Read Online A False Dawn by Tom Lowe - Free Book Online

ought to be in a glass case to protect it.”
    “It might protect you one day.”  He threaded the bowstring in the notch on the arrow shaft and pulled the string all the way back to his right cheek, arm’s knotting.  He held the draw, rock solid, sighting a pine tree as a target.  “You hold your breath.  Draw back.  Keep both eyes open.  Block everything out but the spot.  Then let go.” 
    “A young woman died near here the same day I met you.”
    Joe Billie didn’t flinch.  No emotion.  No visible changes in breathing.  He slowly eased the bowstring back down, removing the arrow.
    I said, “Seems to me like you’d have passed by her if you walked down the river.”
    “Where’d she die?”
    “I’ll show you.”  I scooped up Max with one arm and headed for the river with Joe Billie following me.  I thought about what Floyd Powell had told me sitting in his boat at the end of my dock.  The bone hunter ain’t  been seen since.’
    “Stop,” he said abruptly.
    If I turned around, would I be hit with an arrow through my spine?  I slowly turned to face him.  He was reaching toward a bush, examining something. 
    “You remember what the girl was wearing?”
    “Yellow blouse, blue jeans.”   He pointed to something caught on a palm frond.
    “It doesn’t look like a thread from blue jeans, but it’s blue,” he said, reaching for the bright blue thread clinging to a barb on the frond.
    “Don’t touch it.”   I used my pen to carefully lift the thread off the thorn.  I pulled a second Ziploc bag out of my shirt pocket, lowered the thread into the bag and sealed it.
    “You always carry those?”
    “When I get into a murder investigation and I’m the one they’re investigating.”
    “That why you’re curious as to my whereabouts?  You think I killed the girl.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Didn’t have to.”
    “There’s a lot more room to hide a body in the Everglades, don’t you agree?”
    He slowly turned his head toward me, his brown eyes searching my face for a few seconds.  “I didn’t kill him.”
    “Clayton Susskind?”
    “Someone digs up your grandfather, cuts his head off, sells it.  How’d you feel?”
    “Angry.  But not enough to kill.”
    “I told you, I didn’t kill him.  It was the last moon after the Green Corn Dance.  I took him in the rock chickee to sweat out his demons with the fire and smoke.  I gave him the black drink of our ancestors to show him the wrong he did.”
    “Did it poison him?”
    “No, it guided him.  He heard the spirits that night.  When the sun broke, he said he was moving to Arizona.  Said he was being called there to teach…university.”  
    I said nothing, not sure what to say.  Max barked at a lizard and I said, “It does seem odd that you walk down the river and don’t see the girl lying near the bank.”
    He pointed to the thread in the bag.  “I saw that.”
    “It wasn’t easy to spot.”
    “Things that aren’t a natural part of the surroundings can stand out.”  His eyes moved slowly from the branches to the ground.  “Things like this.”  He stepped over to a palmetto thicket, knelt down.  “Don’t think that little plastic bag of yours will hold this.”
    Max followed me, sniffing, growling, and uttering throaty barks.  It was a domestic animal’s reaction to the aberrant, to the incomprehensible—to evil.
     “No, Max!” I shouted, stopping her from sniffing a long stick covered in dark blood.  I looked closer and could see a single hair stuck in the bark and blood. 
    Billie sat on his haunches, pondering, staring at the stick.  “Was she raped?”
    “Yes.”
    “Looks like whoever did it wasn’t satisfied with the sex part.”
    “For this guy, wasn’t about sex.  It was about power and humiliation.”
    Billie stood and searched the area, stopping every few feet to turn a leaf or stick with the tip of his bow.  “Here’s something.”
    Almost hidden under the dried palm