He turned toward the gym suddenly, as if he knew he was being watched. He couldn’t, of course. The light was out. He had no way to know the door was open even a crack.
She continued to study him from her safe distance, trying to determine just what made him so imposing and unique.
His features were compelling. Hardened, fascinating. He was a combination of Indian, white and God knew what else. His skin was bronzed, his cheekbones broad, his chin square, like that of a man who knew where he was going—and where he had been. His nose was slightly crooked, as if it might have been broken at some time. She couldn’t make out the color of his eyes against the darkness of his hair and the bronze of his flesh. He couldn’t possibly see her; still, she felt as if he was staring right through her. She almost stepped back, feeling as if she had been physically touched, as if a rush of smoke and fire had swept through her.
“Jesse,” a soft feminine voice said from behind her.
She gasped, then spun around. Sally Dickerson, the head cashier and bookkeeper, was standing behind her. In her early thirties, she was an attractive redhead. Harry said she had a temper, a way with men, and one heck of a way with numbers that had dollar signs attached to them.
“Sorry, you startled me,” Lorena said.
Sally glanced at her, and she realized the woman hadn’t even heard her gasp. Her attention had been on the man in the moonlight.
“No, I’m sorry—I came in the back way, and I didn’t realize you hadn’t heard me.” She was still staring at the man and didn’t offer anything more.
“Jesse?” Lorena pressed lightly.
Sally’s eyes flicked her way, and the woman smiled broadly. “Yeah, Jesse. He’s a cop. A local cop. On the Miccosukee force. He hasn’t been back long.”
“Oh, I realize that he’s a cop,” Lorena murmured, wondering if Sally could hear the slight note of bitterness in her tone. “But…he’s back from where?”
“Oh…the city. He’s something, huh?”
Lorena turned back to study the man in question. Sally didn’t need an answer.
Yes, something. He seemed to be both pure grace and pure menace. Powerful, smooth. Sensual, she thought, with some embarrassment. In a thousand years, she never would have admitted that she understood exactly what Sally meant.
No, no, no, no. He was definitely a man with an attitude, and that attitude definitely contained an element of disdain for her. She shook her head slightly, mentally emitting an oath. It now seemed likely that she would meet him again.
Apparently, he hung out around here. And that made him…suspicious.
Cops had been known to be dirty, dirtier even than other men. Sometimes they needed money. Sometimes even good men went bad, seeing how the rich could buy good lawyers and get away with all kinds of things. They had more chance to abuse power, to sneak around, to bribe…
To threaten.
To kill?
“Interesting. We have security guards. Why is he here?” Lorena asked, looking at Sally once again.
“He checks in now and then, makes sure everything is running smoothly.”
“Why did he come back?” she asked.
“Oh,” Sally said slowly, “his wife was murdered. He was devastated.”
“How horrible.”
“I know. Damn, I have a busy night ahead of me…but still…Jesse. Excuse me, will you, honey? I want to talk to the man.”
“Sure…friends help when you’re devastated,” Lorena said pleasantly.
Sally shot her a quick glance. “Honey, I said he was devastated, not dead. Take another look at the man, will you?” She opened the door fully and exited the gym. With a sway of her hips, she approached him, calling his name. He turned to her, arching a brow, acknowledging her presence. Sally went straight to him, placing her hands on his chest. She said something softly. He lowered his head, grinning, and the two turned to walk toward the staff quarters.
When they were gone, Lorena left the gym and hurried back across the compound. The alligators began to grunt in a wild, staccato song.
She let herself into her own room, closed and locked the door. She was breathing too heavily once again.
Maybe she was the wrong woman for this job.
No, there was no maybe about it, but that didn’t matter. She had to become the right woman, and she would.
She showered, slipped into a nightgown, and assured herself once again that her door was securely locked. Even then, she also checked once more on the small Smith & Wesson she carried. It was loaded, safety on, but close at hand in the top drawer of the nightstand next to the bed. She took one last look at it before she lay down to sleep.
Despite that, she dreamed.
She didn’t want to have nightmares; she didn’t want to toss and turn. She dreamed far too often of horrible things. She knew that dreams were often extensions of the day’s worries, and she was constantly worried.
But that night, she didn’t dream horrible things. She dreamed about him. The Indian cop. The world was all foggy, and people were screaming all around her, but he was walking toward her, and she was waiting, heedless of whatever danger might be threatening her because he was watching her, coming for her….
She awoke, drenched with sweat, shaking.
She was definitely the wrong woman for this job. She was losing her mind.
No, she had to toughen up. What the hell was wrong with her? She had to be here.
Had to.
Because she, of all people, had to know the truth.
East of the deep swamp, Maria Hernandez plucked the last of her wash from the clothesline. The darkness had come; night dampness had set in. She pressed her clean sheets to her nose, deciding that they still smelled of the sunshine, even if she had cleaned up dinner late and gotten the clothes down even later. Sometimes it seemed that darkness came slowly. Sometimes it descended like a curtain, swift and complete.
But tonight…
Tonight was different.
There were lights. Strange lights appearing erratically down by the canal.
“Hector! Come see!” she called to her husband. He’d been picking all day. He picked their own crops, then rented his labor out like a migrant worker. This was the land of opportunity; and indeed, she had her nice little house, even if it was on the verge of the swamps, but one had to work very hard for opportunity.
“Maria, let me be!” Hector shouted back to her.
“But you must see.”
“What is it?”
“Lights.”
Hector appeared at the back of the house, a beer in his hand. He was a good man. One beer. Just one beer when he came in at night. He loved his children. They had grown quickly in this land of opportunity, and they had their own homes now. He was a hardworking and very good man. He had provided them with a dream.
But now he was tired.
“Lights?” He had spoken in English. Now he swore in Spanish, waving a hand in the air. “Maria, it’s a plane. It’s boys out in an airboat. It’s poachers. What do I care? Come inside.”
But the lights were so strange that Maria found herself walking toward them. The farther she got from the house, the stranger it seemed that there should be lights. What would children be doing out here? Or poachers? Yes, she was on the edge of the swamp, land just grasped from it, but…
Then she heard the noises.
Strange noises…
There was a big lump on the earth. She walked toward it, then paused. Instinctively, she knew she should go back. There were stories about things that needed to be watched out for—things that came from the swamp. Snakes…bad snakes. And there were reports of alligators snatching foolish dogs from the banks of the canal.
She started to back away from the lump on the ground, but then, just as she had instinctively felt that she was facing danger, she suddenly knew that the lump was a dead thing. She kept walking to it.
Clouds drifted against the dark sky, freeing the moon for a brief moment.
It
was an alligator, but a dead one.
She didn’t know much about alligators. Oh, yes, she lived out here; she had driven along the Trail, seen them basking in the sun. They came in close—the canals were theirs, really, this close to the Glades. But she didn’t do foolish things. She didn’t try to feed them, heaven forbid! She knew enough to stay away, and little else. But this one was dead, harmless, so she moved closer. And closer.
Because this one seemed very strange.
It had been big, very big. It lay on its back, and it looked almost as if it had been stuffed, and as if all the stuffing had been pulled out of it. There was a strange hole in the center of its chest, as if a fire had burned a perfect circle in the center of the white underbelly. Toes were missing. The jaw gaped open in death.
The lights started flickering again. Maria lifted a hand to her eyes so that they would not blind her.
Her heart quickened.
UFOs! Aliens, spacemen. She was proud of her English; she read all the papers in line at the grocery store. They came down to study earth creatures; they abducted men and women.
She’d seen lights before. Strange lights, late at night. In fact, she’d told her daughter, Julie, about them not so long ago, laughing at her own silliness, because of course Maria had never believed in aliens until now, and Hector scoffed at such silliness. But the lights…
And the alligator…
If they were UFOs, then her initial instinct to run had been right. She had to get back to the house and ask Hector to call the police. Maybe the tall Indian policeman was close by and could help them quickly, far more quickly than the white policemen from the city would make it.
She started to back away. At first it had seemed that the lights were coming from the sky. But now…
They were coming from the brush. From the foliage where the swampland that had not been reclaimed started, just feet from where her lawn began.
Suddenly she was very afraid. She looked at the alligator. A hole in its underbelly. Toes cut off. Eyes…
Eyes cut out.
She turned and started to run.
“Hector!”
A single bullet killed her. A rifle shot straight through her back, tearing through the anterior region of her heart.
Hector heard his wife’s scream. He came running out.
The shot that killed him was square between his eyes. He dropped dead still wondering why his wife had called him.
Chapter 2
It had already been one hell of a bad morning.
It had started out with Ginny Hare calling first thing, before it had even begun to be light outside. Jesse was an early riser, but hell, Ginny’s hysterical voice before coffee was not a good way to start off the morning.
Billy Ray hadn’t come home.
He’d tried to calm Ginny. Lots of times Billy Ray would crash out wherever he’d been and find his way home the next morning.
This was different—Ginny was insistent. He’d gone out fishing with a twelve-pack of beer. And he hadn’t come in the morning, the afternoon or the night, and now it was morning again and Billy Ray still wasn’t back.
Jesse had tried to soothe her.
“Ginny, I’ll get out there looking for him, but you quit worrying. A twelve-pack of beer, Ginny, think about it.”
“But, Jesse, he’s stayed out two nights!”
“Ginny, I’ll look for him, I promise. But he probably got himself as drunk as a skunk and he’s sleeping it off somewhere—or, he woke up and knew he’d be in major trouble, and he’s trying to figure out how to come home.”
When he’d hung up, he’d wondered about the power of love. Billy Ray Hare was the worst loser he’d ever met—white, Indian, Hispanic or black. He hit Ginny all the time, though he denied it, as Ginny did herself. He was her man, and in Ginny’s eyes, whatever he did, he was hers, and she was going to stand up for him.
Jesse knew that Billy Ray hated him. That was all right. He had no use whatsoever for Billy Ray. Billy Ray liked to call him “white boy,” which was all right, because yes, his father had been white. But his mother could trace her lineage back to Billy, Old King Micanopy, back before the start of the Seminole Wars, back before the government had even recognized the Miccosukee as an independent tribe, speaking a different language from the Seminoles with whom they had intermarried and fought throughout the years. Billy Ray never understood that Jesse was proud of being Indian—and furious when men like Billy Ray fell into stereotypes and became lazy-ass alcoholics.
So Billy Ray was useless. But despite the fact that she loved Billy Ray, there was something very special about Ginny. And for her, Jesse would spend half his day in the sweltering heat of summer looking for her no-good husband.
But he hadn’t had a chance to look for Billy Ray yet.
Before he’d gotten out of the house, he’d gotten the call about Hector and Maria Hernandez.
Their property was on the county line, so the Metro Police were already on the scene. The homicide detective in charge of the case was Lars Garcia, a man with whom Jesse had gone to college up at the University of Florida. His Cuban refugee father had married a Danish model, thus his ink-dark hair, slim, athletic build and bright powder-blue eyes. The media liked to make it sound as if the Indian—or Native American cops—were half-wits who were given only a small measure of authority and who hated their ever-present big brothers, the Metro cops. Jesse resented the media for that, because it simply wasn’t true. The Metro-Dade force had suffered through some rough years, with rogue cops and accusations of corruption and drug abuse. But they’d cleaned house, and they weren’t out to make fools of the Indians policing their own.
Besides which, he’d been a Metro homicide cop himself before making the decision to join the Indian police.
He felt lucky wherever he got to work with Lars when a body was discovered. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a rare happening.
A swamp was a good place to dump a body. There had been the bizarre—body pieces dredged up in suitcases—and there had been the historical: bodies discovered that had lain in the muck and mud for more than a century. Man’s inhumanity to man was not a new thing. Sad as it might be, he was accustomed to the cruel and vicious.
Homicides happened.
But the unfairness of homicide happening to good people never ceased to upset him.
Jesse had known Hector and Maria. Known and liked them. They were as homespun as cotton jeans, without guile or cunning. She always wanted to bring him in and feed him; Hector always wanted him to taste a fresh strawberry or tomato. They had loved their small home, loved their land more. It was theirs. He’d never seen two people appreciate the simple things in life with such pure and humble gratitude and pleasure.
Uniformed cops were cordoning off the crime scene as he arrived; Lars had been talking with the fingerprint expert but excused himself and walked over to Jesse as soon as he saw him. “Terrible thing, huh? It’s technically outside your jurisdiction, but the killers must have come from somewhere. Maybe they were hiding in the swamp, maybe…” His voice trailed off.
“The bodies?” Jesse said.
“You don’t have to see them.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Hector’s body was covered when they walked to it; Lars hunkered down and pulled back the blanket. Hector looked oddly at peace. His eyes were closed; he just lay there—normal-looking except for the bullet hole in his forehead. Nothing had been done to the body; the killer probably hadn’t even come near him.
“Tracks?” Jesse asked.
Lars shook his head. “None so far. The lawn is all grassy…then there’s foliage, and the canal. No tracks yet.”
Jimmy Page from the medical examiner’s office was still bending over Maria when they reached her. She lay facedown, her head twisted. Her eyes were still open.
She had seen something terrible.
There was a hole through her back.
“Hi, Jesse,” Jimmy said, making notes. “I’m sorry as hell, I heard you
knew them.”
“Yeah. Nice couple. Really good people. Have the children been notified?”
“The son is in the navy, on active duty—they’re trying to reach him. The daughter will be here this afternoon.”
He winced. Julie was going to come home alone to see her murdered parents. He would have to make a point of being available later.
“Know when she’s coming in?”
“American Airlines, two-thirty flight from LaGuardia. Want to meet her with me?” Lars asked.
“Yeah.”
“Thanks. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to her on my own.”
“Have you got anything, Jimmy?” Jesse asked. “I mean…” He looked down into Maria’s eyes, thinking he would remember the way she looked for a very long time to come. “This is no drug hit. These people were as clean as they came.”
Jimmy shook his head. “Jesse…I’ve got to admit, about all we’re going to know is the caliber of bullet that hit them, maybe the weapon that fired it, an approximate time of death and maybe a trajectory. They were shot,” he said, sounding angry. “As to why they were shot…Jesus, you’re right. Who can tell?”
“Mind if I take a look around?” Jesse asked Lars.
“Be my guest. We think the killers must have been to the southwest, from the way Maria fell. She was running. Hector was coming to help her.”
Jesse nodded, surveying the expanse of lawn. The neat yard the couple had tended so lovingly reached a point where it became long, thick grasses. Back in the grass, the water table began to rise and mangroves grew. Beyond that lay the canal.
He walked carefully to where the thick grass began to grow, studying the lawn. Although his relations with the Metro police were good, he wondered if any of the beat cops were cracking jokes about an Indian being better at finding footprints than they were.
Hell. He was going to look for them, anyway. He was going to look for anything.
He turned, calling back to Lars, “I think an airboat came through here. See the flattening?”
“Yeah.”
“And…” Jesse began, then trailed off. He walked a little further, seeing something in the grass. He moved closer. Bent over. Frowned.