Black Coral

by Andrew Mayne

  “Oops!” he says as he swims to the side and places his phone, keys, and wallet on the patio.

  “Moron,” says my mother.

  Huh . . . the two of them together again. I was so deep into my work, I didn’t even think about it till now.

  “Will your mom be joining us too?” I ask Run.

  “I would say the odds are against it.”

  I hear more footsteps and see two blurs as my nephews come hurtling through the air over my head and land in the middle of the pool like meteors.

  The waves pour over the edge of the pool, sending a small flood toward my mother. Jackie runs over to her. “Come on, Nana!”

  Mom, always the last one to get in, lets Jackie walk her to the steps, where she can soak her feet.

  Dad’s in the middle of a splash war with my nephews. My brother Robbie takes a seat on the edge of the pool with a beer.

  “Where’s Marta?” I ask.

  “Book club,” he replies. “Basically, an excuse for a bunch of broads to drink wine and bitch about men.”

  “Where can I sign up?”

  “You have to learn to read first,” he fires back.

  I splash him. He feigns a smile. I can tell he’s stressed out, but he’s never one to talk about what’s bothering him. A genuine laugh escapes him as he sees his son Robbie Jr. try to splash Dad, only to have Dad duck, drenching Mom instead.

  Run swims up next to me. “I figured we’d expand movie night tonight. I hope it’s okay.”

  I nod. I can’t remember the last time I got to be around everyone like this. Jackie’s laughter crackles through the air, and it brings a smile to my face.

  “Is our girl doing okay?” I ask quietly.

  “She almost got suspended from the swim team,” says Run.

  “What?”

  Run whispers, “She punched some kid named Conner for calling one of the other girls fat.”

  “Oh. And how do we feel about that as parents?”

  “I yelled at her in front of the coach. Then I high-fived her in the parking lot,” says Run.

  “Was that the right way to handle it?” I ask, not doubting him, but truly unsure how you’re supposed to raise a strong girl.

  “She cried when she saw the black eye she gave him. So I think she’s not a sociopath.”

  “Or she’s really, really good at manipulation.”

  “God help us,” says Run.

  We both look over at the smiling face of our daughter as she uses a pool noodle to slap the backs of both her cousins’ heads at the same time. “Nuck nuck nuck!” she calls out, like the Three Stooges.

  “Did she get that from daddy-daughter homework time?” I ask.

  “I blame YouTube.”

  “Right. Maybe I need to talk to her about violent behavior.”

  Run bites his lip. “Um, about that . . . She told me she had a nightmare.”

  Oh damn. My blood turns cold. “Because of what I told her about the case?”

  Run nods.

  “I’m so stupid.” I can’t believe I traumatized her like that. What was I thinking? Then I draw the connection to her hitting Conner. “She punched that boy because of what I said. Damn it, I never should have done that.”

  “It may have been a mistake,” says Run. “But maybe not a bad one. She’s not a victim, Sloan. Our little girl is tough,” he says, trying to soothe me.

  “I don’t want to raise a bully either. Some people can’t tell the difference.”

  “Give her some credit. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than we were at that age.”

  Run slides his hand around my waist. I can feel his muscular forearm through my clothes as my body presses against his chest. All of a sudden, I feel less worried. He’s still got it. Of course, that tingling, “everything is all right” feeling is how Jackie happened in the first place.

  We climb into the hot tub while Dad and Mom play Marco Polo with the kids. Robbie Sr. sits on the sidelines, watching. I should probably talk to him at some point, one-on-one.

  “How are you doing?” Run asks me as we settle in.

  “This case . . .” I shake my head, at a loss for words. “This guy’s still out there.” I glance at the distant lights. “It feels weird to be here while he could be . . . killing someone.”

  “You can’t run your engine nonstop. You’ll burn out,” says Run. He nods to the pool. “You need this every now and then.”

  “I need to be there for Jackie,” I reply.

  “She’s doing fine. She knows she’s loved. What I would have given to have had this when I was her age.”

  “A bunch of bathing apes splashing each other?”

  “Exactly,” he says. “I know you had it rough, real rough. I saw some of that. But your family, as dysfunctional as it was, was a family. Is a family. You’d kill for each other.”

  “More likely, lie, cheat, or steal,” I reply.

  “Yeah, family . . . I know things between us are, uh—”

  “Complicated.”

  “That’s one word for it. But no matter what, I’ll have your back. And I’m not saying this as an excuse to get more time with Jackie. I’m saying this because I want the time you spend with her to be quality time.”

  “And not me traumatizing her with tales of teen rape and murder.”

  “No. Time spent where you’re not traumatizing yourself with those stories. Jackie’s tough. Her mom, on the other hand—she’s vulnerable and tries too hard to hide it sometimes.”

  “Fair enough,” I reply. “What about you? Are you happy?”

  He waves a hand at the pool filled with laughing people and the mansion. “I have just about everything I could possibly want.”

  “Just about?”

  His blue eyes look deeply into mine. “Just about.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  WETLAND

  Kell, an uncle of a friend of Run’s, paddles his canoe ahead of Hughes and me, guiding us deeper into the swamp. We pulled the canoes out this far behind his boat, then boarded them to go deeper into this part of the Everglades.

  Kell, a tall Miccosukee in fly-fishing clothes and a New England Patriots cap, grew up in South Florida hunting in the Everglades with his uncles and then went to school up north. Even during college, he came back to help them with their guide business during the summer.

  He’s crisscrossed the Everglades from one edge to the other and even traversed it from the Keys to Lake Okeechobee on foot and in a canoe. If anyone knows all the back trails and hidden spots, it’s Kell.

  When we first told him about a secret graveyard, he seemed skeptical, like we were describing a lost pyramid that had somehow managed to stay hidden for hundreds of years. He was also a bit concerned because of the uneasy history of white explorers in the Everglades.

  Ever since Ponce de León, men have tromped their way through this land in search of treasure and lost empires, digging up cemeteries and destroying sacred places.

  As an archaeologist in Florida, I’m acutely aware of the line between exploration and stomping on someone’s history. While I think some indigenous peoples’ claims stretch things a bit, I’m not the arbitrator of where that line should be.

  When we discussed what Sleazy Steve’s graveyard might look like, Amelia Teng said it could be something that wasn’t obvious but symbolic. It would have meaning for the killer and could contain some kind of surface feature, like a tree or group of trees, that stood out. She added that some serial killers’ dumping grounds have been discovered only a few yards away from public hiking spots. In fact, that’s often what gave them the idea.

  We based our search area on two things: glowing splotches from the military’s night-vision photos and the frequently used paths of airboat tours. We decided on the latter because Sleazy Steve might have seen something he liked on a tour and decided to go back and investigate in his own boat.

  The fact that he uses a boat suggests that the site is accessible from the water and wouldn’t require trekking too f
ar overland, given that he’d have to haul one or more bodies to their final resting place.

  “This way,” says Kell as he paddles into a small cut in the mangroves.

  I could have paddled right by and never noticed the narrow waterway. We follow him in, careful not to hit the sides and get stuck.

  “Could he get a boat through here?” asks Hughes.

  “Probably not. This is a shortcut. Leaving the canal saves us almost two miles to get where we’re headed.”

  “Did your uncles show you?” asks Hughes.

  “No. Google Earth,” Kell replies with a laugh.

  The trees form a canopy overhead. Birds and frogs chirp and croak while things splash into the water or out of it as we drift through.

  There’s a moment when you enter the Everglades, leaving behind the tourist trails and man-made canals, when you realize you’re in the wild—a wild as exotic as the Serengeti. You could fit two of Hawaii’s Big Island inside here.

  What makes it deceiving is the plain of sawgrass that stretches into the distance in the north. The flatness and apparent uniformity make it seem smaller than it actually is.

  However, once you’re on foot or in a canoe in the wetlands, you feel dwarfed.

  It’s like you’ve been shrunk down and dropped into your own backyard. Every tiny blade of grass is now a tree, towering over you.

  In the sawgrass prairie, you can walk for an hour and feel like you’ve made no progress at all, unlike in a forest, where you have landmarks denoting changes in the landscape. Here, I feel closed in and can’t make out any useful features at all. At least at sea, if you know the currents and the time, you can get a pretty good idea of where you are.

  “This can get pretty spooky,” says Hughes.

  “At night it’s amazing,” replies Kell. “But also terrifying when you’re a little boy. My uncles used to tell me stories of the Gator Men.”

  “Gator Men?” asks Hughes.

  “You know, half-man, half-alligator monsters that roamed the Everglades,” says Kell over his shoulder.

  “Imagine if they teamed up with the sea goblins,” Hughes says to me as we exit the trail and come to a wide waterway.

  “You have any childhood monsters?” I ask him.

  “Just one that would come home drunk and beat the living daylights out of me and my sister if our chores weren’t done to his satisfaction.”

  “Yikes,” I say.

  “He’s in a better place now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sobriety.”

  My family certainly has its own challenges with sobriety, but my dad never lifted a hand against me. I saw him slap Harris and Robbie around a few times for outright stupidity—but never any harder than I’d have hit them myself.

  Kell slows down his paddling and lets us catch up to him. He points to the shore, where the water gives way to low grass. “From here it’s overland on foot, then through marsh.”

  “Could he have carried a body through here?” asks Hughes.

  “We carried wild boar out of swamp like this on foot,” says Kell. “Same difference if you know what you’re doing. All you need is two sticks and a tarp.”

  Wild boar hunting? I wonder if our guy is a poacher?

  “Would he go to the effort?” asks Hughes. “Or is that the point? A symbolic thing? Bringing a body out here?”

  I pull out a marked-up, plastic-laminated map and compare it to the landscape. The military photos showed that someone with a high body temperature was within a mile of here on one particular night. Another, fainter heat spot indicates what might’ve been a boat motor that had been pulled ashore a few hundred yards from here.

  This seems as good a place as any, but something’s been bothering me. Dr. Teng said that we should look for a prominent visual marker. Sleazy Steve came here at night. Did he do it from memory? GPS?

  I follow Hughes and Kell to the shore and pull my canoe next to theirs. We grab our gear, then start down a small trail, following our guide.

  “Boar trail?” asks Hughes.

  “Deer and wild hogs. Occasional panther too.”

  The trail leads us in a zigzag pattern through grassy landscape and sparse trees. The view doesn’t change much, but I keep my eyes up, looking for something to pop out at me.

  The trouble is, a serial killer graveyard could stand only yards away in the grass, and we’d never know.

  Two hours go by, and we’ve seen a few alligators, heard a lot of creatures rustling in the grass, and had to cross knee-deep water at multiple points. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but this is a disappointment.

  “Let’s head there,” says Kell, pointing to a cluster of cypress trees.

  We have to walk around a small inlet to get there without swimming. When we finally arrive, we find an old lawn chair sitting in the shade with a pile of beer bottles.

  Hughes and I stare at the items.

  Kell grins. “Don’t get too excited. It’s a hunter’s spot.”

  “Not a very tidy one,” says Hughes.

  “No. Probably someone hunting for a living.”

  I walk back to the edge of the shade and stare out into the Everglades. Maybe we should have used a helicopter. Or maybe this was a bad idea to begin with.

  I pull out my maps again and sit on a dry patch of ground. The small glow we’re reasonably sure was Sleazy Steve appeared only a few hundred yards from here; yet, much as in the ruins of the amphitheater, he remains elusive.

  Where does he go when he comes out here? I scan the horizon for warped trees or anything else that stands out visually, but it all looks the same in every direction.

  “What do you see out here?” I ask aloud, then stare back at the map and his spot.

  What brought you here? Did some feature call to you? Or was it something you sought out?

  I try to find a pattern but can’t discern one. Okay, step back. This is a place he wants to find but doesn’t want others to know is there. It’s something he needs access to but doesn’t want anyone else to discover. What does that remind me of?

  Buried treasure.

  But you can’t bury something out here and expect it to stay buried for long . . .

  Almost all the really old archaeological sites in Florida, the ones going back to the Ice Age, are underwater. Not all were flooded in the intervening centuries. Some tribes used underwater burial as a means of disposing of their deceased. They’d be placed in skin bags and staked into the water, or in some cases, their bodies would be held to the bottom by a series of poles trapping them.

  Where were Sleazy Steve’s first victims found? In a van, underwater.

  Where was he trying to dump the last one?

  In the water . . .

  We’re not looking for some aboveground burial site or shrine. What we’re looking for is underwater.

  I stare down at my map. He didn’t choose the location from an airboat ride. He chose it the same way Kell found the secret cutoff. He looked at Google Maps or whatever reference he had back then and found a spot.

  To the west of us is a collection of small, round ponds, as shown by the map. A dozen of them are spread across a several-mile-wide area. They have almost a ghastly look, like mouths screaming.

  It’s not the kind of thing you’d notice from the ground, but you’d see it easily enough in a black-and-white aerial photo.

  I call to the others. “I think I know where we have to look.”

  “Great,” says Hughes.

  “Yeah, there’s just one problem. I think we can only find it at night.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE MAZE

  Kell examines the aerial image of the “mouths,” then looks out to the Everglades, where storm clouds are beginning to gather on the horizon. “Huh, I didn’t realize we were looking for the Nexus of All Realities.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “A bridge between our world and other universes,” he replies.

  “Is that a thing you believe in?
” I ask.

  Hughes starts to chuckle. “It’s a comic-book thing, McPherson. Man-Thing.”

  “Oh, like Swamp Thing,” I reply.

  “That’s DC,” says Kell.

  “Sorry, I’m not up on the great works of literature.” I never took Hughes for the comic-book reader—he’s full of surprises.

  Kell hands me the photo. “That’s a weird spot. Expect to run into gators. Lots of them.”

  We’ve all got hiking poles to poke into brush and try to scare away anything that can be scared away. If that fails, Hughes and I are armed with our pistols, and Kell has a marine shotgun. We’re also all wearing waders.

  I’ve used my waders before when I had to dredge things out of shallow water where diving didn’t make any sense. I’ve also had plenty of experience in wetlands like this. My biggest fears out in the open aren’t alligators—they’re snakes and snapping turtles when I stick my hands into slimy spaces.

  We march toward the small ponds, stepping on tall grass at some points and muck at others. Even in thick grass, it’s hard to tell if our next step will be on land or in water.

  Kell, who’s a head taller than Hughes, takes long strides and clears a path for us. Occasionally he comes to a stop and gestures for us to hold back. This usually means he spotted an alligator sunning himself on land. Most of the time they get irritated and slip into the water.

  When we come to a large gator that has its snout aimed in our direction, Kell taps his pole on the ground, making sure it knows we’re here.

  Reptilian eyes stare back at us; the gator shifts but doesn’t move.

  “I suggest we go around,” says Kell.

  “She’s protecting a nest,” I say over my shoulder to Hughes.

  When we’re what we presume is a safe distance away (hard to know when you’re dealing with an amphibious creature that can outrun you), Hughes calls out to Kell, “Did McPherson tell you about her trip inside a gator den last week?”

  “Inside?” asks Kell. “How’d you fit? And why?”

  “It was a few feet across and about twenty feet deep. I was searching for clues.”

  “I call bullshit. I never heard of one that big,” he says back.