The Alibi Man (4 page)

I sat down on the chair and watched. There were snapshots of the horses she cared for, of Sean riding in the big arena at the Wellington show grounds. There was one of myself riding D’Artagnan, Sean’s handsome copper chestnut, early-morning fog hugging the ground beneath us, making it look as if we were floating.

The more interesting photos were of Irina and her friends partying, tailgating along the side of the polo field. The stadium of the International Polo Grounds rose up in the background. A polo match was in full swing.

No jeans and T-shirts at this party. Everyone was dressed to the nines. Irina wore a big pair of black Dior sunglasses and a simple black sheath dress that showed off a mile of leg. Her hair was slicked back in a tight ponytail. Her girlfriends were similarly turned out. Big hats, big smiles, champagne glasses in hand.

I didn’t recognize any of them. Even if they had been other grooms from the neighborhood, I wouldn’t have recognized them out of their barn attire. That’s how it is in the horse world. At social events the first hour of the party is spent trying to recognize the people we see every day in breeches and baseball caps.

The photos were not limited to girlfriends. There were half a dozen shots of gorgeous Argentinian polo players, some on horses, some standing, laughing, an arm around one or more of the girls. I wondered if any of them was
B
.

I touched the mouse. The screen saver disappeared, revealing the last Web site Irina had been looking at: www.Horsesdaily.com.

Without hesitation, I put my gloved hands on the computer’s keyboard and went to work, clicking and double-clicking until I located the files that contained the photographs. I wanted to e-mail them all to myself, but that would leave a trail that would bring Landry down on my head like a ton of bricks. Instead, I pulled Irina’s digital camera from my pocket and simply took pictures of the snapshots as each appeared on the screen.

The desktop screen returned when I closed the file on the pictures. The AOL icon beckoned. If I was very lucky, Irina would have her account set up with the password saved so she didn’t have to enter it every time she signed on. She lived alone. There was no nosy roommate she needed to protect herself from.

I clicked to sign on and was immediately rewarded with the AOL greeting and the announcement that Irina had mail. Mail I couldn’t open because no one should have been on this computer after Irina’s death. The mail had to remain new. But I pulled a white note card out of the table drawer and wrote down the e-mail addresses of the senders.

Access to saved mail was another story. I brought that up and browsed through the list, opened everything from the three days before I last saw Irina, and printed them out. Later I would go through them carefully, looking for signs and portents of the evil that was to come. Now I couldn’t take the time.

Also on the writing desk was a basket holding mail. A coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond, a doctor’s bill, an offer to join a health club. On the back of one of the e-mails, I jotted down the name and address of the doctor.

The message light on the phone was blinking, but as much as I wanted to listen to her messages, I couldn’t do it without being found out, for the same reason I couldn’t open her new e-mail. I could, however, check the numbers of the missed calls without disturbing the voice mail itself.

The readout in the small window of the phone told me Irina had missed four calls. Using the tip of the pen, I touched the button to scroll through the calls, and jotted the numbers down. Two were local, one looked like a Miami number, one was
Unknown,
a blocked call. All had come on Sunday, the latest being logged at 11:32
P.M.
A call from Lisbeth Perkins.

I wondered what the callers would feel when they found out Irina was dead, may have already been dead at the time they made their calls to her.

Who were her friends? Did she have any family? Had one of those calls been from someone she loved?

To I. From B.

I checked the drawer for an address book but couldn’t find one. Irina had been addicted to her cell phone. I imagined she kept pertinent addresses and phone numbers in it and/or in her computer. The cell phone—which had become like a growth on the side of her head, she used it so constantly—would have been with Irina on the night of her death. I wondered if Landry and company had found a purse in the weeds or in the canal.

If I couldn’t have the cell phone, the next best thing was the cell-phone bill, which I found in a plastic file box under the table. I took the last two statements, hurried downstairs with them, and made copies on the fax machine in Sean’s office.

I looked out the end of the barn, nervous that Landry would come rolling in, even though I knew better. He would be a long time at the scene. There would be no sense of urgency to go through the victim’s apartment. The first priority was to find evidence where the body had been dumped. A shoe print, a cigarette butt, a weapon, a used condom, something dropped by the perpetrator.

Landry was lead on the case. He would stay there and oversee every detail. And he would have to deal with the press, because the news crews, like bloodhounds, would have picked up on the scent of death by now and beat it out there.

Still, I hurried back upstairs and replaced the bills. The copies I folded and tucked inside the waistband of my pants.

The crunch of tires on the crushed-shell drive drew me to the window—the farrier come to replace a thrown shoe. The delivery truck from Gold Coast Feed rolled in behind him.

The world kept turning. That fact always seemed cruel to me. There was no moment of silent respect for the dead, other than within the minds of those she left behind.

chapter
5

         
“WHAT A
fucking mess,” Landry muttered as he watched the ME’s people load the various pieces of the girl into a body bag. Everyone was sweating and swatting at flies. It had to be eighty-five degrees, with wet-blanket humidity. His hands were sweating inside the latex gloves he wore.

A floater, a dump job, no crime scene, and Estes was involved.

“Why was
she
here?” Weiss asked with an edge to his voice.

“’Cause somebody dumped her here,” Landry said, purposely misconstruing the detective’s question. Weiss was a pain in the ass, always with the chip on his overly developed shoulder. The guy spent so much time in the gym his arms stuck out from his sides like he was a blow-up doll.

“I meant Estes. What was
she
doing here?”

“She found the body. Turns out the DB was someone she worked with.”

“Yeah? How do we know she didn’t do it?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I don’t like her being around,” Weiss announced.

“She didn’t ask to find someone she knows dead in a canal.”

“She’ll be a problem.”

Landry said nothing. Weiss was right. Elena would be a problem. She wouldn’t stand back and let the detectives do their job. She knew their job. She’d done it herself, and she’d been good at it. Irina was someone she’d worked with every day. She was going to take the girl’s murder personally. She was probably doing something she shouldn’t be doing on Irina’s behalf at that very minute.

Frustrating, maddening, difficult, attitude up to here. It pissed him off no end that he wanted to be with her.
Had
wanted—past tense. That was over. Thank God they had been discreet. No one in the SO knew (at least not for a fact) they’d been seeing each other, therefore no one knew they’d split.

“Did she call you?” Weiss asked. “You weren’t up. I was up. Why didn’t I get the call?”

Landry rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake. You have a bug up your ass because you didn’t catch this case? We got no murder scene, no evidence, no witness, no suspect, a dead body mutilated by an alligator. Say the word, Weiss. You can have this gem. And you can deal with Estes too. She’ll be so glad to cooperate with you, I’m sure.”

“I don’t want it,” Weiss said. “I’m just saying. The call didn’t come through the channels.”

“Well, you go tell the teacher on me,” Landry said sarcastically, as he went toward an evidence tech making a mold of the shoe print Elena had pointed out to him along the bank.

“Why’d she call you?”

Landry looked over at him. “What’s the matter with you? She called me because she knows me. If you found a friend of yours dead—assuming you have any—who would you call? You’d call someone you know. You wouldn’t take your chances on getting the first incompetent moron up on the board.”

Weiss puffed up. “Are you calling me incompetent?”

“I’m calling you a pain in the ass. Just shut up for once and get your mind on the job. Jesus, you act like some jealous woman.”

The shoe print. Landry looked down at it. Maybe it belonged to their perp. Maybe it belonged to some redneck who dumped his used motor oil into the water a week ago. It didn’t tell them anything, didn’t give them anything to go on. The only good it would do to have the cast would be once they had a suspect and could get a warrant to look in the guy’s closet.

“Looks like a boot,” the evidence tech said without looking up. “A work boot. Round toe. Blundstones or something like that with a medium-deep tread.”

“Are you doing the tire tracks?” Such as they were. A few ridges in the powdered shell along the other side of the canal. A stiff wind would blow them away.

“Grant is on her way. She’s better with the fragile ones.”

Landry jammed his hands at his waist and looked around. They had stretched the yellow tape across the road from his car to the bank. Behind the barrier was a bottleneck of white-and-green county cruisers, unmarked sedans, the ME’s van. News vans had rolled in to further choke off the only way in or out of this backwater shit hole.

The reporters swooped in on a death scene almost as fast as the buzzards and were just as hungry and noisy. A corpse to feed on? Their favorite fodder. They didn’t get that many in the Wellington environs, though the statistic climbed a little each year. The area was growing fast. Construction was constant. And with the influx of people came an increase in every kind of problem, including crime.

“The natives are getting restless,” Weiss said, nodding at the growing crowd.

“Fuck ’em.”

“Hey, Landry,” another of the detectives called from farther up the bank and back into the scrub. “Got something here. A purse.”

The bag was small, cylindrical, gold encrusted with rhinestones. Landry snapped a photo of it with his digital camera. The crime-scene photographer took half a dozen shots from varying heights and angles. One of the crime-scene guys took measurements from the purse to where the body was found, and from the purse to the boot print.

When the evidence marker went down to mark the spot, Landry picked the purse up and opened it. A cherry-red lip gloss, a compact, an American Express gold card, three twenties, two condoms.

“Guess we can rule out robbery as a motive,” Weiss said, loudly enough to catch the attention of a reporter or two on the other side of the canal.

Landry gave him a look. “Girls don’t get dumped in canals because they carry too much cash.”

“I’m just saying.”

Weiss was always just saying. The man never had a thought cross his mind that didn’t fall out of his mouth.

“There’s no driver’s license,” Landry said. “No cell phone.”

“Haitians have been stealing cell phones,” Weiss said. “They’ve got a racket going. My brother-in-law got a bill from Verizon that was twenty-seven pages long. Calls to Zimbabwe, the Ukraine, all over the world. The farthest he ever called was his mother in Astoria, Queens.

“So maybe some Haitians followed her out of a club, grabbed her…”

Landry tuned him out. Another couple of sentences and Weiss would be into his theory that Castro was behind the influx of criminal types from the islands to South Florida. Maybe he was, but Landry didn’t want to hear about it. He had to deal in the present, the here and now, the corpse du jour. The anti-crime unit could worry about Castro.

He opened a little zippered compartment in the purse. Inside was a foreign-looking coin. The girl was Russian. It was probably something from the old country to bring her luck.

The ME’s people came past with the body bag.

So much for that theory.

“All right,” he said on a sigh. “I’m going to go deal with these people and get it over with.”

As he made his way to the other side of the canal, he dug in his pants pocket, came up with a couple of extra-strength Excedrin and choked them down without water, shuddering at the bitter taste left in his mouth.

Like hogs at a trough, the reporters tried to muscle one another out of the way for the honor of being the first to stick a microphone at him.

“Detective!”

“Detective!”

“Detective!”

The pushiest was the blonde from the NBC affiliate in West Palm. “Detective, what can you tell us about the victim? What can you tell us about the murder?”

“I can’t tell you anything about the victim, and we don’t know yet that this is homicide,” he said. “The ME will determine cause of death.”

“But clearly the body was dismembered,” the woman said.

“We don’t know when that happened. We don’t know how long the body has been in the water.”

“Are you saying this is another alligator attack?”

Excitement swept through the group, raising voices, as if some poor soul being eaten alive by a giant reptile was a better story than a regular person-on-person murder. The media seemed to want to promote the idea that the alligators were conspiring to take back their habitat, like something from a bad horror movie.

Three area residents had recently died in separate incidents with gators. One swimming in a pond, one walking a dog on a jogging path along a canal, and a drunk who had the misfortune of passing out on the bank of another canal within easy striking distance for the predator. Even if he’d been conscious, the drunk probably wouldn’t have gotten away. An alligator can charge short distances as fast as thirty-five mph, nearly as fast as a thoroughbred racehorse running full out.

“No, I didn’t say that,” Landry said.

“But it could have been?”

It could have been aliens,
he wanted to say, but sarcasm was not looked on with a sense of humor in the sheriff’s office.

“I can’t speculate as to the cause of death” was what he said. “At this point we have no idea how the young woman died or how she came to be here. The sheriff’s office will be releasing a sketch of the victim later today, and we’ll ask for help from the public in trying to ascertain her whereabouts the last few hours of her life.”

“A young woman?”

“How old?”

“Who was she?”

“Have you found the murder weapon?”

“Was she sexually assaulted?”

“We won’t know that until the autopsy is complete,” Landry said.

The blonde leaned ahead of the pack. “Who found the body?”

“A local resident.”

“Will you release his name?”

“No.”

“When will you be able to give us more information?”

“When we have some,” Landry snapped. “Now you’ll have to move the vehicles so we can get on with it. We’re burning daylight.”