Detective

  At the eighth floor, as they emerged, the security guard, Cobo, stepped forward. “Do you gentlemen have business—” He stopped on seeing the Miami Police ID badges that Ainslie and Quinn had clipped to their jackets.

  “Unfortunately,” Quinn said, “we do.”

  “Sorry, guys! Sure glad you’re here. I’ve been stopping everyone who has no—”

  “Keep it up,” Ainslie told him. “Stay on it. Lots of our people will be arriving, but don’t let anyone by without identification. And we’ll want this corridor kept clear.”

  “Yes, sir.” With all the excitement, Cobo had no intention of going home.

  From the doorway of room 805, Officer Ceballos approached, treating the Homicide detectives with respect. Like many young policemen, his ambition was to shed his uniform one day for a detective’s plain clothes, and it did no harm to create a good impression. Ceballos handed over the security guard’s note identifying 805’s occupants, and reported that apart from the two brief inspections by Cobo and himself, the crime scene was undisturbed.

  “Good,” Ainslie acknowledged. “Remain on the scene and I’ll get a two-man unit to assist you. The press is already in the hotel and pretty soon they’ll be swarming. I don’t want a single one on this floor, and don’t give out any information; just say a PI officer will be here later. Meanwhile, no one else gets even close to room 805 without seeing me or Detective Quinn. You got all that?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Okay, let’s see what we have.”

  As Ceballos opened the door of 805, Bernard Quinn wrinkled his nose in disgust. “And you think I’ll miss this?”

  Ainslie shook his head dismally. The odor of death was a sickening, rancid smell that permeated every homicide scene, especially where there were open wounds and seeping body fluids.

  Both detectives recorded in notebooks their time of entry. They would continue making notes—about every action taken until the case was closed. The process was burdensome, but necessary in case their memories were later challenged in court.

  Initially they stood stock-still, surveying the awful scene before them—twin pools of partially dried blood and the mutilated, already decomposing bodies. Homicide detectives learn early in their careers that once a human body has ceased to live, the process of decay is extraordinarily swift; when heartbeats stop and blood no longer flows, armies of microbes soon turn flesh and body liquids into rotting offal. Ainslie remembered a veteran medical examiner who was given to proclaiming, “Garbage! That’s all a human corpse ever is, and once we’ve learned what we need to, the sooner we dispose of it the better. Burn cadavers! That’s the best way. Then if somebody wants to spread the ashes over some lake, fine, no harm done. But cemeteries, coffins, they’re all barbaric—a waste of good land.”

  Apart from the bodies in 805, the room was in a state of wild disorder, with chairs turned over, bedding disarrayed, and the victims’ clothes scattered around. The radio, on a windowsill, continued to play.

  Quinn turned to Ceballos. “That was on when you came in?”

  “Yes, and when the security guy got here. Station sounds like HOT 105.”

  “Thanks.” Quinn made a note. “My son listens. I can’t stand the noise.”

  Ainslie was beginning a series of calls on his portable police phone. Room 805’s telephone would not be used until after a fingerprint check.

  His first call was to summon a Crime Scene ID detail—identification technicians who were part of a civilian arm of the Miami Police Department. The ID team would photograph the crime scene and all evidence, including minuscule items that untrained eyes might miss. They would seek fingerprints, preserve blood samples, and do whatever else the detectives needed. Meanwhile, until the ID crew arrived, the crime scene would remain “frozen in time”—exactly as when discovered.

  One single blundering individual, merely walking or touching, could destroy a vital clue and make the difference between a crime being solved and a criminal going free. Sometimes even senior police officers, visiting a murder scene out of curiosity, compromised evidence; that was one reason why a Homicide lead investigator had total authority at any scene, no matter what his or her rank.

  More calls by Ainslie: a report to Homicide’s commander, Lieutenant Newbold, already on his way; a request for attendance of a state attorney; a plea to Police Headquarters for an information officer to handle the media people.

  As soon as the ID team was finished with the victims’ bodies, Ainslie would summon a medical examiner, whose first inspection should take place as soon as possible after death. ME’s were touchy, however, about being called too soon and having to wait while the ID people completed their work.

  Later still, after the medical inspection and the bodies’ removal to the Dade County morgue, an autopsy would follow, which Bernard Quinn would attend.

  While Ainslie was telephoning, Quinn used a rubber glove to unplug the loud radio. Next he began a detailed study of the victims’ bodies—their wounds, remaining clothing, articles nearby—all the while still making notes. He observed several pieces of expensive-looking jewelry on a bedside table. Then, turning his head, he exclaimed, “Hey, look at this!”

  Ainslie joined him. Incongruous and bizarre—laid out on the far side of the dead persons, and initially out of sight, were four dead cats.

  The detectives studied the inert creatures.

  At length Ainslie said, “This is meant to tell us something. Any ideas?”

  Quinn shook his head. “Not offhand. I’ll work on it.”

  In the weeks and months to come, every brain in Homicide would conjecture reasons for the dead cats’ presence. While numerous exotic theories were advanced, in the end it was conceded that none made sense. Only much later would it be realized that an important matching clue was present at the Frost crime scene, within a few short inches of the cats.

  Now Quinn leaned down, viewing more closely the crudely severed body parts. After a moment he gulped. Ainslie glanced across. “You all right?”

  Quinn managed to say, “Back in a minute,” and headed for the outer door.

  In the corridor outside, Cobo pointed to an open doorway down the hall. “In there, Chief!”

  Seconds later, Quinn disgorged into a toilet bowl the breakfast he had eaten an hour before. After rinsing his mouth, hands, and face, he returned to the murder scene. “Long time since I’ve done that,” he said ruefully.

  Ainslie nodded. The experience was one that Homicide officers shared from time to time, and no one criticized. What was unforgivable was vomiting at a murder scene and contaminating evidence.

  Voices in the hall signaled the arrival of an ID crew. A lead technician, Julio Verona, stepped inside, followed by an ID technician grade one, Sylvia Walden. Verona, short, stocky, and balding, stood still, his piercing dark eyes moving methodically over the scene confronting him. Walden, younger, blond, and leggy, whose specialty was fingerprints, carried a black box resembling a weekend suitcase.

  Nobody spoke while the two surveyed the room. Finally, Verona shook his head and sighed. “I have two grandkids. This morning we were having breakfast and watching this TV news story about a couple of teenagers who murdered their mother’s boyfriend. So I tell the kids, ‘This world we’re handing you has become a pretty rotten place,’ then right at that moment I got this call.” He gestured to the mutilated bodies. “It gets worse every day.”

  Ainslie said thoughtfully, “The world’s always been a savage place, Julio. The difference now is there are a lot more people to kill, and more who do the killing. And every day news travels faster and farther; sometimes we watch the horror while it’s happening.”

  Verona shrugged. “As always, Malcolm—the scholar’s viewpoint. Either way’s depressing.”

  He began photographing the dead couple, taking three photos of several groupings: an overall shot, a medium, and a close-up. After the bodies he would photograph other areas of room 805, the corridor outside, stairwells, elevat
ors, and the building exterior, the last including entrances and exits a criminal might have used. Such photos often revealed evidence originally overlooked.

  As well, Verona would make a detailed sketch of the scene, to be transferred later to a specialized, dedicated computer.

  Sylvia Walden was now busy, searching for latent fingerprints, concentrating on the doorway first, inside and out, where a perpetrator’s prints were most likely to be found. When entering, intruders were often nervous or careless; if they took precautions about prints, it was usually later.

  Walden was dusting wood surfaces with a black graphite powder mixed with tiny iron filings, and applied with a magnetic brush; the mix adhered to moisture, lipids, amino acids, salts, and other chemicals of which fingerprints were composed.

  On smoother surfaces—glass or metal—a nonmagnetic powder was used, of differing colors to suit varied backgrounds. As she worked, Walden switched from one type of powder to another, knowing that prints varied depending on skin texture, temperature, or contaminants on hands.

  Officer Tomas Ceballos had reentered the room and briefly stood watching Walden at work. Turning her head, she told him, smiling, “Finding good prints is harder than people think.”

  Ceballos brightened. He had noticed Walden the minute she arrived. “It always looks easy on TV.”

  “Doesn’t everything? In real life,” she explained, “it’s surfaces that make the difference. Smooth ones like glass are best, but only if they’re clean and dry; if there’s dust, prints will smear—they’re useless. Doorknobs are hopeless; the area’s not flat, too small for good prints, and just turning a knob smears any prints made.” Walden regarded the young officer, clearly liking what she saw. “Did you know fingerprints can be affected by what someone ate recently?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No joke.” After another smile, she went on working. “Acidic foods cause extra skin moisture and clearer prints. So if you’re planning a crime, don’t eat citrus fruits beforehand—oranges, grapefruit, tomatoes, lemon, lime. Oh, and no vinegar! That’s the worst.”

  “Or the best, from our viewpoint,” Julio Verona corrected.

  “When I make detective,” Ceballos said, “I’ll remember all that.” Then he asked Walden, “Do you give private lessons?”

  “Not normally.” She smiled. “But I can make exceptions.”

  “Good, I’ll be in touch.” Officer Ceballos left the room looking pleased.

  Malcolm Ainslie, who had overheard, commented, “Even at a murder scene, life goes on.”

  Walden grimaced, glancing toward the mutilated bodies. “If it didn’t, you’d go crazy.”

  Already she had located several prints, though whether from the killer or killers, or the dead couple, or belonging to hotel employees on legitimate business would be determined later. For now the next step was to “lift” each print onto a transparent tape that was placed on a “latent lift card.” The card, dated, signed, and the print’s location noted, would then become evidence.

  Julio Verona asked Ainslie, “Did you hear about our zoo experiment?”

  Ainslie shook his head. “Tell me.”

  “We got permission from MetroZoo and took fingerprints and toeprints of their chimpanzees and apes, then studied them.” He gestured to Walden. “Tell him the rest.”

  “Everything was exactly the same as with human prints,” she finished. “The same characteristics—ridges, whorls, loops, arches, identical points, no basic difference.”

  “Darwin was right,” Verona added. “We’ve all got monkeys in our family tree, eh, Malcolm?” The comment was pointed. Verona knew of Ainslie’s priestly past.

  There was a time when Ainslie—though never a fundamentalist—accepted the Catholic skepticism of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin had, after all, scoffed at divine intervention and denied mankind’s superiority to the rest of the animal world. But that was long ago and Ainslie answered now, “Yes, I believe we came that route.”

  What they were all doing, he knew—Walden, Verona, Ceballos, Quinn, even he himself—was distracting themselves, however briefly, from the ghastly horror that faced them. Outsiders might have viewed their behavior as cold-blooded; in fact, it was the reverse. The human psyche—even a conditioned Homicide crew’s—had limits on how much sustained revulsion it could handle.

  Another male technician had appeared and was working on blood samples. Using small test tubes, he collected samples of the pooled blood around each victim. Later these would be compared with blood taken at autopsy. If the blood groups differed, some of the pooled blood might be from the attacker or attackers. From appearances, though, it seemed unlikely.

  The technicians took fingernail scrapings from the Frosts, in case one of them had scratched an assailant, causing minuscule fragments of skin, hair, cloth fibers, or other materials to lodge under their nails. The scrapings were placed in containers for lab technicians to examine later. Then the victims’ hands were bagged for preservation, so that before autopsy they could be fingerprinted, and the bodies examined, too, for alien fingerprints.

  The Frosts’ clothing was inspected carefully, though it would remain in place until their bodies reached the morgue. Then, before autopsy, it would be removed, with each item sealed in a plastic bag.

  By now, with the additional people, a buzz of conversations, and continuous phone calls, room 805 had become crowded, noisy, and even more malodorous.

  Ainslie glanced at his watch. It was 9:45 A.M., and he suddenly thought of Jason, who, at that moment, would be in the school auditorium with the rest of his third-grade class, waiting for a spelling bee to begin. Karen would be in the audience with other parents, feeling anxious and proud. Ainslie had hoped to join her briefly, but it hadn’t worked out. It so seldom did.

  He turned his mind back to the homicide scene, wondering if the case would be solved quickly, hoping the answer was yes. But as the hours wore on, the biggest impediment emerged: despite a multitude of people moving within the hotel, no one had even glimpsed a possible suspect. Somehow the murderer or murderers had managed to get in and out of the room, and probably the hotel, without any attention being paid. Ainslie had police officers question all the guests on the eighth floor, as well as on the two floors above and below. No one had seen a thing.

  During the seventeen hours Ainslie was at the murder scene that first day, he and Quinn considered motives. Robbery was possible; no money whatever was found among the victims’ possessions. On the other hand, the jewelry left at the scene (and later appraised at twenty thousand dollars) could have been removed easily. And certainly a cash robbery could have been achieved without two people being murdered. Nor was the awful savagery explained, or the enigma of the dead cats. So a prime motive remained as elusive as a prime suspect.

  Initial information about Homer and Blanche Frost, resulting from calls to police in South Bend, Indiana, their hometown, revealed them as well-to-do but innocuous people with no apparent vices, family problems, or unsavory connections. Even so, to make on-the-spot inquiries Bernie Quinn would fly to South Bend within the next few days.

  Some facts and opinions did emerge from the medical examiner, Sandra Sanchez, who inspected the Frosts’ bodies at the scene and autopsied them later.

  After the two victims had been subdued, then gagged and bound, she believed they had been placed so that each could see the other suffer. “They were tortured while conscious,” Sanchez suggested. She believed the bodily assaults were done “methodically and slowly.”

  While no weapon was found at the murder scene, the autopsies showed deep knife cuts on both bodies, producing distinctive flesh and bone markings. And a terrible detail: flammable liquid had been poured into Mr. Frost’s eyes, then set alight, leaving charred cinders where the eyes had been and blackened skin around them. Beneath the woman’s gag, part of her tongue had been bitten off, probably a reaction to her agony.

  Dr. Sanchez, in her late forties, had a reputation for directness
and an acid tongue. She dressed conservatively in navy or brown suits; her graying hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Among her scholarly interests—as Bernard Quinn knew—was Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion that flourished in Dade County, Florida, with an estimated seventy thousand adherents.

  Quinn had once heard Sandra Sanchez affirm, “Okay, I’m not saying I believe in the orishas—the gods—of Santería. But if you believe those other tall tales—Moses parting the Red Sea, the virgin birth, Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, and a whale regurgitating Jonah—there’s at least equal logic in Santería. And what it does is offer soothing voodoo for troubled minds.”

  Quinn, aware that animal sacrifice was part of some Santería rites, wondered if the four dead cats were Santería-related.

  “Positively not,” Sanchez told him. “I’ve looked at those cats; they were killed by hand—almost certainly brutally. Santería animal-killing is done with a knife and with devotion, and dead animals aren’t abandoned like those cats. They’re often eaten at a feast, and cat is never on the menu.”

  Ainslie and Quinn concluded that initial results were far from promising. As Ainslie reported to Leo Newbold, “It’s a classic whodunit.”

  A whodunit—which, oddly enough, was exactly what detectives called it—was the kind of murder Homicide teams liked least. It implied a total absence of information about an offender, and sometimes about the victim, too. In such cases there were neither witnesses nor anyone to suggest paths of inquiry. The two opposites of whodunits were an “easy rider”—a case in which a murder suspect was quickly apparent, along with evidence to convict; and a “smoking gun,” easiest of all—where the guilty party was still at the murder scene when police arrived.

  In the end, long after the tragic saga of Homer and Blanche Frost, it was a smoking-gun homicide that would provide an apparent solution and close the case of the Frost murders.

  2

  Shortly before eight o’clock on Friday morning, three days after the Royal Colonial Hotel murders, Bernard Quinn walked from the Homicide offices to the civilian-staffed Identification Unit, also on the fifth floor of Police Headquarters. In an interior office where a half-dozen ID technicians worked amid computers and printout-laden desks, Quinn approached the young fingerprint specialist who had searched for latent prints at the Royal Colonial crime scene. Sylvia Walden was tapping at a keyboard in front of a large computer screen and looked up as he approached. Her long hair, he noticed, was damp, perhaps from the heavy rain shower that had also caught Quinn on his way to work.