A Killing Night mf-4

by Jonathon King

  After twenty minutes the trail opened up into a clearing and the track curved to a stop. To the east the hammock fell away and went flat, melting into the sawgrass. To the west the black mangroves grew thicker, almost like a wall. I was studying the tire track, tracing it with the light. It formed a three point turn in the opening and I thought of Morrison's move at the DUI stop. I was sweeping the light beam on the ground, looking for trash or some sign of carelessness and bent to examine what might have been the impression of a foot heel in the earth when I heard the grunt.

  The sound caused a breath to catch in my throat and I turned to it. I cupped my hand over the lens of the flashlight and froze. Thirty seconds of silence, then it came again, low, like a cough into the emptiness of a big wooden barrel. It was a living sound. I stared in its direction, searched the darkness inside the wall of mangroves for movement, imagined whatever it was doing the same to me.

  I looked down at my hands; the ring of light from the flashlight lens was glowing red against my palm and I snicked it off.

  The next sound was a snort, and a rustling of vegetation that was deep into the trees. A big male gator makes such sounds during mating season. It is a call to the females meant to impress them by indicating size and power. I had heard them many times on my river. If it was a gator he would not be frightened away by my skimpy noises. If it was something else I still couldn't just sit here in the open. I moved to the edge of the tree wall as quietly as I could. Again I wished I had my gun.

  I knelt and strained to hear, trying to raise my senses, and I felt the wind change. It had been rotating during the walk in, clearing the sky and stirring the leaves as it swung to come out of the west and now it had gained strength. I heard the snort and heavy rustle again and then on the breeze came an odor that washed over me and made me involuntarily twist my nose and squeeze my eyes shut. It was the stench of death, rotted in earth and water, never dried to dust by the sun but left putrid on the moist ground.

  Now I knew the snorting noise and I stood and snapped on the light and searched for an opening in the tree wall and stepped in. The terrain went down at an angle, covered in the soft detritus of fallen leaves and loose soil that in the flashlight beam appeared to have been disturbed already. I had to crouch to get through and under the limbs and found a footprint, big enough for a man, pointing back up in the direction I had come. I was thirty feet in and flicked the light beam back up and there was a pair of luminous eyes staring at me. It was a wild boar, its ugly face frozen in the sudden circle of light, its massive body looming black and glistening behind. Strings of gristle and dirt hung from its mouth and I yelled, half in fear, half in disgust and anger. The beast startled and I yelled again and crashed through the trees and my upright and aggressive assault caused the damn thing to scream from its throat and flee the other way.

  I stayed still and listened until I could no longer hear the sounds of the animal splashing and snapping twigs in retreat. Then I waited until I couldn't hear my own heart banging in my chest. But as I settled, the smell came back into focus and it was stronger. I wished I'd had the tin of Vicks we used at homicide scenes to dab inside my nose. Instead I pressed my left hand to my nostrils and pointed the flashlight to where the boar had been snuffling.

  In a slight depression at the base of a clump of black mangrove roots my light caught a torn strip of yellow plastic first. The animals had shredded it and parts were still pushed down into the thick muck. When I fanned out with the light and got down closer, even I could identify bone fragments. Out here in the wet heat where insects and microbes flourish, a corpse could be consumed in a matter of a few days. Scavengers like the boar and gators and even birds would cause a certain amount of destruction and drag evidence for yards, maybe more, spreading out the crime scene. Non-biodegradables like plastic and clothing would last much longer, but even they would eventually disappear.

  I did not want to disturb more than I had to, so I stepped up onto the tree root and bent to pick up a strip of the plastic. It was a medium thickness like the kind used for police tarps. I'd used them myself to cover bodies, to give them some dignity in death while the news camera crews in Philly flocked around homicide scenes. "Bastard," I whispered aloud.

  I shined the flashlight down into the pile again where the boar's hooves had dug down and the light found something metal the size of a penny. I snapped a twig from the tree and poked it loose. It was a snap button, still rimmed by frayed blue-jean material with the word GUESS stamped into it. I put the button and strip of plastic into a ziplock baggy and then I widened the search, not panicked but intent. If it weren't edible the animals wouldn't have carried it.

  I studied the muck in concentric circles at first, like I'd seen crime techs do. Then I took a chance and looked back from the pile shaped like a cone where the digging boar would have flung the muck and bone as it was pawing.

  I picked up the glint of shiny metal six feet back. It was lying in a patch of standing water, just below the surface, and shimmered in the beam as I moved closer. The water had cleansed it of dirt and it gleamed up at me. It was a flat chrome bottle opener with a handle at one end, the kind of opener women bartenders slip into their back pockets, the kind men watch and the girls know that they watch. But this was never supposed to be a part of the game.

  CHAPTER 32

  "I'm bringing the evidence back," I said. "Where do you want to meet?"

  "At Kim's," Richards said. "She's back."

  "What?"

  "Marci, she's back and I've got her working."

  I was in the truck, driving, fast, for the city. It had taken me half the time to get back to the roadway. I stayed in the middle of the two-track to keep from messing up any tire prints for the impression techs but there wasn't anything else to look for. With what we had, Morrison's documented trip to the burial spot, a trace of a police tarp and obvious property belonging to the missing girls, we could squeeze the hell out of this guy. And that was before the crime scene guys got out there to match his tire tracks and go through the forensics at the site. In daylight there was no telling what they might find. The son of a bitch had gotten cocky. That had been his mistake.

  When I got back to my truck I'd used a marine rope from my truck and strung a barrier across the entrance just in case someone should come along. When I got Richards on her cell phone I told her what I'd found and she'd gone quiet long enough to make me think I'd lost the connection again. Then she came back.

  "I'll call the Florida Highway Patrol and have them put a trooper out there to secure the scene," she said.

  "You're still on Morrison, right?"

  "Yeah. I've been checking with dispatch. They've been in touch with him by radio and have been sending him out on regular assignments," Richards said.

  "So what's with Marci? Where the hell was she?"

  Richards lowered her voice.

  "She won't say. When I asked her she just said, 'Wait and see.'

  "I was still in the office working the phones and the computer using her social security number to trace her folks in Minnesota but they'd both died-her mother when Marci was young and her father of a heart attack three years ago. Then Laurie called me and said she'd just shown up for work, begging to make up her time on the night shift."

  Instead of sounding relieved, maybe even giddy over Marci's safety and my report on what we'd gotten from the Glades site, Richards sounded wary.

  "So where are you now?" I said, slowing as I moved into a more populated section of Broward County. I didn't need to get stopped now.

  "I'm at Kim's. I pulled a stool back into the hallway and I'm watching her work. She keeps answering the phone and looking out the windows," Richards said. "I'm not letting her out of my sight and if Morrison comes in here I'm going to arrest his ass myself."

  "Look, Sherry," I said. "If that happens, call for backup first, OK?"

  "Right," she said, and the phone clicked off. It was one in the morning when I got to the bar. My jeans were wet up t
o the middle of my thighs from the swamp. My shirt was smeared with muck and I thought I could still smell the stench of death in the material. I parked in a spot on the back side of the shopping center and walked through the pool-room entrance. Richards was still sitting in the hallway that linked the two rooms, her back up against the wall. Another patron was making his way to the men's room and said to her: "Hey, honey. You still here? I told you I'd be glad to give you a ride home."

  "My boyfriend will be here any minute," she answered.

  "That's what you said an hour ago, sweetheart."

  "I was being polite," she said and then noticed me walk in. "And I still am."

  The guy shrugged and slid by me.

  "What's up?" I said, looking beyond Richards to see Marci behind the back bar, working at the register, closing out the paper tabs that were piled there.

  Even here in the shadows I could see the gray in her eyes. She'd let this whole mess boil too long in her head.

  "I woke up the damn prosecutor and he said the evidence is circumstantial," she said, the bitterness snapping off the words. "He said we'll have to take it to a grand jury if we want to go after a cop."

  I put my back to the wall opposite her and leaned into it. I was tired.

  "He said if forensics comes up with a blood match out there in the morning, maybe. If we run a photo spread past some other women who pick him out as trying to take them out there, maybe. The fact that he might have driven his squad car out there to look at the stars isn't criminal. Even if you're right and those are my girls out there, it's still circumstantial. No judge will order an arrest warrant."

  Everything she said, I'd heard before and she had probably heard every time she'd gone to the same prosecutor's office for the last several months on her disappearing girls. She was looking at the floor, trying to hide her tears. I was looking down, trying to think of something to say.

  "He raped me."

  We both looked up at Marci. She'd come out from behind the bar and was standing in the hallway opening. Her arms were folded across her chest. Her chin was up and she did not try to wipe the tears from her cheek.

  "He raped me out there in the Everglades, where he goes. I went to the sexual assault treatment center today. That's where I was. I thought they would just go and arrest him but they didn't."

  Richards and I looked at each other but let her continue.

  "They taped an interview and made me sign a sworn statement and when I asked them what they were going to do they said they had to send everything to some internal office because it was a cop and that they'd get back to me. I thought that meant a couple of hours so I stayed away from my place all day and they never called but he did," she said and a tremble was setting up in her voice and a paleness I had seen before when I had first told her of Morrison's motives.

  "So I came to work because I was afraid and he's still calling and he's still out there and he's going to be out there when I get off and…"

  This time when she stumbled, Richards jumped forward and caught her. She reached under the girl's elbows to support her and this time Marci did not wave off the help and instead leaned into Richards and sobbed, and then they wrapped their arms around each other and Sherry looked up at me and her eyes were filled with tears. "We're going to arrest his ass now, right now," Richards barked into the cell phone. "We've got a witness to an attack perpetrated by him, the same witness that your office has had all goddamn day and sat on your hands with for the sake of goddamn protocol. We also have evidence of at least one other homicide at the same site where this witness was attacked and we're picking him up. You can meet us out there if you're fast but we're not waiting."

  We were in my truck, Richards in the passenger seat, Marci in between us. When Richards had called dispatch, they told her Morrison was helping to set up a perimeter on the east side of the city park. Another officer was in foot pursuit of an aggravated battery suspect. She had pulled out her police radio and switched channels to the Fort Lauderdale P.D. frequency and we were following their call out directions.

  Richards had asked if the battery was of a woman and the dispatcher had answered, "No, it's a, uh, Ms. O'Kelly, out in front of her home in Victoria Park. She reported that someone threatened her with a baseball bat."

  The name set a lump in my chest and I asked Sherry to turn the radio up.

  "Description of the suspect, four-eighteen?" dispatch asked.

  "White male…heavy, six-foot…wearing, wearing gray cutoff sweatshirt…uh…dark pants…"

  "Four-eighteen? Four-eighteen, what's your location?" the dispatcher said, worry now sneaking into her voice.

  I turned off from Sunrise Boulevard into the main entrance of the park and could see other spinning cop-car lights coming in from two other directions.

  "Four-eighteen. Suspect in custody," the winded cop on the radio said.

  "Ten-four, four-eighteen. Location?" said the dispatcher.

  "On the soccer field, north end of the park."

  We followed the patrol cars and came to a stop in the parking lot of the soccer field. Richards held her door handle and we both scanned the squad cars, looking for Morrison's number or someone in uniform that looked like him. When we couldn't spot him, we got out.

  "Stay inside for right now, OK, Marci? We need you to point him out, give us a positive identification. Just wait here," Richards said and reached out and touched the girl on the leg before closing the door.

  We walked over to the line of cars together, looking in both directions, closely. The officers had aimed their headlights out onto the field and then gotten out. There were six of them.

  The rain had stopped and the grass out in front of us was glistening in the low trajectory of the headlights and then someone yelled, "There they are."

  Out on the field two figures were walking and appeared to be half dragging a third.

  We stood and looked out along with the rest of the arriving cops and as the three came closer I recognized two of them.

  They were twenty yards away when Morrison stopped, jerking the whole procession to a halt. He was staring at me with my stained shirt and jeans soaked to the thigh, and then at Richards and then farther to her left. Marci had walked up and stood beside her.

  At first his face looked confused and then tightened like a fist into anger. He dropped the man I knew as David Hix and pointed his finger at Richards.

  "What's that bitch doing here?" he yelled, to no one in particular.

  The officers around us seemed to stop moving.

  "Yo, Kyle," someone next to us started but Morrison stopped him.

  "No," he yelled. "I want to know why these fucking people are here!"

  A few of the cops looked at us, at least one recognized Richards.

  "Hey chill, Kyle. It's command, man."

  Richards turned and said something I could not hear to Marci. The girl nodded yes and Richards stepped forward.

  "We need to talk with you, Morrison. It's as simple as that. Let your colleagues handle this arrest and come with us."

  She took another step forward and I matched her.

  "No. I don't think so," Morrison said, looking down at Hix and over to the running cop who seemed to be frozen by the turn of events. "You don't order me around, bitch."

  I heard a jostle behind me and then a large, broad-chested man in uniform with sergeant stripes on his arm pushed through.

  "I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he said to Richards as he passed her and then turned. "Goddammit, Officer Morrison, you are screwin' this up for everyone. Now surrender your weapon. I call the goddamn shots on this shift."

  The collection of uniforms, polished leather, bristling chrome and brushed-steel weaponry was uncharacteristically caught up in indecision. One of their own was freaking. One of their own was way out of line, right in front of them. There was no standard procedure for it. No chapter in the manual.

  Off to one side and behind Morrison, a figure came out of the dark and then stopped. I could tell
by his size and shape it was O'Shea, on foot. But he too froze at the sight before him and no one on the line seemed to notice him.

  They must have been watching as Morrison used his right hand to deliberately and slowly unsnap the leather guard on his holster.

  "Officer Morrison," the sergeant said again, thinking it was a calming voice, thinking the cop's beef had to be with Richards for some reason. "I gave you an order, son. I'm the officer in charge here."

  No one on the line said a word, but I saw the cop next to Morrison move away and I heard the clicks of several holster snaps behind me.

  "No sir," Morrison said. "I beg to differ."

  He pulled his 9mm and raised it, barrel first, and pointed it in our direction and just as every cop is trained, and just as every one on the line knew, it was a death sentence that Morrison now controlled.

  At least a dozen rounds exploded from behind and to the side of us, many of them hitting their mark only twenty feet away and Morrison went down without once pulling his trigger.

  Marci screamed and turned away. David Hix yelped and curled up into a ball on the grass. I looked down the line at Richards and she had not moved to draw her own weapon.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was early morning and the sun had broken white and molten like a heavy bubble stretching up and then off the horizon. I was in my beach chair, sipping my coffee, watching the sky and water absorb the blue light of refraction over the rim of my cup.

  There was not a ripple of breeze and the ocean lay flat like a hot sheet of glass. The black-footed terns were working the shoreline, pecking and dancing. I would have at least another hour before the electrician came to install a new light over the dining room table. I had not been able to sleep on the couch with the smell of fresh paint in my nose so I had camped out on the beach since long before dawn.