The morning after the last incident, Medina made some calls and set up a deal. He and Santos were to meet one of their contacts in the middle of the Everglades. It had been years since either of them had made a deal like this and both felt a certain level of excitement as the moment drew closer, albeit for vastly different reasons. They rented an airboat and Medina piloted the craft out to a desolate area where all that met their eyes was blade upon blade of saw grass. Medina slowed to a stop and informed Santos that they were to wait there for their contact to arrive. Santos reached down to grab a beer from a cooler they brought with them. His head parted ways with his body as Medina’s machete ripped through meat and bone in a perfect slice.
Medina watched Santos’s headless body slump over the side of the airboat. Half of it seemed to want to dive into the water after its lost extremity, while the other half was content to hold on to the ice-cold Coors. Medina decided easily and tossed the body into the murky water. He wasn’t one to pay any attention to the plethora of signs begging park goers not to feed the wildlife. Even the prehistoric beasts deserved a treat occasionally.
Chapter 10
Osteen and Vivian were driving in their squad car down A1A when Stairway to Heaven abruptly broke the silence. Osteen pressed a button on the steering wheel and the magical sound of guitars being strummed ceased to exist.
“Osteen.”
“Detective,” replied the timid voice at the other end of the phone. “This is Gertrude Wooden over at Cr… Crandon Park.”
“How can I help you, ma’am?”
“I think I’ve found something that may interest you.”
“What might that be?” Osteen wondered aloud, tensing slightly in his seat.
“Video of the park from the night that Edgar Jennings was stabbed,” Wooden answered.
“When the hell did you guys get cameras? There wasn’t anything on record stating you had any near the scene of the crime.”
“There were some kids a while back who thought it would be a hoot to spray paint our restroom pavilions. The county kept denying our requests for funds, so we pooled our money together and picked up a few low-grade security cameras to hide near the pavilions. We had hoped to find out who the culprits were, but they stopped their shenanigans not long after we put the cameras in place.”
“Why wasn’t this mentioned when we were there? It would have made this entire process considerably easier on both our parts.”
“Few people knew about it, likely less than half of our staff,” Wooden said. “If you’d like, you can swing by the office and see the footage for yourself. I’ll be here for another hour.”
“I’m on my way.”
-#-
The video was grainy, and the lighting was less than ideal, but there wasn’t much Osteen thought he could reasonably expect from such a cheap surveillance system. They had watched the tape five times from each vantage point, but there was little to go on. The members of the staff at Crandon Park bothered enough by the graffiti to pool their money for some surveillance equipment, installed six total cameras. Of that small collection, only three were in the vicinity of the murder scene.
They had installed one camera in a vent on the restroom pavilion. Though its view was of a patch of land to the west of the building, the installation took place after park hours because the staff members didn’t want to risk blowback on their sting operation because of an unrelated lawsuit.
On the camera in question, Osteen and Vivian saw a man sitting on a bench. He had something in his right hand. It wasn’t immediately obvious what he was holding–it looked like a light brown blob. He brought it up to his mouth every so often, like a diver who was snorkeling and needed air now and again.
Vivian assumed it was a beer, but neither detective was all that interested in the contents of the blob to devote much deductive work to solving the mystery. After a few minutes, Jennings appeared on the screen, jogging toward the beach. He quickly made his way past the bench and disappeared from the camera’s view. Oddly enough, the man who had been sitting on the bench stood up a few seconds later and walked directly south, into a lightly wooded area. He left the mysterious brown blob behind to fend for itself.
Camera number two sat in the upper crevice of the first “A” in the Crandon Park sign out in front of the welcome center. It pointed down toward the parking lot. This camera was of better quality than the first, if only because it offered a slightly wider field of view. They could see the man from the bench walking around the Mercedes, pre-char, apparently trying to devise a way to get inside. Shortly after the mystery man’s arrival, Jennings appeared on screen. The lights on his car flashed and the man from the bench immediately crouched.
They watched as Jennings approached the car. Though they couldn’t see clearly enough to make out his facial expressions, it seemed he thought himself alone in that moment. As if on cue, the man from the bench reached behind his waist and fumbled around for something, never relinquishing his gaze. As Jennings grabbed hold of the door handle, the man slithered behind and rushed him. In an instant, the man raised his right arm, an odd shape in its entirety, and struck Jennings in the throat. It was impossible to see the man from the bench with any sense of clarity, or what he introduced to Jennings’s neck, but they could only assume it was the knife.
The third camera rested on the back of the mailbox at the front of the park. It faced outgoing traffic and
