I turned and moved out to the living room. Locked the door and got on the road.
I drove out of the neighborhood and past Grapeland Heights Park. The blue and purple slides of the waterpark reflected the morning sunlight, and I turned onto 953 toward the airport. Taking the on-ramp for I-27 a little later, I traveled with the canal to my left. The older Hialeah airport motels were on my right, mixed in with window tinting shops, Cuban restaurants, and banquet halls.
The highway turned vertical, and all along the roadside, hatchbacks were open. Small signs taped to car windows advertised tamales.
On my left, was the wide expanse of Florida, home to endless farms, as well as a hundred miles of wetlands and sawgrass, cypress and alligators. I broke west by northwest onto a series of state highways, cutting through one of the most diverse farmlands in the country. In Hendry County, there were fish and gator farms. The agriculture included tree nuts and berries, melons, sweet potatoes, and tobacco. Livestock ranches sold sheep, donkeys, and cattle. Some even cultivated Christmas trees.
My phone buzzed, and it was Richie, returning my call from last night. I hit the button to accept. “You got something?”
“Maybe,” he said. “You remember our unidentified body?”
I pictured each decomposed skeleton in my head. Matched them up with names where we had IDs. Landed on one unknown woman. “The most recent victim, right?”
“Yeah,” Richie said.
Most of the bodies were nearly skeletons, but this woman had only been in the ground a few weeks or a month. “Did you find something?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Agent Harris called in an ME specializing in exhumations. They established a PMI of twenty to fifty days.”
A PMI was a postmortem interval. The amount of time the body was estimated to be in the ground. I hit the accelerator. To my right, a bank of hard dirt led up to Lake Okeechobee.
“They tried to test for drugs and poison,” Richie said. “But the decomp was too much.”
“Richie, if there’s something you found—”
“There were muscle groups we examined,” he continued. “There’s some indication the woman was in restraints.”
I considered how they must have come to this conclusion. There was actually a body of scientific data on restraints causing asphyxia, mostly from police holding suspects down.
“What muscles?” I asked.
“The flexor carpi ulnaris,” he said. “The tibialis anterior—”
I had been picturing this incorrectly. “Her wrists and ankles?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“You have a theory?”
“The ME couldn’t test for drugs. But there wasn’t any indication of starvation or dehydration. I think these women might’ve been held or transported. But if so, only for a short time. A day, maybe?”
“Transported?”
I heard conviction in Richie’s voice. “I still think there’s a connection to our gun case,” he said. “Maybe this body hasn’t been ID’d because the victim’s from South Florida. Maybe there’s another field of corpses down there.”
This part was speculation. Richie holding on to his theory about bodies being moved around the state.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Agent Harris wanted you to know. For timing reasons. We’re looking at the frequency these women were taken. The interval between kills.”
Richie always used the name Joanne or Agent Harris. Never Shooter.
“You’re saying he’s due,” I replied.
“Yeah,” Richie said.
“Have you discussed some sort of public notice with Detective Quinones?”
