for the night. Then I realized why the silence was so troubling.
Not even the dog barked.
The first time I’d visited, Sergeant had practically answered the door herself and nearly eaten me alive on the way out. The second time, she was chained in the yard but barked at my presence. This time, I’d driven up to a perfectly quiet house in a rather noisy Jeep, walked across the lawn, and knocked twice on the front door. It seemed strange that I’d gone unnoticed. Very strange.
I knocked once more, this time with the base of my fist. I pounded hard, and with the third deep thud the door swung open. I stepped back, startled, but no one was there. Evidently it hadn’t been completely closed. The mere force of my knock had pushed it open.
I stepped to the open doorway and said, “Jaime?”
I heard nothing. I glanced again at the car in the driveway, thinking it odd that if someone had taken Jaime out on Friday night that they would have taken his dog with them.
I stuck my head inside the dark foyer, just enough to see inside. “Jaime, it’s-”
I froze in midsentence. From the other end of the hall, at the entrance to the kitchen, Sergeant was staring me in the face, eyes wide open. She wasn’t growling, wasn’t blinking. She wasn’t even breathing. The dog’s body was sprawled across the kitchen floor in a crimson pool of blood.
My instincts told me to run, but I found my feet moving me in the opposite direction, into the house, down the hall, toward the lone light in the kitchen and the grim smell of death. It had been just five hours since Jaime had sent me an e-mail offering to show me where my father had gone. The very sight of his dog lying dead on the floor drew me inside for the answer I feared.
I stopped at the kitchen and gasped.
Jaime was hanging by the neck, twirling slowly round and round at the end of a rope that was fastened to the ceiling fan.
At first I couldn’t move, stunned by the ghastly sight of this strangely elongated body. The toes seemed to reach in futility for the floor. The chin pointed toward the ceiling, yanked upward by a rope so taut that his bulging eyes had nearly popped from the sockets. The whole hideous sight just kept turning with the blades of the paddle fan right before my eyes, as if on display.
Murder was my first thought, but then I remembered how Jaime was so afraid of prison that he would have stabbed me to death to avoid ending up like his brother, abused while incarcerated. He was cowardly enough to kill himself. But why would he have killed his dog, too? Then it hit me. This wasn’t just an escape. This was Jaime’s
Death was what he’d shown me. Gruesome deaths-a slit throat, strangulation.
I nearly fell against the doorframe, sickened by the perverse and tortured message that I now knew he was sending me.
65
An ambulance arrived in minutes. The Miami-Dade police weren’t far behind.
I’d told the 911 operator that Jaime was already dead, but apparently she’d thought that paramedics would be better judges. I waited outside as they rushed in, the police just a few steps behind them. The paramedics came out with no body on the gurney, and I presumed correctly that their lifesaving work was over before it had started. In seconds the whole yard was surrounded by yellow police tape. Two more police cars pulled up, one marked, the other unmarked, both with swirling blue lights that gave the dark house the strange glow of the aurora borealis.
A uniformed officer asked to take my statement. I hesitated. I was still concerned about Jaime and the insurance scandal making the newspapers. For all I knew, the kidnappers were Jaime’s buddies, and they might take it out on my father if they were to hear that Jaime was dead.
“I’d like to speak to a detective,” I said.
The officer seemed to note my reluctance with some suspicion. “Sure. Wait here.”
A detective was already on the scene, the guy who’d pulled up in the unmarked car. He was inside with a photographer and videographer. A van from the medical examiner’s office arrived, and a few minutes later an entire forensic team was at work. I waited almost twenty minutes before the detective finally came out the front door.
“Mr. Rey?” he said as he crossed the lawn. He walked quickly, a rather athletic stride. The sleeves of his wrinkled white dress shirt were rolled up to the elbows, revealing forearms as hairy and muscular as a grizzly bear’s. He wore an open collar with loosened tie, his neck too thick to let him close the top button. I would have bet my father’s ransom that he had been a football star at Miami High about twenty-five years earlier.
“I’m Nick Rey.”
I was standing at the front gate. A crowd of rubberneckers had already gathered on the street outside the house. Cars slowed as they passed, and a few had stopped for a longer look. This was quickly becoming prime neighborhood entertainment.
He introduced himself as Detective Gutierrez and shook my hand. He seemed concerned about the gathering crowd. “Why don’t we go down to the station, where we can talk?”
“Sure. I’ll follow you.”
“You can ride with me, if you want.”
“That’s all right. I can follow.”
He shrugged as if to say, “Suit yourself.”
I got into my Jeep, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway, dispersing the pack of gawkers that had gathered behind my vehicle. From the street I took one last look at Jaime’s house, and that image of him twirling from the ceiling fan popped back into my mind. It stayed there for several moments, till I checked the rearview mirror and saw what, for my father’s sake, I had feared most: two news vans with camera crews.
It was only local, but in today’s world local could quickly become national, national could turn international. Butterflies churned in my stomach as an image flashed through my mind, the kidnappers sitting around a television or computer screen watching Matthew Rey’s son being interviewed about the death of their good buddy, Jaime Ochoa.
I drove away quickly, wanting no part of that.
Detective Gutierrez and I talked in his office, joined by his partner, who simply introduced himself as “Henderson.” He was an older detective, skinny, bald-headed, and a man of few words. He was seated on the edge of the lumpy couch cracking pistachio shells, popping the nuts into the air, and catching them in his gaping mouth.
I told them my concerns about Jaime’s death, how I feared that media leaks could possibly result in retaliation against my father by the kidnappers. Gutierrez seemed somewhat sympathetic, though it wasn’t easy to read the jaded heart of a homicide detective.
“So let me make sure I got this,” said Gutierrez. “You went to this guy’s house once before. He sicced his dog on you and threw you out.”
“Basically.”
“You went there again, and you guys got in a friggin’ knife fight.”
“That’s oversimplifying, but yeah.”
“You went there a third time, convinced that Jaime’s the guy who got your father kidnapped. And Jaime ends up dead.”
“He was already dead when I got there.”
The skinny guy asked, “Want some nuts?”
“No, thanks.”
Gutierrez made a face, seemingly puzzled. “It bothers me that the dog was killed.”
