Sheffield clicked the remote and froze it. The arm.
“I don’t see any tool marks,” Sheffield said.
“The image is poor quality.”
“The wound is so neat it’s like the arm was chopped off with a cleaver, not bit off by a crocodile. You ever seen crocodile teeth? They’re all over the place, snaggly. There’d be tool marks.”
“If you say so.”
“What about that rubber bracelet?”
“What about it?”
“Camouflage. What does that stand for? Bracelets like that represent causes of one kind or another. Did you check out what camouflage means?”
“It’s a bracelet. It’s decoration.”
Sheffield sighed. He massaged his forehead. Ready to strangle her. “Did you show this video to an animal expert, an outside biologist?”
She shook her head.
“Did you drag the canals for remains or articles of clothing?”
“We did an extensive search. It’s in the report.”
“Before you released the scene, you put your scuba team in the water?”
“No.”
“You got a body missing in a canal and no one went in that water?”
“We felt it was too dangerous. We did an extensive sweep of the area and found nothing.”
“The scuba guys thought it was too dangerous? That’d be a first.”
“I deemed it too dangerous.”
“You found no articles of clothing?”
“No.”
“In the video Ms. Levine was wearing a long-sleeve shirt. But the severed arm is bare. What happened to the sleeve? Did you consider that?”
“Apparently it was lost in the struggle.”
“That arm could be off a mannequin for all you can tell from the video. It could be a fake. No tool marks, no shirtsleeve, no blood.”
“Agent Sheffield.” Killibrew stood up. “Are you familiar with clitoridectomies?”
“Say that again.”
“Mutilation of a woman’s genitals. The cutting away of the clitoris. In this case with a pair of scissors.”
“What the hell?”
“On the night of June the ninth, the crime scene I was working when I was dispatched to Turkey Point power plant was the seventh rape and genital mutilation in the last six months. The rapist’s first two victims died at the crime scene, so as a homicide detective I was assigned the case in January of this year and have been working all the subsequent rapes and mutilations. After the first two died, the other victims have managed to survive the injuries. Though none have been helpful with descriptions. Their attacker wears a mask, and as you can imagine, the trauma is horrendous. They have great difficulty reconstructing the events.”
“I’ve read about it. You’re the lead on that?”
“Yes, I am. With all the cutbacks, that’s how shorthanded we are, pulling me off a case of such magnitude, to investigate a crocodile mishap.”
“I see.”
“So if you think about it, Agent Sheffield, you might understand why I was not overjoyed to be removed from an active rape scene and sent to work on what was clearly an accidental death of a woman who put herself in harm’s way on a regular basis. If my mind wasn’t fully engaged on the effort of locating body parts, or the specific crocodile that attacked and dragged off Ms. Levine, or the whereabouts of articles of her clothing, then I beg your forgiveness. But my focus was elsewhere.”
She was almost out the door when Frank said, “Can you get somebody to make me a copy of the file, and a copy of this video, too? I’d like to enhance it, take a closer look.”
“Of course.”
“And one last thing.”
She waited at the door, staring past him at the far wall. Probably seeing those mutilated women wherever she looked. Sheffield sympathized and sure as hell didn’t want to get into a pissing contest, so he kept his voice neutral.
“You happen to remember the name of the person in charge of the power company’s search team? I didn’t see any mention of it in the report.”
“The head of Florida Power and Light’s security squad.”
“That would be Claude Sellers?”
“Yes, that’s right. Claude Sellers. A very unpleasant man.”
“Well, at least we agree on that.”
TWENTY-ONE
NICOLE WASN’T PICKING UP HER cell. Her message wasn’t recorded in her own voice but was a female robot telling him to leave his name and number. Saying it with that condescending edge female robots were so good at.
He refused to talk to robots, even Nicole McIvey’s. So he hung up, then a few minutes later called again and hung up again, and ten minutes later did it all again, still got the robot.