This is a piece from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel which was the impetus behind A Killing Night, the fourth in the Max Freeman series. A Love Story By Jonathon King, Staff Writer Sunday, July 2, 2000 It began as love stories always do, before things go bad, before they turn dark. They start with a quiet kiss because before the first sharp slap, before the promises that it won't happen again, before things turn ugly, there has to be a glimmer of possibility. Their story began in a bar, but they were not typical players. She was the 23-year-old bartender, quick on her feet, quicker with a smile. If you sat down in front of her, Cindy Cusano was suddenly your newest friend. And there was something about her energy and feistiness and that backyard football kind of look that made you believe it. She was no Hooters girl. She rarely left the house in anything but blue jeans and a T-shirt, her long brown hair in a ponytail, a billed cap shading her face. When she was 17, a restaurant manager once gave her money to go buy lipstick. She spent it on football cards. "She was a compassionate and spirited girl, and a bit of a tomboy," says her mother. "She was the kind of person who didn't cover up who she was. With Cindy, what you saw was what you got." And sometime in the early months of 1999, Danny Rodriguez must have liked what he saw. He was the cop. Broad-shouldered. Better than 6 feet tall. Dressed in the black uniform of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and carrying all the sense of competence and power that goes with it. Rodriguez had the look, and he made sure his 30-year-old body kept it with regular weight lifting. You had to look close to see the hairpiece that covered his premature baldness. You wouldn't know that he'd had the sleeves of his shirt carefully hemmed so they would pass regulations, but still fit tightly around his biceps. Rodriguez worked an off-duty police detail at the Quarterdeck Seafood Bar & Grill near the beachfront in Fort Lauderdale where Cindy tended bar. When they met, Cindy told friends she wasn't interested in Rodriguez. Not her type, she said. Kind of old, she said. Don't like that whole hairpiece thing, she said. But Danny Rodriguez was nothing if not persistent. He could be charming. He could be attentive. He had a way of ingratiating himself into people's lives and found his way into Cindy's. "One night she comes home and she's all bubbly," remembers Cindy's mother, Marie Cusano. "She's going on about Danny, `Oh, he's a pilot. Oh, he used to ride horses in shows. Oh, we've got so much in common.' "If he was everything he said he was, or wanted to be, or wanted you to believe he was, he would have been the perfect guy for her." Friends and family speculate that Cindy fell for Danny's image. They say she was ready for more than just another date and was attracted by his stature, his sense of maturity, his stability. They say she was looking for commitment and he was quick to give it. They say she listened to the dreams he spun and believed them. "I think when she started going out with him it was like uncharted territory," says her friend, Jennifer Shusky. "It was new and different. She liked getting that kind of attention, and he was doing that right from the beginning." Sometimes, it is the way of domestic violence. Sometimes, the ways of a heart are hard to fathom, especially when they lead to anguish. An unsettling allure Let's fly to the Bahamas for the weekend, I'll let you pilot the plane. Let's go to Disney with your parents, I love big families. Let me take you home in the patrol car, I'll let you drive. Danny Rodriguez was good at wooing Cindy Cusano. He did all the right things. He found out they shared a passion for flying, and used his connections to borrow a plane they both could pilot. He met her family - she was one of six children -- and within days was calling her mother "Mom." He offered to help take care of her menagerie of horses, dogs, cats and box turtles. He couldn't be dissuaded from fixing her GMC pickup. It was the same as the start of any relationship, the ones that blossom, the ones that fail. You put your best foot forward at the outset, and leave your sins in the hallway. But the morning that Cindy excitedly told her mother about Danny letting her drive his Fort Lauderdale police cruiser down Interstate 595 at 100 miles an hour, Marie Cusano got a glimpse of an unsettling allure. "I took a deep breath and said, `Cindy, that's got to be wrong. What happens if you get caught?'" Cusano recalls. "She just said he told her it was all right, that he wasn't going to get caught." It was yet another reason, her friends believe, that Cindy let herself get involved with Rodriguez. "I think she liked the idea that he was somebody different, somebody who could break the rules and get away with it," Shusky says. Soon enough came a trip to the Bahamas. An Easter card with the $100 gift certificate to Burdines. Carefully crafted love notes and cards. It was best foot forward stuff. But the dark parts were not far behind. On May 28, four months after they met, Danny and Cindy went to Disney World with her parents and another couple. It was the day, her family says, they saw the couple's first full-blown argument. The fight was over an ex-boyfriend of Cindy's, who had called her. When Rodriguez found out, he fumed. "It went on the whole day," Marie Cusano remembers. "He and I were riding together at one point and he told me, `I just get this terrible pain in my stomach when I think of this guy because I know she dated him before.' I guess, as a mother, it was touching that he cared so much about her." Throughout the day "he was being very calm and collected,'' Cusano says. "Cindy was the one being ugly. She really didn't hide her anger well." The day after the argument, she questioned her daughter about her attitude toward a man who was seemingly so calm about his feelings. "All Cindy said was: `You don't hear him when he's alone with me,'" MarieCusano says. The dark side Other people had heard how Danny Rodriguez could be when he was alone with a girlfriend. More than a year before he met Cindy, the sister of Danny's live-in girlfriend, Lisa Phillips, received a terrifying phone call. For 45 minutes, Lauri Barefoot listened to her sister sob and scream during a fight with Rodriguez. The call was made from their apartment, and Phillips had inadvertently left the phone off the hook. "Miss Barefoot advised that while the line was open, she attempted to contact the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and because she was excited, was told by whoever answered the phone to calm down, that the conversation was being recorded," reads an investigative report filed nearly two years later. Barefoot gave the dispatcher the couple's names. She was told that police officers would make every attempt to check on the situation. When Barefoot talked to Danny about the incident later, he was more concerned about his job than about his behavior, she said. He was upset that she had called the department. In the investigative report, Phillips said a sergeant had been notified and told Rodriguez "to knock it off." Phillips never filed a complaint against Danny. She was a public service aide for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and worked with him almost every day. Later Phillips gave detectives a detailed account of her relationship with her co-worker. She told them about his obsessive contact, how he continuously called her on her police radio or paged her with a 911 while they were on duty "and be highly upset if she didn't return his calls right away." She detailed how he "constantly responded to calls that she was dispatched to and would be constantly present with her throughout the shift." She told detectives of Danny's jealousy over any attention she paid to her children from an earlier marriage. She said when he drove her home at night, he would lock the doors of his cruiser "and drive extremely fast, which would scare her." There were nights when she was so afraid, she slept in her car instead of with him. With the help of her sister, Phillips ended her relationship with Danny in April 1999. When he kept calling and paging her and blocked her car in the police department lot, Phillips finally complained to a sergeant, who gave her a tape recorder to record harassing calls. But formally, the troubles were not documented. Formally, Rodriguez received glowing evaluations throughout his three years as an officer. Privately, Phillips told investigators that her friends in the department began to stay away from her "because of the constant presence of Daniel Rodriguez." It was a laundry list of the classic signs of domestic abuse: Jealousy. Constant calls and pages. Verbal and physical intimidation. Control and alienation from friends and co-workers. Those familiar with domestic abuse would have checked them off and pleaded for intervention. Cindy Cusano may have only begun to realize that side of Danny, but her family still saw a gracious man with charm and stature. "When she first introduced him, I remember thinking, he's a police officer. I'll never have to worry about anyone hurting my daughter," says John Cusano, Cindy's father. "It lulled us into this sense of security." Tomorrow: The Violence Begins The Violence Begins (Part 2) By Jonathon King, Staff Writer Monday, July 3, 2000 To love and cherish. In joy and in sorrow. For the rest of our lives. They stood in a tiny Las Vegas chapel, he in a dark suit looking every bit an off-duty cop, she in a white dress looking lovely but uncomfortable out of her tomboy image. They made their promises. And that night he broke them. Five days after her wedding, Cindy Cusano came home from her honeymoon with a bruised body and a wounded spirit, and it wasn't enough to get her out. "We saw the fingerprints on her arm and the bruises, but we didn't confront her with it at first," remembers Cindy's mother. "All I knew was that she didn't look happy. She didn't look like a new bride." In spring 1999, Cindy was a popular 23-year-old bartender from Davie. Danny Rodriguez was a bright and seemingly stable 30-year-old police officer from Fort Lauderdale. She was no cowering wallflower. He was no struggling loser. They met and dated and started a history together. And in seven months, it was over. Only the speed and finality of their story sets them apart from millions of others trapped in abusive relationships. But the warning signs in the tale of the headstrong girl and the fractured cop were both glaring and subtle. And no one, despite the clues, seemed able to stop it. `We'll be happy' "From this point on, we're going to be happy," Danny Rodriguez said, standing in his new in-laws' home, promising, after yet another fight with his wife of seven days, that things would change. He was using his cop voice, the one with the sure and commanding tone, his finger on his watch. "From this minute, we will JUST BE HAPPY." If only it had been true. "I remember him pointing at the watch, stating the time that it was all going to change," says Cindy's mother, Marie Cusano. By then, she was already learning how easily promises came to her new son-in-law. At some point in his life, Danny Rodriguez must have promised himself that he would become a cop. It was a goal he never gave up on. In 1989, two years out of Cooper City High, he applied for police jobs at six departments in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. He was turned down by every one because of an abysmal driving record, which included seven moving violations in two years. But the rejections didn't deter him. Instead of an officer's job, he took a dispatcher's position with Fort Lauderdale and worked there for three years. He made friends with fellow dispatchers and with officers. But he wasn't on the street. So in 1991, he hooked a different opportunity and left to become an air traffic controller. As a controller at Fort Lauderdale's executive and international airports, his supervisors called him solid. He mastered a job that demands a quick mind and solid nerves. He got along with co-workers. He was, to all appearances, stable. In 1992 he married, and two years later he and his wife had their first child. Soon he was making $54,000 a year as a controller. His parents would later tell detectives their son was financially secure and had a healthy marriage. He was, on the surface, a young man with everything. But he had never let go of his dream of being a cop. In March 1996, Rodriguez and his wife had their second child, and two months later he applied for a police officer's job at Fort Lauderdale for half the money he was making as a controller. This time, his old tickets didn't seem to matter. And neither did an incident in 1991, when he was stopped by a Metro-Dade officer and lied about being a policeman, flashing his old dispatcher's badge in an unsuccessful attempt to beat a ticket. He got hired and entered the police academy. By the end of 1996, he had graduated second in his class. He was in the top 10 in his physical profile. He scored a 98 in defensive tactics. He ranked high in firearms training. Now he was an officer on the street, sworn by the state of Florida to uphold the law. Now he carried a .45-caliber handgun on his hip. Now he controlled more than airplanes. Now he legally tucked his own 9mm Sig Sauer into the fanny pack he always wore around his waist. But his stability was beginning to shake. Rodriguez's marriage was going bad. His first wife would later tell investigators that he had never been abusive to either her or the children. But his personality, she told his parents, had changed since he'd become a cop. There was rumor of an affair. They filed for divorce. By June 1997, Rodriguez was living with another woman, Lisa Phillips, and any domestic harmony he'd once displayed was left in the past. Phillips, a public service aide for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, would later tell detectives that Rodriguez had been controlling and jealous from the beginning of their relationship. She told them how he called and paged her constantly while they were working. She described how he went through her purse and work bag and would go into a tirade if he found anything he considered suspicious. She told them she sometimes slept in her car, too afraid to stay in their apartment. Phillips didn't report her problems with Rodriguez, she told detectives, because she was afraid other officers would ostracize her. She stayed silent, and Rodriguez moved on. Getting caught Cindy was not naive about men. She had been a bartender and worked in the restaurant business since she was 15. She'd seen hundreds of bar-side pickups. Heard hundreds of pickup lines. Watched how the romance game worked and had been in a few herself. She came from a big, tight family -- one of six children, including three older sisters and an older brother. At Western High School in Davie, where she graduated in 1993, she was on the basketball team and played on the boy's golf team. She would frequently challenge her big brother's friends to pingpong and billiards and then laugh her throaty laugh when she beat them. She had as many male friends as she did girlfriends. She had even dated a couple of cops. Men liked her daring. "I mean, the girl was a pilot, you know." Some liked her moxie. "You knew you could get a rise out of her just by saying a woman couldn't do it," said Scott Desjardins, a fellow bartender at the Quarterdeck. She drove a big black GMC pickup truck with a silver dolphin emblem on the rear window. She'd been a horseback rider since she was a toddler and doted on her two Siberian huskies. When she decided to be a pilot, she simply walked into Ross Aviation at North Perry Airport and said: "What do I have to do to learn how to fly?" But by spring 1999, when she started dating Danny, her friends say she was a woman looking for commitment. "Her brothers and sisters had kids and families of their own. She talked a lot about that," says her best friend, Jennifer Shusky. "She'd say, `Look at me, I'm 23 and I'm a bartender, living with my parents. What have I got?' She wanted a family. She wanted kids. I think Danny started promising her the things she wanted." The allure of possibility blurred the unsettling signs of trouble. When Danny parked his patrol car across the street from the Quarterdeck and called every time she talked too long with a male customer, it was grating. But when they discussed buying a house and several acres for her horses in Palm Beach County, it was promising. When his temper flared because she wanted to have lunch with a girlfriend, it was irritating. But when he penned another love note and slipped it over the bar, it was touching. When he tossed the chair across their apartment, it was scary. But when he let her run driver's license checks for him on his patrol car computer, it was exciting. When he told her he'd been married before, that he had two children living with his ex-wife in New York state, it made her angry. But he quickly won back her trust. In late June, she moved into Rodriguez's apartment in Davie. And on July 8, the romantic Danny had a banner plane fly over the revolving rooftop restaurant at Pier 66 towing a proposal: Cindy Will You Marry Me??? They danced to From This Moment. She said yes. The first strike Now a commitment had been made, a future planned. And the night after their engagement, he started backhanding her. In the cab of her truck, he started hitting her. Cindy fought back, kicking at her new fiance as she huddled with her back to the door. Rodriguez showed up at roll call the next day with scratches on his face and said it was the cat. No one believed it. On at least three occasions, Cindy was battered after her engagement. Maybe even she didn't believe it. "Many nights I sat right here across from her saying it wasn't right. It's not the way it's supposed to be. And she'd sit there saying: `I know you're right. I know you're right,'" says Shusky. Shusky, too, had been a victim of domestic violence. Cindy had been a big part of helping her recover after she fled to Florida to escape that relationship. "I could see it," Shusky says. "I knew what she was going through. I talked and talked until I was blue in the face. But, you know, it's hard to take advice from someone else when you're in it. You have to want to get out." Ten days after their engagement, Cindy and Danny had every wedding plan set. The church and the reception hall. The guest list and the wedding dress. "He had to approve of every detail, every decision," remembers Cindy's mother, Marie Cusano. "He absolutely had to go with her to pick out the dress at David's." Some people call it love. Some call it smothering. "Isn't that the way relationships are when they're new? You're always together. You spend all your time together. Who's to say what's normal?" says Tory Buckman, a friend of Cindy's who still aches over signs he missed. "He was sucking up her life," says Shusky. "He never let up." The wedding date was set for the following February. But on Aug. 5, 10 minutes before they boarded a flight for a 10-day vacation in Las Vegas, Cindy and Danny told her parents they were getting married the next day. Her parents were stunned and confused. When Marie Cusano called the next day to wish them luck and happiness, Danny refused to let her speak to her daughter. When she begged him to let her tell Cindy she loved her on her wedding day, he hung up on her. It wasn't until later, when friends and family saw the bruises, that a dark reality began to seep in. It wasn't until later, when Cindy admitted that Danny had hit her, and she had hit him back, that they began to understand the insidious nature of domestic violence. It wasn't until later that they learned of Lisa Phillips, the police public service aide who had lived with Danny for a year, the one who called him controlling and obsessive, the one who once told his friend that Danny put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she ever left him. Tomorrow: Love Gone Wrong The Final Chapter of Love Gone Wrong (Part 3) By Jonathon King, Staff Writer Tuesday, July 4, 2000 They found her with a pillow in her lap, her arms wrapped around its softness. She had done that since she was a child -- grab a pillow when she was upset, hold it close to her chest, maybe to cover the tears she didn't want to show or maybe to keep the pain from spilling out. This day she didn't seem to hold it for protection any more than she had as a youngster. Yet, as a young woman, she had only just learned that a defiant chin and feisty courage provided little defense. For seven months, Cindy Cusano, a popular bartender, and Danny Rodriguez, a well-liked but troubled Fort Lauderdale police officer, rode a deteriorating relationship. They met in the early months of 1999 at a beachside restaurant, where she tended bar and he worked as an off-duty officer. Both were pilots. Both had a thing for Disney World. Both were looking for someone. And even though their jagged edges never quite fit, they thought, at least for a while, they'd found each other. "It all happened so fast" is a phrase often repeated by friends of Cindy and Danny, and their dismay fits both the momentum and the ugliness of the couple's relationship. He told her he loved her on their first weekend together. She called him arrogant and pushy. They got engaged two months after their first date. The next day he started backhanding her. They eloped to Las Vegas despite elaborate wedding plans. She was battered on her honeymoon. The violence between them was private at first, but when they returned from their wedding, Danny was openly hostile toward his bride. And Cindy began confiding in close friends: "He doesn't beat the crap out of me, but he does hit me." The day they got home from Las Vegas, they argued after Danny saw an innocuous e-mail on her computer from an old boyfriend. He yelled at her and left a curse-filled message at the phone number he'd misread off the screen. Experts say his behavior clearly fit the profile of "a textbook domestic batterer." His heated jealousy. His Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. His pure control. But emotional abuse is tough to fathom if you're not the one who gets scared and confused by it. Sometimes it takes an act more blatant to see the danger. On Aug. 15, Danny, dressed in his Fort Lauderdale police uniform, smacked Cindy in the mouth while she was working the bar at the Quarterdeck. The reason was jealousy and the trigger was, by all accounts, absurd. Danny had always been jealous. Before his engagement to Cindy, he would call her from his patrol car, parked across the street from the Quarterdeck, if he thought she talked too long to a male customer. Once he used his police contacts to trace the background of a former boyfriend of Cindy's. But on this summer night, an old boss of Cindy's had stopped in to congratulate her on her marriage. When they said goodbye, Cindy gave John Maddalena a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Maddalena is 20 years older than Cindy, and he had brought his girlfriend with him to visit her. But the kiss was enough to bring Danny fuming through the door. People in the restaurant watched as he cursed at Cindy and threatened to come over the bar. She yelled back at him, ordering him to stay away. When she retreated into a back office, Danny confronted her and hit her in the mouth. A man at the bar called the Fort Lauderdale police to complain that a uniformed officer was making a scene with his girlfriend. Others had seen Rodriguez's anger, watched it flash so quickly it scared them. There was the time he sprayed mace in the face of a handcuffed suspect in the Quarterdeck parking lot. There was the time he snapped at a man who asked him about a parking space: "What the hell do I look like, a meter maid?" "Look, I liked the guy. He did a lot of nice things for me. But when he got angry, it didn't come out partially," says Scott Desjardins, a bartender at the Quarterdeck. "He could go from normal, from just a guy having a conversation, to the highest sense of anger in a flash. I don't know how he was able to do that, but I know I was glad that he liked me." That night at the Quarterdeck, Cindy had felt Danny's anger once too often. At 2 a.m., she called her best friend. Dabbing at her split and swollen lip, she asked Jennifer Shusky to come and get her. "Please take me home. I'm not going to take this anymore." With the help of her parents, her brother and her friends, Cindy moved out of the apartment she had shared with Danny for less than two months. At 3 a.m., Danny was watching her furniture being carried out, pleading for Cindy to change her mind. His parents also arrived to try to help calm the situation and to persuade the Cusano family not to report their son. "I know a lot of things were being said. He was trying to talk with her. She was spitting mad," Marie Cusano said. "But what Danny and his parents kept saying over and over was: `Don't call the police.' They all kept saying if we called the police, Danny would lose his job." It was no idle assumption. Federal law makes it illegal for anyone convicted of domestic violence to own or possess a gun. The law makes no exception for police, and, as a result, officers in some cities have been fired after being stripped of their firearms. This time Rodriguez knew he had stepped over the line. But by some accounts, he had been well over that line before. Months before, word had gotten to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department that Rodriguez had put a gun to the head of his girlfriend and threatened to kill her if she ever left him. The report came from an air-traffic controller Rodriguez briefly dated, who heard the story was being circulated among other controllers. On Jan. 1, 1999, she told a Fort Lauderdale sergeant that when she confronted Danny about it "he got very angry and said he did not want to see her anymore." The sergeant filed a report, saying the woman "believes Rodriguez is a very unstable person and is afraid he may do harm to her if he knows she is making a complaint against him." She went on to say, according to the sergeant, that she wanted something in writing "in case something happens to her." The story originated with Jim Courtney, a controller friend of Rodriguez's, who later confirmed it. According to Courtney, Rodriguez and his then girlfriend, Lisa Phillips, a public service aide for the Fort Lauderdale police, had visited him and his wife in New York in 1997. As the couples were returning from dinner -- the men in one car, the women in another -- Phillips told Courtney's wife that Danny had put a gun to her head. Courtney said Phillips repeated the allegation to him and his wife when they got to their home. "Danny admitted to me and my wife that he put his gun to her head and threatened to kill her," said Courtney, who had worked with Rodriguez in Fort Lauderdale. "Up to that point, I had never seen that side of him, and it was scary as hell. I told him he had to see somebody. I said it wasn't right. I told him not to hurt her, not to touch her." When Fort Lauderdale's internal affairs detectives took the report in January 1999, Rodriguez's supervisor asked Phillips about the gun incident and she "adamantly denied that such an event took place." Rodriguez also said it never happened. It was months later that Lisa Phillips described her 2-year relationship with Rodriguez as frightening and obsessive. She told detectives he had been controlling and jealous from the outset and had often intimidated her. To this day, she says she does not remember whether Rodriguez put a gun to her head. She cannot remember telling Jim Courtney and his wife that he had. After she finally ended her relationship with Rodriguez, Phillips told detectives she was relieved to learn he was dating someone else. "And although his harassing her never ceased, she felt that it would become less as he became fixated on another person," according to a detective's report. Cindy, her family and her friends had never heard the story about Danny holding a gun to Lisa Phillips' head. But by mid-August, they were familiar with Rodriguez's fixation, his obsession, or as her mother would eventually call it, his sickness. Winning her back Two weeks after their elopement and four months after they began dating, Cindy and Danny were deep into an abusive relationship. But when he hit her in the Quarterdeck, the violence had gone public. Rodriguez was pulled from the bar detail. He told Cindy's parents a police captain had confronted him. He asked if they had reported him. They had not, but they were sure that the disturbing relationship between their daughter and the cop was over. "I told Danny: You should end it. You should get some help and start all over," Marie Cusano says. But textbook abuse always contains the element of apology. Sometimes there is nothing so sympathetic as a contrite lover. In healthy relationships, there can be something endearing in forgiveness. In abusive partnerships, it can be a disastrous hook. The day after Cindy moved out, Danny tried to redeem himself with a written apology. "We have many dreams, hopes, aspirations and what I wish from the bottom of my heart is that your love will forgive the past and let you embark into the rest of your life with your love at your side," Rodriguez wrote on his computer. "Cindy, I am horribly embarrassed of the pain I have put you through, and I wish nothing more than to treat you like the princess you are." Cindy agreed to go with Danny to see a marriage counselor. In their first session, they told the counselor they fought a lot and admitted that when they fought, both of them became physical, battering each other, according to a detective's interview with the therapist. By the end of the month, she'd moved back into his apartment. Her friends were frustrated. Her family was afraid for her. The only glimpse into Cindy's mind comes from a letter written to her parents: "If I don't spend some time with Danny then I will never know if things feel right, I want to have some time to think about what I want without people questioning me all the time. "I didn't marry Danny for the hell of it, I did it because I love him. I am not ready to turn my back on that love." Cindy's mother, the woman Danny had called "Mom" only a week after meeting her, finally spoke to him. "He said, `I'm sorry for what I put you through.' And I didn't know what to say," Marie Cusano says. "I told him that I had one major concern and it's for her safety. I told him I worried about what's going to happen to her. "And he said, `Nothing's going to happen to her.'" The last round They found her with a pillow in her lap, holding it close to her chest, her arms wrapped around its softness. On Sept. 29, Cindy called her parents from a motel room in Kissimmee. She was crying in a way her parents had never heard before. "She was hysterical. She was asking us to come and get her," Marie Cusano says. "She was screaming at Danny, `Get away from me. Get away from me you f - - - ing ass - - - -!' "In the background we could hear him saying: `Tell them I didn't do anything to you. Tell them I didn't do anything.'" They knew Cindy was with Danny again. Earlier in the month she had again moved out of his apartment and had contacted a lawyer to explore a divorce. But he coaxed her back again and again. One night he was drunk at the Quarterdeck, and she took him home and stayed. Another night he couldn't sleep and begged her to just be nearby. On Sept. 28, he had lured her one last time. On that day, Rodriguez's supervisors told him he was the focus of an internal-affairs investigation. It had been alleged that he falsified time records for an off-duty detail in Fort Lauderdale. "Mr. Rodriguez became extremely disturbed by the news of the investigation and asked for the remainder of the day off," according to a detective's report. Danny called Cindy and asked her to go to Universal Studios with him. It was their favorite place, a fantasy place. A place that covered up reality. A place they had used before to escape. She told her parents: "He needs me because he's so upset. He just wants me to be with him." She told her best friend she thought it was "her duty as his wife." They left for Orlando in the middle of the night. At 9:30 in the morning, Danny called his partner in Fort Lauderdale and told him they were having a great time. At 12:30 in the afternoon, they bought ice cream inside Universal Studios. By 3:40 p.m., they were having their final fight. After Cindy's cry for help over the phone, her father, John, and her younger sister, Patricia, jumped into her truck and started for Orlando. Marie tried to call Cindy back to tell her they were on their way. When she couldn't get an answer, she called the motel and asked for someone to check on her daughter in Room 133. The head of housekeeping knocked but got no answer. When she looked through the window, she saw a young woman sitting on the couch, holding a pillow. When deputies from the Osceola County Sheriff's Office arrived, they had to push Danny's body aside to get through the door. They found Danny's off-duty weapon, a 9mm Sig Sauer handgun, on the floor. His police identification was in the fanny pack he always wore, along with $103.86. In his pocket was a receipt for ice cream bought four hours earlier. He had killed himself with a single shot through the roof of his mouth. Cindy was propped up on the couch, her arms holding the pillow. She was wearing jeans and her Pimm's volleyball T-shirt. Her wedding rings were on her left hand. The pillow was stained on the outside with gunshot residue. Danny had killed her with a single shot to the right temple. Outside, detectives found a photograph of the couple, torn in half and left on the ground near the door of his Pontiac Grand Am. A witness had seen part of their last argument, a motel guest who said he'd seen Cindy tossing some belongings from the trunk of the Grand Am into the nearby woods. No one else heard a thing, no sound of struggle, no sign of trouble. It was an unspeakable end to a plague that thrives on silence. Haunting questions The funeral procession strung out for miles to a spot at Hollywood Memorial Gardens where Cindy's mother weeps today, eight months later, still asking why. Marie Cusano comes here every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for three. She brushes stray grass clippings from a marker that reads: "Fly high sweet angel. We all love you Cindy." She freshens pink carnations. She cannot bear to remove the tiny toys her grandson left on the grave, "so Aunt Cindy would have something to play with in heaven." "It's not like losing a child to an accident, or even an illness," she says. "The thing that haunts me most is that she died unhappy and afraid." For weeks after the burial, Marie wandered the cemetery grounds, inspecting other fresh sites, fearful that Danny Rodriguez had been buried nearby. "I know it was irrational. But I couldn't get the idea out of my head, that he was still harassing her, that he was still somewhere near," she says, bending to straighten a vase. Cindy's father watches from a soft distance, the weight of his grief, the pain he sees in his wife's eyes, makes it too hard to visit for long. "We just didn't know what to look for," says John Cusano. "We weren't trained. We knew zero about what to look for. Maybe someone else will see. Maybe."