Fire laced his throat. His heart pounded impossibly hard in his chest, each separate beat threatening to shake him apart. Sweat dripped from his face in a silent, steady rain.
“God. Oh, my God…”
Flies were already gathering at the foul-smelling puddle he had made. Weakly he crawled away from it, off the path into a patch of weeds, then buried his face in the dirt, tasting grit. For a long time he did not move again.
Gradually pain and sickness receded, leaving him with the limp, hollowed-out feeling of utter exhaustion.
I think you’re going to make it, old buddy. The interior voice was still Jack’s, the words accented with cold mockery. Looks like you bought yourself a second chance.
“Second chance…” Steve licked his lips. His tongue was sandpaper. “Yes, Jack. That’s what I’ve got.”
He lifted his head from the dirt and blinked, trying to clear his vision.
The world seemed murky. Had the poison damaged his eyesight somehow?
No, of course not. It was his glasses; he’d lost them in the fight with Jack. That was why he couldn’t see.
All right, then. How was he doing otherwise?
Methodically he took inventory of his symptoms.
The numbness in his extremities was still present, but less obvious than before.
His limbs had lost their leaden heaviness.
He no longer had to fight a nagging impulse to shut his eyes and yield to sleep.
His thoughts seemed clear.
“It worked.” A crooked smile ticked at the corner of his mouth. “Goddamn worked.”
He had purged himself of the drug. He was clean.
Fighting light-headedness and a residue of nausea, he struggled to his knees. The effort was too much for him. He fell forward, panting.
For a bad moment he was sure he would be sick again. His stomach convulsed. But there was nothing left inside.
He lay unmoving, concentration focused on deepening each breath and slowing his hectic pulse.
When he felt ready, he tried again to stand.
This time he succeeded. His knees fluttered badly, and he had to grab a tree limb for support.
Holding tight to the branch, eyes shut, he waited for his strength to return while considering his next move.
He had to find Kirstie. That much was obvious. Track her down and take her to the boat. Either the motorboat at the dock or…
Or Jack’s runabout.
His eyes flickered open with a thought.
He’d forgotten the runabout. It was camouflaged under fronds and sedges on the verge of the beach, only a short distance from this spot.
The most logical thing to do was to leave the island right now. Take the boat, speed to Islamorada.
Could he navigate the harbor waters without his glasses? Probably. He might nudge a few buoys along the way, but there would be few other obstacles this time of night.
Within twenty minutes he could be at the sheriff’s station, reporting everything.
But if he did that, he would be abandoning his wife. Leaving her alone on Pelican Key with Jack.
He remembered her desperate shriek: Stop it, you son of a bitch!
Afterward, nothing except a final gunshot, some moments later.
The coup de grace? The bullet that had ended her life?
Or was she still alive, but a prisoner?
He pictured her, bleeding, helpless, Jack’s toy. Not hard to imagine the kind of games Jack would play with her.
If he went to the authorities, how much time would pass before they believed his story and agreed to send a patrol unit to the island? An hour? Longer?
He could not leave Kirstie for an hour. Not when she might be in agony, might be dying.
The boat would have to wait. He would find his wife first. Find her and save her life.
If she was not already dead.
The thought stabbed him, icicle-sharp. He blinked back a stinging eyewash of tears as he headed up the trail.
37
Thirty-one pages of documents had come over the fax line at the sheriff’s station in Islamorada, to be produced as hard copy by an inkjet printer, then stapled together by a thoughtful deputy. A complete record of the Montclair Police Department’s 1978 investigation into the death of Meredith Turner, preserved on forms filled out when Tamara Moore was still in grade school, forms typed on electric typewriters and doctored with correction fluid, forms that were artifacts of the pre-computer age.
The death investigation form was first, followed by a crime-scene log, press release, chronological record, victim and crime information form, suspect information form, multiple pages of signed statement forms, a master report information form, and the follow-up form that had closed the case. After that, a new sheaf of papers: autopsy protocols, lab reports, and miscellaneous crime-scene photos, sketches, and evidence-collection inventories.
Moore scanned the file once, then went back to study the suspect information form and the signed statements. As she read, she smoothed the flimsy fax paper with her hand.
“Something interesting here, Peter,” she said without looking up.
Lovejoy, distracted and half asleep, was fumbling with the controls of a Mr. Coffee machine. “Mmm?”
“Jack was a suspect.”
That got his attention. “In the Turner case?”
“Right.”
He stared at her across twenty feet of checkered linoleum. They were alone together in the station’s squad room, surrounded by schoolroom trappings: front desk, fluorescent ceiling panels, comical or inspirational posters tacked to cinder-block walls. Moore sat at the desk like a teacher; Lovejoy was a misbehaving student being held after class.
The rest of the station was largely deserted now, at two A.M. In the lobby, a sergeant biding time until retirement manned the night-watch desk; nearby, in a tiny alcove labeled Communications, a sleepy deputy tapped at the keyboard of a computer terminal; in one of the holding cells at the rear of the building, a sun-blistered transient snored on a steel bench. Somewhere a dog was barking, and no one seemed to care.
“So what does it say?” Lovejoy asked finally. The coffee machine began to gurgle.
“Meredith suffered a skull fracture and subdural hematoma. Cause of death was drowning; her lungs were filled with chlorinated water that matched a sample from the swimming pool. The head injury was consistent with a diving accident. She could have struck her head on the edge of the diving board itself or on the bottom of the pool.”
“Except…?”
“Except the coroner’s investigator found no blood or tissue on the diving board, and given the height of the board and the depth of the pool, she probably couldn’t have hit bottom, at least not with any force.”
“People don’t always use the board. They dive off the side of the pool, into the shallow end. They’ve been known to crack their skulls.”
“But Meredith was an experienced diver, a lifeguard. Not the type to make that kind of mistake.”
“Unless she was drunk, stoned, something like that.”
“Serology tests all came back negative.”
“All right. Suppose her death wasn’t an accident. How does Jack fit in?”
