Hell by Hilary Norman Page B

South Beach promenade in his earlier, bold killing days . Though if it was Cal the Hater luring unsuspecting men like Andy Victor into his horror web, then he might still be acting out the ‘joy boy, joy giver’ character he’d written about in his Epistles .
    At three fourteen Thursday afternoon, the squad got wind of another missing persons report that sounded warning bells.
    Ricardo Torres, age nineteen, from Hallandale Beach, had been reported missing by his mother, Mrs Lilian Torres, after her son had failed to come home for the fourth night in a row. Mrs Torres said that she knew Ricardo had been going out to a party two Saturdays back, on April 24, but she didn’t know who’d invited him or where the party had been.
    The report had been filed with the local police department, and if there was cause to suspect a sinister reason for the young man’s disappearance, any crime would lie in Broward County’s jurisdiction.
    Little more than dumb luck, therefore, that word had filtered through to MBPD’s Violent Crimes Unit, but now they had it, and by five thirty, Sam and Martinez were in the Torres apartment, not far from Hallandale Beach Boulevard.
    Mrs Torres was a well-rounded woman with dark, distraught eyes, but she took time to invite them to sit on her narrow balcony, offered them fresh lemonade and home-baked sugar cookies.
    â€˜This is wonderful,’ Sam told her. ‘It’s not often we get treated so well.’
    â€˜Perhaps you’d like coffee instead?’ Lilian Torres’s anxiety stretched to giving them the right kind of hospitality. ‘I should have asked.’
    â€˜Ma’am, this is great,’ Martinez assured her.
    â€˜I can tell you it made me nervous right away – ’ Mrs Torres got down to her fears – ‘that he wouldn’t tell me about the party, because usually my Ricardo tells me where he’s going, but if he’s planning something he thinks I might not like, it’s like shutters come down over his eyes, and there’s nothing I can do.’
    â€˜Is Ricardo a student, Mrs Torres?’ Martinez asked.
    â€˜Not any more,’ she said. ‘He works in a shoe store in Aventura, in the mall.’ She shook her head. ‘If his father was still with us, Ricardo would still be at college and he would not feel able to disappear like this.’
    â€˜Where is Ricardo’s father?’ Sam asked.
    â€˜Gone,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t know where.’
    â€˜Might Ricardo know?’ Sam asked.
    â€˜No,’ she answered.
    â€˜So there’s no chance your son might be with his dad?’ Martinez asked.
    â€˜Not unless he’s been keeping that from me too.’
    â€˜Does Ricardo have close friends?’ Sam asked.
    â€˜None of them know where he is.’
    â€˜What about a girlfriend?’ Martinez asked.
    Closest way he could think to ask if the young man was gay.
    â€˜No,’ Mrs Torres said.
    Martinez’s take on the situation as they left the building was that Ricardo Torres might not be missing at all.
    â€˜Deadbeat dad, mom unable to control her kid.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘He’s been gone twelve days.’
    He’d seen other things up in the Torres apartment: photographs of a boy with sweet, dark eyes and skin several shades lighter than his own, but still dark, and maybe straight, maybe not, but either way still the kind that Jerome Cooper loved to hate.
    To mutilate and destroy.
    A young man whose natural wish for independence might have pushed him straight into Cal the Hater’s path.
    Or maybe not.
    â€˜I hope to God you’re right,’ he told his partner as they got back in the Chevy.
    Martinez still remembered what Cooper’s previous victims had looked like.
    â€˜Me too,’ he said.
    Grace’s cellphone rang at six forty-seven Thursday evening.
    Sam had called earlier to say he’d