William Heffernan: The Dead Detective

The figure watched the trail that the two detectives entered. He stood in the shadows, his back to a line of trees, and he knew he was invisible, or as close to invisible as a person could be. Just one of many shadows in the preserve, blending into his surroundings like he had planned, into the foliage, the earth itself; completely unnoticed by anyone who could pose a threat. It was the way it had to be. He had become a lone branch on the spreading boughs of a large oak, a part of the whole, indistinguishable from all the rest. There for anyone to see and yet invisible. He fought off a smile. They would never find him unless he made a mistake, and he was much too smart to let that happen.

By now the detectives would have reached her body. And they would know. They would know who it was; know who had been made to answer for her sins. The small smile began to return but was quickly forced away. The dead woman was not the only one who had to wear a mask. Masks were necessary right now, very necessary. Another smile began to form but it, too, was driven away. Patience was also necessary. Just wait and watch. That is all you can do now. Wait, watch, and take pleasure in the fruits of your labor. But don’t let anyone see your pleasure. And soon you will be able to do even more.

Darlene Beckett was tall, statuesque, blond, and beautiful. She was a former bathing suit model, whose picture had appeared in various magazines, primarily those devoted to motorcycles and automobiles. At twenty-four she left modeling, married, and entered the teaching profession. Her first job was teaching health at a Tampa middle school. Two months into her new career she took a fourteen-year-old student home with her and had sex with him. The sexual encounters continued for several months. They took place in the home she shared with her husband of six months, in her school classroom, and in the backseat of her car. Like the good health teacher she was, she always provided the boy with condoms. Her undoing came when she performed repeated acts of sexual intercourse with the boy as his fifteen-year-old cousin drove her car along county roads and watched through the rearview mirror. The fifteen-year-old was later overheard telling a friend how he had watched this beautiful teacher “screw the shit” out of his cousin. And all the time she did it, he told his friend, “she kept watching me watch her, and she kept smiling at me.”

Darlene was subsequently arrested and after a year of legal haggling, the state’s attorney agreed to a modest plea bargain. To save the boy from testifying, prosecutors allowed Darlene to plead guilty to sexual assault of a minor and accept the following penalty: registration as a sex offender, surrender of her teaching certificate for life, the inability to live within 1,000 feet of a church, school, or playground, and three years of house arrest, which required her to wear an ankle monitor and to be inside her home by ten o’clock each evening.

Harry thought about the woman as he stared out into the pond at the side of the hiking trail. He had just completed a cell phone call to his captain, Pete Rourke, and had been told not to proceed with his investigation until he got further instructions. That meant Rourke was calling the chief of detectives, which meant that the crime scene would soon be overrun with brass. Harry wasn’t sure which he liked less, fighting off the media or fighting off the brass. He’d probably end up with both. The chance of the story leaking from a commander’s office was even greater than it leaking from the field.

“What are you thinking about?” Vicky asked.

“That nine-foot gator,” Harry said. “I finally spotted it.”

“Where is it?”

Harry elevated his chin toward the other side of the pond. “It’s in that patch of duckweed just opposite us.”

Vicky stared at the duckweed, a floating emerald-green plant so tightly formed that it makes the water it covers look like solid ground. Tourists have been known to step on it unawares and come up sputtering for air and covered in a green film. In the center of the weed bank she could just make out the gator. “He is a big boy,” she said. “I’m surprised he didn’t sniff out our corpse.”

“He would have by tonight,” Harry said. “And if he didn’t the vultures would have for sure.”

Vicky inclined her head toward the gator. “What do we do if he decides to come across the pond?”

“We shoot him.” Harry took in the slightly shocked look on her face and smiled. “Back when I was on patrol, I was sent out to back up a deputy who was trying to keep a four-footer from crossing a highway. Ten minutes later we were calling for backup again. There were five of us before it was all over, four deputies and an animal control officer. This little four-footer chewed up the pants leg of one deputy and beat the hell out of the rest of us with its tail. The animal officer finally got a capture wire around its jaws, but it still took all of us twenty minutes to wrestle it back into the retention pond it had crawled out of. And that pond was only fifty feet away.”

Vicky nodded her head. “I knew they were nasty, but alligator wrestling… I missed that little thrill during my time on the street.” She gave him an impish smile. “But you just got my vote, Harry Doyle. That nine-footer comes over here, we shoot it.”

The brass arrived twenty minutes later. Pete Rourke led them in, keeping everybody to the side of the trail. You’d think they’d know that without being carefully directed, Harry thought. But he knew this wasn’t the case. He had endured enough compromised crime scenes at the hands, and feet, of senior commanders to know better. Above squad commander, which was Rourke’s level, promotions were based purely on politics-who had most ingratiated himself in Florida’s political quagmire. And the sheriff’s department offered some of the biggest political plums to be had. At the county level the department commanded more jobs, more authority, and a bigger share of the budget than any other. That made the elected office of sheriff one of power personified. And promotions to the upper levels of his department were reserved for those who had served the sheriff politically and could be considered trusted allies. It was mostly a question of earned patronage rather than competence, although occasionally you found someone who was a clever politician and who also knew the job. But it was rare. In Harry’s view, the three men who Rourke now led into the crime scene did not fall into that rarified category.

Marching along directly behind Rourke was Kyle Rothman, the chief of department, a man who had jumped to that post from a lieutenancy in patrol after working tirelessly for the election of Dave Oberoff, the incumbent sheriff. Oberoff, himself, had never seen the inside of a patrol car. Prior to taking control of the county’s police force, he had headed one of the state’s largest real estate firms-a multimillion-dollar company that was now operated by his wife. Rothman supposedly ran the department for him. In reality, Rothman, a tall, slender, hatchet-faced fifty-year-old with fast receding black hair, contented himself with issuing the sheriff’s directives and planning press conferences that would make his boss seem like an “in charge” police executive, while assuming that the real cops under him would keep the department functioning. And that’s what Harry assumed he was doing here now-evaluating the crime scene for press potential-that and amusing himself by playing detective, a rank he had never achieved.

Following directly behind the chief was his right-hand man, Rudy Morse, whose main job was to drive the chief’s car and open his doors. Morse was in his late thirties, a weightlifter gone to seed, with a square head shaved in a high and tight military cut, who despite a questionable I.Q. had been hired into the newly created post of assistant to the chief. He did have one essential qualification: he was the sheriff’s nephew.