The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  “Fuck me,” I mutter, moving toward Taylor’s door.

  Hoskins and Craddock separate to give me a better view inside the office. Taylor is sitting at his desk squeezing the red tension balls like there’s no tomorrow. But his sports deodorant seems to be working, keeping his shirt dry, so the situation can’t be irredeemable.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, looking at Craddock for a clue. But he stares back at me like a morose funeral director.

  “I got a call from the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office in East Texas this morning,” Taylor says.

  The instant he starts the conversation with “I got a call from,” my muscles begin to tighten as though I’m preparing for a long jump.

  He finishes with “A body was found Saturday morning floating in Caddo Lake, next to Uncertain.”

  “Uncertain what?” I ask.

  “Uncertain, Texas,” he answers with strained patience. “It’s the name of the town.”

  “You’re kidding.” I flick my eyes at Hoskins, sure that this is a prank.

  “I’m not kidding, Detective,” Taylor says. “That’s the name of the town. It’s right on the lake. You can look it up on a map. And in the lake, right off a camper’s fishing pier, they found a body chained to a cypress tree. Want to guess who the corpse once was? Wait, I’ll give you a hint: it’s headless and has lots of tattoos, including an arm tattoo that reads Juárez and another on the back of the left leg that happens to be a jaguar.”

  I have a clear flash of memory. The dream of El Gitano’s head, the decaying remnants of his lips moving soundlessly, trying to tell me something. I exhale slowly before speaking. “Ruiz? But it’s been almost three weeks since the head was discovered. What shape’s the body in?”

  “That’s just one of the crazy parts. It looks like someone kept the body frozen until they decided to dump it.”

  “Frozen?” I want to sit down but I don’t want to be on my ass when everyone else in the room except the sergeant is standing.

  Taylor gets up, moves to my side of the desk, and, reluctantly, almost apologetically, hands me a dozen crime scene photos. In the first one, taken from the pier, the naked body of a muscular man floats at the surface of the lake, the surrounding water so dense that the body looks horizontally transected by a pane of indigo glass. The background is thick with primal-looking cypress trees cloaked with Spanish moss, reflecting perfectly in the motionless water. Above the trees, the sky is a rich, untroubled autumnal blue.

  In a closer shot, the figure looms larger and I can see that the body does not have a head. Several more photos follow, probably taken from a small boat at different angles. One end of a heavy chain encircles the torso and the other end has been wrapped once around the tree and padlocked.

  The last few photos are of the body on a morgue table, prone, the neck wound puckered grotesquely around a portion of protruding spine, the jaguar tattoo showing clearly on the left calf. The right foot below the ankle is badly mangled, either through an accident or, more likely, from something nibbling at a lakeside version of a frozen dinner.

  “Where’s the body now?” I ask. The oatmeal I had at Norma’s is reconstituting itself as mortar in my gut.

  “In the ME’s office in Tyler. It was Saturday when the body was found, so it took a while to process the positive ID.”

  Saturday. The day the DPD Narcotics squad beat the bejesus out of a ragtag, jersey-less Homicide team. Seth, Jackie, and I sat on the bleachers during the football match, enjoying the buttery light, screaming ourselves hoarse in a victorious frenzy.

  “What’s the other crazy part?” I ask, and in that moment of silence between my question and Sergeant Taylor’s answer, I distinctly hear Benny’s voice whisper in my ear, Here comes the Cosmic Screw.

  “The sign nailed to this tree,” Taylor tells me.

  He hands me one last photo, a close-up of the cypress, onto which a plank has been nailed. There are two words carved into the plank: WELCOME HOME. Below the message is a simplistic line carving of curved, upswept wings and a sword with the letter L on one side and V on the other.

  Hoskins is looking over my shoulder. “It’s definitely a message to someone, but what in the hairy fuck does it mean?”

  I can feel both Hoskins’s and Taylor’s eyes on me, and I know they’re thinking about the message that Tony Ha imparted to me from the killer, that I could come home now.

  On the plank is the familiar image of uplifted wings and the sword, but the letters are not the same as in Sergei’s drawing. I turn and look for Ryan, find him standing just outside the sergeant’s door. I hand him the photo, along with Sergei’s drawing.

  “What do you make of this?” I ask him.

  Ryan looks at each image and then, taking the two pieces of paper with him, hurries to his desk. “Give me a minute to check something out.”

  “And look into the Deuteronomy Bible verse as well,” I call after him. “See if there’s a connection.”

  Craddock says, “The plank was nailed to the tree, which would have made some noise—”

  “So would the rattling of the goddamned chains,” Hoskins adds.

  Craddock makes an impatient gesture for Hoskins to shut it. “Did local law enforcement question the campers at the park?”

  Taylor shakes his head. “The camping area is some distance from the pier, and there were only a few campers that Friday night. They’re still trying to locate those who left Saturday morning before the body was discovered. So far, no one heard anything other than swamp noises that night.”

  The initial queasiness has worn off, and I’m beginning to feel a surge of relief. Ruiz has been found, and in a county that does not hold Dallas. Whatever battle brought him to Uncertain, Texas, was most certainly not ours anymore. Lana’s killer has not yet been found, but it’s a Homicide problem now.

  “This is still a Narcotics problem,” Taylor says, disabusing me of that misconception. Then he directs everyone except me to clear the room and he closes the door.

  “Carter Hayes and the FBI are now back in the picture,” he tells me, motioning for me to sit down. He rests one meaty haunch on a corner of the desk. “You have no idea how badly I want this Ruiz case to go away. But for the past year, the Mexicans have been moving into East Texas big-time. Local law enforcement is overwhelmed with the proliferation of high-grade Mexican crystal, and by high-grade, I mean ninety percent pure, and the body count is growing, not only in Texas but in Louisiana and Arkansas as well.

  “We’re not looking at just a few pitiful trailer-trash run-ins, we’re looking at five people murdered, execution-style, four of them Mexican nationals, over the past few months within fifty miles of Tyler. One of those killed was a four-year-old girl. A bullet passed through her father’s torso and into her skull. Some people behind the Pine Curtain are making it their business to clarify their territory.”

  He rubs his eye with the knuckles of one hand, the buttons on his short-sleeved dress shirt straining, pulled taut across his expanding waist. For the first time, I notice how much gray is hiding within the black wiry brush of his hair. Behind him, on the wall, is a dusty championship plaque from the Bill Pickett Rodeo and a decades-old photograph of a much younger and leaner Taylor riding a bronc, his hat firmly in place, his dark face set to a determined dominance of the wild animal beneath him.

  Taylor follows my gaze to the photo. “You know,” he tells me, “I’ve seen that look on your face before.”

  He stretches a hand across his left pectoral muscle, massaging the flesh. “There aren’t many black men riding rodeo. That knowledge encouraged me not to fall on my face.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I experience something similar every day when I walk to my desk.”

  “I hit thirty years’ service next spring. And then I’m off to Louisiana with the wife. Do a little riding, a little fishing, play with my grandkids. It’s going to leave a hole in this department.” He watches me closely and grins, wagging a finger. “Ah, see, there’s that l
ook again.”

  “What look?” I ask, knowing full well that, for the briefest, untempered moment, my competitive self has broken through the visage of neutrality like an orca through thin ice.

  “Red, I understand you better than you think I do. But you know that old saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for’?”

  “Careful?” I say. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  He smiles briefly at me, but then stands up from the desk and moves back to sit in his chair, the relaxed camaraderie gone. “You’ve been requested by Hayes and the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office to make a run out to Caddo Lake to see if there’s anything of significance they might have missed, either with the body at the morgue or at the discovery site. It would be a favor to Hayes for you to talk to the drug task force out there as well. Share with them our knowledge of Ruiz’s contacts. But, of course, you can say no.”

  “What would you like me to do?” I ask.

  He palms one of the red tension balls. “Make my life easier,” he says.

  His complexion has an ashen cast to it, and he’s rubbing the left side of his chest. He sees me watching him and stops.

  “You need anything else from me before I venture into Uncertain?” I ask, standing to go. A call to the paramedics, perhaps?

  “Yeah. Some of your vitality.” He gives me the get-lost wave. “You’re taking Hoskins, by the way. Call me when you get there.”

  When I leave Taylor’s office, Ryan is waiting for me. He tells me excitedly, “I don’t think those letters that Sergei printed were English letters at all. I think they were Russian Cyrillic.”

  I follow him back to his desk and he shows me a printout of the Russian alphabet, pointing to the letter we had thought was an unfinished A. “It’s the letter L in English.” He points to another Russian letter, the one that looks like a B. “This letter is V in English. I think the kid got rattled and wrote in Cyrillic what were actually the letters carved into our cypress plank, L and V.”

  Sergei had been anxious, nervous with the knowledge that the smiling deliveryman had been leaving a severed head in a box a few feet from his family’s apartment. “Makes sense,” I say.

  “Something else,” he says. “I did a general search for the letters L and V and got several hits for the Latin saying Lux et veritas. ‘Light and truth.’ Quite a few organizations use veritas in their mottoes—Harvard, Drake, the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church. But two use the exact slogan: Yale University and a small North Carolina college, Chowan, in Murfreesboro.”

  “I don’t see our delivery guy going to Yale, do you?”

  “No, but look at the insignia for the other college.” I position a chair close to the computer screen, and Ryan pulls up the Chowan website, points to an enlarged image of a book nestled inside an open laurel wreath that, in a certain light, could be viewed as upswept wings. “No sword in this image,” I say.

  “No,” he agrees. “But the slogan fits, so maybe North Carolina’s a good place to start looking for one of the Roys.”

  I shrug. “Possibly. What about the Bible verse?”

  “Here’s the creepy part. The verse is commonly used to justify vengeance against one’s enemies. I found a lot of evangelical-church websites quoting this verse—”

  “Nice to know us Catholics don’t have the monopoly on sanctified revenge.”

  “Then,” he says, pulling up another screen, “I found this.”

  He clicks on a website link for OneNationOneTruthOneRace. The darkened screen slowly brightens to reveal animated flames flickering through a backdrop of scorched buildings. Out of the flames the Deuteronomy verse appears: When I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me.

  Then the message fades and is followed by several paragraphs of the usual Aryan hate rhetoric: the white man is being mongrelized by dark-skinned people, the government is coming to take away the white man’s guns, Western civilization is threatened by godless academics.

  Ryan scrolls through the text and at the end of the rant are two raised blue wings pierced with a red sword. The last sentence on the page: Lux et veritas.

  The skin on my arms turns to gooseflesh. “Can you track down where this originated?”

  “I’m on it,” he says.

  “Nice work, Ryan.”

  I see Hoskins walking toward the desk, coat on. It’s over one hundred and eighty miles to Uncertain. Almost three hours in the car alone with Hoskins. He waves that he’s ready to go whenever I am.

  “I’ll be out of the office the rest of the day,” I tell Ryan. I point to Sergei’s cell number scribbled across the bottom of his drawing. “Do me a favor and call the kid, just to be certain you’re on the right track about the Russian letters. Also, check into Chowan’s student records for any of the Roy family. Who knows, maybe something will show up. And one more thing,” I say quietly. “Keep a close eye on the sergeant today. He’s not feeling well.”

  I walk with Hoskins toward the garage and we pass by Booking just as two large patrolmen are bringing in a wildly agitated man wearing hunter’s camouflage, a studded leather vest dangling off his shoulders. The cuffed man begins to panic, dragging his feet and skittering his legs around a row of chairs like a rhesus monkey. The chairs skate crazily across the floor and clatter together with a deafening crash, and we step out of the way as two more officers rush to help subdue the man.

  He’s raging and spitting, but still he manages to catch my eye. “The fuckin’ Mexicans are takin’ over the country!” he screams. “Can’t you see that? They’re gonna kill us all—”

  The four officers manage to wrestle the man to the ground, securing him with zip ties around his ankles. They upend him and carry him like a sack of menacing cats feetfirst through the hallway, his Old Testament beard trailing the floor.

  26

  Indicating how much progress we’ve made as colleagues, Hoskins puts up only a minor fight when I get into the driver’s side of the car that we took from the department motor pool.

  He glares at me at first, and then motions for me to hurry up, saying, “I’ll never hear the end of it if Craddock sees I’ve let you behind the wheel.”

  I call the sheriff’s office in Tyler to let them know we’re driving directly to Caddo Lake and giving them an ETA. It’s after ten o’clock when we merge onto I-20 headed east toward Uncertain, and within thirty minutes, we’re away from suburban strip malls and the Walmarts that have parking lots with their own zip codes. The quality of light has softened further over the past week, no remnants of summer haze, and the sun casts a yellowish tinge on even the homeliest of country storefronts and grime-covered pickups. A brief rain shower has created patches of purplish clover throughout the scrubby remains of livestock hay in the surrounding fields.

  We pass a faded, hand-painted sign that reads WILEY’S GUNS, FOR ALL YOUR GUN NEEDS, and Hoskins breaks away from studying the Caddo Lake crime scene photos to point out what I’ve already seen, which is the convenience store next to the sign, Wiley’s Last Stand, the front door riddled with bullet holes. I don’t bother responding when he asks if I want to turn back so he can take a picture of it for a cop-humor website.

  Seeing my dismissive expression, he asks, “Is there anything about Texas you actually like?”

  “I’m swimming against childhood prejudices,” I say. “My uncle Benny once told me a joke that went like this: ‘What’s the difference between yogurt and Texas?’ The answer is ‘Yogurt’s the one with the live culture.’”

  Hoskins crosses his arms, trying not to smile. He leans back against the car door to face me. “So there’s nothing you like about Texas?”

  I shrug noncommittally.

  “Come on,” he prompts.

  “Okay, the food trucks in Klyde Warren Park downtown and the margaritas at Gloria’s.”

  “What?” Hoskins says, mock offended. “No sweet tea, no Tex-Mex, no barbecue? What about kolaches?”

/>   I turn and look at him incredulously. “You’re fucking kidding me, right? You’re seriously going to ask a Polish girl from Brooklyn about kolaches?”

  “Well,” he says, conceding my point by nodding. “You gotta love the state fair, though.”

  “I’d rather swallow razor blades than eat their fried anything one more time.”

  Now he’s really offended. “So that’s it? Food trucks and sugared tequila?”

  I consider his question and say, “There are some good-looking cowgirls at the Fort Worth rodeo.”

  Hoskins laughs out loud. “That’s for damn sure.” After a pause, he offers, “Bluebonnets.”

  “Bluebonnets what?” But his agreeing with me about the kolaches has moved me to cooperation. “Okay, the bluebonnets are spectacular,” I say. “Now can you shut the fuck up about All Things Great in Texas and just let me drive in peace for a while?”

  He smirks but goes back to studying the photo of Ruiz’s body floating in the lake, frowning with concentration. I catch a glimpse of his left hand and realize he’s still wearing his wedding ring. The shirt with the too-large collar is spotted on the front with some grease stains, and his pants probably haven’t been dry-cleaned in a while. If I were to look closer, I’d probably find that his socks are mismatched too.

  “Actually,” I say, disturbing him from his reverie, “Dallas is growing on me. I even went to a play with Jackie a few weeks ago.”

  He takes on a pained look. “A play? Man, you are pussy-whipped.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. “No, it was good. I enjoyed it.”

  “Yeah? My wife tried to make me go to the theater a couple of times.”

  “And?” I ask, for some inexplicable reason wanting to keep the conversation going.

  “It was The Lion King or some such shit like that. Jeez, talk about swallowing razor blades.”