"All right, Max," she said after twenty minutes. "You win."
"What?"
"Yeah, what. What's going on with your search for the trail workers, and what about the tracers?"
I didn't gloat. I just launched into what Billy and I had come up with, the list of clergy and my instinct on the Placid City minister.
"How about the tail?" she said. "No more white vans?"
"Not that I've noticed."
"You guys ever trace the numbers on that helicopter?"
"Could never really make them out. Just a private job was all we could tell."
"You check with the local airports? Takeoffs of private choppers during that time frame?"
"You're talking like a cop, Richards. I'm not so sure the towers are going to be so forthcoming to a P.I., but no, I didn't check. Good catch, Detective."
She smiled and leaned back farther in her chair.
"I could do an NCIC on your reverend," she said. "If he pans out and you get a DOB on the father, we could go into the archives."
I knew the National Crime Information Center could be accessed only by government and law enforcement agencies. "Isn't that against policy, Officer? Using a government database for private reasons?" I said.
She finally turned her head and lowered her sunglasses to the tip of her nose. "Yeah, it is," she said, a smile behind the look. "But something tells me that with your track record, Freeman, this isn't going to stay a private matter for long."
We sat back for awhile, letting our skin soak in the sun. She pulled a paperback out of her bag and read and I watched the movement of the ocean, the curl and boil of the waves and the catch of spray in the southeast wind. The visibility was a good ten miles and to the south I could see the gray hulk of a freighter anchored out at sea, off the inlet to Port Everglades. The financial and manufacturing lifeblood of the South American hemisphere was now moving through southeast Florida and the ports that were dredged out of the coastal rivers over the last century. The infrastructure-railroads and highways-that moved the goods of that economic foundation were first built on the muscle and sacrifice of men like Cyrus Mayes and his sons. Was it any different with the men who dug the Panama Canal? Built the Transcontinental Railroad to California? Hell, some six hundred were killed by a hurricane that hit the middle Keys in 1935, many of them workers building Henry Flagler's impossible railway across the necklace of coral islands from the mainland to Key West. The barons and moguls and king's names always go down in the history books tied to such projects, while the names of the dead workers disappear or are scratched on some memorial long forgotten. It is the way of history. Was there any justice in it? Maybe not, but if nearly two generations of a family were killed for trying to walk away from such a project, wasn't some sort of justice or at least some amount of truth due? The sandy touch of her foot against mine brought my head around. I had out-waited Richards's nonstop energy again.
"Hey, before you go into a coma, you wanna take a run?" she said, folding her knees up. "Just an easy one?"
We stretched out on the hard pack at the water's edge, then started north at a loping pace. Richards had pulled on a T-shirt and was on my inside shoulder. She liked to be ankle-deep in the water as she ran. I admit I was the one who opened the conversation.
"How's your friend? The one with the patrolman problem?"
She waited about fifteen strides before answering.
"She came over to my place the other night."
"You made up?"
"She needs help, Max. I mean, she's bitching about this clown one minute, and defending him the next. She's confused as hell.
"I don't want to just tell her to dump the asshole and get out. I'll just end up pushing her away like I did last time, and she'll just fall back with him to prove she's not wrong."
Her frustration was in her pace. The angrier she got, the more energy went into her legs and the faster we both ran.
"But I can see the shit coming, Max. She was over for a couple of hours. We were out back and her cell phone must have rung twenty times. She just kept checking the callback number and not answering. I could tell it was him doing that control thing."
We were pushing now, fast enough so it was becoming hard to talk and keep our breathing steady at the same time. I let her gain a bit on me and watched her from behind, the bob and swish of her ponytail, the cabled lines of muscle in her calves. She finally eased up and drifted back to me.
"You ask any of the other guys on patrol about him? His partner maybe?" I said. I had not told her about the stop McCrary had made at the convenience store.
"I talked with his sergeant. He said he'd look into it. Give the guy the word," she snorted. "What word? Be careful when you're smacking your girlfriend around?"
She needed to blow this out. I let her grind on it for a few more strides and then challenged her to push it to the fishing pier that was coming up about three hundred yards away. We lengthened our strides and the effort stole any extra breath I had. My legs started to ache, and I think I caught a quick grin from her at the hundred-yard mark, when she caught me by surprise and opened up a sprint that put her at the wooden pillars of the pier. We pulled up in the shade underneath and circled each other, our lungs still grabbing air, our hands on our hips. When our breathing was back near normal, we turned south and she took my hand.
"Beat you," she said, and the smile had moved up into her blue eyes. I said nothing and we walked together back to our chairs. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the shade of the umbrella, eating ham-and-tomato sandwiches and drinking iced tea while I fulfilled a promise to her and told her the story of my father.
She sat quietly, her legs crossed and shoulders turned close to me while I talked of the abuse that my cop dad had brought home on a regular basis from the time I was old enough to remember. I spoke of my own fear and shame at not having put an end to it myself. And I told her the secret that my mother and Billy's mother shared. How two women, unlikely friends of different races but of similar heart, had conspired and worked together to free my mother from a lifetime of control and humiliation. It was a story that I had not shared with any other person. Billy and I had even let the secret slip back into a past that neither of us wanted to revisit. When I finished, Richards took off her sunglasses and looked at me. Not a look of sorrow or of pity. She was studying me and I raised my eyebrows in question.
"What?"
"Thank you," she said, again taking my hand.
"For unloading?"
"No," she said. "For giving me a piece of you, Freeman."
I looked out again at the color of the water and the scatter of seabirds, then back at her.
"Fair enough," I said, and squeezed her fingers.
We packed away our beach things and walked up to the tiki bar and climbed the sandy ramp to the open-air restaurant. We ordered margaritas and conch fritters and watched the light of the day leak out behind us and turn the water a deep indigo and then a slate gray. My phone had not rung. I knew I would have to make the trip to Placid City to get answers, but tonight we were going to do nothing. No cop talk. No analyzing cases. We were going to be like normal people, without any worries.
CHAPTER
15
Early on a Sunday morning I packed up an overnight bag, folded a Florida map and started driving to church. Our list of clergy possibilities had been whittled by callbacks. I'd left two more messages for the pastor at the Church of God in Placid City that went unanswered. Billy and I had discussed the possibility that we might be on a fishing trip in a much larger sea. It had only been a rumor that the male descendent of our gunman Jefferson had become a preacher, and even then we were only guessing that he had stayed in the state. Billy expanded the search parameters into northern Florida and was talking about pushing it up into other Southern states. He'd even forwarded the idea that the grandson could have changed his name after leaving Everglades City in the 1970s and disappeared anywhere.