The Hundredth Man
Authors: J. A. Kerley
A headless male torso is found in the sweating heat of an Alabama night. The victim is believed to be a prostitute, murdered in a moment of passion. But Carson Ryder, a detective famous for solving a series of brutal murders the previous year, sees something else: the deliberate placing of the body, the lack of blood, bizarre writing on the skin.
Another torso, another, even stranger, message and the victim this time is no prostitute. There is a darkness at the heart of these killings which speaks of a psychopath out there in the night. It seems to Ryder, though, that obstacles are deliberately being placed in the way of the investigation and he and his partner decide to go it alone.
But Ryder himself is harbouring a terrible secret. As he hunts a killer, the demons from his own childhood rise again to torment him.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk/crime
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
First published in the USA by Dutton 2004
Copyright © Jack Kerley 2004
Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 00 718058 6
Set in Minion and Eurostile by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Limited, St Ives plc
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To my parents, Jack and Betty Kerley
Contents
“Why don’t you get your butt out of advertising and write that novel?”
The preceding quote, voiced by my wife Elaine after I’d had a bell-in-a-handcart week in copywriting, ultimately led to this book. Gentler assistance was provided by my children, Amanda and John, who endured manuscript pages spread throughout the house, rants about missing pens, and my commandeering the computer whenever an errant thought arrived.
The Fiction Critique Group of the Cincinnati Writers Project helped me understand what worked, what didn’t, and how to turn the latter into the former. Special gracias to Katey Brichto, who set aside her own work to read and improve mine.
Thanks also to Julia Wisdom, my editor at HarperCollins, for her solid input, and to Richard Green, for his powerful cover design.
The folks at the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency were -and continue to be - amazing: Joy Ritchey (since departed), who started my manuscript on its journey, the buoyant and indefatigable Lucy Childs, the foreign rights magician Lisa Erbach Vance, and the impresario himself, Aaron Priest. A first-time author never had a surer set of guides.
I
exercised broad license in bending settings, geography, and various institutions and law-enforcement agencies to the will and whims of the story. Everything should be regarded as fictitious save for the natural beauty of Mobile and its environs. Any similarities between characters in this work and real persons, living or elsewise, is purely coincidental.
S
econds before one of the most long-awaited events of Alexander Caulfield’s adult life, an event he’d spent years planning and pursuing, an event marking his ascension into professionalism, a decent salary, and the respect of his peers, his left eye started winking like a gigolo in a third-rate Italian film.
tic
Caulfield cursed beneath his breath. A physician, he recognized a manifestation of transient hemifacial spasms: eye tics or flutters in response to events sparking anxiety or posing a threat.
tic
Anxiety was ludicrous, he lectured himself, squeezing the offending eye shut; he’d performed or assisted with hundreds of autopsies during his internship. The only difference was this was his first professional autopsy. She was sitting twenty feet away.
Caulfield slowly opened his eye …
tic
He angled a glance at Dr. Clair Peltier. She was opening a letter in the autopsy suite’s utility office, apparently absorbed in correspondence. Caulfield felt blindsided, unprepared, fumble fingered: Today had been scheduled for procedural reviews and meeting new colleagues at the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau.
Then she’d casually suggested he take her place during a procedure.
tic
Caulfield refocused the ceiling-mounted surgical lamp over the body of the middle-aged white male on the table. Water rinsed beneath the corpse, sounding like a small brook playing over metal. He glanced at Dr. Peltier again: still studying her mail. He mopped his sweating brow, adjusted his mask for the third time, and studied the body. Would his incision be perfectly midline? Would it be straight? Smooth? Would it meet her standards?
He drank in a deep breath, told his hands, Now. The blue-white belly opened like a curtain between pubis and sternum. Clean and straight, a textbook opening.
Caulfield slipped another glance at Dr. Peltier. She was watching him.
tic
Dr. Peltier smiled and returned to her correspondence. Caulfield pushed his fear to a far corner of his mind and focused on inspecting and weighing organs. He spoke his findings aloud, the tape recorder capturing them for later transcription to print.
“On gross examination the myocardial tissue appears normal in size and wall thickness. Areas of myocardium in the left ventricle are suggestive of past myocardial infarction… .”
The familiar sights and words steered Caulfield onto a trusted path; he didn’t notice when the spasms melted away.
“… liver mottled, early indication of cirrhosis … kidneys unremarkable …”
The man had been found sprawled in his front yard after a 911 call. The EMTs followed aggressive resuscitation procedures for a heart attack, but the man entered University Hospital as a DOA. Caulfield’s initial findings supported a massive cardiac event, though the nondamaged tissue appeared healthy and free of epicarditis or atherosclerosis. Caulfield moved lower in the cavity.
“An obstruction is noted in the descending colon… .”
Caulfield pinched the lump in the bowel. Hard and regular in shape, a man-made object. It wasn’t uncommon, emergency-room physicians were forever sending patients to the ER to extract vibrators, candles, vegetables, and suchnot; people were inventive in their quest for erotic sensation.
“Using a number-ten blade, a ten-centimeter vertical incision was made through the anterior wall of the descending colon… .”
Caulfield retracted the bowel to reveal the source of the obstruction.
“An object can be visualized, silver and cylindrical, resembling a section of flashlight casing… .”
Wet metal gleamed through the slit in the intestine, black fabric wrapping one end. No, not fabric, friction tape. Caulfield’s finger tentatively tapped the casing. Something about the object glimmered with threat, an intruder in the house.
tic
He heard Dr. Peltier’s chair push back and high heels start toward him. She’d been listening. His fingers slid into the passageway and grasped the object. He tugged gently. It slipped easily through the slit, then resisted. Caulfield tightened his fingers around the object and pulled harder.
tic
Simultaneous: white flash, black thud. Caulfield’s head whiplashed and the floor slammed his back. Red mist and smoke painted the air. A woman’s scream spun through the roaring in his ears. Someone above him waved a blunt stick, a club.
No, not a club …
The light flickered twice and failed.
When the autopsy was transcribed to printed form, transcriptionist Marie Manolo was uncertain whether to include Dr. Caulfield’s final six words. Trained by Dr. Peltier to be clinically detached and thorough, Marie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued typing:
My fingers. Where are my fingers?
“A
guy’s walking his dog late one night… .”
I watched Harry Nautilus lean against the autopsy table and tell the World’s Greatest Joke to a dozen listeners holding napkin-wrapped cups and plastic wineglasses. Most were bureaucrats from the city of Mobile and Mobile County. Two were lawyers; prosecution side, of course. Harry and I were the only cops. There were dignitaries around, mostly in the reception area where the main morgue rededication events were scheduled. The ribbon cutting had been an hour back, gold ribbon, not black, as several wags had suggested. “What kind of dog?” Arthur Peterson asked. Peterson was a deputy prosecutor and his question sounded like an objection.
“A mutt,” Harry grunted, narrowing an eye at the interruption. “A guy is walking his mutt named Fido down the street when he spots a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight.”
Harry took a sip of beer, licked foam from his bulldozer-blade mustache, and set his cup on the table about where a head would be.
“The dog walker asks the man if he’s lost something. Man says, “Yeah, my contact lens popped out.” So the dog walker ties Fido to a phone pole and gets down on his hands and knees to help. They search up and down, back and forth, beneath that light. Fifteen minutes later the dog walker says, “Buddy, I can’t find it anywhere. Are you sure it popped out here?” The man says, “No, I lost it over in the park.” “The park?” the dog walker yells. “Then why the hell are we looking in the street?””