A sense of unreality stole over Kirstie as she watched. A couple of minutes ago she’d been confronting Jack Dance alone, trying to find the strength either to scream or flee. Now here he was, accepting the stick from Ana, then kneeling to let her lick his face, her tongue slopping across his mouth in a slobbery kiss.
Kirstie found herself studying Jack’s clothes. They were creased, slightly soiled, as if they’d been slept in.
She remembered Anastasia’s jittery nerves last night. Perhaps a bad dream hadn’t been the cause, after all. Perhaps she’d heard Dance’s arrival.
Had he beached the boat in darkness? Had he spent the night on the island?
The thought traced a slow shiver along her spine.
“How did you get here, Jack?” she asked in a neutral tone.
“Rented a dinghy with an outboard motor.”
“This morning?”
“Just showed up.”
“Funny. I’ve been awake for a little while. I didn’t hear a boat.”
Jack shrugged. “The way the wind’s blowing, the sound wouldn’t have reached you.”
“If you tied up at the dock,” she said, pressing slightly, “you must have seen the house. I’m surprised you didn’t notice that it had been repaired.”
He showed her a bland smile. “I didn’t use the dock. Didn’t see the south end of the island at all. I approached from the north and beached the dinghy at the cove. That’s where Steve and I used to come ashore.”
Kirstie wouldn’t let it go. “Pretty early in the morning to rent a boat.” She watched his eyes. “It must have been tough to find anyplace open before dawn.”
She detected no flicker of uncertainty when he answered. “I rented it last night. Figured I’d get an early start this morning. A friend at the marina arranged it.”
“Mickey Cotter?” Steve asked.
“That’s right. Good old Mickey.”
“Didn’t he tell you I was out here?”
This time there was hesitation, and Kirstie was sure Dance had been caught in a lie. But all he said was: “No, never mentioned it.”
Steve sighed. “Maybe Pice forgot to let him know.”
“Who’s Pice?”
“Boat captain who ferried us to the island. He’s got a thirty-foot sportfisher called the Black Caesar. Picking us up first thing tomorrow.”
“You’re going home then?”
“Afraid so.”
“I nearly missed you. Glad I didn’t.”
“So am I. Come on back to the house and we’ll have breakfast. We’ve got a refrigerator full of groceries we need to use up.”
They headed off together, Anastasia trailing Jack and woofing happily, Kirstie taking up the rear.
Ahead loomed the line of trees bordering the beach, furnace red in the intense daylight. The palms threw feathery shadows on the hardwood stands behind them. The casuarinas were graceful sculptures in bold relief.
At the end of the beach Kirstie paused to look back. The sun was a full circle now, stamped on the sky like a target, burning a fiery path through the shallows to the shore. As she watched, the pelican dived into the glitter and bobbed up with a catch in its pouch. It floated on the surface, head lowered, as if in thankful prayer for the gift of food.
The same thought recurred to her: Hunter and prey.
She turned away with a jerk of her head and followed Steve and Jack into the forest.
Close-packed trees and shrubs swallowed them like the walls of a cave. Flies buzzed like miniature dive bombers. Green darners chased mosquitoes in the tremulous young light.
Jack twisted a cane free of a blackberry bush, then produced a pocketknife and deftly sliced off leaves, stems, and thorns. Kirstie thought of Jack’s hand reaching for his pocket as they faced each other on the beach. A tremor passed through her as she watched the slim, clever blade coruscate in a patch of sun.
He threw the twig to Anastasia, continuing their game. The dog snatched it up and scampered away. Jack followed at a jog trot, laughing.
Kirstie touched Steve’s arm to hold him back.
“How could you invite him to stay all day without asking me?” she hissed.
“I didn’t have much choice. He’s an old friend.”
“So I gathered. Tom Sawyer, reunited with Huck Finn.”
“It’s not like that,” Steve said quietly, as his eyes took on that unfocused gaze she knew too well.
She wouldn’t let him drift away. “When he was alone with me,” she whispered insistently, careful not to let Jack overhear, “he seemed ... weird. Dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Steve frowned. “How?”
“The things he said.”
“Like what?”
She replayed their conversation in her mind. Suddenly the encounter struck her as frustratingly innocuous. There had been no open threats, nothing blatantly improper, only an intuitive sense of jeopardy, impossible to justify with a bare recital of the words exchanged.
She tried, anyway. “He kept asking if I was alone. When I told him to get off the island, he ignored me.”
“Did he say he wouldn’t leave?”
“Well ... not exactly. But I didn’t feel safe with him. And I still don’t.”
Steve smiled. “Look, there’s nothing to worry about. He’s just a high-school friend who happened to turn up. Anyway, I’m here to protect you. Okay?”
He moved on, rejoining Jack, without waiting for an answer. Kirstie stared after him.
She’d barely heard what her husband had said. Her whole attention had been focused on his face.
His mouth had been smiling. But his eyes had captured some other emotion, something she could not define. Grief, perhaps, or guilt. Or ... fear.
She wasn’t sure what she had seen or what it meant.
But somehow it scared her, scared her worse than the knife in Jack Dance’s pocket.
Kirstie felt herself trembling as she continued down the trail.
13
Delta flight 627 out of Atlanta touched down at Miami International at 9:57 a.m. Lovejoy and Moore hustled their carry-on bags out of the overhead bins and got off fast.
An Airphone call to the Miami office shortly before landing had established that no one would be meeting them at the gate. The field office’s resources were entirely consumed by the hunt for Mister Twister.
“At least there isn’t any shortage of cabs in this town,” Lovejoy said as he and Moore hurried down the concourse. “But before we leave the airport, it might be advisable to pay a call on security.”
William Proster had been chief of security at Miami International for seventeen years. He offered his visitors a donut (declined) and a seat (accepted). The radio chatter of patrol units crackled and buzzed over the squawkbox on his desk.
“I understand you’re still not a hundred percent sure your boy actually deplaned here,” Proster said, dunking a cruller in a mug of coffee. “So I came in early today and watched some TV.”
He chewed the donut, waiting for the obvious question. Moore obliged. “TV?”
“Well, nothing that’ll give Phil and Oprah a run for their money.” Proster chuckled at his own wit. “We’ve got dozens of video cameras set up in strategic locations. Any arriving passenger would have to walk right past some of them to exit the terminal. This morning I screened the sections of the tapes recorded in the relevant time frame.”
“Did you see him?” Lovejoy asked.
“I can’t say for a certainty.” The soggy cruller vanished in two last bites. “But maybe yes. At least, there’s one fellow who’s dressed right—jeans, casual shirt, knapsack. ’Course, a million joes dress like that. The face ...” Proster sighed. “To me it’s a blur. Why don’t you take a look-see for yourselves?”
He escorted them to the video surveillance center, where rows of color monitors lined the walls from floor to ceiling, showing overhead views of the concourses and baggage-claim areas. Flocks of miniaturized travelers hurried past in real time, exiting
from one monitor only to enter another a moment later. Two security guards nursed coffees and watched the screens.
The tape from last night was already cued up on a video deck in the corner. “This camera is stationed on the American Airlines concourse,” Proster said, “near the security checkpoint.” He punched Play, and a hazy image of what might have been Jack Dance passed across the upper right-hand corner of the picture tube. A digital display in a corner of the frame marked the time at 10:04 p.m.
“Again,” Lovejoy said.
Proster rewound the tape a couple of feet and replayed it.
Lovejoy shook his head. “I’m not sure.” He looked at Moore. “You?”
“I think it’s Jack. But I can’t be positive. The image is too hard to read.”
“We picked up the same man on a couple of other cameras, but in those instances he’s pretty much lost in the crowd or in shadow. This is the best look at him we got.”
“It’s not enough to confirm his arrival,” Moore said.
Proster nodded. “True enough. However, I’d bet my winnings from a good night of five-hand stud that this fellow”—he tapped the picture tube, where the frozen image lay like a painting behind glass—“is your boy, and here’s why. Two cars were stolen from long-term parking yesterday. Now admittedly this is Miami, where grand theft auto is not exactly unheard of, but even so ...”
Lovejoy was taking notes. “What kind of cars?”
“One was a ’93 Dodge Dynasty LE sedan, silver exterior, gray interior. Owner went off on a day trip, got back at eleven p.m. and discovered it missing. With the other car we got a little bit lucky. The owner expected to be away till Sunday night, but his seminar got canceled, so he came back from Houston only a few hours after he left. His car was gone. Must’ve disappeared between four and midnight.”
“Make and model?”
“Pontiac Sunbird. Four-door hardtop. 1992. White exterior, blue interior.”
“Plates?”
Proster rattled off both license numbers without consulting any notes.
“Miami P.D. put out APB’s?”
“You betcha. Statewide. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Lots of cars go to the chop shop in the Sunshine State.”
Lovejoy was still looking at the fuzzed image on the monitor. “Would it be possible for us to borrow that tape?”
“Think if you ogle it long enough, you can convince yourself it’s him?”
“Not exactly. There might be a whole new way of seeing it.”
Moore asked him what he’d meant once they were back in the concourse.
“From what I understand, certain computer programs can do video enhancements of single frames. Improve the resolution, bring out more detail.”
“Good thought. We can messenger the tape up to D.C Have the Headquarters lab take care of it.”
Lovejoy pursed his lips. “That’s one possible approach. But we might have to wait awhile for the results.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Local talent.” Lovejoy stopped by a bank of pay phones, found the Yellow Pages, and flipped to a section marked Television Production Services. “One of these outfits may be able to digitize and enhance the image while we wait.”
A couple of quick phone calls, and they had an appointment at a video-production house called Sorcerer’s Apprentice on Flagler Street in downtown Miami.
A revolving door ejected them into the scorching dragon’s breath of the day. The air was humid and thick, the heat stifling. Lovejoy sneezed twice before climbing into the first taxi in the queue.
“I hate this climate,” he said as he dabbed his nose. His standard complaint.
“You hate all climates.” Her standard response.
Lovejoy gave the video firm’s address to the driver.
As the cab pulled away, Moore said thoughtfully, “You know, taking this tape to an outside agency for analysis isn’t exactly going by the rules and regs.”
“Well, sometimes it may be necessary to ... slightly ... bend the rules.”
She had never expected to hear Peter Lovejoy say that.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an unprepossessing warren of offices in a rundown brownstone. The receptionist introduced them to a technician named Davis, a youngish man, bearded and pony-tailed and amazingly pale for south Florida. He wore a loose T-shirt that growled HATE THE STATE.
The slogan led Moore to expect a hostile reaction when she and Lovejoy identified themselves as federal agents, but Davis merely nodded, listened patiently to their request, and said, “Okay. Come on.”
He led them down the hall to a narrow room cluttered with electronic gear. Lovejoy surrendered the tape, and Davis popped it into a camcorder plugged into a connection box at the back of a Quadra 950 computer, then ran the video in a full-motion display.
“Huh,” he said, sitting comfortably at the console. “Pretty bleary, all right.”
“Can you enhance it?” Lovejoy asked.
“You can always tweak an image. But in this case, maybe not enough. Let me grab a frame and see.”
He ran the video in slow motion, then frame by frame, till he found the most promising image. A double click on the mouse made a dialog box appear; he selected “Capture to RAM” in response to a prompt.
“You want just his face?”
Lovejoy said yes.
Davis cropped and resized the frame, enlarging the man’s face to fill most of the screen. He activated a pull-down menu, clicked on one of the options, and increased the contrast.
“Looking a little better already. Now let’s sharpen it up, improve the edge definition.”
He clicked on another menu option, then went on clicking as the blurred picture came into progressively crisper focus in a rapid series of adjustments.
“That’s as clear as I can get it,” he said finally.
“Quite possibly clear enough,” Lovejoy muttered. “Personally, I think we’ve got a match.”
Moore thought so, too, but wanted to be sure. From her briefcase she removed a copy of Jack Dance’s mug shots, modified by a sketch artist to incorporate his disguise. She compared the profile view with the face on the monitor.
Same hair. Same glasses. Same nose and jaw.
“It’s him,” she said. “We’ve confirmed him in Miami.”
Davis leaned back in his swivel chair. “Want a hard copy of this frame?”
Lovejoy nodded. “If possible.” Half a minute later a laser printout was in his hand. “Thanks. You’ve been a considerable help. What do we owe you?”
“No charge. Glad to be of service to the authorities.” He saw Moore’s raised eyebrow and added, “Oh, don’t mind the T-shirt. A holdover from my Murray Rothbard phase. I used to think anarchy was cool.”
“What happened?” she asked, amused.
“I got mugged.” Davis pivoted in his chair and tapped the screen. “This is the serial killer, isn’t it? Saw his picture in this morning’s Herald.”
Lovejoy coughed into his fist. “The Bureau is involved in a large number of manhunt operations at any given point in time, only a few of which make the headlines. It’s hardly prudent to jump to conclusions concerning any particular—”
“It’s the same man,” Moore cut in, impatient with her partner’s evasions. “But we’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread the story around. We don’t want this to get on the news. It’s best if he doesn’t know how close we are.”
“How close are you?”
“Well ... we know he’s in Florida.”
Davis grunted. “Florida’s a big place.”
“He’s correct, you know,” Lovejoy said as he and Moore pulled away in a second cab. “Florida is a big place.”
“We need another break, that’s all.”
“In my estimation, we’ve already gotten more breaks than we had any right to expect.”
Moore had no answer to that. They were silent during the rest of the ride to the field office.
14
“
Terrific lunch.” Jack polished his mouth with a paper napkin. “Steve, you’re a lucky man. Not only is your wife beautiful, she’s also a hell of a cook.”
Kirstie showed him a cool smile. “Cheeseburgers aren’t exactly gourmet fare.”
She was seated across the patio from Jack, her tray balanced in her lap, her suntanned legs stretched lazily along the chaise longue. Sometime earlier she had kicked off her sandals; her bare toes wiggled. Jack thought she had cute feet.
“Ordinary cheeseburgers—no.” He enjoyed taunting her with his phony courtesy, his lying compliments. “But yours are something special. What’s that sauce you put on them?”
“Ketchup.”
“Oh, come on, there was more to it than that. Some secret ingredient. Am I right?”
Her shoulders lifted. “Dash of Tabasco.”
“The master stroke.”
She looked away, a muscle in her cheek ticking angrily.
“I think you’re embarrassing her,” Steve said through a mouthful of potato chips. “She’s not accustomed to such rave reviews.”
“Well, she should be. Treat her right, Stevie, or you never know. I just might steal her away.”
Kirstie turned in his direction again. Her eyes were two blue slits.
She was not embarrassed, of course. Jack knew that. She hated him, feared him, and she wanted him off the island, out of her life. Well, he could hardly blame her.
The sun beat down. Flies buzzed, droning their insect songs. Anastasia, curled at Jack’s feet, burred in deep sleep.
Jack was glad they’d chosen to eat outdoors. The house was stifling, claustrophobic. It felt like a cage. Memories jumped at him from every corner—good memories, but tough to face now, as he pondered the problem of what to do about the Gardners.
The patio felt safer. Here he could smell the flowers and smile at the blue sky. Surrounded by beautiful distractions, he hardly even had to look at Steve ... or at Steve’s wife.
But it was hard not to look at Kirstie. She was perfect. She was exactly his type.
He studied her as she finished her sandwich. A slender woman, not fashion-model tall, but perfectly proportioned. The teasing breeze had thrown her hair into lovely disarray. It tumbled across her shoulders—thin, gently rounded shoulders naked save for the tank top’s straps, the smooth skin dusted with soft freckles.
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