A Killing Night (24 page)

CHAPTER 30

R
ichards couldn’t start the car. We sat outside the apartment in silence and looked straight ahead, putting mental dominoes in a row.

“OK, Max,” she finally said. “Was that the truth?”

“That was her. I saw her portrait in Philly, on the wall of the store where she worked. It’s only been three years. That’s her.”

“Damn,” Richards said, and all I could do was agree.

She finally turned the ignition. The start of the motor was something, an action at least, while we both tried to line up where to step next. We started back in the direction of the Galleria, to my truck.

“You know I’m going to have to report this,” Richards said and her voice held as much question as statement. “I mean, she’s officially missing, and we found her.”

I knew what that report meant, both to Faith Hamlin’s life and to Colin O’Shea’s, and so did she.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, pulling out my cell phone. “But do you think we could wait until we get Colin’s side of all this before you do that?”

I flipped open the phone but paused. Richards chewed the side of her lip and then nodded. I punched in the numbers to O’Shea’s cell.

“You’re not going to pull an ‘I told you so’ on me are you, Max?” Richards said while I listened to the ring in my other ear.

“No,” I said. “And you wouldn’t have done it to me, either. There are more important moves to make here.”

I was now hearing a recorded voice telling me that the customer I was trying reach was unavailable at this time. I left a message for O’Shea to call me as soon as possible.

“Morrison?” she said and I nodded while we sat at the light.

From memory I replayed my conversation with Marci the bartender, her admission that she had been seeing Morrison for a few months, that the romance had gone wrong and that the officer had raped her. The word itself caused Richards to recoil.

“She told you this?”

“Yeah. I thought I was going to talk her into opening up on some kind of drug connection the two of them had,” I said. “I told her about the missing bartenders and that we were looking at Morrison as a possible supplier who might have been responsible for their disappearance.”

“We, Max?”

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring the question. “Then she just spilled it. She said she didn’t fight him and it might have saved her life.”

“And let me guess, she’s not willing to press charges and testify,” Richards said.

I didn’t have to answer. I watched her hands flex on the steering wheel. She was controlling her anger, keeping it at bay while she ran the scenario. She might even have been seeing the image of a dead deputy lying facedown in her front yard, the gun still in her hand.

“The rape took place out in the Glades, Sherry,” I said, trying to pull her back. “Some spot out off the Alley.”

She reconnected her eyes to mine.

“But she couldn’t lead you to it, right?” she said and I must have had some look of stupidity on my face again.

“So somehow you get it in your head to tail the guy? How long did you think you’d have to pull that off?”

“It wasn’t that blind,” I said, defending myself. “I talked with Marci and got her to pass on a lie to Morrison that we had physical evidence on one of the missing bartenders.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you used her to set him up?”

“It was just an attempt, Sherry. It might have stirred up something to cause him to make a mistake, give up a lead. O’Shea was covering her,” I said. “It didn’t work out and if Morrison did have someplace to go, he’ll stay the hell away from it now.”

We both went quiet as we pulled into the parking garage and up next to my truck.

“Maybe not,” Richards said and I looked at her. “I put a tracker on his patrol car the day after I told you about his file.”

Now I was staring.

“You know, those GPS trackers that the delivery managers and armored car guys use on their vehicles so they can monitor their fleets or individual drivers? It clocks their stops and mileage and maps out every damn place they go during the day.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know what they are. How the hell did you manage that?”

“Internal affairs,” she said. “Morrison was already on their screen. I just gave them a nudge. They called in his car for a bogus maintenance check and stuck the tracker in there the other day.”

“So you believed me,” I said.

“I was opening myself up to possibilities,” she said, not looking away. “I checked it this morning and last night after Morrison caught you up in his little DUI trap he went home to his residence until about midnight and then took this long drive out on Alligator Alley.

“He got about fifteen miles out past the toll booth and then turned north on some kind of trail, I’m guessing, because the map doesn’t even show a road. He stopped there for thirty minutes. Then it appears he turned around and came back.”

“Christ,” I said. “That’s where he takes them.”

I could feel the blood in my veins, the adrenaline chasing it. Sherry saw it too, the scenario, the possibilities.

“And you’ve got the coordinates of this place where he stopped?” I said, opening up my door.

“I’ve got a mapped printout. It’s in my briefcase.”

“You know where he is now?”

“I can find out,” she said.

I tried O’Shea again, got the recording. While I called Kim’s, Richards handed me the printout of Morrison’s trip to the Glades.

“I have a friend in dispatch,” she said and then made a call of her own.

When I finished I looked in at her and she raised a finger to me, said thank you to someone and clicked off.

“Marci didn’t show for her two o’clock shift,” I said. “It’s the first time she’s missed since she was hired and Laurie can’t get her on her cell.”

“Morrison checked in at roll call and will be on patrol for the next eight hours,” she said.

“All right, I’m taking this with me,” I said, waving the printout. I expected her to stop me, to tell me to wait for a crime scene team, to at least demand that she come with me.

“You make that run, Max,” she said instead, a sense of urgency in her voice. “I’m going to find this girl.”

CHAPTER 31

I
was ten miles west of the tollbooth, doing eighty in the rain and watching both the darkening roadway slide out under my headlights and the truck’s odometer to mark the turnoff. Richards would be checking Marci’s apartment and the hospital E.R.s and doing it without having anything broadcast out on the police radio band. She’d keep checking with a friend at dispatch to confirm that Morrison was still working in his Victoria Park zone. I was out after physical evidence only.

My wipers were running a delayed beat, a one-step brush and then silent. Sunset had long been shrouded by the cloud cover. The rain was light but had turned the freeway into a ribbon of asphalt that shined wet in my lights and then dulled and disappeared out where the beams could not catch up to my speed. The hiss of tires slinging water up into the wheel wells sounded just above the deep rumble of my engine. When I’d stopped to hand the toll-taker a dollar I’d noticed the cameras and knew that there would be yet another piece of evidence against Morrison if he tried to deny his trips out here.

When the woman gave me change I tossed it into the cup holder and punched the trigger on my trip meter. I was now watching for 21.7, the exact distance Richards’s planted GPS tracker had recorded. As I got closer, I slowed to 50 mph, then 20. When the odometer crept to 21.5 I pulled over to the shoulder and crept along, looking out into the darkness on my left for a sign of disturbed gravel or a light-colored wheel track in the vegetation. Almost to the exact mileage mark I spotted a streak of matted grass leading off to the north and I stopped. I put on my slicker and took the long- handled flashlight from its place behind my seat and got out. It was a two-track, unmarked by anything official. But clearly it had once been used for some kind of access to the other side of the canal that ran the length of the freeway. I walked twenty yards out and shot my flashlight beam out to the north. A man-made earthen bridge had been built across the canal over a culvert which allowed the water to flow. Even in the dark my eyes could pick up the difference in black shades that showed a tree line. There was a hammock extending out from the freeway. There were no reflectors or fences or signage, just a path to nowhere.

I went back to the truck cab and dialed Richards.

“Your map was on the money,” I said when she clicked in. “I’m going to walk it in and see what I can find. Any luck with Marci?”

There was a scratchy delay over the transmission and then it cleared.

“…to her apartment but nothing seems out of place. Her clothes are still there and her makeup. The manager said he doesn’t remember ever seeing a marked police car out in front of the place. He said the last time he saw her was when she drove away Wednesday morning and he didn’t notice her carrying a bag or suitcase.”

While she talked I watched a set of headlights grow out of the east. The sound of low and powerful engine noise reached me before I could make out that it was a tractor-trailer rig. It blew past me, leaving a swirl of rainwater and wind in its wake that I had to turn my face away from. Its passing drowned out the first part of another sentence.

“…don’t want to put the plate number out on the radio in case Morrison could recognize it but we’re going to have to do something soon,” she was saying.

“Look. The map shows it’s only a half mile from here to where he stopped. I’ll let you know,” I said.

“Max?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful, all right?”

“Yeah,” I said and hit the End button and stuck the phone in my raincoat pocket.

Before starting in I got back in the truck and parked it lengthwise across the entry to the trail. With the canal on either side, no one would be able to drive in and surprise me. On the other hand, it was a marker that I was here and on foot. I reached into the glove box and took out a handful of plastic ziplock baggies for evidence and stuck them in my back pocket.

I locked the doors by habit and started out with my rain hood off so I could hear the sounds around me. I had been living on the edge of the Glades for a few years now and trusted my senses. Morrison might know the tricks of the streets but I felt sure he could not match me on this turf. This had become mine.

I stepped carefully down the slight incline and used the flashlight to trace along the flattened grass and rut of the left track. When I got to the other side of the canal, I stopped when the beam glistened dully on the ground and then bent to look at a recent impression in a patch of clear mud. The tire track was not one of the wide, chunky off-road types that hunters and gladerunners used. It was a street tread. If it didn’t rain too much more, it might be lifted with a mold and then matched against an existing tire. I filed the thought away and moved on.

Once I got used to the footing, it was easy going. I kept sweeping the light beam in a circle, up to judge the reach of the gumbo limbo lining the path and then down in front of me from one track to the other to check for any drop-off. The rain had stopped and I had not gone far before the sounds of passing traffic behind me were absorbed by the thickness of vine and fern and leaf cover. The hiss of the tires was replaced by the sound of wind in the tree branches. Off to the west I thought I could even hear the rush of acres of open sawgrass being pushed and folded by the breeze, the long stiff blades softly clattering. Twice the trail became enclosed in a tunnel of overhang and melding branches. If there had been a chirrup of frog or cicadas before my arrival, they were quiet now. I had learned from my late canoeing that the animals of the swamp were highly sensitive to any unnatural stirrings of water and air. The night dwellers would have sensed me long ago. They also would have marked Morrison’s presence each time he came here. Nothing goes unwitnessed in this world.

After twenty minutes the trail opened up into a clearing and the track curved to a stop. To the east the hammock fell away and went flat, melting into the sawgrass. To the west the black mangroves grew thicker, almost like a wall. I was studying the tire track, tracing it with the light. It formed a three point turn in the opening and I thought of Morrison’s move at the DUI stop. I was sweeping the light beam on the ground, looking for trash or some sign of carelessness and bent to examine what might have been the impression of a foot heel in the earth when I heard the grunt.

The sound caused a breath to catch in my throat and I turned to it. I cupped my hand over the lens of the flashlight and froze. Thirty seconds of silence, then it came again, low, like a cough into the emptiness of a big wooden barrel. It was a living sound. I stared in its direction, searched the darkness inside the wall of mangroves for movement, imagined whatever it was doing the same to me.

I looked down at my hands; the ring of light from the flashlight lens was glowing red against my palm and I snicked it off.

The next sound was a snort, and a rustling of vegetation that was deep into the trees. A big male gator makes such sounds during mating season. It is a call to the females meant to impress them by indicating size and power. I had heard them many times on my river. If it was a gator he would not be frightened away by my skimpy noises. If it was something else I still couldn’t just sit here in the open. I moved to the edge of the tree wall as quietly as I could. Again I wished I had my gun.

I knelt and strained to hear, trying to raise my senses, and I felt the wind change. It had been rotating during the walk in, clearing the sky and stirring the leaves as it swung to come out of the west and now it had gained strength. I heard the snort and heavy rustle again and then on the breeze came an odor that washed over me and made me involuntarily twist my nose and squeeze my eyes shut. It was the stench of death, rotted in earth and water, never dried to dust by the sun but left putrid on the moist ground.

Now I knew the snorting noise and I stood and snapped on the light and searched for an opening in the tree wall and stepped in. The terrain went down at an angle, covered in the soft detritus of fallen leaves and loose soil that in the flashlight beam appeared to have been disturbed already. I had to crouch to get through and under the limbs and found a footprint, big enough for a man, pointing back up in the direction I had come. I was thirty feet in and flicked the light beam back up and there was a pair of luminous eyes staring at me. It was a wild boar, its ugly face frozen in the sudden circle of light, its massive body looming black and glistening behind. Strings of gristle and dirt hung from its mouth and I yelled, half in fear, half in disgust and anger. The beast startled and I yelled again and crashed through the trees and my upright and aggressive assault caused the damn thing to scream from its throat and flee the other way.

I stayed still and listened until I could no longer hear the sounds of the animal splashing and snapping twigs in retreat. Then I waited until I couldn’t hear my own heart banging in my chest. But as I settled, the smell came back into focus and it was stronger. I wished I’d had the tin of Vicks we used at homicide scenes to dab inside my nose. Instead I pressed my left hand to my nostrils and pointed the flashlight to where the boar had been snuffling.

In a slight depression at the base of a clump of black mangrove roots my light caught a torn strip of yellow plastic first. The animals had shredded it and parts were still pushed down into the thick muck. When I fanned out with the light and got down closer, even I could identify bone fragments. Out here in the wet heat where insects and microbes flourish, a corpse could be consumed in a matter of a few days. Scavengers like the boar and gators and even birds would cause a certain amount of destruction and drag evidence for yards, maybe more, spreading out the crime scene. Non-biodegradables like plastic and clothing would last much longer, but even they would eventually disappear.

I did not want to disturb more than I had to, so I stepped up onto the tree root and bent to pick up a strip of the plastic. It was a medium thickness like the kind used for police tarps. I’d used them myself to cover bodies, to give them some dignity in death while the news camera crews in Philly flocked around homicide scenes. “Bastard,” I whispered aloud.

I shined the flashlight down into the pile again where the boar’s hooves had dug down and the light found something metal the size of a penny. I snapped a twig from the tree and poked it loose. It was a snap button, still rimmed by frayed blue-jean material with the word
GUESS
stamped into it. I put the button and strip of plastic into a ziplock baggy and then I widened the search, not panicked but intent. If it weren’t edible the animals wouldn’t have carried it.

I studied the muck in concentric circles at first, like I’d seen crime techs do. Then I took a chance and looked back from the pile shaped like a cone where the digging boar would have flung the muck and bone as it was pawing.

I picked up the glint of shiny metal six feet back. It was lying in a patch of standing water, just below the surface, and shimmered in the beam as I moved closer. The water had cleansed it of dirt and it gleamed up at me. It was a flat chrome bottle opener with a handle at one end, the kind of opener women bartenders slip into their back pockets, the kind men watch and the girls know that they watch. But this was never supposed to be a part of the game.