The Butterfly Forest

FORTY-THREE

“I need to go,” I said to Elizabeth, touching her shoulders. “Stay here. I’ll be back soon. Maybe they’ve got Soto in their sights. Whoever it is, there’s a good chance he could be connected to Molly and Mark’s deaths. If it’s Soto, maybe I can learn something, possibly hear him confess and tell us why he did it. It’s a remote chance, but I’d like to be there when they pull him out.”

“Be careful, Sean.”

“The officers will stay with you.”

“I never thought I was capable of feeling hatred this deep for another human.”

I touched her hand and ran to the squad car where the sharpshooter deputy was standing, speaking quickly into a radio microphone. I waited for him to finish and said, “You’ll never make it out there in that SUV. You’ll sink to your oil pan. I have a Jeep. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

“Appreciate that,” he said, lifting a scoped rife from the vehicle.

Within fifteen minutes, we’d almost reached the scene. It was wetland. Thick swamps, the muggy air filled with the scent of moss and rotting leaves. Orders came through the radio for the deputy to come as close to the river as possible, where the suspect was believed heading. We passed two cruisers, stalled, buried to their axels in black mud.

The deputy sitting on the passenger side of my Jeep was Anthony Rodriguez. I’d briefly told him of my involvement in the case, and he told me he’d spent two tours of duty in Iraq before returning to Ocala and taking a job with the sheriff’s SWAT division. He was rated expert with the M-24 rifle. I could tell he was already slipping into sniper mode, becoming quiet the closer we drove to his possible target. I said, “One of the officers said the river was more than a half mile wide down there.”

“Yeah. Flat and low. Not much wind today.”

We heard the chopper hovering about a quarter mile directly east of where we were moving. The blue pickup truck, the one that I first saw transporting the dogs, was parked under a cypress tree, dark mud dripping from its fender wells. A man sat in the truck, cigarette smoke curling out of the open window. I recognized him as the man who was driving the truck when I first saw Bo Watson sitting in the passenger side this morning.

As we churned through the mud, I spotted another pickup about thirty feet on the far right side from the dog truck. The other one was green, a Department of Forestry emblem on the sides. I remembered it, or one identical, the late afternoon I was at the gravesite of the teenager girl. The same shade of mud was splattered on the truck again. Ed Crews sat behind the wheel, speaking into a hand-held radio microphone. He wore dark sunglasses, nodded and waved when we passed.

I turned to Deputy Rodriguez. “Whoever they’re chasing, I don’t want him to escape, but if we don’t have to take him out, that would be better.”

“If he killed these college kids he deserves—.”

“We don’t know if he did it. We do know he’s running from law enforcement. Maybe he did something that has no connection to the murders.”

“I don’t like to think that way.”

“I know. It can cloud your judgment looking through the scope.”

He said nothing.

“You can stalk a target you know is bad to the bone, someone who’s responsible for taking out one of your men, or a whole squad. You wait long hours for the bastard to show. Full body shot would be nice. You’ll take the head. You look at the leaves blowing in the trees, dust moving in the air — hell, some people think you can see air. You calibrate heat, wind, and trajectory — anticipate movement. You have more patience than most humans because you need it. You need it to assassinate another human being because you know that target is the enemy. Today, we don’t know that.”

His head turned toward me. “Who are you? You talk like you’ve been there.”

“Sometimes I’m still there. I used an M-82.”

“Impressive weapon. One of the best. Right now I have a job to do.”

“We all do. Finding who’s responsible for the deaths of Molly and Mark is our job. I believe it’s bigger than one man, Frank Soto. If we kill the worker bee, we’ll never be led back to the nest, and that’s where we’ll find our queen.”