A Garden of Vipers

by Jack Kerley

  Instead, he saw Racine Kincannon at his desk, door closed, pouring a drink from his ever-present flask. Lucas cranked the power up a notch and it was like looking into a flattened version of Racine Kincannon’s face from three feet away. Lucas saw indecision, which he’d expected, and fear, which he had hoped for. Then, after ten minutes, he saw a touch of smile, Racine Kincannon grinding his way to a decision.

  “Thank you,” Lucas whispered to the man upstairs.

  CHAPTER 26

  A ringing. I could actually see the sound, like a train bearing down on me. Just before being slammed I opened my eyes and grabbed the bedside phone, fumbled it to my face, turned it right-side up.

  “Nmh?”

  “Carson, it’s Clair Peltier.”

  “Mmph?”

  “You’re not awake, I take it?”

  I stifled a yawn, shook my head. “What time is it?”

  “Six-forty. Since you’re obviously not at work, how about you stop by the morgue on your way in? I’ve dredged up some interesting information. Bring Harry, too.”

  I blinked at the clock on the opposite bedside table as it blinked from 6:40 to 6:41.

  “Answer me one question, Clair. When do you sleep?”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Ryder. See you in a few.”

  Harry and I walked into the morgue at half past seven, me jamming my shirttails into my pants, Harry in a sky-blue blazer and plum shirt, yellow pants anchoring the ensemble. Muted for the morgue.

  Clair walked us to her office.

  “It was four years ago. I didn’t do the post, Daugherty did. I was out of town, too, a symposium on temperature and humidity’s effect on epidermal degradation. Pretty good presentation.”

  “Were you lead presenter?” I asked.

  She smiled.

  I asked, “What made you recall the victim, Clair?”

  She tented slender fingers beneath full pink lips. “You, in a way. Talking about Hibney, the woman from the fire, got me thinking about torture. I recalled a conversation with Daugherty about broken fingers, checked with him. Bingo.”

  We drew chairs before her desk. Clair opened a report, pulled some photographs from the file, slid them across the desk. Harry grabbed a half dozen, I picked up the rest. Autopsy photos, a visual record of visible wounds. There were plenty of photos, but there was much to record.

  “The damage looks damn familiar,” Harry said.

  “Name’s Frederika Holtkamp,” Clair said. “The body was found by hunters in a shack up by Nenemoosha, at the edge of the Delta. Sixty-three years old. A retired teacher. Unmarried. Lived alone. No narcotics in the blood.”

  “Look at her hands, Cars,” Harry said, handing me two of his photos.

  “Broken digits, like with Franklin,” Clair said. “Nearly identical wounds and slashes, including the neck wounds.”

  “When did it happen?” I asked, shuffling through the pictures.

  “Four years ago.”

  “The vic’s name again?” Harry asked. Clair spelled it out. Harry excused himself, pulled his cell, stepped to the hall to start gathering information.

  Harry reappeared a minute later, dropping his phone into his pocket.

  “It was a county case with help from the state boys. Unsolved. Never had a suspect.”

  It was time to move toward Nenemoosha. We thanked Clair for her vigilance. Harry said he’d meet me in the lobby and headed to the restroom. I slipped on my jacket.

  “Tough one?” Clair asked.

  “Lots of tentacles but no octopus.”

  Her face softened into concern. She touched my arm. Her fingertips felt warm and dry.

  “You feeling all right, Carson?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not coming down with anything?”

  “I, ah…it’s personal stuff, Clair. Nothing major.”

  I turned away but felt her gaze, as if the intense blue of her eyes had weight and volume.

  She said, “I’m sorry to hear it. If you ever want to talk, I’ll be—”

  The words welled unbidden from my throat, burst across my lips. “My girlfriend and I are having big problems, Clair. I found out she’s seeing another man.”

  Clair made a sound of sympathy and shook her head. She stepped forward and I found myself wrapped in her arms. Her hands were tight on my back and her breasts pressed warmth into my belly. I felt the beating of her heart. Her hair smelled like sunlight on peaches. She leaned back and our eyes stared into each other’s. They always left me breathless, and now was no exception.

  “I’m sorry, Clair. It’s my business. I shouldn’t have…”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m glad you told me.”

  “It’s been a weird few days.”

  “Do you want her to return, Carson?”

  “I have a feeling I’m noncompetitive. The guy she’s seeing has money out his wazoo and looks like Adonis’s GQ brother.”

  She brushed hair from my eyes with her palm.

  “I worry about you, Carson. Please take care of yourself.”

  I don’t know why, but I kissed her temple. I turned away and stumbled down the hall like a drunk.

  Harry had called the County Sheriff’s Office to ask about the Frederika Holtkamp case, and was given Sergeant Cade Barlow. Surly on the phone, Barlow was worse in person, treating us like we’d urinated in his shoes.

  “The state boys took the case over. You want to know more, ask them.”

  Barlow stood in the entrance to his office, no invitation inside. He was a tall, bone-knuckled guy in his early fifties, weather-beaten, bags under crinkle-corner eyes. The broken veins of a serious drinker threaded his nose and cheeks. His teeth were horsey and yellow.

  Harry said, “We’d like to see where it happened, the scene.”

  “It’s a distance.”

  Harry nodded toward the sheriff’s office.

  “You want me to ask your supervisor if you can take a field trip?”

  Barlow stomped toward the door. “Christ. Let’s git this bullshit done so I can git back to work.”

  We followed Barlow for several miles, cut down a tight dirt lane more cow path than road, the Crown Vic bottoming out as we pitched over ruts for a mile or more. Barlow was driving a high-sprung SUV. He stopped near the edge of a sprawling woods.

  “This isn’t my usual routine,” he said. “Babysitting people wantin’ to see an ancient crime scene.”

  Harry stared evenly into Barlow’s eyes. “Four years isn’t ancient. It’s yesterday. And last I recall, there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  Barlow grunted and led us to a clearing. Centering it was a stew of scorched timbers, twisted roofing metal, heat-shattered brick.

  “Here’s where her body was found.”

  “I thought it was in a shack,” I said.

  “Guess it burned down.”

  I heard my teeth grinding and looked into the distance. Jutting above trees a hundred yards away was a microwave tower, maybe twelve stories tall. A white light strobed at its tip.

  “Who was she?” I asked. “The victim.”

  Barlow cleared his throat, spat. “State cops have that stuff. Teacher. Retired.”

  “Age?”

  Barlow flicked something from his teeth, shrugged. “Sixty-something.”

  “Who was lead on the case, Sergeant Barlow?”

  “Some kid was putterin’ in it. He ain’t here no more.”

  “This puttering kid was abducted by aliens?” Harry asked. “Fall down a sink hole? Drown in his grits?”

  “Moved to Montgomery.” Barlow grunted, spat, walked away. He climbed in his cruiser. Harry walked over.

  “You always this helpful, Barlow? Or you just being nice to fellow law enforcement?”

  Barlow hawked deep, started to spit toward Harry, thought better of it. He swallowed.

  “I got four more months to pretend I give a shit. Then I’m retired. You get out the same way you come in.”

  Barlow drove away
in the opposite direction, cutting through a road in the trees.

  “Why’d he go that way?” Harry asked.

  “I think I know. Follow his tracks.”

  We aimed our front bumper at Barlow’s rear one. A couple hundred feet later we came to a paved road. Barlow’s vehicle disappeared in the distance.

  I said, “He brought us in a mile across the fields just to bang us around for the hell of it. A local custom, you think?”

  “Hick asshole,” Harry muttered.

  We put Barlow in our Unpleasant Memories file and headed to the local state police post. Luckily, we knew our contact here, Arn Norlin, a pro with twenty-plus years in grade. We called ahead with an outline of what we wanted to talk about. He was ready fifteen minutes later.

  Arn looked like a Viking who’d traded the horned helmet for a trooper’s Stetson. He had a ruddy face, strong Nordic nose, wide forehead, eyes of diluted blue. His hands were thick and hard, like he’d rowed between Denmark and Iceland. Those same hands painted the most expressive watercolor seascapes I’d ever seen and I was honored to have one of Arn’s works in my living room.

  “We have part of a file. I think the cold-case folks look at it now and then, scratch their heads, move on to more fertile ground. I’d love to say we’ve got it front-burnered, but…”

  “Manpower,” I said.

  “Every politician talks about putting more feet on the beat, but come budget time, we’re hidden in the basement like a crazy aunt.”

  “Part of a file, you said?”

  He shot me a look over tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Pieces disappeared. Misplaced, supposedly.”

  “When?”

  “In the hands of the county folks. Barlow didn’t tell you, I take it.”

  “A slight omission,” Harry said.

  Arn leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head. “I had hopes for a solve on the county side, kept out of it. It was a Pettigrew case.”

  “Pettigrew?” I said.

  “Ben Pettigrew. A young guy, only on the county force a couple years. Pettigrew was a hot dog, the good kind, bright, curious. It was his first gut-wrencher case, knifeplay, torture. Pettigrew took the case to heart. Went at it with hammer and tongs.”

  “Good for him,” Harry said.

  “First thing Pettigrew did was grid the whole area. He was crawling on the ground, pushing through sticker bushes. You see the microwave tower near the scene?”

  I nodded.

  “Pettigrew climbed the damn thing to get a better lay of the land. He saw where a car had been hidden away and also felt someone had been laying in the weeds at the base of the tower.”

  “Barlow mentioned Pettigrew moved to Montgomery.”

  “Got recruited by the city cops up there. Good for a bright, hard-charging guy like Pettigrew to get on with a big-city force. Good for Montgomery to have a guy like that. Bad for the county.”

  “Because it lost a hotshot?”

  “Bet you money if he’d stayed, he’d have nailed the killer by now. That boy was a pit bull.”

  “Wish Pettigrew was still around,” Harry said. “We couldn’t get squat from Barlow. The guy treated us like we had airborne syphilis.”

  Arn picked up a couple of paper clips, linking and unlinking them.

  “I don’t know what happened there. Barlow used to be a pretty decent cop. A few years back, he suddenly got old and cranky. It was like someone he loved died and he never came back from it. But I didn’t catch news of anything like that.”

  “Years back?” Harry asked. “Like four?”

  Arn dropped the clips to the deskpad and brushed them aside. “That’d be about right. Maybe a bit less. How’d you know?”

  “It’s a time span we’re hearing more and more.”

  Montgomery Police Department detective Benjamin T. Pettigrew leaned back in his chair and set tooled alligator boots on the meeting room table.

  “It was grim,” Pettigrew said. “The victim was crumpled inside the little hunter’s shack, over two dozen knife wounds.”

  Even at a steady twenty miles per hour above the limit it had been a two-hour trip to Montgomery, and one we probably didn’t need to make. But between the lost files and the burned-out shack and Arn Norlin’s description of Pettigrew, we felt it best to cover all bases. And face time beat the hell out of phone calls.

  “Fingers broken?” I asked.

  He wiggled the appropriate digits. Pettigrew was in his late twenties, sandy hair and a light complexion. He wore a threadbare cotton jacket over jeans, a beaded leather belt. He looked relaxed but his eyes were fully engaged.

  “Arn Norlin says you scoped out the scene down to individual blades of grass,” Harry said.

  “Norlin exaggerates. I did what little I could.”

  “You really climbed the microwave tower?”

  “Wanted to get a bird’s-eye view of the field and woods. I did find something interesting at the base of the tower. The grass and weeds had been crushed down. I found blood on the grass, bagged it for Forensics. It DNA’d out as Frederika Holtkamp’s blood. The victim.”

  “A teacher was what Barlow said.”

  “Special education, taught retarded and autistic kids. Retired. Seemed to be getting on all right, real nice house, good car. She had more money than most retired teachers I’ve seen. But we never found out much more. We don’t even know where or how she got taken. It was so slick it was scary.”

  “You mentioned blood around the tower. But the shack was a football field’s distance away. How you figure her blood got there?”

  “I thought maybe she’d broke loose from the perp, ran to the tower scattering blood from her wounds. But Forensics said it wasn’t spatter, but soaking. Like a bloody rag left on the weeds. Or clothes.”

  “The perp rested there, maybe,” Harry suggested. “Soaked with blood.”

  Pettigrew sat forward, picked up a pencil and tumbled it through his fingers.

  “I grew up hunting with my daddy and uncle. Deer, wild hogs, anything. Got OK at tracking. A lot of it’s looking for subtle indicators.”

  “Talk subtle to me,” Harry said.

  “I was up in the tower, fifty, sixty feet. It was half past eight in the morning. Ms. Holtkamp had been found an hour earlier by two old farmers out squirreling before chores. Sunlight was at a sharp angle and dew hadn’t cooked off yet. I saw several trails in the weeds, the dew knocked off, the tiniest shift in color. A camera wouldn’t pick it up. The trails met at the base of the tower.”

  “Arn said you found evidence of a vehicle.”

  “Definite tire impressions in the grass, busted-off branches probably used to cover the vehicle.” He paused. “There was one thing about the car that never made sense to me.”

  Harry said, “That being?”

  “Tire impressions where it had been driven back into the trees, fifty, sixty feet off the road. There was another set where it backed out. The tread picked up dirt, got faint where the vehicle pulled onto the road, but still discernible. Then the tracks stopped dead.”

  “Vanished?” Harry said, narrowing an eye.

  “Like the car pulled onto the asphalt and disappeared. Never figured it out. Sucked into a Martian spaceship?”

  He chuckled at the example, but I could see it still bugged him.

  “Your take on the whole scene?” I asked.

  Pettigrew put his arms on the table and leaned forward. He spoke near a whisper.

  “You guys are the PSIT down in Mobile, right? The guys that get the crazies?”

  “It’s a part-time gig,” I said. “Like twice a year.”

  “Ever do any conjectures that get a bit out of the box?”

  I nodded. “Even when we’re wrong it’s the right way to think. Everything’s a possibility.”

  Pettigrew lowered his voice. “My conjecture: The perp brought the victim to the shack, made his kill. He wandered from the scene to the tower—tired? High on something and disoriented? I’ll
never know. But someone else showed up. More than one someone, I’m thinking.”

  “Keep going.”

  “I think someone else caught up with the killer at the base of the tower.”

  “Who?” Harry asked.

  Pettigrew grunted, slapped the table. “No idea. None. Not a damn one.”

  “What about the car?”

  “Two choices: Either it belonged to the perp, or his pursuers. I’d think the perp, since it was hidden.”

  I’d been tumbling a thought through the back of my mind since Pettigrew mentioned the lost tire tracks.

  “If the car got hauled away instead of driven away, it might explain the missing tracks.”

  “I like that,” Pettigrew said, narrowing an eye, like he was squinting across four years. “I like it a lot. Wish I’d considered it then.”

  “What did Cade Barlow think?” Harry asked out of the blue.

  Pettigrew’s nose wrinkled like someone had opened a garbage can under it. “What do you know about Barlow?”

  “That he ain’t much interested in a murder that took place in his jurisdiction four years back.”

  I’d seen how Ben Pettigrew looked when he was uncertain. Now I got to see what he looked like angry.

  “Barlow should have been trying to get out ahead of me on the case, steal my thunder. It’s how he was, a scene-stealer and credit-grabber. I didn’t mind, the competition kept me sharp. But on the Holtkamp murder, he threw roadblocks in my way, ridiculed my ideas. I floated my thoughts on the trails in the grass, Barlow rolling his eyes, comparing it to crop circles, asking if I thought extraterrestrials killed the woman. He had higher-ups laughing at my ideas.”

  “Think he had something to do with the missing case materials?” I asked.

  Pettigrew instinctively glanced through the meeting-room window into the squad room, making sure we weren’t being eavesdropped on.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  I had a sudden thought, one of those errant connections. “You ever see Barlow talking to a guy, square-built, hard-looking, six one or two, blond curly hair? Looks kinda like Jerry Lee Lewis if he pumped iron instead of playing piano.”