Jessica had once believed that she had seen the future of police detection in DNA fingerprinting, serum and tissue matching. Maybe the real future lay instead in Dr. Desinor's psychic detection. Perhaps police agencies in the twenty-first century, on remote outposts in the galaxy, would be manned by psychics and empaths. Maybe the world would be a better place for it.
Maybe… a big maybe, but no one was making any guarantees, and certainty was an illusion no one believed in any longer, not the holy men, not the community leaders, not the politicians, not the government and certainly not the criminologists or those who projected into the future of law enforcement.
Arriving at her lab, she gave J.T. a big hug and a thank-you for putting Stephens and her together.
6
His heart is like a mountain of iron.
New Orleans
A few days' decay, the elements and the animals had conspired to create a grotesque tapestry over the corpse. Two, possibly three days in the Louisiana heat was enough to turn even the freshest meat into a wormy muck. Internal gases had been baked inside the decomposing corpse, had bloated the body, finally exploding through the skin at unaccountable locations: the cheek turned to the earth, the leg with the most lividity, the forearm where the boy-man had been gnawed at by raccoons or wild dogs.
Degeneration to the once-fine features had created a hideous, repulsive mask which no Hollywood makeup artist could hope to capture. What lay here before Lieutenant Detective Alex Sincebaugh didn't seem human, or rather was a horrid mockery of a once-sentient, lively, active young person. What remained seemed more akin to soiled rags, discarded cardboard, leftovers-”toast,” as the MTV generation might more aptly put it.
“ You think it's Surette?” Ben asked.
“ Can't tell for sure, can you?” Alex replied to the hulking figure standing over him and the body. Sincebaugh hadn't remembered going to his knees over the victim, but now he found himself staring up at his partner. DeYampert's large eyes looked on the verge of tears, but that expression was one Big Ben carried with him everywhere: the sad, doughy eyes of a basset hound. And like the irises of a calf or a St. Bernard, the glistening, moist eyes meant to reveal no more than a resigned acceptance. Ben, like most cops, kept his feelings tightly balled up. Alex knew that his partner of so many years now had gone to the edge on this one, a missing persons case that had looked to be solved, only to become a murder case.
Sincebaugh too had allowed himself a brief moment of hope that they would locate twenty-one-year-old Victor “Vicki” Surette-but not like this. They'd had every reason to believe they'd find the cross-dresser quite well, alive and unharmed, panhandling or doing johns along the dingy periphery of Bourbon Street. After all, they'd gotten a lead about “Vicki” from Gilreath, a transvestite and a snitch they often pulled over for a mock arrest and street news.
“ If this here do be Vic Surette,” Ben deYampert drawled in his native Louisiana tongue, “he ain't so much a looker no more.”
“ It's going to take some time to ID him; take prints, maybe get some dental records to match what's in his mouth-if we can get any records out of the family vault…”
Some families of gay men, cross-dressers and transvestites were extremely reluctant to cooperate with police, even when they loved their offspring, despite the circumstances. And Victor Surette was rumored to have no family, or one so steeped in Old New Orleans values and traditions that no relative would come within speaking distance of him. Gilreath had hinted at old money and modern business holdings. Gilreath had also hinted at a deep-seated hatred there, and since most victims of crime were victims of family, friends and acquaintances, this could not be ignored. But a search of the missing man's apartment days before the location of his body had turned up not one scintilla of information about his family. Gilreath had said that Vicki, as he was known to his dearest friends, wanted it that way. Still, Alex could hardly believe how clean the kid's apartment had been of paper, and without paper, there was no trail back to family, unless one of them picked up a newspaper or heard about Surette's fate on the nightly news and then came forward to claim the body.
“ You think it's him, don't you, Sincy?” pressed Ben.
“ I'd say the clothes appear to match the last known description.” Sincebaugh breathed heavily, his stomach churning, his head reeling from the stench of the corpse, which lay sprawled on its stomach, limbs akimbo.
No one had touched the body, knowing it was Alex Sincebaugh's call since he was detective in charge on this rotation.
He had waited long enough for the M.E., he decided. Wanting to know more now, he slipped on a pair of surgical gloves and turned the body over, his hands instinctively repulsed by the Jell-O-like pressure against his touch. Rigor had come and gone, the body now relaxed and rapidly emulsifying thanks to the heat of a record-breaking week in New Orleans.
“ Sincy, you sure we shouldn't wait for Wardlaw?”
Sincebaugh slowed a bit at the use of the nickname his partner had saddled him with, but he bawled in response, “For Chris sake, Big… waited long enough for that damned souse.”
“ Miss Old Doc Whitaker, don't you?”
“ Sure as hell do.”
They were in a wood on a clear, humid New Orleans night. Nearby, egrets silently stalked the shallows even in darkness, until one broke the silence by piercing the water, spiking a fish with its beak. Alex and Ben were working over a body lying beside the indigo waters of huge Lake Ponchartrain; they weren't in New Orleans proper anymore but had come all the way out to Slidell as soon as it was recognized that this was a murder victim. They'd been out of their jurisdiction, doing a routine rundown on a case involving a pair of high rollers who'd been pumping the area with a new, synthetic drug that was leaving users in various stages of paraplegia and vegetative comas, when the call came over, and since they were so close and Slidell was undermanned, they took it, swinging the car around just before entering the bridge traffic which would've taken them back to downtown New Orleans.
Both men were feeling the tension on the streets in Slidell, where race relations hadn't been so grand lately, and where they felt ill at ease anyway because it was so far from their home jurisdiction and base of operations in New Orleans.
There'd been a riot of a different color than race “o'er t' Biloxi, Mississippi,” as Ben had put it in his best Cajun tongue. “At one-a-dem grand 'Sippi casinos der on't da river.”
It was a floating palace the size of four football fields, called the Royal Flush. TTie ballroom/concert hall had gotten in the Granite Psycho rock band to add a little allure to the gambling tables, as if there were a need, and things had gotten out of control. Since the gambling casino boat was moored between Biloxi and New Orleans, and the Mississippi legislature had allowed a two-day blue-flu walkout when negotiations failed there, New Orleans police were prevailed upon to respond. So while almost every cop within a six-county radius of Biloxi, including two precincts from New Orleans, had turned out in full riot gear there, Alex and Ben had agreeably driven out to Slidell to follow a lead on Kenny Alvarez and Terrell Foreman, the pushers, only to get the coincidence call of the century, should this work out to be Victor Surette's body, since they'd been doing the M.P. work on him up till now. Ben called it “i-ron-knee.”
Dispatch had spoken of a badly decomposed body found at a dump site on a lonely stretch of sand disguising itself as a path. The weeds here were as large as cattails. It was a place that even Alex was unfamiliar with. Alex and Ben had immediately decided as they pulled into the thicket that whoever killed the victim knew the region intimately.