The organization of law enforcement bodies in the state of Florida is different from some other states. For one thing, there’s no state police in Florida. There’s a state highway patrol, of course, but their job is mostly what their name suggests: patrolling state highways. With no state police or state crime lab, a lot of authority devolves onto the sheriffs’ departments of each county. Each county runs its own crime lab, for instance, and in addition, the sheriffs’ deputies act as law enforcement for the smaller towns. But like Fort Lauderdale, Bahia Beach is large enough to support its own police department and to handle its own cases, from petty theft to mass murder.
The crime unit officers found important things at the scene.
But it was Paul who found the footprint on the Hatteras. And the ashes. And fingerprints on the fishing pole. And gouges in the ground where the perpetrator had dug in his toes to climb up and then dug in his heels coming back down. All of which would later be tied directly to the crime. And it was Robyn who sensed the truth, which would lead directly and with astonishing rapidity to the arrest of the suspect.
Knowledge of the murder of a child, and witnessing something like what the Williamses saw, tends to change people, sometimes dramatically. But as Paul says, “Hell of a way to learn it. I’d go back to being dumb ol’ me, if that brought Natty back.”
It’s bad enough, a parent’s worst nightmare, to be informed a child is dead when you know she’s been missing and you’ve been desperate for news of her. If any fate could possibly be worse than that, perhaps it was what Natalie McCullen’s parents faced that morning.
They didn’t even know she was gone.
Apparently, Natalie slipped out of the house on some private little adventure of her own. It must have been after her mom kissed her and put her to bed, which was around nine o’clock, on Monday night, June fifteenth.
She was a bold little soul, by all accounts. Unlike most children, Natalie was never afraid of the dark. Whenever she played outside at night, Susan or Anthony always had to “call” her many times by flashing the porch light on and off when the sun went down. “Natty would have stayed out and played all night, if we let her,” Susan says. “She always imagined she was born on a star.” The child was a little star to her family, a sparkler who lighted their days and nights, a child who never met a stranger, who was outgoing and daring as a puppy.
When the McCullens’ doorbell rang at 8:30 A.M. that dreadful Tuesday morning, Susan answered in her bathrobe, and found two detectives, a man and a woman, on her doorstep. They identified themselves, and then they asked her as gently as they knew how, “Are you the mother of Natalie Mae McCullen?”
“Yes, why, has she done something wrong? She’s only six!”
“Ma’am—we’re sorry to ask this, but do you know where your daughter is?”
“Of course, I do! She’s asleep in her room!”
“Would you please check, just to make sure?”
“Why?” Susan didn’t wait for their answer, however. Suddenly driven by the most overwhelming, sickening, soul-wrenching fear of her life, she fled from them, and ran down the hall to her daughter’s room.
They heard her scream, “Natty! Natty, where are you?”
On the front step, Robyn Anschutz took a shaky breath, and felt her eyes fill, and her mouth tremble. Her partner tightened his lips, and simply thought, Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
“Where’s my baby!”
Looking frantic and terrified, the mother ran back to face the police officers, who wished they could be anywhere but there, delivering any news but what they had to say next.
They told her that the body of a little girl had been found—they didn’t tell her how, not yet—and the child had a card in her pocket that identified her as Natalie Mae McCullen. They described her, and her clothing. They told her that they believed that her daughter—who she had thought was safely sleeping—was dead. They said her daughter’s body, if the child was Natty, was on its way to the morgue.
“It was,” Paul Flanck said later, “enough to make you want to quit police work, and start mowing lawns for a living.”
Making it even worse was the unavoidable fact that in the murder of a child the first suspects are always the parents. That meant interviewing Susan and Anthony McCullen during the first moments of the greatest shock and grief of their lives. It was very hard for either detective to believe that the beautiful, hysterical young woman standing in the doorway in front of them could so heinously have murdered her own child. “My baby, my baby,” Susan McCullen screamed, before she collapsed to the floor, moaning, crying, screaming, “no, no, no.” The muscular, good-looking young man who ran up behind her appeared so undone by the news of his child’s death that Detective Robyn Anschutz’s first impulse was not to interrogate him, but to hug him.
2
Raymond
“This is my courtroom!” Judge Flasschoen has put down her pistol and picked up her gavel, and she’s pounding and pounding on the wooden surface of the bench. “Order! There will be order in my courtroom!”
Nobody pays any attention to her now.
We’re all still angling to see what happened to the man she shot.
She sits down so hard that her chair rolls back to the far wall and slams against it, jerking her head so hard that her neck bones crack audibly into the microphone attached to her robes. She rubs the back of her neck, and withdraws into a display of silent judicial dignity while chaos explodes around her.
I get a quick glimpse of Ray, motionless below her bench.
Through the crowd, I see Leanne pick herself up and hurry to his side, where she kneels, and screams, “For god’s sake, somebody do something! Call 911! We need a doctor!”
I flinch as the double doors at the back of the courtroom fly open and bang against the walls. Here come five Howard County deputy sheriffs surging in. Two of them, in the dark green short sleeve uniforms and gold badges of the department, take up posts at the back, not far from me, to keep people from leaving. Another one runs down the center aisle, and yells out, “Ladies and gentlemen, sit down and be quiet. Quiet! Take your seats. We’ll get you out of here as soon as we can, but we need your cooperation right now.”
Slowly, reluctantly, we spectators follow his orders, although within moments we’re popping back up to our feet again, and the noise level rises to its previous roar.
Word filters back through the crowd that Ray is alive, but unconscious. When I hear that, I start inching my way forward, hoping no deputy will stop me. I want to see for myself, for my book.
“Excuse me. I need to get through. Thank you.”
People are obliging, and move aside. A few do a double take, as if they’ve recognized me from my book jackets, or from magazine or television interviews. One of them even says, “Aren’t you—?” and I nod, smile, and keep moving.
I get almost up to the front, and there he is—
I stop in my tracks, feeling weak-kneed at the sight of Ray Raintree lying facedown on the courtroom floor. For all the times I have written about murders, this is the first time I’ve seen an actual shooting. Cold bodies in morgues are one thing—I have viewed enough of them to get almost used to it—but a wounded, bleeding person I know . . . this is scary. I don’t see any blood, so it must be soaking into his flesh and his clothes. His attorneys dressed him up in a white shirt, and dark trousers and a tie, trying to make him look normal. His black running shoes—they never talked him into dress shoes—lie still against the hardwood floor.
Maybe he’s dead, and not just wounded?
I glance to my right, looking for Tony McMullen, and I see him sitting down among all the frantic people who are standing up around him. Natty’s young father looks shell-shocked. As I watch, he leans over and puts his head between his legs, as if he’s on the verge of passing out.
“Marie! Come on up here!”
I jump at the sound of my own name.
It’s Leanne’s paralegal, Manny Meade, calling to me.
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Besides the judge and a few jurors, Manny is the oldest person on the other side of the railing that separates the players from the spectators. Jowly, overweight, always disheveled in flamboyant baggy suits, Manny looks more like a Damon Runyon character than a paralegal. I haven’t yet figured out a tactful way to say that in my book, and I haven’t decided if I really need to divulge that he is an ex-con who served time for fixing sporting events. As a former felon, Manny can’t be admitted to the bar, but Florida law lets him get this close to it. He is sixty-three years old, a war veteran. “Oldest paralegal south of the panhandle,” he likes to brag, although I doubt that’s true.
I slide through the opening that he provides for me by shoving open the half-door through which witnesses come and go.
“Manny!” I hear adrenaline in my voice, and tamp it down. It feels unseemly to be so bloodthirsty for details. “How bad is Ray hurt? Is Leanne all right?”
“Don’t know, Marie.”
I turn to ask Leanne’s cocounsel, Jaime Suarez, who shrugs, and says “You know as much as we do, Marie.”
“Why aren’t you guys up there helping her?”
“Leanne’s got it under control,” Manny claims.
“I don’t want to touch him,” Jaime says, with an expression of distaste. “Slimy bastard.”
If his client could hear that, there’d be a malpractice suit. In an early draft of a chapter for my book I described Jaime as “tall, slim, well dressed, and fit-looking, a man with the deadpan expression of a prisoner of war, and the cynical mouth of a street thug.” Then I erased it, because it’s not my style to insult my subjects.
“Don’t quote me, all right?” he adds, quickly.
“I won’t, if”—I smile teasingly—“you’ll tell me what Leanne said to Ray.”
“When?”
“Right before he went off. She leaned over and whispered something into his ear. What’d she say to him?”
“Did she say something?” Jaime glances at his paralegal, who is at least thirty years older and an equal number of pounds heavier than he. Some people claim there’s a similar difference in their IQs, with the advantage going to the older man. That’s another observation I erased after I wrote it down. “Did you hear her say anything, Manny?”
The response is a jowly head shake: no.
“She put her arm around him,” I remind them, although I realize they may not have seen it. “And she said something to him. And a couple of seconds later he went ballistic. You don’t know what she said?”
Manny mutters comically out of the side of his mouth, “She said, ‘Pay me before the first of the month, Ray.’”
I smile at his irreverent joke at their client’s expense.
Jaime inclines his head toward the opposite side of the aisle. “So, Marie, you going to make them look like heroes, and us like jerks?”
“Marie never makes anybody look bad,” Manny corrects him. “Except for the killers.” He winks at me, before turning back to his young boss. “She isn’t just a pretty face, she’s fair to everybody she writes about. Don’t you read her books?”
“Why, thank you, Manny.”
I smile at the flattery.
“Who’s got time to read about crime?” Jaime sounds aggrieved. “Besides, why would I want to pay money to see other lawyers get all the glory?”
Manny leans close to me, and says in a mock-confiding tone, “Jaime is only in the law to serve humanity.”
“A man of principle, clearly,” I reply.
“Yeah.” The young man in question snorts. “Humanity. Like, Ray Raintree is human. Not.”
This time his paralegal shoots a look up at him like a stern father warning a smart-mouthed son.
Jaime clamps his jaw, and shuts up.
“How can he be unconscious?”
I turn toward the skeptical voice which uttered those words, and see a gray-haired woman right behind the defense table. She’s somebody I’ve noticed at the trial every day. When I asked a deputy who she was, he informed me that she’s a “regular,” a trial junkie who shows up at the courthouse for juicy cases.
“It was just a little-bitty twenty-two caliber gun,” she says to me, with a dismissive wave of a hand. “I’ve got one of those for scaring squirrels away from my bird feeders. I don’t think it could even kill a sparrow. You can’t even bleed to death from a little-bitty ol’ twenty-two caliber bullet wound. So how can he be unconscious?”
Manny says, “Maybe she shot him between the eyes?”
Jaime and the woman both laugh, but then the woman leans closer and says to me in a loud whisper, “I know what Ms. English said to him before the judge shot him. Do you want to know for your book? What she whispered to Ray? After the verdict? She said, ‘Don’t piss off the judge, Ray, she always packs a pistol!’”
“Thanks,” I say, and write it down, feeling a bit shell-shocked myself.
I don’t know whether to believe her, but I take down her name, making a show of spelling it right. She looks pleased and gratified. “I just love your books,” she confides, and seems eager to engage me in a conversation about them.
But just then, the door to the little courtroom elevator slides open and two paramedics in navy blue uniforms step out, carrying a gurney and medical equipment. It gives me a tactful excuse to turn away, and start taking notes again. When the paramedics eventually lift Ray onto the gurney and carry him to the elevator, he looks completely out of it. His head lolls, turning our way, and it’s obvious that she didn’t shoot him between the eyes. There’s a splash of blood in the middle of the white shirt. Small bullet or no, he certainly appears to be hurt and unconscious. Within moments, they’ve got him into the elevator, along with Leanne English and a deputy sheriff.
The elevator door slides shut.
The show is over.
“Good-bye, Ray,” Manny Meade intones.
“Good fucking riddance,” Jaime Suarez echoes.
A spectator begins to clap, and the woman behind us calls out, “Judge, Judge!” The applause swells, and soon it seems as if the whole courtroom is calling out for Her Honor. Judge Flasschoen rises to her feet. She lifts her arms. The sleeves of her black robe fall back, revealing a black strap attached to her left forearm, which must be where she secured the gun. She bows to the crowd, and they stomp, cheer, and whistle while sheriff’s deputies vainly attempt to establish order.
During the celebration, I scribble a note about how unnaturally small and skinny Ray looked on the stretcher. He could pass for a child from a distance, or for a teenager up close. For an eerie moment, just as he was being lifted, I could have sworn that his eyelids opened a fraction, and that he looked directly at me.
When I look up, I find that the state’s attorney, Franklin DeWeese, is staring at me with an unreadable expression on his handsome face. My heart does an embarrassing little skip, which makes me glad that hearts are not visible from the outside. I catch myself staring at his mouth, and I quickly shift my gaze to his eyes, which still doesn’t make objectivity any easier.
I step closer to him, so he can hear me.
“Congratulations, Franklin.”
“Thank you, Marie. You on their side now?”
“What? Just because I’m standing here?”
It amazes me, what people assume about my biases, when I try so hard not to show any at all.
“What are you going to do about the judge, Franklin?”
“If it were up to this crowd, I’d have to give her a medal.”
“Well, Florida is a death penalty state, she just tried to beat you to it.”
He smiles at that. “Even our electric chair is more efficient than this, Marie.” The Florida electric chair is infamous for shorting out at the worst possible time. “We don’t usually wound them first and kill them later.”
“Where will they take him?”
“You want to see?”
“Yes!”
“Come with me, girl, we’re outta here.”
&nb
sp; The prosecutor grabs me by an elbow, and instinctively, I move away a little. He drops his hand. More subtly this time, he steers me toward the same courtroom elevator where Ray, the paramedics, a deputy, and Leanne English have just gone down.
Side by side, we wait in front of the door, where we see reflected in its metal surface a black man in a charcoal suit and a blond woman in a pale summer dress. Our glances meet in the metal, but quickly slide away from each other.
The elevator thumps to a stop on our floor.
When the door finally slides open again, and we see what’s inside, I start to scream. The same sheriff’s deputy who rode down is now slumped inside of the elevator. He’s a young man, can’t be more than thirty, but now he’s wild-eyed and there’s blood pouring from a terrible wound in his face, and he’s crying.
The Little Mermaid
By Marie Lightfoot
CHAPTER TWO
Once upon a time, Susan and Tony McCullen felt blessed.
They were young, still in love, the parents of a beautiful daughter and sweet twin boys. They got along well with their families. Tony had a decent job with a good future. To top it off, they lived in one of the nicest houses in Bahia Beach. Tony thought it was the deal of a lifetime, because they hadn’t had to pay a cent for it.
“My boss owns it,” Tony explained to anybody who was blunt enough to inquire how an auto parts salesman and a grocery store cashier could afford a home in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in Bahia Beach. “He comes down here a lot, but his wife can’t. It’s hard for her to get away. They have a lot of kids in schools all over the world, so she likes to stay in one place, so their kids know where to call home.”
So here was this beautiful, four-bedroom, Florida-style ranch, complete with a three-car garage and a swimming pool, on one of the high-dollar canals in Bahia, just off the Intracoastal. It was an elegant neighborhood, where royal palm trees marched in even, towering rows down both sides of the street and where homes sold in the high six figures, and more. Tony’s boss didn’t want to sell it, but he didn’t want to rent it to strangers, either. So he approached his salesman Anthony McCullen and said to him one amazing day, “Tony, would you like to move your family into my house?”