by Mark Murphy
"There was this guy on faculty at USF named Walter Jernigan. A little older than my brother, been there about a year or two when all this went down. My brother said he was a minimally invasive guy—lapa-roscopic surgery, things like that. The two of them were social acquaintances. They were both athletic. Rode bikes together sometimes. Anyway, Jernigan went to this Miami meeting with my brother the month before that first girl was murdered in Tampa, so I checked out his background. Everything seemed to be in order at first—medical school at Albany Med in upstate New York, residency at Iowa, that sort of thing. Board-certified in surgery, the whole nine yards. Except . . Billy shook his head.
"My sixth sense told me something wasn't right with the guy. I talked to him a few months before Jimbo was executed and he seemed defensive. Something in his eyes didn't look right. So I checked the source documents. I asked Albany Med to pull his transcripts, for example, even though they had him recorded as having received a degree there," Billy said.
"Let me guess: he never attended."
Billy pointed a finger at Malcolm.
"Bingo," he said.
"Someone had hacked into their record-keeping system and had listed him as a graduate in the class of 1988. But there was no transcript. The guy was made up—a cyber-ghost, a phantom. And when I checked at the University of Iowa I found the same thing."
"So was he really a surgeon?"
"I'm pretty sure he was. If he's not, he'd sure learned to fake it pretty well in the OR. But this Jernigan guy had covered his tracks so well over the years that no one knew who he really was or where he was really from. He was a chameleon. That's when I started to see this guy for who he was—even if I did not truly know who he was."
Malcolm picked up a twig and began picking at the bark.
"So what happened to Walter Jernigan?"
At this, Billy smiled. But it was a tight, thin-lipped smile.
"I knew he was my guy. I had him. But I got a little cocky and I called him on his cell phone—a number that I got from my brother's cell. I told Jernigan that I knew his deal, and could prove he was the culprit and clear Jimbo's name. I had no real evidence, of course. Let my heart get ahead of my head—a rookie mistake, stupid and unprofessional, something I'd never do under normal circumstances."
"Why'd you do it, then? I mean, that seems like a bad idea even to me."
"I was trying to make Jernigan panic, hoping he'd make a mistake.
But this cat was one cool customer. I called a friend of mine on the Tampa PD and convinced him to go by his house and pick him up that night for questioning, but he was gone before they even got there. No letter of resignation for USF, office left as it was, home simply abandoned. It was like he'd been waiting for this moment, just sitting on the launching pad ready to blast off."
"And there was nothing left behind? Nothing at his home or in the office?"
Billy shook his head.
"All clean as a whistle. The guy's a pro. That's why I call him the 'Shadow Man.' He's there one minute and gone the next, blending into the shadows where he can't be seen. And then he pops up someplace else with a different set of credentials and starts over. That's part of the game to him. He's enamored with the idea that he's smarter than everyone else—so smart that he can kill and get away with it. But that's not good enough for him. He has to hide in plain sight, working in a visible position where everyone can see him. And he has to be able to pin his crimes on someone else. Ruining an innocent person's life is the piece de resistance for him, the culmination of each series."
Billy took another swig from his flask and pointed it at Malcolm.
"And you're this guy's latest target," he said.
"How do you know?"
Billy grinned at him.
"You're serious?" he asked.
"Well . .
"You fit the profile to a T, Dr. King. That's why I am here."
"So how did you find me? You still haven't answered that question," Malcolm said.
"I mentioned the Miami connection. There's usually only one big surgical meeting in Miami every year. I never let on to Jernigan that I was aware of that aspect of his target selection, so I figured that's where I'd start my search. Every year, I get a list of the Miami surgical conference attendees, and . . ."
"Wait a minute. How did you do that?"
"Come on. I'm a cop. You don't think any Seminoles work at the Miami Beach Convention Center?" said Billy, grinning.
"Anyway, I got a list of the attendees, made another list of the towns they had come from, and had my work computer automatically pull any police reports regarding possible serial killers or mutilation murders in those listed communities on a daily basis. The murders in Savannah came up. I checked them out, called up here and said that I needed to find out about the prime suspect in this case as a possible connection with a case I was working down in Florida. They gave me your name, I thanked them, found out where you lived and came up here. Then I just shadowed you and waited. I figured that the cops would come to get you sooner or later. I also figured they'd try to take you at home, probably at night when they knew you'd be there. So I stationed myself by the most logical egress point for you. You had to avoid the street, so I went to the water. And then, when the moment arrived, you came running down the dock."
Billy tapped his finger to his temple and raised his eyebrows.
"Indian tracker, remember?"
"How did you know I wouldn't be caught?"
"I didn't. There was a plan B. But I guess we won't have to worry about that now," he said.
A boat was plying the waters of Green Island Sound, engine thrumming, kicking waves of phosphorescence off its bow.
"Billy, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" Malcolm said.
The Indian smiled and shook his head.
"Figure I owe you that much," he said.
"You're chasing down leads and driving up here on a moment's notice. How does your quest to restore your brother's honor impact what you do day-to-day? You got a family? Kids?"
Billy was silent for a moment. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his long, black hair.
"I'm married," he said at last. "No kids. It has impacted me, though. My wife left me over all of this. I was checking out a lead in Osceola late one night and when I got home she was gone. Just took one suitcase. No note. She won't even answer her cell when I call her now—it just goes to voicemail. We'd been fighting some before she left, but I love Janie more than anything. So, yeah, I've paid a price—a steep one. But let me ask you something: do you have a brother? Or someone else you love a great deal?"
Malcolm thought of Amy and Mimi and nodded.
"Well, imagine what you'd do if this sort of thing happened to them. Wouldn't you do everything you could to make it right, even if it hurt you?"
Billy stood up and put his hat back on. His silhouette, all angles and planes, seemed carved out of the silver beams of moonlight that filtered through the pines.
"I loved my brother. This is something I have to do. For him. Not me."
And, in an instant, Malcolm understood.
15
Timmy was late.
The sun was low on the horizon, and he knew what that meant. Mom was going to be furious if he got home after dark.
His front tire caught on a pine cone as he made the sharp turn at Bluff Drive. He almost slipped.
Almost.
But Timmy had great balance. That's what Coach Fox always said in P.E.: "You've got some wheels, young man." Which was Coach Fox lingo for having great balance. All the kids knew that.
Timmy lurched to the left, instinctively countering the shift in weight as the bike tried to skid out from beneath him, and the wheels of his Raleigh Record snapped back in line like he knew they would.
Timmy chugged past the marina parking lot, knees churning. He did not even glance at the scores of bobbing Grady-Whites and Sea Pros tied up at the Isle of Hope Marina.
It was just then that
the seagull flew right smack into him.
He'd biked this route a hundred times before—no, maybe a thousand—and he'd never ever hit one, despite their omnipresent state by the edge of the river, despite their squawking, scrabbling, boorishflappiness, for lack of a better term.
Still, today was different.
Today, he was trying to beat the setting sun, thinking about his mom and the butt-whipping he'd getfo' sho' and then the bird hit him.
The gull came zooming in from the bluff side like a feathered cruise missile. It clocked Timmy squarely in the temple, knocking him from his bike. He had no time to think, no time even to react, when the bird committed its kamikaze flight into his skull: one minute he was furiously peddling his bike on Bluff Drive and the next he was lying, bruised and bleeding, at the oyster-strewn base of the Isle of Hope Bluff.
Timmy's bike had taken a decent tumble, too. The handlebars were bent sideways, and the Shimano gear changer that Timmy had cut grass all summer to pay for had somehow been torn free of its moorings and lay in pieces on the embankment.
"Aw, crap!" Timmy said, although he was thinking of a different word that he dared not say. Mom always said that God was watching even if you didn't see or hear him. That always made Timmy a little uncomfortable, as though the world was just a big one-way mirror with the Almighty on the other side.
The poor bird lay crumpled on the ground beside him, glassy-eyed. Timmy marveled that anything so light could have ever done all of this damage.
He was picking up the battered remains of his gear changer when he saw the bag.
It was a Hefty lawn bag, partially buried in the dry, dark earth of the bluff. He knew the brand, recognizing the texture of it from bagging grass the summer before. Something had pulled at it a bit, leaving parts of it exposed. An animal, perhaps—a dog or a raccoon.
Perhaps.
Or maybe I knocked it open falling down the bluff, he thought. Timmy was still worried about being late. But the stink he smelled made him forget that. That stink was like nothing he had ever smelled in his life. It was the inimitable stench of dead flesh, a scent his nostrils knew meant get away from before the time he was born.
And then Timmy saw the hand.
It was shriveled, like a monkey's paw.
The finger pads were wrinkled and collapsed, and each fingernail was tipped with flaking red nail polish. The hand was severed at the wrist; the bones jutted out like two dirty sticks. There was a ring on the fourth finger set with a yellow-colored emerald-cut stone. It glimmered broadly, splaying rays of jaundiced light from the dying sun.
Timmy stared.
Timmy blinked.
Maggots erupted from the hole in the ground—a bumper crop of writhing pestilence that bubbled up from the Underworld. A scream was building in Timmy's throat even before he saw the swarm of flies that followed, a cloud of them boiling out of the sightless skull.
Hours passed. The shorebirds roosted and the stars came out and still Timmy screamed. He screamed until his voice gave out, until all his shredded vocal cords could produce was a hoarse whisper. That's the way his mama found him, hours later—shivering cross-legged in the dark, eyes wide and unseeing, his little brown hands clenched into fists so tightly that the nails had drawn blood. He had cried until all of his tears were gone, until the terror left him and spilled out all over the ground, until his panicked mother found him there covered with flies as he sat next to a dead woman's corpse.
"Oh, baby! Sweet Jesus, Timmy, what has happened to you?"
Mama held her little boy in her arms and rocked him for an hour before she called the police. There would be no butt-whipping. Not that night, nor ever again.
On many a dark night thereafter, while he lay in bed waiting for sleep to come, Timmy would see the open-mouthed skull grinning at him from a stinking hole in the ground of the Bluff at Isle of Hope.
The screams echoed deep inside his brain long after Timmy's voice went silent.
16
"How long were they here?" Ben asked.
"Hours. Too long, really."
Amy was all cried out. The SWAT team had burst through the front door in the middle of the night, brandishing a search warrant for her husband, who was now prime suspect number one in a serial murder case. She thought of that awful policeman, Baker or something, the one who looked like a balding leprechaun with his bright green eyes and crooked leer. She had not liked the way the man had looked at her.
He had looked like he was hungry.
The questions had gone on for hours. She had been exhausted when they left. Her temple and her jaw hurt. Hell, even the bones in her hands hurt. She supposed she'd been clenching them, and her jaw muscles, too. She wasn't sure, and it didn't matter anyway.
And they had grilled her unmercifully, bright lights shining in her eyes so that she could only hear their voices, sweat trickling down her back as she sat there, feeling naked and alone in her nightgown and bathrobe, wishing that this was all a dream.
But it was really a nightmare.
"I'm sorry. I had so little warning. I barely had time to warn Mal they were coming," Ben was saying.
"I don't know how he got away. It seemed like they were inside the house only a minute or so after he said goodbye."
"Did he go out the back?"
"I don't know."
Ben gazed out of the kitchen window.
"The boat's still there. They sent search dogs into the marsh. And although he could have swum away, he wouldn't get far like that."
Amy smiled, tight-lipped.
"No, he wouldn't. Not without snorkeling gear. He hates swimming without his fins."
A thought entered Amy's head and she brushed it away. But it came back again, like an insistent mosquito, relentless and unnerving.
"Do you think he's guilty?" she asked at last.
"No. Do you?"
"No. I really don't. It's just not like him. He'd run into a burning building to save someone he didn't even know. There's no way he'd kill anyone. It's just not in him."
"There are things we don't know about people sometimes . . ."
Amy glared at him.
"I know, okay? And you do, too. Mal's no killer."
She shook her head, staring at the floor.
"Of course you're right," Ben said. "Look at me."
As she glanced up again, Ben brushed the hair from Amy's eyes.
"Amy, we'll find out who is doing this to Mal. I swear. And I'll make sure that you and Mimi are safe. I promised Mal that I'd take care of you both."
Amy felt her eyes swimming in tears once again.
"Dammit," she said under her breath, wiping her eyes.
She did not tell him what she was actually thinking, that little persistent insect of a thought that kept buzzing around in her head, but the thought came back again. Stronger this time.
Is it you, Ben? she kept thinking.
Is it you?
17
When Malcolm awoke, the sun was coming up.
The plovers skimming across Green Island Sound called out to the morning, their songs echoing through the twisted oaks and among the rustling ferns.
"Jesus," Malcolm said, standing up, his knees popping as he did so. He blinked and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The last thing he remembered he'd been leaning against a tree, staring at the stars in the night sky, talking to the dark-haired Indian who had spirited him away from his own house in the middle of the night.
And then it was now.
Billy was pulling underbrush off of the boat. Malcolm heard the palmetto fronds rattling as they struck the dark earth.
"We're leaving?" said Malcolm.
"I'm leaving. Gotta get some supplies. You're staying here. Town's going to be crawling with people who could recognize you. No one knows me. I'll be back in two hours, tops," Billy said.
"You can't leave me here. What if somebody finds me?"
"There are no people here, remember? You'll be fine. Just stay out of sight if anybo
dy shows up."
"How do I know you're not going to get the police?"
Billy stared at Malcolm. He tossed a smoking cigarette butt onto the ground and ground it out with his boot.
"Now why the hell would I do that?" Billy asked.
"I don't know. I just don't know who to trust anymore."
"Well, you'd better figure your trust issues out quick. Seems to me you don't have too many options."
The big Seminole pulled the boat halfway down the bank, then stopped, pushed his hat down, and looked back at Malcolm.
"You gonna help me or just stand there?" he asked.
Malcolm grabbed the edge of the boat. Minutes later, Malcolm stood on the shore watching as the skiff's motor sputtered, coughed and roared to life.
Billy piloted the boat upriver, waving as he rounded the marsh point where the river turned. And then he was gone, leaving Malcolm alone on the island with the sea and the sky.
The sky was cloudless, a brilliant cerulean blue. A pair of jets streamed high across the sky, white contrails in their wakes.
"Damn," he said out loud. "I'm marooned on Green Island."
Malcolm took out his iPhone and thought about calling Amy but decided against it. The cops might be at his house. He'd read someplace about police using smartphones to find people, and although he didn't know exactly how that worked, it just didn't seem like a good idea to chance it just yet.
But then he had an idea.
He looked at the phone's display and found that he had plenty of battery life and a surprisingly good cellular signal.
"Let's see about you, Billy Littlebear," Malcolm said out loud.
Within minutes, Malcolm had found Billy on the Internet. Everything was as the Indian had said. He read the stories about Jim Littlebear's execution, flipped through the Seminole tribe's police website, and even saw a picture of Billy Littlebear in his Special Forces gear.
And then he saw something that surprised him.
Billy Littlebear was not just any Seminole. Billy was one of the five leaders on the Tribal Council, the governing body of the Seminole Nation.
"All we need now is a lawyer, 'cause we've got a doctor and an Indian Chief," Malcolm said to himself.