“From the look of your face that was a heck of a punch. Who were these guys?”
“I have no idea. The one who hit me, the one in charge, was called Martinez. I don’t know the names of the others. My father hired them. I don’t know where. Is it important?”
“Well, yeah!” said Finnegan. “According to you, they removed a victim of a crime from a crime scene, and as far as I know they’ve failed to report any of this to the police. We’d definitely like to talk to these fellows. I assume your father will have records, payments, contracts with the security firm, and so on.”
“As I say, I have no idea.”
“Fine. Then what happened?”
Victoria described the scene with her mother, the call to 911, the ambulance, and the calls to the relatives.
And now the classic question, from Ramirez: “Ms. Calderon, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your father?”
“Nearly everyone who knew him at one time or another, myself included. He wasn’t an easy man. He had some business rivalries that got pretty intense, but that kind of thing gets settled by lawyers, or by screaming over the phone, not by…not, you know, by someone breaking into a man’s home and chopping him up with an ax.”
“You think the killer used an ax?” asked Finnegan. “Why is that?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t, I mean, I couldn’t look at the body, I mean, examine it, but it was just smashed and torn up so much, I guess…you know the phrase ‘ax murder’ just came into my mind. And that kid they took away, the guard. I saw him pretty well. His face and his neck were just shredded.”
“All right,” said Finnegan, “but maybe when you’ve had a chance to think, you might put together a list of, as you say, ‘rivals,’ people your dad had a beef with. There must have been someone on his mind, right? Because he hired guards.”
“Oh, that was the vandalism. Someone clawed up our front door about-what’s today, the twenty-fourth? — oh, maybe three weeks ago. And left, um, some fecal matter on our walk.”
“Fecal matter,” said Finnegan with a quick look at his partner. “What kind of fecal matter?”
“I don’t know, Detective. I’m not an expert on fecal matter. We disposed of it and replaced the door.”
“And you didn’t call the police about this.”
“No, my father likes…liked his privacy. He wanted to take care it himself, so he hired guards.”
Now the follow-up questions, as the detectives tried to reconstruct the events of the victim’s last day on earth. Finnegan let Ramirez lead on this, listening and watching the woman. He knew there was something deeper going on here; the crazy story of the so-called guards, and the dead man they had dragged away, went to demonstrate that, and the blow to the woman’s face, also out of line. In Finnegan’s experience, security guards did not strike their clients, and he was beginning to put together in his head a story he liked better. The vic was in with some mob and this was a hit, and one of the bad guys had got shot or killed, too. They’d slapped the woman around as a warning. All this could be checked out, and he intended to do so, should he be allowed to proceed along those lines. The Metro Dade PD was in general a cleaner outfit than the Miami PD, but murders involving high-end Cubans were subject to strenuous review from the upper levels of the department, especially if they might have political or organized-crime coloration. So however it fell out, this one was going to be a pain in the ass, and…
His thoughts here were interrupted by a man in the doorway, gesturing urgently. Finnegan left Ramirez to his work and went out with the man, whose name was Wyman, and who was the head of the crime scene crew. Crime scene crews had become somewhat more importunate of late, a result of the fame of their fictional counterparts on television. In former times, a CS tech would never have interrupted a witness interview. Finnegan had even noticed some of them doing the work of detectives, actually talking to live people at crime scenes, just like on TV. He did not approve.
So he was a little gruff with Wyman in the hallway.
“What is it, Wyman? I’m in the middle of an interview here.”
“We found a bullet in the study, a nine millimeter, in the couch back. It’s in real good shape. So the story about the shot is true, at least.”
“This is what you came in there for, a fucking bullet?”
“No, Finnegan, not the bullet. It’s something out in the back.” With that, the technician turned away and went out through the living room and a large semi-enclosed, tile-floored room with many plants and miniature orange trees in pots, through French windows to the patio. There was the usual swimming pool, covered now, and extensive plantings of ornamental shrubs. There were lights and epiphytes in the three large live-oak trees and the whole yard was surrounded by a hibiscus hedge ten feet high and precisely trimmed into a square-topped vertical wall.
“Look up there,” said Wyman, pointing to the rear wall of the house. “That’s where we think the perp entered.”
Finnegan saw what he meant. They were directly under the study window, a tall casement, and both wings of the window were standing straight out from the wall.
“It was open at the time of entry. I guess the victim felt pretty secure because there was a guard in that Florida room we just passed through. We found cigar butts and coffee cups.”
“Yeah, that’s what the maid said.” Finnegan looked up at the window. The lower edge was at least fifteen feet from the ground. A little less than halfway up this wall was a rolled awning. He said, “He could’ve moved the table and climbed onto that awning.”
“He could’ve,” said Wyman, “but what he actually did was, he jumped right up to the window from the ground there and grabbed the wall and the window frame with his claws.”
Finnegan looked at the man to see if he was joking, but Wyman’s face was serious, with worry lines creasing his broad forehead. He pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his coveralls and shone it on the wall. “There they are, four parallel gouges times two in the stucco and”-here he shifted the bright beam-“same again in the wood of the window frame.”
“It could’ve been some kind of ladder, with hooks…,” Finnegan offered.
“Yeah, that was our thought at first. Until we found these.”
Shining the flashlight on the limestone slabs of the patio, he led the detective some twenty-five feet from the house. There in the center of the path were four reddish marks. They were smeared but unmistakably the pad marks of a large cat.
“The floor of the study and the area just outside were soaked with blood. I mean, both victims were almost entirely exsanguinated, that’s over two gallons of blood. There are these same pad marks all over the place up there and on the windowsill, too. It jumped from the window and landed here, then a couple of steps and it jumped over that hibiscus hedge and landed in the next yard. Then it, or they, turned the inside key of a wrought iron gate and went down a service alley out to Montoya Avenue. And then they were gone.”
“So what’re you saying, a guy and some kind of animal?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” said Wyman. “And believe me, I tried. It certainly explains the apparent damage to the victim. The man’s skull was crunched up like a piece of tinfoil. His belly was ripped open, and it looks like half the liver is gone. And look over here.”
Wyman went to an island of plantings under one of the live oaks. He moved the foliage of a ginger plant aside and directed his flashlight beam to the loose earth below it.
“This is where it set itself before jumping over the hedge. We’re going to take casts, of course, but I can already tell you you’re dealing with a big animal. If I had to take a wild-ass guess, from the depth of that footprint, I’d say around four hundred pounds.”
“Good Lord! What, some kind of lion?”
“A tiger, more probably. Lions aren’t much for that kind of jumping. Or the world’s largest leopard. Or the jaguar from hell. Or extraterrestrials. This is a strange one, my friend.”
Finnegan looked up at the tall, thick, unbroken hedge and then down to the ground. There were no human footprints of any kind visible. “So how did the guy get over the hedge?”
“I don’t know, Finnegan,” said Wyman. “You figure it out-you’re the goddamn detective.”
Santiago Iglesias’s cell phone went off, snapping him out of his light doze. He looked out the window. The
