Hit the road jack, p.5
Hit the Road Jack, page 5
part #1 of Jack Ryder Series
“We need to change a light bulb in room one-eleven. Could you do that before you leave? You know how your dad is with ladders. I don’t like him climbing on them.”
“I got it,” I said.
I found a new bulb in the cupboard behind the bar, then grabbed the ladder and went into room one-eleven and changed it. I did all I could to help out around the motel. My parents were getting older, and it was harder and harder for them to keep up with the maintenance. It was the least I could do, with all the help they gave me. As my way of saying thanks, I devoted my weekends to helping them out. That way, the kids got to play with their grandparents too, so it was a win-win.
I looked at the twins, who were drawing on one of the tables in the restaurant. They were sitting underneath it and drawing on the bottom. Luckily, my parents hadn’t noticed. I cleared my throat.
“Abigail, Austin. We need to go home. Emily?” I called through the window.
“What?” she answered.
“We’re going home.”
“Finally,” she said.
I heard the TV shut off, then the sound of her dragging feet across the ground. She came out. She looked odd with her big army-boots and black outfit in this heat.
I smiled. “How was your day?”
She shrugged indifferently. “Fine, I guess.” She grabbed her backpack and put it on. I wanted to give her a hug, but was afraid it would come off as awkward. Instead, I turned to face the twins. “I said we were leaving.”
“Aw, we were having so much fun,” Abigail said.
Austin crawled out from under the table and walked to me. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said, and handed me the crayon. “I know,” I said. “Abigail. Get out from under there, now, young lady.”
“Wait a second. I just need to finish this.”
Was she kidding me?
“Abigail. Now.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. Six years of age and already a teenager. “All right, all right. I’m coming.”
We walked to the car and greeted one of the guests of the motel. Harry was his name. He had been a guest for a month or so now. A snowbird. We had a lot of those. They came down from the north and stayed all winter.
“Nice evening?” I said, as we passed him.
He nodded and smiled at the children. “Yes, indeed. Gonna be a beautiful day tomorrow, don’t you think?”
“Definitely.”
No one discussed the weather as much as snowbirds. They came to keep warm in the winter, while the snow and cold roamed up north and made it miserable for people. Harry petted the children on their heads, then went on towards the beach. An older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, who were also regulars and came every winter, got out of their car and walked towards the rooms. I nodded in greeting as I passed them, and we talked about the weather as well before they disappeared into their room. I was so happy for people like Harry and the Millers. They were the ones who let my parents earn enough money to be able to keep the motel.
I put the kids in the car and drove next door to the place where I had rented a condo. It was also right on the beach, and in walking distance of my parents’ place. It was in South Cocoa Beach, in the more secluded part of town. I, for one, loved it here. Arianna hadn’t liked it much. She thought it was too small…nothing really happened here, she always said.
That was what I liked about it.
“Can we watch TV before we go to bed, Dad, please?” Abigail asked with big pleading eyes.
“Okay,” I said, as we walked towards the complex. I opened the front door and let the munchkins storm in and fight over who should hit the button for the elevator. “But only for half an hour,” I said on the way up, when they had finally quieted down. Abigail had naturally won the fight. She always did. She was the big sister and had beat her brother into this world by fifty-eight seconds. She had been beating him ever since.
“Aw,” Abigail pleaded. “Can’t we say one hour instead?”
I sighed and opened the door to the condo. I looked at my watch. It was going to be late. “Okay.” I said. “If you brush your teeth and put on your PJs first.”
The kids didn’t hear that last part before they stormed inside and threw themselves on the couch and turned the TV on. Emily went to her room and shut the door without a word, while the theme song to SpongeBob filled the living room. Each of the twins grabbed an iPad and started playing while watching TV.
The new generation of multitaskers.
I shook my head and sat next to them, and soon after, the iPads were put away and I had both kids on my lap.
15
SEPTEMBER 1984
SHE NEVER TOLD anyone what had happened to her. She was too ashamed, too scared of what would happen if she did. So, Annie kept it to herself. She didn’t remember much. She couldn’t recall the details, but she believed she had been raped. She just wasn’t sure if it had all been a dream. She had woken up in the grass by the lake the next morning, but hadn’t been able to remember what had happened. But, as the days passed, little by little, she remembered bits and pieces. She knew she had been with Tim. And she knew she was badly bruised when she woke up. She covered the marks with make-up and stayed away from her friends for weeks afterwards. She even avoided Julia and told her she wasn’t feeling well. She didn’t want to have to answer her questions. She didn’t want anyone to know how stupid she had been.
She was determined to forget everything.
And she had succeeded. After the bruises were gone, no one ever asked questions or wondered what had happened. Except Julia…and Annie simply kept avoiding her. She missed her friendship like crazy, but she had to cut her off. That was the only way she could forget, the only way she could avoid having to talk about that night, that dreadful night when Tim had taken her to the lake.
But, as the fall came, something started to happen to Annie’s body. It was like it had gotten a life of its own, like she had no control over it anymore.
She could wake up at night and suddenly be so hungry it felt like she was about to die if she didn’t eat. She would keep crackers and candy under her pillow, so her roommate wouldn’t wake up when she ate at night. She had a jar of pickles that she ate greedily. And then there was the extra weight. The nightly eating made her gain a lot of weight. And some nights her stomach would hurt. She even started throwing up in the mornings, and wondered if that was due to her strange hours of eating.
Finally, she went to the doctor and was examined. Her mother took her. She had come for a visit, and when Annie had thrown up for the third time while she was there, she suspected something was wrong.
“She’s gaining weight rapidly,” her mother told the doctor.
“Well, that’s not too odd, given her circumstances,” he said with a smile. “Congratulations.”
Annie’s mother shrieked. She went completely pale, then hid her face between her hands. “I feared it might be something like this,” she said with a trembling voice.
On the way back to the campus, her mother didn’t speak while driving. Not until she parked in front of the dorm. Annie felt sick to her stomach and a thousand thoughts went through her mind.
Was it Tim’s? There were others that night. Could it be from one of them?
Her mother turned her head and looked at her. “Listen to me. I don’t know who got you into this trouble,” she said hissing. “But either you get married, or you have an abortion. You hear me? Or you’ll never be able to set foot in our house again. You won’t be our daughter anymore.”
“But…but…”
Her mother turned her head away. “Fix this,” she said. “Or don’t come back home.”
And just like that, Annie’s life was changed forever. Standing in the parking lot, looking after her mother driving away, she knew nothing would ever be the same again. Her plan of becoming a teacher and going back to Windermere to teach at her old school, then marrying a nice guy and having a family was completely broken. Destroyed in a matter of seconds. She had no idea what to do, but she did know one thing. There was no way she was getting rid of the baby. She had heard stories of women not being able to conceive again. She was no killer. She could never kill a child. Born or unborn.
No way.
16
JANUARY 2015
THE NEXT MORNING, I watched the sun rise while sitting on my board. Emily had her own car that I had bought for her, and she took care of herself in the morning, so I took just the twins with me to my parents’ place to eat breakfast. Meanwhile, I decided to start the day my favorite way, in the ocean. My mother had told me she would take the kids to the school bus, which stopped right outside the motel.
It was one of those unbelievably gorgeous mornings, where the sun was allowed to rise on a cloud free sky. The water was cold at this time of year, the coldest it got in Florida. I know people in other parts of the country would laugh at me thinking sixty-nine degree water was chilly, but to me it was. You get used to it being in the eighties for most parts of the year. So, I had put on my wetsuit and was waiting for the next wave, while wondering about Laura Bennett. I couldn’t stop thinking about her and hadn’t slept much all night. I kept going back to the way the killer had arranged the fingers after he had separated them from her body. They had all been in a neat row and so carefully cut off, like he didn’t want to ruin them any more than necessary.
The waves rolled in in nice straight lines. They weren’t big today, but the wind was off-shore, and they were glassy and smooth as I rode them on my longboard. The wind blew the top of the waves off as they broke, and created rainbows in the rays from the sun. I drew in a deep breath and enjoyed every moment of it. To make it perfect, I spotted two dolphins not too far from me. They were chasing fish and making big splashes in the water. I could have stayed like this all day, just surfing and watching nature, but unfortunately, I had to get out and get to work before nine.
I caught one last wave and rode it to the beach, feeling the wind in my face and the thrill of the ride. I usually rode shorter boards, but on small-wave days like this, I enjoyed longboarding. I practiced my cross-steps and made it almost to the tip of the board before I reached the beach. As I came out of the water, I grabbed my board, then turned around and took one last glance at the beautiful scenery, as if to greet the ocean and say thanks before I ran back up and into the shower.
Surfing always made me feel cheerful, and I was still singing when I arrived at the station. A note on my desk told me the medical examiner’s office was done with the initial autopsy. I peeked into Weasel’s office and let her know where I was going, then grabbed one of the department’s cars and drove to Rockledge on the mainland.
The county had recently gotten a new District Medical Examiner, appointed by the Governor, and I hadn’t had a chance to meet him yet. It was very rare we needed their help. It was mostly when tourists committed suicide by jumping off cruise ships and ended washed up on our beaches. Or after bar fights when someone was stabbed. I had liked the former District Medical Examiner, Dr. Parker, but unfortunately, he had retired three months ago and they had to appoint a new one.
I parked in front of the office and walked up. I had put on a hoodie. The temperature today would stay in the high sixties, and I found it to be quite chilly. The sun would probably warm up during the day and make it nice, but for now, it felt good wearing a sweater. In January, you never knew what you’d get. It could go from the low sixties and windy out of the North to the low to mid-eighties in a day or two.
“Jack Ryder. I’m here to see Dr. Díez,” I said to the secretary behind the counter, while reading the last name from my note.
The secretary smiled. “One moment, please.”
I sat down and found my phone. I started going through my emails and answering as many as possible before a door finally opened and someone stepped out.
“Mr. Ryder?” a voice said.
I stood up. In front of me stood a woman in her mid-forties wearing a white coat. Her thick dark brown hair was gathered in a bun on the back of her head. She was short and slightly overweight. Her brown eyes stared at me.
“Mr. Ryder?” she repeated, and reached out her hand. I grabbed it. “I’m Dr. Díez, District Medical Examiner. Shall we take a look?”
17
JANUARY 2015
WE WALKED DOWN a flight of stairs and entered the autopsy suite.
“So, I guess a welcome is in order, Dr. Díez,” I said.
She turned her head and smiled “Thank you, Officer. And you can call me Yamilla.”
“Yamilla? That sounds Spanish?”
She walked to a table and put on plastic gloves and a mask. I did the same.
“Cuban,” she said. “But I was born in Tampa. My father escaped as a child, just before it was too late.”
“So, your mother is American?” I asked, as we walked towards the steel table where the covered body was.
Yamilla grabbed the white blanket and lifted it. “Yes and no. She was born on American soil, but has Cuban roots too. Both her parents are Cuban. We have a way of finding each other. Only she’s second generation, and like me, she has never been to Cuba.” She paused and glanced down. Then she pulled the blanket off.
I swallowed hard at the sight of Laura Bennett once again. Next to her, on another table, lay the cut off parts. Yamilla took in a deep breath.
“We don’t see many of these kinds around here.”
“We sure don’t,” I said, and looked closely at the body. “So, what can you tell me about her?”
“She was strangled to death. But not with his hands or anything tied around her neck. You see, there are no marks on her throat. “The Petechiae under her eyelids is a sign of strangulation. He didn’t use his hands.”
“He’s a gentle killer,” I said. I looked at the mouth. “There is no sign of aggression. No anger. Any marks under her upper lips?”
Yamilla smiled. “Someone has seen this before,” she said. She grabbed the upper lip and lifted it. “As you can see, she has marks here. Her lip was pressed against her teeth, leaving the marks. But there is nothing on the outside to indicate anything was pressed against her lips.”
“A pillow,” I said. “Leaves no marks.”
“Exactly. The killer went to great lengths to not leave any trace.”
I leaned in over Laura Bennett’s face and studied it closer. “Or, maybe he didn’t want to bruise her. He cares about her body, not about her.”
“That could be a theory,” Yamilla said.
“Anything else? A time of death?” I asked.
Yamilla looked at me from above her mask. “Between one-thirty and two in the morning.”
I wrote it on my notepad, thinking that eliminated Travis Connor, who had been seen at the Beach Shack from ten-twenty till it closed at two. The bartender told me he was positive the guy had stayed there till two, since he had trouble getting him to leave.
“Anything else?”
Yamilla paused. There was something.
“She was washed.”
“Yes. We determined on the scene that she had been in the shower,” I said. “There were still water drops and dirt on the sides of the bathtub. We figured she had been in the shower when the killer surprised her. That’s why I’m quite surprised at the time of death. I was certain it had been in the morning hours. I was sure she had gotten out of bed, then was taking a shower when the killer came in.”
“No,” Yamilla said. “She was washed after death occurred. She was washed with bleach. There is nothing on her body. It’s completely clean. No fingerprints. No DNA. Not even a drop of sweat, which there would be if she struggled for her life during strangulation. Her body would have released noradrenaline, a hormone closely related to adrenaline. Yet, I find no trace of anything on her. It has all been washed away.”
18
JANUARY 2015
I SAID GOODBYE to Dr. Yamilla Díez and hit the road again. Across the first bridge that took me to Merritt Island, the island between my beloved Cocoa Beach and the mainland, I couldn’t help thinking about this new information. The killer had washed Laura Bennett’s body after he strangled her. Who did that? Who washed her with bleach just before starting to cut her up? Was it some kind of weird ritual? Was it to get rid of DNA? Bleach was known to get rid of DNA. Bleach contained sodium hypochlorite, an extremely corrosive chemical that could break the hydrogen bonds between DNA base pairs and degrade a DNA sample. In fact, bleach was so effective that crime labs used it to clean workspaces so that old samples didn’t contaminate fresh evidence.
A picture of the killer had started to shape in my mind. The picture of a guy who took his time with his victim. A killer who enjoyed what he did and wanted the moment to last. He was also very controlled. He made no mistakes. This was no ordinary guy. On top of it, he was gentle with the victim’s body.
I passed the second bridge and drove into Cocoa Beach shortly after. Tourists and snowbirds were on the roads everywhere, not knowing where to go, cruising down A1A, slowing the traffic down.
At a meeting at the station, I told everyone what I had learned at the medical examiner’s office. They didn’t seem to buy into my idea of him being a gentle killer much, especially not Weasel, who looked skeptically at me from her seat at the end of the table.
“I still say we take a closer look at the husband. He’s the one with the best motive. It was the wife’s money. He’s getting everything. She was about to leave him. They lost a child, and he blames her for it. Lots of reasons to finish her off in an angry tantrum while drunk, then pretend to pass out.”
“But he doesn’t remember anything,” Joel Hall said. “When we got to the house and talked to him, he was completely out of it. Hardly knew who he was, let alone what had happened the night before.”
“How is the guy doing?” Weasel asked. “Can we interrogate him soon?”
“I was with him last night, Marty took the morning shift,” Jim Moore said. “I left the hospital at four in the morning, then slept till nine. Brandon Bennett was completely knocked out all the time I was there. But I can go call Marty and see if there is any news.”
