Actually, she had not known the girl was quite so well- connected; still, beyond this indisputably political fact, the corpse was so damnably mannequinlike in appearance that it no longer resembled anything human, but rather a gelatin mold in places, a slick of albino tar in others. Strong political ties could no longer help her.
Coudriet laughed mildly at some deep inner thought. “You wish to share something funny, Doctor? I could use a laugh,” she said, unable to fathom what could possibly be funny in this affair.
“No, not at all. It’s just that this is more than just a case of a simple floating victim perturbing my boys.
The two of them see this as an opportunity to advance their careers, if they can impress the former governor and Congressman Norris, or the senator, you see. “But you don’t?” He laughed further, more uproariously now. “Me? What can a congressman or a senator do for this old shell? No, my dear, I believe you could do more for me and my libido than all of the congressmen in all the states combined, thank you.” He laughed more—an infectious laugh—and this time Jessica joined him. Maybe she was wrong about him, she thought now.
Still, she thought the use of the term boys for Thorn and Powers spoke volumes, and she wondered if the doctors were some sort of threesome outside the office, say golfing buddies. But she rather doubted that. Coudriet likely simply thought of them as his underling children. “In a way, I’d rather work on a faceless, featureless corpse than the other extreme,” he said, confiding what she thought to be an odd statement, even for a medical examiner.
“Really?” she replied, pulling wide another door and stepping into the closet where she could strip away her surgical garb and dump it into a basket.
He’d followed her in after taking a long, lingering look at her backside. “A floater like this isn’t near so bad as a victim with identifiable features,” he continued, trying to convince her of his sincerity but unable to fully do so. He was mostly talking to hear himself, she gathered. “Especially when the corpse has a familiar face, say that of an acquaintance. Ever happen to you, Coran?”
“Once or twice, yes.”
“Then you know what I mean. Good. Experience shows in you. Now, with this Norris girl’s cadaver here, unless you saw the pictures in the papers of this young woman before this happened to her, you could just treat her like a mannequin, like one of those corpses we had in medical school, right, Doctor?” He looked to Jessica for affirmation, but Jessica didn’t give him the satisfaction. He took another long, lingering look to admire her form as she removed the green gown, displaying her crisp, white blouse and beige slacks beneath. In the other room, she could hear the click-click-click of Powers’s Polaroid at work.
“But if they’ve got looks, these sweet features,” continued Coudriet, coming around to face her, “well, it’s just harder for me, personally. I’m a grandfather now, three times over, and I look into those innocent eyes and faces, and I think if God ever put one of those innocent little sweethearts of mine on my slab, I’d run out of here screaming. Be right off to the loony farm. Felt the same way when I saw those little baby children blown to bloody shards in Oklahoma City. What’s so frightening about it all is that in today’s world, I have a one-in-five chance of seeing one of my grandchildren violently killed before I die.”
She mentally questioned his statistics but had to agree that he wasn’t far off. He was a half inch or so taller than she, his eyes a burnt umber, the brown orbs shining orange under the dim light of the dressing area. The little orange flecks glowing in his eyes matched his limitless freckles and augmented what was left of his red hair. In his time he’d been a powerfully built, handsome man, and he still managed to bring together enough stage presence to make others curiously jealous of him. His eyebrows were bushy across a thick ridge of forehead. He was a genius and he knew it, and he wasn’t certain he wanted Jessica’s competition on the case. His little display of first trying to make her feel uncomfortable and threatened, then the mild form of sexual innuendo, followed by ruminations about his grandchildren and their vulnerability, meant that he felt vulnerable. The Night Crawler cases had so escalated as to eclipse any and all others his department was working on— or had ever worked on during his twenty-nine-year reign as chief medical examiner for the city of Miami.
She guessed that he might’ve retired with an outstanding record, but then this had come up, and he felt duty-bound to see it through, like the president of a failing business trying desperately to see black again before retirement. She both respected and disliked his stubborn Irish. And she realized that he was understandably feeling like a man under a microscope, the intense heat of which could burn away a lifetime career.
She did her best to allow for this. “I guess I know what you mean,” she said, humoring him regarding his preference for a corpse without a face to one that possessed fine, comparatively healthy features.
He suddenly took her by the arm and escorted her back into the autopsy room, where he stood and pointed at the bloated, fishy creation of the sea that lay across the slab. Powers was just finishing his snapshots.
The senior medical man began a new diatribe. “She has no hue in her bloated eyelids, no eyebrows, lashes or color; this girl has neither a pointed nor a flat nose, no ears jutting out or lying back in feline majesty; no moles, fissures, pockmarks, overbites, underbites; the lips are neither dark nor light, thick nor thin, nor meaningful, since you can’t say where they begin or end; and as for the eyes ... God, were they ever so deep-set in life as now when they are missing altogether, pecked out by crabs and microscopic sea life?”
“Dr. Coudriet,” said Powers, taking hold of his boss’s arm. But Coudriet shook off the other man’s touch, continuing, “Is that her brow or that of a Cyclops? If she had eyes, brows, a large or small forehead, at least she’d be somebody, even in death.”
“I think I’ve seen enough for one night,” Jessica firmly told Coudriet, anxious now to step away from Allison Nor ris’s remains for the last time, angry with Coudriet’s having put her so near the girl and so far from her main objective.
But he continued on, waving his hands as he spoke, a professor repeating a favored lecture to a student. “With this kind of bloated corpse, every minuscule pore and cell is saline-swelled, burying the facial characteristics in pulpy flesh, so there is no recognizing Allison for Allison.”
Now Dr. Thorn tried to intervene, using a kind word. “Doctor Coudriet, it’s late, and you must be exhausted....”
Still he continued on as if he were alone with the corpse. “With Allison Norris, even the distinguishing birthmark on her hip—used along with dental and medical records to ID her—was so ballooned up as to be three times its normal size. She—it—had no identity left, not to speak of, no fingernails or prints, eyebrows or lashes...”
Jessica easily and quickly acknowledged all this as true enough. The sea had been merciless, unaffected actually, uncaring and unforgiving—like a storm—leaving Allison’s body a blank, a mold upon which nothing had been stamped. All color was bleached white to an albino finish, a waxy white lather painted on with a huge brush to create the patina of death. Her auburn hair, once quite close to Jessica’s own in appearance, was bleached from the intense Florida sun. And even this hinted at a horrid truth, Jessica realized. The body had floated atop the water for at least two and perhaps three weeks before discovery. But where and how could it have without being seen by someone somewhere? And if dragged through the water, wouldn’t it have had to be by boat? And if by boat, could not the killing ground have been the sea, the entirety of the ocean itself? If so, this explained a great deal.
Coudriet, like some bad actor now, was still working on his monologue. “Without the birthmark and the dental records, Allison’s body could never have been identified. The quivering mass ot” flesh remaining was like an empty slate, and decay had even blemished this when the abdomen, due to a buildup of noxious gases, had erupted and ruptured. A hell of a lot of li
sh had dined on her after that.”
As if on cue, a globule of flesh, now at room temperature, first separated itself from the body like a piece of living clay and then spattered onto the white-tiled morgue floor, where it promptly seeped like thick syrup through a grate over a drain below the slab, following the water seeping from a hose that ran continuously to keep the area clean. Pieces of Allison were disappearing before Jessica’s eyes, Jessica thought just as Coudriet. being careless, still wearing his “civvy” shoes, slipped on a second globule off the dripping dead woman, going to one knee. Powers quickly helped the older man back up. Coudriet’s face was flushed red now, and Jessica realized for the first time that he’d been drinking.
There wasn’t much hope of learning anything further from Allison tonight, but at this rate, Jessica wondered how much more Allison’s corpse could tell anyone, including Jessica Coran or even the impatient and obsessed Dr. Coudriet.
Jessica made a few additional quick assumptions about the killer and his modus operandi, but she wisely kept these to herself for the time being. It was late, and Coudriet was being a tad more than strange and eccentric now. When he signaled with a slight nod that he was finished, Ted Thorn took charge to remove the body.
Jessica thanked Coudriet for his opinion and his time, adding that she was tired and thought she’d go back to the hotel to get some rest, in order to return refreshed in the morning.
“Yes, of course,” Coudriet agreed as if coming out of a trance. She wondered if, besides the booze she now smelled on his breath, he were on something—perhaps medication for an ailment.“Well, good night to you all. I’ll likely see you tomorrow.”
She quickly exited, noticing the embarrassment on the faces of the two junior men in the room. Perhaps their mentor was slipping in more ways than one.
• FIVE •
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.
—William Shakespeare
Jessica stared momentarily at her watch as she made her way from the bowels of the teaching hospital’s morgue and back toward Miami-Dade Central Police Headquarters through a series of tunnels, stairwells and twists and turns that eventually brought her to ground level. She wondered why morgues were always located below ground, as if in constructing them a kind of subconsciously created perdition was ever the aim, but she also knew two truths which led architects and builders to place morgues at the base of modern buildings. First, like their Egyptian counterparts who placed their most distinguished dead in secret chambers where cavernous mazes terminated, modern builders utilized the principles of cold storage, and nature provided the first refrigerator in the earth itself; and second, everybody knew that no one really wanted to be reminded of the dead on a daily basis, even if those dead were frozen or mummified. Out of sight, out of mind. Nowhere was that truer than in modern America.
Jessica had made arrangements to have dinner with Eriq Santiva, so she located Detective Quincey to take her back to the hotel. Quincey didn’t know how to be subtle. In the car on the way to the hotel, he wanted to know her and Santiva’s relationship; wanted to know the outcome of the trip to the Keys; wanted to know the outcome of the second autopsy performed on Allison Norris; wanted to know if Dr. Coran had a dinner companion for the evening. She managed to dodge all his questions with the vague generalities she had come to rely on in the early stages of investigations, knowing he’d hear soon enough through Thorn, Powers and possibly Coudriet her views on the crime. She managed to keep the detective happy and satisfied that she was cooperating on the case, yet confused enough to think she might still have some answers forthcoming.
‘ ‘Then there is a connection with some of the body parts found in Islamorada?” he pressed. “And not just the Allison Norris/Precious connection?”
She conceded this, saying, “It appears so, but it’s too soon to be a hundred percent, Detective.”
“Quince... you can call me Quince, Dr. Coran. How much more percentage do you need? I mean, the word Precious on that bracelet turning out to be the girl’s nickname, an endearment from her father?”
“I take it her father’s whole life is politics, like her grandfather’s and uncle’s?”
“No, no... not entirely.”
“What else does he do?”
“Owns a string of boat lots, yachts and sailboats.
“Boat lots?”
“He sells sails—sailboats. You name it. Sales, repairs, outfitting, but he’s never there any more than he was at home.” She wondered if there might be some connection between Allison Norris’s disappearance and her father’s connection with boats.
“Why? Whataya thinking?”
“Did Allison perhaps work for her father?”
“Yeah, out of the Biscayne sales office, as a matter of fact. But we covered all her boyfriends.”
“She had more than one?”
“Hey, she was a hot property, quite well-off by most standards.”
“During your inquiries, did anyone see her get on a boat with any of these boyfriends—before she disappeared, I mean?”
“Nothing like that surfaced. You think she was killed on a boat?”
“I’m beginning to think so, yes. Why don’t you and your partner—what’s his name?—Samer ...”
“Samernow—Sam, I call ‘im.”
“Why don’t you revisit the boatyard, ask around about any recent flame, someone who might’ve brought a boat in for repair or had recently purchased a boat and was hitting on her.”
“What kind of boat?”
“Anybody’s guess at this point.”
“I hear you.”
If nothing else, this line of investigation might get Quincey off her back, she thought when she saw in a flashing light that reflected off the darkened windshield that the detective was grimacing. “That is, if you think it’s worth the effort. Quince,” she qualified her request to make it more palatable to the male of the species.
“No, no, that’s no problem.”
“What is it, then?”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid the smell of the morgue has attached itself to you, Doctor. Sorry I’m so crude.”
“I’m sorry. I would’ve showered at the lab, but I was a little uncomfortable doing so with certain live stiffs around.”
Quincey laughed appreciatively, knowing that she was referring to Dr. Coudriet. “Then you met Doc C? He never was one for bashfulness, and he has a keen eye for the ladies.”
“Yes, I made his acquaintance, and we’d best leave it at that, Quince.”
“He likes the ladies,” continued Quince. “But in your case, it’s probably purely professional, Dr. Coran, although I could understand why... I mean, how...”
“Quince, let me suggest that we leave this subject alone.”
“You got it, Doctor.” She was never so glad to see her room before, to shut out the world. Once behind closed doors, she freshened up, scrubbing away the smell of the morgue, she prayed.
Jessica met Santiva in the Blue Piano Room, a restaurant fashioned around a baby blue grand piano. A talented pianist was playing some Yanni as if it were his own, the melody hauntingly filtering its way through Jessica’s entire being and somehow relaxing her. The entire atmosphere was perfect—a fitting place for Jessica Coran to remove herself from her professional life, she mused.
She spied Eriq at the bar, throwing back a shot of what appeared to be either bourbon or brandy. She guessed it to be bourbon, and she guessed from the look of him that Eriq had spent as frustrating and dismal a day in Miami as she had, that he had not seen any of the renowned sugar-white beaches or any girls in bikinis, but rather only the inside of an institutional-gray or -green room, swapping leftover information with Quincey and his reluctant partner. He could probably match her item for item on distressing moments, despite the fact that she’d spent her day with a revolting corpse and a peculiarly male bastion of doctors whose leader was a kind of modern-day failing Genghis
Khan. No doubt Eriq had spent his day with a revolting pack of local politicos and press harpies calling for someone’s head.
She waved across the room when he looked up in search of her. He returned the salutation and came across the floor to greet her, commenting on how different she appeared tonight.
“Different? What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know, so Cosmo and beautiful. It must be that stunning dress.”
The way the compliment was phrased, she wasn’t sure whether to thank him or slap him, but she chalked it up to male stupidity and let it go at that.
After showering and splashing herself down with jasmine, she had slipped into her best dress, a sleeveless, strapless black affair, only because Eriq had booked them into the most prestigious hotel in the city, the Fontaine-bleau. Santiva obviously liked his accommodations first- class.
“This place is a palace,” she said to him, thinking the prices were going to be astronomically high. “Paul Zanek would’ve blown his stack if I’d ever dared put in a voucher for this.”
“As it is, the accountants’re going to be screaming,” he agreed, hefting a half-empty glass.
“But since you are the boss...”
“Quit worrying,” he advised. “We may as well be de- cadently comfortable. After all. our days are filled with so much...”
“Shit. Say it, Eriq, but tell me, which is it to be? Decadent or comfortable? I think that’s what we call an oxymoron. The two don’t go hand in hand. Comfortable is Holiday Inn, comfortable is Best Western, comfortable is—’’ “This business we’re getting ourselves into is going to become more and more horrendous as we go on. But of course, we both knew that going in, didn’t we?” From the tone of his voice, she’d been absolutely right about the bourbon and his day. Eriq had his own monkey on his back.
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