It all made sense. Ronald Vance was Brokenhearts. He’d been released from the subacute care center less than seven months ago — half a year before the new murders started up. Now he was trying to atone for those previous murders — by killing more people! There was a motive here, even if it was insane.
She took a deep breath. Admittedly, there was more due diligence to be done. But this felt right.
This felt huge.
Fauchet turned to a people-search app on her phone and typed in “Ronald Vance, Miami.” It took her less than ten seconds to get a hit.
Name:
Ronald C. Vance
Age:
24
Address:
203 Tarpon Court
Golden Glades, FL 33169
Holy shit: there it was. So he had come home!
Golden Glades — where was that again? She pulled up her keyboard and typed in the address, and a map of the endless Miami sprawl appeared on her screen. There: abutting North Miami Beach, only a few miles from Pendergast’s safe house. And not too far from the site where the first heart was left.
A half-hour drive. Maybe less, if the traffic cooperated.
Once again she tried to call Pendergast and Coldmoon, but the calls still went straight to voice mail.
She went over the train of logic again, slowly. Was it actually possible she was right? Could Ronald Vance be Mister Brokenhearts — and could he really be living just a short drive away?
She stared at the screen and the map it displayed, with the little red arrow blinking just above the street named Tarpon Court.
42
Up close, the airboat was even smaller than it had looked from a distance. The bow swept upward, like a World War II landing craft. There were two seats, one behind the other, both on stilts. The big prop at the rear was attached to a ninety-horsepower Lycoming engine and enclosed in a wire cage. Coldmoon rapped on the gas tank: full.
Pendergast turned to him. “Have you ever driven one of these?”
“No,” said Coldmoon.
“In that case, no time like the present. Care to take the helm?”
“I’d rather not. I, um, don’t like water.”
He felt Pendergast’s amused gaze on him. “I’m not overfond of the substance myself, at least in large, stagnant, miasmic bodies. But if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to function as guide and lookout.”
“Let me guess. If I object again, you’ll remind me whose idea it was to interview John B. Vance.” Coldmoon got into the boat and, muttering to himself in Lakota, stepped up to the wheel, then cast an eye over the helm. Everything looked pretty simple: a key, a choke, and a combined throttle and gearshift with neutral, forward, and reverse. And there was a little stopcock on what was obviously the fuel line. He sat down in the front seat, opened the stopcock, set the throttle to neutral, pulled out the choke, and turned the key. The engine fired up almost immediately.
“Ready to cast off?” asked Pendergast.
“Do I have a choice?”
Pendergast untied the boat, climbed aboard, and gave them a push away from the dock with a wing-tip shoe.
When Coldmoon eased the throttle forward, the propeller engaged with a whir of wind, and the flat-bottomed boat surged forward. Coldmoon cautiously steered it into the main channel. Pendergast, meanwhile, had reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a map, folded into a remarkably small size. No wonder he wanted to be guide, Coldmoon thought, wondering whether Pendergast had purchased his seemingly bottomless suit jacket from a magician’s supply store.
“Canepatch is almost exactly three miles to the southwest of us,” he said.
Coldmoon pulled out his phone to check the GPS. “Zero bars. Figures.”
“That is why we have this.” Pendergast opened the map with a whip-like motion, and it extended to an alarming size. “Set a course for two hundred ten degrees.”
“How the hell do I do that? I’ve never driven a boat before. My preferred mode of travel is a horse, and they aren’t usually equipped with GPS.”
Pendergast pointed at a small compass, set into a bulb on the helm. “Turn the boat until it is pointing toward two ten. Then go straight.”
“I knew that.” He steered the boat around until it was pointing in the right direction. There were many channels among the cypresses, and the direction they headed was fairly open.
“What is our speed?” Pendergast asked.
“Um, eight miles per hour.”
“Barring any obstructions or delays, we should reach Canepatch in twenty minutes.”
The water was smooth, and the movement of the boat produced a refreshing breeze. It was loud as hell, though — even louder than the Shelby. Weaving among the big trees, Coldmoon tried to keep the boat headed in the direction indicated by the compass. Once in a while they passed a hummock of mud, where there was invariably an alligator or two. Another time, he was sure he saw a snake winding through the water.
They continued on through the mangroves, the noise of the engine making conversation all but impossible. Strange trees came together overhead in an exotic canopy that threw the bayou into semi-darkness. Coldmoon found it impossible to imagine anyone would live out here. In fact, the farther they went, the more certain he felt that nobody did. The rented airboat must be for fishermen or the like. The old guy had either died or returned to civilization — who could live out here for a decade without going crazy?
“And here we are,” said Pendergast. Ahead, in the gloomy shade, Coldmoon could see a dock sticking into the water. Beyond, solid land rose up, and the cypress trees gave way to a forest of oaks above a thick carpet of ferns.
As Coldmoon slowed alongside the dock, he could see, looming through the trees, a large old wooden house on a rise, with a wraparound veranda. It was remarkably shabby, and yet hinted at current habitation. Coldmoon wasn’t sure why he believed this: there was no hum of a generator, no curl of smoke from a chimney, no satellite mini-dish on the roof of the structure. From the look of things, it might be squatters.
He clumsily brought the boat in, bumping hard against the dock. Pendergast jumped out and tied it to a post as Coldmoon killed the engine.
“So much for the element of surprise,” Coldmoon said, jerking a thumb toward the huge propellers slowing in the cage behind them.
Pendergast glanced at Coldmoon. “I would not care to surprise the kind of person who chose to live out here.”
Coldmoon patted his jacket where his sidearm was. “As in, some crazy old geezer who’d shoot first and ask questions afterward?”
“Precisely.”
“I suppose that’s why you’ll ask me to go first.”
They stood on the dock, peering at the house. A narrow, sandy trail led from the small clearing, through ferns, across a wooden bridge, and up the hill. There was a makeshift sign on the bridge he couldn’t read.
Pendergast cupped his hands. “Halloo!”
Silence.
“There’s no boat at the dock,” said Coldmoon. “Maybe no one’s home.”
“Halloo!” Pendergast called again. “John Vance?”
A faint, unintelligible voice filtered back down. Coldmoon squinted up at the house again, but nobody was visible.
“Let’s go.” They advanced along the trail and approached the bridge, where the crudely lettered sign read:
DANGER!!
DO NOT PROCEED!
Pendergast paused to call out again. “FBI!” he said. “We’d like to come up and ask a few questions!”
The voice responded: high-pitched and urgent, still unintelligible.