Deadly Touch Read online

  Fourteen

  Conveniently, the address of the restaurant where the group was meeting was also in Coconut Grove, in walking distance from Jordan’s house.

  Axel knew Raina was growing anxious. She was hoping against hope they would get there and Jordan would be there, and she’d be tripping over herself, admitting she’d been worried sick and they’d gone in his house.

  He wasn’t expecting to see Jordan.

  The man had wanted to talk to Raina.

  Then he had stopped answering his phone.

  He didn’t try the local office for help; he’d be told Jordan Rivera was an adult, more than welcome to not answer his phone for an afternoon if he so chose not to answer it. He wasn’t gone anywhere near long enough for a missing-persons report.

  But he was missing, and Axel knew it. So he called Angela and gave her Jordan Rivera’s phone number, and asked her to somehow get a trace on it.

  It might have been left in the house, but he doubted it. And the only neighbor he’d been able to find had said, oh yeah, someone had come to Jordan’s house earlier—maybe he’d left with whomever that had been.

  The neighbor knew someone had visited because she’d been watering her hibiscus plants on the side of the house and she’d heard voices.

  “Male or female?” Axel had asked.

  “Frankly, I don’t know. And what business is it of yours? What are you? FBI or something?”

  And so he had produced his credentials, but the woman still hadn’t known. She just hadn’t been paying attention and she’d only really known someone had been there because her earphones had fallen out. She’d been listening to music, and happily, that drowned out the rest of the world.

  “I’m really worried,” Raina said.

  “Maybe he’ll be at dinner.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  When they arrived, Mya and Elly were already there, along with Tate Fielding. The three stood as Axel and Raina arrived and they hugged all around.

  Raina’s group was out on the patio area of the restaurant. It was a great spot, covered but open, with fans to keep the heat at bay. The night was beautiful, the place right on the water.

  “So, heavy on the trail?” Tate Fielding said, looking at them both. He grinned at Raina. “You’re becoming a bloodhound yourself?”

  “Pardon?” Raina said.

  Tate laughed. “Well, Axel is down here on a case. And you’re always with Axel, so...”

  “Oh! His friend Andrew, with the Miccosukee police, has the most amazing horse! I’ve been working with him,” Raina said.

  “Out in the Everglades!” Mya said, and shivered. “I don’t like to admit it, but I hated that camping trip we went on. Snakes, mosquitoes...alligators. Mosquitoes! It just isn’t me, I’m afraid.”

  “There are mosquitoes everywhere,” Elly said.

  “True,” Mya said. “But more out there! Anyway, we should sit. My husband should be here any minute, and Lucia just went out to put another few hours on her parking. You know Lucia. She lost her ticket so she has to do the whole thing over again. Otherwise, the silly girl could have called it right in!”

  “We haven’t heard back from Jordan, but we have a seat for him if he’s able to get here. He’s been a bit secretive lately. Maybe it’s a girl,” Elly said.

  “Jordan always has a girl. He brings a new one every time we get together,” Tate said.

  “Hey! Don’t pick on Jordan. You have a new girl every five minutes, too,” Elly said.

  “That’s because he doesn’t want one for real,” Mya said, shaking her head sadly.

  “They’re all real girls. Women, that is!” Tate said. He shrugged. “Give me a break—I’m young. And I’m looking for the best.” He glanced over at Raina and said lightly, “Had a good one once, but she slipped away. Ah, well.”

  “You’re such a liar, Tate,” Raina said, laughing. “You love the law and moving forward, and that’s okay. We are still young.”

  Axel noted she was truly amused. There was nothing bitter in her words, and Tate grinned, as well. It was all in good humor.

  Or so it would appear.

  “There, you see,” Tate told Mya and Elly.

  “Oh, your love life—or lack thereof—is your problem, my friend. One of us is always around when you need sisterly advice. Hey! There’s Lucia,” Mya said. “And cool! Len is right behind her.”

  The other two joined them, with greetings all around.

  “No Jordan?” Len Smith asked, taking a seat by his wife.

  “No, I guess he got busy. He had said he’d try to come, and we texted him the information. His loss, I say,” Lucia told him. She sat at Axel’s other side, happy to see him. “So, are you really relaxing for the evening? I guess no one can work twenty-four hours a day.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment; their waitress appeared with the drink orders she’d evidently received from the first arrivals. Friendly and smiling, she asked the others for their preferences and suggested a few appetizers.

  They ordered.

  “So, you guys getting anywhere?” Tate asked him.

  “One step at a time. Strange, though,” he told the group. “A girl disappeared years ago—the night of your camping trip in the Everglades. Her body was just found. Or her bones, I should say.”

  “Where?” Len asked.

  “In the Everglades.”

  “Near where that poor other girl was just found?”

  “Different area—deeper into the Everglades, or more off the beaten path, really, between the Tamiami Trail and the tip of the peninsula.”

  “That’s so sad!” Lucia said.

  “Terrible,” Mya said. “I told you—scary place.” She shuddered. “And the fact that we were out there! Now that’s truly scary. You’re going to catch this guy, right?”

  “Statistically, there are twenty-five to fifty active serial killers on the loose at any time in the United States,” Tate said, shaking his head and looking at Axel. “Sorry, I went to law school—spent some time in the prosecutor’s office. I looked you up, too. You’re something special.” He laughed. “More than being a ‘special’ agent. Your unit has its own offices, special assistant director, special field director—you guys are elite.”

  “Yes, I have a great unit. Actually, I think we’ve been promoted to ‘branch,’” Axel said, shrugging pleasantly at Tate.

  Tate Fielding had been a kid when the murders had started. But his apparently casual interest here seemed to be a bit too...casual.

  And he’d looked up the Krewe of Hunters.

  “And you go all over,” Tate said. It wasn’t a question.

  “We handle special cases.”

  “A very special agent on very special cases. We’re lucky we rate down here,” Tate said, lifting his glass of beer to Axel. As he did so, their waitress returned.

  “Soda with lime,” Tate said as Axel’s glass was delivered. “I guess you don’t ever consider yourself to be off duty.”

  “Oh, sometimes I do. Not tonight,” Axel said pleasantly.

  “You’re going to work again after dinner?” Elly asked him. “Your life must be exhausting!”

  Axel smiled. He leaned forward. “That’s why we’re considered to be so elite. We don’t stop, you see, until we get answers to all the questions we have.”

  He heard the sound of a chair scraping back. It was Raina. She stood. “Excuse me, guys. Trip to the ladies’ room.”

  “Right inside,” Lucia told her. “To the left!”

  “Thanks!” Raina called to her.

  “Still nothing from Jordan?” Len asked Lucia as Raina walked away.

  Lucia shook her head. “Tate, he really didn’t call you with any kind of an excuse or anything? It’s not like him not to answer me at all.”

  Axel stood. He
didn’t know what they were going to find when the lab came back with a report on the hunk of meat he’d taken from Raina’s yard. But anyone who knew her or knew about her knew full well a very big and potentially lethal dog would happily die before allowing anything to happen to her.

  Now, Raina was away from her dog.

  “Excuse me, phone call,” he said.

  He stood. As if on cue, his phone started ringing.

  He walked away from the table, surprised to see by his caller ID that it was Raina calling him.

  “You’re all right?” he said quickly. “I was just heading in to check on you.”

  “I’m fine—just in the ladies’ room. But we have to go. Axel, I got a call from Jordan. I can’t go back to the table. Not now. I’m all right. But I have to try to remember this call. Please. Can you say goodbye for us? Can we go right away?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll say goodbye. Pick you up on the way out,” he told her.

  He strode back to the table. “Hey, guys, sorry. Call from some tech at Miami-Dade,” he told them. “Probably more of nothing, but yeah. I’m always working.”

  “I can give Raina a ride home,” Lucia said.

  “That would be great, but I’ve got her dog and it’s complicated.” He decided to take a shot in the dark. “Titan is sick,” he said. “We left him with a friend of mine.”

  “Titan! Oh, no, poor puppy. He’s going to be okay, right?” Elly asked.

  “Hopefully. Anyway, thank you all for a great partial evening,” he said. He looked around, curious to the way her friends might react. Elly—truly concerned. Lucia—dismayed. Both Mya and Len appeared to be concerned. Tate...

  Looking downward and then up. “Tell Raina we’re hoping the best for Titan,” he said. “And hopefully, sometime while you’re still around, we can have dinner!”

  “Thanks,” Axel said.

  He hurried inside. Raina was waiting by the bar.

  He took her arm, leading her out quickly. As they headed for his car, he asked, “Where’s Jordan? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know where he is. He doesn’t know where he is. Axel, he called and just started talking, babbling. He said he got away. I tried to ask from who—and from where. He said it was dark, so dark, and he was screaming about snakes. And he suddenly said, ‘Oh, shit!’ And then the line went dead on me.”

  “Dark and snakes? But he didn’t say who or what was going on?”

  “He just started talking. The call couldn’t have been more than several seconds. I had just stepped in here. I couldn’t get a word in. I tried. He talked so fast.”

  Axel called Angela.

  “Anything? Have you got a location on that cell for me?”

  “The phone is still on, but the signal’s been in and out. I have people on it.” She gave him the coordinates of the towers the signals were bouncing from.

  He thanked her and hung up.

  “Anything? Where is he?” Raina asked him anxiously.

  “He’s in the middle of the Everglades. Somewhere about twenty miles west of Miami and another five miles south of the Tamiami Trail.”

  “Oh, my God! By himself? Running from a killer?” Raina said. “We have to find him, Axel. We have to find him fast. There are all kinds of killer creatures out there.”

  “None quite so deadly as man,” Axel said. “Yes. Jon Dickson and Kylie Connolly are on their way. Let’s pick up Titan first and head out. I’ll alert Andrew and he’ll get the tribal folks moving. And Nigel can get the rangers and some of his people on it. We’ll find him, Raina.”

  Dead or alive, he thought. But he didn’t say those words out loud.

  “He does know something,” Raina said, staring ahead into the night. “He must. The way he was acting, that strange feeling I had. He knows something, but he’s not a killer. I think he might know who killed Jennifer Lowry, and that’s why he was so angry, why he kept saying she didn’t deserve it. Axel, Jordan could be the key to what’s going on. Maybe we should head straight there. Titan is great, but he’s really not spent much time crawling around the Everglades.”

  He didn’t want to suggest they should get her dog because it seemed the dog was someone’s target, as well.

  “We need him,” he said simply. “There’s no alarm on your house.”

  “Titan is an alarm. Oh, my God. You really think someone tried to poison my dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “To get to me. But... I’m with you.”

  “And we need to keep it that way,” he told her.

  She swallowed and nodded.

  He got on the phone as he drove, calling everyone with voice control. He spoke with Andrew first, then Nigel and Angela. Then he hesitated and called the lab.

  “I was just about to call you,” the head of the department told him. “We went high priority as you asked on that sample you gave us. And yes, it was laced. Common rat poison, available many places, but of course we’ll get going on a list. But there’s something else you need to know about the meat.”

  “What about it?” Axel asked.

  “It was human. Human thigh muscle.”

  Fifteen

  Raina had always thought she understood the meaning of “darkness.”

  But in the middle of the Everglades, in the middle of the night, darkness took on new meaning.

  She stood in the back of Andrew’s yard. He had a small army of Miccosukee friends, park rangers and a few other people who knew the area well, even some of the python hunters they were all so quick to disparage as being white-collar businessmen out for a spree or uneducated locals looking for a spot on a television show. Miami-Dade police and others were part of the group, as well; the search would be extensive.

  She would never mock those wanting to look like hicks to get on a television show again. They were all there to help.

  A couple of the python hunters had an idea of where to search. They’d seen an all-terrain vehicle moving in just about five miles south of Andrew’s that day. That was very strange, because the terrain out there was lousy for fishing or sporting of any kind. Only airboats usually traveled the area.

  Both Andrew and Axel addressed the makeshift search party, warning they had to be careful, as they all knew, at night. They all loved the Everglades, and they all knew even without possible danger from a killer there were plenty of predators to be found in the darkness.

  The parties split up. Axel remained with Andrew. Nigel had arrived and apparently the three of them had a plan.

  “She’s coming—and the dog?” Nigel asked, referring to Raina.

  “Safer than leaving her—and the dog—anywhere else,” Axel said.

  “And like hell you’d be leaving me. It’s my friend who’s out there,” she said.

  “We going to follow the route the python hunters suggested?” Nigel asked.

  “It’s as good as anything else,” Axel told him. “And it jives with the placement Angela reported on the cell phone.”

  “Let’s do this. Titan going to be okay on an airboat? Billie Osceola has one waiting for us.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Raina said with assurance. She paused a minute and then turned to Andrew. “Billie Osceola? A relative?”

  He grinned. “There are lots of us Osceola—Miccosukee and Seminole. But Billie. Yeah, I think we’re third cousins or something like that.”

  They drove the distance to the village where Billie Osceola was indeed waiting for them; he was going with them.

  “I’m better at navigating an airboat than any of you.”

  “Hey!” Andrew protested.

  “You want the airboat?” Billie asked.

  “Take her away,” Axel told him.

  The moon suddenly broke from the clouds as they started out. It provided a glow over the Everglades—the hardwood hammocks and the wetlands, fields o
f sawgrass barely covered in water, deeper pools scattered as if by a casual hand.

  The airboat had a powerful light, illuminating each area as they moved.

  They saw all manner of creatures.

  They woke sleeping gators, and at one point bounced over something.

  “What the hell?” Nigel murmured.

  “Python, I think. Damn things are getting to be just about everywhere down here. We have to kill them when we find them. It’s kind of sad. It’s not the fault of the damned creatures that they’re out here. Found a rock boar in my yard the other day. Cool little dude.” He hesitated. “I didn’t kill it. I have a friend who’s a science teacher in the city. Gave it to her. Didn’t tell her where I got it—and she didn’t ask.”

  They kept moving through the night. The powerful beam at the front of the airboat cut through mud and muck and foliage and trees.

  “Stop!” Axel called out suddenly.

  Raina hadn’t seen anything.

  And not for lack of searching.

  “What?”

  “There’s something on that mangrove limb over there,” Axel said. “Billie, can you get us a little closer?”

  “Am I a driver extraordinaire or what?” Billie asked.

  He maneuvered them into position. Raina saw there was a piece of clothing caught on one of the branches.

  Axel reached for it, drawing it in.

  “Oh, my God!” Raina breathed.

  “You know what this is?”

  “It’s one of Jordan’s jackets...he had it on the other day, when he was at my house,” Raina said.

  He studied her for a minute and handed her the jacket.

  “See what you get,” he told her.

  “See what I get?”

  “Put it on,” he suggested.

  She swallowed hard and then did so quickly.

  “There’s, uh, there’s no mirror,” she said.

  “Close your eyes. Let your mind be the mirror,” Axel told her.

  She closed her eyes. For a minute all she felt was the humidity and the heat, slightly relieved by the fall of night. She heard crickets, something large slinking back into the water, somewhere.