Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

"That's gotta be Hammonds and the bag boys," Diaz said, starting back up the trail.

As Diaz passed the butchering area and rounded the corner, I took a wet handkerchief from my pocket and pulled the curved knife from the stump. If it wasn't Brown's and it wasn't Ashley's, whose was it? I folded and wrapped the blade and tucked it down into my combat boot. I was again corrupting a crime scene, harboring evidence. But I also knew the one we were really after had finally slipped up, left something behind he couldn't afford to lose. But we'd need him to come after it. The knife was useless without the hand of the owner.

Hammonds was jumping from the bow of a center-console Whaler when I came around the corner. A second identical boat was still trying to get up the shallow sloping bank, the driver jabbing the throttle and churning up the creek bottom with the propeller. There were five men in each boat. I could tell the two with Hammonds were FBI even before they turned around and showed the bright yellow letters sewn onto the backs of their navy-blue windbreakers.

Hammonds was also wearing a light jacket despite the steaming heat. At least he'd taken off his tie. But he was still wearing black wingtips, now sunk to the laces in mud. Diaz was talking to him, his hands pointing: The kid was in there with Richards, the DOA back there.

The FBI guys were next to them now, listening but looking up into the trees as if they were spotting for snipers. Diaz took the crime scene crew from the second boat and waited for them to assemble their gear before going back to Ashley. Hammonds started toward me. The mud sucked at his shoe and nearly pulled if off before he reached down and rescued it. He didn't seem flustered when he finally approached. In fact, he seemed damn near jovial.

"Nice place, Freeman," he said, and the jocularity of it caught me off guard. "When we get back you can tell me in your own words how you came to find it." I was silent. The FBI was silent. We all moved on to the cabin.

The medical techs had the girl on a stretcher. An IV was taped to her hand, the line being fed from a plastic pouch of clear liquid that I was familiar with. They had wiped her face clean with swabs and covered her with clean white blankets. They were ready to move back to the helicopter. Richards was still stroking the child's hair and quickly briefed Hammonds.

"She's shocky and suffering from dehydration and exposure. Probably hasn't had anything to drink since he took her. They're not sure if she would have stayed conscious much longer, but she should be all right now."

I could tell Richards was trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.

"They don't think she was abused."

"I want you and Diaz in the hospital with her until she's stable," Hammonds said, touching his detective's shoulder.

She nodded and the techs picked up the litter and started out. As they passed me, Richards looked up into my face. Her eyes were shiny with tears and I thought she tried to smile when she said, "We got here in time."

Hammonds was watching me when I turned back into the room. The FBI guys were moving through the place. One of them had unpacked an expensive digital camera and was shooting the room from different angles, recording the world of a monster for their academy classes, I thought.

The medical team had left behind a scatter of torn paper and plastic wrappings from the syringes and instruments they'd used. I made a mental note that someone, Richards I assumed, had put the child's clothes and the tattered blanket into an evidence bag and left it for the crime scene guys. The chair on which I'd found the GPS unit had been shoved away.

Hammonds studied the place for a few minutes, apparently showing no interest in the broken table or the shattered oil lamp.

"I'm going to check on the late Mr. Ashley," Hammonds said, and the FBI, unusually dutiful, followed him out.

I stayed on the porch listening to the TraumaHawk engines. The man-made gale again whipped through the hammock, this time stripping a shower of leaves from the tree canopy as the machine climbed and swung away toward the east. I wondered where Nate Brown was. I knew he would not be far, sitting down in the tall sawgrass perhaps, seeing the chopper come and go, hearing the whine of the boat engines grinding through the shallow creek, smelling the ripe clouds of exhaust.

I called Billy on the cell phone and got him at his office. He listened patiently as I described the events of the day.

"They're going to call it a murder-suicide and close the book," he said.

"Yeah. I know."

"So you'll be off the hook. They'll probably keep your file open and know they didn't finish it, but if another child doesn't disappear, it ends."

"Yeah. Happily ever after."

I didn't tell him about the knife in my boot. He said he needed to work on some records he'd been researching and that he'd meet me at the police administration building where we both knew there would be a frenzy of media when we got back in.

"My advice is to duck it," Billy said.

"Thanks," I said and punched him off.

When I got around to the back of the cabin the crime scene guys were carrying the black vinyl body bag containing David Ashley out of the trees. The wiry Gladesman had weighed barely 150 pounds alive. The team was strong and experienced and it was hardly a chore. One of them was working a small video camera, carefully documenting the scene and would have spent extra time on the noose and the tipped-over chair in Ashley's clearing. I wondered if he would be as careful inside the cabin. No one would want to make a return trip out here. The team seemed particularly stone-faced. Everyone was slapping at the following clouds of mosquitoes that were swarming around their heads and necks. The scene techs had put on long- sleeved shirts that were already soaked through with sweat, leaving dark Vs on their backs and rings under their arms. Mud was caked on their boots and no doubt some animal gristle they couldn't avoid. But their job was rarely easy and they went about it stoically.

No one else was carrying around the sheen of relief that was subtly, but unmistakably, coloring Hammonds' face. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, sweating like the rest. At one point I could see at least three or four mosquitoes light on his face but he seemed unaware as he watched his team pack up. He would answer a question from one of the men with a short sentence or order and turned occasionally to talk softly with one of the agents. But mostly he stood silent. He looked to me like a man who could envision a cool, soft bed and a long, untroubled night's sleep in the near distance and he wanted it badly.

The sun was going orange in the western sky by the time they were finished. The boats were reloaded. Ashley held an inglorious spot on the floor in the stern and the team members pointedly avoided looking down at the black bag. The bank to the creek was now trampled into a lumpy oatmeal of mud and grass, and two obvious paths led from the bank to the front of the cabin and to the thicket where the hanging took place. Each was littered with wrappings and film containers and discarded latex gloves. Before we pushed off, a scene tech stretched a three-inch-wide streamer of yellow tape across the landing from the trunk of a gumbo-limbo to a pigeon plum that read: crime scene, do not enter. I was sure that none of these men would ever return. They had all they needed.

Our boats ground and churned their way through the narrow channel until we cleared the hammock on the opposite side from where Nate Brown and I had originally entered. When the waterway opened up into the sawgrass the Florida Marine Division driver inched up the throttle and we began making time.

Out of the hammock the moving air was cooler and from my spot near the bow it smelled clean and tinged with the odor of fresh-turned soil. The rain had held off and the sky was strung now with clouds going pink and purple, their edges still bright and glowing in front of patches of blue. The whine of the engines covered any other sound and most of the men rode with their faces turned up into the wind, their eyes glossed over with the colors of the sunset.