A Garden of Vipers Read online

  “Not gonna happen, Logan,” Harry said. “It’s ours.”

  “I got seniority, Nautilus.”

  “Then join AARP,” Harry said. “I’m not saving your worthless ass anymore.”

  Logan froze. His eyes tightened. “It was a Forensics screwup, not mine.”

  “You almost blew the case, Logan,” Harry said. “Have the balls to own up to it.”

  Logan’s hands squeezed into fists. “For a simple fuck, Nautilus, you’re a sanctimonious son of a bitch.”

  “And for a cop, Logan, you’re a helluva defense lawyer.”

  Logan made a guttural sound and launched a punch toward Harry’s gut. Harry blocked it, grabbed Logan’s wrist, twisted, dropped to a knee. Logan went down. Harry rammed Logan’s arm behind his back. He writhed on the wet pavement, cursing and threatening.

  “Knife!” someone yelled, a nightmare word. Everyone froze, heads turning, hands dropping to holsters.

  “Easy, guys,” Tyree Shuttles said, a few feet behind the Mazda. He pointed into shadows by the curb. “I found a big-ass knife. Over here in the gutter.”

  Harry released Logan’s wrist. Logan squirmed up, gasping and wheezing, a heavy smoker. He leaned against the Mazda to catch his breath. Something caught his eye, and for a moment Logan seemed transfixed by an image near the sidewalk. I turned to look, but all I saw was water rushing down the gutter, dumping into a storm sewer.

  Harry and I jogged to Shuttles, kneeling beside a metal object in the gutter, only a portion of the handle visible above the water. Logan wheezed up, looked at the weapon, then at Shuttles. Harry backed away and sighed, having the civility to invent an ad hoc protocol.

  “Shuttles found evidence, Logan. You guys get the case.”

  Logan leaned against the driver’s side of the Mazda, looked inside. He stared a moment, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, checked again, shook his head. Logan laughed without a trace of humor.

  “You want this one, Nautilus? It’s yours.”

  Logan turned away, walked back to his vehicle, climbed in the passenger’s side. Shuttles shot a glance at his vehicle, Logan sulking within. The young detective looked embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry about what went down with Pace,” Shuttles said. “He’s been in a shitty mood the last couple weeks.”

  Harry brushed rain from his face, stepped closer to Shuttles, lowering his voice so the uniforms couldn’t hear. “I know you won’t request a new partner assignment, Tyree. I respect that. But transfer to another district. Get a new partner that way. Logan’s not doing your career any good.”

  “Pace is retiring in two months, Harry. He’ll be gone soon.”

  “You sure?”

  Shuttles nodded.

  Harry bounced a gentle punch off the young detective’s shoulder, said, “Hang in there.”

  The slender black officer walked back toward his car. He paused, turned to Harry, and mouthed Thanks. Shuttles climbed in, flicked off the flashers behind the grille, pulled away. I didn’t envy him the rest of his shift with Logan pissing and moaning and inventing ways he got screwed.

  Harry told the uniforms the show was over and to get back to diverting traffic, if any happened to show up. I put on latex gloves, opened the door of the Mazda. The victim’s bowels had released and the car was thick with the smell of blood and excrement. She was tumbled across the transmission hump, her head on the passenger’s seat, braided and beaded hair flung like a rag doll’s. Her nose appeared broken. Her lower lip was torn. There were wounds across her torso, her blouse glossy with blood. Her throat had been slit.

  I took a deep breath and continued my visual inventory. One of her hands looked odd. It was hanging down on the passenger’s side, in shadow. I went to the passenger’s side and opened the door, my fears confirmed. Three fingers broken, the digits bent backward. It was unsettling, like a hand assembled incorrectly.

  I made myself concentrate on the pillaging of the vehicle—sound system removed, wires dangling. The glove box was open, contents scattered. Maps half open on the floor, registration, manual, tire-pressure gauge. Sun visors pulled forward. Sometimes folks clipped a few spare bucks there, for toll roads and the like. Blood was everywhere, like the interior had been hosed down with an artery.

  I knew why Logan had passed on the case. This one had an immediate bad feel, a one-glance Creep Factor. I studied the woman again, a cold wave spreading through my gut. The smell overwhelmed me and I withdrew.

  “She was beaten and cut,” I told Harry. “It’s bad.”

  Harry had gone to the car for his rain gear, not that it would do much good. He leaned in and scanned the scene for several minutes, his mind taking pictures. Now and then a detail pulled a grunt or a sigh. He studied the floor at the woman’s feet, put his hand in, touched the floor, looked at his fingertips. Then, aiming the flashlight close to the floor, he repeated the motion.

  “What is it, bro?” I asked.

  Harry didn’t hear me. He turned his face to the sky, like he was looking for the answer to something.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lucas crouched in shadow beside the fast-food restaurant’s stinking Dumpster, wadding cold French fries in his fist and jamming them into his mouth. Untouched fries were safest, he figured. The cast-off sandwiches all had bite marks.

  Lucas pushed sodden, foot-long black hair from his eyes, brushed French-fry salt from his thick beard. He leaned out into the light. There was a bank beside the restaurant, a small branch office with an ATM in the drive-through. Getting money was critical to Lucas’s plan. Money breeds money, hadn’t he heard that a thousand times? Like a mantra: Money breeds money.

  In the half hour he’d been waiting, over a dozen cars had slipped to the ATM, drivers making transactions, zooming away. Two of the drivers had pulled to the side, close to the rear of the restaurant. Lucas had watched as the drivers turned on their dome lights and fiddled with banking paperwork.

  The door at the back of the restaurant slammed open. Lucas froze in the shadows and stench.

  “You there, you,” a voice yelled, angry. Lucas felt his muscles tighten, his hands ball into hard fists.

  “Me?” said someone inside the place.

  “You—Darryl, is it?”

  “Daniel,” a voice grunted.

  “I got soft drink canisters out here. Get ’em inside.”

  “I still got to finish mopping the—”

  “Now.”

  The door banged shut. Lucas slithered beneath the wheeled Dumpster. His heart sank when he saw he’d forgotten his purse. Made of cheap white vinyl, it lay past the Dumpster, almost in the cone of light from the restaurant. The door reopened and feet appeared. Canisters were hefted in the door.

  The door shut. Lucas squirmed from beneath the Dumpster, pavement grease now added to his shirt and pants, pulled from a donations pile outside a Goodwill store. He’d left his institutional clothing with the other castoffs.

  Lucas clutched the purse to his chest and turned his eyes back to the ATM. Women afforded the best opportunities. But he’d take whatever fate provided and work with it.

  He waited twenty minutes, only one vehicle stopping at the ATM in that time, a pickup truck with dual tracks and a stars ’n’ bars decal on the window. A good ol’ boy, Lucas thought. The type to keep a pipe under the seat. Or a gun.

  Not worth the risk.

  Minutes later a compact car entered the bank lot: a woman, driving slow. Lucas gathered the purse in his hand and threw it into the shadowy corner of the bank lot, twenty feet away. It landed as the car’s headlights washed over the pavement. The lights hit the purse, passed by, angled toward the ATM.

  Slowed.

  Stopped a dozen feet short of the ATM. Lucas held his breath.

  Take the bait.

  The car began backing up. Lucas raised to a crouch. Tensed his muscles. The car parked beside the purse. He heard the door locks snap off.

  Lucas was up and running.

  CHAPTER 3

  Th
e next morning I arose to a sky the color of clay. Harry and I had worked until three in the morning, ascertaining what we could from the victim’s name and vehicle papers. Thunder rumbled in the distance, another storm cell rolling through. The phone rang as I was pouring coffee. It was Danielle Danbury—my girlfriend.

  “Carson, can you stop by before work?” Her voice was somber.

  “What’s wrong, Dani?”

  “Please hurry.”

  “On my way.”

  Though Dani’s profession as a TV journalist made us natural adversaries, we’d been thrown into an uneasy alliance last year, tracking collectors of serial-killer memorabilia. The bizarre episode had taken Dani and me—I simply couldn’t use her on-air moniker, DeeDee—to Paris to interview an elderly art professor. While in the City of Light we’d become lovers, a condition that remained.

  The erratic and overlong hours of our jobs made getting together more chance than certainty, and not counting sleeping, we grabbed maybe fifteen hours a week together. At least that had been the norm until a couple months back when Harry jumped into Logan’s mess and I’d played catch-up eighteen hours a day.

  I raced down the steps of my stilt-standing beachfront home and jumped in my old pickup, making Dani’s house in twenty minutes. She was in reporter garb: good jeans, white silk blouse, burgundy linen jacket, strand of pearls at her neck, tiny matching earrings. Her blond hair was lacquered, a concession to the cameras. She clutched a copy of Woodward and Bernstein’s book on Watergate, All the President’s Men, to her breast. Her eyes were red and swollen.

  I stepped inside, my heart racing. “What’s wrong, Dani? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Carson. It’s a friend…. She was killed last night. Murdered. I just read it in the paper.”

  There was only one murder last night.

  “Taneesha Franklin,” I said, reaching to hold Dani. “I was there. I’m sorry. Was she a good friend?”

  Dani wiped her eyes, leaned back to look into my face.

  “More like mentor and mentee, I guess. But she was a wonderful person.”

  “She was a reporter?”

  “For a tiny radio station, WTSJ. She was a newbie, spent her days covering city meetings, ribbon-cuttings, yapping politicians…the usual starter crapola. I’d had lunch with her a few times, Teesh asking questions about journalism, me answering. She was bright and dedicated and excited about her little reporting job. What happened, Carson? The paper had maybe four column inches. I can read between the lines. It sounded…brutal.”

  “It was bad. Probably a robbery that went haywire.”

  Dani and I hear so many lies in our jobs that we don’t lie to one another, not even the little white ones. Dani was still holding All the President’s Men. I tapped its cover, tried a smile.

  “You’re about thirty years behind on your reading, babe.”

  “It was a gift from Teesh. I told her my copy of the book was about to turn to dust, and she bought me a new one. She dropped it off a few weeks back. Read the dedication, Carson.”

  Dani opened the book to the inside cover. I saw script in a neat and flowing hand.

  To DeeDee…who told me how things are supposed to work, and when they don’t, how to maul the bastards messing in the machinery. Love, Teesh

  “Isn’t that great?” Dani asked.

  “Maybe a tad strident.”

  “It’s how the good ones start out,” Dani said, a tear tracing her cheek.

  I met Harry at the department and we went to the hospital. Last night we hadn’t been allowed to interview the trucker who’d discovered the crime scene—he’d suffered a heart attack, but was now stable.

  Arlin Dell was a strapping guy with about five bedside devices either measuring or dripping something. The doc gave us five minutes. I pulled up a chair, Harry leaned against the wall. Dell was pale, his voice light. He seemed a bit fuzzy, like he was on a mild narcotic.

  “I’d just left the yard with a full load of electronic gizmos headed for Memphis. I cut down that side street, rain pouring, me wondering if it’s gonna be like this all the way to Tennessee, when I see this red car in the middle of the street. No lights. I jam on my brakes, about jackknife the rig.”

  “You see anyone near the Mazda?”

  Dell made a whistling noise, like laughing or choking. “An ape jumped out of the car, ran straight at my headlights, then cut to the side and jumped into the shadows.”

  “Ape?” Harry said.

  “I climbed from the rig and looked in the car. When I saw what was inside, my heart grabbed in me like a fist. I made it back to the cab, called 9–1–1.”

  “Tell me you didn’t really see an ape.”

  “It was a hairy guy.” Dell patted his cheeks. “Furry face, long hair. Like an ape. Or the thing in those Star Wars movies.”

  “A Wookiee?” I asked.

  Dell shrugged. “Ape. Wookiee. Or maybe one of those guys from ZZ Top.”

  “I hate a bearded perp,” Harry said as we left the hospital and aimed the Crown Vic for WTSJ, the victim’s employer. “The bastard shaves and he’s got a brand-new face.”

  I’d been replaying Dell’s recollections in my head, picturing myself high above the ground in a cab-over Mack.

  “You know what really got me, bro? The perp ran straight for the rig, then juked at the last second, disappearing. He ran a dozen feet directly into the truck’s headlights.”

  Harry tapped his thumbs on the wheel. “Headlights, engine rumble, windows like eyes…The truck should have scared the hell out of a guy who just committed a capital crime. Standard response is haul ass the opposite direction.”

  “Maybe thought he could attack the truck,” I said. “Roaring on crack or PCP. Or maybe insane.”

  “He’d already pitched his knife. It was on the other side of the vehicle. If he was going to war with the semi, he was going at it bare-handed.”

  “Ballsy son of a bitch,” I said. “Or a full whack-out.”

  “Never a good thing,” Harry noted. “Either choice.”

  WTSJ was in a squat concrete-block building near Pritchard, a town abutting Mobile to the north. The receptionist’s eyes were shadowed with grief, but she forced a smile.

  “Lincoln’s the station manager. He’s on the air two more minutes.”

  She put us in a small anteroom. Lincoln Haley was in the adjoining studio, visible through a thick window. Haley was mid-forties, square-jawed, a neat beard. His forehead was high and protruding, like it was filled with songs. Racks of CDs were at his back. He wore a black headset and spoke into a microphone the size of a beer can. He saw us looking, flashed two minutes with his fingers, leaned over the microphone. Speakers filled the anteroom with his voice.

  “…coming up on the hour, time for Newsbreak. After the hour it’s time for the Queen Bee, Miss Pearlie Winston, bringing you the best in funk ’n’ blues in the whole United States…. Now I’m gonna take you to the top with Marlon Saunders….”

  Music kicked in. Haley stood, set the headset on the table, rubbed his face. A man worn past the tread. The studio door admitted a large and brightly dressed woman. She gave Haley’s hand a squeeze. He appeared in the anteroom seconds later, khakis, sandals, sweater, hands in his pockets.

  “I’ll do anything if it helps find the animal who hurt Teesh.”

  Through the glass I saw the woman put on the headphones, pull the microphone close. She took a deep breath, a big fake smile rising to her face.

  “This is Pearlie Winston, queen of the funky scene….”

  Haley reached to a switch, killed the speakers.

  “Pearlie’s heart is broken, but she sounds like she’s about to break into song. It’s tough. Taneesha was like my daughter, everybody’s daughter. She was…w-was…”

  “Tell me about Ms. Franklin’s job,” Harry said. “At your own pace.”

  Haley nodded, composed himself.

  “We’re a small station, Detective. When Pearlie’s not on the air, she�
�s selling advertising time. When I’m not broadcasting or managing things, I’m the electrician. Teesh was our reporter, but sometimes wrote ads.”

  “You’re probably not ripe for a takeover by Clarity Broadcasting,” I said. Clarity owned Channel 14, Dani’s employer.

  Haley’s eyes darkened. “Everything Clarity touches turns to garbage—profitable garbage, but soulless.”

  “Ms. Franklin worked here how long?” Harry said.

  “Started as an intern two years back. That girl had boundless enthusiasm.”

  “Did she want to be a DJ or whatever, on the air?”

  “She did the midnight show for several months. But talking between tunes was too tame for Teesh. Her dream was to be a reporter. Teesh had the aggression, the drive. She just needed more polish. I moved her into our tiny news department. You would have thought I’d given her a job on CNN.”

  Harry said, “Was she working a story last night?”

  “Not an assignment. But Teesh was always looking to break that big story, find something no one was supposed to know, putting the light on it. I told her we didn’t have money for investigations. But she thought of it as training, kept at it on her own time.”

  “Self-propelled,” I said.

  “Know who she wanted to be like? That investigator on Channel 14, uh, I can’t recall names…blonde, big eyes, kind of in-your-face, but sexy with it….”

  “Uh, Danbury?” I said.

  Haley snapped his fingers. “DeeDee Danbury. Teesh spoke with Ms. Danbury a few times, asked questions. Teesh called her a kick-ass lady with a mind all her own.”

  “I’ve heard that about Ms. Danbury,” I said.

  CHAPTER 4

  We left the station and headed for Forensics. We walked into the main lab and found deputy director Wayne Hembree sprawled across the white floor, tie flapped over his shoulder, glasses askew on his black, clock-round face, one bony arm beneath the small of his back, the other flung above his head.