The Hundredth Man Read online

  Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, token detectives, so much for the A-list. I doubted we’d still be recognizable; as demonstrated by the reporter, the media’s present-tense mentality had filed the year-old case somewhere between the Norman Conquest and the Industrial Revolution. I started to thank Doc P again anyway, but an upwardly mobilized junior prosecutor shouldered me aside and presented his giggly fiancee to “one of the top female medical examiners in the nation.”

  I smiled as I walked away. “Top female medical examiners … ” Clair was gonna eat that little bastard’s soul the next time they worked together.

  A heavy black hand squeezed my shoulder. Harry.

  “Working the crowd, amigo?” I asked.

  He winked. “A bash like this, Cars, all the politicos and wannabes getting half blammed, you can’t beat it for getting milk.”

  Milk was Harry’s term for inside information concerning the department or its influences. Though not a political type himself, he loved departmental gossip and always had the skinny, more milk than a herd of Guernseys. He leaned whisper close. “Rumor has it Chief Hyrum is rolling and strolling next spring, summer at latest.”

  “He’s taking dancing lessons?” Harry’s rhyming affliction alternately amused or irritated me. Today was irritation.

  “Early retirement, Cars. Two years early.”

  I’d been a street cop for three years, a detective for one. Though I knew of the thicket of departmental politics, I was indifferent. Harry’d spent fifteen years studying them on a molecular level. I requested a translation. He paused, divining.

  “Gonna be power plays, Carson. Upstaging, backstabbing, and downright lying. People that do nothing but push paper are gonna make like they’re the hottest shit since the devil’s stables.”

  “How much of that manure is gonna land on our heads?” I asked.

  Harry scowled at his “empty glass and pushed toward the bar, the multitude parting like water for a black Moses in pink slacks and purple shirt. “Don’t fret it and sweat it, bro,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re too far down the ladder to get caught in the shit storm.”

  My glass of iced tea was mostly cubes and I strained it through my fingers and swiped ice chips over my sweating face and the back of my neck. The effect was delicious in the night’s heat; a cold startle of wet ice and the astringent draw of tannin. I sighed at the joy of small pleasures and leaned back in my deck chair. A gibbous moon swept above, hazy and haloed, the air glutted with wet. Hours gone from the morgue rededication ceremony, bare feet propped on the railing, I watched the golden plume of an oil rig burning off gas three miles across the Gulf. Fire from the dark water seemed as exotic as a parrot in a scrub-pine woodlands.

  I live on Dauphin Island, thirty miles south of Mobile, several of them water. By Island standards my place is blush-ingly modest, a two-bedroom cottage perched on pilings over beachfront sand, but any realtor would list it for four hundred grand. When my mother died three years back she left me enough to swing the deal. It was a time in my life when I needed a safe retreat, and where better than a box in the air above an island?

  The phone rang. I reflexively patted where pockets would be if I’d been wearing clothes, then plucked the phone from the table. It was Harry.

  “We’re wanted at a murder scene. Could be Piss-it’s coming-out party.”

  “You’re two months late for April Fool’s, Harry. What’s really happening?”

  “Our inaugural ball, partner. There’s a body downtown looking for a head.”

  Harry and I were homicide detectives in Mobile’s first district, partners, our job security assured by the mindless violence of any city where the poor are abundant and tightly compressed. That shaped our world unless, according to the recently revised procedures manual, a murder displayed “overt evidence of psycho pathological or socio pathological tendencies.” Then, regardless of jurisdiction, the Psycho-pathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team was activated. The entire PSIT, depart mentally referred to as Piss-it, of course, was Harry and me and a specialist or two we could enlist as needed. Though the unit was basically a public-relations scheme and had never been activated there were those in the department not happy with it.

  Like me, right about now.

  “Get there as fast as you can,” Harry said, reading me the address. “I’ll meet you out front. Use siren, flashers. Gun it and run it, don’t diddle around.”

  “You don’t want me to pick up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread?”

  The phone clicked dead.

  I jumped into jeans and pulled on a semi clean dress shirt, yanking a cream linen jacket from the rack to cover the shoulder rig. I stumbled down the steps, climbed into the unmarked Taurus under the house, and blew away in a spray of sand and crushed shells. The flasher and siren stayed off until I’d crossed the inky stretch of water to the mainland, where I cranked up the light show, turned on the screamer, and laid the pedal flat.

  The body was in a small park on the near-southwest side of Mobile, five acres of oak and pecan trees surrounded by a turn-of-the-century neighborhood moving from decline to gentrification. Three flashing cruisers fronted the park, plus a tech services van. Two unmarkeds flanked a shiny black SUV I took as Squill’s. The ubiquitous news van had its uplink antenna raised. Harry was forty feet ahead and walking toward the park entrance. I pulled to the curb and stepped out into an ambush, a sudden burst of camera light in my eyes.

  “I remember you now,” came a vaguely familiar voice from behind the glare. “You’re Carson Ryder. You had something to do with the Joel Adrian case, right?”

  I blinked and saw the woman reporter from the morgue rededication. She was in full TV-journalist bloom, lacquered hair, scarlet talons gripping a microphone like a condor holds a rabbit. Her other hand grabbed my bicep. She lifted the mike to her lips and stared at the camera.

  “This is Sondra Farrel of Action Fourteen News. I’m outside of Bowderie Park, where a headless body has been discovered. With me is Detective Carson Ryder of the “

  I scowled at the camera and unleashed a string of swear words in three real languages and one invented on the spot. There’s nothing reporters hate worse than a sound bite that bites back. The reporter shoved my arm away. “Shit,” she said to the cameraman. “Cut.”

  I caught up with Harry at the entrance to the park, guarded by a young patrolman. He gave me a look.

  “You’re Carson Ryder, aren’t you?”

  I looked down and mumbled something that could have gone either way. As we passed by, the patrolman pointed at his uniform and asked Harry, “How do I get out of this as fast as Ryder did?”

  “Be damned good or damned crazy,” Harry called over his shoulder.

  “Which one’s Ryder?” the young cop asked. “Good or crazy?”

  “Damned if he ain’t a little of both,” Harry yelled. Then to me, “Hurry.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The scene techs brought portable lights with enough wattage to guide in a 757, all focused at a twenty-by-twenty area spiked with head-high bushes. Trees surrounded us and blotted most of the stars. Dog shit lurked beneath every step. Two dozen feet away a sinuous concrete path bisected the park. A growing audience pressed against the fence where the park met the street, including an old woman twisting a handkerchief, a young couple holding hands, and a half-dozen sweat-soaked runners dancing foot to foot.

  Two criminalists worked inside the taped-off area, one kneeling over the victim, the other picking at the base of a tree. Harry trotted toward the onlookers to check for witnesses. I stopped at the yellow tape and studied the scene from a dozen feet away. The body lay supine in the grass as if napping, legs slightly apart, arms at its sides. It seemed surreal in the uncompromising light, the colors too bright and edges too sharp, a man incompletely scissored from another world and pasted to this one. The clothing was spring-night casual: belt less jeans, brown deck shoes without socks, white tee with an Old Navy logo. The shirt was drawn up to
the nipples, the jeans unzipped.

  Bending over the body was the senior criminalist on the scene, Wayne Hembree. Black, thirty-five, thin as poor-folk’s broth, Hembree had a moon face and a sides-and-back fringing of hair. He sat back on his heels and shrugged kinks from his shoulders. His forehead sparkled with sweat.

  “Okay walking here, Bree?” I called, gesturing a line between my shoes and the body. I didn’t want to stick my feet into something important. Dog shit either. Hembree nodded, and I slipped under the tape.

  An old street cop who’d seen everything this side of downtown hell once told me, “Find a head without a body, Ryder, and it’s weird, but there’s something whole about it. Find a body without a head and it’s creepy and sad at the same time just so alone, y’know?” When I looked down on that body, I understood. In four years with the MPD I’ve seen shot bodies, stabbed bodies, drowned bodies, bodies mangled from car crashes, a body with a pile of intestines squirted beside it, but never one without a head. The old cop nailed it: that body was as alone as the first day of creation. I shivered and hoped no one saw.

  “Killed here?” I asked Hembree.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. I can tell you he was decapitated where he’s laying. ME folks thinking two or three hours back. Puts time of death between eight and ten.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “Kids, teenagers. Came back here to make out and “

  Footsteps behind me; Captain Squill and his hulking, omnipresent shadow, Sergeant Earl Burlew. Burlew was chewing paper as usual. He kept a page of the Mobile Register in his pocket and fed torn pieces between his doll-sized lips. I always wanted to ask was there a difference between sections, Sports tasting gamier than Editorials, maybe. Or did they all taste like chicken? Then I’d look into Burlew’s tiny, oyster-colored eyes and think maybe I’d ask some other time.

  Burlew said, “Look who’s here, Captain: Folgers instant detective. Just add headlines and stir.” He swiped his hand down his sweating face. Burlew’s centered features were too small for his head, and for a moment he disappeared beneath his own palm.

  “Fag revenge killing,” Squill said, glancing at the body. “Love to hack, don’t they? Good place to do it, park’s copacetic after dark. It’s a yuppie-pup pie neighborhood; Councilwoman Philips lives two blocks down; street gets over patrolled to keep her in happy world….”

  I’d heard Squill had a speech mode for every crowd. With uniformed cops a dozen feet away he was spewing cop-movie jargon. Disheartening, I thought, a seventeen-year police administrator acting like a cop instead of just being one.

  “… killer thumps the vic’s melon or pops a cap. The perp pulls his blade and scores a head.” Squill pointed to the bushes around us. “Unsub dropped him here so the body’d stay out of sight.”

  I fought the compulsion to roll my eyes. Unsub was short for “unknown subject” and the FBI types used it a lot. Unsub was fedjarg.

  “Killed and beheaded here?” I asked.

  “Something wrong with your ears, Ryder?” Squill said.

  Though the body lay partly beneath a bush decorated with small white blossoms, it was free of petals. Just outside the scene tape was a stand of the same bushes; I walked over and fell into them.

  “What the hell’s he doing?” Squill snapped.

  I stood and studied the drifting of petals down the front of my shirt. Hembree looked between me and the body.

  “If the vie fell through the bushes he’d have petals on him, but they’re” he studied the corpse and the ground “they’re around the body but not on it. The perp brushed aside the branches, so nothing fell on the corpse. Like maybe our friend here was pulled into the bushes.”

  I looked deeper into the vegetation. “Or out of them.”

  Squill said, “Delusional. Why pull the body out of deeper cover?”

  Hembree’s chunky assistant produced a flashlight and bellied beneath the bushes. “Lerame see what’s back there.”

  Squill glared at me. “The un sub lured the vie here and dropped him where the body stayed hidden in the bushes, Ryder. If it wasn’t for a couple horny teens, it would’ve stayed hid until the stink started.”

  “I’m not sure it’s hidden,” I said, cupping my hands around my eyes to blot the scene lights and looking through oak limbs and Spanish moss at a bright streetlamp fifteen yards distant. I crouched beside the body and saw the streetlamp boxed between branches.

  “Can we cut the lights?” I asked.

  Squill slapped his head theatrically. “No, Ryder. We got work to do and can’t do it with white canes and leader dogs.” He looked at the uniforms for his laugh track but they were staring at the streetlamp.

  Hembree said, “Lights turn back on, y’know.”

  Squill had no control over the techs and hated it. He turned and whispered something to Burlew. I was sure Squill’s mouth shaped the word nigger.

  Hembree yelled to an assistant in the forensics van. “Tell the EMTs and cruisers to douse their lights. Then kill these.”

  The lights from the vehicles disappeared, leaving only the portable lamps. When they went black it took our eyes several seconds to adjust. I saw what I’d expected: The streetlamp sent a thin band of light through the branches and between two large bushes, a spotlight on the body.

  “It’s not hidden,” Hembree said, checking angles. “Anyone coming around the bend in the path looks right at it. Hard to miss with the white shirt.”

  “Speculative bullshit,” Squill said.

  The tech squirming through the bushes yelled, “Got fresh blood back here, bring me a kit and a camera.”

  “Dropped in the dark, dragged into light,” Hembree said, winking at me. The uniforms nodded their approval. When the scene lights snapped back on, Squill and Burlew were gone.

  I did an end-zone shuffle, spiked an invisible ball, and waggled my hand at Harry for a high five. He jammed his mitts in his pockets, growled, “Follow me,” and stalked away.

  Harry Nautilus and I had met in the Alabama state pen five years before; visitors, not inmates. I’d driven from Tuscaloosa to interview several prisoners as part of my master’s in psychology. Harry’d come from Mobile to pump info from an inmate whose jugular had, unfortunately, been slashed a couple hours earlier; Harry was having a rotten day. He passed me in a tight hall and we bumped elbows, spilling his coffee. He studied my clothing denim intensive, red-framed mirror shades, faded ball cap over self-inflicted haircut and asked a guard who let the big, dumb hillbilly out of his cell. I’d come from two hours with a boasting pederast and transferred my sublimated aggressions to Harry’s nose. The laughing guards broke it up as he was choking me out.

  Afterward, we both felt shoe-staring ridiculous. Mumbled apologies turned to explanations of why we’d both been at the prison that day, and what had conspired to give us the temperament of dyspeptic pit bulls. Stupidity gave way to laughter, and we ended the day drinking in the bar in Harry’s motel. After a few belts Harry launched into cop stories, amusing and intriguing me. I countered with tales from recent interviews with the South’s preeminent psychopaths and sociopaths.

  Harry dismissed my interviews with a wave of his hand. “Behind every one of those pieces of busted machinery is a megalomaniac that loves to talk. Reporters, shrinks, college boys like you the craze-o’s tell them anything they want to hear. It’s a game.”

  “You know the Albert Mirell case, Detective?” I asked, referring to the psychopathic pedophile I’d spent an ugly two hours with.

  “His last vie was in Mobile, college boy, remember? If you talked to Mirell, all you got was smirks and bullshit. Right?”

  I lowered my voice and told Harry what Mirell had revealed to me as spit gleamed over his teeth and his hands squirmed beneath the table. Harry bent forward until our foreheads almost touched. “There’s maybe ten folks in the world know that stuff,” he whispered. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Guess I put Mirell in a mind to talk,” I said, preten
ding that’s all there was.

  Harry studied my face a long time.

  “Let’s keep in touch,” he said.

  This was when my mother was alive and I was an impoverished student at the University of Alabama. Still, every couple of weeks I’d drive to Mobile or Harry’d make the run to Tuscaloosa. We’d grab a bucket of chicken and talk about his crumbling marriage or my fading interest in student hood after six years and four majors. We kicked around aspects of cases bothering him, or discussed my wilder interview sessions. Sometimes we sat quietly and listened to blues or jazz and that was fine too. This went on for three or so months. One night Harry noted my usual at-home meals consisted of beans and rice, and going for a beer meant digging under couch cushions for change.

  “Teaching assistant’s not a high-pay industry?” he asked.

  “It’s basically a no-pay industry,” I corrected. “But what it lacks in compensation it makes up for in scarcity of job possibilities.”

  “Maybe one day you’ll be a famous shrink, Carson Freud, driving around in a big old Benz.”

  “Likeliest thing I’ll be driving is pipe on an oil rig,” I said. “Why?”

  “I think you’d make a good cop,” Harry said.

  Ten minutes after we left the park, I followed Harry to a back booth in Cake’s Lounge, a dark bottom-dwellers’ saloon wedged between factories and warehouses near the bay. Several ragged loners drank at the bar, a few clustered in booths. Two unsteady men played pool.

  “Why here, why not Flanagan’s?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. Cake’s smelled like the air hadn’t been changed in a decade; Flanagan’s served cheap drinks and decent gumbo and pulled a lot of cops.

  “Squill might have been there, and Squill’s what we’re gonna talk about. That was a dumbass hot-dog trick with the flowers and lights. Why did you want to outshine him in front of everybody?”