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  “Send someone to check on it,” she requested.

  “Yes, ma’am,” responded 911.

  The caller was Mrs. Marjorie Noble, an eighty-six-year-old widow who lived alone, and who was alert to untoward activity on her canal. At the time of the incident, she was reclining in the dark in the Florida room at the back of her home. If you’ve never seen one, a Florida room is a kingsize screened-in porch, more like an actual room in the house, and frequently holding a swimming pool, as did Mrs. Noble’s. She thought she heard something approaching from the east, where the canal opened directly into the much larger Intracoastal Canal.

  Knowing that she couldn’t possibly be seen, Mrs. Noble got up and peered through the screen as best she could. It wasn’t unusual to see boat traffic at any hour on the canals, but Mrs. Noble suspected there were very few innocent reasons for people to be roaming about in a boat in her neighborhood near midnight. She felt that her neighbors appreciated her watchfulness, which derived, she explained, from insomnia. Many nights, Mrs. Noble stretched out on her La-Z-Boy on the porch, watching for hours the slow, peaceful night go by.

  Normally, an eighty-six-year-old person claiming to witness criminal activity at night was a defense attorney’s dream. On cross-examination, the value of the senior citizen’s eyewitness testimony could be respectfully demolished on the grounds of aging eyesight, hearing, and memory. Whether that was fair, or not, it could be done. But not in the case of Mrs. Noble. She was, in fact, a prosecutor’s dream.

  “I had the last of my cataract operations, only six weeks before,” she told the jury.

  “What effect did those operations have on your eyesight, Mrs. Noble?” Franklin DeWeese inquired courteously. The defense objected, claiming that called for an expert opinion she was not qualified to give, but Franklin calmly pointed out that she was the best expert on the view from her own eyes, and that he could provide the testimony of an opthomologist, anyway, if they liked. Leanne English, the lead defense attorney, did not like any of it, but the judge allowed Franklin DeWeese to carry on. A journalist covering the trial observed this was one of the times when Franklin looked like he was struggling to keep from looking smug, because this case was so easy to prosecute.

  When Mrs. Noble was finally permitted to answer his questions, she said, “It restored my sight to twenty-twenty.”

  Actually, as her own surgeon would testify, the operation had left Mrs. Noble with slightly better than twenty-twenty vision.

  Even that might have been demolished by the defense, except that this dream witness had two other gifts for the prosecution: binoculars and cassette tapes that came complete with date, time, and recorded descriptions!

  “I wanted to kiss her,” Franklin DeWeese says, “after reading her deposition. When I met her, I did kiss her. Nice little buss on her cheek. I hope she didn’t mind; she didn’t seem offended. I told her I loved her, and wanted to marry her.” The prosecutor smiles, remembering her reaction. “Mrs. Noble said that would be all right, as long as I didn’t have any objection to her continuing to go to her bridge games on Wednesdays. I said, heck, no, I’ll even drive you.”

  It was no wonder the prosecutor was enamored of his witness. Not only was she sharp and clear-spoken in person, but she had that more-than-perfect vision, those binoculars, and those recordings.

  “I am a bird-watcher,” she testified. “You’ve got to have really excellent binoculars to be a serious bird-watcher. With mine, I can see the crest on a tufted titmouse from fifty yards away.” A tit is a very small bird, as Franklin made sure to point out to the jury. Much tinier, by far, than a boat on a canal, or the man steering it.

  As for her notes, Mrs. Noble kept a tape recorder and a journal by her side on the porch, where she spent most of her time. She started keeping the journal for medical reasons (“You wouldn’t believe what those doctors want you to keep track of!”), but it turned into a sort of hobby in which she jotted down practically everything she did, said, or thought. When writing all that down became too burdensome, she switched to a little tape recorder that her son gave her.

  From then on, Mrs. Noble talked into it just as if she were talking to another person, or to herself. Everything was there, on stacks of tiny tapes. Until the prosecutor subpoenaed them, none of the tapes had ever been transcribed, but each was dated, in Mrs. Noble’s tiny script. (She did continue to keep the written journal, but only for notations related to her medical affairs.)

  The tape player became a place for recording both the past and the present. There were thoughtful passages on the tapes, philosophical pieces derived from her many decades of life; some clever, rhyming poetry; memories to leave for her descendants, and, of course, a constant log of her activities, from brushing her teeth in the morning to watching the moon rise at night.

  “I think I hear a boat. At this hour? My watch says it’s eleven-fifty-four P.M. I’ll use my binocs to look. It’s a motorboat. Small. It’s got some kind of ugly black-and-white design on it, like a checkerboard square. And there’s writing on the side, but I can’t . . . the number six, it’s got the number six on it. I’ve seen it before, or one like it. I only see one person in it, looks like a boy, but surely not at this hour. If it is, what can his parents be thinking? He’s got on a yellow shirt, pink pants, green baseball cap. Crazy outfit. He looks like a parrot.

  “Eleven-fifty-five P.M. Called 911. I reported young man in boat. Got no business going up and down our canal at this hour. They said they’d send someone to check. They’d better just do that!

  “Twelve-oh-five A.M. When I looked through my binocs again, I saw that same boat moving back down the canal. I mean, I heard it again, I didn’t see it, because my view is blocked by that roof on my neighbor’s boat dock, which they ought to knock down. I’ve told them and told them.

  “Twelve-thirty-five A.M. Good grief, there are lights being flashed through our yards. Police? Well, they’re just too late, if it’s them. That boat is long gone.”

  It was, in fact, a patrol car checking the neighborhood from the street. A few minutes later, Mrs. Noble wrote down that she heard a helicopter overhead and then saw the canal cast into high relief in its searchlight. It was so bright that she saw a fish jump out in the water, as if it were rising to a bait of false sunrise. The Bahia Beach police had not sent the ’copter over especially to check out the 911 call; it just happened to be over the neighborhood and took a look.

  Two and a half hours later, Sergeant Broyle Crouse, the forty-one-year-old pilot, reported seeing a small black and white boat five canals to the west. He recognized it as a Checker Crab water taxi, not a waterway prowler. Sensing no problem with that, he banked steeply toward the ocean, and whirred away. He reported seeing only one person in the boat, which was pulled up to a much larger boat docked next to the bridge.

  Crouse had spotted the number six Checker Crab at the bridge where Natalie’s body would be found the next morning. Most likely, she was already dead by then.

  Unfortunately, due to a shift change in the police dispatcher’s office, there occurred one of those communications bollixes that curse even the best of police departments. There had been an earlier call to 911 relating to the case. It came in at 11:45 P.M. from an angry boatyard owner who called to report that one of his boats was missing and probably stolen.

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Donor Miller.”

  He spelled it for her, at her request.

  “You own the missing boat?”

  “Goddamn right I own it, that one and five others just like it. Tell ’em to look for a black-and-white checkered boat with a number six on it. That’s my boat, goddammit.”

  The dispatcher who directed Sergeant Crouse to look for a possible intruder on the water didn’t know about that call, and so Crouse didn’t know that at 2:30 A.M. he had spotted a boat that had been reported stolen. Neither were they informed that Mr. Miller called back at 2 A.M. to cancel his earlier complaint.

  “False alarm,” he told
the 911 operator. “Boat was here all the time, goddammit. One of my idiot employees put it in the wrong slip.”

  “You want me to cancel your request for an officer, sir?”

  “Oh, hell, yes.”

  It is department policy to send an officer to check out 911 calls, even if they are later canceled. It’s a well-intentioned policy, intended to prevent the sort of situation that occurs when a gun is being held to the head of the person who is calling 911. The Bahia Beach police like to make sure everything is copacetic, by sending an officer to the door to inquire, “Are you sure everything is all right, ma’am?” Or, sir. But it is only rarely carried out, because there simply aren’t enough officers to handle all the false alarms, plus the legitimate requests, too. A small-boat theft was a low-priority crime, anyway, especially for the night shift. Despite departmental policy, no police officer drove out to make sure that the boatyard property and the people on it were as secure as the owner claimed they were.

  It appears then, that Natalie died sometime between 11:55 P.M., when Mrs. Noble put down her binocs to pick up the phone, and 2:30 A.M., when Broyle Crouse spotted the boat near the bridge.

  3

  Raymond

  Ray Raintree has escaped from the county courthouse.

  By the time I finally get home tonight, I know enough about how he pulled it off to be able to write about it, although I can’t get further than two paragraphs into it without having to stop and take a few calming breaths.

  I write, on my laptop this time:

  He rolled off the gurney and grabbed the deputy’s gun out of its holster just as the elevator door was opening on the basement level. It was cramped in the courtroom elevator, with barely enough room for all four people who were standing, plus the gurney with Ray. He took advantage of the tight space to create maximum panic and pain. As he came up from his roll, he flailed his arms around wildly, hitting people in their faces hard, causing them to cry out and to raise their arms to protect themselves rather than acting to prevent him from escaping.

  Once he had the gun, he flailed it around, too, striking everyone in his path with the hard hurtful metal weapon. Blood was flying as he grabbed Leanne by the front of her suit and jerked her off the elevator with him, leaving carnage behind them. Like a wild animal with a victim in its claws, he came out of the elevator pushing his lawyer before him.

  Both paramedics fell bleeding and screaming out onto the floor.

  The doors closed, sending the stunned and wounded deputy back up.

  I stop writing, needing to get up and walk around a bit. The man has sent four people to the hospital in conditions ranging from fair to critical. The poor deputy will need reconstructive facial surgery and they still aren’t sure if bone fragments entered his brain. The paramedics have broken facial bones and gruesome bruises going clear to their bones, while Leanne English has a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder from the way he manhandled her before releasing her several hundred yards from the courthouse.

  I go back to my computer, and try again:

  When the paramedics can talk coherently, they report their conclusion that Ray suffered an abrasion when the bullet hit him from the judge’s gun. Sometimes bullets ricochet off the very bodies they’re intended to hit. This was what both paramedics believe happened, because they didn’t observe an actual hole in his chest where the bullet struck him.

  If that’s true, Ray is not only gone, he’s healthy, and certainly in much better shape than his victims. The police have already pieced together what happened next. He ditched his bloody shirt in a trash bin. He ran down to the New River, which flows through downtown, not far from the courthouse. There, he stole a life jacket from one of the boats that’s permanently moored on the river. He may have washed his face and arms in the river. Then he made his way back up to Bahia Boulevard and boarded a free trolley for tourists.

  The small skinny guy in the running shoes, dark trousers, and orange life vest looked a little odd to the out-of-towners on the trolley. But he didn’t look all that odd compared to other weirdos they’d seen on their vacations in south Florida. Probably wore swimming trunks under those trousers, and just would rather wear the bulky life preserver than carry it. He smiled at them. Uneasily, they smiled back. How old was he, anyway? Old enough to be out of school for the day? Strange-looking little person, they hoped he wouldn’t ask for money. After a moment, as the trolley continued to fill up, they stopped staring, and ignored him in order to continue their sight-seeing.

  With all of the tourists, Ray stepped off the trolley at the beach. He joined the mob of pedestrians strolling on the boardwalk. The last anybody saw of him, he was slipping into a public men’s room.

  And that is “the last known whereabouts” of Ray Raintree.

  I get up from my desk again, and walk to my windows.

  A guilty verdict, a shooting, an escape.

  I decide to forgive myself for feeling a bit overwrought.

  My sliding glass doors are open, and my air-conditioning is turned off so I can defrost after all the hours in Judge Flasschoen’s frigid courtroom. I put my hands up to the screen, and feel the mesh on my palms. I can only imagine how the jurors are feeling. One of them told me that after the verdict Ray stuck his tongue out at them, obscenely miming a French kiss in their direction. That’s why they looked so upset and repulsed before the shooting. As undone as I feel on this night, I picture them prostrate in their beds, staring at their ceilings.

  Poor things, are they nervous with Ray loose out there?

  I slide open the screen door, and step outside into my backyard.

  I live on the west bank of the Intracoastal Canal, on the southern edge of a private, gated cul-de-sac just north of the Bahia Boulevard Bridge. From any spot on the water side of this five-room house, I can pull the drapes to get a floor-to-ceiling view of the canal and bridge traffic. At night, with the lights from the bridge, the boats, and the houses across the canal, it looks like Christmas all year-round, and I feel very grateful.

  Fifteen feet below my backyard, the turbulent waters of the canal slap violently and constantly against the seawall, precluding any safe harbor for my own or anybody else’s boats.

  I chose this site with an eye to security, front and rear.

  At the entrance to the cul-de-sac, a round-the-clock series of armed guards courteously requests identification from visitors. Nobody drives in unless the guard has their name on a list, or verifies their welcome with a phone call. There is no access at all from the water, not unless intruders are willing to risk getting their boats battered to pieces against the seawall. The cul-de-sac property owners with boats moor them elsewhere, in private marinas with their own armed guards.

  The developers named this enclave Isle d’Bahia, even though it isn’t an island at all, and hardly even qualifies as a peninsula, being more in the nature of a gentle outcurving of land around a point of the canal. My neighbors jokingly call it Paranoia Park, but we all have our reasons for valuing the security. For me, it’s a matter of taking precautions against the types of people I write about in my books, and also against a tiny but peculiar minority of my readers.

  I step back into my house, close and latch the screen.

  With Ray loose out there, I feel safe in here.

  Not that I’d be a target of his. The killers I interview think I’m their best friend until my book comes out. Then they hate my guts, because I’ve told the whole world the truth about them, which isn’t anything like what they tell themselves. The book I am writing about Ray and his terrible crime isn’t out yet—isn’t even finished yet, and may never be—so he shouldn’t be hating me yet.

  It’s a little early in the publishing schedule for that.

  I smile to myself, and walk to another window, another soothing view.

  With the windows open, I can hear the water splashing.

  This house is the smallest on the cul-de-sac, a two-story apricot stucco flat-roofed cube, Italianate, with green shutters. Fr
om the street, the house is nearly invisible behind six towering cypress trees, three on either side of the double front door, which is painted a lacquered green almost identical in shade to the cypresses. The trees, themselves, are visible for miles in either direction from the canal, and are a landmark to the water traffic. From the air or the water, I can pick out the location of my home even before the big bridge comes into view.

  Other people can’t easily see me, however.

  Their visibility is limited from the water by the fifteen-foot cliff and the fact that the house sits on just enough of a slope to block the view from the decks of boats. I can see them, if they aren’t directly under my windows, but they can’t see me. From my three back doors—one each from the kitchen, living room, and office—it is, oddly, a bit of an uphill walk to stand over the water.

  I turn and look around my home.

  Some people wouldn’t agree, but I think: How fortunate I am!

  There’s nothing like a shooting to make you value your life.

  From my foyer, the house opens into one large sunny living and dining room, all glass along the south wall. The west wing is kitchen, with wraparound windows, and a half bath. To the east is my office, on the canal side, and a bathroom and a guest bedroom behind it. My bedroom suite consumes the entire second floor, but since the house isn’t large, the area seems perfectly proportioned to my sense of space, rather than seeming a room for giants. Taking my cue from the apricot stucco walls of the exterior, I have decorated the interior in the colors of the Italian countryside, or of a bowl of ripe fruit—lemons, peaches, oranges, frosted grapes, and strawberries.