The Butterfly Forest

FORTY-NINE

Dave Collins pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and studied the pictures on my computer screen. He grunted and said, “I wonder if Molly and her boyfriend ever even noticed the marijuana growing back in there?”

“If they did, she didn’t mention it to her mother and me when I questioned her about Soto and why he might have been following her.”

“She was a college kid. Maybe she or her boyfriend did see them growing, and then decided to harvest a few leaves to take back to college.”

I could hear Nick outside on Jupiter’s cockpit, stoking heated charcoals in my grill while he cooked snook and snapper. The aroma of olive oil, fresh fish and lime hung in the air. Max, the consummate beggar, was at his feet. “I don’t think Molly would have picked marijuana leaves.”

Dave looked over the frame of his glasses. “Why?”

“I believe she was blatantly honest, a free spirit with few secrets. If she’d seen the marijuana, or even taken some, I think she would have mentioned it.”

“I wonder what kind of an operation is in there. It wouldn’t be difficult to grow and hide marijuana in Florida deep within a remote forest. If those plants we see in the image are the tip of the iceberg, there might be a hell of a lot more.”

“Enough to get Molly and Mark killed.”

Dave stood when Nick entered and headed to the galley. He chatted in Greek to Max. She was a few steps behind him.

Dave said, “The picture of the butterfly you sent me… it was indeed the atala. I spoke with an entomologist friend of mine at the University of Miami. He said the atala, in the caterpillar stage, is very colorful, too, spending its days gorging on the highly toxic coontie plant. And, as a butterfly, predators rarely attack it because of its bright red body. Birds instinctively know the atala was weaned on a plant that’s very poisonous to them. Toxins from the coontie remain in the butterfly after it emerges from its cocoon.”

“Beautiful, fragile and yet deadly to predators.”

“Yes, and it’s funny how nature does its balancing act. These particular butterflies can’t escape quickly. They fly very slowly, almost without effort. It’s as if they float in flight — a suspended animation, if you will. That can lead to the illusion that they aren’t afraid of people.”

“Maybe that’s why I got so close to the one I photographed.”

Dave looked at the image on the screen for a moment, his eyes settling back to mine. “Somebody’s growing marijuana, probably a lot of it, somewhere in the Ocala National Forest. Do you think this guy they picked up, Palmer, is our farmer?”

“He could have been hired by someone. That would explain why he was there. Palmer told investigators he was searching for Civil War relics.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t think a guy comes out of prison, after serving forty years, and takes up a hobby like hunting for antiquities in the middle of a national forest.”

“Then what do you think he was doing there?”

“He was hunting for something, but I don’t have a clue as to what.”

“Do you think he killed the first girl, the one in the fairy costume?”

“No, but I believe he knew her or had met her.”

“Over the phone, you’d mentioned the late-night drum beating ceremony with dozens of people who hadn’t had a shower in a while. A Midsummer’s Eve with a lot of dirt behind the ears.”

“Something like that,” I said. “When Palmer spoke, he seemed like he genuinely cared for the girl’s welfare.”

“It’s a possibility. But the hard facts are this: He was locked up for forty years. Murder. He hadn’t been with a woman in a lifetime. All of the sudden, deep in a forest, he stumbles into a treasure trove — a group of drugged-out hippies, many of the girls dressed in fantasy clothing. For a guy like that, it’s a Midsummer Night’s wet dream. Maybe he tried to take her, she fought back, and he snapped her neck. He buried her in a hole, and now the causality list is three bodies. So much for penal rehabilitation.”

“Fish ready in three minutes,” Nick shouted from the cockpit.

Dave pulled a barstool next to my computer screen as I brought up the last picture in Molly’s camera. It was another angle of the forest, coontie plants in the foreground, marijuana in the background hidden beneath oaks. “Gotcha,” I said.

“What’d you find?’ Dave leaned closer.

I enlarged the grainy image. “It appears to be a man — a man I’ve seen before.”

“But I wonder if Molly ever even saw him there?”

Under the oaks, hidden in shadows, Frank Soto stared into the camera lens.