The Death Box

by J. A. Kerley

  “Dubois!” bayed a woman’s voice from a distance, sending a half-dozen crows fleeing from a nearby tree. “Du-bois! Where you at? Duuuuuuuu-bois!”

  My neighbor winced, pulled low the brim of the hat and started to turn away. “Stop by for a drink some night, Mister Ryder. We can talk about dead bodies. I may even have one you can look at.”

  I splashed away, the sun sending shadows of my temporary home out into the water to guide me ashore. I slipped wet feet into my moccasins and jogged the boardwalk to the porch, moving faster when I heard my cell phone chirping from the deck. The call was from Roy McDermott, my new boss.

  “Looks like we got a regular Sunshine State welcome for you, Carson. I’m looking at the weirdest damn thing I ever saw. Scariest, too. I know you don’t officially get on the clock for a couple weeks, but I’m pretty sure this can’t wait.”

  “What is it you’re looking at, Roy?”

  “No one truly knows. Procurement gave you a decent car, I expect?”

  “I signed some papers. Haven’t seen a car.”

  A sigh. “I’m gonna kick some bureaucratic ass. Whatever you’re driving, how about you pretend it’s the Batmobile and kick on the afterburners. Come help me make sense of what I’m seeing.”

  I hurled myself through the shower and pulled on a pair of khakis and a blue oxford shirt, stepping into desert boots and tossing on a blue blazer. My accessorizing was minimal, the Smith & Wesson Airweight in a clip-on holster. On my way out I grabbed a couple Clif Bars for sustenance and headed down the stairs.

  The elevated house was its own carport, with room for a dozen vehicles underneath, and my ancient gray pickup looked lonely on all that concrete. I’d bought it years ago, second-hand, the previous owner a science-fiction fan who’d had Darth Vader air-brushed on the hood. After a bit too much bourbon one night, I’d taken a roller and a can of marine-grade paint and painted everything a sedate, if patchy, gray.

  The grounds hadn’t been groomed since the dope dealer had ownership, overgrown brush and palmetto fronds grazing the doors as I snaked down the long crushed-shell drive to the electronic gate, eight feet of white steel grate between brick stanchions shaded by towering palms. I panicked until remembering I could open the gate with my phone and dialed the number provided by the realtor.

  Phoning a gate, I thought. Welcome to the Third Millennium.

  I aimed toward the mainland, an hour away, cruised through Key Largo and across the big bridge. My destination was nearby, a bit shy of Homestead. Roy had said to turn right at a sign saying FUTURE SITE OF PLANTATION POINT, A NEW ADVENTURE IN SHOPPING and head a quarter mile down a gravel road.

  “You can’t miss the place,” he’d added. “It’s the only circus tent in miles.”

  3

  It wasn’t a circus tent in the distance, but it was side-show size, bright white against scrubby land scarred by heavy equipment, three Cat ’dozers and a grader sitting idle beside a house-sized pile of uprooted trees. Plastic-ribboned stakes marked future roads and foundations as the early stages of a construction project.

  A Florida Highway Patrol cruiser was slanted across the road, a slab-shouldered trooper leaning on the trunk with arms crossed and black aviators tracking my approach. He snapped from the car like elastic, a hand up in the universal symbol for Halt, and I rolled down my window with driver’s license in hand. “I’m Carson Ryder, here at the request of Captain Roy McDermott.”

  The eyes measured the gap between a top dog in the FCLE and a guy driving a battered pickup. He checked a clipboard and hid his surprise at finding my name.

  “Cap’n McDermott’s in the tent, Mr Ryder. Please park behind it.”

  It felt strange that my only identification was a driver’s license. I’d had my MPD gold for a decade, flashed it hundreds of times. I’d twice handed it away when suspended, twice had it returned. I’d once been holding it in my left hand while my right hand shot a man dead; his gamble, his loss. It felt strange and foreign to not produce my Mobile shield.

  You made the right decision, my head said. My heart still wasn’t sure.

  I angled five hundred feet down a slender dirt road scraped through the brush, stopping behind the tent, one of those rental jobs used for weddings and whatnot, maybe sixty feet long and forty wide. I was happy to see a portable AC unit pumping air inside. On the far side, beside a house-sized mound of freshly dug earth, were a half-dozen official-looking vehicles including a large black step van which I figured belonged to the Medical Examiner or Forensics department.

  Beside the van three men and a woman were clustered in conversation. Cops. Don’t ask how I knew, but I always did. A dozen feet away a younger guy was sitting atop a car hood looking bored. I wasn’t sure about him.

  The entrance was a plastic door with a handmade sign yelling ADMITTANCE BY CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY!!! the ONLY underscored twice. Though I hadn’t been cleared – whatever that meant – I’d been called, so I pressed through the door.

  It was cool inside and smelled of damp sand. Centering the space was a pit about twenty feet by twenty. Above the pit, at the far end of the tent at ground level, were several folding tables. A woman in a lab coat was labeling bags atop two of the tables. Another table held a small microscope and centrifuge. I’d seen this before, an on-site forensics processing center.

  I returned my attention to the pit, which resembled the excavation for an in-ground swimming pool, wooden rails keeping the sandy soil from caving. Centering the hole was an eight-foot-tall column with two lab-jacketed workers ticking on its surface with hammers. I estimated the column’s diameter at five feet and watched as a white-smocked lab worker dropped a chipped-off shard into an evidence bag. When the worker stepped away, a photographer jumped in. The scene reminded me of a movie where scientists examine a mysterious object from the heavens. Shortly thereafter, of course, the object begins to glow and hum and everyone gets zapped by death beams.

  “You there!” a voice yelled. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  I snapped from my alien fantasy to see a lab-jacketed woman striding toward me, her black hair tucked beneath a blue ball cap and her eyes a human version of death beams. “Where’s your ID?” she demanded, pointing at a naked space on my chest where I assumed an identification should reside. “You can’t be here without an—”

  “Yo, Morningstar!” a voice cut in. “Don’t kill him, he’s on our side.”

  I looked up and saw Roy McDermott step from the far side of the column. The woman’s thumb jerked at me.

  “Him? This?”

  “He’s the new guy I told you about.”

  The woman I now knew as Morningstar turned big brown death rays on Roy. “I’m in charge of scene, Roy. I want everyone to have a site ID.”

  Roy patted dust from his hands as he approached, a luminous grin on his huge round face and the ever-present cowlick rising from the crown of semi-tamed haybright hair. He called to mind an insane Jack O’Lantern.

  “I’ll have someone make him a temporary tag, Vivian. You folks bring any crayons?”

  Morningstar’s eyes narrowed. “Condescension fits you, Roy. It’s juvenile.”

  Roy climbed the steps from the pit and affected apologetic sincerity. “I forgot his clearance, Vivian. I’m sorry. All we have time for now is introductions. Carson, this is Vivian Morningstar, our local pathologist and—”

  “I’m the Chief Forensic Examiner for the Southern Region, Roy.”

  “Carson, this is the Examining Chief Region of the – shit, whatever. And this, Vivian, is Carson Ryder. We’re still figuring out his title.”

  Morningstar and I brushed fingertips in an approximation of a handshake, though it was more like the gesture of two boxers. Roy took my arm and swung me toward the pit. We stepped down on hastily constructed stairs, the wood creaking beneath us.

  “Now to get serious,” Roy said. “Damndest thing I’ve seen in twenty years in the biz.”

  Three techs stepped aside as we walked
to the object. Seemingly made of concrete, it resembled a carved column from a temple in ancient Egypt, its surface jagged and pitted with hollows, as though the sculptor had been called away before completion.

  “More light,” Roy said.

  The techs had been working with focused illumination. One of them widened the lighting, bringing the entire object into hard-edged relief.

  A woman began screaming.

  I didn’t hear the scream, I saw it. Pressing from the concrete was a woman’s face, eyes wide and mouth open in an expression of ultimate horror. She was swimming toward me, face breaking the surface of the concrete, one gray and lithic hand above, the other below, as if frozen in the act of stroking. The scenic was so graphic and lifelike that I gasped and felt my knees loosen.

  Roy stepped toward me and I held my hand up, I’m fine, it lied. I caught my breath and saw ripples of concrete-encrusted fabric, within its folds a rock-hard foot. I moved to the side and saw another gray face peering from the concrete, the eyes replaced with sand and cement, bone peeking through shredded skin that appeared to have petrified on the cheeks. One temple was missing.

  My hand rose unbidden to the shattered face.

  “Don’t think of touching it,” Morningstar said.

  My hand went to my pocket as I circled the frieze of despair: two more heads staring from the stone, surrounding them a jumble of broken body parts, hands, knees, shoulders. Broken bones stood out like studs.

  My hands ached to touch the column, as if that might help me to understand whatever had happened. But I thrust them deeper into my pockets and finished my circle, ending up at the screaming woman, her dead face still alive in her terror.

  “It was found yesterday,” Roy explained. “A worker was grading land when his blade banged a chunk of concrete. The foreman saw a mandible sticking out and called us. We had the excavation started within two hours.”

  Most municipal departments would have needed a day to pull the pieces together, maybe longer. But that was the power of a state organization. The FCLE arrived, flashed badges, and went to work.

  “What formed the column?” I asked.

  Morningstar tapped the object. “The concrete was poured into an old rock-walled cistern. Stones initially surrounded the object, but the techs spent last night dislodging them.”

  “Any idea when it was put here?”

  “Could be a few months, could be two years. I’ll get closer as we analyze more samples.”

  “You’re gonna find different times,” called a basso voice from above. “Older bodies, newer ones. The bottom bodies may go back years, decades even.”

  I looked up at a guy on ground level, mid-forties or so, dark complexion, black suit, gray shirt. His sole concession to festivity was a colour-speckled tie that seemed from one of Jackson Pollock’s brighter days. The man’s gleaming black hair was swept back behind his ears. He wore dark sunglasses on a prize-winning proboscis, more like a beak. With the clothes, nose, and down-looking pose he called to mind a looming buzzard.

  “What you been up to, Vincent?” Roy asked.

  The guy brandished the briefcase. “Copying property records at the Dade County assessor’s office. Someone had to know the cistern was here, right?”

  Roy nodded approvingly. “Come down into the hole, Vince. Got someone you should meet.”

  I shook hands with Vincent Delmara, a senior investigator with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. Though the FCLE might swoop in and start bee-buzzing a crime scene, shutting out the locals invited turf wars which, in the long run, had no winners.

  “You’re thinking these bodies were built up over time, not just dumped all at once?” Roy asked Delmara.

  “We got us a serial killer,” Delmara exulted. “He’s been using the hole as a dumping ground over years. We’re gonna solve a shitload of disappearances.”

  I understood Delmara’s enthusiasm. Miami-Dade, like any large metro area, had a backlog of missing persons. If this was a serial killer and the bodies were identified, a lot of cases could be cleared and families granted closure.

  “I’m thinking he used an ax,” Delmara said. “He dumps the corpse in the cistern and pours in concrete to cover. They were supposed to stay hidden for ever, except development got in the way.”

  “What do you think accounts for the brownish cast to the concrete?” I asked. “And the rusty streaks, like here?”

  “Mud mixing with the cement. Dirt.”

  Roy produced an unlit cigar to placate his fingers. “The only problem I got is picturing a guy mixing a tub of ’crete every time he dumps a body. It gets riskier with repetition.”

  “Maybe he gets off on the risk,” Delmara said. “Mixes his concrete as an appetizer, dumps the body for his entree, jacks off into the hole for dessert.” Delmara circled his fingers and mimed the concept.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Morningstar said.

  “How many crime scenes you been at where jism’s squirted all over the place, Doctor Morningstar?” Delmara grinned. “More than a few, I’ll bet.”

  I closed my eyes and pictured the area as if it were a time-lapse documentary, day turning into night and back to day, clouds stampeding across blue sky, white clouds turning black, sun becoming rain becoming sun again.

  “Maybe the concrete was poured in dry to save time and risk,” I suggested. “Rain would soak the cement powder, time would harden it.”

  “Genius,” Roy said, clapping a big paw on my shoulder. “No fuss, no muss, no mixing. Plus cement contains lime, which helps decomposition.” He looked at Delmara. “What you think, Vince?”

  “Tasty.”

  “You think we got us a serial killer, Carson?” Roy asked.

  I turned to the column to study a splintered ulna, a severed tibia, a caved-in section of rib cage. Many seemed the kind of injuries I’d noted in car crashes. Whereas Delmara was seeing an ax used on the bodies, I was picturing a sledgehammer. Or both, the violence was that horrific. Something felt a shade off, though I couldn’t put my finger on it; having no better idea, I nodded.

  “It’s the way to go for now.”

  “Hell yes,” Delmara said, punching the air. “We’re gonna close some cases.”

  Morningstar stepped forward. “Excuse me, boys. But if you’re done being brilliant, I’d like to get back to work.”

  Delmara made notes. Roy and I retreated up the steps as Morningstar motioned her team back into place. The chipping of chisels began anew.

  We stopped at the entrance. Roy lowered his voice. “Look, Carson, I want you to start work early and be the lead on this case.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “I need you, Carson.”

  “Your people are gonna be drooling for this case, Roy. It’s a biggie.”

  “How many bodies did John Wayne Gacy stack up under his house before he got nailed?” Roy said. “Twenty? Thirty? How about Juan Corona? We might have a grade-one psycho out there, Carson. Your specialty, right … the edge-walking freaks?”

  “I’ve not even met your people, Roy. If I start by giving orders I’ll start by stepping on toes. Bad first step.”

  “You were here ten minutes and figured out the concrete angle.”

  “A conjecture.”

  “It’s the kind of thinking I need. And don’t worry – I’ll deal with any delicate tootsies.” He slapped his hands – conversation over – and headed outside. I followed, thinking that if his people let a newbie waltz in as lead investigator on a case this big, they must be the most ego-free cops the world had ever produced.

  4

  The semi-truck rumbled down the sandy lane in the South Florida coastal backcountry, a battered red tractor pulling the kind of gray intermodal container loaded on ships, traversing oceans before being offloaded to a truck or train to continue its journey. Tens of thousands of the nondescript containers traveled the world daily and it had been calculated that at any given moment over three per cent of the world’s GDP lay within the containers of
Maersk, the world’s largest intermodal shipper.

  But those were official loads. This particular shipment was a ghost, its true contents never recorded in any official documents. With the complicity of bribed clerks and customs agents, this simple gray box had boarded a ship in Honduras, sailed to the Port of Miami and been offloaded to the red tractor, with only the kind of glancing notice that came from eyes averted at the precise moment the container ghosted past.

  “Looks quiet to me, Joleo.”

  The passenger in the cab porched his hand over a scarred and sunburned brow, his dull green eyes scanning a stand of trees in the distance. Between the treeline and the truck was a corroded Quonset hut, a hundred feet of corrugated aluminum resembling a dirty gray tube half sunk in the sand. The passenger’s name was Calvert Hatton, but he went by Ivy, tattooed strands of the poison variety of the weed entwining his arms from wrist to shoulder.

  “Our part’s almost over,” the driver said, pulling to a halt. He was tall and ropey and his name was Joe Leo Hurst, but over the years it had condensed to Joleo. “Go move ’em to the hut, Ivy.”

  Ivy jumped from the cab and walked to the rear with bolt cutters in work-gloved hands as Joleo climbed atop the hood to scan the area.

  “I still hate opening that damn door,” Ivy grumbled. “After that shipment last year …”

  “We’ve done a bunch more since then. You remember one shipment that went bad?”

  “I get nightmares,” Ivy whined.

  Ivy wore a blue uniform shirt that strained over a grits-and-gravy belly and his thinning hair was greased back over his ears. He reached the bolt cutter’s jaws to the shining lock on the container and snapped the shackle. He climbed the tailgate to undo the latch on the doors, jumping down as they creaked open.

  “The goddamn stench,” Ivy complained, pinching his nostrils as he peered into the module. “OK, monkeys, welcome to the Estados Unitas or whatever. Come on, get off your asses and move.”