Palindrome (23 page)

Williams turned off the machine, sat down, picked up the phone gingerly, with two fingers, and dialed. "Who's this? Okay, this is Lee Williams; I have a possible crime scene, and I want a team out here right away—everything—the works, except no meat wagon; there's no corpse." He gave the address. "Also, I want a plate number for a new Volkswagen Jetta, white, registered to Mary Alice Taylor at this address, and I want an APB out on it right away. Ce the responsibility. If the car is found parked, I don't want it touched until I get there. I want to know if the Bobcats played Miami this past weekend, and if they did, how and when they traveled, coming and going. I want to know if Bake Ramsey was with them, coming and going. I'll be at this number if you need to reach me." He gave the number, then hung up and dialed again. "Hello?"

"Captain, it's Lee. I'm afraid I've lost my witness."

The doorbell to Mary Alice Taylor's apartment rang.

"Hang on, Captain." Williams got up and opened the door.

Bake Ramsey was standing on the doorstep; he looked puzzled. "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked.

CHAPTER 34

"Hi, Bake," Williams said, managing a surprised smile, "what are you doing here? I didn't expect to see you, either." Ramsey was staring at him very hard. "Mary Alice didn't show up for work tonight, and the hospital called the cops. I took the call."

"Why didn't she show up?"

Williams took Ramsey's huge arm and led him up the steps to the parking lot, talking all the time. "That's what I'm trying to figure out, myself. You have any idea where she could be?" He stopped and leaned against his car.

"No, I haven't seen her since last week."

"When last week?"

"Thursday night. We had a date."

"Did you talk to her after that?"

"Nope. I called her a couple of times from Miami. I was down there with the team."

"When did you leave?"

"Friday afternoon."

"And when did you get back?"

"This morning. It was a night game, and we stayed over."

"I see."

This was squaring with what he knew so far, but Ramsey's stories always squared. "Look, has something happened to Mary Alice?" Ramsey showed just the right degree of puzzlement and concern.

"Not that I know of. We have to check these things out when we get a call, though. Listen, you go on home, and I'll call you when I get some more news."

"Okay," Ramsey said reluctantly. He gave Williams his number. "Maybe I should take a look inside and see if anything looks wrong."

"Don't worry about it. Security is in there, now, and there's nothing too unusual. We'll lock up and get out in a minute. I'll call you. Good night, Bake."

"Good night, Lee." Ramsey ambled over to a Mercedes, got in, and drove away.

Williams breathed a sigh of relief; he wanted Ramsey out of there before any more cops arrived. He had the gist of Ramsey's alibi, now, though it wouldn't be admissible, because he hadn't read the man his rights. He could always do that later, when he knew a crime had been committed. A moment later, a police van arrived, and people spilled out. Williams reentered the apartment with the group and got them to work. Two hours later, they left with their evidence, and the security lady locked the apartment behind them. "Anything else I can do for you?"

Williams handed her his card. "Please let me know if Mary Alice Taylor returns to her apartment—make sure that all your people know to look out for her—and I'd like to know if Bake Ramsey enters the grounds at all."

"The football player?"

"That's the one."

"You got it." She handed him a key and a plastic card. "Here's a spare key for the apartment, should you want to get in again when I'm not here. The card will let you into the back gate of the complex, which doesn't have a guardhouse." He thanked her for her help and got into his car. There was fear in his heart as he drove away. He was afraid that, without Mary Alice Taylor's help, he wouldn't be able to break Ramsey's alibi for the Ferguson killings. But mostly, he was afraid for Mary Alice Taylor.

CHAPTER 35

Liz sat in the cottage's living room and drank bourbon. It had gotten dark, and she hadn't bothered to turn on a light. The silence was broken by the scuff of a bare foot on the kitchen linoleum, and she knew Keir was back. She no longer jumped when she heard such a noise; he came and went that way so often that she had begun to think of it as normal. "Hi," she said, when he had time to reach the living room.

"It's not like you to sit alone in the dark," he said, sliding onto the sofa next to her.

"It's not like me to sit alone in the dark, drunk, you mean."

"How come you're drunk?"

"Because I found Jimmy Weathers's arm this afternoon—that alligator did something with the rest of him—and I can't forget it. I thought bourbon might help." She rested a hand on his bare thigh. "Why do you wear that loincloth?" she asked. "I always meant to ask you."

He laughed softly. "When I was a kid, I went naked a lot. Somewhere around puberty, I became a little self-conscious about it—I think I thought something was going to grab my crotch, and it had recently become terribly important. The loincloth was as close as I could get to naked and still protect my little cock."

"Not so little."

"It was, then."

"You're not surprised about Jimmy?"

"Buck Moses told me."

"I didn't think an alligator would do that. I mean, even when he came after me, I didn't really think he was a man-eater."

"Goliath is something special, you know. He's had precious little experience with man, and I think he must regard us as just larger-than-usual animals to hunt."

"Buck said he wouldn't come out of the water to attack a man; is that true?"

"I don't think anybody knows, anybody who's alive to tell us, anyway."

"Do you think he's really twenty feet long?"

"Yes, I do. I read somewhere once that the largest gator ever found in the United States was in Louisiana, in the last century. He was nineteen feet, two inches long, and the reason they found him was he was so old, he had crawled out of the water to die. I don't think they get that big anymore, because men kill them before they're old enough. But Goliath has been sitting out there in that lake for God knows how long—a hundred years?—with nobody to hunt him and plenty to eat. I wouldn't be surprised if he were the largest alligator alive."

"How do you know he's a 'he'? Have you checked?"

"Females don't get that big."

"Why do you think he went after Jimmy?"

"Maybe Jimmy got near his young. I what I did trying to photograph the little ones when he came at me."

"Just before he attacked, do you remember a noise like this?" Keir made high-pitched grunting noise in his throat.

"Yes! Exactly like that! How did you know?"

"That's the distress signal of the little ones. They make that noise, and mama and papa come running. I'll bet that was the last sound ol' Jimmy heard, except for his own screams. I just hope poor old Goliath doesn't come down sick from eating such a poisonous meal." Keir chuckled to himself.

"How can you talk like that about him?" she demanded drunkenly. "He was a human being, and he's dead! He was your cousin, for God's sake!"

"So what?" Keir said with some feeling. "If he'd had his way—and he very likely would have—he'd have raped this island from one end to the other; he'd have built on most of it and paved over the rest, believe me. It would look like Hilton Head and all the other barrier islands that the developers got their hands on."

"But he couldn't have done it," she protested.

"Sure, he could. Grandpapa won't make a will, and he was playing right into Jimmy's hands."

"But he has made a will!"

"You don't know what you're talking about. He has a thing about it; every time somebody brings it up, he throws a tantrum, threatens to disinherit us all."

"He's made a will. I know because I witnessed it." There was a stunned silence. "Keir, I saw the document; he told me what it was; I signed my name as a witness. And he told me he'd done it in such a way as to keep any part of the island out of Jimmy's hands." Keir leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

"Christ, I don't believe it," he said, and then he began to laugh. "So, poor old Jimmy died for nothing; just a good dinner for a passing alligator and his brood. Christ, what a joke on him! What a joke on me!"

"On you? What do you mean?" Keir went on laughing. It was a haunted, despairing sound, and Liz hated it.

"Stop it!" she shouted, slapping him across the back of the head. "Shut up!" She hit him again. He sat up and took a deep breath.

"Oh, Jesus," he said pitifully. He turned and slipped his arms around her, put his head in her lap, and hugged her body. "The man who loves you is a pathetic creature." He sighed. "He can't love anything without destroying something else. Love and destruction, that's all he's capable of."

She leaned over and rested her cheek on his shoulder. "Shhh," she said.

"You don't know what you're saying." She didn't want him to say any more; there were some things she just didn't want to know. She stretched out on the sofa and pulled his head to her breast. "Shhhh," she breathed softly. "You don't have to tell me. I love you, whatever you are, whatever you've done." She stroked his hair until the bourbon and her day overcame her, and she fell asleep in his arms.

CHAPTER 36

Lee Williams arrived at Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, a general-aviation field on the north side of Atlanta, twenty minutes after he got the call. He turned in through the main gate, and he could see, a block away, what he was looking for; two police cars, an ambulance, and the crime lab van were gathered in a parking lot, separated from a line of single-engine airplanes by a row of pine trees. He swung into the lot and stopped next to the ambulance; he could now see that the vehicles surrounded a white Volkswagen Jetta. The group of men were standing sullenly about; he had kept them waiting.

"Can we crack this car, now, Lee?" Mike Hopkins, the lab man, asked.

"Just a minute." He walked slowly around the car; here and there it was grimy with black fingerprinting powder. He looked inside. There was a nurse's uniform in a dry cleaner's plastic bag lying on the backseat. There was a black leather handbag on the front passenger seat. He didn't like that. No woman would deliberately leave her handbag in a car in plain sight.

There was nothing else to see inside the car.

"Okay," he said, "pop the trunk." He walked around to the back of the car and stood while an officer tried keys on the trunk lock.

Williams tried to breathe normally. "Here we go," the man said, as a key turned. The lid came up to complete silence from the gathered group.

They all winced at the smell. Hopkins stepped forward, looked into the trunk, and spoke into a hand-held dictating machine. "The victim was discovered in the trunk of a 1989 Volkswagen Jetta, registered in her name. The body is lying in an unnatural position, which presumes death before entering the trunk; the odor of decay is moderately present. The body is entirely nude and is cold to the touch." He manipulated an arm, then a leg. "Rigor mortis is not present." He stepped away from the car and let the photographer get on with his work. 

Williams stepped away with him. "How long?"

"I can tell you better later."

"Best guess."

"Over the weekend. Saturday, probably."

"Was she raped?"

"Too soon to say. They usually are when they're found nude."

"One thing you should know: she had sex with her boyfriend, by his account, on Thursday night.

It may have been pretty rough. You might see if you can differentiate between any bruising from that session and whatever happened at the time of her death."

"Thanks, that's good information."

"When can I have some results?"

"Preliminary"—he glanced at his watch—"ten o'clock tonight. Conclusive, tomorrow, the day after."

"Give me as much as you can tonight," Williams pleaded.

"I'll try. It may be an easy one, who knows? If it'll help, I think cause of death will be a broken neck; I don't think she was strangled."

"A powerful man, then?"

"That's a reasonable assumption."

"Anything else you can tell me now?"

Hopkins looked at his feet. "She's badly beaten up, you can see that. Looks like the guy wanted to hurt her a lot before he killed her."

"Uh, huh. Do you think he just meant to beat her up, that maybe she got the broken neck from a blow to the head?"

Hopkins shook his head slowly. "I think he meant to destroy her."

Williams nodded. "Okay, that fits my senario."

Williams drove slowly from the airport. The ambulance overtook him, no lights blazing. There was no hurry for Mary Alice Taylor. It occurred to him that, in all his years as a policeman, he had never, until that day, seen the dead body of a victim he knew personally. It made a difference.

CHAPTER 37

Williams arranged the chairs carefully. He had borrowed his captain's office for the morning, and he didn't want to use an interrogation room just yet; he wanted to get Ramsey on the record, first. Nervously, he picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Medical examiner's office."

"Hopkins, please."

"He's on his way, Sergeant," the woman said. She knew the detective's voice by now.

"Did he finish?"

"He's got everything with him."

"Good. Thanks." He hung up and waited impatiently. It took Hopkins another twenty minutes to get there, and, looking at his watch, Williams saw that he had only five minutes before his scheduled meeting.

"Sorry to be so late," Hopkins said, puffing as he sat down.

"It's okay; I appreciate your getting this done so quickly. What have we got?"

"Pretty much what I thought last night. She was beaten badly with fists, and her neck was broken."

"Rape?"

"Not exactly. She had some bruises which would correspond with Thursday night's intercourse with the boyfriend, but she had more recent, more serious damage to the vagina and anus, which occurred closer to the time of her death."