The Blue Edge of Midnight by Jonathon King

Author:Jonathon King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Freeman, Police Procedural, Detective and Mystery Stories, Mystery & Detective, Ex-police officers, General, Max (Fictitious character), Mystery Fiction, Everglades (Fla.), Children - Crimes against, Fiction, children
ISBN: 9780451410788
Publisher: Onyx
Published: 2003-04-01T00:51:52+00:00

CHAPTER 16

I waited until I was back on the Tamiami Trail and then called Billy, giving him a brief description of my meeting with the Loop Road group. I left out the encounter with the welcoming committee. I gave him the names of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.

Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.

When I got back to Billy’s apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.

He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, “a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine.”

She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer’s figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.

As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.

“W-What happened to your face?”

I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.

“Door,” I said.

The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.

“Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case.”

I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.

“It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched,” she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. “Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he’d done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area.”

“N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown,” Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.

“Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer’s backroom people allegedly threatened Sims,” McIntyre continued.

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