by J. A. Kerley
Truman went to sit on the dark back porch. Seconds later he heard a ripping sound as Rose yanked carpet from the bedroom floor.
Ryder watched Mayor Norma Philips enter the briefing room, silencing it suddenly and completely. Stormin’ Norma, she was often called, with other printable appellations ranging from tree hugger to naïf to bull in a china shop. The unprintables were more extensive. A councilwoman and former community organizer, Philips had improbably—and to everyone’s utter astonishment including her own—somersaulted Mobile’s established political network to become interim mayor some months before.
A tall and loose-limbed brunette in her mid-forties, Philips had the strength of features proponents called handsome and detractors labeled horsy. She wore simple, inexpensive suits and eschewed any form of ornamentation save for a thirty-dollar Timex currently on its third band.
Ryder found her abrasive, impolitic, and incapable of crossing a room without stepping on every toe there. He also felt she could be a first-rate mayor if she somehow survived the upcoming election.
It was a measure of either her naïveté or bullheadedness that she stood before them now, Ryder thought, watching the sullen discomfort of Squill. A politically attuned mayor would have dealt with Squill alone, but the grassroots-trained Philips felt the way to get anything done started with soldiers, not generals. She nodded to Bidwell, who stood uneasily beside Squill.
Fit looking, if on the portly side, with jowls beginning to measure gravity, the fifty-four-year-old Bidwell had risen through the ranks on a tripoded ladder of caution, committed noncommittal, and a sincere, media-friendly visage. Ryder suspected Squill had summoned Bidwell because his uniformed presence would add a policely look amidst all the plainclothes.
“This is everyone working the investigations, Acting Chief?” Philips asked, studying a dozen sitting detectives. Ryder was in the third of four rows. No one sat in the front row but Duckworth, who chewed a toothpick and smirked at the mayor when her back was turned.
“Everyone associated with the abductions, like you asked, Mayor,” Squill said. “They’ve all been briefed on the body in the fire. It could be a coincidence. We’re still not sure if—”
“Three missing girls between eight and twelve years old? Black? A body found in a fire in a condemned house not—” she looked at her watch—four hours ago? A blaze the Fire Marshall calls blatant arson? Now the ME’s telling me it’s the body of an African-American female seven to ten years old? What’s your definition of ‘coincidence,’ Acting Chief?”
Ryder saw Squill flinch each time the mayor punched the word acting. No one in the department dared use any title other than the unmodified Chief.
She said, “The black community’s going to get hot when it’s out that the girl’s dead. They think the lack of information means you’re not doing jackshit. Got any leads you’re not telling the media about, stuff you’re holding?”
“No, Mayor.” Squill looked like he was chewing shingles. Philips threw a mournful glance over the assembled cops, a vegan scanning the buffet at a roadkill restaurant.
“Anyone else besides Homicide and Missing Persons have usable experience? Anyone in Vice?”
Squill shook his head. “We’re using Vice for leads on peds and molesters. Nothing there yet.”
Philips sighed heavily. “OK, how about former detectives? Retireds? Any experienced eyes out there could come take a look?”
“A couple we could ask, Mayor,” Squill said, barely controlling his fury at being questioned about his handling of the cases. “Braden, DeWitt. I’ll give them a call.”
Bidwell cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Chief, but Braden’s in Hawaii and DeWitt’s so crippled up with emphysema he can barely stand. We got a guy on sick leave, but his doctor barred him from working.”
Philips turned her back to Squill and faced the men in the room. “Anyone here have an idea? A little electricity in the gray matter?”
The room was as silent as the bottom of the sea. Everyone looked at someone else. Philips scanned each face in turn.
“Come on, boys. Don’t be shy. Speak up.”
Ryder watched Zemain’s hand lift and return to the desktop three times before his fingertips scratched the air. “Excuse me, Mayor?”
“What is it, Sergeant Zemain?”
Zemain cleared his throat. Ryder saw sweat on the back of his neck.
“Uh, we had one guy who might be a consideration … This guy, he, uh, came at cases his own way, sort of out of the box …”
Squill narrowed his eyes at the stuttering Zemain.
“The guy got almost weird about cases, Mayor … real tightly focused; obsessive, some people said, working days without sleeping. Living at the department. Kept a cot in the basement …”
“Oh, for chrissakes, Zemain,” Squill spat. “I know what you’re thinking. No way. No stinking way.”
“Will you let me conduct my own meeting, Acting Chief?” Philips said. “Go on, Sergeant.”
“All of a sudden he’d get this look and you knew he had it figured—”
“You’re trying to get Sandhill in here, aren’t you, Zemain?” Squill snarled. “You’re pimping for Sandhill.”
“He had the highest case-clearance rate three years running.”
Bidwell frowned. “You sure, Roland? I thought it was four.” He winced when he realized he’d made a contribution.
“Sandhill’s been gone for years.” Squill looked ready to vault the front row of chairs for Zemain’s throat. “Out of here. Good-damned-riddance.” Squill turned to Philips. “Mayor, Sandhill’s not anyone you’d want to have messing in this case. Trust me on this.”
“This Sandhill, he still around here?” Philips asked.
Squill shook his head in disgust. “It’s not an option, Mayor. Sandhill’s not a cop any more—he’s a goddamn fry cook.”
“He’s not a fry cook, Chief,” Zemain corrected. “He’s the Gumbo King.”
Chapter 9
The head was wrapped in white from crown to above the eyebrows, resembling a mummy in progress. An IV-tubed hand emerged from beneath a thin blanket, reached to the head, and pushed at the heavy swathing. The hand clenched in frustration, then opened toward Ryder, fingers flicking the gimme motion.
“Hand me that fork, Carson.”
“I just see a spoon.”
“Gimme that, then.”
Ryder slapped a teaspoon into the outstretched palm as if he were handing a surgeon a scalpel. The hand jammed the spoon beneath the edge of the bandages and stirred from side to side.
“Oh lawd, the motion is the potion. Nothing worse than an itch you can’t scratch.”
Harry Nautilus handed the spoon back to Ryder. “I’ll be damn glad when they unwrap this cockeyed turban.” His voice was a thin rasp. “It’s hair growing back that causes the damn itching.”
“How long you gonna be gone, brother?” Ryder asked.
Nautilus rolled his eyes. “Answer’s the same as last time, Carson. The docs got me barred from any sort of duty for at least two more months.”
The room smelled of inactivity and disinfectant. There were various medications on the bedside table. Nautilus wore scarlet pajamas with outsize paisley swirls. Three months ago, before the attack, he weighed two hundred and forty pounds. He was now a hundred and ninety, the bones of his square face sharp and prominent. Even the brushy hyphen of his mustache looked emaciated.
“How about your memory, Harry? Anything new there?”
Nautilus held his hands in the air, balling them into fists and flicking them open. He repeated the action several times.
“Are you supposed to exercise your hands?” Ryder asked, perplexed. “Does it help something?”
“I’m counting all the times you asked that question. If I remember anything, you’ll damn well be the first to hear.”
Ryder knew his partner was angry at more than the memory loss. It rankled to have been blindsided. Nautilus had been walking in his neighborhood
at ten at night when someone had crept up from behind and slammed his head with a pipe or other blunt instrument. His wallet had been taken, along with his watch. Only a dog walker coming by minutes later prevented Harry Nautilus from succumbing to a hemorrhage in his brain. He remembered nothing of the incident. It was black coated with black and buried in a pile of shadows.
“Try, Harry.”
“There’s nothing else there yet, Carson,” Nautilus rumbled. “I remember going out for a walk. The next thing I remember is waking up with half a hospital hooked to me, plus your ugly face beside the bed.”
Nautilus’s aunt, Sophie Hopewright, bustled through the door. Fifty-eight and more administrator than nurse these days, she managed a hospital’s nurse-training program. But the moment she’d heard of her nephew’s injury, she’d turned a room in her home into a convalescent center, overseeing Nautilus’s recovery with the demeanor of a dyspeptic drill sergeant. Ryder thought of her as Attila the Nurse.
“Move your skinny butt to the side, Ryder,” she commanded, brandishing a thermometer in his face. He retreated to a corner and watched the tall woman with short, steel-gray hair dispatch her tasks.
“Don’t you tire him out,” she admonished, a scowl promising dire retribution if he disobeyed.
“Fifteen minutes, max, Soph,” Ryder pledged, hand in the air.
“Five,” she said, no room for a counter-offer.
Ryder hugged the wall to keep from getting sucked into the woman’s slipstream as she thundered from the room. He edged back to bedside.
“Months until you come back to the department, Harry? What if you do real good, ace all your tests or whatever? Could you come back sooner?”
Nautilus sighed. “We can talk about that later. Fill me in on the latest at work.”
“You saw the news about this morning’s fire, the young girl’s body?”
“I figured it was your vic.”
“The black community thinks we’re sitting on our thumbs. There’s nothing to go on so far. Forensics is combing the ashes, but …”
“Something’ll break, Carson. Most of Investigative’s working the case, right?”
“There’s no focus, just Squill’s endless run-in-circles meetings.”
Nautilus nodded. “With Squill giving orders but keeping a delegator’s distance, I’ll bet.”
“Squill’s letting Duckworth make command decisions,” Ryder moaned. “It’s insane.”
“It’s completely logical,” Nautilus corrected. “Duckworth’s as driven and amoral as Squill, but content to whisper in Caesar’s ear, not be Caesar.”
Ryder paused. “All this time, before you’re allowed back …” His voice rose with hope. “You’re sure that’s set in stone?”
Nautilus didn’t seem to hear. He reached for a plastic cup of melting ice, sipped noisily through a bent straw, set the cup down.
“Hey, Carson, you ever dig into that stack of cold cases Tom laid on my desk a few days before I got jumped?”
Changing the subject, Ryder noted. It was hardly likely Harry had given the cases a moment’s thought. The unit’s overseer, Lieutenant Tom Mason, routinely handed out unsolved cases to the detective teams, hoping fresh eyes might find something.
“Are you kidding, Harry? When you got bonked, I sent the cases back to Property. I never had the time to even open the files.”
Ryder looked out the window. The Fairhope water tower loomed in the dark sky, feeding water to the town like a floating metal heart. Ryder watched red lights pulse on the tower before turning back to his partner.
“A strange thing happened at a meeting today, Harry. Mayor Philips came by. She wanted to know if there were any retired or inactive dicks that might help work the cases, shed some light.”
Nautilus nodded. “She’s got to be feeling heat, especially from the black community. Nothing strange about that.”
“Here’s where the weird comes in. Zemain mentioned Conner Sandhill. I vaguely remember him, big guy, kept to himself. He left the force a little after I made detective. Odd guy, from what little I recall. No one seemed to talk about Sandhill after that. You never have.”
Nautilus grunted.
“What?” Ryder asked.
“Nothing. Keep going.”
“I remember Sandhill working sex crimes and cold cases. Then he just disappeared. When Zemain floated Sandhill’s name, Squill sank it with cannon fire. I hear he runs that restaurant on Parlor Street. The one you never want to go to, right?”
Nautilus looked away to refill his drinking glass. “I got other places I like better.”
“What happened with Sandhill, Harry?”
“I don’t like talking from rumors. Things get scrambled.”
“What kind of ru—”
Sophie stampeded through the door, tapping her watch crystal with a fingernail. “That’s it. Time’s up, Ryder. You take your ten o’clock meds, Harry?”
“Uh …”
“I knew it. Get them pills in your mouth before I do. You keep forgetting and I’ll have the pharmacist mix ‘em in suppository form. Then I’m gonna buy me a hammer. Get my drift, Harry Nautilus?”
Ryder winced and tiptoed from the room.
Heading back across the bay, Ryder was troubled that his partner didn’t want to discuss when he’d return to work, immediately changing the subject. The avoidance was puzzling. He was on the causeway when a thought hit him so hard it kicked the breath from his lungs and he had to pull off the road.
Heart pounding in his chest, Ryder did the math …
Harry was forty-six years old. He joined the force when he was twenty-two. Twenty-four years in, and the sick time kicked it right up to a full-pension twenty-five.
Harry Nautilus didn’t need to come back. He could retire with full benefits if he wished.
Ryder closed his eyes and listened to breaking waves until his lost breath returned. He drove home slowly, crossing the bridge to Dauphin Island near midnight. Entering his stilt-standing beachfront home, he noted a single call on his answering machine, the screen blinking the number of Harry’s cellphone.
Ryder stood in the dark and punched play. The voice of Harry Nautilus filled the room.
“Carson, no one would be better for taking a look at the abduction cases than Sandhill …”
A long empty hiss followed, like his partner had something he needed to add. Ryder pictured Harry Nautilus in his bed, phone in hand, frowning, trying to give Ryder some form of explanation, or enlightenment. Anything beyond sixteen words.
Nothing seemed to come. Nautilus hung up.
Chapter 10
At ten a.m. Sandhill finished wiping the last letter of his neon sign, the G in king. He tucked the rag in the back pocket of his jeans and debated turning the sign on. Though the restaurant was an hour from opening, Sandhill loved the sizzle and crackle as his sign flickered into life.
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed the New Orleans restaurant where he’d been the head chef, Sandhill tried a couple other places as an assistant, didn’t like perverting his craft—powdered garlic? Factory-made andouille? Blasphemy!—and a year back had returned to Mobile, toying with the thought of opening his own restaurant. Ninety-nine per cent of him dismissed the idea as pure lunacy. One morning, however, while the rational ninety-nine per cent was still in bed, a subversive one per cent smuggled him to the sign shop to put a hefty down payment on the creation of a neon-red THE GUMBO KING, a bright yellow crown flashing at a rakish angle above the cursive letters.
Thus invested in a magnificent work of signage, he’d felt logically compelled to follow through, and eleven weeks later the doors of the restaurant opened.
Sandhill heard a knock at the locked door. He opened it, ready to recite the hours, when Nike Charlane walked wordlessly past, swung a crocheted purse the size of a grocery bag on to the nearest table, and sat. She wore impenetrably dark sunglasses, a blue ball cap, and a white tee with the logo of the Mobile Art Museum and Exploreum. Paint-speckled canvas pan
ts fell to outsized flip-flops. Sandhill sat and stared into the void of her Ray-Bans.
Nike took a deep breath. “Listen, Conner, about the other night in the alley, I wanted to say—”
“Wait,” Sandhill said. He reached across the table and gently removed Nike’s sunglasses. Her outsized eyes were laced with red.
“Aha, there you are.”
She blinked. “I wanted to say thanks for the other night.”
“It was no problem.”
“Uh, Conner, I’m a little fuzzy on details, but you had a gun to that boy’s head. You wouldn’t have—”
“An act. At least with that damned misaligned kid. I would have enjoyed shooting the other one.”
“I was afraid you were going to when he pulled the knife.”
“If the kick had missed, it was my next choice. I preferred avoiding that route, thus avoiding unnecessary contact with the constabulary. There’s some of them don’t love me, strange as it seems.”
Nike shook her head. “I shouldn’t have gone down the alley.”
“You weren’t thinking straight.”
“I’m better now.”
“For how long?”
She started to speak, then stood and swept her purse from the table. “Thanks again. I have to go.”
“Stay for coffee.”
“I don’t need lectures, Conner.”
“Bad things are happening, Nike. You’ve got to keep that little girl safe. Jacy’s not safe when you’re on a binge.”
She stared through him. But, at the corners of her eyes, he saw fear.
“You’re making more out of it than it is, Conner. Most of the time I’m fine.”
“That’s denial. Most of the time won’t cut it. Try all of the time.”
Nike feigned a look at her watch. “Aren’t you late for your self-righteousness class? I’d hate for them to start without you; they’d miss so much.” She slung the purse over her shoulder and started away.
“Nike.”
She closed her eyes, sucked in a breath and turned. “I’ve got things to do, Conner. What is it?”
“How’s your painting going?”
