Suitable for Framing Read online

  “It’s all right, it’s all right.” I dropped to my knees, crooning. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” Her thin blanket was scorched and a tiny flailing arm was red and blistered, probably by the car’s muffler or catalytic converter. No bleeding, no obviously broken bones. She was wailing loudly, a good sign. Afraid to pick her up, I tried to make her comfortable in her seat.

  Her mother was lying silent on the pavement, legs splayed in a terribly twisted position, bones obviously broken. Lottie and an older woman hovered over her. I searched faces in the growing, babbling crowd and shouted.

  “Did anybody call Nine-one-one?” Blank, shocked expressions.

  “They’re on the way! On the way!” A young black security guard was barking into his radio. Waving his arms, demanding that people stand back, he averted his eyes from the dreadful sight on the pavement, trying to direct traffic around the scene and clear a path for rescue.

  Lottie gripped my elbow. “She’s got a pulse,” she muttered, her face white. “The mother’s still alive, but I don’t know for how long. Your keys,” she demanded, twangy voice flat.

  “The keys? We can’t follow them, they’re long gone.”

  “Your keys,” she repeated, her outstretched hand remarkably steady. “My cameras.”

  Of course. I tossed her the car keys and she took off at a dead run.

  Swallowing hard, I fished a notebook from my purse. There was a fire station just a mile away, and I prayed that rescue was not tied up elsewhere. I enlisted a motherly middle-aged woman to keep anyone from touching the screaming baby until help arrived.

  The scene was a mess. A plastic baby bottle crushed on the pavement next to the mother’s scuffed left tennis shoe, laces still neatly tied. Her purse spilled, contents scattered over a wide area. Her right shoe, fifty feet from its mate, between a diaper bag with tire tracks and a Raiders cap.

  Cops and paramedics arrived fast, though the wait seemed like forever. It always does in real emergencies. The mother’s right arm was also fractured, white bone protruding. Blood trickled from her mouth. Air rescue had been dispatched. She and the baby would be airlifted to the county hospital trauma center. No rush to move the toddler. No hurry when the next stop is the morgue.

  “They took my fucking Trans Am,” the agitated young man in the muscle shirt blustered to the first cop on the scene. “They took my fucking car! Look what the hell they did!” He gestured angrily toward the chaos. “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this!”

  His name was Arturo, and he noisily complained that be had just put fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of work into the car. The cops took his car’s description and plate number, then issued a BOLO: Be on the lookout.

  “They went west on One hundred sixty-third Street,” I offered. “They could be on the I by now.” The Interstate and the Palmetto Expressway were nearby, with Broward County and downtown Miami just minutes away. They could be anywhere.

  “Street punks. Stinking little bastards,” Arturo was saying. “Son of a bitch! They got my Trans Am. There’s his hat!” He pointed at the Raiders cap. “That hat belongs to one of them.”

  After a workout at a mall exercise club, Arturo explained, he had stepped outside and seen a trio of street kids, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, breaking into his car. He shouted as they piled inside and hotwired the car as he bore down on them. He was fast, but they were faster.

  We had seen only two shadowy silhouettes behind the dark-tinted front windows. But Arturo said there was a third; a skinny kid had scrambled into the backseat.

  The car’s engine had sprung to life with Arturo only a few strides away. In a last desperate effort to stop them, he had heaved his gym bag containing a set of ten-pound weights. The windshield broke and the driver reacted by slamming the car into reverse, into the woman and her children.

  “They gonna be okay?” Arturo had simmered down, voice subdued, suddenly comprehending something much more tragic than a stolen car. “Look at them.” He stared wide-eyed at the victims. “They just left them, like roadkill. You don’t drive off and leave an animal in the street like that.”

  The woman, now surrounded by medics, must have heard Arturo’s shouts and tried to steer her kids out of harm’s way.

  “You a witness?” the cop asked me.

  “To part of it.” The young mother replayed her airborne acrobatics slowly in my mind, churning my stomach. “She went over the top of the car, and they hit her. Dragged her.”

  “Accounts for the road rash.” His stolid face remained impassive. “She alone with the two kids?”

  I nodded. “We had just seen them in the mall.”

  The lot could not be cleared because many of the cars belonged to moviegoers inside the mall’s triplex theater. Police blocked 163rd Street instead, so the chopper could touch down in the roadway.

  With a mounting sense of dread, I studied new faces in the still-growing crowd. What had she said? “Time to go meet Daddy.”

  He must be on the way or waiting somewhere, checking his watch, expecting his family. My stomach knotted in sympathy for this stranger whose life was about to change forever.

  Detective Bill Rakestraw had arrived and was removing his Rolatape, a digital tape measure on wheels, from the trunk of his unmarked car. He wore a grim expression and department-issue coveralls, navy blue, with MIAMI POLICE on the back.

  “Britt. How’d you get here so fast?”

  “I didn’t I was here when it happened. Lottie too. We just stopped for some yogurt, saw this woman and her—”

  “Is this what they say it is?” His thin, sharp face was somber behind the bristly mustache.

  “Yeah,” I said miserably. “Kids.”

  I know how he reacts to fatalities involving children. A tough cop, he is also a family man and nearly quit traffic homicide after handling the hit-and-run death of a nine-year-old bicyclist the same week that a three-year-old swung open the back door of the family car and tumbled into an expressway fast lane. Two so close together seemed overwhelming.

  There are many sad jobs in police work. Rakestraw has one of them. He investigates fatal accidents. Whenever his beeper chirps, somebody is dead.

  My own beeper, clipped to my purse, began to sound and I darted into the mall to call the city desk.

  It was my day off, but that never stopped Gretchen Platt, the editor from hell.

  “Britt, we have a report of some kind of hit-and-run involving pedestrians at the—wait a minute, let me see here—the Hundred and sixty-third Street Mall. Can you check it out? See if it amounts to anything.”

  “It does. I’m here, at the mall. A mother and her two babies. Some kids backed a stolen car over them at about forty-five miles an hour. They got away. It’s awful, Gretchen. They’re working on the woman now.”

  “How many dead?” Bright and officious, her voice had a distant quality.

  “One little kid, maybe the mother.”

  “I’ll send photo.” Her businesslike tone never changed. Did this woman have a clue as to what was happening?

  “No, Lottie’s here too. She’s shooting a lot of stuff.”

  “Excellent. We’ll need you to write for the state edition.”

  Rakestraw had talked to witnesses and was now on hands and knees inspecting the asphalt where the stroller had gouged the pavement. That would help determine the point of impact.

  “Got anything?”

  “Just starting to document the physical evidence,” he said slowly. “A busted tail light.”

  “How did they get into the car? The owner said he locked it.”

  “Looks like they busted a window. Probably used a spark plug.”

  Spark plugs are convenient tools for thieves. Their porcelain tops will crack car windows, which can be easily pushed in without the shatter of broken glass. Kids wear them on leather shoestrings dangling from their necks or belts. Some pride themselves on spitting spark plugs with
enough force to smash a window. Whatever happened to innocent times when kids were content to see who could spit seeds the farthest?

  “And it was a GM.” The detective shook his head. “The GM steering column is the lifeblood of thieves.”

  A patrolman sent to follow the stroller scratches in the roadway reported back, his words tinny on Rakestraw’s walkie. The driver had pulled up on a curb three blocks west of the center. The front-seat passenger had jumped out and yanked the stroller from beneath the car, witnesses said. It was still there where they had left it.

  Rakestraw instructed him to hold the scene until he got there. “If we’re lucky we may get a print off it,” he said. “That baby was saved because her mother kept her strapped in her car seat. It absorbed the impact, exactly what it was designed to do.”

  His job was to painstakingly reconstruct exactly what happened in those terrible split seconds. The physical evidence, witnesses’ stories, and information gleaned from injuries would all fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He measured skid marks, the width of the road, and the location of the driveway, meticulously stepping off paces as he rolled the tape to the closest cross street. Scene diagrams drawn to scale, site sketches, and photographs would be provided to the state attorney’s office for use in a prosecution—if the guilty parties were ever caught.

  I retrieved my keys from Lottie, who was shooting the medics’ feverish work, and drove the three blocks to where the stroller had been found.

  A lone police officer guarded the mangled bit of evidence, left in the gutter in front of a small dry-cleaning establishment. In the traffic on his walkie, I heard the mother referred to as a “possible forty-five.” A dead body.

  Cops and medics are sometimes wrong, I thought. Our new trauma center literally plucks patients back from the dead. I thought of the young police officer shot in the head by a deranged army deserter. All but the trauma team presumed him dead. No way he could survive, a weeping colleague told me at the crime scene. Wrong. He will never be a policeman again, or the man he once was, but he is alive.

  She’s young, I told myself, unlocking my car to return to the mall. Young bodies are astonishingly resilient, and she has lots to live for. A white Buick stopped alongside. A man about thirty, wearing a white shirt, his tie loosened, rolled down his window. “What happened?” he asked, staring past me at the patrol car and the tattered strip of yellow canvas caught in the crumpled metal framework.

  “An accident,” I said lightly. I am usually impatient with gawkers who stop to eyeball the misery of others. I have an excuse to be there; it’s my job. But something about his voice, or maybe his big eyes and curly hair, suggested he might be more than just a curious passerby.

  “What kind of accident?” His tone became more urgent.

  I stepped away from my car and approached his. If he was who I suspected he was, I didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

  “My little daughter has a stroller like that one,” he said.

  Fear had begun to grow in his eyes. He gripped the steering wheel.

  “There’s been an accident over at the mall,” I said.

  “At the mall?” He looked confused. “How did that get here?”

  “It was dragged under a car. But I think the baby is fine,” I quickly added.

  “My God! How could she be?”

  “She flew out, in her car seat,” I said gently.

  He looked numb.

  “There are a lot of baby strollers. This one probably isn’t yours.” I tried to sound reassuring.

  He didn’t seem to hear. A car honked behind him. He didn’t seem to hear that either.

  “I was supposed to meet them at the mall exit by the bus stop.” His voice was controlled, as though trying not to panic. “They weren’t there yet, so I came to pick up the dry cleaning. I’m going back for them now.”

  “Who were you picking up?”

  He glanced sharply at me, as if wondering who I was. “Britt Montero,” I said, “from the Miami News. I’m covering the accident.”

  “My wife, my little boy, and my baby girl. They’re at the mall,” he repeated.

  It was him. Cringing inwardly, I dug in my pocket for a business card and handed it over.

  “I saw a lot of flashing lights inside the parking lot when I went by.” He stared past me, at the policeman. “I kept going.” A terrible awareness was overtaking him.

  “They may have been involved,” I said quietly. “If there is anything I can do to help, please call me. Stay here, and I’ll ask the officer to notify Detective Rakestraw. He can give you all the details.”

  “No,” he said, suddenly moved to action. “I’m going back there. My wife must be scared to death. The baby, and Jason—”

  “No, wait,” I said, as he shifted into reverse. “Don’t. It’s better if you stay here and—” But he was gone.

  Tires squealing, the Buick shot across two lanes of traffic to turn east, back toward the mall.

  “He doesn’t know,” I told the patrolman, who had left his car and joined me. “That’s the husband and father of the victims.” He radioed Rakestraw that next of kin was on the way, scared and unaware.

  Traffic had snarled into a worse tangle back at the mall as heavy chopper blades beat against the growing dusk, rising slowly, hovering noisily over the roadway. The man who had been driving the Buick sat in the passenger seat of Rakestraw’s unmarked. The car had been repositioned so the occupant could not see the accident scene. When Rakestraw emerged, clipboard in hand, I approached him. “He’s the husband?”

  The detective nodded and asked an older policeman to join the man in the car. “I don’t want to leave him sitting there alone,” he said, turning to me. His deep-set eyes, shadowed and weary, flicked to his notes. “Name is Jason Carey.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “He wanted to know where his wife was.” Rakestraw glanced toward the darkening sky, which had swallowed the flashing lights of the chopper. “They were just taking off when he got here. I feel so sorry for the guy. Gave him what I could. Told him his boy had expired. That his wife is critical and on the way to the trauma center with the baby. I think the little one will go to the ER and be admitted. She looks like she’ll be all right.”

  “Think the father will?”

  Rakestraw shook his head. “He’s totally lost. It takes them awhile to comprehend what you’re saying.”

  We stood wordless in the gloom.

  The detective left to resume his work. Only in his thirties, his shoulders looked stooped.

  A huge fire engine rumbled up, slowly angling into place, back-up signal bleating, to light the area for the investigator and hose away the blood. The medical examiner’s wagon followed. The routines that attend violent death were beginning to be carried out.

  The Trans Am was still missing, along with the occupants. Had yesterday’s carjackers added death to their crime spree? If so, what could they be thinking now?

  Arturo was waiting for a girlfriend he had called to drive him home. “What do you need my insurance information for?” I heard him ask a cop, his voice aggrieved. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  Rakestraw was rewalking the entire lighted scene to be sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  Jason Carey sat in the detective’s car, head in his hands. His partner in a small water purification company was en route to take him to the hospital, Rakestraw told me. I approached and tapped on the window. The officer in the driver’s seat rolled it down. The chill from the air-conditioning spilled across my bare arms, making me tremble.

  “May I speak to Mr. Carey?”

  The officer indicated that it was up to his companion.

  Carey raised his head, eyes drowning.

  “Remember?” I said gently. “We met in front of the dry cleaners?”

  He nodded.

  “I wanted to ask a few questions about your wife.”

  “Why?” It was mo
re a sob than a question. “Have you heard anything from the hospital?” he said fearfully.

  “Not yet, she’s still en route. I’m writing a story.”

  “Why?” he repeated.

  “This is a tragedy. People care. It may help find the ones who did this.”

  He nodded again. “Okay.”

  The patrolman climbed out, leaving the door open, and went to assist Rakestraw. Breathing again, stomach still clenched, I slipped behind the wheel. “How old is she?” I asked carefully.

  “Jennifer is twenty-seven; her birthday was last month, the sixteenth,” he said, choking on the words.

  “Is she a Miami native?” I handed him a tissue from my purse.

  He pressed it to his eyes for a long moment. “No. Her parents moved here from Lexington, Kentucky, when she was eleven.”

  High school sweethearts, they met when she was a freshman and he was a junior. He played basketball. She was a cheerleader. They married after college, almost five years ago.

  Jason and Jennifer had been discussing moving, finding a better place to raise their children because of the crime in Miami. They weren’t fast enough.

  “And how old is your son?” I kept it present tense. No victim will hear a loved one referred to for the first time in past tense from me. Death is so final. The realization comes soon enough.

  “If I lose her, I’ll have nothing left,” he said, weeping. His raw pain permeated the air around us. “Nothing left to live for.”

  “She’s hanging in there,” I told him. “And your daughter, your little girl needs you.” My own eyes tearing, I forged on, asking to borrow a family photo and waiting as he fumbled in his wallet.

  If I did this story right, the killer’s own mother might be moved to surrender him. Hearts would be touched, readers outraged. One of the thieves might even feel remorseful enough to turn himself in, though that possibility seemed remote. The teenage criminals I’d encountered lately were scary creatures. Sometimes I suspect they were born with a birth defect, like a cleft palate or an absent limb. But what they lacked was conscience. Look in their eyes. All you can see are MTV, rap music, and violent movie fantasies.