'But the men in the town, one by one were each drowned, in the poison that poured out by buckets!' He switched back to my mother's voice, solicitous. 'It's all right, Carson, Mommy's here. You haven't finished your spit. Is it cold? Can I warm it back up for you?' He made a hawking sound.
'Jeremy, will you please stop '
In the background I heard a door opening, followed by scuffling and a man cursing. My caller screamed, 'No! Go away. It's a personal call!I'm talking to my past!'
A loud crack turned to skittering, as if the phone had been dropped and kicked across the floor. Other voices joined in with grunts, cursing, sounds of struggle. I stood in my cool room and listened breathlessly as sweat poured from beneath my arms.
His words became distant and I pictured men in white dragging him across the floor: 'The murder, Carson! Tell me about it. There must be more than a missing head, there's always more. Did he take their dicks? Is hejamming sausages up their butts until they shoot out the neck hole? Call me! You neeeeeed me again…'
More sounds of scuffling. Then nothing.
Channel 14's affiliate in Montgomery must have picked up the beheading-in-the-park story, run it on the late news.
Television was one of the few luxuries Jeremy was allowed, and he would have studied the story with a scholar's focus. I blew out the candles and lay on the couch with my face in a pillow. Sleep, when it finally arrived, was paper thin and shot through with rats and the smell of burning silk.
My alarm fired just past daybreak. I stumbled numbly into the Gulf and swam straight into the waves for a half mile, then turned and dragged myself back. I followed with a four-mile beach run that left me sweat soaked and cramp calved. After a grudging, almost angry, session with the weights, I began to see events with a clearer eye, and wrote off Jeremy's call as an aberration; frighteningly resourceful, he'd somehow managed to get hold of a phone.
But hadn't I listened as it was taken from him? It wouldn't happen a second time; the episode was over.
I showered and ate a breakfast of cheese grits with andouille. My mood began to lift and I headed to work. Harry flipped a coin, and tails bought me autopsy duty. I had time before the cut, and headed to the criminalists' offices, a science lab grafted to a computer store. Two white-jacketed technicians studied a toilet float as if it were the Grail. Another tapped a pencil against a Mason jar full of squirming bugs. Hembree sat beside a microscope drinking coffee.
'We got a print hit on the headless man,' he said, picking up a sheet of paper.
I made a drum-roll sound with my tongue. 'And the winner is?'
Hembree mimicked a cymbal crash. 'One Jerrold Elton Nelson, aka L'il Jerry, aka Jerry Elton, aka Nelson Gerald aka Elton Jelson.'
'A big list of aliases.'
'A pissant list of priors,' he said, reading from the page. 'Twenty-two years old. Eyes and hair are blue and brown wherever they are. Petty city and county raps for shoplifting, male prostitution, possession of stolen goods, possession of a couple joints. In March a woman charged him with borrowing eleven grand and not paying it back, charges later dropped.'
'Hooker and a gigolo con artist? Guess his door swang both ways.' I said, turning away. Though the autopsy was an hour off, I planned to head to the ME's office.
'I almost forgot,' Hembree said as I was halfway out the door. 'That bit last night with the petals and the streetlight was inspired, Carson, pure Sherlock. Squill's got his head so far up his ass, he spies on his teeth from his throat. I loved how you pointed that out to him.'
The morgue's front desk was empty and my footsteps in the hall caused Will Lindy to come to the door of his office. The new facility had been open officially only a few days, but Lindy looked dug in, forms stacked on his desk, manuals alphabetized across shelves, calendars and schedules on his wall.
'Morning, Detective Ryder.'
'Howdy, Will. I'm here for the post on Nelson. Clair around?'
I was maybe the only person in the universe who called Dr. Peltier by her first name; I'd used it since our introduction and she hadn't torched me yet. She countered by using only my last name, addressing everyone else by first name or title. Lindy looked at his watch.
'She's due at nine, which means '
I glanced at my timepiece, 8:58. 'She'll be here in one minute.'
We heard a burst of masculine laughter from down the hall and saw a pair of funeral-home staffers retrieving a body for burial. They rolled a covered body toward the back dock like kids playing with a supermarket buggy, weaving the clattering gurney from side to side.
Lindy was down the hall like a shot.
'Hey, fellas,' he said. 'What you do at the parlor is your business.
Around here we show respect.'
The funeral home guys froze, reddened. They mumbled apologies and continued on their way, slow and silent.
'Good going, Will,' I said when he returned.
Lindy gave a half smile; funny how half a smile indicates sadness.
'Poor guy's on his last ride, Detective Ryder. There's no need to treat it like a game.'
I admired Will Lindy for his stand; too many homicide cops and morgue workers forget the bodies passing by were once the exact center of the universe, to themselves anyway. No one knows why we were chosen to be here, or if we had much hand in the choices we made during our presence. In any event, for the arrivals at the morgue, this level of the journey was over. Bad people, good ones, the indifferent they'd all crossed to the final mystery and left behind a soft, soon-gone husk, not always to be mourned, but at least respected.
Lindy and I turned to an insistent rapping: Doc Peltier high-heeling toward us. I detected she'd been to breakfast with her husband, Zane, since he was walking beside her and working his teeth with a toothpick.
Zane's fifty-nine, but looks younger, with cool gray eyes in a chiseled face, a nose ridge like the spine of a slender book, and a mahogany tan independent of seasons. He wore a charcoal three-piece cut to hide a touch of paunch and walked fast to keep up with his wife.
'A little early, aren't we, Ryder?' she said as I jumped into her slipstream. Her perfume suggested champagne made from roses.
'I'd like to take a look at the body before the post.'
I always tried to do this when the bodies weren't badly decomposed, feeling it provided a stronger link with the victims. After the post, the invasion, the deceased seemed different, as if they'd shifted from our world to the anteroom of the next.
Clair rolled her eyes. 'I don't have time to indulge you today.' She wasn't big on my linkage concept.
'Please, Clair. A minute?'
Clair sighed. We stopped at the door of the autopsy suite. She remembered her manners. 'Have you met my husband, Zane?'
'Art museum, months ago,' I said, offering my hand. 'Detective Carson Ryder.'
Zane Peltier had one of those handshakes that stop short of locking thumb to thumb; he shook my knuckles. 'Of course I remember,' his mouth said as his eyes denied it. 'Great seeing you again, Detective.'
Clair opened the door. Her husband said, 'I'll wait out here, dear.'
'They won't bite, you know, Zane.'
He smiled but didn't approach the door. I understood his hesitancy I believe people sense death as precisely as cattle sense lightning forming, an atavistic warning system that'll be with us until we evolve to creatures of pure reason, slim chance.
Clair and I stepped into the suite. 'Make it fast, Ryder,' she said.
'I've got a busy day and don't need distractions.'
'Yes, Your Majesty,' I replied, drawing a withering glare but no comment. She slid the body from its refrigerated confines, drew the sheet away.
I studied the odd tableau for several seconds. Without the head I took no sense of being, just of loss. All I noted was the victim's physical dimensions, wide of shoulder, narrow of hip, well muscled. Death removes some of the tone and definition, but it was obviously a body the owner had put time and effort into.
