The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 21

The last light had left the sky by the time we reached the public fishing camp that Hammonds used as a staging area. I could see the glow of unnatural lights from a distance, but we still had to use hand-held spotlights to find our way to the boat ramp docks.
When we hit solid ground the group moved with a familiar efficiency. Others who had been waiting throughout the afternoon in boredom jumped to help unload the boats. A large white crime scene van was parked nearby on the shell parking lot and next to it was a black Chevy Suburban from the medical examiner’s office. I could see a sheriff’s helicopter sitting fifty yards behind it.
The techs moved the evidence and the equipment first and then let the M.E.’s people retrieve Ashley’s remains. As they hoisted the black body bag out of the Whaler a floodlight suddenly flashed on, its brightness causing everyone to squint and turn their faces or shield their eyes. Billy had been right about the media. At least one news crew had staked out the staging area and now was getting “exclusive footage” of the body being removed from the Everglades.
No one was surprised. Little could be kept from the media. Every newsroom had a variety of police and emergency scanners or contracted with a sophisticated service that did nothing but monitor the array of radio traffic and dispatch instructions being sent twenty-four hours a day. Some agencies had even given up on the traditional signal codes, a now archaic attempt to broadcast a homicide as a Signal 5 or a rape as a Signal 35 in hopes of keeping some eavesdroppers at bay. Reporters and the freelance listening service operators knew the codes by heart and the game was useless.
Since the child killings began, any radio traffic sending cops out to the Glades would have caused an immediate heads up. By this time there would be TV crews at the hospital, the Flamingo Lakes neighborhood and outside the task force headquarters. Out here a young woman reporter and cameraman had gambled on following the crime scene and M.E. units, and had spent the day waiting to see who or what would come back in on the boats. Their payoff was the body bag footage. And I knew it would make prime time on the news.
I stood on the other side of the Whaler, just outside the cone of the camera’s light, watching as the M.E. guys lifted Ashley out. The boat’s stern was still rocking in shallow water and as one of the techs stepped over the gunwale he stumbled and a strap on the bag got caught on one of the stern cleats. As the camera rolled, the two men struggled to free the package. Another tech came to help but they couldn’t pull it loose. The scene was getting awkward under the glare of the television lights and I thought of how it was going to play on the eleven o’clock news. It might be my only opportunity.
With one quick move I bent and pulled the wrapped knife from my boot, snapped it open and stepped into the boat. The camera lights flashed on the blade and with one motion I cut the strap clean.
One of the M.E. boys said thanks, and they continued up the slope to the Suburban, the cameraman following. Now he had even better footage.
As I climbed back out of the boat I saw Hammonds watching me but he was quickly distracted by someone calling his name.
“Chief Hammonds. Excuse me, Chief.”
The woman reporter approached and instead of raising his palm and walking past her, Hammonds stopped. She was short and thin with high cheekbones and brown eyes that held Hammonds’ attention and seemed to simultaneously assess the others in his group, including me.
“Chief, can you give me anything on where you’ve been and maybe who’s in the bag?” she asked in an informal way. The cameraman was still across the lot and she was being both polite and disarming. Hammonds seemed to know her.
“Donna, you know the drill. First I have to go in and brief the sheriff. These guys have to speak to their people,” Hammonds said, hooking a thumb at the FBI agents. “And then we’ll most likely have a press conference for everybody at the same time for the eleven o’clock.” He too was being polite.
“OK. Off the record then,” Donna said, turning back to her cameraman as if to emphasize that he wasn’t filming. “Just so I didn’t wait out here all day being eaten by mosquitoes for nothing.”
“Off the record, Donna,” Hammonds said, the grin I’d seen earlier now undisguised. “I think we got our guy.”
The agents turned their heads and began walking with Hammonds toward the helicopter and the reporter turned to me.
“Mr. Freeman? Right?” she said. “Coming out of the swamp again. How you doing?”
I looked in her face, a foolish confirmation. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a smart reporter would recognize me from the plane crash with Gunther only a week ago. I didn’t respond.
“Mr. Freeman, are you on loan from Philadelphia?” She was again polite. “Does any of this tie in somehow to Philadelphia?”
Billy was right again. There would always be one who did their homework.
“No comment,” I said, feeling a flush rise in my neck.
“You coming?” Hammonds called from the parking area where the helicopter blades were just starting to spin. I turned and jogged after him.
We were all strapped in and the helicopter was beginning to wobble and rise when Hammonds turned and yelled over the engine whine: “We’ll have a briefing in the conference room as soon as we’re in.”
He was talking to all of us and looking at me. As the machine rose he pulled a headset over his ears and no one said a word during the trip in. I stared out the window and shivered at the thought of the last time I flew. But this time there was only an ocean of black below. For thousands of acres there was not a light. Without a moon, even the canals that did run through the sawgrass could not show themselves. The windows of the chopper only reflected the pilot’s green instrument board.
It was hot and close inside the cramped space and I sat trying to imagine Ashley somehow moving the girl out into his old and rusted rowboat and making it out here in the dark four nights ago but the vision wouldn’t come. His navigation through this part of the wilderness I didn’t doubt. His ability to steal her away from the backyard and through the man-made lake was also plausible for a man of his talents. But there was no waterway or wood that led from the surrounding streets of Flamingo Lakes into these dark acres. How would a man like him make that leap? How would a man confined to oil lamps and animal skinning send an e-mail of GPS coordinates from a downtown Radio Shack?
I was convinced he hadn’t, but I wasn’t sure what Hammonds believed. As I ground the edges, a false dawn and then a sliver of light put a border on the eastern horizon. The glow of the coastal city. Minutes later we crossed highway 27 due west of Fort Lauderdale. It was the boundary. On one side was blackness, on the other lay a blanket of lights webbed all the way to the ocean.
The pilot brought us in on a straight heading, following a line of orange-tinged lights that flanked a boulevard running through suburbia. You couldn’t see the trees at night, only dark splotches interrupting the pattern of street lamps. The broader dark areas I knew had to be golf courses. The light grids thickened as we approached what I could now see was the glowing gray belt of the interstate, and we started down. The pilot swept us in a banking circle and we hovered over the neighborhood that tolerated the sheriff’s administration building and he eased down to it. I wondered what the citizens thought of the chopper’s occasional wind and noise assault, the sight of a machine so familiar but so far from their experience. They would never ride in it, or sit in it on their way to some important meeting. They surely weren’t asked whether they had objections to its boisterous comings and goings. Maybe they didn’t give a damn. Maybe they just watched TV and became oblivious to its sound, just like the night train whistle or the hum of interstate traffic. That’s just the way it was. You just live in it.
The helipad was next to a motor pool and as a group we climbed out of the settled helicopter and walked along the now-closed garage bays and through a set of fenced gates. Hammonds’ key card let us through an unmarked metal door into the big building. He was slipping us in the back way. We all knew the TV crews and reporters were staked out in front. We went up an elevator that may have been the same one Diaz had taken me on, but it was a different ride.
We stank. We were four men who’d spent a day in the humid Everglades in the company of rotting entrails, decaying plants and a ripe corpse. We had sweated through clothes that were soaked in swamp water and smeared with mud. Our faces were insect-bitten and sunburned. Hammonds had pushed number six when we got on, but the elevator stopped at four and opened. A woman in office attire carrying an armload of files started to get on but either the sight or smell hit her and she backed off and flipped the back of her fingers mumbling something that sounded like “go on.” We got off at six.
It was nine o’clock but the office pods and aisles were still filled with investigators in shirtsleeves and with uniformed aides. A wave seemed to push out in front of Hammonds, causing a silence as it went. He nodded at several people. An older detective reached out and briefly shook his hand and said, “Congratulations.”
When we got to the glassed office, both Diaz and Richards were waiting. The FBI broke off to their computer table and Hammonds crooked his finger to the detectives and to me as he entered his office. Diaz closed the door behind us.
Without a word Hammonds went through another small door in the back corner of his office. I heard water begin to run.
I sat down in an upholstered chair, mud and all. Diaz was still wearing his clothes from the swamp, minus the boots. Richards had changed her shirt and was wearing a tight knit top tucked into her water-stained jeans. She’d brushed her hair to a gloss.
“How’s the girl?” I asked, an excuse to look at her face.
“She’s fine. Her family’s with her.” A small smile touched the corners of her mouth.
Hammonds returned, wiping his face with a towel and then dropping heavily into his chair and leaning back.
“OK. Update me.”
“The kid’s all right,” Diaz started, looking at a small notepad. “She was dehydrated. Her, um, potassium levels were down. She was covered with insect bites and there was a small bite, maybe a rodent, the doc said, on one foot.” He flipped a page as if it had to come from some official record.
“There was no sign of sexual assault and the only sign of physical injury was some bruises on her arms where the docs think she was grabbed and probably picked up and carried. And they took some adhesive out of her hair and off a cheek that looks like it came from a strip of duct tape he used to gag her.
“They expect a full recovery, but they said she was really on the edge.” He finished, looking at me.
Richards was again half sitting on the edge of the table, her arms crossed.
“Her parents were brought in and they were all put up in a hospital suite on one of the upper floors. The doctors want to keep her at least a couple of days for observation,” she said without the aid of a notebook. “The newsies were waiting for us and were camped out for hours until hospital public relations got the E.R. doctors to issue a brief statement that she was in guarded condition and they were optimistic for a recovery.”
Diaz checked his notes and nodded at the precise language.
“The parents are holding off on the press. They don’t want to say anything yet,” Richards continued. “They were grateful. We gave them a vague description of where she was found and told them we thought the kidnapper had killed himself.” She looked up at Hammonds, wondering if she’d overstepped.
“All right. Fine,” he said, turning his eyes on me. “Now, Mr. Freeman. If you wouldn’t mind explaining again how you found this situation.”
I knew the grilling was coming. It was the only reason Hammonds had brought me along. While he began to twist the small towel in his hands, I went through the same description of Nate Brown’s appearance and the boat ride to the cabin I’d given Diaz. They listened. I gave the same description of the girl and of finding Ashley’s body. They listened. Then I went out on a limb.
“There was some evidence of a struggle. The table and lamp broken. That bit with the chair under the tree was too pat. And why does a loner like Ashley even bother to bring the kid all the way to his place? It wasn’t for rape. It wasn’t for torture.”
They listened. Diaz moved uneasily behind me. Richards studied the carpet. Hammonds twisted the towel and the lines at the corners of his eyes were tightening again.
“What the hell’s your theory?” he finally asked.
“Someone else was there.”
“Brown?”
“Yeah. But someone else too.”
“You have proof of that?”
I thought of the knife, still stuck inside my boot.
“It just didn’t feel right,” I said.
All three of them let it set. Maybe they were thinking about how it felt. Hammonds broke the silence.
“Look, Freeman. I’m not sure you aren’t in deeper shit than even you think. Sure, we’ll try to find this Brown and talk to him. Hell, we don’t even have a damn autopsy on Ashley yet. But in fifteen minutes I have to go in front of the sheriff, the FBI’s regional director, the county mayor and who the hell knows who else and spin a logical string of events.”
He had rolled up to his desk. The towel was stretched between his hands like a thick rope.
“We’ve reached a point of urgency here. And I cannot entertain any goddam conspiracy theories at this point in time.
“We’ve got a damn good suspect who’s damn good and dead. We saved a kid from becoming victim number five. Now if you want me to make you out to be the hero in that, fine. But I don’t think you’re up to the scrutiny that that would bring. Am I right?”
I was thinking of Donna the reporter. Maybe he was too. I nodded my head in agreement.
“So we go with what we have for now.”
The others nodded. Hammonds stood up and started for his bathroom as we began to file out and stopped.
“And Freeman,” he said, again in control of his voice. “Don’t leave the state.”
The FBI agents watched us as we headed for the hallway. Each time I saw them it looked as though they expected to see me in handcuffs. I couldn’t tell if they were disappointed or not.
“Jesus,” Diaz said, again leading us with his voice. “I never heard the old man cuss before.” We reached the elevator and he punched the down button.
“If he expects us to be at the press conference, I gotta change down in the locker room,” Richards said, looking at her mud-flecked boots and jeans. She couldn’t see the fine red welts still glowing on her forehead and cheek from the branch whippings. “I’m a mess,” she said, more to herself than us.
As we rode down Diaz asked if I had a way back north.
“My attorney’s downstairs,” I said.
“That was probably good planning,” he said, smiling.
When the doors opened at the second floor, Diaz punched the lobby button for me and shook my hand before stepping out.
“We’ll be talking, right?”
Richards started to follow him out, but put her hand on the door guard. I thought she was going to say something but instead she stepped in close, reached up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth.
“Thanks,” she said. Her eyes were an unmistakable green.