Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) (7 page)

“Yes, Mr. Kincaid, I know who you are.” She hesitated again. “The sheriff is on vacation.
In Montreal.”

Montreal?

“She’ll be calling in to get messages, Mr. Kincaid,” the secretary said. “I can tell her you called.”

“What? No, no, that’s okay,” Louis said.

He thanked the secretary and hung up. He stood for a moment, staring into the deepening shadows of the living room, still wrapped in only the towel, his skin sticky from sweat.  Finally, he moved to the air conditioner and flicked it on. With a groan, it began to split out a meager stream of cool air.

He grabbed the holstered
Glock
and went into the bedroom. It was nearly dark and he had to switch on the bedside light. He paused before he put the gun away, taking a moment to slip it from its holster.

The Buddha was in his head now, whispering.

For those of you who ride alone it is the only partner
you’ll
ever
have.

Goddamn it
. He was
getting
tired of riding alone.

He slid the
Glock
back in the holster, put it in the drawer and went to the bathroom. His hands still smelled of
Hoppes
oil and he washed them quickly.

The smell was still there.

That’s when he remembered it.

He opened the medicine chest, scanned the bottles on the shelves but it wasn’t there. He jerked open the door beneath the sink and rummaged through the bottles of hydrogen peroxide, shampoo and shaving cream. He found it behind the rolls of toilet paper.
             

He rose, staring at the small
plastic
bottle of
Jean
Naté
After
Bath Splash. It looked empty. He took off the top and upended the bottle into his palm. A trickle of green spilled out.

Louis brought his palms up to his nose and closed his eyes.

For a moment Joe was there and then she was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“They seem to be doing a very meticulous job.”
             
Louis watched the two crime scene techs as they worked their way the through tangled brush sticking evidence flags in the ground, taking pictures and sifting through the dirt.

He looked to Katy. She wore a green long-sleeved shirt
over an old t-shirt
, a vest bulging with stuffed pockets and long camouflage pants. Her face –- rendered dark brown by the tint of his sunglasses -- was streaked with sweat.

“The sheriff said they’re the best
techs
he has,” Louis said.

She looked up at the sky. “I hope they’re quick,” she said. “It’s going to rain soon.”

He glanced up at the sky. Ugly purple clouds were building to the southwest and the humid air was heavy with the smell of ozone. It wasn’t just going to rain. It was going to be a palmetto-pounder of a storm.

Katy had wandered away from him, apparently not expecting a reply. Although they were fifty feet from the techs, her eyes were also locked on the ground. Louis knew she was hoping she would find something the techs didn’t. He understood that. Many times he had been
at
a scene, separated from the forensics team by yellow tape, but still he looked for something he thought only he could see.

Katy stopped under a tree and pulled off her ball cap to redo the
scrunchie
holding her ponytail. What a strange woman, he thought, quiet, reserved, somewhat disconnected from what was going on around her.  

They had been together nearly two hours, walked maybe a mile, but she had spoken only three times. Once to ask how many days the techs would be able to come out here and once to caution him not to step on a Scarlet King snake. The third time she had stopped Louis and pointed to something up in a tree. His heart quickened because he thought he was going to see
a
panther but then he realized she was pointing to a
p
urple and yellow flower high on a limb. She told him it was a rare clamshell orchid and like the panthers, the orchids were protected from poachers. 

She was smiling –- the first time he had seen her do so -– so he just nodded, deciding not to tell her he already knew that. He had learned all about wild orchids from the weird case
he had just finished over in Palm Beach –- a string of grisly murders involving rich salacious women who all had an obsession with a rare flower called the Devil orchid.

He thought about telling her about the case because he wanted to convince her that he wasn’t just some hack PI trying to catch a chance with the sheriff’s department. For some reason, he felt the need to impress this woman.

That’s why he had gotten up early and stopped off at the Fort Myers Library. He had spent a quick hour reading everything he could find on Florida panthers.

The big cats, he learned, had once roamed over all of the southeast states and
were
hunted as pests, with the State of Florida offering a five-dollar bounty for every panther scalp. As the state’s human population grew, the panthers declined, their habitat shrunk by housing developments, highways and drainage canals. By the 1970s, everyone thought the animal was extinct.

But a Texas animal tracker named Roy McBride found evidence
of
surviving panthers. School kids took up the cause and pressured legislators to name the panther the state animal. Speed limits on the highways cutting through the Everglades were lowered and committees were created to save the cats.

It was an uphill battle. Only a handful of the cats were believed to still be alive and the ones that survived were weakened by inbreeding. Last year, in an act of desperation, the state had even started a sperm bank for the remaining males.

Louis had found one other interesting fact in a magazine article -- the panther was considered sacred to the Seminoles. 

Louis had read all this with a deepening sense of depression. But it also created in him a more urgent resolve. He was damned if he was going to let Mobley sideline this case.
             

“Kincaid!” one of the techs called. “Come here.”

Louis started over toward Mickey, the older of the two techs. Katy hurried to catch up. They paused in a small clearing where the brush was tamped down into the muck.

“I have tire tracks,” Mickey said.

Louis bent over but could see no definable impressions in the mess of leaves and mud. Mickey motioned for Louis to step back and pulled a clunky-looking light from his bag. He told his partner to hold a small tarp over the ground to block the sunlight and knelt down. When he directed the ultra-violet beam at the ground the rugged outlines of the tire tracks seemed to rise up from the mud. They were too narrow to have come from one of Fish and Game’s giant swamp buggies.

“I’ll know for sure later,” Mickey said, “but I think we’re looking at Super
Swamper
radials.”

“Are they standard on a specific four wheel drive?”

Mickey shut the light off and stood up. “No,” he said. “People buy them for their mud buggies to be able to get around out here and any place else they want to go four-wheeling.”

“But if we find a suspect we can compare his vehicle tires to these tracks?” Katy asked.

“That’s the idea,” Mickey said. “These treads look to be pretty worn with some specific nicks. If we find a suspect tire the match will be as strong as fingerprints, ma’am.” 

“How far do the tire tracks go?” Louis asked.

“Well, they look visible quite a ways out heading toward the southeast.”

Louis turned in the direction Mickey was pointing. He took off his sunglasses and peered between the cypress trees to the prairie beyond. He was disoriented by the primitive landscape, not able to tell where the hell they were.

“What towns are we near?” he asked.

“Immokalee’s the only one out here,” Mickey said.

Louis nodded. At least he knew where that was. Once again, he had met up with Katy there, leaving his Mustang in Juan’s parking lot. But Immokalee was to the northwest, in the opposite direction of these tire tracks.

The sun slipped behind some clouds and there was a low rumble of thunder.

“What else is out here?” Louis asked.

“
There’s
some cattle ranches but they’re pretty far east, closer to Lake Okeechobee, down around Devil’s Garden,” Mickey said.

Louis had been to Devil’s Garden for the Palm Beach case. There was nothing there but a rusty sign marking an intersection, an old cinderblock store called Mary Lou’s and
an
abandoned cattle pen where they had found a decapitated body. Devil’s Garden and the cattle ranches were too far away for the panthers to be any threat to livestock.

“Actually, the closest thing to civilization way out here is the
rez
.”

Louis looked back at the tech. “The Seminole reservation?” he asked.

“Yeah.
It’s called the Big Cypress Reservation.”

“How far?”

“Oh, maybe twenty miles or so.”

Louis glanced at Katy. She was slowly moving away, eyes still trained on the ground. There had been no accusing tone in Mickey’s voice but Louis sensed Katy had heard something that had compelled her to step away from them and maybe away from the idea that an Indian might be involved. Louis decided to let the possibility go for now and hoped they would find something that led away from the reservation.

“Let’s follow the tracks some,” Mickey said.

He led Louis and Katy across the clearing, stabbing the ground with the small orange flags as he walked.
Suddenly, Mickey stopped walking and knelt down. Drawing a small ruler from his shirt pocket, he measured the depth of the track in three places before looking up at Louis.

“The tracks deepen here by a quarter inch and look to continue that way,” Mickey said,
pointing
south. “I’m guessing he stopped here and added weight to his load.”

“Weight?
How much weight?”
Louis asked.

“Hard to say.
Maybe a hundred pounds.”

“He put Grace in his truck,” Katy said.

“Grace?” the tech said.

“That’s the missing panther’s name,” Louis said.

“I thought they just had numbers.”

Katy turned to stare hard at the tech. “They do have numbers. She was FP105,” she said dryly. “She weighed ninety-two pounds last time we were able to dart her and check.”

Louis looked down. “If he loaded her up here, aren’t we walking all over his footprints?”

“Already checked,” Mickey said. “Foot prints would’ve been
shallower
, easily washed away by last night’s rain.”

“It didn’t rain last night,” Louis said.

“It did out here,” Mickey said. “I checked before I left the station this morning. We’re lucky he has Super
Swampers
on his vehicle or we might’ve lost these tracks, too.”

“Hey Mick.”

The other tech, a pudgy guy named Buck, appeared suddenly out of the brush. He wore a white paper jumpsuit, purple latex gloves and a pair of glasses with a magnifying lens inset on the right side. He looked a little like a
Haz
-mat responder.

“Look what I got,” he said.

He held up a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was a slightly crumbled box of cigarettes.

“It was back there, under a tree,” Buck said. “I might be able to get some prints off it. Cellophane looks clean.”

“Butts?”
Louis asked.

“Nope,” Buck said.
“Haven’t seen one butt of any brand.”

“Can I see that?” Katy asked.

Buck handed the bag to her. She took a long look then handed the evidence bag back to Louis. She turned and walked away.

Louis stared at her back for a moment then brought the evidence bag up to peer closely at the pack inside. He could easily make out the brand –
-
Viceroy –
-
but it took him a couple more seconds to see what Katy had noticed. Cigarettes packs in Florida
,
as in all states
,
bore a state tax stamp on the bottom of the cellophane. This pack had no stamp and that meant one thing. It had come from the only place in the state where cigarettes weren’t taxed -- the reservation.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to Buck, handing him the bag.

He walked to where Katy stood. She had taken off her hat and wiped her face with her sleeve, leaving a dirty smear of sweat across her forehead.

“He’s not Indian,” she said.

“You don’t know that,” Louis said.

“I know,” she said. “I
feel
it in here.” She put her fist to her chest.