printouts, all dating back to the first child abduction. The follow-up stories documented the FBI’s involvement, the futile searches for clues, the shattered parents, speculations, and not surprising, fear.
My throat had gone dry and the printout paper felt dusty between my fingers. Billy had purposely left out any reproduction of photographs that I knew would have been published: The smiling elementary school snapshots, the pictures of parents standing bleary-eyed and dazed at funerals, the flower collections and rain-soaked cards and farewells at some public spot.
As I read, the sun crept onto our table and Billy, sitting silent with his legs crossed, waved away the waiter twice. I finally looked up and he met my gaze and without a hint of humor said: “You don’t g-get out m-much. Do you?”
The uproar that the killings created hadn’t gotten onto my river or through my self-imposed wall against the world. As I stared out at the asphalt street, Billy filled me in on his inside information on the cases that had buzzed through the courthouse and law offices for weeks.
The investigators were keeping the details, especially the cause of death, as close as they could. They also had not revealed how they knew where to look for the bodies they had found. But somehow they’d gotten onto my river and were probably less than a couple of hours from finding the child I’d discovered. Now they had me attached to that killing. It was only good police work to consider me a suspect.
I was staring out across the street again, my fingers lightly touching the scar on my neck. I hated circumstances. A logical world can’t stand them, and an overcrowded world can’t avoid them.
Had the body floated down into the spot where I found it from some point upriver? The source of the tributary was a broad shallow slough that drained into the cypress swamp and was also fed by a canal opening that helped drain the Glades. Had the body been wedged at that particular spot on purpose? Did someone know about my nightly forays? Did someone know I’d find it?
Over the tops of the buildings a thick stack of thunderheads was creeping out of the western sky, roiling up as they sucked moisture out of the Glades and pushed toward the coast. But the ocean breezes held them back. Here the sun still glinted hot and bright off the chrome on a line of cars that filled the street and then flushed away each time the stoplight changed.
“If you’re th-thinking of t-talking to them, don’t,” Billy said.
I just shook my head. He knew I was thinking like a cop. He knew I would be thinking about Hammonds’ team and their struggle with a high-profile case.
He finally waved the waiter over and while it was my turn to hold a response, he ordered a cold penne pasta salad and, looking at me with a slightly raised eyebrow, took my silence as license to double the order for two. Billy knew I was existing on canned meat and fruit and the occasional skillet-fried tarpon from the river. He automatically tried to influence my diet when he had the chance.
His advice not to talk to Hammonds and his team meant he was asking me to hold on to my right to remain silent. It was something I hated when I was a cop, and because of that experience I knew how valuable it was from the other side of the fence.
“They’ve got to be pulling in every favor and chit they can to get this one off the board,” I said. “How the hell do you keep four dead kids off the front page and the brass off your ass?”
I knew the pressure to solve a case like this would be tremendous. They would already have looked hard at family members with the first abduction. That’s standard homicide procedure, especially when kids are involved. But according to the newspaper clips Billy pulled, none of the first three families had any connection with each other except that they all lived in new neighborhoods close to the edge of the Glades. Whether there was some hidden link between them that was being held back from the press was a guess. If it was not true, that left only the outsider theories. In between bites we talked about the possibilities.
Billy had been mildly intrigued by the case since the second child was found. Television news was all over it. The press conferences with broken, tearful parents