Loose Ends

“Can you keep a secret?”

Jules lit up a cigarette (without asking permission) while we were staking a possible hide out for a drug kingpin out in my car. I indulge him because he’s my partner and fifteen years my senior, with just the same amount of time on the force to observe and learn from.

“Is it that you still hide you haven’t quit smoking from your wife?”

Jules smoked as he exhaled slowly through the window cracked open as small droplets of rain made their way in to roll down the inside of the passenger door (also without permission).

“The kingpin isn’t in there,” Jules said as he flicked out the butt and rolled up the window, waiting for my response.

“No shit! Last he was seen was three weeks ago on the other side of town. We just got posted here because his second cousin was seen here last night. Just another dead end.”

“Yeah, he’s not in there, but someone else is.”

I eyed him up and down as his normally all grin demeanor turned to a seriousness that I had never seen on him in the year I had been his partner. I was still slightly annoyed at the cigarette smoke that was seeping into my car’s interior, so I didn’t bite.

“I’ll give you a hint – got any loose teeth?”

I stopped and looked at him. He knew one of the reasons I decided to join the force was because of growing up with my mother whose best friend was one of the victims of the “Flat Tire Killer”, who was also known as the “Tooth Fairy Killer” for taking out teeth as souvenirs. My mom had been terrified into staying inside the entire summer of 1975 when her friend was brutally murdered off the side of the road when she had a flat tire, and the killer, posing as a good Samaritan, had stopped to help.

“See, I knew that would get your attention. Another reason they want us to stake out this house, besides that second cousin, is because this house was robbed about a month ago. We caught the guy who robbed the place. Went into closets, grabbing all he could to toss into a backpack, and ran out to go through the loot later. He wasn’t too smart, that one, and we caught him running from the house into traffic down the road and arrested him when he almost caused an accident by jumping into said road. Had a bunch of jewelry from the wife, money that was stuffed in socks, and an odd coffee can he said he grabbed from the closet. Guess what was inside that coffee can?”

“Teeth.”

“Ding, ding, ding! A lot of them, too. Ran forensics and they were a match for two of the unidentified victims.”

“Then why aren’t we already in there?”

“Well, see that’s the thing. Everyone seems to think it’s the robber and that he already had it in that bag."

I couldn’t tell if he was pausing for dramatic effect or about to light another cigarette. I spoke into the moment to hopefully prevent the latter from adding more smoke to the upholstery.

“But you don’t think that, do you?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. First of all, our robber was a little young at that time, barely a teenager. Also, the killer we are looking for hit Florida in February of 1975 and killed until roughly January of 1976 that we know of, assuming he isn’t linked to cases that fit a similar pattern that struck up in California or Massachusetts. In all of these killings, the investigators theorized that the killer had deflated the tires of these women before offering them assistance. They all took place in the vicinity of Cutler Bay. Guess who was working a construction contract in Cutler Bay for about a year?”

“Yeah, so were a bunch of men. That could easily have been the burglar, too.”

“We happen to know for a fact that the burglar wasn’t in the Cutler Bay area. He was locked up for a few months for another burglary at the time of some of the murders. Wasn’t him.”

“Then why do they still think the teeth belong to the burglar?”

“They think it might have been a partner job. They said our guy here doesn’t fit the profile, but I do know that our buddy in this house is real close friends with our chief of the precinct.”

I was starting to bite my fingernails, which I haven’t done since I was about fifteen. I had even once put fingernail polish remover that I had stolen from my sister on my fingers to quit the nasty habit, but apparently I had met the ultimate trigger that would undo all my years of finger gnawing sobriety.

“You think the chief is trying to move attention away from him as a suspect?”

“I don’t just think it. I know it. Check this out.”

He handed me his phone that was open to an email inbox.

“You hacked into the chief’s email?”

“Don’t look at me like that. No one has to know. Plus, he was hiding his buddy in there. All of the correspondence proves it.”

I looked through quietly (much against my better judgement) and read in horror as the chief chatted back and forth casually about explicitly leading the suspicions of the force in another direction before the emails abruptly stopped after the last email verified that the trail had turned its focus elsewhere.

“Why did they stop? The emails?”

“They change email addresses after four or five days. Never use the same one for more than that. I’m lucky that the chief stupidly used his personal email this once instead of an encrypted account like they usually do. They got sloppy is the only reason I caught them. I’ve been following his emails for some time now and just got this gem because they got cocky.”

“You think the chief is in on this?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. Looks that way, though. Don’t want to think that, but it doesn’t look good, does it?”

“Why did you start spying on him? The chief, I mean?”

“He came under my eye when he got in trouble for not reporting a property area he owns in the Cutler Bay area on his taxes. Why would he do that? It doesn’t make since. The chief’s an upscale citizen who obeys the law, so why would he purposefully not report a property he owns on his taxes? Seems like a weird thing to do year after year.”

“Where in Cutler Bay?”

“Exactly my thought process. One of the unknowns was found on the main road that led up to his property he didn’t claim on his taxes. One of the others not too far away.”

I gave his phone back to him and took a step back mentally to take in all of the information objectively.

“Look, Jules. Where are you planning on going with this? Why are you telling me this?”

“We need something they can’t ignore. Something we can take higher up than the chief, who may be on it for all we know. We need evidence that this our guy. Your mom wouldn’t let you leave the house when you were a kid because of this pathetic excuse for a human.”

“What are you planning on doing exactly, Jules? This is all just a hunch so far.”

“Look at this email. This one was sent on the second day. See our guy mentions that he needs help ‘steering the ship away from the buried treasure’? What do you think that means? Buried treasure is evidence. Must be something concrete in there or he wouldn’t have mentioned it that way.”

“Looks like a lot of speculation on your part, Jules. I don’t know that any of this is worth losing our jobs over. I think maybe we’ve had too much time in this car to think.”

“Well, take a look at the garden he has in the backyard. Lots of beautiful roses, don’t you think? Seems like a perfect place to bury something.”

I looked over to the pristine rose garden you could see from across the fence line. My mind was torn between the emails (which had been illegally hacked) and the probability of the suspect being the "Flat Tire Killer" (which was hard to judge clearly through Jules and his paranoid pushing of his theory).

“Jules, we are not digging up a suspect’s rose garden, especially without a warrant. We are just watching the house. That is it. I’m done with the theorizing. If the chief knew you had hacked his email –”

Jules looked down at his phone ringing and picked it up.

“Hi, chief.”

As Jules talked, I saw someone move the curtains back in the side bedroom of the house where we are parked. Our car was barely visible from the window, but we could still be seen. I saw the suspect, who must be into his seventies now, stare straight at me from the window as he went to light a cigarette of his own. He looks well off for his age, but it was hard to imagine him brutally killing young girls when staring at him now.

“Yeah, chief says that the burglar is our guy. Guess they found some prints on an old weapon that matched. Sorry, buddy. I think you’re right. Too much time alone and I shouldn’t have been peeping in on the emails. I get too carried away sometimes, I know that. I need to get a hobby outside of work. We can get going and head into the precinct now. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention any of my crazy talk back there.”

The suspect had his cigarette in his hand and a phone in the other.

The phone lit up his face as he was smoking and looked down to check it.

He stared straight at me with a huge grin as we started to drive off, waving goodbye.