“I know.”

“Can you call it plain view exception?” Wainwright asked.

Louis glanced back. “Yeah. Let’s try it.”

He clicked off and returned to the truck, reaching under the seat.

“What are you doing?” Van Slate yelled.

Louis used a pen to carefully extract the knife handle so he could see the blade. But it wasn’t a blade. It was a putty knife, dull and gobbed with a hard mud-brown paste.

Louis let the seat fall back into place. Damn it.

“What? What?” Van Slate asked.

“Let’s go,” Louis said to Candy.

They got back in the cruiser and pulled away. Louis was watching as Van Slate moved quickly to his truck and started rummaging inside.

“What a nightmare,” Louis muttered.

“What?” Candy asked.

“He might be destroying evidence and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

It was late when he got home that night. Inside, the house was quiet and dark except for the patio lanterns out back.

Louis grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, picked up his files and notes, and slipped out the sliding glass door to the patio. He dropped into a chair and took a drink. It was pitch-black, no moon, no stars. A cool breeze drifted in from the mangroves bringing with it the dank smell of low tide. The quiet was broken only by the groan of Dodie’s boat against the pilings.

Serial killer.

When Wainwright had come out and said those two words, something had ignited inside him—horror, fear. He wasn’t afraid to admit it. More dead men, more dead black men, more crushed faces and broken families.

But with the horror had come something else—a ripple of adrenaline coursing through his veins.

He had spent most of the day after the visit to Van Slate wading through the NAACP files. One hundred and five angry white men, all with axes to grind, rage to vent. All looking for someone to blame for their own misery.

He thought back to the encounter with Van Slate. The guy hated blacks, that much was obvious. But did he hate them enough to kill? He didn’t know that much about serial killers, but he did know enough about people in general, that sometimes what you saw on the surface wasn’t what simmered beneath. Did enough rage boil below Matt Van Slate’s bigotry to turn him into a murderer? Was there a seed of evil there?

“You’re in late.”

Louis turned to see Dodie standing near the patio door. He was wearing boxers, a T-shirt, and white socks. His little spikes of gray hair shimmered in the lantern light.

“Need a fresh one?” he asked, nodding at Louis’s beer.

Louis shook his head. “No, thanks. Did I wake you?”

“Nah, I was watching the news in bed. The guy said cops think it’s a serial killer now. That true?”

Louis nodded and took a drink.

Dodie sat down across from Louis. “You know much about serial killers?”

“Just a little, from reading,” Louis said. “They weren’t such a hot topic when I was in school. Kind of a new breed.”

“They caught Bundy down here, you know.”

“I know. Stopped by a traffic cop. We could stop our killer tomorrow and not know it was him. We have no idea who he is.”

“You’ll catch him. You and Wainwright make a good team. He’s got a damn good reputation down here.”

Louis laid his head back. “He’s calling in his buddy from the bureau.”

“Well, that’s gotta help.”

Louis got up abruptly. He tossed his beer into the trash can and stood there, staring out at the canal. It was so dark out here. So quiet.

“What’s the matter, Louis?”

“Nothing.”

Dodie was quiet for a minute; then Louis heard the chair squeak as Dodie got up. Louis turned and watched him walk toward the sliding glass door.

“I need to tell Wainwright about Michigan.”

Dodie came back and sat down across from Louis.

“I don’t want him to hear it from someone else. I want him to know why I had to quit the force.” Louis looked away. This was hard. “I don’t want to lose his respect.”

“Then tell him.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Tell me first then,” Dodie said. “It’ll be easier the second time around.”

The darkness seemed overwhelming. Louis could feel the sweat on his forehead.

“It all came down to one night,” Louis began slowly.

Twenty minutes later, Dodie sat back in the lounge chair, his eyes leaving Louis’s face for the first time. For a long time, Dodie just sat there, staring at his hands. Then he looked up at Louis.

“Sounds to me like you had no choice, Louis,” he said.

“Should I tell Dan?”

“If you feel like you need to, yeah. If it’s bothering you that much, tell him.”

Louis shook his head. “But he’s got so much on his mind right now. He doesn’t need this.”

Dodie nodded. “You’ll know when. It’s your choice.” He rose, stretching. “Well, I’m going in to bed. Night, Louis.”

“Night, Sam.”

Dodie left. A few minutes later, the light in the bedroom went out.

Choice . . . had he had a choice that night in Michigan? Yes, he had plenty of choices he could have made. Not to go into the woods, not to pull the trigger. Men were dead because of his choices. And he was just now learning to live with that.

The question was, could others see it the way he had that night in the woods? Could a cop like Wainwright see it and not condemn him?

Louis gathered up the files. He would tell Wainwright. But not now, not until this case was over. They needed to catch a murderer and to do that, they had to believe in each other. The rest could wait. It would have to.

Chapter Eighteen

The large bulletin board took up the entire wall near the watercooler. Wainwright told Louis he had put it up that morning, and this was the first time Louis had seen it.

It was divided into three columns, one for each victim, and covered with photos and colored note cards. Wainwright had told him it was a method he learned back at the bureau.

Louis stared at the cards. If there was a system to the color code, he couldn’t figure it out. He was reading a yellow card that detailed Anthony Quick’s job when Wainwright came in from the bathroom.

“What are the yellow ones for?” Louis asked, pointing.

“Background. Maybe we’ll find a thread,” Wainwright answered. “You want some coffee?”

Louis shook his head as he went back to reading the cards. Wainwright yelled out the door for Myrna the dispatcher to bring him a coffee.

“I got a call from the bureau yesterday,” Wainwright said. “We’re not getting Elliott.”

“Why not?” Louis asked, turning.

“They didn’t say. They’re sending someone else, though. Named Farentino. Out of the Miami office.”

Wainwright fell silent. His old chair squeaked as he rocked it back and forth. Louis took a chair opposite the desk and stared at the colored cards on the bulletin board.

“How you doing with those NAACP files?” Wainwright asked.

“I’ve gone through all hundred and five and pulled out about thirty that could be legitimate suspects,” Louis said.

“Christ, thirty?”

Louis nodded. “But of those, there are only five that I think we should really concentrate on.” He pulled his notebook out of his jeans pocket and flipped it open, slipping on his glasses.

“I’ve got a Fort Myers man who used to run a white supremacist group in Texas, but he’s fifty-seven with emphysema. Two other men who were arrested for starting a brawl at a Jessie Jackson speech. And there’s a twenty-two-year-old guy named Travis Durring suspected of a 1984 church burning in Immokolee. Where’s that?”

“Town southeast of here in Collier County. You check into him?”

“Yeah. The file says he is also suspected of spray-painting racial slurs on a synagogue in Naples.”

“Travis gets around. Coincidence?”

“The paint? I think so.”