The Blue Edge of Midnight Read Online Free PDF

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         The body of Melissa Marks, the South Florida kindergartener reported missing last week, was found Monday in a remote area of Broward County’s western Everglades.
     Investigators said the cause of the six-year-old’s death was not yet known, but they believe the girl is the third victim in this summer’s string of bizarre abductions and murders of children that have terrified South Florida communities over the past three months.
     “We think the same person or persons are responsible for this and the previous atrocities,” said spokesman Jim Hardcastle of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has been coordinating a multi-agency task force that includes three county sheriff’s offices and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     “We are continuing a massive investigation into these homicides and are committed to finding those responsible.”
     Hardcastle declined to give any details of how police were able to locate Marks’ body and would only say that it was found in a remote area about thirteen miles west of U.S. 27, which is the unofficial border of the still-wild Everglades and the suburban communities of Broward County.
     Marks had been missing from her home in the new development of Sunset Place since last Sunday, when her parents reported to police that the girl had disappeared from their home in the middle of the night. The child had been asleep in her bedroom and was discovered missing by her mother who had awakened to give her daughter medicine for a recent illness.
     Despite an almost immediate and widespread search by neighbors and police with helicopters and dogs, no trace of the child was found until Monday’s discovery.
     The disappearance and death is eerily similar to the two earlier cases in which a seven-year-old boy from the western community of Palmetto Isles and a five-year-old girl from Palm Ridge were abducted in June and July. Their bodies were also found in remote wilderness areas.
     Investigators refused to comment on the causes of death and also declined to give details on how they were able to locate those bodies within days after the children were taken.
    I shuffled through the printouts, all dating back to the first child abduction. The follow-up stories documented the FBI’s involvement, the futile searches for clues, the shattered parents, speculations, and not surprising, fear.
    My throat had gone dry and the printout paper felt dusty between my fingers. Billy had purposely left out any reproduction of photographs that I knew would have been published: The smiling elementary school snapshots, the pictures of parents standing bleary-eyed and dazed at funerals, the flower collections and rain-soaked cards and farewells at some public spot.
    As I read, the sun crept onto our table and Billy, sitting silent with his legs crossed, waved away the waiter twice. I finally looked up and he met my gaze and without a hint of humor said: “You don’t g-get out m-much. Do you?”
    The uproar that the killings created hadn’t gotten onto my river or through my self-imposed wall against the world. As I stared out at the asphalt street, Billy filled me in on his inside information on the cases that had buzzed through the courthouse and law offices for weeks.
    The investigators were keeping the details, especially the cause of death, as close as they could. They also had not revealed how they knew where to look for the bodies they had found. But somehow they’d gotten onto my river and were probably less than a couple of hours from finding the child I’d discovered. Now they had me attached to that killing. It was only good police work to consider me a suspect.
    I was staring out across the street again, my fingers lightly touching the scar on my neck. I hated circumstances. A logical world can’t stand them, and an overcrowded world can’t avoid them.
    Had the