Time of Departure Read online

  … and me running and running and running on invisible legs … and the freeze-frame sequence of me racing up the steps of our porch, and my mother holding me tight against her thigh, and the man getting into a car, and the car’s taillights disappearing at the end of our street.

  There was something wrong with my life.

  It had been lurking behind the tree line of my consciousness for a very long time.

  3

  “What’s going on with Martínez?”

  “His inventory’s down, so we should get some action soon. The taps are in place.” The cop sounded confident.

  “Good. I want daily transcripts.”

  “Daily?”

  “Is that a problem, Detective?”

  He waited a beat before he answered. Just so I’d get the message. “No, ma’am.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up.

  Roberto Martínez ran a local auto wrecking yard out on NE Fifty-third. It turned out his business was devoted to more than just offering a highway towing service and salvaging cars that insurance companies had written off. The man was making his real money by operating a steal-to-order auto theft ring.

  Wreckers tend to form unofficial networks. If one yard doesn’t have a particular part for a particular model, the owner will contact wreckers in neighboring communities to see if they have the part or know where to find it. Martínez always seemed to have hard-to-find parts in stock. In the rare cases when he didn’t, he would have the part within a day or two. Eventually some of his competitors got together and compared notes. Being good citizens—and prudent businessmen—they reported him to the authorities. After the detectives assigned to the case had exhausted the usual investigative techniques, I was able to secure an ex parte interception order from a judge. For the past two weeks, the squad had been running a wiretap on the phones at the wrecking yard and Martínez’s residence.

  But if the cops working the case appreciated my help, they weren’t ready to show it. Roy Wells had been the Felony Division Chief for eight years. He’d been their tame attorney and their drinking buddy. They clearly weren’t ready to transfer their allegiance to a successor who was not male, not tame, and mostly kept to herself.

  There was a knock, and my door opened. Annie Morrison entered. Annie was ten years older than me, a single mom, a bit overweight, and an absolute star of a secretary.

  She was carrying a thick package. “A man left this for you.” She set the package on my desk.

  It was addressed in neat printing that looked like it had been done with a Sharpie.

  FOR DELIVERY TO CLAIRE TALBOT—CONFIDENTIAL

  “What man?”

  “Older guy. He wouldn’t leave his name.”

  Older guy? Oh hell!

  “Describe him!”

  “Harrison Ford.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, he kinda reminded me of him.” Annie smiled, more to herself than to me. “Maybe not as old, but he was fit like him, you know? Joan called me out to reception, and he was standing there, and my first thought was that he was probably pretty hot when he was younger.”

  “Your first thought, huh? Maybe you should get out there more, Annie.”

  She looked a bit sheepish. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She left.

  Harrison Ford? Hmm, now that she mentioned it …

  I pushed the stupid thought away.

  I eyed the envelope suspiciously. I already had the uneasy feeling that I was being stalked, and it crossed my mind that I should send the package to the police lab for fingerprinting and a controlled opening.

  I flipped it over. It was neatly sealed with packing tape.

  Should I or shouldn’t I?

  My curiosity overcame my paranoia. I opened a drawer and took out a pair of scissors. I cut the envelope open at both ends. Then I slit it lengthwise and carefully folded back the flaps.

  I breathed a sigh.

  No wiring. No detonator. No suspicious-looking granular material.

  Just photocopied documents and a map of Alachua County.

  I unfolded the map. The area in and around Gainesville was marked with eight black circles. Next to each circle a female name appeared, printed in black ink. Each circle contained a thin, hand-drawn line traced in red ink, one end marked S and the other marked F. I puzzled over it for a moment and then set it aside.

  The next document was a photocopy of a magazine article.

  GAINESVILLE’S “DISAPPEARED”

  A decade later, eight unsolved cases still haunt this Florida city—

  The date on the top of the page was May 1, 1988.

  Embedded in the text of the story was a photo array of eight smiling young women, seven brunettes—six Caucasian, one Asian—and one blonde, with names printed underneath. I checked the names against the ones written on the map. They matched.

  I flipped through the rest of the documents: eight stapled photocopies of missing person reports, all filed with the Gainesville Police Department or the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department and all on outdated official stationery. Each report bore a black-and-white photograph, and each matched a photo in the magazine article.

  I went back to the text.

  Gainesville, Florida, is home to the University of Florida and its famously successful “Gator Nation” athletic program, one of the best in the country. In the late 1970s, Gainesville had a population of around 80,000, swelled by several thousand students every September, but still a community of fairly modest size by college-town standards.

  But despite the many undoubted attractions that Gainesville’s boosters will be only too pleased to extol for the inquiring visitor, it is a city suffering under the dark cloud of a haunting memory.

  As far as is known, it all began late on the afternoon of April 2, 1977. Ina Castaño, 21, put on her freshly laundered uniform, kissed her mother good-bye, and set off to report for her scheduled shift at the local Denny’s. The restaurant was located just a few blocks from her mother’s home on NW Fourth Avenue, so during daylight hours, Ina normally walked to work. When the evening shift ended, a fellow staff member was usually available to drive her home.

  Ina had worked at Denny’s for just over two years, where her energy, cheerfulness, and ready smile made her popular with her workmates and memorable to her customers.

  But Ina didn’t report for work that night.

  She walked out of her mother’s house, shut the door behind her … and disappeared.

  Over the next 13 months, seven other women vanished without a trace. Six of them, like Ina Castaño, were Gainesville residents. The other was a reporter from The Miami Herald. Pia Ostergaard, 30, was in the city on an assignment to investigate the disappearances. She left her hotel one evening to meet a colleague at a local restaurant and was never seen again.

  Apart from Pia Ostergaard, all of the women were in their 20s and—again with the exception of the newspaper reporter—all were brunettes. In each case, a missing person report was filed; in each case, the police conducted a thorough investigation; and in each case, the investigation came up empty.

  Completely empty.

  As could be expected, the abduction of an investigative reporter resulted in a frenzy of media attention—both national and international. Despite this firestorm of publicity, two more women vanished during the two months following Ms. Ostergaard’s disappearance. Four different law enforcement agencies sweated over these cases: the Gainesville Police Department, the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At times they worked separately and at times together in multiagency task forces, but none of them ever found a single trace of any of these young women.

  No trace of them alive.

  And no trace of them dead.

  Amanda Jordan, 24, was the last of the eight to disappear. She left her home in Newberry, a small Alachua County community located 17 miles west of Gainesville, on April 22, 1978, to attend her bridal shower—she w
as due to marry during the following month—and was never seen again.

  Then, as abruptly as they had begun, the disappearances ended.

  It is not difficult to conclude that a serial killer was at work in the Gainesville area during those years. A serial killer who—for whatever twisted reasons—was fixated on young, attractive women with dark hair. The sole exception to that victim profile was Ms. Ostergaard, a blonde. Law enforcement investigators are convinced she was targeted for a different reason. The most prevalent theory is that, following leads she had developed herself, she unwittingly crossed paths with the killer and paid the ultimate price. If she had committed her suspicions to paper, she must have been carrying those notes with her on the evening she disappeared because—according to the Miami Herald’s own intense follow-up coverage—nothing the reporter left behind in her hotel room was of any assistance to the investigation.

  Experienced homicide investigators say that it is almost unprecedented for a killer to operate for such a lengthy period of time and not leave a single witness, a single clue, or—in the words of one retired officer who worked the case—“a single molecule of physical evidence.”

  “The only thing we’re pretty sure of is that these poor women weren’t victims of Ted Bundy,” the ex-detective added. “Although Bundy remains a prime suspect in several unsolved disappearances of young women across the country, he was already in custody before the last four Gainesville women were taken.”

  Bundy, by many accounts the world’s most notorious serial killer, was apprehended by a Pensacola police officer near the Alabama state line on February 12, 1978, just one day before Victim No. 5, María Ruiz, disappeared, and ten weeks before the final victim, Amanda Jordan, went missing. Bundy was later convicted of murdering two coeds in Tallahassee in January 1978 and a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Lake City a few days before his arrest. He was executed last year at the Florida State Prison in Starke.

  The article meandered through interviews with two retired cops, the mother of one of the missing girls, and a pointless quote from a long-dead city councilman. As I read on, I began to perspire. I dabbed at my forehead with my hand. I felt an odd sensation ripple down the skin of my back … odd at first, but then uncomfortable. It reminded me of an attack of prickly heat I’d suffered one summer as a young child. The sensation seemed to subside as I finished the article.

  Ten years have passed since Amanda Jordan walked out into the Florida night and disappeared. Today, the authorities know no more about her whereabouts than they did on that fateful evening.

  Whatever happened to the eight young women you see pictured here remains a mystery—a mystery that may forever haunt this quiet college town.

  I set the news story aside and started reading the missing person reports.

  Ten minutes later, I was bent over a toilet, retching.

  For no damned reason.

  The missing person reports were as bland as anyone would expect, carefully pecked out on a typewriter a generation ago in the stilted syntax of police operational language. In my short but eventful career as a prosecuting attorney, I’d spent hours poring over crime scene photographs of torture and murder. I’d attended autopsies. I’d once stood, horrified, over the body of a decapitated child. The staggering depravity of some so-called human beings had often made me sick at heart and, yes, nauseated, but it had never made me vomit.

  I’d been halfway through the file on Amanda Jordan when a wave of nausea hit me like a tsunami. As I raced for the bathroom, the fear struck me that there really had been some toxic substance mixed in with the photocopies. That I should never have opened that envelope. That now I was going to die because I was an idiot.

  I straightened and leaned against the partition, bracing for another wave of nausea.

  It didn’t come.

  Relieved, I left the cubicle and tottered to the sink. I stared into the mirror. My pallid face stared back.

  What was that?

  I rinsed my mouth, returned to my office, bundled up the papers, and shoved them into a drawer.

  4

  The patio at Sam and Diana Grayson’s seemed almost as big as their indoor living space, but that was just an illusion, since the four-thousand-square-foot penthouse was on two levels. Sam had started his career doing personal injury and class action work, and he’d scored a gigantic judgment against a Fortune 500 company while he was still a relatively young man. “A very big judgment, with an embarrassingly big fee,” as he sometimes described it, with demonstrable justification. A framed copy of the payout check hung over the desk in Sam’s study.

  For the last twenty years, Sam had devoted himself to “giving back through public service,” as he liked to put it—although he could usually be counted upon to add: “Not that anybody seems to notice. All they remember is that damned judgment!”

  It was early evening. Sam and Diana had invited about forty people to this semiannual get-together. Well-dressed men and women sat or stood in groups, some in deep conversation, others talking animatedly or guffawing over someone’s recounted antics. A trio of gas barbecues smoked away in one corner of the patio, tended by a uniformed chef from a catering company.

  I was standing near the fringes of the crowd, champagne glass in hand, making idle conversation with a middle-aged couple whose names I had already forgotten. I heard Sam’s voice.

  “She’s over here, Ernie!”

  I turned to see Sam heading my way, accompanied by District 14’s balding, barrel-chested chief bloviator, State Senator Ernie Spotts. I groaned inwardly, but managed to fix a welcoming expression on my face as they approached. The couple I’d been speaking with evidently knew a thing or two about Mr. Spotts, because the lady touched my arm, whispered, “We’ll talk to you later,” and beat a hasty retreat, taking her husband with her.

  Cowards, I thought.

  Sam stopped a civilized distance from me, but the senator washed into my personal space like an overeager porpoise. Eyes bright with habitual insincerity showed an immediate and undisguised interest in my physical presence. I immediately regretted leaving my hair down and wearing the most revealing summer dress in my closet.

  I took a step back and came hard up against the railing. Sam, missing nothing, eased himself partially into the space between me and my suitor, under the guise of introducing their mission.

  “Claire, Senator Spotts just wanted to extend his—”

  The senator grabbed my hand. “Ah wanted to personally congratulate ya, is all, young lady! Damn smart move on Sam’s part! After ya put those Smoochie twins away last year, Ah said to myself—”

  “Pouchie,” I said, retrieving my hand from the senator’s fleshy grip.

  “What’s that?”

  “The twins … their name was Pouchie.”

  Daniel and David Pouchie had run a smart little crime wave. They always dressed in matching clothes, and they took turns committing armed robberies. They were quite brazen about it. Apart from wearing Minnesota Twins ball caps, they seldom took precautions to hide their faces—even though they knew there were security cameras. In fact, in a few cases they had looked directly at the camera, as if to taunt the police. After their arrest, they had coolly defied us to produce a single witness who could say which one had committed which robbery. They were so eerily identical that we knew no victim would ever be able to positively identify the correct offender. I was pretty sure we had them cold on conspiracy, but I wanted a complete indictment. That’s when I decided to enlist the services of a forensic videographic analyst with a fortuitous subspecialty: facial mapping. He went through every frame of every CCTV capture of every incident. He soon discovered that there was one infinitesimal but defining difference between the two men: David had a condition known as aponeurotic ptosis—in other words, a drooping eyelid—in his case, the upper left. The difference was tiny, less than a millimeter, but it enabled my expert to take the stand and identify which twin had committed which robbery. The Pouchie boys were both sentenced to li
fe in prison.

  “Rahht,” the senator responded. “Ah said, ‘That’s one smart girl! Sam’d better hang on to her!’ Phoned and told ya so, didn’t Ah, Sam? Anyway, young lady, Ahm really sorry Ah wasn’t in town when the Attorney General made the announcement. Ah woulda been happy to call a press conference!”

  “I wasn’t aware she’d made an announcement,” I said.

  Sam looked discomfited. “I figured it was best not to tell you. The press hounds were so busy baying over those corrupt drug squad cops in Miami that the announcement ended up buried on a back page.”

  “Youngest prosecutor in the state to head up a Felony Unit!” the senator effused. “Yer a credit to Sam’s office, girlie, and a credit to the State!”

  I concede that my expression may have frozen during the second or two before I fixed Mr. Spotts with a level stare and repeated: “Girlie?”

  Sam knew what was coming next. He shot me an imploring look. I pretended to relent. I forced myself to smile broadly, and before the senator’s tortoise-paced wits could digest my initial reaction, I unleashed a bit of mischief on both of them.

  “Thank you, sir. I really appreciate your confidence.” I moved pointedly closer to Sam and leaned into his big comfortable frame. My move forced him to drop an arm around my shoulders. “But, you know,” I continued, injecting a hint of Marlene Dietrich throatiness into my delivery, “I couldn’t have done it without Sam. He’s the best mentor any young attorney could ever ask for.”

  Senator Spotts opened his mouth, and then closed it. One of his eyebrows notched upward.

  I noticed a few nearby guests were looking at us strangely.

  Sam must have noticed, too, because he quickly disengaged his arm and clapped the senator on the shoulder. “Ernie, I almost forgot! My daughter made one of those Pavlova desserts you’re always raving about! She wants your opinion. She’s in the kitchen.”

  Sam’s daughter, Suzanne, was twenty-two, highly intelligent … and gorgeous.

  “Sure.” The senator tore his eyes away from my cleavage. “How is she, anyway? Your daughter … uh…?