The Blue Edge of Midnight mf-1

by Jonathon King

  Meg had become the team sniper soon after her recruitment to the team on the strength of her ability to put five out of five.308-caliber rounds from a sniper rifle into the dimensions of a quarter at two hundred yards. Good sharpshooters say they aim for a spot just in front of the ear, right where a close sideburn might end. A.308 round there will kill a suspect instantly, before his reflexes can pull the trigger of his own gun.

  But on this day Meg was playing backup, armed with an MP5 assault rifle and given the task of covering a teammate who was doing a mirror probe of a classroom.

  As the six-person team took up their positions, she had settled in against a hallway corner. Although her eyes were already on the doorjamb of the target room, I could feel her peripheral vision taking me in. She was wearing a pair of black gloves with the fingers cut off and before locking herself into position, knowing I was watching, she consciously loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair from her baseball cap and stroked it behind her ear. I would learn, much later, that it was a calculated move. And I fell instantly in love.

  Once the drill started, she fixed her rifle sites on the doorjamb while her partner crawled quietly along the floor, inching like an awkward snake along the baseboard of a scarred and dirty wall. When he got to the open doorway, he pulled out a long-handled mirror similar to a dentist's tool and slipped it around the corner, squinting and tilting the reflection to search the room.

  For thirty-two minutes the heat in the hallway climbed. And for thirty-two minutes I watched Megan Turner's concentration. The sweat started in tiny beads at line of her cap and I watched them build and then roll in strings down her brow and neck. The air grew thick and nearly impossible to draw in. She sighted her weapon and never flinched. I'd never seen such a display of total focus.

  When the officer on the floor yelled "Clear" the sharp sound of his voice made me jump and bang my shoulder against the extinguisher box. Megan simply exhaled, a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  After the exercise the squad gathered in the parking lot where they stripped out of their dark clothing and bulletproof vests, dumped cups of water over their heads and inhaled Gatorade. I was hanging near Gibbons and one of the team leaders when Megan looked up and caught me watching her again.

  "So what do you think, Freeman?" she said, and the voice seemed way too soft, far too feminine.

  "Impressive," I said, surprised that she knew my name.

  "Challenging enough for you?"

  "Possibly."

  "Love to have you."

  Gibbons looked up with the rest of the team, but I didn't see them rolling their eyes. I was watching Meg loosen a strand of her now wet hair and stroke it into position behind her ear.

  "Yeah," was all I could manage.

  We dated for six months and I tried every day to figure out if I'd fallen for the toughness it took to hold the crosshairs of a sniper rifle on a suspect's head for several minutes, or her ability to cry after separating another kid from his junkie mother on yet another domestic violence call.

  Both of the attributes fascinated and scared me.

  How I got past that and asked her to marry me I still didn't know. I was not a commitment kind of guy, more out of apathy than avoidance. I didn't think of myself as a man who needed companionship. I'd never had a date in high school. I'd gone out with friends that friends had set up for me, but rarely made a move myself. Women unsettled me. I'd grown up in a male- dominated household and had little clue how the female psyche worked. I'd tried to study them from afar, to grind out answers to their odd emotional abilities, but had obviously failed. Even Megan was indecipherable. But her energy hooked me.

  We got married in a relatively small ceremony in South Philly. Her family side was huge and varied. My side was full of cops, mostly friends and family from my father's side. After the wedding we went to Atlantic City for a week. Meg discovered blackjack and the dealers and pit bosses loved her. She cussed when she lost and shrieked when she won and her smile and flashing blond hair made everyone at her table happy to be there. I often stood back from the green felt table, watching, touching her spine through the sheer fabric of her blouse just to remind her I was there.

  For three years we kept a small townhouse apartment tucked away between the tight center city streets just north of Lombard. We went to the Walnut Street Theatre and she watched quietly and then drank loudly at the Irish pub across the alley. We took the Broad Street subway to the Vet to see the Phillies and I watched quietly and we both drank deeply at McLaughlin's afterward. When she worked out at the local Nautilus club, I left her alone. When I holed up with my books, she left me alone. When we made love, she was enthusiastic. I'm still not sure what I was.

  Throughout the marriage, Meg stayed on the SWAT team. Sometimes, when she got called out in the middle of the night, I would show up in uniform and stand out on the perimeter, talking with the crowd-control guys, trying to picture her inside or up high on a rooftop, sighting in her sniper rifle. But the night she took out a suspect holding three hostages at gunpoint in Overbrook, I was on another call.

  The guy had been chased by campus police after a robbery where he'd already wounded a security guard. He had slipped in behind three women, students at St. Joe's, as they walked into their dorm room, and then forced them into a lounge on the second floor, screaming that he would kill them if the cops tried to arrest him.

  Meg's team was on call and as the uniform guys cleared the dormitory to isolate the room, they took position. She was on the third floor of the student affairs building across the street with a clear view inside the lounge. Her teammates were silently creeping the halls while a hostage negotiator was getting an earful of cuss words on the only telephone in the room, a wall-mounted set that was directly in Meg Turner's sight line.

  The negotiations were short. The fourth time the negotiator rang the phone in an attempt to keep the suspect talking, he pulled one of the women over to the phone with him. He had his gun to the girl's head and through Meg's telescopic sight, she could see his finger on the trigger and his face in full profile.

  "You motherfuckers done called one damn time too many already and now you gone see what the hell it's gone cost…"

  The man never finished his sentence. The.308 round exploded perfectly on his right sideburn. All three students were rescued unhurt.

  Hours later, after my shift, after the SWAT crew had been debriefed and let loose, I found them at McLaughlin's. The place was full. The Phillies were in New York, getting whipped by the Mets on the overhead television. Off-duty cops were in every corner and clustered at the bar, sifting in and out among the members of the shooting team.

  When I came in out of a light rain, I stood in the vestibule and could see her through the frosted glass. She sat at the end of the polished bar, her perfect profile caught by the light coming off the ancient mirror, her ice-blue eyes shining with that soft electric emotion I'd seen the very first day in the halls of the elementary school.

  She wasn't drunk. She wasn't loud. She seemed to be carrying nothing extra in her head only hours after killing a man. She just looked damned beautiful. But her eyes this time were subtly moving on a blond, broad-shouldered member of one of the other Special Weapons teams. He was smiling widely and moving his hands in animated expression. I'd seen him before and some sense of his ambition caused me to avoid him.

  I stayed behind the glass, watching her play him. The rain dripped off my jacket and pooled at my feet. I watched my wife take up her glass of draft, draw a sip, and then with her eyes on another man she loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair and stroked it into position behind her ear.

  CHAPTER 12

  I am cold. In my dream I can hear water sluicing through concrete gutters. A swirling rain, caught in the wind that shears around the Wanamakers building, tunnels down Chestnut Street and whips against my face. Water is running black into the storm drains in center city Philadelphia and I am running, hard, my black Reeboks slappi
ng the sheen of water on the sidewalk. I am breathing hard, gasping against the rainwater pelting my face and I keep looking up to see the corner at Thirteenth Street, but I'm confused. Am I getting closer? Or farther away? Am I running at it? Or running way from it? Suddenly my foot hits a spot. I skid, lose my balance, start to fall.

  The scraping sound of stiff plastic on concrete jars me awake and my eyes pop open and I am gripping the arms of a chaise lounge. I am on Billy's patio, sitting in the late-morning sun. I got to my feet and walked into the kitchen, trying to shake the dream out of my head. I cupped my hands under the faucet and splashed water into my face. I was back in the world.

  Billy had gone to his office. He'd taken me out of the hospital two nights ago. With a few carefully folded fifty-dollar bills, he'd gotten help from hospital security to get me out a back entrance and avoid any lingering members of the media. He'd waited until after 9:00 P.M., after television's main broadcast hour, when the reporters would be easing back from any live standups they might have done.

  "I'm a-afraid you've 1-lost your anonymity," he'd said.

  Billy of course was right. After the plane crash, my name was in the accident reports. Gunther was going to recover. And since the Glades ranger was going on about how I'd dragged the pilot to the dock, the instant inclination of the press was to do a hero story. In my favor was the fact that I had no address for them to find and no phone to call. No sound bites, no quotes, no hero.

  But I also knew reporters weren't all slaves to the news cycle. Someone would have seen Hammonds and his team at the hospital and made a connection: What's the lead investigator of the child killings doing interviewing a guy who crashed a plane in the Everglades? Television might not care, but the newspapers would question whether or not to make a hero out of a guy being questioned about serial killings. The media didn't like stories that didn't fit into pigeonholes. How do you portray a cop who gets shot in the line of duty but kills a twelve-year-old in the process? I knew the drill. They'd back off to see "what develops." They might eventually move on. I hoped Hammonds would be smart enough to let them.

  For a full, quiet day it had worked. I'd lain here, stretched out in the warm morning sun and then through the shady afternoon. Billy had mixed up some kind of hydrating mixture of watered-down fruit juice and vitamins. I'd been able to eat, bowls of brothy soup and then some thin pita bread. I drifted in and out of sleep with the ache in my ribs and the one in my dreams taking turns waking me.

  This morning my body was stiff, but my head wasn't going to let me rest any longer. I got up and went inside and poured myself a cup of coffee, washed down a prescription Percocet with it, and looked out through the wall of windows at the thin line of the horizon. The coffee cup shook when I tried to raise it and I needed both hands to steady it. I was still wobbling despite the sleep and the medication. My skin was dry as paper and my lips were still swollen and cracked. The hot coffee stung them but I couldn't deny my habit. Diaz's card lay on the counter and I picked up the phone.

  "You have reached the desk of Detective Vince Diaz, if you would like to leave…"

  I waited for the damned beep.

  "Look, Diaz. This is Max Freeman. I've been able to locate your piece of electronics. If you want to pick it up, call me." I left Billy's cell phone number, even though I knew the detective bureau would have a caller I.D. readout and probably already had Billy's private number. I looked at the digital clock on the stove. Diaz called back in eight minutes.

  "Hey, Mr. Freeman, that's great. I'd like to come up as soon as possible. Get moving on that particular thing, all right?"

  I gave him the address and told him he could call from the lobby when he arrived.

  "Yeah, you kind of surprised us leaving the hospital so soon."

  "About an hour?" I said.

  "Yeah, sure, an hour."

  I punched him off and dialed again.

  "Ranger Station twelve, Cleve Wilson."

  "Cleve. Max Freeman."

  "Good God, Max. Where the hell you been?"

  It might have been a question, or a statement of wonder.

  "I've been a little busy Cleve, I'll fill you in when I get out there but I'm not sure when that will be."

  "You know those detectives were back out here with a warrant. I had to show them to your place," he said and this time I could hear the apology in his voice. "But I went in with them, you know, just to watch if they messed things up."

  "It's all right, Cleve. I appreciate it."

  "And boy, they do not miss anything, if you know what I mean."

  Cleve was a pro at understatement.

  "Anything interest them in particular?"

  "Well, they did perk up a bit when they found that nine millimeter of yours in the bottom of your duffel."

  I had forgotten about the gun and sat there in Billy's kitchen wondering how I'd been able to let it slip far enough into the back of my mind as to finally let go of its memory, the feel and smell and sound of it echoing off the brick and glass of Thirteenth Street.

  "But they didn't take it," Cleve said quickly, breaking the silence. "I heard one of them wondering if it was your old service issue. Then they put it back."

  "Yeah? Well, thanks, Cleve. Like I said, I'll see you when I get back out there. I was actually calling to check on my truck."

  "It's sitting here. The boy come back with it and since the scratch was gone and it was all shined up, I figured he was telling the truth about you letting him use it. But I've got the keys back in my desk."

  "Thanks, Cleve."

  I punched the phone off and finished my coffee while I watched the beginning of an afternoon rainstorm drive the sunbathers off the beach below.

  I met Diaz in the lobby. I was carrying a small gym bag and a traveler's cup of coffee. I'd taken a shower and dressed in a pair of light cotton trousers and the loosest long-sleeved shirt I had. My skin was still tight and had started to flake off my forearms, either from the salve for the mosquito bites or from the dryness of dehydration. The Percocet had taken the edge off the ache in my bruised ribs.

  Diaz was waiting under the watchful presence of the tower manager to whom he'd presented his I.D. before having me called. The manager bowed slightly when I thanked him, but continued his careful vigil as we drifted to a sitting area in an anteroom off the main entrance hall.

  "Nice place," Diaz said, sitting down on the edge of a wingback chair while looking up at the vaulted ceiling.

  I took a seat on the adjoining couch and put the bag between my feet on the marble tiled floor.

  "That for me?" he said.

  "Look. I'll be straight with you. I don't want any of this coming back on Billy Manchester. I've got this and it's going straight to you. No one else in the middle or with knowledge," I said. Diaz was looking 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 t
o 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."