The Hundredth Man (4 page)

“You got a detective shield. But Squill grabbed what he’d been after for years, a seat at the big table. It was you that put him there, Cars.”

I frowned. “I don’t see the big deal.”

“You don’t see the big picture. Squill likes to think of himself as a self-made man. But when he sees you” Harry tickled the air in a falling motion “down crash them cards.”

“He can just ignore me.”

“He does. For a year you’ve been nothing but a name on the roster. And PSIT’s been nothing but words on paper. But if PSIT gets activated …”

I thought it down the line: Activating PSIT put Harry and me on center stage. We’d be the ones coordinating the efforts, signing the reports, meeting with the brass.

“There I am, up front again, in his face.”

Harry flicked the dying match into the ashtray. “Yeah. Only, think of it as in his sights.”

The pool-table argument turned loud. One man emphasized his point by bouncing a cue stick off the other’s ear. The struck man dropped, cupping his ear and moaning. The bartender looked at the pair, then at Harry. “You’re a cop. Ain’tcha gonna do something about that?”

Harry put his big fist to his forehead, opening and closing it repeatedly.

“What the hell’s that?” the bartender asked.

“My off-duty light.”

We stood and headed toward our separate cars in the sticky night.

“Thanks for the history lesson, Professor Nautilus,” I said.

“Read it and heed it, showboat,” Harry replied.

I drove to Dauphin Island slowly, windows down, letting the night smells of marsh and salt water wash my thoughts like a cleansing tide, but the headless man kept bobbing to the surface. Once home, I lit some candles, sat cross-legged on my couch, and did the deep-breathing exercises recommended by Akini Tabreese, good friend and martial artist. Akini does a lot of deep breathing before busting hay-bale-sized ice blocks with his forehead. Me, I’d do a little deep breathing and pick up a sledgehammer.

Walk the scene… I instructed my oxygenating thoughts. See the park.

I breathed away my anger at Squill and Burlew and visualized what the killer saw as he met the victim, perhaps on the path. The streetlight so near, they slip back into the bushes; here Squill seemed correct, sex the lure, if not the motivator. The victim dies, gunshot maybe, or a hard blow. If the head is crucial to the killer’s delusion, it should have been removed deep in the shadows, the blade sliding quickly through its task. But, inexplicably, the killer pulls the body into the ribbon of streetlight, petals streaming in their wake. He kneels, performs his grotesque surgery, and disappears.

My mind played and repeated this scene until the phone rang at 2:45. I figured it was Harry. He’d be considering the scene as well, in a lit room with his stereo playing “thought jazz,” Thelonious Monk perhaps, the solos where he breaks through the membrane and flies alone in the raw wind of music.

Instead of Harry I heard a trembling old woman. “Hello? Hello? Who’s there? Is anyone on the line?” Then, as if years were dropped from the voice, I heard the voice of a woman in her thirties, my mother’s voice.

“Carson? It’s me, Mommy. Are you hungry? Can I fix you some lunch, son? A nice Velveeta sandwich? Some cookies? Or how about A BIG BOWL OF FUCKING SPIT?”

No, I thought, this can’t be happening. It’s a nightmare, wake up.

“CARSON!” The voice shrieked, no longer female. “Talk to me, brother. I need to feel some of that OLD FAMILY WARMTH!”

I closed my eyes and slumped against the wall. How could he call out? It wasn’t allowed.

The caller banged the phone on something hard and shouted. “Is this a BAD TIME, brother? Do you have a WOMAN with you? Is she HOT? I hear when they get hot, juice POURS out of them. Hi, fellas, I’d like you to meet my date, the Johnstown Flood. WEAR BOOTS WHEN YOU FUCK HER!”

“Jeremy,” I whispered, more to myself than the caller.

“There once was a girl from NANTUCKET, you wore boots each time that you’d FUCK IT …”

“Jeremy, dammit …”

“But the men in the town, one by one were each drowned, in the poison that poured out by BUCKETS!” He switched back to my mother’s voice, solicitous. “It’s all right, Carson, Mommy’s here. You haven’t finished your spit. Is it cold? Can I warm it back up for you?” He made a hawking sound.

“Jeremy, will you please stop “

In the background I heard a door opening, followed by scuffling and a man cursing. My caller screamed, “NO! GO AWAY. It’s a PERSONAL CALL! I’m talking to MY PAST!”

A loud crack turned to skittering, as if the phone had been dropped and kicked across the floor. Other voices joined in with grunts, cursing, sounds of struggle. I stood in my cool room and listened breathlessly as sweat poured from beneath my arms.

His words became distant and I pictured men in white dragging him across the floor: “THE MURDER, CARSON! Tell me about it. There must be more than a MISSING HEAD, there’s always more. Did he take THEIR DICKS? Is he JAMMING SAUSAGES UP THEIR BUTTS UNTIL THEY SHOOT OUT THE NECK HOLE? Call me! You NEEEEEED ME AGAIN … “

More sounds of scuffling. Then nothing.

Channel 14’s affiliate in Montgomery must have picked up the beheading-in-the-park story, run it on the late news.

Television was one of the few luxuries Jeremy was allowed, and he would have studied the story with a scholar’s focus. I blew out the candles and lay on the couch with my face in a pillow. Sleep, when it finally arrived, was paper thin and shot through with rats and the smell of burning silk.

My alarm fired just past daybreak. I stumbled numbly into the Gulf and swam straight into the waves for a half mile, then turned and dragged myself back. I followed with a four-mile beach run that left me sweat soaked and cramp calved. After a grudging, almost angry, session with the weights, I began to see events with a clearer eye, and wrote off Jeremy’s call as an aberration; frighteningly resourceful, he’d somehow managed to get hold of a phone.

But hadn’t I listened as it was taken from him? It wouldn’t happen a second time; the episode was over.

I showered and ate a breakfast of cheese grits with andouille. My mood began to lift and I headed to work. Harry flipped a coin, and tails bought me autopsy duty. I had time before the cut, and headed to the criminalists’ offices, a science lab grafted to a computer store. Two white-jacketed technicians studied a toilet float as if it were the Grail. Another tapped a pencil against a Mason jar full of squirming bugs. Hembree sat beside a microscope drinking coffee.

“We got a print hit on the headless man,” he said, picking up a sheet of paper.

I made a drum-roll sound with my tongue. “And the winner is?”

Hembree mimicked a cymbal crash. “One Jerrold Elton Nelson, aka L’il Jerry, aka Jerry Elton, aka Nelson Gerald aka Elton Jelson.”

“A big list of aliases.”

“A pissant list of priors,” he said, reading from the page. “Twenty-two years old. Eyes and hair are blue and brown wherever they are. Petty city and county raps for shoplifting, male prostitution, possession of stolen goods, possession of a couple joints. In March a woman charged him with borrowing eleven grand and not paying it back, charges later dropped.”

“Hooker and a gigolo con artist? Guess his door swang both ways.” I said, turning away. Though the autopsy was an hour off, I planned to head to the ME’s office.

“I almost forgot,” Hembree said as I was halfway out the door. “That bit last night with the petals and the streetlight was inspired, Carson, pure Sherlock. Squill’s got his head so far up his ass, he spies on his teeth from his throat. I loved how you pointed that out to him.”

The morgue’s front desk was empty and my footsteps in the hall caused Will Lindy to come to the door of his office. The new facility had been open officially only a few days, but Lindy looked dug in, forms stacked on his desk, manuals alphabetized across shelves, calendars and schedules on his wall.

“Morning, Detective Ryder.”

“Howdy, Will. I’m here for the post on Nelson. Clair around?”

I was maybe the only person in the universe who called Dr. Peltier by her first name; I’d used it since our introduction and she hadn’t torched me yet. She countered by using only my last name, addressing everyone else by first name or title. Lindy looked at his watch. “She’s due at nine, which means “

I glanced at my timepiece, 8:58. “She’ll be here in one minute.”

We heard a burst of masculine laughter from down the hall and saw a pair of funeral-home staffers retrieving a body for burial. They rolled a covered body toward the back dock like kids playing with a supermarket buggy, weaving the clattering gurney from side to side. Lindy was down the hall like a shot.

“Hey, fellas,” he said. “What you do at the parlor is your business. Around here we show respect.”

The funeral home guys froze, reddened. They mumbled apologies and continued on their way, slow and silent.

“Good going, Will,” I said when he returned.

Lindy gave a half smile; funny how half a smile indicates sadness. “Poor guy’s on his last ride, Detective Ryder. There’s no need to treat it like a game.”

I admired Will Lindy for his stand; too many homicide cops and morgue workers forget the bodies passing by were once the exact center of the universe, to themselves anyway. No one knows why we were chosen to be here, or if we had much hand in the choices we made during our presence. In any event, for the arrivals at the morgue, this level of the journey was over. Bad people, good ones, the indifferent they’d all crossed to the final mystery and left behind a soft, soon-gone husk, not always to be mourned, but at least respected.

Lindy and I turned to an insistent rapping: Doc Peltier high-heeling toward us. I detected she’d been to breakfast with her husband, Zane, since he was walking beside her and working his teeth with a toothpick. Zane’s fifty-nine, but looks younger, with cool gray eyes in a chiseled face, a nose ridge like the spine of a slender book, and a mahogany tan independent of seasons. He wore a charcoal three-piece cut to hide a touch of paunch and walked fast to keep up with his wife.

“A little early, aren’t we, Ryder?” she said as I jumped into her slipstream. Her perfume suggested champagne made from roses.

“I’d like to take a look at the body before the post.”

I always tried to do this when the bodies weren’t badly decomposed, feeling it provided a stronger link with the victims. After the post, the invasion, the deceased seemed different, as if they’d shifted from our world to the anteroom of the next.

Clair rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time to indulge you today.” She wasn’t big on my linkage concept.

“Please, Clair. A minute?”

Clair sighed. We stopped at the door of the autopsy suite. She remembered her manners. “Have you met my husband, Zane?”

“Art museum, months ago,” I said, offering my hand. “Detective Carson Ryder.”

Zane Peltier had one of those handshakes that stop short of locking thumb to thumb; he shook my knuckles. “Of course I remember,” his mouth said as his eyes denied it. “Great seeing you again, Detective.”

Clair opened the door. Her husband said, “I’ll wait out here, dear.”

“They won’t bite, you know, Zane.”

He smiled but didn’t approach the door. I understood his hesitancy I believe people sense death as precisely as cattle sense lightning forming, an atavistic warning system that’ll be with us until we evolve to creatures of pure reason, slim chance.

Clair and I stepped into the suite. “Make it fast, Ryder,” she said. “I’ve got a busy day and don’t need distractions.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I replied, drawing a withering glare but no comment. She slid the body from its refrigerated confines, drew the sheet away.

I studied the odd tableau for several seconds. Without the head I took no sense of being, just of loss. All I noted was the victim’s physical dimensions, wide of shoulder, narrow of hip, well muscled. Death removes some of the tone and definition, but it was obviously a body the owner had put time and effort into.

Clair watched me with disapproval, then let her eyes wander the body with professional appraisal. She started to draw the sheet back into place, but paused.

“What the hell?” she said, leaning over the pubic region. “What’s that?”

“A penis?”

“No, dammit. Above the pubic hair. Make yourself useful, Ryder, get me some gloves.”

I ran to yank a wad of latex surgical gloves from a box beside an autopsy table. Clair snapped them on and pressed aside the matted hair.

“It’s writing,” she mumbled. “So small I can barely read it. “Warped a whore,”” she said, squinting at words I couldn’t see. ““Warped a whore. Whores Warped. A full quart of warped whores. Rats back. Rats back. Rats back. Rats. Rats. Rats. Back. Back. Back.””

Clair leaned back and I bobbed forward. There, in precise lavender writing, were two horizontal lines of words, just as Clair had read them.

Without turning from the body she called, “Dr. Davanelle, come here.”

I looked to the small utility office in the corner where a petite and pale woman studied a file, so mouse quiet I hadn’t noticed her. She had dark shoulder-length hair and owlish glasses. Her name was Evie or something, a fairly recent hire, and I hadn’t worked any cases she’d handled. She hurried over. I smiled and nodded and she ignored me.

Clair tapped the victim’s pubic bone. “Since you were kind enough to show up at work today, Doctor it being a Monday and all I wanted to point out the writing here on the pubis. Call Chambliss and get him over here with the microphotography gear and have him shoot the inscription. And check the body for any other writing. Got it?”

“I would have done that in any case, Doct “

“What are you waiting for? We’re not voting on it; go.”

Evie or something retreated to the utility office to summon the photographer. The intercom crackled and I heard the voice of receptionist Vera Braden, the Deep South dipped in honey and fried up with a side of grits.

“Dr. Pel-tee-a? Bill Ahnett from the eff-bee-aye on line fower. Says he got the ‘nalysis on yoah tissue samples from las’ week.”

“I’ll take it in my office,” Clair announced to the air and clicked out the side door to her office. I took the opportunity to jump into the rest room a few paces away. I returned a minute later to find Zane Peltier had wandered into the suite. He stood white faced beside the body. His knees looked one shiver shy of buckling and he kept whispering, Jesus.