He heard a car stop in his driveway but he didn’t rise from the chair. His visitor was a fellow detective, Rogelio Burton.
“Why don’t you pick up your phone?” Burton said.
“You believe that monstrosity? It’s like a goddamn mausoleum.”
Burton sat down beside him. “Sonny wants you to take a road trip.”
“Miami?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll pass.” Yancy glared at the construction site across the fence. “The house is forty-four feet high—I measured it myself. The county code’s only thirty-five.”
“It’s the Keys, man. The code is for suckers.”
“Deer used to come around all the time and feed on the twigs.”
Yancy offered his friend a drink. Burton declined.
He said, “Andrew, it’s not like you’ve got a choice. Do what Sonny wants.”
“But I’m suspended, remember?”
“Yeah, with pay. Is that Barbancourt?”
“My last bottle. Tell him anywhere but Miami, Rog.”
“You want me to ask if you can go to Cancún instead?” Burton sighed. “Look, it’s a day trip, up and back.”
“They always screw me on the mileage.”
Burton knew this wasn’t true. Yancy had issues with the Miami Police Department, from which he’d been fired in a previous era of his life.
“Chill out. You’re just going to the ME’s office.”
“The morgue? Nice.”
“Come out to the car,” said Burton.
Yancy set down his drink. “This ought to be special.”
The severed arm had been bubble-wrapped and packed on dry ice in a red Igloo cooler. To make it fit, the limb had been bent at the elbow.
“That’s all they found?”
“You know how it goes,” Burton said.
“John Doe or Juan Doe?”
“Rawlings says white male, mid-forties, heavyset, black hair.”
Dr. Lee Rawlings was the pathologist who served as the chief medical examiner for Monroe County. There were relatively few murders or accidental deaths in the Florida Keys, but Rawlings never complained. He filled his free time with golf, and was rumored to have whittled his handicap down to five strokes.
Yancy knew the sheriff was sending the arm to Miami because Miami was the floating-human-body-parts capital of America. Maybe they’d luck out and find a match, although Yancy thought it was unlikely.
“Traumatic amputation,” Burton said.
“Ya think?”
“Charter boat brought it in yesterday. We checked our missing persons, all three of them. Nobody fits the description.”
Yancy noticed the upraised finger on the end of the arm. “A sour farewell to the mortal realm?”
“Random rigor mortis is what Rawlings says. He took a picture anyway.”
“Of course he did.”
“Look, I’m late for my kid’s soccer game.”
“Absolutely.” Yancy put the lid on the cooler and carried it up to his porch.
Burton said, “Sure you want to leave it out here all night?”
“Who’s gonna jack an arm?”
“It’s evidence, man. I’m just sayin’.”
“Okay, fine.” The island was plagued by opportunistic raccoons.
Burton drove off and Yancy moved the cooler into the house. From a kitchen cupboard he retrieved the Barbancourt bottle and ambled to the deck and poured himself one more drink. Next door, the construction crew was gone. Yancy’s watch said five p.m. sharp.
For the first time all day he could hear seabirds in the sky.
The new sheriff of Monroe County was a local bubba named Sonny Summers who won office because he was the only candidate not in federal custody, the two front-runners having been locked up on unconnected racketeering charges eight days before the election. Sonny Summers’s opponents were unable to post bond and therefore faced a strategic disadvantage during the campaign’s final debate, which was conducted via Skype from a medium-security prison near Florida City.
During his sixteen years as a road patrol officer, Sonny Summers had received numerous commendations for not fucking up on the job. He was well-groomed, courteous and diligent about his paperwork. One year he led the whole force in DUI arrests, a highly competitive category in the Keys. His spelling on arrest forms was almost always legible, he never took any of his girlfriends on dates in his squad car and he smoked pot only on his days off.
Upon becoming sheriff, Sonny Summers arranged a series of get-acquainted luncheons with business leaders up and down the islands, from Key West to Key Largo. A recurring theme of these meetings was the fragility of tourism and the perils of negative publicity. The BP oil spill was often invoked, although not a drop of crude had ever reached South Florida beaches. Sonny Summers was sympathetic to the business owners, whose support he would need for future elections. Under no circumstances did he wish to be blamed for scaring customers away.
With that in mind, Sonny Summers ordered his public-information officer not to divulge any information about the severed arm that had been brought in aboard the Misty Momma IV. It was the new sheriff’s worry that floating body parts would be bad for tourism, particularly the waterfront trades. This was laughably untrue, as any marina owner in Miami could have assured him. Nothing short of a natural disaster discouraged people from going out on (or into) the water. One particular beach on the Rickenbacker Causeway got spunked regularly by raw sewage, yet squads of riot police couldn’t keep the swimmers and kiteboarders away.
In any case, Sonny Summers was fighting a lost battle. A crime-scene van had been waiting for the Misty Momma IV when it docked, so news of the icky discovery spread quickly. Worse, the boneheaded angler who’d reeled in the dead arm was showing the pictures on his cell phone to everybody at the Chart Room. There was even a rumor that he’d posted a photo on Facebook.
“I’m counting on you,” the sheriff said to Yancy, after Yancy finally answered the phone.
“How so?”
“I’m counting on you not to come back from Miami with that you-know-what.”
Yancy said, “What if there are no matching limbs at the morgue up there?”
“I need some optimism from you, Detective. I need some can-do mojo.”
“The Gulf Stream flows north.”
“Duh,” said Sonny Summers.
“Also, the prevailing breeze this time of year blows from the southeast.”
“I was born here, Yancy. Get to the point.”
“Factor in the wind and currents, the odds of that arm floating from Miami all the way down here are pretty damn slim—unless it was paddling itself.”
The sheriff was aware of Yancy’s employment history. “You don’t want to drive up to the big coldhearted city, that’s all.”
“What if they won’t take the case?”
“See, I’m depending on you to persuade them.”
“I can’t just leave a limb at the ME’s office if they don’t want it.”
Sonny Summers said, “Tomorrow I’m announcing that the investigation has been turned over to the appropriate authorities in Miami-Dade County. That’s the game plan, okay? This is officially no longer our headache.”
“I would wait a day to be sure.”
“Know what happened this morning? Some dickhead from Channel 7 calls up and says he heard that mangled corpses are floating up in Key West harbor!”
“Did you tell him to fuck off?”
“Call back tomorrow is what I told him. Wait for the media statement.”
“Our victim’s probably a rafter,” Yancy said. “Drowned on the crossing from Havana and then got hit by a bull shark or a hammerhead.”
“There you go!” the sheriff exclaimed brightly. “Aren’t most rafters on their way to Miami to meet up with family? So that’s where the goddamn arm belongs—Miami! End of discussion.”
“It’s not really up to me, Sonny.”
“Let me put it another way: There will be no human remains on my watch. Understand? No human remains.”