from her mind except how to approach Ferguson.
Carefully, she decided. Play him like a strong fish on light tackle; a sudden move or too much pressure will break the line and set him loose. It's only the barest of threads. Nothing tied Ferguson to the murders on Tarpon Drive except the presence of a single reporter. No witnesses, fingerprints, or Woodwork. Not even a modus operandi, the sexual assault-murder of a little girl having little in common with the terror slaughter- ing of an elderly couple. And according to Cowart and his newspaper, he wasn't even guilty of the first half of that equation.
As the plane twisted through the airspace, she could see the broad ribbon of the New Jersey Turnpike snaking below her as it sliced north and south. She was struck with a sudden depression that she'd flowed herself to head off on some crazy tangent and would be better served by simply grabbing the first flight back to Florida and working at Weiss's side.
'Everything had seemed clear standing in the lobby of the Miami Journal. The murky, gray skies of New Jersey seemed to mock the uncertainty that filled her.
She wondered if Ferguson had learned anything the first time around. Probably. Her impression of him, gleaned from Cowart's words, was that he was clever, educated, and not at all like most convicts. That was too bad. One of the contradictory truisms of police work was that the prisonwise suspect was not harder to trip up. In fact, the opposite was true. But Ferguson, she suspected, was a different case.
Still… she remembered a moment on her stepfather's boat a half-dozen years earlier. They'd been fishing in the early evening, catching the outgoing tide as it ran fast between the pylons of one of the Key's innumerable bridges. The client had hooked a big tarpon, well over a hundred and twenty pounds. It had jumped twice, gills shaking, rattling its head back and forth, then sounded, its sleek silver shape slicing through the darkening waters. It had run with the current, using the force of the water to help it fight against the pressure of the line. The client had hung on, stubbornly, grunting, legs spread, back bent, fighting against the strength of the fish for nearly an hour. The big fish had pulled on, dragging line from the reel, heading toward the bridge pylons.
Smart fish, she thought. Strong fish. It had known that if it could get in there, it could sever the line on a barnacle. All it had to do was run that taut, thin length of monofilament against a pylon. The fish had been hooked before. It knew the pain of the barb in its jaw, the force of the line pulling it toward the surface. Familiarity gave it strength. There was no panic in its fight. Just a steady, intelligent savagery as it made for the bridge and safety.
What she'd done had seemed crazy. She had jumped to the man's side and in a single, impulsive motion, twisted the drag on the reel down all the way, virtually locking it. Then she'd shouted, Toss it over!
Toss it over! The man had looked wildly at her, and she'd seized the rod from his hands and thrown it over the side of. the boat. It had made a small wake as it was towed rapidly away. 'What the hell…' the man had started angrily, only to be interrupted when her stepfather pivoted the boat in the channel and roared underneath the bridge, throttling down on the far side.
She could see her stepfather standing on the flying bridge, peering through the growing darkness until he finally pointed. They all turned and saw the rod, its cork handle bobbing at the surface twenty yards away. They came alongside and she bent over and grasped it from the water, loosening the drag in almost the same moment. 'Now,' she had said to the fisherman, 'land him.' The man had pulled back on the rod, breaking into a grin when he felt the weight on the other end. The still-hooked tarpon exploded from the surface in shock and surprise when it felt the point of the hook drive hard once again into its jaw. It had jumped fast, soaring through the air, black water streaming from its sides. But she'd known it was the big fish's last run; she could sense the defeat in each shake of its head and twist of its body. Another ten minutes and they had the tarpon to the side of the boat. She'd lip-gaffed the fish and brought it out of the water. There had been a flurry of photos, and then they'd returned the fish to the channel waves. She'd leaned over the side, holding the fish, reviving it gently. But before setting it loose, she'd seized one of its silver scales, the size of a half-dollar, and broken it off. She'd put the scale in her shirt pocket as she watched the fish swim off slowly, its scythelike tail slicing through the warm water.
Smart fish. Strong fish.
But I was smarter and that made me stronger.
She pictured Ferguson again. Hooked before, she thought.
The airplane droned and bumped to a halt. She gathered her things together and headed for the exit.
The liaison captain at the Newark Police Department arranged for a pair of uniformed officers to accompany her to Ferguson's apartment. After a few brief introductions and modest small talk, the pair drove her through the city toward the address she'd given them.
Shaeffer stared out at streets she thought cut from a subdivision of hell. The buildings were all dirty brick and dark concrete, rimmed with grime and helplessness. Even the sunlight that caught the street seemed gray. There was a never-ceasing procession of small businesses, clothing stores, bodegas, cut-rate loan offices, appliance centers, and furniture rental showrooms, each clinging with decrepit energy to the edges of the littered sidewalks. There were black steel bars everywhere; inner-urban necessities. A different cluster of idle men, teenage gangs, or gaudy hookers seemed to occupy each corner. Even the fast-food outlets, with their uniform codes of cleanliness and order, seemed frayed and tattered, a far cry from their suburban counterparts. The city was like a has-been fighter, hanging on in the latter rounds of one too many fights, staggering but still inexplicably standing on its feet because it was too old or stupid or stubborn to fall.
'You said this dude is in school, Detective? No way. Not down here,' said one of the officers, a taciturn black man with gray hair touching his temples.
'That's what his attorney told me,' she replied.
'There's only one school down here. Where you learn whoring and pimping and dealing and how to do a B and E. I don't know what you'd call that school.'
'Well, maybe,' said his partner driving the car, a younger man with sandy blond hair and a drooping mustache. That's not altogether true. There's plenty of decent folks down here…'
'Yeah,' interrupted the older policeman. 'Hiding behind steel grates and bars.'
'Don't pay any attention to him,' the partner said. 'He's a burnt-out case. He's also not mentioning the fact that he started out down here and worked his way through night school. So it ain't impossible. Maybe your man's riding the commuter train out to New Brunswick and attending classes at Rutgers. Or grabbing evening classes at St. Pete's.'
'Don't make any sense. Why live in this rathole unless you have to?' the older policeman answered. 'If he's got some money, he could live out there. Only reason to live down here is if you ain't got a chance of being someplace else.'
I can think of another reason,' said the younger cop.
'What's that?' Shaeffer asked.
The policeman gestured with his arm. 'You want to hide. You want maybe to get swallowed up a bit. Best place in the world.'
He pointed at an abandoned building, pivoted in his seat and looked back at her. 'Parts of these cities, they're like the jungle or a swamp. We pass a building like that, been hit by fire, abandoned, whatever, there's no way to know what's really inside. People live in there without electricity, heat, water. Gangs hang out, hide weapons. Hell, there could be a hundred dead bodies in one of those buildings and we'd never find 'em. Never n know they were there.'
He paused for a moment. 'Perfect place to get lost.: Who the hell'd ever come down here looking for someone unless they really needed 'em?' he asked.
1 guess I would,' she said quietly.
'What d'you need this man for?' asked the driver.
'He may have some information about a double homicide I'm working.'
'You think he's gonna give us some trouble? Maybe we ought to have some backup. This drug-related?'
'No. More like a contract killing.'
