“Sean O’Brien. Good to meet you.”
“So you’re looking to buy a ranch?”
“Maybe. You never know.” O’Brien glanced around. “I like the isolation. Not a lot of this kind of Florida left anymore. May I ask why you want to sell the place?”
Hawkins nodded, running his tongue on the inside of his left cheek. “In one word … taxes. It’s almost eleven thousand acres. Back when the family ran cattle, I’m talkin’ hundreds and hundreds of head, we did all right. Cain’t grow crops on this land, though. We survived through the years. People will always eat beef, but they’ve cut back for the asinine health reasons, especially when this vegan crap came up. My daddy lived to the age of eighty-four, and he ate meat every day of his life. It’s harder to run cattle in Florida than some of the open land out West.”
“Here the land fights back.”
Hawkins grinned. “That’s for damn sure. Cattle have a tougher time in swamps and jungles.”
Max barked.
Hawkins looked over to the Jeep and smiled wide. “Whatcha got in there … a miniature beagle?”
“Her name’s Max. My wife gave her to me a few years ago. Max is fairly low maintenance.”
“You can let her out. My dog, Blackie, won’t hurt her.” He motioned to the dog on the chain. “He never barks. Blackie prefers to slip up on trespassers and take a chunk outta their ass. My last dog was a blue tick. A fine dog, and I miss him every day, especially huntin’ season. That dog could put you on the birds.”
Hawkins watched as O’Brien opened the door, and Max scooted out. She gave a mock chase at the chickens, the hens and one rooster fleeing back to their coops. O’Brien raised his voice. “Max! Don’t play tag with the chickens.” She stopped and trotted back to him, her head high, pink tongue barely visible, and eyes bright.
Hawkins snorted, glancing down at Max and slowly raising his eyes up to O’Brien. “Man o’ man. You gotta be at least six two or three, and she comes up to your ankle. You’re quite a pair. Mr. O’Brien, I’ve been a horse and cattle trader all by life. Buy and sell livestock, sell or bartered for most of my life. I can pretty much read a fella. I don’t think you’re here to look at my ranch – at least not to buy it. That’s not saying you can’t afford that. I don’t know that. But I do know, at least I believe, you’re not in the market for this place.”
“When you asked me I said maybe … you never know, and that’s the truth. I might not be able to afford all eleven thousand acres, but you could be willing to sell off parcels.”
Hawkins eyed O’Brien for a few seconds, the shrill sound of the red-tailed hawk overhead. “I’m gonna put the baby chicks in the coop, then you and me can sit down on my front porch and you can tell me why you really came out here. Otherwise, I might just call the law and introduce you to the sheriff for trespassin’, and then I’ll take Blackie off his chain.” He grinned.
THIRTEEN
Wynona Osceola opened her eyes and watched the falling rain. “Right now Frank’s a missing person,” one of the senior detectives had said hours ago, loosening his tie and lifting his sports coat off the back of his chair as he headed for the door. “He’ll show up on the rez. Maybe he’s on a bender in one of the casinos.”
Wynona knew better. The missing man was born on the rez. He rarely left it, and his family was here. She thought about her job as the only female detective within the tribe’s police department. She had to work longer, harder and ultimately smarter than many of her male colleagues. But that’s what she did because, in spite of wading through the cesspools, there were fleeting moments of success. There were footnotes of closure for the victims, and sometimes for their families. Moments in time where she had helped make a difference.
Living for moments. Living to cement a touch of dignity back into the cracks of those who’d been robbed of it.
A man was missing.
She finished her drink. The alcohol eased the sting, but it never numbed the source. If she could somehow delete the images from her brain, erase the memory banks of a scene so horrific that nothing in all of her FBI academy training at Quantico could have prepared her for … she would do it.
Her supervisors at the Bureau had called what she’d done as ‘the use of excessive force.’ Wynona had made no excuses or apologies. He was dead. In her mind, even death wasn’t justice enough for what he had done. Federal agents had wired the home of Masood Aswad in Dearborn, Michigan. Aswad owned a Middle Eastern bakery and coffee shop. The FBI had it under surveillance five months before the night that Wynona could never forget.
She’d been a Special Agent with the FBI for six years when it went down. She was one of seven agents assigned to the Bureau’s office in Detroit. And she was the investigator looking into the activity of Aswad, a man believed to be a radical Islamic jihadist and funneling money and recruits into ISIS.
The agents listened to the conversations coming through the hidden microphones in Aswad’s home. Sometimes the discussions were in Arabic. It made no difference. A translator was always in the Bureau’s radio reception room. But more often the conversations were in English. It was in English when Aswad and his wife spoke to their oldest daughter, Rala. But the night of the murder, the slaughter, it was a combination of English, Arabic, and screams—gut-wrenching screams, a universal plea for help.
Wynona and her partner, Special Agent Michael Levin, had been on a stakeout. They sat in a dark blue undercover van across the street from the Aswad home. They were with an FBI multimedia expert and an interpreter, monitoring and recording the conversations coming from the house. Wynona closed her eyes, her thoughts drifting. In the subdued light of her home, she could hear Rala’s frightened voice echoing, the frantic pleas, “No, Papa! Please don’t!”
“Tonight, my daughter, you must die.”
“I did nothing!”
“Shut up! You disgraced the family.”
“I did nothing!”
“I told you to stay away from that boy. He is no good.”
Wynona looked across the inside of the cargo van at Agent Levin. He nodded. She said, “He’s going to kill her! We’ve got to get in there!”
Wynona opened the van’s back door. “Let’s go!” She turned to the technician wearing dark frame glasses. “Call for backup!”
Rala’s voice came across the van speakers. “Mother! Please! Help me!”
In broken English a woman said, “You give us no choice.”
Aswad shouted. “Silence! Hold her arms, Malia.”
“Father! No! Please! Noooooo!” The screams were bloodcurdling.
Wynona bolted across the street to the house. Levin followed her and said, “You didn’t put on your vest.”
“No time!”
They approached the front door, pistols drawn. Wynona tried the doorknob. Locked. She kicked out the glass above the handle, reached inside and opened the door. She ran in, Levin next to her. Wynona could hear the slaughter. The muffled screams. The labored breathing and grunts from Aswad.
They rounded a corner through a small living room and entered the kitchen. Rala was on her back, her mother holding the girl’s arms against the floor. Masood Aswad, a fleshy man with black hair, knelt over his daughter, plunging a butcher knife into her stomach. Blood poured from the girl’s chest and stomach.
“Drop it!” Wynona yelled.
Aswad glanced over his shoulder. Blood splattered on his thick glasses and across his sweating, twisted portly face, his eyes wild. He sneered and continued stabbing.
Rala looked at Wynona, a distance gaze in the girl’s eyes—an expression that had transcended a plea for help to one of disbelief, to absolute surrender.
Wynona’s first shot entered Aswad’s back. He turned, pulling the knife from his dying daughter’s stomach. He stood, gripping the knife.
Wynona aimed for the center of his barrel chest. “Drop it!”
He took a step. The second and third bullets hit him dead center in his chest. The fourth entered his right sho
ulder. The fifth hit his neck, snapping his spine. The six round blew his lower jaw off. The seventh was in the center of his forehead. She fired three more times before Agent Levin said, “Wynona! That’s enough. He’s not getting up.”
Levin kept his gun pointed at the Rala’s mother. “Move back!” He knelt down, feeling for a pulse on the side of the girl’s neck, his fingers covered in blood. He looked at the woman for a moment, shook his head. “Get up. You’re under arrest for murder.”
Wynona stared down in the dead teenager’s eyes. The life gone. All that remained was a look of death that said her parents must have made a mistake. How could he kill me? Their daughter. How could they abandon me?
Wynona leaned against the doorframe, the odor of gunpowder and blood in the small kitchen. A teenage girl deserted and slaughtered by her own parents, lying in a pool of blood. Her father—her butcher, his body was sprawled next to her. The mother, stone-faced and indifferent, mumbled something in Arabic as she was handcuffed.
They led the woman from the kitchen through the living room and toward the front door. Out of the corner of her eye, Wynona could see a tiny amber light in the room. A surveillance camera captured them. Walking through the house, she spotted two more cameras.
At the front door she paused and looked over at Agent Levin and said, “Those cameras in there. No one mentioned cameras when the audio bugs were installed.”
“That’s because they weren’t there at the time.”
“Did Aswad install them? Or did his jihadist pals do it? And if they did it, could they’ve spotted us?”
A month later, Wynona’s question was answered. Agent Levin was shot once in the back of the head as he walked his family dog on a rainy night at his Rochester, Michigan home. The Bureau monitored the chatter online between known associates of Masood Aswad. The intel was that they were coming for her, too. Maybe not immediately. But in the future, because they would not forget the past. Vengeance could take a lifetime. They were persistent. Wynona was assigned a desk job pending the internal investigation into whether the killing of Masood Aswad went beyond self-defense and became a vengeance killing with the use of ‘excessive force.’
Five days later, Wynona quit the FBI, refused a protection program, and returned to the home of her ancestors, to the Big Cypress Seminole reservation in South Florida.
* * *
Wynona pulled her feet up on the overstuffed chair. She looked through the glass doors into her backyard, watching the rain through the cone of the light. She could hear the croaking of the frogs near her back porch. Beyond the porch, the reservation was bordered by the Everglades. Her ancestors used to call the ‘glades, pahayokee—the land of water and grass. The place of life. The place of healing and restorative powers.
She knew too well that it was also a place of death. The Everglades had become the largest dumping ground of dead bodies in the nation. The proximity to Miami, the legendary drug wars, mafia turf killings, and the fact that when a murder victim was left in the ‘glades, nothing was left. The heat, humidity, insects and scavengers were the last witnesses. And, although they were silent, they could tell a story about the victim’s death, if the body was found before it was eaten.
Wynona wondered if the insects would tell Frank Sparrow’s final story.
Tomorrow, she would organize an aerial search of the glades and the Big Cypress Preserve—all two million acres.
FOURTEEN
Lloyd Hawkins sat in a large wooden rocking chair on his front porch and stared through the screen at a green hummingbird darting from a bamboo trellis of yellow trumpet flowers. He rocked slowly, his weight in the chair causing the wooden porch to creak. O’Brien sat in a whicker chair and Max hopped on a wooden bench with a cushion across it. Hawkins turned to O’Brien. “So, what brings you out to the ranch?”
“A mutual friend.”
“I doubt you and I travel in the same circle of friends.”
“Not friends. One man. His name’s Joe Billie.”
Hawkins stopped rocking and slid his Stetson a little further up on his forehead. “How do you know Joe Billie?”
“We met a few years ago when he was searching for arrowheads in the St. Johns River near my old cabin. The cabin, like your place, is out of the way. I don’t have eleven thousand acres. But I do have three acres. How do you know Joe?”
“Knew his daddy first. Sammy Billie was a fine man. Hard worker. Took care of his wife and two sons. Sammy would come out here a day or two each month and cut fronds for the chickees. Mostly palmetto. Hell, I probably would have paid him to clear brush. But he’d never have taken it. He taught his boys well. Joe seemed to take to the land more than Jimmie did. Joe’s the oldest. Jimmie never amounted to much. Although Sammy wouldn’t say anything, when he brought the boys out here, after a few hours workin’, I could tell he was often disappointed in Jimmie. It was probably that way until Sammy’s death years ago. He died just as the Seminoles were gettin’ into high-stakes bingo, which led to all the casinos you see in Florida today.”
“Joe doesn’t talk much about his family.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Mr. Hawkins—”
“Lloyd works just fine.”
“Lloyd, Joe is a prime suspect in the murder on your property. Detectives are building a case against him. I think you and I both know Joe didn’t kill that man. What can you tell me about the murder scene?”
“Nothing I didn’t tell the police. You’re right. I don’t believe Joe did it. And I told the law that very thing. When they asked me if anyone had been on the property, I told them the only invited guest was Joe Billie. He has a key to the cattle gates, and he can come and go as he pleases. Police say the murder victim was killed on a Thursday, the same Thursday that Joe was out here gathering fronds. I know, ‘cause he stopped on his way out and told me wild boar were rootin’ up a small pasture I’d cleared a few years ago.”
“You found the victim, correct?”
“That’s right.” He tilted his head slightly, the diffused sunlight coming through the screen and highlighting the left side of his face, white stubble on his chin visible in the light. “I got a feeling you are or were a cop.”
“At one time I was. I worked homicide with Miami-Dade PD.”
“You look too young to retire.”
“My wife died, and I decided to find a new line of work.”
“And what’s that?”
“I do private investigations, most often for people who’ve fallen through the cracks of the justice system. Some cold case work, too. Victims, sometimes the families of victims, people who really need help. Joe really needs help.”
Hawkins nodded, pulling at a cuticle on his left thumb, the hammering of a woodpecker coming from a dead cypress tree. “You’re right about that. I’ll tell you all I know. It was one of the worst killings I’ve come across, and that includes the time I spent in Vietnam.” For the next ten minutes, Hawkins told O’Brien what he found at the murder scene. When finished, he added, “It doesn’t make sense, at least not to me. Why somebody would butcher that guy and pose the body is beyond me.”
“How far is the crime scene from here?”
“About a mile.”
“Can you get there following the road by your driveway?”
“Yes. I was here part of the day—the day cops say the man was killed. The following day I took those people from the state out to the mound. I believe they were goin’ to buy a large tract for a nature preserve until this happened.”
“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to ride out there and take a look. Maybe I can find something to help Joe.”
“That’d be unlikely. The spot has been combed over time and time again by a whole bunch of cops and forensics investigators.”
“I owe it to Joe to at least take a look.”
Hawkins crossed his long legs, letting out a deep breath. “I suppose it cain’t hurt. They’ve come and gone, collecting all kinds of dirt and whatnot. Y
ou’ll need me to get you out there.”
“Okay.”
Max raised her ears, growling. From the porch of the main house, she stared in the direction of the cabin. A man stood on the front porch, let the screen door slap to a close behind him, and started walking toward them. Max stood on the bench, her growls becoming louder as the man came closer.
FIFTEEN
O’Brien turned to Max. “Easy girl. It’s okay.”
Hawkins grinned. “That’s my son. No need to bite his ankle.” He looked at the man approaching the screen door. “Come on the porch, Bobby. I want you to meet Sean O’Brien and his sidekick, Max.”
He opened the door and stepped inside. He was in his early thirties, tall with wide shoulders. He wore jeans torn at the knees and a jean jacket, sleeves cut off. His hair was jet black, damp from a shower. He wore a gold chain around his neck. O’Brien counted three tattoos. One on both forearms and one on his chest. O’Brien assumed there were more. The one on his chest appeared to be a human skull, an American flag bandana wrapped around the skull.
Hawkins leaned back in his rocker. “Bobby, this is Sean and the hound dog’s Max. Sean this is my son, Bobby Hawkins.”
O’Brien stood and extended his hand. “Good to meet you.” O’Brien could look the man in the eye, almost the exact height.
“Likewise,” said Bobby. “Better watch your little dog out here. We got some big hawks and eagles that’ll swoop that thing up like he was a rabbit.”
“She,” said O’Brien. “Max is a she, and thanks for the warning. I’ll keep an eye on the sky.” O’Brien smiled, continuing to look directly into the man’s detached blue eyes, which signaled an aloofness that bordered on contempt. After a few seconds, Bobby scratched his forearm and turned his head toward his father.
Lloyd said, “Sean’s a friend of Joe Billie.”
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