A False Dawn (6 page)

The next morning I drove with Max to near the spot I had parked when I found the girl.
 Was her name Angela like Reverend. Jane said?   She was now a body under a sheet in the coroner’s cold storage filing cabinet tucked away like another crime statistic.

Max followed me to the spot where I’d found her.  I knelt down and began to search the area.   Max sniffed blades of grass.  She seemed to sense that something was wrong here.  Deer tracks, wide and deep.  The deer had been running.   Had the deer been frightened by the person who had killed the girl? 

“Let’s see where these came from, Max.”  She ran ahead, barking and wagging her tail.  Max and I were now backtracking, following a trail in reverse hoping it might lead to the start of how the girl got to the river.                                          

We were within seventy-five feet of the road when Max stopped.  This time the fur rose along her spine, a whine coming from her throat.  She found a single shoe, a woman’s shoe.  It had a high heel and a closed toe.  I took a pen from my shirt pocket and lifted the shoe from the ground.  It was the shade of cherries.  No brand name. 

I held the shoe with a handkerchief and carefully poured some of the contents from the toe area into one of the Ziploc bags I’d brought.  The soil trickled out of the shoe like coal dust.  Holding it to my nose, I could detect the faint odor of phosphates, possibly manmade fertilizers.     

I lowered the shoe back where Max had found it and looked around for a second shoe before calling Detective Slater on my cell.  “I found what I think may have been one of the victim’s shoes.”

“Where?  Under your car seat?” Slater asked.

“It’s where you should have found it if you’d searched the crime scene the right way.”  I fired back, regretting my comment the instant I said it.  “Look, Detective Slater, she wasn’t wearing shoes when I found her.  This shoe is another two hundred yards north of the river, near Highway 44.  Maybe she lost it running from the perp.  Maybe she’d been in his car.  Or she could have been some poor kid in the wrong place at the wrong time hitching a ride.  The shoe’s here.  I’m leaving it and any other evidence right where I found it.  Come get it.”

I could almost hear his mind crunching through the phone.  “I’ll be there in an hour.  Don’t touch anything.  And don’t leave.”

“I wouldn’t think of it, Detective.  Did you get an ID on the girl?”

“No, but we have the autopsy report.”

“You took a DNA sample from me.  I know there was no match.  But I don’t know exact cause of death or who she was.  I was hoping you could tell me that.”

“Stay put until I get there.”

“I’ll make this easy.  I’ll tie a white handkerchief on a tree limb next to Highway 44.  You pull off the road and walk about seventy-five feet straight north from the tree and you’ll find the shoe.  But you won’t find me.  Do your own police work, Detective.”

I hung up. Max had vanished.  “Max!” 

Silence.

There was the noise of something moving in the brush.  “Max, where are you?”  Nothing.  Then there was a sound you never forget—the sound of a rattlesnake.

“Max!”

I stepped around a large pine tree and stopped.  The snake was as thick as my arm.  Body coiled, ready to strike.  The eyes trained on Max like heat-seeking weapons.  They were dark, polished stones.  The snake’s tongue tested the air in flickers of black.

“Max!  Stop!”  I blurted.  She paid no attention to my command.  Here was an animal she’d never seen, and it was shaking a new toy.  Playtime with death.  

The next few seconds switched to a film gate of macabre slow motion.  Max’s nostrils quivered.  She froze, mesmerized by the unblinking dark pearls.  The snake coiled tighter.  Head poised to strike. 

“Max move!” My scream sounded distant.  The strike was a blur.    

The snake was dying before it could bury its fangs into Max’s face.  An arrow had gone right through the rattlesnake’s head, impaling it in the ground.  Its body wrapped around the shaft in a death grip, the rattle growing quiet, softly caressing the yellow quill feathers as constricting muscles and nerves died.   The black pearls seemed to stare somewhere beyond Max.  

I turned around as Joe Billie stepped from between two tall pine trees.                       

“Where’d you come from?”  I asked. 

Joe Billie looked at Max, who seemed as bewildered as I was, and said, “Ever think about getting a Lab?  Don’t think you’d see a lab playing with a rattlesnake.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Passing by.  Thought you could use the help.”

He held the long bow to his side, and a hunting knife was strapped to his belt.  There were no other arrows.  No quiver.

“Where are the rest of your arrows?”

“Usually carry one.  You aim better when there’s no second chance.”

I glanced at the dead snake.  “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“Had good teachers.” 

He approached the snake, placed a boot on its head and slowly pulled out the shaft and arrowhead. 

“Why’d you leave that arrow at my house?”

“You said you had a bow, thought you might appreciate it one day.”

“I do appreciate your gift, but I was surprised to find it on my porch.”

Billie said nothing. 

“I’d hate to use something that ancient in my bow.  Seems it ought to be in a glass case to protect it.”

“It might protect
you
one day.”  He threaded the bowstring in the notch on the arrow shaft and pulled the string all the way back to his right cheek, arm’s knotting.  He held the draw, rock solid, sighting a pine tree as a target.  “You hold your breath.  Draw back.  Keep both eyes open.  Block everything out but the spot.  Then let go.” 

“A young woman died near here the same day I met you.”

Joe Billie didn’t flinch.  No emotion.  No visible changes in breathing.  He slowly eased the bowstring back down, removing the arrow.

I said, “Seems to me like you’d have passed by her if you walked down the river.”

“Where’d she die?”

“I’ll show you.”  I scooped up Max with one arm and headed for the river with Joe Billie following me.  I thought about what Floyd Powell had told me sitting in his boat at the end of my dock. 
The bone hunter ain’t  been seen since.’

“Stop,” he said abruptly.

If I turned around, would I be hit with an arrow through my spine?  I slowly turned to face him.  He was reaching toward a bush, examining something. 

“You remember what the girl was wearing?”

“Yellow blouse, blue jeans.”   He pointed to something caught on a palm frond.

“It doesn’t look like a thread from blue jeans, but it’s blue,” he said, reaching for the bright blue thread clinging to a barb on the frond.

“Don’t touch it.”   I used my pen to carefully lift the thread off the thorn.  I pulled a second Ziploc bag out of my shirt pocket, lowered the thread into the bag and sealed it.

“You always carry those?”

“When I get into a murder investigation and I’m the one they’re investigating.”

“That why you’re curious as to my whereabouts?  You think I killed the girl.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t have to.”

“There’s a lot more room to hide a body in the Everglades, don’t you agree?”

He slowly turned his head toward me, his brown eyes searching my face for a few seconds.  “I didn’t kill him.”

“Clayton Susskind?”

“Someone digs up your grandfather, cuts his head off, sells it.  How’d you feel?”

“Angry.  But not enough to kill.”

“I told you, I didn’t kill him.  It was the last moon after the Green Corn Dance.  I took him in the rock chickee to sweat out his demons with the fire and smoke.  I gave him the black drink of our ancestors to show him the wrong he did.”

“Did it poison him?”

“No, it guided him.  He heard the spirits that night.  When the sun broke, he said he was moving to Arizona.  Said he was being called there to teach…university.”  

I said nothing, not sure what to say.  Max barked at a lizard and I said, “It does seem odd that you walk down the river and don’t see the girl lying near the bank.”

He pointed to the thread in the bag.  “I saw that.”

“It wasn’t easy to spot.”

“Things that aren’t a natural part of the surroundings can stand out.”  His eyes moved slowly from the branches to the ground.  “Things like this.”  He stepped over to a palmetto thicket, knelt down.  “Don’t think that little plastic bag of yours will hold this.”

Max followed me, sniffing, growling, and uttering throaty barks.  It was a domestic animal’s reaction to the aberrant, to the incomprehensible—to evil.

 “No, Max!” I shouted, stopping her from sniffing a long stick covered in dark blood.  I looked closer and could see a single hair stuck in the bark and blood. 

Billie sat on his haunches, pondering, staring at the stick.  “Was she raped?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like whoever did it wasn’t satisfied with the sex part.”

“For this guy, wasn’t about sex.  It was about power and humiliation.”

Billie stood and searched the area, stopping every few feet to turn a leaf or stick with the tip of his bow.  “Here’s something.”

Almost hidden under the dried palm leaves was a piece of gray duct tape. 

I stared at the tape and felt my chest tighten.  My palms were moist.  I touched it with the end of a pencil.  I could see a dark hair stuck to one corner of the tape.

At the river’s edge, I could smell the odor of dead fish and honeysuckles.  A half eaten catfish, probably ripped from a trotline by a gator, had washed ashore.

“Here,” I pointed to the spot I found her, “she was on her back here.” 

He looked around the area, lifting a dead leaf or a broken twig, eyes moving like a bird of prey.  “When I came upriver I was over on the far bank with my canoe.  That’s Dickensen Point.  I crossed to this bank about another hundred yards down.  Pulled the canoe onto a sandbar and walked in the shallows until I came to your dock.”

Max looked toward the east and uttered a low growl. 

Joe Billie smiled.  “I’m startin’ to gain more respect for that little dog.”

 “Why’s that?”

“Because she knows somebody’s coming.”               

Within three minutes, Detective Slater arrived with a posse.  Two unmarked cars and two Volusia County sheriffs’ cruisers pulled up, lights flashing, dust trailing.  Max barked at the detectives and deputies spilling out of their cars at once. 

Detective Leslie Moore wore her hair pinned up.  Her partner, Detective Dan Grant, followed her.  Slater took his time, staying in his car, cell phone pressed to his ear, eyes on me.  He waited for the others to almost encircle us before he appeared.  

“So, what do we have here?”  Slater asked.  “O’Brien and the crocodile hunter?”

Billie ignored the comment.  Slater continued, “We have a man with a bow and arrow and a hunting knife.  What are you hunting?”

“Artifacts.  Spear and arrowheads.” Billie said.

“You won’t find arrowheads here unless the victim was stabbed with an arrow.” 

I said, “Detective, we’ve found a couple of things that may have slipped through your first investigation.  Between here and the road, less than a quarter mile, you’ll find a woman’s shoe, a bloodied stick and a piece of duct tape.  The tape looks like it has a hair stuck to it.  I’ll show you where we found them.”  I wasn’t going to tell Slater about the thread or the dirt I’d taken from the shoe. 

Slater turned to Billie. “I’d like to take a look at that arrow.”  Billie handed him the arrow.  Slater removed his sunglasses and studied it.  “I see tiny pieces of something between the stone and wood.  We’ll run DNA on it.”

“Unless you’re storing rattlesnake DNA in your database you won’t get a hit,” I said.  “He saved my dog’s life when a rattlesnake was about to strike her.”

“This man shot a rattlesnake with a bow and arrow, huh?  Don’t see that every day.”  He adjusted his sunglasses. “Arrow’s going to the lab, that skinning knife, too.”

Billie unbuckled his belt and handed Slater the knife and arrow.

“What’s your name?” Slater asked.

“Joe Billie.”

“Got an ID, Mr. Billie?”

“You mean driver’s license?”

“That’d be a good start.”

“No.”

“It’s against the law to drive without a license.”

“Didn’t drive here.”

“Are you and Mr. O’Brien carpooling?”

Billie's face was flat, no sign of emotion.  He stared at Slater for a moment then looked toward the river.

“You live around here, Mr. Billie?”

“Most of my life.”

“Where?”

“Hanging Moss Fish Camp.”

Slater glanced at my Jeep.  “Hanging Moss is way upriver.  How’d you get here?”

“Canoe.”

“Where’s your canoe?”

“Behind those trees.”  Billie motioned toward some willows near the riverbank.

Slater turned to a deputy.  “Check it out.”  The deputy nodded and left

 “What were my DNA results?” I asked.

“Negative,” said Detective Moore.  Slater looked hard at her.  She ignored him and said, “Where is this physical evidence you just mentioned?”

“About a ten minute walk from here.”

 “Mitchell,” she said to Slater.  “Want me to check it out?”

“Maybe you both should see this,” I said before Slater could speak.  “The more eyes, the less chance something might not be seen.”  

A muscle below Slater’s left eye twitched.  He started to say something but was interrupted by the deputy who was returning.  “There’s a canoe tied up down there.”   

#

A DEPUTY ROPED OFF
a semi-rectangle between the scrub brush and pine trees.   Detective Grant took digital photographs of the evidence and the surroundings.  They collected and bagged the shoe, duct tape, bloody stick, leaves and dirt from the area.

I stood out of the way, holding Max and watching Detectives Slater, Moore and Grant work.  She and Grant were thorough, organized.  Slater smoked three cigarettes and looked at his watch four times in fifteen minutes.  They approached us. 

Detective Moore removed her gloves and petted Max.  “Cute dog.”

 “Thanks.  Her name’s Max.”

Slater lit another cigarette and sucked a mouthful of smoke into his lungs. “Let’s cut the chitchat and get to the point.  Mr. O’Brien, you are a person of interest in this investigation.  Now, so is Mr. Billie.  We’ll be taking Mr. Billie in for further questioning.  Mr. O’Brien, we’re not done quite yet.”

I said, “You’re eloquent.  I called you, remember?  Now you have some hard evidence in your bag.  Let’s see what you can do with it, Detective.”

He turned to Billie.  “If you have no history, you’re a mystery.  I solve mysteries.” 

Detective Moore said, “Mr. Billie, we’d appreciate it, sir, if you could come to the department to answer a few questions.  If you don’t have a car we’ll provide transportation back to your home or to your canoe.”  

Billie said nothing.  He looked in the direction of the river.  A red-tailed hawk alighted on the top of a pine tree.  The bird watched Billie being led away. 

I stood there and saw the hawk fly to a cypress trees.  Even with Max, I suddenly felt alone, out of sync with everything around me.  The faraway sound of a train whistle beckoned down the St. Johns.  It was a lonesome sound, a hymn carried by trestles crossing rivers of time to bridge the soul.  In two weeks the girl would be a cold case.  Forgotten.  But I couldn’t forget the promise I made to her and to my wife.

A gut feeling and a heartfelt promise often don’t mix.  No easier than good and evil can sleep in the same bed.  My gut told me one thing while my heart spoke another.  I hadn’t asked to be tossed into this ring, but some choices are already made for you.

The girl I found had no choice.

“Come on Max.  We’re told her name was Angela.  Let’s see if we can name her killer.”