They couldn’t point to a spot on a map where he had performed either the murder or the mutilation. They didn’t know what he had done with the pineal gland after he had removed it, and they didn’t know why he had taken it. And none of that mattered to the prosecutor, nor would it matter to the eventual jury.
As Franklin DeWeese would hammer home to them:
“The question is not, where did he kill her? It is not, how and where did he mutilate her body. It is not even, why did he do it? It is just: Did he do it? Did he kidnap her? Did he kill her? And the simple answer to those simple questions is: Yes, of course, he did! His own words convict him. The evidence in the boat convicts him. The eyewitness living across the canal convicts him. The testimony of the policeman in the helicopter convicts him. The footprint and the ashes on the Hatteras convict him. The footprints going up and down the bank beside the bridge convict him. The fingerprints on the fishing rod convict him, and a little girl’s bloody handprint on his shirt convict him.”
The prosecutor gazed from juror to juror.
“There is no reasonable doubt. No. Reasonable. Doubt. He did it. Nobody else did it. You will be so convinced of that indisputable fact that you will find it a straightforward matter to come to a straightforward verdict: Ray Raintree is guilty as charged in the first-degree felony kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Natalie Mae McCullen.”
“And that’s how it really was,” individual members of the jury said afterward. “It really was that easy to convict him. We didn’t bat an eyelash, not one of us. Guilty, guilty, guilty, twelve times, the first time we took a vote. We knew we didn’t have a lot of the facts, and the defense tried to fool us into thinking that was important, but we knew better. Mr. DeWeese told us right, and we made the right decision, based on the law and the evidence.”
It would not even matter that Ray’s employer, Donor Miller, would not be available to testify at the trial. Three days into the investigation—after Ray had been arrested and arraigned, and following the intensive search of the premises of Miller’s company—the chubby, grubby boatyard owner disappeared.
“We called him, and one of his employees answered the phone,” Robyn remembers. “They said he hadn’t been in that day, and nobody knew where he was, but they’d have him call us as soon as he got there. We didn’t hear anything for a couple of hours, so finally we went back out there.”
The detectives found everything just as they had left it: in an utter mess, which the young employees were still attempting halfheartedly to clean up. But they were slowing down their labors, as it was payday, and their boss wasn’t appearing with their checks in hand. Flanck and Anschutz found Miller’s ancient Oldsmobile convertible still parked in the marina lot, and his papers spread on his desk, as usual. Having learned where he lived, they stopped by a little condo where they found dozens of old movies on videotape, and musical instruments that looked even more ancient. The ratty place seemed to suit its owner well, but he wasn’t in, and none of his neighbors reported having seen him since the day before.
“We figured he made a bunk,” Paul Flanck says.
“A couple of the employees heard him arguing real loud with some man at the marina, and they figured it was a bill collector,” Robyn adds, to explain the “bunk.”
“Plus, he had made it clear he didn’t want anything to do with this business,” Paul adds. “He didn’t want to get blamed for anything, or sued for anything, and we figured he just said the hell with it, and got himself a new used car, and left town.”
Both detectives had been right there in front of Miller when he had seemed surprised to learn that his boat had actually been missing for a time from his boatyard.
They were convinced he had nothing to do with the crime, because why would he call to report his boat missing, if he were involved? Why summon cops to his marina, if he were guilty?
If Donor Miller had just upped and left, it meant that he had apparently abandoned a profitable, if not beautiful, little business. But they didn’t spend a whole lot of time attempting to locate him, for the same reason that they didn’t pursue the answers to some of the other mysteries of this case: They had their man, and enough evidence to convict him without any help from his employer.
Donor Miller was gone, vanished into thin air—or, rather, the thick, humid air of south Florida—but it didn’t matter to anybody except the employees to whom he owed a week’s pay. Nobody even bothered to tell Ray Raintree about it. Nobody cared where Donor Miller went, or what he did when he got there.
It just didn’t seem to matter.
The furor over the autopsy results had not even begun to die down when the Bahia cops stopped hedging about inquiries and came out in public with the truth and a plea:
“Who is this man?”
It wasn’t that their suspect didn’t tell them anything. He did, increasingly and at length. Ray talked a lot of people’s ears off, before he stopped talking altogether.
When Detectives Flanck and Anschutz asked him where he was from originally, he told them that he was born and raised in Brooklyn, to a family of barbers. He said that from the time he was big enough to sit up by himself in a barber’s chair, he went to work with his dad and two of his uncles on Saturdays.
It sounded so normal, they nearly dozed off as they heard it.
“Biggest day of the week for barbers,” he said, “’cause all the men were off work. Coming in for the trim they’d put off too long. Their wives were teasing them they looked like hippies. After they came to our barbershop, then they’d go get their cars washed and stop by the hardware store. Then they’d go home to watch a sports game on TV. Maybe barbecue for friends in the backyard that night, with their hair cut all nice, so their friends’d say, ‘Hey, who’s your barber?’”
Saturday sounded like an all-male, all-American day in Brooklyn to hear Ray tell it. He painted a word picture to the detectives of himself as a little boy listening pleasurably to all the man-talk.
“The women came in during the week,” he said. “Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, with their little boys, after school. Monday’s we were closed, of course. Barbershops and beauty salons are always closed on Mondays, you know.”
“What was the name of the shop, Ray?”
“Ray’s Barbershop,” he said, as if that should be obvious. “My dad was Ray, Senior, and he was the oldest of the brothers, so it was only right to name it after him.”
But then later, he told them the barbershop went back four generations, which would have placed its origins back around the Civil War, Robyn figured out. This genealogy made a certain gruesome sense to her, given the facts of the case.
Robyn said to Ray, “It seems to me that barbers used to be surgeons. Is that where you came by your interest in . . . surgery . . . Ray? Sort of part of the family history, you might say?”
He laughed, which made her skin crawl.
“Wait a minute. I thought you said it was named after your father,” Paul challenged Ray. “How could it be Ray’s Barbershop if your grandfather and your great-grandfather owned it, too?”
“Oh, they were named Ray. Raymond. All the men, all the fathers in my family are named that.”
“Your dad wouldn’t have been a senior then, would he?”
The suspect shrugged, as if the complexity of naming the generations was beyond him.
“I hear you used to be a barber,” Ray’s public defender said to him the first time she met him. This was before Leanne English’s law firm appeared on the scene.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s here,” she said, patting a transcript of his interview with the detectives. “I read it.”
“That’s not how it was.”
“No? How was it, Ray?”
“Sharecroppers. My folks were sharecroppers in Alabama. Near Mobile? We raised cotton.” He lifted his hands to show her his palms. “Still calloused, from pickin’, all the years I was little. We’d be out in the fields from sunup to night. That’s
why I never went to school. My parents always made me work beside them in the fields. We needed the money, otherwise they’d never have done that to me. You might think that they were terrible parents for working me like that, but they were great and we had a real good time together. My mom was a great cook and my dad was the strongest man in the county, maybe in the whole state. He made a lot of money, but we never got rich, because he always gave it away to other sharecroppers for their families, so they wouldn’t go hungry and their kids’d have shoes to wear in the wintertime.
“My mom always complained when he gave everything we made away, but she didn’t mean it, and I could tell, because she was always cooking for other people, taking them sweet potato pies and ham steaks and biscuits, like that.
“They’re dead now, my mom and dad, but they were wonderful people.”
His public defender sat staring at him.
“Were there any barbers in your family?”
“Nah, I just told them that because I don’t like them. My folks were sharecroppers, like I’m telling you.”
The lawyer took it hook, line, and sinker until she reported it back to her boss, who looked at her incredulously, and said, “Philanthropic sharecroppers?”
When a young assistant state’s attorney came to the jail to interview Ray in the watchful presence of his public defender, the young prosecutor started it all out by saying, “So which is it, Ray? Son of a barber? Son of a sharecropper? Son of Sam?”
“Hey!” objected the public defender.
“All right,” the suspect said, as if capitulating to the inevitable. He cast a sly smile toward his own lawyer, whom he had fooled so easily. “Okay, I’m just screwing with you guys. I’m tired of this. I’ll tell you how it really was, but then you got to leave me alone about my life. I mean, all that’s over, and I don’t want to have to talk about it all the time. What I told the detectives and what I told you”—he shot another sly look toward his lawyer, who stared impassively back at him—“was kind of both true. My dad was a doctor.”
Ray laughed, so that his teeth showed. They looked more like baby teeth than adult ones, his public defender thought. If he had ever used the toothpaste the cops found among his belongings, she didn’t see any evidence of it.
“He was a surgeon, like what barbers used to be. So that wasn’t so far-fetched, was it? And he was like a gentleman farmer, too.” His sly grin appeared again. “That’s where I got the sharecropper. But the truth is, we raised horses, mostly, but there was a few pastures of hay to feed them. You could say that’s related to sharecropping, right? And my dad really was a great man, like I said. He saved all kinds of kids’ lives. He was a bone doctor, what do you call it?”
“Orthopedic surgeon, Ray,” said the assistant prosecutor, with heavy sarcasm.
“Yeah, that. He fixed their bones and birth defects, and stuff.”
“And your mother,” said the prosecutor, in the same sarcastic tone, “she was a great cook, no doubt. A Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, maybe?”
“Well, if you’re not going to believe me,” Ray said, looking offended, “I’m not going to tell you anything else.”
“Come on, Ray,” said the prosecutor. “Tell me another story.”
“Where’d you come from, Ray?” they all asked him.
He had other stories, too, to “explain” himself. He spun them out one by one, as each previous one got shot down or the detectives’ patience wore thin. As each story grew more elaborate than the one before, they also seemed to move further away from anything resembling the truth.
4
Raymond
I feel my own patience wearing thin, so I put down the manuscript, and look at my watch: almost midnight, and I still don’t know anything new, except that I’ve done a fair job on those four chapters, and I feel okay about them. Unfortunately, a good literary effort doesn’t help the search effort. I get up and stretch, and go to my kitchen for a snack to see me through the next batch of pages. With a pot of smoked fish dip, a box of rice crackers, a knife, and a napkin, I return to my office to go through my notes.
Here’s a sarcastic quote from Paul Flanck about Ray: “There was the My Father Was a Fireman story. Dad Was a Doctor Who Saved My Life One Time. That was a good one. Then we had, My Mother Was a Doctor and My Father Was a World-Famous History Professor. I kind of liked that one.”
When she heard that, Robyn retorted, “No, the best one was, I Come from a Long Line of Attorneys. His great-grandfather was Clarence Darrow in that one, I believe, and the way he told it, you would have thought it was the god’s honest truth.”
But the truth is apparently what Ray is incapable of telling.
Each story sounds convincing for about the first five minutes of the telling, until it unravels over some obvious boner—like the number of Raymonds in his family. Then the detectives would say again, “Okay, one more time, Ray, whose little boy were you?” And their suspect would shrug and frown and appear to be trying really hard to remember something.
Robyn told me they thought they had a break when she telephoned Paul at home one night, woke him up, and asked him, “Paul? What kind of kid makes up stories about hero dads?”
“What?” And then the sleepy detective got it. “Adopted kids?”
“Yeah. Or kids whose dads have died.”
“And kids who hate their dads—”
“I think so. They fantasize about how they’re really adopted and their real dad is, like, an astronaut.”
“A rich astronaut.”
“A rich, handsome, football hero astronaut.”
“A rich, handsome, football hero astronaut who is desperately searching for the son who got away by mistake.”
“So, Robyn, are we looking for a Raymond Raintree who was adopted about twenty-eight years ago?”
Maybe they were, they agreed, but it was damn little to go on. For one thing, they didn’t even know if that was his real name. Or exactly how old he was. And they sure didn’t have a clue as to where he’d been born. By the time they hung up their telephones, they were both feeling as discouraged and frustrated as they were before Robyn got her bright idea to begin with.
According to my notes, it was about that time when Ray stopped spinning his tall tales. They kept asking him the same questions, but now he shrugged his skinny shoulders and said with a martyred air, “Nobody believes anything I say, so I’m not even going to try to tell you anything anymore.” This was before he stopped talking entirely; at this juncture the only thing he refused to utter was any more stories.
“I think somebody insulted him,” Robyn surmised at the time.
Paul disagreed. “Nah, I think he got bored.”
“Maybe.” For once, Robyn had conceded a point to her partner. “If we aren’t going to believe him, maybe it’s not fun anymore.”
I was there, to see Paul roll his eyes. “And don’t we just live to entertain Ray Raintree?”
“One of the problems with the situation involving Raymond,” Robyn Anschutz admitted, and I wrote down, “was that sometimes it seemed so absurd that we had a hard time remembering how serious it was, too.”
My own eyes are gritty with fatigue, but I think of the searchers who are a lot more weary than I am, and then I think of children all over Florida who will not be safe until Ray is captured.
I pick up my notes again, and read:
What they couldn’t get out of their suspect, they attempted to dig out of his meager belongings.
“The contents of those backpacks were intriguing,” Robyn said, “but they didn’t tell us a thing about who he really was, or where he came from.”
The detective wasn’t particularly surprised to find the comic books.
“Superheroes,” she scoffed. “Typical. These guys, these killers, they have this inflated idea about themselves. I’ve talked to psychiatrists about it. They call it ‘inflation,’ it’s like blowing a limp balloon full of hot air. These guys—their egos—are limp balloons. Sometimes their pecke
rs are, too, and they can get it up by acting out against weaker people. Low self-esteem doesn’t even begin to describe it.” She warmed to her theme. “And the way they see other people, that fits a comic book, too. We’re not real or three-dimensional to them, we’re just these pictures they think they can move around, stomp on, do anything they please.”
You’re so right, Robyn, I thought. I wouldn’t be able to use that wonderful pecker quote for my book, but I could use the rest of it. From Robyn’s own reading on the subject, she knew it was unfortunately true that psychopaths—if that’s what their suspect as—didn’t model themselves on the sterling virtues of comic book superheroes. It was only the power they craved. Psychologists might say it was a power over other people, because sociopaths/psychopaths lack any real power over their own wills, having wholly surrendered to sick compulsions.
I set those notes aside and pick up another pile.
The medicine the detectives found in one backpack had troubled them.
If Ray had been stealing other people’s medicine and swallowing it indiscriminately, his lawyers might have a stab at some kind of effective defense, if they could demonstrate diminished capacity.
“He was a regular little pharmacist,” Paul Flanck had told me. “There were a lot of over-the-counter pills, like cold medicine, the sort of stuff everybody has in their medicine cabinets, even on a boat. He had NyQuil, Sudafed, Robitussin, zinc lozenges, ibuprofen, you name it. But he also had prescription medicine for high blood pressure and asthma. We found antibiotics and vitamins, there were suppositories and inhalants. Stem to stern. We figured the guy was a galloping hypochondriac. If he wasn’t sick before he took all that stuff, he would be if he mixed them up.”