He took a step away from the computer terminal, then thought of one other thing, a wild shot. He went back to the computer and punched in the name Robert Earl Ferguson.
The computer blipped and within a moment returned with the words Twenty-four Entries. Cowart sat back down at his seat and typed in: Directory All. The library computer came up with a list. Each entry was dated, and its approximate length given. Cowart scanned the roster of stories, recognizing each one. There was the original story and the follow-up pieces, the sidebars, and then the stories following the release, and finally the most recent, the stories he'd written after Blair Sullivan's execution. He scanned the list a second time, and this time noticed an entry from the previous August. He looked at the date and recognized it as the time he'd taken his own daughter to Disney world on vacation. It was a month after Ferguson had been released, in the time before his case had been thrown out of court. It was also four days before Dawn Perry had stepped out of the world. It was measured in the listing: 2.3 inches. A brief. He called it up on the screen.
The entry was from a Religion page roundup. This was the weekly listing of sermons and speeches given at churches throughout Dade County the following day. In the midst of the group was the item: FORMER DEATH ROW INMATE TO SPEAK. Cowart read, Robert Earl Ferguson, recently released Florida Death Row inmate unjustly accused of an Escambia County murder, will speak on his experiences and how his religious devotion has sustained him through the criminal justice system at the New Hope Baptist Church, Sunday, 11 a.m.
The church was in Perrine.
16. The Young Detective
Detective Andrea Shaeffer greeted the dawn from her desk.
She had tried sleep, only to find it elusive, then fitful. Rising in the compressed black of the early morning, she had discarded an awful dream of blood and torn throats, dressed, then driven to the Monroe County Sheriff's Department homicide substation in Key Largo. From where she sat in the second-floor offices, she could stare through a window and see a pinkish ridge of light painted on the edge of the night. She imagined the slow disintegration of the darkness out on the Gulf Stream, where the razor-sharpness of morning seemed to carve shapes onto the tossing waves and finally, with a great slash, cut the horizon free from the ocean.
For a moment she wished she were out on her stepfather's fishing boat, rigging hooks in the near-black, her legs spread against the bounce and shock of the swells, her hands, slippery from handling bait, rapidly twisting wire leaders and tying knots in monofilament. The fishing would be good today. There would be big thunderheads lurking far out over the water and the heat would stir up narrow waterspouts that would show even blacker and more terrifying against the sky. But the fish would rise toward the surface, hungry, anticipating the storm, eager to feed. Dance around on the edges of the gathering winds and keep the baits moving, she thought. Fast baits, for kings and wahoos and especially billfish. Something that scratches and slaps at the waves, furrowing through the dark Gulf Stream waters, irresistible to the big fish searching for sustenance.
That was what I always liked about fishing, she thought: not the fight against the hook and line, no matter how spectacular; nor the last impetuous panic at boatside; nor the back-slapping accomplishment or the beery congratulations. What I liked was the hunt. Her eyes stared through the homicide office window while her mind churned over what she knew and what she didn't know. When the light finally seemed to have succeeded in its daily battle, she turned away, hack to the spread of papers that were strewn about her desk.
She glanced at the summary report she'd prepared after questioning the neighbors on Tarpon Drive. No one had seen or heard anything of note. Then she fingered the report from the medical examiner's office.
Proximate cause of death in both subjects was the same: abrupt severing of the right carotid artery leading to sudden massive loss of blood. He was left-handed, she thought. Stood behind them and drew the blade across their throats. Skin around the wounds was only mildly frayed. A straightedge razor, maybe a carbon steel hunting knife. Something real sharp. Neither victim showed any signs of significant postmortem injury. He killed them and left. Premortem injuries included bruising around each victim's arms, which was to be expected. The killer had tied them savagely, the rope cutting into the skin. A strip of duct tape had gagged them. The male victim had a contusion on his forehead, a split lip, and a fractured pair of ribs. The knuckles on his right hand were skinned with trace residue of paint, and the chair legs had scratched the linoleum kitchen floor. At least he fought, if only for an instant. He must have been second, jamming his hands against the frame of his chair as he struggled, fighting to get free until he was slammed across the chest and in the head. There was no sign of sexual trauma to the woman, although she had been found naked. Humiliation. Shaeffer remembered seeing the old woman's night-clothes folded neatly in the kitchen corner. Folded carefully. By whom? Victim or killer? Fingernail scrapings were negative. Both victims had been body-printed at the morgue, but without success.
Shaeffer tossed the papers onto the desktop. No help, she thought. At least no obvious help.
She picked up the crime-scene preliminaries, struck with the language of the documents she was reading. Death reduced to the most clipped, unevocative terms. Things measured, weighed, photographed, and assessed. The rope that had been used to bind the elderly couple was quarter-inch nylon clothesline, available in any hardware store or supermarket. Two pieces, one measuring forty-one inches, the other thirty-nine and one-half, had been cut from a twelve-foot length discovered by the back door. The killer had made a slipknot, looped that over his victims' wrists, then doubled and tripled it, ending with a simple square knot to hold it all together.
An ordinary, nondistinctive knot, temporary, improvised at the scene. Strong enough for the moment of killing but one that, given time, could have been worked loose. That suggested something to her: not a local, someone from somewhere else. Keys folks for the most part knew their knots; they'd have tied something sturdier, nautical.
She nodded. Middle of the night. He broke in. Subdued them, tied them, gagged them. They thought they were going to be robbed and acquiescence would save their lives. No chance. He simply killed them. Maximum terror. Quick. Efficient. No extra time. A silent knife. No gunshot to arouse nosy neighbors. No robbery. No rape. No slamming door, race-away panic. A killer who arrives, murders, and exits, pausing only to open a Bible on the table between his victims, unseen, unheard by everyone except his victims. She thought, All murders leave a message. The drug dealer's body found decomposing in the mangroves with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head,
Bold watch and diamond jewelry still dangling from his wrists, sends one sort of message. The young woman who thinks it's okay just this once to hitchhike home from the restaurant where she waits on tables and ends up three counties away, naked, dead, and violated, sends another. The old man in the trailer who finally tires of tending his wife's degenerative cancer and shoots her and then himself and dies clutching a fifty-five-year-old wedding album is telling a different story
She looked down at the crime-scene photos. The glossy eight-by-ten pictures summoned up her memory of the oppressive heat in the death room and the nauseating smell of the bodies. It always made it worse when nature had had time to work on a murder scene; any residual dignity left over from their lives had dissipated swiftly in the soaring temperatures. It also played havoc with the investigative process. She had been taught that every minute that passed after a homicide made a successful resolution less likely. Old, cold cases that get solved get headlines. But for every one that results in an indictment, a hundred remain behind, each a tangled knot of suppositions. Two old people who helped bring into the world and deform a mass murderer are themselves murdered. What the hell sort of crime is that? Revenge. Maybe justice. Possibly a perverse combination of the two.