The Blue Edge of Midnight Read Free Page B

unexpected news, it still caught all of them hard. Hammonds’ lips went tight together and Diaz winced. I felt the woman take an instinctive step closer.
    “What kind of scene, Mr. Freeman?” Hammonds said.
    “A dead child. Wrapped up. Just above the dam.”
    Cleve was the only one in the group that registered any true shock.
    “Jesus, Max,” he said, looking at the faces around him.
    “Let’s get a team out here,” Hammonds said to no one in particular as he looked out over the water, his block chin tipped up into the air.

CHAPTER 3
    W ithin an hour they knew what I knew and I was left guessing. That’s the way conversations go with good investigators. Even in supposedly friendly interviews. You answer their questions, offer your observations, try to be cooperative. They nod their heads, encourage the dialogue, make nice, and give you squat. By the time you walk away you feel like your pockets are empty and you just made a really bad deal with a door-to-door salesman. No wonder lawyers tell you to just say no and close the door.
    The only line I’d been able to read between their questioning was that this wasn’t the first kid they’d found. There had been others. I couldn’t tell how many or where. I also knew I was a suspect. The first person who comes across the body in a homicide always is. I didn’t have to be told not to leave the state.
    In two hours a crime scene truck was parked on the boat ramp and Cleve was loading up his park service Boston Whaler. Hammonds had decided not to wait for daylight. Cleve had tied a spare canoe to the stern cleat. In this high water, and with his knowledge of the river, he could get them up to the dam. From there they would have to take the other boat up to the body. Hammonds, Diaz and two others climbed into the Whaler and Cleve started it up with a rumble, got the men to cast off his lines and then chunked it into gear and slowly motored out onto the river.
    The woman detective stayed at the ramp, talking to two crime scene technicians and into a cell phone at the same time. When she finally snapped the portable shut and took a step toward me, I stood up from my interview spot on the dock and gave her my back.
    “I’m going home,” I said over my shoulder, waiting for an objection that never came.
    I dragged my canoe into the water. Out to the west I could see Cleve’s portable spotlight flickering in the mangroves. I’d be far behind. As I pushed out and settled in for a first stroke, I stole a look over my shoulder and saw the woman standing back, four feet from the water line, arms crossed over her chest, following me with her eyes.
    As I paddled, the knots in my shoulders from the hours of sitting and answering questions started to work themselves out. It was still a good hour from sunrise. The river was now unnaturally quiet. I could pick up the low undulations of Cleve’s outboard even though they had to be a mile ahead. But the motorboat’s passing at this hour had effectively turned off the millions of live sounds along the banks and in the thick mangrove islands. The frogs and insects had shut up, wary of the man- made noise and movement, and fallen into the survival cover of silence. I’d interrupted their natural rhythm with my nightly paddling. But as I’d learned to smooth my passage, and perhaps as the river world got accustomed to my months of slapping through the night, it had simply adapted. Even the lower species do that.
    I got back into my own rhythm: a reach, a pull through, finish with a light kick. A soft slurring of black water. I was grinding again. The dead child’s face was in my head, mixing with the kid on a Philadelphia sidewalk. The FDLE team would have to spend some time up at the scene. But what were their options other than recovery? You couldn’t cordon off a river. And despite the overblown tales of forensics, you weren’t going to lift prints from the trees.
    But I knew they’d pass right by the old stilted research