by J. A. Kerley
“Can you come and make introductions?”
“Did you see my waiting room?”
Clark directed us to the camp. We passed several miles of pasture before seeing a cluster of graying wooden houses with small porches. A fiftyish Hispanic man sat on one porch, sipping beer from a can as chickens pecked in the sparse grass. When we pulled into the dirt drive his head turned away, like if he didn’t see us, we weren’t there.
“Excuse me,” I said. “May we speak?”
His eyes went blank. “No Ingles, señor.”
“Uh, Big Ryde …” Gershwin said, stepping in front of me. “How about you go reorganize the glove box and I’ll call you in a few.”
I headed to the car as Gershwin sat on the steps. I watched him pull his badge and ID, point to the ID, likely explaining that we weren’t inmagracíon. The guy finally nodded, and they started talking. After a couple minutes Gershwin waved me from the car.
I discovered that Gershwin was a miracle worker; Señor Ronaldo Vasquez had learned English in under five minutes. After the requisite pleasantries, I asked what he’d heard about the illnesses and the death.
He thought a moment, like framing his words. “There were rumors about the sickness, about a man’s death. There are always rumors.”
“That the men had been purposely poisoned?”
“That is a likely thing to think.”
“By who? Was that speculated?”
“A greasy snake named Abaca. He had been visiting the men at their little camp. He was all smiles and brought beer and a bag of tacos for each man. Not long after, they were sickened.”
Abaca was the low-life Clark said would do anything for a price, a sociopath, I figured. No conscience, no qualms. I looked at Gershwin. Was Abaca our killer? Was Abaca Donnie? Feeling a surge in my heart rate, I pressed forward. “The workers knew this for certain, Don Vasquez? That Abaca had given them something bad?”
“They were eating and bad food is a problem always. Especially in this heat.”
“But weeks later, after the tests came back as poison? That’s when Abaca became a suspect?”
“When your soul is black, you open yourself to such thoughts.”
“What happened to Abaca? Do you know?” I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping the old man had an idea of Abaca’s whereabouts. I looked at Gershwin, he was staying cool, but thinking the same.
The man paused for a long moment, as if gauging internal distances. “You are not of the police here, Señor Ryder. That is what Señor Gershwin told me. Nor do you have any interest in the inmagracíon. Or even … locale crimes?”
“All true, Don Vasquez.” Come on … please God let this man know where we can find José Abaca …
But Don Vasquez went another direction.
“One of the men was the son-in-law of the dead man,” he said. “The other was his good friend. Honor was involved and they went to … speak to Abaca.”
“But Abaca was gone by then, right? Perhaps to Miami?”
“You are sure, señor, that you have no interests here?”
“All we want is the truth, Don Vasquez.”
The man paused for a long moment, as if gauging internal distances. His eyes found mine. “No, Señor Ryder. Abaca had not disappeared. He was dead on his floor, his face a terrible thing to behold. He died while eating.”
I started to speak, but used my head instead of my mouth. The men had probably intended to injure or kill Abaca, revenge, but found him dead. Figuring they’d be prime suspects, they’d made the body disappear. I suspected Abaca was weighted down beneath four feet of Everglades water, a fate he likely deserved.
“Why did Abaca poison the men?” I asked. “Was it known?”
The man shrugged, at a loss. “It is strange, as they were very pleasant men, not given to making enemies.”
“You have lived in this area for long, Señor Vasquez?”
“For eighteen years. I know everyone here.”
For what had to have been the two-hundredth time in three weeks I pulled the photos of Ocampo from my jacket. Held them to a pair of eyes and held my breath. For the two-hundredth time the eyes scanned the pictures, thought carefully …
And a mouth said, “No.”
56
Before we lifted off, Gershwin phoned the department to check our calls. “Anything?” I said, dreading that Patrick White had appeared, injured in some hideous fashion.
“You had one call, Jefé. Someone named Folger.”
I frowned. Alice Folger? Four years passed like a blur and I was racing through Manhattan trying to get to my brother ahead of the NYPD, while simultaneously appearing to assist their manhunt. Lieutenant Alice Folger started as my adversary, ended up as what Ava might call a brief thang.
What could Alice Folger want?
We were edging toward Okeechobee when I put the air call through my helmet and dialed Bobby Erickson, the ex-FSP sergeant who handled 23rd-floor calls.
“Gershwin told me about a call, Bobby … Folger?”
“Yeah,” he said, chomping something as he spoke. “Name was Alice. With the NYPD.”
“She say what she wanted?”
“Only that an old friend of yours had finally surfaced.” He swallowed. “She sounded real happy, Carson.”
Debro stared through the window at his newest penitent, Patrick White. The man was lying on his back, his head slowly tapping the floor as his eyes rolled slowly in his head. White looked at Debro but, of course, could not see him. He was probably seeing dancing body parts. It was something he had said at the bar: “I’ve got a test coming up tomorrow, anatomy. It’s a toughie and I’ve spent two weeks cramming my head full of body parts.” He had pointed to his head with a laugh, “They dance in there all day, livers, spleens, colons – ascending and decsending, you know – veins, arteries, capillaries …”
“I thought we were solid straight through,” Debro had said. “Like potatoes.”
White had thought that was funny.
Debro felt at his crotch. He’d had two good sessions with White, but the most recent had been two hours ago, and Debro wasn’t back to full heat yet. It was best when you pictured them in your head for an hour or two – imagining it, maybe bringing yourself close with your hand – then stopping and letting it build.
At first he couldn’t get enough – why he started with three in the first week – but since Brighton, one at a time was better. You could focus on things besides sex, like the bad things they’d done and the ways they should pay.
Assuring himself that White was still deep within the triplicate prisons of hallucinations, weakness, and a dead throat, Debro headed downstairs, where the LOGO channel was beaming a trio of female impersonators yammering like lovely little magpies and for a moment Debro savored the thought of putting the whole trio on his floor and beating them with a ball bat.
Debro grabbed a beer, muted the sound, and sat on the couch, feeling relaxed, pleased and, as always, invisible. The cops would be looking for Donnie even more intently, of course. The dead-and-then-alive Donnie, the six-foot-four Donnie, the hospital-orderly-sized Donnie. They’d be looking for dark-complected Donnie. Blue-eyed Donnie. Donnie of the twin tattoos.
Debro smiled to himself. The tattoos had been a stroke of genius, not only bolstering the dead-brother deception, but throwing another wrench into the cops’ machinery.
What was happening with the investigation? He wondered. The only real advantage of having Gary alive was the occasional peek inside Ryder’s head. But the lump of chickenshit had turned pure yellow when Debro finally administered true justice. The fat bitch should have been cheering.
“You took away a boy’s dancing,” Gary had whined the last night of his worthless life. “It was never supposed to be like this.”
“It was your idea, Gary.” Derek had reminded the pouting moron. “Revenge.”
“Not hurting them forever. You started thinking about it that first day!”
A group meeting had j
ust ended at the University, Phase Two, a dozen fat turds sitting in a circle and mewling at Dr Roth. It broke up and it was just Derek and Gary hanging out and talking. Another wave of fatties started in the front door like a parade of elephants, Roth directing them into a side room holding chairs with arms, like when you gave blood. Derek had asked what was going on.
“Those are participants in phase two, the clinical phase,” Roth had said. “There’s more physical monitoring involved. Lipids, cholesterol, insulin levels … tests related to metabolism. There’s a DNA test as well.”
Derek had studied DNA in veterinary school. Like chemistry, it was interesting stuff. Botany, too. A lot more interesting than studying a bunch of stinking animals.
“Why DNA?” he had asked, his senses prickling like he was seeing the future.
“An investigation into genetic aspects of weight.”
“I don’t know much about DNA,” Derek had said, doing his best naïve. “Do the results like, become available for cops to look at? Are they like fingerprints?”
“It’s likely that law enforcement can be granted access to DNA testing, Derek. I should also mention that tens of millions of people are in DNA databanks, so unless you’re planning a life of crime, it doesn’t make a big difference.”
Roth entered the blood-draw room as the pair watched the nurse hand corpulent participants a wood-handled swab so they could brush their teeth for a few seconds, then hand it back.
The Idea appeared in that one, beautiful moment.
What if … Derek had thought. It was just floating-in-his-head kind of thinking. Like when he’d see a cute boy in the street and wonder What if I could tie him down on my kitchen floor and kick that smug look from his face? It was like that. What if you put someone else’s spit in your sample jar. What would happen? You’d be someone else, right? Or someone else would be you.
What if …
It was that very night when Gary – flirting like they were a pair of slender twinks and not a six-hundred-pound monster coming on to a then-three-hundred-pound man – said he was going to enter the Phase Two program. Then he’d put on that ridiculous fucking hat and made all sorts of shit disappear and reappear, Derek pretending it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen but all the time thinking, What if someone else’s spit was on Gary’s swab? What would that mean? What could happen?
Derek had responded to Ocampo’s flirting. Within three nights of sweaty emissions into the rolling bag of fat – Gary sometimes giddy, sometimes weeping – Scott learned the darkest details of Ocampo’s life: the whispers, the insults, the betrayals …
The dead brother.
57
We arrived at the department. The elevator opened on the twenty-third floor and I was four steps into the hall when I heard Bobby Erickson’s voice.
“Call on line one, Detective Ryder. Her again: Captain Alice Folger, NYPD.”
“I’ll get it in my office, Bobby.”
Gershwin went to talk to Roy. Somehow I made it down the hall. I closed my door and picked up the phone. “Yo, Carson,” Folger said. “You’re a hard man to track down. I tried Mobile, they directed me here.”
I forced a smile to help fake a cheery voice. I probably looked like Dr Sardonicus. “Alice, damn! Great to hear your voice. Did I hear the title ‘Captain’?”
“It’s your doing. After that ruckus you dragged me into I was too out of control to keep on the street, so they made me Cap.”
“Come on.”
“OK … after our dance with Crazy Jeremy I took classes in psychology. Got a Masters, actually. I’m spearheading a unit like that one you ran in Mobile. You doing the same thing in Florida … tracking the hardcores?”
“Sure enough. Stop sending them here.”
“Ha! Why’d you book from Mobile? You piss someone off?”
“The Chief of Police.”
“Glad to hear you haven’t lost your touch. Why I’m calling … have you heard the news?”
I swallowed hard: here it came.
“Heard what?”
“Speaking of good ol’ Jeremy Ridgecliff … guess who just showed up?”
I closed my eyes. The worst had happened: Jeremy spotted in Key West, or somehow ID’d in Kentucky, a background check for the property sale maybe. Had he been arrested? Was he again on the run? In three seconds a dozen questions zipped through my mind.
“Come on, Carson,” Folger prodded. “Guess who surfaced after all these years?”
I could feel sweat dripping inside my shirt. I swallowed hard and forced nonchalance into my voice. “Jeremy Ridgecliff, I take it. What about him, Alice?”
“I figured you hadn’t heard. The news came across the wire, the pull notice … I was always afraid he was hiding in one of the boroughs, waiting.”
“What haven’t I heard, Alice? What do you mean, ‘pull’?”
“Ridgecliff’s dead.”
It made no sense and I replayed the words in my head. It was like Folger was talking from a land of crystalline focus and I was surrounded by black fog, blind and lost.
“Dead?” I rasped.
“The Feds just pulled him from the Wanted listing, Carson. He’s history.”
“I … how? What’s the story?”
“I told an agent buddy to fax me the full packet to close out our file. Seems last month a body was dragged from a river during a bridge project, rotting meat in clothes, dead for months. A DNA sample went to the FBI, got backlogged, and yesterday came back as Ridgecliff.”
“Dead for months?”
“I imagine they’ll put the carcass in a potter’s field somewhere. Or maybe toss it back into Lake Michigan as fish food.”
“Lake Michigan? What?”
“I forgot to mention: the soggy remnants were in a river channel leading to the lake. Ridgecliff died in Chicago.”
In the span of a city’s name, the fog blew away.
“Always trust a river, Carson.” My brother’s cryptic words illumed.
“The packet you requested …” I said. “Did it include an autopsy report, Alice?”
“You wanna make sure he’s officially dead? Me too, cuz I read it twice. Says right here: Deceased. It’s signed by one Dr Ava Davanelle. Guess Doc Davanelle got the world’s last look at crazy Jeremy.”
I hung up and understood what Ava had meant by “days countable” and headed to the morgue. Ava was in a meeting room poring over a procedural manual. A tech called a greeting and I flicked a wave, then stepped inside the room and closed the door. Ava wore a dark blue dress, white hair at her shoulders, dark eyes intent on her reading. She was turning pages, her purse and notepads on the table, a cup of coffee at her elbow.
She shot me a What’s-up? look as I shut the door.
“Seems the countdown’s over,” I said.
She closed the manual and pushed it to the side. “How’d you hear?”
“A detective in Manhattan called to say the FBI had pulled Jeremy from the Wanted listings. Death does that.”
“Yes, it certainly does.”
One wall of the room was glass and I walked to it and let my eyes wander the clear sky, pushing the last wisps of fog from my mind. When I turned, Ava was redoing her lipstick, a light gloss.
“What was it, Ava … a simple substitution?”
She made a kissing shape, dropped the lipstick and mirror back into her purse. “A rotting corpse no one wanted to go near, just bones and shreds of meat. The skeleton was approximately six feet in height.”
“You kept some of Jeremy’s tissue on hand.”
“In my purse for months. A shred of skin, some hair follicles.”
“Jeremy didn’t, uh, have a hand in …”
The hint of a frown. “I assure you, Carson. The deceased was a total stranger, another lost soul delivered to the morgue.”
“It’s why Jeremy’s been noncommittal about when he’d come to Florida, talked about how laying a foundation took time. You were waiting for the perfect corpse.”
She nodded. “Decomposed past visual identification and of correct height and gender.”
I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall, considering the process. “And in law enforcement agencies across the land, Jeremy’s pictures are traveling from wall to wastebasket, his computer records dragged to the trash. Case closed. The hunt is over.”
“Jeremy Ridgecliff is dead, Carson, which means Jeremy Ryder is free.”
I nodded and turned for the door with much to absorb. I paused and turned back to Ava.
“You violated your professional oath. You misrepresented the facts.”
She was again studying the manual. “Which I have to live with,” she said, not taking her eyes from the book. “Perhaps one day you’ll tell me how it’s done.”
58
I left the morgue unsettled, yet feeling an odd calm. I returned to the department wondering how Ava had felt when she made the switch of Jeremy’s tissue for the man found in the river. Surely she had realized she would be forever changed by the deception. She must have believed it worth the price.
I pictured her with the decayed carcass on the gleaming autopsy table, water rinsing beneath the ragged, necrotic flesh. Were other autopsy tables nearby? I wondered, pathologists speaking into recorders, assistants weighing, marking, bagging, maybe a cop nearby to observe a procedure.
I wondered if the substitution had been dangerous, Ava having to slip Jeremy’s tissue from her clothes as the dead man’s sample was pocketed, her face a mask of innocence as her fingers broke the law.
Was her face as calm and natural as Gary Ocampo making a quarter disappear from my closed palm? Gary Ocampo holds my hand at the bottom, touches it on the top. I know exactly where the quarter is, and yet I do not. All my attention is diverted, exactly how he wants things. He’s pulling the old sleight-of-hand switcheroo.
Switcheroo.
Gary Ocampo sneezes into the tissue, closes his hand around it, turns to the wastebasket, opens his hand and the tissue is flung into the can at my side …
