by J. A. Kerley
Bam answered the wood. Then again, bam.
An object hammered her side and she grunted with pain. Something skittered across the floor. “HELP!” she screamed again. “PLEASE HELP M—” A punch to her sternum knocked the words from her mouth. Again, she felt the breath of something moving past her head. She dropped to a knee and held her hands against whatever seemed to be hitting her. The footsteps again, the hissing, poisonous voice …
“Then the LORD rained upon Sodom, And upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven …”
Something struck Teresa’s face and she tumbled backwards in a spray of blood and pain. Her hand went to her nose but it was no longer there, just a flat lump of shrieking pain. When she fought to her knees something hit her in the side of the neck and the blackness turned red, then white, then black again.
8
Belafonte stared into her Earl Grey. I think it’s where her eyes needed to rest after studying Kylie Sandoval’s morgue photos.
“Who’d do such a thing?” she said.
I pushed my remaining pastries aside. Seeing the shots again had killed my appetite. “Maybe the perp thought burning the body would hide Kylie’s ID, or destroy evidence of his involvement. Or it could be darker.”
The eyes lifted from the mug. “What does that mean?”
“The burning satisfied a psychological need. There was also damage to the skull and the face. The postmortem will tell the full story.”
“When’s that?”
I looked at my watch. “Forty-seven minutes. We’ve got a ringside seat.”
She froze, eyes wide. “I’ve never, uh … do I have to be present?”
“I can go it alone, but one of us should be there.” I stood and shuffled the photos into my briefcase, clicked it shut. “I’ll get in contact later in the day and let you know what we found.”
Belafonte and I walked back through to the atrium where she went her way, me mine. I had no ill feelings toward Belafonte for leaving me alone with the post. Harry hadn’t cared much for the procedure himself, part of our division of labors: I took the bulk of the autopsies, and Harry handled the majority of courtroom work, testifying in cases we’d worked. It was a perfect division since he resembled a mustached James Earl Jones down to a bass rumble of a voice and, when it came to resembling actors, I’d been more often aligned with Jason Bateman. My courtroom testimony tended to meander into concept and supposition, while Harry’s sounded like a pronouncement from Zeus.
And, truth be told, I liked to look into the machinery that was us, the bags and tubes and glistening orbs of multicolored meats that formed our engineering. I was fascinated by the intricacy of the systems and at the same time awed that this assemblage of material – not much different from the systems that powered pigs and cattle – had managed to create glorious paintings, send men to the moon, discover subtle mathematics, build towering structures, create majestic symphonies … There was something different in the us. I had no idea what it was, but suspected we contained more than complex chemical engineering in bipedal configuration.
Those weren’t, however, my thoughts as I pulled into the morgue lot, the sun high in a sky of scudding cumulus, the advance ranks of a nearing shower; I was thinking only of a dark cocoon found on a lonely strand of beach, stinking of scorched meat and chemical accelerant and sending some poor beachcomber screaming back to his hotel, pausing only to vomit in the sand.
Dr Ava Davanelle was on duty and I found her preparing in an autopsy suite, pulling the blue gown into place. The body was on the table, a mosaic of red flesh mingled with char, the burning uneven. Ava looked up, saw me, registered surprise.
“I thought I’d see someone from Miami-Dade.”
“They’re busy.”
It took two beats to register. “Menendez,” she said.
“The cops are running full-tilt boogie.”
“I met Ms Menendez a couple months ago at a city-county function. She seemed both smart and sweet, a lovely person.”
“She had a lot of friends,” I said, looking down at the corpse. “But this girl had very few, I think.”
“But she now has you,” Dr Davanelle said quietly, picking up a wicked-looking scalpel. I walked to a chair against the white wall and sat. My history with Ava Davanelle had started a dozen years ago in Mobile, where she had been my girlfriend, a newbie pathologist with lyrical hands and a fierce addiction to alcohol. She was drawn into a case I was working and almost killed. Ava had also met my brother Jeremy back then, when he was incarcerated at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior and being studied by Dr Evangeline Prowse, who was fascinated by my brother’s brilliance.
Time and events travel roads we can never suppose. Jeremy had escaped from the Institute years ago, placed on every Wanted listing between Mexico City and Nome, Alaska. Last year a man of Jeremy’s height and weight had been pulled from a river in Chicago, the corpse’s DNA matching my brother’s. He was now dead and long gone from the listings.
Or maybe not.
In reality, my brother – after a lengthy hiding-out period in an isolated cabin in the Kentucky mountains – was now living in a huge house in Key West and picking stocks based on a simple but bizarre equation developed during his years in hiding: The financial market had but two true states, scared child or blustering drunkard, all else just states of transition.
He’d made millions from his insight.
And the DNA sample taken from the corpse in Chicago? It had been supplied by the pathologist performing the autopsy, one Dr Ava Davanelle, who had been my brother’s secret girlfriend for years, though both Jeremy and Ava disdained the characterization, saying their relationship was far more complex.
“Interesting,” I heard Ava say, looking up as she leaned over a resected section of upper arm, the bicep splayed open as she studied through a magnifying lens. She cued a communications link to the room where the techs worked. Seconds later a ponytailed young woman in a lab jacket whisked through the door and nearly ran to Ava, who handed over bags of labeled tissue.
“Stain and check these for hemorrhage, Branson. I’m also looking for differentiation between intravital and postmortem trauma. Look close.”
“You found something?” I said.
“Just a supposition,” she said, turning back to her work.
After an hour – Ava slicing, weighing organs and calling for more tests – I went outside to breathe an atmosphere not thick with the smell of death and antiseptic. The rain had passed though, leaving only small patches of cloud in the eastern sky, clear blue above. In the distance the jagged Miami skyline seemed to glisten in the renewed air and I walked the grounds and the nearby streets for an hour, grabbing a coffee from a street vendor and sipping it beneath a tall King palm in a tiny streetside park, the fronds swaying and rattling against one another.
When I returned, Ava was closing the body, the heavy stitches straight from Frankenstein. The top of Kylie Sandoval’s head lay beside her on the table.
“Well?” I said.
Ava replaced the bowl of skull as she spoke. “I’ve identified four sites struck by a blunt instrument, two on the head, two on the body. I suspect it was one of these blows that broke her nose, another that shattered the left temple, creating intercranial hemorrhaging. I think I’ll find more.”
Ava shed the gown and mask and I followed her to her office, utilitarian, shelves of medical and forensics texts and a simple desk and chair. There was a single large painting on one wall behind her desk, a streetscape of Key West in thick swaths of impasto oil, the houses dark and hunkered shapes, the twilight sky dappled with fierce strokes of orange and red, one slender palm bridging earth and sky, as still as a patch of paint can be, yet somehow moving within the frame of the picture.
It was a stunning work and my brother had painted it, claiming his move to Key West had brought out his artistic side. I had never been able to fathom the inside of his head, and his sudden ability to paint further scrambled
my understanding.
Ava studied her notes. “I need analysis from other tissue samples before I confirm my suspicions of multiple trauma sites. Should take a few hours, same with the tox screens, and I’ll call you with the results. They might be quite interesting.”
9
I was crossing the parking lot when my phone rang: Belafonte.
“Can we speak?” she said.
“We are.”
“I mean … meet somewhere? I really need to talk to you, hopefully today.”
“Where are you?”
“Flagami, tracking down information on Kylie.”
“Gimme an address. Preferably a bar where I can get a decent beer.”
“I’m, uh, in uniform.”
“Go home,” I told her. “And await further instructions.”
I hung up and pressed the fifth number down on my speed dial. Three rings.
“Carson, what’s up?” Vince Delmara. He sounded beat.
“What did you do to me, Vince?”
“Belafonte? She’s all I could find, Carson. Really. Every detective or soon-to-be detective is beating the streets on Menendez. Did you see any news show last night? All they talked about was lack of progress. We’re in crash-and-burn mode here.”
I sighed. “OK, Vince. But I gotta problem with Officer B.”
“I figured. She’s smart like a whip, but I think she was born with a broomstick up her—”
“Not that. She’s in uniform.”
It took a second for Vince’s frazzled mind to grasp. “Shit, of course. I’ll get her reclassified as undercover. Anything else?”
“Call and tell her when it’s done. I’m not sure she likes the sound of my voice.”
Twenty minutes later my phone rang, Belafonte. “Detective Delmara just phoned. He said—”
“I know. Jump into street clothes and let’s reconvene near a beer tap.”
I drove over and parked outside a decent-looking place in West Buena Vista named the Sea Breeze – something of a stretch, since the bay was about fifteen blocks distant, but perhaps they meant during hurricanes. Belafonte pulled in two minutes later, driving a venerable Crown Victoria, a former cruiser, given that I could see the logo beneath the fading paint job supposed to cover the previous usage. I stepped out as she did, finding she’d transformed from officer to female, the creased brown uni now blue slacks and a white safari shirt buttoned to the top. Both the slacks and shirt had been pressed rigid. Her shoes were pumps with a two-inch heel. She looked like an advertisement for Sears, except Sears models tended to look happy.
I passed by the bar, the woman behind it offering a smile and a “What you folks need? I’ll bring it over.”
I glanced at the taps and I ordered an Eldorado IPA from the local Wynwood Brewing Co. Belafonte said, “A glass of water, Pellegrino if possible.”
The joint was mostly empty and I angled toward a booth in a far corner, sat as Belafonte followed suit. I stared at her and offered my widest smile, receiving only an anxious look.
“There’s something I wanted to say, Detective Ryder.”
I stuck my fingers in my ears.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I can’t hear you. My fingers are in my ears.”
“Have you gone daft?”
“I’m not going to listen until you order a freaking drink, Belafonte. Unless you’re a confirmed teetotaler or a recovering alcoholic, we’re going to sit here like two standard-issue cops and sip an honest and refreshing beverage while we talk.”
“It’s not professional to drink during duty,” she said.
“You’re now plainclothes, Officer Belafonte. It’s not professional to get drunk on duty, or otherwise impaired. I expect this case to take us to some pretty low places. We can’t go into a joint where people are banging down whiskey shots and order Pellegrino.”
The big eyes challenged me as the waitress arrived with one beer, one fizzy Italian H20. “Will that be all?” she asked.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Belafonte said, the eyes holding on me. “Please be so kind as to bring me a Rum Collins, light.”
“Atta girl,” I said. “Now, didn’t you have something to discuss?”
The big eyes dropped, came back up. “I should have gone with you to the procedure, Detective Ryder. I know nothing of autopsies. And never will unless I attend one.”
“Stop by the morgue any day and tell Dr Davanelle I sent you. Now, what do you know about Kylie? Did she have a pimp?”
A nod. “It may have been why she needed to get back to the street. Fear of the guy. Or maybe he had the drugs.”
“Did she, Kylie, mention a name?”
“Someone named Swizzle. Should we go out and try and find him?”
“We don’t go out, not yet. First we ride on the coattails of others.”
My call went to Juarez, a detective with Miami Vice. He was dedicated and bright and a favorite of Vince Delmara.
“Swizzle?” Juarez said. “You’re probably talking about Shizzle, Shizzle Diamond. Real name’s T’Shawn Matthews. Collects runaways and confused girls from the streets and bus stations. He’s good at being what they need, uncle or daddy or friend, then takes a few weeks to feed ’em and fuck ’em and hook ’em on heroin.”
“I think there’s a rap song there.”
“I ain’t writing it. Matthews – I ain’t using that idiot pimp name – rides his herd hard and moves them around, sometimes as far north as Orlando. But mostly it’s Liberty City or the sadder parts of Flagami and so forth. He might run ’em over to the Beach, but he tends to venues with dark alleys and cheap motels, usually watching from a car or the window of a bar, sipping brandy while his sad little troupe services johns.”
“Any idea where I can find this particular bag of garbage?” I asked.
I heard a hand cover the phone, a question yelled out. After a minute the hand fell away. “Feinstein says he saw Matthews a couple days back at Black’s Lounge, lower Liberty, probably got his crew working there for a while.”
I thanked Juarez and pocketed the phone. “Drink up,” I told Belafonte. “We’re going hunting.”
We headed outside and I saw the Crown Vic. “Who gave you that junker? I can see the goddamn cop logo under the paint.”
“Motor pool. It’s all they had.”
“We’ll use my wheels,” I said. “Jump in.”
I drive a green Land Rover Defender with every possible option for safari use: racks, grille and headlamp shields, spare tire bolted to the roof, heavy-duty suspension. It had been confiscated from a dope dealer and though it rode a bit rough, it was, I figured, the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country and if a case ever took me to the top of Kilimanjaro, I was ready.
Night was deepening as we went to the corner where Shizzle Diamond had been spotted. It was not a neighborhood Miami would feature in a tourist ad, unless the tourists were looking for peep shows, strippers and the uglier side of street life, as demonstrated by the wino puking into the gutter as we passed.
“Get close to me,” I told Belafonte. “Whisper in my ear and play with my hair.”
“What?”
“We need to look like a guy who’s just picked up a woman. Or maybe a guy and a woman wanting a third hand at cards.”
“Cards?” She thought a moment. “Oh.”
Reluctantly, she scooted as close as the shifter allowed. Her hand patted my head like I was a Welsh Corgi. “Try for passion,” I said.
She moved her head closer and twirled a lock of my hair. “Is this how you behaved with your male partners?”
“When it was necessary.”
Which was true. Harry and I had several times gone hand-in-hand into gay bars or situations to hunt for a perp or gather information. In one memorable instance I had donned a dress and wig to play a cross-dresser, Harry dubbing me “the ugliest woman he’d never been with”.
Thus engaged in mock passion, Belafonte and I cruised toward one of the bars supposed to co
ntain the pimp. There were two damsels of the dark on the street, but there were recessed doorways in the buildings and alleys and I figured there might be ladies back there, either waiting or working on a customer.
“There’s a bottle under your seat,” I told Belafonte. “Grab it.”
She reached down and found a half-full pint of bourbon. “You’re going to drink?”
“Pop the cap and bring it to your lips. You don’t need to open your mouth, but we need to look like we’re partying. Hurry. If we’re made they’ll slide back into the shadows. Or Matthews might pull them off the street.”
She screwed the cap off the bottle, appeared to take a hit. She passed the bottle over and I did the same and pulled to the curb beside a small alley. Across the street a woman of Latina extraction – girl, really – in gold lamé shorts, a top little more than a black bra and net hose studied us. I gave her a wink and took another pull from the bottle. She waved with three coy fingers.
“Now what?” Belafonte whispered.
“According to Juarez, these are some of Matthews’ girls, and that means he should be in one of these bars.”
“Why then are we here?”
I kept my eyes on the hooker as if appraising her, talking to Belafonte with as little lip-motion as possible. “I don’t want to brace him on his turf. I want him out here.”
“How’s that going to happen?”
“I’m gonna run a play on these folks,” I said.
“A play?”
I winked, time to show the kid how the pros did things. “Stay put, watch how it’s done. I’ll have Shizzle-boy out here in two minutes.”
I half climbed, half fell from the Rover, recovered and meandered toward the hooker. “Hey, babuh,” I slurred. “My fren’ and I are looking for a li’l spice.”
A smile below the street-wise eyes; in this area I figured alley stand-ups and front-seat oral was more the norm. “I can party with y’all,” she said. “Two hundred an hour.”
“Hunh-unh,” I said. “I just need you to tell us where we can find a pretty white lady. We’re not into spicks.”
