Florida Heatwave (14 page)

At three o’clock, I began to make my final preparations. Thankfully, the nervousness of the night before was gone, and I was able to go about my activities in a methodical way. My concentration was broken only once, when Susanna telephoned. I thought it strange she called me in the middle of the afternoon, especially as we had spoken just a few hours before. I reassured her that the rewrite was coming along very well.

I went downstairs to the garage of the building, got into the Land Rover, and drove off. My first stop in Florida City was at my unit in the storage facility. There, I began to quickly and methodically change my appearance. After braiding my long blond hair, I tucked it under a baseball cap; next, I put on a blue jean jacket three sizes too big that I had bought at Sears two days before; and, then I inserted a pair of lifts inside my sneakers, which instantly added several inches to my height. Using the mirror, I drew on some heavy dark eyebrows over my normally thin, light ones.

Eyewitness accounts of a crime were notoriously unreliable, so I had decided that it would be prudent to accentuate several easily identifiable characteristics that would throw off any kind of accurate description of myself. Outside the unit, I smeared some mud on the license plate of the Land Rover to obscure several of the numbers. I simply could not be too careful.

I parked the car across the street from the entrance of the food store, and for the next couple of hours, watched as the motley crew assembled. By now, I was familiar with their routine: first they pooled their money and bought a pack of cigarettes; next, one by one, they filed into the store and purchased bottles of beer—they favored Pabst Blue Ribbon—which they would take outside to drink. The first beer never lasted too long, for each man would drink a second and a third in quick succession. Every so often, each of the men would walk the half a block or so to a clump of bushes, out of sight of the street, to pee.

After an hour, my victim would be on his fifth beer and need to relieve himself. His friends would continue hitting the drinks hard but my fellow, a lightweight, would slow down after that, and chain-smoke cigarettes. That night was no different. I watched as he went to the side of the building to relieve himself, then waited until he had finished before approaching. I was pleased to see that he was weaving slightly, and his pale blue eyes were unfocused. Good.

“Hey, my name is Nora.” I greeted him in a friendly way. “I’m a photographer.” I pointed to the camera I was holding. “I was wondering if I could take some pictures of you. You have wonderful cheekbones, anyone tell you that?”

“Cheekbones?” The man put his hands to his face, and rubbed it. Then he opened his eyes a bit wider, and asked suspiciously, “Pictures? What kind of pictures?” The man started swaying a bit, and he reached out to the wall next to where he was standing to steady himself. “I don’t do that naked stuff. Or anything with kids.”

The fact that my victim was so quick to ask questions about naked pictures with children immediately made me wonder if he’d had experience with those. “Oh, no. Not those kinds of pictures.” I hurried to reassure him. “These are formal pictures—you’d be totally dressed. And no children are involved. I’d pay you, of course, for your time.” I showed him a hundred dollar bill. “It would just be for a couple of hours—my studio is just a few blocks away. You’d be back with your friends in less than two hours.”

“Oh, okay. Two hours, huh? You sure that’s all it would take?” Anyone listening to him would think he had an agenda full of appointments. “And you’ll give me the hundred?” I showed him the money again. “I guess so.”

“Good.” I took him by the arm. “My car’s right here. Come on.”

The victim got into the front seat of the Land Rover, and immediately closed his eyes. He must have been drunker than I had thought. I walked around the car to the driver’s side and reached under the seat for the bag I had placed there back at the storage unit. “Here—this beer will help you relax for the shoot.” I shoved the can of beer into which I had dissolved a Roofie—the drug known as the “date rape drug”—earlier.

The word “beer” must have had magic connotations for the victim, for he immediately opened his eyes, and held out his hand for the can. “Gee, thanks.”

I watched as he drank half the contents without stopping. It would take between fifteen and twenty minutes for the drug to take effect—so I could not waste any time. I drove to the storage facility. The young man had almost passed out by the time we got to my unit.

I took the time to look him over. This man had once been someone’s baby, probably wanted and loved. I was tempted to go through his pockets to see if he had any identification on him, but I stopped myself. The last thing I wanted or needed was to put a name to him, to humanize him. Well, he would not have died in vain—he was going to give up his life for another—mine. A selfless act.

“Here, here we are at my studio. Time to get out of the car.” I didn’t want to have to carry him unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Huh?” The man looked around confused. “We’re here? Where is here?”

“At my studio, for the photos, remember?” I needed for him to be sufficiently awake to follow my orders, but not too awake to figure out what I was doing. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

The young man somehow managed to coordinate his body enough to get his legs to hold him up, but once inside the unit, right by the door, he collapsed into a heap, out cold. I poked him a few times, the last ones hard, but he did not move.

“Shit.” I whispered. In my book, the victim was laying on his side, spread out flat, and he was all crumpled up. It would not do.

I put on the one-piece plastic jumpsuit, goggles, and gloves that would protect me from any blood splatter, and dragged the victim to the middle of the unit, just over the drain in the floor. I could have shot him where he lay, but as I was going to have to move him later on to dismember him, there was no point in having to move him twice. I laid him out exactly the same way my victim was in the book, and, without giving myself time to think about what I was doing—or to back out—I assumed the pose the murderer in my book had. To muffle any sounds, I first held a small white cotton pillow over the muzzle of a gun I had stolen years earlier from my second husband. Then, after taking a deep breath, I shot him in the side of the head.

Just as in my book, the young man did not die immediately. Good. I’d gotten that right. I calmly stood up, and went to get my laptop, then began describing the scene in minute detail: the sound of the shot, the size of the hole the bullet had made as it entered his head; the twitches of the victim as the life flowed out of him; the blood seeping slowly out of the wound; the way his skin changed colors; then, finally, the death rattle. It was all I had expected, and much more.

I was amazed at how composed I had been through the experience, but that could quickly change. I checked to make sure I was completely covered up—the last thing I needed was to get the victim’s blood on me—he could have had some illness.

I began my next gruesome task. Images of the bathroom scene in the movie Scarface in my mind, I proceeded to dismember the victim’s body, cutting him up using the chain saw I had bought at Sears. The victim had barely any muscle and his bones were quite soft—so cutting him up was not as labor intensive as I had feared. I waited until most of the blood had drained from his body—to lighten the load as much as possible—before placing the cut-up parts of the body into the heavy construction bags, and tied the tops off with rope. By the time I finished, I was sweating profusely.

I made sure no one was lurking outside before placing the five bags in the back of the Land Rover and covering them up with a couple of blankets I had purchased for that purpose. After that, I returned to the unit and removed any items I had brought with me. Once the place was completely emptied out, I washed the whole area with water from a garden hose that I had connected to the spigot outside. Holding my nose to avoid inhaling the pungent odor, I splashed the contents of three bottles of bleach around to get rid of any smell of blood that might be lingering. I put the protective clothing I had been wearing—jumpsuit, gloves, and protective glasses—in a small bag, and stuffed them under the passenger seat. I locked the unit, and left.

I drove slowly to the entrance of the Everglades, and handed the sleepy guard the ten-dollar fee. Just in case any of the rangers might be patrolling, looking out for visitors at such a late hour—by then it was close to one o’clock in the morning—I drove about aimlessly for the next fifteen minutes. Only when sure that I was not being observed did I head for the place I had picked out earlier. I stopped the car at the edge of the pond, and, with the motor still running, dragged the bags out quickly, taking care to loosen the ropes so the animals could get at the body easier. I needn’t have worried, for no sooner had I gotten back into the car than I could hear the water in the pond being sloshed around, then saw some shapes moving around silently in the darkness. It was beyond creepy.

I passed through the entrance—happily, the guard was dozing so he did not see me leave—and drove for the next hour until I reached the outskirts of Miami. There, I stopped at a gas station, and parked outside the view of the surveillance cameras mounted on the roof of the convenience store. I went into the ladies’ room at the side of the building, took off the clothes I was wearing, and put on different ones. Even at that late hour, there were several cars in the parking lot, so I had to wait until I was sure I was not being watched before heading back to the Land Rover. Once in the car, I added the clothes I had just taken off to the ones I had placed a few hours earlier under the front seat. Then I drove back to Miami Beach.

In the parking garage of my building, I carefully cleaned off the mud from the license plate of the car, and went upstairs. Once in my apartment, I poured myself a stiff Jack Daniels, then, after drinking it, another. I then sat down at my computer, and using the detailed notes I had taken at the unit, completely rewrote the death scene in the book. The sun was coming up when I emailed Susanna the new version.

No sooner had I pressed the Send button than the enormity of what I had done hit me, and I put my head down on the desk and just sobbed. Had I really just killed a man in cold blood? I, who had not been to church in twenty years, began praying: “Please, dear God, make it all have been a dream.” I couldn’t get the vision of the victim’s sightless eyes, as he stared off into the distance, out of my mind. The events of a few hours ago kept playing over and over again in my head, as terrifying as one of Wes Craven’s goriest, scariest, most horrific movies—only what had just happened was not make believe and would not be over in two hours.

I went down to the beach for a swim and a run then made an enormous breakfast. After turning off the phones, I took a Xanax and went to bed. Thankfully, the Xanax did the job, and I slept until late the following afternoon.

When I awoke, I saw that Susanna had left me several messages—voice-mail; text; e-mails—congratulating me on the new pages, and informing me she had been so pleased by them that she had already inserted them into the manuscript.

I had been about to respond to her last e-mail when my phone rang. It was Susanna. “Mary, I’ve been trying to reach you for two days! Where the hell have you been?”

Susanna called me Mary. I was back to being in her good graces. “Oh, sorry Susanna—I’ve been working so hard that, after emailing it to you, I feel asleep.”

“I sent the manuscript on to Tom—he just texted me telling me he was really liking it.” Susanna took a deep drag of her cigarette. “Keep your fingers crossed—I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything concrete back from him.” Another drag and she asked. “How did you do you it, Mary? The new pages are so authentic, they read so real. What kind of breakthrough did you have? I’m curious.”

I thought for a moment. “I just delved more deeply into my research, is all. Just approached the scene differently.”

“Whatever you did, it worked.” Susanna was euphoric. “I’ll be in touch.”

After hanging up with Susanna, I opened the front door to my apartment and picked up the two
Miami Heralds
—the day before and today’s—and turned to the local section to see if there had been any kind of write-ups about a missing young man from Florida City. Nothing. I looked over the pages again to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. Still nothing. I was safe! I promised God that if he let me get away with killing the young man, I would never, ever do anything like that again.

Two days later, Susanna called to give me the great news that not only had Tom loved the manuscript, he was moving up the publishing date, something that was quite rare in publishing, a business that made a snail’s pace seem as if it were breaking speed records. However, the best part was that he was approving the release of the second set of funds due me upon the acceptance of the manuscript. Life was good. Still, I could not forget Florida City.

The novel, which received glowing reviews, was an instant success. Tom, sensing the potential of the new series, had ordered a huge first printing of the book, a number that assured it a spot on the secondary of the
New York Times’
Bestseller List. My telegenic looks apparently helped sales, as I was booked on just about every television show available. The buzz was such that there was even talk of a television series.

I found it a bit alarming that every reviewer commented on how realistic the murder scene was depicted. Tom, wanting to strike while the iron was hot, requested that I finish the next book in the series in six months, so he could publish it a year after the hardback, releasing it simultaneously with the paperback of the first one.

Every so often I would check the newspapers to see if there was any mention of a missing homeless man—surely the victim had a family that would miss him; or, his fellow drinking buddies—but from what I could tell, nothing had been reported. In time, I began to relax, believing I had actually gotten away with it. My relief was overwhelming.