Harry cut the conversation short by spinning on his heels and heading for the stairs. Vicky hurried to catch up.
“Hey, you two be careful,” Diva called after them. “Sounds like you might have a psycho on your hands.”
“Slow down, the vic’s not going anywhere,” Vicky said.
“Yeah, but there’s always the chance somebody else might get there ahead of us. I like to get to a crime scene when it’s still fresh, before anybody screws it up,” Harry said, taking the stairs two at a time. When they reached the parking lot he glanced back and grinned. “How come Diva gets to call you honey?” he asked over his shoulder.
“’Cause I want her to,” Vicky said. “But don’t let that give you any ideas.”
“Never happen,” Harry said. “I won’t even ask you to bring me a beer. And I won’t ask you to drive either,” he added as he slid behind the wheel of their unmarked car.
Vicky got in, slipped on her sunglasses, and looked at him over the tops. “That’s good, Harry. I don’t want your feminist side to start running amok.”
The Brooker Creek Preserve is 8,000 acres of raw Florida land, a mixture of sandy pine forest and cypress swamp that sits on the northern edge of Pinellas County in a densely populated and pricey residential community known as East Lake. A series of wetlands in neighboring Hillsborough County flow lazily across fifteen miles, constantly feeding the preserve, and only a three-building environmental education complex and two and a half miles of hiking trails mar a landscape that was once prime hunting grounds for Seminole Indians.
Harry pulled up to the preserve’s open iron gates, stopping at a sign that listed the hours it was open to the public. He jotted them down in his notebook- Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Thursdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday. It was now five-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. Harry studied the gate. It was electronic, run from a keypad so it would have to be opened each morning and closed each night by someone who either knew the code or had an override key like the ones police, fire, and rescue personnel carried. He turned to Vicky.
“We won’t know until the autopsy, but if our victim was killed here, or dumped here right after the park opened, whoever was in charge of this gate may have seen our perp entering the preserve. We need to find out who that was.”
Vicky stared into the forest that spread out from the gate. “Sure is a lot of cover for a dirty deed.”
Harry started to laugh. “A dirty deed?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Harry shook his head. “What’s next, ‘Curses, foiled again’?” “I’m saving that for when Nick Benevuto kicks me out of his bed,” Vicky quipped. “Nicky the pimp has never kicked anyone-or thing-out of his bed,” Harry said. “Well it’s true then,” Vicky snapped back. “God is good.” Harry put the car in gear and started down the mile-long macadam road that led to the Environmental Education Center. Two hundred yards in he pulled off to the right behind two sheriff’s patrol cars that had been parked on each side of a partially overgrown hiking trail leading into the forest. A uniformed deputy stood guard at the head of the trail.
Harry left his coat on the front seat, walked to the rear of the car, and opened the trunk. He took out the small crime scene case he carried to all homicides, then removed a pair of rubber boots and slipped them on. He glanced at Vicky, who had come to the rear of the car and was watching him intently.
“You should get a pair of these boots, or something similar,” he said. “We can have the size and sole prints on file with forensics. It’ll save time eliminating your footprints at crime scenes. It’ll also save you from replacing three or four pairs of ruined shoes every year.”
Vicky grinned at him. “I’ll do it.” She glanced at his rubber boots. “But something a bit more stylish, I think.”
Harry smirked. “Whatever,” he said, as he turned and walked toward the deputy guarding the head of the trail, looking him up and down as he did.
The deputy was tall and lanky with a country boy’s raw-boned strength, but behind a pair of intense blue eyes a good amount of intelligence looked back. Harry was certain they had never met before and made a mental note of the man’s name tag, which read, Morgan.
“What’s your first name, Morgan?” he asked as he came up beside him.
Morgan’s eyes drifted to the detective’s badge attached to Harry’s belt. “Jim,” he said.
Harry extended his hand. “Harry Doyle. I’m with homicide.” He tilted his head toward Vicky. “This is my partner, Vicky Stanopolis. I understand you’ve got a body for us.”
“Sure do,” Morgan said. “Back up that trail about a quarter of a mile at the edge of a cypress swamp. It’s a weird one for sure.”
“How so?” Harry asked.
“Lady’s all posed… sexually posed. And she’s wearing a mask and all. Like one of those they wear at Mardi Gras.”
Harry nodded and studied the ground. Fresh tire tracks ran off into the trail. “You guys drive in there?” he asked.
The deputy shook his head. “No way. I was the first one here and I saw the tracks right off. I asked the ranger who called us if he drove in, but he said he didn’t. Said they never do unless they’re running a work crew. He said they haven’t worked on this particular trail since last spring. After I heard all that I made sure nobody else drove in.”
They’d lucked out, Harry thought. Morgan was sharp, much more so than a good percentage of deputies.
“Okay,” Harry said, “when the crime scene boys get here, tell them I want photographs and casts on those tracks. Tell them I want all four tires if they can get them. They’ll probably have to do it on a curve in the trail, but they’ll know that. Anybody else going in, you tell them to keep to the sides of the trail. And no smoking, no candy bars, no anything that’ll screw up my crime scene. You got all that?”
“I got it.”
Harry looked Morgan in the eye. “One more thing, Jim. You did a nice job. Thanks.”
Harry and Vicky slipped on latex gloves and started in, each one using a different side of the eight-foot-wide trail, which was little more than heat-hardened earth, covered in dry, matted grass. A heavy growth of pines rose on each side, obscuring much of what lay beyond…
The deputy called after them: “Be careful when you get to that cypress swamp. There’s a nine-foot gator back there thinks it’s his.”
“Thanks again,” Harry called back.
They walked in slowly, checking the trail for any discarded items that might have been left by the killer, finding only three scattered cigarette butts, a chewing gum wrapper, and a number of shoe impressions. Close to where the tire tracks ended they found an empty book of matches advertising a topless bar in Tampa. Harry made a note of the name. All in all the items they found could have been dropped by anyone too lazy to stick them in a pocket to discard later. But every item had to be checked, so they took their time, placing small orange marking flags next to each one. This was only preliminary, an effort to save them time. The crime scene unit would do a far more thorough job; they would literally sweep the area around each flag that Harry had left and comb the entire area in much greater depth, carefully looking for hair, clothing fibers, anything that might be linked to the crime. Still, Harry gave the trail a reasonably thorough search. He didn’t want to wait several hours for the CSI unit to give him an obvious clue.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the cypress swamp where the land and vegetation suddenly changed. There was a long, narrow pool at the swamp’s center, dotted with water lilies, and it forced the hiking trail, which now turned into black, loamy earth, to veer to the left. A green heron strutted along the bank of the pond hunting frogs, its sharp dagger beak and snakelike neck poised to strike. Harry saw no sign of the gator he had been warned about. Thirty yards ahead, where the trail skirted the pond, he could see two uniformed deputies standing guard over something unseen. He motioned Vicky to his side of the trail, away from the edge of the pond.
“Don’t wanna use me as gator bait, huh?” she said.
“I’ll wait for gator season,” Harry shot back.
“That’s my new partner. Just a sweet, sensitive guy.”
“Always,” Harry said.
When they reached the deputies they could just make out one leg of the body. It extended out past a rotting
