by Scott Blade
I stood with the FBI agent and an Army doctor looking over the corpse.
We were on an Army base where I wasn’t popular. The day before they had been putting me in restraints and now I was back, working with the FBI.
I stepped closer to Dekker’s body.
The Army medical doctor stood on the opposite side of the table. He gasped when he saw me reach out and touch the body. Like I was going to check her pulse, second guessing his assertion that she was dead. I wasn’t. I wanted to feel her skin.
I hadn’t known Dekker in life, but I wanted to touch her in death. I wanted to touch her because I was feeling rage from what had happened to her and I wanted to touch her like a family member might brush the hair of a dead relative at a funeral.
It was a second nature thing.
I wore surgical gloves as we all did, but I wasn’t authorized to touch her, not in the doctor’s eyes. I was an outsider, a nobody. I didn’t belong here.
I ignored him and did it anyway.
Through the glove, I could feel that Dekker was cold, colder than the polished, metal table beneath her. She was colder than the ocean water that she had washed in on. She might’ve been colder than the nights in prison, where the guy that they had pegged to be the killer was awaiting death. I wasn’t sure if he had murdered the other women or not, but I knew he didn’t kill this one.
Even though I had seen dead people before, it had been a long time. I wasn’t a cop anymore and I certainly wasn’t military either.
I had been a man who goes everywhere and does anything. Attached to nothing. I owed debts to no one. I took orders from no one. I liked it that way.
No one waited up for me. No one waited for me to come home. No one waited to hear where I was or what I was doing. I had no children. No house in the suburbs. No mortgage to pay. No car insurance to worry about. I enjoyed simply living in the moment.
I no longer heard the voice of my team leader in my earpiece, telling me when to breach a house or a compound. I no longer heard the WHOP! WHOP! of helicopter blades as I escaped some godforsaken place in the Middle East.
I didn’t spend my nights unable to sleep for fear that the enemy would ambush me and kill me while I slept.
I had once been an undercover cop, with NCIS. I had been assigned to the SEALs teams. Sometimes my enemies were my friends, and sometimes my friends were my enemies.
Living a double life like that can leave a man not knowing up from down.
That life was far behind me now and I was glad for it. But this brought me right back into it.
I looked over at the Army doctor and asked, “Any physical evidence that’s different with her from the others?”
“Other than the bruise from the muzzle?”
“Other than that?”
The Army doctor said, “It’s all in the report, but no. I’d say that her experience was long, drawn-out suffering. Same as the rest. It was bad. She didn’t go quickly.
“I’ve been in the Army for ten years now. I’ve seen some combat, in Iraq. Three tours. And a stretch in Frankfurt. We got a lot of guys there. A lot of hopeless cases. So, I’ve seen tons of guys flown back from that war. I’ve seen missing limbs, gunshot wounds, IEDs. You name it. But I’ve never seen a single soldier endure torture like this.”
I stayed quiet.
“Judging by the reports of the other women, this murder syncs up the same. Nothing’s different.”
I looked at the FBI agent that I had met just twenty hours earlier.
She nodded. There was defeat in her eyes because she knew that this meant her guy wasn’t the killer. They had arrested the wrong man.
She said, “It’s the same killer.”
CHAPTER 2
BEFORE I STARED at Karen Dekker’s broken and bashed and lifeless body, I had been caught up in a temporary setback of my own.
I couldn’t breathe!
My first instinct was to open my mouth—wide. Desperately, I wanted to suck in air! I wanted to fill my lungs!
I needed air!
I needed to breathe!
I wanted to gasp a breath of anything!
I was desperate!
But I couldn’t breathe!
I couldn’t breathe because I was submerged underwater. It had been a sudden shock. I hadn’t expected it. Therefore, I hadn’t taken a deep breath beforehand.
With all my strength, I fought against the current. My hands and feet propelled and fishtailed and rotored back and forth, out of control, like fragmented helicopter blades.
I was caught in a tailspin.
Lightning cracked and crashed high above. Thunder rumbled and boomed.
The lightning flashed and spiderwebbed under the rolling clouds of black.
An hour ago, it hadn’t been this bad. An hour ago, the sun beamed across the sky and bounced off fluffy white clouds that floated through the air, soft and harmless.
Everything changed—fast.
Less than a half-hour passed and suddenly I saw storm clouds roll in over the surface of the ocean. They rolled steadily, foreboding and unstoppable. They had chased away the harmless, fluffy clouds, which I didn’t like. And they chased away the tourists, which I did like. They also chased away the local surfers.
But not me. I stayed.
I had seen plenty of bad weather in my time in the Navy. Out on the ocean, surrounded by nothing but endless water and endless sky, the one constant that threatened tranquility was bad weather.
Naval Mariners fought more bad weather than enemy ships at a ratio of a million to one or even ten million to one.
No matter how much time I spent at sea, weather constantly surprised me. No matter how many times weather behaved badly, mankind continued to pretend that it was predictable.
Nothing was less predictable than weather. Nothing except for the future.
At the time I was submerged underwater, fighting to breathe, I had no idea about the future and the crimes I was going to get tangled up in.
Being dragged underwater without any breath in my lungs was a little embarrassing because I had once been a sailor and later a Navy SEAL.
I knew how to swim. And I was good at holding my breath.
Guess I shouldn’t have been too hard on myself since no one expects to be dragged under by an undertow. If they had, then no one would succumb to them.
Less than a minute earlier, I had been on a rented surfboard. The next moment, I wiped out and then I was being swept under.
I had lost my footing on the surfboard. That was a split second after I saw the whitecaps grow larger and larger, unexpectedly.
I chose to surf under the storm clouds. My fault.
I was going to turn thirty-six later in the year and I still acted like I was twenty-six. This was a universal truth that we all go through, a miscalculation of our age and abilities.
Live long enough and we’ll all experience that moment when we can’t quite walk up that long flight of stairs as easily as we once could. We can’t run and jump like we could before. We all must start watching our diets one day. Counting calories. Watching out for cholesterol. Noticing that our hair used to be a little thicker, a little less gray.
We all start working a little harder to do the normal things that we used to do so well.
I wasn’t there yet. I was only thirty-five years old. But I was closer than I ever had been before. Every second ticks down the countdown of our lives.
This wasn’t going to me my last tick.
I twisted and heaped and swerved under the ocean like a sea lion caught in a net. Then I frogged my legs back and swam up. At least I hoped it was up.
Turned out it was.
I burst through the waves and gasped for air. I took two deep breaths and held the second one because I knew that chances were I was going back under.
This time I had the breath for it. And I had my bearings.
I swam in the direction of the beach.
The next wave passed over me and I resurfaced. This time I wa
s prepared to stay above the water.
I looked up at the sky. It was a lot darker than I had thought. It looked like the entire atmosphere was one big storm cloud.
I twisted and spiraled around. I was looking for the surfboard. For stupid reasons, I had opted not to fasten the leg rope around my ankle despite my instinct for safety.
I didn’t have a good excuse for not doing it. The best that I could say was that it was like not wearing a seatbelt.
In that moment, I had decided I was too good for it. I had been a SEAL and I knew how to swim. I was pretty good at it too.
Dumb mistake.
I searched the tops of the crashing waves and saw no sign of the board.
I felt a little frantic about losing it because I had had to put a two-hundred-dollar deposit on it. I looked left, looked right. I couldn’t see it.
Another heavy wave came rolling at me and crashed over my head. Again, I was swept under, and again, I resurfaced and decided to swim back to shore.
I swam.
It didn’t take long because the waves were carrying me half the distance.
Once I made it to the shallow waters, I walked out of the ocean.
The beach was basically deserted, except for a lifeguard truck that was headed in my direction like a security cop with nothing better to do.
Great, I thought. I was in trouble for not getting out earlier.
The truck was a yellow-and-red pickup with a thin light bar mounted on the roof. It flashed red and white. No siren.
I didn’t wait around staring at them. I turned and scanned for the surfboard. No law said that I had to stop and be nice to the local lifeguards. But I did want to find and return that surfboard.
Two hundred bucks was two hundred bucks.
I was a tall guy, so I didn’t have to stretch out or climb up onto anything to see far over the shoreline.
Cocoa Beach was pretty flat, which usually meant a postcard-perfect view, in contrast to the high crashing waves and the blackening, storm-covered skies that had developed this morning.
It was a beautiful beach.
I looked from one side of the coastline to the other. No surfboard. It should’ve been washed in by the surf. No way did it go out to sea, not in these rough conditions.
I looked out over the ocean. Nothing.
The lifeguard truck was getting closer. The main street was at their backs and the ocean was at mine. I wasn’t going to outrun them.
I waited. What choice did I have?
The truck pulled to a stop about ten feet from me. They hadn’t been traveling at top speeds, but a truck driving over sand at slow speeds was still going to kick up sand and pebbles as it braked to a stop.
That’s exactly what they did. Only they made it all dramatic. Like a couple of cops making a bust.
The truck stopped and I expected two lifeguards to hop out with hands drawn like they were pretend guns. I expected them to say, “Freeze!”
They didn’t do anything that dramatic or stupid, but they did hop out—fast.
And I had been wrong about them. They weren’t lifeguards.
They were beach cops. Technically, they were called Cocoa Beach Police. They were an offshoot of the local police, a beach patrol unit. So they weren’t lifeguards, but a fraction of a rung higher than that and a rung lower than bicycle patrol.
Although, I may have been wrong about that because technically the bicycle patrol has less impressive equipment. They use bicycles and not trucks.
The driver hopped out, shut his door and adjusted his pants by grabbing his gun belt.
The passenger got out a second later and left his door open. He walked up to the passenger side tire and leaned on the side of the truck and stared at me.
The driver walked down past the hood and the tire and stopped dead in front of the fender.
They had sidearms.
I would be lying if I said that part of me didn’t want to laugh out loud.
What were they going to use sidearms for? I imagined that busting a litterbug didn’t require guns.
I stayed quiet.
The driver said, “Sir, you got a death wish?”
I didn’t answer.
“Sir, did you not see the ‘beach closed’ sign?”
The passenger said, “Sir, you gonna answer?”
I said, “Is there a law about being on a public beach?”
The driver said, “Sir, this beach is closed. The sign says that very thing. Did you not read it?”
The passenger asked, “Sir, can you read?”
“I can read just fine.”
“So, why did you disobey the sign, sir?”
I said, “I didn’t see the sign.”
“Sir, it’s an illegal act to disobey and not to follow the directions of a warning sign in the State of Florida.”
“I didn’t disobey the sign. I just told you that I didn’t see it.”
The driver said, “Sir, you can spend up to ten nights in jail and pay a fine of one thousand dollars for disobeying a ‘beach closed’ sign here.”
Two hundred bucks, gone. And now a thousand-dollar fine. I was racking up the charges.
The driver moved in closer and moved his right hand not all the way to his sidearm, but closer to it. I’d say it was in the proximity of it. Making it fast to grab. Fast enough to draw. Which it didn’t need to be because it was obvious that I wasn’t armed. Not unless I was packing a nine millimeter in my swim trunks.
I wasn’t.
“Sir, the fact of the matter is that there is a sign. Not the fact of the matter is that it is irrelevant if you saw it or not.”
“Not the fact of the matter,” he had said. That was a weird phrase. It made me think that maybe the guy had tried to be clever and tried to come up with something smart to say. A failure on both accounts, but you don’t tell that to a guy who has a gun and a legal right to discharge it. Or at least he can discharge it and claim it was under legal circumstances later.
Not something I was interested in being a part of.
I said, “I’m sorry for not reading the sign. My mistake.”
The driver stopped walking toward me and gave me a hard look. He looked me up and then down and back up again. Which made me feel a little uncomfortable.
He said, “That’s some tattoo you got.”
The passenger beach cop asked, “How long that take you to get?”
He was a little younger than the driver. Both beach cops were about late twenties to early thirties. I could tell in all the obvious ways, but the driver had a middle-aged look about him, like he had been cursed with looking older his whole life.
I knew they weren’t really interested in my tattoos. Florida beaches were full of guys with lots of tattoos. Most of America was full of those types of guys now.
I said, “It’s not one piece. It’s several pieces.”
“Huh. They don’t come together to form one image?”
“No.”
“They look like they were all drawn together.”
The driver asked, “If you didn’t request them to all be one tattoo, then how’d you manage to get them to blend that way?”
Are we really having this conversation? I thought.
I said, “Luck, I guess.”
They said nothing to that.
The driver said, “Listen here. Those waters are bad and about to get worse, when it starts raining.”
I nodded.
“You stay out of the water. You wanna swim? Go home and come back tomorrow.”
I nodded again.
The passenger stepped closer and looked behind me. Looked along the sand. Then he asked, “Where’s your stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“Where’s your belongings?”
Which was a good question. Most of the time I would’ve answered it with I don’t have any stuff. But this time I did have stuff. I had had a pair of navy blue track pants, which reminded me of PTUs or Physical Training Uniforms, even though they weren�
�t shorts. And I had had a tank top and pair of flip-flops. I also had my passport, bankcard, and a toothbrush. Carrying a toothbrush was the only lesson that I had learned from my father, although I never even met him. He was supposedly a drifter and former Army officer.
I said, “I don’t know.”
“Someone took them?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
The driver asked, “If your belongings are missing then you need to report them stolen.”
These guys were very serious about their job. I thought of a smart remark to make, but I stayed quiet.
I looked around.
“Maybe you misplaced them?”
“Maybe you forgot where you put them?”
I didn’t answer.
The beach was completely empty except for the three of us. In fact, the road was empty except for the occasional car passing by. In South Florida, bad weather chased everyone indoors.
I combed over the sands, thinking maybe I did misplace them. I had rolled them up in a towel that I also bought from the surf shop across the street.
I didn’t see my belongings, but I did finally see the surfboard. It washed in just as I was looking north. It came in with a massive wave. The wave pushed it a few feet away from the edge of the next wave.
At least I could get back my two hundred bucks, which was good because I might not get back my bankcard.
The driver followed my gaze and noticed my surfboard.
He said, “Danny, look.”
The passenger looked at where he was pointing.
Danny asked, “Is that a surfer’s?”
Which was a dumb question, but again I wanted to stay on their good side, so I said nothing about it.
The driver asked, “You see anyone else out there while you were swimming?”
“No. Just me.”
They looked at me. Both wore the same suspicious expression. Which made me realize that maybe they suspected that I was lying. I also started to think that maybe they would concoct a farce about me drowning a swimmer and trying to steal his surfboard.
I said, “It doesn’t belong to another surfer. That’s my board. I was out on it. Got towed under is all. And the board got shaken loose.”
