wondered, as he always did after these marine jaunts, why he didn’t do it more often. Back home, he read Vierchau for a while and fell asleep in his white leather chair with the book on his chest.
He was awakened at 4:45 a.m., by Mendes.
“The fucker did it again,” said Mendes. Paz did not wonder which fucker and what he had done. He noticed, however, that the chief’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill.
“Some woman didn’t go in.”
“No, he did her right in the Milano. Get over here, now!” Click.
Paz hung up the phone, got to his feet, and rubbed his face. He was not dreaming.
They had the street blocked off in front of the Hotel Milano, and a dozen police vehicles of various sizes stuffed the access drive to the building. A helicopter flapped overhead, beaming its powerful light on nothing much, but looking good for the TV cameras. The media vans were being kept well away. Paz parked on Biscayne Boulevard, affixed his badge to the front of his jacket, grabbed his briefcase, and walked in.
The lobby was full of cops, some of them in SWAT team gear, in case the perp decided to stop cutting up women with a knife and started blasting away with an automatic weapon. There was a continuing tinny susurrus of radio voices, but the police were moving, Paz observed, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. The faces of many of them showed fear, bafflement, a profound, nearly existential doubt, something that the faces of cops never showed, in his experience. He got directions to the murder scene and proceeded to room 416, passing a fourth-floor corridor packed with more cops, crime-scene people, wailing women in nightclothes, and social worker types trying to keep the hysteria under control. Mendes looked as if it were he and not (as Paz soon learned) one Alice Jennifer Powers, aged twenty-two, unmarried white female, who had just experienced an evisceration. Mendes was talking to a couple of patrol lieutenants, so Paz went into room 416, finding, as he expected, Barlow already there.
“Well, here we are again,” said Paz, looking at the meat on the bed, a chubby girl with short brown hair and skin that shone blue as skim milk. Like the others, she looked peaceful.
“Any ideas how our boy got in here?”
Barlow said, “We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope as though we had no eyes; we stumble in noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places, as dead men. Isaiah 59:10. That’s what we got to find out, Jimmy. All the fellas that were on duty tonight in the lobby, and the fella who was on this floor, they got them all down in the coffee shop. The chief wants us to interview them individually. There’s a little manager’s office down there you can use. I think I can handle the scene by myself.”
“Yeah, we’re getting real good at it with all the practice. It looks just the same as the others, right?”
“Not quite,” said Barlow. “He took the baby with him this time. Also, as you can see, this here room is a double. There was a woman sleeping right in the next bed. That’s how we knew. Woman got up to use the bathroom around ten of three and found her roommate like this. They got her under sedation.”
Which meant she would not be available for questioning for some time. Paz thought that a small loss; it was unlikely that she would be able to tell them any more about the killer than Tanzi Franklin had.
There were four cops waiting in the coffee shop, a sergeant named Mike Duval and three patrolpersons, Bobby Ruiz, Dick Laxfelt, and Mercedes Aparicio. They all looked up at Paz with an expectant air when he came in, as if he could save them. Paz took the sergeant first.
Duval had been on the force for eighteen years and had a decent rep, which is why he had been given this peculiar job. He knew how to give a report, too, and Paz respected that, and let him speak.
“Two-twenty-five: I’m behind the hotel desk with Aparicio, we’re going over the watch list for the next shift and I’m about to go check the foot posts, which I did every hour, more or less on the half hour, but varying, just to keep ‘em awake. I got a guy out at the service entrance, a guy out front?that was Laxfelt?and a guy by the elevator on each floor. Ruiz was the one on four. So, I look up and there’s this guy walking across the lobby toward the elevator bank, like he was a guest going to his room. I almost figured it was one of you guys, but he should’ve checked at the desk, and so I yelled at him, like, Hey, sir, where’re you going? And he waved at me and mashed the button. The doors opened and he went in. Just like that.
“So, shit, I freaked, I got on the radio and alerted the floor posts we had an intruder, and called Laxfelt and asked him how the fuck he let this guy walk right by him, and he swore that there hadn’t been anyone by. He’s standing right at the front door, which is fucking made of glass, and I could see him standing there myself from the desk. He swears there was no guy. But we?me and Aparicio?we saw the guy. So I call for backup, I figure we’ll search every room. Meanwhile, we see from the indicator there that the car’s stopped at four, and I alert Ruiz, he’s getting off on four, and Ruiz says, over the radio, I see him, I got him. Then nothing. I can’t raise him. I get in the other elevator and go up to four. No Ruiz. So I’m shitting now. I hear the sirens. I take the car down to the lobby again. There’s Lieutenant Posada with ten guys and more are coming up the drive, so I tell him what’s happened, and we get set to search the whole hotel, every room, the service areas … we put two people on every exit. We search the rooms.” Here he took a deep breath. “We searched all the rooms on four, including 416. I looked in them myself. All sleeping, real peaceful. Same in the rest of the place. By this time it’s nearly four o’clock. That’s when the fucking house phone rings and it’s the woman in 416, screaming her head off.” Duval rubbed his big face and ran fingers through his hair. “And you want to know what the guy looked like, right?”
“That might be helpful, Sarge.”
“Yeah, well, the thing is, I can’t describe him. I looked right at him across a lobby, maybe twenty yards away, all the light in the world, and I can’t tell you if he was black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, thin, or wearing a fucking Santa Claus outfit. I got no fucking memory of it. Okay, I thought I was going crazy, but Aparicio’s the same. It’s a blank, like in a dream; one second you’re there, you’re balling some terrific piece or whatever, walking on Mars, and the next you’re lying in bed and thinking, What the fuck …!”
“Okay, I got that?also, just to make you feel better, we have evidence that this guy’s got access to all kinds of drugs, mind drugs?he could’ve sprayed something, who knows? What about Ruiz, what happened to him?”
“Oh, Ruiz!” Duval snorted. “We found Ruiz in a utility closet about ten minutes after we found the girl. He looked like he was drunk or doped. Ruiz got a story too. I’ll let you get it from him.”
Paz took Aparicio next, who confirmed her sergeant’s story in every detail, and then Laxfelt, who was completely baffled by the night’s events and mulish in his conviction that no one had come by him into the lobby. Ruiz was a thin, nervous kid, less than a year out of training. He had sweat beading on his forehead, and he chain- smoked Camel filters. Ruiz took up his story at the point when the elevator door opened.
“I was in a crouch, with my weapon out. The door opens and this guy steps out. So I drop him flat. He goes down, no problem, and I cuff him. I call the sarge on the radio and I tell him, I got the guy, he’s cuffed. I search his pockets and sure enough, I find this knife …”
“What kind of knife, Bobby?”
“One of those wood-carving knives, an X-Acto, with a red plastic handle, and like a long scalpel blade in it. I bag that. Then the sarge comes up the other elevator with Dick. And they take the guy away. And Lieutenant Kinsey’s there, my shift loo, and he goes, great job and all, everyone’s slapping me on the back. I mean I remember this. It happened. And the loo goes, Hey, take the rest of the shift off, it’s all over. So I take my car back to the precinct, and change, and go home. I go to bed. And it’s like I’m having a dream, like a nightmare, there’s this smell, a sharp smell, and I’m in this dark place, cramped, like a coffin, but I’m standing up. And then … I realize, I’m not dreaming, I’m not in bed, I really am in a dark place, with this smell, like strong bleach. It was a maid’s closet on the fourth floor. I walk out and there’s cops all over the hallway and all of them looking at me, and Sergeant Duval goes, Where the fuck you been? My cuffs are still on my belt. The first thing I say is, You got the guy, right? You got the guy! And they look at me. And they tell me what went down.”
Ruiz put his face in his hands, saying, “Ah shit! Ah, fuck it!” Dry sobs followed. Paz did his little talk about exotic drugs, but it did not seem to help. The perp had somehow stolen this kid’s sense of reality, and it was a violation like the rape of a virgin, but of the mind not the body, an incurable wound.
Paz wound up the interview; Ruiz could not recall a face either, not a big surprise. Paz walked out of the hotel to get some air, but what air there was was full of fumes from the vehicles, both police and press. The copter chattered uselessly above. He sat down on a stone bench and looked through his notes as the sunrise lightened the horizon over the sea, the dawn of a day that no one in the Miami PD was anticipating with joy. He felt his phone ring.
“Where’s your car?”
Paz told him. “What’s up, Cletis?”
“Call just came over TAC One. They found the baby.”
