I turned around as Joe Billie stepped from between two tall pine trees.
FOURTEEN
“Where’d you come from?” I asked.
Joe Billie looked at Max, who seemed as bewildered as I was, and said, “Ever think about getting a Lab? Don’t think you’d see a lab playing with a rattlesnake.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Passing by. Thought you could use the help.”
He held the long bow to his side, and a hunting knife was strapped to his belt. There were no other arrows. No quiver.
“Where are the rest of your arrows?”
“Usually carry one. You aim better when there’s no second chance.”
I glanced at the dead snake. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“Had good teachers.”
He approached the snake, placed a boot on its head and slowly pulled out the shaft and arrowhead.
“Why’d you leave that arrow at my house?”
“You said you had a bow, thought you might appreciate it one day.”
“I do appreciate your gift, but I was surprised to find it on my porch.”
Billie said nothing.
“I’d hate to use something that ancient in my bow. Seems it ought to be in a glass case to protect it.”
“It might protect you one day.” He threaded the bowstring in the notch on the arrow shaft and pulled the string all the way back to his right cheek, arm’s knotting. He held the draw, rock solid, sighting a pine tree as a target. “You hold your breath. Draw back. Keep both eyes open. Block everything out but the spot. Then let go.”
“A young woman died near here the same day I met you.”
Joe Billie didn’t flinch. No emotion. No visible changes in breathing. He slowly eased the bowstring back down, removing the arrow.
I said, “Seems to me like you’d have passed by her if you walked down the river.”
“Where’d she die?”
“I’ll show you.” I scooped up Max with one arm and headed for the river with Joe Billie following me. I thought about what Floyd Powell had told me sitting in his boat at the end of my dock. The bone hunter ain’t been seen since.’
“Stop,” he said abruptly.
If I turned around, would I be hit with an arrow through my spine? I slowly turned to face him. He was reaching toward a bush, examining something.
“You remember what the girl was wearing?”
“Yellow blouse, blue jeans.” He pointed to something caught on a palm frond.
“It doesn’t look like a thread from blue jeans, but it’s blue,” he said, reaching for the bright blue thread clinging to a barb on the frond.
“Don’t touch it.” I used my pen to carefully lift the thread off the thorn. I pulled a second Ziploc bag out of my shirt pocket, lowered the thread into the bag and sealed it.
“You always carry those?”
“When I get into a murder investigation and I’m the one they’re investigating.”
“That why you’re curious as to my whereabouts? You think I killed the girl.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t have to.”
“There’s a lot more room to hide a body in the Everglades, don’t you agree?”
He slowly turned his head toward me, his brown eyes searching my face for a few seconds. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Clayton Susskind?”
“Someone digs up your grandfather, cuts his head off, sells it. How’d you feel?”
“Angry. But not enough to kill.”
“I told you, I didn’t kill him. It was the last moon after the Green Corn Dance. I took him in the rock chickee to sweat out his demons with the fire and smoke. I gave him the black drink of our ancestors to show him the wrong he did.”
“Did it poison him?”
“No, it guided him. He heard the spirits that night. When the sun broke, he said he was moving to Arizona. Said he was being called there to teach…university.”
I said nothing, not sure what to say. Max barked at a lizard and I said, “It does seem odd that you walk down the river and don’t see the girl lying near the bank.”
He pointed to the thread in the bag. “I saw that.”
“It wasn’t easy to spot.”
“Things that aren’t a natural part of the surroundings can stand out.” His eyes moved slowly from the branches to the ground. “Things like this.” He stepped over to a palmetto thicket, knelt down. “Don’t think that little plastic bag of yours will hold this.”
Max followed me, sniffing, growling, and uttering throaty barks. It was a domestic animal’s reaction to the aberrant, to the incomprehensible — to evil.
“No, Max!” I shouted, stopping her from sniffing a long stick covered in dark blood. I looked closer and could see a single hair stuck in the bark and blood.
Billie sat on his haunches, pondering, staring at the stick. “Was she raped?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like whoever did it wasn’t satisfied with the sex part.”
“For this guy, wasn’t about sex. It was about power and humiliation.”
Billie stood and searched the area, stopping every few feet to turn a leaf or stick with the tip of his bow. “Here’s something.”
Almost hidden under the dried palm leaves was a piece of gray duct tape.
I stared at the tape and felt my chest tighten. My palms were moist. I touched it with the end of a pencil. I could see a dark hair stuck to one corner of the tape.
At the river’s edge, I could smell the odor of dead fish and honeysuckles. A half eaten catfish, probably ripped from a trotline by a gator, had washed ashore.
“Here,” I pointed to the spot I found her, “she was on her back here.”
He looked around the area, lifting a dead leaf or a broken twig, eyes moving like a bird of prey. “When I came upriver I was over on the far bank with my canoe. That’s Dickensen Point. I crossed to this bank about another hundred yards down. Pulled the canoe onto a sandbar and walked in the shallows until I came to your dock.”
Max looked toward the east and uttered a low growl.
Joe Billie smiled. “I’m startin’ to gain more respect for that little dog.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she knows somebody’s coming.”
FIFTEEN
Within three minutes, Detective Slater arrived with a posse. Two unmarked cars and two Volusia County sheriffs’ cruisers pulled up, lights flashing, dust trailing. Max barked at the detectives and deputies spilling out of their cars at once.
Detective Leslie Moore wore her hair pinned up. Her partner, Detective Dan Grant, followed her. Slater took his time, staying in his car, cell phone pressed to his ear, eyes on me. He waited for the others to almost encircle us before he appeared.
“So, what do we have here?” Slater asked. “O’Brien and the crocodile hunter?”
Billie ignored the comment. Slater continued, “We have a man with a bow and arrow and a hunting knife. What are you hunting?”
“Artifacts. Spear and arrowheads.” Billie said.
“You won’t find arrowheads here unless the victim was stabbed with an arrow.”
I said, “Detective, we’ve found a couple of things that may have slipped through your first investigation. Between here and the road, less than a quarter mile, you’ll find a woman’s shoe, a bloodied stick and a piece of duct tape. The tape looks like it has a hair stuck to it. I’ll show you where we found them.” I wasn’t going to tell Slater about the thread or the dirt I’d taken from the shoe.
Slater turned to Billie. “I’d like to take a look at that arrow.” Billie handed him the arrow. Slater removed his sunglasses and studied it. “I see tiny pieces of something between the stone and wood. We’ll run DNA on it.”
“Unless you’re storing rattlesnake DNA in your database you won’t get a hit,” I said. “He saved my dog’s life when a rattlesnake was about to strike her.”