The Blue Edge of Midnight

by Jonathon King

  Before walking out the door I slathered some insect repellant on my face, neck and wrists and put out the lamp. My night ritual began again.

  I headed upriver, slow at first, breathing in the thick smell of marsh and wet cypress. It was dark and this time the waxing moon was shrouded in high cloud. But even in that uneven light I could follow the water trail south into the current. Within a few minutes my eyes adjusted and I could pick out the edges of the root tangle and tree boughs. I’d been this route so many times I could almost time the upcoming curves and turns around the cypress knees and fallen logs. Still, I kept glancing behind me, expecting to see the beams from spotlights swinging through the vegetation in search of my shack.

  I’d tucked the wrapped GPS under my seat so I could get to it quickly and wedge it into a root hole if I had to. Maybe they’d wait until morning. Hammonds and his crew had already had a taste of the night out here. The word would have gotten around. Serving a warrant in unfamiliar territory is full of the same unpleasant possibilities whether you’re in a place like this or in some dark tenement house in the city. You don’t know what’s coming around the corners. You don’t know what kind of reaction you’re going to get from someone when you tell them you’re the man, and all their rights to be secure and private in their own home have just been flushed. I didn’t like doing it myself as a cop and I didn’t like the idea of it being done to me now.

  I picked up the sound of the water spilling over the dam ten minutes before I got there. The current strengthened and I had to drive the bow in to get around the eddies to the concrete abutment. I yanked the canoe up and onto the upper river and started again.

  As I passed the spot where I’d found the dead child, the moon broke through a gap in the clouds and raised the light. Somewhere in the canopy a barred owl let out its double set of notes.

  Hoo. Hoo.

  It was the first time I’d heard that species on the river. Who indeed, I thought.

  When I reached the access park, Billy was waiting, sitting in his car along the entrance road with his engine and lights off. The park was deserted at this hour. The place is used almost exclusively by canoeists and kayakers, and calling it a park is giving it too much glory. There is a single canoe concession that rents boats and paddles. The owner is a tobacco-spitting transplant from Georgia who is long gone by 5:00 P.M. when all his rentals are due back in. A single bare bulb glowed over his makeshift office and I pulled my canoe up into the pool of light knowing that tomorrow he’d recognize it and keep it safe until I returned.

  Billy didn’t see me until I walked into the light, and then he came over to help me with my bags.

  “Will handling evidence get you in trouble?” I asked, holding out the GPS bundle.

  “Only if w-we go to c-court. And if this is w-what I think it is, w-we better not go to court.”

  As we drove east to the ocean I filled Billy in on my discovery of the footprint and the unit. We were both thinking, “Setup.” But who? The cops or the killer? We ground out the possibilities.

  Hammonds’ crew was under tremendous pressure to find a suspect. But no matter how I rolled it, I couldn’t see them getting desperate enough to plant the GPS. The feds could be jumping the gun to try and snatch credit away from the locals, but why not just let Hammonds fall flat on his own? Either could have gotten a GPS unit easily enough. And they pretty much knew the location of the shack from Cleve. But how do they get out there and slip in and leave the thing without being seen or without leaving a trace? Cops are not the most subtle actors on their feet, I knew from experience. They also don’t like to muck up the chance of making a clean case against a suspect that they still have on the hook. And when you put my discovery of the body, the psych report from Philly and my canoe access to the wilderness Glades together, they already had a pretty good barb in me.

  On the other hand, if the killer planted it, he was taking a hell of a chance.

  He could easily know the water. Might even have known the shack. He could have come in from the west out of the Everglades, but he would have had to be watching to see me leave. So why hadn’t he called in an anonymous tip right away? If he’d planted it after I left this morning, he could have called Hammonds’ group and they could have escorted me back from their offices themselves.

  “W-Warrants are hard to g-get signed on a Friday,” Billy said, working the puzzle with me. “Even f-federal warrants. But they c-c-could be there now.”

  As we drove over I-95 on the Atlantic Boulevard overpass I caught a glimpse of the moon opening up over the ocean through the clouds. If the killer had put the cops on to me, he would have been there too, watching from somewhere in the forest, waiting, like a good hunter, to see his trap sprung. Was he still there? Or would he have followed me out? Was he following now? As Billy pulled onto A1A and headed south to his oceanfront apartment building, I cussed myself for being paranoid but looked back at the traffic behind us as we pulled into the entrance of the Atlantic Towers.

  CHAPTER 7

  I had spent two weeks in Billy’s penthouse apartment when I first moved to Florida. But a place like this never fails to amaze.

  The elevator stopped at the twelfth and highest floor and opened onto an alcove that was all his own. A handsome set of double oak doors stood at one end. Billy snapped down the European brass handles and pushed the doors wide to swing my bags through. He punched a single button on a wall panel and the huge, fan-shaped living area glowed in subdued recessed lighting. The thick carpet and textured walls were done in subtle shades of deep greens and blues. The wide leather couches and chairs were dark but offset with some kind of blond wood tables that kept the place from feeling heavy. Sculptures in onyx stone and brushed stainless steel glowed in the indirect light and several paintings adorned the walls. On the south wall was my favorite, an oil by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch called The Wanderer, which I had pondered for hours during my first stay.

  But the dominant feature of the place was the bank of floor- to-ceiling glass doors that spanned the east wall and opened onto the ocean. Billy opened the center panels knowing I couldn’t resist. I stepped out onto the patio and into a salt- tinged sea breeze that poured into my nose and made me feel young. The ocean was black. In the distance I could pick out points of light from freighters or maybe night fishermen. Even in darkness you could feel the expanse. For someone who’d lived his whole life in the boxed-in, high-walled grid of the city, this was a foreign land. Billy had told me when he first moved to South Florida and began making “real money,” he’d determined that he would never live on the ground floor again. He had done too much time on the cracked sidewalks and asphalt streets of Philadelphia. Once he’d made it out, he craved vistas above the shadows. I understood, but it still felt too high to me, too exposed.

  Billy let me stand quiet at the railing for several minutes before calling out “Drink?” from his kitchen.

  I grinned, knowing he was already pouring my favorite Boodles gin over ice. When I came back inside he had the drink and the oilcloth package sitting on the wide kitchen bar counter. I took a seat on a stool and a sip from the glass.

  “Y-Your m-move,” he said, taking a drink of chardonnay from a crystal wineglass.

  I unwrapped the GPS unit and now it was Billy’s turn to show his own anxious excitement.

  “M-May I?” he said, extending his palms and when I nodded, he scooped up the unit and headed through an open door on the west wall that led to his home office. Inside I knew he had an array of computers and modems and a wall of law and research books. I stayed at the kitchen counter, drinking gin and watching The Wanderer while he tinkered. Outside I could hear the rhythmic wash of ocean waves, inside the irregular tapping of computer keystrokes.

  “You’re right about the setup. You can call up the previous settings logged into the unit,” Billy called out through the door of the office. “There are four. And I called up a geological survey map from a Web site and the last one
matches your spot on the river. The others are out in the Everglades and could easily be where the other bodies were found.”

  Billy was talking from the other side of the wall. The physical barrier had removed his stutter.

  “If the investigators found this in your place, it would have been some heavy evidence. They would have had no choice but to stick you in jail.”

  “No doubt the killer knew that too,” I said, loud enough for him to hear.

  “We’re not dealing with some backwoods hick or pissed off frontiersman trying to fight off the new settlers. This guy’s got a plan,” he answered.

  Billy’s use of the word “we’re” meant he’d stepped over the line from sitting back and denying my involvement to actively pursuing a theory on who and why someone was killing children along the edge of the Everglades.

  As I sipped my drink at the counter, he told me how he’d contacted friends in the medical examiner’s office who must have owed him big time. He’d learned how the children had been killed.

  The first victim had been poisoned and the toxin was analyzed and found to be rattlesnake venom. According to Billy’s source, the stuff had been pumped into the kid through two puncture wounds in the child’s leg. The wounds had looked remarkably like an actual bite. But the M.E. still wasn’t sure whether the killer had let a real snake bite the child or had faked it and administered the dose himself. It could have been either way.

  In the early 1900s, Billy explained, Florida was home to more rattlesnakes than any other state in the nation. As late as the 1940s professional snake men cleared them off newly purchased land. Charging by the head, they frequently poured gasoline down the gopher holes where the snakes nested and then snatched them up when they fled the fumes. A small industry had grown up around the sale of the snake skins like so many of the pelt and plumage trades that once thrived in Florida. And in more recent years, a small medical industry had found a niche in milking the rattlesnake venom to use for creating antitoxins. It was not a difficult procedure if you had the know-how and the guts to perform it.

  The second child, according to Billy’s man, died of a single slash across the throat. The cut was created by a thick, three- inch-long claw that forensics experts identified as coming from a large wildcat, possibly a Florida panther. The claw, shiny and yellowed, had been found wrapped up with the body. A body, Billy said, wrapped in the same way I had described the child on the river last night. The Florida panther had long been on the endangered species list, hunted by the early settlers and then penned in by shrinking open territory.

  The third child had been drowned, but when the medical examiners studied the water left in the lungs they found an impossibly large concentration of chemical fertilizer, a pollution level far higher than any river or canal or lake sample in the region.

  “This guy is definitely sending messages,” Billy said.

  “So why try to put it on me?” I said.

  “Who knows? Maybe Hammonds’ team was getting too close. Maybe it got too hot. The guy is obviously familiar with the Glades. Maybe he knew about you living out there and snatched an opportunity.”

  “I don’t think Hammonds is close at all.”

  There was a silence from the other room. I didn’t want to admit to Billy that I’d gone against his advice and been to Hammonds’ office. I changed the subject.

  “So you start killing kids with a half-assed attempt to make at least the cause of death look natural, but then you leave messages all over the damn Everglades so the cops can find exactly what you did and where. Why? Just to scare the hell out of everybody?”

  A few years ago I’d read about a series of tourist attacks in Miami and at a rest stop in northern Florida. It hit the tourism industry pretty hard at first, but now it had become an old memory, and not even that for the hordes of new visitors.

  “The real estate people are already freaking out,” Billy answered. The sound of keystrokes continued in the other room. “There are at least a dozen new developments under construction out along the Glades border and the publicity is killing sales. You’re talking about losing millions of dollars if they dried up, not to mention the construction industry jobs that would go down the drain.”

  “So somebody that’s pissed off at carpenters and land developers starts killing kids? Come on,” I said.

  “Development has been the lifeblood of the South Florida economy for a hundred years. When the beach communities started filling up, it pushed west into the wetlands. They drained the Glades with canals and changed the entire lay of the natural land,” Billy said. “The Seminole Indians hated it. The environmentalists fought it. But it’s still going on.”

  “The Audubon Society turns to serial killing?” I said, my voice loaded with cynicism.

  “There are wackos in every group. You know that.”

  I remembered the West Philadelphia neighborhood where John Africa’s so-called back-to-nature group MOVE barricaded themselves in an inner city compound and railed against the authorities for crimes against the people. Back to nature in the middle of one of the biggest and oldest cities in the country. Make sense of that.

  With bullhorns, the group’s members had begun bellowing at passersby about their right to freedom and the destruction everyone around them was wreaking on the planet. In their naturalist mode, MOVE didn’t believe in garbage pickup, or the modernity of basic hygiene. Their compound began to stink. Neighbors complained. The health department issued orders, which MOVE ignored. More neighbors complained, soon about children living in filth, unkempt and possibly in danger. MOVE refused to let anyone on the property. They barricaded the place. They were armed.

  My father was working twelve-hour shifts outside the West Philly home and told us at breakfast that the frustration was growing thick as a fog around the place. Finally, the police tried to make an arrest. Gunshots were exchanged. Next thing we knew the mayor cleared a plan to drop a bomb on MOVE’s bunker. Years later we heard that the demolition expert put three separate charges together, each strong enough to do the job. Someone put all three in one bag and let the package go from a helicopter. We saw the whole damned block go up in flames. Eleven people were killed, including four children. Sixty-one homes were destroyed.

  Yeah, I knew there could be wackos all right, on both sides.

  Billy came out of the office and laid the GPS unit and a printout of a topographical survey on the countertop. I flattened out the map while he filled both of our glasses. He had marked three red Xs on the longitude and latitude intersects. I recognized the shape of my river and the spot above the old dam. The other Xs were in similar territory, remote, out on wilderness land far from any road or trail.

  While Billy pulled his typical kitchen magic in putting together dinner, I walked back out to the patio and stood looking at black ocean, listening to the shushing of waves below and thinking of children lying dead in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER 8

  The next morning I jolted awake. The mattress was too soft. The air too cold. I didn’t know where the hell I was.

  I propped myself up on my elbows, focusing on the off- white wall in front of me until I recognized Billy’s guest bedroom. After eating Billy’s superb Spanish omelets last night, we’d stayed up drinking on the patio, staring out at an invisible horizon and hashing out scenarios. Billy answered my ignorant questions about the Everglades, and admitted he was far from expert. But he knew people, Billy always knew people, that he could introduce me to. Some were guides, he said, men who knew their way in and out of the rivers and wetlands and isolated hammocks. They also knew a lot of the people who lived out on the edge of civilization, the recluses and the ones who had moved away from society.

  I turned my head to look at him when he said recluses. In a way, he knew he was describing me.

  “I w-will arrange a meeting,” he’d said, tipping his glass. “G-Good night.”

  Now I was feeling the aftereffects of gin and air conditioning. My head was full of cotton and m
y throat was as dry as parchment. I dressed, went into the kitchen and downed three aspirin with a glass of water. Billy had left a note next to a bowl of sliced fruit on the counter. He’d gone to his office and would call at noon. A fresh pot of coffee was waiting and I poured a cup and went out on the patio. In the early sun the ocean stretched out like the sky itself. From this high up the horizon gave the illusion that you could actually see the curve of the earth. An easterly breeze put a corduroy pattern on the ocean’s surface and about halfway out to the horizon the water turned a deeper, oddly tinged shade of blue. The wind had been blowing from the east for two days and the Gulf Stream had shifted closer to shore. The Stream was a huge river of warm ocean water that began as a loop current in the Gulf of Mexico and then funneled up between the tip of Florida and Cuba. At a steady three knots, the vast stream pushed northward along the coast of the United States, its flow so enormous that its water would eventually mix with the North Atlantic and reach the British Isles.

  The edge of the Stream was always shifting, and when the wind blew east, it slid closer to the Florida coast. Boatmen here could tell when they crossed into it by the color of the water, a deep, translucent blue unlike any other color on the planet. Scientists say that the water of the Stream is so clear that it affords three times the visibility of the water in a typical hotel swimming pool, and since its depth ranges to some six hundred feet, it is like looking into a blue outer space.

  Billy had taken me sailing on his thirty-five-foot Morgan during my first few days here and when he knifed the boat into the Stream, I stared at that color in disbelief. It had an unreal way of drawing you deep into a place where you forgot your surroundings, your petty material anchors and your constant grindings. For an hour I lay on the bow deck, staring into its depths. I was sure that if I reached over and scooped it up I would have a handful of blue in my palms.