Through the brush, the battered blue and white Airstream trailer that the kid and his mother called home was barely visible from the canal, perched up on the bluff maybe a hundred feet from the shack. Because of the recent drought, the water was low so the mother had no reason to fear the kid getting swept downstream. Spring would be a different story altogether. She’d never let him come down here alone, especially since alligators mated in springtime. But it wasn’t spring—and the canal wasn’t raging and the fish weren’t jumping and the cotton wasn’t high.
So the boy came down. His name was Travis Valentine. Nice name, smart boy. The dog’s name was Bo, short for Bodacious. Dumb name, dumb dog, but teeth down to here.
The dog came first. A black mongrel whose genealogy some Lab must have made a pass at. For Billy, the dog was an unnecessary complication—and half the reason for the getup. A third of the odors of human beings issued from the head—mouths, nostrils, eyes, facial skin. Another third from the hands. Thus, the face-plated hood and scent-lock surgical gloves. Without them Billy would have broadcast his presence the moment the dog stepped outside the trailer, setting off barking like a fire alarm. But Billy was a hunter. He knew better. Still, he didn’t like to think what that dog could do to his ankle. He was a big muscular animal with a big bouldery head and powerful jaws that could crack through bone like that.
Billy heard the door of the trailer slap against the frame. “You got ten minutes, so be back when I ring. And keep away from the water, now.” She’d summon him with a handbell.
The kid moved down the little path, the dog ranging widely, snorting after every critter scent, yarfing and whining to itself. Creatures of habit. Dinner over, and it was down by the riverside with old Bo. The same pattern Billy had observed over the past few nights.
It didn’t take Bo long to pick up the rabbit. In a matter of seconds he found the half-buried carcass Billy had laid out earlier under a bush. And while the dog got lost in the bouquet of viscera, the little boy in the red shorts and white Kennedy Space Center T-shirt and sneakers came sauntering down the dirt lane to the shack. In his right hand was a long-handled net, a glass jar in his left. A butterfly hunt. The kid collected butterflies. And, as Billy had noted, the place was loaded with them.
In his mossy oakleaf Scent-Lok 3-D camo suit, Billy stood behind some trees just a few yards from the shack, his breath wheezing inside his mask and misting up the eye plate. He had used the outfit to hunt deer, but it was the first time on a kid.
While the boy was at some bush maybe twenty yards away, the scrub shifted behind the dog. The dog looked up, and before he could muster a growl, a muffled
“Bo? Here, Bo?”
The boy had heard something and looked around. Just a half-note yelp. No more. He went to the shack and looked inside, thinking the animal had passed through the small swing flap. “Bo?”
Bo. That was the last syllable the boy uttered.
Billy slapped the chloroform-soaked towel against the kid’s face from behind, raising the squirming body against his chest. He struggled with surprising vigor, whimpering into the towel, but the thick hand clamped the small face like an iron mask, forcing the pockets of his lungs to swell with the vapors. To prevent him from heeling his genitals, Billy pressed against the wall, locking his leg around the boy’s shins.
The boy struggled and whimpered for maybe half a minute. Then it was over. A final twitch, and Travis Valentine’s young-colt strength gave out. Billy lowered him to the floor as limp as a rag doll.
For a brief moment, Billy studied his prey. The kid was actually good-looking, with an oval face and short chin, small pug nose, and feathery brown eyebrows, a band of freckles across his nose, his shiny hair longer than was fashionable. His eyes were slitted open, and Billy could see the hazel irises. If he were a girl he’d be beautiful.
Billy unzipped a black body bag made of the same scent-free material as his suit, then took off the kid’s shoes and laid him in it, then zipped it. He grabbed the butterfly net and went back down to the canal. The place was dead—not a sound except for the bugs and bats chittering in the darkening skies. He went back to the shack, and when he was certain that the woods were clear, he moved outside and with his gloved hands picked up the dog and scraps of brain matter and dumped it all and the rabbit into another bag. He sprayed the ground with coon urine from the aerosol can to deflect search-party dogs.
When he finished, he hauled the bags back into the woods maybe two hundred yards then turned west and headed to where yesterday he had dug the four-foot-deep hole, now covered over with brush. He laid down his bundles and uncovered the hole. It was deep enough and already limed. He dropped in the remains, filled the hole with dirt again, sprayed more coon urine, and then returned the brush.
But the exertion in the suit nearly made him faint. He trudged his way to the next clearing in the trees then crossed up and over the rise that would take him back to Little Wiggins Canal Road and to the cutoff in the woods where the van waited with the Igloo cooler full of ice and the six bottles of Coors Lite.
Billy thought about the beer then about the story in tomorrow’s local papers: How little six-year-old Travis Valentine of Little Wiggins Canal Road and his dog Bo were missing, and how the authorities speculated that the boy had gotten lost in the woods. And in a few days people would begin to fear that the boy and his dog had been snatched by alligators because it was nesting season and males are very protective by nature. And then it would come out how some large bulls reaching upward of eleven feet had been spotted in canals not too far from here. Wildlife officers would comment that although gators generally fear humans, some local animals had lost their timidity because residents had been feeding them even though that was against the law, and that most gator attacks occurred around dusk. And a spokesman from the Florida Game and Fish Commission would say something about how the boy’s death should not create a panic, that there had been only eleven confirmed deaths by alligator in the last twenty years, and that death by drowning and bee sting were more common. While that wouldn’t be much comfort to Mrs. Valentine, the commission just wanted to put things in perspective. And the local sheriffs office would solemnly promise that his men would hunt and kill the animal, and that the Game Commission would dissect it to ensure it was the one that got the Valentine boy.
And the distraught mother would report how there had been no screaming or barking or sounds of thrashing water. And how Travis would never disobey her and go near the water because he had more sense than that. He knew about gators, and even though they had almost never been spotted in the vicinity, she had schooled him right. Besides, he had Bo who would detect a gator if it were nearby.
But the authorities would express bafflement that even with a party of police, forest rangers, and a couple dozen backcountry volunteers with dogs, not a trace had been found of young Travis or his mutt—just a butterfly net and a solitary sneaker at the edge of the canal, leading them to rule out foul play, mountain lions, and bears, leaving them with the sad conclusion that both the dog and the boy had been snatched by alligators, the dog probably first—pulled right off the shore without a sound—then, when he went to help, another animal had burst from the depths and pulled in Travis, too.
No bloody clothes, no ravished bodies, nothing but a single sneaker and a butterfly net.
Like he had just up and disappeared
7
To Greg’s mind, the groomed piney acreage surrounding the medical examiner’s office was an overstated apology for the interior grimness.
One of the three satellite offices of the Boston headquarters, the Pocasset unit occupied the dark concrete basement of Barnstable County Hospital, a former chronic care facility. Joe Steiner’s office was off a labyrinthine hallway, which housed autopsy rooms, a morgue, and storage facilities filled with cadavers and body parts in plastic containers. Greg parked next to some white ME vans.
He hated the place, for it was where Lindsay had been brought that night two years ago. As he walked down the hall, he could still recall the soupy unreality of moving past these walls and doors to identify her body, knowing
