Act of Betrayal (30 page)

I drove slowly past the rutted dirt road that led into the camp. It looked dark through the pines and cypresses. No lights. I pulled the car off the pavement, cut the engine and headlights, and sat watching. Nothing.

The night sounds quickly resumed around me. I stepped out, searching for any movement, then walked back to the dirt road, sailing solo through a sea of night. A heavy chain stretched across the entrance, secured by padlocks. As I slipped beneath it, a small creature skittered, an owl watched, eyes glowing. Stumbling in the dark, I moved slowly, carefully, toward the only building in sight, a wooden barracks.

And then I heard it. The hum of a generator, and the faint sound of a radio, a Spanish-language program. I stood frozen, listening to a station out of Miami. There was an antenna on the roof. Heart beating wildly, I crept closer, senses acute, skin tingling, then peered around the corner of the budding. There was a light, not visible from the road because the windows feeing it had been covered. There was a car, also hidden from the road.

Through a screened window I saw that the barracks was a far cry from a luxurious bay-front mansion or a presidential palace. But still too good for a man who murdered children.

The radio sat on a wooden table at the far end of the room along with several open newspapers, a dirty plate, a glass, and a bottle of Scotch.

Where was he?

“Britt Montero?”

Startled by the familiar voice, I spun around with a gasp.

He stood behind me, no longer the suave, immaculately tailored man who had shared a podium with the President. Unshaven, he wore rumpled dark trousers, a dark shirt, and an empty shoulder holster.

The gun was in his hand. It looked like a nine-millimeter Glock.

“How did you find me here?” He was genuinely puzzled.

“I knew you were alive,” I said softly. “I knew it.”

“You came alone.” It was more statement than question.

“No,” I lied. “The cavalry is right behind me.”

He knew it wasn't true and smiled, listening to the night, head cocked like a wild animal sniffing the air.

“Come visit my humble abode.” He gestured with the gun and we stepped inside.

Some papers and documents lay on a chair. “My new passport,” he said, following my eyes.

“Jorge Bravo told me from the start that you were a monster. I should have believed him.” Totally without fear, I was full of questions. I wanted to pick his brain. How did he become so evil? Was he born that way?

I sat at the wooden table.

“Did it start with your American cousin?” I said. “The boy in the picture.”

“He died in an accident,” Reyes replied offhandedly. “They said it was an accident.” He smiled and took an opposite seat, watching me intently. I could see that he was wearing a bulletproof vest again. He had good reason for paranoia.

“What about all the other boys, why…?”

“They were out on the street,” he said, shrugging. “They did not belong there.”

“So that justifies what you did to them?” My voice rose shrilly. “Charles Randolph wasn't out on the street. He was taking care of your fucking boat!”

“I am not a homosexual,” he said.

“Oh?” I said sarcastically. “What about the Swedish boy and David Clower … and all the others?”

His eyes took on an almost dreamy look in the dim light. His voice softened.

“That one, David. Beautiful. A beautiful
niño.
Fine features. Like a little girl, perfect in every way. Delicate fair skin.”

I shuddered but he appeared eager to talk. Isolation was so unlike his usual lifestyle. The gun remained in his hand, the barrel resting on the wooden table.

“They were all beautiful. Only one was difficult. He had a knife, a Swiss Army knife. When I tried to handcuff him, the little bastard struggled and tried to cut me.” He looked incensed, indignant that a victim had tried so hard to fight him off.

“He was the one five months ago, wasn't he?”

“Very good,” he said, nodding.

“You kept the knife. They found it.” Way to go, Butch, I thought. You should have cut his throat.

“Most people don't understand,” Reyes was saying, “but the Greeks, they had a philosophy. Women are intended only for procreation. They used boys for birth control.

“You know”—he leaned forward, voice fatherly and persuasive, as though seeking my approval—” it is all pan of a plan in human nature.”

I shook my head. Was he trying to convince me or himself?

“What about murder? Is that pan of a plan? I don't recall that pan of Greek history.”

He rocked back impatiently, eyes threatening, so I changed the subject. “How did you find Armando Gutierrez?”

“The obvious.” He waggled the gun, making me nervous. “I had the home of his relatives in Miami watched. He was cautious enough to stay away but he could not resist calling. My contact with the telephone company cooperated with a tap on the line and traced it back to his hotel.” He looked pleased at his proficiency.

“Did you destroy the diary?” I held my breath.

He smiled. “I have been reading it while waiting for other plans to fall into place. You and Catalina would have found it most interesting. Too bad you cannot leave here.” He sounded almost regretful.

“But it is impossible.” He rose, the gun in his hand. “If Catalina had given Tony Montero a son there might have been a contest here. Reyes versus Montero, history repeating.” He smiled. “Thirty years ago I stopped him. Now this. But I assure you that I find no joy in killing a woman.”

“Perhaps if I was a little boy…”

He slapped me then, almost knocking me off my feet, his heavy ring bruising my cheekbone.

“Enough,” he snapped. “We will take a stroll in the woods. You can carry this.” He tossed me a shovel with a wooden handle and shook his head sadly. “You should have stayed in Miami.” We stepped out into the night.

The moon spilled silver across the treetops as it emerged from cloud cover, big, ripe, and full. News had to be breaking on the streets of Miami, I thought, despite the curfew.

I entertained the idea of swinging the shovel at him as hard as I could, but his gun was at my back. No way could I move faster than a bullet.

“Was it on a night like this that you betrayed my father?”

He did not answer. Instead, he stopped in a stand of slash pines. “Dig here.”

The sandy ground was matted with pine needles that resisted the shovel. I bent to scrape them away, then cried out and fell bade.

“Rattlesnake!” I screamed.

He danced backward, the gun in both hands, training it from left to right, seeking the reptile. I slammed him in the shins with the shovel. The blow was not solid enough to knock him down.

His gun fired, the bullet went wild.

He was off balance, face contorted, as I swung the shovel again, bashing his gun hand. The weapon fell into the palmetto scrub as he lunged toward me, cursing. He caught me in a headlock, a choke hold, and began wrestling me toward where his gun lay.

I managed to reach down to my waistband and wrench out my gun. I don't think he ever saw it in the dark. Grunting, he continued to drag me as I tried to dig in with my heels. Awkwardly I lifted the gun behind my neck, tried to aim in the general direction of his head, dosed my eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion hurt my ears. The flash lit up the night around us. Reyes's grip on me relaxed and I fell onto my back, wriggling away, lifting the gun again.

Smoke still trailed from the barrel as I held it in front of me, steady in my hands. He drew in a ragged breath of surprise and toppled sideways into the palmettos, then rolled onto his back. In the bright moonlight, I stared at Reyes's empty eyes and the blood leaking from the corner of his mouth and felt nothing. Not a thing.

Killing him had been so easy.

It did not seem necessary to check his pulse. Although I am not squeamish, he disgusted me, even in death.

History might have repeated, I thought, if my mother had given Tony Montero a son. Reyes surely would have frisked a man. I brushed the pine needles off my clothes, then walked back to the barracks, where I searched methodically until I found what I wanted: the worn leather-bound volume with my fathers initials on the cover.

I put it in the trunk of the Camaro, then drove to a truck stop and called the police.

I was so afraid it would be like a bad movie, that we would tramp back into the woods and the corpse would be missing. But Reyes was still there, just the way I had left him.

One of the two officers on duty stayed to maintain the scene until daybreak. The other took me to police headquarters, located on the first floor of a small modern building. The fire department was upstairs, on the second floor. I found it curious that the dispatcher-receptionist who greeted us on an intercom in the any lobby was seated snugly behind bulletproof glass. The chief, furious after being roused from his bed in the middle of the night, had all but convinced me that his community had no crime rate, at least not until I arrived.

“You have a lot of 'splaining to do, young lady,” he said, reiterating once more that this was their first murder in three years.

I kept telling them that the dead man was a serial killer from Miami, that I was a reporter from Miami, and that he should call the Miami police.

“Might know,” he muttered. “Nothing good ever comes up here from Miami.”

“I think it's probably the full moon,” I said wearily. “At least that's been my experience.”

“I thought that whole damn town down there just got blowed away.”

“Almost,” I said, yawning.

“You on drugs?” he said suspiciously. “You are pretty damn cool for somebody who just shot a man down on his own property.”

I assured him that I was only very tired and asked him again to call Miami homicide.

As it happened, Miami called him first. My second call from the pay phone had been to the homicide unit. A beleaguered midnight-shift secretary had finally answered, recognized my voice, and assumed I was calling about the national guardsman who had run amok and killed three hurricane survivors who had been taunting him, or the woman who was holding a baby and threatening to jump from an overpass.

“No,” I had told her, my voice wan. “Don't tell me about them now. This is long distance and I don't have time.” I gave her the short version of where I was and what I had done.

My own calm surprised me as I sat alone in the small interrogation room. I had always believed that killing another human being was a wrenching emotional experience. I had met combat veterans who never recovered and knew cops who required psychological counseling to deal with the trauma after taking a life even under the most justifiable of circumstances. I remembered the tears in Hal's eyes. I had always pitied those who carried the burden of such remorse. But killing Reyes had been so simple, so natural.

What would always haunt me was the lost boys, all of them, and the lives they would never lead. I would never forget their parents. The enormous guilt that led to Edwin Clower's drinking. The allergies his ex-wife, Vanessa, acquired after their son vanished. The Kearnses at each other's throats. Cassie Randolph, whose only child never walked out the door without kissing her good-bye. And Andrea Vitale, eating compulsively for two, still buying snacks for her missing son.

The chief returned from the phone with a new attitude. Miami was sending people up to sort things out, he said. I could go back to my motel room if I agreed not to leave it until morning. He would pick me up then to return to the scene for a walk-through of what had happened, for him and the local prosecutor.

I drove the Camaro back to the motel, traded by a police car. “Git some rest,” the officer said. He waved and drove off as I closed the trunk, walked inside, and nearly ran to my room. Sleep played no role in my plans. I had no trouble staying awake. I had waited all my life for this moment. I curled up in a chair beneath a lamp and opened my father's diary.

My Spanish is not terrific, the letters were faded in some places, and at times tears blurred my vision, but it was all there.

The secret mission that the CIA had prevailed upon him to carry out. The insistence that he tell no one of the plan, the promise that his wife would be informed after his departure, and that the government would provide for his wife and daughter should anything go wrong.

First Juan Carlos Reyes betrayed my father, then it was Winslow, the CIA, the government. One act of betrayal after another.

I cried for my father and for Jorge Bravo and all the others betrayed. And for my mother, who was betrayed perhaps the most of all. Like Bravo, she too had lost thirty years of her life, he in an impossible crusade, she to bitterness.

Odd that an act committed by Reyes so many years ago had resulted in his death here in this place, that justice ultimately overtook him, with my finger on the trigger.

I walked through the reenactment in the morning. The bullet had caught Reyes at an angle near the top of the head and slammed into his brain, a lucky shot. Lucky for me. Not him.
La mala hora
had been his. Not mine. The chief was sending out for sandwiches when the detectives from Miami arrived.

Lieutenant Kendall McDonald found me sitting in the police station drinking coffee. He asked if I was all right.

“Fine,” I said too loudly, smiling cheerfully, startled as always by the silver-blue depths of his eyes.

He frowned and went off with the chief. They wrapped things up in a few hours.

“Come on,” McDonald said. He put his arm around me. “I'll take you back to Miami.”

I had to make one call first, to my mother.

“Mom,” I said, excited. “I can't wait to get back. I have something to show you.”

“Where are you, Britt?”

“On my way home,” I said. “I love you.”

She can grieve at last, I thought. Her life will change.

Detective Simmons, from the Missing Boys Task Force, had come with McDonald. He followed in the Camaro.

“Watch out,” I warned him. “It pulls to the right.”

I sat beside McDonald in a city car, headed south, the diary in my lap. It is my history, I thought sleepily. One of the relics of my life. All I will ever have of my father.

McDonald understands such things, so I told him how easy I had found it to kill Reyes.

“It is easy to kill when you have a reason,” he said, skillfully passing a slow-moving citrus truck on the two-lane road, “but it's hard to forget. You have the rest of your life to think about it.”

The afternoon light hurt my eyes and I was already dozing off. I woke up once, when we stopped on the turnpike for coffee.

“How's Miami?” I said, sleepily, as though I had been away for a long time.

“Don't ask about last night,” he said, and grinned. “We had to call in extra teams from home.”

I became wide awake as we got closer, into Broward County. I thought of Jorge Bravo, who would never again walk on his native soil. One day I will do it for him. And I will bring back a handful of Cuban soil to sprinkle on his grave. Then I can whisper: “You can rest now, Jorge. Cuba is free at last.”

Strangely battered cars began appearing in traffic and I knew we were nearly home. The sun was setting as we reached the Dade County line. “Take the flyover,” I told McDonald, and he signaled for the right lane.

The flyover is a forty-million-dollar boondoggle that tied up motorists for years while it was being built. Its purpose was to end the traffic jams at the Golden Glades interchange. The result is a single lane, a nightmare that has worsened the problem because of poor engineering, lousy signage, and cars that crash and burn. But, rising high over the rest of the traffic, it has a great view.

There it was. Miami. All purple and rosy, the golden fingers of dying sunlight curling around its skyline. I caught my breath, as though glimpsing a passionate lover after being gone too long. My heart beat faster. I do love this place. The city glowed, like hope overcoming the misery, the recovery to come, the pain of rebuilding.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” I whispered.

“Yeah, it is,” he said, and held my hand.