‘We left it exactly as we found it,’ Tru Zeffers said as he walked Manny Alvarez and Mike Dickerson into Bill Bantling’s old cell on death row. ‘Didn’t touch a thing. Before we even heard he was missing we was thinking you might be interested in what we found.’
Tru had been hopping mad when he heard the news that Bill Bantling was unaccounted for down in Miami. He still was. But he couldn’t help smiling some now as the arrogant suits from Miami paraded past with egg all over their red faces — starting with that supersized Detective Manny Alvarez and his geezer partner. Tru had been hoping that State Attorney Collier would be with them, maybe dressed in his fine suit and polished shoes, carrying on with his smarty-ass, haughty attitude. Tru couldn’t wait for that one to call him a redneck under his breath again. Who’s the loser now, Chief? Just wait till the public finds out what you let back into society …
Inmates had tried shit on Tru before, but in his fifteen years on the row, not one of those scumbags had made it past him. Not one. Those homicide detectives and prosecutors might think Tru’s security precautions with the inmates were over the top, or put on just for show, but as a CO on death row you had to remember who you was dealing with and never forget it. There was no room for giving breaks, neither. The bad boys in this prison had nothing left to lose — even their basic right to keep on breathing was at the discretion of some judge in Tallahassee or Atlanta or DC. Tru knew better than to underestimate scum like Bill Bantling. Oh, that one was slick, all right. Mr Handsome and smooth talker. Always on the lookout for an opportunity, for a way out. He’d soon slit your throat if an opportunity to slip through those bars presented itself. And he wouldn’t feel bad about it, neither.
‘Holy shit,’ exclaimed Mike Dickerson as they stepped inside what for seven years had been Bill Bantling’s cell.
‘Holy shit is right,’ Manny repeated. He immediately went over to the empty cot where Bantling had once slept. The plastic mattress was leaning up against the wall, beside the metal bed frame that was bolted into the wall. Laid out on top of the bed frame were pictures. Drawings. Sketches. Manny picked one up and looked at it. Then another. And another. The same woman in each picture, fifteen in all. In some of the drawings the woman was nude and bound, obviously being violently tortured. In one she was being raped. He turned to Tru Zeffers. ‘You didn’t think to call somebody and tell them about these when he was being moved? These drawings didn’t set off some sort of alarm in you, Sergeant?’
Tru stopped smiling inside, startled that instead of being praised for alerting the detectives, he was being called to account for his actions. ‘Notifying you about anything wasn’t my decision to make, Detective. Take that up with the warden. I found them drawings tucked into the mattress, all folded up into tiny little pieces of paper. The mattress was gonna be thrown out. If it wasn’t for me looking, no one would have ever found those drawings.’
‘And when did you discover them?’
‘’Bout a week after Bantling went missing, I suppose.’
Manny looked at Zeffers. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Here? You took the mattress apart here?’
Zeffers shifted. ‘That’s what I said.’
‘I’m thinking maybe you wanted to keep a little souvenir of Cupid for yourself after he left for Miami, something nasty you could auction off on eBay one day when you retired from working this hellhole. But then you heard he was missing and that the mattress you took home was not on a list of inventory scheduled to be destroyed, and you got either nervous or curious and started to examine your booty a little closer. Is that when you found the drawings, Sergeant? Is that when you got real worried that they were gonna be evidence in the investigation of his escape? And is that why it took you a goddamn week after a serial killer was reported missing to call and say you had evidence? Or were you hoping to sell these drawings on eBay as well?’
Zeffers turned red. ‘They were gonna throw out the mattress, like I said. It would’ve been long gone. You wouldn’t have ever known about them. You should be thanking me.’
‘Forgive me if I don’t. Are these all of them? Or are you holding back?’
Zeffers shook his head. ‘I ain’t holding nothing back.’
‘He drew these?’ Dickerson asked, picking up one of the pictures. ‘Bantling?’
‘He was always sketchin’ something. We didn’t let him draw no porno, or violent stuff, which is why he most likely hid those. He didn’t want us to take them.’
‘Obviously,’ Manny shot back.
‘It’s the same woman in each picture,’ Mike commented as he studied the sketches. ‘If you move them around, she almost looks age-progressed, like he drew her throughout the years.’ He turned to Manny. ‘You worked Cupid. She looks familiar. How do I know her? Is this one of his victims?’
Manny nodded. The woman in the drawings was beautiful, sultry, innocent, frightened. A woman who was naturally stunning, no matter what she wore or what she did to disguise it. By the later drawings, her long, wavy blonde hair had been chopped into a dark bob that tried to hide her face. Crow’s feet had aged her eyes, marionette lines her mouth. Circles lined her hypnotic, fearful green eyes. The drawings were like looking at photographs, they were that detailed, that perfect, that accurate.
‘You know who she is?’ Mike asked again.
Manny ran a hand through hair he no longer had, wishing he didn’t have to make the phone call that he was about to make. As much as he didn’t want to think it possible, as much as he didn’t want to believe he knew the inner thoughts of a madman, he did.
More than a week had passed since Bantling had walked off a corrections bus and disappeared into a massive hurricane that had all but leveled South Florida, from Fort Lauderdale down to Miami Shores. Thankfully, Artemis had made landfall as a Cat 4, with sustained winds of 139 miles an hour, rather than the devastating Cat 5 that was feared. It also came in slightly north of its anticipated target of Miami Beach. Yes, it could have been so much worse, but as it was right now, it was bad enough. So far 203 people were dead and the death toll was still rising. Most of South Florida was struggling to recover basic necessities — homes and businesses were still without power in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Palm Beach was almost all in the dark and the eastern shoreline was underwater. Power crews from fifteen different states were working to get the city of Miami back up. Most of the county, city and state police force were working twelve-hour shifts trying to control the looting and price-gouging, and deliver water, food and ice to the hardest hit areas.
Although Tru Zeffers and the good folks in the rest of the Sunshine State — and in the rest of the country, for that matter — couldn’t really wrap their heads around the enormity of it all, Miami was in complete and utter chaos. There was no time to hunt for fugitives or follow up on leads or work cases. Nothing was normal anymore; every cop in every law enforcement agency south of Martin County was in survival mode. While this trip to Starke wasn’t exactly unauthorized, it was Manny who had made it a priority, coming up here the first chance he had free. Tomorrow he and Mike would be back working the Liberty City area. Their lieutenant had advised Manny to just get an arrest warrant for Bantling’s recapture, notify the feds and the US Marshals and let them use their resources, which were not bogged down in hurricane response. ‘And for Christ’s sake,’ his lieutenant had added, ‘keep it the hell out of the press that he’s gone.’
He’s gone. Cupid has left the building.
As for that last request, Manny was running out of time. The media had reached saturation point with survivor stories and were out to find other angles on the hurricane aftermath. It was only a matter of time before someone called the Herald. The only reason no one had done it already was most likely because no one wanted to take the blame for letting loose a serial killer — and there was blame enough to go around. First, to the Department of Corrections for the colossal fuck-up in letting him go, and then to the State Attorney’s Office for cutting a deal with Cupid, and now to the City of Miami and every other agency that had left it too long to let anyone know Bantling was missing. As for the folks at Starke not blowing the whistle, Tru Zeffers didn’t want anyone to find out he was the collector of macabre serial-killer paraphernalia that he would someday try to hock on the Internet for a hefty price. Manny wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years more drawings mysteriously surfaced on eBay.
With every hour Bantling was gone, the trail grew that much colder. The man had no family. He had no friends. He had no accomplices, and as far as anyone knew he had no help. He was like a damn ghost. As far as money went, that was something Bantling once did have. Enough to afford private defense attorneys and a nice bachelor pad in Coconut Grove. And he’d likely stashed some of it away, hoping an opportunity like this would one day come.
The feds had helped out, and had so far tracked Bantling to a Greyhound bus station in Orlando that had taken him to Opelika, Alabama. But the trail from there had suddenly dead-ended. Bill Bantling could be anywhere in the world by now. He could look like a completely different man — different hair, different eye color, different skin tone. He could appear to be fat or uber skinny. And if he did have cash, he would have access to plastic surgery, passports, transportation out of the country. He could completely transform his appearance and be unrecognizable within weeks. With no friends or lovers or family it was impossible to find a starting point.
Most prison escapees were caught within the first forty-eight hours. Here it was Day Nine and counting. Manny stared at the creepy sketches of the scared woman he knew all too well. While he didn’t know where William Rupert Bantling was headed, he had a pretty good idea who the man was hoping to find.
‘Give me a second, Mikey,’ Manny said. Then he stepped out of the cell, picked up his phone and flipped through it, finding a number he hadn’t used in a long, long time. Too long, but that was not his choice.
‘Dom. Long time, brother,’ he began when the man who used to be his closest friend finally picked up the phone. ‘It’s Bear. I have a situation going on here in Miami, and, well, you and me, we gotta talk …’