Hornet's Nest (7 page)

“I’d like to know what their profilers would have to say,” West said.

“Forget it,” Brewster said, chewing a toothpick and swiping Vicks up his nose.

Dr. Odom picked up a big sponge, and squeezed water over organs. He grabbed a tan rubber hose, and suctioned blood out of the chest cavity.

“He smells like he was drinking,” said Brewster, who could no longer smell anything except childhood memories of colds.

“Maybe on the plane,” Odom agreed. “What about those guys at Quantico?” He eyed Brewster, as if West had never brought up the subject.

“Busy as jumping beans,” Brewster replied. “Like I said, forget it. They got what? Ten, eleven profilers and are about a thousand cases behind? Think the government’s going to fund shit? Shit no. Too damn bad, too. ’Cause those profilers are damn good.”

Brewster had applied to the FBI early on, but forget that, too. They weren’t hiring, or maybe it had to do with the polygraph test he wasn’t about to take. He sniffed more Vicks. God, he hated death. It was ugly and it stunk. It was a tattletale. Like this fellow’s dick, for example. The guy looked like a balloon with this little knot, so all his air didn’t get out.

West was angry, her face hard, as she stared at the fleshy nude body opened up from neck to navel, and blaze orange paint no amount of scrubbing would wash away. She thought of his wife and family. No human should ever have to come to such a grim place and be put through something like this, and she felt fresh anger toward Brazil.

She was waiting for him when he trotted out of the Knight-Ridder building, his notepad in hand as he headed to his car and a story. West, in uniform, climbed out of her unmarked Ford, and she strode toward Brazil like she might tackle him. She wished she could have bottled that dead smell and sprayed it in Brazil’s face, and rubbed his nose in the reality West had to live with every day. Brazil was in a hurry and had a lot on his mind. A Honda was on fire in the Mental Health parking lot, according to the scanner. Possibly, it was nothing, but what if someone was in it? Brazil stopped. He was startled as West jabbed a finger into his breastbone.

“Hey!” He grabbed her wrist.

“So how’s the Black Widow reporter today?” West coldly said. “I just came from the morgue, you know, where reality’s laid out and carved up? Bet you’ve never been there. Maybe they’ll let you watch someday. What a good story that would be, right? A man not old enough to be your
daddy. Red hair, hundred and ninety-seven pounds. Guess what his hobby was.”

Brazil released West’s arm. He groped for words but didn’t have any.

“Backgammon, photography. He wrote the newsletter for his church, wife’s dying of cancer. They got two kids, one grown, other a freshman at UNC. Anything else you want to know about him? Or is Mr. Parsons nothing but a story to you? Little words on paper?”

Brazil was visibly shaken. He started walking off to his old BMW as the Honda in the Mental Health parking lot burned and he no longer cared. West wasn’t going to let him off so easy. She grabbed his arm.

“Get your goddamn hands off me,” Brazil said. He jerked his arm free, unlocked his car door, and got in.

“You screwed me, Andy,” West told him.

Brazil cranked the engine and squealed out of the parking deck. West returned to the LEC and didn’t go straight to investigations because she had a few of her own. She stopped off at the Records Room, where women in their own special uniforms ruled the world. West really had to court these girls, especially Wanda, who weighed somewhere between two-fifty and three hundred pounds and could type a hundred and five words a minute. If West needed a record or to send a missing-person report off to NCIC, Wanda was either a hero or hell on earth, depending on when she was fed last. West brought in a bucket of KFC once a month, and sometimes Girl Scout or Christmas cookies, depending on what was in season. West approached the counter and whistled at Wanda, who loved West. Wanda secretly wished she was a detective and worked for the deputy chief.

“Need your help,” West said, and her police belt was making her lower back ache, as usual.

Wanda scowled at a name West had scribbled on a slip of paper. “Lord have mercy,” she said, shaking her head. “If I don’t remember that like it was yesterday.”

West couldn’t be certain, but thought Wanda had gained more weight. God help her. Wanda took up two lanes of traffic.

“You sit on down.” Wanda pointed with her chin, as if she were Chinese. “I’ll get the microfilm.”

While Wanda’s minions typed, stacked, and racked, West went through microfilm. She had her glasses on and was hurt by what she saw when she got to old articles about Brazil’s father. His name, too, was Andrew, but people had called him Drew. He had been a cop here when West was a rookie. She had forgotten all about him and had never made the connection. Christ, but now that she was looking at it, the tragedy came back to her and somehow put Brazil’s life in focus.

Drew Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old robbery detective when he made a traffic stop in an unmarked car. He was shot close range in the chest, and died instantly. West took a long time looking at articles, and staring at his picture. She headed upstairs to her division and pulled the case, which no one had looked at in a decade, because it had been exceptionally cleared, and the dirtbag was still on death row. Drew Brazil was handsome. In one photograph, he wore a leather bomber jacket that West had seen before.

The scene photographs clubbed her somewhere in her chest. He was dead in the street, on his back, staring up at the sun on a spring Sunday morning. The .45 caliber bullet had almost ripped his heart in half, and in autopsy photographs, Odom had two thick fingers through the hole to demonstrate. This was something young Andy Brazil need never see, and West had no intention of talking to him ever again.

B
razil was looking up articles, too, in the
Observer
file room. It was amazing how little had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and this impressed him quite a lot.

The librarian was impressed, too. She peeked at Andy Brazil about every other second, her heart stumbling whenever he walked into her domain, which was fairly regularly. She’d never seen anyone research stories quite the way this young man did. It didn’t matter what he was writing about, Brazil had to look something up or ask questions. It was especially gratifying when he spoke to her directly as she sat primly at her neat maple desk. She had been a public school librarian before taking this job after her husband had retired and was underfoot all the time. Her name was Mrs. Booth. She was well past sixty and believed that Brazil was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. He was nice and gentle and always thanked her.

It shocked Brazil to read that West had been shot. He could not believe it. He scrolled faster, desperate for more details, but the lamebrain who had covered the incident had
completely missed an opportunity for a huge 1-A story. Damn. The most that Brazil could pin down was that eleven years ago, when West was the first female homicide detective, she had gotten a tip from a snitch.

A subject West had been looking for was at the Presto Grill. By the time West and other police arrived, the subject was gone. Apparently, West answered another call in the same neighborhood, and the same subject was involved, only now he was really fried and irritable. He started firing the minute West rolled up. She killed him, but not before he winged her. Brazil was dying to ask her about it, in detail, but forget it. All he knew was that she took a bullet in the left shoulder, a flesh wound, a graze, really. Was the bullet as hot as he had heard? Did it cook surrounding tissue? How much did it hurt? Did she fall or bravely finish the gunfight, not even realize until she held out a hand and it had blood on it, like in the movies?

The next day Brazil drove to Shelby. Because of his tennis prowess, he had heard of this small, genteel town in Cleveland County, where Buck Archer, friend of Bobby Riggs, who had lost to Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes, was from. Shelby High School was a well-kept brick complex, and home of the Lions, where students with money got ready for college in big cities like Chapel Hill and Raleigh. All around was farmland and cow towns with names like Boiling Springs and Lattimore. Brazil’s BMW rumbled around to the tennis courts, where the boys’ team was holding a summer camp. Kids were out with hoppers of chartreuse balls. They were whacking serves, overhead smashes, cross-court shots, in pain and sweating.

The coach was prowling the fence, clipboard in hand, dressed in long white Wimbledon pants, a white shirt, a shapeless hat, zinc oxide on his nose, and all of it out of fashion and old.

“Move your feet. Move! Move!” he called out to a boy who would never move anything fast. “I don’t want to see those feet stop!”

The boy was overweight and wore glasses. He was squinting and hurting, and Brazil remembered the suffering
inflicted by coaches and drills. But Brazil had always been good at everything he tried, and he felt pity for this kid and wished he could work with him for an hour and maybe cheer him up a little.

“Good shot,” Brazil called out when the boy managed to scoop one up and push it over the net.

The boy, who did not play in the top six positions, missed the next shot, as he searched for his fan behind the green windscreen covering the fence. The coach stopped his tour, watching this blond, well-built young man heading toward him. He was probably looking for a job, but the coach didn’t need anyone else for this camp, which was the most worthless crop in recent memory.

“Coach Wagon?” Brazil asked.

“Uh huh?” The old coach was curious, wondering how this stranger knew his name. Oh God. Maybe the kid had played on the team some years back and Wagon couldn’t remember. That was happening more and more these days, and it had nothing to do with Johnnie Walker Red.

“I’m a reporter for
The Charlotte Observer
,” Brazil was quick and proud to say. “I’m doing a story on a woman who played on your boys’ team a long time ago.”

Wagon might be deleting a lot of files these days, but he’d never forget Virginia West. Shelby High School had no women’s team back in those days, and she was too good to ignore. What hell that had caused. At first, the state wouldn’t hear of it. That kept her off the team her freshman year while Wagon battled the system on her behalf. Her sophomore year, she played third racket, and had the hardest flat serve for a girl that Wagon had ever seen, and a slice backhand that could go through hot bread and leave it standing. All the boys had crushes on her and tried to hit her with the ball whenever they could.

She never lost a match, not singles or doubles, in the three years she played tennis for Coach Wagon. There had been several stories about her in the
Shelby Star
, and the
Observer
when she blazed through spring matches, and the regionals. She had reached the quarterfinals of the state championship before Hap Core slaughtered her, thus ending her career as
a male athlete. Brazil found the articles on microfilm after he got back to the newspaper. He rolled through more stories, like someone possessed, as he made copious notes.

The pervert was also possessed, but beyond that distinction, there were no similarities between her profile and Brazil’s. The pervert was writhing in her chair in her dim den in her small house where she lived alone in Dilworth, not far from where Virginia West lived. The two were not acquainted. The pervert was in a La-Z-Boy brown vinyl recliner, footrest up, pants down, as she breathed hard. Information about her was not forthcoming, but the FBI would have profiled her as a white female between the ages of forty and seventy, since the female sex drive wasn’t known to develop transmission problems as early as the male’s. Indeed, profilers had noted that women got into overdrive about the same time they ran out of estrogen.

This was why Special Agent Gil Bird at Quantico, busy working on serial murders, would have pinned the female pervert’s age at a reasonable forty or fifty, her biological clock a phantom-pain of time, ticking only in her imagination. Her periods were simply that, an end of sentence, a coda. It wasn’t that she really wanted Brazil. She just thought she did. Her lust was far more complicated. Bird would have offered a possible scenario that might have explained it, had he been officially invited into the case.

Special Agent Bird would have accurately hypothesized that it was payback time. All those years the pervert was dissed, and not nominated for the homecoming court, and not worshiped, and not wanted. As a young woman, the pervert had worked in the cafeteria line at Gardner Webb, where basketball players, especially Ernie Presley, always grunted and pointed, as if she were as common as the greasy scrambled eggs and grits they desired. Andy Brazil would have treated her in precisely the same fashion. She did not have to know him to prove her case. At this stage in her frustrated life, she preferred to screw him in her own time, and in her own way.

Blinds were drawn, the television turned low and playing an old Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn movie. The pervert was breathless as she whispered on the phone, drawing it out, enunciating slowly.

“Saw you driving. Shifting gears. Up and down in high gear . . .”

Her power over him was the most exciting thing she’d ever known in her nothing life. She could not contain it as she thought of his humiliation. She controlled him as completely as a fish in a tank, or a dog, or a car. Her heart was on a drum roll as she heard his confused silence over the line, and Hepburn walked into the bedroom, dressed in a satin robe. What incredible bones. The pervert hated her and would have switched channels, but she did not have a free hand.

“Screw yourself,” Brazil’s voice rewarded her with its presence. “You have my permission.”

The pervert didn’t need permission.

Packer scrolled through Brazil’s latest and most masterful article.

“This is great stuff!” Packer was ecstatic about every word. “One hell of a job!
Wild, Wild West.
Love it!”

Packer got up from a chair pulled close. He tucked in his white shirt, his hand jumping around as if his pants were a puppet. His tie was red and black striped and not the least bit elegant.

“Ship it out. This runs one-A,” Packer said.

“When?” Brazil was thrilled, because he had never been on the front page.

“Tomorrow,” Packer let him know.

That night, Brazil worked his first traffic accident. He was in uniform, with clipboard in hand, the appropriate forms clamped in. This was a lot more complicated than the average person may have supposed, even if the damage was nonreportable, or less than five hundred dollars. It appeared that
a woman in a Toyota Camry was traveling on Queens Road, while a man in a Honda Prelude was also traveling on Queens Road, in this unfortunate section of the city where two roads of the same name intersected with each other.

The pervert was nearby in her Aerovan, stalking and listening to the police scanner and Brazil’s voice on it. She was working her own accident about to happen as this young police boy pointed and gestured, all in dark blue and shiny steel. She watched her prey as she rolled past flares sparking orange on pavement in the dark of night, crossing Queens as she traveled west on Queens.

Streets having the same name could be attributed to rapid hormonal growth, and was similar to naming a child after oneself no matter the gender or practicality, or whether the first three were christened the same, as in George Foreman and his own. Queens and Queens, Providence and Providence, Sardis and Sardis, the list went on, and Myra Purvis had never gotten it straight. She knew that if she turned off Queens Road West onto Queens Road East and then followed Queens Road to the Orthopedic Hospital, she could visit her brother.

She was doing this in her Camry when she got to that stretch she hated so much, somewhere near Edgehill Park, where it was dark, because the day was no longer helpful. Mrs. Purvis was the manager of the La Pez Mexican restaurant on Fenton Place. She had just gotten off work this busy Saturday night and was tired. None of it was her fault when Queens ran into Queens and the gray, hard-to-see Prelude ran into her.

“Ma’am, did you see the stop sign there?” The boy cop pointed.

Myra Purvis had reached her limit. She had turned seventy last February and didn’t have to take this sort of shit anymore.

“Is it in Braille?” she smartly asked this whippersnapper
in blue with a white tornado on his arms, reminding her of something she once used to mop her kitchen floor. What was the name of that? Genie in a Bottle? No. Lord, this happened a lot.

“I want to go to the hospital,” that man in the Honda was complaining. “My neck hurts.”

“Lying like a rug,” Mrs. Purvis told the cop, wondering why he wasn’t wearing any hardware beyond a whistle. What if he got in a shoot-out?

Deputy Chief West didn’t often get out to cruise so she could check on her troops. But this night she had been in the mood. She floated along rough, dark streets in David One, listening to Brazil’s voice on the scanner in her car.

“One subject requesting transport to Carolinas Medical Center,” Brazil was saying.

West saw him in the distance, from the vantage of her midnight-blue car, but he was too busy to notice as he filled out a report. She circled the intersection as he worked hard, talking to subjects in barely damaged cars. Flares languished along the roadside, his grille lights silently strobing. His face was eerie in blue and red pulses, and he was smiling, and seemed to be helping an old biddy in a Camry. Brazil lifted his radio, talking into it.

He marked E.O.T. for End Of Tour and drove to the newspaper. Brazil had a ritual few people knew about, and he indulged himself in it after zipping through a small story on Charlotte’s quirky traffic problems. He went up the escalator three moving steps at a time. The workers in the press room had gotten used to him long months before and didn’t mind when he came into their off-limits area of huge machinery and deafening noise. He liked to watch some two hundred tons of paper fly along conveyor belts, heading to folders, destined for bundles and driveways, his byline on them.

Brazil stood in uniform and watched, not talking, overwhelmed by the power of it all. He was used to laboring on
a term paper that took months and was read by maybe one person. Now he wrote something in days or even minutes, and millions of people followed every word. He could not comprehend it. He walked around, avoiding moving parts, wet ink, and tracks to trip on as the roar filled his ears like a tornado on this sixth night before the seventh day of his career’s creation.

It was chilly out the next morning, Sunday, and sprinkling rain. West was building a high wooden fence around her yard on Elmhurst Road, in the old neighborhood of Dilworth. Her house was brick with white trim, and she had been fixing up the place since she’d bought it. This included her latest, most ambitious project, inspired, in part, by people driving through from South Boulevard, and pitching beer bottles and other trash in her yard.