They got out of the car. Max stretched and yawned and rolled his neck while Joe got the crime-scene materials he kept in the trunk green, powder-filled latex gloves, wooden tongue depressors, glassine evidence bags and envelopes, a Polaroid camera, and a pot of Vicks mentholated grease they'd smear on their upper lips to ward off the stench of death.
They made an odd pair, the two detectives, Jenny thought, as she watched them going about their business, talking to witnesses and inspecting the body on the grass. They couldn't have been more different. Mingus, the white one, was brusque to the point of rudeness. When he'd introduced himself and his partner, Detective Liston, she'd smelled stale booze and cigarettes on him. He looked like he'd slept in his car, if at all. His clothes black chinos, grey sports coat, pen-necked white shirt were crumpled and hung off him like they wanted to be on someone else; he was unshaven and his close-cropped dark brown hair needed a good combing.
He was squat, solid and broad, with big shoulders and little to no neck separating them from his head. He was a good-looking guy behind the stubble and the bloodshot blue eyes but there was an air of unpleasantness about him, a sense of a tightly coiled meanness just waiting to spring and sting. She was sure he was the kind of cop who
beat the crap out of suspects and gave his girlfriend he had no wedding ring hell at home.
Detective Liston was a well-groomed black man in a navy blue suit, light blue shirt and matching tie with a gold clip. He looked like a sales rep for a big corporation just starting his day. He asked her questions about finding the body, whether she'd seen or heard anything suspicious the previous night, what she'd been doing. He was professional, very much by the book, but he was also genuinely courteous and engaging, to the point where she wished she knew more so she could help him out. He reminded her of Earl Campbell, the running back. Same height, same build, same demeanour. Like his partner, he had no wedding ring.
'Looks like he's been dead two weeks,' Max said, undoing his shirtsleeves, folding them over the cuffs of his jacket and pushing them up to his elbows, the way he always did whenever he was inspecting a cadaver. It was just in case he needed to stick his hand into a wound to retrieve an important fragment of evidence.
'Smells like three,'Joe said, turning away from the stench, which had broken through the barrier of Vicks and gotten up his nose and into his stomach. It was as intense as it was vile, like a whole dead cow left in a dumpster in high summer. He didn't know how Max could stand to get in so close.
The body was that of a black man, naked, and in an advanced stage of decomposition. It was swollen and misshapen, pumped up with a cocktail of malign gasses emanating from the liquefying insides; the skin was stretched as tight as it could go, in places semi-transparent like gau2e, allowing glimpses of the body's afterlife, the shadowy movements of the parasitical worms and insects now colonizing it.
The mouth was completely covered in a grotesque pout of busy fleshflies - told apart from common blowflies by their candy-striped black and white bodies. The eyes were long gone, as were their lids, both eaten by insects. The sockets had become two teeming nests of writhing maggots, the colour and texture of rancid butter. They were being picked off one by one by an orderly procession of metallic green hister beedes, which were travelling in single file up from the corpse's left ear, grabbing a maggot in their jaws, pulling them out of their communal home and carrying them, wriggling fiercely, back into the right ear, in parallel descending streams. Viewed from above, it looked like the black man's squirming eye sockets were crying big shiny green tears.
Max and Joe were the only ones near the body. The paramedics were tending to the security guard who'd discovered it and swallowed a mouthful of flies for his trouble.
They were explaining what stomach-pumping involved. He was talking about needing coffee. Two North Miami PD officers were standing away to the left, one young, one old, fingers hooked around their belts, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. The rest of the Park staff had all congregated in the public tunnel and were watching the scene through the wire. Neither forensics nor back-up had arrived.
Meanwhile, behind them, Max and Joe could hear the zoo's inmates getting increasingly restiess. Ever since they'd arrived they'd heard loud, fearsome roars coming from the trees. It sounded like a lion, only angrier and edgier, with more to prove. Howler monkeys - the veterinarian had explained with a smile, when she'd seen Max and Joe exchange worried looks it was what they did in the morning to warn off any competition: nothing to be scared of, t hey were harmless, all bark, no bite. Then they'd heard more sounds, coming from other kinds of monkey - screeches, hollering, howls and something like the high-speed cackling
M of a hen on steroids. The noises, uninhibited and completely abandoned, came together in a mad primal cacophony, not unlike a bar filled with drunks speaking in tongues.
There was plenty of accompanying movement in the jungle too, the unmistakable sound of disturbance, crashings in the trees and bushes, branches snapping, things being knocked over and broken, all of it getting louder, clearer and closer.
Max looked over at the jungle an impressive but completely incongruous legion of tropical trees, too tall and wide for the area of flatland they occupied and way too tall for Miami - and clearly saw monkeys, lots and lots of them, hopping from branch to branch and tree to tree, heading towards the high perimeter fence.
Max stood up and walked over to the corpse's feet. The ends of the toes had turned completely black and sticky. He noticed puncture marks in the legs, teeth and claw marks, all of them leaking clear slimy fluid, some already squirming and yellowy with maggot nests.
He looked along the body and into the trees, then returned his gaze to the area of grass beyond the feet. A stretch of grass behind and beyond the head, approximately the width of the dead man's shoulders, was lying flat. The grass in front of the toes, leading to the main building, was upright. The body had been dragged here.
Max got up and began to walk towards the jungle, looking down the whole time. He traced the trail of flattened grass all the way back to the forty-foot-high wire fence. There was a sign on it, a big stark banner warning of electrocution.
It was the same kind of fence they had in maximum security prisons, only theirs hummed with lethal current. This one was quiet. Which meant it wasn't working.
He reached the beginning of the trail. It ended at the gate.
He tried it. It was open.
Something on the grass to his right caught his eye. He
turned around and found himself looking at a row of eight monkeys sitting on their haunches, staring right at him. They were beige, apart from their arms, shoulders and heads, which were light grey. Their faces were also grey, except for the area around their eyes and nose, which was a hori2ontal figure of eight in white, like the Lone Ranger mask, while their eyes and mouths were surrounded in black borders.
How long had they been there? Had they dragged the body over? He couldn't exactly ask them.
Suddenly he heard heavy footfalls from behind the fence.