it didn’t matter. Even if she were awake, the rule these days was that Mommy always answered the door. Hannah was never alone in the house.
“It’s me—Allan.”
Even though she recognized the voice, Danni looked through the peephole to be sure. Maybe she was overly cautious, but whoever the murderer was, he knew she was on the case. And if he took her out, her daughter was defenseless. She finally opened the door.
“I don’t care what you’ve got, I’m not going with you. Hannah and I need this day.”
“I’m not going to take you away from your day. I just have some bad news,” Allan said.
“What is it?” she asked impatiently. She had no idea what was coming.
“Stacey Kincaid is dead. The St. Petersburg police contacted us early this morning. She was at a party and apparently went for a walk on the seawall. Some boy found her. She was stabbed twice: once in the abdomen, once in the chest.”
Danni felt like she had been stabbed in the chest herself. It was a totally different experience to find out about the murder of someone you knew. Danni had taken Stacey under her wing and given her motherly advice. They hadn’t known each other that long or that well, but they had touched. She didn’t want to show her emotion though, at least not to Allan, although she could tell he understood that this was different.
“Anything we can use?” she asked.
“Nothing. Nobody saw anything and there was nothing at the scene but the body.”
“It’s him though. Had to be. She was his loose end.”
“No doubt about it,” Allan replied.
Danni’s mood had dissipated somewhat by the time she and Hannah reached Whiskey River Springs. It was partially her own attitude adjustment and partially the springs themselves.
As for her attitude adjustment, Danni only needed to remind herself that every one of those victims had a mother and father, relatives, friends, and acquaintances who loved and cared for them dearly. The difference between Stacey and the others was that she, Danni, had been one of Stacey’s acquaintances and not just the investigating officer. Danni had to put her personal feelings aside and do for Stacey exactly what she had to do for those other girls and for future victims: Find the murdering bastard who killed them and who would kill again.
The other part of her mood change was Whiskey River Springs. Set outside the town of White Springs in northern Apache County, the underground springs were one of the many natural wonders of Florida that tourists who stayed on the main drag would never see. This was farm and ranch country, where the cypress, pine, and great oak, their branches littered with Spanish moss, sheltered and protected their hidden jewels, the spring-fed Suwannee, Ichetucknee, Crystal, and Santa Fe Rivers that meandered across the interior landscape of north central Florida like the fingers of a giant celestial hand.
Whiskey River Springs was actually a series of underground springs that fed the Santa Fe. You could rent a tube and float down the river from one spring to another, which Danni and Hannah often did, or you could just lounge at one spring as they were doing on this particular day.
Hannah at ten was like a fish in the water. Danni and Mike, Hannah’s father, had put her in lessons before she was a year old and it had paid off. She loved the water, especially the springs.
“How did they get here?” she had asked Danni not so long ago.
It was a teachable moment that Danni luckily was prepared for. “The springs have been here for thousands of years, honey.” She told her daughter how ordinary rainwater over thousands of years had carved out underground caverns and caves in the limestone. “As the water travels in these caves and caverns, it has to come out somewhere. The springs are where it comes out.”
They always carried goggles, and Danni had shown Hannah where the caverns were in each one of the springs. “Promise me you’ll never swim in there.”
“I promise, Mommy.”
Danni had firsthand knowledge of both the danger and the spectacular nature of the caves and caverns of these particular springs. She was a certified scuba diver, and she and Mike had explored these caverns years ago before Hannah was born and before she discovered that Mike was one of those assholes who needed more than one woman to satisfy his needs. She kept forgiving him and letting him come back home until finally he’d left her for a