Blackwater Sound Read online

  Alexandra was thirty-one years old and had been doing this work for a decade. A third of the way to retirement, wearing the same cheap blue jumpsuit for eight hours every day, the same routine back at the office as she processed her film and precisely organized the photos or videotape. A job that could be grueling and soul-draining, though she couldn’t imagine finding work that suited her better. Walking down these narrow alleys, or into the stifling, lurid apartments, or the spacious mansions of the grotesquely rich and freshly dead, always with the prickle of excitement, always the fresh rush, absorbing these places, these limp bodies, taking her pictures, bleak documents, graphic and obscene. For much of her eight-hour shift she did just this, circling corpses, staying vigilant, heedful of every angle, every item. The hairbrush on the dresser, the slash of lipstick on the mirror, an overturned bottle of perfume. You never knew which seemingly insignificant detail was going to pay off.

  And she always took her shots quietly, with a reverential hush. The other officers chattered in the background, making their jokes, planning their after-hours drinking, but Alexandra Collins stayed quiet, always with that deep ache of awe. Recording one after another of these grim scenes.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Romano said. “This is the smart-ass who’s always nosing around the department, stopping people in the hall, chatting ’em up, trying to wheedle some dirt. Same fucker who wrote that piece on Karen Curtis over in vice. About her and that nineteen-year-old stud going to that sex club. You remember that, Alex, two, three years back. Got Curtis relieved of duty. Just a little friendly hanky-panky with the hot-oil and rubber-sheet crowd and bang, that’s the end of her career. Busted for debauchery.”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s him,” Romano said. “The shit apparently stuck his nose too far into something this time.”

  “Charlie Harrison,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, that’s his name. Writes for the Miami Weekly.”

  “Wrote,” she said, moving down the alley, getting a couple of footprints, flat-soled shoes with tiny creases, like boat shoes, made to grip slippery decks. The boat shoe killer, that’s what Charlie Harrison would tag him. The yachtsman assassin, something like that, smug and self-conscious, trivializing the horror of it. One of the things that seemed to come so easily to journalists.

  Alexandra would have to take the shoe impressions later, make sure none of the detectives stumbled into that area close to the side of the corrugated aluminum warehouse.

  Romano squatted down beside the girl. For the last month he’d been on a diet, cutting back on his doughnuts and coffee, down to only a fifth of rum a night, although it hadn’t worked worth a damn. He was still fifty pounds overweight, and his face was always flushed and the scalp showing through his thinning white hair fired up to a bright crimson at the least upward bump in his blood pressure.

  “I don’t recognize the hotty,” he said. He tugged her shirt back across her breast. Gruff Dan Romano, the prude. “Could be it’s his mistress. Like maybe Charlie’s wife is spying on him, finally catches him with the broad, and she goes ballistic, like in a literal sense. Takes them both out. Bing, bang, bong.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Which would make it the third one of those in the last week. Jealous rage. If I can’t have you, no one can. Man, I’m getting sick of that shit. You know, Alex, my personal creed when it comes to being rejected by women—if I can’t have you, then fine, to hell with you.”

  Alexandra switched off the sound on the video recorder. It would be too distracting later as she was reviewing the scene to hear all this irrelevant byplay.

  “They were shot somewhere else, dumped here.” She motioned at the twin set of parallel grooves in the mud where the victims’ heels had dragged. One of the girl’s leather sandals lay ten feet away at the opening of the alley. “You would’ve noticed eventually.”

  Romano stood up and coughed. He reached into his breast pocket, got his pack, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, took a quick, deep drag, then immediately stubbed it out on the side of his silver Zippo. He put the dead cigarette in his jacket pocket, which was bulging with its brothers.

  “Harrison is the same guy did that piece on the Gator football team. A couple years ago, maybe three. Some female alumnae sneaking into the locker room before games, sticking hundred-dollar bills down some random jockstraps. Hell, that one article got three assistant coaches fired, half their offensive line thrown off the team. Wrecked Florida’s season. Put them on probation. So my guess is, our man Charlie was a guy without too many friends. A professional asshole like that, you want to know where to look for someone with a motive to kill him, you flip open the phone book, close your eyes, and put your finger on a name.”

  The other detectives had arrived and were talking and smoking at the end of the alley. Billy McCabe, a young patrolman, looped the yellow crime scene tape from one gutter drainpipe to another, blocking off the far end of the alley. The white City of Miami crime scene van pulled up behind a couple of the green-and-white patrol cars, and Stanley Fitzhugh, the other ID tech working the day shift, got out, followed by their new crime scene trainee, a young black woman named Lisa Roberts.

  “Reinforcements,” Alex said.

  Romano lit another cigarette, took a quick hit, then stubbed it out on the Zippo. He went through close to three packs a day like that. Dan’s way of cutting back. He liked to call it “going warm turkey.”

  “Maybe I’m crazy,” he said, “but sometimes I find myself longing for the bad old days. Cocaine cowboys running amok, Marielito ex-cons killing each other off. Five homicides before midnight, running our asses all over town fast as we could just to stay even. Stretched so thin, Christ, we were in a hyper-drive the entire shift. All that café Cubano, all that adrenaline. Now look at us, we got our feet up on the desk half the day, we finally get out to a scene and we got so many extra personnel we’re walking all over each other.”

  “That’s sick, Dan.”

  “It is?”

  “Nostalgic for a higher murder rate? Yeah, I think we could call that an unhealthy view.”

  Dan rubbed his chin and took a meditative look up at the sky, as if struggling to see the error of his ways. She could see some smart-ass remark forming on his lips when his cell phone squawked. He glanced back at Alex and shrugged. “Hey, I’m just saying the job used to be more stimulating when those idiots were shooting up the town. Now it’s all this pathetic back-alley shit. Boyfriends shooting girlfriends. The glamour days are long gone.”

  He scowled at the dead couple, then plucked the phone out of the leather holster on his belt, listened for a second or two, then said, “Yeah, yeah, I got it. Northeast side of Rickenbacker Causeway. Yeah, yeah, we’re rolling.”

  He clicked off, put the cell phone away, and shook his head at Alex.

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “Let me guess,” Alex said. “Murder rate just took a bump.”

  “One dead, maybe more. They’re waiting for us before they haul the body out of the bay.”

  Alex sighed, lifted her video camera and switched it on, and took a last look through the lens at the young woman with the bullet through her breast, running the camera up and down her body, then panning carefully left and right.

  “Floaters,” Dan said. “Jesus, I hate floaters.”

  “New or old?”

  “Fresh,” he said. “Some kind of boating accident.”

  Alex lingered on Charlie Harrison’s scowling face. A bitterly impatient look, as if he’d just gotten the juiciest scoop of his career and now was forced to deal with this annoying interruption before he could rush it into print.

  “You about through?”

  She switched off the video recorder and capped the lens.

  “Sure,” she said. “Let me brief Fitzhugh, and I’ll follow you over there.”

  Dan fingered his pack of Marlboros, debating another quick hit.

  “Hey,” he said. “Wasn’t your dad going out on a boat toda
y?”

  Alex raised her eyes and studied Romano for several seconds.

  “You had to say that, didn’t you? You had to go and say that.”

  The body was twenty yards offshore of Rickenbacker Causeway. A Canadian family picnicking in the shade of a coconut palm had spotted it and called police. Now the young Canadian father was taking snapshots, angling around behind the cops to get a better view of the body rising and falling in the light chop. His two blond daughters and blond wife stayed on their picnic blanket, staring off at the distant city skyline.

  Dan Romano had gone down to the shoreline to talk to the cops while Alexandra stayed in her van to use her cell phone. She dialed her dad’s number twice more, but got only the “customer is unavailable” message. She snapped the phone shut and sat there a moment longer, looking out at the glare of blue water. Either Lawton had switched off his phone or he and Arnold were out in the Gulf Stream by now, beyond cell range. That had to be it. Had to be.

  Nine days out of ten at this hour Lawton Collins could be found at Harbor House, an adult care facility out in Kendall. Basket weaving, a rousing game of checkers, a light aerobic workout, a fairly nutritious lunch followed by a nap. The staff-to-client ratio was good, the facility was clean, and they didn’t allow the patrons to languish in front of the television all day. Lawton enjoyed the place, mainly because he was the darling of half a dozen different widows who vied for his attention with a constant onslaught of cookies and pies. Much to Alexandra’s relief, every morning he showered and shaved, doused himself with Aqua Velva, and got dressed without any prompting.

  For a couple of years now Lawton had been taking a day off from Harbor House twice a month for an excursion with Arnold Peretti. Fishing mostly, or sometimes just cruising around the bay, having a couple of beers, reminiscing. Now and then Arnold drove them up to Gulfstream to bet the daily double. Arnold and Lawton had been friends since before Alex was born, and he was one of only a few of her father’s buddies who hadn’t deserted him when he started his decline. The fact that Arnold Peretti had spent his entire professional life as a bookie only mildly disturbed Alex. His friendship with Lawton had given her dad a boost that Alexandra, as hard as she tried, hadn’t been able to accomplish.

  Alex zipped the phone back in her purse and got out of the van. She unloaded the video camera from the rear and hoisted it on her shoulder and began to tape the scene as she slogged through the thick sand down to the shoreline. A sweep from south to north to place the scene in context, from the arching Rickenbacker Causeway, to the skyscrapers of downtown Miami, and finally the rainbow-tinted high-rise condos along Brickell. As Alexandra worked forward to the water’s edge, the cops made way for her. She taped the two Miami PD divers in their wetsuits wading into the shallow water. No tanks, no masks, no flippers, sloshing out to the waist-deep water where the body floated face down. She couldn’t tell much about how he was dressed, but she saw he had white hair.

  A dark buzz began to burn in the back of her head. Alexandra stepped forward, following the divers into the water, rolling videotape, the bay water warm against her flesh, rising to her knees, then her crotch, Dan Romano calling to her from dry land, telling her there was no need for that, no need to get wet, telling her to stay on the beach, let the divers bring the body in, but she followed them out, focusing on their backs, inching deeper across the smooth, silty bottom, until the water was at her navel, and Alex followed the divers, until they reached out for the body, and she stepped around him so she could witness it all, so she could tape this victim, seeing through her lens the man with white hair, long and wispy, that floated around his head like the delicate roots of some rare flower, and the diver said something to Alexandra, asked her a question, but she didn’t register his words, taping as she was, focused with all her being on the lens, on what she was seeing through the glass eyepiece, and then Dan Romano called from shore again, yelling for her to get the hell back in there, what did she think she was doing out in the middle of the goddamn ocean, that equipment was expensive for Godsakes, but Alex didn’t flinch, kept her finger tight against the switch, taping this floating man, this man with white hair whom the diver was turning in his arms, turning and lifting, cradling up from the water, holding him like a sleeping child, the man’s right cheek resting against the diver’s chest, and Alexandra moved the camera to the man’s face, the man’s familiar face, that face that was not her father’s, not Lawton Collins.

  “You okay?” the diver asked her.

  Alexandra lowered the camera and stared at the dead man’s features.

  “No,” she said. “Not okay.”

  “What is it? You know this guy?”

  “I know him, yes.”

  The diver trudged through the water back to shore with Arnold Peretti’s head bumping against his chest and the old man’s sightless eyes gazing up at the flawless span of blue.

  Eight

  Thorn was outside in the dark tying flies. A dim, moonless night. He’d never done this in the pitch-black before, working blind with tweezers, glue, silver beads from a key chain, mounting those shiny eyeballs on one of the triangular epoxy bases he’d created last winter. Dark Avenger. That’s what he’d call this one. Maybe wrap it in black Mylar thread, use the dark boar bristles for its body, those short, brittle hairs one of his clients plucked from a wild hog he’d gunned down on some fenced-in hunting ranch.

  Dark Avenger. Yeah, it had the right quixotic tone for the half dozen bonefish guides who were his biggest customers. A bunch of romantics. Priests of the flats with hair-trigger muscles and supernatural vision. On misty days or in the full blast of sun, those guys could detect the gray shadow of a bonefish ghosting the shallows from fifty yards away, or the imperceptible riffle on the surface of the water that marked the bone’s wary passing. They prayed to that silver god, worshiped at the altar of tail and dorsal fin. They devoted their lives to stalking a fish so elusive that weeks could pass without sighting even one of its kind.

  Thorn squeezed out a micro-dot of glue and tweezered the silver eye into place. In the dark like this, he was probably bungling the job, creating some kind of misshapen monster, something that would spook the bonefish back into hiding for months. But he didn’t care. At the moment he needed to keep his hands busy, needed to keep his focus short. Doing this purely by touch on that gloomy night, nothing to break his concentration but the occasional boat passing on Blackwater Sound, and the light breeze moaning in the wispy Australian pine.

  Deep in his inner ear there was a sharp pinging, probably from the bottle of cheap Chardonnay he’d guzzled at sunset, the last shrill cries of dying brain cells. He was feeling sorry for himself, and for the dozens of people who’d died in the airplane crash, and for the Florida Bay and for every other damn thing that crossed his mind.

  Thirty yards to the east, Sugarman’s car crunched down his gravel drive. Thorn recognized the chuff and sputter of the old Ford V-8. Sugar killed his lights and got out and came up the stairs. Thorn didn’t look up. He glued the other eye into place. Maybe what this fly needed was three eyes, or four, maybe a dozen. Dark Avenger, all-seeing, all-knowing. A sinker that would drop down through the clear water into the silt and mud and turtle grass and stare straight into the gray eyes of those ravenous bonefish.

  Sugar climbed the steps and took a seat across from Thorn. On the table between them he set a glass pitcher that rattled with ice.

  “Green tea,” Sugar said. “Thought you might need a pick-me-up.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Never better.”

  “Oh, yeah, Thorn. You’ve got such a happy glow.”

  Sugar lifted the pitcher and filled Thorn’s empty wineglass. Ice sparkled in the faint moonlight. Thorn caught a whiff of the tea. He stared at the glass, then set down the glue, lifted the drink, saluted Sugar’s health and took a sip.

  “Casey not here?”

  “She left.”

  “Left?”

  “Came by this afternoon. Packed her st
uff and split.”

  “For good?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “You try to stop her?”

  “I asked her not to go.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Did I block the door, try to use force? No.”

  “You tell her you love her?”

  Thorn glanced across at his friend.

  “I would’ve told her if it was true.”

  Thorn lifted his eyes and watched the channel marker in Blackwater Sound blink like the secret pulse of the world. Slow and steady, unfazed by the disastrous affairs of humankind. He tried to time his heartbeat to it, but it was no use. He was hopelessly out of synch.

  “She take the pink buffalo?”

  Sugarman was peering out into the dark.

  “No,” he said. “She wanted me to have a memento of our good times.”

  “I don’t know why, but I like those stupid things. I’m thinking of getting one for my lawn. Maybe a whole herd. To perk up the neighborhood.”

  A thin scum of clouds dulled the moon and blotted out the stars. Night birds cut swaths through the haze of insects that floated in humming clouds out in the darkness.

  Thorn had another sip and Sugarman topped up the glass.

  “You feel bereft?” Sugarman said.

  “Bereft?”

  “You know, bereaved, dispossessed.”

  “I feel sad,” Thorn said. “Not as bad as bereft.”

  “Bereft is about as bad as it gets.”

  “Casey said I liked her because she was shallow. I wanted someone simple and uncomplicated.”

  “An insightful observation.”

  “No, it’s not. I liked her.”

  “You liked her because she was easy. Because she didn’t have a lot of baggage, or seething conflicts. There’s nothing wrong with that. You deserve to coast a little, all the shit you’ve been through.”