The Little Death (21 page)

How exactly that might happen, Louis wasn’t sure. It would require that there be enough usable skin left on the hands to obtain clear fingerprints. Or, as a last resort and probably an option they would never take, there would have to be enough of a body left to be viewed and recognized by Rosa.

“What are we going to do if we can’t ID him?” Swann asked.

Louis looked at Swann. His usual peachy tan glow was gone, replaced by the gray pallor of dread that accompanied someone’s first visit to a morgue.

“I don’t know,” Louis said. “You got any other ideas?”

“You ever heard of DNA testing?” Swann asked.

Louis nodded. He’d read about it in forensics magazines and heard talk around O’Sullivan’s. It was a new technology that gave cops a surefire ID off small amounts of human tissue. More important, it offered an indisputable genetic blueprint of whoever left tissue or blood at a crime scene.

“I know a little about it,” Louis said. “But wouldn’t we have to have some tissue from Labastide that we know is his, something we can compare this tissue to?”

“Sure,” Swann said. “But in the absence of that, there’s also a way to match him up with relatives at a lesser percent.”

“Like Rosa?”

Swann nodded. “But we’d need a really large sample to do that. Plus, it would take months to get the results back, and it’s very expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow.”

“A lot of money for something when the courts don’t even allow it to be admitted.” Swann shook his head. “Can you imagine how easy our jobs would be if we could swab up a drop of blood at a crime scene and match it up to some criminal whose genetic profile is already in the system?”

Louis could see a hard glint of interest in Swann’s eye that he had never seen before. The guy had the heart of a true crime dog. That was the nickname Louis had given those studious guys on the force who loved poring over science files and psych profiles rather than being out on the street.

“I don’t know many defendants who can afford that kind of testing,” Louis said.

“Yeah, but it will get cheaper,” Swann said eagerly. “Like video cameras. Remember when those came out, they were around a thousand dollars? I bought one last week for the department for under three hundred.”

Louis was quiet. He’d been a PI for more than three years now and didn’t want to admit to Swann that he’d only recently bought a Nikon with a telephoto lens. He hadn’t even mastered all of the settings yet.

“Hello, gentlemen.”

Vinny made his entrance. Tall and lanky, with a healthy head of gray hair, he wore a loose-fitting cotton shirt printed with the red tongue logo of the Rolling Stones. As always, a pair of headphones hung around his collar.

“Hey, Vinny,” Louis said, extending a hand. “Good to see you. This is Lieutenant Swann of Palm Beach PD.”

Swann stepped forward and, with an obvious hesitation, extended a hand to Vinny. Louis wondered if he was afraid Vinny had dead people’s cooties.

“So, you’re the big bucks behind this?” Vinny asked Swann.

“Me? No, I’m not paying for this.”

Vinny looked to Louis. “Then who is?”

“I’ll write you a check.”

“Semper letteris mandate,”
Vinny said, shaking his head.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Get it in writing,’” Swann said.

They both looked at him.

“You speak Latin, too?” Louis asked.

Swann shrugged.

“My man!” Vinny said, holding up his palm. They high-fived.
“Latine loqui coactus sum!”

They launched into a rapid-fire dialogue in Latin, laughing like two old golf buddies.

“Can we get on with business?” Louis said finally.

“Fine with me,” Vinny said. “Let’s go take a look at our friend.”

He led them into the autopsy room. A familiar smell pricked Louis’s nostrils: human rot, industrial-strength disinfectant, and that odd metallic scent of blood. There were three tables, two empty and the third covered with a limp blue sheet. It was only when Louis stepped forward that he could see the skeletal contour of what lay beneath the cloth.

Louis looked back. Swann hadn’t moved from the door.

“First time?” Vinny asked.

“I saw an autopsy once in the academy,” Swann said. “On film.”

Vinny handed him a jar of Vicks VapoRub and motioned for Swann to rub some under his nose. Swann did as instructed, handed the jar back to Vinny, and followed him to the table. Vinny carefully pulled back the sheet.

Louis had to stifle a gag. He’d seen quite a few dead bodies, some as healthy-looking as they had been in life
and others so decomposed that little remained but black sludge. This body was a weird combination of both. The legs tapered off into ragged black flesh; the bones of the ankles and feet were gone. There was a hollowed-out gut but an almost intact rib cage. There was no head.

Louis looked at Swann, wondering if he was going to have to pick him up off the floor, but Swann was staring at the remains with the awe of a kid seeing his first fireworks display.

“Come around here and look at the hand,” Vinny said.

Louis and Swann stepped around the table. The dead man’s hand was moldered and missing all of the fingers, but what remained was the ballooned stub of a thumb. And Louis knew why it was distended: Vinny had injected it with fluid to stretch the skin and get a clear print.

“Did it work?” Louis asked.

Vinny held up two fingerprint cards. One was the worker ID card from the old Palm Beach jail that they knew to be Labastide’s. Louis had given it to Vinny the day they dug up the body. He recognized the other as one from the Lee County lab.

“Gentlemen, say hello to Emilio Labastide,” Vinny said.

Louis walked to the end of the table and motioned to the decayed stump of the neck. “Can you tell us anything about the weapon used to decapitate him?” he asked.

“I can tell you it’s not the same one that was used to stab him in the chest,” Vinny said. “That was a small and narrow-bladed knife of some kind.”

“Could he have been beheaded with a sword?” Louis asked.

“Sword? Why do you ask?”

“They took one from the suspect’s house.”

Vinny picked up several X-rays. As he slapped them onto the backlit panels, he started talking.

“Well, there were no X-rays taken originally,” Vinny said. “I took these this morning of Labastide’s cervical vertebrae. The only thing I can tell is that it was a large blade of some kind. There isn’t enough tissue left for me to say exactly.”

“So, it could be a sword?” Louis pressed.

Vinny nodded. “I can tell you that whatever was used, it was done with extreme violence. It’s not easy to behead someone. Inexperienced killers would most likely try to saw a head off, especially if they were doing it to avoid identification.”

“This happened in the middle of nowhere and likely in the dead of night,” Louis said. “The killer probably had all the time he needed to do whatever he wanted with this body.”

“Instead, he hacked away like a madman,” Vinny said. “How big is this sword?”

“Maybe three feet long,” Swann said. “It looks like an old saber.”

Vinny crossed his arms and studied his X-rays. Louis could hear music squeaking from the little black foam pads on his headphones. It was Janis Joplin: “I’m gonna lay my head / On that lonesome railroad line / And let the 2:19 ease my troubled mind.”

“One thing to keep in mind,” Vinny said. “A sword is not an easy thing to use. If it’s old, it’s probably heavy and may not be sharp. I’m thinking whoever did this was standing upright and swinging downward. And even
though he was in a rage, he had to have some strength and skill.”

Louis stared down at the remains. At least they had a way now to connect Labastide to Durand—if the weapon was in fact a sword. But a more telling piece of evidence was still missing.

“Vinny, did you see any sign that Labastide was tortured?” Louis asked.

Vinny frowned and picked up the original autopsy report. He scanned it and shrugged. “Nothing here.” He paused, looking down at the remains.

“Well, well,” Vinny murmured.
“Minima maxima sunt.”

“‘The smallest things are the most important,’” Swann said.

Vinny grabbed a magnifying glass off the shelf and used it to peer at the shriveled hand. He looked back up at Louis.

“The original autopsy was done by Thomas Cartwright, a.k.a. Careless Cartwright,” Vinny said. “He wasn’t the sharpest scalpel in the drawer and was known for going with what seemed the most likely. He noted a mark on the right hand, and because he knew the victim had been stabbed, he assumed it was a defensive wound.”

Vinny motioned Louis closer and held the magnifying glass over the hand for him. Swann came, too, filling the space with a citrusy aftershave, which, given the stench from the table, was strangely welcome.

“Now, I ask you,” Vinny said. “Does this look like a knife wound to you?”

Louis looked at the ashy, bloated hand. The furrow across the palm was clearly visible. He glanced down
at his own hand, at the old knife scar that banded his palm like a strap. The line was white, flat, and razor-thin, nothing like the mark on Labastide’s hand.

“That’s not a knife cut,” Vinny said. “I’d say that’s a rope-burn-type mark, like the kind you’d get playing tug-of-war.”

“Could it be a whip mark?” Louis asked.

Vinny raised a brow, then bent to examine the hand more closely. When he lifted his head, he nodded. “Sure could be.”

Louis moved away from the table. His mind clicked back to the crime-scene photos he’d seen at O’Sullivan’s, and suddenly it wasn’t difficult to imagine the last few moments of Emilio Labastide’s life.

Willingly or not, Labastide had been driven more than a hundred miles to the middle of nowhere. At some point, Labastide was overpowered by someone who stabbed him in the chest. He fought back and managed to get away. His attacker pursued him, maybe with the knife, but with a whip for certain. Labastide was young and strong, and despite the stab wounds, he managed to catch the tail of the whip in an attempt to wrestle it away.

But then he started to lose strength. Or maybe his killer came at him with a knife or the sword and hacked away with a madness that cops saw only in crimes that were intensely personal or blind rage. But were they looking at a lone serial murderer or a group motivated by pure hatred?

“You okay, Louis?” Swann asked.

Louis nodded.

There was no question in his mind that the murders of Mark Durand and Emilio Labastide were committed
by the same killer or, quite possibly, killers. The links—the last known locale of the victim tied to Palm Beach, vicious decapitations, and torture with a whip—were too strong for even someone like Barberry to ignore.

Not that Louis intended to share any of this information with him. He knew Barberry would, beyond all logic, continue to dismiss any evidence that didn’t favor his case against Reggie Kent.

If they wanted to make their case for a different killer irrefutable, they needed to offer the Palm Beach prosecutor not just circumstantial evidence but a believable motive for someone other than Reggie Kent.

Louis looked back to Vinny, who was pulling the X-rays off the clips. “Thanks for doing this, Vinny,” he said. “We appreciate it. Can you hold the remains until we can notify his sister and find out where she’d like him reburied?”

“I can give you about three days,” Vinny said. “Then I have to send him somewhere. Unless, of course, your benefactor wants to pay storage fees.”

“We’ll get back to you as soon as we can,” Louis said.

Vinny pulled his headphones back on his head and covered the remains with the sheet. Louis and Swann left the autopsy room, walking quickly down the long hall in search of fresh air. Once outside in the sunlight, Louis paused on the sidewalk and took two or three deep breaths.

Swann came up next to him, hands in pockets, wearing Ray-Bans. “Are we going to see Labastide’s sister now?”

“Yeah,” Louis said. “We need to tell her we’ve
found her brother, and after you apologize to her, you need to ask her some tough questions.”

“About her brother’s sex life?”

“Yeah. You up for that?”

“Sí, jefe.”

Louis stared at him.

“Yes, boss,” Swann said.

Rosa was watering the red flowers outside her door when she spotted Louis and Swann coming up the stairs. Her look to Louis was warm, but when she recognized Swann, her brown eyes snapped with scorn.

Swann must have seen it, too, because he held out a hand in a gesture to stop Louis and moved slowly by himself to Rosa. Rosa set the water can on a small table and crossed her arms.

“Es usted. ¿Cómo se atreve a usted presentarle aquí?”

Louis didn’t understand a word she said, but from the tone, it was not kind.

Swann stood close to her and began speaking very softly. Louis stayed where he was, a few feet from the open front door. Rosa’s head was down, face hidden behind the thick curtain of ebony hair as she listened calmly to Swann.

“Su hermano está muerto,”
Swann said.
“Lo siento.”

Louis understood a few words—brother, dead, sorry.

Rosa’s hands went to her face, and to Louis’s surprise, she fell gently against Swann. He let her cry for a moment, then wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her inside the apartment. Louis followed.

Swann took Rosa to the small table near the kitchen
window and sat across from her. She continued to sob, handfuls of Kleenex pressed to her face.

Louis sat on the arm of the sofa. For the next five or six minutes, he was quiet, listening to the soft murmur of Swann’s Spanish and looking around at the meager Christmas decorations.

A small artificial tree stood on a table, draped with gold tinsel and decorated with three—only three—brightly painted glass ornaments in the shape of a sombrero-wearing
señorita
. Sitting on a plate nearby was a small array of what looked like gingerbread cookies shaped like the flowered decals of the hippie era.

A gurgle drew his attention to a blanket-draped playpen near the window. He went to it and looked down. A baby in a white T-shirt and an old-fashioned cloth diaper and rubber pants stared up at him, its brown eyes wide in curiosity. It was sucking tenaciously on a pacifier.