The Death Collectors

by J. A. Kerley

Piss-it was departmental slang for the PSIT, or Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team, a specialty unit with a name longer than its roster: Harry and me. It was the one per cent of our jobs.

  Harry sighed. “Don’t start, Roy.”

  Trent thought a moment. “Or how about the Wizards of Weirdness?” He chuckled and started to invent another title, saw the look in Harry’s eyes, remembered his business with the patrol guys and retreated.

  Our bit part in a too-familiar drama over, Harry and I climbed back into the car. The Orange Lady’s case would be cleared fast, we figured; the poor woman had pissed someone off and he or she had gotten revenge. Backshooting a fleeing woman in broad daylight was irrational, an act of emotion, not brains. Trent and Bridges would check the victim’s acquaintances, find who she’d recently irritated. Nail the case shut.

  Bang. Just like that.

  The awards ceremony was at a downtown hotel. By the time we arrived, only carafes of tepid coffee remained on the banquet tables. Harry and I slipped to our table and nodded apologies. At the dais centering the front of the large, low-ceilinged room, an overdressed woman from the Sanitation Department clutched a plaque to her bosom, uttering immortal words about landfills.

  “…like to thank all the microbial organisms who work so hard at breaking down organic waste materials…”

  Mayor Lyle Edmunds stood beside her, a frozen smile on his ruddy face. The Sanitation woman finished her soliloquy and padded back to her table. The Mayor regained the microphone, but no words came from the sound system. He tapped the mic with a finger, was rewarded with a screech of feedback. Two hundred faces winced, mine included. The Mayor leaned forward, tried again.

  “—esting, testing. This thing working again? All right. Once again I’d like to thank y’all for coming today, my chance to honor folks who’ve made a difference in the quality of life in the beautiful Port City, a year in which this administration also made a difference by…”

  Most members of our table watched the dais, obliged to appear transfixed by the Mayor’s oratory. At the head of the table - if a round table can have a head - was Chief of Police Burston Plackett. Plackett was flanked by four other members of the police brass. The lowerrent side of the table was Lieutenant Tom Mason, Harry, and me.

  The Mayor wound down. He studied the table of awards beside him, lifted a pair of plaques.

  “Two awards - it’s us,” I whispered to Harry. “What should I say in my acceptance speech?”

  “Let the Mayor handle the speeching and preaching, Carson. Just grab the wood and beat your feet back to the table.” Harry frowned at me. The frown said, Don’t go near the microphone.

  The Mayor tapped the mic again, leaned into it. “My next award goes to the Mobile Police Officer of the Year. This year I’m proud to recognize a team effort: two members of Mobile’s finest, instrumental in tracking down the morgue killer a while back, as well as Joel Adrian a couple years ago. Together, detectives Nautilus and Ryder form a special team known as the PSIT, or Psychopatho-ological and Socio-socio-sociolo-…doggone, that’s a mouthful. Let me just say that these two fine gentlemen are living proof that no city surpasses Mobile in the quality of its…”

  The Mayor soared off on another flight of political self-indulgence spurred by the media. They huddled to the side, reporters, videographers, and a photographer from the Mobile Register. I saw the reporter from Channel 14 staring at me. When I stared back, she smiled and turned her gaze to the Mayor. I recalled her name as DeeDee Danbury. Trim, blonde, medium height, somewhat outsized features, eyes especially. When Harry and I’d been in the brief glare of camera lights, Danbury had the voice closest to my ear and microphone closest to my face. I didn’t much care for either effect.

  Two minutes of humid ventings later, the Mayor looked around the room, saw the slender white guy sitting beside the big, square-shouldered black guy.

  “I’d like to introduce detectives Harry Nautilus and Carson Ryder. Come receive your awards, officers.”

  Applause rang out. I followed Harry’s mustard-yellow suit to the dais. His shirt was lavender, his tie red. Harry liked color, but that didn’t make him good at it. We stepped up, shook the Mayor’s hand, took our awards. Someone yelled, “Hold for a photo.” I angled my head, steeled my jaw, and did my best Serious Crimefighter pose. Cameras flashed. I tucked my plaque against my side and started from the dais. The microphone floated in front of my face and despite Harry’s admonition I couldn’t resist leaning in for a few words.

  “First off, I’d like to thank the academy…”

  The microphone squealed like chisels on sheet metal. Everyone winced, several people ducked. In the center of the room a startled waiter dropped a full tray of dishes, china shards skittering across the floor. Harry growled and jabbed his thumb into my kidney, propelling me from the dais and my moment of glory.

  Chapter 2

  The photo taken at the Mayor’s bash ran the following day, Tuesday. I was off rotation and didn’t see the photograph until Wednesday, coming in early to whittle at paperwork. Some wag had taped the clipped-out photo to my chair, attaching a Post-it scrawled, Super Detective to the Rescue.

  In the photo, Harry and I clutched our plaques, the Mayor between us. Harry had a wisp of smile beneath his bulldozer-blade mustache. My Serious Crimefighter pose made me look like a cross between Cotton Mather and Dudley Do-Right. I shook my head, made a mental note never to accept an award again, and read the text:

  OFFICERS OF THE YEAR HONORED - Mayor Lyle Edmunds presents Mobile Police detectives Harry Nautilus (left) and Carson Ryder (right) with Officers of the Year awards at the Mayor’s annual Recognition Breakfast. Nautilus and Ryder are members of the MPD’s elite Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team, or PSIT, and are considered authorities in the area of serial killers and other psychologically deranged…

  “What you think? They get your good side?” said a molasses-slow voice from behind me. I turned to see Tom Mason smiling, or as close as his crepe-wrinkled face ever managed. “Interesting expression you got, Carson. Intense, I guess you’d call it.”

  I felt my face redden like a school kid caught with a girly mag and flipped the clipping on the desk. Tom said, “We just got a 911 about a body in a motel, the Cozy Cabins. I think it’s got a little weird to it, maybe more than a little. I just got hold of Harry. He’s heading that way now.”

  I stood, reached for my sport jacket. “Weird how, Tom?”

  “Caller wasn’t speaking real good English; I’ll let you see for yourself. Medical Examiner’s there, Forensics is on the way. I told everybody not to worry because I was sending the Officers of the Year. You can bet they got a kick out of that one.”

  The Cozy Cabins was a fading motel comprised of a dozen small units spread across four or five tree-shaded acres. Back in the seventies it had probably been charming, but the city’s sprawl and clutter had metastasized, the units now surrounded by strip malls and bars and “We Carry Your Note” car lots. These days the Cozy Cabins mainly catered to trysting couples, or Johns wanting to take their rented partners somewhere a little nicer than the back seat. I swung into the drive and saw Harry walking into the front cabin, a neon OFFICE sign in the window. I hit the horn. Harry paused in the doorway, turned.

  I yelled, “What’s up?”

  Harry shook his head as if words were insufficient, pointed to the farthest cabin, and stepped inside the office. I drove back to the unit. Parked outside were ME and Forensics vehicles, plus a patrol car, Officer Leighton Withrow leaning against the fender and patting sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief. I pulled behind Withrow and got out. The day was a scorcher and my first non-air-conditioned breath about dropped me to my knees.

  “What’s up, Leighton?” I gasped.

  He nodded toward the cabin. “You better git inside quick, Ryder. They’re about to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.”

  “Happy Birthday?”

  Withrow turned to watch the
traffic on the highway, like it amused him. I walked to the unit, maybe twenty feet square, stucco, needing paint. Forensics supervisor Wayne Hembree stood in the doorway, his back to me. Hembree was a balding, 36-year-old black man with less meat on his bones than a race-bred greyhound. He turned to the sound of my footfalls, a sad smile on his moon-round face.

  “Stuff like this makes it tough for me to eat by candlelight,” he said, stepping aside so I could peek into the room.

  Candles. Dozens of them. On the floor, on the scruffy furniture, atop the bolted-down television. Tubular candles, square candles, octagonal candles, triangles. Some were scented and an olfactory collage thickened the air. Smaller candles had burned to pools of wax, while the bulk of them, larger and thicker, were topped by shivers of flame, bright points in the shadowed room.

  A dozen feet away, centered on the red bedcover, a woman’s naked body lay covered with wilted flowers. Her eyes were huge and white and poured from the sockets, tiny wormlike pupils in the center.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, wondering if her eyes had somehow liquefied. Stepping closer, the horrendous effect was revealed as melted-down white candles over her eyelids, the sockets overflowing with wax, burnt wicks forming her pupils. The wicks stared at me. Her lipsticksmeared mouth sagged open and seemed to be asking, Why me?

  Hembree passed the camera to a Forensics tech, nodded for me to follow, and walked to the body between candles, moving as carefully as a man treading barefoot among glass.

  Her hands crossed over her breastbone, barely visible beneath the roses and lilies and other flowers I couldn’t identify. Cheap rings encircled both thumbs and most of her fingers. In contrast, her dark brown hair was short, conservative, clean; at odds with the rest of her. Wax drippings clung to her hair like petrified tears. Abrasions encircling the woman’s neck suggested ligature strangulation, an angry red collar. There were no other apparent marks or signs of struggle. I smelled rot rising through the sweetness of the flowers. When we return to dust, it’s not a pretty transformation.

  Hembree looked at me. “What age you put her at, Carson?”

  “I’ll say late thirties, early forties.”

  The Forensics tech pressed an invisible button in the air, made a game-show buzzer sound. “Bzzzzt. Wrong answer. Try fifty. At least.” He bent over the body and palpated a bicep. “Good condition, physically, muscle tone is balancing out the ageing. Or was. How many fifty-year-old hookers you see with muscle tone like that?”

  I made a zero with my thumb and forefinger. Most street girls never made fifty, and if they did, looked eighty. I knelt and took the woman’s hand from Hembree, seeing calluses across the palm and fingers. “Working hands,” I noted. “Outside work, and I don’t mean pounding pavement. Check the rings.”

  I slid a couple bucks’ worth of pot metal and glass up the victim’s digit. “Dime-store crap,” I said. “If she’d worn it any length of time there’d be discoloration.”

  “Strange designs,” Hembree said. “Some kind of knot on the one, a sword on the other. A moon on her other hand. And here’s a pentacle.”

  “Satanic? Goth?”

  Hembree lifted the hair behind the victim’s ear. “Found an identifying feature here, Carson.”

  I saw a birthmark near the base of her neck, a quarter-sized splash of claret across the skin. Hembree aimed his penlight into the crease marks at the back of the woman’s neck. There were thin, ruddy lines in the folds, like penstrokes made with rust.

  “Look down here,” he said, aiming the light at the crook of an arm.

  “More of the same,” I said. “What’s the tint from?”

  “Nothing’s certain until we get it to the lab.” Hembree wasn’t big on guessing and having to later recant, though his accuracy made takebacks rare.

  “Come on, Bree, give it out,” I chided, mockpunching his vermicelli bicep. “I won’t hold you to it. What are you thinking?”

  He kept the penlight on the woman’s arm, studying. “I’m thinking the perfect Officer of the Year wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.”

  “Maid find body,” Cozy Cabins manager Saleem Hakkam was telling Harry when I opened the office door to a small room filled with smoke. “Maid scream into office, I drop coffee on floor, call 911. Much scream, maid.”

  Hakkam stood behind a chipped Formica counter sucking a filterless cigarette that smelled like burning shoeshine rags, occasionally tipping ashes into a Dr Pepper can on the counter. The portly Hakkam held the cigarette tightly with three fingers, like he was afraid it would get away.

  “Can we speak to her?” Harry asked.

  Hakkam took a deep drag. “Maid scream. Jump in car, drive. Scream down street.” His words came out punctuated by smoke.

  “When will she be back?”

  Hakkam shook his head sadly. “Scream like that, no come back.”

  “Who rented the room, Mr Hakkam?” Harry asked. “They come in and register?”

  Hakkam looked away. Harry sighed, seeing the picture. “Mr Hakkam, you’re not in any trouble here. Unless you lie to me.”

  Hakkam’s eyes blinked warily through smoke. “No lie at police. Phone call come yesterday after lunch. Want to rent cabin for Tuesday night.”

  We’d both seen this before. “And you don’t know who rented the place?”

  “No see. Come in late.”

  “Payment?” Harry asked.

  “Caller say money in mailbox. I look. Money there. Caller say leave door open, key inside on table. The money good, why not do?”

  “You see the vehicle?”

  “No.”

  “You have the envelope the money came in?”

  “Burn with trash.”

  “The caller - male or female?”

  Hakkam shook his head and put his hand at forehead level. “Voice not up here like woman…” then dropped it to his groin “…not down here like man. In middle.” He shrugged. I suspected the caller had muffled his or her voice.

  Harry said, “How much money did you get paid, Mr Hakkam?”

  “Five hundred dollar.”

  “About ten times the going rate. You figured a dope deal, right? Drugs?”

  Hakkam averted his eyes and sucked another chestful of greasy smoke. I figured his lungs looked like bags of mud.

  “Job is rent cabins, not ask people’s business.”

  He frowned, took one final hit and dropped the tar-soaked butt in the can. It hissed and died, a curl of brown smoke issuing from the opening, like the damned thing didn’t want to give up.

  We walked back to the cabin under tall longleaf pines, the shade meaningless in the heat. The conversation with Hakkam wasn’t unusual in a failing neighborhood. Business was sketchy and he’d happily rented to someone paying a premium for privacy - dope dealers wrapping or distributing product, porn types taping a bottom-drawer flick. Hakkam did exactly as asked, hoping for repeat business.

  We turned the corner to the front of the cabin. Harry froze, grabbed my jacket, and yanked me backwards.

  “Buzzards,” he said, pointing around the corner. “Pooling and drooling.”

  Harry had a rhyming tendency, though some days I’d call it an affliction. In the six years of our friendship, I’d learned to decipher half of what he said. But I’d seen these buzzards before. I peeked around the corner for confirmation.

  Reporters.

  Kept from the cabin by Leighton Withrow, they clustered near the entrance, alerted by police-frequency scanners, or some vestigial instinct that drew them to tragedy like June bugs to a screen door. There were a couple of television stations and radio outlets, a brace of print reporters.

  Harry nodded dolefully. “I see Cunt and Funt from Channel 14 out there.”

  I gave Harry the raised eyebrow. While far from politically correct, Harry wasn’t fond of pejorative classifications. “Uh, who?” I asked.

  “DeeDee Danbury from Channel 14, she’s uh, the C-word lady. There’s some squirrelly little camera guy usually with her; he’
s Funt. It’s what they’re called over at City Hall. By some folks, leastwise.”

  “Funt? That’s the camera guy’s real name?”

  Harry peered around the corner again. “Used to be a TV show called Candid Camera. Folks’d go to stick mail in a box and suddenly a hand reaches out and grabs it, that kind of cheesy schtick. All the time the scene’s being shot from a hidden camera. The guy who thought up the show was named Funt.”

  “The Channel 14 camera guy hides in mailboxes?”

  “The way they work is Cu—, I mean, Danbury, zings in questions hoping to catch folks off guard, Funt shoots pictures of their confusion.”

  “How come you know this Danbury so well? You start watching TV?” Harry was the original Music Man, vinyls of old blues and jazz spreading through his house. He’d only recently - and grudgingly - started collecting CDs. The last time I saw Harry’s television, a ten-inch black and white, it was a doorstop.

  “She jammed me up three-four years back. I let slip a dead body was a heavyweight dope boy, tried to suck it back a minute later. She said OK, then later that night I hear the name on the news.”

  “And?”

  “What I didn’t know was DEA had a lock on this guy, tracking a shipment to him from Colombia. When it hit the airwaves the guy was toast, the runners dove underground. Without the coverage, the shipment would have sailed into the arms of the feds.”

  I winced. “Ouch.”

  “I about got assigned to traffic control at tractor pulls,” Harry said, peeking around the corner. “Still can’t look at that woman without my teeth grinding. “OK, Carson, let’s run it and gun it.”

  We came around the corner moving fast. The reporters dove at us the second we hit their sights.

  “Who’s in there?”

  “No comment.”

  “Was it a robbery?”

  “No comment.”

  “Any ideas on motive?”

  “No comment.”

  We ran the gauntlet with heads lowered; eye contact increased their frenzy, blood to a shark. Answering questions wasn’t our bailiwick anyway; the department had flacks to make up crap by the barge load - we always had our hands full dealing with the truth.