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The knife part was twenty-six inches long, four inches wide. Heavy-duty steel. The wooden handle was seven inches, warped, badly nicked, with big rivets like a kitchen carving knife. When it was held in one hand, the machete brought to mind cutlasses and sword fighting.
    Sitting in the paperback library at the Plantation Inn, Dr. Meral Johnson examined the sharp knife for a long time.
    He held it up close to a bright reading lamp. He whipped it through the air, cutting at shadows. Scary weapon. Johnson had personally seen a machete cut a goat in half at a swipe.
    The weary policeman plopped down on an old morris chair in the library. He began to sort through some of the loose, contradictory details of the case … the Turtle Bay massacre. The American Airlines’ plane that was bombed. The curious shooting of Leon Rachet.
    Right then, the best Dr. Johnson figured he could do was concentrate on details that might lead him or the army to the island revolutionary Monkey Dred. He instructed his men to do the same in their investigations.
    It was an honest but costly mistake—and one the Roses had counted on.
    Policemen are relatively simple-minded human beings…
    Witnesses.
    A tennis pro and his wife from Saddle River, New Jersey, had seen a black hobo on the beach near the time of the machete murders.
    An elderly Englishwoman saw a group of “unruly native boys” congregating in the royal palms just beyond the inn’s main stretch of beach.
    A couple from Georgia remembered seeing an old black man with some mangy goats on a rope leash.
    A pretty eleven-year-old girl was brought to Dr. Johnson because she had a story, her mother said. The girl explained that around eight o’clock that evening, she’d locked herself in her mother’s suite. Then she’d screamed bloody murder until one of the hotel bartenders—Peter Macdonald—came and broke down the door with a fire ax. The girl’s mother, an actress, wanted the police chief to get both of them on an airplane back to New York that evening. Crying, occasionally screaming at the black man, she said that her daughter was about to have a nervous breakdown.
    Simultaneously, another group of “witnesses” was being questioned inside the inn’s main business office.
    “You’re one of the bartenders here.” Constable Bobbie Valentine spoke softly at first. The country policeman was sitting behind a Royal office typewriter, only occasionally glancing up from his notepad. “Talk to me, mon.”
    In as few words as possible, Peter Macdonald tried to explain what he’d seen bike riding up on the Shore Highway that afternoon.
    He described Damian Rose as English looking: “a tall blond Englishman.”
    He told the constable about the two blacks who’d come up from the beach, dripping with blood. He mentioned the expensive German rifle, the green sedan; he even described the coat from Harrods in London.
    When he was finished, the black constable seemed to be smirking. He looked at Peter as if he were just another American nut on the loose. A crank case.
    “Dat’s good, mon,” the policeman said. “Next, please,” he called out the open office door.
    Peter could feel himself starting to get a little angry. “Hey, could you wait a minute?” he said. “Slow down for just a second, please. Okay? I understand that you’re seeing a lot of very upset people tonight. I know it’s crazy around here…. But what about this Englishman?”
    “I took notes.” The black man held up his pad. “Anyway, we already know about dem killers. Colonel Dred. Bad-ass. You know about Dred, mon? Nah, you don’t know ‘bout Dred.”
    “I don’t know much about him.” Peter tried to break through to the policeman. “But I saw a blond
white
man up there where those two poor kids were killed. I saw a lot of blood on a couple of black guys who looked like they’d just strangled a grammar-school class with their bare hands. I got scared, and I don’t get scared very easily.”
    Once again