“Whoa, girl, I was gonna ask you if you wanted to have dinner and some lovin’ tonight.”

“Can’t tonight.”

“Even for Joe’s Stone Crab?”

“That’d be nice, but it’s September. Joe’s is closed.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not, baby?”

“I’ve got to wash my hair.” She cracked a smile at that old one.

“C’mon, baby, that’s a bunch of-”

She didn’t hear the rest as she mashed the “end” button on her phone. She smiled, thinking that between Sutter and Tasker, one of them had to be free tonight.

Tasker focused on east Palm Drive as it turned into Southwest 344th Street, the empty Homestead speedway a few miles behind them. Sutter sat in the backseat of the Cherokee, talking-more like reasoning-with Alicia Wells. She had come in from the cold, like a spy from the sixties. And she had problems. Alicia told the investigators some of her story, but obviously held back quite a bit. What she did say was that Wells might have a secret box near the Turkey Point power plant and she thought she could find it. Knowing that the discovery of physical evidence might help them find the elusive repairman from Naranja, Tasker decided Alicia could talk in the car and headed out to this quietly modern part of the county.

Alicia sat, half-turned toward Sutter in a sundress and, clearly, no bra. She had garnered a few stares back at the office, which was another reason Tasker thought it best to hustle her out of the FDLE building. She had cried on and off during the brief interview, and now Sutter was waiting for her to regain her composure. He handed her a tissue. She held it to her nose and cut loose with a deafening honk as she blew her nose. Tasker thought a semi had rolled up behind him.

Alicia said, “That’s better, thank you.” She wiped her eyes again.

Tasker asked, “Still up this road, right?”

“I’m guessing it’s on the dirt road to where we used to fish. The boys told me that Daniel could see them from where he liked to park on the bank of the canal.”

“And you can find it?”

“I’m not stupid. Just choose not to deal with everything. Wish I didn’t have to talk to you fellas, but I do.” She looked at Sutter. “And I’m sorry I pepper-sprayed you.”

Sutter smiled. “It was a good move. A smart move. I never expected it.” He handed her another tissue. “And believe me, I cried and blew my nose a whole lot more than you are now.”

She smiled and let out a short giggle.

Tasker said, “You said Daniel worried you. Did he give any specifics?”

“Naw, only that it was gonna be spectacular and on Thursday.” She blew her nose again, earning an amazed stare from Sutter. “And that it was gonna be in Miami.”

“Anything else?”

“Just that he didn’t seem to care if people got hurt. He might be a little confused. He gets that way sometimes. Focused on something and then forgets other stuff. If he was working in his workshop, he’d sometimes forget to eat.” She put her hand on Sutter’s knee. “I couldn’t live with myself if someone got hurt and I didn’t do anything.”

Sutter said, “There’s a lot of that going around.” He threw his intense stare over to Tasker in the driver’s seat.

Alicia went on. “Daniel is a good man. He’s a great father and treated me better than I ever been treated. I don’t want him in trouble, neither. I reckon if you catch him before he hurts someone, he might just get probation.”

Tasker remained silent. He didn’t want to mislead her. He left his eyes on the straight road and kept driving.

“Daniel is a little different in some ways.”

“How do you mean?” asked Sutter.

“He likes order in his workshop, but everywhere else he likes things just… goin’ nuts. I mean, he lets those boys of his run wild. They’re holy terrors.”

“If everyone who let their kids run wild was crazy, we’d all be in asylums,” said Tasker.

She leaned forward and rested her hand on his shoulder. He looked up in the rearview to see her piercing blue eyes. It felt like electricity was shooting through his body where her hand touched.

Alicia said, “No, it wasn’t like they were bad. He punished them if they sassed or didn’t eat good. He liked them to start fires and break stuff. He watched them and sometimes gave pointers on how to make it worse.”

Sutter said, “They ever hurt anyone?”

“Not that I know of.”

Tasker thought back to the FBI profiler. Maybe she wasn’t so full of horseshit. “Did he ever say he liked to be in control of things like that? Like fires or breaking things?”

“Naw, but he told me once that he liked when things were out of order. When they were in… I can’t think of the word he used.”

Tasker and Sutter said in unison: “Chaos?”

“Yeah, that’s it. He liked to see how people reacted to chaos. He had an idea, a what-do-you-call-it?”

This time nothing popped into Tasker’s mind.

Alicia said it herself. “He had a theory that the bigger the flash, the crazier people acted. Didn’t matter if there was any real danger-it was all show.”

Tasker asked, “He ever say how he tested this chaos theory?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“You don’t have any idea where he might be staying?”

“Nope. He just calls me or my mama from a pay phone. I don’t even got an idea where he uses the pay phones. One time it was in a Publix, ’cause I heard the people talkin’ on the store speaker.”

“He have any close friends he might go to?”

“Naw. He did call one fella a lot, and the guy called him, too. He came by the house a coupla times.”

“What’s his name?”

“Never heard it. He was from up north. New York or Boston. Talked real fast, and funny, but always dressed nice, like he was a banker or a lawyer.”

Tasker thought of one more thing as she said, “Turn here.”

He slowed and pulled off the paved road onto a soft, muddy road that cut between two long strips of Brazilian peppers. Some people called them Florida Holly, but they definitely weren’t native plants. The thin long branches of the low trees crept out toward the two-lane asphalt road. Tasker turned off 344th onto the uneven, winding trail. Several times the Cherokee almost bogged down, feeling like it might get stuck in the soft sand.

Once he had a grip on the vehicle’s handling, he asked Alicia, “Why was Daniel learning to drive a big rig?”

“He just wanted to learn. I asked him if that meant he’d be gone truckin’, ’cause I didn’t want to stay alone with them kids. He said he wouldn’t be leavin’. But he kept going to that school.”

Tasker nodded. He slowed the car when he saw the narrow canal with the lime-green water. The patchwork of canals here were used to cool the power plant. The fresh water was pumped in and out of the plant, keeping this marsh area off-limits to developers. As a result, it was also one of the largest habitats for crocodiles in the Northern Hemisphere. Over the years, Tasker would occasionally see one on a bank or in the water, but never up close. Their reputation for being more aggressive than alligators made him keep his distance. This little dirt road was about as close as you could get without trespassing on Florida Power and Light land.

Alicia said, “This was his place. He came out here all the time.”

“Any idea where the box is buried?”

She shook her head.

Sutter said, “Can’t be that hard to find. Look for disturbed dirt.”

The problem was that with the dirt-bike tire tracks and the soft dirt, it was a giant upturned sandbox.

Tasker said, “Let’s look at it like a crime scene. Figure where he would stand to fish and how far he could see.” He had Alicia point out the tree Wells usually sat under. Tasker took his place and turned to survey the field. Almost immediately, he saw the square patch of upturned dirt near the edge of the brush line where they had entered.