Authors: Jefferson Bass
“So where
did
he get them?”
I shrugged, and Vickery said, “That’s what we were hoping to learn from the GPS collar we put on the dog.” Riordan nodded, then excused himself to take a look inside.
Another unmarked car appeared, but this one didn’t stop at the house; instead, it continued farther down Pettis’s dead-end road. Thirty minutes later the car returned and stopped, and a pale young man with short, dark hair and wire-rim glasses got out. He held out a hand to me. “You must be Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist.” I nodded. “I’m Nathaniel James—Nat—from the Forensic Computing Section. Nice to meet you.”
“You, too, Nat. I’m a little surprised to see you out here. I wouldn’t have pegged Mr. Pettis as particularly wired.”
“No, he wasn’t what I’d call wired,” said Nat. “But
we
are. I just retrieved the GPS receiver and the flash drive I set up in the fire tower. We don’t have the collar that was on the dog, but I’m pretty sure we do have the data it transmitted.”
If he was right, would that mean we’d find the source of the bones? And would it mean that Pettis and the dog had not died in vain?
D
arkness had fallen by the time we left the cabin and headed back toward the lavish comforts of the Twilight Motor Court and the Waffle Iron diner. Angie and Whitney had bagged Pettis’s body, and it was loaded onto a panel-truck van from a local funeral home, which would transport it to the small hospital where Dr. Bradford would autopsy the body. After much arguing and a series of phone calls, the dog’s body had been added to the van, for delivery to a McNary animal hospital. I had hoped that Jasper would be buried beside Pettis, but I suspected that he’d be unceremoniously dumped in a ditch somewhere beside Highway 90.
The forensic techs had finished their work in the house, but Vickery had asked the sheriff’s office not to release the scene until after we’d seen what Nat James was able to learn from the GPS data captured by the receiver and stored on the flash drive. Deputy Sutton’s penance—for he continued to feel guilty about failing to prevent Pettis’s death, and possibly even contributing to it—was to keep vigil at the property until we returned the next day.
As Angie and I bumped along the dirt road back to the highway, her phone rang. She glanced at the display. “Oh my God,” she said, “it’s Maddox, from the GBI.” She flipped open the phone. “Mr. Maddox, it’s good to hear from you. Did you get my messages? . . . I understand. It’s been busy down this way, too . . . So how’s the investigation going? . . . Well, have y’all questioned Don? . . . Okay, that’s a good start. Have you
charged
him?” Angie was silent, and as far as I could tell, Maddox was silent, too. Finally she said, “Mr. Maddox? Did I lose you?” She took her foot off the gas, and the Suburban slowed to an idle. “I don’t understand, Mr. Maddox.” She put the transmission in park, and the Suburban lurched and slithered to a stop. “You mean not
yet
, right? You mean you aren’t charging him
yet
. But you
will
, won’t you?” Panic and despair were rising in her voice, and as they did, I felt sorrow welling up in me. “But
why
? Why
not
? He
killed
her, Mr. Maddox. That man put a shotgun in my sister’s mouth and blew her
head
off. You
know
that. You saw her body. You saw the trajectory. You saw that she didn’t do that to herself, Mr. Maddox.” Pleading now. “But you saw it. You saw it, you saw it, you
saw
it.” She was choking on the words now; they came out as a guttural, ragged whisper that I suspected was not even audible at the other end of the line. “You saw it.” I heard a beep as she disconnected the call and let the phone fall beside her. She turned and stared at me, hollow-eyed in the dim light from the instrument panel. “He says he doesn’t think they’ll charge him. So far they don’t have enough evidence to make a case. They’re sending Kate’s body back to be reburied.”
I stared at her, feeling helpless. “I’m sorry, Angie. So very sorry.” I struggled to find some words of comfort. “Maybe it’s not over yet. Maybe they’ll reconsider. Maybe we can come up with something else.”
“What else? There
is
nothing else. It’s done.” She shook her head. “She’s like one of those dead boys whose graves we just saw. Nobody gives a damn.”
“
You
give a damn,” I reminded her.
“A lot of good that’s done her. I’ve let her down. And it’s killing me.”
“Don’t let it. Don’t give up—on her or on yourself.
That
would be letting her down.”
She drew a deep, shuddering breath, put the Suburban in gear, and drove us to the Twilight in sad silence. Vickery’s car was parked outside his bungalow, and a light showed through the threadbare curtains. “I don’t feel like going to dinner,” Angie said. “You and Stu go on without me.” I started to protest, but she waved me off. “Really. I’m exhausted,” she said as we got out. “I’d be lousy company, and I can’t eat. I just want to sleep.”
“You sure you’ll be okay?” She nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said again, acutely conscious of the inadequacy of the words. “Sleep well. I’ll see you in the morning.” She headed for her door, and lifted a weary hand by way of a good-night.
I showered as quickly as the anemic water pressure would allow, then headed for Vickery’s bungalow. Angie’s light was still on, so I decided to check on her before collecting Vickery. I tapped lightly on her door. She didn’t answer, and I realized that her air conditioner was even noisier than mine, so I knocked again, harder this time. The door was unlatched, apparently; it swung open from the force of the knock, and as it did, my blood froze.
Angie St. Claire was lying on her bed. In her mouth was the muzzle of a shotgun.
“A
ngie, don’t,” I shouted from the doorway.
She jerked convulsively, wild-eyed, and the shotgun fell from her hands and tumbled to the floor. Instinctively I ducked and covered my head with my arms, but there was no blast from the gun. The only blast was a piercing shriek from Angie.
“Son of a
bitch
,” she yelled, scrambling to a sitting position against the headboard as I dove for the gun. “You scared the living
shit
out of me.” She pounded the mattress a few times with her fist. “Thank
God
that thing’s not loaded. You’d be picking my brains off the floor for sure.” She took a deep breath and whooshed it out, then took in another and let it out more slowly. “Wow,” she said, and then she looked at me and laughed—actually
laughed
. I was still kneeling on the floor, clutching the gun and staring at her, as confused as I’d ever been in my life. “Bless your heart, how
awful
,” she said. “You must have thought I was about to pull the trigger.”
“Well, yeah.
Weren’t
you?”
“No. I’m not suicidal. I’m just . . .
obsessed
, I guess. Still trying to figure this thing out. Still trying to understand how in the world my sister ended up with a Mossberg twelve-gauge in her mouth.”
“I thought we already figured that part out.” I got to my feet, my heart still pounding, and took a few deep breaths of my own. “Learn anything new?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Always make sure the door’s locked when you’re doing something questionable in a low-rent motel.”
I tried to smile, but it felt more like a grimace. I laid the gun on the bed, after making sure the safety was on.
Suddenly I heard a door banging somewhere nearby, then heard Vickery yelling, “Angie? Are you okay?
Angie?
”
“Oh, shit,” she said in a low voice. She tucked the gun into the gap between the bed and the wall. “Keep this between us, would you? I don’t want Stu to think I’m cracking up.” She held my eyes for an instant, and I nodded. Then she tucked her feet beneath her and sprang into a standing position on the mattress.
Vickery appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, on high alert, his pistol in his hand. He looked at Angie, standing on the bed, then at me, then at Angie again. “I heard a scream. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry to scare you. It was just a mouse.” He stared at her, his eyes still wide, his nostrils flaring, his breath rasping loudly enough to be heard over the air conditioner. “A
mouse
? You’re kidding me, right?” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Doc, is she pulling my leg?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see the mouse. But I sure heard the scream.”
Angie stepped off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I was lying down, resting for a minute before dinner. I felt something crawling up the leg of my pants, and I freaked out. Sorry, guys.”
Vickery shook his head. “Jesus, Angie. And everybody thinks you’re tough as nails.” He holstered his gun. “What’s it worth if I keep my mouth shut about this?”
“Stu, are you blackmailing me?”
“I sure am.”
“Uh . . .” Clearly she was struggling to switch gears. “Well, could I buy your silence with the meat-and-three special at the Waffle Iron?”
“I was thinking more like a lifetime supply of cigars,” he answered. “But I’m a reasonable man. Throw in a piece of apple pie, and the mouse incident stays in the vault.”
“Shake on it,” said Angie, “and let’s go eat. Dr. Brockton, will you be my witness?”
“Sure, I’ll be your witness,” I agreed.
But a witness to what? I wondered all through dinner—the dinner Angie had earlier said she didn’t want. There was a reason I wondered. As we’d left Angie’s room to head to the diner, I’d glanced back at her bed, and my eyes had caught sight of a small box sitting on the lower shelf of the nightstand. I wouldn’t have staked my life on it, but in the instant before she switched off the lamp, I thought I’d glimpsed the image of a shotgun shell printed on the side of the box.
I continued to wonder about Angie after we returned to the Twilight, and then my wondering shifted gears, became more personal and more painful. I wondered about my father, and the moments just before he pulled the trigger and shot himself. If someone—anyone: my mother, a client, even my own three-year-old toddling self—had come into his office and found him with the gun to his head, might he have explained away the scene, put away the gun, and set about cleaning up the financial mess he’d accidentally made?
I would never know, of course. And therefore I would forever wonder. “Remember me, remember me, remember me.” The ghost whispering those words was not Angie’s sister nor Hamlet’s father this time, but my own.
T
he next morning Angie, Stu, and I returned to Pettis’s place. We were met there by ten crew-cut-sporting students who’d been bused over from the Pat Thomas Law Enforcement Academy, a training facility located in the nearby town of Quincy.
We were also met by Nat James, from the Computer Forensics Section. “Do you want the last track,” he asked Angie, “or do you want the
dog’s
last track?”
“Aren’t those the same?”
“Nope,” he said. “There’s a slow, loopy track in the middle of the night. And then there’s a straight, fast track yesterday morning, about an hour after Pettis called Deputy Sutton. That one heads away from the cabin and out the dirt road to the highway, moving about twenty miles an hour. Then, at the highway, it turns north and accelerates to seventy-five miles an hour.”
“It’s the killer,” breathed Angie. “The collar is tracking the killer as he drives away.”
“Where does it go?” demanded Vickery.
“It ends.”
“You mean he stops?”
“No. I mean he gets out of range. The collar’s still moving fast, then the receiver loses the signal.”
“Crap,” said Angie.
“Leave it on,” said Vickery. “Maybe he’ll come back.”
Nat nodded. “I thought of that. I’m rigging a satellite link, so if the receiver picks up the collar’s signal again, it’ll relay the new track to my computer right away.”
Angie carried a handheld GPS into which Nat James had loaded Jasper’s track, so the route we took would be superimposed on the map of Jasper’s. Slung over one shoulder was her crime-scene camera, and tucked into the belt of her cargo pants was a bundle of orange survey flags. In addition, she’d enlisted students to carry two shovels, two trowels, a couple of baggies of gloves, more survey flags, a partial roll of crime-scene tape, and paper evidence bags.
Stu carried his cigar. I carried a half-dozen detailed topo maps, which Nat James had brought us. The computer whiz was right: FDLE, or at least his piece of it, was highly wired. The day that Pettis had agreed to putting the GPS collar on the dog, Nat had come out to put the finishing steps on the tracking technology. He’d connected the receiver—the small display on which a hunter could see his dog’s position—to a flash drive, which captured the location coordinates that the collar transmitted. He’d reset the tracking interval from five seconds to thirty, to stretch the battery’s life. Then he’d concealed the pair of devices high in the nearby fire tower, as Pettis had suggested, for maximum range.
Most of the dog’s coordinates clustered around and inside the cabin. The one notable and intriguing exception was the long, looping ramble that the dog had taken during his final night.
The top page of the printout I carried was an overview of the area, including a bright red “you are here” dot marking the location of the cabin. From it, a squiggly red line meandered to the northeast before looping back. The other five pages each showed enlarged views of segments of the route Jasper had covered before returning with the bone. According to the tracking data, Jasper had covered seven miles during his final outing. As the crow flew, though, he’d remained within a three-mile radius of home.
Vickery had suggested that we retrace the dog’s footsteps exactly, but Angie disagreed. “I doubt that the dog did a lot of wandering with a big bone in his mouth,” she reasoned. “He obviously wasn’t looking for a place to bury it, since he brought it back, right? See how the last part of the track looks fairly straight? It’s like he was hurrying home with his new treasure.”
“I think I see what you’re saying,” I said. “You think we should follow the track in reverse.” She nodded, and Vickery agreed, so we lined up at the edge of the clearing side by side, Angie at the center, flanked by Vickery and me, with five trainees on either side. Angie had us spread out, arms stretched wide, until our fingertips were barely touching. “That’s your spacing,” she said. “Try to maintain it. I’ll set the pace. We’ll stop and re-form the line whenever it gets too ragged, but try to keep it fairly even.” On her signal we began moving forward in unison, more or less, scanning the ground for bones, signs of recent digging, or anything else out of the ordinary.
The first mile or so took us through pine stands that were relatively free of undergrowth, and we made good time. Jasper had also made good time on this stretch, his home stretch: the red thread of the GPS track was marked on the map with a string of small dots, showing his location at thirty-second intervals. Judging by the spacing of the dots and the scale printed on the map, the dog had covered the final mile in just ten minutes. It took us twenty-five minutes, partly because there were occasional stops to examine holes in the ground—the burrows of various animals, according to Vickery, including one that he swore, with a straight face, had to be a python’s hole—and partly because Angie had to call several halts to straighten and tighten the ragtag line.
A half hour after we’d started the search, we halted once more. This time it wasn’t to inspect an animal burrow or to re-form ranks; this time it was to figure out how, and whether, to cross a coffee-colored stream that lay in our path. Angie, who’d zoomed her GPS all the way in to pinpoint where Jasper had crossed, pointed to a narrow, muddy notch in the bank. “Dog tracks,” she said, and I saw that she was right. “That was a damn good collar.” I squinted at the map, which showed a narrow blue squiggle corresponding to the brown water before us. The fine print that bordered the squiggle sent a chill down my spine: the stream was named Moccasin Creek, and I was reasonably certain the name wasn’t a reference to footwear.
Moccasin Creek moved sluggishly between high, eroded banks bordered by overhanging branches. Lurking amid the leaves, camouflaged by the foliage, were countless snakes, I felt sure, draped liked venomous garlands, just waiting to drop upon us as we waded, neck-deep, in the murky waters. My nightmarish reverie was interrupted by Vickery. “Mind if I take a look at that map?” I handed it over, and he studied it briefly. He stepped closer to the bank and peered upstream and downstream, then huddled with Angie and me. “We could have big problems if we cross this creek,” he said quietly.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s nervous about snakes,” I said.
“Huh?” Vickery looked puzzled. He reexamined the map, then shook his head. “Actually, Doc, I’m more worried about humans than reptiles.” Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “We’re in Apalachee County right now,” he went on. “But over there? The other bank? That’s Miccosukee County.”
“Oh, good grief,” Angie groaned. “So what?”
I was inclined to take Angie’s view. “No offense,” I ventured, “but FDLE has jurisdiction statewide, right? You can go into any county in Florida.”
“Theoretically, yeah,” said Vickery. “But like I told Pettis the other day, we have to be invited by the locals—in this case, the Miccosukee County Sheriff’s Office. And Miccosukee County Sheriff Darryl Judson is not an inviting kind of guy. He’s old as dirt, hard as nails, and mean as a stepped-on cottonmouth.”
“Oh, come
on
,” Angie said. “Really, Stu? You’re actually worried about crossing a little bitty corner of Miccosukee County?”
“Hey, I’ve been around a long time, but I need to hang on a little longer to get my pension,” Vickery shot back. “Three years longer, to be precise. I’ve heard stories about Sheriff Judson. He’s got friends in high places—his father was a state senator or some such, back in the day—and he’s got dirt on other folks in high places, too. I never heard of anybody who won a pissing match with Sheriff Judson.”
“Can’t we claim innocence by way of ignorance? That we were walking in the woods and we didn’t know what county we were in? Circle back and ask for forgiveness instead of permission?”
He shook his head. “If Judson made a big stink and the brass took a close look at your GPS or the maps Nat printed out for us, they’d see the county line. Then they’d have to decide if we were lying or just stupid. That would make it even worse.”
“Stu, we’re working a homicide,” she argued, “and we have got reason to believe that it’s linked to a prior homicide—more than one, in fact—that was committed in Miccosukee County.”
“The fact that a dog might—emphasis on
might
—have dug up these age-old skulls in Miccosukee County,” he retorted, “is not going to carry a whole hell of a lot of weight with a territorial sheriff whose private kingdom has just been invaded.”
“Think about the guy who killed Pettis,” she challenged. “Maybe he already knows where the skulls came from, maybe not. But he’s got the collar, and he’s got a head start on us, right?” Vickery nodded grudgingly. “If he’s looking, and he gets there ahead of us, he might wreck the scene. Can we afford to take a chance on that?”
“You’re not the one whose neck is on the line,” he retorted. “I’m the case agent. If anybody gets hung on the cross by Sheriff Judson or one of his Tallahassee cronies, it’ll be me.”
“Call Riordan,” said Angie. “If he tells us to keep going, it’s on him, not you, right?”
Vickery frowned. “Shit.”
“Come on, Stu, grow a backbone,” she snapped. “Are you really just gonna mark time for the next three years? Is that who you want to be?” Vickery reddened; he snatched his cigar from his mouth and rolled it angrily between his thumb and fingers. “That poor son of a bitch back there died trying to help us,” she pressed. “Don’t we owe him at least a good
try
?” Vickery’s jaw clenched and unclenched. As he continued rolling the cigar, I noticed the pressure of his grip increased. Shreds of tobacco sifted through his fingers as he slowly crushed the cigar to bits.
“Goddammit,” he muttered. “You’re right.”
Angie smiled. “Good man. You want to call Riordan anyhow? Just to cover your ass?”
“Not particularly, but I guess I have to.” He pulled the phone from his belt and dialed the prosecutor. “So,” Vickery began after a few throat-clearing preliminaries, “we think we’re closing in on the bones . . . I hope so, too. But we have a slight wrinkle, and I figured you’d want a heads-up . . . Well, unfortunately, the damn dog didn’t pay too much attention to county lines and jurisdictions when he went sniffing around, if you catch my drift . . . What I mean is, we’ve tracked the dog as far as the Apalachee County line. If we want to keep tracking him the rest of the way to his hunting ground, we’ve got to cross into Miccosukee County . . . Yes, sir, I’m sure about that. I’m looking at his paw prints right now where he came across the creek from Miccosukee. Exactly, that’s Sheriff Judson’s county . . . I know, I know—Judson does put the ‘dick’ in ‘jurisdiction,’ doesn’t he?” Vickery forced a laugh. “Well, we just didn’t know—the GPS track from the collar didn’t show us the county lines . . . Yes, sir, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. We
should’ve
taken a closer look. But we didn’t. So here we are, out here in the middle of nowhere. Out here in the middle of a search that we think might lead to something . . . With all due respect, sir, I disagree. I believe we ought to keep going . . . No, sir, I
don’t
want to start a shooting war with the sheriff. But I also don’t want to let a hot trail go cold . . . No, sir, I
don’t
think it can wait till tomorrow . . . Look, whoever killed Pettis took the collar off the dog. You’re aware of that, right? . . .
No
, sir; no,
sir
, I am
not
condescending to you, I’m just making sure you’re aware that the collar’s gone . . . So the killer might be able to download the same data we’ve got, cover the same ground we’re covering.” Angie had made this same argument to Stu; now, she shook her head doubtfully and appeared about to interrupt him, but Stu held up a hand to shush her. “No, sir, I don’t know that to be a fact, but I just don’t think we can afford to take that chance, can we? What I
do
know is that if we spend twenty-four hours kissing the sheriff’s ass, our chances of finding whatever’s out here in the woods get worse, not better . . . I understand that this puts you in a tough spot, and I wish the dog had stayed in his own damn county, but he didn’t. If you tell us not to go on, we won’t, but I hope you won’t do that . . . All right, thank you, sir. . . . You’ll call the sheriff? Okay, I appreciate that . . . Yes, sir, I’ll be sure to keep you posted . . . I guarantee it—you’ll be the first to know if we find anything . . . Sorry to put you on the hot seat. Thank you, sir. Talk to you soon.” I had never heard so many “sirs” in such swift succession, but they seemed to have helped. Vickery hung up, blew out a long breath, and shook his head. “Well,
that
was fun.” He turned to the group and put on a smile. “Okay, people, let’s find a way to cross Moccasin
fuckin’
Creek that won’t get us drowned or snakebit.”
The steep, narrow notch where Jasper had crossed the stream looked risky, so Angie asked for volunteers to seek out an easier place to cross. She recruited two to jog upstream and another two downstream. “Turn around in ten minutes,” she instructed, “whether you’ve found a good crossing or not. We don’t have time for a big detour.” While they explored, we studied the detailed maps Nat had printed out for us. On the other side of the creek, the dog’s track was practically a beeline for half a mile or so, then it reached a spot where he seemed to loiter and explore. “That, I’m hoping, is where we might find something,” she said.
Her phone rang—an incongruous, startling sound, deep in the woods as we were. “Hi, Nat. What’s up? . . . Really? No kidding?
. . .
Hang on a second. Let me put you on speaker, so Stu can hear, too.” She flipped open the phone and pressed a button. “Nat, you still there?”
“I am,” came the computer analyst’s voice.
“Okay, back up and start over, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m getting data from the tracking collar again. Remember, I left the receiver in the fire tower and rigged it to a satellite link? So if I got a signal from the collar again, it would send the new data to my computer?”
“I remember. Go on,” Vickery prompted.