Mel paused, staring at Barberry, then snapped the Zippo closed. He set it on the desk, his eyes never leaving Barberry’s face.
“Kent would have needed a car to transport the body out there,” Louis said. “You’re going to have to tie him to a vehicle to make your case.”
“No shit,” Barberry said, bristling. “But Kent could’ve borrowed a car. I’ll place him behind the wheel of something, and once I do that, it’s over for him.”
“Swann told us Kent and Durand had a relationship,” Louis said. “Did you consider there might have been-”
Barberry smirked. “Another man? Sure, I thought about that. But why should I waste my time hunting down some phantom fag when Kent won’t even admit he was sleeping with Durand? Give me a fucking break.”
The phone on Barberry’s desk rang. Barberry answered it, turning his back. Louis looked at the accordion file. He wanted to see the crime scene and the autopsy photos.
Barberry hung up his phone. “Well, gentlemen,” he said. “It seems I have somewhere to go. Can I walk you out?”
Barberry gestured toward the door, leaving them no choice but to head in that direction. Mel pushed from the chair, and Louis followed him out to the lobby.
“Tell the fudge packer I’ll be over to see him soon,” Barberry said at the door, and started away.
“Hey,” Mel said sharply.
Barberry turned. “What?”
“Knock that shit off,” Mel said.
Barberry stared hard at Mel, like he didn’t get it. Then he gave him a hard grin. “Whatever you say, pal.”
Outside, they paused as Mel reached for his Kools and stood there in the hot sun, patting his pockets for his lighter.
“Damn, I left my lighter in there,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Louis slipped on his sunglasses. The whine of a jet coming in for a landing drew his eyes up for a second, then back to two uniformed officers coming up the walk. They didn’t give him a glance as they went inside.
At home, in Lee County, he was used to getting nods of recognition from the local cops. His relationships with the sheriff and the chief were prickly but at least respectful. But here, in Bizarro World, as Mel called it, nothing felt even close to comfortable. Not only was he hitting brick walls with two different police departments, but their own client was parsing the truth about his sex life.
Client. Louis shook his head slowly. Despite his loyalty to Mel, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with Kent.
“They found the head,” Mel said.
“What?”
Mel came down a step, lighting up a cigarette. “They found Durand’s head,” he said. “It’ll be here in about a half hour.”
“How do you know that?”
“When I went back in for the lighter, I heard the phone conversation,” Mel said. He blew out a stream of smoke. “We need to go see the ME.”
“He isn’t going to talk to us, Mel,” Louis said.
“Why don’t you call Vinny?” Mel asked. “See if he knows the guy and can get us a few minutes inside.”
Vinny Carissimi was the Lee County medical examiner and a good friend of Louis’s, and there was a fraternity of MEs across the state, just as there was for cops.
“Let’s go find a phone,” Louis said.
The medical examiner’s office was located around the back of the building. Louis and Mel parked in the last row of the lot, next to a jail transport bus. They watched as a county van pulled up, letting out a deputy with an orange Igloo cooler.
A few minutes later, Barberry came around the corner of the building and disappeared inside. He reappeared forty minutes later, a little paler. Without lifting his head even to look around, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.
Louis and Mel waited five more minutes before they went inside. The automatic doors opened with a wheeze, drawing the attention of a deputy standing farther down the hall, the same one who had brought in the Igloo cooler. Despite the NO SMOKING sign above his head, he was stealing a few puffs of a cigarette. He looked at Louis and Mel like a kid caught in the high school john, then managed to regain some sense of command.
“Hold up,” the deputy said. “Who are you?”
Louis paused. As a favor to Vinny, the ME was expecting them, but Louis couldn’t be sure the deputy wasn’t assigned by Barberry to guard the head from outsiders. So he lied.
“Dr. Vincent Carissimi, Lee County ME,” Louis said. “This is Detective Landeta. We’re here about the severed head.”
“Oh, well, then,” the deputy said, gesturing toward the door closest to Louis. “You go right ahead. Dr. Steffel is right in there.”
“Thanks.”
Louis held the door for Mel and followed him inside. In the large tiled room, three stainless-steel autopsy tables, empty and shiny, sat under hooded lights. Below the shout of industrial-strength Lysol lurked the sour whisper of rotting flesh.
A door near the back opened, and a small woman in green scrubs came through it. She was about fifty, with a pretty pale face and a short, dark pixie haircut.
“Louis Kincaid?” she said, coming forward with outstretched hand.
“Dr. Steffel?” Louis asked.
“Sue Steffel,” she said. She looked expectantly toward Mel, and Louis introduced him.
“I appreciate you letting us get a look at Durand,” Louis said.
“Vinny and I are old friends,” Dr. Steffel said with a smile. “If he vouches for you, then you’ve got to be okay, even if you are cops.”
“Ex-cops,” Mel said.
“There’s no such thing,” she said.
“Point taken,” Mel said with a smile.
Dr. Steffel crossed her arms and leaned back against a steel table, giving them both an appraising look. “Vinny says you’ve got an open mind.”
“A mind is like a parachute,” Louis said. “It only works when it’s open.”
“Well, in this room, I work only with the facts,” Dr. Steffel said. “And too often I find myself dealing with people who form their theories first and then try to make the facts fit.”
“People like Barberry?” Louis asked.
Dr. Steffel held his eyes for a long time, arms still folded.
“We’re just trying to find out the truth about Mark Durand,” Louis said.
She pushed away from the steel table. “Which part of him do you want to see first?” she asked.
“Either.”
Dr. Steffel motioned for them to follow her into a second room lined with freezers. She opened one, pulled out a gurney, and threw back the blue sheet.
The body lay chest up. It had been washed, and the skin was pale gray, the chest, arms, and legs knotted with muscle, the belly flat. Louis swallowed back a rise of bile.
There was something surreal about a body that was in perfect shape but had only a ragged stump of a neck. It looked like a toppled Greek statue.
“You’ll notice a pronounced lack of color,” Dr. Steffel said. “The blood loss was massive.”
Louis stepped closer. There were no other wounds, except for some small lacerations just visible over the shoulder. But the kneecaps were bruised and torn.
“May I?” Louis asked, and nodded to a hand.
“Be my guest,” Dr. Steffel said.
Louis took Durand’s wrist and turned it so he could see the palm. It was shredded like the knees.
“His knees and palms are torn up,” Louis said, for Mel’s benefit. “Like he was crawling around.”
“Take a look at this,” Dr. Steffel said. She turned the body onto its side to expose the back. The red marks extended all the way around the torso. Thickest across the middle of the back, they formed a road map of welts, cuts, and tattered skin.
“It looks like he was whipped across the back,” Louis said.
“How bad?” Mel asked.
“Bad.”
Dr. Steffel lowered the body back to the gurney. Louis looked again at the bruised knees. The image of Durand groping around in the darkness with a whip cracking behind him was hard to stomach.
“Where is the head?” Louis asked.
Dr. Steffel moved to a smaller drawer. She paused before opening it and looked to Louis and Mel. “You want something to cut the smell?”