Jilliane Hoffman (29 page)

68

Bobby stood up from behind his desk and stared out the window at the endless stream of cars headed westbound on the Dolphin. The sun was just starting its slow descent into the Everglades and roadwork crews were packing up for the day, which only helped thicken the congestion. ‘Anything?’ he asked into the phone.

‘We combed every bay like we were looking for lice on Carrot Top’s head – nothing,’ Larry replied. Bobby, Zo, Don McCrindle and an army of BSO uniforms and Customs officers had spent the day at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. Larry, Ciro, Veso, Roland and MDPD had covered the Port of Miami. Both teams had come up empty.

‘Ya know, all day long I’ve been thinking, trying to figure where it was I might’ve seen that scene before,’ Larry continued. ‘It’s been bugging the shit out of me, ’cause it looks familiar. And I was thinking, maybe Kelly’s right – maybe this guy is getting real profound, you know? Maybe the flames are symbolic and instead of leading us to a site, he’s maybe trying to send us a message.’

‘I’m listening …’ Bobby replied quietly, still staring out the window. Traffic looked the same as it did five minutes ago. As it did that morning. As it did yesterday. In fact, but for the Christmas trees strapped to the roofs of some cars, everything outside looked exactly the same as it did every day. Construction workers in T-shirts and sheikh caps packed up their coolers, smoking cigarettes and goofing off, while others finished up for the day expanding the same stretch of highway they’d been working on for the last couple of years. Down the halls of MROC, the same secretaries gossiped about the same people, the same agents worked at the same desks on the same cases. Everything looked and sounded exactly the same as it did yesterday or last month or last year, but with the simple unfolding of that canvas – with a quick sniff of nauseating oil paint – the whole world as Bobby knew it had changed once again. No longer did he have even the comfort of his imagination that his kid was fine and defying every cold, hard runaway statistic. No. Today his only child might be dead – the victim of a sadistic serial killer, perhaps kidnapped and tortured and raped all those days and weeks and months that everyone’s life on the other side of that window went on as normal. And now, as he looked out on Miami, wondering where the hell Katy was, he couldn’t stop the incredible anger that was swelling inside of him. Anger at Picasso, at himself, at every person on the other side of the glass. And he secretly wished – like he had for the past 365 days – that he was one of those mindless, faceless drivers stuck in traffic, banging on his steering wheel in frustration because he was going to be late for his kid’s recital or miss dinner with the family. He wished to God he didn’t have to feel the incredible pain he was feeling right now – a burning ache in every fiber of his being, as if he were coming apart at the very seams that held him together as a person. It was an indescribable pain that he could not imagine could get any worse, and yet he knew most definitely would, when and if his worst fear was finally confirmed – when the phone rang and the terrible words were finally spoken: ‘It’s her.’ Like a death-row inmate already living in abject hell who’d vowed he’d rather die than live his life out in a 6 × 8 cement box, Bobby stood waiting with anxious hope as the clock ticked its way down to midnight to hear if he’d won an improbable last-second, last-chance reprieve. He’d told himself since Katy left that the not knowing was the worst, but he knew now that was wrong. And as he listened to the warden’s footfalls slowly approach his cell with grim news of his appeal, he realized that living in hell was much better than the alternative.

‘… that’s when it popped into my head! I have some dope I’ve got to drop off in a case that closed out years ago, when I was in Narcotics,’ Larry was saying. ‘The guy pled to twenty and the two keys are just sitting there, waiting to get destroyed, right? I have the court order and everything, but it’s just freaking sitting there in the evidence room and I really have to get rid of it. Anyway, I’m driving across the MacArthur and I’m thinking about this dope and I’m thinking it’s a Broward case, so I’ll have to drop the dope up in Broward, and I don’t know when I’ll be there again. The last time I had to get rid of smack, it was at the dump. You ever had to dump dope, Bobby?’

‘No.’

Zo walked in the office, a frown on his face. ‘You look like shit. What’re you doing?’

‘Thanks,’ Bobby replied, rubbing his temples. ‘Waiting for Larry to get to the point.’ He put the phone on speaker. ‘Zo’s here. You’re on the air.’

‘Hey,’ Larry answered. ‘So I haven’t been there in years myself, to the dump, but I start to think about it, Bobby. When you drop dope, you know, to destroy it, they have to burn it.’

Bobby froze.

‘The burn pit, it’s outside. You can be standing in the sunshine while this sanitation worker’s getting high off your leftover nose candy. Now, I haven’t been there in years, so I call to see what time they’re doing burns, ’cause it used to be they’d only do it by appointment and only on certain days of the week. But they’re freaking closed! Like closed, closed. Now burns are done at the Wheelabrator facility off 441 and Interstate 595. The administrative facilities are still out there in the fucking Everglades, but the site’s been shut down for a couple of years, and the landfill’s been closed. That’s when I started thinking – shit! That might be it! The burn site at the dump!’

He’s taunting you to find him, even going so far as to send you the evidence that he himself created. He’s challenging you
.

It made sense. Where the police dumped and burned their evidence, Picasso would dump his. It would be very symbolic, like Roland Kelly had suggested. Bobby looked at Zo. ‘Larry, is every burn site like Broward? You know, Miami, Palm Beach?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I only had to get my stuff burned in Broward. I would think there’s at least a procedure in each county, because you need a court order. Checks and balances, you know? To make sure we don’t take it home and smoke it ourselves,’ he laughed. ‘Or sell it. Now that’s capitalism.’

It would also be symbolic to get rid of that evidence in the county in which it was seized. Bobby lived in Broward.

Bobby was already on the radio. Within minutes he had uniforms from a half-dozen departments responding to secure both the current and closed narcotic evidence burn sites in Miami, Palm Beach, Monroe and Broward counties.

‘You’re not going,’ Zo said quietly as Bobby grabbed his sports jacket.

‘The hell I’m not.’

‘You didn’t sleep last night.’

‘Neither did you.’

‘Maybe. But this is way too much.’ Zo hesitated, as if he’d almost said the wrong thing, and closed the office door with his foot. ‘Listen, I want to say I’m sure it’s not her, I want to tell you that, but I can’t. And neither can you. Today’s one year since she ran away. This psycho’s addressing these portraits to you, and the clothing in the painting matches Katy’s description to a T. If Larry’s right and he’s dumping the evidence at that site …’ Zo trailed off and lowered his voice. ‘It’s just not looking good, brother. And I don’t think you should be there to see it.’

‘That’s exactly why I am gonna be there, Zo. It isn’t looking good. I know exactly what it looks like. It looks like this is gonna turn out to be my daughter. And if it is, well,
I’m
gonna be the one to find her, and
I’m
gonna bring her back home.’ He willed both the tears and the fear back as he opened the door and stepped into the squad bay. ‘And then I’m gonna find the sick fuck that did this to her, and when I do, when I’m through with him, he’s gonna be begging me to fucking kill him.’

69

LuAnn knew something was wrong. She felt it in every joint in her body. She felt it in her gut, and she felt it in her heart. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

Bobby was holding out on her.

At first she thought it was another woman. And that made sense. She’d been away from him for so long – emotionally, physically – that she’d often thought one day he’d decide he’d had enough and go find someone else. Or someone else would find him. At times during the past year she’d actually wished it would happen – so that it would be over with, so that she could finally be completely alone in the world, so that nothing and no one would matter any more. She could stop silently blaming him, and he could stop silently blaming her and it would be done – their lives could go in different directions, without even the bond of a child to bring them back together at a future graduation and wedding. She could just curl up into a ball, and wallow in self-pity until life was over. And the waiting for it to happen – to finally find out about the affair, to confront him, to see her marriage end, to watch him move out and start a life with someone new, to find herself completely alone – well, the waiting was too exhausting. She’d just wished the inevitable would happen already.

So it was no doubt unfair of her to think that a few nights together might close the expansive emotional void that had grown between them, no matter how great or tender the sex was, or how much she might will it to be so. No matter how close they’d seemed for a few days, or how much it felt like the ‘old days’ of their marriage, when everything was normal and people called them lucky. She’d made a mistake shutting him out for all these months, she knew that now, but she was finally ready to heal. She was finally ready to come back. But should she expect him to still be there waiting? The truth was, no. A year was a long time.

The past few days had been, in a sense, worse than the previous eleven months: The void seemed now a chasm, but it was Bobby who was shutting down this time. When the midnight phone call came that he uncharacteristically didn’t answer, she’d laid there beside him in bed, her heart pounding, thinking,
‘This is it. This is how I will find out. And no matter how much I thought I wanted it, I’m not ready to know. I’m not ready to watch everything I had unravel, and at the end of it all blame myself. I’m not ready for him to leave …’

She’d pretended to be asleep, lying there, waiting for him to sneak downstairs and call his mystery lady back, and wondering what she should do next. Should she hire a PI? Or, perhaps get the number from his cell and call the woman back herself and confront her? Bobby hadn’t moved, either. She could hear his heartbeat quicken, she could feel his body tense. But when he played back the message in the dark bedroom, and she heard the panicked whispers of that reporter on the other end, she knew it wasn’t another woman that she’d lost her husband to – it was this case. This case that had consumed him from the second he’d picked it up. It was too close to home. For both of them. It was too close to Katy.

He had rushed out and she had waited up all night, trying to shush the horrible thoughts that were now running unchecked in her brain, only to hear him finally come home, but not come to her. She knew there was a reason, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was, and so she’d stayed upstairs, waiting. Waiting for him to come. Waiting for him to leave. Waiting for the day that had just begun to finally end.

They had not spoken about today – there was no note on the fridge to remind either of them of the significance of the date. But of course neither of them needed a reminder. November 19 was an anniversary LuAnn had never expected to pass. One last Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Mother’s Day, she could never imagine having. An anniversary. For couples and jobs and tragedies, an anniversary was the mark to make.
Wow, it’s been a whole year! Look where we are!
More than just the passage of 365 days, it was the symbolic turning of an event into a permanent part of time – a day of remembrance. And LuAnn wanted no part of it. Ever. Before the concussion that had laid her up now for almost a week, she’d volunteered to work a double.

She could only imagine how hard the day would be on Bobby. Like a firefighter who’s called to put out a blaze in a downtown Manhattan skyscraper on September 11, he had to focus on the emergency while the world held vigils and the ghosts of fallen comrades screamed in his head. After her husband had quietly slipped back out of the house when the sun came up, she’d turned on the TV for company, only to shut it right off. Bobby’s case was already all over CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. Another brutal painting. Another possible teenage victim. Another runaway. Another Miami serial killer. Another frantic manhunt underway.

So she’d flipped on satellite radio and wandered about the house all day, doing busy, mindless things, like watering plants and dusting bookshelves and mopping the floors. She almost welcomed the distraction when the doorbell rang, tempered by the fear that it was a neighbor who perhaps had marked the date on
her
calendar and wanted to make sure LuAnn was OK with a plateful of cookies, a sad face and a few intrusive questions.

All she saw when she opened the door, though, were flowers. Red and white roses and white lilies – an enormous bouquet of flowers.

‘I have a delivery for Mrs Dees,’ the deliveryman said, passing a clipboard to her.

‘From who?’ she asked as she signed the receipt and watched as he placed the vase on the hall table. There were at least two dozen roses in the bunch …

‘Don’t know, ma’am. There’s a card, though.’

She stared at the flowers, but he stood in the foyer and didn’t leave. ‘Oh,’ she said after a moment, digging into her pocket for a couple of bucks. ‘Here you go.’

He smiled. ‘Sure do appreciate it. Have a nice day, now.’

‘Thank you,’ she said absently as he headed down the front walk. Normally she hated the short days of winter, but today she welcomed seeing the setting sun and the long shadows of afternoon. She flipped on the front light and turned to head back inside. The heavy perfume of fresh roses already filled the living room, and the smell was making her nauseous. This was not the day for flowers.

Who the hell in their right mind would send her flowers on the one day of the year she would most like to forget?

‘Enjoy them, ma’am,’ the deliveryman called out just as she closed the door. ‘They sure are pretty. Just like you.’