The Butterfly Forest

TWENTY-THREE

His heavy face was filled with distrust, a sweat ring around the top part of his collar on his button-down shirt. Necktie loose. He was African-American with graying hair, coal-black eyes that drew you into them, like gravity.

“I’m Sean O’Brien. Detective Lewis in Sanford said I might find you here.”

“I’m here because it’s my job. Why are you here?”

I motioned with my hands. “I have information for you.”

His eyebrows rose. He shook his head and followed me to a cruiser where I turned and stood. “Look, Detective Sandberg, I worked homicide for thirteen years with Miami-Dade. The last place on the planet I want to be right now is here. However, a week ago, a perp tried to kidnap a woman and daughter from a Walmart parking lot. I happened to see it going down and intervened.”

“I heard about that. So you’re the guy who did the flying body-slam, huh?”

I nodded.

He said, “I wish we had video of that. It’s something I’d like to offer to the general public on YouTube to show them how to get killed real quick.”

“That’s a good idea. By default I fell into this thing. The perp, name’s Frank Soto, he might be the guy that put the girl in the grave.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

I told him about The Art House, Inkman and the fairy tattoo. I added, “So the forest may have been the first place Soto spotted Molly Monroe and her boyfriend.”

“Maybe he’s a psychopath, a serial killer. Maybe he killed the vic in the hole, and he was gunning for the Monroe woman, but we don’t know that.”

“I’d like to know if the girl in the back of the ambulance was sexually assaulted.”

“So would we, Mr. O’Brien. We’ll find out soon. I can tell you her neck was broken. If she was raped, how do you think rape plays into the scenario you’ve painted?”

“I don’t think Soto was kidnapping Molly Monroe and her mom to rape them. He’s a knee-breaker for bikers and other gangs. I think he was trying to silence them, and, more than likely, he was going to kill her boyfriend the same day, but the boyfriend left for vacation.”

“What could these college kids have seen that would cause their hit?”

“It may have been something the girl saw.”

He nodded. “Lots of weird stuff happens in here. We got reports the other day about some kind of animal sacrifices.”

“What do you mean?”

“Goats. Two campers reported they’d found goats killed. We sent in a unit. Officers said it looked like the animals had been slaughtered next to a round ring, a ring of rocks formed into a circle. Looks like there’d been a big fire in the circle.”

“How were the goats killed?”

“Heads were cut off. You never know what you’ll see in a place this secluded.”

As the coroner’s van drove slowly by us, I said, “Maybe the dead kid in that van witnessed it, too, and that’s why she was murdered and tossed in the hole.”

“The ranger mentioned he saw a camper or a homeless guy walking down a dirt service road. We want to find and question him. Unfortunately, the forest is Mecca for crazies, and a lot of people just down and out. They pitch tents way back in here and scratch out a survival somehow. Forestry runs these people out when they can find them. But they drift back in.”

Luke Palmer thought he would be safer sleeping in a bombing range. It was after 11:00 p.m. He’d never seen or heard the Navy bomb this late. Besides, he was on the outskirts of the range, not in the center where the bunkers and other targets were present.

He pitched his tent beneath the canopy of tall pines, pulled the lid off a can of beans ‘n franks and ate with a plastic spoon. He thought about the dead girl. She’s somebody’s daughter. He wanted to report it to the forest rangers, but no one would believe he didn’t do it.

No, he didn’t do it, but Luke Palmer had an idea who did.

But they wouldn’t believe that either. He watched bats dart under the light of a three-quarter moon. A slight odor of sulfur and burnt gunpowder settled into the earth along with the smell of decaying leaves and oozing pine sap.

As Palmer lay under the tent, a light rain began to fall on the canvas. He closed his eyes. Pop, pop, pop. The sounds bled into his dreams where he saw a small, two-story white house under the moss-draped live oaks. Inside, Ma Barker and her boy, Fred, huddled down with pistols drawn. Palmer heard the popping noises of guns firing, bullets breaking glass and slamming into the walls with the ferocity of a hundred ax blades chewing wood and spitting splinters. All he could see was plaster, paint chips and dust coating the old woman and her youngest son.

The FBI was closing in and, soon, those in Ma Barker’s house would be silenced forever.