Ford looked at the canvas again. There was the man striding through shallow water, a wedge of mangroves and the bay behind him. A squall was coming, pushing a burnished green light, and the water was a roiled green with wind feathers in random streaks. It had taken great precision for her to capture that mood of randomness, that sense of the inexorable, yet she had controlled it so that the coming squall dominated the bay, but not the man. The view was from the man's side: revealing, powerful .. . somehow a little troubling, too, but not lurid. Ford said, 'No ... I like it, Jessi. I like it a lot. Am I really that hairy—'
'Oh, you men—as if that matters at all. And you're smirking again.'
'I've never seen myself on canvas before.'
'Why should I be so embarrassed about this? I just wanted to try and do something different, something strong. Show the male form in an attitude that wasn't cheap or glitzy. I'm an artist, for Christ's sake, and there should be no taboos—quit that smirking!' She was laughing, the tension gone. 'Drink your wine and shut up. No, don't shut up. Tell me what was so important yesterday; the thing that made me feel like such a shit for going off and leaving you.'
Ford said, 'You said you had something to tell me.'
'I do. But not now.' She was sitting on the couch, looking over the lip of her wineglass. 'It'll keep.'
Ford said, 'Did you know a man named Rafe Hollins?' then watched her carefully as she stared into his eyes for a moment before saying 'No; no, I don't think so—should I?'
'I found your name in his address book. There was a telephone number, too, but with a New York area code.'
It was an old number, disconnected. Ford had tried it.
She puzzled over that, sipping at her wine, then said, 'Wait—is he a pilot?'
'He was.'
She was nodding. 'Okay; right. I know who you mean. A couple of years ago, when I was thinking of moving down here, I wanted to fly over the area in a small plane, really get an idea of where the best places to live might be. I called the municipal airport to see about a charter, and I ended up in one of those small helicopters they use to spray crops. I think the pilot's name was Rafe; kind of an odd name—I don't remember his last name—and he flew me around all morning. He didn't have to charge much, he said, because it was a company helicopter or something. Big guy; very nice looking in a cowboy sort of way, but a little too loud for my taste. And he did things to try and scare me. Flew very low; made sharp turns. I guess he thought it would impress me. It didn't.'
Ford said, 'That was Rafe. Did you ever see him again?'
Jessica said, 'No.' Then: 'Why were you looking through his address book?'
'Yesterday afternoon I found his body on a little island south of here—'
'His body? You mean he was
'As in very dead. I wasn't sure it was Rafe at first. Vultures had been working on the body for a while, so it was hard to tell—'
Jessica had her hand to her mouth, incredulous. 'That's why you came here in such a mess! And you were bitten! My God, Doc, don't be so nonchalant. Tell me what happened!'
So he told her about Hollins. Told her about high school, the phone call and finding him on the island, finding the gems; some of the rest of it, but keeping it simple while Jessica listened, making sad faces. 'My God, that's awful. Just terrible. But are you really sure it was him?'
'I am now. I thought maybe Rafe had killed someone accidentally; someone he was supposed to do business with and, in a panic, tried to cover it up by planting his own wallet on the corpse. It would have been a dumb thing to try, but people often do dumb things when they're scared. It was Rafe, though. If he wasn't dead, he'd have gotten in touch with me by now. He needed me to help get his son back.'
'What are you going to do, Doc?' Jessica was on her feet, looking for the wine bottle, truly upset.
Ford said, 'There's not much I can do about Rafe. For some reason, someone in Everglades County wants his death to appear as a suicide. They may have had a hand in the murder, but I don't see sufficient motive. Rafe went through a nasty divorce, and a local judge got involved with his ex-wife, but they'd already taken his son and his money; why would they want his life? It's more likely someone on Sandy Key decided that Rafe was unimportant enough to sweep under the carpet, avoid all the bad publicity, and then they could still look for the murderer on the sly. That's what I hope happened.'
'But there has to be someone you can call; someone who can find out for sure if he was murdered or committed suicide—'
'He was murdered. There's no doubt about it.'
She said, 'I know he was your close friend, Doc. But that doesn't mean he couldn't have gotten very sick; sick enough to take his own life.' The gentle voice of reason, reminding him.
'You think I'm making an emotional judgment. I'm not. Take the suicide note. It said: I just can't take it no more; something like that. Illiterate; real hicky in big, rough block letters. Well, that's a role Rafe liked to play: the backwoods redneck role. Talked real slow, real southern, like he was dumb as dirt. But he only did it around people he didn't know very well, and always for a reason. He liked to use it to bait the self-important ones, the snobs. He'd start asking dumb questions, and these people would kind of look at him like a bucket of meat, and he'd keep asking questions, getting sharper and sharper but still with the hick accent, until he had made them look like complete asses. Rafe was a very bright guy. Articulate on paper. I went to high school with him.'
'That's the only reason you think he was murdered? The way the suicide note was written?'
'No. But the note's part of it. It tells me Rafe didn't write the note. And it tells me quite a bit about who did. Whoever wrote the note didnt know Rafe very well, but they knew him—and probably on a business or professional level. Why else would he have played the redneck role other than to use it to some kind of advantage? In their conversation or conversations, Rafe wanted the person to think he was dumb. And they believed the act enough to try and mimic him on paper. So that leaves us with some reasonable suppositions: The person who wrote the note was involved with Rafe in some kind of business dealing. He was probably an American originally from the north, probably articulate, probably egotistical—all necessary for Rafe to make his redneck routine work.'
Jessica was looking at him. 'My God,' she said. 'The logical mind.'
Ford was warming to the subject, arranging it in his mind as he talked. 'Whoever wrote the note was the murderer or one of the murderers. That's the working hypothesis. Match it with some of the other things I saw on the island, and you come up with an even clearer picture. It was probably two men. They didn't known much about boats or knots, so they had to come in a very small boat—the kind that doesn't carry more than two people. The water's so shallow, they wouldn't have made it to the island otherwise. They beached at the same cove Rafe beached his boat; they weren't comfortable in the woods, and stuck around for a while after Rafe was dead, probably looking for something. The emeralds, maybe, but that's an assumption. They didn't find what they were looking for Thursday, the day they killed him, so they came back yesterday for another look. A big golden-silk spider had a web across the path from the cove, and someone had walked through it. Rafe was tall enough to hit it, but he wouldn't have—he grew up in the woods. The man who walked through the web was coming from or going to his boat; probably going, because he was preoccupied, wasn't watching. It only takes a golden-silk spider about three hours to completely rebuild its web, and the spider was a little more than half done when I got there.
'Another thing: Rafe thought he had no reason to fear the killer or killers. If they arrived before he did, he would have seen their boat in the cove. If they came afterward, he would have seen them coming across the bay. So they were probably there on a business deal. He wasn't taking social calls. And they were probably buying, not selling.''
'Sherlock Holmes,' she said. 'You're almost scary, Ford. You know the color of the man's eyes? What he had for breakfast?' She was half serious. 'You think they were there to buy the emeralds.'
Ford said, 'If they were, it knocks down an earlier assumption: that Rafe had taken the emeralds from the men who ultimately kidnapped his son. He wouldn't sell something he thought he needed to trade for his son. But it doesn't matter what they were there to buy and it doesn't matter what else I know. The death certificate says death by hanging. Even if the coroner took the time to find out what really killed Rafe—and I doubt if he did—the autopsy report will support the death certificate. The body has been cremated, so the killer is in the clear. If there's no body, there's no way to refute the autopsy.'
'But couldn't the police test the ashes some way? You hear all about those police labs; they can tell everything from a little piece of carpet fiber, tiny things like that.'
'After cremation—man or animal—the only thing you can test for in the lab is metal content in the bones. The
