The Apostle
The Apostle
J. A. Kerley
From the bestselling author of Her Last Scream, a chilling tale of ritual murder and corruption, featuring Detective Carson Ryder.The Reverend Honus Schrum, a nationally renowned minister and owner of a broadcasting empire, tells the media he has come home to Key West to die. Meanwhile, Detective Carson Ryder is investigating the ritualistic murders of young women with chequered pasts, discovering the killings have religious overtones.Simultaneously, a newly retired Harry Nautilus takes a job as a driver/bodyguard for Richard Owsley, an ambitious pastor in Mobile. They come to Florida, where Owsley meets with Schrum and is enlisted to complete a special and mysterious ‘project’ Schrum has promised a billionaire benefactor.As Carson digs deeper into the murders, Harry, interest piqued by all the hush-hush goings-on of his new employer, begins to covertly investigate the strange project. Their independent investigations begin to converge, and Carson and Harry uncover a horrifying connection between the cases…
Copyright (#ulink_e4711b57-50a0-5088-a105-9ac5dd81dbf0)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Jack Kerley 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover design and typography © Blacksheep-uk.com (http://Blacksheep-uk.com)
Cover photographs © David Wile/PlainPicture.com (Main Image): (Bible) © iStock.com (http://iStock.com): (candles) © Francois Dion/Gettyimages.com (http://Gettyimages.com)
Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007493692
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007493708
Version: 2014-11-29
Dedication (#ulink_c6c59b80-ca81-57a7-8283-6f51a15f4e43)
To Floyd and Addie Richardson –
And the house where the trains rolled by
Contents
Cover (#u89489e95-1e00-58a6-a4f5-fab5f7238af7)
Title Page (#u298de9af-c4f1-54d9-9427-7fc34b72a9d0)
Copyright (#u8d43bcd9-1e43-5f62-b2b4-1ee7b1eb8b20)
Dedication (#ud2b37d1a-a1bc-5824-bfd5-38d1316671cb)
Chapter 1 (#u286ec2f3-32c0-50e6-b63e-7a3abca75d32)
Chapter 2 (#ubdc54453-5e70-51af-adb6-5dd1b2ee83e5)
Chapter 3 (#u385b63a0-62cd-5273-8030-73e7e4180283)
Chapter 4 (#u06e27f0e-0ab7-5fbc-826e-ca1cac739966)
Chapter 5 (#u0a4ba689-729e-59cc-b2c4-74bdbe3a963c)
Chapter 6 (#u1d0bb717-6e5c-5771-bbe0-24a5202e4337)
Chapter 7 (#u56dc67a7-8182-5c53-befe-534a5a9aa360)
Chapter 8 (#ud4051261-dcc9-5b4d-af06-c6ebdb9b5e1a)
Chapter 9 (#u01a36f28-c7f7-51e3-97b6-933cf4cd0f39)
Chapter 10 (#u01ebb54a-52a9-5bec-b775-7f8294cd1bbd)
Chapter 11 (#u470fc2f7-3edd-5e8c-9c24-365931d147e3)
Chapter 12 (#u079d4f67-541b-5ea1-9d46-39a415aaac6a)
Chapter 13 (#uecdb77a8-acdc-5f37-90f1-661665c0273f)
Chapter 14 (#u238f60de-a856-541f-8c2b-53cb672f6324)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by J.A. Kerley (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_df59bfc8-703a-5a8e-906b-e15978af5c90)
Miami, April
“I’m putting in the last of Christ’s blood.”
Raoul Herrera studied the slender needle for a long moment, assured himself it was the right choice, then bent forward, his skilled fingers guiding the needle into flesh, adding a bright highlight to a plump drop of red dripping from a thorn. Herrera dabbed a cotton ball in antiseptic, blotted his client’s scapula, then leaned back and studied his work.
“Done,” he said.
Herrera flicked off the instrument and admired the most fantastic tattoo he’d ever created, a masterwork of detail that had stretched his talent to its limits, making him develop new ways of adding depth to color, motion to stillness, beauty to horror.
Yet all the tattoo consisted of was the back of a head. Not inked on the back of a head, an illustration of the back of a head.
The client had entered Skin Art by Raoul six weeks ago. The tattoo artist was alone in the back room, sanitizing equipment and preparing to close for the evening when he’d walked into the reception area. Though the door rang when opened, the bell had not sounded. Yet a man stood in the center of the Oriental carpet, utterly still, eyes staring into Herrera’s eyes, as if knowing the precise space the tattooist would occupy.
Herrera’s heartbeats accelerated. There was nothing but night outside his window and the neighborhood was dangerous in the dark. He kept a .38 pistol in back and Herrera mentally measured his steps to the gun.
“I’m closed,” he said.
The man seemed not to hear. He looked in his mid-thirties, hard-traveled years, lines etched into his angular face, his eyes tight and crinkled, as though he’d spent a lifetime squinting into sunlight. He was small in stature, wearing battered Levis and a faded Western-style shirt with sleeves rolled up over iron-hard forearms. His face was small and flat and centered by a nose broken at least once, the hair a tight cap of coiled brown that fell low on his forehead and gave a simian cast to his features. His eyes were the color of spent briquettes of charcoal.
“I said I’m done for the day, man,” Herrera repeated. “Come back tomorrow.”
Again, the man seemed deaf to Herrera’s words. Work-hardened hands unfolded a sheet of paper and held up a richly detailed illustration of Jesus inked into a man’s bicep, a work by Herrera that had been featured in a tattoo artists’ publication.
“Did you do this?” the man said. “Do you claim it yours?”
“It’s my work. Why?”
“It ain’t quite real yet, is it?”
Despite his uneasiness, Herrera felt his ability challenged. “You won’t find better, mister. Not that I figure you could afford it.”
The man balled the page and tossed it to the floor. “It ain’t there yet. It looks like Him. But He ain’t in it.”
Meaning Jesus.
“Use the door, mister,” Herrera said. “I’m closed.”
Eyes locked on to Herrera, the man turned to the sign switch and flicked off the neon display. He pushed the door closed and set the lock. Herrera inched closer to his gun. The man lifted his hands.
“I mean you no harm. Look here …”
The man eased a hand into his pocket and produced a roll of paper money. He crossed to the artist, took Herrera’s hand and pressed the roll into his palm.
“Count it up.”
Herrera did. Over five thousand dollars in fresh, clean bills.
The new client pushed through the beaded curtain to the work area in back and the tattoo artist followed. The man withdrew his tails from his pants, unbuttoning the shirt and throwing it to the floor. He turned to display his back, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. When he moved, the muscles twitched with sudden electricity, as if hidden power had been awakened. The man sat in the tattooing chair and stared over his shoulder at Herrera.
“Turn a mirror so I can see. This time you gonna get it right.”
Herrera shook his head. “That’s not how it works. I make drawings. Get your approval.”
The man closed his eyes and retreated inside his head. After several long moments he nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You want me to do Jesus, I take it?” Herrera asked.
“The back of His head from the bottom of my neck down. His exact size and as real as His tribulation.”
“How do I know if I’m representing the, uh, subject correctly?”
“He’ll guide your hand,” the man said, meaning Jesus.
Herrera had felt no hand but his own on the needles through a dozen sessions, but something seemed to have driven him to a greater height of art than ever before. The back of Christ’s head appeared dimensional, a tumble of brown and shadow starting at the base of the client’s neck and feathering out on his lower spine. The crown of thorns seemed so real that wearing a shirt would be impossible, the fabric tearing on the horrific spikes, stained by the bright blood dripping down curling locks of tangled hair. The project was beautiful and awesome and terrible in equal measure.
And now it was complete.
The man stood from the chair and reached for his shirt. When he turned toward Herrera the tattooist’s breath froze in his throat. A gulley had been cut into his customer’s chest, an inch-wide strip of flesh and tissue running from below one flat nipple to the other. It was a recent wound, the furrow red and puckered and weeping yellow fluid. Herrera swallowed hard, wondering if the visor-like cut went all the way to bone.
“Um, what happened there?” he asked.
The man pulled on his shirt and left the top half unbuttoned, the raw slit visible in the V. His dead-charcoal eyes bored into Herrera and he shook his head like the tattoo artist was the village idiot.
“He’s gotta be able to see out now, don’t He?”
Meaning Jesus.
2 (#ulink_334340ed-f59b-5bd1-af20-a35c4d80c5b1)
Mobile, Alabama. Mid May
“Carson. Yo, brother. Wake up.”
“Mmmf,” I said, trying to slap a big hand shaking my shoulder. I missed and slapped my own cheek.
“Come on, Cars … time to get hoppin’ and boppin’.”
The only reason I opened my eyes was because I smelled bacon. Say what you will about alarm clocks, bacon is better. I looked up and saw blue sky filtered through tree branches. I tried to sit up, made it on the second try. I was in a lounge chair on Harry Nautilus’s back patio. The picnic table beside me looked like a launching pad for beer bottles. A pedestal fan on the patio was blowing air across me. Harry switched the fan off.
“Good morning, merry sunshine.”
I studied the chair beneath me, gave Harry a look.
“You fell asleep there, Carson. I kept the fan on you to keep the skeeters off.”
“A polite host would have carried me to a real bed and tucked me in.”
“A smart host would have coffee. And these.” His right hand held out a steaming mug and his left opened to display a half-dozen aspirin. I grabbed both, chewing the pills and washing the paste down with New Orleans-style coffee, brewed black with chicory and cut with scalded milk.
“Want a bacon-egg sandwich?” Harry said.
I shot a thumb up as Harry retreated into the kitchen and the previous night returned to me, the major scenes at least. Flanagan’s bar decked out for a party: blue balloons, two long tables weighted down with cookpots of chili and sandwich fixings – ham, turkey, barbecue, cheeses – plus bowls of chips and nuts and pretzels. A twelve-foot banner over the bar said simply, 436 is 10-7.
It meant badge number 436 was out of service. Harry was badge number 436.
It was his retirement party. A surprise, Harry lured there by me and Lieutenant Tom Mason, our long-time leader and apologist. I don’t often get misty-eyed, but when we’d walked into Flanagan’s and I saw the sign, it got a little blurry.
Harry was my best friend and had been my detective partner for years. It was Harry who’d convinced me to join the force when I was a twenty-seven-year-old slacker wondering what to do with a Masters Degree in Psychology gained by traveling to every max-security prison in the South and interviewing homicidal maniacs.
Harry was ten years older than me, a year and some shy of fifty. He’d started on the force young, and when adding in unused sick and vacation days, plus time credits when he’d been injured in the line of duty, it added up to thirty years in service, all but five of them in Homicide.
The bash at Flanagan’s had been an alcohol-fueled semi-riot. Harry was a legend in the MPD, and his friends had come to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was leaving. We’d stayed two hours, neither big on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, slipping away to Harry’s place on the near-north side of Mobile, a trim bungalow in a quiet neighborhood overslung with slash and longleaf pines and the snaking branches of live oaks. His back yard was slender and long and landscaped with dogwoods and banks of azaleas. It was centered by a looming sycamore, from which Harry had strung a half-dozen bright birdhouses.
He’d fetched bottles of homebrew from his closet, channeled mix-tapes of Miles and Bird and Gillespie through the speakers, and we’d sat beneath a fat white moon and had our kind of party, long beer-sipping silences broken by stories from the streets, good and bad and blends of both.
Harry stepped out and handed me six inches of warmed French bread filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, melted cheddar and heavy lashings of Crystal Hot Sauce, and I went to work supplanting beer with food, something I probably should have done more of last night.
Harry’s eyes went to the bottle collection on the patio table.
“Happy to see you liked my homebrew.”
When I’d accepted the position in Florida, Harry’d started brewing beer, saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
“Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”
“It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”
I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.
“You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”
Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.
“It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”
“For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”
“Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”
“You didn’t say who the lady was.”
Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”
“She’s in the Mafia?”
“It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”
“Who you think I’ll tell?”
“Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”
That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”
“I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”
“Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”
“Driver,” he corrected.
3 (#ulink_42520312-2617-5a34-96f0-658202544a79)
I bought a Miami Herald for the flight and returned to Miami. The headlines hadn’t changed much since Friday: “No Progress in Menendez Murder”blared the main story, with another headline, inches below, saying “Miami Mourns Loss of Favored Daughter”.
Last Thursday had been a horror for local law enforcement. Roberta Menendez was an MDPD administrator who’d started as a beat cop, putting in eight years before a fleeing felon’s gunshot shattered her hip. Undaunted, she worked a desk at the department while pursuing a degree in accounting – delighted to find an unrealized ability with numbers – and becoming a supervisor in MDPD’s finances department. Balancing books was work enough, but Menendez gave her remaining time and talent to a host of social and charitable organizations throughout the region, helping volunteer organizations manage their finances on a professional level.
I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.
Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.
It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.
I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.
“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”
My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.
“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”
“No doubt. We in?”
Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”
“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.
“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”
Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.
We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
“Is that a cocoon?” I said.
“If so, this is the butterfly.” Vince passed me a second photo and I saw a woman on an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.
“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”
I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”
“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”
I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.
“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.
“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”
“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.
“Nothing right now.”
It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”
Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”
“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”
“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”
“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”
When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.
Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”
“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”
Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”
“Uh, what?”
But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.
Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.
“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.
“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”
The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.
“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”
Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.
“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”
It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.
I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.
4 (#ulink_e27c0574-6543-5064-a20f-c4191f6792c8)
Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.
Fifteen years ago, give or take, Nautilus had sat in this same room with a half-baked man-child named Carson Ryder when the kid had asked Nautilus why he listened to “all that old music”. Nautilus had dosed the kid with Waller, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, Henderson … they started at sundown and met the morning with Miles.
Along with the intro to jazz, Nautilus convinced the kid his degree in Psychology and eerie ability to analyze madmen would be a gift to law enforcement. The next week Carson Ryder signed up at the Police Academy, blowing through it like a firestorm, impressing many, pissing off as many more. He’d put in three years on the street before solving the high-profile Adrian case, advancing to detective and Nautilus’s partner. They’d been the Ryder and Nautilus Show for over a decade. But today Carson was in Florida and Harry Nautilus was a retiree.
The show was over.
And tomorrow morning, Harry Nautilus was going to the home of Pastor Richard Owsley to meet the man’s wife and try for a gig as a driver. Last week’s interview with the Pastor had taken all of fifteen minutes, the man like a thousand-watt bulb in a room that only needs about a hundred, pacing, smiling, gesturing … all assurance and zeal and – like Southern preachers everywhere – stretching one-syllable words into two and often using larger words than called for, which Nautilus ascribed to latent insecurities perhaps caused by going to schools like West Doodlemont Bible College rather than Harvard Divinity School.
It had all happened so quickly that Nautilus realized he knew little more about Richard Owsley than the stacks of books he saw at local shops, the man smiling on the cover with bible in hand.
He took another sip of brew, set his computer on his lap, and checked YouTube for the Pastor’s name. There were several dozen hits, sermons, it seemed. In his youth Nautilus had been dragged from church to church by a procession of severe but well-meaning aunts, and figured he’d had enough sermonizing for a lifetime. He continued scanning the videos until he found a six-minute piece titled, Highlights: Richard Owsley on Willy Prince Show. Prince had a talk show out of Montgomery and was a regional favorite, a smug little fellow in his forties with shaggy, fringe-centric hair, and a slight mouth permanently puckered toward sneer.
Nautilus hit Play and the screen showed two men sitting at a round table in a television studio dressed with a pair of bookshelves and artificial plants. Nautilus figured someone once told Prince that slouching would make him look more like William F. Buckley, so he resembled a boneless puppet dropped into a chair. Prince sat on the left and was speaking.
“… then to recap, Reverend Owsley, you hold that Jesus wants people to have fine cars, boats, luxury items?”
Pastor Owsley was to the right, a dark-suited figure with narrow shoulders and a touch too much weight at his waistline, slightly pearish. His round and cherubic visage was topped by back-combed black hair. He looked pleasant and not particularly commanding, a small-town insurance salesman whose ready smile is part of the tool kit.
“Jesus wants people to enjoy abundance, Willy,” Owsley said in a Southern-inflected tenor and pronouncing the word in three distinct syllables, a-bun-dance. “In biblical times, abundance might mean having a donkey, chickens and a warm hearth. Today, it might be a new pickup truck and a house with a white picket fence.”
A chorus of handclaps and Hallelujahs from the audience. A raised eyebrow from Prince.
“Or a Mercedes-Benz and a mansion in Miami Beach?”
“If that is your yearning and you honor God, God will hand you the keys to the Benz, the keys to the mansion and then, finally and best of all, the keys to His Kingdom. It’s in John 10:10: ‘There I am come that they might have life, and they might have it more abundantly.’”
The audience again expressed satisfaction with the answer. “Perhaps the abundance comes in the afterlife, Reverend,” Prince said. “In Paradise.”
Owsley nodded vigorous agreement. “Our prosperity in Heaven is boundless, Willy. We’re also supposed to taste of it in this life. Proverbs 15:6 … ‘In the house of the righteous is much treasure.’ Then there’s John 1:2 … ‘Beloved, I wish above all that thou prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospers.’ When your soul prospers, so shall you.”
“So why did Jesus hang around with poor people, Pastor Owsley? I mean, Jesus wasn’t prone to spending his days with the wealthy, right?”
“Of course not, Willy. He treasured the poor.”
“But you just said—”
“Jesus Christ loves the faithful, Willy. If you have ten billion dollars and believeth not in the Lord, you are as poor as a cockroach. Conversely, if you have nothing and turn yourself over to the Lord, you have wealth beyond measure.”
“But you’re still poor, pocket-wise.”
“‘Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.’ That’s Deuteronomy 29:9. It’s said even more directly in Proverbs 28:20: ‘A faithful man shall abound in blessings.’ Do you know the Greek translation of the word ‘blessings’, Willy?”
“Oddly enough, no.”
Owsley’s pink hands came together in a thunderclap. “Happiness! Blessings are happinesses. God wants His faithful children to abound in happinesses. It’s a three-step process, Willy. One, surrender your soul to Christ. Two, cast your bread upon the water. Three, watch the bread returneth a thousand-fold.”
A chorus of amens and hallelujahs. Prince studied the audience and turned to the preacher with an uplifted eyebrow. “You have a lot of followers here tonight, Reverend. Did you pack the crowd, as they say?”
A split-second pause from Owsley, followed by who-me? innocence. “I noted on my website that I was to be a guest. That’s all.”
“Really? I’d like to go to some video we took earlier in the day outside the studio, if that’s OK with you.”
“It’s your show, Willy,” Owsley said. The smile stayed as toothy as a beaver, but Nautilus detected irritation as the screen behind the interview table filled with two large buses emptying to the pavement a block from the studio, an attractive woman with a haystack of blonde hair organizing the passengers into a queue.
“All those folks went directly from the buses to the studio. I’ll ask again: Did you pack the crowd, Reverend?”
Murmurs of irritation from the audience. Owsley replayed the innocent face. “All I can say, Willy, is that I’m delighted so many faithful Christians chose to honor me with their presence.”
Applause. Whistles. Amens.
Prince tented his fingers and frowned in apparent confusion. “Faithful Christians, you say, Reverend Owsley. But what about people of other beliefs? Can they not be equally faithful to the creator of the universe?”
Owsley smiled benignly. “I can only preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, who I hold to be the creator of all that is and ever will be.”
“So other religions are wrong?”
“I judge not, lest I be judged, Willy.”
Prince shook his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, Reverend.”
“No, Willy, I am not. It’s all in my owner’s manual.”
“Owner’s manual?”
Owsley reached to his side and picked up a bible, holding it high with both hands, the thousand-watt grin ramping up another hundred.
The audience went wild.
“Thanks, Mama,” Teresa Mailey said, patting her child on his pink forehead as her mother pulled the baby blanket closer around Robert, just seven months old the day before. “It might not be like this much more.”
Jeri Mailey thumbed graying hair back under the red headscarf and smiled. “Like I care, baby.” Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice.
“Me waking you up at four thirty in the morning when I come to pick Bobby up?” Teresa said.
“Hush up that stuff. I go right back to sleep.” Jeri paused as her smile shivered and her eyes moistened. “I never thought I’d have days like this, baby.”
“Come on, Mama, not again,” Teresa said, her voice gentle.
Her mother brushed a tear from the corner of an eye. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s like every day has been a gift this past year. Taking care of you and Bobby is a gift from God.”
Teresa kissed her mother’s cheek. “It’ll keep giving, Mama.”
Teresa’s mother nodded and pulled Bobby tight as she crossed to the door. “See you later, baby. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
The door closed and Teresa Mailey was alone in the tiny first-floor apartment, the bulk of the rent paid by a charitable organization that helped the fallen regain their feet. She looked out the window and watched her mother put Bobby in the child seat in the rear of her blue Kia Optima and snug him tight. Just before her mother closed the door, Bobby waved goodbye.
OK, only a waggle of his arm, but it looks like he’s waving bye-bye to his mommy.
Teresa went to the mirror and straightened her uniform, the fabric flat and wrinkle-free, the uniform immaculate. Satisfied that she was a suitable representative of her employer, she glanced at the clock, 9:32 p.m., and headed to the door. Pausing, Teresa ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her necklace, a tiny gold chain holding a small cross, and put it around her neck.
I’m ready for this again.
Teresa exited to a third-hand Corolla. She had to be at work at ten, and the Publix was twenty minutes distant. She was to do night restock until four a.m. Yesterday her supervisor had spoken of moving Teresa to daytime as a permanent deli worker. Permanent!
“You’ve gotten noticed by a lot of people upstairs, Teresa,” the super had said. “Your attitude, work ethic, ability to shift positions … we’d like you as a permanent member of the team.”
The year had been a gift, Teresa thought as she drove through the warm Miami night. Of finding out who am I, and that I have worth.
The traffic was thick with homecoming day workers, but Teresa pulled into the Publix lot with eight minutes to spare, aiming toward the far edge where the employees parked. She grabbed her purse, exited the vehicle, and started for the store when she felt a tingle on the back of her neck, like eyes were watching.
Teresa turned to see a light van parked three slots distant, a hard-worked vehicle judging by the dinged body and dented hood. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, face hidden behind a newspaper, the halogen-lit lot bright enough for reading. He was tanned and ropy and shirtless, a line running across his upper chest, a weird tattoo.
No … not a tattoo …
A nasty, puckery scar.
The man shifted in his seat and the scar stared at Teresa. Feeling an odd void in the base of her stomach, Teresa turned and hustled toward the supermarket.
5 (#ulink_dfbb36b7-2fd1-5a5c-a7e3-d69c91e4ccfb)
It was eight a.m., the oblique sun lighting a soft mist that rose from a brief morning rain, giving a ghostly cast to the tree-canopied streets of Spring Hill, Mobile’s finest old neighborhood, many of the homes dating back to antebellum times. Harry Nautilus pulled to a two-story house set back a hundred feet from the avenue, a square, white, multi-columned Greek Revival monster Nautilus thought as charmless as it was large, redeemed by the landscaping: oaks and sycamores standing in hedge circles further bordered by azaleas and bougainvillea. Lines of dogwoods paced the high fence of the side boundaries.
He blew out a breath and pulled into the long drive. His red 1984 Volvo wagon had recently expired at 377,436 miles and he’d found a 2004 Cross Country model truly owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays, the odometer registering 31,000 miles.
Nautilus parked behind a gleaming red Hummer with smoked windows and was rolling his eyes when he realized it was probably what he’d be driving. He exited the Volvo wearing the suit he’d worn to the interview with Richard Owsley, coal black, the suit he wore to court and funerals. His shirt was blue with a button-down collar and the tie a red-and-blue rep stripe. The whole drab get-up was already beginning to itch.
Nautilus patted his hair, a one-inch natural with a sprinkling of gray, licked an index finger and smoothed his bulldozer-blade mustache, took a deep breath and walked to the front door. The knocker was a cast-iron version of the three crosses of Golgotha – currently unoccupied – hinged to slam the base. Nautilus gingerly lifted a thief’s cross and let it drop.
A harsh metallic clank. Nautilus stood back as the door opened to reveal one of the most impressive stacks of hair he’d seen in years, a cascade of blonde-bright ringlets that bounced atop the shoulders of a slender, and apparently confused woman in her early forties. Her make-up was old-school-thick, early Dolly Parton, but her face was model-perfect, with high cheekbones, a pert nose and lips like pink cushions. With her dress, white and embroidered with creamy flowers, she looked part porcelain angel, part country singer from the seventies. Nautilus immediately recognized her from the Willy Prince Show, the woman organizing the bused-in audience.
“Mrs Owsley, I’m Harry Nautilus. You’re expecting me, I’m told. Or hope.”
The woman stared, as if Nautilus was a unicorn. “Mrs Owsley?” Nautilus said, resisting the impulse to wave his hand before her wide, blue-shadowed eyes. “Did your husband tell you I’d be by today?”
“You’re black,” she said, just shy of a gasp.
“Since birth. Is something wrong?”
A brief pause and the woman’s startled expression flowed effortlessly into a glittering smile, teeth shining like marquee lights. “Goodness, no,” she said, reaching to touch Harry’s sleeve and tug him over the threshold. “It’s just such a surprise. All my other drivers were, well … do you folks prefer the term white or Caucasian?”
“It doesn’t really matter, ma’am. It’s more what you prefer to call yourselves.”
She canted her head in thought, followed with a tinkly laugh. “Of course. Come inside, Mr Nautilus, please.”
She led Nautilus through the wide entranceway and into an expansive living area, the walls a soft peach, the French Provincial furniture having matching cushions and looking delicate and expensive. The room was vaulted, twenty-feet tall, a pair of ceiling fans whisking high above. One wall held family photos, one the front windows. The third held a cross of dark and rough-hewn beams, a dozen feet tall, eight wide. It had been thickly coated in shellac or varnish and gleamed in the in-streaming sun.
Nautilus said, “You have a beautiful home, Mrs Owsley.”
“God gave it to us,” she said, looking to Nautilus as if expecting an amen.
He said, “Indeed and fer-sure, ma’am,” and found his voice failing. “Might I trouble you for a drink of water? I seem a bit dry.”
“Right this way.”
The kitchen was straight from Architectural Digest: beaten copper sinks, twin refrigerator-freezers, an island with a maple chopping block. The countertops were richly textured marble. Above, an eight-foot rack was hung with cooking implements.
“There’s water, of course,” Celeste Owsley said. “I also have sweet tea.”
“Tea then, please.”
A crystal vase of tea was produced from a refrigerator seemingly sized to hold sides of beef. Celeste Owsley poured a glass and handed it to Nautilus. He sipped and studied the vast kitchen.
“You must truly like to cook, ma’am.”
The woman frowned at the rack festooned with pots, pans, colanders, whisks. “They all do something, but I’ve no idea what. Thankfully, our cook likes to cook. You’ll meet Felicia, I expect. She’s a precious little Mexican girl.”
“Girl?” Nautilus asked. “How old is she?”
Ms Owsley canted her head sideways, perplexed. Somehow the huge beehive ’do remained centered. “I never asked,” she said, a scarlet talon tapping a plump lower lip. “Forty? Fifty?”
Girl, Nautilus thought, holding back the sigh as Celeste Owsley gestured him toward the wide staircase. “Now let’s meet our daughter and see how she is today.”
Owsley clicked the high heels across the floor to the foot of the broad staircase and clapped her hands as if summoning a pet poodle. Seconds passed and Nautilus heard a door opening upstairs, looked up to a teenage girl staring down, her brown hair shoulder length and a pouty look on an otherwise sweet face.
“What?”
“Well, come on down.”
The girl sighed dramatically and headed down the steps. Nautilus knew she was sixteen – research again – and her name was Rebecca. Owsley’s face lit to a zillion watts as she pointed to Nautilus like he was door number three on a game show.
“This is Mr Nautilus, hon. He’s our new driver.”
The girl scowled. “But he’s bl—”
“He’s your Papa’s choice,” Owsley interrupted, “and that means he’s the best there can be.”
The girl stared at Nautilus. A smile quivered at the edge of her bright lips.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Becca!” Owsley snapped.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” the girl said, looking pleased. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck …”
“Get upstairs! Now!”
The girl slowly climbed the stairs, repeating her mantra until it ended with the slamming of a door. Owsley sighed and turned to Nautilus.
“I’m sorry. It’s a stage. I can’t wait for it to be over.”
The meeting seemed to have reached a conclusion, Owsley leading Nautilus back to the front door. Her hand was on the knob when she turned, her eyes searching into Nautilus’s eyes.
“You have been saved, of course, Mr Nautilus.”
The same question had been asked by Reverend Owsley, early in their meeting, as if, answered improperly, the interview would be over. Ten years back he and Carson had been chasing a trio of murderous dope dealers through a dilapidated warehouse, their leader a psychotic named Randy Collins. Nautilus had been following Collins down a rotting flight of stairs when they collapsed, Nautilus tumbling ten feet to concrete, gun spinning from his hand as the maniac spun and lifted his weapon, the nine-millimeter muzzle staring straight into Nautilus’s chest as a tattooed finger tightened on the trigger.
Until the front of Collins’ face disappeared, Carson firing from forty feet away, a perfect shot in the shadowed warehouse.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nautilus replied, just as he’d done with the mister. “I was saved years ago. It was a beautiful day.”
Nautilus returned to his vehicle thinking about his interview, the written part and subsequent face-to-face sessions with Owsley. A good third of the questions had – in veiled fashion, mostly – been about his discretion, the ability to handle secrets. He’d answered truthfully, meaning that he didn’t disburse private information. There would have been other vetting, he now realized – probably a private-investigation firm – but even his enemies would have said something akin to, “Harry Nautilus doesn’t carry tales.”
Twenty bills an hour, he told himself as he buckled into his car. Drive ’em around, stay uninvolved, cash the checks. The gig is worth it, right?
6 (#ulink_e6a2fbc5-eb45-535f-8227-b4fb94eb03ba)
I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of dreams made of flames and punctuated by screams. Breakfast was strong coffee and stale churros and I was at the department an hour later, hungry to track down the maniac who’d killed Kylie Sandoval. Roy was in his office, the muscular Miami skyline looming outside the windows of his twenty-third-floor office, Biscayne Bay visible to the east.
I gave him an anything happening? face, meaning Menendez.
He shook his head. “I figure this will be solved by snitches and shoe leather. It’ll come. Like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.” He gave me a curious look. “I take it you haven’t been to your office yet.”
“No, why?”
He closed his eyes and began whistling “Rule Britannia”.
Wondering if my boss had gone around the bend, I headed down the hall to my office, finding the door ajar. I used to share space with Ziggy Gershwin, but Zigs had impressed Roy enough to get his own office and assignments last month, so I was the sole occupant, generally leaving it unlocked.
I pushed the door open quietly, seeing a light-skinned woman of African heritage sitting in the chair opposite my desk, her back to me. She was leafing through a book I had contributed to some years ago, The Inner Cultures of Sociopaths, more for academic than general audiences. She wore a taupe uniform and though only a small portion was visible, I recognized the shoulder patch of the Miami-Dade PD.
I cleared my throat and she jumped, the book skidding from her lap to the floor.
“Bloody hell,” she said, standing. “You scared the piss out of me.”
Her voice sounded closer to London than Miami. I scooped up the book from the floor and set it back on the shelf, then sat, head cocked. My visitor was a petite woman in her mid-to-later twenties, brunette hair tugged back in a ponytail. Full lips framed a small mouth that was now pursed tight. Her eyes were large and brown and watching me as intently as I was watching her. I had the feeling I was being weighed.
“And you would be?” I ventured.
“Holly Belafonte. I’m an officer with the MDPD.”
I didn’t point out that, as a detective, I’d already deduced it by the uniform, though the accent seemed misplaced. “Did I mis-park my car, Officer Belafonte?” I said, a shot at humor that went wide, judging by the narrowed eyes.
She nodded to the chair. “Can I sit?”
“I suspect you can, since you were sitting when I entered.”
The stare again. Humor didn’t seem her métier. “Please,” I sighed. “Sit. And tell me why you’re here.”
She sat tentatively, reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope.
“I’m told this will explain things.”
I opened the envelope and saw Vince’s card clipped to two sheets of paper, the top one in his jagged handwriting.
Hey Buddy – Meet H. Belafonte, your official departmental liaison on the Sandoval case. She’s all I could scratch up on short notice and I picked her because she knew the vic personally. I cleared this with the Chief – at least I shoved it under his nose while he was screaming at everyone. The head of Investigative signed off as well, so you’re clear to proceed and I’ll lend a hand whenever possible. This place has gone nuts.
The second sheet of paper was typed:
This document authorizes Of. H. Belafonte to serve as official contact between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Florida Center of Law Enforcement in duties relative to Case 2015/6 –HD 1297-B.
Below that was a hastily scribbled signature, the line tailing off the paper, like the signer was running while signing. Even the top brass at MDPD were in sprint mode due to Menendez.
“You know what this stuff says?” I asked Belafonte. “The notes?”
A prim nod. “We’re to work together on the Kylie Sandoval murder.”
I stared at the face; handsome but expressionless. “How long have you been with the force, Officer Belafonte?”
A frown. “Long enough.”
“I’m talking about measured quantity, as in time.”
She stared evenly without speaking.
“Well?”
“You asked, so I’m thinking.” Five more mute seconds passed. “One hundred and sixty-seven days. I’m counting days on duty but not counting today yet. Tomorrow will of course make one hundred and—”
I held up a hand to cut her off, barely resisting banging my head on my desk. Instead of working with the typical seasoned investigator, I’d be dragging around a uniformed newbie a half-step above writing traffic citations.
“We’re done here,” I said, standing.
That put expression on the stone face. “You’re bloody dismissing me?” she said, eyes wide. “Just like that?”
“I’m dismissing nothing,” I said, giving her a come-hither jerk of my head. “We’re adjourning to the coffee shop in the atrium. I need a triple espresso. Or maybe a shot of whiskey.”
We reconvened below, where I ordered my coffee, Belafonte a tea, declining to allow me to pay for her tinted water.
“That’s not a typical Miami accent,” I noted. “At least not in MDPD.”
“My childhood was in Bermuda. It’s a British territory.”
“Oddly enough, I knew that.”
“I’ve met people who think it’s one of the fifty states, along with Puerto Rico and Nova Scotia.”
I started to laugh, then realized she wasn’t making a joke, just transferring data. “I lived in Hamilton,” she continued, “the capital, until I was twenty-one, when my father and I moved to Miami.”
“Why here?” I said. “Both to the US and Miami?”
“Shouldn’t we be discussing the Sandoval case?” she said.
So much for get-acquainted talk. “You knew her, I take it?”
“I work out of South Division and arrested Kylie twice for prostitution. And nearly a third time but, but …”
She paused with tea in mid-air and set it back on the table, her eyes serious, as if looking inside her head and not liking the pictures there. Belafonte swallowed hard and turned away. I realized I’d seen a glisten of tear in the expressionless eyes.
“Take your time,” I said.
“The third time I arrived as a john propositioned her, an obese businessman who stank of gin and sweat and had greasy hair and vomit on his lapels. When I told the arsehole to bugger off he gave me a big smirk like Big deal, copper, I’ll go find another one. I cuffed Kylie to a pipe, followed Mr Businesspuke around the corner. I let him get in his car and turn the key and busted him for drunken driving.”
“And then took Kylie to the lockup.”
“Actually, I took Kylie to an all-night diner and bought her a meal.” She paused. “My shift was over, of course.”
“I don’t care about your timecard, Belafonte. But why the kindness, may I ask?”
She looked out the window a long moment. “The john was a disgusting lump of ugliness, like some hideous disease taken human form. I then realized how these girls … don’t simply sell their bodies. They have to pretend to like these scumbags. I was new to that world and wanted to understand how they did it time and again, night after night.”
“Drugs,” I said. “It shows their power.”
Belafonte nodded. “At first Kylie played the hardcore working girl, every third word a curse. But subsequently, as I was driving her back to her cheap flat, I saw tears rolling down her cheeks. Kylie broke down like a, like a … little girl dressed in hooker clothes. I realized many of them are little girls in hooker clothes. Childhood doesn’t end when they go on the street, it gets packed away under layers of numbness. But sometimes it breaks out. And there’s nothing before you but a terrified little girl.”
It was beginning to seem Belafonte wasn’t quite the robot she’d initially appeared. “You befriended her, right?”
A sigh. “I tried to get her into therapy, but the free clinics are booked for months. I brought her home with me, told her to stay until she got herself together.”
“How long did it last?”
“Three days. Kylie had had something broken inside her, Detective. I don’t know what happened, but someone or something had torn everything from her, every bit of self-worth. Kylie lived with a horrific hurt buried inside her and I pray she didn’t die in pain.”
I fished the investigative reports from my briefcase and reluctantly handed them over. My day was about to reach its low point.
7 (#ulink_81f9e912-9b4a-59d1-8b76-02ffc9b8d9ab)
Teresa Mailey opened her eyes. Or had she? The dark with her eyes open was darker than the dark behind her eyelids. Her head ached and she felt her stomach tumble and pushed herself up from what felt like a hard dirt floor, a wave of dizziness too much for her stomach to handle and she vomited between her hands.
What happened?
Pictures began to return to her head: Working until four and walking out to her car. As she departed the lot she noticed the road seemed darker on the right. She stopped and discovered a shattered headlamp, a thoughtless shopper had backed into her car. She’d headed to her mother’s trailer court to pick up Bobby, winding down the road from the main highway, darker than usual, like the streetlights had all burned out at once. She’d reached the final turn to find a tree branch in the center of the road and crept to the ragged limb, sighing. Teresa had gotten out, road dust blowing into the beams of her headlamps and dragged it to the side of the road. Until … until …
Footsteps somewhere in the dark.
“Hello?” she had called in the enveloping darkness. “Is someone there?”
Until hands like steel covered her mouth and tape covered her screams and a cloth bag fell over her head.
And now she was here, wherever here was, stinking with a smell of burned meat and motor oil, lightless, as black as death. She could feel flies lighting on her bare arms.
“Please … who’s there?” Teresa called out, her mouth so dry the words came out as a rasp. “What do you want?”
“Sinner …” The words a hiss. “Jezebel …”
The sound of footsteps again. Her head jerked to the sound, but all Teresa saw was black. “I have a baby,” she pleaded. “He needs me to take care of him.”
The footsteps again. Hands held before her, Teresa walked until stopped by a wall, rough and wooden and she felt her way along its surface, trying to hold her breath and keep her feet from making sounds. Get out! her mind screamed. Find a way out.
The footsteps again.
“HELP!” Teresa shrieked into the darkness. “SOMEONE HELP ME!”
The whispering voice moved closer, the words becoming a growled sentence. “For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer …”
Heart pounding, like a hammer, sweat pouring down her covered face, Teresa retreated down the wall until her flailing hands found the shape of a window, but wood where glass should be. A shuttered window? Her fists pounded the wood like a drum.
‘’SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!”
Bam. The wood answered back with a single staccato sound. Had someone heard her?
“I’M IN HERE,” Teresa yelled. “HELP ME!”
Bam answered the wood. Then again, bam.
An object hammered her side and she grunted with pain. Something skittered across the floor. “HELP!” she screamed again. “PLEASE HELP M—” A punch to her sternum knocked the words from her mouth. Again, she felt the breath of something moving past her head. She dropped to a knee and held her hands against whatever seemed to be hitting her. The footsteps again, the hissing, poisonous voice …
“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom,And upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven …”
Something struck Teresa’s face and she tumbled backwards in a spray of blood and pain. Her hand went to her nose but it was no longer there, just a flat lump of shrieking pain. When she fought to her knees something hit her in the side of the neck and the blackness turned red, then white, then black again.
8 (#ulink_c6c89e79-554f-5c4b-8f66-375748c1969d)
Belafonte stared into her Earl Grey. I think it’s where her eyes needed to rest after studying Kylie Sandoval’s morgue photos.
“Who’d do such a thing?” she said.
I pushed my remaining pastries aside. Seeing the shots again had killed my appetite. “Maybe the perp thought burning the body would hide Kylie’s ID, or destroy evidence of his involvement. Or it could be darker.”
The eyes lifted from the mug. “What does that mean?”
“The burning satisfied a psychological need. There was also damage to the skull and the face. The postmortem will tell the full story.”
“When’s that?”
I looked at my watch. “Forty-seven minutes. We’ve got a ringside seat.”
She froze, eyes wide. “I’ve never, uh … do I have to be present?”
“I can go it alone, but one of us should be there.” I stood and shuffled the photos into my briefcase, clicked it shut. “I’ll get in contact later in the day and let you know what we found.”
Belafonte and I walked back through to the atrium where she went her way, me mine. I had no ill feelings toward Belafonte for leaving me alone with the post. Harry hadn’t cared much for the procedure himself, part of our division of labors: I took the bulk of the autopsies, and Harry handled the majority of courtroom work, testifying in cases we’d worked. It was a perfect division since he resembled a mustached James Earl Jones down to a bass rumble of a voice and, when it came to resembling actors, I’d been more often aligned with Jason Bateman. My courtroom testimony tended to meander into concept and supposition, while Harry’s sounded like a pronouncement from Zeus.
And, truth be told, I liked to look into the machinery that was us, the bags and tubes and glistening orbs of multicolored meats that formed our engineering. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the systems and at the same time awed that this assemblage of material – not much different from the systems that powered pigs and cattle – had managed to create glorious paintings, send men to the moon, discover subtle mathematics, build towering structures, create majestic symphonies … There was something different in the us. I had no idea what it was, but suspected we contained more than complex chemical engineering in bipedal configuration.
Those weren’t, however, my thoughts as I pulled into the morgue lot, the sun high in a sky of scudding cumulus, the advance ranks of a nearing shower; I was thinking only of a dark cocoon found on a lonely strand of beach, stinking of scorched meat and chemical accelerant and sending some poor beachcomber screaming back to his hotel, pausing only to vomit in the sand.
Dr Ava Davanelle was on duty and I found her preparing in an autopsy suite, pulling the blue gown into place. The body was on the table, a mosaic of red flesh mingled with char, the burning uneven. Ava looked up, saw me, registered surprise.
“I thought I’d see someone from Miami-Dade.”
“They’re busy.”
It took two beats to register. “Menendez,” she said.
“The cops are running full-tilt boogie.”
“I met Ms Menendez a couple months ago at a city-county function. She seemed both smart and sweet, a lovely person.”
“She had a lot of friends,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “But this girl had very few, I think.”
“But she now has you,” Dr Davanelle said quietly, picking up a wicked-looking scalpel. I walked to a chair against the white wall and sat. My history with Ava Davanelle had started a dozen years ago in Mobile, where she had been my girlfriend, a newbie pathologist with lyrical hands and a fierce addiction to alcohol. She was drawn into a case I was working and almost killed. Ava had also met my brother Jeremy back then, when he was incarcerated at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior and being studied by Dr Evangeline Prowse, who was fascinated by my brother’s brilliance.
Time and events travel roads we can never suppose. Jeremy had escaped from the Institute years ago, placed on every Wanted listing between Mexico City and Nome, Alaska. Last year a man of Jeremy’s height and weight had been pulled from a river in Chicago, the corpse’s DNA matching my brother’s. He was now dead and long gone from the listings.
Or maybe not.
In reality, my brother – after a lengthy hiding-out period in an isolated cabin in the Kentucky mountains – was now living in a huge house in Key West and picking stocks based on a simple but bizarre equation developed during his years in hiding: The financial market had but two true states, scared child or blustering drunkard, all else just states of transition.
He’d made millions from his insight.
And the DNA sample taken from the corpse in Chicago? It had been supplied by the pathologist performing the autopsy, one Dr Ava Davanelle, who had been my brother’s secret girlfriend for years, though both Jeremy and Ava disdained the characterization, saying their relationship was far more complex.
“Interesting,” I heard Ava say, looking up as she leaned over a resected section of upper arm, the bicep splayed open as she studied through a magnifying lens. She cued a communications link to the room where the techs worked. Seconds later a ponytailed young woman in a lab jacket whisked through the door and nearly ran to Ava, who handed over bags of labeled tissue.
“Stain and check these for hemorrhage, Branson. I’m also looking for differentiation between intravital and postmortem trauma. Look close.”
“You found something?” I said.
“Just a supposition,” she said, turning back to her work.
After an hour – Ava slicing, weighing organs and calling for more tests – I went outside to breathe an atmosphere not thick with the smell of death and antiseptic. The rain had passed though, leaving only small patches of cloud in the eastern sky, clear blue above. In the distance the jagged Miami skyline seemed to glisten in the renewed air and I walked the grounds and the nearby streets for an hour, grabbing a coffee from a street vendor and sipping it beneath a tall King palm in a tiny streetside park, the fronds swaying and rattling against one another.
When I returned, Ava was closing the body, the heavy stitches straight from Frankenstein. The top of Kylie Sandoval’s head lay beside her on the table.
“Well?” I said.
Ava replaced the bowl of skull as she spoke. “I’ve identified four sites struck by a blunt instrument, two on the head, two on the body. I suspect it was one of these blows that broke her nose, another that shattered the left temple, creating intercranial hemorrhaging. I think I’ll find more.”
Ava shed the gown and mask and I followed her to her office, utilitarian, shelves of medical and forensics texts and a simple desk and chair. There was a single large painting on one wall behind her desk, a streetscape of Key West in thick swaths of impasto oil, the houses dark and hunkered shapes, the twilight sky dappled with fierce strokes of orange and red, one slender palm bridging earth and sky, as still as a patch of paint can be, yet somehow moving within the frame of the picture.
It was a stunning work and my brother had painted it, claiming his move to Key West had brought out his artistic side. I had never been able to fathom the inside of his head, and his sudden ability to paint further scrambled my understanding.
Ava studied her notes. “I need analysis from other tissue samples before I confirm my suspicions of multiple trauma sites. Should take a few hours, same with the tox screens, and I’ll call you with the results. They might be quite interesting.”
9 (#ulink_9d7ac542-d327-5a93-ba3b-353569a55a67)
I was crossing the parking lot when my phone rang: Belafonte.
“Can we speak?” she said.
“We are.”
“I mean … meet somewhere? I really need to talk to you, hopefully today.”
“Where are you?”
“Flagami, tracking down information on Kylie.”
“Gimme an address. Preferably a bar where I can get a decent beer.”
“I’m, uh, in uniform.”
“Go home,” I told her. “And await further instructions.”
I hung up and pressed the fifth number down on my speed dial. Three rings.
“Carson, what’s up?” Vince Delmara. He sounded beat.
“What did you do to me, Vince?”
“Belafonte? She’s all I could find, Carson. Really. Every detective or soon-to-be detective is beating the streets on Menendez. Did you see any news show last night? All they talked about was lack of progress. We’re in crash-and-burn mode here.”
I sighed. “OK, Vince. But I gotta problem with Officer B.”
“I figured. She’s smart like a whip, but I think she was born with a broomstick up her—”
“Not that. She’s in uniform.”
It took a second for Vince’s frazzled mind to grasp. “Shit, of course. I’ll get her reclassified as undercover. Anything else?”
“Call and tell her when it’s done. I’m not sure she likes the sound of my voice.”
Twenty minutes later my phone rang, Belafonte. “Detective Delmara just phoned. He said—”
“I know. Jump into street clothes and let’s reconvene near a beer tap.”
I drove over and parked outside a decent-looking place in West Buena Vista named the Sea Breeze – something of a stretch, since the bay was about fifteen blocks distant, but perhaps they meant during hurricanes. Belafonte pulled in two minutes later, driving a venerable Crown Victoria, a former cruiser, given that I could see the logo beneath the fading paint job supposed to cover the previous usage. I stepped out as she did, finding she’d transformed from officer to female, the creased brown uni now blue slacks and a white safari shirt buttoned to the top. Both the slacks and shirt had been pressed rigid. Her shoes were pumps with a two-inch heel. She looked like an advertisement for Sears, except Sears models tended to look happy.
I passed by the bar, the woman behind it offering a smile and a “What you folks need? I’ll bring it over.”
I glanced at the taps and I ordered an Eldorado IPA from the local Wynwood Brewing Co. Belafonte said, “A glass of water, Pellegrino if possible.”
The joint was mostly empty and I angled toward a booth in a far corner, sat as Belafonte followed suit. I stared at her and offered my widest smile, receiving only an anxious look.
“There’s something I wanted to say, Detective Ryder.”
I stuck my fingers in my ears.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I can’t hear you. My fingers are in my ears.”
“Have you gone daft?”
“I’m not going to listen until you order a freaking drink, Belafonte. Unless you’re a confirmed teetotaler or a recovering alcoholic, we’re going to sit here like two standard-issue cops and sip an honest and refreshing beverage while we talk.”
“It’s not professional to drink during duty,” she said.
“You’re now plainclothes, Officer Belafonte. It’s not professional to get drunk on duty, or otherwise impaired. I expect this case to take us to some pretty low places. We can’t go into a joint where people are banging down whiskey shots and order Pellegrino.”
The big eyes challenged me as the waitress arrived with one beer, one fizzy Italian H
0. “Will that be all?” she asked.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Belafonte said, the eyes holding on me. “Please be so kind as to bring me a Rum Collins, light.”
“Atta girl,” I said. “Now, didn’t you have something to discuss?”
The big eyes dropped, came back up. “I should have gone with you to the procedure, Detective Ryder. I know nothing of autopsies. And never will unless I attend one.”
“Stop by the morgue any day and tell Dr Davanelle I sent you. Now, what do you know about Kylie? Did she have a pimp?”
A nod. “It may have been why she needed to get back to the street. Fear of the guy. Or maybe he had the drugs.”
“Did she, Kylie, mention a name?”
“Someone named Swizzle. Should we go out and try and find him?”
“We don’t go out, not yet. First we ride on the coattails of others.”
My call went to Juarez, a detective with Miami Vice. He was dedicated and bright and a favorite of Vince Delmara.
“Swizzle?” Juarez said. “You’re probably talking about Shizzle, Shizzle Diamond. Real name’s T’Shawn Matthews. Collects runaways and confused girls from the streets and bus stations. He’s good at being what they need, uncle or daddy or friend, then takes a few weeks to feed ’em and fuck ’em and hook ’em on heroin.”
“I think there’s a rap song there.”
“I ain’t writing it. Matthews – I ain’t using that idiot pimp name – rides his herd hard and moves them around, sometimes as far north as Orlando. But mostly it’s Liberty City or the sadder parts of Flagami and so forth. He might run ’em over to the Beach, but he tends to venues with dark alleys and cheap motels, usually watching from a car or the window of a bar, sipping brandy while his sad little troupe services johns.”
“Any idea where I can find this particular bag of garbage?” I asked.
I heard a hand cover the phone, a question yelled out. After a minute the hand fell away. “Feinstein says he saw Matthews a couple days back at Black’s Lounge, lower Liberty, probably got his crew working there for a while.”
I thanked Juarez and pocketed the phone. “Drink up,” I told Belafonte. “We’re going hunting.”
We headed outside and I saw the Crown Vic. “Who gave you that junker? I can see the goddamn cop logo under the paint.”
“Motor pool. It’s all they had.”
“We’ll use my wheels,” I said. “Jump in.”
I drive a green Land Rover Defender with every possible option for safari use: racks, grille and headlamp shields, spare tire bolted to the roof, heavy-duty suspension. It had been confiscated from a dope dealer and though it rode a bit rough, it was, I figured, the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country and if a case ever took me to the top of Kilimanjaro, I was ready.
Night was deepening as we went to the corner where Shizzle Diamond had been spotted. It was not a neighborhood Miami would feature in a tourist ad, unless the tourists were looking for peep shows, strippers and the uglier side of street life, as demonstrated by the wino puking into the gutter as we passed.
“Get close to me,” I told Belafonte. “Whisper in my ear and play with my hair.”
“What?”
“We need to look like a guy who’s just picked up a woman. Or maybe a guy and a woman wanting a third hand at cards.”
“Cards?” She thought a moment. “Oh.”
Reluctantly, she scooted as close as the shifter allowed. Her hand patted my head like I was a Welsh Corgi. “Try for passion,” I said.
She moved her head closer and twirled a lock of my hair. “Is this how you behaved with your male partners?”
“When it was necessary.”
Which was true. Harry and I had several times gone hand-in-hand into gay bars or situations to hunt for a perp or gather information. In one memorable instance I had donned a dress and wig to play a cross-dresser, Harry dubbing me “the ugliest woman he’d never been with”.
Thus engaged in mock passion, Belafonte and I cruised toward one of the bars supposed to contain the pimp. There were two damsels of the dark on the street, but there were recessed doorways in the buildings and alleys and I figured there might be ladies back there, either waiting or working on a customer.
“There’s a bottle under your seat,” I told Belafonte. “Grab it.”
She reached down and found a half-full pint of bourbon. “You’re going to drink?”
“Pop the cap and bring it to your lips. You don’t need to open your mouth, but we need to look like we’re partying. Hurry. If we’re made they’ll slide back into the shadows. Or Matthews might pull them off the street.”
She screwed the cap off the bottle, appeared to take a hit. She passed the bottle over and I did the same and pulled to the curb beside a small alley. Across the street a woman of Latina extraction – girl, really – in gold lamé shorts, a top little more than a black bra and net hose studied us. I gave her a wink and took another pull from the bottle. She waved with three coy fingers.
“Now what?” Belafonte whispered.
“According to Juarez, these are some of Matthews’ girls, and that means he should be in one of these bars.”
“Why then are we here?”
I kept my eyes on the hooker as if appraising her, talking to Belafonte with as little lip-motion as possible. “I don’t want to brace him on his turf. I want him out here.”
“How’s that going to happen?”
“I’m gonna run a play on these folks,” I said.
“A play?”
I winked, time to show the kid how the pros did things. “Stay put, watch how it’s done. I’ll have Shizzle-boy out here in two minutes.”
I half climbed, half fell from the Rover, recovered and meandered toward the hooker. “Hey, babuh,” I slurred. “My fren’ and I are looking for a li’l spice.”
A smile below the street-wise eyes; in this area I figured alley stand-ups and front-seat oral was more the norm. “I can party with y’all,” she said. “Two hundred an hour.”
“Hunh-unh,” I said. “I just need you to tell us where we can find a pretty white lady. We’re not into spicks.”
“You ain’t into what?”
“But you ain’t too shabby for darker meat. Tell you what, I’ll give you ten for a hummer … as long as my lady can watch.”
The eyes turned to slits. “Get the fuck outta here, asshole.”
“Don’t be mean, chica,” I said. “What else you got goin’ on?”
“FUCK OFF!”
“I’ll make it fifteen. Where you from, little mama? Haiti? Honduras? Fifteen bucks is like, what, a year’s pay over there?”
“GET LOST!”
I was betting one of Matthews’ other products had run to his hidey-hole to report a problem. I backed the girl against an abandoned storefront.
“Twenny, chica … all right? But you gotta do my lady, too.”
She tried to slip by to my right, I was in front of her. Darting left did the same. I was a fast drunk. I saw her eyes look past my shoulder and go from scared to relief.
“Yo, muthafucka,” said a voice from behind me; Shizzle, no doubt, out of his hidey-hole and protecting the merchandise. I spun. He was tall and in full-length leather topped with a wide-brimmed white hat, furious that I’d pulled him from the comfort of his brandy cavern.
I was about to cool him out with the shield but my eyes burst into flames. A fist caught me in the throat and sent me to the pavement on hands and knees, rolling away when a kick caught me in the gut and knocked out my breath.
“Muthafucka, you gonna be pissing blood for a week.”
Gasping for wind, I was too concentrated on warding off the next kick to try for the piece in my waistband. Plus I was near blind.
“Excuse me?” I heard a polite feminine voice say. It was followed by a sound reminiscent of a hammer striking meat and a simultaneous scream. Shizzle Diamond’s hatless head slammed the pavement beside mine and kept screaming, rolling on his back and pulling his legs to his chest.
I blinked through tears to see Holly Belafonte silhouetted against a streetlamp, a collapsible nightstick twirling through her fingers like a drum majorette in a holiday parade. She helped me to my feet. Matthews was still on the concrete, teeth clenched in pain. It seemed the hooker had pulled pepper spray from her purse and blasted my eyes. Belafonte had trotted over armed with the nightstick kept in her purse, and whipped it behind one of Shizzle’s legs. It hurt like hell.
I held my shield in Matthew’s face, then dragged him by his shirtfront into the alley where I patted him down, tossed the belt knife to Belafonte, and held the pimp against the building.
“You ain’t vice,” he said.
“FCLE.”
Confusion. “A state guy – why?”
I leaned close enough to let him smell my breath. “A pity the fabric burned but not the skin, T’Shawn. You left two perfect finger prints on her body, bud. It’ll go easier if you start talking.”
His eyes went wide and the pimp persona dissolved into cold-sweat fear. “Body? B-body? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, MAN?”
“You know, bitch.”
“NO I DON’T! TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”
“You beat Kylie to death and set her on fire.”
“I D-DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, MAN. SHE’S DEAD? OH JESUS. OH MY FUCKING GOD …”
I didn’t see knowledge or evasion: I saw stark terror. Ten years in the detective game, the last five so experienced from the first five that I knew the scumbucket had no idea what I was talking about.
“Tell me about Kylie,” I said, the hands loosening on his shirt.
“I-I ain’t seen her in four days. I figured she booked.”
“I think I believe you,” I said. “So right now I need the whole ugly truth, T’Shawn. Anything less, I’ll take you downtown and sweat you all night. Your choice.”
He’d probably have done a go-right-ahead bit if I’d been MDPD, but the FCLE had arrived in his squalid little world, which meant things were serious.
“Anything, man,” he said. “But you gotta know, it wasn’t me.”
I asked questions, he provided answers. Matthews had found Sandoval on the streets seven months back, drunk. He’d brought her to one of his two cribs, babied her. He also traded out the booze for H and put her on the street.
“What’d she do before she got to Miami?” I asked at one point.
“She never talked about that, man. Never. Like she’d shut it off. Bad shit at home, maybe. You wouldn’t believe what got done to some of these girls when they lived at home.”
In the end Matthews knew almost nothing of Sandoval; little more to him than an ATM, and as long as she kept pumping out money, he was fine with it. I shot a glance at Belafonte. Her eyes were expressionless but her nose looked like a sewage field was nearby.
“Beat it,” I said, releasing the pimp. Matthews ducked low past me and went to pick up his hat but Belafonte was standing on it. He gave her a wide berth and retreated down the street as we climbed back into the car to press onward into the unrevealed world of Kylie Sandoval. I took a deep breath and rested my head on the steering wheel. My cheek was sore from the punch and my side ached from the kick.
“Quite the interesting play,” Belafonte said, giving me my first-ever sample of what amusement sounded like in her voice. “Your take on Richard III, perhaps?”
“My kingdom for a nightstick,” I sighed.
10 (#ulink_5dc0b5fc-96e9-5dd7-abe1-d0dd1a6e4346)
I dropped Belafonte off at her car and headed to Viv’s. The place was deserted and my heart sank. I gave her a call.
“I’m running a half-hour late … be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make a food grab on the way in. Miguelito’s?”
“Olé.”
Viv arrived minutes later with burritos, chips, salsa and guacamole from a favored tacquería. She grinned as she scampered by to warm the chow and I used the time to admire Vivian’s slender form bending to put the food in the oven. She wore a simple blue skirt over improbably long legs and a gray blouse. The kicks were dark athletic shoes which looked out of place, but were the requisite wear for long hours of hard hospital floors.
We feasted on burritos – chicken for Viv, goat for me – washed down with Negra Modelo. Our conversation veered briefly into the sadness of Roberta Menendez’s loss, then, happier, into a recap of my weekend with Harry and his new prospects.
“Harry’s driving someone around?” Viv said. “He’s already bored with retirement?”
“Harry felt he could stash some playtime cash. And yes, Harry needs to be doing something or he gets mopey.”
“Mopey?”
“That time he got his head bashed in and spent weeks in the hospital? He hated TV so he tried crossword puzzles. Doing them bored him after two days, so he started making them. I remember one had the word ‘heimidemisemiquaver’ crossing the word ‘subdermatoglyphic’.”
“What the hell do those mean?”
“The first has something to do with music, the second concerns fingerprint patterns, and is the longest word where every letter is used just once, the reason Harry wanted to use it. It took him a month to build that damn puzzle but when he was done it made the New York Times Sunday version look like it was written by a ten-year-old.”
Viv gave me a look. “You miss him, don’t you?”
I made a smile happen. “We had some good times. But the world moves on.”
Another look, then a change of subject. “Harry thinks he’ll like being a chauffeur?” Vivian asked, curling the long legs on to the sofa.
“Driver,” I corrected. “We’ll just have to wait to find out.”
“I guess we will,” she said, standing and angling toward the stairs. “But until then, I know something that can’t wait much longer.” She winked.
I was off the couch like a shot.
Viv left for MD-Gen before six a.m. and I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of a fleeting kiss. Breakfast was leftover frijoles refritos and chips and I was ready to attack the Sandoval case when my phone rang: JEREMY.
“There’s a huge commotion down the street, Carson,” my brother said before I could speak. “What is it?”
I suppressed a moan: My brother always wanted something.
“A commotion?”
“An ambulance, a quartet of cop cars. A news van. There’s a goddamn circus out there. What the hell is going on, Carson?”
“Why should I know that?”
“You’re a big-league detective, right? Find out.”
“Jeremy, I’m—”
“It’s a distraction. I can’t concentrate on my work.”
I figured Jeremy had been up at daybreak studying the morning’s financial indicators from Asia, preparing for the day’s buys and sells. I’d seen what a trading floor looked like and assumed part of Jeremy’s success in the market came from years in an institution for the criminally insane.
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Drive out and shoot them?”
“How much do you pay in rent, Carson?” He hung up.
Through a Byzantine set of manipulations, my brother was my landlord and I paid a hundred bucks a month to live in a home that should have cost three grand. I stared at the phone, sighed, and made a call to King Barlow, an investigator with the Key West PD.
“I got a weird call, King. From a friend, sorta, that lives out there. He says there’s a commotion down the block. He’s kind of a crank, and thought I could assure him it’s not an alien invasion or whatever.” I gave King the block number and he blew out a breath.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Carson. Gonna be on the news any minute, I expect.”
“What is it, King?”
“Amos Schrum has come home to die.”
A picture immediately came to mind: a man of towering height with his face looking hewn from flint, all angles and hollows. His eyes were squinty small and peered from the cave of his brow, and his curling, snow-white hair flowed back from his high forehead like a foaming wave. Schrum’s stentorian voice had once been compared to “a trumpet calling the righteous to battle”.
The Reverend Amos Schrum had been a fixture on the religious scene since I was a kid, my mother dragging me to one of his tent revivals thirty-something years back. Schrum would have been in his late forties at the time, and though I recalled not a word of his message, my child’s eyes were riveted to the figure on the distant stage: diamond-bright in cones of light that seemed aimed from the heavens. People were Amen-ing and Hallelujah-ing. Some wept openly. A black woman beside me began babbling nonsense. A white man fell to his hands and knees and started barking like a dog. Throngs rushed the stage to be saved.
If there were more than a few people who conflated Amos Schrum with God Almighty, I could almost understand.
“Schrum’s from Key West?” I asked.
“Lived here until he went to bible school. He felt close to the place – family home and all – and kept the house. He’s had a caretaker living there, though Schrum hasn’t visited in years.”
“What’s wrong with the guy?”
“Supposedly the old ticker might blow at any second. His people told us Schrum was arriving today around daybreak, and when the news got out we’d need crowd control.”
“Schrum’s that big a deal?”
“The guy’s network broadcasts into over seven million homes a week. He carries a big stick in conservative and evangelistic religious circles.”
“So I should tell my br— … friend that his neighborhood’s gonna be chaotic for a while?”
“There’ll be church buses hauling in the faithful to pay respects, prayer vigils, TV vans, that kind of thing. At least until the bucket gets kicked.”
“Thanks, King. I’ll pass it on.”
I channel-surfed news outlets, stopping on a woman backgrounded by a photograph of Schrum and I upped the volume.
“… seventy-six-year-old evangelist and creator of the Crown of Glory television empire, is reportedly gravely ill and has moved from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to the house in Key West where the influential pastor spent his early years … wife of thirty years died five years ago from ovarian cancer … no details on his illness are available, though a history of heart problems … pacemaker implanted in March …”
I called Jeremy and told him to get used to crowd scenes.
“It’s already started,” he moaned. “Four more news vans and two dozen halfwits weeping in the street. One lunatic is dressed in sackcloth and dragging a wooden cross. Maybe I’ll saunter over in a devil mask and tap the window. Give Schrum a heart attack so I can get some peace.”
“Stay away, Jeremy. Crowds are potentially dangerous.”
“You said my visage no longer graced the halls of police departments. I’m a free man.”
A year after being identified as dead and removed from Wanted listings, I was less fearful of my brother being identified with old photos than of his need to meddle and manipulate. Despite his claimed need for peace, a crowd of emotionally distraught mourners would fascinate my brother.
“Stay inside and let it blow over,” I said. “Promise me you’ll ignore the commotion.”
“Can you believe this,” he said – and I knew he’d been looking out his window – “a guy with a bullhorn has started ranting about homosexuals. Interesting.”
“Stay inside,” I told him. “Promise me.”
“Yes, yes, of course …” he said, hanging up the phone, suddenly distracted.
11 (#ulink_171ec98f-82e3-5a02-8582-f34f14b9de13)
Frisco Dredd sat naked save for a T-shirt and briefs in the tiny room on the southern edge of Little Havana, watching the traffic crawl down Highway 90 through a dirt-hazed window. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a dripping sink, the shower a two-by-two recess in the wall, the plastic curtain half hanging on the broken-tile floor.
The rooms rented by the week, mainly to the desperate, downtrodden and addicted. But the hotel-apartment was anonymous, the other dwellers transient and acknowledging Dredd with a fast nod and averted eyes, if at all.
I live amidst the wicked until my tasks are finished … Dredd thought. He closed his eyes and recalled a passage from Malachi: “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet …”
The room came furnished with a beaten couch, a lopsided chair and a wooden table. The bed was in an alcove and Dredd had stripped off the threadbare cover and stained sheets and put them in the garbage, buying a sleeping bag to put atop the mattress and a fresh white sheet to cover his body. He’d also purchased a small refrigerator and a cheap set of weights to keep his body strong.
His body needed to stay fit: It carried precious cargo.
Dredd started to stand, but his knees quivered and he sat heavily. When with the Jezebel last night, the power had flowed through him brighter and purer than the sun and while he worked the holy symphony sang in his head. But after he’d finished, his energy had drained away, leaving him weak as a kitten.
Dredd looked at his briefs and saw the purple stain of dried blood. He’d been so wearied he’d fallen asleep before removing his wire. He winced as he eased the underwear down and over his animal. Dredd fought his way to standing and limped across the room to the kitchen drawer he used as a tool box. He pulled it open: hammer, vise-grips, duct tape and – tucked in back – the spool of .32 gauge copper wire and the snips. He grabbed the snips and returned to the bed, sitting on the edge with his legs spread wide, picking gingerly at the base of his animal, grimacing as he pulled up a knotted loop of thread-thin brass wire, snipping the strand. Teeth clenched against the pain – nothin’ compared to your pain and tribulation, Lord, forgive my weakness – he slowly unwrapped the biting wire from his animal, fresh blood seeping from cuts inflicted when the women were close and his animal awakened and hungered for them. But the constricting wire stopped that, the fierce pain reminding him of his holy mission.
Gasping, Dredd dropped the crusted wire to the floor. He fell back to the mattress and began to sing in a high and whispery voice.
“When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be white?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
Dredd stripped off his shirt to let the Lord see that Frisco Dredd had again fought his animal and won.
“Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb …”
After several verses, Dredd gathered his strength, pushed from the bed and went to the bathroom, dropping to his knees beside the sink. The pipes went into a jagged hole in the wall. Dredd snaked his arm through the hole until his fingers withdrew a leather rectangle with a silver cross of duct tape.
Dredd returned to the bed. From the leather holder he withdrew a black notebook. His missions, his holy crusades, were listed within, along with valuable information: times, dates, locations, employers, routes traveled, maps, photos … Time to prepare for the next mission. Dredd thumbed open a page, a list of names. Who would be chosen? Who was next?
Dredd held the notebook inches above his bleeding animal, showing it to the gaping wound.
The choice was His to make.
12 (#ulink_962e0b5e-f3bf-5c7d-b48c-9286dd8aed1e)
Jeremy Ryder’s Key West home sat toward the rear of a long, palm-studded lot abloom with bougainvillea and myrtle, the front yard picket-fenced with ficus on both corners. Pastel yellow with white accenting and a deep porch, the house stood two stories tall plus an attic story beneath a high-pitched roof, a rounded tower twelve feet in diameter comprising the southern corner of the home and ending with a third-story projection with cupola. The majestic dwelling had been built in the early 1920s, when ceilings were a proper height, twelve feet. The original owner, Mr Tobias Throckington, had made his fortune during Prohibition, running liquor from Cuba to speakeasies as distant as Galveston.
It was the top story of the tower where Ryder currently stood, his office, a burled-oak desk curved to fit the wall below one of the wide windows. On the desk were the six small displays of his Bloomberg terminal, his link to the financial world. On the other end of the desk was his personal computer, a large-screen iMac. The Bloomberg monitors danced with charts and graphs and streaming numbers, the personal computer was dark.
Pushed to the desk was a Hermann Miller chair, black and expensive and purchased for comfort, as Jeremy Ryder sat in it several hours daily. A richly detailed oaken wardrobe sat across the room, outfitted to hold files and office supplies. Jeremy Ryder hated file cabinets: they reminded him of institutions.
Three windows faced outward, the northernmost angling toward the re-occupied Schrum edifice. The home had always been well-kept, but lifeless for the most part, a crew arriving every second summer week to keep things tidy, diminishing to every three in the cooler months. The only vehicles in regular attendance belonged to either the crew or tourists gawking at the architectural excesses on the broad avenue. They paused before his home, mouths drooping, cameras ticking.
But now the street resembled a parking lot: news vans, cop cars, the gathering crowd. A catastrophe, Jeremy Ryder thought.
But an interesting one.
A hundred people now, up from fifty just minutes ago, not including the news types. Some stared mutely at the Schrum house, others knelt and prayed. From nowhere a man had appeared wearing a coarse robe and dragging a wooden cross up and down the street.
Jeremy started to draw his blinds, but stared down the street, unable to pull the cord.
Why are they there? What do they see? What can a dying man give them?
No … what do they think a dying man can give them?
The sound of an incoming Skype. Jeremy flicked his personal computer into life. The screen filled with the image of Ava Davanelle in a green surgical gown, her shoulder-length hair snow white though she was in her late thirties, her skin fair, her green eyes sparkling with amusement.
“How goes the day, boyo?” Davanelle said. It amused Jeremy Ryder that her hair was as white as that of the glum Schrum supposedly withering away down the street. Ava was calling during her morning break at the South Florida morgue. She was its newest pathologist, hired last year from her post in Chicago.
Jeremy smiled and leaned the wall across from the camera with arms crossed. “I was checking Baltic shipping rates, but got distracted by the Mongol hordes.”
Davanelle sipped from a coffee cup. “Strom Thurmond served in the Senate until a hundred years old. His last years he resembled a drooling puppet carried into the chamber by his aides.”
“Meaning?”
“Schrum’s a tough and driven old buzzard. Driven types don’t die easy.”
“I can’t work,” Jeremy said, scowling out the window and noting church buses pulling to the Schrum house. “Maybe I’ll saunter over and inspect the carnival.”
An arched eyebrow from Davanelle. “That so?”
“Carson advises me to keep distant from the spectacle, Ava,” Jeremy said. “What’s your advice?”
She smiled. “When it rains, use an umbrella.”
Davanelle blew a kiss and the screen went dark. Jeremy changed his khakis and sport shirt for a sky-blue seersucker suit, cream shirt, red-accented tie, slipping bare feet into cordovan loafers, stopping at the entryway closet to select a cream Panama and large sunglasses. He opened the door to a day bright with promise, and walked toward the milling crowd. The police had blocked half the thoroughfare to give people room for their various enterprises, from open-mouth stares to prayer to lugging a wooden cross. There were impromptu singings of hymns, prayers, candles dribbling wax all over the street. Jeremy watched until bored, ten minutes. He yawned and started back to his house, but paused as a stretch limousine with blackout windows passed the cross street at the end of the block. Normally, a stretch limo was not worth a second glance, another celebrity vacationing in the Keys, but this one was pulling an eight-foot trailer.
A limo with a trailer?
Jeremy reversed direction, jogging down the street to see the vehicle pull into the gated drive of a house two doors down, the house directly behind the home where Reverend Schrum lay. Two men stepped from the vehicle, dark suits, sunglasses, sized like football linemen, one was a buzz-cut redhead, the other had dark hair and Jeremy knew he was seeing bodyguards, security, whatever. Small minds, large muscles, no creative resources.
The day was getting brighter.
Jeremy retreated around the corner and stationed himself midpoint on the block, looking down the back yards. After ten minutes his conjecture was rewarded. The new arrivals at the house whose backyard abutted the Schrum backyard were now crossing between houses.
Why not park in front? Jeremy wondered. The crowds a problem? Or did they not wish to be seen?
Jeremy saw the two security types, plus another of the same rugged stature, a third who doubled as a driver, perhaps. With them were two others, one a man in a motorized wheelchair with tall tires – obviously carried in the rental van – and an auburn-haired woman, tall and slender and walking precariously between the yards, the effect of high heels sinking in to sandy ground. At one point she teetered sideways and when the red-haired bodyguard put out his hand to assist, she slapped it away.
Though Jeremy had seen the wheelchair man and auburn-tressed woman for three seconds and from two hundred feet distant, he knew their names and occupations.
He’d made money from them.
The quintet disappeared into the lush foliage at the rear of the Schrum home. Jeremy slipped his hands into his pockets and, whistling a jaunty air, strolled back to his home to ponder the meaning of the visitation.
13 (#ulink_f979d4be-c4aa-52d4-bba0-0a81f97349f8)
Eliot Winkler’s motorized chair buzzed to the bottom of the steps to the back porch of the Schrum residence. The rear door was opened by Andy Delmont, a gospel singer and one of the Crown of Glory network’s most popular celebrities, his five albums in wide distribution. Delmont was in his early thirties, with red-blond hair, emerald-green eyes, freckle-dappled cheeks, and a bright, engaging smile that bordered on childlike. As always, Delmont looked dressed for a performance, white country-and-western-style suit with embroidered lapels and mother-of-pearl buttons, sky-blue shirt with a bolo tie, silver-tipped leather straps through a silver, cruciform fitting.
“Mr Winkler. Ms Winkler,” Delmont said, his face eager to please. “So good to see you. We didn’t have time to install a ramp, but I’m sure a couple of your men can lift you up to—”
Winkler scowled and pressed a lever on the wheelchair’s arm, the customized Viking all-terrain-wheelchair climbing the steps as the seat adjusted to keep Winkler upright. He reached the top and rolled across the threshold, Delmont having to jump back to keep his toes from being run over.
“Where is he?” Winkler demanded as he whirred past. Vanessa Winkler followed, then paused at a full-length hallway mirror to freshen her lipstick and pat her elegant coif.
“The Reverend is upstairs,” Delmont said, stepping quickly to catch up. “The doctor is with him.” Delmont nodded to a latticed metal door down a short hallway. “There’s an elevator, sir.”
Winkler rolled to the metal grate, pressing the button and rolling inside before the door was fully open. He craned his head toward his sister.
“You coming, or you gonna primp all day?”
Vanessa Winkler dropped the lipstick into her purse. “You don’t have to do this, Eliot. Let’s get back in the limo and—”
“Get in the elevator, Nessa.”
An audible and dramatic sigh and Vanessa Winkler entered, pressing between her brother and the operation panel. Winkler grinned wetly and nodded toward the rounded feminine derriere at eye level.
“You reckon that’s a good ass, Andrew?”
Delmont looked stricken. “Pardon me, Mr Winkler?”
“You think Vanessa’s ass is a nice one? Speak up, son.”
Delmont colored with embarrassment and forced a smile to his face. “I … uh … don’t believe I should be the judge of—”
“Closing in on fifty,” Winkler continued, “and she wears pants tighter than wallpaper. How much it cost to keep that butt so high up, Nessa?”
“I’m not listening, Eliot.”
“Nessa could buy her own gym, Andy boy – hell, a hundred of ’em – and keep that machinery tuned up in private, but instead she goes to some sweaty club. Why, you ask. Cuz Nessa loves showing off for the young bucks. Now and then she brings one home and drains him dry.”
Vanessa Winkler remained expressionless. “You’re reaching new levels of disgusting, Eliot.”
A bell bonged and the door slid open. Eliot Winkler rolled out into a hallway, followed by his sister and Delmont. “Where you got him hid?” Winkler said, looking both directions.
“To the left, Mr Winkler. Toward the front.”
Winkler passed through a set of wispy curtains, pushing them aside and finding a small room holding a half-dozen mismatched chairs.
“He ain’t here.”
“That’s the visitor’s waiting room, sir. Keep going.”
A door on the far side was open and Winkler’s chair rolled into a large, high-ceilinged room, his sister in his wake. Just inside the room was a desk with a computer monitor and several files. Dr Roland Uttleman, the preacher’s private physician, was at the desk. A slender, sixtyish man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and round silver-framed glasses, he stood and nodded at the incoming trio.
“Hello, folks. How’re you, Eliot?”
“What’s this set-up?” Winkler said, pointing at the desk. “Checkpoint Charlie?”
“It’s my medical station, Eliot,” Dr Roland Uttleman said, coming around the desk with outstretched hand. Winkler ignored the gesture, rolling past, the chair’s rubber tires hissing over the polished wood flooring.
The room was cavernous enough to echo, nearly as long as the house was wide. One entire wall, door to sitting area, was lost behind flowers, some thrusting from vases, others foam crosses abloom with buds. Inscriptions ran from Get Well Soon, to Our Prayers Are with You to simply Love. Two folding tables had been brought in, pots of bloom atop and below. At the far end a sitting area was in place: couch, low table, a pair of large, soft chairs, a fifty-inch flat-screen television on the wall. The window behind the area was closed with a heavy drape.
Centering the long room was a king-sized mechanical bed flanked by medical monitors, and centering the bed was the long form of Amos Schrum, his robe thick and dark and running from his shoulders to his calves, the white bouffant of hair like a soft snowdrift over a pitted crag of flint.
Winkler rolled to the bed where Schrum appeared to be asleep, though when his eyes blinked open they were strangely bright, and focused immediately on Winkler.
“Hello, Eliot,” Schrum rasped, elevating the top third of the bed to sitting position. “How’s my old friend?”
Winkler reached out and took Schrum’s hand. “I got a lot on my mind, Amos. How you doing?”
“The good Lord granted me another sunrise. I’ll take it.”
“He does it because He loves you, Amos. You’ve carried His sword into great battles.”
Schrum coughed and Uttleman appeared with iced water. Schrum sipped and cleared his throat. “His … full glory will soon be … mine to behold, Eliot.”
Winkler’s chair spun to the others in the room. “How ’bout you people leave us be? Go get coffee, or food, or maybe Nessa will show you her butt. Me and Amos need some alone time.”
Delmont almost ran to the elevator. Uttleman looked unhappy, but followed. Instead of departing, Vanessa Winkler strode forty feet to the balcony window and yanked open the drapes. Light poured inside, and with it the low murmur of prayers and hymns from the street below.
Winkler glared at his sister, shook his head, and turned to Schrum. “You’ve come back from these heart things before, Amos. He needed you here and He touched you with healing.”
“That was years ago, Eliot. Perhaps my miracles are all used up.”
Winkler leaned forward. “I pray that’s not true. But you have one miracle yet to grant: My miracle.”
Schrum’s wide shoulders drooped. “Eliot …”
“I’ve done many great things for you, Amos. All I ask is one great thing for me.”
“I think about it all the time, Eliot. It’s just, just …” Schrum seemed overcome by the effort and his head fell back to the pillow, eyes closed. Breath rattled in his throat and his head drooped to the side.
“Amos!” Winkler screeched, grabbing at Schrum’s hand. “AMOS!”
Schrum’s eyes batted open. “I’m fine, Eliot. I’m just … so tired.”
Eliot Winkler’s face, a visage that cowed Titans of industry, crumbled into that of a child lost in the dark. His hands tugged at Schrum’s robe. “Amos … you promised. It was your idea that day when I was in … when I realized my soul was in jeopardy. You said, you promised, that you had a way, that there was a way …”
“I’ve been working on it, Eliot. But I …”
“You promised you’d do it. Please …” Eliot Winkler started weeping.
Vanessa Winkler turned from the window to her brother. “Jesus, Eliot. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Winkler’s head spun to his sister, eyes bright with tears and anger. “I’m trying to save my soul. I’d save yours, too, if it didn’t already reside in the Pit.”
Vanessa Winkler rolled her eyes. Her brother turned back to Schrum. “Amos, I need you. I’ve never needed anyone more.”
Schrum’s hand found Winkler’s. “Finish the project on your own, Eliot. It’s nothing to someone with your resources.”
“I CAN’T, AMOS! Without your blessed presence, it’s unsanctified. You told me that the event is stuck in time, waiting only to be released. Its release has to be engineered by a man of God.”
“I can’t even stand up, Eliot.”
“The project doesn’t need you to stand, Amos. You just have to be there to make it real. YOU HAVE TO DO IT, AMOS. IT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!”
“Oh, for shit sakes,” Vanessa Winkler muttered.
Schrum started to lift his head, but it fell back into the pillow. “The daily stress of the project … it’s not something I can manage, Eliot. Not on a daily basis … All I have is the power of my faith in God.”
“He listens to you, Amos!” Winkler beseeched. “Beg Him for strength.”
Schrum coughed and his eyes fell closed. Uttleman appeared, his face dark. “You have to leave, Eliot. The stress will kill Amos.”
Tears staining his cheeks, Eliot Winkler whirred reluctantly to the elevator. Vanessa followed, high heels ticking the floor like tack hammers. Uttleman saw the pair to the first floor, riding down in silence.
“Andy,” Uttleman said to the singer, sitting at the kitchen table and arranging sheet music, “would you escort our guests across the yard?”
Delmont scurried to catch the Winklers, now exiting the back door. When it closed, Uttleman took the lift upstairs, where Amos Schrum was sitting up in the bed. The doctor frowned at the open drapes, crossed the floor, and pulled them tight.
“He’s gone?” Schrum said.
Uttleman went to his desk and tapped keys on the desk monitor to see live video from six cameras. “Heading through the yard.”
“Where’s Andy?”
“Walking beside the Winklers and chattering like a magpie while they ignore him.”
“Think he’s coming back today?” Schrum frowned. “Andy?”
Uttleman shrugged. “What’s so important about Andy?”
“He sings and prays and doesn’t require anything.” Schrum narrowed an eye at his physician. “It’s a nice change.”
“We’re alone, Amos. And we need to talk.”
Schrum stood and angled toward the sitting area at the front of the room. “Later. I’m gonna go watch some television.”
“It’s important, Amos.”
Schrum grabbed a pint bottle of cough syrup from his bedside table and poured two ounces into a glass as his black leather slippers padded to the sitting area. He sat on a lounger, crossed his legs, tipped back the glass and finished the syrup – cherry vodka actually – in a single swig. Uttleman followed and sat on a wooden chair.
“Eliot won’t be mollified, Amos,” Uttleman said. “You better get used to him.”
Schrum started to respond, but only sighed. A sound of singing drifted from the street below. Schrum stood, crept to the front window and furtively peered around the edge of a drape. “My lord, Roland. There must be three hundred souls out there, all waiting for me to die.”
“All hating that you might die, Amos. They love you.”
Schrum’s face was impassive. He frowned toward Uttleman.
“How did I get to this point, Roland? Hiding in Key West like a schoolboy feigning the flu?”
“You were being kind to an old friend and one of your greatest backers over the years. You offered hope, was that so bad?”
Schrum held up the glass of flavored vodka. “I’d been drinking. I might have even been joking.”
“You can still pull it off, Amos. Eliot needs it bad.”
Schrum didn’t seem to hear, head canted to the choir singing to him from below. He again peered around the drape.
“Come away from the window, Amos,” Uttleman said. “They’ll see you.”
“And?”
“And they may think you’re not as ill as reports are suggesting.”
Schrum sat back down on the chair. He picked up the remote and turned on the television, Uttleman noting the selector set on a small religious cable channel out of Alabama.
“I’m starting to feel better these last couple of days, Roland. Maybe even able to return to the Jacksonville studios in a couple weeks.”
“Before that, uh, blessed event happens, Amos, I’ll need to prepare from a … a medical standpoint.”
Schrum looked tired of the train of conversation and waved Uttleman from the room. “I’m feeling an upturn, so start preparing. If you see Andy outside, tell him I could use a little entertainment. And a ham-and-cheese sandwich.”
14 (#ulink_8cbba057-a759-54b4-ae8c-96849a2a7f82)
The FCLE comprised two floors in Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center. Though it was the hub of municipal government, I suspected the politically attuned and sporadically Machiavellian Roy McDermott was the reason our agency had been allocated such prime airspace. The admin and upper-level investigative and legal types occupied the twenty-third floor, with the one below the province of pool investigators, support, and record-keeping.
When Roy had moved Ziggy Gershwin from the tight back room of my office to his own space, he’d kept the kid on the twenty-third floor, claiming there was no room downstairs, but I knew it was because Roy figured Gershwin was a future star, proving himself in the cases we’d closed.
Gershwin’s office was small and windowless and down a long hall past the legal team. He was at his desk, tipped back in his chair and studying reports. We’d spent a lot of time together and he seemed to have adopted some of my traits, trading in the former skate-punk garb for summer-weight jackets over T-shirts and jeans, and wearing dark running shoes, which beat the hell out of hard soles on the occasions when you had to chase lowlifes down alleys and over fences.
He looked up and grinned. “S’up, Big Ryde?”
“I need a listing of sex offenders in a fifty-mile radius, Zigs, especially those recently released from prison. Got a couple trainees you can use?”
My worst fear was that the perp had settled an old score with Sandoval, but had more scores to settle. We needed to take this monster down fast.
“Uh, no problem.”
“You sound hesitant.”
“Just thinking who I can put on it. Roy’s got me on the Menendez case, kind of on the QT.”
“Menendez? Like what?”
“The lady’s a saint, right? So no one’s looking past that. Roy wanted me to take a tiptoe through her history.”
Meaning dig into Menendez deeper than others were doing, but leave a light footprint, if any. All cop agencies have biases toward their own, and it was best outsiders handle such things.
“Understood,” I said.
“But no problem with checking the pervs,” Gershwin assured me, picking up his phone. “I’ll put Wagner and Brazano on it. They’re new, but good.”
“Gracias, amigo.”
I was thinking about Menendez as I returned to my office. It was the worst type of case: a beloved and talented public figure killed for apparently no reason, knifed down in her prime in her own home, not a shred of evidence to be found. I was pitying every MDPD detective when my cell rang: Belafonte.
“Good morning,” I said, trying for jovial to balance out my dark musings on Menendez. “How’s my favorite MDPD liaison today?”
“She just heard about a body found in the waterway in Golden Glades,” Belafonte said quietly. “She’s hearing ‘wrapped in a burnt sheet’.”
So much for starting the day on a high note. With siren and flashers pushing aside traffic, I raced there in fifteen minutes, a retiree-oriented neighborhood shaded by palms and garnished with tropical foliage. The street was blocked by a white-and-green MDPD patrol car and I continued to a brick home fronted by another cruiser, an ambulance, and mobile units from the Medical Examiner’s office and the Forensics team. Anxious residents stood at the curb and beyond them I saw Belafonte beside the canal a hundred feet behind the house, part of a highway of water running from the glades to Biscayne Bay.
The body had been bobbing at the water’s edge, but was now ashore, a charred husk shaped like a mummy. Belafonte was talking to a distraught-looking elderly guy holding a Chihuahua to his breast. I figured he’d found the horror. The scene tech was a friend, Deb Clayton.
“This no place to leave a corpse, Carson,” Deb said. “The perp would have to cross the yard, set off a half-dozen yappy dogs. Seems more likely it was dumped upriver.”
I looked upstream and saw Dixie Highway bridging the canal, the traffic a line of fast metal. I heard the roar of heavy trucks and motorcycles. Belafonte saw where I was looking.
“Even at night, there’s a lot of traffic on Dixie. Better would be Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just past Dixie. Traffic’s lighter. But she could have been dumped anywhere above here.”
“Wonder what the flow rate is?” I said, studying the waves.
Belafonte bent to the water’s edge and found a sodden cigarette butt. She flipped it into the canal and watched it float lazily away.
“The water’s moving a quarter-mile an hour, give or take.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”
“First we got a date at Missing Persons.”
The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.
I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.
“We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”
“Four a.m.?”
“The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”
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J. A. Kerley
From the bestselling author of Her Last Scream, a chilling tale of ritual murder and corruption, featuring Detective Carson Ryder.The Reverend Honus Schrum, a nationally renowned minister and owner of a broadcasting empire, tells the media he has come home to Key West to die. Meanwhile, Detective Carson Ryder is investigating the ritualistic murders of young women with chequered pasts, discovering the killings have religious overtones.Simultaneously, a newly retired Harry Nautilus takes a job as a driver/bodyguard for Richard Owsley, an ambitious pastor in Mobile. They come to Florida, where Owsley meets with Schrum and is enlisted to complete a special and mysterious ‘project’ Schrum has promised a billionaire benefactor.As Carson digs deeper into the murders, Harry, interest piqued by all the hush-hush goings-on of his new employer, begins to covertly investigate the strange project. Their independent investigations begin to converge, and Carson and Harry uncover a horrifying connection between the cases…
Copyright (#ulink_e4711b57-50a0-5088-a105-9ac5dd81dbf0)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Jack Kerley 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover design and typography © Blacksheep-uk.com (http://Blacksheep-uk.com)
Cover photographs © David Wile/PlainPicture.com (Main Image): (Bible) © iStock.com (http://iStock.com): (candles) © Francois Dion/Gettyimages.com (http://Gettyimages.com)
Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007493692
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007493708
Version: 2014-11-29
Dedication (#ulink_c6c59b80-ca81-57a7-8283-6f51a15f4e43)
To Floyd and Addie Richardson –
And the house where the trains rolled by
Contents
Cover (#u89489e95-1e00-58a6-a4f5-fab5f7238af7)
Title Page (#u298de9af-c4f1-54d9-9427-7fc34b72a9d0)
Copyright (#u8d43bcd9-1e43-5f62-b2b4-1ee7b1eb8b20)
Dedication (#ud2b37d1a-a1bc-5824-bfd5-38d1316671cb)
Chapter 1 (#u286ec2f3-32c0-50e6-b63e-7a3abca75d32)
Chapter 2 (#ubdc54453-5e70-51af-adb6-5dd1b2ee83e5)
Chapter 3 (#u385b63a0-62cd-5273-8030-73e7e4180283)
Chapter 4 (#u06e27f0e-0ab7-5fbc-826e-ca1cac739966)
Chapter 5 (#u0a4ba689-729e-59cc-b2c4-74bdbe3a963c)
Chapter 6 (#u1d0bb717-6e5c-5771-bbe0-24a5202e4337)
Chapter 7 (#u56dc67a7-8182-5c53-befe-534a5a9aa360)
Chapter 8 (#ud4051261-dcc9-5b4d-af06-c6ebdb9b5e1a)
Chapter 9 (#u01a36f28-c7f7-51e3-97b6-933cf4cd0f39)
Chapter 10 (#u01ebb54a-52a9-5bec-b775-7f8294cd1bbd)
Chapter 11 (#u470fc2f7-3edd-5e8c-9c24-365931d147e3)
Chapter 12 (#u079d4f67-541b-5ea1-9d46-39a415aaac6a)
Chapter 13 (#uecdb77a8-acdc-5f37-90f1-661665c0273f)
Chapter 14 (#u238f60de-a856-541f-8c2b-53cb672f6324)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by J.A. Kerley (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_df59bfc8-703a-5a8e-906b-e15978af5c90)
Miami, April
“I’m putting in the last of Christ’s blood.”
Raoul Herrera studied the slender needle for a long moment, assured himself it was the right choice, then bent forward, his skilled fingers guiding the needle into flesh, adding a bright highlight to a plump drop of red dripping from a thorn. Herrera dabbed a cotton ball in antiseptic, blotted his client’s scapula, then leaned back and studied his work.
“Done,” he said.
Herrera flicked off the instrument and admired the most fantastic tattoo he’d ever created, a masterwork of detail that had stretched his talent to its limits, making him develop new ways of adding depth to color, motion to stillness, beauty to horror.
Yet all the tattoo consisted of was the back of a head. Not inked on the back of a head, an illustration of the back of a head.
The client had entered Skin Art by Raoul six weeks ago. The tattoo artist was alone in the back room, sanitizing equipment and preparing to close for the evening when he’d walked into the reception area. Though the door rang when opened, the bell had not sounded. Yet a man stood in the center of the Oriental carpet, utterly still, eyes staring into Herrera’s eyes, as if knowing the precise space the tattooist would occupy.
Herrera’s heartbeats accelerated. There was nothing but night outside his window and the neighborhood was dangerous in the dark. He kept a .38 pistol in back and Herrera mentally measured his steps to the gun.
“I’m closed,” he said.
The man seemed not to hear. He looked in his mid-thirties, hard-traveled years, lines etched into his angular face, his eyes tight and crinkled, as though he’d spent a lifetime squinting into sunlight. He was small in stature, wearing battered Levis and a faded Western-style shirt with sleeves rolled up over iron-hard forearms. His face was small and flat and centered by a nose broken at least once, the hair a tight cap of coiled brown that fell low on his forehead and gave a simian cast to his features. His eyes were the color of spent briquettes of charcoal.
“I said I’m done for the day, man,” Herrera repeated. “Come back tomorrow.”
Again, the man seemed deaf to Herrera’s words. Work-hardened hands unfolded a sheet of paper and held up a richly detailed illustration of Jesus inked into a man’s bicep, a work by Herrera that had been featured in a tattoo artists’ publication.
“Did you do this?” the man said. “Do you claim it yours?”
“It’s my work. Why?”
“It ain’t quite real yet, is it?”
Despite his uneasiness, Herrera felt his ability challenged. “You won’t find better, mister. Not that I figure you could afford it.”
The man balled the page and tossed it to the floor. “It ain’t there yet. It looks like Him. But He ain’t in it.”
Meaning Jesus.
“Use the door, mister,” Herrera said. “I’m closed.”
Eyes locked on to Herrera, the man turned to the sign switch and flicked off the neon display. He pushed the door closed and set the lock. Herrera inched closer to his gun. The man lifted his hands.
“I mean you no harm. Look here …”
The man eased a hand into his pocket and produced a roll of paper money. He crossed to the artist, took Herrera’s hand and pressed the roll into his palm.
“Count it up.”
Herrera did. Over five thousand dollars in fresh, clean bills.
The new client pushed through the beaded curtain to the work area in back and the tattoo artist followed. The man withdrew his tails from his pants, unbuttoning the shirt and throwing it to the floor. He turned to display his back, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. When he moved, the muscles twitched with sudden electricity, as if hidden power had been awakened. The man sat in the tattooing chair and stared over his shoulder at Herrera.
“Turn a mirror so I can see. This time you gonna get it right.”
Herrera shook his head. “That’s not how it works. I make drawings. Get your approval.”
The man closed his eyes and retreated inside his head. After several long moments he nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You want me to do Jesus, I take it?” Herrera asked.
“The back of His head from the bottom of my neck down. His exact size and as real as His tribulation.”
“How do I know if I’m representing the, uh, subject correctly?”
“He’ll guide your hand,” the man said, meaning Jesus.
Herrera had felt no hand but his own on the needles through a dozen sessions, but something seemed to have driven him to a greater height of art than ever before. The back of Christ’s head appeared dimensional, a tumble of brown and shadow starting at the base of the client’s neck and feathering out on his lower spine. The crown of thorns seemed so real that wearing a shirt would be impossible, the fabric tearing on the horrific spikes, stained by the bright blood dripping down curling locks of tangled hair. The project was beautiful and awesome and terrible in equal measure.
And now it was complete.
The man stood from the chair and reached for his shirt. When he turned toward Herrera the tattooist’s breath froze in his throat. A gulley had been cut into his customer’s chest, an inch-wide strip of flesh and tissue running from below one flat nipple to the other. It was a recent wound, the furrow red and puckered and weeping yellow fluid. Herrera swallowed hard, wondering if the visor-like cut went all the way to bone.
“Um, what happened there?” he asked.
The man pulled on his shirt and left the top half unbuttoned, the raw slit visible in the V. His dead-charcoal eyes bored into Herrera and he shook his head like the tattoo artist was the village idiot.
“He’s gotta be able to see out now, don’t He?”
Meaning Jesus.
2 (#ulink_334340ed-f59b-5bd1-af20-a35c4d80c5b1)
Mobile, Alabama. Mid May
“Carson. Yo, brother. Wake up.”
“Mmmf,” I said, trying to slap a big hand shaking my shoulder. I missed and slapped my own cheek.
“Come on, Cars … time to get hoppin’ and boppin’.”
The only reason I opened my eyes was because I smelled bacon. Say what you will about alarm clocks, bacon is better. I looked up and saw blue sky filtered through tree branches. I tried to sit up, made it on the second try. I was in a lounge chair on Harry Nautilus’s back patio. The picnic table beside me looked like a launching pad for beer bottles. A pedestal fan on the patio was blowing air across me. Harry switched the fan off.
“Good morning, merry sunshine.”
I studied the chair beneath me, gave Harry a look.
“You fell asleep there, Carson. I kept the fan on you to keep the skeeters off.”
“A polite host would have carried me to a real bed and tucked me in.”
“A smart host would have coffee. And these.” His right hand held out a steaming mug and his left opened to display a half-dozen aspirin. I grabbed both, chewing the pills and washing the paste down with New Orleans-style coffee, brewed black with chicory and cut with scalded milk.
“Want a bacon-egg sandwich?” Harry said.
I shot a thumb up as Harry retreated into the kitchen and the previous night returned to me, the major scenes at least. Flanagan’s bar decked out for a party: blue balloons, two long tables weighted down with cookpots of chili and sandwich fixings – ham, turkey, barbecue, cheeses – plus bowls of chips and nuts and pretzels. A twelve-foot banner over the bar said simply, 436 is 10-7.
It meant badge number 436 was out of service. Harry was badge number 436.
It was his retirement party. A surprise, Harry lured there by me and Lieutenant Tom Mason, our long-time leader and apologist. I don’t often get misty-eyed, but when we’d walked into Flanagan’s and I saw the sign, it got a little blurry.
Harry was my best friend and had been my detective partner for years. It was Harry who’d convinced me to join the force when I was a twenty-seven-year-old slacker wondering what to do with a Masters Degree in Psychology gained by traveling to every max-security prison in the South and interviewing homicidal maniacs.
Harry was ten years older than me, a year and some shy of fifty. He’d started on the force young, and when adding in unused sick and vacation days, plus time credits when he’d been injured in the line of duty, it added up to thirty years in service, all but five of them in Homicide.
The bash at Flanagan’s had been an alcohol-fueled semi-riot. Harry was a legend in the MPD, and his friends had come to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was leaving. We’d stayed two hours, neither big on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, slipping away to Harry’s place on the near-north side of Mobile, a trim bungalow in a quiet neighborhood overslung with slash and longleaf pines and the snaking branches of live oaks. His back yard was slender and long and landscaped with dogwoods and banks of azaleas. It was centered by a looming sycamore, from which Harry had strung a half-dozen bright birdhouses.
He’d fetched bottles of homebrew from his closet, channeled mix-tapes of Miles and Bird and Gillespie through the speakers, and we’d sat beneath a fat white moon and had our kind of party, long beer-sipping silences broken by stories from the streets, good and bad and blends of both.
Harry stepped out and handed me six inches of warmed French bread filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, melted cheddar and heavy lashings of Crystal Hot Sauce, and I went to work supplanting beer with food, something I probably should have done more of last night.
Harry’s eyes went to the bottle collection on the patio table.
“Happy to see you liked my homebrew.”
When I’d accepted the position in Florida, Harry’d started brewing beer, saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
“Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”
“It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”
I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.
“You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”
Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.
“It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”
“For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”
“Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”
“You didn’t say who the lady was.”
Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”
“She’s in the Mafia?”
“It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”
“Who you think I’ll tell?”
“Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”
That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”
“I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”
“Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”
“Driver,” he corrected.
3 (#ulink_42520312-2617-5a34-96f0-658202544a79)
I bought a Miami Herald for the flight and returned to Miami. The headlines hadn’t changed much since Friday: “No Progress in Menendez Murder”blared the main story, with another headline, inches below, saying “Miami Mourns Loss of Favored Daughter”.
Last Thursday had been a horror for local law enforcement. Roberta Menendez was an MDPD administrator who’d started as a beat cop, putting in eight years before a fleeing felon’s gunshot shattered her hip. Undaunted, she worked a desk at the department while pursuing a degree in accounting – delighted to find an unrealized ability with numbers – and becoming a supervisor in MDPD’s finances department. Balancing books was work enough, but Menendez gave her remaining time and talent to a host of social and charitable organizations throughout the region, helping volunteer organizations manage their finances on a professional level.
I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.
Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.
It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.
I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.
“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”
My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.
“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”
“No doubt. We in?”
Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”
“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.
“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”
Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.
We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
“Is that a cocoon?” I said.
“If so, this is the butterfly.” Vince passed me a second photo and I saw a woman on an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.
“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”
I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”
“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”
I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.
“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.
“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”
“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.
“Nothing right now.”
It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”
Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”
“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”
“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”
“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”
When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.
Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”
“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”
Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”
“Uh, what?”
But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.
Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.
“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.
“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”
The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.
“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”
Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.
“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”
It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.
I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.
4 (#ulink_e27c0574-6543-5064-a20f-c4191f6792c8)
Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.
Fifteen years ago, give or take, Nautilus had sat in this same room with a half-baked man-child named Carson Ryder when the kid had asked Nautilus why he listened to “all that old music”. Nautilus had dosed the kid with Waller, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, Henderson … they started at sundown and met the morning with Miles.
Along with the intro to jazz, Nautilus convinced the kid his degree in Psychology and eerie ability to analyze madmen would be a gift to law enforcement. The next week Carson Ryder signed up at the Police Academy, blowing through it like a firestorm, impressing many, pissing off as many more. He’d put in three years on the street before solving the high-profile Adrian case, advancing to detective and Nautilus’s partner. They’d been the Ryder and Nautilus Show for over a decade. But today Carson was in Florida and Harry Nautilus was a retiree.
The show was over.
And tomorrow morning, Harry Nautilus was going to the home of Pastor Richard Owsley to meet the man’s wife and try for a gig as a driver. Last week’s interview with the Pastor had taken all of fifteen minutes, the man like a thousand-watt bulb in a room that only needs about a hundred, pacing, smiling, gesturing … all assurance and zeal and – like Southern preachers everywhere – stretching one-syllable words into two and often using larger words than called for, which Nautilus ascribed to latent insecurities perhaps caused by going to schools like West Doodlemont Bible College rather than Harvard Divinity School.
It had all happened so quickly that Nautilus realized he knew little more about Richard Owsley than the stacks of books he saw at local shops, the man smiling on the cover with bible in hand.
He took another sip of brew, set his computer on his lap, and checked YouTube for the Pastor’s name. There were several dozen hits, sermons, it seemed. In his youth Nautilus had been dragged from church to church by a procession of severe but well-meaning aunts, and figured he’d had enough sermonizing for a lifetime. He continued scanning the videos until he found a six-minute piece titled, Highlights: Richard Owsley on Willy Prince Show. Prince had a talk show out of Montgomery and was a regional favorite, a smug little fellow in his forties with shaggy, fringe-centric hair, and a slight mouth permanently puckered toward sneer.
Nautilus hit Play and the screen showed two men sitting at a round table in a television studio dressed with a pair of bookshelves and artificial plants. Nautilus figured someone once told Prince that slouching would make him look more like William F. Buckley, so he resembled a boneless puppet dropped into a chair. Prince sat on the left and was speaking.
“… then to recap, Reverend Owsley, you hold that Jesus wants people to have fine cars, boats, luxury items?”
Pastor Owsley was to the right, a dark-suited figure with narrow shoulders and a touch too much weight at his waistline, slightly pearish. His round and cherubic visage was topped by back-combed black hair. He looked pleasant and not particularly commanding, a small-town insurance salesman whose ready smile is part of the tool kit.
“Jesus wants people to enjoy abundance, Willy,” Owsley said in a Southern-inflected tenor and pronouncing the word in three distinct syllables, a-bun-dance. “In biblical times, abundance might mean having a donkey, chickens and a warm hearth. Today, it might be a new pickup truck and a house with a white picket fence.”
A chorus of handclaps and Hallelujahs from the audience. A raised eyebrow from Prince.
“Or a Mercedes-Benz and a mansion in Miami Beach?”
“If that is your yearning and you honor God, God will hand you the keys to the Benz, the keys to the mansion and then, finally and best of all, the keys to His Kingdom. It’s in John 10:10: ‘There I am come that they might have life, and they might have it more abundantly.’”
The audience again expressed satisfaction with the answer. “Perhaps the abundance comes in the afterlife, Reverend,” Prince said. “In Paradise.”
Owsley nodded vigorous agreement. “Our prosperity in Heaven is boundless, Willy. We’re also supposed to taste of it in this life. Proverbs 15:6 … ‘In the house of the righteous is much treasure.’ Then there’s John 1:2 … ‘Beloved, I wish above all that thou prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospers.’ When your soul prospers, so shall you.”
“So why did Jesus hang around with poor people, Pastor Owsley? I mean, Jesus wasn’t prone to spending his days with the wealthy, right?”
“Of course not, Willy. He treasured the poor.”
“But you just said—”
“Jesus Christ loves the faithful, Willy. If you have ten billion dollars and believeth not in the Lord, you are as poor as a cockroach. Conversely, if you have nothing and turn yourself over to the Lord, you have wealth beyond measure.”
“But you’re still poor, pocket-wise.”
“‘Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.’ That’s Deuteronomy 29:9. It’s said even more directly in Proverbs 28:20: ‘A faithful man shall abound in blessings.’ Do you know the Greek translation of the word ‘blessings’, Willy?”
“Oddly enough, no.”
Owsley’s pink hands came together in a thunderclap. “Happiness! Blessings are happinesses. God wants His faithful children to abound in happinesses. It’s a three-step process, Willy. One, surrender your soul to Christ. Two, cast your bread upon the water. Three, watch the bread returneth a thousand-fold.”
A chorus of amens and hallelujahs. Prince studied the audience and turned to the preacher with an uplifted eyebrow. “You have a lot of followers here tonight, Reverend. Did you pack the crowd, as they say?”
A split-second pause from Owsley, followed by who-me? innocence. “I noted on my website that I was to be a guest. That’s all.”
“Really? I’d like to go to some video we took earlier in the day outside the studio, if that’s OK with you.”
“It’s your show, Willy,” Owsley said. The smile stayed as toothy as a beaver, but Nautilus detected irritation as the screen behind the interview table filled with two large buses emptying to the pavement a block from the studio, an attractive woman with a haystack of blonde hair organizing the passengers into a queue.
“All those folks went directly from the buses to the studio. I’ll ask again: Did you pack the crowd, Reverend?”
Murmurs of irritation from the audience. Owsley replayed the innocent face. “All I can say, Willy, is that I’m delighted so many faithful Christians chose to honor me with their presence.”
Applause. Whistles. Amens.
Prince tented his fingers and frowned in apparent confusion. “Faithful Christians, you say, Reverend Owsley. But what about people of other beliefs? Can they not be equally faithful to the creator of the universe?”
Owsley smiled benignly. “I can only preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, who I hold to be the creator of all that is and ever will be.”
“So other religions are wrong?”
“I judge not, lest I be judged, Willy.”
Prince shook his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, Reverend.”
“No, Willy, I am not. It’s all in my owner’s manual.”
“Owner’s manual?”
Owsley reached to his side and picked up a bible, holding it high with both hands, the thousand-watt grin ramping up another hundred.
The audience went wild.
“Thanks, Mama,” Teresa Mailey said, patting her child on his pink forehead as her mother pulled the baby blanket closer around Robert, just seven months old the day before. “It might not be like this much more.”
Jeri Mailey thumbed graying hair back under the red headscarf and smiled. “Like I care, baby.” Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice.
“Me waking you up at four thirty in the morning when I come to pick Bobby up?” Teresa said.
“Hush up that stuff. I go right back to sleep.” Jeri paused as her smile shivered and her eyes moistened. “I never thought I’d have days like this, baby.”
“Come on, Mama, not again,” Teresa said, her voice gentle.
Her mother brushed a tear from the corner of an eye. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s like every day has been a gift this past year. Taking care of you and Bobby is a gift from God.”
Teresa kissed her mother’s cheek. “It’ll keep giving, Mama.”
Teresa’s mother nodded and pulled Bobby tight as she crossed to the door. “See you later, baby. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
The door closed and Teresa Mailey was alone in the tiny first-floor apartment, the bulk of the rent paid by a charitable organization that helped the fallen regain their feet. She looked out the window and watched her mother put Bobby in the child seat in the rear of her blue Kia Optima and snug him tight. Just before her mother closed the door, Bobby waved goodbye.
OK, only a waggle of his arm, but it looks like he’s waving bye-bye to his mommy.
Teresa went to the mirror and straightened her uniform, the fabric flat and wrinkle-free, the uniform immaculate. Satisfied that she was a suitable representative of her employer, she glanced at the clock, 9:32 p.m., and headed to the door. Pausing, Teresa ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her necklace, a tiny gold chain holding a small cross, and put it around her neck.
I’m ready for this again.
Teresa exited to a third-hand Corolla. She had to be at work at ten, and the Publix was twenty minutes distant. She was to do night restock until four a.m. Yesterday her supervisor had spoken of moving Teresa to daytime as a permanent deli worker. Permanent!
“You’ve gotten noticed by a lot of people upstairs, Teresa,” the super had said. “Your attitude, work ethic, ability to shift positions … we’d like you as a permanent member of the team.”
The year had been a gift, Teresa thought as she drove through the warm Miami night. Of finding out who am I, and that I have worth.
The traffic was thick with homecoming day workers, but Teresa pulled into the Publix lot with eight minutes to spare, aiming toward the far edge where the employees parked. She grabbed her purse, exited the vehicle, and started for the store when she felt a tingle on the back of her neck, like eyes were watching.
Teresa turned to see a light van parked three slots distant, a hard-worked vehicle judging by the dinged body and dented hood. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, face hidden behind a newspaper, the halogen-lit lot bright enough for reading. He was tanned and ropy and shirtless, a line running across his upper chest, a weird tattoo.
No … not a tattoo …
A nasty, puckery scar.
The man shifted in his seat and the scar stared at Teresa. Feeling an odd void in the base of her stomach, Teresa turned and hustled toward the supermarket.
5 (#ulink_dfbb36b7-2fd1-5a5c-a7e3-d69c91e4ccfb)
It was eight a.m., the oblique sun lighting a soft mist that rose from a brief morning rain, giving a ghostly cast to the tree-canopied streets of Spring Hill, Mobile’s finest old neighborhood, many of the homes dating back to antebellum times. Harry Nautilus pulled to a two-story house set back a hundred feet from the avenue, a square, white, multi-columned Greek Revival monster Nautilus thought as charmless as it was large, redeemed by the landscaping: oaks and sycamores standing in hedge circles further bordered by azaleas and bougainvillea. Lines of dogwoods paced the high fence of the side boundaries.
He blew out a breath and pulled into the long drive. His red 1984 Volvo wagon had recently expired at 377,436 miles and he’d found a 2004 Cross Country model truly owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays, the odometer registering 31,000 miles.
Nautilus parked behind a gleaming red Hummer with smoked windows and was rolling his eyes when he realized it was probably what he’d be driving. He exited the Volvo wearing the suit he’d worn to the interview with Richard Owsley, coal black, the suit he wore to court and funerals. His shirt was blue with a button-down collar and the tie a red-and-blue rep stripe. The whole drab get-up was already beginning to itch.
Nautilus patted his hair, a one-inch natural with a sprinkling of gray, licked an index finger and smoothed his bulldozer-blade mustache, took a deep breath and walked to the front door. The knocker was a cast-iron version of the three crosses of Golgotha – currently unoccupied – hinged to slam the base. Nautilus gingerly lifted a thief’s cross and let it drop.
A harsh metallic clank. Nautilus stood back as the door opened to reveal one of the most impressive stacks of hair he’d seen in years, a cascade of blonde-bright ringlets that bounced atop the shoulders of a slender, and apparently confused woman in her early forties. Her make-up was old-school-thick, early Dolly Parton, but her face was model-perfect, with high cheekbones, a pert nose and lips like pink cushions. With her dress, white and embroidered with creamy flowers, she looked part porcelain angel, part country singer from the seventies. Nautilus immediately recognized her from the Willy Prince Show, the woman organizing the bused-in audience.
“Mrs Owsley, I’m Harry Nautilus. You’re expecting me, I’m told. Or hope.”
The woman stared, as if Nautilus was a unicorn. “Mrs Owsley?” Nautilus said, resisting the impulse to wave his hand before her wide, blue-shadowed eyes. “Did your husband tell you I’d be by today?”
“You’re black,” she said, just shy of a gasp.
“Since birth. Is something wrong?”
A brief pause and the woman’s startled expression flowed effortlessly into a glittering smile, teeth shining like marquee lights. “Goodness, no,” she said, reaching to touch Harry’s sleeve and tug him over the threshold. “It’s just such a surprise. All my other drivers were, well … do you folks prefer the term white or Caucasian?”
“It doesn’t really matter, ma’am. It’s more what you prefer to call yourselves.”
She canted her head in thought, followed with a tinkly laugh. “Of course. Come inside, Mr Nautilus, please.”
She led Nautilus through the wide entranceway and into an expansive living area, the walls a soft peach, the French Provincial furniture having matching cushions and looking delicate and expensive. The room was vaulted, twenty-feet tall, a pair of ceiling fans whisking high above. One wall held family photos, one the front windows. The third held a cross of dark and rough-hewn beams, a dozen feet tall, eight wide. It had been thickly coated in shellac or varnish and gleamed in the in-streaming sun.
Nautilus said, “You have a beautiful home, Mrs Owsley.”
“God gave it to us,” she said, looking to Nautilus as if expecting an amen.
He said, “Indeed and fer-sure, ma’am,” and found his voice failing. “Might I trouble you for a drink of water? I seem a bit dry.”
“Right this way.”
The kitchen was straight from Architectural Digest: beaten copper sinks, twin refrigerator-freezers, an island with a maple chopping block. The countertops were richly textured marble. Above, an eight-foot rack was hung with cooking implements.
“There’s water, of course,” Celeste Owsley said. “I also have sweet tea.”
“Tea then, please.”
A crystal vase of tea was produced from a refrigerator seemingly sized to hold sides of beef. Celeste Owsley poured a glass and handed it to Nautilus. He sipped and studied the vast kitchen.
“You must truly like to cook, ma’am.”
The woman frowned at the rack festooned with pots, pans, colanders, whisks. “They all do something, but I’ve no idea what. Thankfully, our cook likes to cook. You’ll meet Felicia, I expect. She’s a precious little Mexican girl.”
“Girl?” Nautilus asked. “How old is she?”
Ms Owsley canted her head sideways, perplexed. Somehow the huge beehive ’do remained centered. “I never asked,” she said, a scarlet talon tapping a plump lower lip. “Forty? Fifty?”
Girl, Nautilus thought, holding back the sigh as Celeste Owsley gestured him toward the wide staircase. “Now let’s meet our daughter and see how she is today.”
Owsley clicked the high heels across the floor to the foot of the broad staircase and clapped her hands as if summoning a pet poodle. Seconds passed and Nautilus heard a door opening upstairs, looked up to a teenage girl staring down, her brown hair shoulder length and a pouty look on an otherwise sweet face.
“What?”
“Well, come on down.”
The girl sighed dramatically and headed down the steps. Nautilus knew she was sixteen – research again – and her name was Rebecca. Owsley’s face lit to a zillion watts as she pointed to Nautilus like he was door number three on a game show.
“This is Mr Nautilus, hon. He’s our new driver.”
The girl scowled. “But he’s bl—”
“He’s your Papa’s choice,” Owsley interrupted, “and that means he’s the best there can be.”
The girl stared at Nautilus. A smile quivered at the edge of her bright lips.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Becca!” Owsley snapped.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” the girl said, looking pleased. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck …”
“Get upstairs! Now!”
The girl slowly climbed the stairs, repeating her mantra until it ended with the slamming of a door. Owsley sighed and turned to Nautilus.
“I’m sorry. It’s a stage. I can’t wait for it to be over.”
The meeting seemed to have reached a conclusion, Owsley leading Nautilus back to the front door. Her hand was on the knob when she turned, her eyes searching into Nautilus’s eyes.
“You have been saved, of course, Mr Nautilus.”
The same question had been asked by Reverend Owsley, early in their meeting, as if, answered improperly, the interview would be over. Ten years back he and Carson had been chasing a trio of murderous dope dealers through a dilapidated warehouse, their leader a psychotic named Randy Collins. Nautilus had been following Collins down a rotting flight of stairs when they collapsed, Nautilus tumbling ten feet to concrete, gun spinning from his hand as the maniac spun and lifted his weapon, the nine-millimeter muzzle staring straight into Nautilus’s chest as a tattooed finger tightened on the trigger.
Until the front of Collins’ face disappeared, Carson firing from forty feet away, a perfect shot in the shadowed warehouse.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nautilus replied, just as he’d done with the mister. “I was saved years ago. It was a beautiful day.”
Nautilus returned to his vehicle thinking about his interview, the written part and subsequent face-to-face sessions with Owsley. A good third of the questions had – in veiled fashion, mostly – been about his discretion, the ability to handle secrets. He’d answered truthfully, meaning that he didn’t disburse private information. There would have been other vetting, he now realized – probably a private-investigation firm – but even his enemies would have said something akin to, “Harry Nautilus doesn’t carry tales.”
Twenty bills an hour, he told himself as he buckled into his car. Drive ’em around, stay uninvolved, cash the checks. The gig is worth it, right?
6 (#ulink_e6a2fbc5-eb45-535f-8227-b4fb94eb03ba)
I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of dreams made of flames and punctuated by screams. Breakfast was strong coffee and stale churros and I was at the department an hour later, hungry to track down the maniac who’d killed Kylie Sandoval. Roy was in his office, the muscular Miami skyline looming outside the windows of his twenty-third-floor office, Biscayne Bay visible to the east.
I gave him an anything happening? face, meaning Menendez.
He shook his head. “I figure this will be solved by snitches and shoe leather. It’ll come. Like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.” He gave me a curious look. “I take it you haven’t been to your office yet.”
“No, why?”
He closed his eyes and began whistling “Rule Britannia”.
Wondering if my boss had gone around the bend, I headed down the hall to my office, finding the door ajar. I used to share space with Ziggy Gershwin, but Zigs had impressed Roy enough to get his own office and assignments last month, so I was the sole occupant, generally leaving it unlocked.
I pushed the door open quietly, seeing a light-skinned woman of African heritage sitting in the chair opposite my desk, her back to me. She was leafing through a book I had contributed to some years ago, The Inner Cultures of Sociopaths, more for academic than general audiences. She wore a taupe uniform and though only a small portion was visible, I recognized the shoulder patch of the Miami-Dade PD.
I cleared my throat and she jumped, the book skidding from her lap to the floor.
“Bloody hell,” she said, standing. “You scared the piss out of me.”
Her voice sounded closer to London than Miami. I scooped up the book from the floor and set it back on the shelf, then sat, head cocked. My visitor was a petite woman in her mid-to-later twenties, brunette hair tugged back in a ponytail. Full lips framed a small mouth that was now pursed tight. Her eyes were large and brown and watching me as intently as I was watching her. I had the feeling I was being weighed.
“And you would be?” I ventured.
“Holly Belafonte. I’m an officer with the MDPD.”
I didn’t point out that, as a detective, I’d already deduced it by the uniform, though the accent seemed misplaced. “Did I mis-park my car, Officer Belafonte?” I said, a shot at humor that went wide, judging by the narrowed eyes.
She nodded to the chair. “Can I sit?”
“I suspect you can, since you were sitting when I entered.”
The stare again. Humor didn’t seem her métier. “Please,” I sighed. “Sit. And tell me why you’re here.”
She sat tentatively, reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope.
“I’m told this will explain things.”
I opened the envelope and saw Vince’s card clipped to two sheets of paper, the top one in his jagged handwriting.
Hey Buddy – Meet H. Belafonte, your official departmental liaison on the Sandoval case. She’s all I could scratch up on short notice and I picked her because she knew the vic personally. I cleared this with the Chief – at least I shoved it under his nose while he was screaming at everyone. The head of Investigative signed off as well, so you’re clear to proceed and I’ll lend a hand whenever possible. This place has gone nuts.
The second sheet of paper was typed:
This document authorizes Of. H. Belafonte to serve as official contact between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Florida Center of Law Enforcement in duties relative to Case 2015/6 –HD 1297-B.
Below that was a hastily scribbled signature, the line tailing off the paper, like the signer was running while signing. Even the top brass at MDPD were in sprint mode due to Menendez.
“You know what this stuff says?” I asked Belafonte. “The notes?”
A prim nod. “We’re to work together on the Kylie Sandoval murder.”
I stared at the face; handsome but expressionless. “How long have you been with the force, Officer Belafonte?”
A frown. “Long enough.”
“I’m talking about measured quantity, as in time.”
She stared evenly without speaking.
“Well?”
“You asked, so I’m thinking.” Five more mute seconds passed. “One hundred and sixty-seven days. I’m counting days on duty but not counting today yet. Tomorrow will of course make one hundred and—”
I held up a hand to cut her off, barely resisting banging my head on my desk. Instead of working with the typical seasoned investigator, I’d be dragging around a uniformed newbie a half-step above writing traffic citations.
“We’re done here,” I said, standing.
That put expression on the stone face. “You’re bloody dismissing me?” she said, eyes wide. “Just like that?”
“I’m dismissing nothing,” I said, giving her a come-hither jerk of my head. “We’re adjourning to the coffee shop in the atrium. I need a triple espresso. Or maybe a shot of whiskey.”
We reconvened below, where I ordered my coffee, Belafonte a tea, declining to allow me to pay for her tinted water.
“That’s not a typical Miami accent,” I noted. “At least not in MDPD.”
“My childhood was in Bermuda. It’s a British territory.”
“Oddly enough, I knew that.”
“I’ve met people who think it’s one of the fifty states, along with Puerto Rico and Nova Scotia.”
I started to laugh, then realized she wasn’t making a joke, just transferring data. “I lived in Hamilton,” she continued, “the capital, until I was twenty-one, when my father and I moved to Miami.”
“Why here?” I said. “Both to the US and Miami?”
“Shouldn’t we be discussing the Sandoval case?” she said.
So much for get-acquainted talk. “You knew her, I take it?”
“I work out of South Division and arrested Kylie twice for prostitution. And nearly a third time but, but …”
She paused with tea in mid-air and set it back on the table, her eyes serious, as if looking inside her head and not liking the pictures there. Belafonte swallowed hard and turned away. I realized I’d seen a glisten of tear in the expressionless eyes.
“Take your time,” I said.
“The third time I arrived as a john propositioned her, an obese businessman who stank of gin and sweat and had greasy hair and vomit on his lapels. When I told the arsehole to bugger off he gave me a big smirk like Big deal, copper, I’ll go find another one. I cuffed Kylie to a pipe, followed Mr Businesspuke around the corner. I let him get in his car and turn the key and busted him for drunken driving.”
“And then took Kylie to the lockup.”
“Actually, I took Kylie to an all-night diner and bought her a meal.” She paused. “My shift was over, of course.”
“I don’t care about your timecard, Belafonte. But why the kindness, may I ask?”
She looked out the window a long moment. “The john was a disgusting lump of ugliness, like some hideous disease taken human form. I then realized how these girls … don’t simply sell their bodies. They have to pretend to like these scumbags. I was new to that world and wanted to understand how they did it time and again, night after night.”
“Drugs,” I said. “It shows their power.”
Belafonte nodded. “At first Kylie played the hardcore working girl, every third word a curse. But subsequently, as I was driving her back to her cheap flat, I saw tears rolling down her cheeks. Kylie broke down like a, like a … little girl dressed in hooker clothes. I realized many of them are little girls in hooker clothes. Childhood doesn’t end when they go on the street, it gets packed away under layers of numbness. But sometimes it breaks out. And there’s nothing before you but a terrified little girl.”
It was beginning to seem Belafonte wasn’t quite the robot she’d initially appeared. “You befriended her, right?”
A sigh. “I tried to get her into therapy, but the free clinics are booked for months. I brought her home with me, told her to stay until she got herself together.”
“How long did it last?”
“Three days. Kylie had had something broken inside her, Detective. I don’t know what happened, but someone or something had torn everything from her, every bit of self-worth. Kylie lived with a horrific hurt buried inside her and I pray she didn’t die in pain.”
I fished the investigative reports from my briefcase and reluctantly handed them over. My day was about to reach its low point.
7 (#ulink_81f9e912-9b4a-59d1-8b76-02ffc9b8d9ab)
Teresa Mailey opened her eyes. Or had she? The dark with her eyes open was darker than the dark behind her eyelids. Her head ached and she felt her stomach tumble and pushed herself up from what felt like a hard dirt floor, a wave of dizziness too much for her stomach to handle and she vomited between her hands.
What happened?
Pictures began to return to her head: Working until four and walking out to her car. As she departed the lot she noticed the road seemed darker on the right. She stopped and discovered a shattered headlamp, a thoughtless shopper had backed into her car. She’d headed to her mother’s trailer court to pick up Bobby, winding down the road from the main highway, darker than usual, like the streetlights had all burned out at once. She’d reached the final turn to find a tree branch in the center of the road and crept to the ragged limb, sighing. Teresa had gotten out, road dust blowing into the beams of her headlamps and dragged it to the side of the road. Until … until …
Footsteps somewhere in the dark.
“Hello?” she had called in the enveloping darkness. “Is someone there?”
Until hands like steel covered her mouth and tape covered her screams and a cloth bag fell over her head.
And now she was here, wherever here was, stinking with a smell of burned meat and motor oil, lightless, as black as death. She could feel flies lighting on her bare arms.
“Please … who’s there?” Teresa called out, her mouth so dry the words came out as a rasp. “What do you want?”
“Sinner …” The words a hiss. “Jezebel …”
The sound of footsteps again. Her head jerked to the sound, but all Teresa saw was black. “I have a baby,” she pleaded. “He needs me to take care of him.”
The footsteps again. Hands held before her, Teresa walked until stopped by a wall, rough and wooden and she felt her way along its surface, trying to hold her breath and keep her feet from making sounds. Get out! her mind screamed. Find a way out.
The footsteps again.
“HELP!” Teresa shrieked into the darkness. “SOMEONE HELP ME!”
The whispering voice moved closer, the words becoming a growled sentence. “For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer …”
Heart pounding, like a hammer, sweat pouring down her covered face, Teresa retreated down the wall until her flailing hands found the shape of a window, but wood where glass should be. A shuttered window? Her fists pounded the wood like a drum.
‘’SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!”
Bam. The wood answered back with a single staccato sound. Had someone heard her?
“I’M IN HERE,” Teresa yelled. “HELP ME!”
Bam answered the wood. Then again, bam.
An object hammered her side and she grunted with pain. Something skittered across the floor. “HELP!” she screamed again. “PLEASE HELP M—” A punch to her sternum knocked the words from her mouth. Again, she felt the breath of something moving past her head. She dropped to a knee and held her hands against whatever seemed to be hitting her. The footsteps again, the hissing, poisonous voice …
“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom,And upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven …”
Something struck Teresa’s face and she tumbled backwards in a spray of blood and pain. Her hand went to her nose but it was no longer there, just a flat lump of shrieking pain. When she fought to her knees something hit her in the side of the neck and the blackness turned red, then white, then black again.
8 (#ulink_c6c89e79-554f-5c4b-8f66-375748c1969d)
Belafonte stared into her Earl Grey. I think it’s where her eyes needed to rest after studying Kylie Sandoval’s morgue photos.
“Who’d do such a thing?” she said.
I pushed my remaining pastries aside. Seeing the shots again had killed my appetite. “Maybe the perp thought burning the body would hide Kylie’s ID, or destroy evidence of his involvement. Or it could be darker.”
The eyes lifted from the mug. “What does that mean?”
“The burning satisfied a psychological need. There was also damage to the skull and the face. The postmortem will tell the full story.”
“When’s that?”
I looked at my watch. “Forty-seven minutes. We’ve got a ringside seat.”
She froze, eyes wide. “I’ve never, uh … do I have to be present?”
“I can go it alone, but one of us should be there.” I stood and shuffled the photos into my briefcase, clicked it shut. “I’ll get in contact later in the day and let you know what we found.”
Belafonte and I walked back through to the atrium where she went her way, me mine. I had no ill feelings toward Belafonte for leaving me alone with the post. Harry hadn’t cared much for the procedure himself, part of our division of labors: I took the bulk of the autopsies, and Harry handled the majority of courtroom work, testifying in cases we’d worked. It was a perfect division since he resembled a mustached James Earl Jones down to a bass rumble of a voice and, when it came to resembling actors, I’d been more often aligned with Jason Bateman. My courtroom testimony tended to meander into concept and supposition, while Harry’s sounded like a pronouncement from Zeus.
And, truth be told, I liked to look into the machinery that was us, the bags and tubes and glistening orbs of multicolored meats that formed our engineering. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the systems and at the same time awed that this assemblage of material – not much different from the systems that powered pigs and cattle – had managed to create glorious paintings, send men to the moon, discover subtle mathematics, build towering structures, create majestic symphonies … There was something different in the us. I had no idea what it was, but suspected we contained more than complex chemical engineering in bipedal configuration.
Those weren’t, however, my thoughts as I pulled into the morgue lot, the sun high in a sky of scudding cumulus, the advance ranks of a nearing shower; I was thinking only of a dark cocoon found on a lonely strand of beach, stinking of scorched meat and chemical accelerant and sending some poor beachcomber screaming back to his hotel, pausing only to vomit in the sand.
Dr Ava Davanelle was on duty and I found her preparing in an autopsy suite, pulling the blue gown into place. The body was on the table, a mosaic of red flesh mingled with char, the burning uneven. Ava looked up, saw me, registered surprise.
“I thought I’d see someone from Miami-Dade.”
“They’re busy.”
It took two beats to register. “Menendez,” she said.
“The cops are running full-tilt boogie.”
“I met Ms Menendez a couple months ago at a city-county function. She seemed both smart and sweet, a lovely person.”
“She had a lot of friends,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “But this girl had very few, I think.”
“But she now has you,” Dr Davanelle said quietly, picking up a wicked-looking scalpel. I walked to a chair against the white wall and sat. My history with Ava Davanelle had started a dozen years ago in Mobile, where she had been my girlfriend, a newbie pathologist with lyrical hands and a fierce addiction to alcohol. She was drawn into a case I was working and almost killed. Ava had also met my brother Jeremy back then, when he was incarcerated at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior and being studied by Dr Evangeline Prowse, who was fascinated by my brother’s brilliance.
Time and events travel roads we can never suppose. Jeremy had escaped from the Institute years ago, placed on every Wanted listing between Mexico City and Nome, Alaska. Last year a man of Jeremy’s height and weight had been pulled from a river in Chicago, the corpse’s DNA matching my brother’s. He was now dead and long gone from the listings.
Or maybe not.
In reality, my brother – after a lengthy hiding-out period in an isolated cabin in the Kentucky mountains – was now living in a huge house in Key West and picking stocks based on a simple but bizarre equation developed during his years in hiding: The financial market had but two true states, scared child or blustering drunkard, all else just states of transition.
He’d made millions from his insight.
And the DNA sample taken from the corpse in Chicago? It had been supplied by the pathologist performing the autopsy, one Dr Ava Davanelle, who had been my brother’s secret girlfriend for years, though both Jeremy and Ava disdained the characterization, saying their relationship was far more complex.
“Interesting,” I heard Ava say, looking up as she leaned over a resected section of upper arm, the bicep splayed open as she studied through a magnifying lens. She cued a communications link to the room where the techs worked. Seconds later a ponytailed young woman in a lab jacket whisked through the door and nearly ran to Ava, who handed over bags of labeled tissue.
“Stain and check these for hemorrhage, Branson. I’m also looking for differentiation between intravital and postmortem trauma. Look close.”
“You found something?” I said.
“Just a supposition,” she said, turning back to her work.
After an hour – Ava slicing, weighing organs and calling for more tests – I went outside to breathe an atmosphere not thick with the smell of death and antiseptic. The rain had passed though, leaving only small patches of cloud in the eastern sky, clear blue above. In the distance the jagged Miami skyline seemed to glisten in the renewed air and I walked the grounds and the nearby streets for an hour, grabbing a coffee from a street vendor and sipping it beneath a tall King palm in a tiny streetside park, the fronds swaying and rattling against one another.
When I returned, Ava was closing the body, the heavy stitches straight from Frankenstein. The top of Kylie Sandoval’s head lay beside her on the table.
“Well?” I said.
Ava replaced the bowl of skull as she spoke. “I’ve identified four sites struck by a blunt instrument, two on the head, two on the body. I suspect it was one of these blows that broke her nose, another that shattered the left temple, creating intercranial hemorrhaging. I think I’ll find more.”
Ava shed the gown and mask and I followed her to her office, utilitarian, shelves of medical and forensics texts and a simple desk and chair. There was a single large painting on one wall behind her desk, a streetscape of Key West in thick swaths of impasto oil, the houses dark and hunkered shapes, the twilight sky dappled with fierce strokes of orange and red, one slender palm bridging earth and sky, as still as a patch of paint can be, yet somehow moving within the frame of the picture.
It was a stunning work and my brother had painted it, claiming his move to Key West had brought out his artistic side. I had never been able to fathom the inside of his head, and his sudden ability to paint further scrambled my understanding.
Ava studied her notes. “I need analysis from other tissue samples before I confirm my suspicions of multiple trauma sites. Should take a few hours, same with the tox screens, and I’ll call you with the results. They might be quite interesting.”
9 (#ulink_9d7ac542-d327-5a93-ba3b-353569a55a67)
I was crossing the parking lot when my phone rang: Belafonte.
“Can we speak?” she said.
“We are.”
“I mean … meet somewhere? I really need to talk to you, hopefully today.”
“Where are you?”
“Flagami, tracking down information on Kylie.”
“Gimme an address. Preferably a bar where I can get a decent beer.”
“I’m, uh, in uniform.”
“Go home,” I told her. “And await further instructions.”
I hung up and pressed the fifth number down on my speed dial. Three rings.
“Carson, what’s up?” Vince Delmara. He sounded beat.
“What did you do to me, Vince?”
“Belafonte? She’s all I could find, Carson. Really. Every detective or soon-to-be detective is beating the streets on Menendez. Did you see any news show last night? All they talked about was lack of progress. We’re in crash-and-burn mode here.”
I sighed. “OK, Vince. But I gotta problem with Officer B.”
“I figured. She’s smart like a whip, but I think she was born with a broomstick up her—”
“Not that. She’s in uniform.”
It took a second for Vince’s frazzled mind to grasp. “Shit, of course. I’ll get her reclassified as undercover. Anything else?”
“Call and tell her when it’s done. I’m not sure she likes the sound of my voice.”
Twenty minutes later my phone rang, Belafonte. “Detective Delmara just phoned. He said—”
“I know. Jump into street clothes and let’s reconvene near a beer tap.”
I drove over and parked outside a decent-looking place in West Buena Vista named the Sea Breeze – something of a stretch, since the bay was about fifteen blocks distant, but perhaps they meant during hurricanes. Belafonte pulled in two minutes later, driving a venerable Crown Victoria, a former cruiser, given that I could see the logo beneath the fading paint job supposed to cover the previous usage. I stepped out as she did, finding she’d transformed from officer to female, the creased brown uni now blue slacks and a white safari shirt buttoned to the top. Both the slacks and shirt had been pressed rigid. Her shoes were pumps with a two-inch heel. She looked like an advertisement for Sears, except Sears models tended to look happy.
I passed by the bar, the woman behind it offering a smile and a “What you folks need? I’ll bring it over.”
I glanced at the taps and I ordered an Eldorado IPA from the local Wynwood Brewing Co. Belafonte said, “A glass of water, Pellegrino if possible.”
The joint was mostly empty and I angled toward a booth in a far corner, sat as Belafonte followed suit. I stared at her and offered my widest smile, receiving only an anxious look.
“There’s something I wanted to say, Detective Ryder.”
I stuck my fingers in my ears.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I can’t hear you. My fingers are in my ears.”
“Have you gone daft?”
“I’m not going to listen until you order a freaking drink, Belafonte. Unless you’re a confirmed teetotaler or a recovering alcoholic, we’re going to sit here like two standard-issue cops and sip an honest and refreshing beverage while we talk.”
“It’s not professional to drink during duty,” she said.
“You’re now plainclothes, Officer Belafonte. It’s not professional to get drunk on duty, or otherwise impaired. I expect this case to take us to some pretty low places. We can’t go into a joint where people are banging down whiskey shots and order Pellegrino.”
The big eyes challenged me as the waitress arrived with one beer, one fizzy Italian H
0. “Will that be all?” she asked.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Belafonte said, the eyes holding on me. “Please be so kind as to bring me a Rum Collins, light.”
“Atta girl,” I said. “Now, didn’t you have something to discuss?”
The big eyes dropped, came back up. “I should have gone with you to the procedure, Detective Ryder. I know nothing of autopsies. And never will unless I attend one.”
“Stop by the morgue any day and tell Dr Davanelle I sent you. Now, what do you know about Kylie? Did she have a pimp?”
A nod. “It may have been why she needed to get back to the street. Fear of the guy. Or maybe he had the drugs.”
“Did she, Kylie, mention a name?”
“Someone named Swizzle. Should we go out and try and find him?”
“We don’t go out, not yet. First we ride on the coattails of others.”
My call went to Juarez, a detective with Miami Vice. He was dedicated and bright and a favorite of Vince Delmara.
“Swizzle?” Juarez said. “You’re probably talking about Shizzle, Shizzle Diamond. Real name’s T’Shawn Matthews. Collects runaways and confused girls from the streets and bus stations. He’s good at being what they need, uncle or daddy or friend, then takes a few weeks to feed ’em and fuck ’em and hook ’em on heroin.”
“I think there’s a rap song there.”
“I ain’t writing it. Matthews – I ain’t using that idiot pimp name – rides his herd hard and moves them around, sometimes as far north as Orlando. But mostly it’s Liberty City or the sadder parts of Flagami and so forth. He might run ’em over to the Beach, but he tends to venues with dark alleys and cheap motels, usually watching from a car or the window of a bar, sipping brandy while his sad little troupe services johns.”
“Any idea where I can find this particular bag of garbage?” I asked.
I heard a hand cover the phone, a question yelled out. After a minute the hand fell away. “Feinstein says he saw Matthews a couple days back at Black’s Lounge, lower Liberty, probably got his crew working there for a while.”
I thanked Juarez and pocketed the phone. “Drink up,” I told Belafonte. “We’re going hunting.”
We headed outside and I saw the Crown Vic. “Who gave you that junker? I can see the goddamn cop logo under the paint.”
“Motor pool. It’s all they had.”
“We’ll use my wheels,” I said. “Jump in.”
I drive a green Land Rover Defender with every possible option for safari use: racks, grille and headlamp shields, spare tire bolted to the roof, heavy-duty suspension. It had been confiscated from a dope dealer and though it rode a bit rough, it was, I figured, the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country and if a case ever took me to the top of Kilimanjaro, I was ready.
Night was deepening as we went to the corner where Shizzle Diamond had been spotted. It was not a neighborhood Miami would feature in a tourist ad, unless the tourists were looking for peep shows, strippers and the uglier side of street life, as demonstrated by the wino puking into the gutter as we passed.
“Get close to me,” I told Belafonte. “Whisper in my ear and play with my hair.”
“What?”
“We need to look like a guy who’s just picked up a woman. Or maybe a guy and a woman wanting a third hand at cards.”
“Cards?” She thought a moment. “Oh.”
Reluctantly, she scooted as close as the shifter allowed. Her hand patted my head like I was a Welsh Corgi. “Try for passion,” I said.
She moved her head closer and twirled a lock of my hair. “Is this how you behaved with your male partners?”
“When it was necessary.”
Which was true. Harry and I had several times gone hand-in-hand into gay bars or situations to hunt for a perp or gather information. In one memorable instance I had donned a dress and wig to play a cross-dresser, Harry dubbing me “the ugliest woman he’d never been with”.
Thus engaged in mock passion, Belafonte and I cruised toward one of the bars supposed to contain the pimp. There were two damsels of the dark on the street, but there were recessed doorways in the buildings and alleys and I figured there might be ladies back there, either waiting or working on a customer.
“There’s a bottle under your seat,” I told Belafonte. “Grab it.”
She reached down and found a half-full pint of bourbon. “You’re going to drink?”
“Pop the cap and bring it to your lips. You don’t need to open your mouth, but we need to look like we’re partying. Hurry. If we’re made they’ll slide back into the shadows. Or Matthews might pull them off the street.”
She screwed the cap off the bottle, appeared to take a hit. She passed the bottle over and I did the same and pulled to the curb beside a small alley. Across the street a woman of Latina extraction – girl, really – in gold lamé shorts, a top little more than a black bra and net hose studied us. I gave her a wink and took another pull from the bottle. She waved with three coy fingers.
“Now what?” Belafonte whispered.
“According to Juarez, these are some of Matthews’ girls, and that means he should be in one of these bars.”
“Why then are we here?”
I kept my eyes on the hooker as if appraising her, talking to Belafonte with as little lip-motion as possible. “I don’t want to brace him on his turf. I want him out here.”
“How’s that going to happen?”
“I’m gonna run a play on these folks,” I said.
“A play?”
I winked, time to show the kid how the pros did things. “Stay put, watch how it’s done. I’ll have Shizzle-boy out here in two minutes.”
I half climbed, half fell from the Rover, recovered and meandered toward the hooker. “Hey, babuh,” I slurred. “My fren’ and I are looking for a li’l spice.”
A smile below the street-wise eyes; in this area I figured alley stand-ups and front-seat oral was more the norm. “I can party with y’all,” she said. “Two hundred an hour.”
“Hunh-unh,” I said. “I just need you to tell us where we can find a pretty white lady. We’re not into spicks.”
“You ain’t into what?”
“But you ain’t too shabby for darker meat. Tell you what, I’ll give you ten for a hummer … as long as my lady can watch.”
The eyes turned to slits. “Get the fuck outta here, asshole.”
“Don’t be mean, chica,” I said. “What else you got goin’ on?”
“FUCK OFF!”
“I’ll make it fifteen. Where you from, little mama? Haiti? Honduras? Fifteen bucks is like, what, a year’s pay over there?”
“GET LOST!”
I was betting one of Matthews’ other products had run to his hidey-hole to report a problem. I backed the girl against an abandoned storefront.
“Twenny, chica … all right? But you gotta do my lady, too.”
She tried to slip by to my right, I was in front of her. Darting left did the same. I was a fast drunk. I saw her eyes look past my shoulder and go from scared to relief.
“Yo, muthafucka,” said a voice from behind me; Shizzle, no doubt, out of his hidey-hole and protecting the merchandise. I spun. He was tall and in full-length leather topped with a wide-brimmed white hat, furious that I’d pulled him from the comfort of his brandy cavern.
I was about to cool him out with the shield but my eyes burst into flames. A fist caught me in the throat and sent me to the pavement on hands and knees, rolling away when a kick caught me in the gut and knocked out my breath.
“Muthafucka, you gonna be pissing blood for a week.”
Gasping for wind, I was too concentrated on warding off the next kick to try for the piece in my waistband. Plus I was near blind.
“Excuse me?” I heard a polite feminine voice say. It was followed by a sound reminiscent of a hammer striking meat and a simultaneous scream. Shizzle Diamond’s hatless head slammed the pavement beside mine and kept screaming, rolling on his back and pulling his legs to his chest.
I blinked through tears to see Holly Belafonte silhouetted against a streetlamp, a collapsible nightstick twirling through her fingers like a drum majorette in a holiday parade. She helped me to my feet. Matthews was still on the concrete, teeth clenched in pain. It seemed the hooker had pulled pepper spray from her purse and blasted my eyes. Belafonte had trotted over armed with the nightstick kept in her purse, and whipped it behind one of Shizzle’s legs. It hurt like hell.
I held my shield in Matthew’s face, then dragged him by his shirtfront into the alley where I patted him down, tossed the belt knife to Belafonte, and held the pimp against the building.
“You ain’t vice,” he said.
“FCLE.”
Confusion. “A state guy – why?”
I leaned close enough to let him smell my breath. “A pity the fabric burned but not the skin, T’Shawn. You left two perfect finger prints on her body, bud. It’ll go easier if you start talking.”
His eyes went wide and the pimp persona dissolved into cold-sweat fear. “Body? B-body? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, MAN?”
“You know, bitch.”
“NO I DON’T! TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”
“You beat Kylie to death and set her on fire.”
“I D-DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, MAN. SHE’S DEAD? OH JESUS. OH MY FUCKING GOD …”
I didn’t see knowledge or evasion: I saw stark terror. Ten years in the detective game, the last five so experienced from the first five that I knew the scumbucket had no idea what I was talking about.
“Tell me about Kylie,” I said, the hands loosening on his shirt.
“I-I ain’t seen her in four days. I figured she booked.”
“I think I believe you,” I said. “So right now I need the whole ugly truth, T’Shawn. Anything less, I’ll take you downtown and sweat you all night. Your choice.”
He’d probably have done a go-right-ahead bit if I’d been MDPD, but the FCLE had arrived in his squalid little world, which meant things were serious.
“Anything, man,” he said. “But you gotta know, it wasn’t me.”
I asked questions, he provided answers. Matthews had found Sandoval on the streets seven months back, drunk. He’d brought her to one of his two cribs, babied her. He also traded out the booze for H and put her on the street.
“What’d she do before she got to Miami?” I asked at one point.
“She never talked about that, man. Never. Like she’d shut it off. Bad shit at home, maybe. You wouldn’t believe what got done to some of these girls when they lived at home.”
In the end Matthews knew almost nothing of Sandoval; little more to him than an ATM, and as long as she kept pumping out money, he was fine with it. I shot a glance at Belafonte. Her eyes were expressionless but her nose looked like a sewage field was nearby.
“Beat it,” I said, releasing the pimp. Matthews ducked low past me and went to pick up his hat but Belafonte was standing on it. He gave her a wide berth and retreated down the street as we climbed back into the car to press onward into the unrevealed world of Kylie Sandoval. I took a deep breath and rested my head on the steering wheel. My cheek was sore from the punch and my side ached from the kick.
“Quite the interesting play,” Belafonte said, giving me my first-ever sample of what amusement sounded like in her voice. “Your take on Richard III, perhaps?”
“My kingdom for a nightstick,” I sighed.
10 (#ulink_5dc0b5fc-96e9-5dd7-abe1-d0dd1a6e4346)
I dropped Belafonte off at her car and headed to Viv’s. The place was deserted and my heart sank. I gave her a call.
“I’m running a half-hour late … be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make a food grab on the way in. Miguelito’s?”
“Olé.”
Viv arrived minutes later with burritos, chips, salsa and guacamole from a favored tacquería. She grinned as she scampered by to warm the chow and I used the time to admire Vivian’s slender form bending to put the food in the oven. She wore a simple blue skirt over improbably long legs and a gray blouse. The kicks were dark athletic shoes which looked out of place, but were the requisite wear for long hours of hard hospital floors.
We feasted on burritos – chicken for Viv, goat for me – washed down with Negra Modelo. Our conversation veered briefly into the sadness of Roberta Menendez’s loss, then, happier, into a recap of my weekend with Harry and his new prospects.
“Harry’s driving someone around?” Viv said. “He’s already bored with retirement?”
“Harry felt he could stash some playtime cash. And yes, Harry needs to be doing something or he gets mopey.”
“Mopey?”
“That time he got his head bashed in and spent weeks in the hospital? He hated TV so he tried crossword puzzles. Doing them bored him after two days, so he started making them. I remember one had the word ‘heimidemisemiquaver’ crossing the word ‘subdermatoglyphic’.”
“What the hell do those mean?”
“The first has something to do with music, the second concerns fingerprint patterns, and is the longest word where every letter is used just once, the reason Harry wanted to use it. It took him a month to build that damn puzzle but when he was done it made the New York Times Sunday version look like it was written by a ten-year-old.”
Viv gave me a look. “You miss him, don’t you?”
I made a smile happen. “We had some good times. But the world moves on.”
Another look, then a change of subject. “Harry thinks he’ll like being a chauffeur?” Vivian asked, curling the long legs on to the sofa.
“Driver,” I corrected. “We’ll just have to wait to find out.”
“I guess we will,” she said, standing and angling toward the stairs. “But until then, I know something that can’t wait much longer.” She winked.
I was off the couch like a shot.
Viv left for MD-Gen before six a.m. and I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of a fleeting kiss. Breakfast was leftover frijoles refritos and chips and I was ready to attack the Sandoval case when my phone rang: JEREMY.
“There’s a huge commotion down the street, Carson,” my brother said before I could speak. “What is it?”
I suppressed a moan: My brother always wanted something.
“A commotion?”
“An ambulance, a quartet of cop cars. A news van. There’s a goddamn circus out there. What the hell is going on, Carson?”
“Why should I know that?”
“You’re a big-league detective, right? Find out.”
“Jeremy, I’m—”
“It’s a distraction. I can’t concentrate on my work.”
I figured Jeremy had been up at daybreak studying the morning’s financial indicators from Asia, preparing for the day’s buys and sells. I’d seen what a trading floor looked like and assumed part of Jeremy’s success in the market came from years in an institution for the criminally insane.
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Drive out and shoot them?”
“How much do you pay in rent, Carson?” He hung up.
Through a Byzantine set of manipulations, my brother was my landlord and I paid a hundred bucks a month to live in a home that should have cost three grand. I stared at the phone, sighed, and made a call to King Barlow, an investigator with the Key West PD.
“I got a weird call, King. From a friend, sorta, that lives out there. He says there’s a commotion down the block. He’s kind of a crank, and thought I could assure him it’s not an alien invasion or whatever.” I gave King the block number and he blew out a breath.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Carson. Gonna be on the news any minute, I expect.”
“What is it, King?”
“Amos Schrum has come home to die.”
A picture immediately came to mind: a man of towering height with his face looking hewn from flint, all angles and hollows. His eyes were squinty small and peered from the cave of his brow, and his curling, snow-white hair flowed back from his high forehead like a foaming wave. Schrum’s stentorian voice had once been compared to “a trumpet calling the righteous to battle”.
The Reverend Amos Schrum had been a fixture on the religious scene since I was a kid, my mother dragging me to one of his tent revivals thirty-something years back. Schrum would have been in his late forties at the time, and though I recalled not a word of his message, my child’s eyes were riveted to the figure on the distant stage: diamond-bright in cones of light that seemed aimed from the heavens. People were Amen-ing and Hallelujah-ing. Some wept openly. A black woman beside me began babbling nonsense. A white man fell to his hands and knees and started barking like a dog. Throngs rushed the stage to be saved.
If there were more than a few people who conflated Amos Schrum with God Almighty, I could almost understand.
“Schrum’s from Key West?” I asked.
“Lived here until he went to bible school. He felt close to the place – family home and all – and kept the house. He’s had a caretaker living there, though Schrum hasn’t visited in years.”
“What’s wrong with the guy?”
“Supposedly the old ticker might blow at any second. His people told us Schrum was arriving today around daybreak, and when the news got out we’d need crowd control.”
“Schrum’s that big a deal?”
“The guy’s network broadcasts into over seven million homes a week. He carries a big stick in conservative and evangelistic religious circles.”
“So I should tell my br— … friend that his neighborhood’s gonna be chaotic for a while?”
“There’ll be church buses hauling in the faithful to pay respects, prayer vigils, TV vans, that kind of thing. At least until the bucket gets kicked.”
“Thanks, King. I’ll pass it on.”
I channel-surfed news outlets, stopping on a woman backgrounded by a photograph of Schrum and I upped the volume.
“… seventy-six-year-old evangelist and creator of the Crown of Glory television empire, is reportedly gravely ill and has moved from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to the house in Key West where the influential pastor spent his early years … wife of thirty years died five years ago from ovarian cancer … no details on his illness are available, though a history of heart problems … pacemaker implanted in March …”
I called Jeremy and told him to get used to crowd scenes.
“It’s already started,” he moaned. “Four more news vans and two dozen halfwits weeping in the street. One lunatic is dressed in sackcloth and dragging a wooden cross. Maybe I’ll saunter over in a devil mask and tap the window. Give Schrum a heart attack so I can get some peace.”
“Stay away, Jeremy. Crowds are potentially dangerous.”
“You said my visage no longer graced the halls of police departments. I’m a free man.”
A year after being identified as dead and removed from Wanted listings, I was less fearful of my brother being identified with old photos than of his need to meddle and manipulate. Despite his claimed need for peace, a crowd of emotionally distraught mourners would fascinate my brother.
“Stay inside and let it blow over,” I said. “Promise me you’ll ignore the commotion.”
“Can you believe this,” he said – and I knew he’d been looking out his window – “a guy with a bullhorn has started ranting about homosexuals. Interesting.”
“Stay inside,” I told him. “Promise me.”
“Yes, yes, of course …” he said, hanging up the phone, suddenly distracted.
11 (#ulink_171ec98f-82e3-5a02-8582-f34f14b9de13)
Frisco Dredd sat naked save for a T-shirt and briefs in the tiny room on the southern edge of Little Havana, watching the traffic crawl down Highway 90 through a dirt-hazed window. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a dripping sink, the shower a two-by-two recess in the wall, the plastic curtain half hanging on the broken-tile floor.
The rooms rented by the week, mainly to the desperate, downtrodden and addicted. But the hotel-apartment was anonymous, the other dwellers transient and acknowledging Dredd with a fast nod and averted eyes, if at all.
I live amidst the wicked until my tasks are finished … Dredd thought. He closed his eyes and recalled a passage from Malachi: “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet …”
The room came furnished with a beaten couch, a lopsided chair and a wooden table. The bed was in an alcove and Dredd had stripped off the threadbare cover and stained sheets and put them in the garbage, buying a sleeping bag to put atop the mattress and a fresh white sheet to cover his body. He’d also purchased a small refrigerator and a cheap set of weights to keep his body strong.
His body needed to stay fit: It carried precious cargo.
Dredd started to stand, but his knees quivered and he sat heavily. When with the Jezebel last night, the power had flowed through him brighter and purer than the sun and while he worked the holy symphony sang in his head. But after he’d finished, his energy had drained away, leaving him weak as a kitten.
Dredd looked at his briefs and saw the purple stain of dried blood. He’d been so wearied he’d fallen asleep before removing his wire. He winced as he eased the underwear down and over his animal. Dredd fought his way to standing and limped across the room to the kitchen drawer he used as a tool box. He pulled it open: hammer, vise-grips, duct tape and – tucked in back – the spool of .32 gauge copper wire and the snips. He grabbed the snips and returned to the bed, sitting on the edge with his legs spread wide, picking gingerly at the base of his animal, grimacing as he pulled up a knotted loop of thread-thin brass wire, snipping the strand. Teeth clenched against the pain – nothin’ compared to your pain and tribulation, Lord, forgive my weakness – he slowly unwrapped the biting wire from his animal, fresh blood seeping from cuts inflicted when the women were close and his animal awakened and hungered for them. But the constricting wire stopped that, the fierce pain reminding him of his holy mission.
Gasping, Dredd dropped the crusted wire to the floor. He fell back to the mattress and began to sing in a high and whispery voice.
“When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be white?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
Dredd stripped off his shirt to let the Lord see that Frisco Dredd had again fought his animal and won.
“Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb …”
After several verses, Dredd gathered his strength, pushed from the bed and went to the bathroom, dropping to his knees beside the sink. The pipes went into a jagged hole in the wall. Dredd snaked his arm through the hole until his fingers withdrew a leather rectangle with a silver cross of duct tape.
Dredd returned to the bed. From the leather holder he withdrew a black notebook. His missions, his holy crusades, were listed within, along with valuable information: times, dates, locations, employers, routes traveled, maps, photos … Time to prepare for the next mission. Dredd thumbed open a page, a list of names. Who would be chosen? Who was next?
Dredd held the notebook inches above his bleeding animal, showing it to the gaping wound.
The choice was His to make.
12 (#ulink_962e0b5e-f3bf-5c7d-b48c-9286dd8aed1e)
Jeremy Ryder’s Key West home sat toward the rear of a long, palm-studded lot abloom with bougainvillea and myrtle, the front yard picket-fenced with ficus on both corners. Pastel yellow with white accenting and a deep porch, the house stood two stories tall plus an attic story beneath a high-pitched roof, a rounded tower twelve feet in diameter comprising the southern corner of the home and ending with a third-story projection with cupola. The majestic dwelling had been built in the early 1920s, when ceilings were a proper height, twelve feet. The original owner, Mr Tobias Throckington, had made his fortune during Prohibition, running liquor from Cuba to speakeasies as distant as Galveston.
It was the top story of the tower where Ryder currently stood, his office, a burled-oak desk curved to fit the wall below one of the wide windows. On the desk were the six small displays of his Bloomberg terminal, his link to the financial world. On the other end of the desk was his personal computer, a large-screen iMac. The Bloomberg monitors danced with charts and graphs and streaming numbers, the personal computer was dark.
Pushed to the desk was a Hermann Miller chair, black and expensive and purchased for comfort, as Jeremy Ryder sat in it several hours daily. A richly detailed oaken wardrobe sat across the room, outfitted to hold files and office supplies. Jeremy Ryder hated file cabinets: they reminded him of institutions.
Three windows faced outward, the northernmost angling toward the re-occupied Schrum edifice. The home had always been well-kept, but lifeless for the most part, a crew arriving every second summer week to keep things tidy, diminishing to every three in the cooler months. The only vehicles in regular attendance belonged to either the crew or tourists gawking at the architectural excesses on the broad avenue. They paused before his home, mouths drooping, cameras ticking.
But now the street resembled a parking lot: news vans, cop cars, the gathering crowd. A catastrophe, Jeremy Ryder thought.
But an interesting one.
A hundred people now, up from fifty just minutes ago, not including the news types. Some stared mutely at the Schrum house, others knelt and prayed. From nowhere a man had appeared wearing a coarse robe and dragging a wooden cross up and down the street.
Jeremy started to draw his blinds, but stared down the street, unable to pull the cord.
Why are they there? What do they see? What can a dying man give them?
No … what do they think a dying man can give them?
The sound of an incoming Skype. Jeremy flicked his personal computer into life. The screen filled with the image of Ava Davanelle in a green surgical gown, her shoulder-length hair snow white though she was in her late thirties, her skin fair, her green eyes sparkling with amusement.
“How goes the day, boyo?” Davanelle said. It amused Jeremy Ryder that her hair was as white as that of the glum Schrum supposedly withering away down the street. Ava was calling during her morning break at the South Florida morgue. She was its newest pathologist, hired last year from her post in Chicago.
Jeremy smiled and leaned the wall across from the camera with arms crossed. “I was checking Baltic shipping rates, but got distracted by the Mongol hordes.”
Davanelle sipped from a coffee cup. “Strom Thurmond served in the Senate until a hundred years old. His last years he resembled a drooling puppet carried into the chamber by his aides.”
“Meaning?”
“Schrum’s a tough and driven old buzzard. Driven types don’t die easy.”
“I can’t work,” Jeremy said, scowling out the window and noting church buses pulling to the Schrum house. “Maybe I’ll saunter over and inspect the carnival.”
An arched eyebrow from Davanelle. “That so?”
“Carson advises me to keep distant from the spectacle, Ava,” Jeremy said. “What’s your advice?”
She smiled. “When it rains, use an umbrella.”
Davanelle blew a kiss and the screen went dark. Jeremy changed his khakis and sport shirt for a sky-blue seersucker suit, cream shirt, red-accented tie, slipping bare feet into cordovan loafers, stopping at the entryway closet to select a cream Panama and large sunglasses. He opened the door to a day bright with promise, and walked toward the milling crowd. The police had blocked half the thoroughfare to give people room for their various enterprises, from open-mouth stares to prayer to lugging a wooden cross. There were impromptu singings of hymns, prayers, candles dribbling wax all over the street. Jeremy watched until bored, ten minutes. He yawned and started back to his house, but paused as a stretch limousine with blackout windows passed the cross street at the end of the block. Normally, a stretch limo was not worth a second glance, another celebrity vacationing in the Keys, but this one was pulling an eight-foot trailer.
A limo with a trailer?
Jeremy reversed direction, jogging down the street to see the vehicle pull into the gated drive of a house two doors down, the house directly behind the home where Reverend Schrum lay. Two men stepped from the vehicle, dark suits, sunglasses, sized like football linemen, one was a buzz-cut redhead, the other had dark hair and Jeremy knew he was seeing bodyguards, security, whatever. Small minds, large muscles, no creative resources.
The day was getting brighter.
Jeremy retreated around the corner and stationed himself midpoint on the block, looking down the back yards. After ten minutes his conjecture was rewarded. The new arrivals at the house whose backyard abutted the Schrum backyard were now crossing between houses.
Why not park in front? Jeremy wondered. The crowds a problem? Or did they not wish to be seen?
Jeremy saw the two security types, plus another of the same rugged stature, a third who doubled as a driver, perhaps. With them were two others, one a man in a motorized wheelchair with tall tires – obviously carried in the rental van – and an auburn-haired woman, tall and slender and walking precariously between the yards, the effect of high heels sinking in to sandy ground. At one point she teetered sideways and when the red-haired bodyguard put out his hand to assist, she slapped it away.
Though Jeremy had seen the wheelchair man and auburn-tressed woman for three seconds and from two hundred feet distant, he knew their names and occupations.
He’d made money from them.
The quintet disappeared into the lush foliage at the rear of the Schrum home. Jeremy slipped his hands into his pockets and, whistling a jaunty air, strolled back to his home to ponder the meaning of the visitation.
13 (#ulink_f979d4be-c4aa-52d4-bba0-0a81f97349f8)
Eliot Winkler’s motorized chair buzzed to the bottom of the steps to the back porch of the Schrum residence. The rear door was opened by Andy Delmont, a gospel singer and one of the Crown of Glory network’s most popular celebrities, his five albums in wide distribution. Delmont was in his early thirties, with red-blond hair, emerald-green eyes, freckle-dappled cheeks, and a bright, engaging smile that bordered on childlike. As always, Delmont looked dressed for a performance, white country-and-western-style suit with embroidered lapels and mother-of-pearl buttons, sky-blue shirt with a bolo tie, silver-tipped leather straps through a silver, cruciform fitting.
“Mr Winkler. Ms Winkler,” Delmont said, his face eager to please. “So good to see you. We didn’t have time to install a ramp, but I’m sure a couple of your men can lift you up to—”
Winkler scowled and pressed a lever on the wheelchair’s arm, the customized Viking all-terrain-wheelchair climbing the steps as the seat adjusted to keep Winkler upright. He reached the top and rolled across the threshold, Delmont having to jump back to keep his toes from being run over.
“Where is he?” Winkler demanded as he whirred past. Vanessa Winkler followed, then paused at a full-length hallway mirror to freshen her lipstick and pat her elegant coif.
“The Reverend is upstairs,” Delmont said, stepping quickly to catch up. “The doctor is with him.” Delmont nodded to a latticed metal door down a short hallway. “There’s an elevator, sir.”
Winkler rolled to the metal grate, pressing the button and rolling inside before the door was fully open. He craned his head toward his sister.
“You coming, or you gonna primp all day?”
Vanessa Winkler dropped the lipstick into her purse. “You don’t have to do this, Eliot. Let’s get back in the limo and—”
“Get in the elevator, Nessa.”
An audible and dramatic sigh and Vanessa Winkler entered, pressing between her brother and the operation panel. Winkler grinned wetly and nodded toward the rounded feminine derriere at eye level.
“You reckon that’s a good ass, Andrew?”
Delmont looked stricken. “Pardon me, Mr Winkler?”
“You think Vanessa’s ass is a nice one? Speak up, son.”
Delmont colored with embarrassment and forced a smile to his face. “I … uh … don’t believe I should be the judge of—”
“Closing in on fifty,” Winkler continued, “and she wears pants tighter than wallpaper. How much it cost to keep that butt so high up, Nessa?”
“I’m not listening, Eliot.”
“Nessa could buy her own gym, Andy boy – hell, a hundred of ’em – and keep that machinery tuned up in private, but instead she goes to some sweaty club. Why, you ask. Cuz Nessa loves showing off for the young bucks. Now and then she brings one home and drains him dry.”
Vanessa Winkler remained expressionless. “You’re reaching new levels of disgusting, Eliot.”
A bell bonged and the door slid open. Eliot Winkler rolled out into a hallway, followed by his sister and Delmont. “Where you got him hid?” Winkler said, looking both directions.
“To the left, Mr Winkler. Toward the front.”
Winkler passed through a set of wispy curtains, pushing them aside and finding a small room holding a half-dozen mismatched chairs.
“He ain’t here.”
“That’s the visitor’s waiting room, sir. Keep going.”
A door on the far side was open and Winkler’s chair rolled into a large, high-ceilinged room, his sister in his wake. Just inside the room was a desk with a computer monitor and several files. Dr Roland Uttleman, the preacher’s private physician, was at the desk. A slender, sixtyish man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and round silver-framed glasses, he stood and nodded at the incoming trio.
“Hello, folks. How’re you, Eliot?”
“What’s this set-up?” Winkler said, pointing at the desk. “Checkpoint Charlie?”
“It’s my medical station, Eliot,” Dr Roland Uttleman said, coming around the desk with outstretched hand. Winkler ignored the gesture, rolling past, the chair’s rubber tires hissing over the polished wood flooring.
The room was cavernous enough to echo, nearly as long as the house was wide. One entire wall, door to sitting area, was lost behind flowers, some thrusting from vases, others foam crosses abloom with buds. Inscriptions ran from Get Well Soon, to Our Prayers Are with You to simply Love. Two folding tables had been brought in, pots of bloom atop and below. At the far end a sitting area was in place: couch, low table, a pair of large, soft chairs, a fifty-inch flat-screen television on the wall. The window behind the area was closed with a heavy drape.
Centering the long room was a king-sized mechanical bed flanked by medical monitors, and centering the bed was the long form of Amos Schrum, his robe thick and dark and running from his shoulders to his calves, the white bouffant of hair like a soft snowdrift over a pitted crag of flint.
Winkler rolled to the bed where Schrum appeared to be asleep, though when his eyes blinked open they were strangely bright, and focused immediately on Winkler.
“Hello, Eliot,” Schrum rasped, elevating the top third of the bed to sitting position. “How’s my old friend?”
Winkler reached out and took Schrum’s hand. “I got a lot on my mind, Amos. How you doing?”
“The good Lord granted me another sunrise. I’ll take it.”
“He does it because He loves you, Amos. You’ve carried His sword into great battles.”
Schrum coughed and Uttleman appeared with iced water. Schrum sipped and cleared his throat. “His … full glory will soon be … mine to behold, Eliot.”
Winkler’s chair spun to the others in the room. “How ’bout you people leave us be? Go get coffee, or food, or maybe Nessa will show you her butt. Me and Amos need some alone time.”
Delmont almost ran to the elevator. Uttleman looked unhappy, but followed. Instead of departing, Vanessa Winkler strode forty feet to the balcony window and yanked open the drapes. Light poured inside, and with it the low murmur of prayers and hymns from the street below.
Winkler glared at his sister, shook his head, and turned to Schrum. “You’ve come back from these heart things before, Amos. He needed you here and He touched you with healing.”
“That was years ago, Eliot. Perhaps my miracles are all used up.”
Winkler leaned forward. “I pray that’s not true. But you have one miracle yet to grant: My miracle.”
Schrum’s wide shoulders drooped. “Eliot …”
“I’ve done many great things for you, Amos. All I ask is one great thing for me.”
“I think about it all the time, Eliot. It’s just, just …” Schrum seemed overcome by the effort and his head fell back to the pillow, eyes closed. Breath rattled in his throat and his head drooped to the side.
“Amos!” Winkler screeched, grabbing at Schrum’s hand. “AMOS!”
Schrum’s eyes batted open. “I’m fine, Eliot. I’m just … so tired.”
Eliot Winkler’s face, a visage that cowed Titans of industry, crumbled into that of a child lost in the dark. His hands tugged at Schrum’s robe. “Amos … you promised. It was your idea that day when I was in … when I realized my soul was in jeopardy. You said, you promised, that you had a way, that there was a way …”
“I’ve been working on it, Eliot. But I …”
“You promised you’d do it. Please …” Eliot Winkler started weeping.
Vanessa Winkler turned from the window to her brother. “Jesus, Eliot. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Winkler’s head spun to his sister, eyes bright with tears and anger. “I’m trying to save my soul. I’d save yours, too, if it didn’t already reside in the Pit.”
Vanessa Winkler rolled her eyes. Her brother turned back to Schrum. “Amos, I need you. I’ve never needed anyone more.”
Schrum’s hand found Winkler’s. “Finish the project on your own, Eliot. It’s nothing to someone with your resources.”
“I CAN’T, AMOS! Without your blessed presence, it’s unsanctified. You told me that the event is stuck in time, waiting only to be released. Its release has to be engineered by a man of God.”
“I can’t even stand up, Eliot.”
“The project doesn’t need you to stand, Amos. You just have to be there to make it real. YOU HAVE TO DO IT, AMOS. IT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!”
“Oh, for shit sakes,” Vanessa Winkler muttered.
Schrum started to lift his head, but it fell back into the pillow. “The daily stress of the project … it’s not something I can manage, Eliot. Not on a daily basis … All I have is the power of my faith in God.”
“He listens to you, Amos!” Winkler beseeched. “Beg Him for strength.”
Schrum coughed and his eyes fell closed. Uttleman appeared, his face dark. “You have to leave, Eliot. The stress will kill Amos.”
Tears staining his cheeks, Eliot Winkler whirred reluctantly to the elevator. Vanessa followed, high heels ticking the floor like tack hammers. Uttleman saw the pair to the first floor, riding down in silence.
“Andy,” Uttleman said to the singer, sitting at the kitchen table and arranging sheet music, “would you escort our guests across the yard?”
Delmont scurried to catch the Winklers, now exiting the back door. When it closed, Uttleman took the lift upstairs, where Amos Schrum was sitting up in the bed. The doctor frowned at the open drapes, crossed the floor, and pulled them tight.
“He’s gone?” Schrum said.
Uttleman went to his desk and tapped keys on the desk monitor to see live video from six cameras. “Heading through the yard.”
“Where’s Andy?”
“Walking beside the Winklers and chattering like a magpie while they ignore him.”
“Think he’s coming back today?” Schrum frowned. “Andy?”
Uttleman shrugged. “What’s so important about Andy?”
“He sings and prays and doesn’t require anything.” Schrum narrowed an eye at his physician. “It’s a nice change.”
“We’re alone, Amos. And we need to talk.”
Schrum stood and angled toward the sitting area at the front of the room. “Later. I’m gonna go watch some television.”
“It’s important, Amos.”
Schrum grabbed a pint bottle of cough syrup from his bedside table and poured two ounces into a glass as his black leather slippers padded to the sitting area. He sat on a lounger, crossed his legs, tipped back the glass and finished the syrup – cherry vodka actually – in a single swig. Uttleman followed and sat on a wooden chair.
“Eliot won’t be mollified, Amos,” Uttleman said. “You better get used to him.”
Schrum started to respond, but only sighed. A sound of singing drifted from the street below. Schrum stood, crept to the front window and furtively peered around the edge of a drape. “My lord, Roland. There must be three hundred souls out there, all waiting for me to die.”
“All hating that you might die, Amos. They love you.”
Schrum’s face was impassive. He frowned toward Uttleman.
“How did I get to this point, Roland? Hiding in Key West like a schoolboy feigning the flu?”
“You were being kind to an old friend and one of your greatest backers over the years. You offered hope, was that so bad?”
Schrum held up the glass of flavored vodka. “I’d been drinking. I might have even been joking.”
“You can still pull it off, Amos. Eliot needs it bad.”
Schrum didn’t seem to hear, head canted to the choir singing to him from below. He again peered around the drape.
“Come away from the window, Amos,” Uttleman said. “They’ll see you.”
“And?”
“And they may think you’re not as ill as reports are suggesting.”
Schrum sat back down on the chair. He picked up the remote and turned on the television, Uttleman noting the selector set on a small religious cable channel out of Alabama.
“I’m starting to feel better these last couple of days, Roland. Maybe even able to return to the Jacksonville studios in a couple weeks.”
“Before that, uh, blessed event happens, Amos, I’ll need to prepare from a … a medical standpoint.”
Schrum looked tired of the train of conversation and waved Uttleman from the room. “I’m feeling an upturn, so start preparing. If you see Andy outside, tell him I could use a little entertainment. And a ham-and-cheese sandwich.”
14 (#ulink_8cbba057-a759-54b4-ae8c-96849a2a7f82)
The FCLE comprised two floors in Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center. Though it was the hub of municipal government, I suspected the politically attuned and sporadically Machiavellian Roy McDermott was the reason our agency had been allocated such prime airspace. The admin and upper-level investigative and legal types occupied the twenty-third floor, with the one below the province of pool investigators, support, and record-keeping.
When Roy had moved Ziggy Gershwin from the tight back room of my office to his own space, he’d kept the kid on the twenty-third floor, claiming there was no room downstairs, but I knew it was because Roy figured Gershwin was a future star, proving himself in the cases we’d closed.
Gershwin’s office was small and windowless and down a long hall past the legal team. He was at his desk, tipped back in his chair and studying reports. We’d spent a lot of time together and he seemed to have adopted some of my traits, trading in the former skate-punk garb for summer-weight jackets over T-shirts and jeans, and wearing dark running shoes, which beat the hell out of hard soles on the occasions when you had to chase lowlifes down alleys and over fences.
He looked up and grinned. “S’up, Big Ryde?”
“I need a listing of sex offenders in a fifty-mile radius, Zigs, especially those recently released from prison. Got a couple trainees you can use?”
My worst fear was that the perp had settled an old score with Sandoval, but had more scores to settle. We needed to take this monster down fast.
“Uh, no problem.”
“You sound hesitant.”
“Just thinking who I can put on it. Roy’s got me on the Menendez case, kind of on the QT.”
“Menendez? Like what?”
“The lady’s a saint, right? So no one’s looking past that. Roy wanted me to take a tiptoe through her history.”
Meaning dig into Menendez deeper than others were doing, but leave a light footprint, if any. All cop agencies have biases toward their own, and it was best outsiders handle such things.
“Understood,” I said.
“But no problem with checking the pervs,” Gershwin assured me, picking up his phone. “I’ll put Wagner and Brazano on it. They’re new, but good.”
“Gracias, amigo.”
I was thinking about Menendez as I returned to my office. It was the worst type of case: a beloved and talented public figure killed for apparently no reason, knifed down in her prime in her own home, not a shred of evidence to be found. I was pitying every MDPD detective when my cell rang: Belafonte.
“Good morning,” I said, trying for jovial to balance out my dark musings on Menendez. “How’s my favorite MDPD liaison today?”
“She just heard about a body found in the waterway in Golden Glades,” Belafonte said quietly. “She’s hearing ‘wrapped in a burnt sheet’.”
So much for starting the day on a high note. With siren and flashers pushing aside traffic, I raced there in fifteen minutes, a retiree-oriented neighborhood shaded by palms and garnished with tropical foliage. The street was blocked by a white-and-green MDPD patrol car and I continued to a brick home fronted by another cruiser, an ambulance, and mobile units from the Medical Examiner’s office and the Forensics team. Anxious residents stood at the curb and beyond them I saw Belafonte beside the canal a hundred feet behind the house, part of a highway of water running from the glades to Biscayne Bay.
The body had been bobbing at the water’s edge, but was now ashore, a charred husk shaped like a mummy. Belafonte was talking to a distraught-looking elderly guy holding a Chihuahua to his breast. I figured he’d found the horror. The scene tech was a friend, Deb Clayton.
“This no place to leave a corpse, Carson,” Deb said. “The perp would have to cross the yard, set off a half-dozen yappy dogs. Seems more likely it was dumped upriver.”
I looked upstream and saw Dixie Highway bridging the canal, the traffic a line of fast metal. I heard the roar of heavy trucks and motorcycles. Belafonte saw where I was looking.
“Even at night, there’s a lot of traffic on Dixie. Better would be Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just past Dixie. Traffic’s lighter. But she could have been dumped anywhere above here.”
“Wonder what the flow rate is?” I said, studying the waves.
Belafonte bent to the water’s edge and found a sodden cigarette butt. She flipped it into the canal and watched it float lazily away.
“The water’s moving a quarter-mile an hour, give or take.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”
“First we got a date at Missing Persons.”
The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.
I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.
“We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”
“Four a.m.?”
“The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”
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J. Kerley
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: From the bestselling author of Her Last Scream, a chilling tale of ritual murder and corruption, featuring Detective Carson Ryder.The Reverend Honus Schrum, a nationally renowned minister and owner of a broadcasting empire, tells the media he has come home to Key West to die. Meanwhile, Detective Carson Ryder is investigating the ritualistic murders of young women with chequered pasts, discovering the killings have religious overtones.Simultaneously, a newly retired Harry Nautilus takes a job as a driver/bodyguard for Richard Owsley, an ambitious pastor in Mobile. They come to Florida, where Owsley meets with Schrum and is enlisted to complete a special and mysterious ‘project’ Schrum has promised a billionaire benefactor.As Carson digs deeper into the murders, Harry, interest piqued by all the hush-hush goings-on of his new employer, begins to covertly investigate the strange project. Their independent investigations begin to converge, and Carson and Harry uncover a horrifying connection between the cases…