Miami,
Six months later
‘Counselor? You got a minute?’ asked City of Miami Homicide Detective Manny Alvarez.
Miami-Dade County Assistant State Attorney C.J. Townsend looked up from her desk at the burly, bald, olive-skinned detective standing in her doorway who bore an uncanny resemblance to a Cuban Mr Clean. He actually took up most of her doorway. ‘For you, Manny, I have ten,’ she answered with a slow smile.
‘You say the nicest things,’ he answered, pulling up a chair.
‘What are you doing around here at, what?’ She looked at her watch. ‘Five o’clock on a Friday? Jeesh. How’d it get so late? This place must be deserted.’ The support staff at the State Attorney’s Office religiously cleared the halls by four thirty. At five fifteen on a Friday it was possible that she and Manny were the only souls left in the whole building.
‘I was across the street on a motion to suppress with Judge Shapiro that ended about three. So I headed to the cafeteria and was enjoying a café con leche when I got a call from the FDLE lab up in Tallahassee. Seems a lot of folks are working late today. Or maybe they are for this,’ Manny added, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with the case of the Tootsie’s Cabaret dancer who went missing five weeks back. She was the daughter of a Miami-Dade commissioner who didn’t know his little girl was moonlighting as a stripper?’
‘Yeah, I know the case. They found her body last month, right?’
‘Parts of it. Out in the Everglades, off the Miccosukee Indian reservation. It’s Miccosukee land, but the Indians didn’t want it, and since the City of Miami was already working the missing persons case, we kept the homicide and decided to work it with FDLE and piggy-back on their jurisdiction. The kid – Meghan was her name – wasn’t killed where she was dumped, that was for certain, so the Feds didn’t want it, either, although I’m willing to wager they’ll probably be pretty interested now. We knew from the state of the body and lack of decomposition that the girl was definitely held for a period of time before she was killed, which was troubling. Her boyfriend was initially a suspect, but not any more. So the ME did a scrape of the fingernails and we got DNA, made a profile. All’s good, right? I put it in the system and FDLE ran it through their DNA database. I also gave it to the Feds to run through CODIS.’
‘And FDLE just called you? So they have a hit?’ C.J. asked.
‘Oh yeah.’
‘That’s good. Who is it? You look a little stunned, so I’m thinking you’re about to drop a big name on me, Manny. It’s not the commissioner himself, is it?’
‘No, no. What’s interesting is that I don’t have a name. What I have is a match to another crime scene. In fact, this guy I’m looking for has already been indicted. Or his DNA has.’
She leaned forward. ‘What?’
‘And I figured that this case will probably land on your desk, Counselor, for a number of reasons, the first being it’s the murder of a county commissioner’s daughter – who’s about to announce his candidacy for the US Senate. That makes it high profile. And second, you’re the SAO resident expert on serial killers: you’ve tried more of them than anyone else around here.’
C.J. felt her chest tighten. ‘How do you know it’s a serial, Manny?’
‘The DNA is a match to the indicted AWOL partner of acquitted-but-dead Palm Beach murder defendant Derrick Alan Poole. The name of the partner is believed to be Eduardo—’
‘Carbone,’ she finished. ‘I thought he went to Mexico.’
‘Everyone thought he went to Mexico, including the lead detective, Bryan Nill, who was just as shocked and troubled twenty minutes ago to hear me tell him what you’re hearing now.’
‘So Carbone is still in Florida then?’
Manny leaned all the way back in the chair and rubbed the back of his head. ‘Apparently. In fact, I’m sure your boss is gonna be telling you that this guy is all yours, Counselor. If we can catch him.’
‘Of that I have every confidence, Manny.’
‘And I have every confidence that you’d do a better job than that wannabe talk show host who took a stab at it last time and missed. I hear she sucks as an analyst.’
‘Thanks, Manny. Down, boy. It was a hard case. Her main witness had some problems.’
He shrugged. ‘Just speaking the truth. We got a twenty-three-year-old escort from Brickell that hasn’t been seen since hooking up with a Back Page date a week ago. Name is Valerie Brinley and her mom is a wreck, calling the press and shit. I’m thinking now that I got this Cane Killer guy’s DNA down here in Miami all up under the fingernails of a chopped-up stripper, that this escort’s disappearance could be related.’ He blew out a long breath. ‘I don’t need to tell you how many dancers and hookers go missing every year in Miami-Dade County alone. I’m gonna have to trawl though more than a few missing persons files and see who hasn’t made it back home yet, see if anyone fits the description of what this guy Carbone seems to be looking for in a woman. Then I gotta call the County, and the Beach and see what they got in their departments. Oh boy.’
C.J. nodded. ‘So he’s a serial and he’s still hunting. And he’s in the Everglades and he’s dumping by Miccosukee …’
Manny pulled on his thick black mustache, which was as oversized as his forearm, and leaned forward again in the chair, rocking it. ‘We know from the Palm Beach case that these guys held those women in cages in that shack for a few days or more before killing them. That shack was perfect: abandoned and remote. Carbone is a survivalist according to Nill. That means he can live in extreme conditions like the Everglades for long periods of time. There are a couple of structures out west that might suit his needs. The county took down a meth lab off Tamiami Trail last year that was housed in an old mobile home in the middle of nowhere. And I’m remembering the wooden fishing shack where one of the Cupid victims was found strung up. That’s only a couple of miles from the Indian reservation. I’m sure there are other places – abandoned homes, businesses, storage facilities – but those two might be worth taking a ride out to.’ Manny had been part of the multi-agency task force that worked the serial killer Cupid murders. C.J. had headed up the prosecution.
‘I remember that shack and that girl.’ She shivered at the memory. ‘That’s a lot like the Palm Beach Little Shack of Horrors. It’s definitely a place that this Carbone guy would be attracted to, if he found it. I would have thought it had been torn down, though.’
Manny shook his head. ‘Nope. At least it wasn’t last year when I was out on the reservation doing interviews on this other case I had. It’s worth a trip out west to see what else has sprung up in that area. Maybe I’ll make your husband take a ride with me.’ C.J.’s husband, Dominick Falconetti, was a special agent with FDLE. He had headed up the Cupid task force. ‘He knows the area pretty well. And I’ll see if I can get a few boys with Fish and Wildlife to join us. I’m sure they know good hiding spots aplenty. I don’t want to spook this guy, though. If Carbone does keep his victims alive for a while before he kills them, and he does have this Brinley girl – or any other girl or girls – there’s a chance we could save them. I want to be as quiet as possible, but cover as much ground as possible. If he’s still around and we lose him, he probably will flee to Mexico this time and then we’ll be fucked.’
C.J. had worked enough cases in her lengthy career and brought down enough bad guys to trust the intuitive feeling that was raising the hair on the back of her neck. It was a law enforcement sixth sense that abruptly told you, after sorting through hundreds of leads that had led nowhere, that this one could be The One. It was the gut feeling, supported by intelligence, that had caused Admiral McRaven to send a team of SEALs and two Black Hawk helicopters to a remote house in Abbottabad. The abandoned meth trailer or fishing shack might not turn out to be The Place, but Manny and Dominick would find it. It was a matter of time. And her gut was telling her it could be tonight. She reached for the phone. ‘You call Dominick,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be up for it.’
Manny stood. His shiny bald head practically kissed the plastic encased fluorescent tubes that lit her dull gray office. ‘Who you calling then, Counselor?’
‘That detective from Palm Beach,’ she replied as she started to dial. ‘I have a feeling we’ll be needing him to dust off his case files and take a ride down to Miami.’