Free Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman Page B

hands, his index fingers gently rubbing away at the pressure that was steadily mounting behind his temples. Police reports, green investigative report folders, newspaper clippings, and interview sheets littered the length of the rectangular cherry conference table. A cigarette burned somewhere nearby behind an old Starbucks coffee container and an empty brown bag from Burger King. Off in a corner of the crowded room, a television monitor crackled with snow from the gruesome videotape that had just played out. Above him, the ceiling’s bright fluorescent light cast a glare on the five new grisly photographs that were spread out neatly in front of him on the table. A new girl for The Wall.
    The families of the missing eleven young women had been asked to provide a recent photograph of each girl for identification purposes. Prom pictures, high-schooland college graduation pictures, yearbook photos, and professional head shots smiled down at Dominick now from their respective positions on the brown corkboard that task force members somberly called The Wall. The task force had actually received from the families three, five, and in some cases up to ten photos of each girl. From his seventeen years as a homicide investigator, Dominick knew that it was impossible to expect a mother to choose just one picture to capture an entire lifetime of memories of her child, or a sibling just one photo to reflect how a sister should be forever remembered. It was almost disrespectful to ask. So the most detailed photograph of each girl had been chosen for The Wall, and the others had been silently filed away. The eleven pretty faces had then been arranged in a row on the corkboard in chronological order – starting with the date of the first disappearance, not with the date that their bodies were ultimately discovered.
    Directly underneath, and in startling contrast to the happy snapshots, the naked and broken bodies of nine of the missing women had been photographed one final time. Neon-colored thumbtacks held the five-picture collage of each woman’s crime scene and autopsy photos on to a brown corkboard that now stretched almost the entire length of the room. A chilling, ghastly photo album of before-and-after still pictures. Sandwiched between the life and death photos were neatly printed five-by-seven-inch white index cards that listed each woman’s name, age, and her brief physical description, and then the date and location of her disappearance. The last line provided the date and location where her body had been discovered, and finally, the coroner’s estimated date and time of death. The cause of death was not necessary.From the color glossy photos on The Wall, it was all too obvious.
    Dominick took a sip of the coffee, now ice-cold, and stared, as he had done hundreds of times before, at each girl’s haunting face, into her once-trusting, terrified eyes. What had they seen in the last few moments of their short lives before everything mercifully went to black?
    They were all so young. Most of the girls were only in their early twenties, three were not lucky enough to have made it even that far. The oldest of the eleven was just twenty-five, the youngest, barely eighteen. Photographed in life, the vibrant smiles were inviting, the playful pouts coy. Blond hair fell in golden ringlets off one, spilling on to her shoulders; another wore platinum locks cut short behind the ear in a jagged bob; and another’s honey-colored streaks fell pin-straight down her back. All had been blond, and, in life, so beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that six had their professional head shots on The Wall.
    In the past eighteen months, eleven women had vanished into the tropical Miami night, disappearing under the palm trees of Ocean Drive and Washington Avenue from packed, trendy South Beach nightclubs and hot spots where the rich and famous and beautiful liked to frolic. Weeks, and sometimes even months, after their disappearances, the mutilated, nude