Miami, It's Murder by Edna Buchanan

Author:Edna Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION/Suspense
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The message was clear. The rapist was into Santería, which meant I was now the recipient, thank you very much, of some evil hex he had cooked up with his Santero. Swell.

The specter of animal sacrifice and Santería worship stirred vague and shadowy memories of a dark night in my childhood. No time to think about that, I told myself, hurrying into the newsroom. I had a story to write. Deadlines leave no time for panic and have preserved my sanity more than once. I willed myself to focus only on the Sam Farrington story. There would be more stories, more deadlines later. What a blessing that newspapers are published seven days a week.

I called Onnie in the library, requesting anything we had on Farrington. “There may be business side stories. He was a contractor.”

“What’s the matter?” she said. “You don’t sound right.”

“Nothing. Well, it is something, but I’m on deadline and I’ll tell you later. See what you can find on this guy.”

I dialed the number for the medical examiner and caught the chief in his office.

Farrington had arrived, he said, and was still aboard the flatbed truck in the receiving area. He would remain there for the time being.

“You haven’t weighed him yet?”

“Not unless they stopped at a truck weighing station along the way,” the chief said.

A pathologist was supervising an investigator and an attendant, who were wielding hand-held chisels and two- and three-pound hammers to free the body. The receiving area was the perfect location for the job; it is a huge space like an enclosed hangar, where even plane wreckage can be brought intact from crash scenes. Wrecked vans or cars occupied by murder victims can be processed under bright lights, in comfortable air-conditioning, sheltered from the weather, and out of the sight of gaping or unruly crowds.

“I guess you’ve never had a body encased in cement before,” I said with certainty.

“Just once,” he said quietly.

“When was that?” Funny, I didn’t remember one. But the chief has been in charge for almost as long as I have been alive.

“Eighteen years ago,” he said, his voice placid. “The victim was a young woman apparently murdered by her husband, who disposed of her body by cementing it into a stairwell that he built himself.” He paused. “She was this gentleman’s wife, in fact.”

“He killed her? Farrington killed his wife?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he go to jail?” I felt shocked by a sudden elusive thought I could not quite fathom. “Whose case was it?”

“He was never convicted—never tried, in fact—a fluke in the law,” he said, responding first to my initial question. “Statute of limitations. I believe it was investigated by the city. The file’s been pulled, but I haven’t reviewed it yet.”

“There is no statute of limitations on murder,” I argued, never knowing the chief to be mistaken but wanting to protest, trying to grasp the reason for my sense of apprehension.

“There was a statute of limitations in this case. A fluke in the law. Check your newspaper’s old stories.

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