Love Kills (10 page)

I had no time to think about Marsh Holt in the busy weeks that followed.

Another lost tourist, bewildered by Miami's tangled streetscape, lost his rental car, his wallet, and his life when he stopped to ask the wrong resident for directions. The city's brand-new fleet of high-priced garbage trucks began to spontaneously combust, and pet shops were plagued by shoplifters who stuffed expensive teacup puppies down their pants.

The Human Fly continued to confound and outrage both the cops and the Chamber of Commerce. In his most notorious caper to date, he scaled the face of a pricey South Beach hotel, climbed over a fifth-floor balcony, and crept into an unlocked room. There he encountered the latest hard-partying, super-thin young Hollywood star, who screamed long and loud as the Human Fly buzzed off into the night with her handbag and jewelry.

The star spent days spinning her tale of terror, in increasingly vivid detail, on every Hollywood tabloid show, as well as to Jay Leno, Larry King, Nancy Grace, and Greta Van Susteren. The negative national publicity fueled the ire of local politicians and members of the hotel and tourist industry who pressured police to hunt down and swat the Fly. So did editorial writers and TV commentators. But the Fly flew free.

Motorists awoke and found their cars coated by a thin film of red dust. Daytime skies turned milky white with hazy blood-red sunsets. Along the African coast storms had scooped up red sand and passed it off to the wind currents that stream west. Whipped by Africa's desert winds, the monster cloud of red dust swirled across the Atlantic and settled over Miami, where the full moon hung fat and low, a sinister silver dollar tarnished by Sahara dust in the eastern sky. Patients suffering from asthma, hay fever, emphysema, and other respiratory problems packed local emergency rooms.

And U.S. Coast Guard Public Information Officer Skelly O'Rourke redeemed himself for prior broken promises by tipping me to an in-progress high-speed pursuit of suspected smugglers near the Marquesas, a barren swath of islands forty miles off Key West.

Shortly before dawn, radar aboard a Coast Guard cutter had detected a dangerously overloaded boat moving north from Cuba. A smaller Coast Guard vessel approached and signaled them to stop. Instead, those aboard tried to ram the Coast Guard boat and fled, jeopardizing their endangered cargo.

Nobody outruns the Coast Guard. They have planes, choppers, high-speed boats, radar, manpower, really big guns, and long memories. But the fleeing suspects were desperate people. Ruthless smugglers charge up to $10,000 a head to spirit an estimated two thousand illegal migrants a year to Florida under cover of darkness.

When sighted by the Coast Guard, some resort to murder. They throw the evidence, their passengers, overboard or drop them too far offshore to swim safely to dry land. Scores of migrants pay their money and lose their lives every year.

With the chase under way, Lottie and I scrambled aboard a seaplane at Watson Island and headed south to the scene.

We spotted them from a distance, trailing great rooster tails of wake across the deep blue. Lottie captured aerial shots of the speeding boats and the Coast Guard choppers in pursuit. Several of the thirty-six migrants aboard the smugglers' vessel either tumbled or were deliberately thrown overboard during the maneuvers.

The Coast Guard could not save them all. The thrilling chase concluded with the suspects' capture. When the smugglers ignored warning shots across their bow, special shotgun shells were fired to disable the vessel's engines. Many of the remaining refugees jumped into the sea, flailing, and resisting attempts to rescue them.

The price they were willing to pay to escape the island touched my heart and made me think of my father. All these years later, I thought, the dictator still lives and Cubans still die.

Peering through binoculars, as Lottie snapped pictures, I felt an odd sense of déjà vu and thought for the first time in weeks of Marsh Holt, who had escorted his bride's body on their sad journey home to Boston. End of story, I thought. But now, as I watched another tragic high-seas drama unfold, Holt was on my mind.

Then I realized why.

Later, as we met the Coast Guard boat that towed the seized vessel to the Miami Beach Coast Guard station on the MacArthur Causeway, I was sure.

“Lottie,” I whispered, as we watched from behind a security fence, “look at the smugglers' boat.”

She lowered her camera, stared, then focused her telephoto lens for a closer look. “It's a Grand Banks forty-footer. It looks just like—” She turned to me. “But it can't be. How could it?”

“It is, Lottie. Look at that custom rail. The transom.”

She'd seen this vessel before. So had I, in the honeymoon photos of Marsh and Vanessa Holt. The smugglers' vessel was the
Calypso Dancer.
I was sure. The name and the registration number had been scratched off, another engine added, but there was no mistaking its identity.

My mind raced.

Lottie frowned. “I thought it was sleeping with the fishes at seven hundred fathoms.”

“That's what everybody thought. How weird is this?”

Guardsmen were securing the seized vessel. “Shoot as many angles as you can, Lottie.”

The whirs and clicks from her camera were all I heard for the next several minutes. The smugglers were marched ashore in handcuffs. Then their passengers were brought ashore, to cheers and applause from spectators already gathered behind the fence.

Migrants interdicted at sea are swiftly returned to Cuba, under the U.S. Government's wet-foot/dry-foot policy. Those who reach American soil can stay, but those who don't go back at once.

To bring them ashore like this was unprecedented, the irony bittersweet. Because some refugees had died, the others were allowed to reach shore to testify against the smugglers in court.

At a press conference, Coast Guard spokesman Skelly O'Rourke said that the accused smugglers, two Cuban Americans from Hialeah, claimed that during a fishing trip weeks earlier they had found the boat adrift with no one aboard. They salvaged it, they said, souped it up, and seized the opportunity, using it to scoop up family members from Cuba and bring them to Miami. They denied being professional smugglers.

How they came into possession of the boat was the least of their troubles. The accused smugglers would be charged with murder in the deaths of a four-year-old boy who tumbled overboard and drowned during the pursuit and an elderly woman who suffered fatal head injuries when being buffeted about on the smugglers' speeding boat in rough seas.

More carloads of Miami's Cuban Americans arrived as word of the tragedy spread. Some were seeking relatives who may have been aboard; others came to protest U.S. immigration policy, Coast Guard tactics, and the Castro regime. Some threatened to block MacArthur Causeway, a major thoroughfare between Miami and Miami Beach.

I gathered quotes from a number of them and then rushed back to the newsroom to call Marsh Holt in Boston. His number was disconnected. Not surprising. It was for the apartment where the couple planned to reside after the honeymoon; it would be too painful for him to stay there.

I called the Hansens.

“Every day it becomes more real that she's gone, and she's not coming back,” her father said. Mourners had filled the cathedral for Vanessa's funeral, he told me. They played a Bach cantata.

I said I was trying to reach Marsh.

He reacted angrily. “Don't talk to me about him.”

“What's wrong?”

The son they never had had departed shortly after the funeral. “Didn't say a thing. Not even goodbye. Left town—for good, I guess. He's gone. No forwarding address.”

His wife breathed heavily on the extension. “It's not Marsh's fault,” she argued, sympathetic and congested. “He was too heartbroken to stay in the same city where they met and fell in love. I understand. He couldn't take it. I'm worried about him. His heart is broken.” Her words resonated with motherly concern.

They had no idea where he'd gone. But they thought Vanessa's maid of honor and best friend, Sally, might know. The two were like sisters. They gave me her number.

Sally had no idea where Marsh had gone or where he'd come from. He'd blown into town with few ties and little baggage, she said. Vanessa did mention once that Marsh had worked in Chicago with a man named Ron Fullerton. Sally remembered the name because she had an uncle named Fullerton; no relation. Vanessa told her the two men had talked by telephone and had seemed relieved, Sally said, by his contact with an old colleague. Marsh Holt had swept her friend off her feet, but Vanessa was an intelligent and cautious young woman. She had been a bit concerned, as was Sally, about his apparent lack of friends, relatives, and history.

“I thought she should wait until she got the chance to meet people he'd known all his life,” Sally said. “I mean, he's clearly no crook or ex-con, but they just didn't know each other long enough. He's hot, and funny, and really sweet, but he was like a man without a past. I used to joke that he must be in the Witness Protection Program. Even if he had no immediate family, there had to be friends, neighbors, fellow workers, ex-girlfriends. But there weren't. It was like he dropped out of a UFO.”

“How long
did
they know each other?”

“He proposed four weeks after they met. Really romantic but too quick. The wedding was six weeks later. Too soon, if you ask me. But Nessa was crazy about him. She said, ‘When you know it's right, why wait?'”

“I didn't realize they'd known each other such a short time.” I tried to remember exactly what Holt had told me about their courtship.

“I thought they took the plunge too soon,” Sally said sadly. “But we'll never know now, will we? I miss her every day.”

I called Skelly O'Rourke at the Coast Guard to say I suspected that the smugglers' vessel was the
Calypso Dancer.
He'd pass it along, he said, but had a ready explanation if it was true. The Boston bridegroom was no seasoned boater and the tragedy took place on a dark night during a sudden squall. He'd been swept away as he struggled to survive in huge swells. When he turned to look and couldn't see the boat, he probably assumed it had sunk. More likely the
Calypso Dancer
had just drifted out of his line of vision. “You can't see anything out there under those conditions,” he said.

 

The fourth Ron Fullerton I called in Chicago remembered Marsh Holt well. “Used to work for me, but we lost touch,” Fullerton said. “Nice guy. What's your interest in him?”

“I wrote the story about his wife's death,” I said. “Something's come up and I need to talk to him. His old number's disconnected.”

Fullerton didn't seem surprised.

“He's had a tough time. Never got over losing her like that. Happened on their honeymoon, you know. Broke his heart. She was the love of his life.”

“Right,” I said, recalling the bridegroom's despair. “It was very sad.”

“Sure was,” he replied. “Suzanne was such a talented girl.”

“You mean Vanessa.”

“No.” The word rang with the certainty of a man who knew what he was talking about. “Her name was Suzanne.”

“No. Her name was Vanessa. She was a musician.” My voice sounded thin. My mind raced. “She drowned.”

“You've got it all wrong,” he said irritably. “Her name was Suzanne. She fell. They were taking pictures on their honeymoon in Arizona. She stumbled and fell off a cliff, into a deep ravine. Died instantly.”

“That son of a bitch!” I pounded my fist on my desk so hard it hurt.

“What's wrong, Britt?” Ryan asked softly from the desk behind me. He sounded concerned.

“I'm so stupid!” I blurted, on the verge of angry tears. “What's happened to me?”

“Hormones.” He nodded wisely. “It happens. I've been reading up on it.”

“On what?”

“You know. Pregnancy.”

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“So I can help if anything happens.”

“Like what?”

He looked hurt. “Well, in case your water breaks, or anything.”

“Oh, for God's sake!” Had the whole world gone insane? His sweet, sensitive face stayed in my mind, as I fled the newsroom.

 

“I bought it, Lottie, hook, line, and sinker. I swallowed his whole damn story. Every word sounded true to me. How could I be so stupid?”

“Everybody bought it,” she said, “not just you.”

“But what's happened to me? Why did my instincts fail? Where did my street smarts go? My experience?” Was my personal trajectory straight into the toilet? Was I totally unencumbered by the thought process? “He killed them, Lottie. He did it. He killed both those women. There may be others.” I took a tentative sip of the herbal tea she offered and grimaced. “I really hate this.”

“Don't worry, the good Lord will nail his ass.”

“No, I mean this tea! I want to cut out coffee so the baby isn't jittery, but I need caffeine, I
crave
caffeine; it's the only thing that jumpstarts my brain cells. Chamomile sucks!”

“It'll grow on you,” she insisted.

I paced the photo office in a cold rage. “He lied, lied, lied, right to my face, won me over with his stories, those sad eyes, and that radio voice. Had me driving his lying ass all over town. Had me offering words of comfort on how to survive and piece his life back together. I really related to that bastard, treated him like a victim, and all the while he was thumbing his nose behind my back. Laughing at her and her parents, those poor people who really believed he'd be the son they never had. They're the real victims. So are Vanessa and Suzanne—and God knows who else.”

“But why? Maybe he's just a guy who, if he didn't have bad luck, would have no luck at all. Tragedy stalks some people, some places. We've seen 'em. Like that damn boat, the
Calypso Dancer.
Every time it sails somebody dies.”

I rolled my eyes and turned away, trying to think about something—anything—other than coffee.

“Well?” she demanded. “Would you charter that floating death trap for a pleasure cruise?”

“It's not the boat,” I snapped. “The boat's no ghost ship. It's him. And I know the motive. That son of a bitch. I called Sally, Vanessa's maid of honor, again. She'd neglected to mention, as did the parents, that Vanessa had already mingled her assets with her new husband's, and named him her life insurance beneficiary before the wedding. She had discussed it with Sally, her best friend. He suggested that since they were about to travel outside the country they should take out policies naming each other as beneficiaries. It didn't seem suspicious at the time, only thoughtful and efficient.”

“How much?”

“Half a mil, and I'd wager there's double indemnity for accidental death. And that's not all. Just before the wedding, Vanessa moved her savings into a joint account and everything she owned into their new apartment. He sold it all, Lottie, including the wedding gifts, some still unopened, her jewelry, her clothes, even her damn cello, made of wood from Bosnia. I talked to the apartment house manager and a neighbor. Holt had liquidators in the day after the funeral, bidding on everything but the bathtub. Cleaned the place out the same day.

“Her father probably didn't tell me because he's embarrassed, or maybe her mother isn't aware and he's trying to keep it from her. Neither talks on the phone without the other on an extension.

“I'll wager it was the same with Suzanne. Liz, the best researcher we've got, is running Internet searches right now on all possible variations of his name, honeymoon tragedies anywhere in or out of the country, and the deaths of newlywed women in every state. Onnie's helping.”

Lottie took a seat across from me, her brown eyes serious. “If he did kill Vanessa,” she said hopefully, “maybe she was the only victim. Maybe Suzanne did die accidentally and it gave him the idea.”

“I hope you're right,” I said, “but I doubt it. The man's a pro, super dangerous to women. My gut instinct says he's done it before and he'll do it again.”

Lottie picked up one of the photos she'd taken of Marsh Holt in the office that day. “Evil shouldn't look this good,” she said. “Amazin' how women hear his honky-talkin' bullshit blues and agree to marry him twenty minutes later.”

“When her parents suggested they wait and get to know each other better,” I said bitterly, “Vanessa reminded them that they met at a USO dance four weeks before her father went to war. They got married the day before he shipped out. She waited. He survived Pork Chop Hill; the rest is history. If only Vanessa had realized that Marsh Holt was not like her father. The signs were there. He blew into town a blank slate, with something evil, a ghost in the machine.

“This is a helluva story, Lottie. We can nail the bastard. Expose him in the paper, and see him in the slammer before he marries another poor girl.” I checked my watch. “I'll see if Liz has come up with anything.” I paused at the door and frowned. “There's another problem. Ryan's out of control. Did you know he's been reading up on pregnancy?”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “I think he hopes to deliver your baby, Britt. I wouldn't advise it.”

 

Liz was hunched over the computer in her little cubicle as usual, fingers flying, expression intense.

“Anything?”

Her ponytail bounced as she spun her chair around and faced me. “Darn right.” She pushed her little computer glasses up higher on her pug nose, the lenses reflecting a greenish glow from the fluorescent lights. “Here's what I've come up with so far.” She handed me a printout.

Marsh Holt and a Marshall Weatherholt shared the same Social Security number and the same date and place of birth. Before he shortened it, he was widowed under the name Weatherholt: three times. One bride, Colleen, died in a honeymoon ski accident in Colorado. Rachel suffered a fatal snakebite as they explored Mayan ruins in Guatemala on their honeymoon adventure. Gloria, the third, drowned in a Miami scuba-diving accident. As Marsh Holt, he married Suzanne and Vanessa, who experienced the same bad luck.

The brides' deaths had all been ruled accidental. Tragic accidents, perfect murders.

I felt a chill. “Keep looking,” I urged Liz.

 

I found Fred in his office.

“It's a national story,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “The man is a serial killer, and no one even suspects any of the dead were murdered. A helluva story. We have to break it first.”

“Need some help?”

“No way. I'm all over it. It may involve some travel.”

“That might not be wise.” He looked skeptical.

“I might agree in a couple of months. But I'm good to go now. I'm healthy.”

He continued to frown. “I thought you were working on the Spencer York homicide.”

“York's a cold case. He'll keep. He's dead. This guy's still alive, still out there stalking women.”

“How about you stay on your beat, which is what you really wanted, if you recall, and we let another reporter do the legwork. Maybe Nell Hunter could—”

“This is
my
story,” I said heatedly. “This one's unique. Holt is more evil than the serial killers who stalk strangers and murder on impulse, driven by passions they can't, or won't, control. What he does is incredibly complex and totally premeditated. Patiently and persistently, he courts innocent young women with the intent to steal it all: their hearts, their money, and, ultimately, their lives. It takes months of planning and playacting. What could be more callous? This is a once-in-a-lifetime story!”

“How much time would you need to nail it down?”

“No way to know exactly. But you know me. I'll work as fast as I can. Time only moves in one direction, and in this case speed is of the essence.”

He nodded decisively. “Go for it. Keep me posted. Use caution and your own good judgment. Mary will arrange a corporate credit card and help with travel arrangements. Try to keep the travel to a minimum. You know we've closed some of the bureaus and trimmed as much as possible out of the budget. And Britt, when you're on the road, check in with me or the city desk every day, hear?”

“I hear you. Thanks, boss.”

“Oh, and I know you're eating for two, but try to go easy on the per diem. Go get him.”

I flew out of his office and back to Liz's desk, high on adrenaline.

“I think he went to Amsterdam and was in Canada for a while,” she said, scarcely looking up. “He used his original last name.”

I searched
News
files for the case closest to home, Gloria Weatherholt's fatal scuba-diving accident six years earlier. It had scarcely warranted newspaper space, only three brief paragraphs. Gloria and Marshall Weatherholt, a Kentucky couple on their honeymoon, diving from a rented sailboat off Key Biscayne. She failed to surface. He called for help. Search divers pulled her from the water three hours later. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental drowning. Fatal water accidents are common in Miami.

I called Sergeant Craig Burch. He sounded irritated and pulled no punches. “We're swamped, working York full-time. We have enough unsolved murders to keep busy longer than any of us will live, and you want us to reinvestigate an old accidental drowning?” he asked accusingly.

“Exactly,” I said, and filled him in.

His interest level rose rapidly as he listened, but he wouldn't make any promises. When they got a break, he said, he'd have Stone review the file. That was the best he could do.

I worked the phones and the Internet to glean as much data as possible from law enforcement agencies who'd investigated the deaths, the local medical examiners' offices, and news stories published both at the accident scenes and in the brides' hometowns.

Suzanne, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a promising young writer and poet. She had won a national short-story-writing contest, according to a feature in her hometown newspaper, the
Times Picayune.
A prestigious literary magazine had published her prizewinning story. She'd won a grant from a major arts foundation and was at work on her first novel.

Then she met Marsh Holt.

During their Grand Canyon honeymoon, the couple had stopped to snap pictures at a spot with a spectacular view, a news story said. As the budding poet and novelist posed close to the cliff's edge, loose stones apparently gave way and she slipped.
As her new husband watched in horror, she plunged five hundred feet to her death.
It took nearly a day to recover her body. Police described Marsh Holt as “inconsolable.”

I called the sheriff's department investigator, who confided that such accidents are not uncommon. “You never know what a tourist is gonna do,” he said. “Had one a couple weeks ago where a family stops their RV to let their dog out. The pooch runs off into a hazardous area with rock-slide warnings posted. The owner chases after him, right past the warning signs, until the ground gives way under his feet. He and a ton of rocks disappear into a deep crevasse.”

“Any witnesses to Suzanne's fall?”

“None that I know of, other than the husband—and his camera. We processed the pictures. In the last frame he shot, she was standing right at the edge, smiling and waving at him. The man took it hard.”

Oh, sure, I thought.

The medical examiner had found that the slick leather soles and narrow two-inch heels of Suzanne's strappy sandals probably played a role. “When she lost her balance, she had no traction and slid right off the edge,” she said. No foul play suspected.

I downloaded Suzanne's prize-winning short story from the literary magazine and folded the printout into a file folder to read later.

Colleen was a native of Connecticut and an equestrian who rode in competitions from Madison Square Garden to London, England. She had walls full of blue ribbons, rooms full of trophies, and had competed in the summer Olympics.

Athletic and competitive, she was also an experienced snow skier. Despite the fact that it was nearly dusk, she and her new husband had remained out on the slopes. It had begun to snow, but she insisted on making one more run. The bereaved bridegroom told police that he had reluctantly agreed. He assumed his bride was right behind him. It had begun to snow harder, with limited visibility. Colleen somehow missed the trail and skied right off the side of the mountain. When Marshall Weatherholt turned, she was gone. He stopped, waited, then went for help.