I knew the pressure to solve a case like this would be tremendous. They would already have looked hard at family members with the first abduction. That's standard homicide procedure, especially when kids are involved. But according to the newspaper clips Billy pulled, none of the first three families had any connection with each other except that they all lived in new neighborhoods close to the edge of the Glades. Whether there was some hidden link between them that was being held back from the press was a guess. If it was not true, that left only the outsider theories. In between bites we talked about the possibilities.
Billy had been mildly intrigued by the case since the second child was found. Television news was all over it. The press conferences with broken, tearful parents pleading for the return of their children. The reward offers. The inevitable squeeze on the child-molesting suspects. And in this case, the tangible fear among the public. It was just the kind of thing I wanted to know nothing about. But even if I followed Billy's advice and kept my silence, we both knew I was in it now. I was the first person outside the families with a connection, no matter how tenuous. The cops were going to jump on that. The only question was how hard.
After Billy paid and tipped the waiter enough to make his whole lunch shift worthwhile, we walked back to the courthouse through a rising heat I could feel through the soles of my shoes. The asphalt and concrete were like stove burners. The storm curtain had been slowed by the breeze, but its graying face was massing up now as the heat of the city rose up its nose.
"You are p-probably going to g-get a visit soon," Billy said as he reached into a pocket of his suit and slipped out a thin cell phone and extended it to me.
"It's charged up. C-Call me," he said, smiling and serious. "Not next m-month either."
I shook his hand, thanked him, and watched him walk away.
Three blocks later, the sweat was soaking my waistband and my feet actually felt damp. I got to the parking lot and I could see from the way the attendant looked down at his own shoes that something was wrong. When he took my ticket he looked up with a shrug, but with eyes that I swear were beginning to tear.
"I don't know how," he started to say as we walked toward the corner of the lot where I could see my truck parked in a front row. "I didn't see no kids or nothing. I didn't hear nothing either."
I let him lead me around to the driver's side where he stepped back with his palms turned out and issued an audible sigh.
Starting just behind the cab was a deep gouge in the paint about pocket high that ran almost to the middle of the front fender. Someone had used a key or screwdriver. When I bent to touch it, there were still tiny curlicues of midnight-blue paint spiraling off the line. The attendant wouldn't meet my eyes. He just stared at the scratch, trying to wish it away.
I was thinking about a time when I was doing a six-month shift with the metropolitan investigative unit in Philly. The squad of detectives was formed to watch organized crime figures. Once, after spending two days following Phil "The Lobster" Testoro between his South Philly rowhouse and his suite in an Atlantic City hotel, Kevin Morrison, the guy I was partnered up with, got out of our unmarked car and strolled through the parking garage we were in. Checking for witnesses first, he approached Testoro's Lincoln Continental, pulled out his keys and ran a serious sine wave down the length of the Town Car and then coolly returned. I sat without comment for five full minutes before Morrison, without looking at me, said: "Let him know we're watching."
Now I touched the gouge on my truck and scanned the sidewalks and street corners, futilely I knew, for an unmarked car with a couple of bored men in the front seat. Then I shook my head, said "Not your fault" to the attendant and got in the truck, cranked up the air conditioning and headed back to my river.
CHAPTER 5
By the time I pulled into the visitor's parking lot at the ranger station I had a too familiar tightness across my head, a band of pain that strapped from temple to temple and pressed into the bone with a pressure that you tried not to think about because dwelling on it only seemed to screw it down. It's what the traffic did to me. Even at midafternoon it had been bumper to bumper and down here the proximity of fenders had no effect on speed. Everything still moved on the interstate at sixty mph. I wasn't comfortable in it. In the streets of inner city Philadelphia, traffic was slowed by constraint. Unless you used the Schuylkill Expressway or shot over the bridges to New Jersey, speed was not an option. Down here I'd learned to use as many alternate routes as I could find when I ventured out, but when I took the interstate I stayed in the middle lanes and tried to fit in with the lemmings. It still gave me a headache.
Cleve was at the boat ramp, looking up at the piled, sooty clouds that were now directly overhead. One good rip of lightning and the whole front would split open and the rain would drop "like pissin' on a flat rock," the old ranger would say. The humid wind from the east was being sucked west, pulling at our pants legs and shirtsleeves but doing little to dry the film of sweat on my back.
"Give me the willies," Cleve said, still looking up at the coming storm but no doubt seeing the tiny wrapped body from this morning. "Wasn't like that boy with the gator."
Cleve had told me the story the first week I'd arrived. An eight-year-old had been canoeing the river with his family and they stopped along one of the drier banks to get out and stretch. The boy decided to cool off in a slightly deeper pool where the water swirled and spun back before continuing downstream. Whether the male alligator had already been in the hole or had been alerted by the movement, no one knew.
The animal got the boy's head in its jaws and pulled the child under, trying to drown its prey. When the boy's father realized what had happened he jumped to his son's aid, clubbing the gator's head and snout with a paddle until the beast let loose. It had taken too long to get the injured child through the wilderness to a spot where a helicopter could airlift him out. He died later at the trauma center.
Cleve had been at the pickup site, tending the boy's head wounds while his family looked on.
"I've seen what nature can do," he said, finally shaking himself from the past to look me in the eye. "But this one wasn't nature and those boys knew it."
He then told me of his trip up the river early that morning with Hammonds and his crime scene team. They'd barely said a word on the way out. Cleve knew how most people reacted to a trip out here, with relaxed conversation and obvious questions. Instead, Hammonds' boys were quiet and preoccupied with a device they kept out of sight in the stern of the Whaler. They only engaged him with queries about access spots, where the headwaters started, the nearest roadways or bridges. And the location of my place and how often he saw me coming and going.
"You couldn't see the channel to your shack, but I couldn't lie," Cleve said, cutting his eyes to gauge my reaction.
"Don't worry about it," I said.
When Cleve got them to the dam, he had to untether the canoe and float it on the upper river. It would only hold three, so Hammonds and one crime scene photographer climbed in with him. The wrapped body was right where I'd told them. The photographer snapped away as Cleve inched them up to the spot. The ranger saw Hammonds check one more time on the gadget he brought from the Whaler before they lifted the child's body out of the tangle of cypress root. The men said nothing on the ride back, and never looked at the black, zippered body bag into which they'd slid the bundle.
"It was damned eerie," Cleve said.
The rest of the team was waiting at the dock when they got in and loaded the body. Before they pulled out, Hammonds told Cleve they might need him again, without elaboration.
"I don't see why," he said, looking up at the heavy clouds and then helping me settle my canoe in the water. "They won't need me to guide them to that spot again now that they got that GPS reading."