A Garden of Vipers

CHAPTER 13

Harry shoved aside a file of forms on his desktop, set a new stack in its place. He paused and stared at me.

“You all right, Cars?”

“Sure, Harry. Why?”

“You’ve said maybe three words since you got in this morning. How was the big kick-up for Channel 14? Dancing and prancing with the swells? That was this weekend, right?”

“It was fine.”

I realized if I didn’t go into detail, Harry’s antennae would register my distress. I gave a brief synopsis of the evening: impaired music, great eats, first-class beverages, lots of chatter in biz-speak.

“Plus I even got a look at upper-crust Mobile: a family called the Kincannons. They were so-”

Harry broke into my recitation. “You meet Buck?”

I stared at my partner like a plumed hat had appeared on his head.

“What?”

“Buck Kincannon. You get a chance to say hi?”

“How the hell do you know Buck Kincannon?”

“Back four or five years ago I was working with a civic group in north Mobile, by Pritchard. Maybe you remember?”

“I recall a couple months when all your nights seemed locked up. Weekends, too. Something about a ball league?”

He nodded. “The group’s big push was getting inner-city kids into sports, baseball. Kids from ten to fourteen years old. Keep ’em on a ball field, not the streets. We were beating our heads against the wall scratching up thirdhand equipment. We’d been trying to get the city to let us use an abandoned lot as a practice field, but they kept whining about liability. Mardy Baker, the director of a social services organization, sent letters to all the big civic and charitable organizations, trying to scratch up money. No go.”

Harry paused and smiled to himself, as if he were tasting a delicious memory.

“Where’d Kincannon fit in?” I asked.

“One of the letters had gone to the Kincannons’ family foundation. A philanthropic deal. Kincannon himself showed up at our next meeting, checkbook in hand.”

“Keep going,” I said.

“Suddenly our ragtag kids got Louisville Slugger bats, Rawlings gloves, uniforms. It wasn’t just money, it was influence. Like he walked into City Hall with a shopping list and said, ‘Here’s what I want.’ Two days later all permits are in order, insurance isn’t a problem, nothing’s a problem. The old field got resodded, sand and dirt trucked in to fill the baselines, build a pitcher’s mound. Stands went up so parents could sit and cheer for the kids.”

“So you sat around while Kincannon waved a magic wand?”

“The group was moms mainly, plus a couple of community-activist types. They made me designated hitter for dealing with Buck, me being a big, important cop and all. We went to lunch, him laying out plans, me nodding and going, ‘Sure, Buck, sounds good.’”

“What’d you think of him, Kincannon?” I sounded casual.

Harry flipped a thumbs-up. “From setting the city straight to setting the timetable, he took over. You don’t think of people with that kind of power and influence getting down in the gritty, and he’s cool in my book.”

I stopped listening, put my head on nod-and-grunt function as Harry continued enumerating the angelic feats of the Holy Buckster.

“…opened that field and you should have seen the kids’ eyes. Buck later said it was one of the highlights of his…”

Nod. Grunt. Nod. Grunt.

“…all the local politicos showed up like it was their idea, standing next to Buck and getting their pictures taken…”

Nod. Grunt.

“…guess you can do anything you got the money to do it…”

I was between grunt and nod when I remembered I wanted to call Warden Malone up at Holman and get a status report on Leland Harwood. I headed toward the small conference room to get some quiet, but Harry followed, still singing the glories of Buck Kincannon.

“Good-looking fella, too. Probably has to shovel the ladies out the door in the a. m…”

We went to the small conference room. I dialed the prison, ran the call through the teleconference device, a black plastic starfish in the center of the round table. Malone was on a minute later.

“Leland Harwood died two hours after he was stricken in the visitors’ room. Never regained consciousness.”

“Poison,” I said.

“A witches’ brew of toxins. Organophosphates, the report says. I’d never heard the term. Pesticide, herbicide, some industrial chemicals.” I heard paper rattling in Warden Malone’s hand as he read from the page.

“Where did all that stuff come from?” Harry asked.

“All available inside, Detective,” Malone said. “Cleaning supplies, rat poison, roach paste, paint thinner. They’re kept tucked away, but…”

“So someone squirts a bunch of stuff on Harwood’s scrambled eggs and he drops dead later?”

“The docs say it took some mixing of compounds to get the right effect, the maximum bang for the buck, to be crass.”

“Harwood got banged hard,” I noted. “He have any enemies?”

“I’ve checked around and the answer is, not really. He was a smart-ass but managed to stay out of major confrontations. Wanting to appear angelic for the parole board will do that.”

“Got any poisoners up there?” Harry asked.

“Several. But we keep them real far from the pantry, so to speak. The docs said anyone with access to the right supplies could have mixed the brew…with a little help from someone with bad thoughts, the right formula, and high school chemistry.”

“Info that could have come from outside.”

Malone laughed without humor. “Imagine a couple guys in the visitors’ room. The one on the outside says, ‘Soak twenty roach tablets in alcohol, let sit two days, mix in…’”

“Got the point,” Harry said.

We asked Malone to keep us in the loop. Harry clicked the starfish off. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“The next time I decide to race Logan to a scene, how about you strangle me.”

“I was just thinking that. Where from here?”

“Let’s check into Harwood some more, call up the man’s sheet. Talk to folks that knew the deceased. Maybe figure out Taneesha Franklin’s interest in a guy like Leland.”

I sat at the computer, pulled up overviews on the incident as Harry leaned over my shoulder, reading ahead.

“Bernard Rudolnick was Harwood’s victim,” Harry said, frowning at the computer screen. Doctor Bernard Rudolnick.”

“Killed in a bar, right?” I scrolled the screen to the correct info as Harry recited particulars.

“The Citadel Tavern. A low-life joint. Got into a scuffle at the bar, the men went outside. A gun goes bang in the night. The shooter lit out, but Mobile’s finest grabbed Harwood a few hours later.

I studied the screen. “Doctor? Like in M.D.?”

“Psychiatrist,” Harry said. “Bet they didn’t get a lot of shrinks at the Citadel. A pity the one they had didn’t last the night.”

Time for me to pick up the prelim from Taneesha Franklin’s autopsy. I took the stairs, looked into the second floor, and saw Sally Hargreaves sitting at her desk, staring blank-eyed at the wall. Sally was a detective handling sexual crimes, a tough gig on the best days. I continued down the flight, realized Sally wasn’t the wall-staring type. I climbed back up, went to her desk.

“What’s up, Sal? You look like your cat got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.”

She turned, brightened. Pushed strands of auburn hair from her eyes. Smiled with false bonhomie.

“Hi, Carson.”

“You OK?”

She looked at a report she’d been filling out. Shook her head.

“I just got back from the hospital. A rape victim. Among other things. Jesus.”

“Tough one?”

“Ugliness through and through. Bizarre.”

I rolled up a chair for the vacant desk beside Sal’s. The desk had belonged to her former partner, Larry Dayle. Dayle had resigned after four months on the Sex Crimes unit, moving his family to a mountainside in Montana and stringing the perimeter with razor wire.

The floor-Sexual Crimes, Crimes Against Property, Vehicle Theft-was quiet, most of the detectives out. I took Sal’s hand.

“Want to tell a friendly face about it? I can go get Harry.”

She laughed, and the laugh cracked into a sob. She caught herself. Brushed away a tear. It was Sal’s empathy that made her so good at what she did. The downside was what poured back through the door.

She said, “A woman, twenty-five. Student. Got grabbed off the street two nights ago. Picked up bodily and jammed into a vehicle. She was taken somewhere-a barn, she thought, by the smell. Afterwards she got pushed from a moving vehicle into a hospital parking lot.”

“Strange. She was raped?”

“And beaten. Her face…it’ll be a long time before the surgeons make it a face again. She wanted children. That’s gone. Her insides were…”

“Easy,” I said.

“The guy who did it, while he was punching her, doing all the things he did, he kept laughing, yelling, ‘Look at me, bitch, can you see me?’ Then he’d hit her, scream, ‘Look at me, tell me what you see.’”

“She got a description?” I asked.

“No.”

“The perp wore a mask?”

Sally shook her head. “No.”

“What?” I asked.

Sally buried her face in her hands.

“Oh, Carson. She’s blind. Been blind since birth.”

I thought about the rape-abduction as I drove to the morgue. I’d never worked Sex Crimes, though as a member of the Psychopathological and Sociopathological unit I had studied sexual predators. The actions as Sal described them seemed to combine the power-assertive, or entitlement, type of offender with a sadistic, or anger-excitation, type of behavior. The first behavior type humiliates the victim to increase the perp’s sense of self-worth and self-confidence. The second is brutal, often involving a high level of physical aggression, including torture.

I had no idea what to make of the anomalous gesture of dropping the woman at the hospital.

The Crown Vic started to feel crowded and I lowered the windows to let fresh air blow out too many dark thoughts. I parked in the morgue lot beside Clair’s sporty little BMW, worth more than my annual pay. Clair’s former husband, Zane Peltier, was a bona fide member of Mobile society, the old-money contingent, and some of that largesse had rubbed off on Clair during the divorce proceedings.

It hit me that Clair would certainly know of the Kincannons, maybe even know them personally. I might get a question answered, maybe two, if I could sneak them into a conversation.

Clair wasn’t in her office, so I checked across the hall in the main autopsy suite. She was gowned in green and standing against the wall as Lula Baker mopped the floor beneath the autopsy table. Lula was a former housekeeper from New Orleans, one of the vast army of transplants.

“Hi, Lula,” I said.

“Morn’, ’tect Ryd.” Lula was thirty or so, white, skinny, and had the ability to edit most words to a single syllable.

“The prelim’s out front, Ryder,” Clair said, looking up from a copy of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Monthly, required reading for pathologists.

“I wanted to ask you something else.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “I forgot.”

Clair pulled off her reading glasses, studied me with the big blue miracles.

“Maybe because you’re not getting enough sleep. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

“It’s the Franklin case. Nothing’s moving ahead.”

“Take vitamins and eat right. Remember to sleep.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She frowned, but said nothing. I turned to leave, then tapped my forehead, like I had been hit with a sudden thought.

“I was at a Channel 14 party the other night, Clair. Formal, all the bigwigs. I half expected to see you there with the social types.”

“If I never see another champagne fountain it’ll be too soon. Out of your element, weren’t you?”

“If I never see another tux it’ll be too soon. You wouldn’t know a family named Kincannon, would you?”

Her face darkened. “Why?”

“People treated them like royalty. I’ve never seen so much bowing and scraping.”

Clair turned to the housekeeper. “That’s fine, Lula. You can go.”

“Be bact ’mar.”

Lula rolled the mop and bucket out the door. Clair set the CDC report on a counter.

“The Kincannons have money, Carson. It equates to power: lots of money, lots of power. Some people have an automatic reflex when they get near power. Their knees bend.”

“A lot of politicos were there, too.”

“Political knees bend farther and more often. She was there, too, wasn’t she: an older woman, white hair, chunky, aloof?”

“Yes. May-bell-line?”

“Maylene. Yes, she would have been. She’ll always be there, in some way or another.”

I heard something off-key in Clair’s voice, anger maybe, or resignation.

“Some way or another?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She looked at her watch, frowned.

“I’ve got two pathologists down with the flu. I’ve got the day’s second post in three minutes. Look, the Kincannons do a lot of giving to the community and the region. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for parks, health-care institutions, schools, law enforcement…an incredible amount of money.”

“And so?”

“The Kincannons…well, only some of the truly wealthy can give with both hands, Ryder.”

Her words seemed cryptic; Clair was rarely cryptic.

“You mean the Kincannons have so much they can shovel it hand over hand into the community?”

“Think about it. But elsewhere, please. I’ve got to get to work.”

I sucked in a breath, said, “How about Buck Kincannon?”

“Is there a specific question there?”

“No,” I admitted. There are about a hundred.

Clair picked up the phone on the counter, asked for the body to be brought to the table. She turned to me.

“Buck Kincannon is the current golden boy of the family, forty-eight karats of flawless Kincannon breeding. Last month’s Alabama Times magazine listed him as one of the top ten eligible bachelors in the state.”

Not what I needed to hear.

“Current golden boy, Clair?”

“Maylene Kincannon runs that family like a competitive event. Next month it may be Nelson on the pedestal. Or Racine, unless he gets blitzed and slips off. Race likes women and liquor, probably not in that order. Now, unless you’re going to assist, it’s time to skedaddle.”

I nodded, headed for the door. I was stepping into the hall when she called my name. I stopped, turned.

“The Kincannons, Ryder. They haven’t stepped outside any limits, right? You’re not investigating anything, anyone?”

“Just natural curiosity about a lifestyle I’ll never know.”

She gave me the long look again. “It’s mostly fiction. Stay away from those folks, Carson. There’s nothing to be gained there.”

I picked up the report at the front desk, then stepped into a day more like August than May, heat rippling from the asphalt surface of the parking lot.

Stepped outside any limits?

Walking to the car I revisited Clair’s phrase, a curious assemblage of words. And that throwaway line about staying away from the Kincannons…

Was that some kind of warning?

You’re losing it, I thought, slipping behind the wheel. The only warning here is to keep your imagination in check.