The Death Box

by J. A. Kerley

  “I cannot think now, Leala. I hurt too much.”

  Leala studied her friend. She looked roto, broken. “I will find a way out, Yolanda. Then I will be back for you.”

  “Remember la policía, Leala? They will put you in jail or return you to this place. That is how it works here.”

  Leala pointed upstairs. “They told us that. And everything they told us has been a lie. But I will be careful. And I will be back.”

  Yolanda’s eyes filled with terror. “I will not be here. They said I would soon go elsewhere to do … the work.”

  Leala pulled Yolanda’s hand to her breast, bending to kiss her fingers. “I will find you wherever you are, dear amiga. Find peace in sleep and I will find us a way out of Hell.”

  Leala heard footsteps coming down the stairs. She gave Yolanda’s fingers a final kiss and retreated to her room as the grated door opened at the far end of the hall. She heard two pairs of shoes approach, pause for a moment at Yolanda’s door, then continue. Leala pulled the sheet to her neck and pretended to be asleep. The sheet was stripped away as the one named Orzibel spoke with a mocking laugh.

  “I hope you are rested, little slut. Today is the day you start paying your debt.”

  15

  On Saturday I surrounded myself with the case materials, pages and photos on floor, table and countertop. Whenever I felt about to drown in horror I’d retreat to the deck to suck down fresh air and let the sun beat some of the pictures from my brain. It worked until I shut my eyes.

  I was trying to absorb every aspect of the case, true; but it was also true that I was hiding within the files and folders and pictures of torment. Ever since my arrival I had been postponing a call to my brother, Jeremy.

  The call was not as easy as it sounded. Jeremy’s life was six years longer than mine, and more troubled. Our father had been a civil engineer renowned for brilliant responses to engineering problems, but he contained a pathological anger. When his needs were not met – someone late to the table, an errant glance, a report card less than exemplary – he’d fly into black and violent rages. His anger had focused on Jeremy, maybe because my brother physically resembled our father: fair and blue-eyed and with a loose and angular build. They also shared the same complex and brilliant mind, staring at a problem until it fell into components, then self-resurrected as a solution.

  Our mother, simple and rural, had no concept of the situation. When the shattering rages befell our home, she would retreat to her sewing room, the machine’s high drone eclipsing my brother’s anguished screams and calls for help.

  I had just turned ten when I suddenly became the choice for the anger, the beatings, the ranting, unintelligible lectures as I huddled in a corner, trying to push myself into the wall itself. And not only had our father selected me as the focus of his rage, his madness was seeping into every crack of our existence. Where weeks had once passed between rages, the horror now rang nightly through the halls. Another change: whereas our father had always threatened punishment, he was now threatening death.

  “Get out here, you little bastard. I made you and I can kill you.”

  Then, one afternoon beneath a blue Alabama sky, everything changed for ever. My brother Jeremy, sixteen years old, slight and sensitive and his face dusted with gentle freckles, lured our father into the woods, bound him to a pine tree and disassembled him with a carving knife.

  “I never seen nothin’ like it,” I recall one ashen cop telling another on our rural front porch, police cars filling the long dirt driveway. “There was blood and meat ever’where. They found a kidney hanging up a tree.”

  My brother sailed through the investigation. He soon left for college and a few years passed. Then came word that Jeremy had been implicated in the murder of five women, all with vague to startling resemblances to our mother. Given the mitigating circumstance – insanity – Jeremy was sentenced to life in prison.

  Jeremy’s first break came when his case was noticed by Dr Evangeline Prowse, the head of the Alabama Institution for Aberrational Behavior. Intrigued by his penetrating intellect, she won his transfer to her institution, lodging him in a sort of maximum-security college dorm alongside some of the fiercest and most depraved minds to ever spring from human seed.

  Jeremy prospered, eliciting friendships with hulking, insane murderers and drooling serial rapists, making it his hobby to understand their delusions and motivations, and thereby able to stroll inside their minds and make sense of the floor layout. And thus to control them, at least within certain bounds.

  Then, a few years back and for reasons that may never be truly known, Dr Prowse arranged Jeremy’s surreptitious escape from the Institution, flying with him to New York City. Within days, all hell broke loose, and I found myself in Manhattan, where I discovered my brother’s past was more complex than anyone might think. And while not fully innocent of the murders, his participation was not, I felt, deservant of a life in a cage.

  Eluding capture, Jeremy had recently reappeared in the guise of Dr August Charpentier, a retired Canadian psychologist now living in a remote mountain setting in eastern Kentucky and spending his days studying local flora, gardening, and charting financial news from around the globe.

  Taking my laptop to the deck, I looked out over the cove, the wind still, the water blue and smooth as glass. I drew up my courage and Skyped Jeremy’s computer. A pause as the connection established. His face filled my screen, slender and delicate with large and piercing eyes. He remained in his Dr Charpentier disguise, longish hair and neat, professorial beard, both artificially gray. He wore a blue T-shirt, his chest broader than I remembered, muscle, not fat.

  I forced a nonchalant smile to my face. “Howdy, big brother. How’s the weather up there?”

  The blue eyes tightened to slits and the voice that returned was brittle and Southern and hissed through clenched teeth. “Where the hell are you, Carson? You’re not on Dauphin Island. Are those palms I see behind you? WHAT IS GOING ON? WHERE ARE YOU?”

  Jeremy was near panic. Despite his repeated proclamations of being an independent spirit escaped from the system and living without the “shackles” of needing anyone, my brother seemed pathologically reliant on my structured world. My life had a pattern, the only one my brother knew, and I had broken it.

  I sighed. “Calm down, Jeremy. Take a few deep breaths.”

  “HOW CAN I BREATHE WHEN I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOU ARE?”

  “I’ve experienced a few changes, brother. I’m in Florida. I live in Florida.”

  “CHANGES? WHAT? WHERE?”

  “Easy, Jeremy. There’s no shift in emphasis, only in location. I’m renting a house on Matecumbe Key.”

  A pause as my words sank in.

  “You’re still a cop?”

  “Long story short: A person I knew with the Florida Bureau of Law Enforcement called and offered me a job as an investigative specialist in a new section at the FCLE. The politics at the MPD were wearing me down. Plus I called the Chief of Police some names on television, which didn’t enhance my prospects for advancement.”

  “What of your old partner, Harry Nautilus? Did he finally turn on you?”

  Jeremy had an odd jealousy of Harry, probably because he was my prime confidant. “Leaving him was the hardest part, but Harry is nearing retirement and in love with a woman named Sally Hargreaves. I expect to see them here any day, fishing rods in hand.”

  “And the woman you were diddling … Holliday?”

  “Um, that’s kind of …”

  Up in the air? Put on pause? I’d wanted Wendy to come with me, she’d wanted to come with me. But she was into her first year as a Mobile cop and leaving wasn’t a smart move.

  “You ran through another one, right?” my brother snickered. “Some things haven’t changed. You still have that ridiculous animal thing?”

  “Mr Mix-up is staying in Mobile until I find a permanent place.” The new house seemed quiet without my rambunctious, multi-variety canine companion.

&nb
sp; “So tell me about where you’re living,” Jeremy said. “Paint me a picture.”

  Jeremy was calming down. He knew my new position on the planet and was programming it into his mind. I spent several minutes detailing the land and my immediate neighborhood, ending with a description of Dubois Burnside.

  “It sounds like your dream home, Carson. Right down to having a corpse-dresser next door. You’re intending to buy the place?”

  “Too expensive. Especially since I’m keeping the Dauphin Island house. I rent to tourists for a grand a week in season, eight in the off. The firm handling the rentals thinks I can keep it occupied two-thirds of the year.”

  A pause as Jeremy absorbed the information and processed it through his fiscal mechanisms. “An income stream, then? Yes … that works. But it’s not enough to buy your little Eden in the Keys?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  My brother understood finances, as he had turned to making money as a new endeavor. Three years ago, after a period of intense study of the stock market, he claimed the market had but two true states, blustering drunkard or scared child. Jeremy claimed gobbets of profit from this insight and I believed him, money too trivial for my brother’s lies. The stock market was simply a hobby at which his brilliant but unconventional mind excelled.

  He leaned close to his camera, his face filling my screen. “I’ve got more goddamn lucre than I know what to do with, Carson. I can’t buy a Maserati, I can’t build a distinctive abode, I can’t do anything fun without calling attention to myself, which I mustn’t do, lest the constabulary take an interest in my existence. I’ll give you the money.”

  “I thank you for your offer, Jeremy. But I prefer to make my own money, just like you do. Secondly, you can’t simply give me money. It would have to be reported.”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “This event has been hard on me, Carson. Not knowing where you were. I realize I should see you more.” There was a strange flicker of mirth in his voice.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He touched his mouse and disappeared.

  16

  Monday morning I met Gershwin at a Mexican restaurant on the southern edge of Miami, anxious to brainstorm more on the Carosso connection, our only solid lead.

  “You figure Carosso did something weird with the concrete load?” Gershwin said, ladling salsa verde over huevos rancheros. “That was why he was so hinky-dinky?”

  “He might have actually done as he said, dumped it. Or diverted the concrete to some site where he got paid for the load. He was afraid of being fired for stealing ’crete. He might not have a thing to do with the murders.”

  “How about we add pressure anyway?”

  A Redi-flow dispatcher told us today was Carosso’s off day and we were at his door in twenty minutes. “I hope the guy’s taken a shower since Friday,” Gershwin said. “It was like standing beside a rotting mule.”

  I banged the door. “Mr Carosso? It’s Detectives Ryder and Gershwin. We need to speak to you again.” Nothing. I banged twice again, to no avail. I found Gershwin in the side bushes peeking in the window. “Uh-oh. You better check this out.”

  I saw a body on the floor and kicked the flimsy door open to find Carosso staring at the ceiling as a syrupy red halo encircled his head, the product of a slit throat that looked like a huge and hideously grinning second mouth. The room stank of blood and released body products. Flies had found their way inside; they always do.

  Three Miami-Dade units arrived in minutes, the senior officer a fortyish sergeant named Shep Bertleman. He was a string bean, six-two or so, maybe a hundred fifty pounds with a pocketful of nickels. His eyes were large and thoughtful and his nose had been broken a time or two.

  We showed identification, mine making me the de facto owner of the scene. Bertleman was respectful but didn’t know me well enough to trust my getting things right so he covered the scene as well. I liked him from the git-go.

  When we finished he stood beside me, smelling of talcum powder and a fresh haircut. “FCLE, huh? I hear y’all going through changes over there.”

  “I’m part of it. Hired over from the Mobile department.”

  “Celia Valdez, she’s fine, right?”

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk much.”

  “Ceel was hired outta our department. I was pissed at McDermott for stealing her. Still, the man knows quality.”

  The FCLE forensics team arrived like a techno army commanded by a petite woman who could have played lead in a stage production of Peter Pan, a layered shag ’do framing a pixie face. I nodded as she came my way, foot-pushing a heavy case across the floor.

  “You’re Ryder, I take it. I’m Deb Clayton. Pleased to meet you and all that. You found the vic?”

  “Me and Gershwin over there.”

  “Looks pretty cut and dried. Or maybe slit and bled out. You take your look?”

  “Yep. All yours, Miz Clayton.”

  “It’s Deb. And welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Fickle.”

  I looked out the window to see a Miami-Dade Medical Examiner van pulling up. The two departments shared the facilities of the MDME, the FCLE having staff pathologists. From here on, the scene was the province of the evidence pros and medical folks.

  Gershwin and I headed out to canvass neighbors, finding the closest one was visiting relatives in North Carolina. No one knew much about Carosso and I got the feeling it was one of those neighborhoods where everyone has secrets and won’t poke into yours if you don’t poke into theirs.

  We watched the ambulance take Paul Carosso on his final journey and headed back to the office, happy to find two desks, two desk chairs, two chairs for sitting, one low couch, two file cabinets and a whiteboard. Each desk had a computer terminal linked to a printer and both phones worked. A box of office supplies was in the corner.

  We sat and started digging into Carosso’s financial records. An hour of calls to various banking voices revealed that two grand had been deposited in Carosso’s account a year ago. Though it wasn’t much, it was an anomaly, most deposits being paycheck range: three to five hundred every couple weeks.

  Gershwin leaned back with purple skate shoes on his desk and his hands jammed in the front pockets of his paint-tight black jeans. “Maybe Carosso got a big payoff and spent it on something, had two grand left.”

  “I don’t think the guy owned anything that cost more than fifty bucks.”

  My phone rang, Morningstar. “Hello, Doctor,” I said in my most charming and inoffensive voice. “What can I do for—”

  “I need those fibers tested now, not yesterday …”

  “Excuse me, Doctor?”

  “Wake up, Diego! Get me more one-quart evidence bags …”

  I realized that Morningstar had dialed, then started issuing orders, forgetting the phone in her hand.

  “One goddamn Coke,” she bayed. “How hard is that?”

  “YO!” I yelled. “DOCTOR MORNINGSTAR!”

  A beat, and I heard the phone bump her cheek. “Yeah, Ryder. I hear you. Whatdaya want?”

  “You called me.”

  “Oh yeah. How about you haul your ass to the site?”

  “Haul my what where?”

  A pause while she reconsidered her tone. “Can you stop by, Detective? We’ve got some new information you’ll find interesting.”

  We booked to the site and entered the tent – IDs predominant on our chests – and found Morningstar at the upper bank of examination tables. She looked up as we approached.

  “I heard you just sent a body to the morgue, Ryder. Connected to this case?”

  “Can’t say yet. If it is, it adds a new urgency.”

  “Doctor Wilkens will handle the autopsy since I seem to be living here. And to that end, we have another complete body extraction.”

  I saw a body on her side on a reinforced table, almost fetal, legs drawn up, one hand floating in the air, the other below, the spine and rib cage compressed by huge force. Her
preserved face projected forward, mouth wide below a straight nose, the empty eye sockets like twin screams.

  It was the woman who had called to me from the stone, the one trying to swim free. I knew it was an illusion, that her lifeless body had pressed against the wall of the cistern, her face and hand wedging between stones lining the cistern, eluding the concrete and appearing frozen while swimming.

  Morningstar turned to me. “The big reason I called you here? I’m wondering about the serial-killer line Delmara is pushing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “So far we’ve pulled nine skulls, seven females and two males. Several skulls provided a look at dentition. A lot of decay, but the teeth display the kind of contemporary dentistry done by first-world dentists on charity missions.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m getting there. BELT!”

  A tech sprinted over and set a brown leather belt in Morningstar’s outstretched palm. The belt was crusted with cement, but a section near the corroded buckle had been cleaned.

  “You can’t see the words with the naked eye, but under a microscope we’ve made out HECHO EN HONDURAS – made in Honduras. BRACELET!” Morningstar barked and the belt became a silver-colored ID bracelet, the opening heartbreakingly small. She handed me a magnifying glass and pointed to a cleaned area of the bracelet. I squinted at faint letters etched into cheap potmetal.

  “T-e-g-u …”

  “Tegucigalpa,” Morningstar said. “A souvenir from the capital of Honduras. And for the frosting on the cake …” Morningstar snapped her long fingers and the bracelet became a three-centimeter-square piece of jewelry.

  “There’s this, a tin medallion stamped with the Nuestra Señora de Supaya, the patroness of Honduras.”

  “A serial psycho who targets Hispanics?” I said, my mind racing. “Mainly women? That’s what you’re saying we have here?” I was springing to conclusions: a killer from the same culture moving in areas he knew, using the native language … But Morningstar had other experience and shook her head.