head. He seems to be considering something, but he doesn’t say anything else.
It’s something that never occurred to me, how the Angry Man found me there so quickly. I wasn’t even surprised when I saw the other boat that night. It was almost as though I’d been waiting for it, so sure was I that Marlowe had returned for me.
“I need a computer,” I tell my father.
“In the shop.”
He leads me downstairs, and I sit behind the reception desk and surf the Web, trying to find the identity of the Angry Man. I search for the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary and begin sifting through the entries I find. Meanwhile, I have this sense of a ticking clock, a tightness in my chest. I wonder where the Angry Man is now and how he’s tracking my progress. I know enough about Gray’s work to know that the technology is so advanced now that he or whomever is charged with following me could be blocks or even miles away and still have complete audio and visual surveillance. Still, it seems questionable that they’ve given me such a wide berth, such latitude. But maybe they know that they’ve got me by a chain connected to my own heart. I’ll do what they want; I don’t think there’s any question about that.
But of all the places they could have left me, why did they leave me here? They must have known I’d come to my father. Was there some reason they wanted me to?
I look for images of the man I saw, hoping to find a name attached. But I find the same old articles I’ve read a hundred times before, maybe a thousand times. I stare at the screen and resist the urge to take it and throw it on the floor, to stomp on it screaming in my rage and frustration.
My father comes over and lays a large book on the desk in front of me. The computer screen casts it in an eerie blue glow. The book is turned to an eight-by-ten shot of Marlowe’s tattoo. The sight of it sends a cold shock through me. I have seen this image again and again in my dreams, in my dark imaginings. But to see the photograph of it on his skin reminds me that he was just a man, flesh and bone, not a monster from a nightmare I had. He is real and possibly still alive.
I stare at the dark lines of the tattoo. I see a churning ocean crashing over jutting rocks; I see my face hidden within the image. There’s a wolf etched in the face of one of the rocks. Two birds circle above it all. It is as beautiful and as detailed as I have seen it in my memory. In my dreams of it, it pulses and moves, the ocean crashes, the birds cry mournfully. But on the page it’s flat and dead, like some map to Marlowe’s mind.
“Why are you showing me this?” I ask.
“Look closely,” he says, tapping the picture with his finger.
After a few seconds of staring, I see. If you didn’t examine it closely, you’d never notice it. In the lines that form the crags of the rocks lies a hidden image: the barn at Frank’s horse farm.
39
Deep in the dark, wild swamps of Florida amid the lush black-green foliage and through the still, teeming waters, wild orchids grow. Over the last century, orchid hunters, breeders, and poachers have donned their waders and raped the swamplands of these delicate flowers, filling trucks with the once-plentiful plants and shipping them for huge profits all over the world. Now they are so rare in the wild that environmentalists are struggling to rescue the waning populations, and the search for wild orchids is ever more desperate. Most legendary among them is the elusive ghost orchid. Snow white with delicately furled petals, the leafless epiphyte never touches the earth and seems to float like a specter, hence its name. In the history of Florida, people have lied and stolen, fought and died in their quest for the ghost orchid, which flowers only once a year.
Detective Harrison always liked the idea of this, the idea of men who risked their lives in pursuit of the single fragile object of their passion. At the best of times, Harrison considered himself to be one of these men. Through the hinterland of lies, in the decaying marsh of murder, he searched for the fresh white thing