Her fear drove her to the elevator and his office even as it wanted to find an excuse to dodge the SOB. All this while young Tom Benton looked after her with growing concern, sensing that all was not right in her world.
3
A heart is like a fan, and why?-
Twill flutter when a beau is nigh;
Oft times with gentle words he'll take it;
Play with it for a while, then break it.
New Orleans, Louisiana
Some goddamned vacation, Alex Sincebaugh thought as he finished roll one, exposure eight, calmly noting this in his notepad alongside the crude but detailed sketch he'd made of the body, its position both in relation to fixed objects at the crime scene and anatomically. His partner, Ben, always kidded him about the amount of detail he put into his thumbnail crime-scene sketches, saying, “You don't gotta do Gray's friggin' Anatomy here, Alex.”
“ Hey, a d'tail is a d'tail,” he'd respond, thinking he ought to have left town, maybe gone to the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, someplace where headquarters couldn't have so easily located him. What good was he doing anyway? There were better men in the department who ought to have control of the case, but in the NOPD things didn't work that way. You take a call here and you're the detective of record and it stays that way unless the brass steps in and pulls you off.
Ben continued the good-natured ribbing. “Only d'tail I'd like to see is my Fiona's-and mine right beside her… in bed… at home!”
Alex held a year-round pass to the University of New Orleans's sporting events, for all the good it would do, trying to match his schedule with the UNO's. Lately, it had become an impossibility. He'd also scrounged tickets to the pre-season Saints game for Saturday night, had managed to find a date, and had had to back out at the last minute due to the pressing caseload, thanks to a faceless, conscienceless creature stalking the New Orleans area like some cave-dwelling cannibal with an appetite for human hearts.
Alex's days in pre-med at Trinity at long last were being put to the test now as a detective with the New Orleans Police Department. What he didn't know about the human heart, he was quickly finding out from the library of medical books he kept in his apartment. And the skill required to sketch human organs and bodies in various stages of death had come in handy as well. All this only dismayed his father, who believed that he'd simply thrown his life down the toilet pipes by going to work for the NOPD. His father seemed incapable of understanding how much being a detective on the force meant to Alex. He knew the terrain in and around New Orleans like the rooms of the house he grew up in; he was equally comfortable on the West Bank with its elevated West Bank Expressway, General de Gaulle Drive, Terry Parkway and the old span of the Crescent City Connection to which all arteries eventually led. He knew the outlying counties like Beau Chene, each called parishes, and he had once maintained an apartment in Kenner in the East Jefferson Parish. He had family in St. Charles Parish, where the school system had been crippled by mismanagement when its surplus of $9.3 million mysteriously dwindled to a mere $150,000 two years before. Thanks to the new “Shareware” policy and computers, Alex was no stranger to St. John the Baptist Parish, where right-to-lifers, wanting someone's head on a plate, picketed daily outside the hospital named for the county and the saint. In St. Bernard Parish there appeared to be an overachieving arsonist on the loose. Closer to home, in St. Tammany Parish the enor-mous, three-hundred-foot gambling boat, Jewel of the Pon-chartrain, on beautiful Lake Ponchartrain near Interstate 10, had suspiciously slipped its moorings, disturbing all at the gaming tables but the true diehards, who'd played on oblivious of the “titanic” nature of their drift, which had very nearly led them into the bridge pylons before some capable someone fired her engines and moved her back to the safety of the pier.
Not surprisingly, the new approach-spending money- meant for die first time ever, cops could get information before CNN and the Enquirer. Thank God for technology, he now thought.
Alex had investigated homicides, suicides, accidental deaths and deaths by natural causes in every part of the city. Precinct lines in the Crescent City were seldom a deterrent for a cop, and frequently, what with the Mardi Gras mentality of the population-a parade at the drop of a hat and some sixteen officially slated affairs for the spring and summer months alone-one precinct helped out another when there was a need, and no one was complaining.
Alex knew that in such cities as Chicago, L.A. and New York precinct lines were never crossed. To Alex's way of thinking, the laid-back manner in which the NOPD encouraged precincts to support one another foretold a day when more would be accomplished all across the country with such artificial barriers erased.
Here in the Big Easy, the homicide detective who arrived on scene first, no matter what the precinct, was immediately in charge of the body and the case. It was a system that had its good points and its bad, but cooperation among precincts was never a problem, despite the petty squabbles and bets placed on who was going to catch this Queen of Hearts “asshole” first. A little friendly competitiveness was the lifeblood of the NOPD, but cooperation and collaboration kept that life-blood primed and pumped.
Alex was forty-seven years old and had made lieutenant sergeant in Vice, doing gainful decoy and undercover work, before transferring to Homicide the year before. Vice operatives got around to all parts of the city, and so he had gotten to know men in the other precincts quite well. Now he was up for a clean lieutenant's rank, and his rise through the departmental hoops and ladders had been steady and appreciated by everyone but his father, the career beat cop.
It was the last thing in the world his father had wanted for him. The disappointment was like a huge bell that tolled in their ears and hearts, standing between them, ringing out its dull anthem each time they shared space. The ringing of the bell had just increased in density as Alex moved up in rank, and it became solid granite after his mother's death two years before.
Sincebaugh now labeled the exposed film, put it away and began another roll. While he photographed the corpse from every conceivable angle and then some, and while he dusted for prints, his partner, Ben deYampert, with the help of a uniformed officer, was pacing off the tape measure to triangulate the exact position of the body, so that Alex could insert more numbers onto his sketch the moment this was determined.
Ben had already measured from the edge of a shoal marker on huge Lake Ponchartrain to the big toe pointing due south, and was now pacing off the distance from the left foot to a nearby road sign that warned of a $500 fine for littering. Tri-angulation in the woods was a difficult proposition: You couldn't use a tree or a boulder or a road sign; you'd be nailed in a court of law. Even the damned lake might be called into question by a legal-beagle who wanted to talk tides just to play havoc with the prosecution.
“ Got to get a more fixed point of reference, Ben!” he yelled out.
“ Like what? The fuckin' ruts in the mud?”
“ Do the best you can, but vandals or a roadwork crew comes along and we got no sign, and you know what that means.”
DeYampert muttered something unintelligible behind his massive form. “You got a rule book up your ass, Alex. Don't that ever pain you, son?”