The Night Monster_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [30]
The neighborhoods around the Hard Rock were upper middle class. I drove down their narrow streets with my windows down. Buster was good at picking up scents, and I was hoping he’d pick up the shoe’s scent in one of the neighborhoods. Mouse wasn’t stupid, and I had a feeling he’d gotten rid of the crackheads quickly.
I entered a subdivision called Shady Oaks. Not a single oak tree in the entire place. A large number of “For Sale” signs were planted on front lawns. Nearly half the houses looked empty.
Passing a street called Whisper Lane, Buster got animated. He stuck his head out the window and began pawing his seat. I looked around to see if there was another dog in the area, but didn’t see any.
“What is it, boy? You smell something?”
Buster’s head was firmly stuck out his window. Backing up, I turned down Whisper Lane. A dog’s sense of smell was a thousand times more sensitive than a human’s, and my dog let out a mournful whine.
I braked at a two-story Spanish-style home with a “For Sale” sign on the lawn. The house was under construction, and looked half-finished. I leashed Buster and got out of the car. He pulled me up the path.
Buster hit the front door with his nose, and it swung open. I didn’t like entering strange houses uninvited, even unfinished ones.
“Hello? Is anyone home?”
My voice echoed across the high-ceilinged foyer. The sweet smell of sawdust hung in the air, mingling with spackle and drying paint. I found it surprising that the house was under construction considering the number of “For Sale” signs I’d seen, but after all, this was south Florida. No matter what state the economy was in, they just kept building.
Buster led me down a hallway to the back of the house. He was straining at his leash and pulling my arm. He had locked onto a scent and was not stopping until he’d found its origin.
The hallway led to a family room, which in turn led to a screened-in lanai. The slider to the lanai was pulled open. I went up to it and stopped. Then I stared.
The lanai contained a swimming pool shaped like a lima bean. The water in the pool was a sickening blood red. Floating in the water were two men, both bloated and very dead. One was missing a sneaker on his left foot.
Buster looked up at me, his tail wagging.
“Good boy,” I said quietly.
I had seen the dead more times than was healthy. Something about these two wasn’t right. After a pause, I realized what it was. Their killer had twisted their heads so they were floating facedown in the water, while their torsos were floating face up.
Protocol would have dictated that I call one of the several detectives that I knew in Homicide, but I wanted Burrell to see the crime scene first, and hear what I had to say. I called her from my car. Fifteen minutes later, she pulled up in her red Mustang with the racing stripes down the sides. It was the kind of car I would have owned if I could afford it. I told her about the dead floaters, and we headed inside.
“Please leave Buster outside,” she said.
“But he found them,” I replied.
“Leave him outside anyway. I don’t want him contaminating the crime scene.”
“He’s not going to piss on anything.”
“Just do it.”
I tied Buster to a tree, then led Burrell inside to the floating corpses. She picked up on the unnatural position of their heads quicker than I had, and turned her eyes away.
“Jesus Christ. Who are they?”
“A couple of druggies. They were mugging people in the parking lot of the Hard Rock, and picked the wrong victim.”
“How did you happen to find them here?”
I told her about my trip to the Hard Rock, and what I’d learned from viewing the casino’s surveillance tapes. When I was done, I removed the two CDs Riddle had burned for me from my pocket.
“The first CD contains a casino surveillance film of a guy named Mouse who was stalking Sara Long,” I said. “The second CD shows Mouse getting mugged by these two guys behind the casino, and what happened to them. Mouse is driving the same minivan that was used to abduct Sara Long. He and his