An ambulance took Sara to a hospital in Daytona for a series of tests. As she was taken into the emergency room, I heard Sara tell the doctors that she was fine, and asked if she could be released. Abduction victims often suffered post-traumatic stress, and I talked her into staying at the hospital until the tests were completed.
A few hours later, Karl Long arrived at the hospital, and came into the hospital’s emergency room hobbling on a cane. I was sitting in the visitor area thumbing through a magazine. I rose from my chair, and Long hugged me like a long-lost brother.
“How’s my baby?” Long asked.
“Your baby is doing fine. We got her just in time,” I said.
“Can I take her home? My private plane is at the airport.”
“You’ll have to talk to the doctors, but I don’t see why not.”
Long made a check appear out of thin air. Something told me that he’d been practicing doing that on the ride up, just to impress me. With a smile he stuffed it into my shirt pocket. “Thank you, my friend,” he said.
I waited until Long had gone back to see Sara before looking at the check. It was for more money than we’d agreed upon. A lot more.
Hey, I’d earned it.
– – Sara was released a few hours later. She was good to go, and I drove her and her father to the airport, and waved good-bye as they stepped on Karl Long’s private plane. Then I drove back to Chatham.
The dairy farm was swarming with police and FBI agents when I returned. I was cleared to enter, and took a walk around the property. Mouse and Lonnie’s bodies had been brought back to the farm, and lay beneath a pair of white sheets on the ground. The police did not appear to be in any hurry to take them away.
I found Linderman standing by a garden behind the house. He’d taken off his body armor, and had an empty coffee cup in his hand. His clothes were streaked with sweat and hung lifelessly off his body.
“Where are they?” I asked.
Linderman pointed at the garden. It was a small plot of land choking with weeds. I hopped over the small fence that surrounded it. The victims’ graves were in the corner, with piles of white rocks for headstones, just like Kathi Bolger’s grave. I checked the rocks, hoping the women’s IDs were there, but there was nothing.
I studied the graves. Four contained the bodies of young women whose identities we knew. The fifth was a mystery. Was it Danny Linderman or someone else? I had worked with medical examiners offices before, and knew it could be awhile before we found out.
I went back to Linderman. His eyes had not left the graves since I’d found him. I took the coffee cup from his hand. He looked at me with dead eyes.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No,” he whispered.
I spent the next three days taking long swims in the ocean and playing with Buster on Daytona Beach. At night, I visited the local haunts that served fresh seafood, and ate my fill of fish and crabs and washed it down with cold beer. I talked to Rose several times, and got caught up. I told her everything that had happened, but left out the money I’d earned from the job. I wanted to surprise her with that the next time we got together.
Muriel Linderman drove up to be with her husband, and they spent most of the time in their motel room, waiting for Daytona’s chief medical examiner to contact them.
On the afternoon of the third day, the ME finally called, and told Linderman she had made positive identifications of the five bodies that had been exhumed from the garden. She asked Linderman to come to her office.
Linderman called me, and told me the news. I offered to drive him and Muriel to the ME’s office. Linderman agreed, and we arrived at the medical examiner’s building on the west side of town a few minutes past closing.
The ME met us in the building’s lobby. She was a short, pleasant woman, dressed in a lab coat, with bifocals that hung around her neck. She was aware of the Lindermans’ situation, and went out of her way to be kind.
She led us to her windowless office. The autopsy reports for each victim lay in a pile on her desk. She offered us seats, which we declined. Picking up the files, she explained how the victims had been identified through dental records. As she named each victim, she placed their file on her desk, until only one file remained in her hands.
“I’m sorry to inform you, but the fifth victim was not your daughter,” the ME said. “Her name was Clarissa Santiago. She was a Nicaraguan nursing student enrolled at Nova University in Miami. Santiago disappeared five years ago. Her friends told the police she’d been homesick, and thought she’d gone back to Nicaragua. That was why the Miami police never filed a missing persons report.”
Muriel Linderman covered her mouth with her hand. Linderman lowered his head and did not speak. He tried to stop the tears, but could not. In all the time I’d helped him look for Danny, I’d never seen him cry. I wanted to tell him that things would be all right, but that would have been a lie.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I drove them back to our motel and walked them to their room. I wanted to leave, but I stayed long enough to tell them the words I thought they both needed to hear.
“I’m not going to stop looking for your daughter,” I said. “Danielle didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth. There are answers to what happened, and I’m going to help you find out what they are, however long it takes.”
I put my arms around Linderman and his wife and hugged them. We stood that way for a while, and then I said good-bye.