The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  One of the forensic guys walked across to Dixon and got into a close conversation with him, Marsh and Halliday listening in.

  Redding said goodbye to Jennifer, ruffled Killington’s neck again and walked across to hear what the techie had to say.

  “I don’t get it,” Dixon was saying.

  The tech, Redding didn’t know his name, a skinny kid with glasses and large ears, shook his head, staring down at something in his hands, a small digital camera. On the screen, a picture of a steering wheel with black smudges all over it.

  “No prints, but it hasn’t been wiped.”

  “You saw the woman, Jack, when she hopped out of the truck, didn’t you? Was she wearing gloves?”

  Redding thought about it. He had a good memory for things like that. And you always looked at the hands first. He went back for the image, concentrating on the brief glimpse he had gotten.

  “No, Mace. Hands were empty. If she had gloves, they were pink. Skin colored.”

  He glanced at Marsh, who grinned back at him.

  “Okay, white skin colored,” said Redding.

  “So maybe latex?” Dixon asked.

  “Not latex,” said the tech. “We’d have residue. Anyway, there was fresh sweat on the wheel, which you wouldn’t get if the driver had been wearing any kind of gloves.”

  “Human sweat?” Marsh asked. Of course everyone stared at him like he was totally bats.

  He sent the vibe right back.

  “Hey, she fucking disappeared, into thin air, like she was a fucking ghost. Didn’t she, Jim?”

  Halliday wasn’t backing away from it either.

  “Well, we were right on her ass, Cap, and she broke outta the trees and... LQ’s right. It was like she just...vanished. I’m just sayin’.”

  “Lousy visibility with this rain,” said Dixon, and then there was an uneasy silence.

  “Ghosts I don’t know about,” said the tech, after a moment, and mostly to himself, as if the idea was a new one to him. He smiled.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll run it for ghost DNA.”

  “You do that,” said Marsh, not amused.

  “And while you’re doing that,” said Jack, “run it for real DNA too, see if she comes up on any database. Tell the lab we want this done right away, not a week from next Tuesday.”

  The tech promised to push it to the top of the list, and then Dixon’s duty cell phone beeped at him. He glanced down at the screen, gave everybody the “sorry, gotta take this” look, stepped away a couple of yards.

  * * *

  The three of them, Marsh and Halliday and Redding, watched the accelerating activity that was buzzing all around them, and the people on their porches and under their garage roofs, staring out, watching. Getting it all on cell phone cameras.

  The block was swarming with uniforms, the tan and black of the County guys, the charcoal gray of the Highway Patrol, the OIS people in their white pajamas. The rain was tapering away and far off in the west the sun was threatening to show up for a brief appearance at the tail end of the afternoon.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Marsh.

  Redding considered the girl in the backseat of Halliday’s squad car. She was staring back at them, gunning them, a fixed and angry scowl on her pretty young face.

  “Jim, you drive that...creature...to see the docs, but don’t Mirandize her yet. You follow? No Miranda. It’ll just get her attention. Get her to Immaculate Heart ER, have her checked over, and then get her admitted into one of those secured rooms on the fifth floor. Put a PW into the room with her. Tell her she’s in Protective Custody until we can figure what’s going on. Tell her it’s because her kidnapper is still on the loose. She’s in our care, right? Not under arrest. Here’s why. She’ll likely end up being charged with Resisting Arrest with Violence, Battery on a Police Officer and Attempting to Elude. Accessory to Attempt Murder of a Police Officer, if I have anything to say about it. But she’s a kid, a yoot like they say in the Bronx, and I don’t want her skating on some fucking juvie technicality.”

  “I ran her ID,” said Halliday. “No hits other than a misdemeanor shoplifting beef last year. Nothing on the dead kid either.”

  “Okay. Look, LQ, you go up and see to Julie. They took her to Immaculate Heart too. Stay with her. Stay close. Don’t let anybody from Depot or HQ lean on her. You are hereby authorized to shoot any media folks who get within ten feet of her. If they keep her overnight, can you stay with her?”

  “I can,” said Marsh.

  “Good. Thank you. Call her people, if she has any. Call whoever you need to. Take good care of her, LQ. She’s a keeper.”

  “What about you?”

  “I gotta see that this Suburban is sealed up and towed to the Depot. I want Forensics to take it apart in the motor pool. There’s luggage in the back, backpacks, a couple of boxes too. And it’s stuffed full of fast-food junk, candy wrappers, soda cans, like there was some kind of rolling party going on. Like serious fun was being had. I should have picked that up.”

  “Lot of shit going on at the time,” said Marsh.

  “Should have seen it anyway. Make sure Forensics goes through all that stuff. Get receipts for everything. Truck has OnStar so get our IT people to contact them for any route info they might have. I want every parking ticket and restaurant receipt and candy wrapper bagged and tagged. We’ve got their iPhones so lean on the carrier to unlock them and get location data and a list of calls. Also get our people to look at all the security film they can get from gas stations and restaurants they went to. That stuff will be on their credit card records, so jump on VISA and AMEX and those guys.”

  “They always give us grief, Jack.”

  “Give them more. Scare the fuck out of them. Tell them there’s a killer loose, and if she kills again because they fucked us over, we’ll put it on Fox and CNN and make them look worse than United Airlines did last year.”

  “Yow. Okay.”

  “Yeah. Look, mainly I want to know why a kidnapped girl would try to kill the cop who freed her, and why her sister was helping. I want to know where the rest of the Walker family is, the dad and the mom and the other sister. I want to know where those three broads have been the last few days and nights, why were they in New Orleans and what they were doing there and who they were doing it to.”

  “If she’ll talk,” said Halliday. “She could lawyer up, the PD would start up with all that Juvenile Offender bullshit—”

  Redding glared at him, a cold steel look.

  “We’re not gonna make it look like that. Like I said, we’re just gonna be these Officer Friendly cops, we’re just worried about her—is she traumatized, can she tell us what happened? That’s why no Miranda. If she does lawyer up, we make sure she gets the right PD—”

  “Hobie Pruitt is the PD on duty tonight,” said Marsh. Redding took that in.

  “Good. That helps. He’s not a complete idiot, and his father was a city detective in Savannah.”

  Marsh and Halliday said nothing.

  They knew he wasn’t finished.

  “One last thing, guys. I think that runner is still around. If she is, I’m gonna try to have her in the back of my squad before the night’s over.”

  He paused, smiled at them.

  “So. We’re good to go?”

  “We are,” said Halliday.

  * * *

  Dixon finished his call, stepped back to Redding, a troubled look on his face.

  “That was Rod Culhane from HQ. Fernandina Beach PD called a while ago. They were doing a search around the island.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  Dixon’s expression was grim.

  “They located the rest of the Walker family.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Dixon shook his head.

  “It isn’t. Co
uple of their harness guys found them in a storage unit that belonged to the Walkers’ condo. Down in the second-level basement, off in a corner. Padlocked, pretty much airtight to keep out the bugs and rats. But it had one of those roll-down gates. Stuff was leaking out from under it.”

  “Oh jeez.”

  “Yeah. They were inside, all three of them—mom, dad and the little sister. If it was done by the runner, she must have had a gun on them. Not easy to control two adults without one.”

  “Didn’t find one in the truck.”

  “So she’s still got it, I figure. They’d been tied up with plastic cable binders, had their mouths duct-taped, left there on the floor. Ten days.”

  “Cord cuffs and duct tape sounds like she came prepared. The runner, I mean.”

  “Not really. The storage unit was full of that kind of thing. The dad is some sort of collector, had boxes full of bones and shit.”

  “All dead?”

  “Two of them. The wife and the little girl. Heat stroke and dehydration. But the father, Gerald Walker, he was still alive—”

  “After ten days?”

  “Yeah. Guy must be half-lizard. He’s in the ICU at Baptist. Got a pulse like a moth in a bottle. Might make it. Might be a vegetable. No way to tell. Who the fuck could do something like that?”

  It was a rhetorical question. They’d both been cops long enough to know that the world was packed with people who could do that and much worse.

  Dixon shook his head, threw his Old Port into a ditch. He sighed heavily.

  “Fuck this. I’m gonna go up to the ER, see how Karras is doing. Then I’m gonna go up to that kid’s room and turn her inside out. You wanna come for that? If your runner is still here, which I doubt, Flagler County will find her.”

  Redding thought it over.

  “No, I’m gonna stay here, Mace. Whatever the hell happened up at Amelia Island, this runner is at the heart of it. I’m not leaving until we get her.”

  Dixon considered him for a while.

  “Is this personal with you?”

  Redding thought about it.

  “I don’t know... Maybe... I sort of felt like...like I had seen her somewhere.”

  “Like on a Wanted sheet?”

  “No. Something else. Don’t know what. Anyway, now that we got a rookie hurt, that makes it personal.”

  “Yes, it does. See you later.”

  “Mace, you be careful when you talk to the kid. Now that what we have is two, potentially three dead victims. That kid is sixteen going on sixty. She knows what the hell happened. Don’t Mirandize her. We don’t want her to ask for a lawyer—”

  “If she does ask?”

  “Try not to make her ask. I told the guys, we’re Officer Friendly. Be nice. Be caring. Get one of the PW’s to bring her milk and cookies. Get her a fucking blankie. She’s not under arrest, she’s a victim in Protective Custody.”

  “And if she asks for a lawyer anyway?”

  “If you work it right she won’t. If she insists, the duty PD is Hobie Pruitt. He’s a good man. If you have to get her a PD, make sure you get him, and not that stainless-steel bitch—”

  “Marylynne Kostic.”

  “Yeah. Her. Anybody but her. We can slow-walk that issue for twenty-four hours. Mace, this is too fucking serious now. This is Attempted Murder of a cop. One of ours. I know you’re pissed—”

  “I’m pissed, yeah, of course, but this isn’t my first rodeo, Jack.”

  “I know that. I just...”

  You’re a great cop, Mace, but you have already fucked up two good beefs when you lost your temper.

  Redding didn’t say that.

  He didn’t have to.

  “I know,” said Mace, aware of what was not being said. “We don’t wanna lose her on a...technicality.”

  “Yeah.”

  A technicality.

  Like throwing a handcuffed suspect down a flight of stairs. On camera.

  “Well, neither do I,” said Dixon, hardening up. “And I won’t. Any OT you need, I’m authorizing it. Good hunting. See you back at Depot. You bring that woman in, Jack.”

  “I will.”

  Redding stepped back, watched Dixon pull away, put his Stetson on, squared it up, took a couple of deep breaths and headed back into the trees.

  * * *

  A squad of Flagler County Deputies was moving through the forest, slowly, working their way down to the shoreline. Night was coming on, the short sharp twilight you got in these latitudes, the sun a dying flame in the far west, low enough to light up the underside of the clouds.

  He got to the shoreline and watched as two flatboats marked FHP Marine Unit were slowly paddling their way through the reeds.

  Redding pulled out his portable.

  “Jax 180 to Marine.”

  He saw one of the cops tug out his radio, put it to his lips.

  “Roger, Jax 180.”

  “That you, Leo?”

  “It’s me, Jack.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Bugs are murder out here. Driving us all nuts. Must be a billion of them.”

  They were buzzing around Redding as he stood on the shoreline, but not as bad as it must have been out there.

  “Getting anything at all?”

  “Other than my nose and ears bit off? No.”

  “Well, do your best, Leo. They found the rest of the Walker family.”

  Leo didn’t come back for a second.

  Then he keyed his mike.

  “All three?”

  “Yeah. The mother and the kid were dead.”

  “But not the dad?”

  “He’s still with us. So far.”

  “In the ICU?”

  “Baptist Hospital in Fernandina Beach. Listed as Grave.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Someone left them tied up in a storage locker. Ten days. The wife and the kid died of dehydration.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Yeah. Eventually.”

  Silence.

  Then, “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Redding. “That’s about it. So look real hard, Leo. We want this woman.”

  “If she’s in here, Jack, we’ll find her.”

  But they didn’t.

  * * *

  They came close.

  Close enough for Selena to hear what the boat cop was saying into his radio. They had found the mother and the father and the little girl. The father was still alive. She regretted that. He must have had a very strong life force to survive that long. When Rebecca helped to force them into the storage unit, helped to bind and gag them, the mother had begged her daughter not to do it, with tears and pleas.

  But Selena had the pistol, and Rebecca really wanted to go to New Orleans, and the sex was pulling her along, so the thing was done.

  She wondered if, in the airless dark of that place, the father had seen the Shimmer when his wife and child passed. It would have been better to kill them all—and perhaps to have taken the Shimmer for herself when she did it—but the girls weren’t up to that. Not yet. They were too young.

  But they had done very well, Rebecca and Karen, right up to the end here in this place. Selena was proud of them. They had been strong and brave. They had made it possible for her to escape and continue her work.

  The three gunshots might have been for them, because they had tried to do what she had asked of them. If that was true and they were safely dead, it was all for the best. Selena would always remember them with fondness. And they had been delicious.

  The hull of the boat actually brushed against the back of her jacket as it drifted by and she could smell the cigarette one of the cops was smoking in a vain attempt to ward off the mosquitoes.

  In a way, what saved her were those mosquitoes, be
cause they went for the eyes and the faces and straining to see clearly through a swarm of biting flies was a difficult thing to do properly. And she was being still, even as she felt the hull of the boat sliding across her shoulder blades and little icy jabs of panic were flickering up and down her belly. That was the hardest part, not moving with the boat so close, not giving in to the urge to burst up out of the water, knife them deep, kill them both before they could do anything but die.

  But then the men in the other boat would shoot her and she’d be dead. And that was unthinkable. So she did not move. And after a long while, the boats went away, rowing back out into the waterway, rowing back to the big motor launch that had brought the flatboats in two hours ago.

  * * *

  Another half hour and the dark was now almost complete. She lifted her head...slowly...slowly...and there was one lone figure at the edge of the marsh, facing out into the dark.

  That big cop, standing there in the dying light, was one of the three who had chased her until they heard the gunfire back on the road. This was also the same cop who had spotted them first, back there on the coast highway.

  She had seen his face in her side mirror as he followed the truck, a craggy cowboy face, a big man with heavy hands on the steering wheel of his cruiser, his pale blue eyes, sharp and steady, fixed on her. He had the look of a raptor. She’d known then that she was going to have to run. She’d told the girls to prepare to do what they had talked about if something like this happened.

  The same cop was now standing on the shore, stone still. She could see gold chevrons against the dark gray of his uniform, a sergeant. His right hand was resting on the butt of his service piece, and he was staring out at the swamp. Selena could feel his mind reaching out for her, feel the force in his animal spirit. He was burning for her.

  He stayed there for an unknowable time, watching as the police launch slowly churned away to the main canal and the night came down. She got a vibration off him that wasn’t like the feelings she got from other officers, that wolf pack feeling.

  This one was different from the others. She had encountered his type once before, but not in a very long time. She couldn’t quite catch that distant memory. But this cop was strangely familiar. As if they had known each other in another life.