signal kept fading and I heard shouts and commands in the background.
“All right, Max. We’re on our way. I got your number. We’re bringing a team. Max? You all right?”
“Yeah.”
I punched him off and worked my way back to the front of the shack and went inside and sat on the floor next to the girl. She hadn’t moved. I fed her more water and she still wouldn’t open her eyes. When I touched her the quiet, high-pitched keening started again. I stayed nearby but only held the phone and kept my hands to myself.
I heard the rustling of birds in the trees five minutes before I heard the helicopter. I went out to the porch in time to see a group of green herons sail out of the trees and head out to the marsh and then I picked up the flat sound of blades chopping the sky. There was a scratching sound of nervous scrambling on the wood below me and I heard a splash in the canal behind the cabin that was too loud for a fish.
The mechanical noise grew and the leaves in the canopy started spinning and then thrashing as the chopper came in overhead, hovered, moved off toward the marsh and then sank down below the tree line.
A new quiet returned and I waited in it for fifteen minutes before I heard the snapping and crashing of someone on a headlong rush through the underbrush and vines coming hard from the direction of the chopper. Richards was the first one through. Her hair was tucked up under a baseball cap, the ponytail flashing behind. She was coming through the tangle like a swimmer, arms reaching and sweeping anything in the way behind. Her jeans were soaked to midthigh and as she got closer I could see fresh red welts across her face where the branches had whipped her.
“Where is she?” she said as soon as she got within range. The words were urgent but not harsh. I stepped aside as she started up the stairs and her eyes were bright green with adrenaline and checked emotion as she swept past me. Diaz was five minutes behind, in high boots and picking his way with more care.
“Jesus, Max,” he said, out of breath when he reached the porch. “This is fucking out here.”
He looked around, assessing the scene and narrowing his eyes at the sight of the gator-skin rack.
“The medical guys are coming up,” he said, and then stepped to the door.
Inside the cabin Richards had gathered the child in her arms and was holding her on the bed, rocking. I thought at first that she was singing some kind of lullaby, but realized she was repeating the same phrase, “You’re safe now, you’re safe now,” over and over. The girl’s head was pressed into the detective’s neck and now she was sobbing, her small body vibrating. Her eyes had opened and she was staring, and I hoped that what she was seeing would someday go away.
Richards rocked with her and I saw her look at the child’s blanket, its pattern partially obscured with dirt, and the sight seemed to confuse her. She pulled it off the girl and set it aside.
I hadn’t paid much attention to it at first, but something about the size and color of the blanket now sparked a memory of a mother’s anguished words. The Alvarez girl had been abducted from her backyard. But it was Alissa Gainey who was all ready for bed when she was taken.
“She was already in her pajamas. Her little blanket was gone. She never put it down. Oh God, she’s gone.”
I filed the small rough stone away in my head and watched Diaz as he stepped around the room, absorbing with a cop’s eye but touching nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was using crime scene protocol or was just repulsed by the filth. I told him about the chair, how the GPS unit had been set on it. He looked at it.
“It’s like he was putting a sign on the door. Like he was saying, OK, you found me. But it’s too late for the girl.”
I started to offer a different theory, thinking of Nate Brown, who might have left the GPS as the only way to bring in help quickly, but stopped and only nodded. Maybe Hammonds was right about the snake pit. But now the snakes had given up escape and started feeding on themselves.
But if Brown had been in on