Read Online Never Let Them See You Cry by Edna Buchanan - Free Book Online Page A

Anita Babette, bound and gagged, possibly still alive though probably already dead, nearly two hundred miles north to Yeehaw Junction? It would have been simpler and far safer to leave her in her house. If what the killer sought was a headstart on police, why then did he drive the dead woman’s car back to Miami?
    In her big house—both home and studio—detectives found lists, the names of more than one hundred men referred to Anita Babette by half a dozen dating services.
    â€œThere are a lot of women like her in Dade County,” Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez said. “They outnumber the men. They get lonely.” He hoped other lonely women would help him catch the killer.
    â€œWe believe that if he went so far as to keep her prisoner, take her car and cash her checks, that he has victimized other women. We want to talk to anybody who has ever had a problem with a computer date who tried to get money from them in any way.
    â€œI think we have his name,” Gonzalez said of the killer, “but there are just too many to properly investigate each one.”
    Many of the men declined to cooperate.
    â€œThey are all a little embarrassed,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t think they want it known that they even used a dating service.”
    Sundberg said many were “losers, introverts, quiet conservative guys. They resist coming in to talk to us.” The detectives found the typical man registered with the dating services to be a “middle-class, private person. They’re average. They’re not brain surgeons, they’re not street sweepers either. Maybe they’re a little shy. They’re not your Dale Carnegie-type people.”
    Anita Babette, highly regarded in the field of photography, had been eager to meet professional men of similar education, background and interests. She told friends she was disappointed. Many of the purported professionals referred by the dating services were not what she expected. Some even lacked high school diplomas. Several had criminal records. A few were married men.
    Most said they had talked to Anita Babette on the telephone but had never met her. A few said they had dated her. A few submitted to voluntary fingerprinting.
    Asked how potential dates were screened, a spokesman for one Miami firm said, “They’re not, really.”
    His firm had sent the names of many men to Anita Babette. “I know nothing about her. I’m not interested in discussing her or us,” the spokesman said, and cut me off.
    Members of a singles boating group missed her, but to most she was just a name and a number. She was also remembered by the operators of an outing club. She took a bicycling trip and went sailing with them. The family man who had organized people who love the outdoors recalled her “as a cautious person. We were very sad when we heard about it. We’d like to see whoever it was get caught.”
    During a long and intense investigation the detectives came to understand Anita Babette and other women like her.
    â€œIn her earlier life she traveled all over the world photographing everything,” Sundberg said. “It was always her career. Footloose and fancy free, a girl-and-her-camera type of thing. Then she was forty and thought, ‘I’ve got my career, but I’ve got nothing.’ She wanted the right man.”
    We hoped another lonely woman somewhere in the city might supply an answer, but none did.
    The ultimate Mr. Wrong, the man who killed Anita Babette is still out there.
    Somewhere.
    Another innocent who died for love was a Miamian, kidnapped, robbed and brutally murdered as he moonlighted to buy a birthday present for his wife. As the killers tried to bury the corpse in a backyard, neighbors called police. A year later, five days before the first anniversary of her husband’s death— and her twenty-sixth birthday—the widow swung her son, age two and named after his father, over