The Ice Maiden Page 4

  I fed Bitsy and Billy Boots the cat, surveyed the unappealing prospects in my refrigerator, and checked my messages. Only one.

  I called her back. “You’re running with the Cold Case Squad assignment, aren’t you?”

  “Sure thang,” Lottie said. “Any of them bad boys single and hot to go?” Despite a dispiriting string of Mr. Wrongs, she is ever optimistic.

  She insisted we celebrate our magazine assignment. So Bitsy and I took a quick walk, Billy Boots trailing at a distance, so he could pretend not to know us if we did something embarrassing. Then Lottie picked me up.

  We settled at an umbrella table between the pool and the docks at the Fifth Street Marina. Lottie, the paper’s best breaking-news shooter, bitched bitterly about the day’s assignments from Gretchen, all local politicians “presenting the plaque.”

  “Isn’t this premature?” I asked Lottie, as I ordered a Painkiller Number One. The sneaky concoction of rum, coconut cream, pineapple, and orange juice is smooth and guaranteed to numb the senses. It’s available in various strengths, depending on the severity of your pain. “Shouldn’t we finish the project, then celebrate?”

  She ordered a lime margarita. “We kin party then too, and again when it’s published. Didn’t the President say we all should go back to our normal lives?”

  “Sure. He also said, ‘Watch out, because we don’t know when or how but somebody’s trying to kill you. Now go on out there and live normally, but stay alert.’”

  “Not bad advice whenever,” she said, “especially in Miami. I tell that to myself every time I get behind the wheel, especially when I drive the Palmetto Expressway. You ever been to Xochimilco, Mejico?”

  “I wouldn’t even try to spell it, much less find it. What is it?”

  “Little town where they celebrate four hundred twenty-two official fiestas a year!” She wrinkled her freckled nose and grinned. “Them Mexicans sure know how to live.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing to celebrate around here.” I sighed, watching night creep along the western horizon. “Lately, Lottie, especially after what happened in New York and DC, life feels like a long winter with no Christmas.” I told her about Sunny Hartley and Ricky Chance.

  She shook her head at the terrible details. “Gonna talk to the poor little gal?”

  “Sure. But Burch has to break the news first, find out if the dead guy really was one of her attackers. No point in me intruding on her if he wasn’t.”

  “We’re gonna be working with Riley on the Cold Case gig,” Lottie said cheerfully. “Still suspect she and McDonald have the hots for each other?”

  I took a healthy swallow of my Painkiller and shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it if they do.” The lack of trust, the misunderstandings and regrets all came back to me. I stared in dismay at my drink. So far it wasn’t doing its job. “I don’t even know if he’s back from New York yet,” I said. “Haven’t heard a thing since he left with the contingent of Miami cops who volunteered for the assistance mission. Isn’t it strange that he’d find Riley attractive? You’d think she’d be the last woman he’d lust after. We’re nothing alike. She’s such an obnoxious bitch.”

  Lottie squinted and cupped her ear, as though she hadn’t heard right. “Sure. And you’re a real little Miss Congeniality, so shy and sweet.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, incredulous. “Riley is a superbitch.”

  “And what are you like when some fool gets in your way on deadline?”

  “That is so different,” I said. “You do what you have to on deadline. All that matters is the story. So you do things you’d never do normally. You know how it is. The job gives you tunnel vision. But I’m not really like that, am I?”

  “Then why do some people swear you have a tail and horns?”

  “How can you say that?” I snapped, irritated. “I’m in no mood—”

  “What I’m saying,” she said earnestly, “is that K. C. Riley is probably a whole lot like you: tiger on the job, pussycat at heart.”

  “Oh, puleeze.” I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

  “Why not give McDonald a call when he gets home?” she said. “He’ll probably need lots of TLC after Ground Zero. Be sweet, check it out. Maybe nothing’s going on there. Maybe they’re buddies. You know cops. How they like to hang out with other cops, live in the same neighborhoods—”

  “Yeah, and they tend to intermarry. I never returned his last message,” I confessed glumly.

  She frowned. “You need a blood test,” she said, “to see if any is getting to your brain. I thought you and him were—”

  “So did I, Lottie.” I sighed impatiently. “So did I.”

  “What about Fitzgerald?” she asked. Dennis Fitzgerald is an investigator for the Volusia County state attorney’s office, and we had hit it off when an old case brought him to Miami.

  “A great guy,” I said, “but in Daytona Beach, three hundred miles away.”

  “He’d be here in a heartbeat if you’d show a little interest.”

  “My heart just isn’t in it, Lottie.”

  Mercifully, she changed the subject. “So this gal Sunny survived, but did she recover? Living a normal life?”

  “I guess so,” I said uncertainly. “As if anybody could after what happened to her. You remember what sixteen was like. Everything was a big deal. A date for the school dance was a matter of life or death. She’s grown up now, must be twenty-nine or so. I wonder if she has a life, or just therapy three or four times a week.”

  “People are resilient,” Lottie said quietly, “especially kids. We see it all the time. Even close to home, look at little Darryl.”

  “Right.” I couldn’t help smiling. “He couldn’t be better. In fact, Onnie gave me one of his new crayon drawings the other day. It’s on my refrigerator; I love it. I think he’s got a real talent, even though he’s only six.” I lifted my glass. “I hope Sunny’s life is happy. Maybe she’s married, with kids of her own. Strange, isn’t it, for us to be here, talking about her like this, knowing something she doesn’t?”

  “Like what?”

  “That even if she has put that terrible night behind her, it’s back. Nobody outlives the past.” We watched a quarter moon emerge in the darkening sky. “Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, I wonder if she feels something in the air, senses that her life is about to change.”

  “If that barbecued bandido was one of ’em, she’ll be happy to hear he’s on an elevator ride straight to hell and the rest of ’em may soon git what’s coming to ’em.” She smiled sweetly and winked back at a hunk at the bar.

  An apprehensive chill rippled up my spine. What was Sunny’s life really like? I wondered. How would she react to the news?

  The man at the bar, a smiling sun-bronzed yachtsman named Brad, zeroed in on Lottie like a heat-seeking missile. He was eager to buy us drinks, dance with us to the island music, and whisk us away on a moonlight cruise. She was ready to go, but I wanted an early start in the morning.

  Lottie gave Brad her phone number as he walked us back to her company car, still cajoling us to stay. As we rolled out of the parking lot, her dashboard police scanner crackled to life. Typical Miami night: shots fired in Wynnwood, a hit-run driver fleeing east in the westbound lanes of I-95, and an out-of-control fire at 224 Northwest 14th Street.

  My heart sank. I wanted another Painkiller. “Hear that, Lottie? Fourteenth Street. Let’s go.” I fastened my seat belt.

  “Only one engine company so far,” she protested. “Don’t sound big to me.”

  “It’s big,” I said, a bitter taste in my mouth.

  She shrugged, stomped the gas, burned rubber in a U-turn, and we streaked west.

  “Dammit.” I locked the scanner onto Miami’s fire frequency. “Hear that? Fully involved, out of control.” I groped in my purse for a notebook. “You got your camera gear?”

  “’Course, in the trunk.” The eight-cylinder engine whined as she swerved around a slow-moving jitney and floored it. She poute
d. “Thought you was dead set on gettin’ to bed early.”

  “I was,” I said somberly, “but now I need to get back over there.”

  “Over where?”

  “Gomez Watch Repair.”

  3

  Hoses snaked through the streets and alarms howled like wounded animals. Flames savaged the night sky until firefighters knocked down the blaze, too late for the shop or its contents. Crucial time had been lost initially because illegally parked cars blocked all the nearest fire hydrants. Stolen cars, I was willing to bet. Certain people didn’t care about Andre Coney’s long rap sheet or that he was a thief who probably preyed upon them as well. They wanted Gomez ruined, run out of their neighborhood with nothing to salvage. My Aunt Odalys says it best: Las calles estan duras, hija. The streets are hard, girl.

  “It wasn’t enough to see him in jail,” I told Lottie. “They had to destroy him. I bet the torch is a face in that crowd.”

  She discreetly photographed the jeering, hooting spectators while I asked questions. None of the strangers enjoying the flames reflected in their eyes admitted to knowing anything. A fire captain said the presence of an accelerant was suspected and pronounced the blaze one of “suspicious origin.” Surprise.

  We returned to the News, parked under the building, and scrambled through a rear door into the deserted lobby and onto the elevator. We split up on the fifth floor, Lottie to process her film while I inserted the fire into a new top on my Gomez story for the final.

  Later, at home, I took Bitsy out for a last look at the quarter moon sailing like a pirate schooner through a dark sea of night. Good things do happen on my beat, I thought, I just hadn’t seen any for a long time. After we returned and I went to bed, Billy Boots purring beside me and Bitsy curled up at my feet, I prayed not to see the woman again.

  But there she was in my dreams, among hundreds of terrified people fleeing a towering all-consuming tornado of debris and smoke from a collapsing tower. They ran for their lives, the hellish billowing blackness in pursuit. As always, since I first saw it live in my living room, I focused on one face in the crowd: a young woman in a blue sweater, her flowing brown hair pulled back. Despite the people streaming around her, she did not run. Instead, she walked, more and more slowly, until she finally stopped and turned to face the rapidly advancing darkness. “Run! Run!” I cried from my living room. But to my horror, as the surging humanity parted around her in flight, she slowly began to walk into the oncoming blackness.

  I searched all the footage that followed but never saw her again. Why did she go back? Did she survive? Who was she?

  My eyes ached and my sinuses felt scorched when I awoke. I blamed the dream on last night’s fire scene, but it was something else, something real in the air. I pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, snatched up my Walkman, plugged in the earphones, and trotted the two blocks to the beach.

  The morning tasted acrid. Smoke stung my nostrils and the horizon shimmered in a hazy blur. I didn’t need news radio to know the Everglades was burning again. Wildfires were raging up and down the state, three hundred thousand acres blackened so far this year.

  I jogged the boardwalk at a labored pace, gasping in the polluted air as my footsteps thudded on the weathered boards, the news of a surreal war washing over me. Sword-swinging soldiers on horseback, backed up by Stealth bombers and spy satellites. Unfriendly skies, airport lockdowns, and bad mail—really bad mail.

  Locally, lightning had sparked dozens of new blazes in Dade and Palm Beach overnight. Smoke from two thousand acres of burning saw grass was threatening posh Boca Raton neighborhoods. “And locally, fire destroyed…” The newscaster read the first few graphs from my Gomez story almost verbatim. A few callers reacted to it on the talk show that followed. Most sympathized with the jailed shop owner.

  Like a good omen, a treat waited on my doorstep when I returned, a plump grapefruit freshly picked from one of Mrs. Goldstein’s three trees. So far, they had escaped the chain saws of the canker police, state agricultural inspectors on a search-and-destroy mission to protect Florida’s commercial citrus groves. They cut down both infected trees and every healthy tree within a third of a mile as well. Backyard citrus, another joy of life in South Florida, would soon be just a memory. I cut the grapefruit while my English muffin toasted. Yes! My favorite, ruby red, sweet and bursting with juice. I devoured half with my muffin and tea, planning to save the rest, but couldn’t resist and ate that too.

  I set out on my beat feeling better. Despite the roller-coaster ride that is my job, I love being a journalist. There is something noble and exciting about venturing out each day to seek the truth. And my beat has it all, comedy and tragedy, sex and violence. Shakespeare in the raw—Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet—I meet them all on Miami’s steamy streets.

  I kept an eye out for Sergeant Craig Burch during my usual rounds but had no sightings. He did not respond to a phone message or calls to his beeper. A good sign, I thought. I imagined him seated across from Sunny, dealing out mug shots like playing cards in front of her. Her features were a blur in my fantasy but I saw Burch clearly, poker-faced, alert, sharply observing her reactions.

  A two o’clock bond hearing had been scheduled for Hector Gomez, but I didn’t cover it. Andy Maguire, the courthouse reporter, was as territorial about his beat as I am about mine. Just as well, as it turned out, since breaking news intervened.

  Jerry, an intern who monitored police radios in a cubbyhole niche off the newsroom, called me to report that something unusual seemed to be happening deep in south Dade farm country.

  “I don’t know if it’s anything,” he said hesitantly. “I can’t get a handle on it, Britt.”

  “What does it sound like?” I said.

  “I dunno, but there’s a lot of radio transmissions.”

  “Such as?” I gazed at the murky haze beyond the newsroom’s big picture windows. The horizon was white with a yellow cast.

  “Sounds like a scene in a farm field.”

  An image flashed through my mind: Richard Chance’s sprawled body; Sunny, covered with blood, staggering to her feet.

  “I checked the map,” Jerry was saying. “Looks like the middle of nowhere. The call went to police, then fire rescue dispatched on a three, and now they’re asking for drilling equipment—”

  “Oh, no!” I blurted.

  I told him what it was, exited what I had on the computer, and gathered my things.

  He called back less than a minute later. “You were right,” he said breathlessly. “There’s a baby down a well!”

  Four toddlers had tumbled into uncapped irrigation wells in U-pick-’em farm fields in the past two years. Each frantic rescue attempt had ended the same way, with the recovery of a small lifeless body.

  The field, southwest of the old Homestead Air Force Base, was forty-five minutes away if I was lucky. I told Tubbs on the city desk and rushed for the elevator.

  “Britt!” My instinct was to make a run for it, but the slow-moving elevator hadn’t arrived. Too late. I was trapped. Gretchen had seen me.

  “Wait,” she said. “We’ll want two people on this.”

  “I can handle it.” Fidgeting like a racehorse at the starting gate, I willed the elevator doors to open. They didn’t.

  “No. Too many angles here for one reporter.” She positioned herself between me and the elevator, her gleaming blood-red fingernails resting lightly on her crossed arms, her stance confrontational. “Take Ryan,” she said, cocking her head in her detestably perky way.

  “I don’t need help, Gretchen. It’s a long drive. I need to get down there ASAP.”

  Ryan Battle works general assignment and is my friend, but I didn’t want help.

  “You two can go together.” Gretchen’s take-charge attitude would impress anyone who didn’t know she was clueless, mean-spirited, and homicidally ambitious.

  She hailed Ryan, as though he were a cab, from across the huge newsroom. He sprang from his desk at her
summons, eager to please, soft brown eyes alight. I sighed and tried to zone Gretchen out, focusing on her chunky gold earrings, winking cheerily beneath the newsroom’s fluorescent lights. I always lose mine when using telephones somewhere on deadline. I save the singles, in the futile hope of one day finding their missing mates, or a deserving one-eared person, or that I will someday take up crafts and convert them to meaningful pieces of art in my spare time. But like me, I thought glumly, they will probably remain single, without a mate. Forever. Perhaps I could pierce my belly button and wear the orphans like ornaments, I thought, dangling from my navel.

  Ryan is a gentle soul, sweet, handsome, and impossible to resent. But I tried my damnedest. I hate too many reporters on a story.

  We descended to the lobby in silence.

  The white-hot light was blinding and the heat took my breath away as I charged out onto the pavement, three strides ahead of him.

  “Let’s take my car,” Ryan offered.

  What did he mean by that? Was he referring to past events, the times my cars and Lottie’s were totaled?

  “It was never our fault,” I said, with a sharp look.

  “What?” He blinked, as though puzzled. “My car’s in the west lot.”

  “You must be joking,” I said. “You almost got us killed last time.” The jagged scar across his forehead was barely noticeable now.

  “But that was a riot,” he protested. “A brick through the windshield. But if you want to drive, Britt, that’s okay. I’ll ride shotgun.”