The Blue Edge of Midnight (23 page)

The medical team had left behind a scatter of torn paper and plastic wrappings from the syringes and instruments they’d used. I made a mental note that someone, Richards I assumed, had put the child’s clothes and the tattered blanket into an evidence bag and left it for the crime scene guys. The chair on which I’d found the GPS unit had been shoved away.

Hammonds studied the place for a few minutes, apparently showing no interest in the broken table or the shattered oil lamp.

“I’m going to check on the late Mr. Ashley,” Hammonds said, and the FBI, unusually dutiful, followed him out.

I stayed on the porch listening to the TraumaHawk engines. The man-made gale again whipped through the hammock, this time stripping a shower of leaves from the tree canopy as the machine climbed and swung away toward the east. I wondered where Nate Brown was. I knew he would not be far, sitting down in the tall sawgrass perhaps, seeing the chopper come and go, hearing the whine of the boat engines grinding through the shallow creek, smelling the ripe clouds of exhaust.

I called Billy on the cell phone and got him at his office. He listened patiently as I described the events of the day.

“They’re going to call it a murder-suicide and close the book,” he said.

“Yeah. I know.”

“So you’ll be off the hook. They’ll probably keep your file open and know they didn’t finish it, but if another child doesn’t disappear, it ends.”

“Yeah. Happily ever after.”

I didn’t tell him about the knife in my boot. He said he needed to work on some records he’d been researching and that he’d meet me at the police administration building where we both knew there would be a frenzy of media when we got back in.

“My advice is to duck it,” Billy said.

“Thanks,” I said and punched him off.

When I got around to the back of the cabin the crime scene guys were carrying the black vinyl body bag containing David Ashley out of the trees. The wiry Gladesman had weighed barely 150 pounds alive. The team was strong and experienced and it was hardly a chore. One of them was working a small video camera, carefully documenting the scene and would have spent extra time on the noose and the tipped-over chair in Ashley’s clearing. I wondered if he would be as careful inside the cabin. No one would want to make a return trip out here. The team seemed particularly stone-faced. Everyone was slapping at the following clouds of mosquitoes that were swarming around their heads and necks. The scene techs had put on long- sleeved shirts that were already soaked through with sweat, leaving dark Vs on their backs and rings under their arms. Mud was caked on their boots and no doubt some animal gristle they couldn’t avoid. But their job was rarely easy and they went about it stoically.

No one else was carrying around the sheen of relief that was subtly, but unmistakably, coloring Hammonds’ face. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, sweating like the rest. At one point I could see at least three or four mosquitoes light on his face but he seemed unaware as he watched his team pack up. He would answer a question from one of the men with a short sentence or order and turned occasionally to talk softly with one of the agents. But mostly he stood silent. He looked to me like a man who could envision a cool, soft bed and a long, untroubled night’s sleep in the near distance and he wanted it badly.

The sun was going orange in the western sky by the time they were finished. The boats were reloaded. Ashley held an inglorious spot on the floor in the stern and the team members pointedly avoided looking down at the black bag. The bank to the creek was now trampled into a lumpy oatmeal of mud and grass, and two obvious paths led from the bank to the front of the cabin and to the thicket where the hanging took place. Each was littered with wrappings and film containers and discarded latex gloves. Before we pushed off, a scene tech stretched a three-inch-wide streamer of yellow tape across the landing from the trunk of a gumbo-limbo to a pigeon plum that read: crime scene, do not enter. I was sure that none of these men would ever return. They had all they needed.

Our boats ground and churned their way through the narrow channel until we cleared the hammock on the opposite side from where Nate Brown and I had originally entered. When the waterway opened up into the sawgrass the Florida Marine Division driver inched up the throttle and we began making time.

Out of the hammock the moving air was cooler and from my spot near the bow it smelled clean and tinged with the odor of fresh-turned soil. The rain had held off and the sky was strung now with clouds going pink and purple, their edges still bright and glowing in front of patches of blue. The whine of the engines covered any other sound and most of the men rode with their faces turned up into the wind, their eyes glossed over with the colors of the sunset.

CHAPTER 21

T
he last light had left the sky by the time we reached the public fishing camp that Hammonds used as a staging area. I could see the glow of unnatural lights from a distance, but we still had to use hand-held spotlights to find our way to the boat ramp docks.

When we hit solid ground the group moved with a familiar efficiency. Others who had been waiting throughout the afternoon in boredom jumped to help unload the boats. A large white crime scene van was parked nearby on the shell parking lot and next to it was a black Chevy Suburban from the medical examiner’s office. I could see a sheriff’s helicopter sitting fifty yards behind it.

The techs moved the evidence and the equipment first and then let the M.E.’s people retrieve Ashley’s remains. As they hoisted the black body bag out of the Whaler a floodlight suddenly flashed on, its brightness causing everyone to squint and turn their faces or shield their eyes. Billy had been right about the media. At least one news crew had staked out the staging area and now was getting “exclusive footage” of the body being removed from the Everglades.

No one was surprised. Little could be kept from the media. Every newsroom had a variety of police and emergency scanners or contracted with a sophisticated service that did nothing but monitor the array of radio traffic and dispatch instructions being sent twenty-four hours a day. Some agencies had even given up on the traditional signal codes, a now archaic attempt to broadcast a homicide as a Signal 5 or a rape as a Signal 35 in hopes of keeping some eavesdroppers at bay. Reporters and the freelance listening service operators knew the codes by heart and the game was useless.

Since the child killings began, any radio traffic sending cops out to the Glades would have caused an immediate heads up. By this time there would be TV crews at the hospital, the Flamingo Lakes neighborhood and outside the task force headquarters. Out here a young woman reporter and cameraman had gambled on following the crime scene and M.E. units, and had spent the day waiting to see who or what would come back in on the boats. Their payoff was the body bag footage. And I knew it would make prime time on the news.

I stood on the other side of the Whaler, just outside the cone of the camera’s light, watching as the M.E. guys lifted Ashley out. The boat’s stern was still rocking in shallow water and as one of the techs stepped over the gunwale he stumbled and a strap on the bag got caught on one of the stern cleats. As the camera rolled, the two men struggled to free the package. Another tech came to help but they couldn’t pull it loose. The scene was getting awkward under the glare of the television lights and I thought of how it was going to play on the eleven o’clock news. It might be my only opportunity.

With one quick move I bent and pulled the wrapped knife from my boot, snapped it open and stepped into the boat. The camera lights flashed on the blade and with one motion I cut the strap clean.

One of the M.E. boys said thanks, and they continued up the slope to the Suburban, the cameraman following. Now he had even better footage.

As I climbed back out of the boat I saw Hammonds watching me but he was quickly distracted by someone calling his name.

“Chief Hammonds. Excuse me, Chief.”

The woman reporter approached and instead of raising his palm and walking past her, Hammonds stopped. She was short and thin with high cheekbones and brown eyes that held Hammonds’ attention and seemed to simultaneously assess the others in his group, including me.

“Chief, can you give me anything on where you’ve been and maybe who’s in the bag?” she asked in an informal way. The cameraman was still across the lot and she was being both polite and disarming. Hammonds seemed to know her.

“Donna, you know the drill. First I have to go in and brief the sheriff. These guys have to speak to their people,” Hammonds said, hooking a thumb at the FBI agents. “And then we’ll most likely have a press conference for everybody at the same time for the eleven o’clock.” He too was being polite.

“OK. Off the record then,” Donna said, turning back to her cameraman as if to emphasize that he wasn’t filming. “Just so I didn’t wait out here all day being eaten by mosquitoes for nothing.”

“Off the record, Donna,” Hammonds said, the grin I’d seen earlier now undisguised. “I think we got our guy.”

The agents turned their heads and began walking with Hammonds toward the helicopter and the reporter turned to me.

“Mr. Freeman? Right?” she said. “Coming out of the swamp again. How you doing?”

I looked in her face, a foolish confirmation. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a smart reporter would recognize me from the plane crash with Gunther only a week ago. I didn’t respond.

“Mr. Freeman, are you on loan from Philadelphia?” She was again polite. “Does any of this tie in somehow to Philadelphia?”

Billy was right again. There would always be one who did their homework.

“No comment,” I said, feeling a flush rise in my neck.

“You coming?” Hammonds called from the parking area where the helicopter blades were just starting to spin. I turned and jogged after him.

We were all strapped in and the helicopter was beginning to wobble and rise when Hammonds turned and yelled over the engine whine: “We’ll have a briefing in the conference room as soon as we’re in.”

He was talking to all of us and looking at me. As the machine rose he pulled a headset over his ears and no one said a word during the trip in. I stared out the window and shivered at the thought of the last time I flew. But this time there was only an ocean of black below. For thousands of acres there was not a light. Without a moon, even the canals that did run through the sawgrass could not show themselves. The windows of the chopper only reflected the pilot’s green instrument board.

It was hot and close inside the cramped space and I sat trying to imagine Ashley somehow moving the girl out into his old and rusted rowboat and making it out here in the dark four nights ago but the vision wouldn’t come. His navigation through this part of the wilderness I didn’t doubt. His ability to steal her away from the backyard and through the man-made lake was also plausible for a man of his talents. But there was no waterway or wood that led from the surrounding streets of Flamingo Lakes into these dark acres. How would a man like him make that leap? How would a man confined to oil lamps and animal skinning send an e-mail of GPS coordinates from a downtown Radio Shack?

I was convinced he hadn’t, but I wasn’t sure what Hammonds believed. As I ground the edges, a false dawn and then a sliver of light put a border on the eastern horizon. The glow of the coastal city. Minutes later we crossed highway 27 due west of Fort Lauderdale. It was the boundary. On one side was blackness, on the other lay a blanket of lights webbed all the way to the ocean.

The pilot brought us in on a straight heading, following a line of orange-tinged lights that flanked a boulevard running through suburbia. You couldn’t see the trees at night, only dark splotches interrupting the pattern of street lamps. The broader dark areas I knew had to be golf courses. The light grids thickened as we approached what I could now see was the glowing gray belt of the interstate, and we started down. The pilot swept us in a banking circle and we hovered over the neighborhood that tolerated the sheriff’s administration building and he eased down to it. I wondered what the citizens thought of the chopper’s occasional wind and noise assault, the sight of a machine so familiar but so far from their experience. They would never ride in it, or sit in it on their way to some important meeting. They surely weren’t asked whether they had objections to its boisterous comings and goings. Maybe they didn’t give a damn. Maybe they just watched TV and became oblivious to its sound, just like the night train whistle or the hum of interstate traffic. That’s just the way it was. You just live in it.

The helipad was next to a motor pool and as a group we climbed out of the settled helicopter and walked along the now-closed garage bays and through a set of fenced gates. Hammonds’ key card let us through an unmarked metal door into the big building. He was slipping us in the back way. We all knew the TV crews and reporters were staked out in front. We went up an elevator that may have been the same one Diaz had taken me on, but it was a different ride.

We stank. We were four men who’d spent a day in the humid Everglades in the company of rotting entrails, decaying plants and a ripe corpse. We had sweated through clothes that were soaked in swamp water and smeared with mud. Our faces were insect-bitten and sunburned. Hammonds had pushed number six when we got on, but the elevator stopped at four and opened. A woman in office attire carrying an armload of files started to get on but either the sight or smell hit her and she backed off and flipped the back of her fingers mumbling something that sounded like “go on.” We got off at six.

It was nine o’clock but the office pods and aisles were still filled with investigators in shirtsleeves and with uniformed aides. A wave seemed to push out in front of Hammonds, causing a silence as it went. He nodded at several people. An older detective reached out and briefly shook his hand and said, “Congratulations.”

When we got to the glassed office, both Diaz and Richards were waiting. The FBI broke off to their computer table and Hammonds crooked his finger to the detectives and to me as he entered his office. Diaz closed the door behind us.