“Does this Ray have a criminal record?” Robyn asked. “Does he have a firearm?”
“Oh, shit. You may as well know. Hell, no, he doesn’t have a record. He doesn’t even have a Social Security card.”
Robyn frowned. “How old’s he? Are we talking about a kid?”
“An immigrant, or something?” Paul chimed in.
“No, no, he’s just weird. He showed up one day a long time ago and I gave him some work, and he’s been around ever since. Okay, I’ll admit I don’t even have him on my payroll. I just slip him some money now and then.”
“Mr. Miller, does Ray own or possess any weapons we ought to know about? Pistols, shotguns, homemade bombs?”
“Thermonuclear devices?” The joke was said bitterly, angrily. “Hell, I don’t know. I doubt it, he’s not the type. He’s not a fighter, he’s a hider.”
“A what?”
“A hider. Shy, I guess. Hell, if I looked like him, I’d be shy, too. He hasn’t even got what you’d call a personality. He’s a whatchucallit, hermit. The other men, they call him the hermit crab.”
When Robyn heard that, she cast a sardonic eye at the company owner. If ugly equaled shy, this guy ought to be living in a cave at the bottom of the ocean.
“So where’s his . . . shell?”
“Huh?”
“Where does he live?”
“Here. Like I said, I’m probably the only one’s ever been nice to him. I let him bed down on the boats. Wherever there’s an empty bunk.”
“I’ll bet the boat owners love that.”
“Like I tell them?”
“Can you take us to him?”
“I don’t know exactly where he is. I could call him into the office, I guess.”
Robyn looked at Paul, who said, “Okay.”
They followed Donor Miller back up to his office, where he picked up a microphone and pressed his thumb onto a black plastic switch. “Ray, come to the office! Ray Raintree, come to the office.”
Both of the detectives experienced a moment of dismay, thinking, What have we done? Far from luring their suspect to them, the loudspeaker page—which they heard booming out over the boatyard—might alert Raintree and drive him away. They were just about to panic, when they heard the outer door open.
“I nearly dropped my teeth,” Robyn Anschutz said, of the moment Ray Raintree walked into her line of vision. “It was him. My guy in the gaudy shirt, the one I’d singled out at the scene of the crime. I mean, we didn’t even have time to put our hands on the butts of our guns, and there he was, the very same guy! I’d told our photographers to take a picture of this guy. I couldn’t believe it.”
“You call me, Donor?”
The guy looked nervous. That was Paul Flanck’s second thought. His first was less a thought than an impulse: to step back, to look away from the face of the strange-looking person who stood in the doorway staring in at them from under the bill of a bright green baseball cap. Paul didn’t know about the astonishment his partner was feeling at that moment, the chill of recognition oozing down her spine. What he, himself, felt was the same sensation he’d got one time when he’d stepped on a palmetto bug in his bare feet in the dark. Palmetto bug is the euphemistic name that Floridians give to the large, flying cockroaches that infest their paradise.
Paul’s ex-wife had a saying about the criminals he arrested, whenever he showed her their mug shots. “Repellent creature,” she’d say, with an expression of superiority and distaste that annoyed him. More often than not, she’d add something like, “Slimy under those rocks, isn’t it?” It was true, but Paul had suspected that she also thought he was “slimy” for spending his life crawling under those same rocks to get those criminals.
Now, standing face-to-face with their probable murder suspect, Paul found himself thinking what his ex-wife would have said: Repellent creature, isn’t he?
Is it a man, or a boy? Paul wondered.
“How old are you?” he blurted out.
The guy shrugged, as if he didn’t know, but then he said in a voice that sounded high-pitched, strangled, and nervous, “Twenty-eight?”
“You tell me,” Paul retorted.
The fellow nodded, as if confirming his own age.
Both detectives thought he could have passed for much younger than that, even a middle school student. Was he lying about his age? But why would he? The laws on juvenile offenders started flashing through Paul’s brain, mixed in with images from the best books he’d ever read, The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. In those novels, there was a sickening and evil creature named Gollum, who had lived so long deep in the bowels of the earth that he had developed the appearance of a pale worm. It was an odd analogy for Paul to make, because this boy/man was actually tanned brown as dead leaves.
Later, Paul would try to make the analogy work, by saying, “There was a furtive quality about him, and nasty, like something that’s been hiding in the swamp. I was standing there hoping I wouldn’t have to pat him down, because I didn’t want to touch him. I thought I’d give him a thrill, let Robyn do the honors.”
“As if,” snorted his partner, when she heard that.
Subsequently, people as diverse as reporters, attorneys, and other prisoners would attempt to define what it was about Ray that gave most people the willies. None would ever be satisfied with their own explanation of the phenomenon. Mostly, they’d end up saying, “I can’t really explain it. You’d have to see him for yourself.”
“These are cops, Ray,” his boss informed him.
Robyn said sharply, “Would you excuse us while we talk to Ray, Mr. Miller?”
“You want me to leave?”
“That’s the idea.”
“I don’t think I ought to. What if he says something that incriminates my boatyard? I could get in a lot of trouble I don’t deserve.”
The man, or boy, in the orange and yellow Hawaiian shirt and the pink Bermuda shorts just stood in the doorway, looking in. He didn’t ask why they were there, or what they wanted from him. He didn’t say anything at all in that first interview unless they asked him a direct question.
“These cops want to talk to you, Ray.”
“Mr. Miller,” said Robyn. “Please.”
“You want me to stay with you, Ray?”
The man-boy shrugged, shifted his feet.
“You need a lawyer, Ray, you tell me, I’ll call somebody.”
Paul glanced at Robyn and his wry look said clearly, if silently, We’re losing control here.
Robyn took back control by Mirandizing their suspect.
“Raymond Raintree, you have the right . . .”
It startled her partner, but she made the unilateral decision and acted on it, because it seemed to Robyn that the other man, Donor Miller, was turning out to be a loose cannon. With him as a witness to everything that she and Paul did in the next few critical minutes, she decided they’d better not take any chances with this suspect’s civil rights. If he clammed up on them, she’d take the heat for it from all the Monday morning quarterbacks who would throw a fit at the early Miranda warning. But better that, she decided, than a jury who might be distracted by false claims of civil rights violations.
“Okay,” the suspect said, to the terms.
“You don’t want a lawyer?”
“No.”
“You understand that anything you say can be used against you?”
“Yeah.”
Donor Miller started to interrupt, and Robyn turned on him angrily and snapped, “Shut up. Now. You heard us read him his rights, you heard him say he understands. You heard him say he doesn’t want a lawyer and he’s willing to answer our questions. So either get out of here, or sit down and shut up. One more word, and we’ll slap you with obstruction of justice. Got that?”
The boat owner looked shocked, but he sat down abruptly in his office chair. Dramatically, he clapped his hands over his mouth, thus managing to further infuriate the detective.
“And all the wh
ile,” Robyn recalled later, “our suspect was standing in the doorway, with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bugging out. He looked like a goddamned dead fish.”
Unlike her partner, she doesn’t mind cussing out loud.
“I know the difference between them and me,” she says, mocking Paul’s reasoning. “And if other people don’t, that’s their problem.”
When they escorted their suspect away, Donor Miller shouted conflicting orders at him: “You need anything, you make them let you call me, Ray! You got a right to a phone call! You keep your mouth shut about my business, you hear me? My business is none of their goddamned business!” And his last salvo was, “I don’t want to find out some little kid got hurt ’cause of you, Ray!”
“Well, glory be,” Paul Flanck said, sarcastically to Robyn, over their suspect’s head. “I guess the man does care, after all.”
Their preliminary questioning—and all of their subsequent interrogations—were like nothing the detectives had ever seen before. Since the same basic questions were thrown at Ray many times over the next weeks, a transcript of one of the early sessions recaptures the flavor of all of them. They were remarkable for the manner in which the suspect admitted to almost all of the facts, while completely denying the obvious truths that those same facts implied.
“Ray, did you take out one of Mr. Miller’s boats last night?”
“Uh-huh.” (Yes.)
“Which one?”
“Six.”
“Boat number six?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where is it now?”
“In slip ten.”
“When did you take it out last night? What time?”
“I don’t know.”
“What time did you bring it back, Ray?”
“I don’t know.”
The suspect didn’t wear a watch, so this was possible.
“Where did you go with it?”
“I drove around the canals.”
“Specifically, which canals, Ray? Show us on this map.”
“I went up here . . . and here . . . and over here . . . and down there.”
“You went down the canal between Royal Palm and Palm Sunrise?”
That was the canal where Natalie McCullen lived with her parents, in the house owned by her father’s employer.
“Uh-huh.”
“What time were you there?”
“About midnight.”
It was five minutes to midnight when Mrs. Marjorie Noble called 911 to report seeing the black-and-white checked cab on her canal, the same canal where the McCullens were living.
“You admit you were there at midnight?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much time did you spend on that canal, Ray?”
“I just went up and came back down.”
“Did you stop at any of the docks on that canal?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one, Ray? Show us on the map.”
“This one.” A grimy, stubby finger pointed at the McMullens’ dock.
“What did you do while you were stopped at that dock, Ray?”
“I saw a little girl.”
When Robyn heard him admit that, she could only think, Oh, my God.
“What happened then, Ray?”
“She got in my boat.”
“How’d you get her in the boat?”
“Popcorn.”
There’d been a popcorn bag on the floor of the boat.
“She got in with you to get some popcorn?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No, I didn’t do that.”
This was said with complete impassivity. The questions seemed neither to surprise him, or upset him.
“Do you know she’s dead, Ray?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you kill her?”
“Huh-uh.” (No, said as a little boy might say it, defensively, turning the “uh” into two syllables: “Huh uh-uh.”)
“Who killed her, Ray?”
“I don’t know.” (Again, said as a child might say it.)
“Did anybody else get into the boat with you and the girl?”
“Huh-uh.” (No.)
“It was always just the two of you, you and her?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she get out of the boat and go off with somebody else, Ray?”
“Nope.”
“So she was only with you?”
“Uh-huh.” (Yes.)
“But you didn’t kill her?”
“Huh-uh.” (No.)
“You admit she got into the boat with you and there was nobody else with you, so tell us the rest of it, Ray.”
The answer to that was silence.
“Where did you take her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Show us on the map.”
“I can’t. I don’t know.”
Mrs. Noble had seen him on her canal at midnight. The helicopter pilot spotted him at the bridge at 2:30 A.M.
“Where were you for those two and a half hours, Ray?”
“I don’t know.”
“The last time you saw her, Ray, was she alive?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She was alive? You mean . . . she was still breathing?”
Ray shook his head: No.
“What? But she wasn’t dead? What are you saying?”
Again, a head shake for an answer.
“What the hell does that mean, Ray?”
Suddenly, Ray began to shout passionately, “She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t dead!”
That first time, they calmed him down by putting him in handcuffs and shackles. Both detectives felt relief when that was done, the kind of relief that comes from safely bagging a poisonous snake, or tranquilizing a rabid animal.
At that point, Robyn’s worst fear was that this creepy guy who had done everything but admit outright that he’d killed the child, was smarter than he looked. She had an awful feeling that he, already knowing he was trapped by evidence, was from the start building up his own insanity defense, based on the idea that he was so nutty he didn’t know right from wrong. In short, Robyn was afraid that she and Paul were dealing with a homicide suspect who only looked dull-witted, but who might be a hell of a lot smarter than they were, and several steps ahead of them already. It was one of the fears and ambiguities that many people after them would also struggle over, and few would resolve to their own satisfaction.
Holding Raymond Raintree in handcuffs, the detectives—Robyn specifically—summed up his own words for him.
“So, you admit you saw her, she rode in the boat with you, she wasn’t breathing at the end, but yet you also claim she wasn’t dead, and you didn’t kill her?”
Their suspect was panting, his head was down, he was staring at the floor, and he didn’t say a thing.
“That defies sense, Ray.”
Silence from him.
“That’s like saying you see the sky, but it isn’t there.” This was the first of a long line of metaphors and analogies that frustrated cops, lawyers, writers, and counselors would offer up to him. Others said, “That’s like saying your own hand doesn’t belong to you, Ray.” “You might as well try to say you’re not sitting here right now, Ray.” “How can you keep denying the obvious? It’s like describing yourself, but then saying that’s not you!”
Over and over, he would give the facts that admitted Natalie was dead, and then he’d deny they meant that. Again and again, he’d admit every detail that irrefutably implicated him and nobody else, and then every time he’d deny culpability. With his own words, he proved he kidnapped and killed her. With his own words, he denied everything to which he seemed to be confessing.
It should have been a confession, but it wasn’t.
It should have been a guilty plea, but it was not that, either.
“You know that book?” Robyn Anschutz says. “About how women are from Venus, and men are from Mars? I think Ray Raintree’s fr
om Pluto.”
When the suspect’s personal belongings were cataloged, it was a short list, but an incriminating one. There was a cheap guitar and three backpacks. One of them was full of comic books. One had a razor, razor blades, toothpaste, toothbrush, a package of guitar picks, and a package of strings. It also held a child’s red plastic shovel, and a small white envelope containing three baby teeth. Of course, the discovery of the teeth riveted and horrified the detectives, because of what it might mean: another murder, or two, or three? Were these three tiny ivory pieces the trophies of a serial killer?
The rest of the space in the second pack was crammed with a bizarre mix of prescription medicine with other people’s names on it. The third pack held his clothes. That trio of backpacks would have seemed strange enough, but what also piqued the interest of the investigators was what they didn’t find: no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no bank book or checks, no bills either paid or due, no telephone numbers, no insurance cards, no photos or mementos. In fact, there was no paper at all on him or among his meager possessions, except for the paper in the comic books.
“It’s just like the way he talks about the night of the murder,” Robyn would say to Paul. “It’s like he’s denying his existence, while he’s standing right in front of us.”
The Little Mermaid
By Marie Lightfoot
CHAPTER FIVE
The chief medical examiner of Howard County began the autopsy on Natalie Mae McCullen at about the same time that Detective Robyn Anschutz discovered Ray’s bloody T-shirt in the trash bin.
Dr. Adam Strough spoke the time into a microphone dangling above a silver table where her small body lay naked and apparently undamaged except for the mark of the fishing line pressed into her throat. Her body was ready for incisions.
Ordinarily, Dr. Strough might not have started an autopsy so promptly after receiving a corpse. Bahia Beach is a good-size city, and the medical examiner’s office often has several bodies lined up to autopsy at any given time of the day or night, especially in the months of the most sweltering weather when citizens are most likely to annoy one another. But on this day, Dr. Strough put everything else aside, for the sake of the little girl.