The blue edge of midnight - By Jonathon King Page 0,43

but nodded his head and handed Diaz a bulky, hand-held flashlight.

“The kid was out here playing in the yard while the mom was cleaning up dinner dishes,” Diaz said when he came back, talking like he was briefing me.

“She didn’t hear anything unusual, but the sun was going down, it was getting late so she comes out on the patio to call the kid inside and sees the dog lying there. She looks around. No kid. She freaks.”

I followed as he moved to the back end of the yard.

“They got the fence up to keep the dog and the kid inside. They were safety conscious and worried about the lake.”

We hopped the waist-high fence and Diaz flipped on the flashlight, sweeping it across the ground until it illuminated a row of small white markers standing like folded cards in the grass, each with a number printed on it.

“Patrol guys got here first and found the mom out here knee-deep in the water and came in after her so there’s a lot of prints. But these?” he said, shining the light on a deep print next to marker number one. “Could they be the same as you saw in your place?”

I bent to the imprint. Then the next one. And the third, all left in a patch of shiny mud. They were the same size as far as I could tell. The third one showed clearly that it had no tread, just a smooth size nine.

Diaz swung the beam farther out into a sudden stand of cattails and water lily that spread out into the water. I asked him to swing the light left and saw the water grasses stop abruptly at what appeared to be the property line. Next door the neighbor’s green St. Augustine lawn went uninterrupted into uncluttered open water.

“Weed sprayed,” Diaz said, again reading the puzzle in my face. “The developers tried to sell this whole place as a man- made wetlands area to help appease the environmentalists. They let the indigenous stuff grow in the water and they even have workers come out and pull any non-Florida stuff out.”

He sprayed the light back into the grasses leading out into the water from behind the victim’s house.

“It’s great for luring the birds but some of the owners don’t like it. They think the water grass looks like weeds and ruins their view so they spray it all dead.”

He swung the beam back to the footprints that disappeared into the lilies.

“So what about the prints?”

“Could be,” I answered. “I thought the one at my place might be a moccasin or something. You know? No tread or anything. Just like these.”

“Booties,” Diaz said. I looked up.

“Booties. Like the kind windsurfers or scuba divers wear. They’re like a black neoprene sock that pulls up over your foot. They use them to keep you from chafing your skin with the straps on dive fins or from stepping on shells and stuff in the water.”

I nodded and stood staring at the prints, thinking about Fred Gunther’s scuba equipment bag and the clean canvas tarp in the storage bin of his Cessna. The same kind of canvas that glowed in moonlight and had been wrapped tightly around Alissa Gainey’s floating body.

We started back up to the house. Hammonds and his group were still in their loose circle and he still didn’t look at me.

“So the guy comes in from the water. Maybe he lies out there in the high grass, waiting for the chance, watching the kid and the mom.”

Diaz was one of those detectives who had to run his theories out loud, hear his own voice to find a mistake in the sequence or logic. I knew a couple like that. I just listened.

“He comes out of cover as late as he can because he wants to use the darkness. He jumps the fence and snatches the kid, somehow keeps her from screaming and—boom. Back in the water and gone.”

As Diaz talked, the mechanical whine of a helicopter began to build. I could see it swinging in from the east, a cone of brilliant light pouring into the neighborhood and now into the lake. The chopper stopped and hovered while the beam poked down into another crescent of cattails and maidencane at the shore line. One of the men in Hammonds’ group was looking up and talking into his cell phone. The chopper banked and moved over us, the downdraft ruffling through our clothes. Next to the children’s slide the wind had