Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

This guy knew both worlds. And he had mastered the wall between them.

"Max?"

Diaz was beside me, and had crossed an uninvited line with the use of my first name. I followed him back up to the patio.

"Look, I'm gonna get this GPS thing and the canoe tag over to the lab guys. Maybe there's something more in the memory of this thing and we can always hope for a lucky fingerprint."

I nodded and started up toward the house with him. We stopped in front of Richards, her arms crossed in that classic this-is-my-space pose. But she looked directly into my face; her eyes had flecks of gold in the green irises.

"How's the mother?" I said.

"Her sister's with her," Richards answered. Her voice held a low smoker's rasp.

"You think of anything out there?" She tipped her head toward the lake.

"I'm not sure."

"If he's following you, and you get to him before we do," she said, "don't leave him standing."

I opened my mouth, and then closed it. It was the kind of thing that scared me about women. How did they move from one part of their head to the other so easily? Blow a suspect away one minute, hit on a guy at the bar the next? Comfort a grieving woman one minute, talk about killing a man the next?

"Let's go," Diaz said. "We drop this stuff off and I'll drive you back."

We started through the house and when I took a last look out the French doors, Richards was bent with one knee in the grass, pulling the yellow tarp back over the dog.

I rode with Diaz to the county's forensics lab but stayed in the car in the empty, well-lit parking lot while he went inside. After twenty minutes the detective came out and begged off taking me all the way home. He assigned a young resource officer who looked like a high school student to drive me back.

"We're fresh on this one and I should be out working it," Diaz said. "I'll call you if we get anything off the, uh, evidence."

I said nothing during the trip back to Billy's. The kid took my lead and drove in silence. I'd called Billy on the cell phone to let him know where I'd been. The convenience of having the phone in my pocket was beginning to worry me. I'd carried a police radio with me for most of my working life but thought I'd left that behind.

When I got back the night manager cleared me with a phone call and when I walked into the apartment, Billy was working the kitchen. Two pink slabs of tuna steak were sizzling under his broiler and the odor of garlic bread was rising out of the oven. I hadn't eaten since a dose of my own bad oatmeal that morning and it was now nearly ten. I sat at the counter and Billy put a plate of sliced apple and a tall glass of water in front of me.

"Thanks, mom," I said. But the joke didn't go over well.

"What d-did they have d-down there?" he asked without turning from his work. "I ch-checked the online reports, b-but it was all standard p-press release stuff."

He tipped his chin at a video screen that was recessed in the wall above one end of the counter. A Web page for the local newspaper was up.

I told him about the prints leading into the water, the obvious presence of the FBI and the dead dog. While I talked he laid out the seasoned tuna on two plates with steamed okra and put the garlic bread between them. He ate standing up, thumbed a few buttons on the remote and the Web page screen turned into a live broadcast of the local news. The abduction was the lead story.

A young reporter with glasses was doing a standup in the neighborhood, motioning back to the two-story pink stucco home. The camera had to leave him and zoom to get a grainy shot from where the press had been cordoned off more than a block away. Back in the frame the reporter scribbled circles onto a pad while giving the name of the missing girl and making the leap to put her in with the other victims of what the media had taken to calling the "Moonlight Murderer."

"Another innocent victim silently swept away from her home leaving law enforcement with nothing to do but wait," blabbed the reporter. When coverage jumped to a photo of the child and an interview with one of her teachers, I got up and started making a fresh pot of coffee. I stood at the machine and listened to the lead reporter interview neighbors, asking them if they were now afraid for their own families. One said she was trying to sell her house and knew three other friends putting theirs on the market. A man spoke cryptically about "armed security" and "you do what you have to do."

Billy punched off the report and I sat back down.

"S-So if they l-let you inside, you are at l-least off their suspect list," he said, always the attorney.

"It helps that I was with one of their own detectives when the abduction happened," I said, sipping the coffee. "But once a suspect, always a suspect."

"W-Well, y-you've got one f-fan," Billy said, handing me a message slip from his office. Fred Gunther had called from the hospital, asking me to come in and see him.

"He say how he's doing?"

"Sounded d-depressed to me. They are still not sure about the leg."

"Say why he wants to see me?"

Billy shook his head.

"Maybe he just w-wants to th-thank you."

That night I dreamt of the city, of running from my mother's Philadelphia house near St. Agnes Hospital down Mifflin Street to Front and then north. The heat of the summer is stirring a soup of gutter dust and exhaust fumes and I am pointing my face out to the Delaware River hoping to catch a breeze from the Camden side. On the water, container ships are sliding down with the current and from the sidewalk I can only see their superstructures, moving like buildings on rollers. I hit the cobblestones past South Street and my ankles are twisting and my knees are aching but I ignore the pain and push on. I know there is a fountain up ahead in the park at Penn's Landing so I keep pounding with the goal of cool water splashed up in my face and down my shoulders but when I finally reach the wide, knee-high pool I bend to the clear water and cup my hands around the face of my own reflection but it is Lavernious Coleman's cheeks that I touch, his eyes, filmed and growing sightless. I try to pull my hands away but can't get them out, my fingers are stuck in the cattails and the duckweed of the Everglades and the sawgrass is trying to pull me down.

When I woke up I was sweating. I could hear my heart thumping under the sheets in Billy's guest room. I sat up and swung my feet to the floor and rubbed my face and knew there would be no more sleeping this night. On the patio the ocean was black and murmuring against the beach and I sat waiting for the first soft light of dawn to tinge the horizon.

I needed to get my truck. Needed to get back in my own vehicle, drive at my own pace. Feel like I had some control over something instead of depending on others and spinning whichever way they determined I should be yanked.

I took a cab to the ranger's station, over Billy's protestations, and got there about ten o'clock, just as Mike Stanton was loading up the Whaler for a run out on the river. My truck was parked in the visitor's lot under a light pole. The kid saw me get out of the taxi and pay the driver, but turned back to his work.

I walked to the truck, gave it a once-over and opened the driver's door. A cab full of heat and stale air spilled out. I tossed my bags in and walked across the lot to the boat ramp.

"Nice job on the scratch, Mike. How much do I owe you?"

"About fifty dollars, Mr. Freeman," he said, finally looking up at me. "My friends and I did it ourselves."

"She run all right for you?"

"Yeah, fine. 'Cept I have never been pulled over so many times in my life," he said.

I raised as much innocence into my face as I could.

"Four times in two days by cops asking all kinds of questions about who I was and where the owner of the truck was and had you left the state. It wasn't worth it so I just parked it."