Free The Blue Edge of Midnight by Jonathon King

into a salt- tinged sea breeze that poured into my nose and made me feel young. The ocean was black. In the distance I could pick out points of light from freighters or maybe night fishermen. Even in darkness you could feel the expanse. For someone who’d lived his whole life in the boxed-in, high-walled grid of the city, this was a foreign land. Billy had told me when he first moved to South Florida and began making “real money,” he’d determined that he would never live on the ground floor again. He had done too much time on the cracked sidewalks and asphalt streets of Philadelphia. Once he’d made it out, he craved vistas above the shadows. I understood, but it still felt too high to me, too exposed.
    Billy let me stand quiet at the railing for several minutes before calling out “Drink?” from his kitchen.
    I grinned, knowing he was already pouring my favorite Boodles gin over ice. When I came back inside he had the drink and the oilcloth package sitting on the wide kitchen bar counter. I took a seat on a stool and a sip from the glass.
    “Y-Your m-move,” he said, taking a drink of chardonnay from a crystal wineglass.
    I unwrapped the GPS unit and now it was Billy’s turn to show his own anxious excitement.
    “M-May I?” he said, extending his palms and when I nodded, he scooped up the unit and headed through an open door on the west wall that led to his home office. Inside I knew he had an array of computers and modems and a wall of law and research books. I stayed at the kitchen counter, drinking gin and watching The Wanderer while he tinkered. Outside I could hear the rhythmic wash of ocean waves, inside the irregular tapping of computer keystrokes.
    “You’re right about the setup. You can call up the previous settings logged into the unit,” Billy called out through the door of the office. “There are four. And I called up a geological survey map from a Web site and the last one matches your spot on the river. The others are out in the Everglades and could easily be where the other bodies were found.”
    Billy was talking from the other side of the wall. The physical barrier had removed his stutter.
    “If the investigators found this in your place, it would have been some heavy evidence. They would have had no choice but to stick you in jail.”
    “No doubt the killer knew that too,” I said, loud enough for him to hear.
    “We’re not dealing with some backwoods hick or pissed off frontiersman trying to fight off the new settlers. This guy’s got a plan,” he answered.
    Billy’s use of the word “we’re” meant he’d stepped over the line from sitting back and denying my involvement to actively pursuing a theory on who and why someone was killing children along the edge of the Everglades.
    As I sipped my drink at the counter, he told me how he’d contacted friends in the medical examiner’s office who must have owed him big time. He’d learned how the children had been killed.
    The first victim had been poisoned and the toxin was analyzed and found to be rattlesnake venom. According to Billy’s source, the stuff had been pumped into the kid through two puncture wounds in the child’s leg. The wounds had looked remarkably like an actual bite. But the M.E. still wasn’t sure whether the killer had let a real snake bite the child or had faked it and administered the dose himself. It could have been either way.
    In the early 1900s, Billy explained, Florida was home to more rattlesnakes than any other state in the nation. As late as the 1940s professional snake men cleared them off newly purchased land. Charging by the head, they frequently poured gasoline down the gopher holes where the snakes nested and then snatched them up when they fled the fumes. A small industry had grown up around the sale of the snake skins like so many of the pelt and plumage trades that once thrived in Florida. And in more recent years, a small medical industry had found a niche in milking the rattlesnake