The only advantage to a South Florida traffic jam during the evening rush hour was the chance to see the sunset. Because the state is as flat as a pool table and the interstate overpa.s.ses are often higher than the one-story buildings, you often get treated to a spectacular swirl of purple, orange and soft lavenders in a stubborn cobalt blue sky that hangs on to the late light. I thought of the Tamiami Trail workers eighty years ago who must have seen a similar sight lose its grandeur in their desperate daily labor. By the time I reached the Broward Boulevard exit to downtown Fort Lauderdale, the sun was bloodred, and from the top of the interchange I could see a necklace of bright, starlike lights strung out in its glow. They were the landing lights of airliners stacked up in their approaches to the international airport. More tourists and a returning business cla.s.s flowing into paradise.

Three blocks off the interstate, I pulled into the sheriff's parking lot, fifteen minutes late but lucky enough to arrive during a shift change. I found a s.p.a.ce near the front entrance and backed in. I watched the employees coming and going, mostly civilians with an occasional uniform of dark green trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt. The men tended toward the thick-armed variety, their sleeves tight around the tops of their biceps and their chests expanded by the bulletproof vests under their shirts. Most of them looked young to me.

While I watched, my fingers unconsciously went to the side of my neck and found the small soft spot of scar tissue that the bullet had left after pa.s.sing through skin and muscle and then smacking into the brick wall of a Philadelphia dry cleaner. My eyes were unfocused until I picked up the familiar movement of Richards's long- legged gait. She was halfway across the broad courtyard. Her hair was pinned up in the way of a good professional and she was dressed in a pair of slacks done in some light fabric, with a jacket to match. There was a bounce to her step, an unmistakable athleticism in the slight swing of narrow hips and the squared stillness of wide shoulders. I liked the look.

She almost made the curb, swung her head to scan the lot for my truck and spotted me. I had the window halfway down to wave when something grabbed her attention. She spun on one heel and looked back toward the entrance at a deputy in uniform who was jogging to catch her. He was barely taller than she and had the biceps and the chest. He was also carrying a 9 mm on his hip and a radio microphone clipped to the epaulet on his right shoulder. Patrol cop.

I watched as he started the conversation in earnest, though they were too far away for me to overhear. When I saw Richards square her stance and cross her arms I knew it was no Sunday chat. I'd seen that body language before and it wasn't pretty. The tight knot of Richards's blond hair was bobbing on the back of her head as she spoke. The cop half turned away in one of those, "I don't have to listen to this s.h.i.t" moves, but then he snapped back, putting his hands on both hips and leaning his chin into Richards's s.p.a.ce. She never gave an inch and instead uncrossed her arms and raised a pointed finger, and this time I could read her lips saying "back off." The cop flattened out a hand and raised it, as though he was going to slap the finger out of his face. My instant reaction was to open the door of the truck, but Richards, always observant of movement around her, turned an open palm my way without looking around.

The sound of her voice caused the heads of two pa.s.sersby to turn toward her, and the cop quickly put his hands out, palms to her, and took a step back. He was in midsentence when Richards turned on her heel and stepped off the curb, giving him her back. She walked directly toward my truck, with the dissed officer watching her and me, opened the pa.s.senger door and let herself in. Her face and throat were flushed, and if she had looked me in the face, I knew I would have seen her eyes flashing that green color that always came when she was p.i.s.sed.

"Hi, honey," I said. "How was your day?"

"Shut up, Max. You're not funny."

I pulled out and drove, sneaking a look at the pulsating artery in her neck, waiting for it to trip down a few beats before opening my mouth again. I drove east into the city, crossed Federal Highway and took the back way to Canyons, pa.s.sing the park and the old Florida- style homes along the river. I parked in a lot behind a line of Sunrise Avenue stores and walked around to open Richards's door. She stepped out and into my extended arm and kissed me on the mouth without saying a word.

"Apology accepted," I said.

I closed the door and could see a grin come to the corner of her mouth before she turned away. We sat at the bar waiting for a table. I was drinking coffee, and she waited until she was well into her first margarita before she finally spoke.

"David McCrary. And I don't care what Lynn says, if he touches her again, he's canned." Her eyes had gone back to their bluish hue, but there was still some fire in them.

"McCrary's the cop in the courtyard?"

"Control freak," she said. "And all the s.h.i.t that comes with it, including physical abuse."

"And Lynn is, who? A friend?"

"She's a good cop, a real sweetheart, and she's in love with this a.s.shole."

I waited for Richards to take another couple of sips of her drink.

"She tell you he's. .h.i.tting her?"

"Not in so many words, but she's just leaving that part out. All the signs are there. He calls her constantly on her cell, even when he's on duty. If she's with us at Brownies, he shows up and cuts her right out of the group like some d.a.m.n sheepdog separating the flock. h.e.l.l, these days she'll rarely come out alone."

Control and ownership, I thought. The cornerstones of an abusive relationship. These days every cop gets the lessons, takes a cla.s.s on dealing with domestic violence. Some of them don't pay attention. Some don't want to pay attention. Some can't see in themselves what they're trained to see in others.

"You want to talk about it?" I said.

"No," she said, but she did.

When we were seated at a window table, she talked about her friend between bites of black beans and rice and a mesquite-grilled snapper. I had a wood-grilled filet-I liked to take advantage of steak when I was off the river. We split a bottle of chardonnay and I ate slowly, mostly listening while she argued with herself over reporting the cop to internal affairs.

"You realize your friend is the one who's going to have to file a complaint," I finally said.

"Yeah."

"Tough thing to do, being part of the blue crew and all."

Every cop knew that if a wife or girlfriend filed a domestic a.s.sault charge against him, his head would be on the block. If the charge was upheld, forget it. A conviction meant you could never carry a weapon again. Your career was over. It was a tough decision, holding a fellow officer's career in your hand. It's why so many incidents got swept under the rug, or dealt with internally and off the books.

"I warned him if I ever saw a mark on her that's exactly what I'd do," Richards said.

"And?"

"He denied he ever touched her. Said Lynn was upset. Said he loved her and wouldn't hurt her."

"They all do," I said, finishing the wine.

"Voice of experience?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

"I'll tell you about my father sometime," I said, getting the waiter's attention. "You ready to hit the movies?"

"I don't think so. How about if you just take me home and let me jump your scrawny bones," she said, taking me by the arm.

"I really didn't have any such thing in mind," I said, leaving a tip.

"Liar," she said, pushing me toward the door.

We made love in the hammock on her back porch, surrounded by the nighttime arboretum of oaks and transplanted palms and birds of paradise that lined her city yard. The breath of night- blooming jasmine was in the air, and the aqua light from her swimming pool danced in the tree leaves above. In the wake of our dinner conversation I tried to be tender, but she was having none of it. We ended up on the wooden planks of the patio deck and then in the chlorine-scented water. We were in her bed when I automatically woke at dawn. I rolled onto one shoulder and watched her sleeping. She hated it when I stared at her. I had not brought up the subject of my shack fire or the new investigation Billy had me on. Both were too tentative and given her mood, not worth the interruption. I knew it would come back on me, that I wasn't sharing.

I brushed a strand of hair off her face with my fingertips, then got up quietly and went to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker. I got through one cup and then took a shower. I was dressed and finishing my third cup on the patio when she stepped out to join me. The sky had lightened and she was dressed for work. She put a hand on my shoulder and looked up into the oak at the sound of a trill made by a Florida scrub jay.

"You sleep all right?"

"Not much," I said, kissing the back of her hand.

"You wanna go to Lester's for breakfast and tell me about it?"

I didn't respond, so she added, "About whatever you wanted to talk about when you called yesterday. It's your turn."

I shook my head and smiled. This intuition thing. It was one of the things about women that always amazed and befuddled me.

"Let's go," I said.

After breakfast in a booth at Lester's, after I told her about the fire and the long-shot speculation that at least a few eighty-year-old disappearances in the Glades might be suspicious, I dropped her at work. She had listened, like a good investigator. I've found that most people in conversation listen only to the voice of the person they're talking to, waiting for it to stop so they can throw out their own thoughts and speculations. Richards listened to my words and then weighed them before answering. She pointed out that finding evidence of a homicide in the Glades, if that's what Mr. Mayes was talking about, would be close to impossible. Criminals had been dumping bodies in the lonely stretches of muck and sawgra.s.s for a hundred years. Her own unit worked the disappearance of a young prost.i.tute last month whose dismembered body was found in a Glades ca.n.a.l by an unlucky fisherman. Nature had a way of eating up evidence out there.

She was more concerned about the fire. Who knew what wacky environmentalist or mouth-breathing Glades cracker might want him out of there.

"Maybe it's time to move back into the civilized world, Freeman," she said as she got out of the truck in front of the sheriff's office. It wasn't the first time she or Billy had brought up the suggestion.

"Maybe," was now my standard reply.

"Bulls.h.i.t," she said, and waved as she walked away, always getting the last word.

I drove north to Billy's building, where the concierge with the fake English accent greeted me formally and then electronically buzzed me into the penthouse elevator. The doors opened upstairs onto a private foyer with no other entrances but the one to the apartment. I always left some clothes and a pair of running shoes in the guest suite. My old faded Temple University T-shirt had been pressed by Billy's laundry service. I put on a pair of shorts and laced up the shoes. I went back down, waved at the doorman, pa.s.sed the pool out back and walked out to the beach. I sat on my towel in the hard sand below the high-tide mark and stretched my hamstrings, then left the towel as a motivating finish line and started jogging south. The first fifteen minutes I took it easy, pulling the sea air deep into my lungs, judging if there had been any real damage from the smoke I'd inhaled during the fire. Then I opened up my stride a bit, staying down on the hard-pack and occasionally getting caught by a high, running wave. After thirty minutes I turned around and pushed it. I had to dodge a couple of sh.e.l.l gatherers but kept a steady pace. I couldn't help stealing glances at Billy's growing building, trying to judge the distance. My heart was banging and the blood was pulsing in my ears when I saw the towel and started sprinting. I squeezed my eyes shut over the last ten yards and pulled up only when I felt my foot hit the terry cloth. I jogged to a stop and felt a rasp at the end of each exhalation; could taste the acidic smoke in the top of my mouth. I pulled off my shirt, kicked off the shoes and waded into the surf, letting the breakers wash over my head and the water leach away my body heat. I stood facing east, at the rumpled line of the horizon. I was preparing for something that I did not want to catch me flat-footed, or out of breath, or weak. I couldn't see it yet in my head, but it was there, a tingle of violence that vibrated low in my spine. Something was coming, and even though I could not name it, I knew I would not welcome it.

I shook the sand out of the towel and mopped myself off before attempting to get back into Billy's building. I even slipped my shoes back on. The concierge nevertheless gave me one of those closed- eyes, shake-your-head gestures that says, "Riffraff these days. What can you do?" Upstairs I showered and dressed in a clean pair of canvas pants and a white polo shirt. I drank one more cup of coffee while standing at the rail outside and watched the wind set down a corduroy pattern across the Atlantic. I knew why Billy loved it up here. He had been born and raised in the ghetto of north Philadelphia. By the strength of his own intelligence and his mother's refusal to accept any preset station in life, he had risen. Captain of his public school chess team, a group of black kids who annually kicked a.s.s in national compet.i.tions. Top of his cla.s.s at Temple Law School and the same when he took an advanced degree in business at Wharton. The only thing that kept him from being one of the finest trial lawyers in the East was his inescapable stutter. His background had also turned him into a staunch capitalist. He was never going to settle for academia. Instead he left Philly and came here. He quickly built a client base and a range of contacts that was enormous. He got rich and moved high above the streets into the fresh ocean air and sunlight, determined never to live below the horizon again.

With his shrewd business sense, Billy had invested my disability buyout from the police department and created for me a sizable portfolio. Last year he'd counseled me to leave the shack. "Hiding" he now called it, and he wasn't completely wrong. Maybe I had even considered it, but not now. I drained my cup, grabbed my keys and the plastic bag in which I'd placed a charred sliver of wood from the cabin piling. If I left my river, it wasn't going to be because I had been forced. If someone was trying to scare me out, I'd find out who.

CHAPTER 5.

I drove south on Dixie Highway, and at a section of commercial buildings between coastal cities, I turned off and pulled into a warehouse complex near the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. I rolled down in front of a long, corrugated steel building lined with garage-style doors and simple entrances. Some had trucks backed up to open garage bays. Others were unmarked and shuttered. I found a s.p.a.ce in front of a door with a small un.o.btrusive sign that read drove south on Dixie Highway, and at a section of commercial buildings between coastal cities, I turned off and pulled into a warehouse complex near the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. I rolled down in front of a long, corrugated steel building lined with garage-style doors and simple entrances. Some had trucks backed up to open garage bays. Others were unmarked and shuttered. I found a s.p.a.ce in front of a door with a small un.o.btrusive sign that read GLOBAL FORENSICS INC GLOBAL FORENSICS INC.

I stepped out into the midday heat that reflected off the concrete and the steel walls. Across the way some kind of rap music was thumping out of an open bay. A low-ride Honda Civic with those little toy-sized wheels was jacked up outside, with a pair of skinny legs sticking out from under the front end. Inside the bay two young guys wearing either real long shorts or real short pants were bent halfway into the open hood of an old Pontiac GTO. Three inches of underwear was showing above their belt loops, and both had black and blue tattoos on their lower legs, the details of which I couldn't see from here.

I locked my doors. Riffraff these days. What can you do?

The door to Global Forensics was open, and I stepped into a small reception area that was devoid of any clutter, dust or human presence, and that was freezing cold. When I entered I heard a m.u.f.fled buzzer ring somewhere behind another inside door, and thirty seconds later a baritone voice sounded over a small white speaker mounted high in one corner: "Hey, give me a minute. I'll be right with you. Have a seat."

There wasn't a chair in the room, just a single metal desk with nothing on its surface. There were no pictures on the pale walls. No calendar. No license. I was sitting on the corner of the desk, dangling one leg, when I heard a gunshot ring out from behind the inside walls. It was a heavy report, large caliber. I'd jumped at the initial crack, but stayed seated. I knew what kind of business went on here.

A minute or so later the inside door opened and the large head of a whiskered man appeared. He was wearing a pair of safety gla.s.ses and had a set of protective earm.u.f.fs pulled down around his thick neck.

"Well, Max Freeman," he said. "Come on in, boy. What can I do for you?"

William Lott is a big lout of a man with opinions on everything but a true knowledge and specialty in only one: forensics science. At one time, despite his irascible personality and love of good scotch, he was one of the best in his field at the FBI labs at Quantico. He says that he quit just before the media exposed the myriad problems and botched cases of that unit. He said he had ducked out so that his own "sterling reputation" wouldn't be sullied by the government administration "hacks" and management "drones" who left the true scientists "hung out to dry." He opted to set up his own private forensics lab in Florida. It would amaze you, he said, how many people mistrusted the government and the cops. Since O. J. his practice was booming with clients wanting independent DNA tests, chemical a.n.a.lysis and crime-scene rea.n.a.lysis of evidence gathered against defendants. "And you don't even wanna know how many sheet samples I get in here from the wives or the husbands in Palm Beach and East Boca," he was fond of telling me. He was also quick to add, "All I do is the science. What they do with the results is their gig." Lott was one of Billy's many acquaintances, and on that recommendation alone he would have prospered. Billy had introduced us at lunch one day, and I sat humorously amazed while the scientist downed three dozen hot chicken wings and a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and never lost a beat in conversation.

"Let me put this old cannon away, Max," he said, and I followed him inside. As we pa.s.sed a dimly lit room off to the right, I could smell the stink of cordite drifting out. Lott was carrying a military .45 loosely in his right hand, and his white, long-sleeved glove meant he was capturing blow-back residue from firing the weapon. We entered a large white room that looked like a cross between an industrial kitchen and the biology lab I had in high school. Gla.s.s- fronted cabinets, sinks with long, swan-necked faucets, hooded workstations and three different microscopes set up against one wall, along with rows of numbered drawers.

Lott was a big man, as tall as me at six feet two but carrying sixty more pounds than my 205. Still, he moved about the place with a grace that came from familiarity and a perhaps unconscious efficiency. He laid the gun on a countertop and then carefully took off the glove and placed it under one of the lighted hoods. He then unlocked one of the drawers, placed the gun inside and relocked it.

"OK, Max," he finally said, taking my hand in his big palm and shaking it. "What's our boy Billy got you on now?"

"Nothing, yet," I said. "But he will. You know Billy."

"Yeah. Smart little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, ain't he? Sweet move you getting in with him, Freeman. Got ethics up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s. Not like them other sc.u.m-sucking lawyers out to line their own d.a.m.n pockets creatin' a f.u.c.kin crisis a minute that, of course, only they and their own brethren can solve at three hundred dollars an hour plus expenses."

I nodded, fully prepared to let Lott go on even though I'd heard his line before. But he stopped on his own accord.

"Gettin' on to lunchtime here, Max. What can I do for you, unless you wanna join me over to Pure Platinum, where they have got the finest little buffet and b.o.o.bs lunch special goin' on. They is a little honey from one of them daytime soaps struttin' her stuff you would not believe...."

"No thanks, Bill," I said, pulling the plastic bag with the charred wood sliver from my pocket. "This one's for me. A matter of accelerant, I believe."

Lott took the sample, his eyes and demeanor instantly changing with the challenge. He turned the bag in the light, then opened it and took a careful smell, like some fine-wine connoisseur.

"Gasoline," he said. "But with an additive."

He turned and walked over to another hooded workstation, sat down on a metal stool and opened a drawer. I knew enough to stay where I was. Bill Lott was not the kind of guy who let someone look over his shoulder while he worked. It took him only five minutes.

"Marine fuel," he said, getting up and bringing the sample back to me. "Mixture of gas and oil. The kind you use in outboard motors on small boats. Impossible to tell what brand 'cause you can buy regular gas and mix it yourself."

I took the sample back from him.

"Piece of old hardwood there, Max."

"Piling," I said, not elaborating.

Lott nodded and smiled.

"All I do is the science," he said.

I was headed back to Billy's when I turned off into the parking lot of a convenience store and called him on the cell. I left a message that I'd been there during the day but was going back to the shack to spend the night. I would call to confirm our meeting with Mayes in the morning. After punching off, I went into the store and bought a prewrapped sandwich, a cheap Styrofoam cooler, a bag of ice and a six pack of Rolling Rock, and headed for the river.

I'd finished the sandwich by the time I pulled into the landing parking lot. I flipped my canoe and set the cooler of iced beer in the center. The wind had died, and in the high sun the surface of the water looked like a sheet of hot gla.s.s. The ranger's boat was cleated hard against the dock, and I noted the red, five-gallon auxiliary fuel tank stored in one corner of the well. I floated the canoe, put my right foot on the center line inside, and with both hands on either gunwale, pushed off and glided, balancing, onto my river.

I paddled in a slow rhythm: reach, pull through, and a little kick- out at the end. The river's banks were still. I watched the high clouds in the west sit like smeared white paint on the sky. An osprey seemed frozen at the frondless top of a dead cypress tree. The raptor's white head did not move; its yellow eye was locked on something below in the water. I shipped the paddle and let the canoe glide in the sun. I popped a cold beer and sat back to watch the bird. The osprey is a true hunting bird, an animal with magnificent patience and aerobatic skill. And unlike the bald eagle-which has all the public relations but nowhere near the same hunting pride-he will take only live prey. The eagle will eat another's carrion and will also get his a.s.s kicked in flight by an osprey. I kept as motionless as my sipping would allow. I was on my second beer when the bird lifted off its perch and made a strong, graceful swing to the south, then looped back. The aluminum against my palm was cold, but I didn't change my grip as I watched the osprey come hard and fast back to the north. The bird seemed to lay back its wings as it increased its speed and tilt at a steep angle to the gla.s.sed-out water. It looked like a suicide run, but at the last second I watched his talons stretch open as he pulled them forward into the attack position. The movement stalled his air speed just inches above the water, and then, in a flash of tendon and muscle and the light splash of sun- brilliant water, he struck deep. His body lurched slightly forward from the instant water drag, but with two strong flaps of his wings he climbed up with a small, silver-sided snook in his grasp, the fish's tail vibrating in a death throe. The bird soared out over the tree canopy and disappeared, and as I watched I switched the beer can into my other hand and pressed the cold of my palm against the small of my back, where the tingle of something waiting to drive me off my river had started on the beach.

When I finally got back to the shack I didn't bother to paddle around to look at the black smear on the north wall, but I did take extra care to look for prints on the stairway. If an arsonist had wanted to harm me, why wouldn't he have set the staircase leading to my door aflame? It would at least have forced me to jump. I tied up the canoe and went up. The air had cleared some of the burnt stench from the shack but there was still an odor inside. I coughed on the first lungful, almost as though it had tripped a memory. I started coffee and then stripped naked and stepped back out on the landing, where I showered off under my jury-rigged rain barrel. The barrel was mounted just below the roofline, and the gutter system refilled it with fresh rainwater. A rubber hose clipped above a perforated garden nozzle gave me enough flow to rinse off a film of sweat. I heard the low grunt of an anhinga but couldn't see it hiding back in the foliage. I dressed, but my clean T-shirt had taken on the smoke smell. I tried to ignore it while I moved one of my straight-backed chairs over to the window, where an early evening breeze was sifting in. I don't remember finishing the coffee or falling asleep. But I remember the light change and then the burnt odor too, and then the sight of a young woman sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room chair, a pillow held tightly in her arms. The look on her face made her appear both quiet and terrified at the same time. I even asked her a question before I realized she was dead.

My partner, Scott Erb, and I were working Center City on the two-to-eleven shift and got a dispatch call at 10:45. The security manager had requested our presence at the Wyndham Hotel ASAP. We both winced at the language, and then the dispatcher added her own sardonic, "He reports that discretion is advised." We were only a few blocks away and had no calls holding. The security guy met us in the lobby, introduced himself and led us straight to the elevators. He waited until the doors closed before saying, "I think we've got a murder-suicide, and you're not going to like the shooter." We looked at each other while he punched in a code and lit a floor b.u.t.ton near the top. Scott took out a pad, checked his watch, and started scratching in notes. The hallway was empty when the doors opened on the eighteenth floor. It was a nice place, less than ten years old and pricey. There were fresh flowers in the foyer, even at 11 :00 P.M. P.M. The security man led us to the end of the hall. The security man led us to the end of the hall.

"Honeymoon suite," he said, unlocking the door. "Guy took it for one night only. A special getaway rate."

He pushed the door open and let us go in first. The odor was of cordite and of something else burned. The entry opened onto a large room, the decor ruined by a man's body in the middle of the floor, a stain growing in the carpet by his head. I stepped over the man's legs and bent to look at the 9 mm Glock on the floor inches from his hand.

"Max," Scott said, and when I looked up, my partner was staring at the coffee table, where a department-issue black leather holster lay empty.

"I already checked the I.D.," said the security man, reading our eyes. "He's one of yours."