Tango Key (21 page)

"I mean, here was this very wealthy and powerful man, blubbering like a ten-year-old, begging, pleading with me. He even offered you, babe. You in return for his life. But I didn't need him to get to you. And he knew it. And then I started the saw. It's one of those battery-operated things. Have you ever seen one?"

The knife grazes her earlobe and slides now toward the corner of her eye, then down, down to the side of her nostril.

No, not up there either please please.

"Have you ever seen one?" he shouts. "Answer me!"

"No." She whispers it. She can barely get the word out. It drops into the air like a wingless bird.

He leans very close to her, so close she can smell his sweat. His excitement. "I can't hear you, babe. Louder." The knife slips back through her hair. "You can do it. Loud."

"No. No, I've never seen one."

The tip of the knife glides the circumference of her head, as if he is slicing off the top of her skull. She is weeping now, but silently, without moving her head for fear the knife will slip and some part of her anatomy will be in the way.

"They're very powerful, these saws. Anyway, his hands and feet were tied, and he was lying face-down in the sand . . .

Pink sand, the pink sand.

". . . and I started up the saw and brought it real close to his ear, like this . . ." He slides the knife to the top of her ear. "And I said, 'All right, Doug. I want to know where the goddamn frog is.' And he told me, But, just to make sure he was telling me the truth, I let the saw slip and off came his ear."

She feels the knife up tight and hot against the upper part of her ear, and then he presses down a little, and now the knife is cutting a little into the skin. It hurts, oh God, it hurts, and she hisses, "Please, no . . ." He laughs and releases the pressure on the knife.

"I'm just showing you how it went, babe. I wouldn't cut off your pretty little ear. "He kisses her ear then. He tongues it. He nibbles at the earlobe. Then he lets the knife slide lightly around her neck to her throat, the exact center of her throat. One thrust and it will slam up into her mouth, impaling her tongue and continuing up through the roof of her mouth. She barely breathes. "Doug was very bad about the pain. He bellowed. He really did. And then I plucked up his ear and wagged it in his face, and told him his cock was next if he was lying to me about the frog. As it turned out, he wasn't lying. But at that point it didn't make much difference and by then he had pissed me off with his whining and blubbering, so I just jammed my foot against his shoulders, holding him down in the sand, and pressed the saw to the back of his neck."

He takes the knife away from her throat.

Her body falls forward and she sucks at the air, sobbing, trying to catch her breath. He grabs a handful of her hair, yanking her head back, smiling down at her. "So you see, babe, I know a little about pain, too. Now let's eat, huh?" And he shuffles back to the stove, humming along to an old Mamas and Papas tune on the radio.

Chapter 11

A
line had spent the last three days on sick leave.

It was cheating, because she wasn't physically ill. Her malaise, she knew, was spiritual, a blackening of the soul stuff, something most cops experienced from time to time. But there were no provisions in the book for spiritual sick leave, so every morning for the last three days she had called in dutifully at seven and said she would not be in.
My fever's still a hundred and three
, she told Roxie. Or,
It's in my chest
, and then she would cough hard, knowing she wasn't fooling Roxie or anyone else. But Roxie always replied that she would pass on the message.

But this morning it hadn't worked. This morning the chief had appeared at her door at 6:30 sharp, and now he was pacing restlessly in her kitchen, back and forth, back and forth, a mug of coffee in his hand. He was a thin, sinewy man in his mid-forties whose hair had gone whiter than soap a long time ago on the streets of Miami. He was gruffer than a troll, and she'd heard he had a mean streak in him wider than the Florida peninsula. But she had never seen it. The mean streak, if it even existed, was apparently reserved for the men who worked for him, not for her and Bernie. He treated his "two gals," as he called them, as though they were orphans who had been entrusted to his care. Aline got sick of it sometimes, especially now when she wished he would just shout or call her names and stop wearing holes in her floor.

"Gene, would you cut it out, please? You're spilling coffee."

"Oh. Sorry." Gene Frederick marched over to the stool, straddled it like it was a horse, and sighed deeply. "Okay, here's what I'm going to do, Aline. I'll assign Bernelli to this case with you."

"I told you, I don't want the case."

"I don't give a damn what you want. No one wants a sicko case like this." He lit a cigarette and took quick, urgent puffs on it, then looked around for an ashtray. She opened a kitchen drawer and brought out a half shell which she set in front of him. "Thanks."

"You're stinking up my house."

He wrinkled his nose. "No offense, Aline, but your house already smells funny. If I were you, I'd really consider getting that skunk de-scented."

She hadn't told him about the break-in. She hadn't told him about the appointment book she'd taken from Waite's office. Or about her suspicions concerning Murphy's relationship with Eve. And he didn't know that Kincaid was upstairs, in the sleeping loft, no doubt listening to every word they said.

"I realize you've got enough sick leave accumulated to stretch into next year," Frederick went on. "But please, I'm asking you to come back to work, okay?"

She grinned. "Beg some more, Gene. Offer me a raise."

"How about double time for anything over forty hours?"

"Only if Bernie gets it too."

"Christ." He scratched his head, took a couple more puffs from his cigarette. "Okay. Done."

"Then we have a deal."
Now please leave, Gene, so I can go back to sleep.
"I'll be in tomorrow."

His face fell. "What about today?"

"What about it?"

"You can work today."

She sniffled. She coughed. She pressed her palm against her forehead. She was pressing her luck, but what the hell. "I still don't feel too great, Gene."

"Yeah, yeah." He crushed his cigarette in the half shell and got up. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," she echoed, and then walked with him to the front door. She stood on the porch in her robe, watching as his Chevy backed down the driveway, into the road. He stuck his hand out the window and waved. She waved.
Y'all come back now, heah?
She remained there for a few moments, listening to the inexorable rush of the surf a block away, and watched the opaline light wash through the pines on the other side of the driveway. Then the phone rang inside the house, calling her back.

"This better be good," she said without preface when she picked up the receiver.

On the other end, she heard a familiar chuckle. It was Bill Prentiss. "What a grump."

"You know what time it is, Bill?"

"God, do I. I also know you were already up, because Gene told me he was going to stop by your place at the crack of dawn. You want the results of the rest of the Cooper autopsy?"

"Before breakfast?"

"C'mon, Al. I've been up since four this morning. I want to go home and get some Z's."

"With who?"

The subsequent brief silence said she'd hit it on the nose. "Hey, I'm thirty seconds older. It was supposed to happen to me first."

She laughed. "So what's her name?"

"What's
his
name?"

"I'll bring him along."

"See you in thirty minutes?"

"Fine."

She hung up and walked out of the kitchen and saw Kincaid leaning against the top of the ladder, yawning. "A regular hub of activity, Allie."

"Want to drive over to the hospital with me to get the autopsy results on Cooper's head?"

"Right this minute?"

"Almost." She climbed the ladder and they regarded each other across the top of it. His nose was no longer swollen, and the shiners had faded to soft yellow. The stubble on his jaw was beginning to look like a beard now, slightly darker than his sandy hair, and laced with gray. "Half an hour."

He slid her robe off a shoulder. "Make it forty minutes."

"Oh, sure. It'll turn into an hour and forty minutes."

"Naw, it won't." He nudged the robe from her other shoulder. "Really." Then he grasped her by the arms and pulled her the rest of the way over the ladder and they fell back, laughing, onto the rug. He kissed her. He untied the sash at her waist and she ran her fingers through his hair, part of her already unanchoring. "There's time," he whispered, his mouth against her throat.

And he was right.

K
incaid had come by her place last night, late, dropping in like some wandering minstrel, and had handed her $700. "From Ferret. Your bet doubled. Ferret said not to sweat the small shit."

"Finding Cooper's head was not small shit. Tell him that."

And because she hadn't been in the mood to see him—or anyone, for that matter—she hadn't asked him in. She hadn't moved away from the door. He'd lowered himself to the top step, his back against the railing, and said, "Here's a real travel question for you, Al. What's the nearest star and how many light-years away is it?"

She closed the door and sat on the opposite side of the step, legs pulled up against her as she thought about it. "Arcturus. Thirty-eight light-years."

"Not bad," he said.

"Here's one for you

"Shoot."

"What island does Colleen McCollough live on? I'll even give you a clue."

"The
Thorn Birds
lady?"

"Right. It's in the South Pacific."

Kincaid rubbed his jaw. He frowned. He pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket, nibbled on the end of it, finally shook his head. "This is probably wrong, but I'll take a stab at it. Norfolk Island?"

"Not bad," she said, then they both laughed, and after that it was okay.

She invited him in. She made a pitcher of Nightmare Chasers and they sat on the porch off the kitchen, talking: his marriages and what had gone wrong, her relationship with Murphy, Monica's murder, the rest of it, heavy stuff and light, an exchange of histories. Kincaid, it turned out, was a military brat. He had lived in five countries before he was ten, spoke four languages fluently, and had become a private eye after a stint teaching French to eighth-graders. His marriages had failed, he said, due to irreconcilable differences—namely that his idea of traveling was not ten days at Club Med. He said it, she thought, as if to warn her that traveling was his passion, that he loved it the way other men did their wives or their professions.

They continued talking even after they'd gone upstairs to the loft, while they made love, while Wolfe padded around the bed, sniffing, while the wind rattled the windows and the moon made its solitary journey across the sky. Now, in retrospect, it seemed he had asked an inordinate number of questions about Murphy and about Monica's murder. She had even shown him a picture of Monica and had rifled through the old newspapers downstairs until she'd found a clipping of Eve. He'd admitted that yes, the resemblance really was uncanny. She'd thought then, as now, that he wasn't the sort of man to ask questions without a purpose. But she'd never gotten around to asking him last night why he was so interested, and she knew if she asked now he would just smile and say something like,
Breakfast first, okay?
or
I was just curious, that's all
. He talked when he was ready, unlike Murphy, who trapped everything inside.

"I
f you take a right here, we can go in through ER," she said.

"Righto." He swung the Saab right at the next turn and they pulled up behind the hospital.

The air smelled like it always did in hospitals—of Pine-Sol and alcohol. But neither smell fully masked the underlying odors of sickness. "You ever had surgery?" she asked.

"Tonsillectomy. On the base in Manila. I don't remember much of it. How about you?"

"My appendix when I was twelve. There was this girl in the bed next to mine who'd been bitten by a rabid dog. Every day at noon, I had to leave the room when the nurse came in to give her the shot. I could hear her screaming all the way down the hall. They used a needle that was probably six inches long. Right through the stomach."

"So Eve is the rabid dog?"

She looked over at him. "Did I say that?"

"No, I'm saying it. Eve is the rabid dog, Murphy's the one who'll get the six-inch needle through the gut, and you're the nurse who'll give him the needle, and I'm the doctor who'll make it all better."

Not a bad little allegory
, she thought, and laughed. Kincaid gave her shoulder a quick squeeze.