The Butterfly Forest

FIFTY-SEVEN

After I left the county jail, I stopped at a Kinko’s and made three dozen copies of the image Luke Palmer had drawn. Driving to the sheriff’s office, I thought about the last thing Palmer had said: “If anything happens to me, would you mind sending my niece a note to let her know Uncle Luke tried his best?”

“How do I reach her?” I’d asked.

As one of the guards came for Palmer, he said, “Give me your address. I’ll send it to you.”

“No time to write it down. Can you remember it if I tell you?”

“No problem.”

I gave him my mailing address at the marina. Palmer nodded as they lifted him from the chair and escorted him beyond a gray steel door.

I opened the large wooden door leading to Sheriff Clayton’s office. His secretary of eight years said he wasn’t in, and she didn’t know when to expect him. I smiled and began writing a note:

I placed the note in an envelope with a copy of the drawing. I said, “Please make sure Sheriff Clayton gets this when he returns from the D.A.’s office.”

Her eyebrows arched over the rims of her glasses. “I don’t know if he’s coming straight back. Might have to wait ‘til the morning.”

“It’s urgent.”

“I understand.” She dropped the envelope in a wooden in-box and continued working a Sudoku puzzle on her desk.

“Where’s the detective’s office?”

“Down the hall. Third door on the right,” she said, not looking up at me.

Detective Sandberg sat in a cubicle office, phone pressed to his ear, writing notes across a yellow legal pad. He glanced my way as I approached and motioned for me to sit in one of the two metal chairs in front of his desk. Other detectives worked phones and leads in cubicles scattered across the cavernous room. Behind Sandberg, on a white board, were pictures of Molly Monroe, Mark Stewart and Nicole Davenport. To his right was a calendar of Texas hill country, a barn, blue bonnets and a windmill.

He hung up the phone, looked at me and leaned back in his chair. “O’Brien, give me some good news. I have two search teams out there with twelve men each. Twenty-four of my best combing the Ocala National Forest looking for a pot farm. So far, we’ve found a couple of former meth labs and a few animal skeletons — looked like goats, and an abandoned Corvette that was stripped to the paint. Nothing near where we found the bodies.”

“It’s in there somewhere. You saw the pictures. If it’s gone, might be because whoever’s growing the stuff harvested it quickly and left.”

“We only have about another five hundred square miles to search. That forest is perfect for growing pot because the whole damn forest is green and weedy. The marijuana would blend in like green paint on green paint.”

I was silent.

“We sent a chopper up. Burned a thousand dollars in fuel crisscrossing the forest. Nothing.”

“You’ll find it.”

“Wish I had your optimism.”

“I have more than that.” I handed him a copy of the sketch Palmer had drawn.

“Who’s this?”

“I think it’s the man who killed those three people on the board behind you.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“Luke Palmer drew it. He says this is the face of the man he saw pull the trigger. Palmer said he saw him once before, in the back seat of a car heading into the forest.”

Sandberg said nothing. He leaned in and studied the image.

“I dropped this off to the sheriff’s secretary and asked her to give it to him.”

“You think Palmer’s telling the truth, or is this some image he concocted in his head to take some of the heat off him?”

“If I hadn’t met Frank Soto in the Walmart parking lot, I’d be skeptical, too. But I did, and I’m not. You should release this. See if someone knows who this guy is.”

“That will be up to Sheriff Clayton. I don’t know if he’ll feel comfortable releasing an image done by a man who we’re holding on murder charges.”

“An eyewitness to a shooting is an eyewitness. Where’s your evidence room?”

“Why?”

“Is Luke Palmer’s backpack there?”

“CSI pulled the blood stains from the deer off Palmer’s clothes and anything else they could find.”

“Did they find the bullet?”

“Bullet?”

“It’s in the lining.”

Detective Sandberg glanced at the images on the board behind him. “Let’s take a look.”