“It’s brilliant,” I said. “Who can resist a purse? The good want to help, the bad see money and credit cards.”
We were parked on the causeway connecting the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with the city. Twilight was an orange lantern hung below the horizon of an indigo sky. Fresh stars shimmered in the east. A hundred feet distant, three elderly black men fished from lawn chairs, frequently consulting the brown bags beside them.
“After pushing her back into the car, he didn’t touch Ms. Atkins,” I said. “Didn’t lay a hand on her.”
“He threatened her with death,” Harry reminded me.
“He said he had a gun. Two hours earlier he’d just butchered a woman with a five-inch knife. Why didn’t he threaten to stab her, slice her? Why didn’t he ransack the car? And what’s with that ‘perform to expectations’ line? It sounds like a damn stockbroker.”
Harry looked south at the dark horizon, the mouth of Mobile Bay thirty miles distant.
“He probably tried the purse bit with Taneesha but she heard him running up. She closed the door, locked it. Maybe that’s what pissed him off.”
“Something sure did. How many wounds did Ms. Franklin have?”
“Over thirty. But he broke her fingers first. I don’t get it. Why he’d kill one woman, then three hours later give another a break?”
I forced myself to revisit the Franklin crime scene: the Wookiee breaking the young woman’s fingers, getting off on her pain, then going wild with the knife, poke, slash, jab. Then, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the semi, the perp bails out, runs wildly into the truck’s headlights, veers away into the night.
“Did Forensics find any blood in Ms. 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?”
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 a round hole of a 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-three. 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 a certain responsibility for the former, Clair’s visage softening appreciably after hubby was sent a-packing.