Willis...the district attorney on the fraud case he had just finished down in Bonita Springs.
“You were set to testify next week but the trial has been postponed,” Willis said. “We’ve rescheduled for September 3 but we definitely still need you to be here. My office will follow up with a letter. Thanks.”
The next voice was female, flat and all too familiar.
“You have no more messages.”
Louis stared at the machine for a moment then reset it to record. He got a fresh Heineken from the refrigerator, picked up the stack of mail and went out onto the screened-in porch.
Issy was curled on the lounge chair and he set her gently aside before he sat down. He took a long draw from the Heineken as he sorted through the mail. The stack was fat with supermarket flyers, bills, a Lillian Vernon catalog –- how the hell had he gotten on that mailing list? – bank and credit card statements, and two copies of “Police” magazine.
He set the bills in one pile, gave the “Police” cover a quick glance and tossed the Lillian Vernon catalog to the floor. Something bright fluttered out.
A postcard. A postcard showing a horse and buggy.
Oh shit...
He retrieved the card but he didn’t need to look at the back. He knew who it was from. With a sigh, he turned it over.
Hi Louis,
I found this card at the farmer’s market. It’s Mackinac Island! Isn’t it funny that I found it here and it’s the exact same place where we’re going to go for my birthday? You don’t have to give me a present. You can take me on a buggy ride instead. I can’t wait to see you! – Lily
Louis looked out over the gulf. The sun was starting to set, leaving a pink smudge in the heat-hazed yellow sky.
Lily’s birthday was September 2 and he had promised her he would come up to Michigan and take her to Mackinac Island. But now the damn fraud trial had been postponed and he had to be here instead.
Shit. Shit, shit...shit!
He felt eyes on him and looked down to see Issy looking up at him.
“What?” he said.
The cat just stared at him.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m a fuck-up. I’m a fuck-up who can’t be bothered to pay attention to a cat let alone a kid.”
Issy jumped off the lounge and went into the cottage. With sigh, Louis looked at the postcard again.
Until just a few months ago, he hadn’t even known he had a daughter. Lily’s mother Kyla had been an on-and-off girlfriend during his senior year at University of Michigan. The night she came to his dorm to tell him she was pregnant was etched in his memory like a bad dream.
Rain pounding on the window. Kyla standing at the door of his dorm room, so soaked from the rain he didn’t even notice the tears running down her face.
I’m pregnant, Louis.
What do you want from me, Kyla?
I want to know you love me. I want to know you’ll be there for me.
He didn’t tell her what he was thinking. That he was twenty years old and he didn’t want his life to be over. He just wanted -- after too many foster homes, too many years bouncing from one place and face to another –- he just wanted a clear smooth road ahead for a change.
Kyla’s last words to him that night still stung.
I’ll get rid of it then.
And his words stung worse.
Go ahead.
Louis stared at Lily’s looped signature. Lily...just Lily. That was always how she signed the cards. What did he expect? Love, Lily?
Lily. Just Lily.
Kyla couldn’t have known of course. Couldn’t have known that the name she had given to their daughter was a hybrid of her own name and that of Louis’s dead mother Lila. Strange that the two females in his life who were like strangers to him had blended into this third little female who was becoming...
Becoming what?
His daughter?
He wasn’t a father. Not yet. He had a long ways to go to earn that title. He had no idea what it was going to take right now but he had the strange feeling it was going to be like running the tactical course, a series of twists and turns where things would come flying out of the blue and you never knew what was going to hit you and lay you low.
He downed the last of the beer. The low slant of the sun told him it was maybe six-thirty. Still plenty early enough to call Ann Arbor.
He gathered up the mail and went back inside. Setting the mail by the phone, he dialed Kyla’s number but it went to the answering machine. He had a vague memory of the last time he had phoned and Lily telling him she was going to ballet camp in Interlochen sometime in August.
Damn.
Breaking the news to Lily that he wasn’t going to make it for her birthday was not something he could leave in a message so he hung up. He’d try again in a couple days.
He stared at the steady red light of the answering machine, thinking now of Mel and Ben.
He thought, too, about the small group of people who circled in his life’s orbit. Dan Wainwright, the first chief he had worked with when he moved to Fort Myers. Dan had retired two years ago and moved to Arizona. And Sam and Margaret Dodie, the older couple who treated him like a son but lately only seemed to call on holidays. And his foster parents Phillip and Frances. Even his contact with them had dwindled. Last time he talked to them -– was it a month ago or two? -- they had bought a new Airstream and were planning to wend their way toward Yosemite.
Everyone was moving on with their lives, moving away from him.
Even Joe.
Especially Joe.
After she left her job at Miami homicide to take the sheriff’s job up in northern Michigan, they hadn’t managed to make good on their promises to visit each other. When he had called her last Christmas, she had said that maybe they should see other people. It wasn’t just the two thousand miles that separated them, he knew. It was the widening hole in his own life. Joe had put words to it.
I want you to want something for yourself. Louis.
And her unspoken words -– and until you do I don’t want you.
He grabbed the receiver and dialed Joe’s cabin. He got the machine and hung up without leaving a message. When he dialed Joe’s private number at the Lee County Sheriff’s Department her secretary answered.
“This is Louis Kincaid,” he said. “Is the Sheriff still there?”
“No, I’m sorry, she’s not.”
Louis shifted to look at the clock on the stove. It was nearly seven. Joe was probably on her way home.
“Do you want to leave a message?” the secretary asked.
“No, thanks. I’ll try her at home.”
“Oh, she’s not there. She won’t be back in town until next Monday.”
Louis shifted the receiver to his other ear.
“Would you like to leave a message mister --”
“Kincaid. Louis Kincaid. No, no message.” He started to hang up. “Wait, can you tell me where she went?”
The secretary hesitated.
“I’m a good friend,” Louis said.
“Yes, Mr. Kincaid, I know who you are.” She hesitated again. “The sheriff is on vacation. In Montreal.”
Montreal?
“She’ll be calling in to get messages, Mr. Kincaid,” the secretary said. “I can tell her you called.”
“What? No, no, that’s okay,” Louis said.
He thanked the secretary and hung up. He stood for a moment, staring into the deepening shadows of the living room, still wrapped in only the towel, his skin sticky from sweat. Finally, he moved to the air conditioner and flicked it on. With a groan, it began to split out a meager stream of cool air.
He grabbed the holstered Glock and went into the bedroom. It was nearly dark and he had to switch on the bedside light. He paused before he put the gun away, taking a moment to slip it from its holster.
The Buddha was in his head now, whispering.
For those of you who ride alone it is the only partner you’ll ever have.
> Goddamn it. He was getting tired of riding alone.
He slid the Glock back in the holster, put it in the drawer and went to the bathroom. His hands still smelled of Hoppes oil and he washed them quickly.
The smell was still there.
That’s when he remembered it.
He opened the medicine chest, scanned the bottles on the shelves but it wasn’t there. He jerked open the door beneath the sink and rummaged through the bottles of hydrogen peroxide, shampoo and shaving cream. He found it behind the rolls of toilet paper.
He rose, staring at the small plastic bottle of Jean Naté After Bath Splash. It looked empty. He took off the top and upended the bottle into his palm. A trickle of green spilled out.
Louis brought his palms up to his nose and closed his eyes.
For a moment Joe was there and then she was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“They seem to be doing a very meticulous job.”
Louis watched the two crime scene techs as they worked their way the through tangled brush sticking evidence flags in the ground, taking pictures and sifting through the dirt.
He looked to Katy. She wore a green long-sleeved shirt over an old t-shirt, a vest bulging with stuffed pockets and long camouflage pants. Her face –- rendered dark brown by the tint of his sunglasses -- was streaked with sweat.
“The sheriff said they’re the best techs he has,” Louis said.
She looked up at the sky. “I hope they’re quick,” she said. “It’s going to rain soon.”
He glanced up at the sky. Ugly purple clouds were building to the southwest and the humid air was heavy with the smell of ozone. It wasn’t just going to rain. It was going to be a palmetto-pounder of a storm.
Katy had wandered away from him, apparently not expecting a reply. Although they were fifty feet from the techs, her eyes were also locked on the ground. Louis knew she was hoping she would find something the techs didn’t. He understood that. Many times he had been at a scene, separated from the forensics team by yellow tape, but still he looked for something he thought only he could see.
Katy stopped under a tree and pulled off her ball cap to redo the scrunchie holding her ponytail. What a strange woman, he thought, quiet, reserved, somewhat disconnected from what was going on around her.
They had been together nearly two hours, walked maybe a mile, but she had spoken only three times. Once to ask how many days the techs would be able to come out here and once to caution him not to step on a Scarlet King snake. The third time she had stopped Louis and pointed to something up in a tree. His heart quickened because he thought he was going to see a panther but then he realized she was pointing to a purple and yellow flower high on a limb. She told him it was a rare clamshell orchid and like the panthers, the orchids were protected from poachers.
She was smiling –- the first time he had seen her do so -– so he just nodded, deciding not to tell her he already knew that. He had learned all about wild orchids from the weird case he had just finished over in Palm Beach –- a string of grisly murders involving rich salacious women who all had an obsession with a rare flower called the Devil orchid.
He thought about telling her about the case because he wanted to convince her that he wasn’t just some hack PI trying to catch a chance with the sheriff’s department. For some reason, he felt the need to impress this woman.
That’s why he had gotten up early and stopped off at the Fort Myers Library. He had spent a quick hour reading everything he could find on Florida panthers.
The big cats, he learned, had once roamed over all of the southeast states and were hunted as pests, with the State of Florida offering a five-dollar bounty for every panther scalp. As the state’s human population grew, the panthers declined, their habitat shrunk by housing developments, highways and drainage canals. By the 1970s, everyone thought the animal was extinct.
But a Texas animal tracker named Roy McBride found evidence of surviving panthers. School kids took up the cause and pressured legislators to name the panther the state animal. Speed limits on the highways cutting through the Everglades were lowered and committees were created to save the cats.
It was an uphill battle. Only a handful of the cats were believed to still be alive and the ones that survived were weakened by inbreeding. Last year, in an act of desperation, the state had even started a sperm bank for the remaining males.
Louis had found one other interesting fact in a magazine article -- the panther was considered sacred to the Seminoles.
Louis had read all this with a deepening sense of depression. But it also created in him a more urgent resolve. He was damned if he was going to let Mobley sideline this case.
“Kincaid!” one of the techs called. “Come here.”
Louis started over toward Mickey, the older of the two techs. Katy hurried to catch up. They paused in a small clearing where the brush was tamped down into the muck.
“I have tire tracks,” Mickey said.
Louis bent over but could see no definable impressions in the mess of leaves and mud. Mickey motioned for Louis to step back and pulled a clunky-looking light from his bag. He told his partner to hold a small tarp over the ground to block the sunlight and knelt down. When he directed the ultra-violet beam at the ground the rugged outlines of the tire tracks seemed to rise up from the mud. They were too narrow to have come from one of Fish and Game’s giant swamp buggies.
“I’ll know for sure later,” Mickey said, “but I think we’re looking at Super Swamper radials.”
“Are they standard on a specific four wheel drive?”
Mickey shut the light off and stood up. “No,” he said. “People buy them for their mud buggies to be able to get around out here and any place else they want to go four-wheeling.”
“But if we find a suspect we can compare his vehicle tires to these tracks?” Katy asked.
“That’s the idea,” Mickey said. “These treads look to be pretty worn with some specific nicks. If we find a suspect tire the match will be as strong as fingerprints, ma’am.”
“How far do the tire tracks go?” Louis asked.
“Well, they look visible quite a ways out heading toward the southeast.”
Louis turned in the direction Mickey was pointing. He took off his sunglasses and peered between the cypress trees to the prairie beyond. He was disoriented by the primitive landscape, not able to tell where the hell they were.
“What towns are we near?” he asked.
“Immokalee’s the only one out here,” Mickey said.
Louis nodded. At least he knew where that was. Once again, he had met up with Katy there, leaving his Mustang in Juan’s parking lot. But Immokalee was to the northwest, in the opposite direction of these tire tracks.
The sun slipped behind some clouds and there was a low rumble of thunder.
“What else is out here?” Louis asked.
“There’s some cattle ranches but they’re pretty far east, closer to Lake Okeechobee, down around Devil’s Garden,” Mickey said.
Louis had been to Devil’s Garden for the Palm Beach case. There was nothing there but a rusty sign marking an intersection, an old cinderblock store called Mary Lou’s and an abandoned cattle pen where they had found a decapitated body. Devil’s Garden and the cattle ranches were too far away for the panthers to be any threat to livestock.
“Actually, the closest thing to civilization way out here is the rez.”
Louis looked back at the tech. “The Seminole reservation?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s called the Big Cypress Reservation.”
“How far?”
“Oh, maybe twenty miles or so.”
Louis glanced at Katy. She was slowly moving away, eyes still trained on the ground. There had been no accusing tone in Mickey’s voice but Louis sensed Katy had heard something that had compelled her to step away from them and maybe away from the idea that an Indian might be involved. Louis decided to let the possibility go for now and hoped they would find som
ething that led away from the reservation.
“Let’s follow the tracks some,” Mickey said.
He led Louis and Katy across the clearing, stabbing the ground with the small orange flags as he walked. Suddenly, Mickey stopped walking and knelt down. Drawing a small ruler from his shirt pocket, he measured the depth of the track in three places before looking up at Louis.
“The tracks deepen here by a quarter inch and look to continue that way,” Mickey said, pointing south. “I’m guessing he stopped here and added weight to his load.”
“Weight? How much weight?” Louis asked.
“Hard to say. Maybe a hundred pounds.”
“He put Grace in his truck,” Katy said.
“Grace?” the tech said.
“That’s the missing panther’s name,” Louis said.
“I thought they just had numbers.”
Katy turned to stare hard at the tech. “They do have numbers. She was FP105,” she said dryly. “She weighed ninety-two pounds last time we were able to dart her and check.”
Louis looked down. “If he loaded her up here, aren’t we walking all over his footprints?”
“Already checked,” Mickey said. “Foot prints would’ve been shallower, easily washed away by last night’s rain.”
“It didn’t rain last night,” Louis said.
“It did out here,” Mickey said. “I checked before I left the station this morning. We’re lucky he has Super Swampers on his vehicle or we might’ve lost these tracks, too.”
“Hey Mick.”
The other tech, a pudgy guy named Buck, appeared suddenly out of the brush. He wore a white paper jumpsuit, purple latex gloves and a pair of glasses with a magnifying lens inset on the right side. He looked a little like a Haz-mat responder.
“Look what I got,” he said.
He held up a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was a slightly crumbled box of cigarettes.
“It was back there, under a tree,” Buck said. “I might be able to get some prints off it. Cellophane looks clean.”
“Butts?” Louis asked.
“Nope,” Buck said. “Haven’t seen one butt of any brand.”
Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) Page 4
