After more than a dozen phone conversations, Billy persuaded me to come to Florida.
When he met me at the airport the first time, his GQ appearance made me hesitate. Way too slick for the voice, I thought. Then he looked unblinking into my face with his steady brown eyes and issued what I would learn was his standard greeting: "M-Max. Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy."
After I got over the disbelief and the quick feeling that I'd somehow been conned, Billy haltingly explained that he was a tension stutterer. Over the phone or even from the other side of a wall, his speech was as straight and flawless as the head of a debate team. But face-to-face conversation was a constant struggle. His stuttering was so profound even the most basic words jammed up behind his tongue. But he was as serious and sincere as I had first judged him to be and he put me up in his beachfront tower apartment for weeks until he found the research shack for me. We made an odd pair: a successful black attorney transplanted to the south and a white Philadelphia cop trying to escape the city. But I learned to depend on his judgment and knowledge, and I figured it was going to serve me now.
As we walked east through the heat rising up from the sun- bright sidewalks down Clematis Street, I explained again to him about the events of the night before. He'd said little when I'd called him earlier. But I knew from the envelope under his arm that he'd been busy. When we reached the corner of Flagler Avenue, Billy steered me to a shaded outdoor table on the patio of La Nuestra Cafe. I saw a hurried movement from the waiter who had one of those "No, no, no that's reserved" looks on his face until he recognized Billy and then became effusive in his service.
Billy waited until he had a tall iced tea sitting before him and I had a sweating bottle of Rolling Rock in my hand. Then he put the envelope on the table between us.
In his phone conversations Billy was clear and logical and brilliantly straightforward. Face to face the stutter only made him more so.
"M-Max," he said, his eyes narrowing and going the color of black-brushed steel. "You are in s-s-some shit."
In the envelope was a stack of printouts dated weeks ago that Billy had copied off the computer Web sites of the three largest daily newspapers in South Florida. They lacked the typical, shouting headlines that the actual papers would have displayed, but the simple text was hammer enough.
The body of Melissa Marks, the South Florida kindergartener reported missing last week, was found Monday in a remote area of Broward County's western Everglades.
Investigators said the cause of the six-year-old's death was not yet known, but they believe the girl is the third victim in this summer's string of bizarre abductions and murders of children that have terrified South Florida communities over the past three months.
"We think the same person or persons are responsible for this and the previous atrocities," said spokesman Jim Hardcastle of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has been coordinating a multi-agency task force that includes three county sheriff's offices and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"We are continuing a massive investigation into these homicides and are committed to finding those responsible."
Hardcastle declined to give any details of how police were able to locate Marks' body and would only say that it was found in a remote area about thirteen miles west of U.S. 27, which is the unofficial border of the still-wild Everglades and the suburban communities of Broward County.
Marks had been missing from her home in the new development of Sunset Place since last Sunday, when her parents reported to police that the girl had disappeared from their home in the middle of the night. The child had been asleep in her bedroom and was discovered missing by her mother who had awakened to give her daughter medicine for a recent illness.
Despite an almost immediate and widespread search by neighbors and police with helicopters and dogs, no trace of the child was found until Monday's discovery.
The disappearance and death is eerily similar to the two earlier cases in which a seven-year-old boy from the western community of Palmetto Isles and a five-year-old girl from Palm Ridge were abducted in June and July. Their bodies were also found in remote wilderness areas.
Investigators refused to comment on the causes of death and also declined to give details on how they were able to locate those bodies within days after the children were taken.
I shuffled through the printouts, all dating back to the first child abduction. The follow-up stories documented the FBI's involvement, the futile searches for clues, the shattered parents, speculations, and not surprising, fear.
My throat had gone dry and the printout paper felt dusty between my fingers. Billy had purposely left out any reproduction of photographs that I knew would have been published: The smiling elementary school snapshots, the pictures of parents standing bleary-eyed and dazed at funerals, the flower collections and rain-soaked cards and farewells at some public spot.
As I read, the sun crept onto our table and Billy, sitting silent with his legs crossed, waved away the waiter twice. I finally looked up and he met my gaze and without a hint of humor said: "You don't g-get out m-much. Do you?"
The uproar that the killings created hadn't gotten onto my river or through my self-imposed wall against the world. As I stared out at the asphalt street, Billy filled me in on his inside information on the cases that had buzzed through the courthouse and law offices for weeks.
The investigators were keeping the details, especially the cause of death, as close as they could. They also had not revealed how they knew where to look for the bodies they had found. But somehow they'd gotten onto my river and were probably less than a couple of hours from finding the child I'd discovered. Now they had me attached to that killing. It was only good police work to consider me a suspect.
I was staring out across the street again, my fingers lightly touching the scar on my neck. I hated circumstances. A logical world can't stand them, and an overcrowded world can't avoid them.
Had the body floated down into the spot where I found it from some point upriver? The source of the tributary was a broad shallow slough that drained into the cypress swamp and was also fed by a canal opening that helped drain the Glades. Had the body been wedged at that particular spot on purpose? Did someone know about my nightly forays? Did someone know I'd find it?
Over the tops of the buildings a thick stack of thunderheads was creeping out of the western sky, roiling up as they sucked moisture out of the Glades and pushed toward the coast. But the ocean breezes held them back. Here the sun still glinted hot and bright off the chrome on a line of cars that filled the street and then flushed away each time the stoplight changed.
"If you're th-thinking of t-talking to them, don't," Billy said.
I just shook my head. He knew I was thinking like a cop. He knew I would be thinking about Hammonds' team and their struggle with a high-profile case.
He finally waved the waiter over and while it was my turn to hold a response, he ordered a cold penne pasta salad and, looking at me with a slightly raised eyebrow, took my silence as license to double the order for two. Billy knew I was existing on canned meat and fruit and the occasional skillet-fried tarpon from the river. He automatically tried to influence my diet when he had the chance.
His advice not to talk to Hammonds and his team meant he was asking me to hold on to my right to remain silent. It was something I hated when I was a cop, and because of that experience I knew how valuable it was from the other side of the fence.
"They've got to be pulling in every favor and chit they can to get this one off the board," I said. "How the hell do you keep four dead kids off the front page and the brass off your ass?"