A Garden of Vipers (16 page)

We fought the traffic to Forensics, out by the campus of University of South Alabama. Hembree was in a meeting, due out in twenty minutes. I told Harry I was heading over to the morgue and he opted to keep company with a half-full box of doughnuts in the Forensic department's employee lounge.

Clair was at her desk, book in hand, her lanyarded reading glasses in place. She hadn't heard me walking the hall, and I watched her read for a few moments: study the page, lick the tip of her china-smooth thumb, lift the edge of a page, turn the page as she moved the book slightly to the left so as to begin reading before the page was fully flat on the left-hand side of the book. Efficient. She even anticipated the wetting process, pink tongue tip slipping out as her thumb lifted.

After a minute of study, I cleared my throat. Stepped to the threshold.

“Hi, Clair. What's got your attention? A book on bullet wounds? Blowflies?”

Her neck reddened and she tossed the book to her desk. It fell cover up, a tattered paperback romance novel. The cover displayed a muscular and shirtless man staring into the eyes of a raven-tressed woman in Victorian garb, wind-whipped trees in the background, like a typhoon was blowing through. The title was
A Storm of Passion
.

“Clair?” I asked. “Are you studying meteorology?”

She flipped it cover down.

“Idiot things. My aunt goes through them like candy, then gives them to me. Not to read, Ryder, to pass on. There are a couple women in the office who scoop them up the second I set them in the break room.”

“You weren't reading?”

“I picked it up two seconds before you walked in. Read maybe a sentence. Infantile stuff. Enough chitchat, my lunch hour's almost over. What do you need?”

“You did a post on the woman burned in the fire, the one with her hands cuffed behind her back?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I was heading to work that morning, saw the fire, headed over. I was there when she was discovered, took a look at the scene, what was left. It's just a passing interest.”

“She was savaged,” Clair said. “There's no other way of putting it.”

“Explain.”

Clair pushed aside
A Storm of Passion,
snapped a sheaf of papers from her desk.

“Here, you know enough medical terminology…read about it yourself.”

She handed me the preliminary autopsy report. I sat, flicked on the light beside the chair, started reading. After a long three minutes, I handed the report back. My stomach felt like I'd eaten a sack of cockroaches.

“Whoever did that is a sado-sexual terrorist. Someone who despises women. The word sick doesn't even kick it off.”

“The flesh was deeply burned, as you noted. But the insides could still tell part of the story. Especially the damage to the vagina and uterus, what remained, that is.”

“All while she was alive?” I asked.

“While I was performing the autopsy I kept praying she'd passed out at some point, missed the worst. What do you think, Carson? You're experienced here.”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. “From what I know, Clair, it's the agony that keeps the perpetrator torturing the victim. If the victim passes out, the perp loses interest. Her mouth was probably taped.”

“Where do monsters like this come from, Carson? Are they escapees from hell?”

“They're a homegrown species, Clair. In many ways just a step distant from us.”

“Now there's an ugly thought. There was torture with the woman in your case, Ryder. The Franklin woman. Think there's a link?”

“Ms. Franklin's fingers were broken. It's sad to say, but on a torture index, she got off much lighter than Ms. Hibney. Ms. Franklin was in her car, Ms. Hibney at home. Ms. Franklin appeared to be a crime of opportunity, Ms. Hibney's death probably involved planning.”

“So they're not related.”

“Anything's possible in freakland,” I said. “Could be our boy liked sticking Taneesha Franklin with a knife and breaking her fingers. He just cranked it up a couple notches with Ms. Hibney. Who showed up at her autopsy?”

“Detectives Logan and Shuttles.” She frowned. “Detective Shuttles asked interesting questions, sharp. Kid's got a future. Logan did like he always does.”

“Which is?”

“Sit in the chair behind me and stare at my ass.”

 

I returned to Forensics. The doughnut box was almost empty. Harry saw my frown.

“A couple techs gobbled them down. I just had one.”

I frowned harder. He said, “Two.”

I handed him a copy of Carole Ann Hibney's autopsy prelim in an envelope. Her name was on the envelope. Harry looked at me.

I said, “Save it for later. It's not pretty.”

He sighed and reached for another doughnut, solace.

Hembree escaped from his meeting ten minutes later and met us in the main section of the lab: white counters, computers, beakers. There were several vials of fluids, some like colored water, the more disturbing ones resembling stew.

Harry held up the cassette. “We were hoping someone could take a look at this, Bree, maybe give us an enhancement.”

Hembree grinned. “Had many lucky days, lately, Harry?”

“None. Why?”

“Because today you caught one.”

Hembree led us to the computer-oriented part of the Forensics lab, a recent addition. A long counter held monitors, keyboards, various electronic devices. The guy who'd pseudo-shot Hembree a few days back was sitting on a stool at the counter. Up close he was seventyish, thinning gray hair brushed back, age freckles on his pink face, reading glasses strung from his neck with kite string. His forehead was large and high, his eyes a jolly green. He wore sandals over white socks below his khakis and a silky aloha shirt, electric-pink seahorses galloping through a fluorescent blue sea.

“Thaddeus Claypool, our new digital cowboy,” Hembree said.

I stared. I think Harry was too busy admiring the shirt to notice anything else. Claypool laughed, stuck out his hand.

“I know. The manual says all CGs are supposed to be twenty years old.”

“CGs?” I asked.

“Computer geeks.”

“I didn't mean to imply that your age, ah, that is…”

“Got my first pocket protector at MIT in 1957, Detective. Worked on direct keyboard input, associated algorithms. Drifted to Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies. Went to IBM to make some money in the mid-seventies, felt straitjacketed by the culture. Still managed decent work over eight years. Finished out with twelve years of consulting, running between the two poles.”

“North and South?” Harry asked, confused.

“Apple and Microsoft.”

Hembree said, “Thad's a Mobile native, returned to be with the kids and grandkids. He volunteers with Forensics twelve hours a week. If we had to pay him based on his consultant's salary, we might afford two weeks a year.”

Claypool tapped his bulbous forehead, his eyes sparkling. “You don't keep it busy, your big oyster turns to chowder.”

I handed him the cassette. “I suppose enhancing a videotape is a pretty boring project.”

“Algorithms,” he exalted. “Numbers dancing with numbers, the enhancement program basing choices on statistical probabilities. I made a few tweaks to the software, tricked it out, as the kids say. I love this cop stuff.”

He slipped the cassette into a machine, punched buttons on a keyboard. A monitor came to life, the tape displaying the blond man in one of his few visible frames.

“It's like he's built from shadows,” I said. “Anything you can do?”

“Let me establish a balance.” Claypool caused a bright square to outline the tire of the vehicle, as distinct as fog.

He tapped a few keys, mumbled to himself, tapped a few more. I saw numbers race across the screen. Claypool nodded at the numbers like they carried a pleasing message. He finished with a dramatic flourish on the enter key.

The tire shape shivered and disappeared. Seconds later it returned, so clear I saw tread and the valve stem.

“I think I love you, Mr. Claypool,” I said. “How about doing that trick with the guy's face?”

“Faces are more difficult,” he apologized as the bright square surrounded the smudge of head. “More choices to make, less definition. And it's not a real facial blowup, it's a statistical assessment of what it might be.”

Claypool reprised the triumphant press of the enter key.

“Lawd,” Harry said, staring at the result.

I scowled at the screen. Though the face was defined, it remained elusive. But I
knew
it from somewhere.

“How about it, Cars?” Harry asked. “Tell me you're making a connection.”

“I can't. But it's so close. Like it's on the tip of my brain…”

“Did you see him in BOLOs?” Harry asked. “Maybe he's wanted.”

I memorized hundreds of faces on Be On the Lookout sheets, put together displays of perp photos to show victims, paged endlessly through mug-shot books.

“It doesn't feel right.”

“How about I flip the image?” Claypool said. “Give you a different orientation.”

Claypool tapped twice on the keyboard. The right-looking face swooshed into a black dot in the center of the screen, swooshed back a second later, now looking to the left.

I closed my eyes and saw the curly-haired blond man. But not on the walk in front of the funeral parlor. Sitting to my right, looking left. A phone to his mouth. Talking through a Plexiglas window to a hulking, scarheaded monster.

“I know where I saw him,” I whispered. “He sat beside me the day Leland Harwood was poisoned.”

Warden Frank Malone fiddled with the VCR in the corner of the room. It was VCR day, I guess. Though I was in the office of the prison's head dog, it felt like a cell, bars on the windows, the pervasive stink of fear and disinfectant. Though we were hundreds of feet from the nearest cell block, the smell rolled through the place like smog.

There was no need for both Harry and me to drive up, so I'd made the run, cutting a big chunk out of the day. What this country needs is a good teleportation system.

Malone pressed a remote to activate the unit. He'd racked up the visitors'-room tapes from the morning I'd visited. He fast-forwarded until I saw myself enter the visitors' room.

He looked up and I nodded. This was the start point.

I watched myself talk to Harwood for several minutes before the hulking, scarred convict entered, simultaneous with the arrival of the square-bodied, suited man with the blond hair rippling back from his tanned, blocky face. Though a solid guy, he moved like silk in the wind, a dancer trapped in a bricklayer's body.

Malone tapped the monitor screen. “The huge convict is a serial rapist, Tommy Dowell, known inside as Tommy the Bomb, as in you never know when he'll go off.”

Tommy the Bomb swaggered in like he not only owned the prison, he held the mortgage on every other piece of property within a hundred miles. I'd seen that look more times than most people.

“Psycho,” I said. “Full blown.”

“The guy was a biker with the Iron Rangers, got too psychopathic even for them, was cut loose.”

“Too crazy for the Rangers? That's like being too tall for the basketball team.”

Malone sighed, removed his reading glasses. “I'm the warden, Detective Ryder. I'm supposed to use clinical terms when discussing inmates. I took courses in psychology in order to make my discussions scientific, rational.”

“And?”

“Tommy the Bomb's a true meltdown. Three hundred pounds of fried wiring.”

“Terms I can understand,” I said. “Think he had a hand in Harwood's poisoning?”

“Inmates do favors for folks like Tommy to stay on his good side.”

“Good side?” I pulled my chair up to the monitor, tapped the visitor. “You know this man, Warden? He's who I'm really here to ID.”

Malone put on his glasses, started the tape segment again. The guy's back was to the camera, mostly. Harwood blathered at me. After five minutes, he started wriggling, punching at his chest. I noticed the blond guy shooting a couple fast glances in Harwood's direction.

Malone froze the tape. “Never seen the visitor before. The guards say the guy's visited the Bomb three times in the past couple weeks.” He slid a sheet of paper my way. “Visitors'-log entries from the morning of your visit.”

I checked the time against the names, found the only fit.

“C. M. Delbert,” I said. “He needed ID to get in, right?”

Malone nodded. “Not many people fake their way into prison. We check the ID, but our major concern is contraband and weapons.”

“And we both know any teenager in the country can get a fake ID with the right contact and a pocketful of bills.”

Malone said, “Guy signed in as counsel for Tommy. You figure him a lawyer?”

“Long shot. At least not Harvard law.”

Malone grunted. “Not too many Harvard types want to sit across from a psychotic monster like Tommy the Bomb.”

“Think Tommy the Bomb would talk to me, Warden?”

“Think you'll grow tits and a pussy soon?”

“Doubtful,” I said.

“Not a chance.”

Malone restarted the tape. Two minutes later Leland Harwood was convulsing on the floor as Tommy the Bomb watched. The visitor retreated from the room without looking back, like he was walking from a public restroom.

Malone dropped his glasses in his pocket. “Your man doesn't look real interested.”

“He knows how the story ends,” I said.

 

When I returned to the department, Harry was in a conference room, the murder book between his arms on the table. He looked up.

“Tell me you found the golden link at the prison, Carson. That you're about to sit your ass right down in front of me and pull it all together.”

I sighed and laid out the story.

“He signed in as a lawyer?” Harry said. “Maybe we should check local legal types, see if they can ID him.”

I ran a list of lawyers in my head. Only one got highlighted in yellow. “What we need is a lawyer perfectly comfortable with murderers, rapists, dope mules, and general pukes.”

Harry said, “I can't go near Preston Walls, Cars. I already ate today.”

“Don't sweat it. I can solo.”

Harry stood and yanked the orange sport coat from his chair, pulled it over the blue-centric aloha shirt.

“I wouldn't do that to you, partner. Let's stop on the way over and buy a can of Lysol. I want to spray down before we visit Walls.”

D. Preston Walls had an office near the courthouse, tavern on one side, bail bondsman on the other. Location, location, location. A Porsche at the curb was vanity-tagged
LGLEGL
. I shouted my name into a metal grate and held my badge and ID to a camera before being buzzed inside.

Walls's secretary, receptionist, whatever, was a torpedo-breasted blonde with bee-stung lips, cocaine eyes, and a pair of handcuffs tattooed on a bare shoulder. She purred that we should sit until her boss was off the phone, then sucked a cigarette and stared at my crotch until I crossed my legs.

Ten minutes later Walls appeared, fortyish, five-seven or -eight, overweight, sloppy brown suit, hair in a ponytail like it made him hip. Diamond stud in one ear. At handshake time, Harry turned away and looked out the grated window.

“Carson, Harry, I'm floored,” Walls brayed, indifferent to the slight. “Jeez, I haven't seen you guys since Rollie Kreeg's trial. Last year? Has that much time gone by since…” He paused, mouth open like something slipped his mind. “I think I'm having a senior moment, guys. What was the verdict? Who won?”

I gritted my teeth. “You did, D. P. A. technicality, if I recall.”

Walls grinned. “Technicality, schmecknicality…It's all the clash of ideas. Of constitutional guarantees. Of the collective versus the individual, the safety of the rights of private citizens who—”

Harry stared at Walls. “How safe are citizens from the rapists and murderers you get off?”

Walls raised an eyebrow. “If I get them off, Harry, they're innocent.”

I stepped between Harry and Walls and slid a photo from my pocket, a still shot pulled from the VCR at the prison.

“How about this lawyerish-looking guy, Preston? You know him?”

If Walls glanced at the photo, it was a millisecond. He tried to hand it back.

“Look again,” I said. “Longer.”

Walls took a perfunctory second glance, seemed to be looking past the photo. He frowned.

“What is it, Preston?”

Walls tweezed the photo between his thumb and forefinger, like it was something he didn't feel safe touching. The picture dropped in my hands.

“Never seen him before. Gotta go, guys. Nice talking to you.”

He walked us to the lobby and retreated behind his door. I heard it lock.

 

We returned to the department. Harry started through the doorway, stopped abruptly, threw his arm in front of me, and nodded across the room at our cubicle. Pace Logan was sitting at Harry's desk, leafing through papers. Harry moves fast and light when necessary, a second later was standing behind Logan.

“Help you, Logan?”

“Oh, shit. Nautilus. I was just—”

I jogged up. Logan had Taneesha Franklin's murder book in front of him, opened to the photo section.

“Just what?”

Logan went into defensive mode. “What's it look like? I'm checking the book. I was at the scene, remember? First, if I recall. I got some spare time, thought I'd see how things were developing. That all right with you?”

“You want to look at things, Logan, ask.”

Logan stood, showed teeth. He jammed the book into Harry's chest.

“Fuck you, Nautilus. I didn't know you owned the murder books. Guess I forgot to sign it out from King Dick.”

I stepped between them before Harry did or said something that was momentarily gratifying but improvident in the longer run. Logan stormed back to his desk, the smell of tobacco in his wake. Harry blew out a long breath and we sat. I had my usual pile of call slips from strung-out snitches trying to peddle fiction, but a name stood out. Ms. Rudolnick had called. The message was “Nothing important, just checking.”

I picked up my phone, called, kicking myself for not alerting her the moment we'd secured the files, good manners.

“How are you, ma'am?”

“I was just wondering, did the key work?”

“Thank you, yes. Your son's files are safe. No one else will ever see them.”

“Are the files helpful?”

“We're still reviewing them. It's a big job.”

“Just find the person who caused my son's death, sir.”

“We will, ma'am. Thanks for checking.”

“Certainly. Oh, by the way, sir?”

“Yes?”

“I had some wonderful moments yesterday. A delightful young friend of Bernie's stopped by.”

“Who?”

“I don't trust many people, and I know there are all manner of scams directed at people my age, so I asked questions. He knew everything about Bernie: how his left eye fluttered when he got nervous, how he liked puns. Bernie had a very individual way of walking, fast, spinning on his heel to turn around. The young man mimicked Bernie's walk and we both had a good laugh. It was refreshing, the best I'd felt in a long time. My young visitor had such wonderful things to say about my son.”

“Who was this young man, Ms. Rudolnick?”

“Frank Cloos. He'd worked with Bernie two years back, at the psychiatric wing of Mobile Regional Hospital. Bernie consulted there two days a week. Mr. Cloos had been an MHT, mental health technician.”

“What did Mr. Cloos look like?”

“About your size, I guess. Dark hair with a touch of red. Piercing eyes. A very good-looking young man.”

“You said young?”

“Mid-twenties, I'd guess. A mature bearing.”

“What else did you talk about?”

A pause. I heard the grandfather clock bonging in the distance.

“That was a sad part. Mr. Cloos had been out of town for a while, business. He didn't know about Bernie, couldn't understand why his phone was disconnected. There aren't any other Rudolnicks in the phone directory, so he came here.”

“He didn't know Bernie was deceased?”

“It was the one moment I thought I'd made a mistake by letting him inside my house. When I told Mr. Cloos what happened, well, he seemed to disappear inside himself. He closed his eyes. His hands grabbed his pant legs, his knuckles turned white. It seemed like, like…”

I heard her struggling for words.

“What, Ms. Rudolnick?”

“It was like he was being torn apart inside, ready to cry or scream or throw things. I was scared, but didn't say a word, and it passed. Then he took my hand and asked questions. He was so concerned, so nice. Then I went to fetch some drinks and sweets and that's when we talked about Bernie, the good things, the happy things. We talked for a half hour. Then he had to go. He said he'd be back next month, we'd go to dinner, talk longer.”

“Did he tell you how to get in touch with him?” I held my breath.

“Only that he'd call. We'd go to dinner somewhere nice, somewhere Bernie would have liked.”

I resisted banging my head on the desk. When we hung up I called Mobile Regional and confirmed what I already knew: There was no record of a Frank Cloos ever having worked there. I called Ms. Rudolnick back, asked if I could send a fingerprint team to her house, pretty much knowing nothing would have been touched.

 

I started for home a few minutes later, stopped by Sally Hargreaves's desk on the way out.

“How's your progress with the rape and beating victim, the blind woman?”

Sally nodded and shot a thumbs-up. “I'm feeling better about her, Carson. She's tough, a survivor. She has one minor surgery coming up tomorrow, hopefully heads home by mid–next week. She's using her hand again, too. It's improving daily.”

It stopped me. “What do you mean, using her hand?”

“She had two fingers broken in the attack, another severely dislocated. The doctors were afraid there might be nerve damage, but apparently—”