The Hundredth Man (32 page)

I heard a familiar voice barking orders in the background. “Squill,” I spat.

“He’s pricked out to the max. Maybe I’ll go take the bastard’s head off.”

“Stay cool, Harry. I can deal with Squill.”

“He’s taking over. I think I was just suspended.”

“Any sign of Ava … Harry?”

I heard a popping sound and angry voices. Then Squill’s voice filled my head. “How are you at bagging groceries, Ryder?” he said. The headset crackled. And went off.

In the distance I saw the gray-blue of Mobile Bay, dark clouds rolling from the west like a shroud. “Big storm coming,” the pilot said.

CHAPTER 32

“Y
ou’re suspended, Ryder. That’s just the first move. Then it’s off the force.”

Squill jumped me the second I stepped from the chopper into the parking lot of the motel on the northwest side of downtown. Beside him was his fresh monkey, Bobby Neeland. The new chimp had new shades. Harry’s unmarked screeched into the lot behind them. I pushed past Squill and sprinted to Harry.

“Ava?” I yelled.

He shook his head. “Nothing yet. There’s some odd stuff in Lindy’s basement. We were looking it over when “

Squill was red faced, voice barely controlled. Neeland looked like he was having a jolly time under the captain’s umbrella. Squill jabbed a finger at Harry. “One more word to Ryder and you’re gone, too, Nautilus.”

Harry ignored Squill. “I got a woman in the motel for you to talk to, Cars. Here’s her story “

Neeland was in the full testosterone bloom of being Squill’s selectman. He stuck his face in Harry’s. “Listen to the captain, Nautilus. He wants your black face to shut up right-“

Barely turning from me, Harry buried his fist in Neeland’s gut. Neeland made a few little wet sounds until his knees crumpled and he fell to the asphalt like a gunnysack of mashed potatoes.

Squill said, “You’re both under arrest for assaulting an officer in the performance of his duties. It’s the end of life as you know it.”

Two cruisers bore down the street, lights flashing. Squill waved them over. Neeland tottered woozily to one knee, a green strand of snot hanging from his nose. Squill started counting coup on his pink fingers. “Assault, insubordination, lying …”

“Your inexperience is showing, Captain,” I said, as calmly as I could muster. “Maybe you should have spent more time at autopsies.”

He wheeled on me. “What are you babbling about, Ryder?”

I smiled. It wasn’t what he expected to see. “Our little talk by the autopsy table, Captain. About DC Plackett and various other events? When you were candid. Remember?”

Squill stage-laughed. “You might want to speak with a professional, Ryder, get some help with those delusions. You’ll have the time.”

The cruisers angled in, braking hard. Flashing light spangled our faces. I said, “Remember how the pro sector talks all the time?”

“What?”

“At the morgue. The person doing the autopsy is always talking.”

I pulled from my pocket the white envelope Ava had given me, tore off the end, puffed it open with a breath. I shook a black cassette tape into my palm.

“Did you think they were talking to you?”

I tossed him the tape and he made a fumbling catch. “The tape kept running after Burlew’s autopsy,” I said. “All through our little chat. Good sound quality. Even on the copies.” Doors opened on the cruisers. “So, Captain, you can either tell everybody how you carved Deputy Chief Plackett from a dung heap or …”

“Or what?” Squill whispered, his face drained of color.

“Or you can tell Harry and me what a great job the PSIT is doing. And to keep doing it.”

Neeland made a croaking sound and threw up. Fried chicken and gravy spattered across Squill’s shiny black shoes.

“Rumbling and tumbling,” Harry noted.

“I want you to see something,” Harry said. “Then we’ll talk to a woman who knew Lindy when he was growing up.” Harry passed me an eight-by-ten brown envelope as we ran toward the motel. “Check this out,” he said quietly. “Got it from the sheriff’s department in Choctaw County. Lindy grew up on a farm up outside Butler.”

I opened the envelope and pulled out a faxed photo.

Ava. In a booking photo from the Choctaw County Sheriff’s Department. Front and profile. Arrest number.

Almost Ava. The nose was a shade too long, the forehead a touch too high, and the eyes seemed like eyes from a taxidermist’s inventory, something piscine, or perhaps reptilian.

Harry waited for my shock to subside. “Lindy’s mother. Arrested for child endangerment and related offenses. Kept him chained in a pantry, for one.” Harry sighed. “Plus other bad things. He was sixteen at the time. She died two years later in prison, cirrhosis.”

I said, “When Ava walked into the morgue for her job interview “

“Snapped our boy like a nickel pencil.”

Harry knocked on the door of room 116. A dusty Choctaw County Sheriff’s Department cruiser sat in front. I nodded my thanks to the deputy behind the wheel.

Harry said, “The woman is Velene Clay. She’s fifty-three. Youth-services director around Butler. She’s with her aunt who lived on the farm next to the Lindys. Not a big town.”

“The aunt know anything?” I asked, wanting to shoulder through the door, yell, scream, get things moving, but if there had ever been a time to soak up impressions and details, it was now.

Harry shook his head. “She’s almost eighty and has Alzheimer’s. That’s why the motel: Ms. Clay couldn’t leave her at home.”

“Find anyone else who knew Lindy way back when?”

“He wasn’t out a lot.”

The room was warm, the AC barely breathing. Out of concern for the wire-thin woman in the wheelchair between the twin beds, I supposed. She had a crocheted shawl hanging from hard-boned shoulders and her white hair was combed but not subdued, strands poking out like frosty antennas. Emotionless blue eyes fixed on the blank television. Her hands moved in short jerks from her lap to her lips, smoking an invisible cigarette.

She turned to me. A flame of recognition of something. “Ha-aah,” she said. “Ee-you. P’leasmn.”

Policeman, I thought she said. The left side of her mouth drooped slightly, a stroke probably. I nodded and said hello. She returned to smoking and staring at the television. I had a vision of ancient programs trapped in the starchy sprigs of her hair.

“That’s my aunt, Mrs. Benoit. I’m Velene Clay, sir.”

I turned to a portly woman sitting at the table in the corner. She wore a simple yellow dress and had a tattered folder in front of her. The fingertips of both hands rested on the folder as though it were the planchette from a Oiuja board. Ms. Clay had been youth-services director in Choctaw County for five years and a caseworker before that. I asked for everything she knew about Will Lindy, looking at my watch to emphasize the need for speed.

She spoke hesitantly. “I first saw him when he was thirteen. He’d run away from home. Not so unusual. He was brought to me for counseling. A bright, soft-spoken young man. But the first day I knew something was … very amiss.”

Harry had heard some of her story over the phone. “Listen to this, Cars,” he said.

Ms. Clay continued. “There was a waiting room outside my office. Chairs, magazines, toys for the younger children. I came through the door just as Willy dropped a magazine and bent to pick it up. My phone rang. I said, “Don’t move, I’ll be right back.””

Her fingertips twitched over the folder. It shivered toward me, it quivered back. “The call took twenty minutes. When I came back he was still bending over to pick up the magazine.”

I said, “You told him, “Don’t move.””

“He looked like a statue. I said, “It’s all right, Willy,” and he picked up the magazine and placed it in the rack as if nothing had happened.”

Mrs. Benoit stomped her foot and moaned. She began jabbing the air with her phantom cigarette.

“Sorry,” Ms. Clay said. “She’s disturbed about something. We rarely travel. It’s so hard on “

“What else, ma’am?”

“The next time I saw him was in high school. He seemed to not have changed at all, a bit stouter. But still a tiny boy with the same eyes and the same expression. Blank one moment, engaged the next. Like a switch going on and off.”

“Abuse?”

“He had marks on his wrists and ankles like he’d been bound. He claimed he’d gotten wrapped in the ropes of a tire swing, playing jungle boy or something. It was a very elaborate excuse, coached, I felt. I tried to broach the subject of sexual abuse, but at any mention of the body or genitalia he’d grab his abdomen and start moaning, saying he had to go to the bathroom. Then he’d just turn mute.”

Almost imperceptibly, Ms. Clay’s hands began moving the file toward me. “I had authority to inspect living conditions and went to his home and told his mama I needed to look around inside. I’d seen the woman in town, of course, spoken to her a bit during the first sessions. Always quiet and polite. It was a mask. She went crazy when I asked to come inside. The foulest language I’ve ever heard, every form of violent threat. She was like a rabid animal that spoke English.”

“What was Lindy doing all this time?”

“Ya-hhhh,” Mrs. Benoit said. She looked around the room as if noticing it for the first time. “Y-ahh,” she moaned again, balling her fists and striking the air.

Ms. Clay said, “I saw him through the door. Just sitting in front of the TV, nose right up to it. No sound, but it was like he was hearing the TV just fine, but not hearing the to-do at the door. I noted his fascination with TV during office visits, preferring to stare at the screen in the waiting room instead of interacting with other children.”

“You went inside the house?”

“It took a sheriff and three big policemen to carry her away.”

I said, “It was strange, wasn’t it? The house.”

The folder crept the remaining distance across the table. “The police took pictures. I asked for copies, so I’d always know, you know. What might make a kid act like Willy Lindy.”

“The bows,” Mrs. Benoit whispered. “Bows.”

I slid the folder from beneath Ms. Clay’s fingers and opened it. Twenty photographs, numbered sequentially. The first was of a simple white frame two-story. Nothing behind but flat fields going out of focus, cotton. A heavy tree line in the distance, bordering the Tombigbee River, judging by what I took to be a couple of broken-down boats hauled up between the trees.

The photographer took us inside, documenting his passage. Furniture was sparse. Two hard folding chairs in the living room. One faced a television in the corner. The TV was on, a cartoon judging by the bright color.  We moved into the dining room. A square wooden table, one chair pulled to it. The same in the kitchen. A dog’s bowl sat on the floor of the kitchen, newspaper beneath it.

“What kind of dog?” I asked.

“They didn’t have one,” Ms. Clay said, avoiding my eyes. Another photograph, a pantry off the kitchen. Stripped bare of shelves. Nailed into the wall were various lengths of rope, tag ends friction-taped against fraying. The walls were gray. I saw the shadow of a small boy pass the wall. When I blinked the shadow disappeared.

“There wasn’t anything upstairs,” Ms. Clay said. “Empty.”

I tucked the photo of the pantry at the back of the stack. The next photograph was a small wooden outbuilding.

“Out back,” Ms. Clay said. “About twenty feet from the house.”

A white door with two heavy locks.

The next photo took me into a small room with deep shadows and a stained concrete floor. Black tape covered the windows. In the middle of the floor was a banquet table drilled every few inches near its edges, rope threaded through the holes. Above the table a single hooded light, like a mechanical flower. Two pink snakes dangled from somewhere above with their heads compressing to stubby points.

“What the hell are those tubes?” Harry whispered.

The next photo followed the snakes to the rafters where they joined heavy bladders, one still distended with water.

Ms. Clay’s soft sounds were damped by a tissue. “Poor Willy Lindy, poor, poor little boy.”

“Bows!” Mrs. Benoit wailed.

“Excuse me,” Ms. Clay said, dabbing her eyes and going to her aunt.

“Bows, bows, bows,” Mrs. Benoit repeated, striking out with her fist as if she were trying to nail a shifting image into her mind. We excused ourselves and progressed to the next station in our pilgrimage of horror.

Lindy’s house was a small, neat Craftsman cottage in midtown, tucked into a miniature forest of palmettos and ferns and wild grasses. Rain had started falling. We waved to the slickered cops on guard, passed the tape cordon, and entered. There was a wooden chair in the high-ceilinged living room, a TV in front of it. That was all. A small table and another wooden chair sat in the dining room. The decor had been foretold by the folder beneath Ms. Clay’s fingertips.

Lindy’s sleeping bedroom had a mattress on the floor. His clothes were in precise stacks in the closet, the hanging garments spaced to not touch.

There was a second bedroom and a large Master Lock hung open on the door. “Not locked when we came in.” Harry said. “Like he was scooting fast.”

I walked in. A wall-long table supported several electronic devices, including a computer and video monitor. Two of the devices had tape slots and I took them to be VCRs. A video camera on a tripod sat in the corner. There were two lights on stands, reflectors clamped beside them. Cables snaked everywhere.

“Videotaping and editing equipment,” Harry said. “Amateur but decent. Computer-controlled editing, special effects. Least that’s what Carl Tyler said, he’s the department’s resident tech-brain.”

Four tapes were stacked on the table. “You or Carl look at these?”

“No. I just wanted Carl to make sure this stuff wasn’t booby trapped or any other weirdness.”

“You’re aces, bro. Let’s rack ‘em up.”

Harry put a tape in the player. The monitor screen turned to blue-gray snow. A voice issued from speakers below the table. Harry fumbled with buttons on the monitor and the volume elevated.

“.. . the stomach is tubular and empty, indicating several hours since the last meal … “