by Andrew Mayne
You can almost feel them cheering or jeering the photographer as he set up his large-format camera and snapped the image. Even though it’s black-and-white and decades old, the image feels strangely alive. Especially where Grace, Caitlin, Dylan, and Tim are standing. Caitlin’s on Dylan’s shoulders, making the two-fingered, one-thumbed sign of the horns. Grace wears a half smile, while the boys are all grins.
I’ve seen dozens of photographs of these four kids, from yearbook photos to candid images. This feels the most real and the most . . . invasive.
This is their world, their night. This was their tight little group. And almost surely the last image of them alive—likely because of the young man standing a foot to their right.
Sunglasses, an army jacket, and a smirk on his face make him appear above it all. Dark, messy hair, slightly taller than average, he’s maybe a year or so older than the kids next to him. I can’t point anything out about his face any more than the last guy I saw in a car commercial, but there’s something about the way he carries himself. He’s watching the crowd, not the stage.
It’s Sleazy Steve.
Before coming here, we asked Rafferty to identify Steve from the photo. It took him only a moment. He also pointed out his own stoned face at the outer edge, leaning over a railing, shirtless, not a care in the world.
I walk up the hill, stepping over cracked stone and broken bottles, climbing until I reach the spot where the kids stood. Hughes watches, unsure what I’m doing.
I don’t know either. I just want to stand in this spot.
Why?
Because they were alive when they stood here. All I’ve encountered so far is their deaths. The van was a tomb, and the memorial ceremony an emotional release for their passing. Here they were happy, at least fleetingly so.
I stand here, visualizing the stage, feeling the crowd around me, trying to take myself back to that night. My imagination responds eagerly, and I can almost believe I’m there.
There’s a snap of twigs, and I jerk toward the noise. George Solar walks through what would have been the mosh pit at the concert. He looks at Hughes on the berm with the poster and me standing on the hill.
I expect him to make a sarcastic remark, but he doesn’t. Instead he walks up to the imaginary stage to look at the photo. His gaze moves around the trees, probably visualizing the amphitheater just like I did. What does he see?
Knowing George, it would be a dope deal taking place or a purse thief near the exit, waiting for his accomplice.
His eyes move to me, then alight on the spot where Sleazy Steve once stood. I nervously glance over my shoulder, almost afraid I’ll see him there.
Actually, I wish he were here. So I could . . . what? Kill him? Arrest him? I don’t know what emotion drives me more, my desire for justice or revenge. I didn’t know these kids, but I know what it was like to be troubled. They may have been assholes at times, but so was I. When I went to private school and started dating Run, we were part of the cool clique. I was probably a snobby bitch. There was a time when I would have laughed at jokes directed at the sketchy kids who wore the same T-shirts every week. My desire to fit in and not be an outsider probably made me a mean girl, at least for a while. I can’t judge these kids; I can only feel sorrow for what was taken from them.
“McPherson?” calls George.
I realize I’m still staring at the space where Sleazy Steve stood.
“Hey? Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking.” I erase whatever emotion’s showing on my face and watch George scrutinizing the poster.
“We can get a pretty good simulation of what he looks like now,” George says. “Mostly. The glasses don’t help. But they can do some amazing stuff with the facial structure and extrapolate the rest.”
“I’ve already requested yearbooks from all the local high schools,” says Hughes. “We might get a name for him.”
I hope that’s the case, but I don’t think it will be that easy. The face in the photo appears to be twenty or so. He might not have gone to high school in South Florida, and even if he did, if he dropped out or changed his name between fifteen and twenty, we might never place him, but it’s worth a try.
Whatever the method, we have to find a way to track him in the present. He’s still here, still killing. He could be living a mile away. I’ve probably passed him on the highway or been in the same shopping center he has. So close . . . yet so far away.
“How did it go with Fish and Wildlife?” I ask.
“They’re pulling all the tickets and notes they have from around the time we think he dumped the body. Maybe somebody was an eyewitness.”
“I’ll bet it wasn’t his first time out in the Everglades. We need to go back at least a few years,” I reply.
“That’ll take some work. I’m guessing it’d involve thousands of incident reports.” He doesn’t say this to complain, only to point out a fact.
I look back to where Sleazy Steve was standing and envision the smug asshole with his sunglasses on at night. Did he have an eye condition? Did he want to look cool? Or was it something else?
“The sunglasses,” I say out loud as it hits me.
“What about them?” asks George.
“They’re for control . . . because he wants to control things. He likes using his camera to see, but he doesn’t want to be seen. We should tell Fish and Wildlife to prioritize tickets for people running boats without registrations or running lights.”
“That could be half of them,” says George.
“Yeah. But he’ll have done it several times. Also, we need to check with Highway Patrol in case they’ve stopped anyone near the boat ramps with expired or missing tags.”
Operating your car or boat without your tags is a minor offense and something Sleazy Steve might have been willing to risk rather than have eyewitnesses see him do something suspicious and take note of his license plate.
Also, running his boat at night without the running lights would allow him to avoid being seen if . . .
“We also need to look at all the cases of human remains being dumped out there. Even ones where they had suspects,” I tell George and Hughes.
“Broward Sheriff’s Office has already been doing that. We can go see what they’ve found tomorrow, if you want.”
“Yeah. He has to have dumped more bodies out there, right?”
“That would make sense.”
I get an uneasy feeling with my back facing where the killer stood. I catch myself nervously glancing behind me to make sure that he isn’t actually there.
But if he were, I know what I’d ask him: How many people have you killed?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
PIECES
Detective Hoffer slides a photograph of a severed arm across the table in the Broward Sheriff’s Office conference room. “This was found ten years ago by a fisherman.” She pulls another photo from a folder and shows it to Hughes and me. This one shows a leg from the knee down. “This was found a few days later, after they did a search for more remains.”
“DNA?” I ask.
“Male. White. That’s all they could tell. No match to a missing person.” She pats the folder. “There are eleven other body parts, going back twenty years. All found within the same twenty-mile area.”
Twenty square miles is a lot of area in the Everglades. “Serial killer?”
“We don’t know. Ever since Al Capone, it’s been a convenient dumping ground. Could just be gang related with no pattern, or one guy.”
“Just dumping them?” asks Hughes. “How were they severed?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. Most of them have saw marks.”
“Seems odd,” I reply. “To go through that much trouble to cut up a body and then not do a more thorough job of getting rid of it.”
“I’ll throw you an alternative theory,” says Hoffer. “Maybe he is thorough but a little too prolific. These are just the outliers.”
“You mean there
could be a lot more victims?” asks Hughes.
Hoffer nods. “If he preys on people from different socioeconomic levels and switches things up, we might not detect a pattern. Except . . .” She taps the photograph of the arm. “There’s a reason we didn’t contact you sooner about this. We hadn’t made the connection to the body in the drainage ditch because these are all male, and that body was female.”
“And intact,” I add.
“He cuts up the guys? But leaves the women?” says Hughes. “Why? I mean besides being messed up?”
“I asked Solar’s behavioral psychologist consultant, Teng. I was expecting some kind of psychosexual explanation. She said it could be simpler than that. Males are larger and harder to carry. He cuts them up for convenience. And in the case of Alyssa Rennie, it might mean that her boyfriend, Jared, is somewhere out there in pieces.”
“Do you have a map of where the body parts were found?” I ask.
“I can make one. Hold on.” She leaves us and returns a minute later with a rolled-up map under one arm and a stack of folders under the other. “I brought a bunch of cases. These are ones that we marked as closed because we got a confession from someone. The trouble is, I looked back at a couple of them, and the guy who did the confessing was a pathological bullshitter. We ran a little different back then; closing cases seemed more important than actually getting the bad guys in some situations.”
Hughes and I pick up the folders and start reading through them. They’re filled with reports, photos, and transcripts of interviews. Some of them relate to the photos on the table.
Hoffer flattens the map with two coffee mugs and draws red circles where the body parts were found over the years. Most of them were strewn along the canal on the other side of the berm from where Alyssa Rennie’s body was found.
“You can see they’re pretty spread out here. It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
It does to me. “That’s what happens when you throw body parts from a moving boat. The wake often pushes them ashore.”
“Okay. But why along this canal? It only makes them easier to find.”
“Same reason cocaine bundles wash up on the beach. A criminal would rather ditch them in a hurry than get caught with them. My guess is he went to go ditch the body somewhere else and saw Marine Patrol and got spooked. He didn’t want to risk going back to the boat launch with body parts. So he dumped them. He probably weighted them down, hoping they’d get eaten before surfacing. But it didn’t always work out that way.” I wave my hand over the map. “This isn’t what he planned. This was his contingency plan. And something he had to do more than once.”
“So if this was what he did when he got spooked, what was his plan when everything went fine?” asks Hughes.
I search the map, trying to put simple shapes to features I remember from trips to the Everglades. For people who’ve never been there, it’s hard to fully grasp. The Everglades is a sea of grass that stretches from one side of Florida to the other and runs right up the middle. Instead of a vast plain, it’s shallow marshes, stretches of mangrove-covered islands, and mazes of small waterways that are almost impossible to navigate in some places. Boat propellers get caught in the grass, and paddling a kayak is exhausting. The fastest way to get around is an airboat that glides over the water, but even then, you can only make it so far.
The only way to fully penetrate the Everglades is on foot—which means trekking through chest-high water with alligators, cottonmouths, pythons, and a few hundred Florida panthers.
There are plenty of secret trails and hunting camps, but they’re known only to the locals. It’s easy to get lost out there, but it’s also easy to hide something, if you know where you’re going.
“He’s got a burial ground,” I announce.
Hughes and Hoffer don’t need any convincing. They both nod immediately in agreement.
But agreeing isn’t the same as knowing where the spot is located. We only know where the failed body dumps happened.
“So how do we find it in all this?” asks Hoffer. “We can’t just go start looking.”
“No, of course not. Maybe the Fish and Wildlife reports will tell us more?”
Hughes holds up an artist’s rendering sketch from one of the files he was poring over. “Look familiar?”
It’s Sleazy Steve’s face—only older.
“When was that?” I blurt out.
“Fifteen years ago. After they found a foot, they interviewed fishermen and various airboat operators in the area. Three people said they saw a man matching this description in a small flat-bottom boat.”
“Now we’re talking,” I say. “Anything else in there?”
Hughes flips through the file. “Just some vague descriptions. But it’s pretty thorough. It looked like this even made it on the news for a hot minute.”
“Are there locations?” I ask.
“Yeah. GPS coordinates.”
Hughes makes a quick call to Fish and Wildlife while I put them on the map. Two of them are close to a boat launch. But one of them is in a much more remote part of the Everglades, about five miles distant.
“It’s interesting,” says Hughes, “but I’m not sure where it gets us.”
“Hold on.” I call George on my cell.
“What’s up?”
“Can you do me a favor and search your internal reports for a few dates?”
“Hold on, let me get my computer. Go ahead.”
I rattle off the six dates when the body parts were found.
“One second. Huh. What brought those up?” he asks.
“Body parts found in the Everglades. Parts we think our suspect ditched because he got spotted or spooked.”
“Damn. Makes sense,” says George. “So what do we do with it?”
Hughes and Hoffer are looking at me with the same question in their eyes.
“Those nights when he was out there? DEA and local drug enforcement would’ve had planes up and boats out looking for traffickers dropping loads.”
Hughes nods, getting it. “Our guy could’ve seen the planes or unmarked vehicles and worried they were after him. So he ditched the body parts in case they had eyes on his burial ground. Damn, that’s smart.”
It’s also discouraging. It means Sleazy Steve is highly suspicious by nature. We’re never going to get within a mile of him if he thinks we’re onto him.
“Hey, McPherson, I’m still here,” George says in my ear.
I set my cell on the table. “Putting you on speakerphone.”
“So, you think he may have a specific dumping ground out there?” he asks.
“It’s a possibility.”
“Hmm. Then we might have caught a break.”
“What’s that?”
“Some of those operations were military. They would’ve been using planes with infrared technology. One of those splotches they saw could’ve been our guy. Maybe that footage is still available. Let me make some calls.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MATERNAL INSTINCTS
I’m standing on Run’s back patio, looking at police reports on my iPad as the sun sets in the west. The lights of the houses and buildings across the waterway flicker to life like a thousand fireflies. Boats drift across the channel, sending waves into the sea wall in a gentle drumbeat. It’s a beautiful night outside my head, but I’m too absorbed in eyewitness accounts and forensic details to appreciate it.
I keep tabbing back to the three infrared maps George was able to get for us from the nights when we think Sleazy Steve may have seen DEA undercover units and bailed on going to his graveyard.
The idea of a graveyard was only a notion until we ran it by Amelia Teng, the Florida Atlantic University professor who has done some insightful research into criminal psychology. What I like about her is that she takes more of a zoologist’s approach, focusing on actions instead of trying to mind-read suspects.
Her papers are filled with exhaustive databases of details that sound mundane but actually ma
ke sense: for instance, serial killers often stock up on energy bars and drinks when they’re in their killing phases. Which makes sense if you realize that someone like Sleazy Steve might not want to stop at a McDonald’s drive-through with a dismembered body in the back of his vehicle.
When we showed her Grace’s Polaroid photo and the evidence of instant-camera use by the killer, she showed us a correlation between people collecting symbolic trophies, like photographs, before moving on to physical ones, like body parts.
She said something else that made sense: our suspect being so image-driven may suggest a strong attraction to pornography, especially anything explicitly violent or transgressive. This has us extending our potential suspects to men who have been cited for criminal violations relating to that.
It doesn’t help us narrow potential suspects down, but it does help us understand who we might be looking for if he crosses our path.
Run leans in over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, work stuff.”
“Huh,” he says.
Tonight is pool, pizza, and movie night with Run and Jackie, but I’ve been too obsessed with this case to partake in the fun.
“Being a cop is a twenty-four-hour job,” I reply.
“So is being a mom,” he says, taking the iPad from my hands.
I’m about to snap at him, of all people, for saying that to me, when I feel slender arms gather around my waist and drag me to the edge of the pool.
“Incoming!” shouts Jackie as she pushes me in, fully clothed.
I float back to the surface and look up at her giggling face. “Jackie!”
She puts her hands on her hips and wags her finger at me like I’ve seen my own mother do a thousand times. “You know the rules.”
Ah, yes. The rules of pool, pizza, and movie night: if you’re not in the pool by seven p.m., you’re fair game to be pushed in.
Whoosh! There’s a huge splash as a squat figure jumps into the deep end. My dad’s head pokes above the water. He’s still wearing his clothes too.
