Eye of Vengeance (2 page)

He went directly to the editorial research room around the corner and got the attention of Lori Simons, who was experienced enough not to flinch when reporters called her office the morgue or the library instead of the research center.

“Hey, Nick, whatcha need?”

“Hi, Lori. I need everything you can search up on a guy named Steven Ferris, pedophile who killed two little girls about four years back.”

“I remember that one. You did one of your big Sunday pieces on him, right?”

Nick smiled at her institutional memory. Computers don’t make people smart, people make people smart.

“That’s the one,” he said and then lowered his voice. “He might have just been shot to death over at the jail. Can you send the stuff straight over to my queue? I’m going over to get some confirmation.”

Lori was tall and thin, with long feathered blond hair and blue eyes. Nick had always liked her because she was bright and eternally positive. After the accident, when he’d come back to work, he’d been drawn to her. It was that positive force, he told himself. She came over to the counter that fronted her room of computers and bookcases and fact books and jotted down the name.

“It shouldn’t take me too long, Nick. You want all the court stuff too, right?”

“Yeah, anything you can find,” he said, thanking her and turning to go.

“Good luck,” she said, watching him walk away. “On the confirmation, I mean. If it’s the guy I’m remembering, nobody’s gonna be shedding any tears.”

Nick waved over his shoulder and went straight to the elevators. On the ride down he recalled a line that an old-timer homicide detective had delivered to him when he was just starting out: “Even the bad guys got a mom, kid.”

Somebody’s always going to cry.

Chapter 3

O
ut on the street, Fort Lauderdale’s morning commuter traffic was still heavy. The main county jail was only a few blocks away on the other side of the river. Nick decided it was easier to walk. He’d stopped being in a hurry to crime scenes years ago. He’d gone to enough of them to know that the bodies would still be there, as if he needed to see another body. The immediate area would be cordoned off by the responding officers, so you weren’t going to beat them before the yellow tape went up and get some kind of close-up and personal view. And if friends and neighbors and possible eyewitnesses were what you were after, they’d all still be hanging around, at least the ones willing to talk or wanting to be quoted.

He climbed the pedestrian stairway of the Andrews Avenue Bridge. From the top he could see a television news truck already pulled up onto the sidewalk three blocks to the south. When he got down and made it within a block of the rear entrance of the seven-story jail, he slowed and started observing. Camera guys were up against the chain-link gate to the sally port, trying to get shots through the wire mesh. They would consider themselves lucky if they could get a telephoto of a blood pool or, even better, a shot of the medical examiner guys picking up the body and loading it into their black van. The newspaper’s camera guys would be doing the same, afraid somebody else might get a shot they didn’t have even though they knew no photo editor was going to put fresh blood on the front page. But better to be safe and get the gore shot than have some boss ask you why you didn’t get it.

Bridge traffic going north was backed up, the omnipresent rubberneckers slowing to see what they could see and tell everybody at the office when they got in. Nowadays, they’d probably call it in on their cell phones:
Hey, Jody, I’m down on Andrews and there’s a bunch of cops and television guys. What’s up? Did you hear anything? I mean, wow, the traffic, ya know?
It was the electronic version of the backyard fence, instant and without boundaries.

Oh, and Jody? Tell the boss I’m gonna be late, OK?

As Nick approached the growing bubble of press, he recognized the TV reporters from Channels 7 and 10. They had done lots of crime scenes together over the years. It was a fraternity of odd undertakers.

“Matt. How’s it goin’?” Nick said to the Channel 10 guy.

“Hey, Nick,” he answered, nodding in the direction of the gate. “They got somebody down at the bottom of the steps to the back door. Gotta guess that it’s a prisoner or they wouldn’t still be standing around letting the body lie there.”

Nick looked around and found the
Daily News
photographer. She was on one knee at the far edge of the fence, a camera body up to her face. He walked over to join her.

“Hi, Susan.”

“Figured you’d be here,” she said, not bothering to look away from her viewfinder.

Nick bent down. From her vantage point he could see a long lump shrouded with a yellow sheet at the base of the staircase. He always wondered why they used bright yellow, making it obvious to anyone and everyone that a corpse was lying there. It stuck out, a happy color surrounded by the dark green and blue of uniforms and gray concrete and black van. While the camera guys focused on that, Nick stood up and began searching the faces of the officers, trying to recognize someone he knew, someone he could call later to get an inside edge on information.

A couple of the jail guards were standing together off to the side, smoking, either as a nerve salve or just taking advantage of an unscheduled break from the inside. Four uniformed road deputies were huddled near the still-opened back doors of a detention transport van. Nick knew that the vans usually carried anywhere from two to eight prisoners from the city jails around the county or from state prisons when an inmate needed to show up for court. The main downtown courthouse was right next door, attached by an elevated walkway. It made it easier and quicker to transport defendants back and forth to hearings and legal appearances.

At first Nick found it odd that no one was at the top of the steps guarding the door.

“Anybody been in or out of the door?” he asked Susan.

“Not since I got here,” she said, standing up. “Maybe they’re afraid of it.”

Nick gave her a quizzical look. He’d been on assignment with Susan before. She was very good. Once they had responded as a team to a late-night homicide down by the city marina. At first it looked like a drive-by, but in the wrong neighborhood. The cops were surrounding a nice Lincoln Town Car with the driver’s window blown out and were particularly closemouthed about the I.D. of the dead man slumped over the wheel inside. Susan snapped a shot of the license plate of the car just before the arriving detectives covered it with a dark towel. She called the plate numbers in to research and they matched with a prominent casino tour boat owner. The paper got a damn nice exclusive of a mob-style hit on a high-profile businessman. Mob hits were something that rarely happened in Florida. Since the days of Al Capone and the high-flying Miami Beach of the late 1920s, Florida had been considered “open territory” by the northern mobsters. Since no one mob owned it, they didn’t have to kill each other. So to have someone capped Chicago-style was page one.

“What do you mean, afraid?” Nick said. “Of the door?”

She lifted her digital camera to him and started flashing through her previous shots and stopped at a bland photo of the wall just to the left of the doorframe. She zoomed in on a pattern of discoloration she’d noticed on the beige paint.

“Blood spatter?” Nick said.

“You got it. And from the height on the wall, it looks like somebody got head-shot,” she said.

Nick looked back at the door in the distance, figuring, and shook his head.

“You’ve been at this too long, Susan.”

She looked at him and grinned. “You got that right too.”

Unlike a shooting in a city neighborhood or in a shopping area, there were few witnesses to talk to on this one. Reporters were milling around, no one to quote. It wasn’t like you could get the guy from the house next door to say what a nice, quiet neighbor the deceased was and how you never think it could happen right here on your street. A four-story medical office building was directly across the street. Two blocks away was a donut shop where courthouse workers even now were slipping in and out, blowing on open cups of coffee and giving only a cursory glance at the growing huddle of news folks. Nick swore he could smell the aroma of 100% Colombian in the air and was contemplating a quick trip down there when Susan called his name.

When he turned to her, she nodded her head toward the portico and then raised her camera to her face. Two men had stepped out of the gray door and were standing on the top landing. The first guy out was tall and so thin that his dark suit coat hung from his shoulders as if on a hanger. He had a full head of black hair and stood with his hands in his pockets. He turned his back to the group of reporters and looked down at a slight angle at the blood pattern on the wall and then seemed to tuck his elbows into his narrow hips. He looked like a six-and-a-half-foot-tall exclamation point and stayed that way for several seconds. When he finally turned, Nick watched him give the gathering a short stare-down.

“Hargrave,” Nick said to Susan as she snapped off photos. “Sheriff’s homicide unit. If he’s the lead on this, we’re gonna be hard up for information. He hates the press. Did you get a shot of the sneer?”

“He was looking up,” Susan said.

“Huh?”

She moved the digital viewer away from her face and held it over again so Nick could see a close-up of Hargrave’s face: high cheekbones so sharp they threatened to split his skin, a thin mustache that barely covered a harelip and gave his mouth the impression of a perpetual sneer, eyes so dark they appeared black. He’d transferred in from somewhere in the Northeast. The other homicide guys Nick knew said he rarely spoke. He had yet to even answer a phone call from Nick on a story.

But Susan was right. The press was all at street level. Thirty yards away Hargrave was four feet above them on the landing. Yet, when he’d turned from the blood spatter he was not looking down at them. Caught on camera, his line of sight went up and behind. Nick turned and scanned the building across the street. It was typical South Florida stucco, painted some pinkish earth color with tall reflective glass on the first floor and three rows of windows above, all of them shut. At the roofline there was an attempt at some ornate scrollwork in a complementary color and an antenna of some sort rose into the sky behind it. A physical shift of the press pool caused him to turn around and reporters and cameramen began pressing and then pushing their way to the gate. Over their heads Nick could see Joel Cameron, official spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, walking over toward them, a single sheet of paper in his hand. Press release, Nick thought, straight off the printer.

Unlike the scenes of the media mob on scripted television and movies, no one yelled out some stupid
What happened?
question. They all formed into a half circle. The sound folks got their microphones up front so they could record. Cameron waited until everyone was set. They’d all been through it before.

“Alright, guys. Here’s what we’ve got so far,” Cameron began, reading from the news release:

“ ‘At approximately seven fifty-five this morning shots were fired at the county’s downtown jail facility in the eight hundred block of South Andrews Avenue during a routine transfer of detainees.

“‘One man was fatally wounded as the detainees were being brought through the main jail’s secured north entrance. The location of the shooting is not accessible to the public and no member of the public was in any way endangered.

“ ‘The Sheriff’s Office is presently investigating the shooting and the name of the deceased is not being released until notification of next of kin.’ ”

Cameron took his eyes off the sheet, folded it and took a deep breath, knowing through experience that it wasn’t nearly enough for the media machine and now he’d have to start tap-dancing to both the obvious and the unanswerable questions.

A television guy in the front asked, “Joel, we heard a report on the radio of an officer down. Were any officers or detention deputies wounded?”

“No,” Cameron said. “No law enforcement or detention deputies were injured.”

“How many shots were fired?” asked another.

“That’s still under investigation.”

“Was it a drive-by?”

“That’s still under investigation.”

“Is that the dead guy back there?” asked a newspaper reporter from Nick’s main competition.

Cameron took a long breath, let the question sit there while the group went quiet with professional embarrassment.

“Well, we don’t usually put yellow sheets over their faces if they’re still alive,” said Cameron, raising his eyebrows, while the rest of the news folk tried to hide their sniggering.

“Yes, that’s him, Jean. And the M.E. will be removing the body as soon as the investigators are through.”

Jean was known for stating the obvious at crime scenes, and took an unspoken derision from her street cohorts for being a bit ditzy. But everyone also knew she probably had an editor who demanded a source for every line she wrote. If she stood here and watched the body lie outside for three hours she would still have to quote an official saying the body lay out here for three hours.

While the others tossed questions at Cameron that Nick knew would not be answered, he focused on Hargrave. At times the detective would move out of sight, blocked by the transport van. Then he would step back into view. Nick watched him kneel next to the body, lifting the sheet as the M.E. rolled the man halfway over, then back. He was watching when Hargrave stood and said something into the ear of his partner and both of them looked to the street, but up, eyes again focused high behind the press gathering. Nick whispered to Susan and then backed out of the group, facing forward, watching Cameron as Jean was asking if police had any suspects in the shooting. When Cameron turned to shake his head at her, Nick slipped behind a news truck and then dodged through traffic to the other side of the street.

The building was the Children’s Diagnostic Center and took up most of the block. Offices were on the upper floors, clinics on the first. Nick made his way around the river side, cut through a narrow split in a six-foot ficus hedge to the back and started looking for a fire escape or maintenance ladder to the roof. Less than a dozen cars were parked in the back lot, all bunched close to a rear entrance. Not much cover, he thought, but fewer windows on this side. Halfway down the length of the building there was an interruption in the facade, an alcove with a tow-away sign and the front end of a Dumpster sticking out. Deep in the corner was the ladder he was looking for. It was one of those metal pipe jobs bolted into the side of the stucco. The first rung was five feet off the ground. Why do they do that? Nick thought. Who is that gonna stop other than some overweight burglar who can’t do a pull-up? The ladder climbed up to the top edge and curled over onto the roof, and so did he.

The flat expanse up top was empty. Gray crushed stone and that instantly recognizable smell of sun-warmed tar. Nick was standing up in the open, realizing he hadn’t thought this through. If he was correct in thinking the detectives were looking up here for a bullet angle, why the hell was he not thinking the shooter might still be up here? Dumb-ass.

He looked out at four big air handlers, spaced evenly across the twenty-yard length of the building, none of them tall enough to hide a man. The antenna he’d seen from the street was speared into the middle, guy wires spread from out for support. When he was confident he was alone, he looked carefully around at the graveled surface and saw no footprints. The surface wasn’t made for it, but he still stepped carefully as he made his way across to the front roofline. Nick had never messed up a crime scene in his life and this would not be a good time to start, if he was reading this right. Six feet from the ornamental roof edge he crouched, peering over the top to see if he could spot the sally port fence across the street. The razor wire was north. He crab-walked to his left, looking for anything not to disturb: cigarette butts, pieces of fabric, ejected bullet casings. He rose and took another peek. Middle of the entrance. He flexed a little taller so he could see the heads of the other reporters below. By now they’d been herded to the left and right of the gate entrance and two orange-striped traffic barricades had been set up. From this point he could also see the gray door to the jail, too far away to see the blood spatter, but a perfect alignment. A downward angle. Was this the spot they were looking at? Some deputies and M.E. assistants were still moving around the van. The yellow tarp was still on the ground. Hargrave and his partner were gone.