The Whole Truth Page 6

  “Okay, that’s enough self-congratulations,” I say.

  I return to my desk and computer, after placing an atlas to my left where I can see it as I type. I should be hungry, but I’m not. I haven’t stopped to eat dinner or change clothes in the hours since Ray escaped, but have used the time to interview every official who would talk to me. Then I hurried home to get it all down. I know that when I stop, I will feel dirty, exhausted, and starved, but while I am writing, everything else disappears.

  It’s one of the reasons I write.

  Now, I want to make the larger escape scene clear, especially to my readers who’ve never been to Florida.

  “On maps, Florida looks like a state where it ought to be easy to catch somebody,” I type, with frequent glances at the map beside me. This is the state where I live, but it’s the things a writer takes for granted that are the places where she’s most likely to err. “The farther down south they are when they first escape, the easier it appears to catch them. It’s a peninsula, after all, with water on three sides, where a person ought to feel just about as trapped as on an island. Anyone who has ever tried to negotiate I-95 at any time, much less rush hour, knows just how trapped you can feel on the roads in Florida.

  “From where Ray escaped, he couldn’t run any farther south than Homestead, not unless he dived into Florida Bay, or let himself become all too visible on the causeway to the Keys.

  “To the east from where he fled, there was only the Atlantic.

  “The only through road directly west to the Gulf, from where he ran, was Interstate 75, also known as Alligator Alley, a toll road where it was easy to set up roadblocks.

  “North to Georgia was a long, long way on foot, and the roads were heavily traveled whether he took A1A, Interstate 95, or crossed the state to continue on up 75, or even if he crossed into the middle to get to Highway 27.”

  But that’s only on the one hand, I’m thinking.

  On the other hand, in many ways Florida is uniquely suited to escapees.

  The traffic and the crowds make it easy to hide, to pick up rides, to blend in. There may be water all around, but where there’s water there are boats to steal, hijack, or stowaway. Jump the right ship, and a runaway can be stepping off in Colombia in less than a week. For every highway that’s easy to blockade, there are dozens of little back roads connecting to other little back roads, many of them through Everglades, or swamp, or thick forest where a man can lose himself for a lifetime, provided he has the survival skills to forage for himself—or he forces other people to give him what he needs. Not only that, but many of the thousands of boats that tie up to Florida docks are empty most of the time, waiting for their owners to fly down from Indiana, or just to get a weekend free. Scores of houses sit empty a good portion of the year, too, waiting for tourist renters, or in new developments that are slow to sell.

  In many ways, Florida is an escapee’s paradise, and a law enforcer’s hell.

  This is assuming an escapee who knows what he’s doing.

  I write, “For any other escapee, Florida is a nightmare state of alligators, crocodiles, snakes, quicksand, mosquitoes, poisonous frogs and insects, impenetrable mangrove, black bears, panthers, other violent criminals, and a thousand different ways to drown.”

  I like that last phrase, and pause to admire it.

  Next, comes the search, itself:

  “Not even twelve hours after his escape, Ray Raintree is a man being hunted down by approximately 250 law enforcement personnel. Sheriff’s officers from Howard, Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade Counties join in the search, along with officers from the Florida Highway Patrol, local police, and the Coast Guard. Many of those wear body armor, carry 9mm assault weapons, and are equipped with nightscopes. Add to that: dogs and human trackers and helicopters, and you have as close as Florida law enforcement can get to ‘no stone unturned.’”

  I’ve heard that the governor will call out the Florida National Guard, if Ray doesn’t get recaptured right away.

  “That’ll probably be close to a hundred military police and support personnel from the closest Military Police Company,” a state highway patrol officer has told me. “They’ll help with roadblocks and search teams. Most of them are civilian law enforcement personnel anyway.”

  The search teams are already fanning out over Bahia Beach and beyond, attempting to stymie Ray’s access to escape routes. I wish I could write it from Ray’s viewpoint, but I am probably never going to know about that. He is likely to die, or be killed in this attempt. Hardly anybody survives manhunts of this scope, and then lives to die in the electric chair, although Ted Bundy did it, and in this very state. Even if they bring him in alive, Ray Raintree will never tell anybody the truth about what it has been like for him to be out there alone with 250 guns pointed at him.

  My desk phone rings, and I answer it.

  “Ms. Lightfoot, this is Detective Anschutz.”

  “Hi, Robyn.”

  There is soft laughter. “Hi, Marie. It’s hard to get out of official mode.”

  “Tell me you’ve got him back in custody.”

  “No, that’s why I’m calling, we need your help.”

  “Mine? Sure, what can I do?”

  “Captain Giancola—Cynthia—asked Paul and me to go over all our notes on Ray, because we’re trying to give the searchers some idea of where he might go. You know what I mean? Like, what he might be expected to do.”

  “Good luck,” I say, wryly.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” the cop agrees, with matching sarcasm. “But here’s the way the captain figures it: Paul and I interviewed Ray, you interviewed him, and you interviewed us about our interviews with him. Did you follow that?”

  “I did, indeed.”

  “So the captain says we should all go through our notes one more time, to see if there’s any clue there. It’s a lot to ask. Would you do that?”

  “Of course, Robyn, although I’m not optimistic.”

  “Me, neither. You got my number.”

  “I do, and at home.”

  “So you’ll call me right away if you find anything.”

  “Will you call me if you find anything?”

  The detective laughs. “God, there’s a price to everything.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  “All right, it’s a deal.”

  Well, this is interesting. And this is good, allowing me to return some of the many favors the cops have done for me in the researching of my book. They’ve sat patiently through interviews, put up with a million of my questions, even posed for photographs. I am happy to do this for them, and a little excited at the idea that I might find a tidbit of information that could lead them right to Ray.

  I make myself a fresh pot of coffee, and then turn to my files.

  After curling up on my living room couch, I start with my own chapters three and four, because they lead up to the spooky moment when Ray first showed up in his own story, a moment that doesn’t even hint at the horror to come in chapter five.

  The Little Mermaid

  By Marie Lightfoot

  CHAPTER THREE

  Detective Paul Flanck appeared to be just ambling around, not doing anything in particular at the crime scene, but that impression was far from correct.

  It is a widely held opinion in the police department that Paul takes a wider view of things than most people—like learning Spanish for the future. His boss, Captain Cynthia Giancola, likes to have Paul walk around crime scenes taking in the big picture. While others pick up—literally—the smallest details, Paul’s job is to take it all in. The captain says it’s like having close-up photos as well as panoramic shots. Both kinds are indispensable to the investigators.

  That is why on the morning that the child’s body was found, Detective Flanck slowly paced a wide perimeter, beyond the police barricades. At that very early point in the investigation, none of the officers at the scene knew about Mrs. Noble’s call to 911 a little over seven hours earlier. Nor did
they know about Sergeant Crouse spotting a Checker Crab at this bridge, from his helicopter.

  Paul was thinking about the possible avenues of access and exit for the killer. By car, it would be easy to drive up, drop the body on the fishing line over the bridge, drive away. By water it would be difficult, but still possible. He wondered if there was more than one person involved, perhaps one to hold a boat steady and at least one other to affix the fishing pole to the bridge. It was conceivable that there was someone in a car and somebody else in a boat. Paul didn’t want to limit his imagination when considering the way it might have happened; he let his mind play with as many possibilities as he could think of, staying open to the persuasions of logic, experience, intuition, and good old common horse sense.

  “I saw,” he explains in his tough guy growl, “that there was really only one place down on the water to tie up a boat, and that was on the east side of the bridge.” To Paul, that meant if the killer or killers came by boat alone, it had to have been from the east because until only a couple of hours earlier the water would have been too high for anyone to get from the west side of the bridge to the east, and the child was dangling from the east side.

  On the east side only, there was a boat tied up to a dock. It was a big, beautiful Hatteras, Paul observed, estimating it (correctly) to be forty-seven feet long. The boat’s name was scrawled across the back in flashy silver letters: Overboard. Paul smiled to himself when he read that. Did that mean the owners felt they’d been a bit extravagant—gone overboard—to buy it? It had a flying bridge all decked out for deep sea fishing. The gleaming, immaculate fishing yacht was tied up to a well-maintained cement dock at the rear of a private backyard from which you could climb a short but rather steep little grassy hill to the street and the bridge.

  Paul saw that a boater could have stopped beside the Hatteras, tied up to one of the big metal cleats on her deck, and then used her swim platform and ladder to climb onto the aft deck. He could have walked right across her gleaming white fiberglass deck, climbed out of the Hatteras onto the cement dock, and then made his way up to the bridge, streetside.

  In his imagination, Paul pictured a shadowy, anonymous figure doing just that . . . carrying a fishing pole, propping it between the railing of the bridge so the line hung down . . .

  “No,” Paul corrected himself. “The killer would have cast the line out, snagging his own boat with the hook, because how else was he going to get hold of the line again to wrap it around her neck?”

  In the imagined scene, the killer then retraced his steps back onto the deck of the Hatteras, down into his own boat, where he grabbed the dangling fishing line, wrapped it several times around his victim’s throat, and then lowered her into the water, letting the inflowing tide carry the body on the line toward the west, a bit under the bridge, until the line grew taut.

  “Of course,” says Paul, “my ideas were all bull if he arrived by car, or had an accomplice in a car.”

  But if the killer (he or she, at this point) had arrived by water, Paul worked it out that meant the killer had to have entered the canal from the east, or Intracoastal Canal side, because of the tide. (Later, that idea would connect with the fact that the Checker Crab Company was located only two and a half miles west of the Intracoastal Canal.)

  No one else at the crime scene had looked at the private yacht behind the house yet. Paul saw two people standing in a Florida room, peering out at all of the commotion around the bridge.

  He walked close enough to call out to them, “That your boat?”

  In Florida, just because there is a boat docked at a house doesn’t automatically mean it belongs to the home-owners. Many of them rent out dock space to other people. But a man in shorts and no shirt, appearing to be in his sixties, opened the screen door, and yelled back, “Yeah!”

  Within minutes, Paul had from them a signed consent-to-search form. They were a retired couple from Oklahoma City, in their sixties, and visibly upset by the nature of the crime at their back door. They hadn’t heard a thing, they told the detective. “What a terrible thing,” the wife said, with tears in her eyes. She told Paul they had moved to Bahia Beach to be near their own grandchildren. Whatever they could do to help, they were glad to do. And so, he was soon on his way down their backyard to their dock to look at their yacht. He stood on the dock to which it was snugged, and gave it the once-over.

  Nice, he thought, as who wouldn’t?

  A saltwater fisherman, himself, he couldn’t help but think how great it would be to steer a beauty like this down around Government Cut on a Sunday morning, throw out a live crab on the end of a line, drop it into 150 feet of water, and hope for about a seventy-pound tarpon, maybe some kingfish and barracuda. It was hard not to be envious in a place with more than thirty thousand boats, some of them big enough to accommodate their own helicopters. But Paul figured he could have a decent retirement, or a big boat, but not both. Anyway, a man could catch a damn big fish off an eighteen-foot ketch, and it was the size of the fish that mattered to him, not the size of the boat.

  Almost at once, he noticed a dark smudge on the otherwise pristine white fiberglass deck of the Overboard. Paul removed his own shoes and stepped onto the boat for a closer look.

  The smudge looked to him like a large cigarette ash, flattened by someone walking on it.

  If the killer had been smoking, maybe had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he could have dropped an ash onto the deck without realizing it. If the crime happened at night, as Paul assumed, the killer might not have seen the fallen ash, even if the white deck was illuminated by the moon or by lights. The smallest shadow would hide an ash, or this smudge. Standing there in his stocking feet, Paul noticed something else that gave his heart an excited jolt.

  At the edge of the deck, right where someone boarding from another boat might have first set down a foot, there was the print of the toe of a shoe. Plain as day. With a distinctive V pattern sliced irregularly with the sort of individualistic “wear marks” that delight an investigator’s soul, because they’re so simple to match with the shoe that made them. If you can find the shoe, that is. If there was even a little water and dirt in the bottom of the killer’s boat (this was still assuming the killer came by boat), and if the killer stepped into it before boarding the Overboard, then he would leave this imprint.

  Paul backed carefully away.

  He got off the yacht and pulled his shoes back on, before heading over to his colleagues to report his possibly important discoveries. They might be nothing, have no relationship to the crime. Or . . .

  Sometimes, it pays to take the long view.

  Paul Flanck’s imaginings about a lone killer in a boat turned out to be almost exactly what had happened in the earliest hour of Tuesday morning.

  Detective Robyn Anschutz says she did only one useful thing that morning at the crime scene, and that was to cater to a couple of her own idiosyncratic convictions. Having been trained with a generation of young cops who were fed FBI statistics and psychological profiles along with more traditional training, Robyn firmly believes two weird but verifiable ideas:

  One: Murderers not only return to the scene of their crime, but they like to watch the investigation of it.

  And, two: Many killers are infatuated with police work.

  They like to hang around cops, in other words.

  And they really like to watch those cops work at the scene of the crime they committed. They like to be “helpful,” and may volunteer in a search, for instance, and they enjoy the feelings of secret superiority they may experience while watching the “dumb” cops go down blind alleys or commit investigative errors.

  Because she believes in the likelihood of both of those implausible events, Robyn took a good long look at every face in the growing crowd that morning. Cops. Media. Citizens. Everybody.

  “I don’t get to go to all that many murder scenes,” she says, “which may surprise you. But I’m always bugging our still photographers and our video guy
s to include the spectators in their shots. I always want to see who was there.”

  She admits that she had never yet been able to match a spectator’s face with the eventual suspect’s—or convicted killer’s— face, but she kept thinking that one day she would. Robyn likes to look over “spectator pictures” early in a case, so that she may recognize a suspect if she comes across him (or her) later.

  “It was just this nutty hobby, you might say,” she says, “until the Natalie Mae McCullen murder.”

  At that scene, that morning, indulging her heretofore unproductive hobby, Robyn noticed a wealth of typical south Florida faces. There were tanned, elderly women turned out in Lilly Pulitzer pinks and greens, and there were guayabera-shirted men in summer shorts or slacks. She noticed women in swimming suits, sundresses, shorts, halter tops, or tees. She saw bare-chested men. It was the usual mix of tourists, retirees, and hard-working residents, plus a sprinkling of the homeless men who sometimes haunted even the most posh boulevards. And her eye was definitely caught that morning by a figure she originally mistook for a boy. Dressed in an outrageously garish mix of yellow and pink, topped by a green baseball cap, he looked as if he had been wildly overdressed for the beach by his mother.

  But on second glance, Robyn decided that the skinny, boylike body was more mature than that. It was a youngish man, Robyn decided then. She couldn’t see his face under the bill of the cap, but she sensed how intently he stared at the busy activities of the police, and how very alone he appeared even while standing in the middle of a band of gawkers beyond the police barricades.

  Robyn not only filed him away in her memory, she also sauntered over to the crime scene unit photographer and directed him to get a picture of “the fashion plate in the dirty pink.”

  “Maybe it was intuition,” Robyn says. “Or, maybe it was experience. But if somebody told me that I had to pick the murderer out of the crowd, or die, I’d have pointed to him.”

  And she was right.