Love Kills (5 page)

My mouth felt dry and my eyes began to tear. “I just wanted to let you know that I got your message and did speak to your detectives about the York case.”

“And I got your message. I'm busy, Britt.” She picked up the papers she'd been working on.

“Sorry to interrupt you.”

“You make it a habit. It's as though it's your life's work,” she said, as I closed the door behind me.

I left the station biting my lip. I forced myself to focus on the story, on Spencer York and how he had so eagerly anticipated his big moment in court. It never came. By his trial date he was a wanted man, a fugitive at the center of a media frenzy, the target of a high-profile manhunt.

How he would have loved it. But he missed it all. He never got to star in his own courtroom drama. Instead, he knew nothing, saw nothing, wrapped in a tarp, doing the big dirt sleep, with only the heat and maggots for company. Ironic, almost sad. Life is sad, I thought, and full of broken dreams.

My pager began to chirp. Lottie. Wants to apologize, I thought righteously. It's about time.

I didn't answer.

As I drove back to the
News
, my cell phone rang. The caller ID displayed the photo bureau number.

I ignored it, still stung by her words. Let her regret them a little longer, I thought. Amid the cacophony of car horns, rumbles, and traffic noises, my beeper sounded again. Three cement mixers blocked the turn onto Biscayne Boulevard as I waited through three traffic light cycles. Drivers behind me cursed and leaned on their horns as their blood pressure climbed.

How many would stroke out? I wondered with a sigh. How would an ambulance, or a victim trying to reach an emergency room, survive this traffic gulag?

I examined my beeper. Lottie again. This time she had punched in 911. Emergency.

Wow, I thought, she's really sorry. I felt guilty.
She is my dearest friend.
I glared at a driver trying to inch his PT Cruiser in front of me and called her, but now all I could reach was a busy signal.

“Lottie's looking for you,” said the assistant city editor I briefed on the Spencer York story.

Moments later I scooped up the persistently ringing phone on my desk.

“Britt?” It was her voice.

“I'm sorry too,” I blurted.

The silence was deafening. “Hell,” she finally said, stretching the word into two syllables. “I ain't apologizing for nothing. You're the one didn't answer my messages.”

“You're not sorry?”

“No way.” Before she hung up, she said, “Check your mailbox.”

I did. Nothing special. Mostly routine press releases from the police public information office, artfully composed to impart as little information as possible, and an alert from the Coast Guard on two missing boaters….

I almost spit up my coffee.

A U.S. Coast Guard air and sea search was under way for newlyweds from Boston. The couple and their forty-foot trawler,
Calypso Dancer
, had vanished on their island-hopping honeymoon.

The faces beneath the
MISSING
banner made my heart skip. The golden couple who had lost their honeymoon photos to the sea were now lost themselves.

“Oh, my God!”

“What's wrong, Britt?” Ryan asked from behind me.

I waved the flyer. “I know these people!”

His eyes widened. “Who are they?”

“Newlyweds. From Boston. I mean, I don't actually know them, they're the people whose camera we found.”

Now we had names to match the faces: Vanessa Holt, twenty-six, and her husband, Marsh Holt, thirty-two.

The narrative stated in stilted Coast Guard jargon that nothing had been found: no wreckage, oil slicks, or reported sightings. There had been no distress calls. The search was hampered by the fact that no one was certain how long the couple had been missing. They had filed no precise itinerary, and friends and family had not been immediately alarmed.

Maybe no news is good news, I thought, staring at their faces. My phone interrupted.

“Did you see it?” Lottie demanded impatiently.

“It's them,” I said urgently. “It's them. I'm on it. Make copies of the best pictures for the city desk.”

“Did that.” She paused. “I hope they're not dead, Britt.”

“Me too.”

I called the Coast Guard, then Boston.

“Did they find anything?” Norman Hansen, the father of the missing bride, asked when I identified myself. The fear and anguish in his voice were palpable.

“Not yet. I just spoke to the Coast Guard. The search area is huge, but we have some photos that may help narrow it down.”

“Something terrible happened.” His voice trembled.

In the background his wife asked, “Is it the airline?”

“No, Molly, a reporter,” he said. “In Miami.”

She picked up an extension. I could hear her labored breathing.

“This is not necessarily terrible,” I said. “They may have simply lost track of time; you know how honeymooners are.”

“No,” he said firmly. “Nessa's not like that. She's extremely reliable. When she didn't come back to start rehearsals, we knew it was something terrible.”

“Rehearsals?”

Vanessa, it seemed, played first cello for the Boston Symphony, quite an accomplishment at age twenty-six. The radiant girl with the long hair was a talented musician. Their pride was evident despite their panic and anxiety. The newlyweds had been due back in Boston on Friday. Rehearsals began on Monday. The weekend had come and gone without a word, a call, or a message.

“She devoted her whole life to music, to the Symphony,” her father said, “until she met Marsh. He's a wonderful young man. We were so happy. But when they didn't come back and didn't call, we knew.”

His wife choked back a sob. “We feel so helpless…. We're trying to book a flight.”

“We're coming down,” he said, “to look for them.”

“Don't be so quick to assume the worst.” I tried to comfort them. “Island time is different. Things move more slowly. They may have engine trouble, could be marooned somewhere. Maybe adrift. Coast Guard Search and Rescue is good. They'll find them. Last week they rescued several boaters who'd been adrift for five days. Wait a day or two. It's a big ocean. There's not much you could do here now. When they do come home,” I added cheerfully, “this will be a story you'll tell your grandchildren someday.”

“Please God.” His wife choked.

I asked how to reach Marsh's parents.

“He lost them at an early age,” Molly Hansen said. “He has little family, but he fit right in with us. He's the son we never had. We love him and he loves us.” An engineer from the Midwest, he had met Vanessa shortly after his transfer to Boston and he had swept her off her feet: love at first sight, or something close to it. He proposed only months after they met, after first asking her parents' permission.

The wedding was lavish and rich in music. Fellow musicians had performed; others were members of the wedding party. Marsh had rented the
Calypso Dancer
for their romantic two-week island-hopping honeymoon.

The parents sounded sweet and scared silly. Vanessa was their only child.

“Don't panic,” I said again. “No news is good news at this point. No distress calls went out. There have been no reports of a boat in trouble. No wreckage has been spotted. I'll stay on it and call you the minute I hear anything.” The Hansens, in turn, promised to lend the
News
one of the couple's wedding pictures. Lottie arranged for a Boston service to pick it up at their home and transmit it.

The frightened parents sounded temporarily reassured by the time I hung up. Now I regretted my initial envy of Vanessa and Marsh, husband and wife for less than four weeks. How random fate and Mother Nature can be, I thought. How quickly life can turn on a dime.

Had the newlyweds been swallowed by the shadowy seas of the Bermuda Triangle? Were they targeted by pirates or drug smugglers? Or are they simply still out there, I wondered wistfully, sipping daiquiris and making love on a palm-lined stretch of sugar-white beach, having lost all track of time?

The last option had my vote.

Between calls to the Coast Guard, I contacted local feminists and politicians for reactions to the fate of the Custody Crusader. The once-outraged prosecutor was now a prominent criminal defense attorney. The deposed judge, caught up in a career-crashing whirlwind of criticism and controversy for releasing Spencer York on low bond, was beyond mortal reach, dead for more than a year. Too bad, I thought. He would have felt vindicated. When Spencer York failed to appear for trial, it was not the fault of a too-lenient judge. An unknown killer was the culprit.

Whoever murdered York and hid his corpse had effectively killed the judge's career and reputation as well.

The voices now were not as strident as at the height of the controversy. Laws had changed. Miami was a different city. The most vocal critics had moved on to other issues, other outrages. Some had left South Florida, others were gone from the planet. Miami is known for its short memory, which may be why we keep making the same mistakes.

He was no longer politically controversial, but the legend of Spencer York's disappearance had now morphed into a murder mystery, a good read. It was time to introduce the Custody Crusader posthumously to a whole new generation of
Miami News
readers.

I called York's sister, Sheila, near Waco. She hung up. Unlike her brother, she obviously didn't like talking to reporters and didn't want her name in the newspaper. I sighed. How could siblings be so different? Did they share the same father? I wondered. Had Spencer York been granted a onetime opportunity to speak out from beyond the grave, it would have been to a reporter.

As usual when people hang up on me, I counted to ten and redialed.

“Britt Montero again,” I said sweetly. “We were cut off. Sorry. It must be the thunderstorm we're having. I know this is a bad time, how upset you must be at the loss of your brother, but we need some information about Spencer. I hate talking to strangers when I know you're the most accurate source.”

As usual, it worked.

“What kind of information?” she said warily.

“Just a little background,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Was he your only brother?”

“There was another, but he died when he was two, fell down the well.”

“How awful. So there were just the two of you growing up together?”

“Yes. We were three years apart. He was the oldest.”

“What is it that you remember most about your brother?” I asked.

“Difficult. He was always difficult. We weren't close.”

“I know how that can be.” I did sympathize. “But it's never easy. It's always hard to lose a family member, especially a sibling.”

She must have some positive childhood memory of the man, however fleeting, I thought. Hopefully, he said or did something decent, had been kind to his sister at least once in his life. “Even if you weren't close, he was still family.”

“You're right,” she said. The little catch in her throat seemed to surprise even her. “I guess you sort of think what it might've been like, had Spencer not been the way he was. I always thought the wrong brother had died as a child, or that maybe they mixed Spencer up with somebody else's baby in the maternity ward, and he wasn't really related to us. That sort of thing does happen.”

It piqued her interest to hear I had met Spencer myself. The last time she spoke to him, he had called collect, she said, from Miami. She accepted the charges because she hadn't heard from him for nearly two years and thought it might be an emergency. He told her to read the papers and watch the TV news, boasting that she'd soon see and hear his name.

She'd been embarrassed when she did see his name—on wanted posters. Deputies visited her home several times that first year or so, to determine whether she was harboring the fugitive sought for jumping bond in Miami. They asked if Spencer had been in contact with her. He hadn't. She feared he might. That possibility unnerved her every time a car door slammed, the doorbell rang, or the dogs barked. But after five years or so, she confided, she had come to believe that Spencer was dead.

I asked why.

“Because, you know,” she said matter-of-factly, “bad pennies have a way of turning up.”

Made sense.

I wrote the story, my impressions of York's dysfunctional family mingling with the plight of the warm, close-knit Hansens, who now faced the painful possibility of loved ones lost.

There are families, I thought, and then there are families.

That reminded me to call my mother.

I had intended to wait but decided I had better make contact before she saw my byline in the newspaper.

Should I invite her to my apartment? Go to hers? Or meet her on neutral turf, in a public place?

I turned in my stories, went over the copy with Bobby, the assistant city editor in the slot, to be sure he had no questions or drastic changes in mind, and then called her.

“I'm at work but I'll be off soon,” I said. “Want to grab a bite somewhere, or stop by my apartment for a snack or a drink?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She sounded crestfallen. “How I wish you'd called sooner. I'm meeting Russell for drinks at the Van Dyke at ten. But I can stop on the way for a cup of tea, a hug, and a word about the divine new things we're showing in the fall. I've already seen a darling little form-fitting white sheath that has your name written all over it.”

I laughed out loud.

“It's so good to hear your voice,” she said warmly. “I've missed you.”

“Me too,” I said. “Love you, Mom.”

 

I raced home. No time for elaborate preparations, she'd arrive in less than an hour. I cleaned out Billy's sandbox, found some green tea and crackers in the cupboard, and took Bitsy for a quick walk around the block.

Who is Russell? I wondered. After belatedly learning the truth about my father's death in Cuba thirty years ago, that he had not abandoned us, my mother had finally grieved, and then begun to heal and build a social life. These days, it was far busier than mine.

Moments after I brought Bitsy back inside, there was a knock at the door. She's here! I thought in a moment of panic. I'd hoped to freshen my lipstick and comb my hair. I will never be the fashion plate she would like, but it makes her happy if I appear to be trying.

“You're early,” I cried, throwing open the door.

“For what?” asked Mrs. Goldstein, my landlady.

“I thought you were my mother,” I said, relieved. “She's on the way. I'm making tea.”

“Oh.” Her eyebrows lifted. She looked serious. “So, I won't stay. But there is something you should know, Britt. I need only a minute. Then I'll bring some rugelach to go with the tea.”