Across the field the coroner’s team was removing McCane’s body, hefting the black bag across the dried grass. Richards got up, touched my shoulder and when I looked into her eyes her fingers drifted to the scar on my neck and a single tear stained her cheek. I couldn’t lie and tell her it would be alright.
“I’ll follow you,” I said.
Carannante followed me to my truck, still parked in the middle of the street where Richards had pulled up and come to back me up. The steering wheel was scraped and gouged where the girl had tried to pull herself free from the handcuffs.
“They took her to the lockup on a vagrancy charge,” Carannante said. “That’s all we can hold her on for now.”
“And Carlyle?”
“Couldn’t find him. But he’ll surface.”
I unlocked the glove box and the sergeant handed me an evidence bag into which I slipped the hundred.
“If they match the sequence number to the ones they found in Dr. Marshack’s car, you’ve got a physical link between him and Eddie,” I said, handing him the bag.
“I’ll take care of it,” Carannante said.
I U-turned the truck and had started down the street when I saw them gathered at the next corner. The three-man crew was standing back away from the glare of the squad cars. When my headlights caught them they turned and started the other way. When I pulled up even to them they stopped and the leader looked into my window.
“Y’all a violent people,” he said.
I could say nothing in response. He held out his fist and I tapped his knuckles with mine and he shook his head and turned to continue back north to the off-limits.
36
I was sitting balanced in the stern seat of my canoe, my fly-fishing line lay dormant on the brown green surface of the river. The May sun was on my shoulders and thighs. The sky was a cloudless blue bowl so deep in color it hurt your eyes to stare into it. I pulled the bill of my cap down farther and tried to will a tarpon out of the nearby tangle of red mangrove.
It had been five months since the emergency room doctors had gone to work on Eddie Baines’s exploded kidney, transfusing him with several pints of blood and saving his life. He had recuperated enough to be arraigned on a prosecutor’s charge of five counts of murder in the deaths of Billy’s women.
His public defender had him tested by an independent psychiatrist who reported the man had an IQ of 57 and that his understanding of the charges was such that he could not possibly aid his attorneys in his defense. Eddie was remanded to the forensics unit of the Florida State Prison system in Chattahoochee. Under the law he will stay incarcerated there until he is deemed competent to stand trial.
It had been two months since we gathered—Richards, Billy and myself—at Billy’s apartment to watch an eleven o’clock news report on the issuing of subpoenas to the Delaware-based investor group that had bought the viaticals on Billy’s five dead policyholders.
The cameras caught Billy’s profile in the background as federal marshals carted out boxes of records from the firm’s twentieth floor offices. Billy had been retained as an advising counsel to the government probe. The investment company’s lawyers had already issued a statement that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the five women, denied having ever employed Frank McCane or having ever heard of Dr. Harold Marshack.
“This is a legal and reputable investment business that carries out thousands of viatical transactions in the southeastern United States that benefit the policyholders in a time of financial need. We categorically deny any knowledge of the abhorrent claims contained in the indictment,” a lawyer for the group read from a prepared text into a bouquet of news microphones.
“We do not know,” I’d said, standing at Billy’s kitchen counter, sipping a beer.
“They’ll know w-when the auditors get done m-matching up the names and dates and amounts that that Miami hacker burned on a CD before McCane had him destroy Marshack’s hard drive,” Billy said. “It’s the a-advantage of b-busting an intrastate scheme—you get the G to follow the money.”
And it had been a month since Billy had given me a half-joking ultimatum: He would continue his legal fight against the state’s attempt to take over my river shack, if I would get a P.I.’s license and officially work for him. I’d told him I would think about it.
I was still thinking, my line now snaked out on the water like a curved thread of flotsam. I was staring up at the big osprey perched high in the sabal palm above me, his white chest puffed out, his yellow eye seeing everything. Suddenly, the canoe thumped.
“So, can the fish hear when you’re talking?” Richards said from her seat at the other end of the canoe. She was wearing a wide- brimmed straw hat, huge sunglasses and a long-sleeved shirt, but her legs were bare and crossed at the ankle.
“No, I don’t believe so,” I answered the question.
“Then talk to me,” she said.
So we talked about movies I hadn’t seen, and books she hadn’t read, and places neither of us had been, and we sat back and watched the movement of water and soaked in the warm spring sun and let a Florida breeze softly rock us.
A Biography of Jonathon King
Jonathon King is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.
Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the Philadelphia Daily News and Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. A Visible Darkness (2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community. Shadow Men (2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and A Killing Night (2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing A Killing Night, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.
Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels, Acts of Nature (2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and Midnight Guardians (2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller Eye of Vengeance (2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel The Styx, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.
King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.
Jonathon King playing basketball for his high school team, the Waverly Warriors, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972.
King’s yearbook photo from his senior year of high school in 1972.
For seven summers, from 1974 to 1980, King was a lifeguard in Ocean City, New Jersey. He’s shown here in 1974 or 1975 with his best friend and fellow lifeguard, Scott Erb.
In 1976, King worked as part of a crew hired by boat owners to deliver sailboats from New Jersey to Florida at the end of the summer. He’s shown here sailing a forty-foot vessel down the coast.
King’s children, Jessica and Adam, at ages ten and eight, respectively, with the mascot of the University of Florida in Gainesv
ille in 2003.
A handwritten manuscript page from King’s debut novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight. Worried that his years as a reporter would make it difficult to write thoughtfully using a keyboard, King wrote his first two books with pencil on legal pads to avoid sounding like a journalist.
King’s Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author, which he won in 2002 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, the debut book in the Max Freeman series. The Edgars, which are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, are considered the most prestigious awards in the mystery genre.
King stands inside of Kim’s Alley Bar, one of the oldest taverns in Ft. Lauderdale. Several scenes in the Max Freeman series take place here, particularly in A Killing Night, in which Max investigates the abductions of several bartenders. An actual bartender from Kim’s Alley even made an appearance in the book.
King at an isolated fishing camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2003 by Jonathon King
cover design by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9990-6
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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