by Andrew Mayne
“We’ve got several tread prints,” says Hoffer. “That might help us narrow things down a bit.”
I turn from the body and walk up the other side of the berm. It ends in a sharp drop to a tangle of mangroves and the water of the canal that runs alongside the Everglades Wildlife Management Area.
In places, the mangroves give way to patches of open, rocky shore. It’s part of a fourteen-mile stretch of water carved out by the Army Corps of Engineers. At both ends there are boat launches and small parks.
I spin around and stare at the body again. “He dumped her from the canal,” I say aloud.
This attracts the attention of the other detectives. “What makes you say that?” asks Hoffer.
“Because if he was in a car with the body, he’d have just gone out to Alligator Alley and dumped it there. I think he pulled into a boat launch, had her in his craft, and was going to dump her in the Everglades. Something spooked him, so he landed here instead. Maybe somebody saw him?”
“Like Fish and Wildlife?” asks Hoffer.
I was thinking an airboat tour, but that’s a better idea. “Yeah. It’s just a guess, but I think if you come this far, there’s no reason not to go farther out unless you can’t.”
“Interesting,” Hoffer murmurs.
“It also makes it look like the victim was dumped from a car here, without having to actually use a car. If he got spooked and wanted to get rid of the body away from the water, then hiking it up here makes the most sense.”
Hoffer calls out to the other detectives, “Let’s get forensics over there and check for footprints.”
Realizing I might be standing on evidence, I tread a large, curving arc back to the others, avoiding the path between the body and the canal.
Hughes and I walk back to our parked vehicles to let the BSO techs work. Both of us have our eyes fixed on the ground, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
“What’s next?” asks Hughes.
We both know the waiting game can take forever while forensics tries to find evidence, but neither of us is content to sit still.
“I think the killer had more than a casual connection to the victims. Or the night they died wasn’t the first time they met . . . or at least not the first time the girls met him.”
“Too bad we can’t just pull up their Facebook profiles and see who they knew.”
“Yeah—1989. I couldn’t even find phone records. Let alone a social network. What did they use back then?”
“The mall? MTV?” Hughes shrugs.
Kids had to have expressed themselves in other ways. Communication wasn’t just telephone calls and hallway conversations. What was the 1989 version of Facebook?
I slap my hand against my forehead. Of course. “What was the original Facebook?” I ask Hughes.
“Myspace? Friendster?”
“No, way before that. It was yearbooks. High school yearbooks.”
“I think we have one back at the office,” says Hughes. “It’s where we got the photos from.”
“I don’t mean the yearbook itself. I’m talking about all the inscriptions kids leave in them at the end of the year. Who signed whose yearbook? What did they say? That was their Facebook back then. We need to try to get ahold of all of their class’s yearbooks we can and try to create a map of who knew who.”
“I’ll get on it,” says Hughes.
“Great. One more thing.” I spot Hoffer talking to another detective. “Excuse me, quick question.” I pull Ethan Rafferty’s file up on my phone. “I’m trying to find a particular meth head. Any suggestions?”
Hoffer hands my phone to another detective. He thumbs through to the last arrest report. “Seventy-Two Hundred Pines Avenue,” he says.
I think for a moment. “That’s not a home. That’s a street.”
“Correct. It’s also near a homeless encampment. The county won’t let us shut it down. But if that’s where he got picked up last, that’s where you’ll probably find him. It’s right where the bus ends.” He smirks. “Wear gloves. Double carry.”
Great. “Well,” I tell Hughes, “ready to visit hoboville?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DISPLACED
You’d think a homeless camp would be easy to find since you always seem to run into them when you’re not looking for one, but this encampment’s elusive. It’s after dark, and Hughes and I have been up and down 7200 for the last half hour, looking for tents, shanties, or cars on blocks. All we’ve seen are some rather large raccoons crossing the road. I’m beginning to suspect that we were misled. That or the county decided to dismantle the camp.
“What now?” asks Hughes as we make our fifth trip up the highway.
“Either it ain’t here, they’re using some Harry Potter cloak of invisibility, or they’re nearby and we just can’t see them.”
“I’ve also noticed that there’s a lack of homeless people coming to or from said camp.”
“Hold on.” I take out my phone and look at a map of the area. I search for bus stops and find there’s one a mile down the road at the entrance to Butterfly Park. “Ah. We need to think like pedestrians. Go back to the park entrance.”
Hughes drives us to the gate. “Now what?”
“Now we get out and walk.”
We take out our flashlights and follow the fence until we come to a line of dense bushes and trees. When I shine my light at the base of the fence, I spot a narrow footpath along the outside perimeter leading into the woods.
I start down the path, using my light to keep from walking into spiderwebs or human feces. “If I was ten and didn’t know there was a shantytown of drug addicts and felons at the other end of this path, I’d think this was a magical adventure.”
“Just think of them as goblins,” replies Hughes.
“That really doesn’t help. You ever hear of sea goblins?” I ask.
“No. Is that a thing?”
“It was when I grew up. I was told that if I didn’t go to sleep at bedtime, the sea goblins would climb aboard and take me away. One night I fell asleep reading. I was woken up in the middle of the night by my grandfather yelling. Which wasn’t unusual. In this case he was yelling at something to get off the boat—which would have been traumatic enough if my bed wasn’t covered in seaweed.”
“Your family is weird.”
“This is true. Aren’t they all?” I ask.
“Not like yours.”
The path begins to widen out, and we come to a small clearing. A small blue tent is at one end with a pair of legs sticking out and a man snoring inside.
“Sounds like a goblin,” says Hughes. He kneels by the man’s feet and taps them with his flashlight. “Excuse me.”
The man doesn’t stop snoring.
Hughes taps again, then shakes the tent. “Pardon me.”
A suntanned face with a bulbous red nose over a dark beard pops into view.
“Who’s that?” he asks blearily.
Hughes reaches into his pocket and pulls out his badge before I can tell him not to. The man in the tent squints at it, then yells, “Pigs!”
“Damn it,” I mutter, getting to my feet as the sound of voices shouting and running footsteps filters through the woods.
“Stop him,” I yell back to Hughes.
In the glow of my flashlight, I see bedraggled men running in every direction into the brush like raccoons darting away from car headlights.
The first person I see is a tall man in an orange T-shirt hauling ass in the distance. May be Ethan Rafferty, maybe not, but I give chase. Whoever he is, and despite whatever medical conditions he may be suffering, adrenaline and his long legs enable him to make quick strides.
I chase after him and shout, “I just have some questions!”
“Fuck your questions,” he yells back.
Well, the first step of diplomacy is dialogue. I keep after him, ignoring the others. “I just want to talk!”
He darts through a tangle of twisted branches, clearly having na
vigated this briar patch before. I, on the other hand, find myself getting scratched by twigs and tripped by fallen trees.
I spot him again as he starts booking down a nature trail. I think I can catch him on the straightaway, but I try a different tactic: pity.
“I can’t keep up!” I shout.
The man stops cold in his tracks and wheels around to stare at me, confused. He’s not Ethan Rafferty. Damn, I chased the wrong one.
“Fuck!” shouts Hughes from somewhere in back of me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him swear.
A gravelly voice yells, “STAY BACK, FUCKER!”
I turn on my heel and race back toward the commotion and get tangled a second time in the thick brush. Behind me comes the sound of snapping branches. The man I was chasing is now following me.
“Keep your distance!” I yell, catching him in the beam of my flashlight.
His hands are up in the air. “Don’t shoot, lady. That’s Mad Mike. He’s, uh . . . mad. He just needs to calm down.”
“If he doesn’t, he’s going to get shot.” I hurry toward another clearing and find Hughes with his gun aimed at a small, wiry man with unkempt black hair down to his shoulders holding a hacksaw. Blood is trickling from Hughes’s wrist.
“You okay?” I ask, pulling my own gun on Mad Mike.
“Yeah. I grabbed him by the shoulder. He swung on me. I’ll need a tetanus shot after this.”
I call to the man with the saw. “Hey, Mike, put down the saw.”
Crazy eyes stare back at me. I remind myself that this is a man probably suffering from some mental health condition and not a comic-book villain. Now inside those eyes I see only fear and uncertainty.
I decide to de-escalate and put my gun back in my holster. Hughes keeps his drawn but aims it at the ground. Mike watches us both, unsure if this is a trick.
The man I chased comes clomping into the clearing. “Hey, Mike. Settle down.”
“What’s his condition?” I ask.
“Dunno. Crazy, I guess.”
Over to the left is a small lean-to made of cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting. There’s a bucket and a shopping cart next to it piled high with clothing, cans, and children’s toys.
“Why don’t you drop the saw and go back inside your home,” I tell Mike.
“I’m not going to jail!”
I glance over at Hughes. “Is he going to jail?”
“I don’t know. It depends.” He asks the man behind us, “Is he violent?”
“He doesn’t like to be surprised. But other than that, no. PTSD from Iraq, some say. But I’m pretty sure he was nuts before then.”
“What unit you serve?” Hughes asks Mike.
Mike seems confused by the question, then replies, “Eighty-second.” The rusty blade doesn’t waver.
“You’re not going to jail,” says Hughes at last, holstering his gun.
Mike drops the saw blade and stumbles back to his hut. Under his breath, he grumbles something about fucking cops not leaving him alone.
I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and wrap Hughes’s wrist. We can do proper first aid in the truck. And, yeah, Hughes will want to get shots at the hospital.
My partner glances over at the other man. “Is this the guy?”
“No,” I say, then ask, “Do you know where I can find Ethan Rafferty?”
“You mean Rattery? I think you ran over him back there,” the man says, pointing to where we came from.
Hughes and I retrace my steps. Sure enough, the log I thought I jumped over is actually a man in a brown sleeping bag, still sound asleep and snoring loudly.
“Rattery?” I say, prodding him with my foot.
“What the hell?” he says, wiping his eyes as my flashlight beam hits him in the face.
“I have some questions.”
He falls back down. “Google ’em.”
“Want me to kick the shit out of him until he talks?” asks Hughes. I assume he’s joking.
“Be my guest,” says Rafferty. “Watch the balls.”
Without warning, Hughes leans over and rips open the sleeping bag. Rafferty rolls onto the dirt and stares back at us, confused.
To be honest, I’m a little shocked by Hughes myself. He reaches down and picks something up. A foil packet gleams in the flashlight’s glow.
“What’s this?” asks Hughes.
“It’s not mine,” says Rafferty.
“It will be if you don’t start talking.”
Rafferty pulls himself into a sitting position. “Seriously, it’s not mine.”
I kneel down. “I wanted to talk to you about Dylan Udal, Tim Kelly, Grace Sandalin, and Caitlin Barrow.”
He stares at me for a long moment. Wheels are turning in his head. “The Whack Pack? They died a long time ago.”
Something tells me he doesn’t get the latest news. “How do you know they died?”
“Because I know who killed them.” Rafferty squints into the beam of my flashlight. “But you won’t believe me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FIFTH WHEEL
Rafferty puffs at a vape pen as Hughes and I sit across from him at a park picnic table. The only light is the bright moon overhead. A cold breeze occasionally drifts across the grass and makes the humidity a little more tolerable.
“Like I said, you’re not going to believe me. But trust me, everything I’m telling you is true.”
Neither Hughes nor I say anything because we don’t want to interrupt the man, but I have a feeling that when a meth addict tells you he’s going to share something unbelievable with you, it’s probably not an exaggeration.
“Back then in the late eighties, when we were teenagers, there was all this talk of Satanic worship, right? People blamed Dungeons and Dragons, music albums with backward lyrics, and stuff. So, because we were teenagers, we all started getting into that stuff. I mean, not all of us, but some of us, those of us into that kind of thing. A group of us started meeting up in parks to try stuff.” He looks at us to make sure we understand what he’s talking about.
“What kind of stuff?” asks Hughes.
“Satanic rituals,” Rafferty says with complete conviction.
“Human sacrifice?”
“I’m getting to that.”
Talk about burying the lede.
“Usually we’d do it after a concert, or a movie, or watching the planetarium show down in Miami.”
“The science museum?” asks Hughes.
“Yeah. They’d do Laser Zeppelin or some shit like that. Laser shows where people would go get high in the parking lot then watch the show and trip balls. And then we’d meet up in a field somewhere and try to summon a demon.”
My childhood suddenly seems boring. “Who was this? You and Tim and Dylan and the others?”
“I’m getting to that.”
Okay. I’m hoping he does it soon.
“So, we’re a bunch of kids that don’t know what we’re doing. It’s not like today with the internet. We had to steal books from Borders to figure this stuff out. We’d make a bonfire, light some candles, and do the chants.”
“What about sacrifice?” asks Hughes.
“I’m getting to that. We’d usually draw our own blood and put it into a goblet and drink it. Sometimes there were animals. One time a guy threw a cat into the fire. It came screeching out of there in flames and set the grass on fire. We had to stomp it out.”
I really want to punch this guy in the face right now and knock out his remaining teeth, and I get the sense that Hughes is feeling the same. But we both know better and let the asshole keep talking.
“Sometimes people claimed they saw stuff in the flames. One night some of us saw a Balrog in the fire.”
“A Balrog?” I ask.
“The big monster from The Hobbit,” says Hughes.
“No. It was Fellowship of the Ring, and they’re basically fire and smoke demons. Anyway, somebody, maybe it was Lane Howie or his brother Nathan, came up with this blood potion and thre
w it into the bonfire. It was made up of our blood and, uh, some other fluids, and gasoline. It made a big explosion, and we were all knocked back by the fireball. That’s when some of us saw the face and the wings before it vanished into the sky. That’s when I knew we’d summoned a demon.”
“Were any of the missing kids there?” I ask.
“What? No. They weren’t into that. They were more into that moody electronic stuff.”
“So what does this have to do with them?”
Rafferty shakes his head. “Don’t you see? We unleashed something that night. When they went missing, I knew it was the Balrog.”
“I get it. Quick question: Were you high at the time?”
“Does somebody who isn’t high try to summon a demon? Yeah. I was pretty much high all the time. That’s why I’m a good observer. I can tell what’s real and what’s not because I have so much experience.”
Oh lord.
Hughes is giving me a sideways glance. I already feel guilty for trekking out here and for the gash on his arm. This was a waste.
“Did anyone else see this demon?” I ask.
“Yeah. One guy, Sleazy Steve, was the closest. I’m pretty sure he got possessed.”
“Possessed?” echoes Hughes.
“Have you been listening? I said I thought the demon got those guys. Sleazy Steve was the last person anybody saw with them on the night of the Metal Moon concert.”
“The same night they went missing?” I ask, trying to clarify things.
“For cops, you don’t listen very good. I saw Sleazy Steve talking to the chicks that night. Later on, all five got into the van, and that was the end of it.”
Well, this just took a turn.
“You saw Sleazy Steve with them that night, getting into the van?”
Rafferty looks over at Hughes as if he’s about to ask why I’m so slow, then decides not to. “Yes. Sleazy Steve was at the concert. He was also at our Satanic meetups. Ergo, he got the Balrog.”
Hughes is furiously taking notes on a pad—quite an accomplishment in the moonlight. “Back up for a moment,” I reply. “Who’s Sleazy Steve?”
“Some guy that started hanging around us. I think we met him in Miami at a concert. He was a bit of a weirdo, but cool enough, I guess.”