Truman Desmond retrieved the external hard drive from beneath the wooden flooring of his photo studio. He retreated to his cramped office behind the studio’s anteroom and plugged it into his computer.
The day’s shoot had provided several possibilities for his collection, lilies fresh from the field. Added to selections from other schools, it made a bouquet of seven little American beauties.
Truman smiled approvingly as he transferred Jacy Charlane’s photos to the drive. The low-angle shots first, then the mid-range ones as she studied the camera with thoughtful eyes. Next came the portrait photo, her smile wide and radiant.
Finally, he loaded sound effects. Viewers could, if they wished, study Desmond’s offerings to a tinkly music-box version of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.
Truman scooped a handful of Cheezos from the bag beside the computer, washing them down with
a Mountain Dew. He studied the screen. The Charlane girl was a magnificent find, and he figured her portfolio would create quite a stir when piped to his roster of specialists.
For years, Truman had obtained his photos from playgrounds and public beaches and hanging at the mall with an up-angled camera hidden in a shopping bag. By trading and selling and doing custom work, he’d learned to identify a specific clientele: wealthy bulwarks of business and society who could never act on their desires. Truman had stumbled into the school-photographer job. His photography studio had been suffering the down economy, plus he’d had to back off on his secret business when the cops got heavy into net monitoring. Noting a solicitation for school-photography bids in the
Mobile Register
, he immediately saw the potential for combining his hidden business with a legitimate income. It had been a stroke of genius and would, correctly plotted and cautiously paced, make him a millionaire.
Footsteps at the door; Truman Desmond froze as the doorknob shook violently. He jabbed in panic at the keyboard. The computer locked up with Jacy Charlane on the screen.
The door banged open.
“Company’s coming,” called a laughing voice. “Zip up your pants.”
Truman Desmond closed his eyes and his head slumped forward, his heart jackhammering his ribs.
The idiot simply wouldn’t follow the procedure: three fast buzzes, pause, then a final long buzz.
Truman rolled his chair back to look through his doorway. His brother Roosevelt stood in the anteroom riffling through the day’s mail, a carob-coated nutrition bar clenched in his teeth like a cigar.
“You didn’t use the code, Rose!” Truman railed.
Rose grunted at bills and flyers. “Anyone can buzz like that. I’m the only one with my voice.”
“We’ve got to be careful, you outsized idiot. It’s not a game.”
Rose scowled and looked up. When his eyes saw the image on the computer screen, he threw the mail over his shoulder.
“Hey man, who’s that?”
Truman was hunched over the keyboard, trying to shut off the screen when Rose’s sausage-thick fingers surrounded his hand.
“Leggo, Rose,” he whined.
“C’mon Tru, who’s the chickie? Move over, goddammit. Lemme see.”
“Come on, Rose. I got work to do.”
“Move the hell out of the way, Truman.”
Truman cursed and rolled back. If Roosevelt wanted him out of the way he’d simply pick him up and move him, the advantage of spending twelve of twenty-four years lifting weights.
“Hurry up and look,” Truman pouted. “Then find something to do.”
Rose Desmond put his face to the screen. “What’s baby’s name?”
“Lorelei.”
Rose said, “Not her made-up name, asshole. Her real name.”
“How do you know it’s not her real name?”
“Vitriana. Kittinia. Lorelei. Every name you make up for the website sounds like a fucking Caribbean island. You’re so predictable, Tru. Now, what’s pretty baby’s name?”
“Jacy. Come on, Rose, I’ve got to get done and get the drive stashed. Somebody’s got to do the work around here.”
Rose turned from the screen, the veins in his neck visibly pulsing. “Don’t you give me that shit like I don’t do anything. You’re not around them every day. Taking them food. Smelling their smells. Sometimes I wish I could—”
“They’re product, Rose,” Truman snapped. “No interaction. We’ve discussed it. As soon as we’re done we’ll get away, have some fun. Hell, between Vitriana and Kittinia and Nalique—”
“Darla, Maya and LaShelle. Use real names so I can follow.”
“No matter what you call them we have a shit-load of money, Rose. With lots more to come.”
Rose snorted and pulled another power bar from his pocket, tore an end from the silver package and let it fall to the floor. He balled the remaining package and flicked it into the trash drum across the room, whispering “two points” when it dropped.
Truman said, “This will all be over soon, Rose. We’ll get away for a while, anywhere we want.”
“When?”
“The buyer’s picking up Kittinia—Maya, to you—at the farmhouse in a couple weeks. The buyer and I are negotiating the delivery schedule for LaShelle. How about letting me get back to work?”
Rose Desmond spun his brother back to the computer and stalked away. Truman finished the website work and returned the hard drive to its hidey-hole beneath the floorboards. He found Rose sitting in the studio and reading
Pex
, a magazine devoted to pectoral muscles.
“You leaving soon?” Truman asked.
Rose didn’t look up. “Finish this article and I’m a goner.”
“You gonna check the product tonight, Rose?”
“Yeah. Go too long without emptying the crapper and it gets rank down there.”
Tru walked to his brother and kissed him on the mouth. Practice-kissing, they called it, and it wasn’t faggy because they didn’t use tongues. Tru straightened and said, “We’ll get business over with and find something just for us, brother. A celebration.”
The door closed and Rose heard the locks slide into place. He gave Truman ten minutes before he pulled the drive from the floorboards. He wanted to see the new girl again.
The girl was rigid with fear as Rose climbed the storm-shelter rungs with her over his shoulder. “I like you a lot, Jacy,” he said, lifting her outside
the hatch, clutching her hand as he followed. The night was cloudless and steamy, the stars smudged with haze. “I’m going to teach you to dance. You like to dance?”
“My name’s not Jacy,” the girl said, quivering, eyes wet with tears. “It’s LaShelle. Why did you take me from my house? Why am I in that place down there?”
“You’re very pretty, LaShelle. You have nice eyes.”
“Please, mister. I want my mama. I want to go home. Please don’t hurt me.”
“I’ve got music inside.” Rose swiveled his hips, snapped his fingers and smiled. “I’ll teach you to dance. It’s good exercise.”
“Please, mister. I don’t want to learn no dancing.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
Rose guided LaShelle Shearing into the house. He shut the door and slid the deadbolts.
It was ten p.m. when Ryder stopped at the morgue. He knew Clair Peltier would be working late, trying to make a dent in her paperwork. The guard buzzed him through the building’s main entrance, gilt writing on the door proclaiming Dr Clair Peltier as Chief Medical Examiner, Alabama Bureau of Forensics, Mobile Branch. He waved to the guard and stepped lightly down the hall to Dr Peltier’s office, hoping to catch her by surprise.
She was at her desk, eyes down, reading glasses poised on her delicate nose as she penned notes on
a stack of forms. Her shoulder-length hair was as black as wet coal. Ryder studied the ubiquitous vase on the desk, overflowing with bright flowers from her garden. The floral scents turned the air into a sweet oasis amidst the astringent morgue smells.
“Don’t be thinking you’re sly, Ryder,” Peltier said without looking up. “I heard your footsteps all the way down the hall, tiptoe or not.”
“You’re a difficult woman to sneak up on, Doctor,” Ryder said. “But then, you’re a difficult woman, period.”
Clair Peltier looked up from her writing. “I’m not sure I should be alone with you, Ryder. Is anyone near?”
Ryder leaned out the door and looked up and down the hall: empty. “The closest person is the guard. He’s half-napping in the foyer.”
When Ryder turned back, Clair Peltier was in front of him. Their lips met, brief and chaste and, for a shadow of a moment, something more. Over the years their relationship started acidic, sweetened into a year as lovers, finally reaching today’s point, an understanding each would always be there for the other, occasionally physically, always emotionally.
Ryder stepped back and looked into the blue eyes that struck lightning into his soul.
“You’re really leaving, Clair?”
“I have to go. You know that.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to believe it.”
Peltier brushed an errant lock of dark hair from
Ryder’s forehead. “Come with me then, Carson. You’ll believe it when we’re sitting on the lanai and watching the waves. I know you could use the vacation. Come on, accompany a girl to a symposium in Hawaii.”
“I can’t leave. My cases will fall down the same rat hole as everything else.”
“Departmental politics are still that ugly?”
“It’s like Squill dropped the MPD into a blender. Everything’s torn apart, mixed up.”
Peltier shook her head. “It seemed to happen overnight.”
“The king changed and his pawns own the board. Squill’s in control, I’m at his mercy.”
Clair Peltier stepped back and leaned against her desk, arms crossed. “I know you hate to talk about the situation, Carson, so I try not to ask too much. But can you give me a few more details about how Squill got back in charge after three years? Demoted from Investigative to Public Relations after screwing up the case here in the morgue, right? I thought he was finished as a player.”
Ryder stepped to the door and took another check of the hall, no such thing as being too careful when discussing Squill. The bastard’s sycophantic spies were everywhere. He turned back to Peltier, his voice quieter.
“Putting Squill in charge of PR gave him the two things a political monster covets: access and information. You saw how he turned it into a pos
ition in Internal Affairs, which gave him even more access and information. The heavy-duty kind. Rumor and innuendo, half-truths and half-lies, not necessarily the same thing. He’s used his years in IA to quietly elevate those on his side, kneecap those in his way.”
“Like former Chief Plackett?”
“When Plackett sent off his résumé for that chief’s position in Tampa—a feeler, like people do every day—Squill found out, then used his public-relations links to make it seem Plackett had accepted the job. Squill burned Plackett’s bridges for him, and before the poor naïve idiot knew it, he was history. Pity the job in Tampa never came through.”
Clair Peltier shook her head. “Is everyone in the department unhappy?”
“If Squill likes you—meaning you’re one of his yes-men robots—you’ve got it made. If he’s doesn’t like you, you’re screwed.”
“You and Harry never got along with Squill, right? You have a bad history there?”
“He hates me,” Ryder said. “Given all that’s happened in the last few weeks, maybe I should start looking for another job.”
“Don’t, Carson. No. It scares me when you talk like that.”
“I’ve got to be realistic, Clair.”
“Things change. People, events, police departments. Just keep pushing ahead. I’ll only be gone for a couple of weeks. Hold on, for now at least.
We can talk about it more when I get back, right?”
Ryder leaned back and studied the ceiling, like some form of answer was painted there.
“Carson?” Peltier prompted.
He nodded. “No decisions until you get back.”
They started to embrace, but broke off at the sound of approaching footsteps; the guard on his rounds. Peltier blew Ryder a kiss through lips bright as roses. Ryder left, buoyed by a few minutes in his girlfriend’s presence.
But a minute later, crossing the night-dark parking lot and waving mosquitoes from his face, the buoyancy was replaced by a strange, breath-stealing feeling in his gut, as if something venomous was paralleling his path, operating just past the edge of his vision.
Truman said, “She’s gone, you dumb fuck.”
Rose stared up at the ceiling. He was lying on the floor in the same semi-fetal position Truman had found him, ten minutes after the midnight phone call.
“Tru? Could you come over here? I think something’s wrong.”
“You touched one, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU?”
“I was teaching her to dance, Tru. That’s all. She started yelling out the window. I put my hand over her mouth. Maybe I squeezed too much…”
“Out the window? You took her out of the shelter?”
“She stopped yelling, but she got real still. I wasn’t doing anything nasty, Tru. I swear.”
Truman looked toward the sheet-covered form on the carpeted floor. He’d seen enough crime dramas to know the rug would be covered with the girl’s hair and fingernails and spit and god-knows-what other stuff the cops could find.
“We’ve got to get rid of her. Now. The rug too.”
“I’ll do it, Tru. I know exactly how.”
“There can’t be any traces of us. You know what I mean?”
“I know a condemned house not too far away. It’s like kindling.”
“Jesus, Rose. LaShelle was going to the guy that bought Darla last year. I’m working on a repeat-business concept here.”
“I’ll take care of everything. I promise.”
“You just goddamn better. We have obligations. We’re businessmen.”
Truman went to sit on the dark back porch. Seconds later he heard a ripping sound as Rose yanked carpet from the bedroom floor.
Ryder watched Mayor Norma Philips enter the briefing room, silencing it suddenly and completely. Stormin’ Norma, she was often called, with other printable appellations ranging from tree hugger to naïf to bull in a china shop. The unprintables were more extensive. A councilwoman and former community organizer, Philips had improbably—and to everyone’s utter astonishment including her own—somersaulted Mobile’s established political network to become interim mayor some months before.
A tall and loose-limbed brunette in her mid-forties, Philips had the strength of features proponents called handsome and detractors labeled horsy. She wore simple, inexpensive suits and eschewed any form of
ornamentation save for a thirty-dollar Timex currently on its third band.
Ryder found her abrasive, impolitic, and incapable of crossing a room without stepping on every toe there. He also felt she could be a first-rate mayor if she somehow survived the upcoming election.
It was a measure of either her naïveté or bull-headedness that she stood before them now, Ryder thought, watching the sullen discomfort of Squill. A politically attuned mayor would have dealt with Squill alone, but the grassroots-trained Philips felt the way to get anything done started with soldiers, not generals. She nodded to Bidwell, who stood uneasily beside Squill.
Fit looking, if on the portly side, with jowls beginning to measure gravity, the fifty-four-year-old Bidwell had risen through the ranks on a tripoded ladder of caution, committed noncommittal, and a sincere, media-friendly visage. Ryder suspected Squill had summoned Bidwell because his uniformed presence would add a policely look amidst all the plainclothes.
“This is everyone working the investigations,
Acting
Chief?” Philips asked, studying a dozen sitting detectives. Ryder was in the third of four rows. No one sat in the front row but Duckworth, who chewed a toothpick and smirked at the mayor when her back was turned.
“Everyone associated with the abductions, like you asked, Mayor,” Squill said. “They’ve all been
briefed on the body in the fire. It could be a coincidence. We’re still not sure if—”
“Three missing girls between eight and twelve years old? Black? A body found in a fire in a condemned house not—” she looked at her watch—four hours ago? A blaze the Fire Marshall calls blatant arson? Now the ME’s telling me it’s the body of an African-American female seven to ten years old? What’s your definition of ‘coincidence,’
Acting
Chief?”
Ryder saw Squill flinch each time the mayor punched the word
acting
. No one in the department dared use any title other than the unmodified
Chief
.
She said, “The black community’s going to get hot when it’s out that the girl’s dead. They think the lack of information means you’re not doing jackshit. Got any leads you’re not telling the media about, stuff you’re holding?”
“No, Mayor.” Squill looked like he was chewing shingles. Philips threw a mournful glance over the assembled cops, a vegan scanning the buffet at a roadkill restaurant.
“Anyone else besides Homicide and Missing Persons have usable experience? Anyone in Vice?”
Squill shook his head. “We’re using Vice for leads on peds and molesters. Nothing there yet.”
Philips sighed heavily. “OK, how about former detectives? Retireds? Any experienced eyes out there could come take a look?”
“A couple we could ask, Mayor,” Squill said,
barely controlling his fury at being questioned about his handling of the cases. “Braden, DeWitt. I’ll give them a call.”
Bidwell cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Chief, but Braden’s in Hawaii and DeWitt’s so crippled up with emphysema he can barely stand. We got a guy on sick leave, but his doctor barred him from working.”
Philips turned her back to Squill and faced the men in the room. “Anyone here have an idea? A little electricity in the gray matter?”
The room was as silent as the bottom of the sea. Everyone looked at someone else. Philips scanned each face in turn.
“Come on, boys. Don’t be shy. Speak up.”
Ryder watched Zemain’s hand lift and return to the desktop three times before his fingertips scratched the air. “Excuse me, Mayor?”
“What is it, Sergeant Zemain?”
Zemain cleared his throat. Ryder saw sweat on the back of his neck.
“Uh, we had one guy who might be a consideration…This guy, he, uh, came at cases his own way, sort of out of the box…”
Squill narrowed his eyes at the stuttering Zemain.
“The guy got almost weird about cases, Mayor…real tightly focused; obsessive, some people said, working days without sleeping. Living at the department. Kept a cot in the basement…”
“Oh, for chrissakes, Zemain,” Squill spat.
“I know what you’re thinking. No way. No stinking way.”
“Will you let me conduct my own meeting, Acting Chief?” Philips said. “Go on, Sergeant.”
“All of a sudden he’d get this look and you knew he had it figured—”
“You’re trying to get Sandhill in here, aren’t you, Zemain?” Squill snarled. “You’re pimping for
Sandhill
.”
“He had the highest case-clearance rate three years running.”
Bidwell frowned. “You sure, Roland? I thought it was four.” He winced when he realized he’d made a contribution.
“Sandhill’s been gone for years.” Squill looked ready to vault the front row of chairs for Zemain’s throat. “Out of here. Good-damned-riddance.” Squill turned to Philips. “Mayor, Sandhill’s not anyone you’d want to have messing in this case. Trust me on this.”
“This Sandhill, he still around here?” Philips asked.
Squill shook his head in disgust. “It’s not an option, Mayor. Sandhill’s not a cop any more—he’s a goddamn fry cook.”
“He’s not a fry cook, Chief,” Zemain corrected. “He’s the Gumbo King.”