The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  I saw the bodies of twin brothers. Size, muscles, definition, skin tone, all similar. Even navels and nipples seemed interchangeable. There was a quarter-sized tattoo of a leaping swordfish above Farrier’s left nipple. Nelson had also been tattooed, the oriental dragon above his right shoulder blade.

  I pulled a photo of Deschamps from its file and held it beside the others. It was like a third brother entered the room, older perhaps, stronger, with bulk added to the arms, shoulders and thighs. I pushed Deschamps’s photo aside and concentrated on my twins.

  Why behead Nelson and not Farrier?

  I studied Nelson’s frontals. Like Deschamps, he’d been supine, facing upward. The discoloring livor mortis was confined to his back. I noticed Farrier had two darker stains in the livor mortis and shuffled through his file. In the close-ups they looked like bruises.

  Footsteps by the door. I resisted the urge to hide the photos. The door opened with Walter Huddleston, the diener, behind it. His eyes pierced me like scarlet lasers, then traveled to the photos. He grunted and pulled the door shut, heading back to his coffin, maybe.

  I read Farrier’s autopsy report, hearing Ava’s voice declaim it into the air for transcription. “Contusions over the rib cage indicative of sharp blows delivered before death, and consistent with semi-rounded shoe, athletic style or similar conjecture: two hard kicks as body lay on ground … “

  I gathered the materials and took them to Vera at her desk. I snapped my fingers as I was turning to leave. “Just remembered, Veer I’m putting together a timeline and need to see the May post schedule.”

  She looked over her reading glasses. “All that monthly stuff gets put in a file and goes direct to Dr. Peltier. They’re locked in the credenza in her office.”

  I shrugged. “No big thing, I’ll check ‘em next time through.”

  I passed Clair’s office on my way out. The door was open and I looked inside, not looking for anything more than a sense of a woman I admired and thought I knew.

  CHAPTER 22

  “I didn’t go to the rave,” Dale McFetters said, stroking an emaciated mustache. “Working that night. Pizza Junction.” McFetters had a shaved head, a recent defoliation judging by the way he kept reaching to twist invisible locks. He paced the living room, working his absent hair and tugging a silver ear loop. His jeans appeared to be entering a second decade without laundering. He was shirtless and skinny, ribs countable to anyone so inclined. A blue tattoo resembling barbed wire circled one broomstick bicep. “It could have been me, y’know. I’d have gone if I hadn’t had to work.”

  McFetters and Jimmy Farrier shared a shotgun duplex near the university. Furnished with twenty bucks and a blue-light special on yellow paint, the place was like walking through the interior of a lemon.

  “It wasn’t you,” I said, leaning against a bright wall. “It was Jimmy. I need to know why.”

  McFetters threw his hands up in the air. They were grubby hands and I hoped he’d never made a pizza I’d eaten. “I told all this to the state police,” he protested.

  “Now you get to tell me. Merry Christmas.”

  He flopped into a battered recliner, probably rescued from a Dumpster. “I don’t know nothing else.” A computer-science major.

  I crossed the room to a cork board beside the phone, carry-out menus thumbtacked to it. There were some photos. One showed Farrier and McFetters sunning in a lawn chair in the small front yard of the duplex. I leaned close and studied it. The boys were shirtless, squinting from the bright sunlight. Jimmy looked bemused while McFetters affected a “white-boy-as-gangsta-rapper” pose. McFetters’s body was pasty and anorexic, Jimmy Farrier’s tan and toned. His face looked soft, closer to child than adult beardless, a vulnerability in the eyes, acne on his cheeks and forehead. It was obvious he worked out. His biceps and triceps were firm and expanded, his shoulders thick, his pecs blocking out. Washboard lats above his denim cutoffs. A small bright swordfish leapt above his nipple. The dated photo was almost a year old.

  I turned back to McFetters. “Was Jimmy going to the rave to meet someone, Dale?”

  He shrugged. “Never said. Maybe.”

  “No regular girlfriend, female acquaintance?”

  McFetters studied the citrine ceiling and stroked his lip-cirrus. “Chicks? He had, like, a lot more hope than luck.”

  “Not a pick-up artist.”

  His laugh resembled a seal’s arwk. If he’d slapped his hands together I’d have tossed him a fish. I said, “He ever try and meet girls through the personal ads?”

  McFetters gave me an odd look, then slid out of the chair and went to Farrier’s bedroom. He returned with an old copy of the News Beat bent open to the personals ads.

  “By his bed,” McFetters said. “He was always scoping ‘em out. Sending letters, but ” McFetters twitched his bony shoulders.

  I said, “You don’t know about responses?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  I said, “His stuff still in his room?”

  “His mom said they was gonna come over and get it, but they haven’t.”

  I stood. “Mind if I take a look?”

  He waved toward Jimmy’s door. “Knock yourself out.”

  A typical student’s room. Posters for some band I’d never heard of, skinny androgynes wearing black clothes and mascara-enhanced sulks, nihilism with a beer sponsor. The bed was made. A desk in the corner had a computer atop it. A shelf held textbooks, papers jammed between pages. Free weights sprawled around a lifting bench. The standard clothes in the closet, plus a skim board and some snorkeling gear, decent stuff.

  I opened the top desk drawer. Pencils and pens and paperclips, Post-its. Class schedule. A small framed photograph of Farrier with Mom and Dad and Little Sister. Mountains in the background, everyone smiling, arms clasping one another’s shoulders. There was genuine warmth in the faces, a closeness. Beneath that was a loose photo Farrier and his mother on high school graduation day, the kid in his black gown, mama beside him with her head on his shoulder. Proud smiles. They looked comfortable together, happy. I noted the photographs weren’t atop the desk where his roommate or visitors might see them, but not upside-down in the bottom of the closet, either. I tried the side drawers. The top one held notebooks from various classes, the bottom a six-pack of Coors Light and a twelve-pack of Ramses condoms, unopened.

  Party on, Jimmy, wherever you are.

  I fired up the computer and did a name search of files: Personals, ads, News Beat . nothing. I shifted to a file-by-file scan and under Misc. and discovered a sub-file, Per Lets It turned out to be short for Personal Letters and held responses to ads in the News Beat seven in the eight months since the NewsBeafs redux.

  Jimmy’s response to each was a variation on a basic theme:

  Dear (ad number)

  I saw your ad in the News Beat and would love to meet you. My name is JIMMY and I’m a student at USA studying Computer Science. I LOVE the beach and would be there every day if I wasn’t in school or studying. I’m kind of quiet but I can also be wild if I’m with the right person. I have dark brown hair and blue-green eyes and like to work out with weights. I’d LOVE to meet you and maybe we could meet soon. There’s a place near USA called THE CUPPA where they have coffee and live music on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Maybe we could get together there or anywhere else you want. I hope to hear from you. Jimmy

  I printed the letters and Jimmy’s list of response dates, and left Dale McFetters sitting in his lemon world.

  “Cutter advertised for them, Carson?”

  I crossed my arms behind my back and studied the car’s gray ceiling. There was a footprint beside the dome light. It seemed my size. A horn behind us honked and Harry accelerated.

  “It’s a thought. Deschamps met Talmadge through the personals in the News Beat Now Farrier turns out to have used them.”

  I handed one of Farrier’s letters over the seat to Harry. He studied it while driving, which always made me nervous. He flipped the letter back a min
ute later.

  “OK, Cars say the killer selected Farrier from this. Then why’d he reject him?”

  “I don’t know. Something about Farrier wasn’t right.”

  I stared at the treetops passing by. Something was bothering me, some discord, but it was at the edge of my consciousness, indistinct. My mind kept returning to a picture of the tattoo on Farrier’s chest: crisp and prominent, bright as a Sunday newspaper cartoon. I saw the smiling faces from the photos in Jimmy Farrier’s desk. Heard his mother’s worried voice …

  “Jimmy, a tattoo? You didn’t. It’s not you.”

  “It’s all right, Mom,” Jimmy replies, smiling. “It’s a …”

  I slapped at my pockets for my notebook, opened it to a number just added, dialed.

  “Huh?” the voice answered.

  “Dale, it’s Detective Ryder. I was just there.”

  “Uh-huh. I remember.”

  “Tell me about Jimmy’s tattoo, Dale; was the swordfish real?”

  Confusion. “The fish? It was, like, a drawing.”

  “I know, Jimmy. But it wasn’t a real in-the-skin tattoo, was it?”

  The seal awrk again. “Nah, man, not Jimmy. It was a temp-tat, like a decal. You put it on with water, rub it off with alcohol. You can tell they’re fake usually, the color’s so, like, intense.”

  “Did Jimmy wear them much?”

  A long pause. “Um, like, just when we’d hit a party. We’d get back and he’d wipe it off, worried his dad or mom’d drop in without calling they did that sometimes and he was afraid they’d flip out thinking he’d turned, like, biker or something.”

  “Just a couple more questions, Dale. Jimmy probably sent out photographs of himself with some of his personals letters, right?”

  Again the long pause as gears engaged. “Pictures. Yeah. I even took some at the beach last spring.”

  “Was his shirt off?”

  “He was just in swim trunks.”

  “Think hard, Dale. Was he wearing a tat in the photo? He liked the swordfish. Was he wearing it?”

  We drove three blocks. I said, “Dale, are you there?”

  “I’m like, thinking.”

  I apologized for disturbing him. Three more blocks passed. “I remembered now, man,” McFetters blurted. “He told me some chicks dug tats and some didn’t. He didn’t want to turn any of them off with the picture, y’know?”

  No tattoo.

  Not in the photos sent to News Beat Jimmy Farrier’s belly was as unmarked as a baby’s. But he’d pasted a temp-tat on for the rave, probably figuring it’d be cool there. I turned the phone off, dropped it in my pocket. Harry’s eyes studied me in the rear-view; he had questions, but knew I was working on the answers. I settled back down in the seat, closed my eyes.

  Walk the scene, I told my mind. See the rave …

  I stood in a watermelon field and watched the dancers, sweating appariations with glowing necklaces and water bottles in their hands. In the distance I saw a baby-faced kid bobbing his head to the music and sucking at a beer, self-conscious, not one with the crowd. Waiting for someone; at least that what he hopes. From the black pool of the woods a shadow glides to him. Something’s whispered or maybe shown: a beer, a blunt, a tab.

  “Come on, brother, lighten up, it’s a party, be cool …”

  Be cool, the piper’s incandescent call to the young. The pair stumble through the vines, step over a copulating couple, skirt a man whispering to a melon about God. In the whirling, grinding, music-blind mass, the pair are invisible. Then the trees brush their faces and the rave becomes a bonfire in the distance. A tap on Farrier’s shoulder and he turns into an explosion of pain and a dark, seeping taste far above his tongue. He’s on the ground in a tight copse at the edge of the field, on his side in a dry gully. The shadow has a flashlight, a pen, and somewhere a long sharp blade. Farrier’s pants are unzipped, prepared for the writing. His shirt is pulled up … Tattoo.

  Out of nowhere; unexpected. Blue and red and green against the pink-brown flesh. It’s all wrong, all the work, all the stalking, all the chances. All desperately wrong. Enraged, the killer kicks Farrier twice and leaves him to die, head on, his damaged brain spilling memories until there’s nothing left but primal impulse; Farrier dies with his mouth in the dirt, trying to nurse.

  Suddenly I was bolt upright, slapping Harry’s shoulder.

  “The Farrier the killer wanted wasn’t the Farrier he got,” I said. “Pull over.”

  He yanked the wheel and we skidded into a car wash lot. A half dozen black guys were toweling off a white Mercedes. Curious faces watched me exit the backseat to sit up front. They looked at Harry, saw the cop eyes, and turned back to serious towel action.

  “Cutter selected Farrier from a photo the kid sent with his letter,” I said, closing the door. “Farrier wasn’t tattooed in the picture; he used fake tats, like decals. But he only wore them occasionally, like at the rave. Cutter culled Farrier out and killed him, but when he lifted the shirt to write …”

  Harry nodded. “Surprise. It appears the boy’s got ink.”

  “For some reason the tattoo kept him from decapitating Farrier.”

  Harry held up his hand to slow me down, did devil’s advocate. “Maybe Cutter just got interrupted.”

  “According to Sergeant Tate, Cutter could have done anything he wanted.”

  Harry thought a moment. “Jerry-boy had a tattoo, Carson, the dragon; he still lost his head. How you explain that?”

  My spine started tingling with the feeling of another sense coming on. It happens when I think there’s an invisible line nearby, and we have to walk blindly with our hands out until we touch it. I saw the morgue photos in my mind and rifled though them. Posterior stains on Deschamps and Nelson, two backs dark as bruises. But the anterior bodies were lighter, almost natural, free of settled blood.

  “Livor mortis,” I whispered. “Deschamps and Nelson were on their backs, Harry. The blood wouldn’t pool on their anterior bodies, discolor them. He doesn’t just want them on their back so he can write on them the appearance of the front of the bodies is crucial.”

  Harry’s thumbs drummed the steering wheel. “Farrier was on his side because it didn’t matter?”

  “Exactly. Once Cutter saw the tattoo, figured it was real, Farrier became useless.”

  “Appearance,” Harry mused. “Body art, the body as art. Could that be his thing? His treasure? Something as simple as a photo of the perfect body? The perfect corpse to deliver his perfect message to whoever?”

  “The perfect messenger. Damn, Harry, what if he’s sending avatars?”

  “Copies of himself?” Harry asked.

  “More like stand-ins,” I said.

  “Where do we go from here, Carson? Your call.”

  I felt something glide over my palm, a strand of web. I closed my hand but it was gone. I told Harry about the scheduling records at the morgue and that I’d finesse them from Will Lindy. We turned our attention to Farrier and his connection to the News Beat I looked at my copy of Farrier’s responses.

  “I have dates Farrier responded to ads, but no ads to cross-check against.”

  Harry frowned. “Just the ads, that’s all you need? The ones in the paper itself?”

  “The records are smoke, but we’d know which ads Farrier responded to by the numbers; each ad has a code number. It’s straws in the wind, but …”

  Harry thought for a moment. He said, “Remember that guy up by Flomaton? Lived in a house full of every kind of map he could get his hands on? It was in the newspaper last year.”

  I remembered; too strange to forget. I’d snipped the article and filed it in my Weird World folder. “Maps from everywhere that would send him one. Tokyo. Murmansk. Ulan Bator. Satellite maps, topo maps, maps of geologic faults, population density, dogs per square acre.”

  “Collecting maps. What’s your take on that?”

  I searched my jargon file. “Obsessive-compulsive behavior. Maybe even delusional depending on
what purpose he ascribed to the maps.”

  Harry jammed the car into drive and we squealed from the lot just ahead of a pack of vehicles released from a red light. Irritated horn blasts followed us down the street.

  “Talk about purpose,” Harry said, oblivious to the cacophony. “I want you to see a place and tell me if it really exists.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The two-story clapboard house sat on a deep lot overrun by kudzu, the broad leaves shrouding trees, utility poles, most of the back and side yards. We parked on the crumbling macadam street and walked past two battered bicycles leaned against a pecan tree, a Radio Flyer wagon clothes-roped behind one. An old Checker sedan sat in the gravel drive, its paint so faded it seemed to have evaporated. A car buff once told me whenever Yellow Cab’s Checkers reached five hundred thousand miles they were sold to the Mexican Army to be fitted with ordnance and used as tanks. I never knew when he was kidding.

  We heard cranes from a nearby scrap-metal yard dropping metal into boxcars. The air smelled of rust and salt water. A full minute after Harry knocked I heard dead bolts snap free. The door opened to a wizened and bald black man wearing a faded blue jumpsuit over a frayed white shirt and black bow tie. He might have been sixty years old, he might have been three hundred. Bowing at the waist, he said, “The Nautilus has surfaced.” He repeated it three times, an incantation.

  We entered a large paint-peeling foyer. There was a desk and an ironing board in a room to the right. Several newspapers were stacked on the board and a vintage iron drizzled steam toward the high ceiling. I looked into three adjoining rooms. Newspapers to the ceiling. The old man studied me warily, as if I might represent a biting species.

  “Have you brought uncertainty?” he asked softly. “Challenges from the State?”