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CHAPTER 1
The sweet little old lady was dead, shot in the face by her Kenmore range when she opened the oven door to investigate the explosions inside. Baking cookies for her favorite grandson, she had no idea where he had stashed his ammo.
Her story was no more incredible than the backyard barbecue that had started my week. A patio bug zapper vaporized a mosquito, creating the spark that detonated a gas explosion in the outdoor grill. Still interviewing survivors, I was paged to go to a Miami Beach oceanfront resort. A makeshift raft had washed ashore with six boat people aboard. Only one, a sunburned and dehydrated six-year-old girl, was still alive.
Hours later an overloaded van crashed and rolled on a narrow stretch of U.S. 1. Like three others wrecked in the past four weeks, it was ferrying labor pools of Haitian workers to Upper Keys tourist havens. None of the vans had insurance or decent tire tread. The victims paid $25 a week for transportation to their minimum wage restaurant and hotel jobs. I had spent hours with the survivors and their next of kin and could still smell the haunting brew of green cachimon and vervine, a Haitian herbal tea used to sedate the bereaved.
Shell-shocked, I had escaped to unwind, catch my breath, and browse the new exhibit at my favorite cool and quiet place. In a small, vaultlike room, a powerful but solitary figure stood in shadows, a thick noose of nautical line coiled around his throat. My heels clicked on the cement floor as I stepped inside. Crudely drawn boats, small planes, and dark animal horns covered the walls. They seemed to close in like those of a prison, and the air grew dense. Suddenly claustrophobic, I fled out onto the sun-drenched piazza where pink pentas and demure hibiscus bloomed cheerfully under puffy clouds that cruised overhead.
Digging in my bag for the wrapped empanada bought from a street vendor, I sat in a shady spot near the sculpture court and nibbled my lunch in front of the most whimsical exhibit, a giant snowman built of tar, sweating dark tears in Miami's August heat. Public debate had raged around him. A symbol of white/good, black/evil, critics claimed. Symbolic of Miami's racism and prejudice, others pontificated. I simply enjoyed the incongruity of a tar snowman in the sizzling setting.
My tight shoulder and neck muscles relaxed as I stretched, soaking up the sun and the ambience. Wrought-iron gates surrounded the graceful Mediterranean arches and loggias of the piazza. The downtown skyline, towering glass and stainless steel sentinels, guarded the perimeter. My lazy thoughts drifted back to the man in the noose. The gallery notes said it was the work of an exile artist born in Havana during the Castro regime.
Time to get back to work. Reluctantly, I crumpled the greasy wrapping. As I stepped toward a wire trash basket, the ground shook. Walls trembled and sound waves rattled windows. For a millisecond I thought someone had fired the old Spanish cannon outside the Historical Museum. A dog howled somewhere. I stared up at innocent blue sky and with a growing feeling of dread knew what it was.
A pay phone hung on the wall a few feet away. Digging the ever-present emergency quarter from my skirt pocket, I punched in the dispatch number for Miami Fire.
"Hi. This is Britt Montero from The Miami News. I'm downtown. Where did the bomb explode?"
"Bomb?" echoed the operator.
"Yes. I just heard the explosion." Shifting impatiently, I eyed the walkway to the parking garage. Was the scene close enough to reach on foot? That might be faster and make more sense than driving.
"What makes you think it's a bomb?" The operator sounded slow and skeptical.
"This is Miami," I snapped. "I've been on the police beat long enough to know a bomb when I hear it."
"What was that location?"
"That's what I called to ask you." Frustration backed up in my throat along with my lunch, as I gripped the phone in a stranglehold, scanning the skyline. There it was, a swirling spiral of black smoke.
Suddenly she was serious. "I don't know what went down, but my nine-one-one phones are coming to life. Hold on."
I nearly hung up before she came back. "Don't have an exact QTH, but callers are all saying it's in the area of Northwest Second Avenue and Flagler. They say it's a car," the dispatcher added. "Have to go now, all hell's breaking loose." I hung up and ran.
Sprinting down the open stairwell from the elevated plaza at the Center for Fine Arts, I saw open-mouthed pedestrians staring in the direction of the smoke.
The location, two blocks away, didn't register until I saw the WTOP-TV tower. My heart pounded. Darn. Their reporters would be there first. Then it occurred to me that the television station itself, third in local news ratings, might be the target. Wisps of smoke wound up and around from behind the building.
Traffic was stalled. Sirens converging. People running.
As I caught my breath in that familiar suspended state of fearful anticipation, a thousand possibilities fast-forwarded through my mind. We have had car bombs explode under union officials, nightclub owners, drug dealers, double-dealing informants, federal witnesses, Latin political activists, and victims of mistaken identity.
Bombers have targeted police headquarters, the state attorney's office, the Justice Building, the Latin Chamber of Commerce, beauty salons, bingo halls, boats, trains, and planes, and the offices of the postal service, the FBI, and social security. Sometimes would-be bombers become the victims. A penis was all that remained of one bomb builder who made a mistake. Explosives have been planted in suspicious packages, booby-trapped television sets, and at Spanish-language newspapers. Cars outside various consulates have been blown sky high.
A bomb was even discovered strapped to a shooting victim during surgery. Found bleeding on an inner-city street, he had thirty packets of cocaine, two thousand dollars, and several bullet wounds. As he was transferred from a stretcher to the operating table, an explosive device equal in strength to a stick of dynamite was spotted, concealed in the small of his back. Had a bullet struck him half an inch lower, it and he would have detonated.
The hospital was evacuated as bomb squad experts gingerly removed the device and the surgical team fought to save the victim's life. He died despite their efforts. I mourned his passing. I wanted to hear his story but he took it with him.
Miami has had them all: letter bombs, pipe bombs, hand grenades, bazookas, missile launchers, remote control devices, and ticking time bombs. I hate their unpredictable nature, the impersonal character of their destruction. Bombs have no eyes. No soul. They will shred the flesh, blind the eyes, and end the lives of the innocent as well as their intended targets. Police are paid to face danger; innocent civilians entering a public building are not.
Journalists attract threats and scares, but we had never had a local TV station or reporter targeted by a bomb. My chest tightened. The reporters at WTOP-TV are the competition, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. But they are fellow journalists and I know them.
Breathlessly, I pounded around the corner to the station parking lot.
Debris was everywhere but the heart of the blast was a late-model red Mustang. The tires were flat and smoking. Other parked cars had blown-out windows and shrapnel damage. Their alarms sounded in chorus, bewailing their wounds. The bomb had chewed away at the concrete parking lot where shocked employees now milled about.
Movie pyrotechnics, cars exploding in gigantic balls of fire and consuming infernos, are fiction. In reality, the initial flash and the blast wave subside almost instantly, followed by residual fire as gas and oil spew from fuel lines and slowly ignite. The Mustang's windshield and windows were gone. The hood, a crumpled piece of metal, now rested on the roof of the station's one-story building.
I thought I recognized the flashy little Ford with a blackened PRESS plate on the front.
An older woman stood dazed amid the debris. She appeared to be an office employee at the station. "Is that Alex Aguirre's car?" I asked.
"He was going home for lunch." She wrung her hands and I saw that they were burned, but she seemed unaware. "He goes home for lunch every day."
The mercilessly heated August air stirred against my skin like the hot breath of a wild animal.
"I tried to open the door," she said, her voice an odd monotone, "but it was too hot."
"He's still in there?"
"He just looked at me."
He could be alive. Heart thudding, I stumbled to the car, skirting metal fragments, stepping over broken glass — and instantly regretted it.
The figure in the still smoldering driver's seat in no way resembled the cocky, fearless, and loquacious commentator I remembered, a short, robust man who favored flashy suits instead of guayaberas and always meticulously combed his dark mustache before appearing on camera.
He was badly burned, clothes smoking, head arched back, mouth agape as though he had struggled for a last precious gasp of air. His right hand was missing. His right leg was wrapped around his neck.
Knees rubbery, I gulped deep breaths to settle my stomach and keep down my lunch. Turning away, nearly overwhelmed by the smoky, soupy mix of spilled transmission fluid, gas, oil, and the unforgettable stench of burned flesh, I remembered the family pictures of his smiling children that Alex had proudly displayed the last time our paths crossed at a press conference.
I wanted to warn away the growing crowd of gawkers, to block their view of what I would never forget. I know the dead have no privacy, but I didn't want strangers staring at him. Not now. Not this way.
I needn't have worried. Firefighters had appeared and begun hosing down the car. Police and homicide detectives arrived in droves. Cops began forcing everyone out of the lot, across the street and down the block, roping off a wide area. Bomb squad technicians in brown cargo pants and tan shirts argued noisily with the firemen, accusing them of washing away evidence.
More press was arriving. I saw my friend Lottie Dane and another photographer, named Villanueva, from the News. Lottie's fiery red hair, tight jeans, and camera are hard to miss. She is about five eight, but Villanueva towered over her at well over six feet. Both looked grim as they edged through the crowd.
"Is it who I think it is?" Lottie asked in her Texas twang. She was careful not to say a name.
"Alex," I whispered.
"Is he burned up?"
I nodded.
"A crispy critter?" asked Villanueva.
When I didn't answer, he shook his head and began rapid-firing a Nikon with a 300-millimeter lens.
A WTOP news van screeched to the curb, the last to arrive. The stunned crew leaped out to shoot footage but was kept at bay by police. Apparently every WTOP reporter had been out on assignment at the time of the blast. In the panic that followed, it had not occurred to the news editor to summon a team to cover the top story of the day in their own parking lot.
The station was evacuated as bomb squad techs began a search for a secondary device. Standard operating procedure. The chilling specter of another bomb primed to detonate after the first drew a crowd had not even occurred to me. The thought raised gooseflesh on my sweltering skin as I watched them cautiously comb the shrubbery, searching in and under cars.
"Too early to say," replied Bomb Squad Lieutenant Dave Yates when I asked what type of explosives had been used.
"We haven't even started yet." He glanced back into the parking lot. "We'll have to look at the metal, see if it's ripped or torn. Higher explosives like C-Four make clean cuts. Black powder explosives twist and rip metal."
He screwed up his face and asked a question of his own. "Was this guy controversial, or what?" Yates obviously didn't spend much time glued to a TV.
"He made a lot of noise in the Cuban community, liked to ridicule the pompous establishment with fiery commentary, but I don't think anybody took him that seriously."
"Yup," said Lottie, who had stopped shooting for a moment and joined us. "He wore a big hat but no gun."
WTOP, an English-speaking station, had tried to raise ratings among the predominantly Hispanic community by hiring Aguirre away from a Spanish-speaking station to deliver commentary three nights a week and to occasionally report on Hispanic affairs.
"He feuding with anybody in particular lately?"
"Ha," I said. "Try Fidel Castro, the President, our mayor, the city commissioners, Juan Carlos Reyes, The Miami News, the Mafia, the CIA. Alex is a" — I sighed and corrected myself — "was a gadfly, a Don Quixote. He loved to tilt at windmills. He was super patriotic, hated Castro and communism, loved Cuba, this country, and controversy for the sake of controversy. He blasted anybody who didn't share his politics and played devil's advocate with those who did."
The possibility of a long list of high-profile suspects did not sit well with Yates. Cops always hope the answers will be simple. Usually they are. His expression grew more intense as he watched his men examine the crater under the front of the Mustang.
"Is that where you think the bomb was planted?"
He nodded. "Looks like the transmission and firewall and part of the engine are gone."
"Think it was remote control? That somebody saw him get into the car and pushed a button ..." I squinted into the sun, scanning the crowd for a suitable suspect.
"It's way too early to know anything," he said irritably. "The way the metal is bent and the damage to the floorboard should give us some indication. It coulda been hooked in real quick with clamps and magnets to the undercarriage, or with alligator clips to the starter system, or to the ignition, or one of the spark plug leads. Or it could have been a time device."
"They say he went home for lunch every day," I offered. "Don't know if it was always at the same time. What will your guys do now?" I asked, jotting notes.
"Sweep up the entire parking lot, collect everything we can, then dig up the crater, put everything in bags, sift through it all with increasingly finer screens and examine each piece. We'll probably have to take some debris to Ford auto parts to determine whether it's a piece of the car or part of the device."
"Look there," I whispered. His eyes followed mine. Something hung high over our heads from the branches of a banyan tree. "What is that?"
He squinted up from behind his sunglasses. "Damn," he said. "Looks like one of the windshield wipers."
He called to a uniformed officer. "Move the crowd, including the press, back at least a block. We got pieces of evidence over here."
"Thanks, Britt," grumbled other reporters, irate at me, as uniforms began restringing the crime scene tape to close off a far wider area.
The WTOP camera crew argued noisily and unsuccessfully with police, who refused to grant them special privileges even though the victim was their colleague.
Bomb squad techs divided the entire parking lot into small grids. Homicide detectives canvassed for witnesses. Reporters clamored for answers. "Was it a high-tech, sophisticated device?" a radio reporter demanded, shoving a mike in front of Yates.
"Too early to tell," he repeated. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to build a bomb, you just have to be careful. It's premature to speculate at this point. We've just begun our investigation."
"Was it high explosives?" asked a TV reporter.
"What do you classify as high explosives?" asked another.
"C-Four, TNT, Flex-X," Yates said patiently, as the crowd of reporters grew larger around him, like seagulls flocking to a food source. "As opposed to low-grade explosives like dynamite, gunpowder, or a reloading propellant for firearms."
I didn't remember smelling anything like gunpowder.
"Hell all Friday," Lottie muttered. "Everybody wants to know if it was high explosives or low, was it sophisticated? High, low, sophisticated or not, it don't matter when it kills you. Dead is dead."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Act of Betrayal"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Edna Buchanan.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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