We were soon immersed in deep woods, sunlight all but impenetrable while we hiked around six-foot high ferns. Air plants and bromeliads clung to tree branches resembling red and yellow decorations strung through the limbs. Dragonflies hovered in mid-flight, waiting for the right moment to savagely attack tiny midges and mosquitoes. Bumblebees darted from white orchids to yellow coneflowers. The air was heavy, filled with smells of decaying leaves, moss and wild azalea. I reached down and knocked a crawling tick off my blue jeans.
We continued walking and entered an area less dense. Old oak trees, many the girth of an elephant at the base, stood resembling quiet sentries. The forest felt immutable, a divine being with lungs, a spirit and life sustained through an eternal umbilical cord from Eden.
Through patches of blue sky, beyond the canopies of oak limbs, I caught a glimpse of carrion birds riding air currents high above the forest, the sun brighter than a welder’s arc in the sky. We walked across shadows cast by trees that seemed older than the nation. Billie said nothing, squatting down to study an indentation in the soil.
“What do you see?”
“Tracks. At least three men.” Billie touched one of his fingers to the soil at the toe of a print. He looked up at me. “Odd shoe patterns. Almost like moccasins. They leave no imprint.”
“You mean pattern, like tread on a tire.”
“Yes. Sean, it’s like they’re all wearing the same shoes. No pattern.”
I looked at the imprints. My thoughts flashing back to the small piece of duct tape I’d spotted on Ed Crews’ boot. “I can just see the tracks. Can you follow them?”
“I can try, but no money-back guarantees.” Billie looked at the leaves, the bent grasses, the crushed acorns, the manmade stamp in patches of earth, then he began walking. He’d stop every twenty feet or so, bend down, eyes honing in on signs of human presence, faint marks almost imperceptible to the untrained eye. “Three men were following someone.”
“How can you tell?”
“I see a fourth set, and it has tread.” He pointed to a print in the soil that had a definite pattern, similar to a hiking boot. A black snake slithered through the leaves and pine needles. There was a lump in its throat, just behind the head, the wriggling tail of a live field mouse sticking from the snake’s mouth.
Dark clouds moved in and blocked the light. Under the umbrella of ancient oaks, an early twilight was settling throughout the woods. An owl flew without a sound from a tree deeper into the hollow. Billie stopped and seemed to consider the flight of the owl for a moment. He said nothing. We walked in the direction the bird of prey had flown.
We hiked another quarter mile into the woods, the light dimming as the storm approached. Lightning cracked, its explosion of light creating a white brightness that cast a shadow of something moving for only a second. But it was long enough to catch our eye. The shadow was not part of the forest. It was an aberration, an out of place silhouette barely swaying across the gnarled and aged face of time stamped into what looked like the oldest tree in the forest.
From a limb, hanging at the end of a rope, the lifeless body of Luke Palmer rocked eerily in the breeze.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Joe Billie said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said, “The killers sure wanted to make a statement.” He shook his head and stared at the body, his face unreadable. He cut his eyes up through the boughs of the old tree to see turkey vultures silently riding the air currents in a slow circle.
The rope had twisted Palmer’s neck at an abnormal angle, the skin now swollen and the color of a ripe plum. Two blowflies crawled in blood that had spilled and dried in the corner of his mouth. My heart hammered. I’d worked plenty of crime scenes in my life, but this slaughter hit me in the adrenal glands so hard I felt nauseous. Not from the site of the body, but from the horror and pain the killers had inflicted on Palmer. I looked away, fighting the urge to vomit, trying to find a horizon to focus on, pushing back motion sickness.
I saw movement.
Less than fifty yards from us stood a doe and her fawn. They moved slightly, brown eyes wide and wet even from the distance. I thought about the wounded deer that Luke Palmer had put out of its misery, the bullet he’d removed from the buck’s stomach, animal blood running down his arms and hands. All I had suspected was true. Palmer’s murder, his corpse twisting in the wind, was testament to the fact that he never buried the deer in that grave with Molly and Mark. He never dug the hole nor had he filled it with death.
Billie pointed to something on the side of the tree. We walked around the body and over to the tree. About ten feet from the ground, carved into the trunk was what appeared to be a butterfly. In the center of the left wing were the initials or letters, MA. In the center of the right wing were the letters, ME.
I thought about Molly and her efforts to release endangered butterflies into this forest, this dark place where a man’s stiff and bloated body swung from the end of a rope. What did the butterfly carving mean? Why was Palmer killed here and hung from this tree? I looked closer and saw that the head and body of the carved butterfly, the image between the wings, was more like the “&” symbol. MA & ME carved in two hearts now grown together like butterfly wings.
I remembered the story Palmer had told me about the Barker Gang, the cache of loot hidden in the forest, the FBI shootout with Ma Barker and her son, Fred, in their home near Ocala. I knew what the MA and ME letters meant. Letters carved by Fred Barker into this tree in 1936.
I looked back at Palmer’s body hanging from the old tree in a horrid, swollen silhouette with a blood-red sky painted behind passing storm clouds. I remembered his eyes misty and remote as he spoke of his niece and how he’d hoped to help pay for a kidney transplant. Luke Palmer’s own midsummer’s dream now was a nightmare after spending four decades in a prison to walk as a free man in pursuit of ghosts — two tragic figures in American crime history, Ma and Fred Baker, and their fortune hidden in the forest. But what Palmer uncovered was the grave of a teenage girl, the murders of two college students, and the same evil that could never be contained behind the high walls of prison.
“Do we cut him down?” Billie asked, touching the knife strapped to his thigh.
“No, this is a crime scene. I’m calling Marion County — now maybe Detective Sandberg will get it.”
Billie nodded and stood near the tree as I used the satellite phone to make the call. I was transferred twice and placed on hold for a minute. When Detective Sandberg came on the line, I told him what we found. He said, “Jesus, all right, O’Brien, looks like you’ve substantiated your theory.”
“Never was a theory, Detective. All the evidence pointed away from Palmer. You told me a few hairs discovered on Nicole Davenport's body didn’t have roots for DNA testing.”
“That’s right.”
“And, you said it was dyed dark black.”
“Where you going with this?”
“To U.S. Forestry Ranger Ed Crews.”
“What?”
“I saw him today, in daylight. The roots are growing out in his hair. He’s going to have another dye job soon, no doubt. Check him now, today. If the coloring chemicals in the hair match the ones found on the hair from Nicole’s body, you have him as an accomplice.”
“Accomplice to what?”
“To multiple murders, and to turning his head, aiding and abetting a marijuana operation in a national forest. Gonzales probably paid Crews more than he’d make in a lifetime if he’d help them get in and out of the forest, help them divert the law. Crews was there when we pulled Molly and Mark from the grave. He was present at the first murder. He told me he’d been there for two hours, yet I saw mud on his truck that was glistening wet. It would have dried or almost dried in two hours. The men we were tracking, those who hung Palmer, left shoe imprints with no tread or patterns on the soles of their shoes. I saw a piece of duct tape on Crews’ boot this morning. Duct tape soles wouldn’t leave imprints.”