Barberry held out the phone. Swann seemed frozen, the red in his neck now coloring his face.
“Your chief wants a word with you, Andrew,” Barberry said.
Swann took the phone. Barberry didn’t even give him the courtesy of some privacy. He stood close as Swann lowered his head and listened.
“Yes, sir, I understand. Yes, sir… yes, sir… yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Swann hung up and, without a word, left the squad room. Louis looked at Barberry, who was unwrapping a stick of gum.
“You son of a bitch,” Louis said.
Barberry laughed. “Yeah, well, like that little spic in Hendry County said, ‘Don’t come over here and fuck with me on my turf.’ If and when any charges are dropped against Kent, you’ll be the first to know. Now, go away and let me do my job.”
Louis found Swann in the parking lot, leaning against the Mustang, head bent and arms crossed. He looked up when he heard Louis’s footsteps. His cheeks were still bright with color.
“You okay?” Louis asked.
“I’ve been suspended,” Swann said.
Swann made no move to get into the car. For a second, Louis couldn’t read Swann’s expression. Then he realized he had seen it once before, ironically on the face of a woman. He had been called out on a domestic abuse, and the woman had been sitting there, her face bloody, tears in her eyes, as she watched them haul her husband away. She said she had finally gotten up the nerve to leave him, and it was all there in her face-anger, humiliation, and relief.
“Come on, Andrew,” Louis said. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Swann was silent on the drive back to Palm Beach. Louis didn’t push it. He didn’t know the guy well enough to give him advice about his job or his life, but he sensed that Swann had nowhere to go. So as they left the bridge and pulled onto Royal Poinciana Way, he asked Swann if he wanted to come back to Reggie’s house for a beer.
Swann accepted quickly.
When they walked into the house, Louis stopped and stared. The main wall of the living room had been stripped of Reggie’s beloved Haitian paintings. In their places were two large bulletin boards covered with papers and photographs. The small dining table had been pushed to the center of the room. There Mel sat, his head bent low, magnifying glass in hand.
“What’s all this?” Louis asked.
Mel looked up. “Welcome to the pigpen.”
Louis and Swann came forward. The bulletin board resembled the displays Louis had seen in big-city homicide rooms for major cases, and when working with the FBI on a serial-killer case three years ago.
Separated into columns and color-coded, the board offered an easy-to-grasp visual blueprint of their complicated and increasingly confusing investigation.
On the right side were the victim’s names across the top, with commonalities listed under each and linked in green marker. Under that were lists of physical evidence and subsequent leads formed. On the left side were the two women’s names and those of their husbands, followed by what they knew about each person. A final column had the heading what we know we don’t know. It was blank.
On the second board, Mel had tacked up Swann’s pilfered photographs of Durand’s crime scene and close-up shots of the sword and the boots and all of the other items they had found in Durand’s bedroom. Mel had even cut out pictures of Tucker and Carolyn Osborn and Tink and Dickie Lyons from the Shiny Sheet and hung them up.
“This is impressive,” Swann said. “Why do you call it the pigpen?”
“That’s what we called it back at Miami PD,” Mel said. “Whenever we had a big case going, we’d put all the stuff in one room and we’d sit in there drinking bad coffee and eating cold burgers and throwing shit at the wall.”
Louis knew it had probably taken Mel all day to put this together, given the trouble his eyes gave him with detail work. But Louis didn’t want to deal with headless corpses right now. He was worried about Reggie. And Swann. That wasn’t like him, to take the troubles of near strangers to heart. And no one here in Bizarro World was supposed to give a damn about anyone else.
Louis went to the kitchen to get a beer. But the only things in the refrigerator were a quart of milk, orange juice, and two bottles of Evian.
Louis grabbed the bottles of water and returned to the living room. Swann looked up.
“Sorry, Andrew, we’re fresh out of beer,” he said. He tossed a bottle and Swann caught it against his chest. Louis dropped down onto the sofa and kicked off his shoes.
Mel put down the magnifying glass and looked up from his spot at the table. “What’s with the tone, Rocky?”
Louis opened the water and took a huge drink. “What tone?”
“We’re fresh out of beer because Mel was too busy hanging out at Ta-boo again to go get some.”
“Did I say that?” Louis said.
“You don’t have to say it. I can still hear it.”
“Give it a rest, Mel, will you?”
Louis looked over at Swann. He was standing at the bulletin board, staring at them both. He turned away, on the pretense of studying the photographs. Louis fell back against the cushions and closed his eyes. God, he wanted this case to be over. Nothing about it was making any sense, and every time he was able to empty his mind, Joe was there to fill it.
I want you to want something from yourself.
Right now, all he really wanted was to go home to his cottage and sleep in his own bed. He wanted to sit on his island, on his beach, and watch the sun melt into the Gulf.
“You ready to listen to what I found out today?” Mel asked.
“Go ahead,” Louis said, without opening his eyes.
“First, I’m close to finding the private eye that Osborn said spied on his wife,” Mel said. “Her rival, Morty Akers, died a couple years ago but I tracked down his former aide, who told me the PI’s name was Barney Lassiter.”
“Barney still among the living?” Louis asked.
“Yeah. He’s got a current PI license out of Okaloosa County up in the Panhandle, but his listed employer, Sax and Sax Services, went out of business a few months ago. So, I haven’t been able to zero in on Barney, yet but I got feelers out.”
Louis swung up to a sitting position. “Osborn told me Lassiter did stakeouts and surveillance,” he said. “What do you think the chances are he caught anything on film?”
“Not very likely,” Swann offered. “If he had, he would have used it against the senator. I’ve never heard one piece of dirt on her. In fact, she’s made her name drafting ethics reform and touting family values.”
“That don’t make her a saint, Andrew,” Mel said.
“I never said she was,” Swann said. “I’m just saying she seems like a pretty unlikely candidate for the kind of sleazy adultery we’re talking about here.”
“Let me tell you something, son,” Mel said. “When it comes to sex, no one is an unlikely candidate. Anyone with working genitals can be enticed if the drought has been long enough.”
Swann turned back to the bulletin board. Louis sensed that the conversation embarrassed him. Or maybe he had heard the slight condescension in Mel’s voice. He forgot that Mel didn’t know about Swann’s suspension yet.
“Did you ever hear of those monkeys called bonobos?” Mel asked.
“Spare us,” Louis said.
“They’re a lot like chimpanzees,” Mel went on unfazed, “but unlike chimps and gorillas, the bonobos are almost completely nonviolent and nonterritorial. And do you know why?”
“I said spare us.”
“They’re sex maniacs,” Mel said. “They have sex at every opportunity, as a greeting, a goodbye, before they eat, after they eat. They can even be passing a strange monkey in the jungle and they’ll stop and-”
“We get the picture,” Louis said. “What’s your point?”
“My point is, maybe if people were more like bonobos, they wouldn’t find themselves curled in a fetal position on a therapist’s couch. Or end up killing each other.”