and control. What animal knows more about power and control than a wealthy man?”
Barbaro shook his head and held up his hands to ward off my theory. “No, no, no… Only a psycho does these kinds of things: kills a young woman, throws her body away like garbage.”
I put an elbow on the table and propped up my chin in my hand. I watched his face, bemused by his discomfort at the idea that murderers might be hiding among the upper crust, even though I knew many people labored under the same misconception. I had never understood it, and I never would.
“What do you think a killer looks like, Mr. Barbaro?” I asked. “Do you think a killer has matted hair and bloodshot eyes? Beard stubble? Scars? Tattoos? Do you think every killer, every rapist looks like a monster? I can assure you, that isn’t the case. Dangerous creatures can be very beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “This is true. They can be. Tell me, Elena, are you speaking from experience? I hate to think of that.”
“That, my new friend, is a tale for another time. As fascinating as I’m sure you are, I’ve had a very long day.”
“You have.” He rose with me. “Allow me to walk you out. As you said, there is a killer running loose in our town.”
“How do I know you aren’t the one?”
“I am guilty of many things, Elena,” he said. “But not that. I have an alibi.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said as we walked back through the restaurant. He rested a hand against the small of my back in a gesture that was without thought or guile. “I admit to having had too much to drink that night. I went to the home of a friend here in the Polo Club to sleep my sins away.”
“And she’ll vouch for you, I’m sure,” I said as we climbed the stairs.
“He will vouch for me. Neither of us was sober enough to entertain ladies. I spent the night on his pool table, which I’m sure seemed like a good idea at the time. Not so much the following morning.”
“And this friend has a name?”
“Of course,” he said as we came up to the entry hall.
A Hollywood director couldn’t have timed the moment better. The front door opened, and Barbaro laughed and said, “Speak of the devil!”
The devil indeed.
My body went cold and stiff as I stared at the face of Juan Barbaro’s alibi: Bennett Walker.
Chapter 13
The autopsy suite in the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s building was never a place Landry enjoyed visiting. It was a necessary part of his job. Mandatory, to his way of thinking, though he could have passed this part off on Weiss.
Weiss was like the weird kid in science lab who wanted to dissect everybody’s frog-just because. But from the moment he was given the lead on a case, Landry became the victim’s advocate. It was his job to get justice for that person. And in order to do that, he needed to know, to see with his own eyes, everything he possibly could about the victim-how she had lived, and how she had died.
He stood on the side of the table opposite the ME, in mask, cap, gown, gloves, and booties. All one could see of anyone in the room were their eyes.
The ME was Mercedes Gitan, acting chief medical examiner, to be precise. The defection of her predecessor to a cushy teaching job at the University of Miami had opened the spot for Gitan. If the powers that ran the county had any sense, they would give her the position permanently.
“See here?” she asked, pointing into the gaping wound where the gator had taken a large chunk of tissue out of Irina Markova’s lower torso. “It’s a section of the head of the femur. The gator snapped it like a chicken bone. The power in an alligator’s jaws is unbelievable: between fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds of pressure. Equal to the pressure of the weight of a small pickup truck.”
“I’d rather be under the truck,” Landry said.
“Amen to that. I did the autopsies on two of those recent alligator-attack victims. That’s not a good way to go. I can’t even imagine the terror those people felt. I suppose the good news here is that our victim was already well past feeling anything when she was attacked-by the second animal, that is,” Gitan added grimly.
She heaved a sigh and shook her head as she looked down at Irina Markova’s face, the ravaged eyes and lips. “These are the tough ones. I can slice-and-dice drug dealers and gangbangers all day long. They know what they’re in for, doing what they do. This one is a pure victim. She didn’t go out looking to cross paths with a killer.”
“I knew her a little bit,” Landry said. “Enough to say hello. She was an acquaintance of a friend.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to stay for this, James. I can call you later.”
“No. This is part of it. She’s my vie. You know how I am.”
“Superstitious?”
He shrugged, still staring at the body. “I need to see what happened to them with my own two eyes. I feel like… like I owe it to them to be here, at least for this part, you know? Crazy, huh?”
“Not so. Shows that you’re still human. I always figure that the time I start just counting the bodies, not thinking of them as human beings, is the time I need to consider another career. I mean, I don’t get emotionally involved. We can’t do that and stay sane. But I do them the courtesy of knowing their names.”
“Thanks for coming in for this one, Merci,” Landry said.
He had called her personally to make the request. He’d known her for six or seven years, had watched her work her way up the adder. She was very good and very thorough. This wasn’t going to be an easy case. Gitan would garner every bit of information, no matter how insignificant it might seem. She wouldn’t miss a thing.
“Oh, who needs to have a life?” she said. “Besides, the mayor of Wellington, the mayor of West Palm, the mayor of Palm Beach, he sheriff, the state’s attorney, and half a dozen other big shots called me after you did.”
Landry gave a humorless laugh. “Nobody cares when some Poxahatchee redneck gets his brains blown out. A beautiful young woman strangled and dumped-that’s bad for tourism. Can’t have killer running around during season.”
Gitan glanced at her watch and huffed a sigh. “Where the hell is Cecil? WHERE THE HELL IS CECIL!!”
“Just waiting for you to scream, boss.”
Gitan’s assistant, a seven-foot-tall black transvestite, came into the suite. Even on the stool, Gitan had to crane her neck to look up at him.
The process began with the external examination of the body, Gitan spoke quietly into her microphone, identifying the victim, stating her age, height, weight, sex, color of hair. She couldn’t state the color of her eyes, because there was nothing left of them.
Landry stared at the girl’s hand, at her fingernails, still flawlessly painted a vibrant red despite her time in the water. A couple of them were broken. Hopefully she had sunk them into her killer, hopefully Gitan would discover something to suggest that-skin cells, a microscopic bit of blood, enough of something for a DNA profile.
The body had been in the water for some time, but unless the fish had taken up giving manicures, maybe there was a chance that something lodged well under the nails could still be there.
The analysis of that kind of evidence took time. Serology, toxicology, DNA profiles. Real life isn’t like television. Even with a rush put on the potential evidence, it would take days, even weeks to get results back. And even if they got a DNA profile on the perp, it would be helpful immediately only if the guy had offended before and was in the national data bank.
Gitan examined every inch of the girl’s body. Every mark, every cut, every bruise was measured and photographed. Landry was hoping for bite marks. No defense attorney could argue away bite marks. They were as good as fingerprints.
“What do you think here? Bite marks?” he asked, pointing to several dark semicircular marks around the areola on the left breast. He had put his reading glasses on and bent down close to squint at them.
