A Visible Darkness (6 page)

8

W
hen I left Ms. Greenwood I drove east, over the tracks and toward the ocean. After ten years as a cop I’d heard enough stories, confessions, excuses and bullshit to come to a conclusion. Truth is an ephemeral thing. Perception holds a powerful sway. Ms. Greenwood was convinced that someone connected to her mother’s viatical policy had a hand in her death. That was her truth. Billy, whose judgment I trusted, also believed it. McCane was never going to get his nose in this neighborhood to make any kind of assessment. I could walk away and not subject myself to the hassle. But that was the thing about truth and the possibility of it. I had a hard time leaving it alone.

I crossed A1A and turned down a short residential street to a small oceanfront park and pulled into a shaded spot. I stepped over the bulkhead and walked down to the beach. At the edge of the sand you could smell brine drying on the rocks left behind by an outgoing tide. I dug the cell phone out and dialed Sherry Richards’ direct line.

“Strategic Investigations Division, Richards.”

“I am surprised and honored not to have your machine answer,” I said.

“Freeman. Hey, what happened? The swamp dry up?”

Her voice had a lilt to it. That was positive. It had been a few weeks. Maybe she wasn’t pissed.

“I had a craving for civilization,” I said.

“You’re calling me civilized, Max. How sweet.”

Still, there was that sarcasm.

“Hey, I’m on dry land. How about lunch?”

“Today? I don’t know, Max. Wind’s a little stiff. Might be too busy for you.”

I was left again without response. Seriously pissed? Or joking? Three, maybe four weeks ago we’d been out on Billy’s thirty-four- foot sloop, sailing to nowhere with Billy and his girlfriend, another lawyer who had an office in his building.

I had met Richards several months ago. She’d been on a special task force investigating a string of child abductions and killings. One of the dead kids had ended up on my river. Despite myself, I got pulled into the investigation. She’d kept a professional and wary distance until the case had broken. Then she’d found too many reasons for coming to the hospital to check on me while I convalesced from a gunshot wound.

I tried to see her whenever I came in off the river. Drinks at a beachside tiki bar. Dinner at Joe’s Seafood Grill on the Intracoastal. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her legs during a Saturday afternoon on the beach. She’d noticed. She was after all, a trained cop.

On the sailing trip she’d surprised me with her dexterity and seamanship. She’d been showing me up from the time we’d pushed off from the dock, but it had only registered a small manly tick with me and probably hadn’t even crossed her mind. You don’t do much sail trimming on the streets of Philly. Then Billy had decided to unfurl his spinnaker in a downwind run and I’d jumped to show I wasn’t useless. The damn sail was huge and far too unwieldy and strange in my hands. When I’d tangled the lines and tripped on a stanchion, the women had smartly taken control. Richards had whipped the lines out of my hands before I went overboard. Then she and Billy’s friend expertly set the whisker poles and stood framed in the billowing color and smiled and hooted at the boat’s speed. Billy winked at me as I settled back in the cockpit and watched with a tainted respect.

I’d been through a short marriage with a cop in Philadelphia. She, like Richards, had been strong and tough-minded, smart and intuitive. Those were things I liked, things I understood. But both were also emotional, able to absorb a victims pain, to show an instant empathy. The dual abilities were unsettling.

My ex-wife had also lived on an adrenaline push, one I didn’t want to compete for. I still didn’t think I knew Richards well enough to know if that was another shared quality. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Oh come on, Max. Don’t tell me you got intimidated by two women who could handle a spinnaker in an eight-knot breeze better that you two boys?” she said, breaking my too-long silence.

“Can’t intimidate a man who knows his limitations,” I said. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been in sooner. So introduce me to a new recipe for mangrove snapper.”

My apology must have been accepted.

“How about Banyans at two?” she finally said. “Bring your cash, Freeman, it’s on you.”

I started back south on A1A, rolled down the windows along a stretch of beachfront where oceanside condos had somehow been banned. From the road the view of the surf and the watery horizon were unobstructed. On the sidewalk I watched a young woman in a bikini walking south, her hips switching like a metronome. Two buzzcut boys walking a pit bull said something to her and she nonchalantly flipped them the finger. I slowed for a middle-aged man crossing from the hotel side, sliding on roller blades, shirtless and tanned with a multicolored parrot perched on one shoulder. I passed a throbbing, low-ride Honda Accord that broadsided me with a bass line from a backseat full of speakers. Eight hours ago I was watching a wild bird hunting gar fish on a thousand-year-old river. Welcome to Florida.

I got off the ocean drive and went back west half a mile, over the Intracoastal bridge, and found a parking spot across the street from Banyan’s. Inside the restaurant was an open courtyard dominated by the huge trunk of a live banyan tree that measured some eight feet across and spread its monstrous canopy up and over the surrounding roofs. Its leaves were so dense that even at midday it left a cool and dusky patio below.

When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw Richards sitting at a table near one corner, a cop’s territory where you could catalog everybody who walked in. She was dressed in a cream-colored suit, white silk blouse underneath. She sat at an angle to the table so she could cross her legs. Even sitting you could see her height in the long bones from knee to ankle and elbow to wrist. Her blonde hair was pulled back. Her eyes, I already knew, would look green today. I am not a smiling man, but approaching the table I could feel it coming into my face.

“Hi. Nice table.”

“The advantage of two o’clock lunches,” she said without missing a beat. I took her hand and bent to kiss her lightly in greeting and stole a deep draught of her perfume.

“Freeman, you are god-awful thin,” she said when I stepped back.

“Thank you,” I said, pulling out a chair to the side of hers so I too might have a view.

“What, the fish on the river haven’t been cooperative?”

“You mean they don’t like to be caught and eaten? Or I’m a piss- poor fisherman?”

“Exactly,” she said. “But you’re in luck. The special is red snapper, and it’s very good here.”

I opened a menu as if to make a decision on my own. Took a breath, looked up into her face.

“You’re looking fit, detective. Climbing the gears right off that Stair Master?”

One of our connections was a passion for exercise, a shared habit of sweating through a pain we both understood.

Her husband had been a street cop who had died in the line of duty. He had confronted a kid in a holdup and never expected a thirteen-year-old to aim a gun in his face. According to his partner, that night he’d just stared at the barrel and seemed to tilt his head in confusion when the kid pulled the trigger. It was still not long enough in the past.

“No more Stair Master,” she answered. “Got a new thing. Aerobics boxing. Great stuff.”

“Figures,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow, then let the comment slide.

“So, what’s up on the river, Freeman? Anything we should know about?”

Her question reminded me how hard it was for her not to always be a cop. There had been some loose ends in the abduction case. A witness, an eighty-year-old legend of the deep Glades, had disappeared and was never found for questioning. The detectives knew he had picked me out as a conduit for special information and wondered if I would ever put them in touch “just for conversation to fill in some holes,” they said. What they didn’t know was that the old man had saved my life. My repayment was his anonymity.

“Everything is quiet on the river,” I said. “But we’ve got to get you out there again, work on that paddle technique.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, but there was a grin on her face.

“No,” I said. “This time it’s your side of the woods where I think I need some help.”

The waiter came and took orders, and as we sipped iced tea, I told Richards about Billy’s theory about the insurance scam and murder. I gave her what sketchy information I could about the women’s locations and similarities, and about the insurance investigator who, for lack of a better word, was working with me.

She listened, nodding and only interjecting with the proper street names and neighborhood tides. When the fish came, sizzling off the grill and surrounded by dirty rice, we both went quiet.

She finally broke the silence. “Even that many naturals, in that section of the city, wouldn’t necessarily raise any flags. And even if Billy alerted us to it, I doubt it would push anyone off the dime to take a closer look.”

I looked up from my plate.

“It’s a high crime zone, Freeman. You know the drill. Keep the lid on. Try to make insider friends, keep the politics in check and don’t sweat the small stuff. They’ve got bigger problems over there.”

It was my turn to raise eyebrows, first at the small stuff comment and then as an unspoken question about the bigger problems. She took a few forkfuls of rice, pulled a loose strand of hair back behind her ears and began again.

She told me about a string of rapes in the same area over the past several years that had also passed across someone’s desk. Some were reported, some were just street talk. The women involved were street girls, prostitutes and addicts feeding their habits and not too particular about what they traded for an eight-ball of crack or a dose of heroin.

“They only got reported when the guy got too rough and the women were found hurt. I answered one while I was still on patrol. Girl had marks around her throat like a thick rope had been wrapped around it. She said it was the guy’s hands.”

That case, like the others, had never been solved. The witnesses were too high to give good descriptions. The crime scenes were either forgotten or so contaminated that they were useless for processing.

She saw me looking at her eyes, watching the way they kept jumping away from mine.

“Goddammit, Freeman. I worked it as much as I could. I was only patrol. I handed it up to the detective bureau.”

“I didn’t say a word,” I said, holding up my palms in defense. She went quiet.

The waiter came back. I ordered coffee and stared up into the canopy of the banyan, following the branches down into the thick mass of tangled roots that formed the trunk.

“So what has changed?” I asked.

“They started turning up dead.”

“The rape victims?”

“The users, the hookers, then just women in the neighborhood.”

“But not older women?”

“No.”

The coffee came and she knew enough about my habit to wait until I’d taken two long swallows.

“So that’s their more serious problem? They might have a serial guy out there?” I said.

“We’re working the possibility.”

Richards declined dessert.

“So when can I get an inside tour?” I asked, taking a chance.

“You’re awfully pushy for an ex-cop who’s left the job behind him, Max.”

“Consider it a favor for Billy.”

She looked into my face again. A grin pulled at the corners of her mouth.

“OK. I’ll consider it as such. I’ll have to get a waiver for a ride along, but your name is not exactly unknown. You do remember Chief Hammonds?”

Hammonds had been in charge of the abduction case. We did not hold a mutual trust.

“I would never hold either of you responsible if something should happen,” I said.

A long moment passed. “Tonight then,” she said, catching me off guard. “Meet me at ten in front of the office.”

She got up, bent to kiss me on the cheek and walked away before the bill came.

“Thanks for lunch.”

I watched her from our back table vantage point, heels clicking on the flagstone, never looking back so I could see if there was a smile on her face.

9

I
called Billy’s office. He listened to my description of the meeting with Mary Greenwood and then my lunch with Richards.

“What’s with you two? Maybe we should get out for a sail again, heh?”

“No.”

I refused to let his silence lead me to say more. I waited him out.

“She have anything to add?”

I told him about the rapes and murders in the area where his dead women lived.

“She’s going to give me a tour of the zone late tonight. All right if I wait it out at your place?”

“I’ll call Murray at the desk and I’ll bring some takeout,” he said and clicked off.

I took A1A north, through the condo canyons and past blocks of motels and businesses catering to the tourist crowd. On occasion there would be a stretch of thick green only interrupted by iron gates guarding driveways that twisted up to the backs of beachfront mansions. The huge flat paddles of sea grape leaves billowed up next to the road and twenty-foot high fans of white bird-of-paradise twisted in the wake of the cars. I passed a landscaping truck, mowers and string trimmers being loaded in the back by a crew of men. I thought of the whiskey-laced conversation I’d heard between three old dockside fishermen. One night they were betting on how long it would take the prodigious Florida ferns and vines and water plants to sprout through all the asphalt and concrete and reclaim the land if there were no humans here to cut it back.

“Thirty years and it’d be back to the high tide line,” said one.

“Hell, fifteen,” said another.

“No more’n ten.”

The argument went on but not one of them ventured that it couldn’t be done.

Billy lived in a new beachfront high-rise. I’d stayed with him there during my first few weeks in South Florida. His penthouse apartment was spacious, decorated in expensive natural wood and hung with collected art. His pride was the curving wall of glass that faced out over the Atlantic. The wide porch was always bathed in fresh salt air. The only sound was the low hum of wind nibbling at the concrete corners and the brush of breakers on the sand below. It was the exact opposite of everything Billy had grown up in.

I parked my truck in a visitor’s spot out front. Inside the ornate lobby, Murray greeted me at the desk. Murray was a trim, balding man who always dressed in a suit and tie and spoke with a clipped and efficient English accent. Billy once did a computer dossier on him and discovered Murray had been born and raised in Brooklyn. But if quizzed, he could give you the specific walking directions from London’s Hermitage to the Suffolk House and estimate the time it would take to get there based on the gait and stride you used crossing his lobby. He was a sort of concierge and security man for the building. The residents paid him well.

“Good day, Mr. Freeman.”

“Murray. How you doin’,” I said.

“Mr. Manchester has called ahead. Please do go up, sir. I shall unlock the doors electronically.”

“Thanks for the lift, Murray.”

Ever since Billy had told me about the Brooklyn thing I’d had to stifle the urge to mock his accent. Instead I’d just try to get a rise. It never worked.

At the twelfth floor the elevator doors opened onto Billy’s private vestibule. The double doors to his apartment were of dark wood. The carpet was thick. The flowers in a vase against the wall were fresh. I heard the electronic snick of the lock and went in. The air was cool and sanitized. The place was immaculate and like always I found myself moving through it like a visitor in a museum. I went straight to the open kitchen and started coffee brewing. Then I slid open a door to the patio and stood at the rail, my nose into the wind.

The sun was high and white and the wind had set down a corduroy pattern on the ocean surface. From this height the varied water depths showed in shades of turquoise, cerulean and then a cobalt blue that spread to the horizon. The narrow strip of beach had shrunk since the last time I’d visited. The tide and wave action had eaten away at least fifteen yards. I didn’t relish the idea of doing three miles in that soft sand. The thought of it made me lean into the rail and stretch my calves. But some of my best grinding came while I was running or paddling, and it was going to take some grinding to determine where to go with Billy’s dead women.

I went to the guest bedroom, found some running shorts, a T-shirt and the running shoes that Billy held here for me. I changed and poured another cup of coffee, and carried it to the rail. The wind was stiffening. I swung a heel up on the rail and stretched. Bent. Counted. Swung the other leg up.

Would someone kill old women for money? Of course.

How would he know who to kill? Inside job. List of names.

Do it himself, or contract it? Money guys don’t do the dirty work.

How does the racial angle fit? It might never fit.

I still wasn’t sold on the whole premise and now I was bringing Richards into it. It was how conspiracy theories were started. Look out Oliver Stone.

I put my palms on the floor, propped my toes on the seat of the chaise lounge and did fifty pushups. The blood was singing in my ears when I stood up and exhaled. I took a deep swig of coffee. Time to plow the sand.