Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

"Crime scene, man! Mierda, you know evidence and crime scene protocol!"

Now he'd calmed down as we headed for the access park where I'd left my canoe the night I ducked the warrant, and where the killer must have pulled the tag.

By then we'd agreed the chance of finding fingerprints on anything were remote and tracing the courier who delivered the tag was probably a dead end too.

"That's the way he sent the first set of GPS coordinates," Diaz said. "Straight to the sheriff's office."

Since then he'd altered his methods, even e-mailing the GPS numbers in from a computer terminal at a downtown Radio Shack. It didn't take an FBI profiler to figure out this wasn't some swamp rat survivalist taking shots at the encroaching city dwellers.

"He knows the Glades. He knows how to get in and out of these damn neighborhoods without being seen. He knows enough about the gadgets to use them. And he sure as hell knows how to play on everybody's fears," Diaz said. "Hell, we don't even know if it is only one damn guy."

The detective went quiet as we drove west. He'd already overstepped his bounds talking about the investigation. Seeing his frustration, I doubted they'd found anything to help them. But he was right about the crime scene protocol. They at least deserved to take a look.

I told Diaz where to make the turn off Seminole Drive and we curved out toward a line of cypress trees and then down the entrance road to the park. A warm drizzle was spattering the windshield and Diaz looked up through the glass, hesitating. But when I got out and started toward the river, he followed.

Ham Mathis was hovering around his canoe concession office, emptying out the ice water from the cooler where he kept cold drinks for his rental customers. He peeked out from under the hood of his yellow rain slicker and spat a brown string of tobacco juice into the wet grass when he saw me coming.

"Hey, Ham. How's it going?"

The old Georgian set the cooler down and looked up.

"Hey, Max," he answered, sneaking a look at Diaz coming up behind me. "I truly am sorry about your boat."

He let another string of juice fly and then led us around to the back of his trailer. There lay the carcass of my canoe.

"I pulled her 'round so's the customers wouldn't see her," he explained.

The boat was flipped on its gunwales like I'd left it, but someone had stomped her. Gaping holes in the center of the hull yawned like twisted black mouths in the rain. Each rib had been methodically snapped. It had taken a malicious effort to do that kind of damage to its tough outer skin.

I went around to the bow and checked the port side where the tag had been. The pulled rivets had left four small jagged holes behind.

All three of us just stared at the broken shell for several long minutes.

"That's how she was the other mornin' when I come in," Mathis finally said. "I ain't never had no vandalism out here before."

"Anything else damaged?" Diaz asked.

"'Cept your paddle," Mathis answered, looking at me. "Snapped it like a twig and tossed it down the bank."

I showed Diaz where I'd set the canoe five nights before. We agreed there wasn't much of a chance of picking up any footprints or latents off the canoe skin. Mathis had called the county sheriff's office the morning he'd found the mess and a patrol deputy had come by and written up a report. When Diaz went into the small trailer with Mathis to get a reference number, I walked down to the river. The water had turned dark green in the fading light and was pocked with raindrops. Large circles grew in the spots under the cypress boughs where heavier drops fell from the branches. The air smelled thick and green, an odor I had never known until I came here from the city. A heron sat perched on a log on the opposite shore, searching the water for a meal. Suddenly it raised its head, then croaked its distinctive keyow and flew off as if something in the shadow behind had scared it. I stared into the dark patches but if something had flushed the bird, I couldn't pick it up.

"Angry?"

Diaz's voice startled me. He'd come down from the trailer and was standing behind me, fingers in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the drizzle.

"Guy that smashed that canoe didn't just want to let you know he was following. He was pissed," Diaz said.

"Yeah," I said, turning back to the river and looking into the shadows. "But not enough to show himself."

As we stood there Diaz's beeper went off and he retreated to his car to use his phone. A minute later he flashed his headlights and punched the horn. I yelled to Mathis that I'd come back later with my truck and he waved me off. When I climbed into Diaz's car he put the sedan in gear before I could close the door.

"That was dispatch," he said, setting his lips in a hard line. "They got another missing kid."

Diaz spun a circle through the grass along the edge of the access road and the rubber yelped when he hit the Seminole Road pavement. As he sped east I knew he wasn't planning to drop me off.

He had his blue light on the dash by the time we made the interstate and despite the rain-slick roadway he hit the southbound entrance ramp hard. I kept my mouth shut and cinched up my seatbelt. I'd been on a few car chases in the city but despite how Mel Gibson and the boys make it look in the movies, you rarely get above fifty miles an hour on urban streets. When Diaz merged onto the interstate he was already doing sixty-five. When he got to the outside lane he pushed it to eighty-five and started talking.

"They got the call out from dispatch fifteen minutes ago, same as the last ones, some new housing development called Flamingo Lakes out in Westland," he said as if I knew the layout. He powered past a low ride Honda as the driver picked up Diaz's blue light in his rearview and jumped to an inside lane.

"We scrambled a unit out there and they already got a call out for a K-9 and a bloodhound unit. We used to wait for some kind of confirmation, but not anymore."

We surged up on the bumper of a sport utility vehicle, Diaz laid on the horn and slid halfway into the inside emergency pullover lane so the guy got the full view of the flashing blue light in his side mirror.

"?Muevete, hijo de puta!"

The SUV finally found room to merge over and there was a line of six more cars in the lane ahead. Diaz stayed straddling the emergency lane and forced them all over like he had some sort of force field pushing out in front of him.

"Six-year-old girl," he said flatly as he pushed it to ninety miles an hour in the now open lane. "Playing in a fenced yard on the lake. This time he killed a dog on the way in."

I looked over at the detective's profile, saw his jaw muscles flexing and kept my silence.

Even at this speed it was a thirty-minute trip down into the next county. By the time we reached the entrance to Flamingo Lakes my calves were cramping from pushing my toes to the floorboards trying to put on my phantom brakes. After jumping off the interstate we'd swerved through suburban traffic going west, blew through six stoplights and caused a dozen cars to jam on their brakes.

When we turned onto the street I saw a spray of blue and red lights webbed at the end of a broad cul-de-sac. Diaz had to park a block away. I followed him in and we walked past two television trucks with their broadcast antennas up, a knot of huddled neighbors with cell phones, and a couple of K-9 patrol cars holding barking dogs. A big, boxy ambulance was backed into the driveway of the house at the end of the street. Letters on the mailbox spelled Alvarez. The place seemed too chaotic for a crime scene.

I walked a step behind Diaz, matching his stride as he nodded his way past several uniformed officers. No one gave me a second look. There were two plainclothes detective types just inside the entrance of the house, both talking into two-way cell phones, and we squeezed past.