Bad Monkey (18 page)

“Let me guess: Where you just finished telling the judge you totally agree with Eve—your dad should be declared legally dead.”

“Yeah, so?” On the other end, Nick Stripling’s daughter seemed to be clearing a chunk of cactus from her throat. After the guttural delay she said: “What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? You never heard of closure? Families are supposed to come together, no matter what.”

“And nothing says closure like a million bucks.”

“Dad died when his boat sunk, just like they said. Let it go, dude.”

“Not possible, Caitlin. We’ll chat again, you and I.”

“Why? No, we won’t!”

“Then tell me his name.”

“Who?”

“The mystery uncle in Nassau.”

Caitlin said, “You’re such a dickhead.”

Yancy tossed down the phone and gunned his car toward a gap in the traffic, heading up the Overseas Highway.

Thirteen

When Yancy was younger, he’d briefly considered joining the U.S. park service, like his father. “Why didn’t you?” Rosa Campesino asked.

“I was too lazy. And the pay sucks.”

“Andrew, you’re full of shit.”

“Look at it this way. If I’d become a ranger in the Everglades, we would never have met.”

“Unless an alligator got you, and I was assigned to do the post.”

“Assuming there was something left of me,” Yancy said.

“Oh, there would be. Gators are sloppy eaters. By the way, you’ve healed magnificently.”

“I was hoping you’d notice.”

Rosa was massaging him on an autopsy table. It was half past midnight at the morgue and they were alone in the main suite, which had twelve forensic workstations. Each narrow table was made of eighteen-gauge stainless steel. Rosa had spread some towels, removed the headrest and instructed Yancy to lie still on his belly.

“What happens if somebody walks in?” he asked.

“Just play dead. I’m serious.”

She was wearing a lab smock, rubber-soled white shoes, and nothing else. In theory Yancy should have been wildly aroused, but the venue creeped him out. He’d made love to women in all sorts of odd places—with Bonnie Witt, of course, high on the tuna tower of her husband’s boat, but there had been other memorable trysts inside a windmill on a putt-putt golf course, the second-to-last car of a Metrorail
train, an unoccupied toll booth on the Rickenbacker Causeway and a self-photo kiosk beside the manatee pool at the Miami Seaquarium. He understood the thrill of semi-public sex, but doing it among the deceased seemed more dark than daring.

The Miami-Dade morgue had been designed with a contingency for a worst-case airline crash; its five coolers were made big enough to hold all the passengers and crew from a fully loaded jumbo jet—a total of 555 bodies. Tonight there were only sixty-six in refrigeration. Yancy had declined Rosa’s offer of a tour. It felt good when she pressed her knuckles into the meat of his back, but he was having trouble unwinding. The cold filtered breath of the morgue didn’t smell like death, but it wasn’t exactly a breeze off Monterey Bay.

“Roll over, Andrew.”

“Then I can’t play dead if we’re caught.”

“And why not?” Rosa said.

“Because dead guys don’t get boners.”

“Do what the doctor says.”

She turned off the overhead light and climbed on top of him. The autopsy platform wasn’t comfortable but it was sturdy. Soon Yancy loosened up and his thoughts began meandering, which sometimes happened when a smooth physical rhythm was established. It was no reflection on his partner; he had an incurably busy brain. Rosa herself seemed happily diverted, so Yancy kept pace while sifting through the day’s events.

Except for a colorful exchange of profanity with a meth-head tanker driver on the turnpike, the ride to Miami had been uneventful. Yancy had first stopped at the Rosenstiel marine lab on Virginia Key, where an earnest young master’s candidate examined the shark tooth extracted from Nick Stripling’s severed arm and confirmed the species as
Sphyrna tiburo
, a common bonnethead that typically feeds inshore. The finding proved that Eve Stripling and her accomplice had placed the stump of her husband’s limb in the shallows and chummed up some resident predators in the hope that their gnashing would add verisimilitude to the drowning story.

The pale shards Yancy had plucked from the shower drain at the Striplings’ condo were definitely pieces of human bone, not stone crab shells as Caitlin Cox had claimed. Rosa made the determination visually
over a paella at the Versailles, Yancy introducing the fragments in the same funky nest in which he’d found them. Rosa promised to order DNA tests on both hair and bones, and compare the results to the swab taken from Stripling’s arm by Dr. Rawlings in Key West. Yancy had no doubt of a match. The hatchet, presumed instrument of dismemberment, he had discreetly conveyed in a Macy’s shopping bag.

Later, over flan and Cuban coffee, Rosa had presented him with the only number dialed on Dr. Gomez O’Peele’s cell phone the night he died. She’d obtained this key information from a North Miami Beach detective who was striving to seduce her. The call had been made minutes after Yancy had left O’Peele’s apartment.

Yancy took down the number and went outside to make a call of his own, and soon he had a name: Christopher Grunion, no middle initial. The billing address on the telephone account was a post office box in South Beach. When Yancy returned to the table, he swept Rosa into his arms and kissed her exuberantly until the other diners broke into cheers. He was soaring because Christopher Grunion was the same name that Rogelio Burton had found on the charter contract for the Caravan seaplane Yancy had seen behind the Striplings’ house on Biscayne Bay.

Although Grunion had no criminal record, and not even a Florida driver’s license, Yancy felt certain he was Eve’s secret boyfriend and co-conspirator. O’Peele had likely phoned him to demand hush money after Yancy’s unexpected visit, and got shot for his greedy play. “It’s Poncho Boy!” Yancy had exulted, waving a mango Popsicle while he and Rosa were driving to the morgue. “The guy who killed Phinney—the same fuckweasel who tried to drown me!”

The massage on the autopsy table had settled him a bit. Now, as he was boosting Rosa up and down with his hips, she reached up and fastened her hair into a primly perfect bun, an Elizabethan effect that revealed the flawless slope of her caramel neck and shoulders. For all her lithe athletics she stayed remarkably quiet, as if she were afraid to awake somebody in the building, which would have been quite a trick.

One advantage to fucking on immovable steel was that it didn’t squeak, unlike Yancy’s sagging bed at home. The first time they’d had sex there, Rosa was so distracted by the noise that she couldn’t make it happen. She said the box spring sounded like a chipmunk being skinned
alive. Now, astride him on a slab where hundreds of homicide victims had been meticulously disemboweled, she shuddered suddenly, smiled and teetered forward. Pressing a moist cheek to his chest, she said, “Okay, this is pretty warped. I should probably get some counseling.”

“Well, I thought it was fantastic.”

“Don’t lie, Andrew.”

“Are you kidding? I came like Vesuvius.”

Rosa sighed. “It’s a freaking HBO miniseries. All I need is fangs.”

Yancy kissed the top of her head. “I would’ve been a worthless park ranger,” he said. “Disappearing for weeks at a time with just a tent and my fishing rods. The other thing? Poachers. If I caught some asshole jacklighting a fawn, I’m not sure I could restrain myself, arrest-wise. My dad, he’s a very disciplined guy. I did not end up with that gene.”

“I definitely don’t want children,” Rosa murmured. “Does that make me a selfish rotten person? Never mind. Not a fair question while you’re still inside me.”

“Christ, you cut up dead people for a living. Don’t be so tough on yourself.”

She sat up sleepily. “I should really make an effort to put on my clothes.”

“Do you have video in this place?”

“Of course.” Rosa pointed to a small camera mounted above the table. “Don’t fret, Andrew, it has an Off switch. I’m not
that
twisted.”

“Some weekend we should go camping down at Flamingo, just the two of us.”

“You’re very sweet,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Yancy drove back to Big Pine the next morning and was surprised to see a car in his driveway—an old Toyota Camry with a crooked Oklahoma license tag. He took the tire iron out of his Subaru and ran through a hard rain toward the house.

Bonnie Witt stood in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. She was wearing a Sooners jersey, and her toenails had been painted gold. The fugitive life had taken a toll on her tan.

“I’ve still got a key,” she said pertly.

“Another oversight on my part.”

“I can explain everything, but first I want you to meet someone special. Honey?”

“Hey yo.” A shirtless man was sprawled on the couch watching ESPN. He looked up and gave Yancy some sort of faux bro salute.

Bonnie said, “Andrew, say hello to Cody. Cody, this is my dear friend Andrew.”

Yancy propped the tire iron in a corner and shook Cody’s waxy hand. Whatever he might have looked like in high school, back when Bonnie was blowing his mind, the kid had grown up to be a lump—mottled skin, thinning hair and a gut that hung over unstrung board shorts. Yancy insisted on taking over breakfast duties so that the two of them could share their love story, which he anticipated to be a high point of his day.

“I just couldn’t stop thinking about him,” Bonnie said, “so one day I said screw it, life’s too short. Got up at four in the morning and drove nonstop from Sarasota to Tulsa, nineteen hours. This was after I’d found him on Facebook—”

“But she didn’t even friend me first,” Cody cut in. “One night she just shows up by the salad bar and, you know, holy shit.”

“He was the number two man at the Olive Garden—”

“My boss was a major dickbrain. It was time to move on.”

“When Cliff found out I was gone,” Bonnie said, “he went postal. Called the OSBI and totally sold me out.”

The OSBI was the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which, after Dr. Witt’s tip, had dispatched Agent John Wesley Weiderman to interview Yancy about the elusive Plover Chase. Unfortunately, the lawman’s investigatory mission to the Keys had been cut short when he was stricken with shellfish poisoning after eating contaminated mussels at Stoney’s Crab Palace on Stock Island. Yancy felt somewhat responsible, and he looked forward to ambushing Brennan with another surprise inspection.

“So I quit my job,” Cody said, “and Ms. Chase and I went seriously outlaw.”

Bonnie blushed. “He still calls me that, after all these years—Ms. Chase! The police were looking for the 4Runner so we switched to Cody’s car.”

“Except there’s no XM Radio. Bummer,” he said.

“Last night we camped on the beach at Bahia Honda.” Bonnie favored Yancy with a fond-memory wink. “A raccoon swiped our marshmallows.”

Cody said, “I chased after him but he got away.”

Yancy loaded two plates with eggs and bacon, and he slid them across the counter. Cody inquired about the possibility of a bagel.

“Cream cheese or marmalade?” Yancy asked.

The young man beamed. “Hell, yes!”

Solemnly Bonnie said, “I never stopped loving him, Andrew. You know that.”

Yancy knew no such thing, but he was savoring the plot line. “Does Clifford know Cody’s back in the picture?”

“Lord, no! He thinks you and I ran off to the Seychelles. That’s what I wrote in my good-bye note, just to throw him off.”

“For God’s sake, Bonnie.”

Cody glanced up from his plate. “ ‘Bonnie’? So who came up with
that
one?”

Yancy was wishing that Cody would put on a shirt. His tufted breasts were droopy and mole-covered, and Yancy spied what appeared to be a fresh bite mark above his left nipple. It was increasingly difficult to keep an open mind.

“The night before I left Cliff,” Bonnie was saying, “I walk into the bathroom and there he is, dangling from the shower faucet, flopping and gurgling and jerking on his little weenie. For a noose he used one of my Hermès scarves! I mean, seriously, Andrew, enough’s enough.”

“An intolerable situation,” Yancy agreed.

Through a cheekful of mulched bacon Cody said, “Hey, Ms. Chase. If you’re gonna be Bonnie then I’m changing my handle to Clyde!”

She laughed and squeezed his pudgy elbow. Yancy pried a scorched bagel from the toaster and dressed it to Cody’s specifications.

“So, where are you two heading?”

Bonnie said she was hoping they could stay with him. “Until the heat’s off? Please?”

Yancy told her about the visit from Agent John Wesley Weiderman. “It’s not safe here,” he added. “Also, my girlfriend wouldn’t go for it.”

“Whoa.” Bonnie hitched an eyebrow and put down her fork.
“Andrew has a new lady,” she said to Cody, who was using a green-tinged thumbnail to remove a sesame seed from his teeth.

“She’s a doctor,” Yancy said.

“What kind of doctor?” asked Bonnie.

“Well, a surgeon.”

“Does she have a specialty?”

“She operates on pretty much everything.” It wasn’t a lie; when Rosa did an autopsy, she diced up the whole works.

“Funny,” Bonnie said.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No, I meant it’s ironic: I just dumped a doctor and here you’ve taken up with one.”

Through the window Yancy saw no sign of the construction workers next door. Wet weather was his ally.

Cody said, “Ms. Chase told me how you butt-plugged her hubby with a DustBuster. That’s some awesome man-shit right there.”

He reached across the counter to honor Yancy with a knuckle bump. Yancy tried to visualize the kid’s photograph in the school yearbook. From Cody’s present condition it seemed inconceivable that he could have made himself attractive to Bonnie at any age. Perhaps he had quieter charms, such as a nine-inch cock.

“May I ask you something?” Yancy said. “It’s about Ms. Chase’s trial. I read where you testified against her.”

“A suck move. Mom and Dad made me do that.”

Bonnie gently interrupted, suggesting a change of topic.