The Blue Edge of Midnight (8 page)

Billy let me stand quiet at the railing for several minutes before calling out “Drink?” from his kitchen.

I grinned, knowing he was already pouring my favorite Boodles gin over ice. When I came back inside he had the drink and the oilcloth package sitting on the wide kitchen bar counter. I took a seat on a stool and a sip from the glass.

“Y-Your m-move,” he said, taking a drink of chardonnay from a crystal wineglass.

I unwrapped the GPS unit and now it was Billy’s turn to show his own anxious excitement.

“M-May I?” he said, extending his palms and when I nodded, he scooped up the unit and headed through an open door on the west wall that led to his home office. Inside I knew he had an array of computers and modems and a wall of law and research books. I stayed at the kitchen counter, drinking gin and watching
The Wanderer
while he tinkered. Outside I could hear the rhythmic wash of ocean waves, inside the irregular tapping of computer keystrokes.

“You’re right about the setup. You can call up the previous settings logged into the unit,” Billy called out through the door of the office. “There are four. And I called up a geological survey map from a Web site and the last one matches your spot on the river. The others are out in the Everglades and could easily be where the other bodies were found.”

Billy was talking from the other side of the wall. The physical barrier had removed his stutter.

“If the investigators found this in your place, it would have been some heavy evidence. They would have had no choice but to stick you in jail.”

“No doubt the killer knew that too,” I said, loud enough for him to hear.

“We’re not dealing with some backwoods hick or pissed off frontiersman trying to fight off the new settlers. This guy’s got a plan,” he answered.

Billy’s use of the word “we’re” meant he’d stepped over the line from sitting back and denying my involvement to actively pursuing a theory on who and why someone was killing children along the edge of the Everglades.

As I sipped my drink at the counter, he told me how he’d contacted friends in the medical examiner’s office who must have owed him big time. He’d learned how the children had been killed.

The first victim had been poisoned and the toxin was analyzed and found to be rattlesnake venom. According to Billy’s source, the stuff had been pumped into the kid through two puncture wounds in the child’s leg. The wounds had looked remarkably like an actual bite. But the M.E. still wasn’t sure whether the killer had let a real snake bite the child or had faked it and administered the dose himself. It could have been either way.

In the early 1900s, Billy explained, Florida was home to more rattlesnakes than any other state in the nation. As late as the 1940s professional snake men cleared them off newly purchased land. Charging by the head, they frequently poured gasoline down the gopher holes where the snakes nested and then snatched them up when they fled the fumes. A small industry had grown up around the sale of the snake skins like so many of the pelt and plumage trades that once thrived in Florida. And in more recent years, a small medical industry had found a niche in milking the rattlesnake venom to use for creating antitoxins. It was not a difficult procedure if you had the know-how and the guts to perform it.

The second child, according to Billy’s man, died of a single slash across the throat. The cut was created by a thick, three- inch-long claw that forensics experts identified as coming from a large wildcat, possibly a Florida panther. The claw, shiny and yellowed, had been found wrapped up with the body. A body, Billy said, wrapped in the same way I had described the child on the river last night. The Florida panther had long been on the endangered species list, hunted by the early settlers and then penned in by shrinking open territory.

The third child had been drowned, but when the medical examiners studied the water left in the lungs they found an impossibly large concentration of chemical fertilizer, a pollution level far higher than any river or canal or lake sample in the region.

“This guy is definitely sending messages,” Billy said.

“So why try to put it on me?” I said.

“Who knows? Maybe Hammonds’ team was getting too close. Maybe it got too hot. The guy is obviously familiar with the Glades. Maybe he knew about you living out there and snatched an opportunity.”

“I don’t think Hammonds is close at all.”

There was a silence from the other room. I didn’t want to admit to Billy that I’d gone against his advice and been to Hammonds’ office. I changed the subject.

“So you start killing kids with a half-assed attempt to make at least the cause of death look natural, but then you leave messages all over the damn Everglades so the cops can find exactly what you did and where. Why? Just to scare the hell out of everybody?”

A few years ago I’d read about a series of tourist attacks in Miami and at a rest stop in northern Florida. It hit the tourism industry pretty hard at first, but now it had become an old memory, and not even that for the hordes of new visitors.

“The real estate people are already freaking out,” Billy answered. The sound of keystrokes continued in the other room. “There are at least a dozen new developments under construction out along the Glades border and the publicity is killing sales. You’re talking about losing millions of dollars if they dried up, not to mention the construction industry jobs that would go down the drain.”

“So somebody that’s pissed off at carpenters and land developers starts killing kids? Come on,” I said.

“Development has been the lifeblood of the South Florida economy for a hundred years. When the beach communities started filling up, it pushed west into the wetlands. They drained the Glades with canals and changed the entire lay of the natural land,” Billy said. “The Seminole Indians hated it. The environmentalists fought it. But it’s still going on.”

“The Audubon Society turns to serial killing?” I said, my voice loaded with cynicism.

“There are wackos in every group. You know that.”

I remembered the West Philadelphia neighborhood where John Africa’s so-called back-to-nature group MOVE barricaded themselves in an inner city compound and railed against the authorities for crimes against the people. Back to nature in the middle of one of the biggest and oldest cities in the country. Make sense of that.

With bullhorns, the group’s members had begun bellowing at passersby about their right to freedom and the destruction everyone around them was wreaking on the planet. In their naturalist mode, MOVE didn’t believe in garbage pickup, or the modernity of basic hygiene. Their compound began to stink. Neighbors complained. The health department issued orders, which MOVE ignored. More neighbors complained, soon about children living in filth, unkempt and possibly in danger. MOVE refused to let anyone on the property. They barricaded the place. They were armed.

My father was working twelve-hour shifts outside the West Philly home and told us at breakfast that the frustration was growing thick as a fog around the place. Finally, the police tried to make an arrest. Gunshots were exchanged. Next thing we knew the mayor cleared a plan to drop a bomb on MOVE’s bunker. Years later we heard that the demolition expert put three separate charges together, each strong enough to do the job. Someone put all three in one bag and let the package go from a helicopter. We saw the whole damned block go up in flames. Eleven people were killed, including four children. Sixty-one homes were destroyed.

Yeah, I knew there could be wackos all right, on both sides.

Billy came out of the office and laid the GPS unit and a printout of a topographical survey on the countertop. I flattened out the map while he filled both of our glasses. He had marked three red Xs on the longitude and latitude intersects. I recognized the shape of my river and the spot above the old dam. The other Xs were in similar territory, remote, out on wilderness land far from any road or trail.

While Billy pulled his typical kitchen magic in putting together dinner, I walked back out to the patio and stood looking at black ocean, listening to the shushing of waves below and thinking of children lying dead in the moonlight.

CHAPTER 8

T
he next morning I jolted awake. The mattress was too soft. The air too cold. I didn’t know where the hell I was.

I propped myself up on my elbows, focusing on the off- white wall in front of me until I recognized Billy’s guest bedroom. After eating Billy’s superb Spanish omelets last night, we’d stayed up drinking on the patio, staring out at an invisible horizon and hashing out scenarios. Billy answered my ignorant questions about the Everglades, and admitted he was far from expert. But he knew people, Billy always knew people, that he could introduce me to. Some were guides, he said, men who knew their way in and out of the rivers and wetlands and isolated hammocks. They also knew a lot of the people who lived out on the edge of civilization, the recluses and the ones who had moved away from society.

I turned my head to look at him when he said recluses. In a way, he knew he was describing me.

“I w-will arrange a meeting,” he’d said, tipping his glass. “G-Good night.”

Now I was feeling the aftereffects of gin and air conditioning. My head was full of cotton and my throat was as dry as parchment. I dressed, went into the kitchen and downed three aspirin with a glass of water. Billy had left a note next to a bowl of sliced fruit on the counter. He’d gone to his office and would call at noon. A fresh pot of coffee was waiting and I poured a cup and went out on the patio. In the early sun the ocean stretched out like the sky itself. From this high up the horizon gave the illusion that you could actually see the curve of the earth. An easterly breeze put a corduroy pattern on the ocean’s surface and about halfway out to the horizon the water turned a deeper, oddly tinged shade of blue. The wind had been blowing from the east for two days and the Gulf Stream had shifted closer to shore. The Stream was a huge river of warm ocean water that began as a loop current in the Gulf of Mexico and then funneled up between the tip of Florida and Cuba. At a steady three knots, the vast stream pushed northward along the coast of the United States, its flow so enormous that its water would eventually mix with the North Atlantic and reach the British Isles.

The edge of the Stream was always shifting, and when the wind blew east, it slid closer to the Florida coast. Boatmen here could tell when they crossed into it by the color of the water, a deep, translucent blue unlike any other color on the planet. Scientists say that the water of the Stream is so clear that it affords three times the visibility of the water in a typical hotel swimming pool, and since its depth ranges to some six hundred feet, it is like looking into a blue outer space.

Billy had taken me sailing on his thirty-five-foot Morgan during my first few days here and when he knifed the boat into the Stream, I stared at that color in disbelief. It had an unreal way of drawing you deep into a place where you forgot your surroundings, your petty material anchors and your constant grindings. For an hour I lay on the bow deck, staring into its depths. I was sure that if I reached over and scooped it up I would have a handful of blue in my palms.

After my third cup of coffee I pulled myself away from the patio, laced up a pair of running shoes and took the elevator down. The doorman in the lobby greeted me by name:

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Freeman. Enjoy your run.”

I skirted the oceanfront pool and slogged through the sand to the high tide mark. I stretched out on the hard pack and then did three miles. The first cleared my head, the second leeched the gin from my pores and the third killed me. I finished back in front of Billy’s tower, took my shoes and sweat-soaked shirt off and waded into the surf. There I lay back and closed my eyes in the sun and let the warm waves wash over me for twenty minutes before heading back up. An attendant at the pool handed me a towel. The doorman in the lobby handed me a sealed manila envelope.

“Just arrived for you, Mr. Freeman.”

I turned the package in my hands. Large enough for a subpoena. But it held no markings.

“From Mr. Manchester?” I asked.

“No, sir. It arrived by courier, sir.”

In the elevator I punched in Billy’s code and then ripped open the envelope. I shook the contents out into my hand. Slightly bent at the corners, where the rivets had been popped, was the aluminum logo tag from a Voyager canoe. I recognized the stamped serial numbers as my own. The tag had been pried from the bow of my boat. I held the rectangle of metal by its edges and spun it. No markings. No message. A bell rang when the elevator reached the penthouse. I stepped out and stood shivering in the air conditioning.

I shaved, showered, and was working on a new pot of coffee when Billy called me past noon. Last night I’d been insistent about learning more about the areas where the other children had been found. Billy was calling to give me the name of a pilot in Broward County who was an Everglades guide and gave flyover tours of the wetlands. He would also know most of the other guides as well as the hunters and fishermen who spent serious time there.

“His name is Fred Gunther and don’t be put off if he’s a little tight,” Billy said. “These killings have a lot of people spooked. I get a feeling even the guides are looking over their shoulders.”

He gave me the address of a hangar at a small private airport.

“Use my other car in the parking garage. The keys are in my desk.”

I didn’t tell him about the canoe tag. I’d dropped it back in the envelope and tucked it in a bag along with the GPS unit, knowing I was stockpiling evidence that was either going to save me, or put me on a deep shit list with Mr. Hammonds. I had already brought Billy into it by showing him the GPS. I was getting a cop’s prickly feeling on the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades. I wasn’t going to bring my friend in any further. An hour later I was on the interstate in Billy’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, watching the rearview mirror as much as the traffic in front of me.