I followed as he moved to the back end of the yard.
"They got the fence up to keep the dog and the kid inside. They were safety conscious and worried about the lake."
We hopped the waist-high fence and Diaz flipped on the flashlight, sweeping it across the ground until it illuminated a row of small white markers standing like folded cards in the grass, each with a number printed on it.
"Patrol guys got here first and found the mom out here knee-deep in the water and came in after her so there's a lot of prints. But these?" he said, shining the light on a deep print next to marker number one. "Could they be the same as you saw in your place?"
I bent to the imprint. Then the next one. And the third, all left in a patch of shiny mud. They were the same size as far as I could tell. The third one showed clearly that it had no tread, just a smooth size nine.
Diaz swung the beam farther out into a sudden stand of cattails and water lily that spread out into the water. I asked him to swing the light left and saw the water grasses stop abruptly at what appeared to be the property line. Next door the neighbor's green St. Augustine lawn went uninterrupted into uncluttered open water.
"Weed sprayed," Diaz said, again reading the puzzle in my face. "The developers tried to sell this whole place as a man- made wetlands area to help appease the environmentalists. They let the indigenous stuff grow in the water and they even have workers come out and pull any non-Florida stuff out."
He sprayed the light back into the grasses leading out into the water from behind the victim's house.
"It's great for luring the birds but some of the owners don't like it. They think the water grass looks like weeds and ruins their view so they spray it all dead."
He swung the beam back to the footprints that disappeared into the lilies.
"So what about the prints?"
"Could be," I answered. "I thought the one at my place might be a moccasin or something. You know? No tread or anything. Just like these."
"Booties," Diaz said. I looked up.
"Booties. Like the kind windsurfers or scuba divers wear. They're like a black neoprene sock that pulls up over your foot. They use them to keep you from chafing your skin with the straps on dive fins or from stepping on shells and stuff in the water."
I nodded and stood staring at the prints, thinking about Fred Gunther's scuba equipment bag and the clean canvas tarp in the storage bin of his Cessna. The same kind of canvas that glowed in moonlight and had been wrapped tightly around Alissa Gainey's floating body.
We started back up to the house. Hammonds and his group were still in their loose circle and he still didn't look at me.
"So the guy comes in from the water. Maybe he lies out there in the high grass, waiting for the chance, watching the kid and the mom."
Diaz was one of those detectives who had to run his theories out loud, hear his own voice to find a mistake in the sequence or logic. I knew a couple like that. I just listened.
"He comes out of cover as late as he can because he wants to use the darkness. He jumps the fence and snatches the kid, somehow keeps her from screaming and-boom. Back in the water and gone."
As Diaz talked, the mechanical whine of a helicopter began to build. I could see it swinging in from the east, a cone of brilliant light pouring into the neighborhood and now into the lake. The chopper stopped and hovered while the beam poked down into another crescent of cattails and maidencane at the shore line. One of the men in Hammonds' group was looking up and talking into his cell phone. The chopper banked and moved over us, the downdraft ruffling through our clothes. Next to the children's slide the wind had kicked up the crime scene tarp leaving the crooked rear leg and haunches of a big German shepherd exposed. The cream and black fur had already lost its natural luster.
"You forgot the dog," I said to Diaz, as the chopper moved off.
"Oh, yeah," he replied, looking for the first time at the dead animal. "He cut its throat with one slice. Somehow, before the thing had a chance to even yelp."
"He do this before, kill a pet?"
"No. In fact, the first one he came in the middle of the night and took the kid out a bedroom window. The family dog, a real yapper according to the father, never reacted."
"He's getting reckless."
"Or more pissed off," Diaz said.
When I looked up, Richards was standing on the patio, watching us. She was wearing dark jeans and a white, short- sleeved shirt. The spotlights behind her put a halo around her blond hair and backlit the thin fabric of her blouse, putting the outline of her breasts and her tapered waist in silhouette. I turned away to look out over the black water of the lake while Diaz went to talk with her.
On the opposite side of the lake the chopper was working another spot, hovering like a mechanical dragonfly tethered by a glowing white filament. Hammonds would have patrol officers working the entire perimeter, asking neighbors if they'd seen a strange boat along the shore or a van parked along the streets that didn't seem to belong.
How did the killer move from out there in the wild to a place like this? How did he operate so smoothly in both? I'd known street criminals in Philadelphia, burglars and hustlers and dopers who knew the corners and cracks in the city so well you'd never find them in a rundown and never trace their movements. But drop them off just over the way in the pinewoods of South Jersey and they'd be lost forever, looking for a pay phone on a tree trunk.
This guy knew both worlds. And he had mastered the wall between them.
"Max?"
Diaz was beside me, and had crossed an uninvited line with the use of my first name. I followed him back up to the patio.
"Look, I'm gonna get this GPS thing and the canoe tag over to the lab guys. Maybe there's something more in the memory of this thing and we can always hope for a lucky fingerprint."
I nodded and started up toward the house with him. We stopped in front of Richards, her arms crossed in that classic this-is-my-space pose. But she looked directly into my face; her eyes had flecks of gold in the green irises.
"How's the mother?" I said.
"Her sister's with her," Richards answered. Her voice held a low smoker's rasp.
"You think of anything out there?" She tipped her head toward the lake.
"I'm not sure."
"If he's following you, and you get to him before we do," she said, "don't leave him standing."
I opened my mouth, and then closed it. It was the kind of thing that scared me about women. How did they move from one part of their head to the other so easily? Blow a suspect away one minute, hit on a guy at the bar the next? Comfort a grieving woman one minute, talk about killing a man the next?
"Let's go," Diaz said. "We drop this stuff off and I'll drive you back."
We started through the house and when I took a last look out the French doors, Richards was bent with one knee in the grass, pulling the yellow tarp back over the dog.
CHAPTER 14
I rode with Diaz to the county's forensics lab but stayed in the car in the empty, well-lit parking lot while he went inside. After twenty minutes the detective came out and begged off taking me all the way home. He assigned a young resource officer who looked like a high school student to drive me back.
"We're fresh on this one and I should be out working it," Diaz said. "I'll call you if we get anything off the, uh, evidence."
I said nothing during the trip back to Billy's. The kid took my lead and drove in silence. I'd called Billy on the cell phone to let him know where I'd been. The convenience of having the phone in my pocket was beginning to worry me. I'd carried a police radio with me for most of my working life but thought I'd left that behind.
When I got back the night manager cleared me with a phone call and when I walked into the apartment, Billy was working the kitchen. Two pink slabs of tuna steak were sizzling under his broiler and the odor of garlic bread was rising out of the oven. I hadn't eaten since a dose of my own bad oatmeal that morning and it was now nearly ten. I sat at the counter and Billy put a plate of sliced apple and a tall glass of water in front of me.