Kostas must have driven himself to the waterfront. The particular road that he had taken did not matter. I touched the screen of my GPS system and selected the quickest route to the place where the fishermen discovered the body.
I had not been back to Opossum Creek since the night the Sheriff summoned me there and dropped this mess into my lap. Turning onto Route 417, I downshifted and slowed my Barracuda to a crawl.
This quiet peninsula appeared much different in the daylight. On Wednesday night, the sheriff and I had stood in total blackness, except where searchlights illuminated the rolling waves and patches of fog that slowly drifted ashore.
Now in the sunlight, the unspoiled banks of the bay seemed peaceful and inviting, a nice place to spend a quiet Saturday afternoon fishing, kayaking, or picnicking. Marsh reeds waved to and fro in the gentle wind. White clouds glided across the pale blue sky. An artist with a palette of oil colors could have painted a beautiful seascape here, now that there were no dead bodies floating in the water.
The sheriff had found footprints in the mud and broken cattails where the killers had dumped Kostas. His attackers probably had not planned on killing him. Something happened quickly, faster than anyone had thought out. Otherwise, they would have gotten rid of the body so that no one could have discovered it.
I got out of the car and stood near the spot where the sheriff first questioned me. The low tide had pulled the body in the direction of the open bay, but the divers located Kostas in the creek just off this shoreline. If the killers wanted his body to disappear forever, they should have weighed it down, so the scavenging crabs could have worked their magic and left a skeleton in a matter of days. Maybe Kostas had been anchored down, and the weights had come loose. Whoever dumped the body in the water had done a poor job. Something unexpected may have happened that made the killers rush.
An osprey flew across the sky, prowling for fish. The raptor dived toward the creek, opened its talons, and snatched a silver shad from the water. The osprey screeched as it headed toward the trees.
Farther up the creek where the estuary narrowed, I searched for broken cattails and disturbed soil to find the exact place where the killer dumped the body. The Sheriff’s Department would provide the clues to the site. My former job had taught me one truism about every criminal investigation — forensic teams always left something behind. Once the evidence was tagged, bagged, and sent to the lab, the investigators shifted their attention to analysis. The yellow police tape would be gone, and Kostas’s car impounded to collect fingerprints and DNA, but something else might point out where the investigators had worked the scene.
About fifty yards up the road, a scrap of paper rested between blades of uncut grass. Leaning over, I could tell it was white bindle paper. Some forensic examiners used bindle paper to collect hair and other tiny biological samples, instead of plastic bags that can react with specimens. A deputy must have accidentally dropped this paper here on Wednesday night. It was what I was looking for.
Along the nearby banks, deep shoeprints covered the moist brown mud, but there was no reason for them to be at this remote spot. The killers could have left some of the prints, but the sheriff’s deputies probably made those on the outer edges. Broken reeds drooped where someone had stomped through them. Traces of a pink polymer lined the edges of shoeprints at the waterline. The sheriff had cast impressions.
Visiting the scene of someone’s murder was strange. An eerie calmness surrounded me. The air felt humid and thick. The afternoon sunlight seemed dim. A man had died here. A chill rose up my spine as I took out my phone and snapped photographs of the place where someone had tossed the body of Richard Kostas into the Chesapeake Bay.
A mosquito stung my neck. I swatted it.
The towering trees on the other side of the road had already shed their leaves. Brambles, poison ivy, and vines filled the dense underbrush. The gray asphalt of the road seemed clear of litter and debris. No tires had left any skid marks on the pavement. A sign from the Department of Natural Resources reminded visitors of mandatory fishing licenses and warned of fines. Beneath the sign sat a green recycling bin. Someone had drawn a small yellow chalk mark on the bin.
Then it all came to me. I realized what Richard Kostas had been doing here.
Now the question was whether to call Sheriff Tompkins and tell her what I found.
Before deciding that, I crouched down and studied the chalk mark, just to be sure.
The yellow chalk mark was only a few inches long. It started from the upper right side of the recycling bin and narrowed to a point in the direction of the lower left corner. I lifted my right hand to recreate the slashing motion that someone used to make this mark, but it felt awkward. The natural motion was downward from left to right. Then I tried my other hand. Whoever drew this mark was probably left handed, but maybe I was overthinking it.
The chalk mark looked just like the one Hailey had found on a box at Turner Creek Sporting Clays.
Richard Kostas had a high-tech job at Benton Dynamics before he was fired, but this was not high-tech. This was old-school. A simple signaling technique made sense when governments, corporations, and law enforcement could snoop through everyone’s computers and phones, surveilling anyone they wanted with few restrictions.
Faint traces of older chalk marks were barely visible on the recycling bin. Rainstorms and heavy fogs had mostly washed them away. Kostas had been communicating with someone he likely had never met. From these chalk marks,
