“And he killed them?”

“All of them,” McCaleb said, nodding in the dark. “They went out with him and they never came back. The father was found first. A couple nights later his body was found by a frogger working the grass. It wasn’t too far from a ramp where they launch those boats. He’d been shot once in the back of the head and dumped off the boat.”

“What about the girls?”

“It took the local sheriffs a couple days to ID the father and trace him to the Sea Breeze. When there was no sign there of the wife and kids, and they weren’t back in Ohio, the sheriffs went back out into the ’Glades with helicopters and more airboats. They found the three other bodies about six miles out. The middle of nowhere. A spot the airboaters call the Devil’s Keep. The bodies were there. He had done things to all three of them. Then he tied them to concrete blocks and threw them over. While they were alive. They drowned.”

“Oh, God…”

“God wasn’t anywhere around that day. Decomposition gases eventually made the bodies float to the top, even with the concrete blocks attached.”

After a long moment of silence he continued.

“About that time the bureau was called in and I went down there with another agent, named Walling. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. We worked up a profile-we knew it was somebody very familiar with the ’Glades. Most of it’s three feet deep anywhere you stop out there. But the women were dropped in a deep spot. He didn’t want them found. He had to have known about that spot. The Devil’s Keep. It was like a sinkhole or a meteorite crater. He had to have been out there before to have known about it.”

McCaleb was staring through the darkness at the ceiling, but what he was seeing was his own private and horrible version of the events that took place at the Devil’s Keep. It was a vision that was never far from memory, always in the dark reaches of his mind.

“He had stripped them, taken their jewelry, anything that would ID them. But in Aubrey-Lynn’s hand, when they pried it open, there was a silver necklace with a crucifix. She had somehow hidden it from him and held on to it. Probably praying to her God until the end.”

McCaleb thought about the story and the hold it had on him. Its resonance still moved through his life all these years later, like the incoming tide that gently lifted the boat in an almost rhythmic pattern. The story was always there. He knew he didn’t need to display the photo above his desk like a holy card. He would never be able to forget the face of that girl. He knew that his heart had started to die with that girl’s face.

“Did they catch that man?” Graciela asked.

She had just heard the story for the first time and already needed to know someone had paid for the horrible crime. She needed the closure. She didn’t understand, as McCaleb did, that it didn’t matter. That there was never closure on a story like this.

“No. They never caught him. They went through the registry at the Sea Breeze and ran everybody down. There was one person they never found. He had registered as Earl Hanford but it was a phony. The trail ended there… until he sent the video.”

A beat of silence passed.

“It was sent to the sheriff’s lead detective. The family had a video camera. They took it with them on the airboat trip. The tape starts with lots of happy scenes and smiles. Disney World, the beach, then some of the ’Glades. Then the killer started taping… everything. He wore a black hood over his face so we couldn’t ID him. He never showed enough of the boat to help us, either. He knew what he was doing.”

“You watched it?”

McCaleb nodded. He disengaged from Graciela and sat on the side of the bed, his back to her.

“He had a rifle. They did what he wanted. All sorts of things… the two sisters… together. Other things. And he killed them anyway. He-ah, shit…”

He shook his head and rubbed his hands harshly over his face. He felt her warm hand on his back.

“The blocks he tied them to weren’t enough to take them right down. They struggled, you know, on the surface. He watched and taped it. It got him aroused. He was masturbating while he watched them drown.”

He heard Graciela crying quietly. He lay back down and put an arm around her.

“The tape was the last we ever heard from him,” he said. “He’s out there somewhere. Another one.”

He looked at her in the darkness, not sure if she could see him.

“That’s the story.”

“I’m sorry you have that to carry around.”

“And now you have it. I’m sorry, too.”

She rubbed the tears away from her eyes.

“That’s when you stopped believing in angels, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

An hour or so before dawn McCaleb got up and went back to his uncomfortable bed in the salon. They had spent the night until that point talking in whispers, holding and kissing, but never making love. Once back in his sleeping bag, sleep still did not come to him. McCaleb’s mind kept running over the details of the hours he had just spent with Graciela, the touch of her warm hands on his skin, the softness of her breasts against his lips, the taste of her lips. And during moments when his mind wandered from these sensual memories, he also thought about the story he had told her and the way she had reacted.

In the morning they did not talk about what had happened in the stateroom or what had been said, even when Raymond had gone out to the stern to look into the live well and was out of earshot. Graciela seemed to act as if there had been no rendezvous, consummated or not, and McCaleb acted in kind. The first thing he spoke of while he scrambled eggs for the three of them was the case.

“I want you to do something for me when you get home today,” he said, checking over his shoulder to make sure Raymond was still outside. “I want you to think about your sister and write down as much as you can about her routines. I mean like places she would go, friends she would see. Anything you can think of she did between the first of the year and the night she went into that store. Also, I want to talk to her friends and boss at the Times. It might be better if you set that up.”

“All right. How come?”

“Because things are changing about the case. Remember I asked you about the earring?”

McCaleb told her his belief that it had been the shooter who had taken the earring. He also told her how he had found out late Friday that something of a personal nature had been taken from the victim in the first shooting as well.

“What was it?”

“A photo of his wife and kids.”

“What do you think it means?”

“That maybe these weren’t robberies. That maybe this man at the ATM and then your sister were picked for some other reason. There’s a chance they might have had some prior interaction with the man who shot them. You know, crossed paths with him somewhere. That’s why I want you to do this. The wife of the first victim is doing it for me with her husband. I’ll look at the two of them together and see if there are any commonalities.”

Graciela folded her arms and leaned against the galley counter.

“You mean like they did something to this man to cause this?”

“No. I mean that they crossed paths and something about them attracted him to them. There’s no valid reason. I think we’re looking for a psychopath. There is no telling what caught his eye. Why he chose these two people out of the nine million others who live in this county.”

She slowly shook her head in disbelief.

“What do the police say about all of this?”

“I don’t think the LAPD even knows yet. And the sheriff’s investigator is not sure whether or not she sees it the way I do. We’re all going to talk about it tomorrow morning.”

“What about the man?”

“What man?”

“The store owner. Maybe he was the one who crossed the path. Maybe Glory had nothing to do with it.”