tell me about your case. Ring any bells?'
Brown thought hard, considering what to respond. 'Not really. Ours was a white girl coming out of school. Old case. Had a suspect, but couldn't make him. Almost.'
'Ahh, too bad. Thought maybe you had something that might help us.'
Brown thanked the detective and hung up the telephone. His thoughts drove him to his feet. He walked to the window and stared out into the darkness. From his room, he could see up onto the major east-west highway that cut into the center of Miami, and then led away, toward the thick interior of the state, past the suburban developments, the airport, the manufacturing plants and malls, past the fringe communities that hung on the backside of the city, toward the state's swampy core. The Everglades gives way to Big Cypress. There's Loxahatchee and
Corkscrew Swamp and the Withlacoochee River and the Ocala, Osceola and Apalachicola state forests. In
Florida, no one is ever far from some nowhere, hidden, dark place. For a few moments he watched the traffic flee through his line of sight, headlights like tracer pounds in the darkness. He placed a hand to his forehead, reaching as if to hide his vision for an instant, then stopped. He told himself, it's just another little girl that disappeared. This one happened in the big city and it got swallowed up amidst all the other routine terrors. One instant she's there, the next she's not, just like she never existed at all, except in the minds of a few grieving folks left with nightmares forever. He shook his head, insisting to himself that he was becoming paranoid. Another little girl. Joanie
Shriver. There have been others since. Dawn Perry.
There was probably one yesterday. Probably one tomorrow. Gone, just like that. An elementary school.
A civic center. The lights beyond his window continued to soar through the night.
There was only one other person in the Miami Journal library when Cowart arrived there. She was a young woman, an assistant with a shy, diffident manner that made it difficult to speak to her directly, since she kept her head down, as if the words she spoke in reply were somehow embarrassing. She quietly helped Cowart get set up in one of the computer terminals and left him alone when he punched in Dawn Perry.
The word Searching appeared in a corner of the screen. followed rapidly by the words Two Entries.
He called them up. The first was only four paragraphs long and had run in a police blotter roundup well inside a zoned insert section that went to homes in the southern part of the county. No story had appeared in the main paper. The headline was: POLICE REPORT GIRL, 12, MISSING. The story merely informed him that Dawn Perry had failed to return home after a swimming class at a local civic center. The second library entry was: POLICE SAY NO LEADS IN MISSING GIRL CASE. It was a little longer than the first, repeating all the details that had previously run. The headline summed up all the new information in the story.
Cowart ordered the computer to print out both entries, which only took a few moments. He didn't know what to think. He had learned little more than what the waitress had told him.
He stood up. Tanny Brown was right, he told himself. You are going crazy.
He stared around the room. A number of reporters were working at various terminals, all concentrating hard on the green glowing computer screens. He had managed to slip back into the library without being seen by anyone on the night city desk, for which he was grateful. He didn't want to have to explain to anyone what he was doing. For a moment, he watched the reporters at work. It was the time of night when people wanted to head home, and the words that would fill the next day's paper got shorter, punchier, driven at least in part by fatigue. He could feel the same exhaustion starting to pour over him. He looked down at the two sheets of paper in his hand, the printout of the two entries documenting the disappearance of one Dawn Perry. Age twelve. Sets off one hot August afternoon for a swim at the local pool. Never comes home. Probably dead for months, he told himself. Old news.
He took a step away from the computer terminal, then thought of one other thing, a wild shot. He went back to the computer and punched in the name Robert Earl Ferguson.
The computer blipped and within a moment returned with the words Twenty-four Entries. Cowart sat back down at his seat and typed in: Directory All. The library computer came up with a list. Each entry was dated, and its approximate length given. Cowart scanned the roster of stories, recognizing each one. There was the original story and the follow-up pieces, the sidebars, and then the stories following the release, and finally the most recent, the stories he'd written after Blair Sullivan's execution. He scanned the list a second time, and this time noticed an entry from the previous August. He looked at the date and recognized it as the time he'd taken his own daughter to Disney world on vacation. It was a month after Ferguson had been released, in the time before his case had been thrown out of court. It was also four days before Dawn Perry had stepped out of the world. It was measured in the listing: 2.3 inches. A brief. He called it up on the screen.
The entry was from a Religion page roundup. This was the weekly listing of sermons and speeches given at churches throughout Dade County the following day. In the midst of the group was the item: FORMER DEATH ROW INMATE TO SPEAK. Cowart read, Robert Earl Ferguson, recently released Florida Death Row inmate unjustly accused of an Escambia County murder, will speak on his experiences and how his religious devotion has sustained him through the criminal justice system at the New Hope Baptist Church, Sunday, 11 a.m.
The church was in Perrine.
16. The Young Detective
Detective Andrea Shaeffer greeted the dawn from her desk.
She had tried sleep, only to find it elusive, then fitful. Rising in the compressed black of the early morning, she had discarded an awful dream of blood and torn throats, dressed, then driven to the Monroe County Sheriff's Department homicide substation in Key Largo. From where she sat in the second-floor offices, she could stare through a window and see a pinkish ridge of light painted on the edge of the night. She imagined the slow disintegration of the darkness out on the Gulf Stream, where the razor-sharpness of morning seemed to carve shapes onto the tossing waves and finally, with a great slash, cut the horizon free from the ocean.
For a moment she wished she were out on her stepfather's fishing boat, rigging hooks in the near-black, her legs spread against the bounce and shock of the swells, her hands, slippery from handling bait, rapidly twisting wire leaders and tying knots in monofilament. The fishing would be good today. There would be big thunderheads lurking far out over the water and the heat would stir up narrow waterspouts that would show even blacker and more terrifying against the sky. But the fish would rise toward the surface, hungry, anticipating the storm, eager to feed. Dance around on the edges of the gathering winds and keep the baits moving, she thought. Fast baits, for kings and wahoos and especially billfish. Something that scratches and slaps at the waves, furrowing through the dark Gulf Stream waters, irresistible to the big fish searching for sustenance.
That was what I always liked about fishing, she thought: not the fight against the hook and line, no matter how spectacular; nor the last impetuous panic at boatside; nor the back-slapping accomplishment or the beery congratulations. What I liked was the hunt. Her eyes stared through the homicide office window while her mind churned over what she knew and what she didn't know. When the light finally seemed to have succeeded in its daily battle, she turned away, hack to the spread of papers that were strewn about her desk.
She glanced at the summary report she'd prepared after questioning the neighbors on Tarpon Drive. No one had seen or heard anything of note. Then she fingered the report from the medical examiner's office.
Proximate cause of death in both subjects was the same: abrupt severing of the right carotid artery leading to sudden massive loss of blood. He was left-handed, she thought. Stood behind them and
