The Broken Souls (Carson Ryder, Book 3) Page 3

  “Did Forensics find any blood in Mrs Atkins’s vehicle?”

  Harry said, “No blood, no hair, no trace of any evidence.”

  “At least we got a knife.”

  Harry finished his can of soda, crumpled the can like paper, bouncing it in his hand. “With nada on the prints. An uncharted whacko.”

  “Is this going to turn weird, brother?” I asked.

  “Going to?” he said.

  We heard a ship’s horn and turned to watch a freighter slipping from the mouth of the Mobile River. The ship’s bridge was at the stern and lighted. The only other light was at the bow. Somewhere between the two points were hundreds of feet of invisible ship. A minute later, its wake reached us, hissing against the shoreline with a sound like rain.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lucas stood in the piss-stinking service station restroom, door locked, and foamed restroom soap over his torso, patting dry with rough paper towels. Once more he counted his money, tight clean bills, over a thousand dollars’ worth. Seed money. The next step was to turn it into working capital. A quick way of doing that was to find and supply a product for which there was great demand.

  He could get product. What he needed was a distributorship.

  Lucas studied the face in the grimy mirror: nothing but black eyes and round hole of mouth deep in a sea of black hair. Scary, hideous even, like he’d escaped from hell. But then, how else was he supposed to look?

  Lucas scowled into the mirror, bared his teeth like a rabid dog, growled. Snapped his teeth at his image.

  What’s that face mean, Lucas?

  Dr Rudolnick’s voice suddenly in Lucas’s head.

  “It’s how pissed off I am, Doctor.”

  “You look angry enough to kill, Lucas. Are you really that angry?”

  “I guess not, Doctor. Not today, at least.”

  “Good, Lucas. Let’s do some deep breathing and visualizations, all right?”

  Lucas laughed and tucked the shirt into his pants. He opened the restroom door. Lights in the distance, bars, clubs. Lowlife joints with lowlife people, the kind of folks attuned to nontraditional distribution networks. Something in the automotive segment of the market.

  The nearest bar, a hundred feet distant, had a window blinking LUCKY’S in green neon script. Maybe it was an omen.

  Lucas stepped out into the night, music playing loud in his head, snapping his fingers to an old funk piece by Bootsy Collins, “Psychoticbumpschool”. He angled toward Lucky’s.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Give me a couple minutes with Ms Franklin, Clair?” I said. “Please?”

  Dr Clair Peltier, chief pathologist for the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, stared at me with breathtaking blue eyes. Between us, on a stainless steel table, rested the draped body of Taneesha Franklin. Her face bore the misshaping of the blows she’d been dealt; her bare arms outside the drape displayed puckered knife wounds. Her head lolled to the side, the gaping slash beneath her chin like a wide and hungry second mouth.

  “Ryder …”

  “Three minutes?”

  She sighed. “I’ll run down the hall and get a coffee. It’s a two-minute run.”

  “Thanks, Clair.”

  She waved my appreciation away and left the room, her green surgical gown flowing as she moved. Not many women could make a formless cotton wrapping look good, but Clair pulled it off.

  Perhaps it was peculiar only to me, but as an investigator – or maybe just as a human being – I always sought a few moments with the deceased before the Y-cut opened the body, transformed it. I wanted time alone with my employer. Not the city, nor the blind concept of justice. But the person I was truly working for, removed from life by the hand of another, early, wrongfully. Sometimes I stood with the Good, and often I stood with the Bad. Most of the human beings I stood with fell, like the bulk of us, into a vast middle distance, feet in the clay, head in the firmament, the heart suspended between.

  From what Harry and I had discerned, Taneesha Franklin had lived her brief life with honor, focus, and a need to be of service to others. She had only recently discovered journalism and through it hoped to better the world.

  Good for you, Teesh, I thought.

  Clair stepped back through the door. Without a word, she walked to the body, picked up a scalpel, and went to work. I stood across the table, sometimes watching, sometimes closing my eyes.

  I generally attended the postmortems, while Harry spent more time with the Prosecutor’s Office. We joked that I preferred dead bodies to live lawyers. The truth was that I felt comfortable in the morgue. It was cool and quiet and orderly.

  “Where was she found, Carson?” Clair asked, staring into the bisected throat, muscles splayed outward.

  “Semi-industrial area by the docks. Warehouses, light industry.”

  “Not crowded, then? No one very near?”

  “It’s normally sort of a hooker hangout. But the rain kept them in that night. Why?”

  “Her vocal cords were injured. Lacerated.”

  “From manual strangulation? The knife wound?”

  Clair pursed her roseate lips. “Screaming, probably. I wondered why no one heard her.”

  The procedure took a bit over two hours. Clair snapped off her latex gloves and dropped them into the biohazard receptacle beside the table. She removed her cloth mask and I saw a lipstick kiss printed in the fabric. Clair uncovered her head, shaking out neat, brief hair, as black and glossy as anthracite. She pressed her fists against her hips and stretched her spine backward.

  “I’m getting too old for this, Ryder.”

  “You’re forty-four. And in better shape than most people ten years younger.”

  “Don’t try charm, Ryder,” she said. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  I was perhaps her only colleague this side of God who used Clair’s first name. Not knowing of her insistence on formality, I’d used it when we were introduced. Those with us had grimaced in anticipation of a scorching correction, but for some reason, she’d let it stand, addressing me solely by my last name as a countermeasure.

  When I’d first met Clair, I’d considered her five years older than her actual age, the result of a stern visage and a husband in his sixties. I would later come to realize the latter bore certain responsibility for the former, Clair’s visage softening appreciably after hubby was sent a-packing.

  Two years ago, a murder investigation had cut directly through the center of Clair’s personal life. The revelations of the investigation had wounded her, and I’d been present at a moment of her vulnerability, a time she’d needed to talk. We’d stood beneath an arbor of roses in her garden and Clair had revealed pieces of her past – less to me than to herself – suddenly grasping meaning from the shadows of long-gone events.

  They were startling revelations, and though I disavowed the notion, she had believed me the vehicle for the transformative moment.

  “When will the preliminary be ready?” I asked, pulling my jacket from a hanger on the wall.

  “In the a.m. And don’t expect it before ten thirty.”

  Though our relationship was professional, there had been times – as in her garden – when the world shifted and for fleeting moments we seemed able to look into one another with a strange form of clarity. A believer in reincarnation might have suspected we’d touched in a former life, spinning some thread that even time and distance left unsevered.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow at ten thirty-one, Clair.”

  She walked away, talking over her shoulder.

  “How about sending Harry? Be nice to see someone with some sense for a change.”

  Though at times the thread seemed tenuous.

  I was climbing into the Crown Victoria when my cellphone rang, Harry on the other end. “Hembree wants to see us at the lab. How about you whip by and grab me. I’ll be out front.”

  We blew into Forensics fifteen minutes later. Hembree leaned against a lab table outside his office. He was so ski
nny, the lab coat hung in white folds like a wizard’s robe.

  He said, “You got great eyes, Harry.”

  Harry winked. “Thanks, Bree. You got a nice ass. Wanna grab a drink after work?”

  Hembree frowned. “I meant catching the water depth on the floorboards. I called the regional office of the National Weather Service, talked to the head meteorologist. They archive Dopplers. He reran the night’s readings, checking time, location, and storm cell activity.”

  “Upshot?” Harry asked.

  “The area where the vic’s vehicle sat took pretty light rain, overall. Lightest in the city, at least in the hour before it was spotted. About an inch fell in that hour.”

  “Why so much in the car, Bree? It was a lake.”

  “Maybe a leak along the roof guttering caught rain, channeled it inside. I’ll check it out.”

  “Anything else turn up?”

  Hembree said, “The knife Shuttles pulled off the street? Made years ago by the Braxton Knife Company in Denver. The handle’s bone. The blade’s carbon steel, not stainless, why it looks corroded. It’s a damn nice knife.”

  “How about prints? Anything new?”

  “Pulled a thumb, forefinger and middle finger, some palm. Ran every possible database. Nada. Nothing. Zip.”

  “You got a Wookiee database?” Harry said.

  “What?”

  We waved it off and walked out the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  Harry and I spent the rest of the day wandering the industrial neighborhood where Taneesha Franklin had died. Normally, the area was a cruising ground for hookers, but rain was keeping them inside. We corralled as many denizens as possible, asking about the bearded longhair. The killing had frightened most of the girls, guys, and question marks that hawked wares from the corners. They tried to be helpful, but we ended the day with a zero, heading home at six.

  Home, to me, was thirty miles south, to Dauphin Island. It’s an expensive community, but when my mother passed away, I inherited enough to buy it outright. It was actually my second home on the island, the first turned to kindling by Hurricane Katrina. I never complain about paying insurance premiums anymore.

  I pulled onto my short street and saw a white Audi in my drive, Danielle Danbury’s car, the bumper festooned with birdwatching and wildlife stickers. I parked beneath my house, climbed the stairs and stepped inside.

  Dani yelled, “I’m heading out to the deck. Join me.” The deck doors slid closed with a thump. I stood in the living room hearing only the soft hiss of the air conditioner. Normally Dani would have met me at the door.

  What was up?

  I paused to yank off my tie, toss it over a chair, follow it with my jacket. The shoulder holster and weapon went to my bedside table.

  I heard the deck door slide open. “Where you at, Carson?”

  “Changing.”

  “Get it in gear, Pogobo.”

  Pogobo – and its diminutive, Pogie – came from po-lice go-lden bo-y, coined by Dani after Harry and I were made Officers of the Year by the Mayor. Most of the time we were homicide detectives, but once in a great while we were the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team. PSIT, or Piss-it, as everyone called it, started as a public relations gimmick a few years back, never intended to be activated. But somehow it was, somehow it worked, and somehow it bought us Officers of the Year commendations. The honor turned out to be, as Harry had promised, worth less than mud.

  I slipped into cutoffs, T-shirt, and running shoes a half-mile short of disintegrating. At the kitchen sink I slapped cool water over my face and glanced out the window. Dani paced beside the deck table; on it something hidden beneath my kitchen towel. I dried my face on an oven mitt and went to the deck.

  The waning day remained beautiful and springlike, enhanced by a salt tang breezing up from the strand. Gulls followed a school of baitfish in the small breakers, keening and diving. Several pleasure boats bounced across the Gulf, including a big white Bertram I’d seen a lot lately. High above, a single-engine plane banked at the far edge of the sky, so small it looked like a lost kite.

  Dani stood beside the towel-shrouded tabletop in white shorts and red tank top. Sunlight shimmered from her ash-blonde hair, her big gray eyes made blue by the bright sky. I raised my eyebrows at the table.

  “A magic show? You’re going to make a rabbit appear?”

  She snapped off the towel. Centering the table was a bottle of pricey champagne iced down in a plastic salad bowl, flanked by my two champagne flutes, $1.49 apiece at Big Lots.

  Dani thumbed the cork from the bottle and froth raced out behind it. She filled the glasses, handed one to me.

  “We’re drinking to my elevation from reporter to…” she lifted her glass in toast, “a full-fledged anchor.”

  I stared like she was speaking in tongues. “What?”

  “They’re making me an anchor, Carson. I start this week.”

  “This is out of the blue.”

  I saw the edge of a frown. “Not really. I’ve felt it coming for a few weeks, caught hints. Heard a few feelers.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s June, Carson. When was the last time we had a real conversation? Early April?”

  “I was working.” I heard myself get defensive.

  “I tried to tell you a couple weeks back. But one time you shushed me and went on writing in your notepad, and the other time I looked over and you were asleep.”

  “Why not a third attempt?”

  She didn’t appear to hear the question.

  “I’ll start by subbing for anchors when they’re out. Do weekends. Get viewers used to me.”

  “They’re already used to you.”

  “People only know me as a woman holding a microphone. It’s important the audience comes to know me as an approachable presence. Someone they want to spend time with. Someone they trust. It’s like a relationship with the viewer, something you give them.”

  It sounded like the kind of hoo-hah she’d always laughed at in the past. I was wondering what I’d missed or who she’d been talking to about viewer relationships and approachable whatevers.

  “What’s this lead to?” I said.

  “Regular hours, at least for this biz.”

  “All we have now are weekends, and only sometimes at that. Didn’t you just say that’s when you’ll be –”

  “A trial period, that’s all. Break-in period. Things will change.”

  “Seeing less of each other is better for each other?”

  “I can’t help it, Carson. This is my chance to try a high-profile position. Plus the money is almost double.” She changed subjects. “You already rented your tuxedo for Saturday, right?”

  I slapped my forehead. Channel 14 was having their annual to-do on Saturday night, a formal event. I guess I’d figured if I didn’t have a tux, I didn’t have to attend; sartorial solipsism, perhaps.

  “Get it tomorrow, Carson. This is the big wing-ding of the year and all the honchos from Clarity will be there. I’ve got to make an anchor-level impression.”

  We sat on the deck and I listened as Dani told me things I probably should have heard weeks back. Her job change seemed rational and good for us in the long run; more time, regular hours. But somewhere, behind the hiss of the waves and gentle blues drifting from the deck speakers, I heard a faint but insistent note of discord, like my mind and heart were playing opposing notes.

  CHAPTER 8

  I arrived at the department at eight the next morning. It was quiet, a couple of dicks on the phones, digging. Most of the gray cubicles were empty. Pace Logan was sitting at his desk and staring into the air. I didn’t see Shuttles and figured he was out doing something Logan didn’t understand, detective work maybe. After grabbing a cup of coffee from the urn and tossing a buck in the kitty for a pair of powdered doughnuts, I headed to the cubicled, double-desk combo forming Harry’s and my office.

  I walked into our space, saw Harry on his hands a
nd knees on the floor, looking under his desk.

  “That’s right. Crawl, you miserable worm,” I snarled.

  He looked up and rolled his eyes. “There’s a couple photos missing from the murder book. I figured they dropped down here.”

  The murder books – binders holding the investigational records of cases – had sections with plastic sleeves to hold crime-scene and relevant photos, trouble being the sleeves didn’t hold very well.

  “What’s in the pix?” I asked.

  Harry stood, brushed the knees of his lemon yellow pants, and cast a baleful eye at the wastebasket beside the desk. It wouldn’t be the first time something disappeared over the side, dumped by the janitorial crew.

  “I dunno. I got the file numbers. I’ll call over and get some reprints.”

  I looked at the pile on his desk. Harry had been checking records and information removed from Taneesha Franklin’s office, adding potentially useful pieces to the book.

  “Finding anything interesting, bro?” I asked.

  “Funny you should ask. I was going over Ms Franklin’s long-distance records. Here’s a couple calls caught my eye.”

  He tapped the paper with a thick digit. I looked at the name.

  “The state pen at Holman?” I said. “What’s that about?”

  “Eight calls in two days. Seven are under a minute. The final one lasts for eleven minutes.”

  I nodded. “Like she finally got through to someone.”

  Harry jammed the phone under his ear, tapped in the numbers. “I’ll call the warden, see when we can come up and hang out. You want a king or two doubles in your cell?”

  The warden was a pro, not a bureaucrat, and said we’d be welcome any time. We pointed the Crown Vic north. Two hours later, we were checking into prison.

  Warden Malone was a big, fiftyish guy with rolled-up white sleeves and a tie adorning his desk instead of his neck. His hair was gray and buzz-cut. Loop a whistle around his neck and he’d have been Hollywood’s idea of a high school football coach. We sat in his spartan office overlooking the main yard.