Parker, the deputy, was trying hard not to look smug.
The recorder read off the items on the evidence inventory. Auto registration form, proof-of-insurance form, and other glove-compartment documents consistent with the Pontiac Sunbird stolen from Miami International. A vehicle identification number matching that of the stolen Sunbird. And a single license plate—not from the Sunbird but from some other car.
“He switched plates.” The team leader shrugged. “Probably saved him from being pulled over. We can locate the other vehicle easily enough to confirm that part of the story. For identification purposes the VIN is all we really need.”
Lovejoy consulted with Moore while the search team packed up their equipment and the deputies made arrangements to have the car towed. In the east the sky was brightening, the long night at an end.
“We’ve almost got him.” Lovejoy felt himself shaking, literally shaking, with excitement. “He’s very close.”
“Close.” Moore ran her hands over her hair, a nervous, distracted gesture. “But still one step ahead. Where’s that map we borrowed from the sheriff’s station?”
“In the car.”
They turned on the sedan’s reading light and studied the map of Upper Matecumbe Key.
“He walked to that trash bin from here.” Moore traced Jack’s probable route with her finger. “A half mile south, just off Route One. Industrial Drive’s a dead end. Let’s assume he returned to the highway and continued south …”
Her fingernail reached a narrow inlet labeled marina. She raised her head to look at Lovejoy.
Both of them were thinking of Albert Dance’s trips to Florida in the Light Fantastic, the postcard that began, “Jack and Steve and I took the boat out yesterday,” the snapshot of young Jack and his friend posed casually at the end of a dock.
“Boats,” Moore whispered.
Lovejoy nodded, his hands closing slowly into fists. “Boats.”
43
Deep in the tropical hammock, amid blooms of orchids and bursts of bromeliads like frozen fireworks displays, under a canopy of leaves allowing glimpses of pale pink sky, Jack Dance hunted.
Throughout the night he had been bitten by mosquitoes, stung by centipedes, jabbed by thorns and briers, scraped by poisonwood and manchineel. His shirt was speckled with burs, his pants shredded; dried mud crusted the insides of his shoes.
Acre by acre he quartered Pelican Key. He had explored the cove and the salt ponds, where roseate spoonbills sifted the fine silt for a breakfast of shellfish, and now he prowled the forest south of the swamp, moving slowly toward the island’s eastern shore.
His prey was here somewhere. He would find her. He would not be denied.
He was no longer quite sure why it was necessary to kill Kirstie Gardner. The boat would arrive in a few hours. All he had to do was ambush the captain, then race for the Bahamas. Kirstie could do him little harm after that.
Still, he wanted her. She was precisely his type. Another Meredith.
His eyes narrowed at the memory of Meredith Turner. Bitch. Evil, emasculating bitch.
The songs of cardinals and yellow-throated warblers whistled giddily through the clear, fragrant air. Morning glories opened tremulous blue petals to receive the day’s first light. Fastened to the bark of a gumbo-limbo, a tree snail gleamed like a gemstone, its porcelain-smooth shell a rainbow in miniature.
Beauty. Beauty everywhere.
Jack saw none of it.
“Bitch,” he breathed, the word low and susurrant, scratchy in his throat.
He was eleven years old. Sleepless in the dark, listening to faint noises from the living room.
His parents were out. He was alone in the house with his baby-sitter.
Or perhaps not alone.
Silently he crept to the top of the staircase, peered out from under the banister.
In the flickering glow of a lava lamp, two pale figures twisting on the sofa. Meredith’s white breasts flopping as she groaned. The man with long hair grinding his hips in the slow, measured rhythm of a dance.
Jack watched though the bars of the balustrade till both bodies shuddered in mutual release.
The man left shortly afterward. Jack, in bed once more, touching his penis and thinking, heard the back door swing shut.
Soft footsteps on the stairs. Meredith checking on him, leaning through the doorway, her face limned by the dim light from the hall.
Lying still, eyes half closed, Jack whispered, “I saw what you did.”
“What, Jack? You say something?”
“I saw it. You let that guy fuck you. Did it feel good?”
“I ... You had a dream, that’s all. I didn’t—”
“Felt good, didn’t it?”
“Go to sleep, Jack.”
“I could do it. I’m old enough.”
“Jack, please ...”
“I’ve got a dick, too. See?”
He snapped on the bedside light, kicked off the covers. He’d removed his pajama bottoms. His penis was stiff and red from rubbing.
“Oh, God, put on your p.j.’s—”
“P.j.’s are for little kids. I’m not little. I’m eleven. You’re really pretty, Meredith.”
“Cut it out—”
“I’ll tell. I’ll tell what you did. I’ll tell my folks, and they’ll tell yours.”
“Christ, what are you trying to do, get me killed?”
Jack liked her sudden panic. Enjoyed the sense of power it gave him. Meredith’s parents were devoutly religious, fanatically strict; she had to be terrified of what would happen if they found out about the longhaired boy.
“Let me put it in you,” he said softly, “and I won’t tell.”
“Are you crazy?"
“I can do it as good as that guy. I’m old enough.”
“You are not old enough—Christ—you’re in the sixth grade!”
“Let me do it to you, or I tell.”
“No.”
“Let me, or else.”
“Stop it.”
“Let me.”
“Oh, God, this is sick, you can’t mean this—”
“Let me.”
“Jesus. Jesus ...”
“Let me.”
Sobbing, she turned away from him and tugged at her skirt. Jack watched, pleased with the control he now exercised over this girl who was in high school, nearly an adult, taller and stronger than he was, yet a captive to his will.
Guilt makes people do things. It was a lesson he meant to remember.
Meredith’s skirt was a wrinkled rag on the floor, her panties dangling from one ankle. She sat on the bed and spread her legs.
“What are you waiting for?” Her voice had thickened like paste. Tears glistened on her cheeks; Jack thought of slug tracks. “Do it. Get it over with.”
“Aren’t you supposed to kiss me and stuff?”
“Just goddamn do it.”
He eased himself inside her, slowly, slowly.
And his erection died.
“What’s the matter?” Fury and shame made her cruel. “Can’t you even get it up?”
“I’m trying.”
“You little asshole. You twisted fuck.”
“Hey, shut up.”
“You can’t do it ’cause you’re queer.”
“I’m not!"
“Maybe you could do it with a boy. You want me to find you a boy?”
“I hate you.”
“Faggot.”
“Bitch.”
“Fag, fag, fag!"
She escaped from his bed. For long minutes he heard water running in the bathroom pipes.
Meredith never baby-sat for him again. He told his parents he was too old for a sitter, and they agreed.
He no longer touched his penis. He had no more erections. It was as if a switch had been thrown, shutting off his sexuality.
Until his freshman year of high school, when a dark-haired, green-eyed girl who looked nothing like Meredith seduced him, almost against his will.
No humiliation this time. He was not a queer, not a faggot. Meredith had lied.
The sudden revelation of his sexual potency was the explosive rupture of a dam. Years of suppressed urges burst like floodwaters through the levees and restraining walls he’d built. He needed sex; he could not get enough.
Speedily he acquired expertise in the game of seduction. He possessed all the requisite assets: good looks, skill at manipulation, and a chilly brazenness that passed for charm.
He kept score of his conquests. In one memorable year he bedded thirteen of his classmates, two girls from other schools, and his young math teacher, Miss Chamberlain.
He had redheads, brunettes, girls with raven hair. No blonds, however. No Merediths.
Blonds, he told his envious friends with a shrug, were not his type.
In a deeper sense, though, they were his type, his only type. It was Meredith who obsessed him as he lay in bed in the unforgiving dark. It was Meredith he could not forget. Meredith, who had deceived and insulted him. Meredith, who had tried to make him less than a man.
He waited until August of 1978 before taking revenge.
“Bitch,” he whispered as he held her underwater and let chlorinated water flood her lungs. “Fucking bitch.”
Though he had killed her, she’d never truly died. She survived in every woman who reminded him of her. In Laura Westlake of San Antonio and Dorothy Beerbaum of Dallas and Veronica Tyler of Phoenix and all the others.
And now, Kirsten Gardner.
The others had paid for Meredith’s crime. Kirstie would pay also. And after the hell she had put him through tonight, how he would savor her death. Oh yes. She would be his best Meredith yet.
The trees thinned out. The dense hammock gave way to a clearing speckled with darting swallowtails. An oval of open sky spread a pale lucent wash over thickets of bottlebrush and rustling stargrass.
Half hidden in the grass, almost lost amid the star-shaped blossoms, lay Kirstie’s other sandal.
“Well,” Jack said aloud. “Well, well, well.”
He knelt and picked it up. The sole was caked with mud. She had been here after leaving the swamp.
Carefully he examined the grass. Tufts of green leaves, trampled by hasty footsteps, had not yet sprung upright.
Couldn’t have been very long ago when she passed through.
She was close.
His gaze traveled slowly over the clearing. A thin streak of glitter—something fine, threadlike—was strung along the garish spikes of a bottlebrush plant.
Spider web? No.
A strand of fabric, snared by the shrub.
He plucked the thread free, held it taut between two fists. Though it was ragged and flecked with dirt, its original color was still recognizable.
Yellow. The color of Kirstie’s tank top.
He followed the line of flattened patches in the grass. At the edge of the clearing he found a second yellow thread, fluttering in the beaklike flowers of a bird-of-paradise. Just beyond it, a third.
The tank top, unraveling, had left a loose strand every couple of yards. Even outside the clearing, in the comparative gloom of the canopied forest, he could pick out new threads now that he knew what to look for.
The hunt was nearly over.
He would have her soon.
44
Kirstie lay supine on the bunk in the musty darkness, fighting hard for breath.
The poison had done something to her respiratory system. She couldn’t seem to get enough air. Twice in the woods she’d sunk to her knees in a swoon; only by lowering her head had she saved herself from a blackout.
She lifted her hand to her throat and felt for the carotid artery. Her pulse had been frighteningly weak and fluttery the last time she’d checked. Now she detected no pulse at all.
Dead, then. I must be dead.
The thought was meant as a joke, but she didn’t smile.
Thirst choked her. She wished she had water.
There was water in the house, and the house was not terribly far away. The old Kirstie could have walked there in five minutes. But this was the new, pathetically debilitated Kirstie, the Kirstie locked in a losing battle with whatever witches’ brew of toxins had been unleashed on her system; and this Kirstie could not walk another five feet.
It had required all her energy merely to take refuge in this one-room shack, part of a line of ramshackle row houses on the eastern end of the island. The shacks, she recalled Steve telling her, had been erected in the early part of the century, when a lime tree plantation had flourished on Pelican Key.
Two bunks, upper and lower, were built into one wall. There was no furniture, no lighting, no kitchen or bath; the one window long ago had been boarded up. The plantation workers had been housed like prisoners, two to a cell, without even a toilet of their own.
Hard to imagine how anyone could have lived in this filthy hole. But dying here—that was a different story. She was beginning to develop a disturbingly vivid picture of what that would be like.
Something whined in the dark. Mosquito, shut in with her. A tickle on her shoulder; the bug had alighted to feed. She was too weak to brush it away.
Well, let the goddamn thing drink its fill. Maybe the snake venom would kill it.
Distantly, the slam of a door.
She stiffened.
Had it been the wind? Had one of the row-house doors blown open and shut?
Another slam. Closer.
A brief pause, time enough for her to realize that she could feel her heartbeat now, its rhythm strong and fast, and then a third door banged shut, nearer still.
Someone was methodically checking the shacks, one at a time.
Absurdly she was seized with the impulse to fight. Crazy; she had no weapons, no strength.
But to lie here immobile and let death take her—to put up no final resistance, simply cower like a beaten animal ...
Her right arm hurt too much to move. Reaching down with her left hand, she groped on the floor. Her fingers brushed past the dried carapaces of dead insects, brittle as bits of eggshell.
What did she think she was looking for, anyway? A shotgun conveniently left under the bunk? Or maybe a hand grenade or a bundle of dynamite sticks? Hopeless.
Slam. Closer.
She punched through a gummy meshwork of cobwebs under the bunk. Feeling along the wall, she touched something small and hard and slender, sharply pointed at one end. She withdrew it carefully.
A nail.
Some workman must have dropped it while boarding up the window. A good, long nail—three or four inches.
Slam. Very close now.
A ripple of light-headedness passed through her as she struggled upright. She took a slow step, then another, treading lightly to prevent the loose floorboards from squealing.
Slam. The next door down.
She found the door frame, leaned against the wall, the nail clutched tight in her fist.
Hardly a lethal weapon. But if she put it in his neck, she might disable him long enough to grab his gun—assuming he had a gun—and shoot him, shoot to kill.
She could kill now. Kill either of them. Yes, even Steve. He was not her husband anymore.
Outside, a crunch of footsteps.
There was a very good chance she would be dead within a few seconds. Oddly the thought did not frighten her. She had done her best. She could not have done more.
The door swung open. Pallid light streamed into the gloom. The emaciated shadow of a man stretched along the floor.
Kirstie raised the nail, holding it parallel with her line of vision.
The shadow wavered. The man leaned forward, his face in profile sliding into view.
At first she didn’t even recognize him. Mud streaked the bird’s-nest tangle of his hair. His eyes, sunk deep in the sockets, were underscored by dull crescents the color of dead flesh. Beard stubble dusted his cheeks, fringing cracked and swollen lips, the parched lips of a wanderer in the desert.
&
nbsp; And his shirt—God—it was crusted with blood.
He didn’t see her. Though she had hesitated, though she ought to have forfeited the advantage of surprise, his glazed eyes, blinking vapidly, appeared to focus on nothing at all.
Against such a badly weakened adversary, even a three-inch nail wielded by a woman on the verge of collapse might prove as effective as a bayonet in a soldier’s hand.
But somehow she couldn’t make her arm lash out in a deadly thrust. It would be like ... like killing a dead man.
Instead, almost involuntarily, she breathed his name.
“Steve ...”
The sound of her voice took a second to register with him. He turned in her direction, eyes narrowed, lips pursed.
She couldn’t interpret the look on his face. Warily she lifted the nail in her clenched fist.
“Stay where you are. Don’t try anything.”
He didn’t seem to hear. With dreamlike slowness he reached out to touch her left hand, then gently pried open her unresisting fingers. The nail clattered onto the floor.
“Kirstie ...” he whispered in a voice like death.
The sudden violence of his embrace shocked her. The press of his mouth against hers seemed to capture and condense every kiss they had ever shared into a frenzy of desperate, hurried intimacy.
She didn’t understand—it made no sense, none of it—yet she found herself holding him tight, stroking his matted, brier-strewn hair, as his mouth brushed her neck and he spoke her name again and again, each separate moan a new, agonized confession of remorse.
If this was another trick, another trap, then she would let him deceive her, let him win.
45
The guardhouse at the marina was manned by an elderly wharf rat in a security guard’s jacket and cap. His name, he told Lovejoy and Moore, was Mickey Cotter, and he worked the night shift, from midnight to seven a.m.
Lovejoy showed him the mug shot. “The gist of the situation is that we’re looking for this man. His name is Jack Dance.”
Cotter put on a pair of reading glasses and held the photo under the lamp on his desk. “Face don’t look familiar. What’s he called again?”
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