Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
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Bear said she’d have a tough time sleeping; alcohol impairs the body clock and sends dense, creepy dreams. After slipping into a T-shirt and shorts, I knocked on her door and said I couldn’t sleep, either, maybe it would help if we both didn’t sleep together. She was beneath a quilt and patted beside her. I lay down and we both yielded to a welcome, temporary darkness.
Dawn was at the curtains when my vagabond dreams evaporated. My eyes focused on Ava, turned toward me with her head snuggled into the pillow and slender hands tucked to her chin. I moved slowly getting off the bed, keeping her safely in sleep.
I awoke fully in the surf, the waves chilled by an offshore current, saline taste in my mouth and salt sting in my eyes. The sun was hazed, the air already curdling with heat. I sluiced off the salt in the cold-water shower beneath my house and went inside to the scent of coffee. I dressed and came out to find Ava at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. A glass of orange juice and plate with toast crumbs sat by her elbow.
“I was watching you swim,” she said. “Why so far out? Why not back and forth along the beach?”
“I swim straight out until I’m breathless and can’t go another stroke, then turn around.”
She gave me a raised eyebrow.
“I hate exercising,” I explained. “I either keep swimming or drown. It’s good incentive.”
She shook her head. “I actually understand that.”
I studied her. “You look better.”
She gestured at her garb: pink ribbed tank top, white jeans, hair held back with a golden scrunchy. “DKAA. Casual wear for the recovering alky.”
“I meant you,” I said. “You’re getting color. Your—”
“—hands aren’t shaking as much,” she said, holding her OJ semi-steady in front of her. She took a sip and set it down. “I slept good,” she continued. “Other…bad times, I—no, dammit, on other drunks I always sleep rotten after quitting. But when I woke up, I heard you breathing and I thought, I’m safe, and went back to sleep.”
I walked behind her and my fingers found her shoulders, lightly kneading. She spun a kink from her neck, let her cheek rest against my hand. The sun crested the roofline of the house to my east and the kitchen slowly brightened through my curtains. Dust motes glittered in the sunlit air like pinpoint flares. I watched them burn and felt strangely at peace.
Ava said, “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the first night. It’s a little fuzzy, but I remember discussing the physical similarities between Deschamps and Nelson; how they were basically the same, just that Deschamps had a more pronounced musculature.”
I sat beside her. “Twins, or brothers, you said, one worked out more than the other.”
“Something else popped into my head.” Ava sipped juice and probed her memory. “We had a head trauma victim the second day the new facility opened. A nineteen-year-old boy from a party in the north end of the county. The county police brought the body in and I did the post.”
I remembered the incident, but it was out of our jurisdiction and I hadn’t paid much attention to it.
“He had the same basic body type, tall and long-limbed, plus his skin was smooth and unblemished, nonhirsute as well.”
“Musculature?”
“Very similar to Nelson. Probably high-rep lifting of lighter weights resulting in more definition and less bulk, especially in the arms and shoulder.”
“Cause of death?”
“He was struck in the head with a round, blunt object. A softball-sized stone, judging by the wounds. Or something similar.”
My connection to Sergeant Clint Tate of the Mobile County Police was a patch-through and the signal struggled to reach his cruiser in Citronelle.
“There’d been a rave, buncha kids in a watermelon field,” Tate said, a constant crackle beneath his words like someone crumpling a pretzel bag. “Never seem to find out about raves till they’re done, couldn’t do a helluva lot if we did. They pay some farmer a couple hundred bucks to rent a few acres, haul in a generator for lights and music, and it’s a party. The vic you’re talking about’s a kid named Jimmy Farrier, a student at University of South Alabama. No brushes with the law, nothing. A decent kid that heard about a party and thought he’d give it a try. We’re still digging but we’re spread kinda thin.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Nearest we can come up with is he must have pissed someone off. Blunt-force head trauma in a dry creekbed in the woods, about three hundred feet from the rave proper. He took a while to die.”
“Who found the body?”
“Anonymous call about two a.m. Fake voice. Kid voice, girl. Scared. Probably off in the woods stoned and fell over him.”
“Anything unusual about the body? Maybe marks on the neck where someone tried cutting?”
“All I recollect is that the clothes were”—there were a few loud pops and Tate sounded like he was drowning in flames—”…bit…zipped…neck.”
“I missed that, Sergeant. Repeat please.”
“I said, his clothes had been pulled around a bit. Pants unzipped. Shirt yanked up to the neck.”
“Any leads?” I said, yelling over the electronic warfare. For a moment the signal cleared enough for me to hear Sergeant Tate sigh.
“Got about two hundred half-naked dope-addled kids dancing in a little circle of light with nothing beyond but woods. A killer’s dream party, Detective.”
“When you get done, Carson, just drop ’em off to my desk.”
Vera Braden left me and the three files in one of the morgue’s small meeting rooms. Neither Clair nor Will Lindy were in this morning, something to do with a budget meeting. Vera didn’t know when they’d be back.
I pulled a facial shot of Farrier from the shots taken when he entered the morgue. A square and beardless baby face with eruptions of acne. Prominent ears and shave-sides haircut. There was dirt on his lips and teeth from the field where he’d fallen. I traded the facial for a full-length photo and held a similar shot of Jerrold Nelson beside Farrier.
I saw the bodies of twin brothers. Size, muscles, definition, skin tone, all similar. Even navels and nipples seemed interchangeable. There was a quarter-sized tattoo of a leaping swordfish above Farrier’s left nipple. Nelson had also been tattooed, the oriental dragon above his right shoulder blade.
I pulled a photo of Deschamps from its file and held it beside the others. It was like a third brother entered the room, older perhaps, stronger, with bulk added to the arms, shoulders and thighs. I pushed Deschamps’s photo aside and concentrated on my twins.
Why behead Nelson and not Farrier?
I studied Nelson’s frontals. Like Deschamps, he’d been supine, facing upward. The discoloring livor mortis was confined to his back. I noticed Farrier had two darker stains in the livor mortis and shuffled through his file. In the close-ups they looked like bruises.
Footsteps by the door. I resisted the urge to hide the photos. The door opened with Walter Huddleston, the diener, behind it. His eyes pierced me like scarlet lasers, then traveled to the photos. He grunted and pulled the door shut, heading back to his coffin, maybe.
I read Farrier’s autopsy report, hearing Ava’s voice declaim it into the air for transcription. “Contusions over the rib cage indicative of sharp blows delivered before death, and consistent with semi-rounded shoe, athletic style or similar—conjecture: two hard kicks as body lay on ground…”
I gathered the materials and took them to Vera at her desk. I snapped my fingers as I was turning to leave. “Just remembered, Veer—I’m putting