The Blue Edge of Midnight

by Jonathon King

  “Mr. Freeman. Mr. Freeman. Wait. Please!”

  Diaz was nearly skipping to catch up. I turned to acknowledge him but kept moving toward my truck. He came alongside and blew out a quick breath.

  “You gotta excuse Hammonds. He’s wired a little tight these days,” the young detective said, sticking his fingers down in his pockets despite the heat.

  “I’ll give him that,” I said, unlocking my truck door.

  “These murders got everybody on edge. The bosses, the politicians, the civilians. The feds are pushing and threatening to take over if we don’t show something soon. Everybody wants the killer and Hammonds is the one that has to keep saying we haven’t even got a good suspect.”

  “And he still hasn’t,” I said, opening the door.

  “Hey, I made some checks up north myself. No one said you went signal twenty after that shooting with the kids.”

  “Is that right?”

  Diaz was looking at the long jagged scratch running through the paint on my truck and shaking his head.

  “But no one knew you’d come down here either. They just said you took a payout and disappeared.”

  “Yeah, well, that was the idea,” I said, closing my door and starting the engine. Diaz stepped back as I pulled out of the space, his hands still in his pockets.

  I was cursing under my breath as I pulled out into traffic. Always listen to your lawyer. Especially if he’s your friend. I’d done myself no good here. But at least I knew where I stood. They were desperate and had me on the target board and it was going to take a lot more than a Mr. Nice Guy smile to get me off it.

  When I pulled up behind a line of cars on the ramp to the interstate the traffic was as insistent as it had been at ten o’clock and would be at five and at eight tonight. There were no lazy Southern afternoons here.

  As my line lurched again with the cycle of the light, I caught sight of a newspaper hawker working his way down the row.

  “Slain Palm Beach Child No. 4” read the headline. When the guy got close I rolled down the window. He looked in and I saw that he had a fat face that folded in on itself and a spit- soaked cigar planted in the side of his mouth. I did a double take and then handed him a dollar. He passed the paper in and when he started to dig for change I waved him off.

  I held the paper against the steering wheel and read the secondary headline.

  POLICE LINK KILLING OF GLADESIDE KINDERGARTENER TO MOONLIGHT MURDERER

  VISITATION SERVICE FOR ALISSA GAINEY SET FOR TODAY

  I scanned the front-page story, shuffled to the page inside where it continued, and found mention of the funeral home where the girl’s visitation was being held. The blast of a horn snapped my head up. The line was moving. I swung onto the northbound ramp, squeezed my way onto the interstate and settled into the middle lane, staring into the line of cars in front of me.

  In Philadelphia I had still been in the hospital when they buried the twelve-year-old I shot. I’d read the follow-up stories in the Daily News that identified him as a sixth grader in the North Philadelphia neighborhood near Temple University, that his family was churchgoing, that a collection was being taken up. I’d asked the nurse to get me an envelope and while she was gone I’d climbed out of bed, retrieved my wallet and emptied it. Later I scratched the name of the church on the envelope and wrapped the money inside with a piece of paper with the name of the fund on it. Another shift nurse promised she’d get it mailed. Despite being raised in my mother’s Catholic home I am not a prayerful man. But I prayed for Lavernious Coleman. And I prayed that no nosy reporter would find out about the donation. And I prayed a little bit for myself.

  When I got to Forest Hills Boulevard, I got off at the exit and headed west. After four or five miles, I started looking for the approximate numbers on the neat new shopping complexes and the low, discrete business marquees. They were trying to avoid creating another neon trash alley like those that plagued so much of South Florida’s sprawl. Maybe it was neater, in a gameboard kind of way, but it somehow made me nervous.

  I found Chapel Avenue and followed a curving two-lane avenue with a grass-and-palm-lined divider until I saw the inevitable white Doric columns. The architectural necessity of that classic touch on funeral homes was lost on me. Maybe it had something to do with the pearly gates, a hopeful hint for those left behind. The street was lined with sedans and SUVs. An attendant was directing the overflow to a parking area behind the building. I turned into a lot across the street, backed into a spot and left the engine and air conditioner running.

  There was a television news truck parked a block down. Its telescoping antenna had not been raised, but I could see that the van’s side door was open and at least one reporter and her crew were working the sidewalk. I watched them stop a couple in their thirties with a small child in tow and ask, I assumed, about the little girl who now lay inside surrounded by flowers and grief.

  I picked up the newspaper and read about the child I’d found on the river.

  According to the news account, Alissa Gainey, like the others, had been taken after dark—this time from the enclosed pool area of her home where her parents had set up a lighted play area. “‘She had her little plastic kitchen out there, her table and dolls. She spent hours out there, just playing,’ said a tearful Deborah Gainey. ‘She was already in her pajamas. Her little blanket was gone. She never put it down. Oh God, she’s gone.’”

  The story said the mother had been just inside the sliding- glass doors, writing out household bills. She hadn’t heard a sound. The doors to the screened patio had been locked. The killer had neatly sliced through the thin screening with a razor or sharp knife. The mother had discovered Alissa missing when she went to call her in for the night.

  “The Gaineys’ Gladeside home is in a newly built community of single-family homes that was completed two years ago. The location, a mile from the official berm area that acts as a buffer to the Everglades, is similar to those neighborhoods where the previous child abductions have taken place.”

  Beside the age of the victims, their homes in the suburbs seemed the only other common trait in the cases so far. It didn’t narrow things down much.

  I was new to Florida but I knew enough about the modern-day range wars. Despite its growing population, everyone from the big builders to the workaday carpenters to the little guy waiting to open his dream bagel shop looked out on those acres and acres of open sawgrass and said: “Just a little more. What’s the big deal?”

  It had been going on like that for a hundred years and the environmentalists had fought it for a hundred years. The developers had ruthlessly bid and outbid each other for open land as they pushed out into the Everglades. The landowners either refused to sell on principle or milked the demand for the highest price they could get. And the home builders had to sell every unit to make a profit over the costs. There was plenty of money involved. Tons.

  I looked up from the paper and the flow of couples, dressed in dark and respectable suits, was increasing in and out of the funeral home’s double doors. I watched as the news crew approached a middle-aged man whose face flushed with anger as he pointed his finger into the face of the young woman reporter and backed her off the sidewalk. A uniformed officer seemed to appear from nowhere and slip between them. The reporter was whining, the mourner moved on.

  I turned back to my paper and stared at the inside photograph of Alissa, a blond, thin-limbed child, posing for a school picture in a cornflower-blue dress, her hair in braided pigtails. She had been a quiet, intelligent and friendly student, according to a quote from her kindergarten teacher. The story said she was an only child.

  I thought about Mrs. Gainey’s mention of her daughter’s blanket and wondered if it had been wrapped inside the canvas package I’d found her in. Had the killer taken anything personal with the other children, a sick keepsake, a memento of conquest? Or was it all business with him? I thought about the news printouts that Billy had given me at the restaurant. The quiet stealth was
incredibly risky. I’d worked child abductions from playgrounds, busy department stores and parking lots, but never from a home, unless it was parent related.

  A sudden sharp rapping on my window scared the hell out of me. The newspaper snapped in my hands, tearing the middle section. Standing outside was a cop, dressed in the same city uniform as the one that had stepped in between the reporter and the irate mourner. I rolled down the window.

  “Afternoon, sir,” the officer said. “You here for the viewing?”

  “Uh, yeah. Uh, I mean, no, not really,” I muttered. The question had caught me off guard. I really didn’t know why I was here.

  The cop was young, probably a rookie working the visitation to keep the nosy public moving. He took several seconds to sweep the inside of the truck, look at my clothes and then stare at my face with enough concentration to run the likeness through his head.

  “I, uh, was going to go in and pay my respects, but, you know, I didn’t feel right,” I stammered.

  “OK. Well, you’re going to have to move on,” the officer said.

  I nodded, tossed the newspaper into the passenger seat and put the truck in gear. The young officer stood back, taking in the look of the truck, the scar down the side. As I pulled away, I knew he was taking down my license tag number.

  CHAPTER 6

  I was back at the ranger station by midafternoon and the sun was burning a dull white through a high cover of cloud. The river glowed a flat pewter color and lay unruffled off the boat ramp. Cleve’s young assistant was on duty but made no effort to come out and speak as I flipped my canoe upright and loaded my bags in. He was probably pissed that I hadn’t filled him in on the discovery of the body when I’d seen him two days ago. He was a kid. He’d get over it.

  I stepped into the boat, pushed out onto the windless river and set to stroking, fixing on the tall bald cypress that marked my first turn to the west. The water was empty. Tomorrow was the weekend and would bring a handful of boaters and a few kayakers who would follow the river past my shack. But today it was mine. Without a wind to fight, I stayed in the middle of the channel moving easily against a soft outgoing tidal current. The only sound was the low gulp and slice of my stroke. In the top of a dead cypress an osprey stood on the edge of his stick nest and surveyed the water with yellow eyes. An osprey is a raptor that fishes the coastal estuaries with a quiet efficiency, plucking its prey out of the water with needle-sharp talons. When I first saw one I mistook it for an eagle, but Cleve corrected me and pointed out the difference in color and wing shape and size. He added that the great national symbol was no match for the smaller osprey.

  “I’ve seen them drive a bald eagle out of the sky if they thought it was threatening their nest. An eagle is a scavenger. He’ll take an easy dead meal any day. But an osprey’s a true hunter.”

  The bird watched me pass as I left a slow spreading wake that would quickly clear and leave his market for fishing undisturbed.

  When I reached my small platform dock the light was leaking out of the trees and canopy. The cloud cover had broken up in the west, and the falling sun was shooting red-tinged beams through the few remaining cirrus strings. Before going in I stripped off my clothes and took a rain barrel shower on the porch. The research crew, or maybe even the rich hunting-camp owners, had rigged an oak barrel just below the roof line and fed the gutter system into it so there was always fresh rainwater. A hose with a nozzle was fitted into the bottom of the barrel, and gravity fed the water when the hose was unclamped. It was no match for the showers at the ranger station, but it washed away a layer of sweat and took an edge off the humidity.

  Inside I started a fresh pot of coffee and then pulled on an old T-shirt and a pair of shorts. I poured a cup and then sat in my straight-backed chair at the oversized oak table. The light inside had turned a honey color, and I took a long sip of coffee and watched the rippling pattern of weak sun on the far wall.

  It was a single, less than rustic room and as I sat in the wooden chair with my heels up on the table, I could tell something was wrong in it.

  I had spent a lot of time in this place, most of it in silence, much of it in this chair. A single small room can be memorized by a man who sits and feels it hour after hour, month after month. And such a memory can easily be alerted by the presence of someone else.

  Good forensics cops say no one can come into a room and not change it. Dust comes in a person’s wake. A man’s weight depresses something. The bacteria of his bad breath, the pheromones of his natural skin oils drift in the air. Something had changed here.

  I tilted my head back and stared at the louvered cupola at the very top of my arched ceiling. It was the Old Florida design that let hot air rise and escape and I imagined seeing altered air actually collecting up there. A shaft of light was now pouring through my western window. In its beam I could see floating dust particles. I followed their drift to the floor and there, on the pinewood slats, was a thinly visible footprint in the glow of sunlight.

  I looked foolishly around as if someone might be behind me and then lowered myself out of the chair and moved to the print on my hands and knees. There were no tread markings, no boot pattern. The print was flat like something a slipper or moccasin might make. I had come in barefoot from the shower. When I put my own naked foot next to the print, I guessed the size at a 9 or 10. Out of the patch of light no others were visible.

  I got up and started searching in the corner where the print was pointing and began going over every inch of the room, from floor to as high as I could reach or climb, in every corner, drawer, cupboard and container. Someone had been here and either taken something or left something behind.

  After forty-five minutes of searching I found it. On the back edge of the top bunk mattress, my intruder had made a razor cut. Probing inside I felt a hard plastic box the size of a large cell phone. When I pulled it out, I had a GPS unit in my hand.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said aloud, placing the unit on the table and sitting down to stare at it.

  Outside early night sounds were starting. I could hear the herons and egrets squawking as they settled into the trees to roost. The leopard and pig frogs were beginning their low grunting.

  The cops or the killer? I thought. Somebody planted it and I was being set up.

  By now the room was going dusky. I got up, lit the kerosene lamp and retrieved Billy’s cell phone from my gym bag. It didn’t matter who made the plant, a team with a warrant would have to be on its way. I couldn’t be here when they arrived. And neither could the GPS. I looked at the piece of incriminating technology, and then made a call. The other end was answered on the third ring.

  “Station twelve, Ranger Stanton speaking, may I help you?”

  The kid was still there. It took me a second to remember his first name.

  “Hey, Mike, this is Max Freeman out at the research shack.”

  “Yeah?” he said flatly, probably adjusting the chip on his shoulder.

  “Look, I need a favor, Mike.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m just packing up, Mr. Freeman. My shift is already done.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to put an unrushed tone to my voice. “But I was thinking that since I wasn’t planning on using my truck for a couple of days you might like to use it for the weekend, you know, since its just sitting there.”

  “Yeah?”

  I had definitely lifted the kid’s spirits and used the right bait.

  “Sure. But I need a favor. Cleve said you’re pretty good with cars and I thought you might help me out with that scratch on the driver’s side.”

  “Man, I seen that, Mr. Freeman. That’s a sin, man. Hey, I got a buddy who can compound that right out. You know, I can take care of that easy,” he said with true enthusiasm.

  My hook was set.

  “Great. Why don’t you take it home with you now. Cleve has a key in his desk drawer. It’s the one with the yellow Pep Boys tag on it.”

  Right there under his nose all the time. But
the kid’s joy seemed unaffected.

  “OK. Got it, Mr. Freeman. When do you need it back?”

  “How about Monday or Tuesday?”

  “I got a Tuesday morning shift,” he answered.

  “Sounds good.”

  The kid thanked me again and I punched the off button and knew that, one, the law hadn’t gotten to the boat ramp yet. And two, the kid would be revving that V-8 and be out of there in record time.

  Next I dialed Billy’s private number and he clicked in before the second ring.

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, Billy.”

  “Max? It’s unlike you to call when the sun is down.”

  “I need to see you.”

  “OK. Shall I meet you at the ranger station?”

  Billy could sense my urgency and was instantly turning up his efficiency.

  “No. I need you to pick me up at the southern access park, the one along Seminole Drive.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s going to take me an hour to paddle up there.”

  “Anything you want to tell me now?”

  “No. I’ll see you there.”

  I turned off the phone and stuck it into my bag. I knew I was being paranoid, but I wasn’t going to discuss the GPS unit over the phone. I’d spent very little time with the electronic surveillance guys in Philly but the stories that got passed around about cell-phone intercepts were legion.

  I quickly dressed in a pair of thin canvas pants and a dark long-sleeved shirt. I stuffed some other clothes into my travel bag and put on my black, soft-soled Reeboks. I then pulled out a plastic Ziploc bag that I used for storing salt and sugar. I put the GPS unit inside, sealed it, and then wrapped it tight in a piece of dark oilcloth I used to keep things dry in the canoe. If I met anyone along the way and had to dump the unit in the river, it might stay until I could come back for it later.