Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

Inside the house the energy hum changed. Every light in the big, two-story home seemed to be on, but it held the stark, empty feel of a nightclub thirty minutes after closing time. The decor was off-white and pastel and spotless. But the furniture- sectional couches and oversized chairs-had all been pulled out from the walls.

"Last time we had an abduction callout we were an hour into the search when the kid crawled out from behind a couch," Diaz whispered, as if reading my puzzled look. "She'd climbed back there and fallen asleep."

All conversation inside the house was consciously subdued. I followed Diaz into the kitchen and saw Detective Richards sitting at a polished wood table. Another woman sat next to her, elbows planted wide, her eyes in both palms, fingers thrust up into her dark hair. Richards had an arm resting lightly on the woman's shoulder and was touching her head, stroking her hair as she talked to her in low tones.

Diaz caught his partner's eye and mouthed the question: "Hammonds?"

Richards pointed a finger to the rear of the house and then looked directly into my eyes. Green or gray? I thought. She turned her attention back to the woman, a mother whose heart I could not and did not want to imagine. I followed Diaz through a set of French doors and out onto a patio.

In a corner of the backyard Hammonds stood within a huddle of men dressed just like him, suits minus the jackets, ties knotted, shoes tight and made for the city. I figured FBI, but Hammonds still seemed to be in charge, no matter how tenuously. He stood in the middle, his silvered hair glowing in lights blazing from two outside spotlights mounted high on the corners of the house. I stayed on the cut stone patio while Diaz went out to the group. I could see the low fence that surrounded the long sloping yard. An orange and blue plastic jungle gym and slide stood to one side. Next to it, a yellow crime scene blanket covered a large object on the grass. The dog.

When I looked up, Diaz was talking with Hammonds, who did not look in my direction, but nodded his head and handed Diaz a bulky, hand-held flashlight.

"The kid was out here playing in the yard while the mom was cleaning up dinner dishes," Diaz said when he came back, talking like he was briefing me.

"She didn't hear anything unusual, but the sun was going down, it was getting late so she comes out on the patio to call the kid inside and sees the dog lying there. She looks around. No kid. She freaks."

I followed as he moved to the back end of the yard.

"They got the fence up to keep the dog and the kid inside. They were safety conscious and worried about the lake."

We hopped the waist-high fence and Diaz flipped on the flashlight, sweeping it across the ground until it illuminated a row of small white markers standing like folded cards in the grass, each with a number printed on it.

"Patrol guys got here first and found the mom out here knee-deep in the water and came in after her so there's a lot of prints. But these?" he said, shining the light on a deep print next to marker number one. "Could they be the same as you saw in your place?"

I bent to the imprint. Then the next one. And the third, all left in a patch of shiny mud. They were the same size as far as I could tell. The third one showed clearly that it had no tread, just a smooth size nine.

Diaz swung the beam farther out into a sudden stand of cattails and water lily that spread out into the water. I asked him to swing the light left and saw the water grasses stop abruptly at what appeared to be the property line. Next door the neighbor's green St. Augustine lawn went uninterrupted into uncluttered open water.

"Weed sprayed," Diaz said, again reading the puzzle in my face. "The developers tried to sell this whole place as a man- made wetlands area to help appease the environmentalists. They let the indigenous stuff grow in the water and they even have workers come out and pull any non-Florida stuff out."

He sprayed the light back into the grasses leading out into the water from behind the victim's house.

"It's great for luring the birds but some of the owners don't like it. They think the water grass looks like weeds and ruins their view so they spray it all dead."

He swung the beam back to the footprints that disappeared into the lilies.

"So what about the prints?"

"Could be," I answered. "I thought the one at my place might be a moccasin or something. You know? No tread or anything. Just like these."

"Booties," Diaz said. I looked up.

"Booties. Like the kind windsurfers or scuba divers wear. They're like a black neoprene sock that pulls up over your foot. They use them to keep you from chafing your skin with the straps on dive fins or from stepping on shells and stuff in the water."

I nodded and stood staring at the prints, thinking about Fred Gunther's scuba equipment bag and the clean canvas tarp in the storage bin of his Cessna. The same kind of canvas that glowed in moonlight and had been wrapped tightly around Alissa Gainey's floating body.

We started back up to the house. Hammonds and his group were still in their loose circle and he still didn't look at me.

"So the guy comes in from the water. Maybe he lies out there in the high grass, waiting for the chance, watching the kid and the mom."

Diaz was one of those detectives who had to run his theories out loud, hear his own voice to find a mistake in the sequence or logic. I knew a couple like that. I just listened.

"He comes out of cover as late as he can because he wants to use the darkness. He jumps the fence and snatches the kid, somehow keeps her from screaming and-boom. Back in the water and gone."

As Diaz talked, the mechanical whine of a helicopter began to build. I could see it swinging in from the east, a cone of brilliant light pouring into the neighborhood and now into the lake. The chopper stopped and hovered while the beam poked down into another crescent of cattails and maidencane at the shore line. One of the men in Hammonds' group was looking up and talking into his cell phone. The chopper banked and moved over us, the downdraft ruffling through our clothes. Next to the children's slide the wind had kicked up the crime scene tarp leaving the crooked rear leg and haunches of a big German shepherd exposed. The cream and black fur had already lost its natural luster.

"You forgot the dog," I said to Diaz, as the chopper moved off.

"Oh, yeah," he replied, looking for the first time at the dead animal. "He cut its throat with one slice. Somehow, before the thing had a chance to even yelp."

"He do this before, kill a pet?"

"No. In fact, the first one he came in the middle of the night and took the kid out a bedroom window. The family dog, a real yapper according to the father, never reacted."

"He's getting reckless."

"Or more pissed off," Diaz said.

When I looked up, Richards was standing on the patio, watching us. She was wearing dark jeans and a white, short- sleeved shirt. The spotlights behind her put a halo around her blond hair and backlit the thin fabric of her blouse, putting the outline of her breasts and her tapered waist in silhouette. I turned away to look out over the black water of the lake while Diaz went to talk with her.

On the opposite side of the lake the chopper was working another spot, hovering like a mechanical dragonfly tethered by a glowing white filament. Hammonds would have patrol officers working the entire perimeter, asking neighbors if they'd seen a strange boat along the shore or a van parked along the streets that didn't seem to belong.

How did the killer move from out there in the wild to a place like this? How did he operate so smoothly in both? I'd known street criminals in Philadelphia, burglars and hustlers and dopers who knew the corners and cracks in the city so well you'd never find them in a rundown and never trace their movements. But drop them off just over the way in the pinewoods of South Jersey and they'd be lost forever, looking for a pay phone on a tree trunk.