She knew. No explanations, he realized, were required on either side. Cynthia would have many contacts; a city commissioner could bestow favors and was owed them in return. Undoubtedly someone in her debt perhaps in the grand jury office, even, or the Police Department had quietly picked up a phone and made a call.
"You may not believe this, Cynthia," Ainslie said, "but I wish there were something, anything, I could do."
"Well, let's think about that." Her face and voice were icy, devoid of all empathy. "I know you like executions, so maybe you could attend my daughter's make sure everything goes off the way it should. Mine, too, perhaps. Now, wouldn't you enjoy that."
He pleaded, "I beg of you, don't do this."
"What would you prefer remorse and tears, some sleazy piety from your old game?"
Ainslie sighed. Unsure of what he had hoped for, he knew whatever it was had failed. He knew, too, that Ruby should be with him. He had made a mistake in persuading her to stay behind.
"There's no easy way to do this," he said, placing the arrest warrant on the desk. "I'm afraid you're under arrest. I have to caution you "
Cynthia smiled sardonically. "I'll accept Miranda as read."
"I need your gun. Where is it?" Ainslie's right hand had moved and was holding his own Glock 9mrn automatic, though he did not produce it. Cynthia, he knew, had a Glock also; like all sworn personnel who retired, she had received her gun on leaving as a gift from the city.
"In the desk." She had risen and pointed to a drawer.
Not taking his eyes from her, he reached down with his left hand, opened the drawer, and felt inside. The gun was under a cloth. Lifting it out, he put it in a pocket.
"Turn around, please." He had handcuffs ready.
"Not yet." Her voice had become near normal. "I have to go to the toilet first. There are certain functions you can't do with your hands fixed behind your back."
"No. Stand where you are."
Unheeding, Cynthia turned and walked toward the interior door he had noted. Over her shoulder she taunted, "If you don't like it, go ahead shoot me."
Two fleeting thoughts crossed Ainslie's mind, but he banished them.
As the door opened, he saw it was a toilet inside. Equally obvious, there was no other way out. The door closed swiftly. Removing his right hand from his gun, he strode forward, intending to open it by force if needed. For whatever reason, he suddenly knew he had moved too slowly.
Before he could reach the door, and only seconds after it had closed, it was flung open from inside. Cynthia stood in the doorway, eyes blazing, face tightly set a mask of hate. Her voice was a snarl as she commanded,
"Freeze!" In her hand was a tiny gun.
Knowing he had been outwitted, that the gun had probably been stored inside, he began, "Cyn, look . . . we can . . .',
"Shut up." Her face was working. "You knew I had this. Didn't you?"
Ainslie nodded slowly. He hadn't known, but barely a minute earlier the possibility had occurred to him; it was one of the thoughts he had dismissed. The gun Cynthia held was the tiny, chrome-plated Smith & Wesson fiveshot pistol the "throw-down" she had used so effectively during the bank holdup into which she and Ainslie once walked together.
"And you thought maybe I'd use it on myself! To save me and everybody else a lot of trouble. Answer me!"
It was a moment for truth. Ainslie admitted, "Yes, I did." That had been his second thought.
"Well, I will use it. But I'll take you with me, you bastard!" She was bracing herself, he could tell, for a marksman's shot. Possibilities, like summer lightning, flashed through his mind. Reaching for his Glock was one; but Cynthia would fire the instant he moved, and he had seen the bank robber with a hole precisely central in his forehead. As for Ruby, barely five minutes had passed. With Cynthia there was no more reasoning. Was there anything he could do? No, nothing. And so . . . the end came to everyone in time. Accept it. One final thought: He had sometimes wondered would he, in the last seconds of his life, return to a belief, even a hope, in God and some future life? He knew the answer now. And it was no.
Cynthia was ready to fire. He closed his eyes and then heard the shot . . . Oddly, he felt nothing . . . He opened them.
Cynthia had fallen to the floor; her eyes closed, the tiny gun clutched in her hand. On the left side of her chest, blood was oozing from an open wound.
Against the outside door, rising from the half-crouched stance from which she had fired her 9mm automatic, was Ruby Bowel
5
News of Cynthia Ernst's violent death swept through Miami like a tidal wave.
And the news media exploded.
So did surviving city commission members, infused with white-hot anger at what they saw as the wanton slaying of one of their own.
Even before the body of Cynthia Ernst could be removed, her death having been certified by paramedics, two mobile television crews were at City Hall, filming and posing questions to which no one had coherent answers. They had been alerted by police radio exchanges, as had other reporters and photographers who quickly joined them.
Sergeant Braynen and his partner, aided by hastily summoned reinforcements, attempted to maintain order.
For Malcolm Ainslie and Ruby Bowe, the postconf~ntation events became a mercurial montage. After hasty calls to and from Assistant Chief Serrano's office, they were ordered to remain in place and talk to no one until a "shoot team" from Internal Affairs arrived standard procedure when death or serious injury was caused by an officer on duty. The team, appearing moments later, comprised a sergeant and detective who questioned Ainslie and Bowe carefully, though without hostility, it becoming quickly evident that Internal Affairs had been informed, before the of ricers' departure, of the grand jury indictments and arrest warrant for Cynthia Ernst.
The Police Department, itself scrambling for information, declined immediate comment on the shooting death of City Commissioner Ernst, but promised total disclosure at a news conference at 6:00 P.M. that day, which the chief of police would attend.
Meanwhile the chief sent messages to the mayor and city commissioners that he would telephone each of them personally during the hour before the news conference, to report the latest information. It would have been more convenient to have a special briefing in his office, but under Florida's "sunshine law," commission members could not meet together in any place without the media or public being informed and admitted.
From the "shoot team" interrogation, Ainslie and Bowe moved onward to a private accounting in Assistant Chief Serrano's office behind closed doors, and before Serrano and Majors Figueras and Yanes. During all the questioning, Ainslie and Bowe told no lies, but nor, it seemed, were overly probing questions asked in particular, how did Ainslie and Ruby become briefly separated at City Hall? Instinct told Ainslie that, justly or otherwise, ranks were closing, with the Police Department maneuvering to protect its own. He wondered, too: Was there, among the five, an uneasy memory of Yanes's covert words concerning Cynthia, spoken in this same room barely an hour before: She could do the decent thing and swallow a bullet. Save everyone a potful of trouble. Did they now share a feeling of guilt that no one had protested? And was there an instinct that if probing became too intensive and specific, something they would prefer not to hear would be divulged?
Those were questions, Ainslie knew, that would never be answered.
In the end, what would become the essential police retelling was summarized in a handwritten note by Serrano, to be rewritten and enlarged on as an official statement:
Acting with authority derived from three grand jury indictments, two of Ricers Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie and Detective Ruby Rowe attempted to arrest Commissioner Cynthia Ernst After the prisoner was apparently disarmed, with the gun she was known to own taken from her, and before being handcuffed, she suddenly produced a small concealed pistol which she was about to fire at Sergeant Ainslie when Detective Rowe, using her own police weapon, shot and killed the prisoner.