Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
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the deal. It was a time in my life when I needed a safe retreat, and where better than a box in the air above an island?
The phone rang. I reflexively patted where pockets would be if I’d been wearing clothes, then plucked the phone from the table. It was Harry.
“We’re wanted at a murder scene. Could be Piss-it’s coming-out party.”
“You’re two months late for April Fool’s, Harry. What’s really happening?”
“Our inaugural ball, partner. There’s a body downtown looking for a head.”
Harry and I were homicide detectives in Mobile’s first district, partners, our job security assured by the mindless violence of any city where the poor are abundant and tightly compressed. That shaped our world unless, according to the recently revised procedures manual, a murder displayed “overt evidence of psychopathological or sociopathological tendencies.” Then, regardless of jurisdiction, the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team was activated. The entire PSIT, departmentally referred to as Piss-it, of course, was Harry and me and a specialist or two we could enlist as needed. Though the unit was basically a public-relations scheme—and had never been activated—there were those in the department not happy with it.
Like me, right about now.
“Get there as fast as you can,” Harry said, reading me the address. “I’ll meet you out front. Use siren, flashers. Gun it and run it, don’t diddle around.”
“You don’t want me to pick up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread?”
The phone clicked dead.
I jumped into jeans and pulled on a semi-clean dress shirt, yanking a cream linen jacket from the rack to cover the shoulder rig. I stumbled down the steps, climbed into the unmarked Taurus under the house, and blew away in a spray of sand and crushed shells. The flasher and siren stayed off until I’d crossed the inky stretch of water to the mainland, where I cranked up the light show, turned on the screamer, and laid the pedal flat.
The body was in a small park on the near-southwest side of Mobile, five acres of oak and pecan trees surrounded by a turn-of-the-century neighborhood moving from decline to gentrification. Three flashing cruisers fronted the park, plus a tech services van. Two unmarkeds flanked a shiny black SUV I took as Squill’s. The ubiquitous news van had its uplink antenna raised. Harry was forty feet ahead and walking toward the park entrance. I pulled to the curb and stepped out into an ambush, a sudden burst of camera light in my eyes.
“I remember you now,” came a vaguely familiar voice from behind the glare. “You’re Carson Ryder. You had something to do with the Joel Adrian case, right?”
I blinked and saw the woman reporter from the morgue rededication. She was in full TV-journalist bloom, lacquered hair, scarlet talons gripping a microphone like a condor holds a rabbit. Her other hand grabbed my bicep. She lifted the mike to her lips and stared at the camera.
“This is Sondra Farrel of Action Fourteen News. I’m outside of Bowderie Park, where a headless body has been discovered. With me is Detective Carson Ryder of the—”
I scowled at the camera and unleashed a string of swear words in three real languages and one invented on the spot. There’s nothing reporters hate worse than a sound bite that bites back. The reporter shoved my arm away. “Shit,” she said to the cameraman. “Cut.”
I caught up with Harry at the entrance to the park, guarded by a young patrolman. He gave me a look.
“You’re Carson Ryder, aren’t you?”
I looked down and mumbled something that could have gone either way. As we passed by, the patrolman pointed at his uniform and asked Harry, “How do I get out of this as fast as Ryder did?”
“Be damned good or damned crazy,” Harry called over his shoulder.
“Which one’s Ryder?” the young cop asked. “Good or crazy?”
“Damned if he ain’t a little of both,” Harry yelled. Then to me, “Hurry.”
The scene techs brought portable lights with enough wattage to guide in a 757, all focused at a twenty-by-twenty area spiked with head-high bushes. Trees surrounded us and blotted most of the stars. Dog shit lurked beneath every step. Two dozen feet away a sinuous concrete path bisected the park. A growing audience pressed against the fence where the park met the street, including an old woman twisting a handkerchief, a young couple holding hands, and a half-dozen sweat-soaked runners dancing foot to foot.
Two criminalists worked inside the taped-off area, one kneeling over the victim, the other picking at the base of a tree. Harry trotted toward the onlookers to check for witnesses. I stopped at the yellow tape and studied the scene from a dozen feet away. The body lay supine in the grass as if napping, legs slightly apart, arms at its sides. It seemed surreal in the uncompromising light, the colors too bright and edges too sharp, a man incompletely scissored from another world and pasted to this one. The clothing was spring-night casual: belt-less jeans, brown deck shoes without socks, white tee with an Old Navy logo. The shirt was drawn up to the nipples, the jeans unzipped.
Bending over the body was the senior criminalist on the scene, Wayne Hembree. Black, thirty-five, thin as poor-folk’s broth, Hembree had a moon face and a sides-and-back fringing of hair. He sat back on his heels and shrugged kinks from his shoulders. His forehead sparkled with sweat.
“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-puppie 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