Those tracks didn’t go far. Kane plodded through swampy ground with floating leaves sticking to his boots. The thin layer of water had washed away the girl’s footprints. As Kane weaved between the long branches of the mangroves with their club-shaped leaves, he saw a shadow pass by his right side. He gazed up. Against the blaze of the low-hanging morning sun, he saw a red shoulder hawk gliding past him. The bird circled around back over the mangroves. The predator had its eye on something. Kane hoped another predator didn’t have his eye on him. He rather liked his neck where it was, holding up his head and all.
Hearing a rustling in the bushes behind him, Kane spun around so fast that he scraped his arm against a sharp broken branch. With blood dripping from his arm just below the tattoo of his daughter’s name, he redoubled his grip on the knife. Kane instantly lowered it when he spied the girl. Brown-skinned like her parents, the little illegal immigrant slumped on her knees in the muddy soil. Her straight black hair concealed much of her face besides her clamped mouth, her thin nose and her inquisitive brown eyes. After what had just happened to her parents, the girl should have been terrified of a strange man chasing her with a knife, Kane thought. The little one gazed at him as coolly as a panther. She didn’t even shiver in her soaking wet, mud caked pink dress. Brown and green leaves covered the girl’s arms. She didn’t brush them off. Remembering the rotten oil of despair that had upset his stomach after his grandmother had died, Kane understood why. Grief had shell-shocked the poor girl. By the looks of her, she was in her first years of elementary school and already she had witnessed the gory killing of her parents. Kane didn’t even know her parents, and the sight of their bodies still left a bitter stain on his mind.
Kane put the knife away and held out his hands. She backed deeper into the tangle of mangroves.
“It’s okay darling. I ain’t gonna hurt cha,” Kane said. “That little knife was for my protection-and yours-in case the bad person comes back. You want me to help you outta here to some place dry?” She remained absolutely still. He figured she might not understand English. He could handle that. “What’s your name girl? Como te llamas?”
His Spanish sounded, well, like a redneck speaking the only line of Spanish he knew. Maybe his horrible accent had deeply offended her because the girl didn’t respond. Kane hated when kids ignored him. The Bible says kids should respect their parents, but his daughter ordered him around like a damn farmhand. “ Buy me that movie! Take me to Disney!” When he finally put his foot down, the girl went on a tantrum. That’s when Kane would scoop the stubborn kid up and stick her in her room. Since he didn’t feel like standing in the mangroves all morning with his fishing time wasting away, Kane figured he’d move the process along a bit.
Kane lunged for the girl and reached for her shoulders. She slipped through what he thought had been an impenetrable thicket of mangrove branches and darted behind the plants. She didn’t scream or cry. She moved as nimbly and confidently as a squirrel scurrying up a tree as it evades a lumbering hound. This old dog wouldn’t lie down yet. Kane plowed through the branches after her.
“Would you stop running? I’m trying to help you, kid,” Kane shouted. His wife always scolded him for scaring the kids when he shouted, but sometimes they needed a good scaring to set them straight. “You’re best off leaving here with… oh, shit!”
A black water moccasin fell from a branch right onto his arm. Its wide, flat head aimed right at Kane’s nose. The snake eyed him with coal-black pupils while baring its poisonous fangs. Even without a single hiss from the snake, Kane got the point. He shook the snake off his arm and shuffled backward. The water moccasin landed on the ground and coiled up between him and the girl. She didn’t retreat from it one inch. If he had a dozen more beers in him, Kane would have sworn the girl was hiding behind the snake. Couldn’t be! After seeing somebody murder her parents and then having this knife-wielding redneck chasing her around, he reckoned that she rightly feared people more than she feared a water moccasin.
“If that’s how you want it, see ya, senorita.” Kane didn’t feel like wrestling a snake for a girl who didn’t fancy being saved anyway. He backed his way out of the mangrove swamp toward his boat, where he could call in Sneed and his team. They’d have a hell of a time with this one.
Chapter 1
Monique Williams pulled into the parking lot of the lagoon-side park in her Ford Taurus, which brandished a Brevard County Sheriff’s Office logo on its side. Her finger on the door handle, she sat there watching the officers scouring through the old, beat-up Honda that belonged to the victims. It had a sticker on the back windshield of a man, woman and girl holding hands with smiles drawn across their faces. If only life could be so simple and families never shattered like a tray of glasses on the club floor.
Monique, or Moni, as everybody called her, closed her eyes and shook her head. She had been a police officer for sixteen years and a detective for half that time. It never got easier, especially with murder scenes involving children.
Moni sucked in a deep breath and finally got out of her car. She tugged at her hair band and made sure one of her thin braids hadn’t slipped out. As she headed down the boardwalk toward the murder scene, she noticed all the other officers were white and gave her the all-too-familiar “What the hell is she doing here?” look. Lead Detective Tom Sneed put his team on this case, she thought. She had never worked a case as part of his homicide investigation unit-and neither did any of the other black officers. Being half white didn’t earn Moni half of the assignments with him either. It was all or nothing with Sneed.
He only takes the best qualified, he says. My ass.
She should have expected Sneed here. He always got the big cases and there were none bigger than the serial killings along the Indian River Lagoon. The first victim was a man in his 50s on a jogging trail. The second was a college girl who had gone kayaking by her lonesome. And now two at once. Neither of the first two murders had any leads or witnesses. They couldn’t even say how the murderer had snatched their heads off so smoothly. With this child as the only person who might have seen the killer in gruesome action, Moni and her special training dealing with juvenile victims served as the best hope Sneed had. She had coaxed children into telling her about relatives who abused them or their siblings. Lives had been saved because she helped remove children from horrendous parents. The lead detective better swallow his racial pride before asking for her help, she thought.
She found Sneed huddled with a blue wall of officers on the edge of the boardwalk, where it gave way to the sandy path to the lagoon. Upon spotting her, he promptly steered his gaze on her as if she were a serpent on a branch. Sneed greeted her with his broad shoulders and his back, with a husk of fat hanging over his belt. He jawed at his officers in his gravel-grinding, Georgian accent. Now showing her an ass large enough to make an elephant blush, he hammered home how they better scour every inch of this crime scene for evidence. He made a good point, as he usually did. A detective doesn’t work for 26 years busting gangs and solving murders in Atlanta without knowing more than most cops on the street. That was why, as much as Moni couldn’t stand his attitude or his corny handlebar mustache, she’d rather work with Sneed than for any other detective on the force. Not that the feeling was mutual.
“There you are, Moni!” Sneed hollered as she contaminated his circle of white buddies. “What took you? Did you stop to get your hair weaved?”
She had heard worse, from him and from others. One day, she swore, she’d smack him upside his oversized head, but that wouldn’t be a very tactful move for her first time on his team.
“As soon as I heard there was a child here, I hurried over,” Moni said. “It was my day off and I was in bed when I got the call.”
She braced for Sneed’s snide remark about her eating chitlins and grits or staying out late booty dancing, but it didn’t come. Yet, she saw from the scoffing look in his blue eyes as he elevated his eyebrows into his wrinkly forehead that he had kept those thoughts to himself. He had as much respect for Moni as he had hairs on that hen-plucked balding head of his.
“Well, now that you’ve graciously decided to join us, I need you to work your magic on the girl,” Sneed said. “The first witness on the scene scared her away. I always told Kane he was butt ugly. I sent Officer Skillings to coax her out of the bushes, but the kid won’t come. I think she might want to see a more familiar face.”
Knowing that he meant a similarly dark face, Moni grimaced. Even if he had been right, he didn’t need to treat them like a different species. The girl didn’t respond to Officer Nina Skillings because no child would. That hard-ass cop would make a Rottweiler cower in terror.
