Randy White - Dead of Night

“I agree. I’ve been doing that more and more, lately-saying dumbass, stupid things. What I need is that shock collar I mentioned. Give myself a little zap every time I do something dumb.”

I was looking at the stained weeds. “I know the feeling.”

Tomlinson watched Lake slide the van’s door open. “Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here. This place gives me the willies. There’s the stink of something dark here. Evil.”

I told him, “I don’t smell anything but the canal and hot asphalt. What you just did, though, was confirm your own bias. Which could be useful. Let’s walk through it again, but, this time, you take the side opposite your bias. Point out anything that suggests Frieda’s death was accidental. Try to convince yourself-that’ll make you think it through. I’ll argue the other way-that it’s murder. We give it our best shot and see where it takes us.”

Frieda had been hit on an open stretch of road, in good weather, so Tomlinson said the driver had to be impaired-poor eyesight, old age, alcohol, or drugs. Also, the car had to be traveling so fast that Frieda didn’t have time to jump out of the way.

Combine those elements, he said, and her death was accidental.

We’d returned to the blue X at the point of impact. Waited until Lake had rejoined us to talk it through.

“Dr. Matthews was on the asphalt when she was hit. The sand’s soft here, so there’d be tire marks if the car drifted onto the shoulder and clipped her. She went flying. So did everything she had with her-cell phone, and the missing laptop. Was she carrying her purse, too?”

I said, “I don’t know. I’ll ask Rona. I should have thought of that.”

Tomlinson was silent for a moment, eyes panning the area, visualizing what might have happened. “Okay. There had to be a heck of a lot of speed to knock her more than a hundred feet. She landed near the canal. The stuff she was carrying was lighter than her body, so it traveled farther. If the death was accidental, her phone and the computer went into the water, or got buried in the cattails. A less likely possibility is that someone arrived on scene before the cops and robbed her.”

He began walking toward where the body had come to rest. “The fact that there’re no skid marks before the point of impact supports my idea that the driver was either half-blind or very screwed up. But why aren’t there skid marks after the point of impact? Even if a person’s old and senile, that kind of collision would have to make a terrible noise. Don’t most drivers jam on the breaks automatically when they’re scared or surprised?”

I said nothing, waiting for him to draw his own conclusions.

“So that narrows it down to a driver who was so crazy drunk he didn’t know he hit something. Probably didn’t remember it the next morning, either. A guy on a binge. Which we might be able to prove.”

He had a map, and showed me where the road deadened a few miles away at the Kissimmee Canal.

“There should be a bunch of dead soldiers on the ground there-crushed beer cans or an empty liquor bottle or two. A dead-end road that overlooks water is every drunk’s friend.”

“Smart,” I said. “Let’s go have a look.”

We loaded into the van. I slid in behind the wheel because Tomlinson drives like a man who really does believe in life after death. He combines the wandering inattention of a child with a teenager’s love of speed. Terrifying.

He no longer argues with me about who drives.

After slightly more than four miles, the road ended at a littered turnaround near the water’s edge. It was a quiet place where the canal was wide and straight, and where people sometimes fished, judging from paths cut along the bank.

Among the scrub was the trashy spoor of lowlifes who’d used it as a handy garbage dump: rusted washing machines, stained bedding, sodden magazines. On asphalt and sand, there was also a glitter of broken bottles and squashed cans-but no fresh beer or liquor bottles.

We searched for ten minutes or so before Tomlinson said, “Okay, so maybe they had a bottle of vodka; a jug so big they couldn’t finish it. Or they tossed them in the water. My scenario is still workable. It could’ve been accidental. Let’s hear you convince us that it wasn’t. That it was murder.”

The case I made wasn’t any stronger than Tomlinson’s. My argument was based on the absence of evidence, not the presence of evidence. I listed what those absences implied:

There were no skid marks before or after impact. Someone wanted to hit her.

On a fast, narrow road like this, Frieda would have walked facing traffic. If she’d heard a car coming, she would have turned to look as it swerved toward her.

“She would’ve jumped for cover,” I said. “Not stand there on the road waiting to get hit.”

This was the only open stretch where her killers would be able to spot traffic approaching from a mile or two in either direction-the perfect place to wait as an accomplice drove by at speed, before giving her a push.

“The reason her cell phone and the laptop are missing,” I said, “is because she was abducted from her car. After the killers futzed with her battery. They have the laptop, but they probably dumped the cell phone at the first place handy.”

Lake asked, “Why?”

I said, “Because cell phones are risky. You can hit the redial button accidentally, or accept an incoming call. Plus, they can be tracked electronically. That’s a biggie.

“My guess is, they’d have dumped the phone first thing. Tossed it into the closest water, someplace murky, near where she was parked. I think we should go look.”

My son said, “Just like Tomlinson’s empty beer bottles, if we find it.”

“Uh-huh. Except for what it would prove. It means they took the woman off and killed her in cold blood.”

Randy Wayne White

Dead of Night

We’d already located the dirt service road where Frieda’s car was found. We’d passed it on our way to look for empty beer cans. It was a rutted lane that followed a power line swath bordered by oaks, poison ivy, and swamp maples. I drove with my window open. High-voltage wires hummed overhead.

After half a mile or so of bouncing along, I braked to a stop, surprised to see another vehicle parked near a section of canal: a white pickup truck, recent model. According to our map, this was the approximate spot where they’d found Frieda’s disabled SUV.

As we got closer, I could see that the truck was empty. There were words stenciled on the door in black letters:

TROPICANE INC. ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING VEHICLE 5

“I rest my case,” Tomlinson said. “Providence and God are steering us. You said you need to talk to the Tropicane people? Here they are. It’s very fortuitous that the Big Sugar goons are here waiting.”

I didn’t bother telling him that, in a long-term study, sample sites are standardized for consistency. With both Jobe and Frieda dead, the job would fall to the agencies that had commissioned the tests. I would’ve been more surprised if this vehicle wasn’t from Tropicane.

Instead, I said, “You’re in charge of providence and God. But leave everything else to me, okay? Oh… and Tomlinson? If we meet the people who belong to that truck, please don’t go into one of your anti-big business, antisugar rants. We’re here to collect information, not dish it out.”

He said primly, “Okay, okay, for you I’ll go easy. But they’ve been bleeding the Everglades to death for decades, and we all know it. I’m surprised a certain biologist pal of mine doesn’t consider it his duty to inform the dupes on their payroll.”

I replied, “According to the latest literature, the industry’s exceeding federal environmental mandates. Their own decision. So cut them some slack. Plus, with your new understanding of profit sharing, I’d expect you to be more tolerant. You’re both money machines in your way.”