Pagan Moon

The trailer park squatted three miles west of Military Trail, one of the few developers hadn't gobbled up, leveled, then replaced with tract homes or stick-built apartment complexes that would be slums in twenty years.

Two Sheriff's cruisers blocked access to the shabby mobile home, where an ambulance sat between the squads. All had their lights flashing. I pulled my unmarked Chevy beside yellow crime scene tape that held back curious onlookers. Half were retired pensioners. The remainder were young, white, and rural South.

Admiring the chromed-out Harley chopper parked outside the trailer's single entrance, I nearly collided with a rookie edging out the door, wiping his brow against the muggy afternoon. This kid always gave me an uneasy stare. His eyes liked to fix on the scar on my left cheek. I wondered how he'd react to the gash defiling my abdomen.

'What've we got?' I said.

'Domestic, Sergeant Gage,' he said, his face green from what he'd seen inside. 'Detectives are talking to the woman.'

I nodded and stepped inside.

The air was close and thick, a mixture of bacon grease, cat litter, and recent death. Smells too familiar.

Eyes downcast, a woman sat on the couch between Detectives Joe Zelski and Richie Pantera. The sofa was one of those cheap flowered types she must have purchased at some warehouse outlet.

'I killed him,' she said, her stare vacant through bloodshot eyes. 'Had the Devil in him. Told him not to hit me no more.'

'She been Mirandized?' I said.

'Yeah, Mike,' Zelski replied. The detective's flat expression said he'd heard it all before.

The woman's hard scrabble life was written on her face. Rail thin, she was middle-aged, had stringy blond hair. A Marlboro trailed smoke from between her bony fingers. A bruise the size and color of a ripe plum swelled her left cheek. Others fought for prominence up and down both arms.

'Got it handled?' I asked.

'We'll take her downtown for a statement,' Pantera said.

'Where's the body?'

Zelski motioned toward the bedroom. A paramedic squeezed past me in the narrow hallway shaking his head. In the bedroom, his partner shrugged and shuffled out. The trailer's cheap paneling portrayed the victim's leanings to Waffen-SS,Reichsparteitag der N.S.D.A.P emblazoned on Second World War Nazi posters framed in unfinished pine. A glass case displayed variations of the Iron Cross. They surrounded a German combat helmet on a red Nazi flag.

Like a beached whale, the biker lay face up in the bed, his beer gut a mound of unmoving flesh bisecting bed sheets soaked in blood. Three star-shaped entry wounds triangulated his hairy chest. The tattooed arms of the wannabe storm trooper were flung over his head like a referee signaling a touchdown. His assailant had scored all right.

A large handgun lay at the foot of the bed, a .44 caliber Desert Eagle, the closest thing made to a hand-held cannon. I wondered how the woman had managed the recoil.

Could be he got what he deserved. We'd charge her, book her, then the State's Attorney would arraign and try her. Florida's judges and juries weren't known for their sympathy. I'd heard stories like her's before. She'd been his 'old lady', a biker's gal who'd been passed around between his gang brothers to prove her devotion. Her man most likely drank hard, cooked his brain on crystal meth, and savaged his rage on her bony body. Maybe judge and jury would see things her way. If so, she'd get manslaughter. Be out in three years with good behavior. At least she'd feel safer in prison, comparing notes with her brutalized sisters.

'Sergeant Gage?'

Annoyed, I turned and gave the rookie a hard stare.

Still gawking at me like I was God or the Devil, he said, 'Dispatch calling for you. The Greeks say they got a possible four-oh-seven. Found a girl wandering around out near the Glades. Got her at West County Medical. They said you'd be interested.'

'Don't eyeball me like that again, kid,' I said, shouldering past him, then rushing out the front door.

The woman, her wrists cuffed, was being ushered into a Sheriff's cruiser. 'Kept sayin' the AntiChrist was a comin',' she said. 'Wouldn't let me watch my TV preachers no more.' She posed a gap-toothed smile. 'I killed him real good.'

Pantera put his hand on her head and gently guided her into the cruiser's back seat. I got in my unmarked car, glanced around at the empty faces staring at the woman, and backed out.

I was going to see two deputies. They'd found a young woman, a possible kidnapping. Both of Greek ancestry, we called the uniformed partners the Greeks. Something the girl said had prompted them to call me. Maybe we'd finally found one alive.

Racing out toward West County Medical Center, I dodged the Chevy in and out of rush hour traffic, its siren wailing like an angry banshee. The trip evoked a bitter memory. Myself as a rookie. Nearly twenty years ago. Proud of how good I looked in Sheriff's green, I tried putting the war behind me. I'd bust heads all day, then drink and carouse all night. In one of those after-hours forays, I'd met and bedded her. Maybe even loved her. I was too naive to realize she was a hooker, barely out of high school. Then I found her dead. Out in the Glades.

That's when I first arrived in Palm Beach County fresh out of the Corps. The county was different back then, a sleepy backwater that only awakened for the snowbirds. Since then a pristine wilderness had been replaced by concrete, asphalt, high rises, and strip malls. We were one of the fastest-growing areas in the country, a dreamland fed by tourism and developers. People moved down in droves looking for something. Some found paradise. Most didn't. Others wound up dead.

Of course, I'd changed, too. Maybe my scars were a road map for the wounds on my soul. The perp who'd slashed my face and body had been too freaked out on PCP to realize he'd taken a knife to a gunfight. My sandy shock of hair had thinned somewhat over the years, but I still took pride in how my six-foot frame carried two hundred pounds. People said I look younger than I was. It was hard to believe I was six months away from qualifying for retirement. Packing it in wasn't necessarily part of my game plan, but it did give me a certain sense of give-a-damn that the brass was beginning to notice. Nearly twenty years of searching for the beasts who slaughtered young women up and down the Florida peninsula. Maybe this one had escaped the others' fate.