Sin was hanging on Charlie’s every word. “What?”
“It was garbled, but I’d swear on my mother’s grave that she said something about innocence.”
Blake’s Songs of Innocence flashed though Sin’s mind.
“I knocked on the door, yelled FBI, and that’s when we heard the second gunshot. When we entered the apartment…I don’t really know how to explain it, but I could sense something evil.” He hesitated again before continuing, “What we found were two bodies. Vincent was sprawled in the far corner of the kitchen with a sculptor’s knife next to his blood-soaked hand. Joanna lay a few feet away with a gun in her hand.
“Vincent was dead; still warm, but dead.”
Sin could feel Charlie’s intensity. It was as if he had played and replayed these moments over and over again until they’d been ingrained in his psyche.
“I looked over at his wife, expecting the same. I mean, she was a mess. Cut like the rest of the victims. But that’s when we heard her moan. I called for assistance, and Joanna was taken away.
“Looking at her, I would have sworn she was dead.” Charlie’s last few words seemed to fade.
“Did you take pictures of the scene?” she asked, breaking the mood.
“Click on the file titled, Davenport pics.”
She did as he directed and a picture of a beautiful young woman popped up. “She was gorgeous,” Sin said. “Ashley looks just like her.”
“That’s Joanna at the age of seventeen. It was taken a couple of months after her marriage to Vincent,” Charlie commented. “The next one was taken of her when she first arrived at the hospital.”
Sin moved the curser to the next link and opened the photo. “Damn, you would have a hard time recognizing her. Her face looks like it was passed through a cheese grater.”
“She looked a lot like the victims, that’s for sure,” Charlie said.
“Holy shit,” Fletcher exclaimed, “Did she have plastic surgery?”
“Hold that thought,” Charlie said. “Bring up the next photo.”
“Do you have this file with you?” Sin asked. “You know the placement of every detail.”
“No,” Charlie responded. “I’ve been through it so many times, it’s ingrained in my brain.” Continuing he said, “The next couple of pictures are of Vincent Ash. He had one bullet to the right side of his chest and one to the head.”
“Joanna was a good shot,” Garcia commented. “I mean, Ash must have been in a rage, and with her wounds, she must have been in shock.”
“Maybe too good,” Charlie snickered. “You’re right, Fidel. It’s another piece of this puzzle that never fit.”
“Meaning?” Sin asked
“Meaning, this didn’t make any sense to me then, and it still doesn’t.”
“You need to give us a little more than that to go on,” Sin said.
“When I noticed back then that Joanna was an incredibly good shot, I dug deeper. Autopsy and ballistics showed that the first bullet fired entered Vincent’s chest, missing his heart. To me, that wasn’t exactly a good shot because she was only a few feet away. But the second one went straight through the middle of his forehead.”
Sin started to understand Charlie’s thought process. “Damn good shooting for someone who had just been hacked to near death. And if Ash was the killer he was portrayed to be, he would have attacked after the first shot.”
“Precisely! That’s what Raul and I told anyone who would listen. It was just too neat.”
“And?”
“And they didn’t want to hear it. The Bureau just wanted to tell the public that the killer was dead and that the case had been solved.”
“But you didn’t let it go, did you?”
“No I didn’t. The accuracy of the second shot, Joanna’s injuries, and the position of the bodies wasn’t adding up,” Charlie said, “so I asked the medical examiner for a copy of the autopsy results, and I compared them to ballistics.”
“What did you find?”
“There was gunpowder residue and burn marks on Vincent’s forehead.”
“Then why was his wife found almost eight feet away from him?”
“I argued the same facts until I was blue in the face, but no one wanted to hear it.”
“Back to my question from before,” Fletcher said. “Do you have any pictures of Joanna after she became Miranda? Did she have plastic surgery? I mean, judging from the pictures she must have needed it.”
“Yeah, and whatever happened to Miranda right after the shooting?” Sin asked. “Where the hell was she for the seven years before she landed in Miami?”
Charlie had Sin bring up another file.
“This contains the information I have on Miranda. Although I tried to follow the aftermath of the case, I’ll admit I wasn’t that diligent.”
“You did have a life and other cases to work on,” Sin said.
“Whatever the excuse, I lost Joanna. I didn’t even know she changed her name. By the time I traced her, she was living in Coral Gables. I backtracked and searched through every cold case murder investigation for the seven missing years of her life, and if you open my personal file labeled unsolved you’ll see my findings. There were a string of unsolved murders in Texas and Alabama during those years. They were all of young women in their early twenties, all matching the same basic description of the Midwest Mauler and the Painted Beauty Killer. The MO was evolving. They became less gruesome, more refined over time, but all were plain looking, young women. The unsolved murders stopped when Miranda showed up in the Miami area. It’s not much of a thread, but it’s all I have.”
“You think Miranda was the Mauler, not Vincent,” Sin said.
“It makes sense,” Charlie said. “I think Joanna or Miranda, whatever you want to call her, cut herself and staged the entire death scene. We all know how bad facial injuries can look from even superficial cuts. I think Miranda killed those girls because she found out that they had been sleeping with her husband, and when she
