The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (31 page)

“A small fire.  Palmer put it out.  He had a camper’s shovel, which he said he tossed some dirt over the smoldering leaves and cigar to extinguish it.”

We drove for another two miles and came to Panther Path.  I slowed the Jeep when I saw a stenciled sign that indicated the Yearling Trail crossed through the area.  We stopped and got out.  Billie said nothing as he walked slowly along the road, his eyes scanning the flora.  I walked on the other side of the road and looked for any signs of a charred spot.  After the last rain, everything was in shades of green.

We searched for more than an hour, the deerflies and mosquitoes thick and fearless.  Finally, Billie stopped.  He studied an area a few yards off the dirt road.  He stepped into the scrub a few feet and squatted.  Then he picked blades of grass.  “Find something?”  I asked.

He nodded as I approached.  “Look at the difference in the color of the grasses.  That patch, only about two feet wide, is new grass.  It sprouted from the rains.  It is lighter.  After lightning causes wild fires in the forest, after the rains fall, you see new growth.”  He handed me a blade of grass.  “This is new growth.  Different from the surrounding grasses.  It’s like a sign, but you have to open your eyes to read it.”

He reached in his backpack and pulled out a large hunting knife.  It looked like a Bowie knife, wide blade, serrated teeth at the top.  He used the blade to scrape away loose soil.  There, in the center, was a four-inch stogie, bite marks still present on the end.

“Impressive,” I said.  “You tracked something under the earth.”  I snapped a picture of the cigar, close-up and then with Billie kneeling next to the hole.

Billie stood.  “I just looked for the signs in nature.  You’re pretty good at that, Sean, especially for a paleface.”  Billie chuckled.  “The signs are all around.  You can see it with your eyes, hear it with your ears, and sometimes you can feel it inside you.”

I opened a Ziploc and used my pen to lift and drop the half-smoked cigar into the plastic bag.  “I’ll get this to Detective Sandberg.” 

Billie said nothing as he slowly stood erect and looked down the empty dirt road.

 “Do you hear something?” I asked.

“Yes, I hear the silence.  The birdsong is quiet.  Something’s coming.” 

SEVENTY-SIX

I heard the approaching vehicle before I saw it.  The SUV was a Ford Explorer owned by the park service, two people in the front seat.  The driver slowed and pulled off the side of the road, stopping next to Billie and me.  I recognized the driver.  He was the same ranger I’d seen at Nicole Davenport’s gravesite, the same man who assisted the sheriff in the hunt for Luke Palmer.  Ed Crews took off his dark glasses and asked, “How’s it going?”

“Okay,” I said.

“This is ranger Nancy Thornton,” he said.

“I’m Sean O’Brien.  This is Joe Billie.”

 Thornton nodded.  She was at least a decade younger than Crews.  Her narrow face had no make-up, and I could see tiny potholes from teenage acne across her cheeks.  She had an open and natural smile.  “Pleased to meet you both,” she said.

Crews glanced at the cigar in the Ziploc.  “Looks like you’ve found something I’d like to see banned from all our national forests, damn cigars.  It’s not the cigars that are so bad, it’s the idiots who come out here with their buddies to drink, shoot and smoke cigars.  They, too often, toss ‘em without making sure there’s no hot ash.  It’s enough to give Smokey the Bear a coronary.”  He grinned.  “You hoping that will match the one the deputies pulled out of the grave?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping.”

“Good luck.  Let us know if we can help you.”  He started to put the truck in gear.

I said, “Maybe you can help us.”

“How’s that?”

“Were you two with the search parties when they were here a few days ago hunting for the marijuana field?”

“I was on vacation,” said Nancy.

Crews nodded.  “We had two members of our staff helping the teams the sheriff had out here.  I was on one, and our botanist, Paul Ferguson, was on the other.”

“I’ve got a satellite map in my Jeep.  Maybe you could show me the areas where the two teams searched.”

“Sure,” Crews said.  “You two going to give it a go, too?”

“Maybe you could point out the search areas.”  I stepped to my Jeep, waited a beat for him to come out of the truck, and walked over to them.  I spread the map on their hood.  “Okay, show us where we are now and the distance the teams covered.”

“Happy to,” he said, stepping into the dappled morning sunlight, a light that made the dye in his hair look like black shoe polish.  “Okay, the search team Paul was with worked this area from Juniper Springs to Alexander Springs.  The team I was with worked the opposite direction, from near the Yearling Trail across to Farles Lake
.
  They used aerial surveillance over the rest of the forest.”

“Did you see any coontie?”

“Coontie?”  He grinned.  “You know, come to think about it, I don’t recall seeing any.  But we were looking for a different plant.  Coontie aren’t too easy to spot.”

“Apparently, neither is a marijuana operation.”

“This is a hellava big forest.  Lots of places for crooks to hide stuff.”

“Yeah, I keep hearing that.”

“One time we found a car thief ring.  They brought the stolen cars into the forest, stripped them and used a U-haul to truck the parts out to sell.  We busted them in two-thousand-eight.”  He lifted his foot to the running board and tied his shoe.  Pine straw was stuck to the sole.

I said, “I remember seeing coontie in the vicinity of the marijuana plants in a photo from Molly’s camera.  Didn’t you originally help Molly and Mark locate coontie so they could release the atala butterflies?”

“Absolutely, I gave them some suggestions as to where they might find the plants.  They had a four-wheel-drive and could go just about anywhere in here.  They were resourceful kids.  Said they’d found some and would be coming back.”  He paused, lowered his boot back to the ground, and walked around the truck, pine straw stuck to a small piece of duct tape on his heel.  “It’s horrible what happened to them.  I heard the guy they arrested out here, Luke Palmer, made bond.”

“That’s what I hear.”

He grinned, got back in the Explorer and started the engine.  Ranger Nancy Thornton smiled as they pulled onto the dirt road and drove slowly away.

I turned to Joe Billie and pointed to the map.  “Do you know this area?”

“Sure.  I’ve been there as a young fella.”

“Let’s look in there.  It’s a little north of the two huge areas the teams searched.  Maybe we’ll find something.”

Billie studied the topography on the map.  He pointed toward Alexander Springs and the St. Johns River.  “This place, from river to springs, and up to west of Lake George is wet in summer rains.  I know what the coontie looks like.  It’s similar to a fern.  My mother used parts of it to make bread.  You won’t find coontie growin’ in the wet places.”  He pointed a finger in the vicinity between Juniper and Salt Springs.  “C’mon, Sean.  Let’s head for the high country.  When we find drier ground, there’s a good chance we’ll spot some coontie.”

SEVENTY-SEVEN

There were no more roads.  No more trails.  Billie and I’d come to the last bit of what would have passed as any kind of manmade path or clearing in the forest.  We got out of the Jeep, the heat and humidity wrapped around us like a steam bath.  I swatted a deerfly the second it landed on the back of my neck.  I tucked my Glock under my belt in the small of my back and lifted the .12 gauge shotgun from the backseat.  Sweat dripped down my sides, soaking into my shirt at the belt.

Billie carried his backpack, his knife now in a sheath attached to his belt.  “You want to carry a gun?” I asked.

“No.”

“I don’t know if we’ll find anything.  These guys could be long gone.  But if they’re still here, it’s going to be very dangerous.”

Billie said nothing.  He inhaled deeply, more like he tasted the air rather than just taking a deep breath.  I opened the map.  “Even from a satellite, with its high-powered camera, you wouldn’t be able to see anything below this massive canopy of trees.  Probably the only way Molly and Mark found this area, if this is where they came, was by getting lost.”

“I love these woods.  It’s not so daunting.  This is the Florida of my ancestors.  Even before the time of the Seminole Wars, hundreds of years before.  Many tribes lived off the St. Johns River and the land it touches on its journey to the sea.  I’d rather be here than Miami.  You can survive in here.  This place was home-sweet-home two-hundred years ago.”  Billie began walking.  I locked the Jeep and followed him. 

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.