Deadly Pursuit (25 page)

42

It was four a.m. when the big Bell 204B chopper, a commercial variant of the UH-1 Huey, touched down on Blackwood Drive.

Lovejoy and Moore stood outside the condemned restaurant, squinting against the rush of wind from the twenty-foot rotor blades. A few yards behind them, the two deputies, Parker and Ross, leaned on the hood of their patrol car and watched also.

The helicopter squatted like an immense insect on the asphalt, blocking both lanes. There was no traffic at this hour anyway.

Before the blades had finished spinning, the side door slid open, and five men and two women disembarked. They wore FBI jackets and carried equipment cases. The search team.

“That looks like a Miami P.D. chopper,” Lovejoy remarked as he and Moore led the group to the rear of the restaurant, where the junked Sunbird sat forlornly on its rims.

The team leader nodded. “Field office keeps a Bell Jet Ranger at the heliport on MacArthur Causeway, but that bird doesn’t have sufficient passenger capacity for the eight of us. Miami P.D. uses the Huey for utility work. We borrowed it, with pilot, for the trip to Fort Myers.”

“I assume Jack’s presence there has still not been absolutely confirmed.”

“Haven’t you heard? The news isn’t even that good. The whole Fort Myers angle turned out to be a dead end.”

Lovejoy glanced at Moore and raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Our Prints people found clean latents on the Dynasty’s door handles, matched them with two juveniles in the Miami area. Repeat offenders, real losers; must’ve lifted the car for a joyride, and they were too stupid—or too wasted—to wear gloves.”

“From what I understand, Dance was seen in a convenience store.”

“Another red herring. The local cops got a little overexcited on the basis of a very preliminary report. When one of our street agents showed the eyewitnesses a photo six-pack, they failed to select Jack’s mug shot. Upshot is, there’s no longer any reason to believe he was ever near Fort Myers. I hope this lead will pay off.”

“My feeling also,” Lovejoy allowed, imagining how nice it would be to inform Deputy Associate Director Drury of that particular turn of events.

The car’s license plates had been removed; the VIN plaque had been pried off the dash; and the vehicle certification sticker and safety parts label had been scraped off. In short, there was no way to ID the Sunbird or tie it to Jack unless the missing items could be recovered or fingerprints on the vehicle could be matched to him.

While the two latent-prints technicians dusted the Pontiac and the photographer popped flashcubes, the team leader, recorder, and two finders began searching the area for discarded tags or anything else that could be linked to the car. Having found nothing in the immediate vicinity, the team leader conscripted the deputies, split up the group into two-person squads, and expanded the search to cover Blackwood Drive, a half mile of Route 1 in either direction, and all intersecting streets within that perimeter.

By five-thirty, the prints technicians were thoroughly frustrated. The Sunbird, they informed Lovejoy and Moore, had been wiped clean. Dashboard, door handles, steering wheel, gear selector, trunk lid, hood—all polished and immaculate. The only items not yet dusted were the ashtray and rearview mirror, both of which had been removed at the start of the procedure for close inspection later.

Nothing in the ashtray. “Jack doesn’t smoke,” Moore observed in an undertone.

Lovejoy frowned. “Neither do approximately two hundred million other Americans.”

Application of gray fingerprint powder to the rearview mirror revealed a partial latent in the lower left-hand corner. Enough of the pattern area was intact to permit a comparison.

The first technician photographed the impression with a Folmer-Graflex fingerprint camera, shooting a roll of 120 Tri-X and carefully bracketing the exposures. His partner lifted the print on a strip of Scotch tape and smoothed it onto a glossy white card. Together they examined it in the glare of a portable arc lamp, then compared it with a faxed copy of Jack’s prints.

“Right index,” the first technician said.

His partner nodded. “Central pocket loop, eleven ridges from delta to core.”

“He must have adjusted the mirror when he started driving. Wiped it later, but missed a spot.”

The second technician remembered Lovejoy and Moore. “It’s a match,” he reported in the tone of an afterthought.

Lovejoy wanted to turn handstands. The thrill of vindication was intoxicating, an electric charge. Looking at Moore, he saw the same heady exhilaration in her eyes.

They were still wordlessly congratulating each other with smiles and traded glances when the searchers returned. The team leader carried three plastic evidence bags filled with what looked like trash.

“It
is
trash,” he said in response to Moore’s question. “At least that’s where Parker found it. In a dumper outside a warehouse half a mile south of here, on a side street called Industrial Drive.”

Parker, the deputy, was trying hard not to look smug.

The recorder read off the items on the evidence inventory. Auto registration form, proof-of-insurance form, and other glove-compartment documents consistent with the Pontiac Sunbird stolen from Miami International. A vehicle identification number matching that of the stolen Sunbird. And a single license plate—not from the Sunbird but from some other car.

“He switched plates.” The team leader shrugged. “Probably saved him from being pulled over. We can locate the other vehicle easily enough to confirm that part of the story. For identification purposes the VIN is all we really need.”

Lovejoy consulted with Moore while the search team packed up their equipment and the deputies made arrangements to have the car towed. In the east the sky was brightening, the long night at an end.

“We’ve almost got him.” Lovejoy felt himself shaking, literally shaking, with excitement. “He’s very close.”

“Close.” Moore ran her hands over her hair, a nervous, distracted gesture. “But still one step ahead. Where’s that map we borrowed from the sheriff’s station?”

“In the car.”

They turned on the sedan’s reading light and studied the map of Upper Matecumbe Key.

“He walked to that trash bin from here.” Moore traced Jack’s probable route with her finger. “A half mile south, just off Route One. Industrial Drive’s a dead end. Let’s assume he returned to the highway and continued south …”

Her fingernail reached a narrow inlet labeled marina. She raised her head to look at Lovejoy.

Both of them were thinking of Albert Dance’s trips to Florida in the Light Fantastic, the postcard that began, “Jack and Steve and I took the boat out yesterday,” the snapshot of young Jack and his friend posed casually at the end of a dock.

“Boats,” Moore whispered.

Lovejoy nodded, his hands closing slowly into fists. “Boats.”

43

Deep in the tropical hammock, amid blooms of orchids and bursts of bromeliads like frozen fireworks displays, under a canopy of leaves allowing glimpses of pale pink sky, Jack Dance hunted.

Throughout the night he had been bitten by mosquitoes, stung by centipedes, jabbed by thorns and briers, scraped by poisonwood and manchineel. His shirt was speckled with burs, his pants shredded; dried mud crusted the insides of his shoes.

Acre by acre he quartered Pelican Key. He had explored the cove and the salt ponds, where roseate spoonbills sifted the fine silt for a breakfast of shellfish, and now he prowled the forest south of the swamp, moving slowly toward the island’s eastern shore.

His prey was here somewhere. He would find her. He would not be denied.

He was no longer quite sure why it was necessary to kill Kirstie Gardner. The boat would arrive in a few hours. All he had to do was ambush the captain, then race for the Bahamas. Kirstie could do him little harm after that.

Still, he wanted her. She was precisely his type. Another Meredith.

His eyes narrowed at the memory of Meredith Turner. Bitch. Evil, emasculating bitch.

The songs of cardinals and yellow-throated warblers whistled giddily through the clear, fragrant air. Morning glories opened tremulous blue petals to receive the day’s first light. Fastened to the bark of a gumbo-limbo, a tree snail gleamed like a gemstone, its porcelain-smooth shell a rainbow in miniature.

Beauty. Beauty everywhere.

Jack saw none of it.

“Bitch,” he breathed, the word low and susurrant, scratchy in his throat.

He was eleven years old. Sleepless in the dark, listening to faint noises from the living room.

His parents were out. He was alone in the house with his baby-sitter.

Or perhaps not alone.

Silently he crept to the top of the staircase, peered out from under the banister.

In the flickering glow of a lava lamp, two pale figures twisting on the sofa. Meredith’s white breasts flopping as she groaned. The man with long hair grinding his hips in the slow, measured rhythm of a dance.

Jack watched though the bars of the balustrade till both bodies shuddered in mutual release.

The man left shortly afterward. Jack, in bed once more, touching his penis and thinking, heard the back door swing shut.

Soft footsteps on the stairs. Meredith checking on him, leaning through the doorway, her face limned by the dim light from the hall.

Lying still, eyes half closed, Jack whispered, “I saw what you did.”

“What, Jack? You say something?”

“I saw it. You let that guy fuck you. Did it feel good?”

“I ... You had a dream, that’s all. I didn’t—”

“Felt good, didn’t it?”

“Go to sleep, Jack.”

“I could do it. I’m old enough.”

“Jack, please ...”

“I’ve got a dick, too. See?”

He snapped on the bedside light, kicked off the covers. He’d removed his pajama bottoms. His penis was stiff and red from rubbing.

“Oh, God, put on your p.j.’s—”

“P.j.’s are for little kids. I’m not little. I’m eleven. You’re really pretty, Meredith.”

“Cut it out—”

“I’ll tell. I’ll tell what you did. I’ll tell my folks, and they’ll tell yours.”

“Christ, what are you trying to do, get me
killed
?”

Jack liked her sudden panic. Enjoyed the sense of power it gave him. Meredith’s parents were devoutly religious, fanatically strict; she had to be terrified of what would happen if they found out about the longhaired boy.

“Let me put it in you,” he said softly, “and I won’t tell.”

“Are you
crazy
?"

“I can do it as good as that guy. I’m old enough.”

“You are
not
old enough—Christ—you’re in the sixth grade!”

“Let me do it to you, or I tell.”

“No.”

“Let me, or else.”

“Stop it.”

“Let me.”

“Oh, God, this is sick, you can’t mean this—”

“Let me.”

“Jesus. Jesus ...”

“Let me.”

Sobbing, she turned away from him and tugged at her skirt. Jack watched, pleased with the control he now exercised over this girl who was in high school, nearly an adult, taller and stronger than he was, yet a captive to his will.

Guilt makes people do things. It was a lesson he meant to remember.

Meredith’s skirt was a wrinkled rag on the floor, her panties dangling from one ankle. She sat on the bed and spread her legs.

“What are you waiting for?” Her voice had thickened like paste. Tears glistened on her cheeks; Jack thought of slug tracks. “Do it. Get it over with.”

“Aren’t you supposed to kiss me and stuff?”

“Just goddamn
do
it.”

He eased himself inside her, slowly, slowly.

And his erection died.

“What’s the matter?” Fury and shame made her cruel. “Can’t you even get it up?”

“I’m trying.”

“You little asshole. You twisted fuck.”

“Hey, shut up.”

“You can’t do it ’cause you’re queer.”

“I’m
not
!"

“Maybe you could do it with a boy. You want me to find you a boy?”

“I
hate
you.”

“Faggot.”

“Bitch.”

“Fag, fag,
fag
!"

She escaped from his bed. For long minutes he heard water running in the bathroom pipes.

Meredith never baby-sat for him again. He told his parents he was too old for a sitter, and they agreed.

He no longer touched his penis. He had no more erections. It was as if a switch had been thrown, shutting off his sexuality.

Until his freshman year of high school, when a dark-haired, green-eyed girl who looked nothing like Meredith seduced him, almost against his will.

No humiliation this time. He was not a queer, not a faggot. Meredith had lied.

The sudden revelation of his sexual potency was the explosive rupture of a dam. Years of suppressed urges burst like floodwaters through the levees and restraining walls he’d built. He needed sex; he could not get enough.

Speedily he acquired expertise in the game of seduction. He possessed all the requisite assets: good looks, skill at manipulation, and a chilly brazenness that passed for charm.

He kept score of his conquests. In one memorable year he bedded thirteen of his classmates, two girls from other schools, and his young math teacher, Miss Chamberlain.

He had redheads, brunettes, girls with raven hair. No blonds, however. No Merediths.

Blonds, he told his envious friends with a shrug, were not his type.

In a deeper sense, though, they
were
his type, his only type. It was Meredith who obsessed him as he lay in bed in the unforgiving dark. It was Meredith he could not forget. Meredith, who had deceived and insulted him. Meredith, who had tried to make him less than a man.

He waited until August of 1978 before taking revenge.

“Bitch,” he whispered as he held her underwater and let chlorinated water flood her lungs. “Fucking bitch.”

Though he had killed her, she’d never truly died. She survived in every woman who reminded him of her. In Laura Westlake of San Antonio and Dorothy Beerbaum of Dallas and Veronica Tyler of Phoenix and all the others.

And now, Kirsten Gardner.

The others had paid for Meredith’s crime. Kirstie would pay also. And after the hell she had put him through tonight, how he would savor her death. Oh yes. She would be his best Meredith yet.

The trees thinned out. The dense hammock gave way to a clearing speckled with darting swallowtails. An oval of open sky spread a pale lucent wash over thickets of bottlebrush and rustling stargrass.

Half hidden in the grass, almost lost amid the star-shaped blossoms, lay Kirstie’s other sandal.

“Well,” Jack said aloud. “Well, well, well.”

He knelt and picked it up. The sole was caked with mud. She had been here after leaving the swamp.

Carefully he examined the grass. Tufts of green leaves, trampled by hasty footsteps, had not yet sprung upright.

Couldn’t have been very long ago when she passed through.

She was close.

His gaze traveled slowly over the clearing. A thin streak of glitter—something fine, threadlike—was strung along the garish spikes of a bottlebrush plant.

Spider web? No.

A strand of fabric, snared by the shrub.

He plucked the thread free, held it taut between two fists. Though it was ragged and flecked with dirt, its original color was still recognizable.

Yellow. The color of Kirstie’s tank top.

He followed the line of flattened patches in the grass. At the edge of the clearing he found a second yellow thread, fluttering in the beaklike flowers of a bird-of-paradise. Just beyond it, a third.

The tank top, unraveling, had left a loose strand every couple of yards. Even outside the clearing, in the comparative gloom of the canopied forest, he could pick out new threads now that he knew what to look for.

The hunt was nearly over.

He would have her soon.