A Garden of Vipers

CHAPTER 6

“Give me a couple minutes with Ms. Franklin, Clair?” I said. “Please?”

Dr. Clair Peltier, chief pathologist for the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, stared at me with breathtaking blue eyes. Between us, on a stainless steel table, rested the draped body of Taneesha Franklin. Her face bore the misshaping of the blows she’d been dealt; her bare arms outside the drape displayed puckered knife wounds. Her head lolled to the side, the gaping slash beneath her chin like a wide and hungry second mouth.

“Ryder…”

“Three minutes?”

She sighed. “I’ll run down the hall and get a coffee. It’s a two-minute run.”

“Thanks, Clair.”

She waved my appreciation away and left the room, her green surgical gown flowing as she moved. Not many women could make a formless cotton wrapping look good, but Clair pulled it off.

Perhaps it was peculiar only to me, but as an investigator-or maybe just as a human being-I always sought a few moments with the deceased before the Y-cut opened the body, transformed it. I wanted time alone with my employer. Not the city, nor the blind concept of justice. But the person I was truly working for, removed from life by the hand of another, early, wrongfully. Sometimes I stood with the Good, and often I stood with the Bad. Most of the human beings I stood with fell, like the bulk of us, into a vast middle distance, feet in the clay, head in the firmament, the heart suspended between.

From what Harry and I had discerned, Taneesha Franklin had lived her brief life with honor, focus, and a need to be of service to others. She had only recently discovered journalism and through it hoped to better the world.

Good for you, Teesh, I thought.

Clair stepped back through the door. Without a word, she walked to the body, picked up a scalpel, and went to work. I stood across the table, sometimes watching, sometimes closing my eyes.

I generally attended the postmortems, while Harry spent more time with the Prosecutor’s Office. We joked that I preferred dead bodies to live lawyers. The truth was that I felt comfortable in the morgue. It was cool and quiet and orderly.

“Where was she found, Carson?” Clair asked, staring into the bisected throat, muscles splayed outward.

“Semi-industrial area by the docks. Warehouses, light industry.”

“Not crowded, then? No one very near?”

“It’s normally sort of a hooker hangout. But the rain kept them in that night. Why?”

“Her vocal cords were injured. Lacerated.”

“From manual strangulation? The knife wound?”

Clair pursed her roseate lips. “Screaming, probably. I wondered why no one heard her.”

The procedure took a bit over two hours. Clair snapped off her latex gloves and dropped them into the biohazard receptacle beside the table. She removed her cloth mask and I saw a lipstick kiss printed in the fabric. Clair uncovered her head, shaking out neat, brief hair, as black and glossy as anthracite. She pressed her fists against her hips and stretched her spine backward.

“I’m getting too old for this, Ryder.”

“You’re forty-three. And in better shape than most people ten years younger.”

“Don’t try charm, Ryder,” she said. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

I was perhaps her only colleague this side of God who used Clair’s first name. Not knowing of her insistence on formality, I’d used it when we were introduced. Those with us had grimaced in anticipation of a scorching correction, but for some reason, she’d let it stand, addressing me solely by my last name as a countermeasure.

When I’d first met Clair, I’d considered her five years older than her actual age, the result of a stern visage and a husband in his sixties. I would later come to realize the latter bore a certain responsibility for the former, Clair’s visage softening appreciably after hubby was sent a-packing.

Two years ago, a murder investigation had cut directly through the center of Clair’s personal life. The revelations of the investigation had wounded her, and I’d been present at a moment of her vulnerability, a time she’d needed to talk. We’d stood beneath an arbor of roses in her garden and Clair had revealed pieces of her past-less to me than to herself-suddenly grasping meaning from the shadows of long-gone events.

They were startling revelations, and though I disavowed the notion, she had believed me the vehicle for the transformative moment.

“When will the preliminary be ready?” I asked, pulling my jacket from a hanger on the wall.

“In the a.m. And don’t expect it before ten-thirty.”

Though our relationship was professional, there had been times-as in her garden-when the world shifted and for fleeting moments we seemed able to look into one another with a strange form of clarity. A believer in reincarnation might have suspected we’d touched in a former life, spinning some thread that even time and distance left unsevered.

“I’ll be here tomorrow at ten thirty-one, Clair.”

She walked away, talking over her shoulder.

“How about sending Harry? Be nice to see someone with some sense for a change.”

Though at times the thread seemed tenuous.

I was climbing into the Crown Victoria when my cell phone rang, Harry on the other end. “Hembree wants to see us at the lab. How about you whip by and grab me. I’ll be out front.”

We blew into Forensics fifteen minutes later. Hembree leaned against a lab table outside his office. He was so skinny, the lab coat hung in white folds like a wizard’s robe.

He said, “You got great eyes, Harry.”

Harry winked. “Thanks, Bree. You got a nice ass. Wanna grab a drink after work?”

Hembree frowned. “I meant catching the water depth on the floorboards. I called the regional office of the National Weather Service, talked to the head meteorologist. They archive Dopplers. He reran the night’s readings, checking time, location, and storm cell activity.”

“Upshot?” Harry asked.

“The area where the vic’s vehicle sat took pretty light rain, overall. Lightest in the city, at least in the hour before it was spotted. About an inch in the hour before the vehicle was found.”

“Why so much in the car, Bree? It was a lake.”

“Maybe a leak along the roof guttering caught rain, channeled it inside. I’ll check it out.”

“Anything else turn up?”

Hembree said, “The knife Shuttles pulled off the street? Made years ago by the Braxton Knife Company in Denver. The handle’s bone. The blade’s carbon steel, not stainless, why it looks corroded. It’s a damn nice knife.”

“How about prints? Anything new?”

“Pulled a thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, some palm. Ran every possible database. Nada. Nothing. Zip.”

“You got a Wookiee database?” Harry said.

“What?”

We waved it off and walked out the door.