Eye of Vengeance (13 page)

Chapter 14

N
ick spent the weekend with his daughter, trying as best he could to give her his full attention. He still cheated her out of at least half of his conscious thought.

On Saturday morning he got up and found Carly in her usual spot, camped out in her pajamas, legs curled up under her just like her mother used to do and watching cartoons with a Pop Tart and glass of dipping milk in front of her. He made coffee and settled down next to her without saying a word and aimed his face at the screen.

“SpongeBob SquarePants,” she finally said after three minutes of silence.

“I know,” Nick said.

“Liar,” she said, but the dimples in her smooth cheeks gave her away.

He switched the coffee cup to his other hand and pressed his warmed fingers to the side of her face.

“And Patrick,” he said.

She looked over into his face and smiled that full smile that had the same warm effect on his heart that his fingers were having on her skin.

“OK, maybe you are paying attention,” she said and then, when she saw his expression start to change to that spaced-out, blank look, she quickly added, “What are we going to do today?”

Nick and his wife, Julie, had become aware of both their daughters’ abilities to pick up on the unspoken rift between their parents. Nick’s attention would spin off into the most recent story he was working on, the priorities of keeping up with an investigation or finding yet another source that he hadn’t thought about and then taking a chance that he might best get them to talk by calling or knocking on doors at hours they wouldn’t expect. Like on weekends, or the middle of the night, or when he should have been taking one of his daughters to a piano lesson or driving them all to an impromptu weekend getaway. His frequent disappearing acts had strained the relationship, and his vow, after the accident, was to do better by his surviving daughter.

“I am going to take you out to experience the two things that you love to do more than anything,” he said, deliberately punching up his voice with enthusiasm.

Carly’s face reflected a nine-year-old’s version of skepticism.

“Photography and alligators,” he said, watching her look turn to confusion. “We’re gonna go out to Clyde Butcher’s in the Everglades to look at his pictures, which I know you’re going to love, and while we’re out there I promise you will see some gators lolling around in the water next to his place.”

Carly whined, as nine-year-olds will automatically do. Then, maybe after thinking about the picture-taking, which she did love, and the fascination of gators, which were at least different and possibly exciting, she did something that nine-year-olds don’t normally do: acquiesced.

With Elsa’s help, they put together a picnic lunch of
salteñas,
chips and homemade salsa, and Nick filled a cooler with juice boxes. When they packed the car, Nick tried to coax Carly into the front beside him but was met with a clear statement: “Mom never lets us sit in the front. She says we’re not big enough yet, and the air bag would kill us.”

Nick did not say what immediately came into his head:
The air bags didn’t help your mom or your sister, so what goddamn difference does it make?
Instead he looked into her face to see if she realized what she’d said and then just nodded and put the cooler and a carton of Goldfish in the back seat with her.

Within thirty minutes they’d escaped urban South Florida and were heading west on what was once called Alligator Alley, a name that caused Carly to stare out the side window for at least twenty minutes before getting bored and voicing her opinion that they shouldn’t name a highway for alligators if you can’t see them lying alongside the road. Nick was going to tell her they’d changed the name to Interstate 75 but decided to keep his mouth shut.

He did try to keep up a conversation about the Everglades, directing her attention to the acres of brown-tipped saw grass that rolled out on the northern side of the freeway and stretched to the horizon. He tried to liken the sight to Kansas wheat fields, spread out and swirling in the winds, but realized his daughter had never been to Kansas. He tried to get her to imagine how the water they could see in the canal alongside was just as deep way out in the grass. “Like an ocean with the stalks poking up from the bottom over every inch.”

“So how come the grass is brown at the top, Dad? I mean, jeez, shouldn’t it be green if it’s growing in water?”

He was never surprised by the logic of a child. Pretty damned simple, Dad, if you quit overanalyzing it. It was one of those things his daughters had taught him.

“Right now the tops are brown because the saw grass is blooming, sweetheart. It’s the blooms that are brown.”

All he got from the back seat was an “Uh-huh,” like she’d accept it even if it was stupid for a plant to have brown blooms. Every few miles, Nick would make some kind of observation, loud enough for Carly to hear, but when he glanced back, her eyes were on a book she’d brought, or the blue GameBoy she and her sister always fought over until they bought a second one. The red one had belonged only to Carly. He noticed that after the accident, she played only with the blue one.

Finally, he gave up the act and let the sound of the car’s spinning machinery and whir of rubber on concrete and rush of wind on glass and metal dominate the space. But silence only took his head where he’d sworn not to go.

What was the federal officer doing sniffing around and supposedly looking at similar shootings? Similar to what? The idea of this being a sniper job was getting hard to argue against. The cold precision of that single shot was pretty damned convincing. And both Hargrave and Nick now believed the shooter had climbed up the fire ladder and had prepared the shot, maybe even beforehand. Did the guy have a list of other shootings with the same tag? Professional-type jobs. Preparation. The use of SWAT-style clothing. Did the shooter intentionally wear the clothes to throw off witnesses, make anyone who saw him dismiss him as official? Pretty ballsy. Or stupid.

“Dad?”

Nick was thinking ballsy at this point.

“Daaad?”

His eyes snapped up to the rearview mirror to search for his daughter’s expression. It was annoyed, again, at his wayward concentration.

“Yeah, sweetie. You OK?”

“When are we going to get there?”

The inevitable kid question. He looked alongside the freeway for a mile marker.

“Only a couple more minutes and then we go south, honey. We’re going to go right along the edge of the wildlife preserve, so I want you to look for the panther-crossing signs, OK?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, just like when you see pedestrian crossings or those deer-crossing signs up north. Out here they’ve got panther-crossing areas.”

Carly thought about it for a moment. “Cats don’t walk across the street where you tell them to,” she finally said. “They go where they want to so they can hide and do what they want. Remember Dash?”

Dash had been the girls’ tiger-striped tomcat. The thing would disappear for days, somehow getting into the house through a torn screen just to eat and then slink back out. The only way you knew he was still around was by the empty food dish.

Nick got off an exit and then turned south on U.S. 29.

“We’re not going to see any panthers,” Carly said, not with disappointment or cynicism, just a little girl’s statement of fact.

“You’re probably right, but you’ll still see the signs,” Nick said and looked back and smiled at her, but she was staring out the window.

The road was flanked by a line of trees on the west and a canal on the east. Nick knew from experience that there was little to see and the arrow-straight two-lane was a boring strip cutting through nowhere. His head moved back to snipers, no signs to let you know where they were, where they would strike next. The D.C. killers proved that. Every so-called expert in law enforcement had blown that one from the beginning, working the old scenarios, searching for connections between victims, some sort of pattern so they could predict the sniper’s movements. They took a witness’s statement about a white van and went crazy pulling over every white van they could find.

Now Hargrave too had a witness who’d seen a man in black who looked like a SWAT cop. Would he pull over every SWAT cop he could find and question them and their whereabouts on Thursday morning? Maybe he would. Maybe he already had.

“Dad?”

Carly brought him back and Nick chastised himself. Pay attention, man. Don’t do this to her again.

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“Can we stop someplace to go to the bathroom?”

He smiled, had known it was coming all along.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve got just the place. Can you hold on for another ten minutes, sweetie?”

“If I have to. Yes.”

In five minutes he was at the junction of 29 and the Tamiami Trail and headed back east, past the airboat ride signs, the Miccosukee Indian village signs. He tried to divert Carly’s mind by telling her about how men long ago had built the trail as the first road across the great Everglades by scooping up the dirt and muck and limestone with a huge dredge and dumping it alongside the canal they were creating as they moved forward.

“See the water over here on my side? That’s where they dug, and this road is where they piled the stuff.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nick looked out beyond the canal at the occasional spread of saw-grass meadow spotted by islands of cabbage and silver thatch palms. Then the hammocks of dwarf cypresses, wild tamarind and rimrock pine would fill up the space with a thin greenness. And always there was the heat, bubbling the mixture to a deep simmer. He admired the men who had worked through this relentless nature and wondered if they had ever taken an appreciation of its bare beauty while they tried to tame it.

After another ten minutes, Nick pulled over at a sign reading:
CLYDE BUTCHER’S BIG CYPRESS GALLERY.
He parked next to the small pond that bellied out from a culvert running under the roadway. The water was dark and coppery and lay like an unrippled tarp around several gigantic water cypress trees, their branches strung with Spanish moss.

Carly got out on the other side while Nick gathered up his thermos, balanced a cup on the roof and poured.

“We can go inside and use the bathroom, baby,” he said and when he got no answer he stepped forward and looked over the hood for his daughter. She had forgotten all about her need and was staring out into the near water, her arm outstretched and a slightly crooked finger pointing.

Nick followed the line of her finger and saw the rumpled black nose of a gator cutting slowly through the water, leaving a growing V behind it. The eyes were like two disfigured lumps on the trunk of a tree with their centers buffed smooth and glassy.

“That’s a good-sized one,” Nick said, injecting a lightness into his voice as he moved around the front of the car to Carly’s side. His daughter took a step back, but her eyes did not leave those of the reptile. When the beast took a turn to the south from its dead-on path, Nick felt Carly move up into the side of his leg.

“Wow,” was all she said.

Now that they knew what they were looking for, Nick pointed out two other motionless snouts and Carly found two others among the cypress knees poking up through the water.

“Won’t they come up and, you know, bite the tires or something?”

“I think they’re used to company by now,” Nick said. “As long as some idiot doesn’t start feeding them from the parking lot, they don’t have much reason to come out of the water when people are around.”

They stood and watched for a bit, Carly now giggling at each perceived movement. After several minutes she seemed to have her fill and started looking around. The simple wood deck of the studio took her interest.

“Pictures?”

“Yeah, your other love,” Nick said. “Let’s go in.”

When they stepped inside Butcher’s studio, Carly’s reaction to the large black-and-white photograph of the Big Cypress Reserve had the same effect as her initial spotting of the gator—her eyes froze on the photo. But this time she stepped forward. The frame that greeted them was one of Clyde’s shots of spreading clouds building in the limitless sky over the Glades. Their movement and tumble and growth from drawing up the water below had been frozen in his lens. Below was a sheet of still water, reflecting the image of the clouds as if on a hot mirror. Bordering the open pond were marsh grasses and hammock trees, and bisecting it was a small sliver of island. The textures, in pure black-and-white, made the viewer forget even the possibility of color.

Carly stepped even closer and reached out to touch the photograph with the tips of her fingers as she might a sleeping animal. “Daddy,” she said. “How does Mr. Butcher do this?”

Nick was looking at the photograph with only slightly less wonder than his daughter. He had always been as mesmerized by the man’s skills as she was now.

“He’s just very, very good at what he does, honey. He’s like an artist, only with a camera, you know, who can see things in a way that other people can’t,” Nick said, but he knew he too was flummoxed. “Let’s look at his other stuff.”

Carly uncharacteristically took his hand and they drifted into the gallery, every wall filled with portraits of the wild and majestic Glades, from a small frame of a rare and intricate ghost orchid to a broad, wall-sized print of the moon rising over land no man had stepped on for thousands of years.

Nick had been absorbed by the guy’s photos ever since a newspaper colleague had profiled Butcher years before. But only recently had he been drawn out to the studio, to stand and look again. Nick knew Butcher’s story. The photographer, already a recognized talent, had been stunned by tragedy when his seventeen-year-old son was killed in a terrible car crash. Butcher and his wife closed in on themselves. And then, in a way maybe he himself could not describe, Butcher slipped alone into the ancient and otherworldly land of the Everglades swamp. He spent days and weeks alone in the pristine wilds with his big eight-by-ten-inch box camera and let the energy of his grief spread out in a place where other people did not reach. Out there he would stand waist-deep in the water, then focus and wait, enduring heat and mosquitoes and loneliness until the perfect moment of light and shadow could be captured. And out here he let his talent, the thing that defined him, grow in spite of his anguish and it redefined him. Nick felt a sliver of that now, and it made more sense to him, and he was pulled to it.