The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 5

By the time I pulled into the visitor’s parking lot at the ranger station I had a too familiar tightness across my head, a band of pain that strapped from temple to temple and pressed into the bone with a pressure that you tried not to think about because dwelling on it only seemed to screw it down. It’s what the traffic did to me. Even at midafternoon it had been bumper to bumper and down here the proximity of fenders had no effect on speed. Everything still moved on the interstate at sixty mph. I wasn’t comfortable in it. In the streets of inner city Philadelphia, traffic was slowed by constraint. Unless you used the Schuylkill Expressway or shot over the bridges to New Jersey, speed was not an option. Down here I’d learned to use as many alternate routes as I could find when I ventured out, but when I took the interstate I stayed in the middle lanes and tried to fit in with the lemmings. It still gave me a headache.
Cleve was at the boat ramp, looking up at the piled, sooty clouds that were now directly overhead. One good rip of lightning and the whole front would split open and the rain would drop “like pissin’ on a flat rock,” the old ranger would say. The humid wind from the east was being sucked west, pulling at our pants legs and shirtsleeves but doing little to dry the film of sweat on my back.
“Give me the willies,” Cleve said, still looking up at the coming storm but no doubt seeing the tiny wrapped body from this morning. “Wasn’t like that boy with the gator.”
Cleve had told me the story the first week I’d arrived. An eight-year-old had been canoeing the river with his family and they stopped along one of the drier banks to get out and stretch. The boy decided to cool off in a slightly deeper pool where the water swirled and spun back before continuing downstream. Whether the male alligator had already been in the hole or had been alerted by the movement, no one knew.
The animal got the boy’s head in its jaws and pulled the child under, trying to drown its prey. When the boy’s father realized what had happened he jumped to his son’s aid, clubbing the gator’s head and snout with a paddle until the beast let loose. It had taken too long to get the injured child through the wilderness to a spot where a helicopter could airlift him out. He died later at the trauma center.
Cleve had been at the pickup site, tending the boy’s head wounds while his family looked on.
“I’ve seen what nature can do,” he said, finally shaking himself from the past to look me in the eye. “But this one wasn’t nature and those boys knew it.”
He then told me of his trip up the river early that morning with Hammonds and his crime scene team. They’d barely said a word on the way out. Cleve knew how most people reacted to a trip out here, with relaxed conversation and obvious questions. Instead, Hammonds’ boys were quiet and preoccupied with a device they kept out of sight in the stern of the Whaler. They only engaged him with queries about access spots, where the headwaters started, the nearest roadways or bridges. And the location of my place and how often he saw me coming and going.
“You couldn’t see the channel to your shack, but I couldn’t lie,” Cleve said, cutting his eyes to gauge my reaction.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
When Cleve got them to the dam, he had to untether the canoe and float it on the upper river. It would only hold three, so Hammonds and one crime scene photographer climbed in with him. The wrapped body was right where I’d told them. The photographer snapped away as Cleve inched them up to the spot. The ranger saw Hammonds check one more time on the gadget he brought from the Whaler before they lifted the child’s body out of the tangle of cypress root. The men said nothing on the ride back, and never looked at the black, zippered body bag into which they’d slid the bundle.
“It was damned eerie,” Cleve said.
The rest of the team was waiting at the dock when they got in and loaded the body. Before they pulled out, Hammonds told Cleve they might need him again, without elaboration.
“I don’t see why,” he said, looking up at the heavy clouds and then helping me settle my canoe in the water. “They won’t need me to guide them to that spot again now that they got that GPS reading.”

I almost beat the storm back to my shack. I was well under the cypress canopy when the first muffled rumble of thunder tumbled out of the west. The first light wave of rain got caught up in the tops of the trees and I was just lashing the canoe to my dock when fat drops started smacking through the leaves. By the time I got to the top of the stairs the sound had risen to a rush.
Inside I stripped off my wet shirt and tossed my gym bag near the bed. The first time I experienced a South Florida downpour out here it scared the hell out of me. The roar in the trees mixed with the sharp drumming on my tin roof made me cover my ears. After several months I’d gotten used to it.
I rekindled my stove fire, scooped out coffee from a three- pound can, and sat at the table to wait for my old metal pot to boil.
The table had been left behind by the research scientists and was the size of a large door. It had been repeatedly chipped and gouged and there was no telling what they had spilled or stacked or dissected on it. Large swathes of varnish had been worn or corroded away and the wood was dark where fluids unknown had seeped in and stained the fiber. It had been used hard, as had most of the shack’s furnishings.
Along one wall there was a set of bunk beds with one good plastic-covered mattress that I’d moved from the top to the bottom. Two mismatched pine armoires stood in a row against another wall and may have been used for clothes or scientific equipment. I used one for my clothes and in the other I stacked a growing collection of books. I’d brought some with me, mostly travel narratives by Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban, books that I used to climb into to leave the Philadelphia streets for at least a few hours. The rainy night a sergeant caught me in the subway alcove at the Walnut and Locust station reading Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea was yet another small tumble in my career. When Billy found out I was a reader he started adding to my pile with history books on Florida and the Caribbean.
“You have to know where you are to be comfortable in a place,” he’d said.
Along the length of a third wall was a row of cupboards and a butcher block countertop with an old pre-electric ice box at one end and a slop sink positioned at the other. I used the counter for food preparation but Cleve speculated that the researchers probably used it to stretch out the southern water snakes, the cottonmouths and pygmy rattlesnakes, for measuring and tagging. I had thanked him very much for his insight, especially after the day three months ago when I almost stepped on a Florida green water snake that had curled up on my doorstep, obviously returning for a refitting.
The only modern concession in the place was the walled-off bathroom in the far corner in which the research crew had installed a marine toilet in deference to the local ecology. It also probably helped the accuracy of their water-sample studies.
As my coffeepot began to rattle with the motion of boiling water, a chirping sound poked through the din of rain. It wasn’t until the third ring that I realized it was Billy’s cell phone going off in my bag. I dug it out, sat on the edge of the bunk bed and punched it on.
“Yeah?”
“Global Positioning System,” he said, his voice smooth and unblinking on the other end. The phenomenon of Billy’s come and go stutter always struck me.
“You were reading my mind again, counselor.”
“Now that I’ve got more than just a passing interest in these killings, I pulled some favors. The task force is using GPS readings to find the bodies of the victims,” he said, and then launched into a technical description of the directional technology that used satellites to extrapolate coordinates and locate a spot as small as a square foot anywhere on the planet.
Years ago GPS technology got passed from the military out to the civilian world to the great benefit of ocean shipping and sailing navigation. Even on a moving boat you could figure out exactly where you were by using the satellites. Recently the GPS had miniaturized to hand-held size. Mountain climbers and even half-serious hikers and hunters were using them. Cleve had already figured that was what Hammonds used this morning and I’d been grinding it over since pushing off to paddle home.
Billy’s info smoothed the stone. Hammonds wasn’t marking the spot in order to look for a pattern like I’d thought. He was confirming the coordinates he already had.
“The killer has been leaving them GPS addresses,” Billy said over the phone. “That’s why Hammonds was already on his way when you hit the boat ramp. If you hadn’t found the body, they would have an hour later.”
“My luck,” I said.
I thought of Hammonds, staring into my eyes at the boat landing, trying to see a flinch of deception. I’d had first contact with the body of the fourth victim of a serial killer. I obviously lived, for reasons he didn’t yet know, out on the edge of the Glades, away and apart from society. I was adept with a canoe, one of the few ways, I now knew, to get to the remote places where the previous three dead children had been found.
“Yes. Well, it’s also good defense strategy,” said my lawyer. “Why would a killer direct the cops right to his own backyard and then tip them before they even got there?”
“So he’d get caught,” I said. The line went quiet for several long seconds. “I’ll talk to you later, Billy. Thanks.”
That night after the rain stopped I lay in bed, picking out the individual sounds of the river, the dripping water off my roof, an isolated slosh of some night prey scuttling away from a hunting owl or water snake. When I first moved in here the silence of the place set up a palpable cone around my city ears. It was like the feeling you get when you pull your car to a stop after a long night trip and shut off the engine and just sit there in stunning quiet. In the city those were infrequent moments. Here they were nearly constant.
A breeze sifted through the trees and into my louvered windows but the rain-soaked air was close and thick. Still, the thin sheen of sweat on my chest and legs picked up any air that moved and did its cool evaporation. I was not uncomfortable, but when I closed my eyes I could see the pale face of the child, milky eyes in the moonlight. The image was crowding out my old nightmare. I reached up and touched the scar at my throat and at some point deep in the night, I fell off to sleep.

At 10:00 A.M. the next day the race was on along I-95. As I headed south a steady stream of BMWs, Honda Civics, high-colored convertibles and pickups with metal gang boxes rushed past me on the inside lane. The eighteen-wheelers, fuel tankers and step vans boxed me in on the inside. If you weren’t doing ten over the speed limit, you were in the way. If you got frustrated and said the hell with it and pushed it to eighty in the passing lane you still weren’t immune. Someone doing eighty-five would eventually tailgate you until you moved over. The lesson was simple: be aggressive and pay no attention to the rules. It’s how you got there ahead of the schmucks.
Four hours earlier the birds had awakened me. The anhingas and herons were early fishermen. The ibis and egrets fluttered in after daybreak. In the rising sunlight I made more coffee, stood on the staircase looking up through the cypress and decided to go on my own to Hammonds’ task force offices. When I called Billy, he tried to talk me out of it with that unerring logic of his, but I knew how jammed the investigators had to be. If I could get them off my scent, maybe they’d save some time and turn some other strategy, some corner. Billy countered in his lawyerly best: “Don’t offer.”
If you’ve never been in the system, the old law enforcement saw that says “If you’re innocent, what’s there to be afraid of?” makes a certain sense. I’ve used the line myself when interviewing suspects. But the truth is not always simple. I’ve seen rape convictions, based on the absolute certainty of the woman attacked, overturned by DNA. I’ve seen death-row inmates who gave confessions end up being cleared with the arrest of another. And I’ve seen prosecutors jailed for obstruction in cases they had believed in so deeply that they became blinded to the truth.
I’d also seen the floating face of a dead child. If I was a suspect, Hammonds’ team would have already pulled my Philadelphia file and at least started tracking my move, my money, my life since the night I shot a boy in the back on a rainy street corner. Maybe they’d already dismissed me. But there had been something in the investigator’s face that said no.
As I drove I refused to join the interstate aggression game and hung in the middle lane all the way south into Broward County. It was my habit to keep a wide margin between my front bumper and the trunk in front of me, but down here that’s like creating a parking space in a desirable lot. Somebody behind you always wants the space. They’d pass, move in, I’d fall back. I got leapfrogged all the way to Broward Boulevard and took the exit west.
From the off ramp I could see the county sheriff’s office rising up like a sandstone and mirror box in the middle of an unusually tidy junk yard. Its six stories dwarfed the run-down collection of strip shopping centers, ancient cinderblock apartment houses and low-rent businesses spread out around it. The new headquarters had been built in the middle of a traditionally black neighborhood. They hoped the new presence would change the area, but all the building had changed was the block it stood on. Back in the 1960s the interstate had speared through the community, splitting what cohesion the neighborhoods had once built. After that the poverty, crime, and apathy of government did its own erosion. The blocks around headquarters had been called “The Danger Zone” by the cops who patrolled the area. It had the highest incidence of burglaries, robberies and homicides in the county. The officers called the roaming neighborhood dogs “zone deer.” They called the yellow-eyed drug dealers by name. They called themselves the zookeepers. It reminded me of too many parts of Philadelphia. It took me back home.
I pulled my truck all the way to the back of the parking lot and found an empty spot in the shade of a bottlebrush tree. I made sure the scratched side was facing away from the building and got out in the sparkling heat. It was before noon and already eighty-four degrees. The asphalt was like a burner turned low. In the two minutes it took to walk to the front entrance and get through the double doors I could feel the sweat start in my hair. Inside it quickly evaporated in the envelope of air conditioning.
The lobby was circular with a rotunda-like ceiling soaring all the way to the top. The floor was a dark green faux marble and the stone crawled up the sides of a round reception desk and spread flat on the counter. Even at my six foot three, the desktop came to my chest. The only hint that I wasn’t standing in the lobby of a downtown bank was the uniformed officer looking down at me with one of those developed demeanors that says bored and too busy at the same time.
I asked for Hammonds’ office and she pushed a clipboard with a sign-in sheet and a plastic visitor’s badge at me.
“Fourth floor,” she said, pointing at the bank of elevators.
On four I had to use a phone to get a secretary to buzz me through to a reception area lined with beige doors and offices with glass halfway down the walls. It was a far cry from the overwaxed and stale interior of the Philadelphia police headquarters that we had called the roundhouse. But the atmosphere was the same. The furtive glances, the busy work, the “anybody know this guy?” nods. No one up here was in uniform and they all seemed content to let me chill. When Hammonds’ secretary asked me to take a seat, I thanked her and paced instead.
From the waiting area I could see into two offices. Behind the glass in one, the guys with ties shuffled back and forth between waist-high cubicles. In the other, an open desk dominated a room lined with file cabinets. Two wood-veneered doors were closed and positioned on the far wall. As I paced, one of the doors opened and the woman detective, Richards, walked out and headed for the desk.
She was dressed in a cream-colored skirt and a long- sleeved, silk-looking blouse that fluttered as she moved. Her blond hair was up in some kind of knot and pulled severely behind her head. She was wearing high heels that made her look even taller than she appeared at the boat ramp. Aerobics, I thought, assessing the tight calf muscles in her long legs. She never looked up as she moved from the desktop to the row of files and the sense of athleticism was obvious. Twice she glided past a paper shredder and wastebasket without moving her eyes from the document she was reading. Once she spun away from the desk and then, without breaking stride, hip checked an open file drawer that banged shut hard enough to rattle the glass. Dancer and hockey player, I thought and then turned to see the secretary watching me.
“Mr. Hammonds is right this way,” she said. Whether it was from the embarrassed flush in my face or not, the tight grin on her face said “Caught ya.”
Hammonds’ office was like the rest of the place, indistinguishable from any other modern business I’d ever been in. His broad desk sat at an angle guarding one corner. Bookcases lined one wall, file cabinets the other. Two cushioned chairs were positioned in front of the desk. When I came in Hammonds remained seated, reading a file for several seconds before carefully closing it and rising to acknowledge me.
“Mr. Freeman. Please, sit down. What can I do for you?”
Again he used the eye contact, but I was the one who flinched this time.
“You’ve got a tough one,” I said. “I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to get out of the way so you could get on with it.”
Hammonds kept the lock on my eyes. Always the professional. Never let emotion slip into the language or demeanor.
“Is that right?”
Again we let silence pass between us.
“Look, I used to be a cop in Philadelphia,” I said, giving in. “You’re working this string of child killings, so I wanted to let you know so you could take me out of the mix and get on with your investigation.”
Hammonds still didn’t blink, and just as I was second- guessing my decision to come here, there was a light rap at the door and Detective Diaz with the smile walked in. He was followed by Richards.
“You’ve met the detectives, Mr. Freeman. They have been on this from the beginning. I’d like them to sit in,” Hammonds said, leaving out the “if you don’t mind.”
Diaz stepped in with the collegial handshake. Richards had put on a jacket that matched her skirt. She nodded, crossed her arms and moved behind one of the chairs.
“Mr. Freeman was just offering to help us,” Hammonds said, looking back into my face, waiting.
“Look. I was in law enforcement. I know how some of this works,” I started. “Call up for my records and you can save some time.”
“We know about your record, Mr. Freeman,” Hammonds said, putting the tips of his fingers on the file on his desk. “Twelve years and then it looks like you kind of went off the deep end.”
I had never read what they’d finally put in my personnel file, how they worded the shooting, how the shrinks had described my mindset after hours of counseling, what they thought of my walking away from a job that was in my blood and had long been in my family.
“Yeah, a little,” I finally said, looking down for the first time. All three of them moved almost imperceptibly closer.
“Should we get a recorder in here, Mr. Freeman?” the woman asked.
I looked up into Hammonds’ face. His cheeks seemed hollow. Puffy bags sagged under dark eyes that held no emotion.
“This was not a good idea,” I said and rose to my feet and started out. No one tried to stop me. I was pulling open the door when Hammonds spoke:
“What’s it feel like to kill a child, Mr. Freeman?”
I left the door standing open and walked away, giving all three of them my back.

When I passed through the front doors the heat felt like a fog wrapping around my face and arms and clogging my nose. The air conditioning had set me shivering. Back outside the afternoon bake started me sweating again. I was halfway across the parking lot when I heard my name.
“Mr. Freeman. Mr. Freeman. Wait. Please!”
Diaz was nearly skipping to catch up. I turned to acknowledge him but kept moving toward my truck. He came alongside and blew out a quick breath.
“You gotta excuse Hammonds. He’s wired a little tight these days,” the young detective said, sticking his fingers down in his pockets despite the heat.
“I’ll give him that,” I said, unlocking my truck door.
“These murders got everybody on edge. The bosses, the politicians, the civilians. The feds are pushing and threatening to take over if we don’t show something soon. Everybody wants the killer and Hammonds is the one that has to keep saying we haven’t even got a good suspect.”
“And he still hasn’t,” I said, opening the door.
“Hey, I made some checks up north myself. No one said you went signal twenty after that shooting with the kids.”
“Is that right?”
Diaz was looking at the long jagged scratch running through the paint on my truck and shaking his head.
“But no one knew you’d come down here either. They just said you took a payout and disappeared.”
“Yeah, well, that was the idea,” I said, closing my door and starting the engine. Diaz stepped back as I pulled out of the space, his hands still in his pockets.
I was cursing under my breath as I pulled out into traffic. Always listen to your lawyer. Especially if he’s your friend. I’d done myself no good here. But at least I knew where I stood. They were desperate and had me on the target board and it was going to take a lot more than a Mr. Nice Guy smile to get me off it.
When I pulled up behind a line of cars on the ramp to the interstate the traffic was as insistent as it had been at ten o’clock and would be at five and at eight tonight. There were no lazy Southern afternoons here.
As my line lurched again with the cycle of the light, I caught sight of a newspaper hawker working his way down the row.
“Slain Palm Beach Child No. 4” read the headline. When the guy got close I rolled down the window. He looked in and I saw that he had a fat face that folded in on itself and a spit- soaked cigar planted in the side of his mouth. I did a double take and then handed him a dollar. He passed the paper in and when he started to dig for change I waved him off.
I held the paper against the steering wheel and read the secondary headline.
POLICE LINK KILLING OF GLADESIDE KINDERGARTENER TO MOONLIGHT MURDERER
VISITATION SERVICE FOR ALISSA GAINEY SET FOR TODAY
I scanned the front-page story, shuffled to the page inside where it continued, and found mention of the funeral home where the girl’s visitation was being held. The blast of a horn snapped my head up. The line was moving. I swung onto the northbound ramp, squeezed my way onto the interstate and settled into the middle lane, staring into the line of cars in front of me.
In Philadelphia I had still been in the hospital when they buried the twelve-year-old I shot. I’d read the follow-up stories in the Daily News that identified him as a sixth grader in the North Philadelphia neighborhood near Temple University, that his family was churchgoing, that a collection was being taken up. I’d asked the nurse to get me an envelope and while she was gone I’d climbed out of bed, retrieved my wallet and emptied it. Later I scratched the name of the church on the envelope and wrapped the money inside with a piece of paper with the name of the fund on it. Another shift nurse promised she’d get it mailed. Despite being raised in my mother’s Catholic home I am not a prayerful man. But I prayed for Lavernious Coleman. And I prayed that no nosy reporter would find out about the donation. And I prayed a little bit for myself.
When I got to Forest Hills Boulevard, I got off at the exit and headed west. After four or five miles, I started looking for the approximate numbers on the neat new shopping complexes and the low, discrete business marquees. They were trying to avoid creating another neon trash alley like those that plagued so much of South Florida’s sprawl. Maybe it was neater, in a gameboard kind of way, but it somehow made me nervous.
I found Chapel Avenue and followed a curving two-lane avenue with a grass-and-palm-lined divider until I saw the inevitable white Doric columns. The architectural necessity of that classic touch on funeral homes was lost on me. Maybe it had something to do with the pearly gates, a hopeful hint for those left behind. The street was lined with sedans and SUVs. An attendant was directing the overflow to a parking area behind the building. I turned into a lot across the street, backed into a spot and left the engine and air conditioner running.
There was a television news truck parked a block down. Its telescoping antenna had not been raised, but I could see that the van’s side door was open and at least one reporter and her crew were working the sidewalk. I watched them stop a couple in their thirties with a small child in tow and ask, I assumed, about the little girl who now lay inside surrounded by flowers and grief.
I picked up the newspaper and read about the child I’d found on the river.
According to the news account, Alissa Gainey, like the others, had been taken after dark—this time from the enclosed pool area of her home where her parents had set up a lighted play area. “‘She had her little plastic kitchen out there, her table and dolls. She spent hours out there, just playing,’ said a tearful Deborah Gainey. ‘She was already in her pajamas. Her little blanket was gone. She never put it down. Oh God, she’s gone.’”
The story said the mother had been just inside the sliding- glass doors, writing out household bills. She hadn’t heard a sound. The doors to the screened patio had been locked. The killer had neatly sliced through the thin screening with a razor or sharp knife. The mother had discovered Alissa missing when she went to call her in for the night.
“The Gaineys’ Gladeside home is in a newly built community of single-family homes that was completed two years ago. The location, a mile from the official berm area that acts as a buffer to the Everglades, is similar to those neighborhoods where the previous child abductions have taken place.”
Beside the age of the victims, their homes in the suburbs seemed the only other common trait in the cases so far. It didn’t narrow things down much.
I was new to Florida but I knew enough about the modern-day range wars. Despite its growing population, everyone from the big builders to the workaday carpenters to the little guy waiting to open his dream bagel shop looked out on those acres and acres of open sawgrass and said: “Just a little more. What’s the big deal?”
It had been going on like that for a hundred years and the environmentalists had fought it for a hundred years. The developers had ruthlessly bid and outbid each other for open land as they pushed out into the Everglades. The landowners either refused to sell on principle or milked the demand for the highest price they could get. And the home builders had to sell every unit to make a profit over the costs. There was plenty of money involved. Tons.
I looked up from the paper and the flow of couples, dressed in dark and respectable suits, was increasing in and out of the funeral home’s double doors. I watched as the news crew approached a middle-aged man whose face flushed with anger as he pointed his finger into the face of the young woman reporter and backed her off the sidewalk. A uniformed officer seemed to appear from nowhere and slip between them. The reporter was whining, the mourner moved on.
I turned back to my paper and stared at the inside photograph of Alissa, a blond, thin-limbed child, posing for a school picture in a cornflower-blue dress, her hair in braided pigtails. She had been a quiet, intelligent and friendly student, according to a quote from her kindergarten teacher. The story said she was an only child.
I thought about Mrs. Gainey’s mention of her daughter’s blanket and wondered if it had been wrapped inside the canvas package I’d found her in. Had the killer taken anything personal with the other children, a sick keepsake, a memento of conquest? Or was it all business with him? I thought about the news printouts that Billy had given me at the restaurant. The quiet stealth was incredibly risky. I’d worked child abductions from playgrounds, busy department stores and parking lots, but never from a home, unless it was parent related.
A sudden sharp rapping on my window scared the hell out of me. The newspaper snapped in my hands, tearing the middle section. Standing outside was a cop, dressed in the same city uniform as the one that had stepped in between the reporter and the irate mourner. I rolled down the window.
“Afternoon, sir,” the officer said. “You here for the viewing?”
“Uh, yeah. Uh, I mean, no, not really,” I muttered. The question had caught me off guard. I really didn’t know why I was here.
The cop was young, probably a rookie working the visitation to keep the nosy public moving. He took several seconds to sweep the inside of the truck, look at my clothes and then stare at my face with enough concentration to run the likeness through his head.
“I, uh, was going to go in and pay my respects, but, you know, I didn’t feel right,” I stammered.
“OK. Well, you’re going to have to move on,” the officer said.
I nodded, tossed the newspaper into the passenger seat and put the truck in gear. The young officer stood back, taking in the look of the truck, the scar down the side. As I pulled away, I knew he was taking down my license tag number.