I almost beat the storm back to my shack. I was well under the cypress canopy when the first muffled rumble of thunder tumbled out of the west. The first light wave of rain got caught up in the tops of the trees and I was just lashing the canoe to my dock when fat drops started smacking through the leaves. By the time I got to the top of the stairs the sound had risen to a rush.
Inside I stripped off my wet shirt and tossed my gym bag near the bed. The first time I experienced a South Florida downpour out here it scared the hell out of me. The roar in the trees mixed with the sharp drumming on my tin roof made me cover my ears. After several months I'd gotten used to it.
I rekindled my stove fire, scooped out coffee from a three- pound can, and sat at the table to wait for my old metal pot to boil.
The table had been left behind by the research scientists and was the size of a large door. It had been repeatedly chipped and gouged and there was no telling what they had spilled or stacked or dissected on it. Large swathes of varnish had been worn or corroded away and the wood was dark where fluids unknown had seeped in and stained the fiber. It had been used hard, as had most of the shack's furnishings.
Along one wall there was a set of bunk beds with one good plastic-covered mattress that I'd moved from the top to the bottom. Two mismatched pine armoires stood in a row against another wall and may have been used for clothes or scientific equipment. I used one for my clothes and in the other I stacked a growing collection of books. I'd brought some with me, mostly travel narratives by Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban, books that I used to climb into to leave the Philadelphia streets for at least a few hours. The rainy night a sergeant caught me in the subway alcove at the Walnut and Locust station reading Theroux's The Kingdom by the Sea was yet another small tumble in my career. When Billy found out I was a reader he started adding to my pile with history books on Florida and the Caribbean.
"You have to know where you are to be comfortable in a place," he'd said.
Along the length of a third wall was a row of cupboards and a butcher block countertop with an old pre-electric ice box at one end and a slop sink positioned at the other. I used the counter for food preparation but Cleve speculated that the researchers probably used it to stretch out the southern water snakes, the cottonmouths and pygmy rattlesnakes, for measuring and tagging. I had thanked him very much for his insight, especially after the day three months ago when I almost stepped on a Florida green water snake that had curled up on my doorstep, obviously returning for a refitting.
The only modern concession in the place was the walled-off bathroom in the far corner in which the research crew had installed a marine toilet in deference to the local ecology. It also probably helped the accuracy of their water-sample studies.
As my coffeepot began to rattle with the motion of boiling water, a chirping sound poked through the din of rain. It wasn't until the third ring that I realized it was Billy's cell phone going off in my bag. I dug it out, sat on the edge of the bunk bed and punched it on.
"Yeah?"
"Global Positioning System," he said, his voice smooth and unblinking on the other end. The phenomenon of Billy's come and go stutter always struck me.
"You were reading my mind again, counselor."
"Now that I've got more than just a passing interest in these killings, I pulled some favors. The task force is using GPS readings to find the bodies of the victims," he said, and then launched into a technical description of the directional technology that used satellites to extrapolate coordinates and locate a spot as small as a square foot anywhere on the planet.
Years ago GPS technology got passed from the military out to the civilian world to the great benefit of ocean shipping and sailing navigation. Even on a moving boat you could figure out exactly where you were by using the satellites. Recently the GPS had miniaturized to hand-held size. Mountain climbers and even half-serious hikers and hunters were using them. Cleve had already figured that was what Hammonds used this morning and I'd been grinding it over since pushing off to paddle home.
Billy's info smoothed the stone. Hammonds wasn't marking the spot in order to look for a pattern like I'd thought. He was confirming the coordinates he already had.
"The killer has been leaving them GPS addresses," Billy said over the phone. "That's why Hammonds was already on his way when you hit the boat ramp. If you hadn't found the body, they would have an hour later."
"My luck," I said.
I thought of Hammonds, staring into my eyes at the boat landing, trying to see a flinch of deception. I'd had first contact with the body of the fourth victim of a serial killer. I obviously lived, for reasons he didn't yet know, out on the edge of the Glades, away and apart from society. I was adept with a canoe, one of the few ways, I now knew, to get to the remote places where the previous three dead children had been found.
"Yes. Well, it's also good defense strategy," said my lawyer. "Why would a killer direct the cops right to his own backyard and then tip them before they even got there?"
"So he'd get caught," I said. The line went quiet for several long seconds. "I'll talk to you later, Billy. Thanks."
That night after the rain stopped I lay in bed, picking out the individual sounds of the river, the dripping water off my roof, an isolated slosh of some night prey scuttling away from a hunting owl or water snake. When I first moved in here the silence of the place set up a palpable cone around my city ears. It was like the feeling you get when you pull your car to a stop after a long night trip and shut off the engine and just sit there in stunning quiet. In the city those were infrequent moments. Here they were nearly constant.
A breeze sifted through the trees and into my louvered windows but the rain-soaked air was close and thick. Still, the thin sheen of sweat on my chest and legs picked up any air that moved and did its cool evaporation. I was not uncomfortable, but when I closed my eyes I could see the pale face of the child, milky eyes in the moonlight. The image was crowding out my old nightmare. I reached up and touched the scar at my throat and at some point deep in the night, I fell off to sleep.
At 10:00 A.M. the next day the race was on along I-95. As I headed south a steady stream of BMWs, Honda Civics, high-colored convertibles and pickups with metal gang boxes rushed past me on the inside lane. The eighteen-wheelers, fuel tankers and step vans boxed me in on the inside. If you weren't doing ten over the speed limit, you were in the way. If you got frustrated and said the hell with it and pushed it to eighty in the passing lane you still weren't immune. Someone doing eighty-five would eventually tailgate you until you moved over. The lesson was simple: be aggressive and pay no attention to the rules. It's how you got there ahead of the schmucks.
Four hours earlier the birds had awakened me. The anhingas and herons were early fishermen. The ibis and egrets fluttered in after daybreak. In the rising sunlight I made more coffee, stood on the staircase looking up through the cypress and decided to go on my own to Hammonds' task force offices. When I called Billy, he tried to talk me out of it with that unerring logic of his, but I knew how jammed the investigators had to be. If I could get them off my scent, maybe they'd save some time and turn some other strategy, some corner. Billy countered in his lawyerly best: "Don't offer."
If you've never been in the system, the old law enforcement saw that says "If you're innocent, what's there to be afraid of?" makes a certain sense. I've used the line myself when interviewing suspects. But the truth is not always simple. I've seen rape convictions, based on the absolute certainty of the woman attacked, overturned by DNA. I've seen death-row inmates who gave confessions end up being cleared with the arrest of another. And I've seen prosecutors jailed for obstruction in cases they had believed in so deeply that they became blinded to the truth.