in her City Commission office,
after canceling arrangements for the
boat, she willed herself to be
objective. There were occasions when
ultra-calm was needed, and this was
one. For a moment at the Bay Point
house she had almost given way to
despair provoked by horror at

504 Arthur Halley

the incredibly foolish thing she had
done, or rather had failed to do.
One of Ainslie's Aphorisms came back
to her: All of us do foolish
things sometimes the most ob-
vious and we wonder later how we
could have been so stupid.

First things first.

Her discovery had raised two vital
questions, the first already
answered: the box had not been
opened. The second: Was it likely to
remain unopened? Of course, she
could sit back and hope the answer
would be yes. But sitting back was
not Cynthia's style.

She consulted a phone list and
dialed the number of the Miami
Police Property Department. An
operator answered.