at his hands.
I’d been too paranoid and a hell of a lot more distrustful of the investigators to give up the GPS before. It was perfect evidence for a case against me, even if I was the one who handed it over. Now they were scraping, and more people, including me, were in the target zone. But I didn’t want concealing evidence coming back on a man of Billy’s position.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. No one seemed to know your attorney around the shop, but when we started asking around the law world, everybody seemed to know him. Connected and smart were the words that kept coming back. And I think this is smart too,” he added, looking up into my face.
I reached into the bag and brought out the GPS unit. It was rewrapped in plastic, and I told him how I’d found it, the cut mattress and the filmy footprint I’d found in my shack.
“All the locations of the bodies are logged into it,” I said, passing the machine to Diaz. “That’s how you found them, right?”
The detective looked up and I could tell he was turning a corner, and doing it behind Hammonds’ back.
“You know what this is like. I saw your file out of Philly,” he started. “This guy’s been playing us and we’re scratching at anything we can. It got to the point we were left waiting for a break, a mistake. And when you came paddling up out of the river we figured, hoped, you were the mistake.”
I knew he was holding my eyes to see how I might react.
“Maybe we won’t get anything off this by tracking the supplier and seller. Maybe it comes up empty again. But it’s better than sitting around waiting for another kid to disappear.”
“And maybe he’s through with that,” I said. “Maybe he’s got a new target.”
Diaz let the thought sit for a few empty seconds.
“Yeah, well. No offense, but if that’s true, if he’s after you instead of another kid, a lot of folks aren’t necessarily going to see that as a step back.”
I was still holding on to the straps of the gym bag, hesitating. When Diaz started to get up I reached in and took out a baggie containing the bent aluminum tag from my canoe and handed it to him.
“I think it’s more true than you guys are willing to admit,” I said, reaching into the bag for my second bit of concealed evidence.
Thirty minutes later we were in Diaz’s unmarked sedan heading for the river. He’d been pissed when I told him what the tag was. It was the first time I’d seen him angry and he let some Spanish slip into his voice.
“Crime scene, man! Mierda, you know evidence and crime scene protocol!”
Now he’d calmed down as we headed for the access park where I’d left my canoe the night I ducked the warrant, and where the killer must have pulled the tag.
By then we’d agreed the chance of finding fingerprints on anything were remote and tracing the courier who delivered the tag was probably a dead end too.
“That’s the way he sent the first set of GPS coordinates,” Diaz said. “Straight to the sheriff’s office.”
Since then he’d altered his methods, even e-mailing the GPS numbers in from a computer terminal at a downtown Radio Shack. It didn’t take an FBI profiler to figure out this wasn’t some swamp rat survivalist taking shots at the encroaching city dwellers.
“He knows the Glades. He knows how to get in and out of these damn neighborhoods without being seen. He knows enough about the gadgets to use them. And he sure as hell knows how to play on everybody’s fears,” Diaz said. “Hell, we don’t even know if it is only one damn guy.”
The detective went quiet as we drove west. He’d already overstepped his bounds talking about the investigation. Seeing his frustration, I doubted they’d found anything to help them. But he was right about the crime scene protocol. They at least deserved to take a look.
I told Diaz where to make the turn off Seminole Drive and we curved out toward a line of cypress trees and then down the entrance road to the park. A warm drizzle was spattering the windshield and Diaz looked up through the glass, hesitating. But when I got out and started toward the river, he followed.
Ham Mathis was hovering around his canoe concession office, emptying out the ice water from the cooler where