The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (16 page)

He dropped to his knees to use the shovel to dig.  Two feet down.  There it was.  Trapped.  Held in a grip, as if a giant seized the cache.  Gnarled tree roots wrapped around the treasure.  An old steel trunk.  Time and the elements had turned the outside into dark pewter, the shade of sunlight through soot.  He pulled a hunting knife from his belt and hacked at the roots, pieces of wood and bark flying in his face.  “C’mon, damn you roots!” 

After several minutes of hard cutting, he had the metal box out of the hole.  He used his knife to pry off the lock.  Slowly, hands shaking, Palmer opened the lid.  Old newspaper, the tint of brown mustard, was the first thing he saw.  Palmer pulled back newspapers and looked at stacks of money.  A little aged, but still green and good as gold.  Stacks of one hundred dollar bills.  He lifted a roll of money and held the bills to his nose.  Palmer closed his eyes, the smell of the forest smothered with the scent of money.

He sat under the ancient oak, sat under the carved hearts, and counted the money.  He pictured his niece, Caroline, in her bed, propped up on pillows, looking out her bedroom window with those eyes like melted caramel, her body growing weaker, her face remote as the West Texas landscape. 

I’D LEFT ELIZABETH AT THE sheriff’s makeshift command center, a large and opened tent, near all of the cars.  There was food, water and supporters—everyone comforting but anxious.  More than fifty people, many volunteers, walked through the dense woods looking for evidence—looking for bodies.  As I was leaving, Sheriff Clayton, mid-forties with a linebacker’s girth and a mail-slot mouth, stood in front of cameras, microphones and satellite news trucks anchored where he and Detective Sandberg took questions from the media.

I heard a chopper overhead a quarter mile to my west as I searched through the brush with a younger deputy sheriff, Don Swanson.  By midday, he had already lifted three ticks from his arms and scalp.  His olive green Marion County Sheriff’s tee shirt was black from sweat, the fabric tight against his muscular chest and arms.  He wore a close-cropped flattop haircut, and I saw his scalp turning red under the fierce sun as we walked through one of the few open fields heading toward another pocket of dense woods. 

Swanson had been one of the first deputies on the scene after the hikers located the butterfly box.  He agreed to lead me to where it was found.  He said, “Bloodhounds won’t bark.  We won’t know if they run up on something.  It’s all in their nose.”

“Maybe we’ll cross paths with that search team,” I said.

Swanson pointed out the scrub where the bloodied box had been discovered.

“Was the box open or closed when you found it?” I asked.

“Open.”

“Were all the butterflies gone?”

“I didn’t see anything in the box, just a bloody handprint on the side of it.”  

“Do you know what a coontie plant looks like?”

“A coon what?”  He waved gnats from his eyes.

“Coontie.  It’s the only plant in the world where the atala butterfly will lay its eggs.  The eggs hatch and the caterpillars feed off this plant; it’s the only one they’ll eat.”

“Sounds like a pretty bland diet even for caterpillars.”

“If we can find the coontie not too far from here, we might find the place where this box was opened.  And we might find where someone first approached Molly and Mark.”

“So we’re going to track a freakin’ butterfly?”

“They don’t leave tracks.  They do leave eggs.”  I saw Swanson look toward the tree line as I stepped away, hoping the coontie plants were close. 

THIRTY-EIGHT

The sheriff’s helicopter flew low near the river.  Swanson reached for the button on his radio.  I said, “Maybe we should scout the area first.  No need to send people, especially volunteers tromping all over here, looking for a plant that might be hard to spot.”

“So what are we looking for?”  His brow wrinkled.

“We’re trying to find a plant that looks like a cross between a fern and a sago palm.”  I reached for my cell phone, punched up the picture and handed the phone to Swanson.  “That’s a photo of a coontie.  And right now, far as we’re concerned, it’s an image of America’s most wanted plant.” 

“Detective Sandberg said you worked homicide for Miami-Dade PD.”

“A lifetime ago.”

“I can see how it can get to you.  Body count in Florida gets higher every year.”

“Yeah.  I’ll search the area to the left.  Maybe you can look around to the north.”

“Hunting for a plant?”

“Yep.”

We separated.  I watched him for a few seconds, walking slowly, pulling back scrub brush, probing the shadows.  I heard the sheriff’s chopper in the distance.  Searching the vicinity, I thought of Elizabeth.  When I left her, she stood under the shade of a canvas tarp that the sheriff’s deputies had erected.  She held a water bottle in one hand and clutched a silver cross that hung from her necklace with the other hand.  As the search party was leaving, the look on her face was one of silent desperation. 

I saw something.  It wasn’t the color of a coontie plant, and it wasn’t the color of nature, either.  Plastic.  An opaque image near the base of a pine tree.  I knelt down and studied the bottle.  A half-gallon container, a former milk bottle, with about two inches of water in the base.  A strap, from a piece of an old leather belt, was lopped through the plastic handle.  I used my cell phone to take a picture before I would ask Swanson to call forensics.  Maybe there were trace cells of DNA around the mouth of the bottle or prints on the side.

I worked my way toward a pine thicket interlaced with oaks.  Something caught the light.  I stepped closer to a large pine tree and spotted a tuff of fur wedged in the bark.  It was too high up to have been a rabbit.  Maybe a panther or a deer.  I scanned the ground.  Deer tracks.  Set wide apart and deep.  I knew that the animal had been running hard.  Maybe it crashed into the side of the tree as it ran.  What was it running from?  There are plenty of bears in the forest.  A few panthers and hunters.  But this wasn’t hunting season.  Poachers?  I followed the deer tracks.

Blood.  Coagulated—the hue of a ripe plum.  There were splatters on leaves.  I rubbed a drop between my thumb and finger.  Under the shaded canopy from the forest, the blood was still damp.  The deer had probably been shot just a few hours earlier.  

I continued following the trail.  Fifty yards farther and the blood and prints were lost.  The underbrush was too thick for visible prints, the leaves and vines no longer spotted with a blood trail.  Maybe the deer had died or bolted in another direction and gone deeper into the forest to die.  Or its killer could have tracked it, butchered it somewhere in the woods and taken the meat home.

There was movement to my right—something dark moving in the branches.  I walked slowly through the sticks and leaves in that direction, careful not to make noise.  From out of the foliage, a butterfly rose.  It seemed unhurried, almost animated, flying in near slow motion as it searched for flowers.  I followed the butterfly as it glided just above my head deeper into the forest. 

The butterfly circled near a wild hedge of verdant vines, yellow and white flowers sprouted from the mesh of jade.  I recognized the shape and color of the pedals.  It was a passionflower.  The butterfly alighted on one a few feet away from me.  I watched it feed.  The lower section of its body was a vibrant reddish orange, the ivory black wings trimmed with blue dots at the outer edges.  The top center of the wings was splashed with an iridescent sea green.  As the butterfly slowly opened and closed its wings, while feeding, the green changed to cobalt blue.  It was as if the wings were moving holograms in a cascade of green leaves flowing with yellow and white blossoms.  

I knew that I was watching the rare atala butterfly.  And it was probably one released by Molly Monroe.   

THIRTY-NINE

The atala flew to a second passionflower.  As it fed, I used my cell phone to take the butterfly’s picture.  I called Swanson and told him my location and that I was trying to follow the atala.  “If you can walk over here, two sets of eyes will be better than one.”

The butterfly fed for another half minute before taking flight.  I emailed the picture to Dave Collins and punched in: PLEASE ID.  Swanson caught up with me following the butterfly.  It seemed to float with little effort over the ground, never but a few feet above the floor of the forest.  I said, “If we can keep an eye on it, maybe we’ll find the coontie plants.”

“We’re tracking a damn butterfly?  This is gonna be one for the books.  Did you pick up some kind of insect guerilla training somewhere along the line?”

I heard him chuckle, but I wouldn’t take my eyes off the atala while it appeared to hang in the air drifting around trees, passing other flowers and continuing deeper.  I hoped a bird wouldn’t dive from the branches and take it out. 

We followed the butterfly another fifty or so yards.  It appeared to fly in a circle and then settle down on something.  As we got closer, I saw it had perched on a coontie plant.  There were at least a dozen growing wild in the area.  Sunlight came through the canopy in shafts of stippled light.  The butterfly crawled on the leaves.  “So that’s a coontie, huh?”  Swanson raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s a coontie.  And it was probably here where Molly and Mark released the box of atala butterflies.”

“What’s the butterfly doing?”

“It’s not feeding on the coontie, only its caterpillars do that.  Looks like it's laying eggs.  You’re witnessing one of the rarest butterflies in America reproducing in the wild.”

“That’s what the college kids helped bring about, huh?”

“Yes, and it might have led to their deaths.  Let’s leave the butterfly alone and have a closer look around here.”

Swanson nodded and started searching through the undergrowth.  I began looking for any broken limbs, material and impressions not found in nature or made by it.  I kept in mind the fact this spot may have been hit with the rain that swept through much of the area.  Or maybe the tree canopies acted as a shield, deflecting some of the rain.  I believed that was why the deer blood was visible.  Within a few seconds, I saw blood and could tell it wasn’t from a deer.  There were spots that had soaked through grass and into the ground.  I picked up single blade of grass and rubbed the blood between by thumb and finger.  The coppery smell changes in decay, becomes less metallic, more dirt-like pungency.

“Did you find something?” Swanson asked.

“Yeah.”  I slowly stood and looked at the foliage, searching for dried blood spray.  The person shot most likely fell right where the blood had pooled.  Maybe the bullet had not gone through the body.

The atala rose from the coontie and flew between Swanson and me.  It passed a large pine tree before vanishing into the forest.  Something on the tree, a mark, a flicker in the shadows and speckled light, caught my eye.  There was a thin line reflecting from the bark.  It looked like a dry slime trail left by a tree snail.  And right in the center of the long path was a hole.  I stepped closer.  The hole was about five feet from the ground on the side of the tree directly facing the pooled blood.  Swanson joined me.  “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“It’s a bullet hole.  This dried slime came from a snail.  It probably would have crawled around the hole.  So I’d guess the bullet was fired after the snail had come through this spot on the bark.  See that resin oozing out of the hole?”

“Yes.”

“That means it’s very fresh, like the tree has a new wound.”  I scanned the bark, following the snail’s track farther up the tree.  About twenty feet above the hole was the snail on the opposite side of the tree.  Its shell was a little larger that a walnut, tinted in white, brown and red stripes.  “And there’s the little guy who left his mark.  If he’s doing a foot an hour, for example, the bullet may have been fired fifteen hours ago.  The bullet could have passed through Molly or her boyfriend, Mark, and lodged in the heart of the pine.  Your team might have to use a chainsaw to get it.”

Swanson shook his head.  “First we track a butterfly, now a snail.  What’s next?”

“A deer.  I found a blood trail heading south, but I lost the trail.”  I looked at the GPS map on my phone.  “Could be a stream in that area.  I found a water bottle about one hundred yards to the east.  It needs to be examined for prints and DNA.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Mark this as a crime scene and call in the dogs.”                  

FORTY

The man handling the dogs introduced himself as Bo Watson.  He wore a faded brown Stetson, brim tainted the shade of weak coffee.  A handlebar moustache draped beneath his nose, wiry sun-dried body.  He had tucked his jeans inside his ostrich skin cowboy boots.  Within minutes, a dozen deputies and two forensics investigators joined us along with Detective Sandberg and Sheriff Clayton.  “What do we have?” the sheriff asked.

The team listened to what Swanson and I had found.  The sheriff turned to Watson and said, “We got blood.  Two types.  One might be a deer, the other’s most likely human.  Can you keep your dogs focused on the human stuff first?”