The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  Jeremy spent a half an hour with the photos, then another hour with written reports. Ava and I sat to the side as Jeremy grunted at the photos, sniffed them, ran his hands across them as if secret messages were imprinted in the colors, then scattered them across the floor like confetti.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the pathologist who had his ticklers removed by a bomb? This changes EVERYTHING.”

  Jeremy held up the investigative report on the Caulfield incident and pretended to study it through a lorgnette. It had been included as a sidebar report on the Mueller killing.

  I said, “Caulfield? There was a murder attempt, but it was aimed at Mueller.”

  “So I read, brother. Someone stuck a bombaroo up Mueller’s fundament knowing when he awoke he’d attempt to remove the obstruction and jellify his exhaust system. The man’s lifestyle prepared him for such discoveries. Yawn, what is it this time … a pumpkin? A cocker spaniel? Who could anticipate the man’s heart would explode first and he’d be sent to the morgue.”

  I said, “The bomb wasn’t meant for Caulfield. It was horrible misfortune.”

  “Put yourself in Caulfield’s booties. He’s worked years for the moment, he’s given a postmortem he’s not expected to have, and gets his touchy-fee lies turned to paste. Bye-bye, career.”

  “What do you mean, the post wasn’t expected?” I plucked the sheet from Jeremy’s hands.

  “It’s all there. Mueller’s postmortem was scheduled for Dr. Peltier. She graciously stepped aside and let Caulfield be head chopper.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, my, was that Freudian?”

  I read the report. At the last moment Clair gave the post to Caulfield. This was all new to me; it hadn’t been our case. Jeremy sneered. “Maybe good doctor Caulfield got a little pissed about the substitution.”

  “How do the words fit in? I can’t connect them.”

  “DON’T START with the WORDS! They don’t have to make sense to YOU!”

  “I want them to mean something,” I said, confounded that the thick scrawl of phrases didn’t resolve into order, lacked the finger snap moment of That’s if.

  “Mean something? MEAN SOMETHING? What do you know of meaning? Did you know what the burning silk pad over the eyes of Adrian’s little dolly meant? Your people were saying it was a way of hiding. I told you it was a bond of love … Didn’t I tell you Adrian loved his fires far more than any female could ever love any male and didn’t I send you away from here looking for arson? The first step in may I call him Joel? Thank you Joel’s selection process? That Joel would find people at his fires and follow them until LOVE HAD ITS WAY?”

  It didn’t make sense for Joel Adrian to see fire as a spiritual entity. It didn’t make sense for him to believe his set fires tapped his victims for death. I hadn’t seen it, but Jeremy had, as well as the fires selecting the next four victims. I couldn’t see into the world of Joel Adrian, for which I daily thanked God, but Jeremy could. How could I doubt him?

  I nodded. “You were right, Jeremy. I can’t argue that.”

  Ava spoke up. “Your participation saved lives, Mr. Ridgecliff.”

  Jeremy turned to Ava and his lips curled into a sneer. “You see it as saving lives, witch. I see it as BETRAYING JOEL ADRIAN!”

  Ava startled and her purse fell, its contents spilling across the floor. The red lighter spun on the white tile.

  “Oh, don’t get so excited, honey,” Jeremy said, smiling at the lighter. “We’ll get there.”

  He stood and began circling again. “Caulfield lost his career on the first day he went to work, Carson. Years of work gone in a” he smiled finger snap I think your boyo is a wee bit PO’d at his old boss for slipping his digits in the blender. Think of the bodies as postcards, that’s a nice analogy. Postcards from hell. Miss you, wish you were here. She will be, if our boy has a word in the matter.”

  Ava said, “Why no heads?”

  Jeremy jerked his head to her, veins cording in his neck. “Because SOMETHING has to be MISSING, girly, and missing fingers would point to him. Is that an oxymoron? And consider: Can even the most perfect body function without a head? No. Can even the most perfect pathologist function without a hand?” He said, “Tell me, how were the heads removed?”

  I replied, “With near-surgical precision.”

  Jeremy crossed his arms and tapped an impatient toe. “Is that not a signature for a man dedicated to slicing and dicing?”

  Ava frowned and said, “It wasn’t surgical precision. There were hesitations, he was off track.”

  “He’s got half a fucking hand, WHORE!”

  Suddenly Jeremy was on the floor and my hands were around his neck. He made no attempt to fight. Ava was over me, pulling me away. “Carson. Stop!”

  I released my grip. Jeremy looked at Ava, confused. “Thank you, dear,” he said, recovering and standing. He glared at me.

  Ava said, “If he hates her so much, why doesn’t he “

  “Remove her hated head? He’s making something, laying a foundation. He’s suffered, and he’s planning for her to pay back the pain with heavy interest.”

  Jeremy smiled and took a bow. “Our work here is done, Tonto,” he said. He turned to Ava. “Got that lighter, sister?”

  CHAPTER 30

  “Perhaps my brother explained our little arrangement,” Jeremy said, rubbing his hands together as if trying to strike fire from his palms. “My words for his … music. At first I thought your presence would hinder our ritual. But you, my dear, have touched the magic pretties, swam amid the stink-flowers that bloom within. You have been up to your delicate little wrists in” he reached over and stopped just short of touching her fingertips “the glorious. Maybe you’ll even learn something.”

  He turned to me. “Why don’t you slip that shirt off now, brother. I know you’re anxious to tell the world about Dr. Stubbyfingers’s adventures, and I do have my paycheck coming.”

  I nodded at Ava. She opened her purse and removed the lighter, a simple red Bic, seventy-five cents’ worth of plastic and stamped metal and butane. She held it on her palm and offered it to Jeremy. His hands shook as they reached for the implement, fingers figuring how to pluck it from her palm without contacting flesh.

  “Get what you need, Jeremy,” Ava said. “But make sure it’s a lifetime’s worth.”

  He paused in his reach.

  “What do you mean, lifetime?”

  Ava’s arm slashed the stack of photos from the table. They drifted across the white floor like exotic leaves.

  “What are you DOING?”

  She said, “Wasn’t it fun while it lasted, Jeremy? Having rare blossoms brought to you from the far side of the walls?”

  He turned to me. “What is it SAYING?”

  Ava held the lighter on her palm like an offering. “Breathe deep, Mr. Ridgecliff. Today’s the last day you’ll ever smell the magic blooms.”

  His eyes darted like bait fish beneath an osprey. “What is it SAYING? What does it MEAN?”

  I looked away.

  “You know, you have lovely hands, Jeremy,” Ava continued. “Look at them. So soft, so pink. But think of an old man’s hands. White and blue and wrinkled up like claws. Even when you have hands like that, hands of fifty years from now, you’ll never again have touched outside this building. Because the only way you can ever touch outside is through Carson. And if you touch him with fire tonight, I swear, it’s over.”

  She moved the lighter’ toward Jeremy and he shrank back, looking between my face and the lighter. I said nothing, this was Ava, skating on the far edge of the ice.

  “Look at your hands, Jeremy,” she said. “The next thing they touch outside of here will be the grave.”

  He studied the lighter as if divining entrails. His nostrils flared. He slapped her hand and the lighter flew across the room. He sat back and crossed his arms and legs, looking away, affecting disinterest.

  “Oh, very well. You win, pathologist. But only because you pulled him off me. Good deeds and all that
. My own brother wanting to STRANGLE ME.” He smiled, frost over steel, then leaned forward and tapped my hand with a cold finger.

  “But just so we understand, Carson, this little, uh, abeyance is only valid for the present purchase. Next time my deal will have all the loopholes negotiated out.”

  “Thank you,” Ava said. Jeremy waved her words away.

  He remained seated as Ava and I stood. There was something behind his eyes that frightened me, figures moving through smoke. The conclusion was too fast, too simple. Jeremy should have screamed, ranted, weighed Ava’s every word and countered with his own maimed logic. Never before had I left without him screaming imprecations or singing foul songs or asking for a final recitation of our mother’s pain. Something false rang loud through my head, the dull throb of a leaden bell, and I was followed through the door by its blunted, thudding toll.

  “It’s my habit,” Clair said the next morning. “I always let a new path think the first day is going to be nothing more than a get-acquainted day, practices and procedures and learning paperwork. If there’s an autopsy, I offer it to them. I like to see how they handle the request.”

  It was 8:00 a.m. We were in Clair’s office. I’d picked up a box of pastry on the way in. Everything had shifted to Caulfield. I couldn’t resolve the words on Burlew’s back nor the messages on Nelson and Deschamps all I had was Jeremy’s avowal that they were part of Caulfield’s internal landscape, and no amount of illumination would render them sensible to a sane mind.

  “I was scared to death when you asked me to perform the procedure,” Ava said. “And when it was over I felt like I was part of the group, the team.”

  “It’s being asked to cross the deep end on the first day of swimming lessons,” Clair nodded. “Poor Dr. Caulfield’s eye was twitching.” She closed her eyes. “But he never finished.”

  “No one here talks about him,” Ava said. “Like a curse.”

  “It’s stuck in the air,” Clair said. “It was the motivation for renovating the facility. The autopsy suite was sprayed with blood and I used the tragedy to press for a complete renewal. It took months, but it got done.”

  “You have Caulfield’s address?” I asked Clair.

  She nodded and walked toward her office. “A post office box somewhere in the Talladega Mountains. He receives a monthly check as part of his settlement.”

  She was back in a minute with a photo of Caulfield taken for his ID card. He looked like a nice guy, pleasant, like you’d buy him a beer just for standing next to you in a bar.

  The steep and rutted road in the Talledega Mountains made me glad I’d spent extra for four-wheel drive, the truck like a boat grinding up a churning stream, prow bouncing, slamming down, veering, leaping again, a wake of gray dust streaming from my stern. After fifteen minutes of punishing my truck and my kidneys, I found Caulfield’s house where the kind lady at the post office had said it would be: on a gentle slope to my left, the land rising fast and hard behind it. To the right the mountain dropped like a waterfall. Judging by the condition of the road continuing up the mountain, this was about the end of it.

  I pulled in beside a dusty blue Cherokee and rubbed eyes tired from five hours of driving. The house was modest but well kept, a fresh coat of white paint over the wood, the front yard clear of the spent tires and rusting vehicles that seemed to have rained from the sky onto other spreads I’d passed. The woodpile beside the front porch could have won blue ribbon in a wood-stacking contest. There was a rocking chair on the porch with a table beside it, on the table a small pile of magazines. I looked across the valley. The clarity of the mountain air compressed distance and I saw as through a lens. Low in the valley was a town, little more than a cluster of houses peering from green. Church spires and a few taller, mercantile-looking structures poked from the tree-tops. On the outskirts of the town was a two-story official-looking building with a circular drive and a large, full parking lot; it looked like a medical facility.

  A cyclone-fenced perimeter surrounded Caulfield’s house, the fence hung with signs: keep out, beware of dog, no trespassing. There were no dog leavings in the yard. I stepped from the truck slowly and stayed behind the protection of the door, which also concealed the nine-millimeter in my hand. I had a .32 strapped to my ankle and a shotgun across the driver’s seat.

  Something rustled behind me and I turned, ducking. A ground squirrel flashed across the front yard and into the woodpile. My heart raced and I felt foolish as I faced the door. Holding my badge in my left hand I called across the fence. “Dr. Caulfield. I’m Carson Ryder from the Mobile Police. I’d like to talk with you for a few minutes.”

  I watched the door, the windows. Stayed alert for someone running out with a blazing shotgun. Nothing.

  “Dr. Caulfield, could you please come to the door, sir.”

  I saw it. The merest slitting of curtain. I waved at a solitary eye. “I mean you no harm. I want to talk about … about the day it all went wrong.”

  A minute ticked slowly past. I noticed how loud the woods were with birdsong and insects. The door creaked open a few inches.

  “Go away,” the deep voice behind the door said.

  “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Find someone else to talk to.”

  “This is important, Doctor. It may have to do with what happened to your hand.”

  Birdsong and insects again. Then a hand stuck out the door. Or what was left of one. The voice yelled, “You want to talk about my hand? There it is. Does it inspire conversation?”

  “I’ve got four dead men, Doctor. Three have no heads and I have no answers. Isn’t that what you were trained to do? Help speak for the dead?”

  Silence. I watched a jay flit between trees. “There’s big trouble in Mobile, Doctor. I’m begging for your help.”

  The cabin door opened slowly and a slight man stepped out onto the wooden stoop. He wore an outsized black sweatshirt over khaki pants, dark hair combed neatly, a handsome face alternating between defiance and puzzlement. The right sleeve of the sweatshirt was rolled to his bicep, the left sleeve hanging loose to covered his damaged hand. Wary of a trick, I studied the sleeve, but the hand I saw couldn’t have gripped a weapon.

  I said, “I’d be appreciative of any time you could give me, Doctor.”

  He stared at the crown of a tall sycamore for a few seconds, then sighed and turned back to me. “Time is something I have too much of. Put away the weapon you think you’re hiding and step inside.”

  I let myself through the gate and onto the porch, where his empty sleeve flapped me through the door. Passing across the porch I noted the magazines on the table were topped by a copy of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Report, required reading for a clinical pathologist.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly from his side of the dining-room table. “I wasn’t scheduled to be the pro sector My first procedure was set for the following morning. But when Dr. Peltier asked if I wanted to take the autopsy, what could I say? Of course I said yes.”

  Dr. Alexander Michael Caulfield wasn’t anything I wanted him to be. Not wild eyed and babbling, not ice cold and geometrically precise. He neither lurked nor overwhelmed. His tables were laden with medical texts instead of knives. His wall wasn’t plastered with photos of Clair or spattered with blood, but hung with black-and-white photos of mountain scenes. A low-fat cookbook on an end table somehow reassured me: Do vengeance-driven killers care about cholesterol? In short, Dr. Caulfield struck me to be, like the vast majority of us, a human being of middle distances.

  “Did you suspect Clair was going to give you the helm?”

  “No. My eye started twitching I was so scared. This is Dr. Clair Peltier watching, you know? I’d read every one of her articles, attended three symposia where she presented. I found out later that handing over the autopsy is her way of indicating confidence in the new hire’s abilities.”

  “How did you find out about the job?”

  “A board at med schoo
l listed openings by specialty. I saw the one for Mobile and applied. I met with Dr. Peltier twice before I was hired. I take it I was in a close race with another applicant.”

  “You came to Mobile?”

  “I spent two days the first visit, two weeks later I spent three. The last day was when I was offered the position.”

  “Where did you spend your time during the mating dance?”

  “Virtually all at the morgue. I took the grand tour, met the staff, watched several procedures. About the only time I wasn’t at the morgue proper was meals with Dr. Peltier, and when I went back to my motel at night.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I need a sip of something. Get you a lemonade?”

  “A quick one. I’ve got to head back, start digging again.”

  I blew out a long, disappointed breath when Caulfield left the room. Jeremy had definitely drawn the wrong card on Caulfield. It was a long shot, but since Jeremy had failed, long shots were the only shots remaining. Problem was, I had run out of targets.

  Caulfield returned with two glasses of lemonade carried one-handedly on a tray, un steadied by his wounded hand, as if he were unaware of its potential for support. I drank mine in a couple of long cool drafts and secured his permission to call if I had any other questions. As we walked out on his porch I noticed several bushes in the front yard cut back to allow full view of the distant, official-looking building.

  “What’s that big brick place over there, Doctor?” I asked, pointing.

  “County hospital,” he replied without looking.

  “You ever go over there, look around, introduce yourself?”

  He managed a thin smile and flapped his empty cuff at me.

  I said, “Might be a place where a smart man might do a lot of good.”

  His eyes flashed, then averted. “Look, Detective Ryder, I’ve thought about going over there ” He stopped himself, as if he’d been working on the sentence but didn’t know how to end it, words in progress, subject to revisions.