Last Run
Authors: Hilary Norman
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This title is part of The Murder
Room, our series dedicated to making available out-of-print or hard-to-find titles by classic crime writers.
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The Murder Room
Where Criminal Minds Meet
Hilary Norman
Contents
August 10
The beach at night’s a cool place for killing.
Biggest bath in the world for washing away blood. Sand ruffling with every breath of breeze, shifting with each passing footfall, sweeping away prints, eradicating evidence.
A crime-scene technician’s nightmare.
And a detective’s.
One minute the guy was running; nice, easy, loping strides, warm air sucking in, and blowing out of his well-trained lungs, free as a bird and loving it, the way he always felt
this time of night, the tedium of his day blown away, his body and mind in peaceful tandem, getting ready for rest, for sleep.
No sense of danger.
Not till it was on him. Something swinging at his face.
Last things he heard were the sounds of his own bones smashing.
And the
screaming.
Last things he felt were the terror and the agony.
Nothing after that.
At least six people heard it (every one of them failing to report it at the time) just over four hours before the body was found – at five a.m. on Wednesday – not
far from a jet-ski rental booth on the beach close to North Shore Open Space Park, just south of Surfside.
The crime had been brutal and ugly; the sound, they said, a
kind
of screaming. ‘But not the kind a victim would make,’ one person volunteered. Which made it either the scream
of a witness or, some were speculating, the sound the killer had made.
‘Sounded like an animal to me,’ said a middle-aged man, who’d heard it through the open bedroom window of his fifth-story, ocean-facing apartment.
‘Crazy was what it sounded,’ said his less fanciful wife.
Sam had come in to the handsome white building that was 1100 Washington Avenue, and which housed the Miami Beach Police Department before six a.m., planning to dig in for a day
at the office, when Lieutenant Kovac had appointed him lead investigator for the North Shore homicide, and agreed to free Martinez from the aggravated assault case he’d been working on, so
they could work on the new case together.
Not because Kovac liked either of them any better than he ever had, but that was the way it went; the detectives in the Violent Crimes Section worked a kind of rotation, each man and woman
having their turn to take responsibility for fresh cases. Besides which, even Kovac had been forced to admit over the years that Sam Becket and Al Martinez, while not officially a partnership,
worked better together than apart.
So, for both detectives, a day at the office had turned into a day at the beach.
No picnic, though.
Especially for the late Rudolph Muller.
No problems with unconfirmed identification (no official ID possible yet with the dead man’s face pounded beyond recognition) since Muller had worn a runner’s belt,
complete with water bottle and a pouch for his keys and wallet. Rudolph F. Muller, a janitor at Trent University in North Miami, living on Abbott Avenue, just a handful of blocks from where he had
died.
Had been murdered.
The twenty-dollar bill and three quarters in the wallet, the small size of the wallet itself, and the presence of the man’s keys, appeared, at least at first glance, to rule out the
likelihood of robbery or a drug deal gone bad.
There were two stages to the assault, according to Elliot Sanders, the medical examiner. The first stage had been a vicious blow to the face – possibly with a baseball bat or some other
blunt, club-like object – which had almost certainly rendered Muller unconscious,
after
which his throat had been cut.
‘Straight across,’ Sanders told Sam, just after six thirty, moments after he’d made his preliminary on-scene examination. ‘Nice and clean, probably because the victim was
out cold.’
‘Surgical?’ Sam forced his eyes back down to scan again the horrors that were, to his enduring regret, an integral part of his working life.
‘I’d say not.’ Sanders stooped again for another look. ‘Kitchen knife, maybe. We’ll know more later.’ He surveyed the facial destruction again, and raised a
brow. ‘Anaesthesia technique could use some work.’
‘Anything else, doc?’ Sam was six-three, a rangy African-American, tough-looking, but still grateful he’d missed breakfast that morning.
‘Later.’ The overweight ME hauled himself back upright, took out his handkerchief to mop his brow, already glistening this humid August morning, and began to move away from the
body.
Both men stepped cautiously, the measure ingrained, though they and Al Martinez – currently in conversation with a crime-scene technician over on the sandy path that led to 88th Street and
Collins – had all realized on arrival that the crime scene had already been contaminated by an unknown number of passers-by. Certainly by the two joggers whose misfortune it had been to find
the body; then, just as inevitably in the circumstances, by the fire and rescue team who’d pronounced the victim dead. By which time, the Miami Beach police officers securing the crime scene
had to have known that despite their best efforts all kinds of evidence, most notably any foot impressions that the killer
might
have left (doubtful, in any case, since the instant a foot
lifted up on the beach, the soft sand was already shifting) were lost for ever.
Reaching the path outside the taped-off area, Sanders lit a cigarette and grinned, without malice, at Becket’s still discernible discomfort.
‘Get any paler, Sam, they’ll be calling you Jackson.’
‘Get any fatter, doc – ’ Martinez, slightly built with a rounded face, sharp dark eyes and a lightly accented voice, joined them – ‘we can rent you out for
shade.’
‘Never heard that one before, Al,’ the ME said, wryly.
‘What’s up with you?’ Martinez asked Sam as they pulled up outside the ochre-and-cream two-storey apartment building on Abbott Avenue that had checked out as
Rudolph Muller’s home.
They were friends as well as colleagues, had worked side by side for years with liking and mutual respect. Both of them good, solid, occasionally outstanding detectives, yet neither having won
the promotions they might have anticipated in that length of service; Alejandro Martinez, even-tempered till seriously roused, a courteous man with a strong streak of street fighter, never really
seeking advancement because, as a bachelor – albeit with an eye for pretty women – he felt responsibility to no one other than himself; Samuel Becket because he had developed a tendency
– disapproved of by his superiors – of sailing dangerously close to the wind if department regulations came up against his own strong personal instincts.
‘Muller worked at Trent,’ Sam replied to his colleague’s question.
‘Cathy.’ Martinez knew that Sam’s adopted daughter was studying for a bachelor’s degree at Trent’s School of Social Work, and was equally aware of how his partner
felt when any semblance of danger impinged on her life. ‘The guy was a janitor, man. Cathy probably never even saw him, let alone met him.’
‘I know,’ Sam said.
‘And he was killed on home turf, not at Trent.’
‘I know,’ Sam said again.
Martinez glanced at him. ‘She doin’ OK?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Sam said, which was thankfully, so far as he could tell, true.
‘Grace?’
Sam smiled. ‘Grace is doing wonderfully, thank God, and Saul and my dad, too.’
‘Me too,’ said Martinez. ‘All one of me.’
Sam opened his door. ‘Two lucky bastards.’ He looked up at Muller’s building. ‘And now we get to wreck someone else’s life.’
‘Real lucky,’ Martinez said.
Six years had passed since a grisly serial homicide case in the Miami Beach and surrounding areas had finally been laid to rest, bringing to an end a long and hideous nightmare
that had personally affected both Sam Becket and Dr Grace Lucca, and had all but destroyed the life of their daughter-to-be Cathy Robbins.
Sam and Grace – a child and adolescent psychologist – had been married for four of those years, living with Cathy in the Bay Harbor Island house that had first been Grace’s: a
small white stone house with a red-tiled roof, arched windows, a pair of palm trees and a bottlebrush tree at the front, and a deck at the back – Grace’s favourite spot –
overlooking Biscayne Bay.
It might have felt crowded to her sometimes, this space that had previously been hers alone, but it never had. It just felt right. Marriage – first for her, second for Sam – and
their parental guardianship of Cathy had seemed to flow naturally and, for the most part, contentedly; the only real sorrow in their relationship their seeming inability to bring a new baby into
the world.
After two soul-wrenching miscarriages, however, Grace’s latest pregnancy had made it through to six months, and for both of them joy just didn’t
begin
to describe it. Sam had
hit forty a while back, and Grace, at thirty-seven, was being termed a
geriatric
in medical jargon. Still, Barbara Walden, her obstetrician, seemed quietly confident they were past
Grace’s primary danger zone. And if Sam had thought he could get away with wrapping his wife up at home for the duration, he might have tried, but he knew better. Anyone who’d spent
much time with Grace knew better than that.