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  I felt my body take a step backward and I bumped into Harry.

  “She looks terrible,” Harry groaned, stepping past me to press his hands against the window. “Just terrible.”

  “You’re responding to the tubes and wires,” said a cheery voice at our backs. “She’s doing far better than we expected.”

  Harry and I turned to see the blonde doc who’d sprinted from the helicopter. A brass badge on her breast said Angela Norlin, MD.

  “You’re sure?” Harry asked, skeptical. “She looks like she’s –”

  “She’s asleep, that’s all,” the doc said, bright eyes scanning the read-outs on the monitors. “Her temp’s up a bit, but minimal. All in all it’s a very promising report. Surprising, too.”

  While Dr Norlin studied the machines, I circumspectly studied her. The slight crinkle of skin at her eyes and across the backs of her hands told me I’d been off a few years in my age estimate, and I now figured her for late thirties. A nicely crafted late thirties.

  “Do you specialize in helicopter paediatrics?” I asked.

  “When we got word there was a baby in trouble, the medivac folks sent me instead of the regular medic.”

  “A smart move on their part, I expect,” Harry said. “Why are you surprised she’s doing so good?”

  “Usually by this time we’d have had to flood the victim’s system with high-level antibiotics. There’s a potential for side-effects that can actually hinder progress. Baby Doe has some infection, but it’s low grade, and standard antibiotics are keeping it in check. Her immune system seems in exceptional condition. The power of her immune response is surprising everyone.”

  “The little lady must have good genes,” Harry said, scrutinizing the kid. Her skin was tawny, the eyes almond shaped, the dark hair curly.

  “What race is it, Doc?” I asked.

  Doc Norlin shot me a disapproving glance. “It’s a she. As far as race goes, to me it looks like human.”

  I’d never had much interaction with children. They were all its to me until old enough to communicate, at which point they became interesting. But the it, combined with a racial query and what I’d been told was an accent more cracker than cosmopolitan, probably made me sound a tad cartoonish. Not a good cartoon.

  “I just mean…an, uh, ethnic identity might give investigators an idea what to look for in the parents.”

  “I’m concerned with her health, not her ethnicity.”

  I was trying to think of something to say that would make me sound reasonable and intelligent when Harry reached for my sleeve.

  “Watch out, Carson!”

  Pain stabbed my ankle. I jerked around to a cart at my back, its deck piled with towels and cleaning supplies.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” said the thirtyish guy pushing the cart, somehow looking more smug than apologetic. “I rolled around the corner and didn’t see you.”

  “It’s…all…right,” I grunted, leaning against the wall and rubbing my Achilles tendon. The corner was a dozen feet away; the guy must have been temporarily blind or daydreaming hard.

  I set my foot on the ground. Limped a few feet down the hall. Turned and came back. I waited for Doc Norlin to inspect my potentially broken ankle, but she seemed blind to my pain and suffering.

  The guy started to roll the cart away, but paused to look at the kids. He tickled his fingers at them and smiled as though greatly pleased, then pushed on. Babies have that effect on some people.

  “So you think the kid’ll pull through, Doc?” Harry asked, turning back to the window. He tapped the glass and made an eyes-wide, tongueboinging series of faces through the glass. He cooed and babbled. Harry was one of those people unhinged by babies.

  “The prognosis is guarded, Detective Nautilus, but I’m hopeful. Especially with the strong immune response and general good health, given what Baby Doe must have been through.”

  Harry’s goofy grin descended into a frown. “Baby Doe? Is that what you’re calling her?”

  “Standard procedure. They assign the name in Records.”

  Harry studied the child for a long minute. “Can’t you pick more descriptive names?”

  “What’s wrong with the temporary designation?” I asked.

  My partner stared at me like it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard.

  “Baby Doe’s a generic name, Carson. No one should be generic.”

  Chapter 8

  Leaving Harry to talk baby this-and-that with the blonde doc, I told him I’d meet him at the car and set off down the hall to the can, remembering to limp to keep the weight off my wounded extremity. The orderly who’d rear-ended me was leaning beside a hand-dryer and talking on a cellphone. He glanced up, mumbled, “Gotta go, Miriam. We’ll talk later.” He snapped the phone shut and ducked out the door without acknowledging my presence.

  Outside I found Harry leaning against the car, beaming like a child at Christmas.

  “Isn’t it great,” he said. “The kid’s gonna pull it off.”

  “Pull what off?”

  “Live. Have a life.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who’s driving?”

  We were cut off by the dispatcher. “Harry? Carson? We have a call regarding a possible 10-54D at 824 Bellewood. You anywhere close?”

  The code for a dead body. I grabbed the mic. “Ryder here. Harry and I are maybe four miles. Why us specifically?”

  “Caller is Hispanic and not speaking entirely in English, but she keeps screaming about trabajo de diablo…the work of the devil. Plus she’s screaming sangre. Blood. Sounds like a weird one, so I figured we’d best have the Piss-it boys check it out.”

  “Let’s hit and git it,” Harry said, jumping behind the wheel and pulling a 180 in the street. It was a maneuver he loved but had never mastered. The rear tire banged the curb, jumped up, burned rubber, dropped back into the street and screamed like a scalded banshee until the tires bit. “We’re en route,” I told the dispatcher when my breath returned.

  I hung up the mic and held tight as Harry put the pedal to the floor. He switched on the siren and in-grille lights and we blew past other vehicles like two tons of rabid metal.

  The address led us through a wide white gate, down a long lane canopied by trees, and into a circle of a dozen single-story cabins surrounding a bonfire pit. The cabins were simple and rustic. The land was studded with live oaks veiled in Spanish moss. Longleaf pines towered above. It was a clean and pastoral setting, radiating calm.

  On a slight hill behind the cabins were three crosses made from telephone-pole-sized logs, the center cross taller than the others. A grouping of white rocks at the base of the rise proclaimed Camp Sonshine. We were in a church camp, one of many in southern Alabama.

  “Over there.”

  Harry pointed to a larger cabin outside the circle, two stories tall and set in its own copse, almost hidden in the dense green canopy. It was more house than cabin; the director’s quarters, I figured. I saw a woman in front of the structure, her face in her hands. We roared up the drive and bailed. I ran to the woman, Hispanic, in her forties.

  “What is it, ma’am? What happened?”

  She jabbed fingers toward the house, speaking Spanish through her tears. She bordered on hysteria and I couldn’t catch a word. I put my arm around her shoulders, walked her to the end of the porch and eased her into a wicker chair.

  “Calm down, ma’am. Speak English if you can.”

  I held her hand as she took a few trembling seconds to gather herself.

  “I clean cabins,” she said. “When I come I find a man ees muerte, dead. Madre di Dios. Es de trabajo de diablo.”

  “Is anyone else inside?”

  “I saw no one.”

  I patted her shoulder again, thanked her. Harry had eased open the door and was peering inside. Harry called, “Police.” Waited. Called again. No response, the cabin as silent as an undersea tomb.

  We entered and saw why the woman had been screaming.

  A man was hangi
ng upside-down beneath a suspended staircase, a rope tight from his ankles to a hardware-store pulley on the upper staircase. His purple and blood-swollen head swayed a foot above the plank floor. His eyes bulged hideously, the whites turned red by gravity-exploded veins. Rivulets of blood ran from his eyes to the floor.

  The man was wearing lacy women’s panties and metal clamps bit into his nipples. A black ball gag filled his lipstick-smeared mouth, and something like a black cucumber was lodged in his anus. His toneless, fatty back and buttocks were striped with welts. His hands were bound behind his back with a red scarf. His hair was wild, like whirlwinds had blown across his scalp. Six dead candles lay at points around the carpeted floor, white and thick, the wax pooled and hardened on the carpet. It looked like a scene from a demonic Tarot card.

  “Lord Jesus,” Harry whispered.

  I crept to the body, pressing a puckered thigh with my index finger and studying a pool of congealed brown on the floor.

  “The blood’s caked and rigor’s gone. He’s been dead for hours.” I looked closer. “A lot of blood, but I don’t see any wounds beyond superficial: lashes on his back and ass, broken skin on his nips.”

  “Every time I find one of these scenes it creeps me out for days,” Harry said. “I never understood B&D.”

  “More like S&M,” I corrected. B&D was Bondage and Discipline, a sexual practice where people get a kick out of being restricted in their motion and spanked or whatever. Sadism and Masochism was like B&D on steroids. Some people liked to see how much pain they could take; for them the pain was mixed up with pleasure – the more it hurt, the better the sex.

  It was all way beyond me.

  Harry walked to the front door, checked side to side. “The housecleaning lady’s booked. She’s not coming back, at least not for a while.” He ducked back inside, started a visual inspection. “Let’s you and me take the place apart. I’ll toss the back rooms.”

  Harry stepped through the doorway and took a fast stutter-step, grabbing the door. He muttered, “Shit.”

  “What is it, bro?”

  “Water on the floor. I just about slipped on my ass.”

  I walked over, saw a puddle about two feet around. I got on my hands and knees and sniffed.

  “Weird,” I said. “It smells like sea water.”

  I wondered if there was a broken pipe in the walls and what in the pipe would give leaked water the scent of the ocean. Harry stepped around the puddle and headed to the back bedroom. I returned to my inspection of the front room and the area around the body.

  I found the guy’s clothes in a side closet, brown silk, custom made. No ID. I picked up the jacket and bingo, felt a wallet in the breast pocket. I shook the wallet from the clothing to the floor. Alligator skin and slim, a designer billfold. I riffled a corner of the bills and watched a parade of hundreds flash by, followed by fifties and ending with a single plebian sawbuck. Well over two grand.

  I noted a driver’s license tucked in a pocket of the wallet, picked it free. I stared at the ID a long moment before walking back to the body. I spun the head to face me.

  “Harry,” I called toward the back.

  “What is it, Carson?”

  “You ever wonder what TV preachers do in their spare time?”

  Chapter 9

  Waiting for the techs, we called the department to explain the situation. Tom Mason agreed that we had to inform Mrs Scaler of her husband’s death immediately. The news media would soon darken earth and sky like a plague of locusts. Better us than a dozen reporters at her door with clicking cameras and hollered questions. As soon as the body got into the system, the hunt would be on.

  “You say it looks like an S&M situation?” Tom said. I could hear his grimace.

  “Yup.”

  “Hold that info tight for now and keep everyone close-mouthed. You’re looking for someone else who was there?”

  “Someone had to haul Scaler in the air and stripe his back. I’m thinking a big, blonde Valkyrietype of dominatrix.”

  Tom sighed. “This is the sort of thing makes me yearn for early retirement. Keep it all on the QT until we know more.”

  Harry and I did a corny hands-in-the-air pledge and made the techs swear not to reveal details of the scene. It was pure theater, since the others had worked high-profile cases and knew that leaks did nothing but stir the media and impede the investigation. We were just reinforcing the closed-mouth ethos.

  We released the scene to the forensics folks and went to the Scaler household. The holy man’s home was an imposing, white-columned antebellum structure a football-field’s length from the street, high wrought-iron fence in front, its own gated community. A sprinkler system was watering the grass, intermittent geysers hissing rainbows against the air. The wet lawn seemed luminous in the sun. I saw a swimming pool to the side, tennis courts beyond. Banks of azaleas blazed with color.

  The gate was open and we roared up a tree-lined driveway, passing a five-car garage, four bays holding expensive vehicles, all shiny white and showroom clean, the fifth bay containing a golf cart with a fringed shade.

  “That looks like about a half-million bucks’ worth of vehicles,” Harry noted. “Wonder what the cart’s for?”

  “To drive to the street to fetch the mail,” I joked, then realized it was probably true.

  We parked in a roundabout pinioned by a marble fountain spraying water a dozen feet into the air. The butter-colored glass and lead sconces framing the expansive mahogany front door were large as torpedo launchers. Ringing the doorbell felt akin to ringing the doorbell at Oz, except Oz’s doorbell didn’t bong the opening notes of “Onward Christian Soldiers”.

  On-ward Chris-ti-an sol-di-ors, mar-ching as to war…

  The soldiers marched three times before the door opened. Instead of Mrs Scaler, we found a nervous and diminutive Latina in her fifties.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “Mees Scaler has been take to the hospital.”

  “What happened?” Harry asked.

  “She fall down the stairs.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Las’ night. I was called to stay and watch the house. That’s all I can tell you. Mees Scaler ees at hospital called the general.”

  We raced to Mobile General and found a P. Scaler was in room 231. Entering, we saw a small presence on the railed bed, eyes closed. A heavy bandage crossed her nose. Her eyes were purple-black with contusion and I saw stitches in her lip.

  “You take it, Carson,” Harry said. “A solo.”

  A solo was when only one of us handled an interview, usually when the person being questioned was ill or infirm or intimidated by cops. Going in alone offered a better chance of bonding.

  I nodded and slipped into the room. Cleared my throat at P. Scaler’s bedside. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Oh my,” she apologized in a soft mumble, “I’m not dressed for visitors.”

  I showed my ID and introduced myself. “What happened to you, ma’am? And please don’t talk if it hurts.”

  She nodded toward a water cup on the bedside table. I filled it, angled the plastic straw downward, put my arm behind her back and helped her sit a few inches higher. Patricia Scaler seemed to weigh less than a pillowcase filled with straw. She took a few sips, nodded her thanks. I eased her back down.

  “Silly, clumsy me,” she said, talking slowly. “Wearing high heels down stairs…heel caught, fell down the steps. Doctor says broken nose, some teeth to be replaced. Thank the Lord. I could have broken my silly neck.”

  I heard a throat cleared at our backs and turned to see a slender MD at the door, Harry at his side. Harry pointed at the doc and shot me a come-hither nod.

  “Excuse me for a moment, ma’am.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  I stepped to the hall. “What is it, Doctor?”

  He looked uneasy. “Under those dressings it’s pretty easy to discern three contusions to the side of her nose. Ever see that before?”

  “Sounds like k
nuckles. You’re saying she was beaten?”

  The doc shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure it would hold up in court.”

  Harry stepped close. “When was she admitted?”

  The doc looked to the chart for confirmation. “Eleven twenty. But judging by aspects of her injuries, I’d say she tried to tough out the pain for at least three hours before calling for transport. Maybe more.”

  A simple toothache would send me racing for the oil of cloves and shortly thereafter to the dentist. I couldn’t fathom waiting for hours with three teeth snapped off at the gum line. It must have been agony. And that was without adding in the busted nose, another excruciating injury.

  I stepped back into the room, pulled a chair to the side of the bed. Patricia Scaler’s eyes flicked to me. To the physician at the door. Back to me.

  “What’s wrong? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” I nodded. “It’s your husband, ma’am. I’m afraid that –”

  “He hurt someone, didn’t he? He couldn’t help it. He was angry. He has to be alone when he’s angry. It was my fault. I made him angry.”

  “You’re saying your husband hurt you, Mrs Scaler?”

  “What? No one hurt me. I fell down the stairs.”

  “You’re sure? It looks like you’ve been struck.”

  Her small white hands knotted into fists. She pulled them to her chest, nails of one hand digging into the back of her other hand, as if in subconscious punishment. Tears poured down her face and on to her gown.

  “It’s my fault, all my fault,” she murmured. Her eyes lifted to me. “Where’s Richard now?”

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “Mrs Scaler, I hate to be the one to tell you this…”

  Chapter 10

  I left the poor woman weeping into a pillow, her small body racked with grief. I dropped further questions about the abuse, but was sure her husband had been the cause of injuries that would take cosmetic surgery to undo.