The Blue Edge of Midnight

CHAPTER 20

I strode across the scuffed incline to the front steps, looking back at Brown only once to confirm that he was not following. The first step up to the raised porch creaked under my boot. I hesitated at the hinged plank door and listened for several seconds to stone quiet. Then I turned the dull metal knob and went in low and quick.

The room was in muted darkness. The only two windows were so smeared with dirt that the little light that snuck through was yellow and dull.

I came slowly out of my crouch and could make out a three- legged table that had tumbled against the front wall without its balance. A small stone fireplace was to the left, its ashes dead. A chair was standing alone in the middle of the floor, the seat facing the door as if someone had been waiting. I picked up the glint of broken glass from an oil lamp that had been shattered, its pieces scattered in one corner. The room smelled of animal grease, rotted food and wet smoke. My eyes adjusted, but I still almost missed her.

She was on the floor, partly wrapped in a child's filthy blanket and tucked far under a wood-framed cot. Her eyes were closed but when I touched her I felt soft muscle quiver under my hand.

"It's all right, sweetheart. It's OK. I'm here to help you. You're all right now," I said softly.

I got my hands around her and slowly pulled her out from under the bed. She did not fight but I heard a tiny keening start up in the back of her throat and it was heart-wrenching to know that that was all the struggle she had left in her.

I pulled a cover from the bed and wadded it up and slipped it under her head. Her face was swollen under a layer of grime and a crust of dried moisture was gathered in her lashes and the corners of her eyes. I thought of dehydration and took the mason jar from my bag.

"Here, sweetheart. Take some water."

I tipped the water to her cracked lips but at first could only wet them. Most of what I poured ran down her chin and neck, leaving streaks through the dirt on her skin. Then she began to take it, her mouth opening slightly like a tiny fish trying to breathe.

I felt her for injuries. I looked for blood. She did not recoil at my touch but kept her eyes shut. Maybe she couldn't open them. Maybe she never wanted to open them again. After the cursory check I got on the cell phone, punched in 911 and before the operator could tie me up with questions, I identified myself as a police officer and asked her to put me through to Vincente Diaz with the FDLE special task force in Broward and, yes, it was an emergency. I kept repeating myself and it still took three more dispatchers and what seemed like ten minutes to get to Diaz. The public's perception of police technological efficiency is always skewed by TV and movies. They are never that good.

"Vince Diaz," the detective finally answered.

"Diaz, this is Max Freeman."

"Max. When did you rejoin the brotherhood?"

I ignored the sarcasm.

"Diaz, I've got the girl, the Alvarez girl."

There was silence and I thought we'd been cut off or had lost the satellite connection.

"Diaz?"

"OK. OK, Freeman. Take it easy, all right? Slow down man. Tell me what's going on."

Diaz's voice had slipped into negotiator mode and I realized I'd used the wrong words.

"I found her, Diaz. I found the kid and she's alive. But you gotta get some help out here now."

"Jesus. You found her? How the hell… Where are you, Max?"

I could hear him talking out into a room, spreading the word before coming back to me.

"OK, Max. She's alive? Right? You said she's alive? Where the hell are you?"

I got up and walked outside, hoping for better reception. Nate Brown was gone. If the old man had been in on it, he'd turned by bringing me here. If he'd truly been trying to find the killer, as his group at Loop Road had indicated, maybe they'd succeeded, and taken care of it on their own. Either way, I had a feeling Brown wouldn't be back and I had little clue to where the hell I was.

I looked up into the tree canopy as if there'd be a damn street sign. This was not Thirteenth and Chestnut. You couldn't call in an address.

"We're in the Glades," I said. "Somewhere south of my river off the L-10 canal. West of the canal and in a long hardwood hammock somewhere."

I could visualize them going to the map in Hammonds' office, tracing their fingers from the yellow pushpin that was my river shack. It was quiet on the porch. The air in the trees had gone still and the smell of rotting animal carcass drifted from the gator rack. There was no bird sound. No leaf flutter. Just dead silence.

"Jesus, Max. That's a lot of area," Diaz came back. "Can you give us some mileage? Some landmark?"

I stepped back into the cabin, repeating, I knew, the too vague directions off the canal. That's when I saw it. I don't know how I missed it the first time. Maybe I dismissed the chair at first because it was non-threatening and then because I saw the girl. Now I looked down at the dark cloth on the seat and on top of it was a GPS unit. It was nearly identical to the one I'd found in my river shack.

"I think I can do better than that," I said to Diaz, carrying the unit back out into the light. "I've got a GPS unit."

Billy had shown me how to operate the unit we'd had before. This one had power and I called up the present location on the read-out. I repeated the longitude and latitude numbers to Diaz and asked if I was doing it right.

"That's got to be it, Mr. Freeman."

It was Hammonds on the phone.

"We're dispatching a TraumaHawk helicopter. Is there anyplace for it to land when it gets there?"

Hammonds' voice was taut, but in control.

"Yes," I answered, thinking about the dry ground that Brown and I had walked across to enter the hammock. "There's dry ground to the east of my location." I went outside, walking around for the first time to survey the land around the cabin.

"We're in the middle of the hammock, but the marsh is only a hundred yards or so out."

In the back of the cabin the high ground sloped down to a twenty-foot-wide ribbon of water. A natural canal wound off into the thickness of the tree cover. Pulled up on the bank was a wooden skiff, almost identical to Brown's, and a pitted, flat-bottomed aluminum boat with an ancient Evinrude outboard motor mounted on the transom.

"And you may also be able to get a boat in here," I said, now moving, slower, to the other side of the cabin.

"We've got some logistics people working on that with the coordinates now," Hammonds said.

The other side of the building was in shadow and along the outside wall I was looking at a long split trunk of raw cypress set on the ground behind the gator skin rack. The meat of the wood was stained nearly black. Flies were buzzing around the surface and also around a stump the diameter of a barrel and half as high. It was where the gator butchering was done. A hatchet was half buried in the stump, its blade sunk deep. Next to it a small knife had also been planted in the wood. Its handle was worn smooth and polished with use. Its blade was short and shiny and had a distinctive curve to it.

"Mr. Freeman?" The cell phone was still at my ear. It was Hammonds. His voice was careful. "Mr. Freeman, are you alone with the girl?"

"Yes," I said. "It would appear so."

"All right. Stay on the line."

Diaz came back on the phone. I had left the stump and was moving down a narrow path that appeared worn and led slightly down and into a thicket of trumpet vine and fern.

"Max, we're coming out there. What kind of shape is the kid in? How's she doing, medically?"

"She's breathing OK, but she's probably got some dehydration going on," I said, pushing the branches and vines away with one arm as I followed the path down into a small clearing.

"How about injuries? Any injuries?"

In the clearing the stench of animal gristle was overwhelming. On the ground was a rotting pile of entrails that had been dumped there after the butchering. I was about to turn back when I saw him from the corner of my eye.

From the thick limb of a poisonwood tree hung the body of David Ashley, a yellow nylon rope around his neck, a plain wooden chair that matched the one in the cabin tipped over beneath his feet. He stared down at me, his head cocked at an angle. But his eyes had gone opaque.

"And Diaz," I said. "You better bring a body bag."

"A what? I thought you said she was…"

"She's OK, Diaz," I cut him off. "But you got somebody else out here who's not."

I stayed on the line and backed out of the clearing. Diaz was also moving. The phone signal kept fading and I heard shouts and commands in the background.

"All right, Max. We're on our way. I got your number. We're bringing a team. Max? You all right?"

"Yeah."

I punched him off and worked my way back to the front of the shack and went inside and sat on the floor next to the girl. She hadn't moved. I fed her more water and she still wouldn't open her eyes. When I touched her the quiet, high-pitched keening started again. I stayed nearby but only held the phone and kept my hands to myself.

I heard the rustling of birds in the trees five minutes before I heard the helicopter. I went out to the porch in time to see a group of green herons sail out of the trees and head out to the marsh and then I picked up the flat sound of blades chopping the sky. There was a scratching sound of nervous scrambling on the wood below me and I heard a splash in the canal behind the cabin that was too loud for a fish.

The mechanical noise grew and the leaves in the canopy started spinning and then thrashing as the chopper came in overhead, hovered, moved off toward the marsh and then sank down below the tree line.

A new quiet returned and I waited in it for fifteen minutes before I heard the snapping and crashing of someone on a headlong rush through the underbrush and vines coming hard from the direction of the chopper. Richards was the first one through. Her hair was tucked up under a baseball cap, the ponytail flashing behind. She was coming through the tangle like a swimmer, arms reaching and sweeping anything in the way behind. Her jeans were soaked to midthigh and as she got closer I could see fresh red welts across her face where the branches had whipped her.

"Where is she?" she said as soon as she got within range. The words were urgent but not harsh. I stepped aside as she started up the stairs and her eyes were bright green with adrenaline and checked emotion as she swept past me. Diaz was five minutes behind, in high boots and picking his way with more care.

"Jesus, Max," he said, out of breath when he reached the porch. "This is fucking out here."

He looked around, assessing the scene and narrowing his eyes at the sight of the gator-skin rack.

"The medical guys are coming up," he said, and then stepped to the door.

Inside the cabin Richards had gathered the child in her arms and was holding her on the bed, rocking. I thought at first that she was singing some kind of lullaby, but realized she was repeating the same phrase, "You're safe now, you're safe now," over and over. The girl's head was pressed into the detective's neck and now she was sobbing, her small body vibrating. Her eyes had opened and she was staring, and I hoped that what she was seeing would someday go away.

Richards rocked with her and I saw her look at the child's blanket, its pattern partially obscured with dirt, and the sight seemed to confuse her. She pulled it off the girl and set it aside.

I hadn't paid much attention to it at first, but something about the size and color of the blanket now sparked a memory of a mother's anguished words. The Alvarez girl had been abducted from her backyard. But it was Alissa Gainey who was all ready for bed when she was taken.

"She was already in her pajamas. Her little blanket was gone. She never put it down. Oh God, she's gone."

I filed the small rough stone away in my head and watched Diaz as he stepped around the room, absorbing with a cop's eye but touching nothing. I couldn't tell if he was using crime scene protocol or was just repulsed by the filth. I told him about the chair, how the GPS unit had been set on it. He looked at it.

"It's like he was putting a sign on the door. Like he was saying, OK, you found me. But it's too late for the girl."

I started to offer a different theory, thinking of Nate Brown, who might have left the GPS as the only way to bring in help quickly, but stopped and only nodded. Maybe Hammonds was right about the snake pit. But now the snakes had given up escape and started feeding on themselves.

But if Brown had been in on the abduction, why not finish the job? Or at least walk away? If he stumbled onto this scene, what would his options have been? Pole his skiff to the nearest pay phone and call 911? He obviously knew the way to my river shack. Had he been in my place that day and left the other GPS to frame me? I somehow couldn't picture the old man in smooth-bottomed "booties."

Outside the sound of the medivac team hacking and stomping through the hammock grew. We went out and Diaz directed them in with their portable litter and two huge orange carrying cases of medical equipment. They clomped up the steps and I wondered if the floor of the place was going to hold the weight of all David Ashley's new company.

Diaz and I watched through the doorway as the team started unpacking. Either the child wouldn't let go of Richards or it was the other way around. The detective held the girl while the techs examined her. I turned away feeling useless.

"So where's this DOA?" Diaz asked and I led him around to the back of the cabin. He was still recording with his eyes, mapping the layout, studying the access, trying to put himself in the place. He was a good cop, but I doubted if anyone could put themselves in the world that Ashley lived in out here.

The sun was past high noon now and a natural wind had set the high leaves turning, fracturing the light that dappled the ground cover of dead twigs and leaf husks.

"Jesus. What kind of person could live this way?" Diaz said.

I didn't offer an opinion and kept on walking, but Diaz reached out and caught my elbow.

"Look, Max. I'm not talking out of school here by telling you you're moving back up on Hammonds' shit list," he said, looking in my face as if he were trying to be an ally. It was another good interview technique and when you were good at it, it was hard to see through it. I couldn't tell now.

"This is the second time you find a kid. It's going to be hard to prove that you're not in it."

He was right. But now I was in it.

"The man's gonna think whatever he needs to think," I said, trying to be nonchalant about my own suspicions about Hammonds' surveillance of me. "I think you've got higher priorities right now, regardless of what your boss thinks of me."

Diaz shrugged and looked away. Maybe he was on my side.

When we got to the back of the cabin, the detective noted the two boats, wondering aloud if the old Evinrude on the rowboat worked. When we got to the butchering site, he put his hand to his nose, surveyed the scene, then turned away. He made no comment on the knife stuck in the stump.

"How the hell did you get out here anyway?" he asked.

I told him about Brown appearing at dawn on my river and about the trip up the canal and through the marsh.

"The mysterious Gladesman? The war hero? And you didn't think there was a chance that this old guy, strong old guy I might add, would just whack you during this trip through the wilderness and leave you for the gators?"

"Yeah. I thought about it," I said, and kept walking.

I led him down the trail to Ashley's body. A cloud of insects had gathered in the midday heat and their buzzing set up a low hum. The sight of a hanged man didn't seem to bother Diaz as much as the animal slaughter. He'd seen dead men before and this one held no pity for him.

"I couldn't find a damn thing on this guy while he was alive," Diaz said. "No paper trail of any kind. No arrests. No property. Nada. We're not going to have any prints on him until they take them at the morgue. What's he look? Forty? Forty-five? How does anyone live in the world these days, even out here, without leaving a trace?"

When I didn't respond Diaz reached out and pushed a leg, setting the corpse in a slow spin.

"So he gets threatened by the encroachment of civilization and like some animal protecting its turf he starts killing off the enemy's young to scare them back."

Diaz's spoken theory turned under the unseeing gaze of marbled eyes. The detective might be wrong, but no correction would come from Ashley's blackened lips.

"Then he sees it isn't working and his psychosis gets to him and he does himself and leaves the kid to die out here in this godforsaken place."

Ashley stopped spinning.

"Murder-suicide," Diaz said, turning away. "Seen it a dozen times. Not as weird as this," he said, raising his palms to the hammock. "But a dozen times."

It was a good theory. Made for a neat, plausible package. But I didn't believe it. As Ashley's body had turned I'd seen the scabbard still laced through his belt, the short knife clipped inside. The one stuck in the stump wasn't his.

In the distance we heard the low grumble of powerful outboard motors rolling through the trees from the direction of the creek.

"That's gotta be Hammonds and the bag boys," Diaz said, starting back up the trail.

As Diaz passed the butchering area and rounded the corner, I took a wet handkerchief from my pocket and pulled the curved knife from the stump. If it wasn't Brown's and it wasn't Ashley's, whose was it? I folded and wrapped the blade and tucked it down into my combat boot. I was again corrupting a crime scene, harboring evidence. But I also knew the one we were really after had finally slipped up, left something behind he couldn't afford to lose. But we'd need him to come after it. The knife was useless without the hand of the owner.

Hammonds was jumping from the bow of a center-console Whaler when I came around the corner. A second identical boat was still trying to get up the shallow sloping bank, the driver jabbing the throttle and churning up the creek bottom with the propeller. There were five men in each boat. I could tell the two with Hammonds were FBI even before they turned around and showed the bright yellow letters sewn onto the backs of their navy-blue windbreakers.

Hammonds was also wearing a light jacket despite the steaming heat. At least he'd taken off his tie. But he was still wearing black wingtips, now sunk to the laces in mud. Diaz was talking to him, his hands pointing: The kid was in there with Richards, the DOA back there.

The FBI guys were next to them now, listening but looking up into the trees as if they were spotting for snipers. Diaz took the crime scene crew from the second boat and waited for them to assemble their gear before going back to Ashley. Hammonds started toward me. The mud sucked at his shoe and nearly pulled if off before he reached down and rescued it. He didn't seem flustered when he finally approached. In fact, he seemed damn near jovial.

"Nice place, Freeman," he said, and the jocularity of it caught me off guard. "When we get back you can tell me in your own words how you came to find it." I was silent. The FBI was silent. We all moved on to the cabin.

The medical techs had the girl on a stretcher. An IV was taped to her hand, the line being fed from a plastic pouch of clear liquid that I was familiar with. They had wiped her face clean with swabs and covered her with clean white blankets. They were ready to move back to the helicopter. Richards was still stroking the child's hair and quickly briefed Hammonds.

"She's shocky and suffering from dehydration and exposure. Probably hasn't had anything to drink since he took her. They're not sure if she would have stayed conscious much longer, but she should be all right now."

I could tell Richards was trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.

"They don't think she was abused."

"I want you and Diaz in the hospital with her until she's stable," Hammonds said, touching his detective's shoulder.

She nodded and the techs picked up the litter and started out. As they passed me, Richards looked up into my face. Her eyes were shiny with tears and I thought she tried to smile when she said, "We got here in time."

Hammonds was watching me when I turned back into the room. The FBI guys were moving through the place. One of them had unpacked an expensive digital camera and was shooting the room from different angles, recording the world of a monster for their academy classes, I thought.

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.