“Toto,” Tony murmured, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
The uniform snickered. “They caught the smell over at Café du Monde, thought it was somebody’s garbage.”
Spencer reached into his jacket pocket for the jar of Vicks. After helping himself to a smear, he held it out to Tony. He, too, smeared the goop under his nose.
They climbed the stairs to the observation area. Tony was winded when they reached the top.
He stopped to catch his breath. “I’m too old and fat for this shit.”
“I’m seriously worried about you, Pasta Man. Join a gym or something.”
“I’m afraid it’ll kill me.” They crossed the tracks, then climbed the stairs up the levee. “I’m not too far from couch-potato status. I don’t want to blow it now.”
“Don’t want to keel over before you get that gold-toned watch and pension, right? Think about that gym-”
That’s when the smell of the corpse hit them. Spencer glanced at his partner and saw the man’s eyes were watering.
They descended the stairs, then picked their way to the river’s edge. Spencer spotted Terry Landry, DIU from the Eighth. He’d been his brother’s partner before Quentin had decided to leave the force.
Landry caught sight of them and met them halfway.
“Terror,” Spencer said, greeting the man with the nickname he’d been given as a rookie. A hard-partying hothead, he was stuck with the label.
“Don’t go by the ‘Terror’ anymore, kid. I’ve settled down. Mended my ways.”
“Yeah, right.” Tony shook his hand.
“It’s true. My Thursday night AA group is my new, favorite party.”
“That our vic?” Spencer asked, pointing to a misshapen form on the rocks covering the riverbank.
“Yup. Wallet was in his pocket.”
Spencer tipped his face up to the purpling sky. “Going to have to get some lights over here.”
“On the way.”
“Did you check his pulse?” Tony asked, smirking.
“Oh, yeah,” Terry answered. “I gave him mouth to mouth. Now it’s your turn.”
It was Homicide humor. Checking for a pulse, standard operating procedure, was unnecessary in a case like this one. Spencer and Tony picked their way toward Walter Pogolapoulos’s remains. The artist’s throat had been slit. The wound formed an obscene gaping smile. The decomposition process was well underway, sped up by the warm water.
“Sometimes I hate this job.”
Tony glanced over his shoulder, toward the Café du Monde. “Either you guys want some beignets?”
“You’re a sick bastard, you know that?” Spencer fitted on gloves and crossed to the corpse. He squatted beside it, ran his gaze assessingly over the body, the area around it. He had to strain to see in the gathering dusk.
The vic looked pretty beat-up, though that didn’t surprise him. It was often the case when victims had been dumped in water. They were dragged by the current, scraped against the bottom, gouged by tree branches and sharp rocks and generally banged around. He’d even seen them chewed up by boat props and nibbled on by fish.
The pathologist would differentiate between pre- and postmortem wounds; a body in this state was way beyond his abilities.
From what he could see, it didn’t appear the killer had made any effort to weight the body. Either he hadn’t known that putrefaction gases brought a body to the surface in a matter of days-they called such vics floaters-or he hadn’t cared.
Still, Pogo had popped up a bit ahead of schedule. He hadn’t been dead-or submerged-long enough to have developed adipocere, a yellow, rancid smelling and waxy substance seen on most floaters. Spencer glanced at his partner. “Perp must’ve dumped him upriver. River currents are strong, brought him down here. What do you think? Up toward Baton Rouge? Or Vacherie?”
“Maybe. Pathologist might shed some light on it.”
As if on cue, the coroner’s investigator made the scene. “Where the hell is the van and the lights? What am I supposed to do with this one in the dark?”
He looked really pissed off. Spencer stepped forward, introducing himself. “Looks like your Saturday night just took a turn for the worse.”
“Had theater tickets.” He frowned. “How many Malones are there, anyway?”
“More than a gang, but less than a mob.”
A smile touched his mouth; he looked at Tony. “Thought you retired.”
“No such luck, my friend. You know Terry Landry.”
“Everybody knows the Terror.” The pathologist nodded in the man’s direction, then scowled. “Where’s that van?”
Several of the department’s crime-scene vans were fitted with high-powered, alley lights for nighttime crime scenes.
“I’ll check it out,” Terry said.
The pathologist made his way to the body; Tony followed him. Spencer flipped open his cell and dialed Stacy.
“Hello, Killian.”
“Malone.”
To his ears, she sounded pleased. He smiled. “FYI, Pogo’s dead.”
He heard her sharply indrawn breath. “How?”
“Don’t know for certain yet. He washed up on the riverbank. Throat was slit.”
“When?”
“Looks like it happened a couple of days ago. Hard to tell ’cause our killer dumped him into the river. You know warm water and corpses.”
Her silence said it alclass="underline" they had blown it. With their best lead dead, they had nothing.
Pogo’s murder was no coincidence.
The White Rabbit had silenced him, so he couldn’t talk.
The area flooded with light. The van had arrived.
“Gotta go, Stacy. Just thought you’d want to know.”
He flipped the phone shut and wandered over to Tony. The man grinned at him. “What?” he asked.
“The prickly Ms. Killian, I presume?”
“What about it?”
“You’re going to look good with a pasta gut, Slick.”
“Blow me, Sciame.”
Tony’s laughter echoed on the water, a strange complement to Walter Pogolapoulos’s decomposing form.
CHAPTER 35
Saturday, March 12, 2005
7:00 p.m.
Stacy closed her cell phone. Pogo dead. Murdered.
She took a deep breath and headed back inside the Noble mansion, to the front parlor where Leo and Kay waited for her. Even though the NOPD had done a thorough search of the house and grounds, Stacy did her own. And like them, she found nothing.
When she entered the room, Leo leaped to his feet. “Well?”
“I didn’t find anything out of order,” she said. “No signs of forced entry. A few unlocked windows, but I don’t find that unusual this time of year. And none of the screens looked to have been tampered with.”
Kay sat on the big, overstuffed parlor couch, legs curled under her, a glass of white wine in her hand. She looked at Stacy. “You checked all the closets and cubbies?”
“Yes.”
“The attics and under the beds?”
Stacy felt for the woman. “Yes,” she said softly. “I promise you, there is no one hiding in this house.”
Leo made a sound. Almost like a growl. She turned and watched him pace. She felt his frustration. He wasn’t accustomed to being unable to control his destiny.
“You haven’t been threatened,” she said. “That’s the good news.”
He stopped. Met her eyes. “Really? I find a stranger writing a message in blood on my office floor damn threatening, thank you.”
Her cheeks heated. She pictured the cat’s head, strung up above her tub. “I’m sure you do,” she said softly. “Your life, however, has not been overtly threatened. And that’s a good thing.”
Kay whimpered. “How do you know we aren’t the playing cards?”
“Because I do. If you were his intended victims, he wouldn’t have sent you the message. It’s a game move.”
In truth, it hadn’t escaped her that the hypothesis might work for her as well.