"Do you know if he recorded the numbers of those big bills?"
Palacio shook his head. "I doubt it."
After pausing to let Palacio compose himself, Brewmaster continued, "Let me ask something else." He flipped through several pages of his notebook, referring to notes made earlier. "You told me that when you came into the Ernsts' bedroom this morning, you realized there was nothing you could do to help Mr. and Mrs. Ernst, and you went immediately to a phone."
"That's the way it was, sir. I called nine-one-one."
"But did you touch anything in the bedroom? Anything at all?"
Palacio shook his head. "I knew that until the police got here, everything had to stay the same." The majordomo hesitated.
Brewmaster prompted, "What is it?"
"Well, there was one thing I'd forgotten until now. The radio was playing very loudly. I turned it off. I'm sorry if I- "
"Never mind. But let's go look at it."
In the Ernst bedroom, the two men walked toward a portable radio. Brewmaster asked, "When you turned this off, did you change the station?"
"No, sir."
"Has anyone used the radio since?"
"I don't think so."
Brewmaster slipped a rubber glove over his right hand, then turned the radio on. The song, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, filled the room. The detective peered at the radio's dial, set to 93.1 FM.
"That's WTMI," Palacio said. "It was a favorite of Mrs. Ernst. She often listened to it."
Soon afterward, Brewmaster took Maria Palacio to the murdered couple's bedroom to ask another question. "I advise you not to look at the bodies," he told her. "I'll stand between them and you. But there's something else I want you to see."
The "something else" was jewelry a sapphire and diamond ring with matching earrings, another gold ring, a pearl necklace with a pink tourmaline clasp, a gold bracelet set with diamonds all of it obviously valuable and left in plain view on a bedroom dressing table.
"Yes, that's Mrs. Ernst's," Maria Palacio said. "At night she never bothered to put it away, just left it out, then put it in the safe the next morning. I warned her once. . ." The woman's voice broke.
"That's all, Mrs. Palacio, thank you," Brewmaster said. "You've told me what I needed to know."
Still later, replying to another Brewmaster question, Dr. Sanchez affirmed, "Yes, essentially the facial and head beatings and body mutilations of Mr. and Mrs. Ernst are similar to those in the Frost and Urbina cases and probably, from reports I've received, in the Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater cases too."
"And the knife wounds, Doctor?"
"I won't be sure, of course, until after autopsy. But superficially I'd say the knife wounds on both bodies are from the same kind of bowie knife used on the others."
As to the dead rabbit, Dr. Sanchez asked the owner of a pet store, Heather Ubens, with whom she had worked before, to come to the Ernst house. Ubens, an authority on small animals, identified the creature by its commercial name, a Lopear rabbit. Many of them, she said, were sold locally as pets. Since there was no sign of injury to the rabbit, in Ubens's opinion it had been killed by asphyxiation simply deprived of air.
After the rabbit had been photographed, Dr. Sanchez had it sent to the medical examiner's office to be preserved in formaldehyde.
Sergeant Brewmaster checked with Theo Palacio to see if the rabbit had been a pet at the Ernst house. "Absolutely not. Mr. and Mrs. Ernst didn't like animals," the majordomo told him, adding, "I wanted them to have a guard dog because of all the crime; I even offered to take care of it myself. But Mr. Ernst said no, with him being a city commissioner, the police would always look out for his safety. But they didn't, did they?"
Brewmaster chose not to answer. Subsequently police made inquiries at other Miami pet stores, using crime-scene photos in an attempt to find the rabbit's purchaser. But since so many rabbits were sold, sometimes in litters of seven or eight, and since few stores kept detailed records, the search proved fruitless.
Hank Brewmaster told Malcolm Ainslie about the dead rabbit and asked, "Is there something in Revelation that fits the way those other things did?"
"There's no rabbit in Revelation, or in any other part of the Bible; I'm sure of that," Ainslie said. "It could still be a symbol, though. Rabbits as a species are very old."
"Any religious connotation at all?"
"I'm not sure." Ainslie paused, recalling a lecture series Life Origins and Geologic Time that he had attended soon after his religious faith began to wane. Details came back; he sometimes surprised himself by how much his memory retained. "Rabbits are Lagomorpha that's rabbits, hares, and pikes. They originated in North Asia near the end of the Paleocene." He smiled. "Which is fifty-five million years before the Genesis version of creation."
"You think our guy an obsessed religious freak, you called him knows all that?" Brewmaster asked.
"I doubt it. But who knows what he thinks, or why?"
That night at home Ainslie went to Karen's personal computer, on which he kept a King James version of the Bible. The next day he told Brewmaster, "I did a computer search for any Bible reference to 'lagomorph,' 'hare,' or 'pika.' No lagomorphs or pikes, but 'hare' appears twice once in Leviticus, once in Deuteronomy, though not at all in Revelation."
"Do you think our rabbit could have been intended as a hare, and that way be a Bible symbol?"
"No, I don't." Ainslie hesitated, then said, "I'll tell you what I do think, after a lot of thought last night. I don't believe that rabbit is a Revelation symbol at all. It doesn't fit. I reckon it's a fake."
As Brewmaster looked at him curiously, he went on, "All those other symbols left at murder scenes fitted something specific. Like the four dead cats 'four beasts' and the red moon 'the moon became as blood' and the trumpet 'a great voice, as of a trumpet.' "
"I remember." Brewmaster nodded.
"Oh, sure, a rabbit could be a 'beast' Revelation's full of beasts.'' Ainslie shook his head. "Somehow I don't think so."
"So what are you suggesting?"
"I guess it's mostly instinct, Hank. But I think we need to keep an open mind about whether the Ernst murders were really another serial killing, or whether someone else did them and tried to make them look that way."
"Aren't you forgetting? We withheld those earlier crime-scene details."
"But some were published. Reporters have sources; always happens."
"Well, all that's startling, Malcolm, and I'll try to keep it in mind. But I have to tell you, after seeing that Ernst scene, I reckon your thoughts are way out."
They left it there.
* * *
Soon afterward, Sandra Sanchez announced her findings following the autopsies of both victims. Yes, they had been killed by a bowie knife, as her first inspection of the wounds suggested. However, the distinctive notches and serrations in the bodies differed from those at the other killings, so a different knife was used which proved nothing, because bowie knives could be purchased readily and a serial killer might easily own several.
Thus, as days went by, and despite Malcolm Ainslie's doubts, it seemed increasingly certain that the Ernst killings had been committed by the same hand as the eight preceding unsolved murders. The basic circumstances were identical, and so were the supplementals: the dead rabbit, still possibly a Revelation symbol; removal of all money; the highly visible jewelry left untouched; and the loudplaying radio. Also, as with the earlier murders, there was no fingerprint evidence.
The investigators were troubled, however, by the speed with which the Ernst killings had followed the Urbina/Pine Terrace Condo murders only three days earlier. The previous killings had been spaced two to three months apart. The media and public were curious about that fact, and asked pertinent questions: Had the killer speeded up his deadly mission, whatever it might be? Did he have a sense of invincibility, of being "on a roll"? Was there special significance in a Miami city commissioner being a victim? Were other commissioners or officials in danger? And what were the police doing, if anything, to anticipate the killer's next moves?