The Night Monster (40 page)

I studied the graves. Four contained the bodies of young women whose identities we knew. The fifth was a mystery. Was it Danny Linderman or someone else? I had worked with medical examiners offices before, and knew it could be awhile before we found out.

I went back to Linderman. His eyes had not left the graves since I’d found him. I took the coffee cup from his hand. He looked at me with dead eyes.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No,” he whispered.

I spent the next three days taking long swims in the ocean and playing with Buster on Daytona Beach. At night, I visited the local haunts that served fresh seafood, and ate my fill of fish and crabs and washed it down with cold beer. I talked to Rose several times, and got caught up. I told her everything that had happened, but left out the money
I’d earned from the job. I wanted to surprise her with that the next time we got together.

Muriel Linderman drove up to be with her husband, and they spent most of the time in their motel room, waiting for Daytona’s chief medical examiner to contact them.

On the afternoon of the third day, the ME finally called, and told Linderman she had made positive identifications of the five bodies that had been exhumed from the garden. She asked Linderman to come to her office.

Linderman called me, and told me the news. I offered to drive him and Muriel to the ME’s office. Linderman agreed, and we arrived at the medical examiner’s building on the west side of town a few minutes past closing.

The ME met us in the building’s lobby. She was a short, pleasant woman, dressed in a lab coat, with bifocals that hung around her neck. She was aware of the Lindermans’ situation, and went out of her way to be kind.

She led us to her windowless office. The autopsy reports for each victim lay in a pile on her desk. She offered us seats, which we declined. Picking up the files, she explained how the victims had been identified through dental records. As she named each victim, she placed their file on her desk, until only one file remained in her hands.

“I’m sorry to inform you, but the fifth victim was not your daughter,” the ME said. “Her name was Clarissa Santiago. She was a Nicaraguan nursing student enrolled at Nova University in Miami. Santiago disappeared five years ago. Her friends told the police she’d been homesick, and thought she’d gone back to Nicaragua. That was why the Miami police never filed a missing persons report.”

Muriel Linderman covered her mouth with her hand. Linderman lowered his head and did not speak. He tried to stop the tears, but could not. In all the time I’d helped him look for Danny, I’d never seen him cry. I wanted to tell him that things would be all right, but that would have been a lie.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I drove them back to our motel and walked them to their room. I
wanted to leave, but I stayed long enough to tell them the words I thought they both needed to hear.

“I’m not going to stop looking for your daughter,” I said. “Danielle didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth. There are answers to what happened, and I’m going to help you find out what they are, however long it takes.”

I put my arms around Linderman and his wife and hugged them. We stood that way for a while, and then I said good-bye.

drove home that night with the windows down and the Doobie Brothers’ “The Captain and Me” playing on my tape deck. I hadn’t listened to their music in a long time, and it took me back to a better place than the one I was in.

It was two a.m. when I walked into the Sunset. The Dwarfs had gone home, and the place was quiet. Sonny poured me a cold draft without being asked, and handed me a bowl of table scraps for Buster. I fed my dog, then took a seat at the bar.

“There’s no place like home,” I said.

Sonny picked up the remote from the bar and punched a command into the TV. On the screen appeared a women’s college basketball game. I raised my glass to my lips, then put it back down. One of the teams was the Lady Seminoles.

“Jessie’s team is still in the tournament,” Sonny explained. “They played a few hours ago. I thought you’d want to see it.”

I sipped my beer and watched the game. The Lady Seminoles were having a bad night and did not play well. With a minute and a half left in the first half, they were down by sixteen points.

A substitution was called. A long-legged blonde sprinted onto the
court and got high-fives from her teammates. I could not believe my eyes. It was Sara Long.

“Why are they putting her in?” I asked.

“Just watch,” Sonny said.

Sara looked terrible. She threw two air balls, and sent an errant pass into the stands. With the clock winding down, she attempted a three-pointer from midcourt. The crowd seemed to freeze, and I sat up in my chair. The ball went through the net without touching the rim. As Sara came off the court, her team mobbed her.

“The Seminoles won, in case you were wondering,” Sonny said.

“Give me the remote.”

I rewound the tape to where Sara had entered the game, and watched her play again. This time, I saw how hard Sara was trying, and how that effort had affected the other members of the team. What was broken had been fixed.

Maybe there were happy endings after all.