Eye of Vengeance (4 page)

Back out on the street, the media gang was peeling away. But the camera guys were still there. And two remote television news trucks were still on the sidewalk. That meant the body was also still there and hadn’t been moved and nothing with more violence or potential for blood had hit the police scanners in South Florida this morning. They were all waiting for the shot of the body bag being loaded into the medical examiner’s black SUV, the shot that would inevitably lead the local news.

Nick made two stops on his way back to the newsroom. First to the coffee shop on the ground floor of his building, where he picked up a large with cream and sugar and then stood in the lobby letting the caffeine hit the back of his brain for a few minutes. When half the coffee was gone, he rode the elevator up and went the back way to the library and talked quietly to Lori.

“I shipped a bunch of stuff to your queue, Nick,” she said. “Was it him?”

“They’re not letting it loose officially yet,” he said. “But I think my source is good. What I want to do now is get some kind of an M.O. thing going. Can you do a search first locally and then nationwide on shootings, homicides that involved rifles and that might have been described as sniper-type shootings?”

Lori was writing on a pad. “Pretty broad, but yeah, we can do all the South Florida media. National is going to take some time. We can do most of the online newspaper archives and the Associated Press stuff. How far back do you want to go?”

“Two, three years,” Nick said. “No, make it four.”

She looked up from her pad over the top of her frameless reading glasses. “You’ve got an editor’s approval on this, don’t you, Nick?”

In the corporate world of news gathering, computer search time was money. Somebody had to be held responsible for every dime spent. Nick knew that. Lori knew that.

“Yeah,” he said. “Deirdre.”

Lori was still looking over her lenses. “My ass,” she said.

“OK. I’m grandfathered in,” Nick said.

“My ass again,” she said, this time grinning.

Nick just looked at her with his eyebrows up, surprised.

Lori shook the pad at him and smiled. “Off the books,” she said. “For now.”

Nick almost winked, but then thought, Don’t do that. That’s what Carly would call “weird Dad stuff.”

“And speaking of books,” Lori said, bailing him out, “I’ve got that Van Gogh book that you said Carly might like.” She bent under the shelf and came up with a big picture book he’d commented on weeks ago.

“How’s she doing, anyway?”

“Better,” Nick said, taking the book and wondering about the coincidence that they’d both thought of his daughter at the same time. “She’ll love this, Lori. Thanks.”

On the way back through the rat’s maze to his desk, Nick kept his coffee cup up to his face. Maybe no one would interrupt him at midswallow. But before he got to his chair an editor for the online edition of the paper asked if he had anything new on the jail shooting and could he please file something so they could put it up on the website. Nick just nodded. In another era newspaper reporters had a daily deadline: Get the best and most accurate story you can by nine or ten o’clock tonight so it makes the morning’s paper. Only the wire service and radio reporters had to make several updates during the day, leaving them little time to dig deeper into a story. But in a time of website mania, every daily reporter was in competition on an hourly basis. File what you have so the office workers sneaking looks at the news on their computers at their desks can follow your shifting speculation all day.

Nick hated it, but played the game.

He sat down and called up a blank file and wrote:

An inmate being transferred to the county’s downtown jail was killed by an unknown gunman at 7:55 this morning, police said.

The prisoner, whose name was being withheld by the Sheriff’s Office, was the only person injured during the rush-hour shooting as he was being walked into the rear of the jail building in the 800 block of South Andrews Avenue.

A Sheriff’s Office spokesman said the shooting took place after a van transporting several prisoners was inside a closed gated area just a block from the county courthouse. Investigators were unsure how many shots were fired, said spokesman Joel Cameron, and officials would not speculate on a motive for the killing.

“The shooting piece is in,” he called over his shoulder to the online editor when he finished. It had taken him eight minutes. A lot of nothing, he thought. But it’ll hold them off for a while.

He took a long sip of coffee and then called up his e-mail message inbox and started at the real work.

Lori had sent him several files and he opened up the one titled
YOURFERRIS,
figuring it to be the story he had written on Steven Ferris just four years ago.

THE PREDATORS AMONG US
By Nick Mullins, Staff Writer

They walked hand in hand on the street, two little girls, one in green-and-white sneakers, the other in pink shorts, sisters strolling home after school.

When they were stopped by a soft voice, it didn’t startle them—it was familiar. When they turned to the big doughy man with the kind smile, they felt no fear—they knew him. When he invited them into his green pickup, they didn’t panic—they’d been in his truck before.

In the full sunlight of a warm afternoon, two little girls looked into the face of evil, and didn’t recognize it.

The public now knows the face of Howard Steven Ferris, 30, who police say confessed to the abductions and killings of Marcellina Cotton, 6, and her sister Gabriella, 8.

We know their bodies were found in the attic of Ferris’s Fort Lauderdale apartment. We know, according to his confession, that his sole motivation was to sexually assault them.

But if the allegations are true—which only a court can determine now—do we really know Steven Ferris?

And what of the other 300 sexual predators identified and released from Florida prisons? What of their dark motivations and urges? How do you recognize evil coming, and what can we do about the men who bring it?

The habits and methods of child molesters are no secret. Law enforcement has worked off a general but clear profile for years.

The more that is learned about Ferris, the closer he fits that outline. Detectives could have picked him off the pages of their own investigative handbooks.

The story went on to describe how Ferris, a part-time construction worker and handyman, had come across the two girls and their mother in a local park. They had been living out of their car for several months. Nick had interviewed the mother, who could not find work and was in South Florida alone. She was cooking the family meals on the grill of the campsite and at night she made up an impromptu bed of blankets and pillows made of clothes packed in pillowcases in the back seat for her daughters while she slept in the front. She said her pride had kept her from going to the homeless shelters and community aid programs. She was doling out her savings in order to pay the monthly fee for the camping space. Restricted to only one month at a time, she would drive off for the minimum three days, parking on the streets, and then come back and pay again, taking yet another spot for another month. The woman said she had specifically picked this park because it was close to an elementary school and that she had enrolled her daughters there using the address of a friend who had put them up for a time until her boyfriend had demanded they leave. The mother said she wasn’t afraid of living out in the streets as long as her daughters were near. At night she could reach across the seat back and touch her girls and hear them sleeping in the dark. She considered the park safe. And then Steven Ferris had found them.

Like a predator, Ferris had singled out their weakness. Hanging out in the park where children often played, he read their situation and then struck up a conversation with the mother when she had trouble starting her car. Could he help her? He knew something about engines. He fixed some loose spark plug wires. Later, investigators couldn’t say whether Ferris had pulled the wires in the first place.

Another evening he showed up with food and treats for the girls. Another time he gave them all a ride to the grocery store. He made himself familiar. He made himself look safe.

Nick remembered the interviews he’d done with teachers and the principal of the elementary school, their recollections of the girls, how bright and eager they were to learn and be with the other children. The way the older one was so protective of her sister. The description of what they were wearing on their final day.

As the girls were walking to the park which they now considered home, Ferris pulled alongside in his familiar truck. He told them their mother had gone out to look at a house they might move to. He said she’d asked him to give them a ride. Maybe the girls were reluctant, but they knew him, had ridden in the truck—with their mother—before.

Ferris took them to a small house less than three miles from the park. He knew it was the younger girl’s birthday and promised a cake. But once inside, he molested the six-year-old in a bedroom. When she began to cry, her sister came to her aid. Ferris killed them both and then hid their tiny bodies in the attic of the house. When they failed to show up at the park, the girls’ mother went to the school and police were called. She immediately identified Ferris as a man who had befriended them. It took a day for detectives to track him down. They found him in the small rental house and interviewed him for an hour. They read him like a book and returned the same afternoon with a search warrant.

Nick had gone to the crime scene. He had been there when the two small body bags were carried out, just like the rest of the press. But for this one he could not tear his eyes away. He remembered the look in the lead investigator’s eyes when he later told Nick he would never forget the feeling of realizing that the bodies of those girls had been lying right above him as he’d listened to Ferris deny he had even seen the children. Nick remembered thinking they should not let detectives or police reporters who have kids of their own go to crime scenes involving the deaths of children. He remembered interviewing the mother, even though he knew she was still in shock, her eyes swollen, the pupils enlarged and glossed by sedatives and some internal message that kept trying to convince her it wasn’t so. He remembered hating Steven Ferris.

Nick scrolled down through the story, past the history he’d dug up on Ferris: the arrests for loitering, the multiple laborer jobs, the interview with the girlfriend who had left him after she’d caught him in her daughter’s room but had never reported it, just cursed him and kicked him out.

None of that had come out in court. Ferris’s trial had been emotional and sensational. Nick hadn’t covered it. That assignment belonged to the court reporter. But Nick had slipped into the courtroom on several days, squeezing into the back rows and watching the back of Ferris’s head as he sat at the defense table. One day the little girls’ mother, who could not stand to sit inside, was in the hallway on a bench and recognized Nick as he quietly left during testimony.

“Mr. Mullins,” she said and stood.

Nick stopped and looked at her face, trying to read whether she was indignant or angered by something he had written. “You are the reporter, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nick said, taking two steps closer to her.

When she put out her hand, he closed the final gap and clasped her fingers softly.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “For the way you treated me and my girls in your stories.”

Nick was silent, not knowing how to react, seeing her eyes again, clearer now, but still holding a pain that would be there forever. Nick knew even then that whatever went on in the courtroom would never ease her pain.

“They were beautiful children,” he remembered saying and then had excused himself and walked away.

Now he knew the pain personally. Loved ones dead. A child you could never hold again. The urge for vengeance. Robert Walker.

Within days of the start of Ferris’s trial the predator was convicted by a jury that would later recommend the death penalty. The judge had agreed. Nick shook the scenes out of his head. He remembered each detail, but today’s story wasn’t so much about Ferris as it was about his killer.

He moved on to the other stories Lori had sent him. There was a hearing that the newspaper’s court reporter had written months after Ferris’s conviction. An appeals court had ruled on arguments raised over the prejudicial nature of the trial itself. Several people in the courtroom gallery had worn buttons on their shirts and blouses adorned with photographs of the dead girls. Ferris’s lawyer argued that the crowd and the photos had influenced the jury. Though the prosecution argued that members of the public had a right to attend the proceedings, a panel of judges disagreed.

“Here, the direct link between the buttons, the spectators wearing the buttons, the defendant, and the crime that the defendant allegedly committed was clear and unmistakable,” read the document handed down by the three-judge appellate court panel. “A reasonable jurist would be compelled to conclude that the buttons worn by members of the gallery conveyed the message that the defendant was guilty.”

Lori had sent another quick story that quoted a defense attorney who claimed the conviction should be thrown out. Another hit on the computer came up with only a single line: “Convicted murderer Steven Ferris sits mute as lawyers argue for a new hearing for the man who was given the death penalty for raping and killing two sisters, 6 and 8, three years ago. Ferris is currently serving time and no decision by the court was reached.”

Nick recognized the line as a caption that must have run under a photo that appeared with no story. He wondered how he could have missed it. He checked the date it ran: January 21 of last year.

Nick had not been aware of anything during that month or the February after that. He’d been on an extended leave of absence. Death in the family.