They looked around some more. There was a drinks trolley near the stereo system. On it stood a large punch bowl, part-filled with thick, sticky bright pink syrup. The top was completely covered with a crust of drowned blowflies.
They looked over the eight-foot-long dining table and its white cloth and full dinner service fine heavy silver cudery and china crockery, immaculately laid out with small ivory winged rests for the knives, silver rings for the napkins and three different-si2ed crystal glasses at each place setting. In the middle of the table were uncorked bottles of red wine,
3ť a magnum of champagne and, either side of them half-empty jugs of water. A large framed colour photograph stood near the bottles: Lacour to the left, Guy Martin to the right and the mayor of Miami in the middle, beaming. There were thin lines and spots of dried blood all over the table - impact spray from the bullets.
'He killed his own first,' Max said. 'Then he went after the others.'
The two detectives looked at each for a brief moment, one seeing the other's horror and revulsion and the thought that informed the looks: just when you figured you'd seen it all the very worst thing man could do to his fellow man something that little bit more horrific came shimmering down the pipe, a big bloody grin on its face. They left the room.
A black, open-toed high-heeled shoe stood upright at the foot of the stairs. It had a diamante pattern of creeping ivy around the heel and diamante laurels around the toe opening.
It was surrounded by a chalk mark. There were two more bodies on the hallway stairs, one on top of the other, lying in a wide pool of dried blood, which had soaked the boards and dripped off the side of the steps onto the ground below, some catching on the wall. A woman, shot in the back and then behind her ear, was lying face down on top of a little girl, no more than seven or eight, executed in the same way as the others. The mother had been trying to protect her daughter. Her long black hair partly covered her daughter's face. The beetles were busily working their way through them both.
Lacour's study was next to the living room a large mahogany desk faced the door as they came in, behind it a plush leather reclining chair and lampstand. On one wall hung a crude painting of giraffes in a dense forest, while on another was a large posed family photograph in a gilt frame.
All the victims were there. Lacour was in the middle of the
second row, his hands on the shoulders of his two teenage sons, beaming proudly. His wife sat in front a good looking, if slightly plump dark-skinned woman smiling an unforced, good-natured smile. Next to her was the old man in the wheelchair. Max guessed, from the strong resemblance, that he was Lacour's father. He was holding a baby in his lap. To his left, was his wife. Lacour's young daughter was sitting up on the floor between them.
'No sign of the baby?' Max asked Joe.
'No,' Joe said. 'Maybe someone was lookin' after it while they partied.'
'I don't think so. This was a family party. Just them celebrating the Lemon City deal. The baby would've been there too.'
'So what do you think? He took it with him?'
'Perhaps,' Max said.
Joe walked away to check out the rest of the study. Max continued examining the faces in the portrait. They wouldn't hold the slightest clue as to what had happened and why, but he wanted to imagine them alive, going about their day-to-day business, what their voices sounded like ringing around the house, what their habits were, what united and separated them. He'd always done this, humanized the dead, summoned their ghosts and listened in on them. Thinking about them as people instead of statistics helped keep him focused on the job and what it was really about. A lot of cops working homicide became so jaded and indifferent, so numb inside, that death was a numbers game to them one they were resigned to losing before they'd even started playing. They forgot they were dealing with people just like them, people whose lives had been cut short before their time. Yet, looking at the Lacours, Max felt for the first time a sadness and something collapsing within himself, a support giving way and an ideal crashing to the ground: if this is what people were doing to each other now, turning in on
I
themselves and those closest to them, there was no hope any more. And if there was no hope, there was no point in being a cop.
'Max,' Joe called out, 'come see this.'
Joe was standing by the windowsill, holding up one of a row of photographs he'd picked up from there. It showed Lacour standing on a stretch of grass with his sons and daughter. They were all holding hands with chimps dressed in shorts and Primate Park T-shirts. When they looked closer they saw the picture had been taken at roughly the same spot on the grass verge where they'd found Lacour's body.
'Looks recent,' Joe said. 'Maybe that's why he went back there.'
'Who knows?' Max sighed. 'Who'll ever know?'
Max noticed the evidence bag Joe was holding.
'What've you got?'
'Found it in the parents' bedroom.' He handed Max the envelope. 'Smells of almonds.'
It was a small red and white striped candy wrapper.
'Where d'you find it?'
'Under the cot.'
'Babies don't eat candy.' Max gave him the bag. 'And this house is clean and tidy, orderly. My guess is, when they run prints on that wrapper they ain't gonna find any, 'cause the person who dropped it was wearin' gloves. But if they do get something, it won't belong to any of these people.'
'So you're sayin'. . . ?'
'Yeah,' Max nodded grimly, 'Lacour didn't do this on his own. He had help.'
PART TWO
April-May 1981 'Man. I dunno why you keep on lettin' freaks like that out, 'cause y'all know they gonna do it again - sure as man followed monkey,' Drake murmured, passing Max Mingus a book of matches over his shoulder. They were from a motel called the Alligator Moon in Immokalee, a small town right in the middle of the Everglades.
Max memorized the address as he lit a Marlboro, and then gave the matches back without turning his head. He now had the information he needed: the child-killer Dean Waychek's whereabouts, his hiding place, the rock he'd crawled under as soon as he'd come out of prison.
Drake and Max had been doing business like this for most of the ten years Max had been a cop. Drake was by far and away the best snitch he had. The guy was plugged into the Miami criminal mainframe like no one else. He knew everything there was to know and everyone who was doing it.
Max would tell him what he needed and Drake would call him back with a time and place to meet - always breakfast at a diner, usually one that had just opened up because, Drake reasoned, the food was more likely to be better in a new joint, as they'd be making an extra effort to attract repeat custom. The two would sit back-to-back in adjoining booths and whisper to each other out of the corner of their mouths.