“Anyway, when they got there, they decided to stay. They were only going to be in town a couple days and they’d lose their deposit if they left for a beach hotel. So they stayed. And on their first night there one of the girls spots this pickup in the lot that was attached to a trailer with an airboat on it. You know what an airboat is?”
“Like with an airplane propeller and it goes in the swamp out there?”
“Right, the Everglades.”
“I saw them on CNN when that plane crashed into the swamp and disappeared.”
“Yeah, same thing. But this girl and her family had never seen one other than on TV or in a magazine and so they were looking it over and a man-the owner-just happens to walk up to them. He’s a friendly guy and he tells the family that he’ll take ’em on out for a real Florida airboat ride if they want.”
Graciela turned her face into the crook of his neck and pressed a hand against his chest. She knew where the story was going.
“So they said okay. I mean, they were from some town in Ohio with only one high school. They didn’t know anything about the real world. So they went ahead and accepted this man’s-this stranger’s-invitation.”
“And he killed them?”
“All of them,” McCaleb said, nodding in the dark. “They went out with him and they never came back. The father was found first. A couple nights later his body was found by a frogger working the grass. It wasn’t too far from a ramp where they launch those boats. He’d been shot once in the back of the head and dumped off the boat.”
“What about the girls?”
“It took the local sheriffs a couple days to ID the father and trace him to the Sea Breeze. When there was no sign there of the wife and kids, and they weren’t back in Ohio, the sheriffs went back out into the ’Glades with helicopters and more airboats. They found the three other bodies about six miles out. The middle of nowhere. A spot the airboaters call the Devil’s Keep. The bodies were there. He had done things to all three of them. Then he tied them to concrete blocks and threw them over. While they were alive. They drowned.”
“Oh, God…”
“God wasn’t anywhere around that day. Decomposition gases eventually made the bodies float to the top, even with the concrete blocks attached.”
After a long moment of silence he continued.
“About that time the bureau was called in and I went down there with another agent, named Walling. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. We worked up a profile-we knew it was somebody very familiar with the ’Glades. Most of it’s three feet deep anywhere you stop out there. But the women were dropped in a deep spot. He didn’t want them found. He had to have known about that spot. The Devil’s Keep. It was like a sinkhole or a meteorite crater. He had to have been out there before to have known about it.”
McCaleb was staring through the darkness at the ceiling, but what he was seeing was his own private and horrible version of the events that took place at the Devil’s Keep. It was a vision that was never far from memory, always in the dark reaches of his mind.
“He had stripped them, taken their jewelry, anything that would ID them. But in Aubrey-Lynn’s hand, when they pried it open, there was a silver necklace with a crucifix. She had somehow hidden it from him and held on to it. Probably praying to her God until the end.”
McCaleb thought about the story and the hold it had on him. Its resonance still moved through his life all these years later, like the incoming tide that gently lifted the boat in an almost rhythmic pattern. The story was always there. He knew he didn’t need to display the photo above his desk like a holy card. He would never be able to forget the face of that girl. He knew that his heart had started to die with that girl’s face.
“Did they catch that man?” Graciela asked.
She had just heard the story for the first time and already needed to know someone had paid for the horrible crime. She needed the closure. She didn’t understand, as McCaleb did, that it didn’t matter. That there was never closure on a story like this.
“No. They never caught him. They went through the registry at the Sea Breeze and ran everybody down. There was one person they never found. He had registered as Earl Hanford but it was a phony. The trail ended there… until he sent the video.”
A beat of silence passed.
“It was sent to the sheriff’s lead detective. The family had a video camera. They took it with them on the airboat trip. The tape starts with lots of happy scenes and smiles. Disney World, the beach, then some of the ’Glades. Then the killer started taping… everything. He wore a black hood over his face so we couldn’t ID him. He never showed enough of the boat to help us, either. He knew what he was doing.”
“You watched it?”
McCaleb nodded. He disengaged from Graciela and sat on the side of the bed, his back to her.
“He had a rifle. They did what he wanted. All sorts of things… the two sisters… together. Other things. And he killed them anyway. He-ah, shit…”
