The Butterfly Forest

ELEVEN

I awoke before sunrise, slipped on shorts, T-shirt and running shoes. Max kept under the blanket on her side of the bed. She’d stayed up too late last night pacing the screened-in porch while gators rumbled and roared mating calls on the riverbank. Fog stood motionless above the water as if layered clouds had descended from the heavens overnight. The rising sun was a burnt orange planet trying to penetrate the mist. The sunlight was a shattered radiance bent through steam and moving water, creating color wheels of dappled rainbows. The river itself was drenched in morning light.

My three-mile jog took me north, most of the running on a path near the river. As the sun eased over the tree line, I thought about Elizabeth and Molly Monroe. I’d left my card with them and instructions to call if they needed me. I remembered my cell phone sitting back on the porch next to a framed picture of my wife, Sherri. And I remembered the promise I’d made to Sherri to do something else with my life. “I’m trying,” I said, the sound of my own voice out of character in the surrounding primal land of birdsong, water and light, a place where Florida existed like it had before the Spanish arrived 450 years ago.

I pictured Frank Soto and the hate on his face as he kicked me. What had Molly done or seen…or what had he thought she’d done or seen? Maybe Elizabeth was right. Maybe Soto was your basic serial rapist who got his erections by stalking women, using hate and violence as self-satisfying, sadistic foreplay. Then why did he try to take them both, mother and daughter? Could it have been because he assumed the daughter had told the mother something, and both needed to be silenced?

I climbed the steps to my back porch, and there was Max waiting. She was pacing to a different stimulus, this one bladder-induced. I let her out, and she scampered to her favorite spot in the wide yard. She watched a small Johnboat motor down the center of the river, a fisherman sipping coffee from a thermos, a V rippling the still water.

My cell phone didn’t indicate any missed calls or text messages. I glanced down at Sherri’s beautiful eyes and said, “I’m trying. No calls. That’s a good thing.”

Max looked up at me. “Yep, I know, most of the time I talk to you. I was just…” Her head cocked, eyes curious. “Oh, never mind, Max. Let’s head to the marina.” I had checked on the web and knew we had a few days of hot sun. Now was the time to begin repairs to my boat. It, like my home, creaked with old age.

I locked the river house, put Max in the front seat of the Jeep, headed for the grocery store and then went to Ponce Marina. What I needed was a few days of sanding, painting, lots of sweating, saltwater, and some fresh seafood to keep my head in the direction I told myself it needed to be. Then I thought about the heart-felt embrace Elizabeth Monroe had given me in the parking lot, the scent of her perfume, the slight trembling in her body, the way she held me. But it was at the restaurant when I felt something unfasten inside me. It was when we were saying goodbye. She had faked a boldness that I knew was thin, a shield she held to protect her daughter, like she’d probably done so many times before. And now a psycho had pointed a gun in her face, left her with emotional scars and the threat of his return.

I found the card Detective John Lewis had given me. I called his number, reintroduced myself and asked, “Did you come up with anything more on Soto?”

He cleared his throat. “Right now, Mr. O’Brien, the suspect is still on the run.”

“Where’s his family?”

“We don’t have a last known address. The DL lists an address of a PO Box in Miami. Soto’s done a good job of not leaving a plastic trail. Must use cash for everything. I heard you worked homicide in Miami, is that so?”

“It’s been a while. You think Soto will return?”

“Hard to say what a criminal mind will or will not do. We have a visible presence at the restaurant, officers stopping in for coffee. We’re not so visible to the untrained eye at Miss Monroe’s home, but we’re there.”

“How about when Molly Monroe returns to her apartment in Gainesville?”

“Florida Department of Law Enforcement is working with Gainesville PD.”

“So you believe it wasn’t a random attack, right?”

He didn’t answer immediately. I could hear a croaky sound deep within his lungs. He said, “Correct. We have reason to believe Soto knew or knew of Molly Monroe.”

“Is that because of the tat she saw at the butterfly research center in Gainesville?”

“Yes.”

“She tell you it looked like a woman wearing butterfly wings?”

“Yeah.”

“Detective, it was a hybrid tat.”

“Hybrid? What the hell does that mean?’

“The face was like a young fairy with the body of a grown woman superimposed with the wings and lower extremities of a butterfly.”

He snorted when he laughed. “A damn fairy, like a cartoon, on the body of a nude woman. Now, what does that tell you about the mind of Frank Soto?”

A handful of thoughts raced through my head — not one of them good. I knew the place and direction I needed to be — at the marina, chartering the boat, making a life. I pointed my Jeep that way. But inside, deep inside, my internal compass was beginning to spin toward Elizabeth and Molly Monroe.