guy on a bicycle. I’m thinking master of disguise, which would make him almost certainly a white man, going black for the Wallace murder. I don’t think there’s a case in history where a black man has disguised himself as white to commit a crime.”
Robinette now started talking cult murders, which in his opinion these were not. There was no evidence of anyone else besides the unsub being involved. Cults implied membership. There was nothing traditionally cultlike at the murder scene?no candles, no incense, no mystical markings. The attempt of the unsub to pin the Wallace killing on Youghans was uncharacteristic of cult murders. Cult murders typically took place in specific locations, to which the victim was carried, clearly not the case here. And so on.
Paz was no longer listening closely. He thought profiling was a useful activity when you had a classic nutcase, which he already knew was not the situation here. They had no idea why this guy was doing it, although he liked what Robinette had said about going shopping. That felt right. The why of it was still completely obscure, however, and these further negatives were not clearing it up very much.
In any event, Paz had spent the last ten minutes studying the file on Mariah Do, in particular a certain photograph, the very last of the zillions of photographs taken of the victim. In this shot, Ms. Do was walking down a path flanked by two other people. It was summer in the photo; there were trees in leaf on either side of the path and dappled shadows on the path itself. The victim was pregnant, but gracefully so, like the gravid Madonna in a Renaissance painting. A glow seemed to rise from her, but whether that was real or part of the photographer’s art Paz couldn’t tell. She was certainly transcendently beautiful. To her left, and lagging a little behind, was another woman, a tall blonde, quite thin, with a pinched, worried face. She was looking at the victim with an expression Paz couldn’t read. Pain? Anger? Fear? One of the unhappy emotions in any case. On the victim’s other side was a happy man, smiling and gesturing broadly as at some joke. Could that be the reason for the Madonna smile on the victim and the worried look on the face of the other woman? Her sister, Jane Clare Doe, as the helpful label on the back established. The man was the victim’s brother-in-law, M. DeWitt Moore, husband of Jane Clare. A man who looked a good deal like Paz, it appeared.
Little thrill rockets were coursing through Paz’s gut, and it was agonizing to contain himself while the FBI agent lectured away. Paz had already looked like a jerk twice in this case, once with Youghans, and once with his disastrous effort to get Tanzi Franklin to generate a usable description of the killer. He was not going to chance it again. No, the question now was what to do with this theory. He confronted the eternal detective problem?do you or do you not take a strong suspicion to authority? If you do, you might get enough resources to really nail the guy, but you also might end up in the shit, if the suspicion proved false. But if you don’t send it up the chain, and it is the guy, someone else will pick up the credit eventually, or else the guy will walk away, or worse, do it again, and if it came out that you did have a strong suspicion and did nothing, you would sink even deeper in the shit.
The only smart thing to do was talk to Barlow. That was a Barlow rule, too. Talk to your partner. Barlow, as far as Paz knew, had always been completely open with Paz in the development of cases. On the other hand, Barlow’s suspicions were invariably right and Paz’s were occasionally wrong.
Agent Robinette’s presentation wound to a close. A couple of people asked questions, and a discussion started about whether active steps to forestall or trap the unsub were possible. The cops around the table didn’t like the FBI theory. They wanted a cult, a black Cuban or Haitian cult, maybe with some white adherents. Miami was cult city?did it make sense that someone would breeze in from out of town and pursue some mad scientist enterprise? It did not. And where was he getting these exotic drugs? From the botanicas, from root doctors, brujos, curanderos …
These interesting speculations were arrested by a rumble from the head of the table. Neville D. Horton had not spoken substantively yet, but now he did, and everyone fell silent to hear what he had to say, not only because he was chief of police, but because he was an imposing man, six four and well over three hundred pounds, all of it the color of baker’s chocolate except for a fringe of feltlike prematurely gray hair. The rumble said, “People, in about two hours I am going to see the mayor and the city manager. Shortly after that I am going to stand up with those two fine gentlemen in front of the TV and tell the folks out there that we are hot on the trail of this fiend, that we got the FBI practically giving us his address and phone number, and that it’s only a matter of time before he’s a cooked chicken. I am not going to get up there in front of God and everyone and say that we’re looking for a black white mad scientist on a fucking bicycle. Get serious, people! If we got to put an armed guard with every nine- months-pregnant woman in the city of Miami, then that’s what we got to do. This can’t happen again. Arnie, you’re in charge. In fact, now that I think of it, you should be on the TV, too, so folks’ll know who to blame.” He smiled at this, a broad one, to show that he was kidding, or wasn’t.
“Meanwhile, I need talking points and a plan. You got an hour. People, thank you for your good work. Good luck to you, and God help all of us if we fuck this up.” He rose above the table like a broaching whale and strode out of the room, followed by his aides.
After that, Mendes took charge, snapping out orders to the assembled brass, who resnapped the orders to their underlings as the meeting broke up. Mendes motioned Barlow, Paz, and Robinette to his own office. Mendes was angry, suspecting that he was being set up, in his turn, for the same fall he had outlined so vividly to Paz. He stared balefully at the three others. “Well? What do we tell the public?”
Robinette said, “Captain, it might be time for a strategic misstatement.”
Mendes snorted. “I love the phrase. Meaning?”
“This guy must be feeling pretty pleased with himself. He’s outsmarted the cops so far. He’s probably following the press reportage pretty closely, and laughing his ass off. What if we issue a profile to the press, not the real one but a phony construct suggesting that the perpetrator is an inadequate individual with a load of sexual hang-ups, impotent, working at a menial blue-collar job. It might put stress on him, get him to contact the press, maybe a talk show. At worst, he might think we’re so off base that it makes him careless. It’s worked before. And we could have the chief say that we’re providing security for pregnant women in certain spots, see if he’ll be arrogant enough to challenge you.”
Mendes grinned maliciously. “Oh, yeah, the boss is going to love that one, using the pregnant ladies as bait. Something happens, we’ll all be lucky to get jobs parking cars at the Orange Bowl. How many are there in the city do you think?”
“The U.S. birthrate is fourteen per thousand,” answered Robinette, “figure a million women in the Miami SMSA, so fourteen thousand per year, figure one-twelfth of those are in their last month this month, so eleven hundred sixty, give or take.”
“Hm. Well, that’s at least doable, if it comes to it,” said Mendes. “They can all stay out at your ranch, Cletis.”
“Glad to have them,” said Barlow. “I’ll tell Erma to start boiling water right now.”
Paz said, “Chief, meanwhile I think we should go to New York, see the cops up there and talk to people at the murder scene, the dead girl’s father and so on.”
“And why is that?” asked Mendes. This was the moment to bring up the photo from the Long Island case file and the speculations arising from it, but when he looked into his chief’s eyes and assessed their expression, which was cynical, ready to mock, patronizing, he chickened out. It would keep for a while, until he had it nailed, until Mendes would have to eat it whole and like it. So he said, “Because the guy was there. He did his thing there. He left some trace, somebody remembered him. You heard Agent Robinette here say they did a half-assed investigation because they figured it was a domestic and the killer killed herself after. Now we know that’s not true. People will have bits, threads they never followed up on because they closed the file too early. Someone the dead girl knew, or maybe she was in a cult of some kind, and they didn’t want to bring it up if they didn’t have to. Maybe one of those threads leads to Miami. Someone who was there then is here now?like that.”
“Okay, go,” said Mendes after a moment. “There and right back. Cletis, you go, too.”
Paz made a couple of calls to insure that the people they wanted to see in New York would be available, and another call to the manager of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where he got the answer he expected. As they left, the homicide unit secretary waved him over and handed him a manila envelope. A lady had brought it by during the meeting. She had said it was important, about the murders. Paz shoved it into his briefcase. They boarded a USAir flight at one-ten from Miami International to La Guardia. Barlow took his seat, said, “The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. Isaiah 35:8,” went to sleep immediately after takeoff, and remained out. He awoke when the wheels touched down, stretched, and grinned at Paz. He said, “Nothing like being paid to sleep. You look like a wet hen, boy. How many of them little tiny drinks you have?”
“Seventy-three,” said Paz, sourly.
