Snakehead tct-4

by Peter May

  ‘He’d done a pretty good job of turning himself into a woman,’ Margaret said. ‘As you can see. Good enough to fool his fellow officers, at least until they got right up close.’ She segued through several other transparencies as she spoke, including close-ups of Officer Doobey’s carefully made-up face, his black wig, the glued-on fuschia-pink fingernails that adorned hairy fingers, the dress, the layers of padding beneath it to give him hips and breasts.

  ‘He had gagged himself.’ Red silk over pink lips. ‘And tied his hands behind his back.’

  ‘How’d he do that?’ a black girl on the front row asked.

  ‘Stand up,’ Margaret said.

  The girl glanced at her fellow students self-consciously and got reluctantly to her feet.

  ‘Step out in front of the class and clasp your hands in front of you,’ Margaret ordered. The girl did as she was told. ‘Now bend forward, reaching for the floor, and without unclasping your hands, step through them.’ The girl struggled a little to follow the instructions while her classmates laughed. But with only a little difficulty, she managed to do what she had been asked and stood up with her hands now clasped behind her back.

  ‘You see? Easy.’

  Another series of transparencies flashed on-screen to reveal how Officer Doobey had rigged up a pulley mechanism to raise and lower the hanging noose through a large hook sunk into the roof.

  Margaret elucidated. ‘He controlled the pulley with a remote control unit he had adapted from a basic stereo system. So that made-up, dressed up, gagged and tied, he stood on a chair with the noose around his neck and the remote control in his hands behind him. That way he could raise the noose until it was tight around his neck and taking most of his weight, literally choking him. And then at the last moment lower himself back on to the chair.’

  The class looked back at her in awed silence, clearly visualising the scenario. Then the face of a dark-haired young man from The Woodlands popped up on the monitor and his voice came across the speaker system. ‘But why, Dr. Campbell? I mean, why would he do that?’

  Margaret said, ‘Good question.’ She paused, considering how to phrase her response. ‘We are led to understand that by starving oneself of oxygen, one is able to heighten the sexual experience.’ She registered the consternation on the faces of her students as they tried to imagine what was remotely sexual about dressing up as a member of the opposite sex and hanging yourself. Margaret smiled. ‘But I don’t recommend that you try it at home.’ Which brought the relief of laughter to the room.

  ‘When I got there,’ she went on, ‘I was able to determine pretty quickly that Officer Doobey had managed inadvertently to turn the remote control the wrong way around in his hands after setting the pulley in motion, and was unable to lower it again. You can picture the scene. There he is, hanging by the neck, choking on his own weight. The binding on his wrists that is loose when in front of him, is twisted and tight behind him. He has no flexibility of movement with his hands. He is fumbling desperately to turn the remote around to lower himself to safety. And then it slips from his fingers and smashes on the floor and he knows he is going to die. He struggles for a few moments, feet kicking, then gives up and succumbs to the screaming in his ears and the blackness that descends over him bringing, in the end, a very long silence.’

  A silence filled the lecture room as these green freshmen conjured images of death they could never have imagined. Images, Margaret knew, with which they would become only too familiar when they graduated into the real and unpleasant world beyond this cloistered academic environment. The hum of the sound system seemed inordinately loud in the silence. Margaret caught a glimpse of herself on the monitor. Pale and freckled, fair hair tumbling carelessly over her shoulders. The CCTV cameras did her no favours. God, she looked old, she thought. Much older than her thirty-four years. Perhaps all those images of death she had had to deal with herself over the years had etched themselves into her face. What was it they called it…character?

  A young man with close-cropped blond hair at the back of the room asked, ‘How could you know that for sure? Couldn’t someone have set it up just to look that way, and really it was murder?’

  ‘Yes, Mark, that’s possible,’ Margaret said. ‘But I was able to rule that out pretty much straight off.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because Officer Doobey not only liked hanging himself, he also liked watching himself do it. He had set up a camera, and the whole drama was there on video tape. Death by Hanging—at a cinema near you.’ Margaret grinned ruefully. ‘It would make life a lot easier if all my cases were available on video.’ She closed the folder on her desk. ‘That’s all for today, guys.’

  In the corridor outside, the babble of excited student voices had already receded as they headed out for coffee and no doubt a few cigarettes. Margaret never ceased to be amazed at how many young people were smoking now. A whole generation had given up, but the kids apparently didn’t care about the health issues. It made Margaret think of her time in China where everyone, it seemed, smoked. Everywhere. But even the most fleeting thought of the Middle Kingdom, even after a year, touched raw nerves, and she immediately turned away from it. She pulled her leather jacket on under the turned-up collar of her blouse and stooped to take a mouthful of water from a stainless steel drinking fountain below a wall-mounted display case filled with the badges and stars of innumerable law agencies.

  ‘Ma’am? Can I have a word?’

  She looked up and saw the boy with the cropped head of fair hair from the back of her class. He was grinning shyly, clutching his satchel to his chest, and her heart sank. He always managed to find something he could ask her about after class.

  She stood up and thrust both hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Mark, I’ve told you before — it’s Doctor, or Margaret. Ma’am makes me sound like a…well, like a schoolmarm.’ And she immediately saw the irony in that. Because here she was, a teacher being cornered after class by a pupil with a crush on her. She smiled. ‘Just call me Margaret.’

  But Mark clearly wasn’t comfortable with that. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot, Dr. Campbell, you know, after your classes and all, about what it is I really want to do.’

  Margaret grinned and set off along the corridor. He loped after her. ‘And today you finally figured it out,’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘Autoeroticism. Cross-dressing and oxygen starvation.’

  He blushed to the roots of his hair. ‘No…I…I…didn’t mean…’ he stuttered. ‘I mean, what I meant was…I think I’d like to be a pathologist.’ And he added, unnecessarily, ‘You know, like you.’

  They had reached the entrance hall, lights reflecting off red tile floors, flags representing all the foreign students at the college hanging limply above the stairwell. Margaret was losing patience. She turned on the young man, white sneakers squeaking on the glazed tiles. ‘If you want to be a pathologist, Mark, you should be at med school. But, frankly, I’m not sure you’d have what it takes.’ His face fell. But Margaret was unrelenting. ‘And, Mark…go chase someone your own age.’ She turned and hurried out past a photo portrait of the kindly looking silver-haired man after whom the college had been named. In the car park she paused for a moment, filled with regret. George J. Beto, she was sure, would not have spoken to a student like that. But Margaret had a propensity for harsh words. It was only too easy to hurt others when you were still hurting yourself.

  * * *

  Margaret’s house was on Avenue O at the top of the hill, a spit away from the university campus. It was built of red brick, like the college, and had a grey tile roof. Sprawling on one level, it was set in a lush green garden, screened from the road by trees. It had made sense at the time to take on the rental. The plan had been to settle for a quiet life of academic seclusion. Then, after only three months, the job in Harris County had fallen vacant. Chief medical examiner of the third largest county in the United States, taking in Houston, the fourth largest city. She ha
d thought long and hard about it, and the dean had been very supportive, even encouraged her. She could always, he said, guest-lecture one morning a week. He had grinned and in his clipped New York accent told her it would be quite a feather in his cap to have the CME of Harris County lecturing at his college. She never knew how much influence the dean had had with the appointees, but one of them had told her later that the job had been hers from the moment she applied.

  Margaret checked her watch as she drove up Seventeenth Street. There was just enough time to shower and change before heading back to her office in Houston, a good fifty minutes’ drive if the traffic on the freeway was moving smoothly. But her spirits dipped as she drew her Chevy in behind a bright red pick-up with oversized wheels parked outside her house. Her landlord was standing on the porch with his arms folded across his chest. A young man in overalls and a baseball cap crouched at the open front door, a bag of tools on the stoop beside him.

  Margaret slammed the door of her car and strode up the path. ‘What do you think you’re doing, McKinley?’

  The young man looked alarmed and got quickly to his feet. But McKinley stood his ground defiantly. He was a redneck with money. Owned several of the houses on the hill. ‘That ain’t very’ ladylike kinda language now,’ he drawled unpleasantly.

  Margaret glared at him. He was a walking, talking cliché. Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a checked shirt and a scuffed white Stetson pushed back on his head. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

  The younger man glanced from one to the other. ‘Maybe I should go.’ He stooped to pick up his bag. Chisels and screwdrivers rattled inside it.

  McKinley put out a hand to stop him. ‘You stay where you are, sonny.’ And to Margaret, ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady.’

  Margaret turned to the carpenter. ‘You want to know why?’ He looked like he’d rather eat his baseball cap. But she was going to tell him anyway. ‘Because when I was out he was going into my house and going through my stuff. Left his big oily fingermarks on the bras and panties in my underwear drawer.’

  McKinley’s face reddened. ‘Now that ain’t true. You got no cause goin’ sayin’ stuff like that.’

  The carpenter was examining his feet now with great interest.

  ‘You want to see the proof?’ Margaret asked McKinley. ‘Two hours of video footage from the camera I hid in the closet?’

  It was a bluff, but it proved to be a winning hand. McKinley paled. Then his mouth tightened. ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady. And that’s a contravention, plain and simple, of the terms of your lease. I want you outta here.’

  Margaret’s cellphone rang and she fumbled in her purse to find it. ‘What,’ she barked into it.

  ‘Been trying to get you for the last hour.’ It was Lucy, her secretary, a God-fearing middle-aged Presbyterian lady who disapproved of Margaret.

  ‘I always turn off the cellphone when I’m lecturing, Lucy. You know that,’ Margaret said. ‘Why didn’t you try the college?’

  ‘I did. And missed you.’ She heard Lucy sigh at the other end. ‘Dr. Campbell, we got a call from the sheriff’s office in Walker County up there. They need your help out at a Tex-Mex eatery on Highway 45. Seems they got a truck full of ninety-some dead people.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Margaret said, and she could almost feel Lucy’s disapproval all the way down the line from Houston. ‘I’m on my way.’ She hung up and pushed past McKinley into the house. She always kept an emergency flight case at home packed with all the tools and accoutrements of her profession.

  ‘I mean it,’ McKinley shouted after her. ‘I want you outta here.’

  ‘Tell it to my lawyer,’ Margaret said and shut the door in his face.

  IV

  Margaret drove northwest on Interstate 45, past the Wynne and Holliday Units of the Huntsville prison complex, the tiny municipal airport that sat up on the right, the spur that took off west to Harper Cemetery. She passed several billboards advertising positions as correctional officers for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In Huntsville you either worked for the prison or the university. The warm October sun bleached all colour out of the sky and she could see the cluster of blue and red flashing lights in the distance identifying where the truck had been found. Strictly speaking, this was out of Margaret’s jurisdiction. But the Walker County Coroner simply wasn’t equipped to cope with something like this. Which was why the sheriff had called her office.

  She turned on to the 190 and took a left on the access road to the Mexican diner. Three crows stood on a white picket fence gazing curiously across the scrub toward the parking lot where police officers moved, antlike, around its taped-off perimeter. More than a dozen vehicles choked the entrance to the lot and Margaret recognised a Pontiac driven by one of her investigators and a couple of white forensics trucks. The centre of all the activity was a huge refrigerated container, the door on the driver’s side of its tractor unit still lying open, just as Jayjay had found it. The Walker County sheriff crossed the crumbling asphalt to greet her. He was a big man in his late fifties, with a grey suit and a white Stetson. His badge was pinned to a breast pocket from which poked a red and yellow re-election flyer. His big hand enveloped hers and crushed it.

  ‘Ma’am, thanks for coming,’ he said, and Margaret remembered her cruel words to her young student. The sheriff looked grim. ‘We got a shitload of trouble here.’

  Another man had followed him over. A year or two younger, perhaps. In his middle fifties. He had grey receding hair, neatly cut and thinning on top, and a world-weary face. He was medium height and chunkily built, spreading at the waist. ‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ he said. Clearly a dismissal. ‘You guys are doing a great job here.’ The sheriff nodded to Margaret and moved away, and the other man turned to her. ‘You the ME?’

  Margaret held out her hand and said coolly, ‘Dr. Margaret Campbell.’

  ‘Agent Michael Hrycyk.’ He pronounced it Rychick. His palm was clammy hot. He flipped open a leather wallet to reveal his badge. ‘INS.’

  Margaret frowned. ‘What interest does Immigration have in this?’

  ‘You mean apart from the fact there’s ninety-eight dead Chinese in there?’ He flicked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the truck.

  Margaret’s stomach flipped over. ‘Chinese?’

  ‘Well, Asian. But probably Chinese. Almost certainly illegal. Which’ll make ’em ours.’

  ‘It won’t make them anybody’s, except mine, if they’re dead.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He took out a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Don’t light that here,’ Margaret said. ‘This is a crime scene.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said.

  In the distance Margaret saw the first of the TV trucks arriving. It hadn’t taken long. Ninety-eight dead Chinese in the back of a truck — the local stations would make a killing selling it to the networks. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  He took her arm and started walking her toward the truck. ‘There are anything up to a hundred thousand Chinese EWIs arriving in the States every year,’ he said. ‘Most of them nowadays coming across the border from Mexico.’

  ‘EWI?’ She removed her arm from his grip.

  ‘Entry without Inspection. An EWI’s what we call an illegal immigrant. And in this case, an OTM as well.’ He grinned a humourless grin. ‘That’s Other Than Mexican.’

  ‘You have some interesting terminology,’ Margaret observed dryly.

  ‘Oh, it gets a whole lot more interesting than that, Doc. We used to call the Mexicans wetbacks ’cos they always came dripping out the Rio Grande. But that ain’t politically correct no more. Except it’s what the Mexicans call themselves. Mojados. And I don’t see no reason to call them anything they don’t call themselves. Except maybe spics.’

  Margaret glanced at him with dislike. ‘And your point is?’

  Hrycyk didn’t like her tone and bristled. ‘My point is, Dr. Campbell, these illegal Chinese are worth big money. Up to sixty grand a
head these days. Which by my crude reckoning means that there’s nearly six million dollars worth of dead meat in that container. And no one in their right mind is going to waste six million bucks.’

  At the back of the truck a bunch of police officers was standing about watching two forensic investigators moving around inside the container. The investigators were wearing protective white, zippered, Tivek suits with built-in booties and hoods. Their faces were covered with surgical masks and they wore latex gloves. A photographer, similarly clad, was photographing the horror with a business-like detachment, alternating between video and stills. His lights illuminated a ghastly scene, and as the heat increased so the smell grew riper.

  Hrycyk was unaffected. He said, ‘Way I see it? The truck probably came up the 77 from Brownsville, or maybe the 281, or even the 59 from Laredo. They’re the standard routes.’

  ‘Headed where?’

  ‘Houston.’

  Margaret frowned. ‘But we’re sixty miles north of Houston here.’

  Hrycyk shrugged. ‘So they took a detour to avoid spot checks on the highway. But Houston’s where they were headed.’

  ‘Why? What is there in Houston for illegal Chinese immigrants?’

  ‘A population of three hundred thousand Chinese for a start. The fourth biggest Chinatown in the country.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Margaret said.

  ‘Most people don’t. The Chinese like to keep to themselves. They built a new Chinatown down in the southwest of the city and hardly ever leave it.’ He began to take out his cigarettes again, then caught Margaret’s eye and slipped them back in his pocket. ‘Houston also has the third largest community of consuls in the US. Seventy at the last count. And that means papers — proof of identity, country of origin. You got papers you’re halfway to becoming a legal resident. There’s big business in papers.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Course, most of ’em don’t stay. New York’s the final destination. The Jinshan, the Mountain of Gold they’re all looking for. But in the meantime, they’ll hide out in safe houses and work sixteen, seventeen hours a day in sweatshops and restaurants and whorehouses to pay off the money they owe the shetou.’