Death Trap (36 page)

1

The killer sat inside the car, eyes trained on the parking lot entrance.

“She’s here,” the killer said into the phone, focused on the car as it entered the lot. It was approaching two o’clock in the afternoon of July 5, 2003. The target had pulled into her regular parking space at the Rocky Point, Tampa, Florida, Green Iguana Bar & Grill, got out, locked her car. Then she walked into the building to clock in for her bartending shift.

Rocky Point is a small island west of Tampa International Airport. It is a busy part of the Tampa Bay region, lots of ritzy hotels and high-end restaurants. There are pristine beaches, featuring hard and tanned bodies, and people mingling about, quite oblivious to what is going on around them. When you think of the atmosphere and ambiance here in Rocky Point, picture the colors that Jimmy Buffett’s songs bring to mind: velvety blue water, yellow sun, white sand, puffy cotton clouds, lime-green drinks with salt around the rims, tiny umbrellas pointed skyward.

“Go get ready,” he said.

The killer hung up the phone, hopped into the backseat. Put on a pair of baggy pants. A large sweatshirt. Baseball cap. Copious amounts of black makeup—“I want you to look like a black guy,” he had told the assassin—and a fake beard that wouldn’t stick in the excessive heat of the day.

“The beard won’t stay on,” the killer said after calling him back.

“Forget it, then. But walk around the premises to see if anybody notices you.”

The killer thought this to be an odd request. But then, over the course of the past several months since they had met, he had made numerous demands that didn’t make much sense. Here, in the parking lot of the Green Iguana, no one knew the killer to begin with.
Walk around with a disguise on?
Wouldn’t
that,
in and of itself, draw unneeded attention to the situation ? They had gone through this scenario many times. Heck, they’d even tried to kill this woman once already. Why chance botching the thing again with some sort of crazy strut around the parking lot?

He had, however, trained—some would later say “brainwashed”—his killer well.

“Okay,” the killer said to the request, then got out of the car and took a short walk around the parking lot. It seemed that nobody was interested in a nervous-looking person wearing what was an over-the-top Halloween costume in the middle of summer.

Back inside the car, the killer sat back. Adjusted the seat to get comfortable.

Now it was just a matter of playing the waiting game until the target emerged from the bar.

“Run up to her and shoot,” the caller had said, explaining how he wanted the murder to go down.

Kill her in the parking lot in broad daylight?

As soon as she came out of the building after her shift, he had explained in more detail, the killer was to approach the woman—and, without thinking about it, without hesitation, without a worry that people would see, unload a magazine of bullets into her body. They had been through this part of the murder numerous times. Rehearsed the scenario. Talked about it until they were both blue in the face. That previous attempt the killer had botched—the shotgun had gone off too soon. The plan was abandoned, the evidence destroyed.

Today there would be no mistakes. The killer had a semiautomatic .22-millimeter Ruger pistol. A child could fire it.

Even though he had taught his killer how to shoot the weapon, he was still worried:

“You look into her eyes!”

In theory, he made taking a life sound so easy.

Sitting, sketching out the plan, looking at the building, where the exits from the bar were located, the killer knew damn well that it was going to be impossible to murder the target inside the parking lot—that is, if getting away was part of the plan.

As the afternoon turned to dusk, the sun casting a brilliant red, yellow and orange glow over Old Tampa Bay, the killer waited patiently, nodding in and out.

Then, as the sun disappeared over the cityscape, the killer came up with an even better plan. Thinking about it, darkness closing in around the car, the killer then fell asleep.

 

 

As the target approached her car, unaware that someone had been in the parking lot for the past eight hours, the killer awoke.

But it was too late now to kill her in the Green Iguana parking lot. The target was already in her car, headlights on, stereo blasting, pulling out onto the main road.

All of this went on as the killer realized what was happening, and became unnerved, staring at the target as she left the scene.

“Shit.”

The killer tore out of the parking space quickly and got on the road far enough behind the target, so as not to be suspicious.

Pulling up right behind the target as she approached the bridge over Old Tampa Bay, the killer made another call. Police would learn later it was the twentieth call of the day the killer had made to the Svengali at home calling the shots.

“It will be over in a few minutes,” the killer said, staring at the back of the target’s BMW. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”

As he pulled up closer to the target, their cars just feet apart, no one could have imagined what happened next.