The Hundredth Man (3 page)

“Okay walking here, Bree?” I called, gesturing a line between my shoes and the body. I didn’t want to stick my feet into something important. Dog shit either. Hembree nodded, and I slipped under the tape.

An old street cop who’d seen everything this side of downtown hell once told me, “Find a head without a body, Ryder, and it’s weird, but there’s something whole about it. Find a body without a head and it’s creepy and sad at the same time just so alone, y’know?” When I looked down on that body, I understood. In four years with the MPD I’ve seen shot bodies, stabbed bodies, drowned bodies, bodies mangled from car crashes, a body with a pile of intestines squirted beside it, but never one without a head. The old cop nailed it: that body was as alone as the first day of creation. I shivered and hoped no one saw.

“Killed here?” I asked Hembree.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. I can tell you he was decapitated where he’s laying. ME folks thinking two or three hours back. Puts time of death between eight and ten.”

“Who called it in?”

“Kids, teenagers. Came back here to make out and “

Footsteps behind me; Captain Squill and his hulking, omnipresent shadow, Sergeant Earl Burlew. Burlew was chewing paper as usual. He kept a page of the Mobile Register in his pocket and fed torn pieces between his doll-sized lips. I always wanted to ask was there a difference between sections, Sports tasting gamier than Editorials, maybe. Or did they all taste like chicken? Then I’d look into Burlew’s tiny, oyster-colored eyes and think maybe I’d ask some other time.

Burlew said, “Look who’s here, Captain: Folgers instant detective. Just add headlines and stir.” He swiped his hand down his sweating face. Burlew’s centered features were too small for his head, and for a moment he disappeared beneath his own palm.

“Fag revenge killing,” Squill said, glancing at the body. “Love to hack, don’t they? Good place to do it, park’s copacetic after dark. It’s a yuppie-pup pie neighborhood; Councilwoman Philips lives two blocks down; street gets over patrolled to keep her in happy world….”

I’d heard Squill had a speech mode for every crowd. With uniformed cops a dozen feet away he was spewing cop-movie jargon. Disheartening, I thought, a seventeen-year police administrator acting like a cop instead of just being one.

“… killer thumps the vic’s melon or pops a cap. The perp pulls his blade and scores a head.” Squill pointed to the bushes around us. “Unsub dropped him here so the body’d stay out of sight.”

I fought the compulsion to roll my eyes. Unsub was short for “unknown subject” and the FBI types used it a lot. Unsub was fedjarg.

“Killed and beheaded here?” I asked.

“Something wrong with your ears, Ryder?” Squill said.

Though the body lay partly beneath a bush decorated with small white blossoms, it was free of petals. Just outside the scene tape was a stand of the same bushes; I walked over and fell into them.

“What the hell’s he doing?” Squill snapped.

I stood and studied the drifting of petals down the front of my shirt. Hembree looked between me and the body.

“If the vie fell through the bushes he’d have petals on him, but they’re” he studied the corpse and the ground “they’re around the body but not on it. The perp brushed aside the branches, so nothing fell on the corpse. Like maybe our friend here was pulled into the bushes.”

I looked deeper into the vegetation. “Or out of them.”

Squill said, “Delusional. Why pull the body out of deeper cover?”

Hembree’s chunky assistant produced a flashlight and bellied beneath the bushes. “Lerame see what’s back there.”

Squill glared at me. “The un sub lured the vie here and dropped him where the body stayed hidden in the bushes, Ryder. If it wasn’t for a couple horny teens, it would’ve stayed hid until the stink started.”

“I’m not sure it’s hidden,” I said, cupping my hands around my eyes to blot the scene lights and looking through oak limbs and Spanish moss at a bright streetlamp fifteen yards distant. I crouched beside the body and saw the streetlamp boxed between branches.

“Can we cut the lights?” I asked.

Squill slapped his head theatrically. “No, Ryder. We got work to do and can’t do it with white canes and leader dogs.” He looked at the uniforms for his laugh track but they were staring at the streetlamp.

Hembree said, “Lights turn back on, y’know.”

Squill had no control over the techs and hated it. He turned and whispered something to Burlew. I was sure Squill’s mouth shaped the word nigger.

Hembree yelled to an assistant in the forensics van. “Tell the EMTs and cruisers to douse their lights. Then kill these.”

The lights from the vehicles disappeared, leaving only the portable lamps. When they went black it took our eyes several seconds to adjust. I saw what I’d expected: The streetlamp sent a thin band of light through the branches and between two large bushes, a spotlight on the body.

“It’s not hidden,” Hembree said, checking angles. “Anyone coming around the bend in the path looks right at it. Hard to miss with the white shirt.”

“Speculative bullshit,” Squill said.

The tech squirming through the bushes yelled, “Got fresh blood back here, bring me a kit and a camera.”

“Dropped in the dark, dragged into light,” Hembree said, winking at me. The uniforms nodded their approval. When the scene lights snapped back on, Squill and Burlew were gone.

I did an end-zone shuffle, spiked an invisible ball, and waggled my hand at Harry for a high five. He jammed his mitts in his pockets, growled, “Follow me,” and stalked away.

Harry Nautilus and I had met in the Alabama state pen five years before; visitors, not inmates. I’d driven from Tuscaloosa to interview several prisoners as part of my master’s in psychology. Harry’d come from Mobile to pump info from an inmate whose jugular had, unfortunately, been slashed a couple hours earlier; Harry was having a rotten day. He passed me in a tight hall and we bumped elbows, spilling his coffee. He studied my clothing denim intensive, red-framed mirror shades, faded ball cap over self-inflicted haircut and asked a guard who let the big, dumb hillbilly out of his cell. I’d come from two hours with a boasting pederast and transferred my sublimated aggressions to Harry’s nose. The laughing guards broke it up as he was choking me out.

Afterward, we both felt shoe-staring ridiculous. Mumbled apologies turned to explanations of why we’d both been at the prison that day, and what had conspired to give us the temperament of dyspeptic pit bulls. Stupidity gave way to laughter, and we ended the day drinking in the bar in Harry’s motel. After a few belts Harry launched into cop stories, amusing and intriguing me. I countered with tales from recent interviews with the South’s preeminent psychopaths and sociopaths.

Harry dismissed my interviews with a wave of his hand. “Behind every one of those pieces of busted machinery is a megalomaniac that loves to talk. Reporters, shrinks, college boys like you the craze-o’s tell them anything they want to hear. It’s a game.”

“You know the Albert Mirell case, Detective?” I asked, referring to the psychopathic pedophile I’d spent an ugly two hours with.

“His last vie was in Mobile, college boy, remember? If you talked to Mirell, all you got was smirks and bullshit. Right?”

I lowered my voice and told Harry what Mirell had revealed to me as spit gleamed over his teeth and his hands squirmed beneath the table. Harry bent forward until our foreheads almost touched. “There’s maybe ten folks in the world know that stuff,” he whispered. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“Guess I put Mirell in a mind to talk,” I said, pretending that’s all there was.

Harry studied my face a long time.

“Let’s keep in touch,” he said.

This was when my mother was alive and I was an impoverished student at the University of Alabama. Still, every couple of weeks I’d drive to Mobile or Harry’d make the run to Tuscaloosa. We’d grab a bucket of chicken and talk about his crumbling marriage or my fading interest in student hood after six years and four majors. We kicked around aspects of cases bothering him, or discussed my wilder interview sessions. Sometimes we sat quietly and listened to blues or jazz and that was fine too. This went on for three or so months. One night Harry noted my usual at-home meals consisted of beans and rice, and going for a beer meant digging under couch cushions for change.

“Teaching assistant’s not a high-pay industry?” he asked.

“It’s basically a no-pay industry,” I corrected. “But what it lacks in compensation it makes up for in scarcity of job possibilities.”

“Maybe one day you’ll be a famous shrink, Carson Freud, driving around in a big old Benz.”

“Likeliest thing I’ll be driving is pipe on an oil rig,” I said. “Why?”

“I think you’d make a good cop,” Harry said.

Ten minutes after we left the park, I followed Harry to a back booth in Cake’s Lounge, a dark bottom-dwellers’ saloon wedged between factories and warehouses near the bay. Several ragged loners drank at the bar, a few clustered in booths. Two unsteady men played pool.

“Why here, why not Flanagan’s?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. Cake’s smelled like the air hadn’t been changed in a decade; Flanagan’s served cheap drinks and decent gumbo and pulled a lot of cops.

“Squill might have been there, and Squill’s what we’re gonna talk about. That was a dumbass hot-dog trick with the flowers and lights. Why did you want to outshine him in front of everybody?”

“I wasn’t outshining, Harry, I was detecting. We had a guy with no head and Squill spewing anything that came into his. What was I supposed to do?”

“Maybe you could have canned the drama and suggested things to Squill, made him think it was his idea. Didn’t I hear you used to study psychology?”

“Beaming thoughts into Squill’s head would be parapsychology, Harry, one of the few things I never majored in.”

Harry narrowed an eye. “Squill’s a political shark, Carson. Piss him off and there’ll be nothing left of you but a red stain in the water.”

I posed a question that had been on my mind for most of a year now. “How does a pus-weasel like Squill make chief of Investigative Services, anyway?”

I can tell I’m being obtuse when Harry puts his face in his hands. “Carson, you’re precious is what you are, my apolitical tribesman. You truly have no idea, do you?”

“Infirmative action?”

“You, Carson. You put Captain Terrence Squill where he is today.”

Harry stood and gathered bottles from the table. “I’ll grab a couple more brews and give you a little history lesson, bro. You’re looking like you could use one.”

CHAPTER 3

H
arry started his lecture halfway back from the bar, two bottles clinking in his hand. “For years Squill was a paper-pushing lieutenant in Crimes Against Property, a drone with one talent: public relations. Spoke at schools, neighborhood meetings, shopping center openings, church socials … ” Harry put the beers on the table and sat down. “He polished his act until he became the department’s default media rep. For most people that’s a no-win situation … “

I nodded. “It upstages the superiors, which tends to piss them off.” In college I’d seen tenure-track careers shot down by academic jealousy.

“Not Squill. The bastard knew exactly when to punt to higher-ups. Even better, when the department had a fuckup and the brass wanted to hide, Squill made himself the center of attention, drew the fire.”

I said, “Squill? Jumping into bullets?”

“The media loved him, knowing he’d always deliver contrite, pissed off, colorful whatever was selling that day. “MPD captain says wrongful arrest concerns the department, news at eleven’… “High-ranking officer slams ACLU critics as “misguided crybabies,” story on page four,” et cetera and et cetera.”

Harry plucked a book of matches from the ashtray and fiddled with it. “Then Joel Adrian went on his spree. Tessa Ramirez. Jimmy Narley. After the Porters’ deaths the case blew up. But the investigation went nowhere. You can’t imagine how bad it was “

“Who discovered Tessa, Harry? Who stood in a rat-filled sewer and looked down on her body?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t mean it like that, bro. I’m talking politics here. Calls for resignations. People cussing the chief out in the produce section of Winn-Dixie. The media ground us like sausage. Everyone was pointing the blame finger at everyone else and suddenly this crazy uniformed cop shows up Kid Carson.”

“I had a couple ideas. You ran interference.”

“They pissed on our heads for it,” Harry said. “Until there was nothing left to try.”

The peckerwoods at the pool table began a beery argument on spotting the cue ball. We both looked that way for a couple of seconds.

“I got lucky, Harry. Nothing but that.”

He narrowed an eye. “Luck can be knowing where to look, right?”

It caught me off guard. “What are you saying?”

“Like it’s more than just picking a card; it’s knowing who’s dealing.”

“No. Maybe there’s, I guess, an intuition, I don’t …”

Harry stared at me curiously for a moment, then waved my garble away. “After you came up with that off-the-damn-wall theory and nailed the case, it was a political scramble, everybody trying to turn patrolman Ryder’s Lone Ranger roundup into a personal win. And who was best set for it?”

“Squill?”

Harry tugged a match from its rank and studied it. “He’d kept the media pipeline full during the ordeal, and afterward he started sluicing in his own refined oil. Ever think how fast you faded from the hero light?”

I thought back. For two days I was the man who stopped the mad Adrian. By day three it was the department’s triumph and I was a factotum. By day five I was a misspelled name nine inches into a ten-inch story. Harry said, “Squill’s Law: Kiss up, shit down. He pushed you off the horse so the brass could ride it, one of them being him. He rode it all the way to chief of Investigative Services.”

I shrugged. “So I got jerked around a little. When the smoke cleared, I was a detective. No complaints here.”

The argument at the pool table picked up steam. One man positioned the ball and the other slapped it away. Harry rolled his eyes at the scruffy duo and lit the match just to watch it burn. Matchlight turned his face to gold.