TWO
I knew he had not been pulled under by a gator. His descent was too slow. I stepped over to the side of the dock next to Max. She didn't budge, eyes wide, staring at the spot in the river where the man had disappeared.
“Maybe he slipped in a hole, Max.” She whined, her whimper somewhere on the verge of a bark. Suddenly, the man rose out of the river’s surface like the Greek God Poseidon, clutching his scepter. He used one hand to secure the hat on his head, water pouring from the brim, the other hand gripping the metal pole. Then he dropped something into the leather sack around one shoulder. He said, “Couldn’t get it out with my toes, had to use my hand.”
“What are you doing?”
He closed his eyes and listened, prodding the pole into the river mud. His face was coffee brown, maybe Native American. He had smooth skin for a man I guessed was in his mid-fifties. His hair was long, salt and pepper, pulled back into a ponytail. He had a hawk nose that looked like it had been broken and set more than once. He wore a tank top, and his biceps rolled with muscle as he worked the metal prod.
I heard the pole strike something. With his feet, he seemed to be feeling the river mud. He lifted one foot out of the water and held something between his toes. He reached down to take the object, turning it over in his hand, studying it a few seconds before dropping whatever it was into the sack.
Max wagged her tail and finally barked. The man looked up and spoke in a slow, deliberate tone. “Dog’s gonna attract gators. Saw a big’en here a month ago.”
I almost laughed at the irony. “You’re standing in the middle of the river, water up to your chest, and you’re telling me that my dog might attract gators.”
He stopped his tapping for a beat. “I’m not in the middle of the river. Gator is most dangerous at night. You live around ‘em long enough and you learn their ways.” “I’m glad you’re in harmony with nature.”
“Dog and a gator won’t ever mix. Gator will stalk him. One day your dog will be barkin’ here on the side of the dock and a gator will jump outta the river and grab him.” “What are you doing?”
“Retrieving artifacts.”
“You're hunting for arrowheads?”
“Salvaging the past.”
“Why are you searching in the river?”
“Because this is where they are.” He squinted in the sun. “Lot of the ground’s been picked over. This river basin was the home to thousands of my people. There’s plenty of arrow and spearheads in this river mud.” He walked up to the dock, took his sack off and emptied it on the wooden planks.
Max wagged her tail and sniffed. I smiled. “Okay Max, let’s look at the past, the future is a little obscure right now.” The arrowheads were all near perfect. Some small. Some large. They seemed to have been chiseled from different colors of flint.
He held up the largest. “They’d use a few like this to kill a manatee or a gator.”
The man set the pole on my dock and climbed out of the river, mud clinging to his feet. He washed his feet in the water before standing.
“Name’s Joe Billie.” He stretched his long arm and offered a handshake. I shook his wet hand. I could smell sweat and river mud. His grip was strong. A knife was strapped to his belt and thigh.
“I’m Sean O’Brien. Do you often hunt for arrow—artifacts in the river?” “Whenever I can. I can tell if I’m hitting flint or something like a beer can.” He bent down and scratched Max behind her ears. “Hello dog.” Her tail wagged. “Ya’ll live here long?”
“A few months. I’m restoring the place.”
Joe Billie rubbed Max’s head for a moment. He glanced toward my house. “Ya’ll ever see or hear things you don’t understand ‘round here?”
“All my life. I was a cop.”
“No, here on the mound…you ever
feel
anything?”
“What do you mean by feel?”
“This is a sacred place, a burial ground. Should be treated that way.”
“How do you know it’s a burial mound?”
“Some mounds were for food waste. Others, the ones built overlooking the river like this, were for the spirits of the dead.”
“Okay.”
He looked at me curiously. “Protect what’s left of this sacred place and you’ll be protected.”
I tried not to laugh.
He stopped petting Max, looked up at me and rummaged through his knapsack. He pulled out a dark arrowhead. “Found this one near your dock. Take it. It’s yours.” “Thank you, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it. You keep it.”
“It’s rare. This is a very special arrowhead. No black flint in these parts. Somebody from a tribe outta the area might have used this arrowhead to kill someone or something. Maybe he died right here in or near the river.”
“Maybe so.”
“You ever use a bow?”
“I’ve got an old Pearson. Haven’t shot an arrow in years. Today’s arrows are a little more refined.”
“When a warrior spent time sharpening one of these, he wanted to make sure he got a good shot.”
He carefully laid the black arrowhead in the knapsack with the others and then rubbed a calloused hand across Max’s head.
“You live around here?” I asked.
“I live on the river near DeLand.” He studied my dock for a long moment. “Noticed some of your pilings could use replacing. I’ve set plenty of docks.”
“I’ll remember that. Did you walk in the river from DeLand?”
Joe Billie removed his hat and used his thumb to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I tied my canoe about a half mile upriver.”
“Can I give you a lift back to your canoe?”
“If I walk back, my clothes will dry.” As he started to leave, he paused, looked from my home to the river, squinting from sunlight through the live oaks. “Protect what’s left of this place.”
He retrieved his things and walked barefoot up the path that leads from my home to the dock. He turned left, going toward the largest part of the mound, stopped and dropped to one knee. He touched the mound with the palms of both hands and slowly raised his face to the sky. After a few seconds he stood, ducked beneath Spanish moss hanging from a low limb on a live oak, and vanished.
I decided to follow him. I wanted to see if he arrived in a canoe or by car. Was he casing my home? Maybe the ex-cop in me was too guarded. Screw it. Something was coalescing in my gut, something about Joe Billie making me suspicious.
I left Max in the kitchen, put a shirt on, slipped the Glock under my belt, locked the house and started my Jeep.
As I rounded a bend in the road, I knew I’d see him. I’d try to drive slow enough to see if he hauled the canoe in a pickup truck. Maybe see a license plate. He was nowhere to be seen. I remembered an oyster shell road that led from the county road down to the river. The jaunt to the river was less than a hundred yards. I pulled next to the river and got out of my Jeep. No Joe Billie. No canoe. Nothing.
I looked closely at the spur road. Since last night’s rain, there were no tracks, no impressions from a car or truck anywhere in the damp mud, shell, and gravel. How did a barefoot man beat me walking a half mile to his canoe?
I watched the river for a moment. An invisible curtain of wind came up river, rippling its surface like someone playing piano keys across the water. A mob of gnats gathered in mass near the shore. The air was building in heat and humidity. I felt a drop of sweat roll down my spine. There was the hint of rain in the air.
As I started towards the Jeep, I heard a noise in the thick trees. A crashing sound of attacking wings, primeval aggression. There was a shrill protest from a bird and then silence. A bright red feather floated to the ground less than ten feet from me. A great horned owl, yellow eyes unblinking, stared down at me. The owl had captured and killed a cardinal. The twitching, dying body of the redbird was trapped in the owl’s talons. I knew these big birds occasionally hunted in the daylight but I never expected to witness it.
I watched a smaller feather from the dead cardinal float on an air current towards the river. It was then that I saw the sliver of lemon yellow that looked strangely out of place. Maybe it was a piece of trash that had washed up in the current. But trash doesn’t move by itself. As I walked closer, the sliver of yellow became the blouse of a woman who was either dead or near death.
The woman had been severely beaten. Her left eye swollen shut. I knelt down and reached for a hand that lay across her stomach. Her pulse was weak. She was young. Maybe eighteen. Lower lip split. A wound in her upper chest. Her breathing labored, a slight gurgling sound coming at each inhalation. Dried blood at the corner of her mouth and nostrils. Her blue jeans were stained with blood.
“Can you hear me?” I asked.
She opened her eyes. There was no connection. She seemed to stare at a place somewhere above my head. She was distant and dying. I gently squeezed her hand and lifted a strand of hair from her face. She gasped and pulled away.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
She started to shake. She was going into shock. Her life was compressed into minutes. I held her hand. “There is a phone in my car. I’ll call for help.”
Her lips trembled, and she whispered something in a language I didn't recognize. “
Atlacatl imix cuanmiztle
,” she said in a labored breath.
What did it mean? There was a slight reflex from her hand. A single tear escaped through swollen flesh and shattered blood vessels, past the slit of an eyelid, down her face, vanishing into mud and river sand. One of the bruises on her cheek resembled the letter U.
I ran to my Jeep and dialed 911. “Come on!” An answer on the third ring. I explained to the sheriff’s dispatcher that an ambulance would be too slow. The victim needed to be airlifted by helicopter to the hospital now. I took a towel out of the back seat of the Jeep and ran back to the girl.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said in the most convincing voice I could. My heart raced. “Medical help is coming! Do you hear me?” There was only the sound of air escaping her chest. I applied pressure to her wound. She was slipping away.
Where the hell are they?
She looked at me for a long moment, the clear eye seeming to connect. It was now a pleading, frightened eye, an eye too wise for its young host. From somewhere lost in history and heritage, she looked at me through the saddened eye of the elders. She wept silently. I never felt so helpless.
The wail of sirens sounded in the distance. I heard a helicopter far away. But the look in her eye was further away as it peered through time and space and found me.
I held her hand, my own eyes suddenly watering. “Stay with me! Okay? Stay with me! I’ll find the person who did this to you.”
The feeling was almost surreal. For years I had investigated crime scenes. Now I was the one being questioned. The initial battery of Volusia County deputies had been efficient, articulate, and polite in asking most of the right questions. Had I known the victim? Did I see anyone? They scribbled notes, eyes panning my face while I explained what happened. I gave them permission to search my car as a team of forensics people started sifting through the surroundings.
Then the detectives arrived. A man and a woman got out of an unmarked Crown Vic. Another man, who was alone, parked behind them and stayed in his car with a cell phone welded to his ear. The detectives huddled with two officers for a few minutes, heads nodding and glancing toward me. Then they walked in my direction.
She was in her mid-thirties, an attractive brunette with an aggressive, no nonsense walk. The man was a little younger. African-American, light skin, square shoulders. They both carried notepads and small tape recorders.
She said, “Mr. O’Brien?”
“That would be me.”
“I’m Detective Leslie Moore, and this is Detective Dan Grant, homicide.” Detective Grant removed his sunglasses and nodded. The woman continued, “I understand you worked homicide for Miami PD?”
“Thirteen years.”
Detective Grant said, “Well, you ought to be used to this. What’d you see?”
“You never get used to it.” I told them the entire story. They didn’t interrupt. I concluded by asking them a question. “Is she alive?”
“We don’t know,” Detective Moore said. “She’s in surgery.”
Detective Grant folded his notepad, looked out across the river. “You move up here from Miami, left a place where you investigated killings, and now you find one not far from your house. I guess you’re pretty unlucky, huh?”
“Detective Moore just said the vic’s in surgery. So, at this moment, it’s not a murder. As far as I could tell, the young woman was raped, stabbed and left for dead.”
“How’d you know she was raped?” he asked.
“It was obvious.”
Detective Moore interrupted. “Mr. O’Brien, when you spoke with this man,” she paused and looked at her notes, “this Joe Billie…with your background, did you sense anything suspicious about him?”
“I was intrigued that he’d been walking in the river. Not many people do that.”
“What's your occupation now?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Does it get boring sitting home all day after a career with Miami PD?”
“I don’t sit home all day. I’m remolding the old place.”
She smiled. “We appreciate your cooperation. I just like to know where we might be able to locate you if you’re not home.”
“You have my cell.”
“Sometimes people forget their cell phones.”
“I spend time working on an old sport fishing boat I have at Ponce Marina.”
“You in the charter fishing business?” Detective Grant asked
“Thinking about it.”
The detective who had been sitting in the car approached. His shaved head glistened in the sun. He stepped in front of the other two detectives and came a little too close to my personal space. I could smell his after-shave and perspiration soaking into his starched collar. A blood vessel moved beneath the skin near his left forehead and pulsated like a worm crawling under his scalp.
“I’m Detective Slater. We appreciate your cooperation here, Mr. O’Brien. In your excitement, and it happens to lots of folks who stumble upon a crime scene, you didn’t compromise anything, right? You know, pick up any possible evidence.”
I looked at my reflection in his sunglasses and saw myself grin like I was just asked how long I’d been potty trained. “I tried to save a young woman’s life.”
He glanced down at my hands. “How’d you get those cuts?”
“I’m restoring an old house. Replacing wood. House looks better than me.”
“I guess the scratch on your chin came from the dock.”
“That’s right.”
“You never saw the victim before today?”
“That’s correct.”
“You saw nobody around? Just happened to walk up on a dying woman?”
“While you were on your cell phone, I explained to these detectives why I was here. Prior to that, I gave a full report to the officers.”
“You told the deputies that a man approached your dock.” He paused for effect. “Let me get this story straight…you said he walked out of the river?”
“He seemed as serious as the guys with the metal detectors. But he was looking for arrowheads. Had a sack full of them.”
“How’d he get in the river?” Slater asked.
“I suppose he walked.”
“According to your statement, the man docked his canoe a half mile from your home and walked into the river hunting arrowheads.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Kinda risky. Gators are mating and building nests. They get very territorial.”
“The man’s probably native Seminole. They’ve dodged gators for centuries.”
“Why were you looking for him?
“He’d offered to help me repair my dock. But I didn’t get his number before he left. The man wasn’t acting like someone who’d raped and beaten a woman.”
“How’d you know she was raped?”
“It was evident—blood, a lot of it.”
Detective Slater took out a handkerchief and wiped his bald head. He carefully folded the handkerchief and tucked it into his pocket. “Mr. O’Brien, you’re using a lot of supposition. We assume the victim was raped, but we haven’t received a report from the hospital. And you say this Joe Billie, a man who walks on water, didn’t ‘act like’ someone who’d just committed a heinous crime.”
“I worked homicide for thirteen years. Miami.”
Slater slowly removed his sunglasses. He seemed to be seeing me for the first time. “You look a little young to retire.”
I said nothing.
“Did the victim say anything to you? Anything at all?”
There was something different about the way he asked the question. His eyes too eager to get an answer. The body language edgy. I thought about mentioning what I heard the girl say, but I didn’t. “She was going into shock when I found her.”
“Too bad. Just a short description of the perp would help.”
I turned to leave.
Slater said, “We found a gun under the seat in your Jeep.”
“I have a permit to carry it.”
“No doubt.”
He handed his business card to me. “If you remember any other details, here’s my number. It’s an interesting coincidence, Mr. O’Brien. You worked homicide in Miami, you move out here, and you walk into a crime seen that might become a murder.”
#
I DROVE SLOWLY EAST
on State Road 44 and tried to put the pieces of the morning together. I needed to sort out the smallest details of what I’d just experienced. I decided to drive to Ponce Inlet, buy a new bilge pump, breathe some salt air and install the pump on
Jupiter.
I’d try to forget the look in the girl’s eye.
There was one problem: I couldn’t forget it. Ever.