The Blue Edge of Midnight (11 page)

“I know s-someone at the FAA.”

I had no doubt they’d find some sign of tampering when they went through the wreckage.

Billy was still pacing.

“Hammonds is outside,” he said. “They w-want to talk. I told him only w-with me p-present.”

I looked at Billy’s eyes and when they locked onto mine, I knew he’d found out about my stupid visit to Hammonds’ office without him. I nodded.

“B-Be careful. You’re not off the h-hook yet,” he said, going to get the detectives.

Hammonds came in first, followed by Diaz and Richards. Diaz nodded and I swear came close to winking. Richards took up a spot against the far wall, brushed a strand of blond hair from her face and crossed her arms.

Hammonds stood at the end of the bed. The model of professionalism. He was wearing a charcoal suit, his tie pulled tight. But there was a slump in his shoulders that I doubt was there three months ago.

“I’m a little dismayed that an ex-cop who took it upon himself to bail out of a law enforcement career comes down here and starts getting his fingers stuck in a serial killer investigation,” Hammonds started, pulling no punches despite the situation.

“We’re agreed,” I said, my voice still dry and barely audible.

“We served a warrant on your place Saturday morning,” he said.

“On a tip?”

Hammonds looked quickly at Diaz, who just shrugged.

“On an anonymous tip that we might find an important piece of electronics that could be vital to our investigation.”

“And?”

“Came up empty. And disappointed,” Hammonds said, holding my gaze.

“Maybe you’d find a better suspect by looking for somebody who knows about planes. At least enough to bring them down,” I said, feeling a flush of anger making its way through my medication.

“We’re already on that. In fact your friend Mr. Gunther was on our screen before you got there.”

“As a suspect?” I said, looking over at Billy.

“As a person with a wide circle of friends who know the Everglades, some of whom have strong views about it.”

“From what I understand that’s a big circle,” I said.

“Your involvement with him makes it a somewhat smaller circle.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, now feeling the blood rise in my chest. “I get
involved
with this guy in a series of child killings and then we decide on a suicide pact and crash our plane in your godforsaken Everglades. But then after we’re busted up and Gunther’s half dead, we change our minds and I drag his ass all night through the swamp and then roll over in the fucking middle of nowhere with the near zero chance of somebody finding us before we both shrivel up into fish bait.”

Hammonds’ eyes did not leave my face. His expression never changed.

“If that’s your best fucking theory,
Detective,
no wonder you’re still chasing this asshole.”

My outburst silenced the room and plunged me into a dry coughing fit that ripped at my insides. Billy tried to get a sip of water into me. No one said anything for several seconds.

I looked at Richards who stood staring at the jiggling bag of saline that fed into my arm. Her eyes were red-rimmed and held a deep ache. I’d seen that look before, reflecting back at me in a medicine cabinet mirror in my own Philadelphia home.

“Do you really think I did this?” I said, looking at her.

She started to speak but then turned away and quickly walked out the door. Diaz cleared his throat and took a step forward.

“She was at the kid’s funeral all morning, the one you found,” he said before Hammonds cut him off.

“Mr. Freeman.” His voice was unaffected by my tirade. “We are still seeking that electronic device. And Mr. Manchester has indicated that our search may not be futile.”

I looked again at Billy, who was silent.

“If you are inclined, give Detective Diaz here a call,” Hammonds said and then turned and walked out of the room.

Diaz reached out and put a business card on the bed. This time he actually did wink before leaving. I closed my eyes, exhausted again, and let the silence sit in the room. I could feel my heartbeat under the sheets. I thought I could feel the saline dripping into my vein.

“We should give him the GPS?” I said without opening my eyes.

“I think it w-would be p-prudent. They might track it b-by its serial number. They could g-get lucky.”

Billy’s sense of protecting me had shifted from legal to physical. The killer had made a turn when he sabotaged Gunther’s plane. He’d expanded his threat and his target field. There were no windows in the room, only the off-white walls. It made the space look starkly empty.

“What’s with the woman?” I asked Billy, surprising even myself when the question slipped out of my mouth.

“My guess is sh-she has let herself get too close,” Billy answered. “You know h-how the ch-child you found died?”

I had missed a few days of news.

“Dehydration,” he said. “She was d-deprived of water. Probably f-for days.”

I kept my eyes shut. I had watched Richards when she came in the room, could smell her perfume. I’d seen her move her fingers to her hair and tuck the loose strand behind her ear and the movement raked my insides more than any fractured rib could have.

“Billy,” I said. “Get me out of here, OK?”

CHAPTER 11

I
t was the first time I’d seen her close up. She was crouched in the shadows, holding an assault rifle, breathing in that same deep rhythmic way of hers that I would watch for years afterward in our morning bed.

That day we were inside an abandoned Philadelphia elementary school. The electricity was long since gone, pulled out by the demolition contractors who in a few weeks would knock down the thirty-year-old structure and scoop it off the corner near Lehigh Avenue in Kensington. The only light came in through the partially boarded windows and streamed through the haze of dust that seemed to float from the old recessed tile ceilings.

The Philadelphia Police SWAT team used the building for exercises, practicing how to handle interior room sweeps in the empty hallways and classrooms. Meg had been with them for eighteen months. She was a patrol cop. A good one. Tough when she needed to be and friendly enough when she wanted to be. At least that was the word around the roundhouse. She was also a hell of a good shot with a sniper rifle and that’s why she was working with the Special Weapons And Tactics team.

I was there on an invite from Tommy Gibbons, a guy I’d known since we were in the police academy who’d asked me to stop in and observe this particular training gig. Gibbons had been trying to get me to apply for a SWAT spot for a couple of years. My lack of ambition bothered him. His constant state of enthusiasm bothered me. Somehow, we were friends.

“Come on, Max. Just come out and watch,” he’d said, interrupting a perfectly fine glass of Schaefer on draft at McLaughlin’s. “I know there’s an intense guy under that dumb lineman look. I know it. You got what makes these guys tick, Max. Come on. Just come out and watch ’em work and see if you don’t catch a bug.”

I was into my third glass of beer. It was summertime. A thirty-year-old version of the Drifters singing “Up on the Roof” was on the jukebox. I was staring at the oak scrollwork on McLaughlin’s famous hundred-year-old bar mirror and for some yet unknown reason said, “Yeah, OK.”

So the next day I was leaning against an empty metal fire extinguisher box watching the team position themselves in the hallway for a drill on “room probes” and watching the woman who would capture and then severely stomp my previously lazy heart.

Megan Turner was dressed in black, armed and dangerous. There was something about her profile, the sharp straight nose, the small rise of her cheekbones, and her delicate but determined chin that made me stare despite myself. Yet even that first day it was her eyes that caught me. From a distance of fifteen feet their ice-blue color seemed to absorb the fractured light, reflect none of it, and perform the uncanny task of sending an emotional thought across a room. It was her eyes and her hair that day.

Meg had become the team sniper soon after her recruitment to the team on the strength of her ability to put five out of five .308-caliber rounds from a sniper rifle into the dimensions of a quarter at two hundred yards. Good sharpshooters say they aim for a spot just in front of the ear, right where a close sideburn might end. A .308 round there will kill a suspect instantly, before his reflexes can pull the trigger of his own gun.

But on this day Meg was playing backup, armed with an MP5 assault rifle and given the task of covering a teammate who was doing a mirror probe of a classroom.

As the six-person team took up their positions, she had settled in against a hallway corner. Although her eyes were already on the doorjamb of the target room, I could feel her peripheral vision taking me in. She was wearing a pair of black gloves with the fingers cut off and before locking herself into position, knowing I was watching, she consciously loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair from her baseball cap and stroked it behind her ear. I would learn, much later, that it was a calculated move. And I fell instantly in love.

Once the drill started, she fixed her rifle sites on the doorjamb while her partner crawled quietly along the floor, inching like an awkward snake along the baseboard of a scarred and dirty wall. When he got to the open doorway, he pulled out a long-handled mirror similar to a dentist’s tool and slipped it around the corner, squinting and tilting the reflection to search the room.

For thirty-two minutes the heat in the hallway climbed. And for thirty-two minutes I watched Megan Turner’s concentration. The sweat started in tiny beads at line of her cap and I watched them build and then roll in strings down her brow and neck. The air grew thick and nearly impossible to draw in. She sighted her weapon and never flinched. I’d never seen such a display of total focus.

When the officer on the floor yelled “Clear” the sharp sound of his voice made me jump and bang my shoulder against the extinguisher box. Megan simply exhaled, a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.

After the exercise the squad gathered in the parking lot where they stripped out of their dark clothing and bulletproof vests, dumped cups of water over their heads and inhaled Gatorade. I was hanging near Gibbons and one of the team leaders when Megan looked up and caught me watching her again.

“So what do you think, Freeman?” she said, and the voice seemed way too soft, far too feminine.

“Impressive,” I said, surprised that she knew my name.

“Challenging enough for you?”

“Possibly.”

“Love to have you.”

Gibbons looked up with the rest of the team, but I didn’t see them rolling their eyes. I was watching Meg loosen a strand of her now wet hair and stroke it into position behind her ear.

“Yeah,” was all I could manage.

We dated for six months and I tried every day to figure out if I’d fallen for the toughness it took to hold the crosshairs of a sniper rifle on a suspect’s head for several minutes, or her ability to cry after separating another kid from his junkie mother on yet another domestic violence call.

Both of the attributes fascinated and scared me.

How I got past that and asked her to marry me I still didn’t know. I was not a commitment kind of guy, more out of apathy than avoidance. I didn’t think of myself as a man who needed companionship. I’d never had a date in high school. I’d gone out with friends that friends had set up for me, but rarely made a move myself. Women unsettled me. I’d grown up in a male- dominated household and had little clue how the female psyche worked. I’d tried to study them from afar, to grind out answers to their odd emotional abilities, but had obviously failed. Even Megan was indecipherable. But her energy hooked me.

We got married in a relatively small ceremony in South Philly. Her family side was huge and varied. My side was full of cops, mostly friends and family from my father’s side. After the wedding we went to Atlantic City for a week. Meg discovered blackjack and the dealers and pit bosses loved her. She cussed when she lost and shrieked when she won and her smile and flashing blond hair made everyone at her table happy to be there. I often stood back from the green felt table, watching, touching her spine through the sheer fabric of her blouse just to remind her I was there.

For three years we kept a small townhouse apartment tucked away between the tight center city streets just north of Lombard. We went to the Walnut Street Theatre and she watched quietly and then drank loudly at the Irish pub across the alley. We took the Broad Street subway to the Vet to see the Phillies and I watched quietly and we both drank deeply at McLaughlin’s afterward. When she worked out at the local Nautilus club, I left her alone. When I holed up with my books, she left me alone. When we made love, she was enthusiastic. I’m still not sure what I was.

Throughout the marriage, Meg stayed on the SWAT team. Sometimes, when she got called out in the middle of the night, I would show up in uniform and stand out on the perimeter, talking with the crowd-control guys, trying to picture her inside or up high on a rooftop, sighting in her sniper rifle. But the night she took out a suspect holding three hostages at gunpoint in Overbrook, I was on another call.

The guy had been chased by campus police after a robbery where he’d already wounded a security guard. He had slipped in behind three women, students at St. Joe’s, as they walked into their dorm room, and then forced them into a lounge on the second floor, screaming that he would kill them if the cops tried to arrest him.

Meg’s team was on call and as the uniform guys cleared the dormitory to isolate the room, they took position. She was on the third floor of the student affairs building across the street with a clear view inside the lounge. Her teammates were silently creeping the halls while a hostage negotiator was getting an earful of cuss words on the only telephone in the room, a wall-mounted set that was directly in Meg Turner’s sight line.

The negotiations were short. The fourth time the negotiator rang the phone in an attempt to keep the suspect talking, he pulled one of the women over to the phone with him. He had his gun to the girl’s head and through Meg’s telescopic sight, she could see his finger on the trigger and his face in full profile.