The Little Death

Chapter Four

In Palm Beach, it was all about form. From the undulating eaves of the Spanish-tiled roofs to the precise placement of the potted geraniums on Worth Avenue, everything was designed to please the senses.

Here, five miles west of the ocean and on the ass end of the Palm Beach County airport, it was all about function. From the grab-a-Slurpee gas stations on every corner to the treeless tracts of multilaned boulevards, everything was geared to moving cars along as quickly as possible.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office fit right into its surroundings. It was a huge, blocky complex painted a Crayola-flesh color, tarted up with waxy plants that could survive a decade’s drought. A monolithic addition of the same pallid stucco rose in the back, its slitted windows identifying it as a jail.

Louis parked the Mustang near a white and green sheriff’s cruiser, and he and Mel went inside.

The lobby was standard law-enforcement fare: yellow cinder-block walls and bulletin boards plastered with wanted posters and notices. The three rows of metal folding chairs were occupied by the usual sorry-looking souls watching Wheel of Fortune on TV while they waited for their numbers to be called.

After the sergeant behind the desk tossed Louis and Mel visitor’s passes, he buzzed them through. The squad room was a maze of cubicles. There was a lingering odor of tacos and burnt coffee in the air, along with the steady ring of phones.

Louis had called ahead, and Detective Ron Barberry met them at the door to the Violent Crimes Division. He was a squat man with a lion’s mane of white hair and a face made for a caricature artist: flat, apelike brow, ragged salt-and-pepper mustache, and horseshoe jaw. His bleary gaze, rolled-up sleeves-revealing a nicotine patch-and unkempt nails tagged him clearly as a cop who lived in the station and the local tavern.

Probably the strip joint Louis had seen at the corner of Gun Club Road.

“You got fifteen minutes,” Barberry said as he waved them toward the back of the room.

Barberry parked his butt on the corner of a messy desk. His gaze lingered on Mel like he couldn’t figure out what kind of man wore yellow sunglasses. His hard brown eyes finally swung back to Louis.

“You working for Kent?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Louis said. He felt Mel’s eyes on him but didn’t turn to him. “We’re just checking things out right now.”

“So what do you want from us?” Barberry asked.

“Kent’s afraid you guys have already made up your minds about him and aren’t going to look any further,” Louis said.

Barberry rooted through the debris in a drawer and came out with a pack of Big Red gum. As he folded a stick into his mouth, he glanced at Mel, who was making his way through the desks toward an empty chair.

“What’s wrong with him?” he whispered to Louis. “He got trouble seeing?”

“Yes, I do,” Mel said, turning back. “But I can hear really well.”

Barberry reddened and pulled out his own chair. “Oh. Sorry, buddy. Here.”

Mel gave him a hard stare and came back to sit down, crossing his arms.

Barberry turned back to Louis. “Look, I’m gonna make this easy for you. That fudge packer Kent is as guilty as a whore with the clap. He needs to hire himself a good lawyer, not a couple of out-of-work PIs.”

Louis heard a squeak and looked back to see Mel slowly spinning his chair around away from Barberry.

“Detective,” Louis said, looking back at Barberry. “How about a little cooperation here? Mel and I are both ex-cops, and we’re not trying to make anyone here look bad.”

Barberry glanced at Mel. “You worked in homicide?”

Mel nodded. “Miami.”

“So what’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Retinitis pigmentosa.”

Barberry blinked. “My mom’s got the same thing.”

“That so?” Mel said.

Barberry nodded brusquely. “Yeah. Shit… that’s tough. I mean for you being a cop and all.”

Mel took off his sunglasses. His face was sunburnt, and he had two white circles around his eyes. “How’s your mother doing?” he asked.

“She’s got a nurse, but it still ain’t easy for her.” Barberry cleared his throat and reached for an accordion file on his desk. “Out of consideration for that, I’ll throw you two dogs some bones. They found the corpse in Devil’s Garden.”

“What’s that?” Louis asked.

“Some dot-on-the-map place south of Clewiston,” Barberry said. “Lots of cattle farms out there. Anyway, some dogs sniffed out Durand around dawn. He was laying in a crappy old cattle pen, naked as a jaybird.”

“Did you find his clothes?” Mel asked.

“Nope.”

“What about a wallet, jewelry, anything?”

“Nope.”

“Has the head turned up yet?”

“Nope.”

“Did you find a weapon?”

“Nope.”

“What about a time of death?”

Barberry plucked a set of stapled reports from the accordion file and flipped a few pages. “ME’s best estimate puts the TOD between midnight and three A.M.”

“How did you identify him?” Louis asked. “Prints?

Barberry nodded. “We got lucky. The sucker was in AFIS.”

“He had a record?”

Barberry grinned. “Don’t they all? He was busted in Miami on a solicitation charge.” He set the papers down and picked up his pack of Big Red. He offered a stick to Mel, who shook his head and pulled out a pack of Kools.

“You can’t light up in here,” Barberry said. “It’s a new law. You gotta go outside with the other lepers.”

Mel paused, Zippo lighter in the air, then pocketed the Kools. “How’d you tie him to Kent?” he asked.

“That’s the address on record for Durand’s driver’s license. The boyfriend came here to confirm the ID. Once I met Kent, I knew exactly what I was looking at.”

“Any witnesses to anything going on that night?” Louis asked.

Barberry swung his eyes back to Louis. “I guess you’ll read this in the papers, so I might as well tell you,” he said. “We don’t have anyone who saw anything around the cattle pen, but we got a sighting of a car cruising through Clewiston around one A.M. the night before we found Durand.”

“What kind of car?” Louis asked.

“Maybe a Rolls-Royce or something like it.”

“Get a plate?”

Barberry shook his head, looking for something in the report. “The witness just described it as a ‘big rich-guy car,’ so we showed him photos of Rollses and Bentleys and shit. He couldn’t say for sure what it was. Just that it was a big rich-guy car and it might have been light brown.” Barberry closed the file and tossed it onto the desk. “Or maybe white or tan. Or gold.”

Louis heard a metallic click and glanced at Mel, who was rhythmically opening and closing the Zippo.

Barberry watched Mel for a moment, then looked back at Louis. “The witness said he read in the Clewiston News that we found a body, so he thought he should report the fancy car,” Barberry said. “He said he just thought it was weird to see a car like that in a place like Clewiston.”

“A Rolls or a Bentley would have a very distinct kind of tire,” Louis said. “Did you get any tracks from the area of the cattle pen?”

Barberry shook his head. “No tires. Only dog paws, cowboy boots, work boots, and bare feet that probably belonged to Durand. Oh, and horse hooves, too.”

“Horses?” Louis said.

Barberry paused. “Yeah. It was some cowboys down there that found him.”

“If the ground was soft enough for all that,” Louis said, “didn’t you wonder why there were no tire tracks?”

Barberry shrugged. “The main road going in is asphalt and then hard-packed gravel. Kent probably parked on the gravel and made Durand walk to the pen.”

Louis couldn’t quite envision things the way Barberry described them. He couldn’t imagine that, out there in the middle of nowhere, there had been no tire tracks at all. The people who worked out there had to drive some sort of vehicles.

“What kinds of cars do Kent and Durand own?” Louis asked.

“Durand had some beat-up black Honda that’s been in the garage for three weeks. The older fudge packer doesn’t even own a car.” Suddenly, Barberry’s eyes shot to Mel. “Hey, do you mind not doing that?”

Mel paused, staring at Barberry, then snapped the Zippo closed. He set it on the desk, his eyes never leaving Barberry’s face.

“Kent would have needed a car to transport the body out there,” Louis said. “You’re going to have to tie him to a vehicle to make your case.”

“No shit,” Barberry said, bristling. “But Kent could’ve borrowed a car. I’ll place him behind the wheel of something, and once I do that, it’s over for him.”

“Swann told us Kent and Durand had a relationship,” Louis said. “Did you consider there might have been-”

Barberry smirked. “Another man? Sure, I thought about that. But why should I waste my time hunting down some phantom fag when Kent won’t even admit he was sleeping with Durand? Give me a fucking break.”

The phone on Barberry’s desk rang. Barberry answered it, turning his back. Louis looked at the accordion file. He wanted to see the crime scene and the autopsy photos.

Barberry hung up his phone. “Well, gentlemen,” he said. “It seems I have somewhere to go. Can I walk you out?”

Barberry gestured toward the door, leaving them no choice but to head in that direction. Mel pushed from the chair, and Louis followed him out to the lobby.

“Tell the fudge packer I’ll be over to see him soon,” Barberry said at the door, and started away.

“Hey,” Mel said sharply.

Barberry turned. “What?”

“Knock that shit off,” Mel said.

Barberry stared hard at Mel, like he didn’t get it. Then he gave him a hard grin. “Whatever you say, pal.”

Outside, they paused as Mel reached for his Kools and stood there in the hot sun, patting his pockets for his lighter.

“Damn, I left my lighter in there,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Louis slipped on his sunglasses. The whine of a jet coming in for a landing drew his eyes up for a second, then back to two uniformed officers coming up the walk. They didn’t give him a glance as they went inside.

At home, in Lee County, he was used to getting nods of recognition from the local cops. His relationships with the sheriff and the chief were prickly but at least respectful. But here, in Bizarro World, as Mel called it, nothing felt even close to comfortable. Not only was he hitting brick walls with two different police departments, but their own client was parsing the truth about his sex life.

Client. Louis shook his head slowly. Despite his loyalty to Mel, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with Kent.

“They found the head,” Mel said.

“What?”

Mel came down a step, lighting up a cigarette. “They found Durand’s head,” he said. “It’ll be here in about a half hour.”

“How do you know that?”

“When I went back in for the lighter, I heard the phone conversation,” Mel said. He blew out a stream of smoke. “We need to go see the ME.”

“He isn’t going to talk to us, Mel,” Louis said.

“Why don’t you call Vinny?” Mel asked. “See if he knows the guy and can get us a few minutes inside.”

Vinny Carissimi was the Lee County medical examiner and a good friend of Louis’s, and there was a fraternity of MEs across the state, just as there was for cops.

“Let’s go find a phone,” Louis said.

The medical examiner’s office was located around the back of the building. Louis and Mel parked in the last row of the lot, next to a jail transport bus. They watched as a county van pulled up, letting out a deputy with an orange Igloo cooler.

A few minutes later, Barberry came around the corner of the building and disappeared inside. He reappeared forty minutes later, a little paler. Without lifting his head even to look around, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Louis and Mel waited five more minutes before they went inside. The automatic doors opened with a wheeze, drawing the attention of a deputy standing farther down the hall, the same one who had brought in the Igloo cooler. Despite the NO SMOKING sign above his head, he was stealing a few puffs of a cigarette. He looked at Louis and Mel like a kid caught in the high school john, then managed to regain some sense of command.

“Hold up,” the deputy said. “Who are you?”

Louis paused. As a favor to Vinny, the ME was expecting them, but Louis couldn’t be sure the deputy wasn’t assigned by Barberry to guard the head from outsiders. So he lied.

“Dr. Vincent Carissimi, Lee County ME,” Louis said. “This is Detective Landeta. We’re here about the severed head.”

“Oh, well, then,” the deputy said, gesturing toward the door closest to Louis. “You go right ahead. Dr. Steffel is right in there.”

“Thanks.”

Louis held the door for Mel and followed him inside. In the large tiled room, three stainless-steel autopsy tables, empty and shiny, sat under hooded lights. Below the shout of industrial-strength Lysol lurked the sour whisper of rotting flesh.

A door near the back opened, and a small woman in green scrubs came through it. She was about fifty, with a pretty pale face and a short, dark pixie haircut.

“Louis Kincaid?” she said, coming forward with outstretched hand.

“Dr. Steffel?” Louis asked.

“Sue Steffel,” she said. She looked expectantly toward Mel, and Louis introduced him.

“I appreciate you letting us get a look at Durand,” Louis said.

“Vinny and I are old friends,” Dr. Steffel said with a smile. “If he vouches for you, then you’ve got to be okay, even if you are cops.”

“Ex-cops,” Mel said.

“There’s no such thing,” she said.

“Point taken,” Mel said with a smile.

Dr. Steffel crossed her arms and leaned back against a steel table, giving them both an appraising look. “Vinny says you’ve got an open mind.”

“A mind is like a parachute,” Louis said. “It only works when it’s open.”

“Well, in this room, I work only with the facts,” Dr. Steffel said. “And too often I find myself dealing with people who form their theories first and then try to make the facts fit.”

“People like Barberry?” Louis asked.

Dr. Steffel held his eyes for a long time, arms still folded.

“We’re just trying to find out the truth about Mark Durand,” Louis said.

She pushed away from the steel table. “Which part of him do you want to see first?” she asked.

“Either.”

Dr. Steffel motioned for them to follow her into a second room lined with freezers. She opened one, pulled out a gurney, and threw back the blue sheet.

The body lay chest up. It had been washed, and the skin was pale gray, the chest, arms, and legs knotted with muscle, the belly flat. Louis swallowed back a rise of bile.

There was something surreal about a body that was in perfect shape but had only a ragged stump of a neck. It looked like a toppled Greek statue.

“You’ll notice a pronounced lack of color,” Dr. Steffel said. “The blood loss was massive.”

Louis stepped closer. There were no other wounds, except for some small lacerations just visible over the shoulder. But the kneecaps were bruised and torn.

“May I?” Louis asked, and nodded to a hand.

“Be my guest,” Dr. Steffel said.

Louis took Durand’s wrist and turned it so he could see the palm. It was shredded like the knees.

“His knees and palms are torn up,” Louis said, for Mel’s benefit. “Like he was crawling around.”

“Take a look at this,” Dr. Steffel said. She turned the body onto its side to expose the back. The red marks extended all the way around the torso. Thickest across the middle of the back, they formed a road map of welts, cuts, and tattered skin.

“It looks like he was whipped across the back,” Louis said.

“How bad?” Mel asked.

“Bad.”

Dr. Steffel lowered the body back to the gurney. Louis looked again at the bruised knees. The image of Durand groping around in the darkness with a whip cracking behind him was hard to stomach.

“Where is the head?” Louis asked.

Dr. Steffel moved to a smaller drawer. She paused before opening it and looked to Louis and Mel. “You want something to cut the smell?”

Louis and Mel shook their heads. Dr. Steffel pulled out the drawer and the smell spilled out into the cold room. Louis fought back the urge to gag.

The head was lying on its side, facing them. Unlike the body, it was well into putrefication, the flesh swollen and mottled. Part of the left jaw was missing, exposing the lower teeth, and the eyes were gone, leaving only sunken black holes.

“You guys okay?” Dr. Steffel asked.

Louis managed a nod.

“Peachy,” Mel muttered from behind a handkerchief.

“The head was found three hundred yards from the body and was out there almost a week longer,” Dr. Steffel said. “I’m pretty sure what you see here is the work of animal scavengers. I’ll be able to tell more after I get in for a good look.”

Louis drew in three shallow breaths, not wanting to risk one deep one.

“Come around to this side,” Dr. Steffel said.

Louis and Mel joined Dr. Steffel on the other side of the table. He heard the snap of latex as Dr. Steffel pulled on some gloves. She carefully raised Durand’s tangled, dirty hair from his neck.

“The first thing I wanted to know was if the head was cut off or chewed off,” Dr. Steffel said. “To do that, I needed to expose the vertebrae and look for tool or teeth marks. It was definitely cut off. Grab that magnifying glass over there and I’ll show you.”

There was a fresh vertical incision from the base of the skull down what was left of the neck. The vertebrae glinted in the tattered tissue.

Louis picked up the glass and held it over the neck. Even before Dr. Steffel pointed them out, Louis saw two crevices in the bone-knife nicks. One was deeper than the other by a half-inch.

“Hesitation marks?” Louis asked.

“Or miscalculation,” Dr. Steffel said.

“What do you mean?”

“The killer could have miscalculated the correct spot to place the weapon,” Dr. Steffel said. “Or miscalculated the strength one needs to sever a human neck. Either way, your killer took three swings. The first two are evident here, and the third was complete and fatal.”

Louis felt Mel pressing behind him and stepped aside so he could get a look. Mel bent low over the head, lifted his yellow-lens glasses, and squinted.

“Even I can see that,” he said. He straightened and moved back quickly, taking a breath. “Any thoughts on the exact type of weapon?”

“I haven’t had any time to check my catalogues and make any comparison,” Dr. Steffel said, “but I can tell you it’s going to be a long blade of considerable strength and narrow width. Something that allows a wide-arc swing that would give the killer the momentum needed to sever the neck.”

“Like a sword?” Mel asked.

Dr. Steffel smiled. “That’s the first thing that came to my mind,” she said. “But it’s important we don’t jump to conclusions. There are many other kinds of weapons out there that could do the trick, and we need to eliminate them one by one.”

“Do you have any idea what position Durand was in when he was decapitated?” Louis asked.

“Unless his killer is twenty feet tall, Durand was kneeling,” Dr. Steffel said. “Again, I can be more precise later, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m estimating his killer to be between five-eight and six feet.”

Reggie was about five-nine, Louis thought. But Reggie also looked like he had never seen the inside of a gym.

“Dr. Steffel,” Louis said, “how much strength would it take to cut off a head?”

“Well, it’s not easy to behead someone,” she said. “In the old days, they used axes and broadswords, and you had to be pretty experienced to hit your mark. But then they invented the guillotine to make the task easier.”

“So, an out-of-shape guy could do this?” Louis asked.

She nodded. “If the blade was sharp and the person swung it just right, he could lop the head off. Strengthwise, he wouldn’t have to be Conan the Barbarian.”

A phone rang somewhere in another room, and male voices carried behind it. Louis did not want to be caught here in an unauthorized interview and end up spending the next six hours in a jail cell on a trumped-up obstruction charge. But he had one more question.

“Do you know if any evidence was picked up around the scene?” he asked. “Cigarette butts? Candy wrappers? Anything?”

“I know they didn’t find much,” Dr. Steffel said. “You’d have to talk to the techs to be sure. But I doubt they’ll be very forthcoming. Their supervisor is Barberry’s cousin.”

Dr. Steffel withdrew a business card from her pocket. “Call me if you discover anything worthwhile. I’ll be glad to give you my sense of things.”

Louis stuck the card in his pocket and started to leave, but a final question popped into his head. He turned back to Dr. Steffel.

“Doctor,” he said, “have you ever seen anything like this before? A decapitation with torture?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been a medical examiner for fifteen years, some time here and some out west. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It takes a mean sonofabitch to whip someone when he’s on his hands and knees and probably begging for mercy.”

Dr. Steffel looked back at the head and slowly closed the drawer. The stench lingered in the air.

“I’d say this took a true monster,” she said.