Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

  “With skinheads it’s skulls, swastikas, the usual Aryan-supremacy garbage,” I said, nodding that I’d seen all I needed. “Not Lepidoptera.”

  “I also found a horizontal band of mucilage twenty-one centimeters below her navel,” Clair said. “Maybe the killer tried taping her to the chair and went to rope when the tape didn’t hold.”

  “Where was she found?”

  Hembree said, “The city dump, sitting at the edge of a sea of garbage. The body was tied upright in a chair, like staring out into the dump.”

  The information made a surreal picture in my head. “Killed there, you think?”

  “Dead at least a day when she was bound to the chair, Carson. But the ligature marks on her wrists and ankles are scabbed over in places.”

  “She was held prisoner.”

  Clair nodded. “For at least two days before being killed.”

  I stared at the body, seemingly in good health and attractive, if you ignored the red hollows below her brows and the contused breasts. “Who caught the call?” I asked.

  Harry said, “Tate and Bryson. But …”

  “But Piss-it has ownership now,” I said, not happy with the thought. Harry and I were members of a special unit named PSIT, the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team, Piss-it for short. We were the sole members, calling in specialists as needed. Murders appearing the work of severely damaged psyches landed on our desks.

  We retreated to Clair’s office to wait out the postmortem. On her desk was a floral vase the size of a half-bushel basket, dwarfed beneath botanical pyrotechnics: roses white and pink, sprigs of dogwood and azalea, camellias, sunflowers the diameter of saucers. Clair’s hobby was gardening. I figured since she spent her days with death, coaxing life from the ground was another aspect of her exquisite balance.

  Harry and I opened briefcases to review other cases and drink first-rate French roast coffee with chicory. Clair paid the difference between primo coffee and the budget brands of most official venues. Since divorcing old-money Zane Peltier years ago, Clair was fixed for life. She worked because she loved her profession.

  I was into my second cup of coffee when I noticed Harry studying me.

  I held up my hand. “Only death will keep me from attending your family reunion on Saturday. I’ll do it even though we’re not related, I’ll know almost no one there, and it’s way the hell over in Mississip—”

  I was interrupted by Clair, stepping into her office and scowling at my shoes on her desk. I looked at my feet with how-did-they-get-there? surprise before dropping them to the floor.

  “Did you determine when the eyes were removed?” I asked.

  “Three to four days back.” She paused. “It’s the same timeline I’d put on the breast damage.”

  I considered what Clair’s words meant. “Kept as a prisoner for five to seven days, beaten, her eyes removed, then left alive for two or three days. Is that it, Clair?” I kept my voice even, forcing down the rage at what human beings could do to one another.

  “Don’t think about it, Carson,” Clair said quietly, her hand coming to rest on my shoulder. “Like I’m trying to do.”

  Chapter 4

  Treeka lay in bed holding a bag of frozen peas to her nose and right eye, the malleable packages conforming to a bruised face better than ice cubes. Tommy had beaten her yesterday after the scene in the grocery, her torso mostly, where the marks didn’t show. But this morning, when he’d started goading her, calling her a lesbian, she’d screamed out, Why do women scare you so goddamn much?

  He’d lost it completely and started punching her face, howling he’d kill her. She’d done like usual, curling into herself until the storm passed, grateful to have again made it through alive.

  Treeka stared one-eyed at the ceiling, feeling melt-water mingle with her tears. She watched her shameful history parade across the ceiling like a low-budget documentary: molested by her uncle from age nine until he died drunk in a car crash when she was thirteen. Her first high-school crush, Carl, slapping her when she looked at other guys, Treeka the one to apologize. She’d won a two-year nursing scholarship, her then-boyfriend, Lane, forbidding her to attend school, Treeka agreeing, terrified of losing Lane’s angry love. She lost it anyway when Lane ran off with Treeka’s best friend, but by then the educational opportunity had passed and Lane had drugged away all the money she’d saved cleaning rooms at a local motel.

  She’d vowed to never go out with men again. Never, ever, no-way. But after two years, Tommy appeared, and Treeka figured she could be forgiven for thinking he’d been sent by God. They’d met at church, a Pentecostal outpost in a trailer north of Estes Park, Tommy a thirty-four-year-old deacon, Treeka twenty-five and the guest of a friend from the Wal-Mart where they worked as cashiers.

  Tommy’d been kind and gentle through the three-month courtship, shy even. It had been his idea that they not be intimate until after the wedding. The newlyweds went to Branson for the honeymoon, renting a cabin in the Ozark Mountains. They’d got tickets for a show at Presley’s Country Jubilee, and Treeka had proudly put on a new dress: scarlet red, scoop-necked, and three inches shorter in the hem than she usually wore – it was a honeymoon, after all.

  “No,” Tommy said, scowling like she was selling herself under a light on a city street corner. “You get something else on, now.”

  It was a command, the first of many.

  The movie in Treeka’s head fast-forwarded to yesterday’s beating and she shut off the projector. Flipping the bag of peas, she replaced it on her swollen eye; another day for the big sunglasses. She figured Tommy made her put them on so he didn’t have to look at what he did, not that he’d see anyway, passed out in the hammock out back and snoring.

  He’d wake up soon enough. He always woke up.

  But Saturday was coming, and since it was a fishing day Treeka would get hours of blessed relief. Several times a month Tommy joined buddies from Estes Park and they’d fish a lake by Silverthorne, over fifty miles away. The earliest he’d ever gotten back was nine at night. Even better, the mountains blocked cell reception and he couldn’t call and check on her. This time, with the fishing trip falling on a Saturday, Tommy would be staying out even later.

  Treeka planned to hop a bus and head to Boulder, to that place by the University of Colorado. She seen it when she’d snuck into Boulder three weeks back, a plain brown house on a block populated by student housing, a store selling earth-friendly sandals, a bike shop, and a dark-windowed bar.

  It was the sign that had riveted her attention:

  WOMEN’S CRISIS CENTER OF BOULDER

  Treeka had walked around the block five times before finally screwing up the courage to walk to the door. Reaching for the door knob, her breath had stopped in her throat and she backed away, looking side to side, knowing it had been a trick and she’d see Tommy’s big loud truck roaring up, him knowing about the trips to Boulder and waiting for her to make her move.

  “I see every thing you do, Treek. You can’t get away from me …”

  But that night, when Tommy stumbled back to the ranch past midnight mumbling about a cooler full of fish that needed cleaning, it seemed he hadn’t seen a thing.

  A center for women? Treeka wondered, holding the peas to her face. What could it mean? What did they do?

  Chapter 5

  Harry and I spent the next few days working the Jane-Doe-from-the-dump case – we’d started calling her butterfly Lady – but the body remained unidentified. Though we’d put out a description via the news media, the only calls had been from earnest folks wanting to help but having little to add, and cranks convinced it was the work of space aliens or terrorists.

  We did get three confessions from men who were at the department within hours of the first broadcast. Sad, fidgety men who showed up whenever a woman died violently and we were seeking suspects. Their confessions were made with angry eyes and hands clenching and unclenching as they described their victim’s last minutes.


  “I killed her, Detective Ryder. She was a conniving, castrating bitch and had to die.”

  “How did you kill her, Randy?”

  “I used a knife. A hunting knife with a serrated blade. I told the slut she’d never be able to spit on me again and I stuck that knife in her filthy heart.”

  “How many women have you confessed to killing in the past decade, Randy? Eight? Ten?”

  “I really killed this one, Detective Ryder, I swear I did. She was too dirty to live.”

  I never understood what made these men confess, except they seemed desperate to explain evil things women had done to them and describe the killings in lavish, though incorrect, detail. They made Harry angry and they made me sick, but there was nothing to do but listen until assured it was the usual situation, then show these babbling and broken machines the door, gone until the next grisly murder of a woman.

  Saturday arrived: Harry’s family reunion. We drove to a church nestled in the pines in backwoods Mississippi. Beside the white church was a picnic area on gently rolling land, folding tables set in the sun-dappled shade of live oaks and sycamores. A line of slash pines ran to a distant grove.

  I got crushed in the iron-hard hug of Harry’s older sister, Molly, a big-boned woman with a yodel for a laugh and a way of making you feel like her day wasn’t complete until you stepped into it. Like Harry, Molly went for color, her dress resembling a canvas from one of Jackson Pollock’s happier days. We joked around until Molly went to yodel and hug some new arrivals into submission. I leant against the church to sip a cup of overly sweet lemonade and cast an eye over the laughing, backslapping throng, the loose-limbed gaits of relaxation, eyes-wide joy at meeting others in the clan. The children were happy and polite, the families tight, everyone exuding an air of comfort in their skins which, taken as a whole, seemed prosperity in its richest form.

  “Hello, Detective Ryder. I heard I’d see you here.”

  I spun to see the young cop who had led me across Mobile like I was welded to her rear bumper. The uniform had been traded for white hiking shorts and a safari-style blouse with bright mother-of-pearl buttons. Long café au lait legs ran to sleek pink-and-red cross-trainers. Atop her short natural was a blue ball cap stating MPD Police Academy. My mind raced to place the face, again drawing a fat blank. After our bizarre meeting I’d figured on looking up my preternaturally informed rescuer, but the savaged woman from the dump had stolen my time.

  “You’re sure we’ve met?” I said. “Before the race to the morgue?”

  “Positive.”

  “You made mention of us, uh, kissing,” I said. “You were making that up, I take it?”

  “We kissed and hugged,” she proclaimed. “It was lovely.”

  I stared, feeling like I’d been pasted in a Dalí painting. A strand of handholding children raced past, stretched out like a line, and it hit me that a family reunion was a string that led into the past. I studied my companion, searched my memory, and finally saw mayhem centered around a pin-the-tail game taped to a wall.

  “A party on Baywell Avenue,” I laughed, relieved at finding the answer. “Two dozen screaming kids running in circles and wearing party hats. You wore a princess-model topper, a pink cone and veil.”

  She grinned. “You kissed my hand, gave me a hug, and said I was the prettiest princess ever.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t recall your name, Princess …?”

  She extended her slender hand. “Reinetta Early. Reinetta Nautilus Early. It was my twelfth birthday party. Uncle Harry stopped by and brought you along. You were in uniform and couldn’t stay because you had to get back to work.”

  “Now it’s making sense,” I said. “The other stuff you mentioned …”

  Intuition v. logic. Poetry. The ladies.

  She smiled. “Must have been overheard at the Police Academy. Or elsewhere.”

  “Like good ol’ Uncle Harry?” I suggested.

  She did the lip-zip motion.

  “Harry never mentioned a niece in the department,” I said.

  “He was respecting my wishes. Our family connection might lead to me getting special treatment.”

  It took me aback. Most recruits with kin in the department would have used the connection like a backstage pass. I was getting to like this kid when the object of our conversation walked up, slapped a hand on my shoulder, and presented me with a can in a foam insulator bearing the logo of the New Orleans Saints. Beer, bless my mind-reading partner.

  “I discovered your secret, Harry,” I said, aiming the can toward Reinetta Early. “An empire of Nautilae is usurping the MPD.”

  “You had to find out sometime,” Harry said, sotto voce. “Just keep our kinship under your hat. Rein’s afraid it’ll –”

  A chubby, jolly woman by the picnic tables yelled “Rein!” and beaconed our comrade to view a photo in one of the many albums scattered across the white tables.

  Reinetta Early touched my hand, said, “See you gentlemen later.” She winked and spun away.

  “You could have told me,” I said to Harry, “that you had a niece enrolled at the Police Academy.”

  Harry looked into the trees, shaking his head.

  “I probably would have, Carson. If I’d known about it myself.”

  Chapter 6

  It was Saturday, sneaking-into-Boulder-day. Treeka crouched in a stand of trees beside the two-lane highway until she saw the bus cresting the hill in the distance before jumping out and waving it to a stop.

  The door closed and Treeka made a fast check of the passengers, though she had scant fear of recognition: the only people Tommy allowed Treeka to befriend were bible-thumpers from their church. Boulder had stores that sold marijuana, restaurants that didn’t believe in meat, and couples of the same sex kissing right out on the street. Everyone at the Parch Creek Pentecostal Church held that the Devil had poked his finger up through his roof one day and it broke through at Boulder. The congregation went to Denver instead, which was bad, but not a vent pipe from Hell.

  Treeka made her way to a seat, happy for the locale’s wide-ranging public-transportation system. Tommy had sold Treeka’s red Corolla one month after the union, saying too many bad things happened to women out on their own. After three months of a straitjacket existence on the eighty-acre ranch, Treeka had steeled up her courage and caught a bus into Boulder, eighteen miles away.

  Today would start like usual, Treeka figured. She’d wander Pearl Street, enjoying the happy faces of the tourists and listening to the street musicians playing guitars and trumpets and didgeridoos, long Australian horns with low, sad voices. Or she’d walk up to the Hill, the university area, and watch the faces of young college girls, their eyes bright and hopeful.

  It was on the Hill where she’d seen the words on that little white sign outside the brown house:

  WOMEN’S CRISIS CENTER OF BOULDER

  Can I do it today? Treeka wondered as the trees flowed by the side of the bus. Can I walk to the door, turn the knob, and step inside?

  “So your very own niece joins the academy, goes through all the training, and becomes a Mobile cop?” I asked Harry. “All without telling you?”

  He rolled his eyes. “She was in Oxford, last I’d heard. Going to the University of Mississippi, pre-law. Then I find out she got an address in Mobile to fulfill residency requirements, applied to the academy. Naturally, I discovered all this after she was on the force for two weeks.”

  “Congratulations. You must have been a helluvan influence.”

  He grunted. “She’s a kid, Carson. She should be in college.”

  Harry looked across the lawn. I followed his eyes to Reinetta Early. There was something coltish in her motions, gangly but graceful, framed in laughter as she carried a bowl of salad to a table, chattering with the women. But she seemed to appear a lot older to me than she did to Harry.

  Harry was summoned by a group of men beside the horseshoe court for arbitration on a leaner. I found a sturdy live oak to rest against,
sipping beer and watching women trade photos, pointing at the pictures with bright smiles on their faces as snippets of conversation blew past.

  “… look how she’s grown in just a few short …”

  “… Teri and Shaun’s new house in Memphis has a …”

  “… so handsome in his graduation gown. Where will he …”

  My childhood photos were mainly in my mind, portraits dark with tones of fear. My father was a civil engineer who specialized in building bridges, an irony, since his pathological insecurity and anger cut chasms between everyone in our family. My mother was a mouse of a woman who pretended to a storybook life; when my father began his insane rants she would shuffle to her room to sew wedding dresses, the grinding of the sewing machine obscuring sounds beyond her door.

  My brother Jeremy, six years my elder, was my hero, loose-limbed and blond, with a piecing intellect and gentle demeanor behind his blue eyes. But he bore the brunt of our father’s savagery and, at age sixteen lured the man into a nearby woods and tore him apart with a knife. Jeremy escaped detection and went to college, but was later implicated in the horrific murders of five women. Judged insane, he had been institutionalized, escaping under mysterious circumstances three years ago.

  I was mulling dark thoughts when a voice arrived at my shoulder, Reinetta Early.

  “I suppose Harry’s been telling you what a screw-up I am, moving to Mobile and joining the police force instead of continuing with school.”

  I took the diplomatic route, smiling and saying nothing.

  “He thinks I’d have graduated college, spent two years as a female Clarence Darrow, then ascended to the Supreme Court. The truth is I’d be sitting at a desk surrounded by a gaggle of other lawyers.”

  “Gaggle?” I asked. “Is that the collective?”

  She stuck a finger toward the back of her throat. “Gag-gle.”