when they regret the evil they’ve done,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t there, of course, but I know the legends. I know the dead. How deeply they were involved in cold-blooded murder, I don’t know. But—” he grimaced, looking at her “—being passive when evil is happening is just as bad sometimes. Maybe the pirates I know are the ones getting a second chance.”
His phone rang and he answered it.
“We should head back,” he said to Raina. “Vinnie Magruder made it to Andrew’s. God knows what he might remember, if anything.”
“Everything is something,” Raina said, lifting Wild Thing’s reins.
Everything, indeed, could be something. She was learning.
Seventeen
“You know,” Vinnie said. “That poor girl, Fran Castle, disappeared over thirteen years ago. Now, I know you’re coming up with more corpses, and that anthropologist medical examiner person is certain she found a slash on the hyoid bone, but that was over thirteen years ago.” He shook his head. “A shame, a crying shame, what’s going on.”
Vinnie Magruder had the look of a grizzled old Floridian, skin bronzed and wrinkled by endless years in the sun, gray hair worn a little long now and matching a gray beard and sideburns. He wore old jeans, battered by the years, and an open cotton shirt over a T-shirt. He was a big man, tall and broad in the shoulders, polite, but skeptical about himself, and seemingly about the ability of anyone else to do anything to stop the killings in the Everglades.
“You came out here when one of the school camps was going on,” Axel said, studying him intently. “What I need to know is if you remember timing. It was night when you arrived. You found the car at about 2:00 p.m. I know about the events registered in the records, but that doesn’t mean something wasn’t going on before.”
Vinnie sighed and looked at Raina. Titan was sitting next to her, and Vinnie smiled. He’d heard Axel perfectly clearly and he would answer, Raina thought, in his own time.
“Great dog,” he told her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“He’s always with you?” Vinnie asked.
“As much as possible,” she assured him.
He nodded. “Good. A dog is better than many a man. Or woman.” He looked at Axel again. “She’s special, huh?”
Raina smiled; she knew he was referring to her.
Axel nodded gravely. “Very.”
“Another of you spooky types, huh? And your friends?” He looked down the table where Jon and Kylie were sitting.
“My spooky friends?” Axel asked.
Vinnie waved a hand in the air. “Oh, in the best way!” he said. He glanced at Nigel Ferrer and said, “You know these guys and their ghost stories about the Everglades. Oh, wait! I think I’ve heard you tell a few, too!”
“There are some good stories about the area, Vinnie, you know that. And we all enjoy the ones from way back, right?” Nigel said easily.
Vinnie shrugged and nodded at the same time. “Ghost ships, ghost planes...the land can claim a lot. Anyway, these murders. I came out here back then to get search parties started up because the girl was missing and her car was parked where it shouldn’t have been. And when I found the registration and called it in to headquarters, they already had her name. Well, her friend, it seems, started with the casino security at about noon and then demanded that the police be notified. Now, you know, that’s not a great deal of time for an adult to be considered missing at all—but I found the car, and the cops had already heard the young woman’s name.”
“Noon?” Axel said. “You’re saying the friend reported her missing at noon. Do you know how long before that she had last been with the friend?”
“We have surveillance video of her at the entrance around ten thirty. They’d met out there early. Seems they had a theory that if you hit the machines early after the night before, they paid out better.”
“But you found her car abandoned about 2:00 p.m.,” Nigel noted, frowning. “People are on the Trail during the day. A two-lane highway. And nothing weird was reported.”
“Right. People all in a hurry. If anyone saw anything, they didn’t call it in. And yeah, 2:00 p.m. is when I saw the car and checked on it. The car was open and no one was around. But it was where it shouldn’t have been—that must be in the report. Anyway, I called in about the car after I checked it out, a little after 2:00 p.m., so that would be correct. Again,