The Hundredth Man Read online

  SYNOPSIS

  A headless male torso is found in the sweating heat of an Alabama night. The victim is believed to be a prostitute, murdered in a moment of passion. But Carson Ryder, a detective famous for solving a series of brutal murders the previous year, sees something else: the deliberate placing of the body, the lack of blood, bizarre writing on the skin.

  Another torso, another, even stranger, message and the victim this time is no prostitute. There is a darkness at the heart of these killings which speaks of a psychopath out there in the night. It seems to Ryder, though, that obstacles are deliberately being placed in the way of the investigation and he and his partner decide to go it alone.

  But Ryder himself is harbouring a terrible secret. As he hunts a killer, the demons from his own childhood rise again to torment him.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk/crime

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

  First published in the USA by Dutton 2004

  Copyright © Jack Kerley 2004

  Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 00 718058 6

  Set in Minion and Eurostile by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Limited, St Ives plc

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  To my parents, Jack and Betty Kerley

  Contents

  Start

  Synopsis:

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Why don’t you get your butt out of advertising and write that novel?”

  The preceding quote, voiced by my wife Elaine after I’d had a bell-in-a-handcart week in copywriting, ultimately led to this book. Gentler assistance was provided by my children, Amanda and John, who endured manuscript pages spread throughout the house, rants about missing pens, and my commandeering the computer whenever an errant thought arrived.

  The Fiction Critique Group of the Cincinnati Writers Project helped me understand what worked, what didn’t, and how to turn the latter into the former. Special gracias to Katey Brichto, who set aside her own work to read and improve mine.

  Thanks also to Julia Wisdom, my editor at HarperCollins, for her solid input, and to Richard Green, for his powerful cover design.

  The folks at the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency were -and continue to be - amazing: Joy Ritchey (since departed), who started my manuscript on its journey, the buoyant and indefatigable Lucy Childs, the foreign rights magician Lisa Erbach Vance, and the impresario himself, Aaron Priest. A first-time author never had a surer set of guides.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I exercised broad license in bending settings, geography, and various institutions and law-enforcement agencies to the will and whims of the story. Everything should be regarded as fictitious save for the natural beauty of Mobile and its environs. Any similarities between characters in this work and real persons, living or elsewise, is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  Seconds before one of the most long-awaited events of Alexander Caulfield’s adult life, an event he’d spent years planning and pursuing, an event marking his ascension into professionalism, a decent salary, and the respect of his peers, his left eye started winking like a gigolo in a third-rate Italian film.

  tic

  Caulfield cursed beneath his breath. A physician, he recognized a manifestation of transient hemifacial spasms: eye tics or flutters in response to events sparking anxiety or posing a threat.

  tic

  Anxiety was ludicrous, he lectured himself, squeezing the offending eye shut; he’d performed or assisted with hundreds of autopsies during his internship. The only difference was this was his first professional autopsy. She was sitting twenty feet away.

  Caulfield slowly opened his eye …

  tic

  He angled a glance at Dr. Clair Peltier. She was opening a letter in the autopsy suite’s utility office, apparently absorbed in correspondence. Caulfield felt blindsided, unprepared, fumble fingered: Today had been scheduled for procedural reviews and meeting new colleagues at the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau.

  Then she’d casually suggested he take her place during a procedure.

  tic

  Caulfield refocused the ceiling-mounted surgical lamp over the body of the middle-aged white male on the table. Water rinsed beneath the corpse, sounding like a small brook playing over metal. He glanced at Dr. Peltier again: still studying her mail. He mopped his sweating brow, adjusted his mask for the third time, and studied the body. Would his incision be perfectly midline? Would it be straight? Smooth? Would it meet her standards?

  He drank in a deep breath, told his hands, Now. The blue-white belly opened like a curtain between pubis and sternum. Clean and straight, a textbook opening.

  Caulfield slipped another glance at Dr. Peltier. She was watching him.

  tic

  Dr. Peltier smiled and returned to her correspondence. Caulfield pushed his fear to a far corner of his mind and focused on inspecting and weighing organs. He spoke his findings aloud, the tape recorder capturing them for later transcription to print.

  “On gross examination the myocardial tissue appears normal in size and wall thickness. Areas of myocardium in the left ventricle are suggestive of past myocardial infarction… .”

  The familiar sights and words steered Caulfield onto a trusted path; he didn’t notice when the spasms melted away.

  “… liver mottled, early indication of cirrhosis … kidneys unremarkable …”

  The man had been found sprawled in his front yard after a 911 call. The EMTs followed aggressive resuscitation procedures for a heart attack, but the man entered University Hospital as a D
OA. Caulfield’s initial findings supported a massive cardiac event, though the nondamaged tissue appeared healthy and free of epicarditis or atherosclerosis. Caulfield moved lower in the cavity.

  “An obstruction is noted in the descending colon… .”

  Caulfield pinched the lump in the bowel. Hard and regular in shape, a man-made object. It wasn’t uncommon, emergency-room physicians were forever sending patients to the ER to extract vibrators, candles, vegetables, and suchnot; people were inventive in their quest for erotic sensation.

  “Using a number-ten blade, a ten-centimeter vertical incision was made through the anterior wall of the descending colon… .”

  Caulfield retracted the bowel to reveal the source of the obstruction.

  “An object can be visualized, silver and cylindrical, resembling a section of flashlight casing… .”

  Wet metal gleamed through the slit in the intestine, black fabric wrapping one end. No, not fabric, friction tape. Caulfield’s finger tentatively tapped the casing. Something about the object glimmered with threat, an intruder in the house.

  tic

  He heard Dr. Peltier’s chair push back and high heels start toward him. She’d been listening. His fingers slid into the passageway and grasped the object. He tugged gently. It slipped easily through the slit, then resisted. Caulfield tightened his fingers around the object and pulled harder.

  tic

  Simultaneous: white flash, black thud. Caulfield’s head whiplashed and the floor slammed his back. Red mist and smoke painted the air. A woman’s scream spun through the roaring in his ears. Someone above him waved a blunt stick, a club.

  No, not a club …

  The light flickered twice and failed.

  When the autopsy was transcribed to printed form, transcriptionist Marie Manolo was uncertain whether to include Dr. Caulfield’s final six words. Trained by Dr. Peltier to be clinically detached and thorough, Marie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued typing:

  My fingers. Where are my fingers?

  CHAPTER 1

  “A guy’s walking his dog late one night… .”

  I watched Harry Nautilus lean against the autopsy table and tell the World’s Greatest Joke to a dozen listeners holding napkin-wrapped cups and plastic wineglasses. Most were bureaucrats from the city of Mobile and Mobile County. Two were lawyers; prosecution side, of course. Harry and I were the only cops. There were dignitaries around, mostly in the reception area where the main morgue rededication events were scheduled. The ribbon cutting had been an hour back, gold ribbon, not black, as several wags had suggested. “What kind of dog?” Arthur Peterson asked. Peterson was a deputy prosecutor and his question sounded like an objection.

  “A mutt,” Harry grunted, narrowing an eye at the interruption. “A guy is walking his mutt named Fido down the street when he spots a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight.”

  Harry took a sip of beer, licked foam from his bulldozer-blade mustache, and set his cup on the table about where a head would be.

  “The dog walker asks the man if he’s lost something. Man says, “Yeah, my contact lens popped out.” So the dog walker ties Fido to a phone pole and gets down on his hands and knees to help. They search up and down, back and forth, beneath that light. Fifteen minutes later the dog walker says, “Buddy, I can’t find it anywhere. Are you sure it popped out here?” The man says, “No, I lost it over in the park.” “The park?” the dog walker yells. “Then why the hell are we looking in the street?””

  Harry gave it a two-beat build.

  “The man points to the streetlamp and says, “The light’s better here.””

  Harry laughed, a musical warble at odds with a black man built like an industrial boiler. His audience tittered politely. An attractive redhead in a navy pantsuit frowned and said, “I don’t get it. Why’s that the world’s greatest joke?”

  “It has mythical content,” Harry replied, the right half of his mustache twitching with interest, the left drooping in disdain. “Given the choice of groping after something in the dark, or hoping to find it easily in the light, people pick the light ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

  Peterson lofted a prosecutorial eyebrow. “So who’s the hundredth guy, the one always groping in the dark?”

  Harry grinned and pointed my way.

  “Him,” he said.

  I shook my head, showed Harry my back, and walked to the reception area. It was loud and crowded, local VIPs churning like a bucketful of mice as they scrambled for position beside an Even More Important Person or in front of a news camera. Guests huddled three deep around the buffet table. I watched a heavy woman in evening wear slip two sandwiches into her purse before puzzling over meat-balls in gravy. A dozen feet away a florid county commissioner babbled proudly for a news crew.

  “… like to welcome y’all to the dedication of the new faculties … one of the uniqueist in the nation … proud to have voted the fundage … the tragedy of Dr. Caulfield should remind us to be ever viligent ..”

  I saw Willet Lindy across the hall and plunged into the roiling bodies, excusing and pardoning my way his direction. A reporter from Channel 14 stared, then blocked my path.

  “I know you, don’t I?” she said, tapping a scarlet talon against pursed lips. “Weren’t you part of, like, a big story a few months back, don’t tell me … “

  I spun and ducked and left her puzzling over my fifteen minutes of fame. Willet Lindy stood against the wall, sipping a soft drink. I pulled myself from the current and joined him.

  “It’s Wal-Mart three days before Christmas, Will,” I said, loosening my tie and wincing at something dark dribbled on my shirt; following the same cosmic dictum that buttered bread always falls sticky side down, the stain was impossible to hide with my sport jacket. Lindy grinned and scooted sideways to give me a piece of wall for leaning. He was four years past my age of twenty-nine, but his gnomish face and receding hairline made him look a decade older. Lindy managed the nonmedical functions of the facility, such as maintenance and purchasing. I’d known him a year or so, starting when my detective status made me privy to the secrets of the morgue.

  “Nice renovation of the place,” I said. “Looks brand-new.” Lindy was a shorter guy, five seven or eight, and I had to speak down half a foot. Not hard, I was told I stooped naturally, a large puppet on slackened strings.

  Lindy nodded. “Cosmetic changes aside, we replaced much of the equipment. Plus we have things we didn’t have before” he pointed to a flyspeck dot in a ceiling tile “security cameras. Miniaturized. If something like the Caulfield incident happens again, the bomb squad can inspect the scene from a distance.”

  Caulfield was the first-timer pathologist whose hand had been mutilated by a bomb meant to kill a man already dead; a horrifying event, unsolved after six months. “Not a lot of cops here, Will,” I said to change the subject.

  Lindy raised a dissenting eyebrow. “The chief and deputy chiefs, a captain or two.”

  I meant cops, but didn’t have the time, or maybe the words, to explain the difference. As if cued, Captain Terrence Squill walked by, saw me, backed up. Squill and I had barely exchanged syllables in the past; he was so far up the ladder I squinted to see the bottoms of his shoes.

  “Ryder, is it? What the hell are you doing here?” His eyes noted the blot on my shirt and his nose wrinkled. The director of Investigative Services was a compact and dapper man whose precise features and liquid, feminine eyes recalled a fortyish Orrin Hatch. The knot of his tie was so tight and symmetrical it seemed carved from marble. I knew nothing of gray suits but suspected I was looking at one fitted by a tailor.

  “I got an invitation, thought I’d come and represent the department, sir.”

  He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “This is not an affair for junior personnel. Did you con some City Hall bimbo into slipping your name on the list? Or did you sneak in the back door?”

  I was amazed at how much anger was in his eyes while his mout
h remained smiling. Anyone out of earshot would figure we were talking football or fishing. “I never sneak,” I said. “Like I told you, I got an “

  Lindy spoke up. “Excuse me, Captain?”

  “What is it, Mr. Lindy?”

  “Detective Ryder was invited by Dr. Peltier. She also invited his partner, Detective Nautilus.”

  Squill pursed his lips as if preparing to speak or spit, shook his head, and disappeared into the crowd. I shrugged off the incident, said I wanted to thank Dr. Peltier for the invite, and dove back into the crowd.

  Clair stood at the door of her office, speaking with Alabama’s attorney general and his satellites. A simple black dress set off her skin, velvet over china, and I enjoyed watching her dominate her audience. A striking forty-four-year-old woman with cropped anthracite hair and ice-blue eyes, Dr. Clair Peltier, director of the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, needs only spear and helmet to claim center stage in a Wagner opera. The effect is enhanced by about fifteen extra pounds, which she wears in her thighs and shoulders. When the AG and his retinue paraded away, I stepped up. With high heels she was almost tall enough for her eyes to level into mine.

  “Will Lindy says you’re the reason I’m here,” I said, raising my cup toward those amazing eyes. “Thanks.”

  “No thanks are necessary, Ryder. The guest list was top-heavy with police brass. The media being here, I figured it appropriate to have some detectives in attendance. I chose you and Detective Nautilus because you might be recognizable from the Adrian case.”