A Garden of Vipers Read online

  “I’ve been shot,” he moaned.

  “Who did it?” I asked. Detectives get paid to ask insightful questions like that.

  Hembree nodded to a far side of the room where an older guy in a neon-bright aloha shirt waved a dummy gun and grinned like he’d just discovered orgasm pills.

  “Not Thaddeus over there,” Hembree said. “From his angle the momentum would have flung me the opposite direction. My arm wouldn’t have been beneath my back, but across my belly.”

  I grabbed Hembree’s hand, pulled him up. He brushed down his lab coat, made notes on a clipboard, then told the shooter they’d act it out from another angle in a few minutes. The Thaddeus guy flicked a salute, faked a couple shots at Harry and me, retreated from the room. Hembree scanned a report and gave us the preliminaries.

  “Reads like a robbery gone bad. The car stops at the intersection, the perp runs from the shadows, busts the driver’s side window, takes over.”

  “Why the torture?” I asked.

  “Motivation’s not my bailiwick,” Hembree said. “Maybe she said something that set him off.”

  “Must have been a hell of a something,” I said.

  Harry had been listening quietly. He stepped up.

  “I got something feels off, myself. How long had she been dead when your people got there, Bree?”

  “Under a half hour, I’d bet. Your trucker saw the perp jump out when he arrived. Why?”

  “The driver’s side window, the busted one, was windward,” Harry said. “Close, anyway.”

  Hembree frowned. “I’m not getting you.”

  “I stuck my finger down on the floor. There was over two inches of rain there. I mean, it was raining like hell last night, but four inches an hour?”

  Hembree frowned. “Rain fell in moving pockets, the storm-cell effect. If a string of cells went over that location, three or more inches an hour is possible. But a location a mile away might get an inch or less.”

  “Makes sense,” Harry said. “One less thing to think about.”

  I heard my ring tone, grabbed the phone from my pocket. The call was from the front desk at headquarters.

  “This is Jim Haskins, Carson. You and Harry are leads on that robbery-murder last night, right?”

  “Ours. What’s up?”

  “Got a woman here at the desk who brought in her elderly mother. Mama’s wrought up, mumbling about a purse, an ATM, and a longhair in her car. Thought you’d want to know.”

  Harry and I arrived twelve minutes later, the wonder of a siren and flashing lights. The daughter was Gina Lovett, forty or thereabouts, plump and bespectacled. Her mother was Tessie Atkins, late sixties, nervous. She kept her arms tight to herself, as if cold.

  “What happened, Ms. Atkins?” Harry asked as we sat.

  She tugged at her sleeve. “I had been visiting a friend at the hospital and passed the bank on my way home. I needed to pay bills. Maybe it wasn’t smart at that hour…”

  “What hour, ma’am?” I asked.

  “Almost midnight. It was late, but there was a restaurant next door, a fast-food place. It made me feel safer. I pulled in and saw something white to the side of the lot. At first I thought it was a cat or some poor animal run down by a car. But then I saw it was a purse. I thought someone’s purse fell out by accident. It happened with my wallet once in the lot at Bruno’s. Some nice Samaritan took it inside the store. I thought…”

  “You’d repay the favor,” Harry said.

  “I pulled next to it and got out to pick it up. The next thing I knew a hand was across my mouth and I was back in the car. It was a man with all kinds of hair, bad smelling. He got down in the passenger’s side, on the floor, and said if I didn’t perform to expectations, he had a gun.”

  “Perform to expectations?” I said.

  She nodded, arms crossed, shaking fingers clasping her shoulders. “He made me take six hundred dollars from my account and three hundred from my two credit cards. It’s my limit. I was too shook up to drive. He drove south of Bienville Square a few blocks and jumped out. I just sat there and cried until my hands stopped shaking. I don’t know how I got home.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “He took my driver’s license. He said if I told the police, he was going to come to my house.”

  Ms. Atkins looked away. The daughter spoke up.

  “I stopped by Mama’s this morning to pick up some sewing. She wouldn’t look at me and I knew something was wrong. She finally told me.”

  We spoke to Ms. Atkins for a few more minutes, honed in on details, what few had registered beyond her fear. She consented to have her car checked by Forensics. Though sure the perp had made his threats just to keep her quiet, we made a quick call to the uniform commander in her district, requested his troops keep a tight watch on Ms. Atkins’s house the next few days.

  “Bait,” Harry said, setting his can of soda on the hood of the cruiser, leaning back against its fender. “He used a purse as bait.”

  “It’s brilliant,” I said. “Who can resist a purse? The good want to help, the bad see money and credit cards.”

  We were parked on the causeway connecting the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with the city. Twilight was an orange lantern hung below the horizon of an indigo sky. Fresh stars shimmered in the east. A hundred feet distant, three elderly black men fished from lawn chairs, frequently consulting the brown bags beside them.

  “After pushing her back into the car, he didn’t touch Ms. Atkins,” I said. “Didn’t lay a hand on her.”

  “He threatened her with death,” Harry reminded me.

  “He said he had a gun. Two hours earlier he’d just butchered a woman with a five-inch knife. Why didn’t he threaten to stab her, slice her? Why didn’t he ransack the car? And what’s with that ‘perform to expectations’ line? It sounds like a damn stockbroker.”

  Harry looked south at the dark horizon, the mouth of Mobile Bay thirty miles distant.

  “He probably tried the purse bit with Taneesha but she heard him running up. She closed the door, locked it. Maybe that’s what pissed him off.”

  “Something sure did. How many wounds did Ms. Franklin have?”

  “Over thirty. But he broke her fingers first. I don’t get it. Why he’d kill one woman, then three hours later give another a break?”

  I forced myself to revisit the Franklin crime scene: the Wookiee breaking the young woman’s fingers, getting off on her pain, then going wild with the knife, poke, slash, jab. Then, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the semi, the perp bails out, runs wildly into the truck’s headlights, veers away into the night.

  “Did Forensics find any blood in Ms. Atkins’s vehicle?”

  Harry said, “No blood, no hair, no trace of any evidence.”

  “At least we got a knife.”

  Harry finished his can of soda, crumpled the can like paper, bouncing it in his hand. “With nada on the prints. An uncharted whacko.”

  “Is this going to turn weird, brother?” I asked.

  “Going to?”

  We heard a ship’s horn and turned to watch a freighter slipping from the mouth of the Mobile River. The ship’s bridge was at the stern and lighted. The only other light was at the bow. Somewhere between the two points were hundreds of feet of invisible ship. A minute later, its wake reached us, hissing against the shoreline with a sound like rain.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lucas stood in the piss-stinking service station restroom, door locked, and foamed restroom soap over his torso, patting dry with rough paper towels. Once more he counted his money, tight clean bills, over a thousand dollars’ worth. Seed money. The next step was to turn it into working capital. A quick way of doing that was to find and supply a product for which there was great demand.

  He could get product. What he needed was a distributorship.

  Lucas studied the face in the grimy mirror: nothing but black eyes and a round hole of a mouth deep in a sea of black hair. Scary, hideous even,
like he’d escaped from hell. But then, how else was he supposed to look?

  Lucas scowled into the mirror, bared his teeth like a rabid dog, growled. Snapped his teeth at his image.

  “What’s that face mean, Lucas?”

  Dr. Rudolnick’s voice suddenly in Lucas’s head.

  “It’s how pissed off I am, Doctor.”

  “You look angry enough to kill, Lucas. Are you really that angry?”

  “I guess not, Doctor. Not today, at least.”

  “Good, Lucas. Let’s do some deep breathing and visualizations, all right?”

  Lucas laughed and tucked the shirt into his pants. He opened the restroom door. Lights in the distance, bars, clubs. Lowlife joints with lowlife people, the kind of folks attuned to nontraditional distribution networks. Something in the automotive segment of the market.

  The nearest bar, a hundred feet distant, had a window blinking LUCKY’S in green neon script. Maybe it was an omen.

  Lucas stepped out into the night, music playing loud in his head, snapping his fingers to an old funk piece by Bootsy Collins, “Psychoticbumpschool.” He angled toward Lucky’s.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Give me a couple minutes with Ms. Franklin, Clair?” I said. “Please?”

  Dr. Clair Peltier, chief pathologist for the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, stared at me with breathtaking blue eyes. Between us, on a stainless steel table, rested the draped body of Taneesha Franklin. Her face bore the misshaping of the blows she’d been dealt; her bare arms outside the drape displayed puckered knife wounds. Her head lolled to the side, the gaping slash beneath her chin like a wide and hungry second mouth.

  “Ryder…”

  “Three minutes?”

  She sighed. “I’ll run down the hall and get a coffee. It’s a two-minute run.”

  “Thanks, Clair.”

  She waved my appreciation away and left the room, her green surgical gown flowing as she moved. Not many women could make a formless cotton wrapping look good, but Clair pulled it off.

  Perhaps it was peculiar only to me, but as an investigator—or maybe just as a human being—I always sought a few moments with the deceased before the Y-cut opened the body, transformed it. I wanted time alone with my employer. Not the city, nor the blind concept of justice. But the person I was truly working for, removed from life by the hand of another, early, wrongfully. Sometimes I stood with the Good, and often I stood with the Bad. Most of the human beings I stood with fell, like the bulk of us, into a vast middle distance, feet in the clay, head in the firmament, the heart suspended between.

  From what Harry and I had discerned, Taneesha Franklin had lived her brief life with honor, focus, and a need to be of service to others. She had only recently discovered journalism and through it hoped to better the world.

  Good for you, Teesh, I thought.

  Clair stepped back through the door. Without a word, she walked to the body, picked up a scalpel, and went to work. I stood across the table, sometimes watching, sometimes closing my eyes.

  I generally attended the postmortems, while Harry spent more time with the Prosecutor’s Office. We joked that I preferred dead bodies to live lawyers. The truth was that I felt comfortable in the morgue. It was cool and quiet and orderly.

  “Where was she found, Carson?” Clair asked, staring into the bisected throat, muscles splayed outward.

  “Semi-industrial area by the docks. Warehouses, light industry.”

  “Not crowded, then? No one very near?”

  “It’s normally sort of a hooker hangout. But the rain kept them in that night. Why?”

  “Her vocal cords were injured. Lacerated.”

  “From manual strangulation? The knife wound?”

  Clair pursed her roseate lips. “Screaming, probably. I wondered why no one heard her.”

  The procedure took a bit over two hours. Clair snapped off her latex gloves and dropped them into the biohazard receptacle beside the table. She removed her cloth mask and I saw a lipstick kiss printed in the fabric. Clair uncovered her head, shaking out neat, brief hair, as black and glossy as anthracite. She pressed her fists against her hips and stretched her spine backward.

  “I’m getting too old for this, Ryder.”

  “You’re forty-three. And in better shape than most people ten years younger.”

  “Don’t try charm, Ryder,” she said. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  I was perhaps her only colleague this side of God who used Clair’s first name. Not knowing of her insistence on formality, I’d used it when we were introduced. Those with us had grimaced in anticipation of a scorching correction, but for some reason, she’d let it stand, addressing me solely by my last name as a countermeasure.

  When I’d first met Clair, I’d considered her five years older than her actual age, the result of a stern visage and a husband in his sixties. I would later come to realize the latter bore a certain responsibility for the former, Clair’s visage softening appreciably after hubby was sent a-packing.

  Two years ago, a murder investigation had cut directly through the center of Clair’s personal life. The revelations of the investigation had wounded her, and I’d been present at a moment of her vulnerability, a time she’d needed to talk. We’d stood beneath an arbor of roses in her garden and Clair had revealed pieces of her past—less to me than to herself—suddenly grasping meaning from the shadows of long-gone events.

  They were startling revelations, and though I disavowed the notion, she had believed me the vehicle for the transformative moment.

  “When will the preliminary be ready?” I asked, pulling my jacket from a hanger on the wall.

  “In the a.m. And don’t expect it before ten-thirty.”

  Though our relationship was professional, there had been times—as in her garden—when the world shifted and for fleeting moments we seemed able to look into one another with a strange form of clarity. A believer in reincarnation might have suspected we’d touched in a former life, spinning some thread that even time and distance left unsevered.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow at ten thirty-one, Clair.”

  She walked away, talking over her shoulder.

  “How about sending Harry? Be nice to see someone with some sense for a change.”

  Though at times the thread seemed tenuous.

  I was climbing into the Crown Victoria when my cell phone rang, Harry on the other end. “Hembree wants to see us at the lab. How about you whip by and grab me. I’ll be out front.”

  We blew into Forensics fifteen minutes later. Hembree leaned against a lab table outside his office. He was so skinny, the lab coat hung in white folds like a wizard’s robe.

  He said, “You got great eyes, Harry.”

  Harry winked. “Thanks, Bree. You got a nice ass. Wanna grab a drink after work?”

  Hembree frowned. “I meant catching the water depth on the floorboards. I called the regional office of the National Weather Service, talked to the head meteorologist. They archive Dopplers. He reran the night’s readings, checking time, location, and storm cell activity.”

  “Upshot?” Harry asked.

  “The area where the vic’s vehicle sat took pretty light rain, overall. Lightest in the city, at least in the hour before it was spotted. About an inch in the hour before the vehicle was found.”

  “Why so much in the car, Bree? It was a lake.”

  “Maybe a leak along the roof guttering caught rain, channeled it inside. I’ll check it out.”

  “Anything else turn up?”

  Hembree said, “The knife Shuttles pulled off the street? Made years ago by the Braxton Knife Company in Denver. The handle’s bone. The blade’s carbon steel, not stainless, why it looks corroded. It’s a damn nice knife.”

  “How about prints? Anything new?”

  “Pulled a thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, some palm. Ran every possible database. Nada. Nothing. Zip.”

  “You got a Wookiee database?” Harry said.

>   “What?”

  We waved it off and walked out the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  Harry and I spent the rest of the day wandering the industrial neighborhood where Taneesha Franklin had died. Normally, the area was a cruising ground for hookers, but rain was still keeping them inside. We corralled as many denizens as possible, asking about the bearded longhair. The killing had frightened most of the girls, guys, and question marks that hawked wares from the corners. They tried to be helpful, but we ended the day with a zero, heading home at six.

  Home, to me, was thirty miles south, to Dauphin Island. It’s an expensive community, but when my mother passed away, I inherited enough to buy a house outright. It was actually my second home on the island, the first turned to kindling by Hurricane Katrina. I never complain about paying insurance premiums anymore.

  I pulled onto my short street and saw a silver Audi in my drive, Danielle Danbury’s car, the bumper festooned with bird-watching and wildlife stickers. I parked beneath my house, climbed the stairs, and stepped inside.

  Dani yelled, “I’m heading out to the deck. Join me.” The deck doors slid closed with a thump. I stood in the living room, hearing only the soft hiss of the air conditioner. Normally Dani would have met me at the door.

  What was up?

  I paused to yank off my tie, toss it over a chair, follow it with my jacket. The shoulder holster and weapon went to my bedside table.

  I heard the deck door slide open. “Where you at, Carson?”

  “Changing.”

  “Get it in gear, pogobo.”

  Pogobo—and its diminutive, pogie—came from police go-lden bo-y, coined by Dani after Harry and I were made Officers of the Year by the mayor. Most of the time we were homicide detectives, but once in a great while we were the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team. PSIT, or Piss-it, as everyone called it, started as a public relations gimmick a few years back, never intended to be activated. But somehow it was, somehow it worked, and somehow it bought us Officers of the Year commendations. The honor turned out to be, as Harry had promised, worth less than mud.