A Garden of Vipers

by Jack Kerley

  I studied the screen. “Doctor? Like in M.D.?”

  “Psychiatrist,” Harry said. “Bet they didn’t get a lot of shrinks at the Citadel. A pity the one they had didn’t last the night.”

  Time for me to pick up the prelim from Taneesha Franklin’s autopsy. I took the stairs, looked into the second floor, and saw Sally Hargreaves sitting at her desk, staring blank-eyed at the wall. Sally was a detective handling sexual crimes, a tough gig on the best days. I continued down the flight, realized Sally wasn’t the wall-staring type. I climbed back up, went to her desk.

  “What’s up, Sal? You look like your cat got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.”

  She turned, brightened. Pushed strands of auburn hair from her eyes. Smiled with false bonhomie.

  “Hi, Carson.”

  “You OK?”

  She looked at a report she’d been filling out. Shook her head.

  “I just got back from the hospital. A rape victim. Among other things. Jesus.”

  “Tough one?”

  “Ugliness through and through. Bizarre.”

  I rolled up a chair for the vacant desk beside Sal’s. The desk had belonged to her former partner, Larry Dayle. Dayle had resigned after four months on the Sex Crimes unit, moving his family to a mountainside in Montana and stringing the perimeter with razor wire.

  The floor—Sexual Crimes, Crimes Against Property, Vehicle Theft—was quiet, most of the detectives out. I took Sal’s hand.

  “Want to tell a friendly face about it? I can go get Harry.”

  She laughed, and the laugh cracked into a sob. She caught herself. Brushed away a tear. It was Sal’s empathy that made her so good at what she did. The downside was what poured back through the door.

  She said, “A woman, twenty-five. Student. Got grabbed off the street two nights ago. Picked up bodily and jammed into a vehicle. She was taken somewhere—a barn, she thought, by the smell. Afterwards she got pushed from a moving vehicle into a hospital parking lot.”

  “Strange. She was raped?”

  “And beaten. Her face…it’ll be a long time before the surgeons make it a face again. She wanted children. That’s gone. Her insides were…”

  “Easy,” I said.

  “The guy who did it, while he was punching her, doing all the things he did, he kept laughing, yelling, ‘Look at me, bitch, can you see me?’ Then he’d hit her, scream, ‘Look at me, tell me what you see.’”

  “She got a description?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “The perp wore a mask?”

  Sally shook her head. “No.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Sally buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh, Carson. She’s blind. Been blind since birth.”

  I thought about the rape-abduction as I drove to the morgue. I’d never worked Sex Crimes, though as a member of the Psychopathological and Sociopathological unit I had studied sexual predators. The actions as Sal described them seemed to combine the power-assertive, or entitlement, type of offender with a sadistic, or anger-excitation, type of behavior. The first behavior type humiliates the victim to increase the perp’s sense of self-worth and self-confidence. The second is brutal, often involving a high level of physical aggression, including torture.

  I had no idea what to make of the anomalous gesture of dropping the woman at the hospital.

  The Crown Vic started to feel crowded and I lowered the windows to let fresh air blow out too many dark thoughts. I parked in the morgue lot beside Clair’s sporty little BMW, worth more than my annual pay. Clair’s former husband, Zane Peltier, was a bona fide member of Mobile society, the old-money contingent, and some of that largesse had rubbed off on Clair during the divorce proceedings.

  It hit me that Clair would certainly know of the Kincannons, maybe even know them personally. I might get a question answered, maybe two, if I could sneak them into a conversation.

  Clair wasn’t in her office, so I checked across the hall in the main autopsy suite. She was gowned in green and standing against the wall as Lula Baker mopped the floor beneath the autopsy table. Lula was a former housekeeper from New Orleans, one of the vast army of transplants.

  “Hi, Lula,” I said.

  “Morn’, ’tect Ryd.” Lula was thirty or so, white, skinny, and had the ability to edit most words to a single syllable.

  “The prelim’s out front, Ryder,” Clair said, looking up from a copy of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Monthly, required reading for pathologists.

  “I wanted to ask you something else.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged. “I forgot.”

  Clair pulled off her reading glasses, studied me with the big blue miracles.

  “Maybe because you’re not getting enough sleep. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

  “It’s the Franklin case. Nothing’s moving ahead.”

  “Take vitamins and eat right. Remember to sleep.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  She frowned, but said nothing. I turned to leave, then tapped my forehead, like I had been hit with a sudden thought.

  “I was at a Channel 14 party the other night, Clair. Formal, all the bigwigs. I half expected to see you there with the social types.”

  “If I never see another champagne fountain it’ll be too soon. Out of your element, weren’t you?”

  “If I never see another tux it’ll be too soon. You wouldn’t know a family named Kincannon, would you?”

  Her face darkened. “Why?”

  “People treated them like royalty. I’ve never seen so much bowing and scraping.”

  Clair turned to the housekeeper. “That’s fine, Lula. You can go.”

  “Be bact ’mar.”

  Lula rolled the mop and bucket out the door. Clair set the CDC report on a counter.

  “The Kincannons have money, Carson. It equates to power: lots of money, lots of power. Some people have an automatic reflex when they get near power. Their knees bend.”

  “A lot of politicos were there, too.”

  “Political knees bend farther and more often. She was there, too, wasn’t she: an older woman, white hair, chunky, aloof?”

  “Yes. May-bell-line?”

  “Maylene. Yes, she would have been. She’ll always be there, in some way or another.”

  I heard something off-key in Clair’s voice, anger maybe, or resignation.

  “Some way or another?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  She looked at her watch, frowned.

  “I’ve got two pathologists down with the flu. I’ve got the day’s second post in three minutes. Look, the Kincannons do a lot of giving to the community and the region. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for parks, health-care institutions, schools, law enforcement…an incredible amount of money.”

  “And so?”

  “The Kincannons…well, only some of the truly wealthy can give with both hands, Ryder.”

  Her words seemed cryptic; Clair was rarely cryptic.

  “You mean the Kincannons have so much they can shovel it hand over hand into the community?”

  “Think about it. But elsewhere, please. I’ve got to get to work.”

  I sucked in a breath, said, “How about Buck Kincannon?”

  “Is there a specific question there?”

  “No,” I admitted. There are about a hundred.

  Clair picked up the phone on the counter, asked for the body to be brought to the table. She turned to me.

  “Buck Kincannon is the current golden boy of the family, forty-eight karats of flawless Kincannon breeding. Last month’s Alabama Times magazine listed him as one of the top ten eligible bachelors in the state.”

  Not what I needed to hear.

  “Current golden boy, Clair?”

  “Maylene Kincannon runs that family like a competitive event. Next month it may be Nelson on the pedestal. Or Racine, unless he gets blitzed and slips off. Race likes women and liquor, probably not in that order. Now, unless you’re goi
ng to assist, it’s time to skedaddle.”

  I nodded, headed for the door. I was stepping into the hall when she called my name. I stopped, turned.

  “The Kincannons, Ryder. They haven’t stepped outside any limits, right? You’re not investigating anything, anyone?”

  “Just natural curiosity about a lifestyle I’ll never know.”

  She gave me the long look again. “It’s mostly fiction. Stay away from those folks, Carson. There’s nothing to be gained there.”

  I picked up the report at the front desk, then stepped into a day more like August than May, heat rippling from the asphalt surface of the parking lot.

  Stepped outside any limits?

  Walking to the car I revisited Clair’s phrase, a curious assemblage of words. And that throwaway line about staying away from the Kincannons…

  Was that some kind of warning?

  You’re losing it, I thought, slipping behind the wheel. The only warning here is to keep your imagination in check.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ms. Kayla Rudolnick was the mother of Dr. Bernard Rudolnick, Harwood’s victim. A thin woman in her late sixties, she wore a brown pantsuit and pink slippers, holding a cigarette in one hand, a glass ashtray in the other. She’d apologized for having her hair in curlers and led us to a couch with antimacassars on the back. The room smelled of Ben-Gay and nicotine. She switched off the television, a soap opera.

  “It was just a phone call. But I recall her saying she was a reporter.”

  “Taneesha Franklin?”

  Smoke plumed from her nostrils. “The Taneesha is what I remember.”

  “What did Ms. Franklin want to know?” I asked.

  Ms. Rudolnick’s eyes tightened behind a wall of smoke. “I told her to leave me alone. Bernie was gone. Never call me again.”

  Ms. Rudolnick plucked a pink tissue from her sleeve, lifted her bifocals, and blotted her eyes.

  “He was a good man, my son. Brilliant mind, good heart.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “He had his problems. But we all do, don’t we?”

  I shot Harry a glance. We’d come back to that.

  “The doctor wasn’t married?” I asked.

  “When he was twenty-eight, again when he was thirty-six. Both marriages lasted under two years. He couldn’t pick women, they both cleaned him out like a closet. Two times he started over.”

  A photo sat on the table beside me: Rudolnick and Mama maybe a half decade back, his arms around her from the back. Like his mother, Rudolnick had sad Slavic eyes and a nose-centric face. His hair was black and thinning, brushed straight back. His white shirt was buttoned to the Adam’s apple, the collar starched. He looked like he could have been dropped into the 1950s and no one would have noticed.

  Harry and I had hoped a wife might provide insight into Rudolnick’s behavior and patterns. But the good doctor had been five years gone from marriage and lived alone. I said, “So his last wife might not be able to tell us much about his life.”

  “Shari, he met her at a bar. You don’t meet decent women at bars. She moved to Seattle four years ago. Probably found herself a new bar and a new Bernie.”

  “You mentioned Bernie having some problems, Ms. Rudolnick,” Harry said.

  She tapped an ash into the tray and looked away. “You know, don’t you?”

  “No, ma’am, I never met your son.”

  “It’s in the records. You didn’t look?”

  “I don’t know what records you’re referring to, Ms. Rudolnick.”

  “The records down where you work.”

  I finally made sense of what she was saying. And maybe why she’d been spooked by a reporter.

  “Your son was arrested?” I asked. “When?”

  She looked away. “Four years ago. He had some problems.”

  “Can you explain, please?”

  “After Shari left he became depressed. Sometimes—not often—he took things to help him cope, calm down. He was always high-strung.”

  “Drugs?”

  “He was a doctor. He used it like medicine.”

  “Of course.”

  “One day he came here. He was crying and I was terrified. He said there was a hospital worker he’d been buying some of his medicine from, and the police had been watching the hospital worker. Bernie was purchasing something. He was sure it would come out in the papers, his career would be over.”

  She looked from my face to Harry’s. Though her son was dead, the episode printed fright and humiliation across her face.

  “It’s all right, ma’am. We don’t need the full story.”

  I figured we’d get it from the arrest report, save the poor woman the retelling.

  She said, “He stopped taking those things. What happened with the police finally made him stop.”

  “How was his behavior before the end?” I asked. “Normal?”

  A grandfather clock in the hall chimed. We waited until it fell silent.

  “About a month before…that day, he seemed depressed again. He came over to see me less. He was quieter, like he was deciding on something.”

  “Could it have been something with his work? Unhappiness?”

  She walked to the mother-and-son photo. Touched it with reverence. “He loved his work. He was born to help people get better. He consulted in the region’s best facilities. Bernie was on the board at Mobile Regional Hospital. He had a private practice.”

  It was a good place to take our leave, on the high note of her son’s achievements. As we moved to the door, I asked one final question.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Rudolnick. Did your son have a specialty?”

  She exhaled a plume of smoke, spun a tobacco-stained finger at her temple. “He worked with tormented minds.”

  Psychotics? A bell rang in my head. Had Rudolnick known Harwood earlier? I wondered. Did they have a history? What if Harwood had been a patient, or part of a study?

  I said, “I don’t suppose he ever mentioned patients by name.”

  She crushed the cigarette dead in the ashtray, set it aside. “He was absolute about privacy.”

  Harry said, “The records your son kept about his patients. All gone, right?”

  “They were in his house and I didn’t know what to do with them. I keep them in storage. I don’t know why.”

  “Would it be possible to look at them?”

  She held up her hands, waving my words away. “No. It’s all confidential, a bond of trust.”

  Harry stepped close. Gathered her hands in his, held them steady. I could never do anything that simple and perfect. “It might be helpful, Ms. Rudolnick,” he said quietly. “It would never go further than Carson and me. And it might be our key to finding who killed your son.”

  Her eyes shimmered with tears and her mouth pursed tight. “It was that filthy Harwood animal, scum. Piece of dirt…piece of shit.”

  “I wish that was true, ma’am. But Leland Harwood was just a tool, a hammer. The man who swung the hammer is still out there.”

  She shook her head. “No. It can’t be. It’s not right.”

  “Detective Ryder talked to Leland Harwood an hour before he died, ma’am. He thinks Harwood was sent to harm your son.”

  She looked at me. “Is that true?”

  I nodded. “Leland Harwood was an enforcer. He always worked for others.”

  Her face tightened in anger. She turned to Harry.

  “You’ll respect the confidentiality of my son’s files?”

  “You have our word on it,” Harry said.

  Kayla Rudolnick looked into Harry’s eyes until she found something she needed to see.

  “The storage facility is on Cottage Hill Road. I’ll get you the key.”

  There were eight white boxes in the facility, rows of locked cages in an old warehouse; a guard had been alerted to our visit. We took the boxes from the cage rented by Ms. Rudolnick and stowed them in the trunk of the Crown Vic.

  Picking up the last of the boxes, Harry nodded throug
h the grid at the adjoining enclosure. I saw a crib, boxes of child’s toys, stuffed animals, posters pulled from walls, the tape at the edges brittle and yellow. A small wheelchair. A red bicycle with training wheels. Even under dust, the bike looked unused.

  I suddenly knew what used-up prayers looked like. Harry sighed, shook his head, and we tiptoed away like thieves.

  We dropped the files at Harry’s house, then returned to the station. I tapped Rudolnick, Bernard, into my computer, expecting an arrest record. Mitigating circumstances allowing Rudolnick to pay a fine, perhaps, slip past punishment if he enrolled in a program and stayed clean.

  The computer whirred and beeped, and came up blinking:

  NO RECORD.

  I tried again. Same effect. Harry stared at the screen.

  “Either the bust never happened, or it got wiped clean. And the second option takes some doing.”

  Ms. Verhooven gestured for Lucas to follow her. There was no furniture in the room and the Realtor’s high heels banged on the parquet floor. Ms. Verhooven was as bright as a new trumpet: blond hair, yellow dress, white shoes. Bright teeth moving behind glossy pink lips. Long legs sheathed in silky hose, rising up past the knee-high hemline toward…Lucas felt himself hardening and looked away, knowing such notions had to be sublimated for now, to use a term from Rudolnick’s world.

  Ms. Verhooven pushed open a door and gestured grandly, like a woman on a TV game show.

  “Ta-da!” she said.

  Lucas stared at a toilet. “Ta-da?”

  The fixture was cream-colored, just like the adjoining countertop. Ms. Verhooven bent over the counter, stroked it like it was a kitten.

  “Quartz countertops in the restroom, Mr. Lucasian. Real, honest manufactured stone. Over at Midtowne Office Estates the counters are only Corian.”

  Lucas nodded, though he had no idea what she was talking about. He was most interested in the sink.

  Note to self, he thought, buy bath towels.

  There was a faux-baroque gilt-framed mirror on the wall. Lucas glanced at a slender and clean-shaven man with a neat part in his short and trendy, red-highlighted hair. His suit was dark and conservative, like the blue shirt and muted tie. He looked young but affluent. A success-driven young man, a starry-eyed entrepreneur with backing from Daddy, ready to make it on his own in the world. There were plenty of them out there.