“I’d like to be present for the autopsy,” Troy said.
“No problem,” Quincy said, “just give me enough time to clear the scene and set up the lab. Say, three hours?”
Troy noted the time and set his mind to further investigate the scene.
Troy turned his attention to the couple who found the body. Sitting on a stretcher next to an ambulance, he witnessed a distraught elderly woman. She held an oxygen mask to her face with trembling hands. The woman looked scared to death. She stared at nothing—wide-eyed, a slight twitch on her left side. Troy couldn’t help but think that if it hadn’t been for what appeared to be numerous facelifts and Botox treatments her look may have been less severe.
He asked the paramedic tending to her if the woman was able to answer a few questions. The medic squinted from the morning brilliance and gently touched the woman’s hand. “I don’t see why not. Just try to be as brief as possible. Mr. and Mrs. Leibowitz have been through quite a…memorable morning.”
Troy pulled out his notebook, flipped it open, and squatted in front of the woman. “Mrs. Leibowitz, I’m Agent Troy Stubbs with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Would you mind answering a few questions?”
The woman removed the mask from her face and offered a half-hearted smile. “I haven’t had this much male attention in years,” she said with a heavy New York accent. “If I knew a dead person would bring me two good looking young men, I would have killed my husband, Stanley, years ago.”
Troy gazed at the woman with a tentative smile. It seemed her humor was a way of dealing with the considerable shock that a beautiful Florida morning had just delivered. “I’m not big on formality,” he said, “so how about you call me Troy and I will call you—?”
“Lorraine,” Mrs. Leibowitz said.
“Thank you. Can you tell me your address, Lorraine?”
“Of course I can tell you my address, what kind of stupid question is that?”
The corner or Troy’s mouth rose in appreciation of her quick comeback. “Let me rephrase the question,” he said. “What is your local address?”
Lorraine told him and he spent the next few minutes gathering her background information. Finished, he took a breath and got to the meat of the questions. “Lorraine, please tell me what you saw when you first approached the area this morning.”
“Stanley and I were taking our morning walk. He pointed to something on the beach when we were still down by the condo.” She pointed to a white, ten story building located about thirty yards up the beach and placed the oxygen mask back on her face, inhaling deeply.
“It’s okay,” Troy said, “take your time.”
She took one more breath, removed the mask, and pursed her already swollen, collagen-filled lips. “Time? Do I look like I have time? I have a busy life I want you to know. I’m missing my mahjong game because of this”—she threw her arms up in the air—“this crazy business.”
Frustrated, he regrouped. “Lorraine, I don’t mean to be rude, but if you can just answer a couple more questions, I promise to leave you alone so you can get back to your busy life.”
Mask pressed up against her face, she nodded.
“When you approached the volleyball nets, what did you witness? What did you see?”
Again, she removed the aid from her face. “Stan and I saw this white sheet draped over a statue, or what we thought was a statue. I figured the city was putting up some sort of display. I wanted to get a look at what was under the sheet, but Stanley told me to leave it be.” She gazed at the crime scene and then back at Troy. “I wish I’d listened to him.”
“What did you do next?”
“I shooed him away and lifted the bottom of the sheet. As soon as it got about this high,” she placed her hand about three feet from the sand, “the wind picked it up like a sail and jerked it out of my hand. It flew off the body like a kite.”
Troy momentarily looked up from Lorraine and spotted one of Quincy’s assistants. “Excuse me,” he said, “did the team recover the sheet that was concealing the body?”
The young woman nodded.
With Troy’s attention back on Lorraine, he noticed her lips quivering. He felt a stab of guilt for the poor woman, but he needed to continue with his questioning.
“Did you know what you were looking at?”
“Not at first,” Lorraine said. “I still thought it was a statue until Stanley grabbed his chest, fell back, and yelled, ‘call 911.’ My poor Stanley,” she muttered; her voice barely a whisper.
She seemed to stare through Troy as the words leaked from her lips. He directed her mask back to her face so she could place it over her nose and mouth, and called for the paramedic. “She’s very upset about her husband,” Troy said. “Can you tell me what happened to him?”
“The shock of seeing the body caused a heart attack. He’s stable. We were waiting for you to finish speaking to Mrs. Leibowitz, so we can transport both.”
“Same ambulance?” Troy said. “Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
“Big accident on the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Besides,” the medic said, “he refuses to be transported without his wife. Signed all the forms. Our hands are tied.”
Troy stepped back and watched as the medics loaded Lorraine onto the ambulance and pulled out with both aboard.
“Mt. Sinai Hospital,” he wrote. At least they’ll be easy to find.
He spent the next hour talking to the CSI team and Quincy. He left with a notebook full of information, a smartphone full of pictures to pass off to his replacement, and a sick feeling creeping through his soul.
3
Troy stood next to Quincy and a lab tech as the victim was laid out on the autopsy table, and the sheet pulled
