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?”
“ Everything strictly by the book, Big.”
“ Yeah, sure… follow rule number one: don't touch a goddamned thing, and then proceed to rule number two-”
“ Don't touch a goddamned thing,” Alex said, finishing the old cop wisdom for him, quietly laughing at the line, realizing just how unworkable it was.
Alex knew it was impossible to follow the rules here, especially since it was his job to search for any conceivable sign of evidence as well as identification of the victim. They'd found signs of someone's having dragged the body to this isolated, dark and remote location. Someone had less than tenderly covered the body with shrubbery cut from nearby, possibly using the same blade that had felled the victim, since bloodstains had been found on the palmetto stems.
The victim was yet another young, well-tanned, soft-featured male, hardly more than a boy in age, nineteen at the most, more likely seventeen.
They'd found scattered bits of clothing and footprints belonging to a heavyset killer who wore flat, wide sneakers that had made an interesting pattern in the mud, something for the forensics guys to make a cast of along with some fresh tire marks. But neither Alex nor Ben held out much hope of either cast ever being of any particular use. They'd found signs of animal leavings about the body, defecation to mark the kill in the wild. There was some evidence the corpse had been ripped apart a bit further by animals, but since the insect activity was not too terribly far along yet, the corpse was marked as having come to rest here some twelve to twenty-four hours before a group of blue-haired, retired ladies and gents on a bird watchers' safari had ingloriously discovered the body, reporting it to the local precinct Crimes Against Persons office. The precinct police had put it on the wire, and since it smelled like another Queen of Hearts murder, Sincebaugh had been given a wake-up call and pulled from his vacation.
When Alex responded to the call, he drove a few miles north of downtown New Orleans and just north of Lakefront Airport, along an unnamed artery off Hayne Boulevard, almost at its terminus, where Hayne became Paris Road. It had already been decided for him that he would take charge of the body and the subsequent investigation and paperwork. It certainly looked related to Sincebaugh's ongoing investigation.
Everything at the scene had been happily turned over to him by a detective out of the local precinct, a guy Sincebaugh knew and disliked named Lyle Kellerman. Kellerman's parting shot was: “You can have all my fag meat cases, Sincebaugh. It ain't my kinda case. Don't even wanna be in the morgue with it.”
“ This meat, as you call the kid, had a name, a history, a past, emotions, a family, Kellerman,” Alex had replied as the other man backed off with a pugnacious grin marring his otherwise handsome features.
“ Some things you never had or ever will have, Kellerman,” Ben had added for good measure.
The discovery was sometime after twilight, the bird watchers, having done their damnedest to log the large- necked, white-ribboned loon here, getting ready to bag all expectations and return home empty-handed. Now it was day watch, definitely the wrong time for Alex and Ben. Alex would have to break Ben's heart; he'd have to put them in for the night shift if they were ever to learn more about this plague of dead boys. Four now that they knew of for certain, and a fifth that Alex clung to as a possible which had occurred over a year before.
They'd been told by Captain Landry that it had been an otherwise dull rotation, only eleven deaths had come on the evening watch, and only a handful were violent deaths, the bulk of them alcohol-related motor-vehicle accidents.
“ You'd think Kellerman would've been pleased to get a murder investigation after a night like the one he just had,” said Ben, returning to the body now. “What's he afraid of, AIDS?”
“ Kellerman's afraid of gays.”
“ Maybe he's got some latent tendencies toward that direction?” Ben laughed to hear himself say it aloud. “Or maybe he's just got good reason, Alex. Maybe he picked one of those Bourbon Street cross-dressers up once,
