Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

The last light had left the sky by the time we reached the public fishing camp that Hammonds used as a staging area. I could see the glow of unnatural lights from a distance, but we still had to use hand-held spotlights to find our way to the boat ramp docks.

When we hit solid ground the group moved with a familiar efficiency. Others who had been waiting throughout the afternoon in boredom jumped to help unload the boats. A large white crime scene van was parked nearby on the shell parking lot and next to it was a black Chevy Suburban from the medical examiner's office. I could see a sheriff's helicopter sitting fifty yards behind it.

The techs moved the evidence and the equipment first and then let the M.E.'s people retrieve Ashley's remains. As they hoisted the black body bag out of the Whaler a floodlight suddenly flashed on, its brightness causing everyone to squint and turn their faces or shield their eyes. Billy had been right about the media. At least one news crew had staked out the staging area and now was getting "exclusive footage" of the body being removed from the Everglades.

No one was surprised. Little could be kept from the media. Every newsroom had a variety of police and emergency scanners or contracted with a sophisticated service that did nothing but monitor the array of radio traffic and dispatch instructions being sent twenty-four hours a day. Some agencies had even given up on the traditional signal codes, a now archaic attempt to broadcast a homicide as a Signal 5 or a rape as a Signal 35 in hopes of keeping some eavesdroppers at bay. Reporters and the freelance listening service operators knew the codes by heart and the game was useless.

Since the child killings began, any radio traffic sending cops out to the Glades would have caused an immediate heads up. By this time there would be TV crews at the hospital, the Flamingo Lakes neighborhood and outside the task force headquarters. Out here a young woman reporter and cameraman had gambled on following the crime scene and M.E. units, and had spent the day waiting to see who or what would come back in on the boats. Their payoff was the body bag footage. And I knew it would make prime time on the news.

I stood on the other side of the Whaler, just outside the cone of the camera's light, watching as the M.E. guys lifted Ashley out. The boat's stern was still rocking in shallow water and as one of the techs stepped over the gunwale he stumbled and a strap on the bag got caught on one of the stern cleats. As the camera rolled, the two men struggled to free the package. Another tech came to help but they couldn't pull it loose. The scene was getting awkward under the glare of the television lights and I thought of how it was going to play on the eleven o'clock news. It might be my only opportunity.

With one quick move I bent and pulled the wrapped knife from my boot, snapped it open and stepped into the boat. The camera lights flashed on the blade and with one motion I cut the strap clean.

One of the M.E. boys said thanks, and they continued up the slope to the Suburban, the cameraman following. Now he had even better footage.

As I climbed back out of the boat I saw Hammonds watching me but he was quickly distracted by someone calling his name.

"Chief Hammonds. Excuse me, Chief."

The woman reporter approached and instead of raising his palm and walking past her, Hammonds stopped. She was short and thin with high cheekbones and brown eyes that held Hammonds' attention and seemed to simultaneously assess the others in his group, including me.

"Chief, can you give me anything on where you've been and maybe who's in the bag?" she asked in an informal way. The cameraman was still across the lot and she was being both polite and disarming. Hammonds seemed to know her.

"Donna, you know the drill. First I have to go in and brief the sheriff. These guys have to speak to their people," Hammonds said, hooking a thumb at the FBI agents. "And then we'll most likely have a press conference for everybody at the same time for the eleven o'clock." He too was being polite.

"OK. Off the record then," Donna said, turning back to her cameraman as if to emphasize that he wasn't filming. "Just so I didn't wait out here all day being eaten by mosquitoes for nothing."

"Off the record, Donna," Hammonds said, the grin I'd seen earlier now undisguised. "I think we got our guy."

The agents turned their heads and began walking with Hammonds toward the helicopter and the reporter turned to me.

"Mr. Freeman? Right?" she said. "Coming out of the swamp again. How you doing?"

I looked in her face, a foolish confirmation. I shouldn't have been surprised that a smart reporter would recognize me from the plane crash with Gunther only a week ago. I didn't respond.

"Mr. Freeman, are you on loan from Philadelphia?" She was again polite. "Does any of this tie in somehow to Philadelphia?"

Billy was right again. There would always be one who did their homework.

"No comment," I said, feeling a flush rise in my neck.

"You coming?" Hammonds called from the parking area where the helicopter blades were just starting to spin. I turned and jogged after him.

We were all strapped in and the helicopter was beginning to wobble and rise when Hammonds turned and yelled over the engine whine: "We'll have a briefing in the conference room as soon as we're in."

He was talking to all of us and looking at me. As the machine rose he pulled a headset over his ears and no one said a word during the trip in. I stared out the window and shivered at the thought of the last time I flew. But this time there was only an ocean of black below. For thousands of acres there was not a light. Without a moon, even the canals that did run through the sawgrass could not show themselves. The windows of the chopper only reflected the pilot's green instrument board.

It was hot and close inside the cramped space and I sat trying to imagine Ashley somehow moving the girl out into his old and rusted rowboat and making it out here in the dark four nights ago but the vision wouldn't come. His navigation through this part of the wilderness I didn't doubt. His ability to steal her away from the backyard and through the man-made lake was also plausible for a man of his talents. But there was no waterway or wood that led from the surrounding streets of Flamingo Lakes into these dark acres. How would a man like him make that leap? How would a man confined to oil lamps and animal skinning send an e-mail of GPS coordinates from a downtown Radio Shack?

I was convinced he hadn't, but I wasn't sure what Hammonds believed. As I ground the edges, a false dawn and then a sliver of light put a border on the eastern horizon. The glow of the coastal city. Minutes later we crossed highway 27 due west of Fort Lauderdale. It was the boundary. On one side was blackness, on the other lay a blanket of lights webbed all the way to the ocean.

The pilot brought us in on a straight heading, following a line of orange-tinged lights that flanked a boulevard running through suburbia. You couldn't see the trees at night, only dark splotches interrupting the pattern of street lamps. The broader dark areas I knew had to be golf courses. The light grids thickened as we approached what I could now see was the glowing gray belt of the interstate, and we started down. The pilot swept us in a banking circle and we hovered over the neighborhood that tolerated the sheriff's administration building and he eased down to it. I wondered what the citizens thought of the chopper's occasional wind and noise assault, the sight of a machine so familiar but so far from their experience. They would never ride in it, or sit in it on their way to some important meeting. They surely weren't asked whether they had objections to its boisterous comings and goings. Maybe they didn't give a damn. Maybe they just watched TV and became oblivious to its sound, just like the night train whistle or the hum of interstate traffic. That's just the way it was. You just live in it.