“That’s possible?”
“They’re in a highly suggestible state. You can tell them not to remember and they won’t.”
“You could suggest that they do something, and tell them not to remember you suggesting it?”
“Yeah. Everyone’s different. But you can get some people to do almost anything—as long as they aren’t morally opposed to it. Some people believe with continuous suggestion you could get someone to even do something against their will, but I don’t know. You might get them to do some things, but nothing like . . .”
“Kill?” I offered.
“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think you could most people, but there’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about the mind. Everybody’s different. There’s an exception to every rule. Plus, there’s a whole hell of a lot of guys in here who aren’t morally opposed to anything.”
I clicked off the call and sat for a moment, breathing, thinking, enjoying the sun streaming in my windows.
Eventually, Jake walked up and I got out. “Mornin’,” he said.
“Morning,” I said. “How are you?”
“Sad,” he said. “You?”
“Same.”
“Don’t feel like myself,” he said. “It’s weird.” I nodded and we were silent a moment.
Finally he jerked his head back toward the crime scene and said, “Nothin’ like a little violent death to force us to let life go on.”
“Whatcha got?”
“Caucasian male. Early twenties. Shot in the head with a shogun. Looks self-inflicted but . . . ME is looking now. He was in that old trailer. It’d been dragged out here for hunters to use. Loggers didn’t even know it was there until the skidder backed through it. Guy’s naked. No clothes or shoes or identification anywhere in or around the trailer. He was just sitting in an old chair, the shotgun leaning against him.”
I nodded and we started walking toward the trailer. “Oh,” Jake said, “I keep forgetting to tell you.
Nobody seems to know anything about the cold-case card deck but Potter. He said they were already there from a previous game and we just pulled them out of the drawer when we needed them. Says there’s more in the drawer.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Is that something?”
“I thought it might be,” I said, “but I don’t think it is. Just a coincidence. Thanks for checking.”
“Sure. I can look further if I need to.”
As we neared the crime scene, I could see that everything was pretty much as Jake had described except for one crucial thing. The guy had not shot himself. He hadn’t even been alive when it happened.
I looked closer.
The small, nude young man, a boy really, his decaying corpse on display for everyone to gawk at, was pale and pathetic, his hairless body narrow and soft.
He was splayed out in an old, large cloth chair, his head flopped back on the top, his arms dangling down beside him, his legs extending out on the partial floor of the torn-asunder trailer.
Dad walked over to us. “How are you, son?”
“Okay,” I said. “You?”
“You did a damn fine job on your mom’s funeral,”
he said. “I was very proud of you.”
I nodded the thanks I was unable to utter at the moment.
He turned back to look at the ME examining the body.
“Sure was hoping this was going to be a hunting accident or even a suicide,” he said. “It’s not?” Jake said.
I shook my head.
“See how there’s no blood or bruising around the gunshot wound,” I said. “He was already dead when it happened, and dead men don’t bleed.”
“That’s exactly what the ME said,” Dad added. “But he’s got some dried blood on him,” Jake said.
“And some bruising.”
I nodded. “Happened before he was shot.”
“A few more miles that way and this would’ve been in Bay County,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“Doesn’t look like it’s going to be quick and easy,” Dad added. “Could very well turn into another open unsolved by the time the election gets here.”
I started to say something but my phone rang. It was the prison.
I stepped a few feet away to take the call and was informed that Brent Allen had been found dead, hanging from his bunk in the exact same manner as Danny Jacobs.
Chapter Forty-one
Déjà vu.
The inmate hanging from the top bunk could’ve been Danny Jacobs. The body fell forward against the rope the same way, the head leaning over the noose at an unnatural angle. The dry, swollen tongue protruded the same way. The lifeless arms dangled like Danny’s had.
But it wasn’t Danny Jacobs.
The latest victim of an apparent suicide at Potter Correctional Institution was the Suicide King himself, Brent Allen.
The same type of small cord looked to have been used on or by Allen. He was in the exact same location and position where Jacobs had been found, a suicide king playing card sticking out of his waistband.
It was all so similar, but from the moment I walked up to the body, I knew this death was different.
The fixed lividity, which was wrong for the position of the body, and the marks made by the rope were inconsistent with the way his neck hung in the noose.
“Maybe we been watching the wrong convict,” Merrill said.
He was standing near me, looking at the body. I frowned and shook my head. “Maybe so.”
“Maybe not,” Officer Wilder said, edging over toward us. “He was sleeping in Phillips’s bunk.”
Derek Wilder, an evening shift officer who had no reason to be in here, had been listening in on our conversation since it started—something I found annoying until he stepped up with useful information.
I called Lance over from where the dorm officers had the inmates lined up preparing to relocate them to one of the empty T-cell dorm quads.
“Brent was in your bunk last night?”
Lance reached up and rubbed his neck. “I was so sore and stove up from what happened in the chapel, he traded bunks with me. I’s having a hard time climbing up on the top bunk.”
“Fucker really did want to die,” Merrill said. “He thought he was invincible, but honestly, we didn’t even think about it. I mean, I wouldn’t’ve been down here if I didn’t think it was safe. No one thought anyone would try something here again. And we figured the dorm officers would be watching us—this back corner—a lot more closely now.”
I turned and looked across the dorm at Donnie Foster.
“I just don’t get you dumb bastards,” Merrill said.
Lance shrugged. “I don’t want to die. Never did. I’m not sure any of us did—but a few didn’t seem to care much either way. Brent was one of ’em. None of this should’ve ever happened. It was just something to do, a way to pass the time.”
I shook my head.
Merrill said, “Lawson and company gonna be here any minute. Anything else you need to—”
As if on cue, the door opened and Mark Lawson walked in. Merrill and I began walking out. No reason to have him kick us out when we could leave voluntarily. We met him halfway between where we had been and the door.
“Chaplain,” he said in a congenial voice. “Just the man I was looking for. I’ve been told to eat some humble pie and ask you to help us on this one.”
I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I was also suspicious as hell.
“Come on,” he said, beginning to move toward the back of the dorm and the body awaiting him there. “Let’s take a look and see what we got.”
Merrill and I both followed him.
I had guessed that Mark Lawson would be the kind of man to make jokes at a crime scene, and when he began I was disappointed I had been right about him.
“Don’t understand why everybody’s killing themselves,” he said. “We doing something wrong? They not happy here?”
We didn’t respond.<
br />
“So’s this guy part of the suicide club?” I nodded. “The Suicide Kings.”
“I’m thinkin’ we need to ship the rest of ’em off to a psych camp. Keep ’em from killing themselves.”
“He was murdered,” I said.
“How can you be so sure?” Lawson said. “They haven’t even done an autopsy on him.”
“Lividity doesn’t match the position of the body.” He took a closer look at the body. “I’ll be damned.”
Brent’s lividity was fixed. The entire front portion of his body was bruised, and his feet, which were the lowest points in his current position, weren’t any darker than any other part of him. The body had been moved after he was murdered.
He had been lying facedown when he was killed.
After he was dead, he had been left that way for a while—probably as the killer waited for the right time to string him up—and it was long enough for the lividity to become fixed. Later, when he was moved, tied up in the position he was in now, the discoloration of his skin from the facedown position he had been killed and left in didn’t change.
“Look at the marks on his neck,” I said. “See how the bruise is in a straight line like a ring?”
Lawson looked. “Yeah?”
“If he’d really been hung, it wouldn’t be a circle, but a V. The pressure of the rope where it’s tied above the head causes it to pull up. Looks like he was strangled facedown on his bunk or on the floor, killed, left there for a while, then hung from the bunk.”
Walking over to Donnie Foster in the far corner of the dorm, I said, “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Sure I ain’t the only one.”
“Oh really?”
“You jam people up.”
“Actually, he help people out,” Merrill said. “Got nothin’ I need help with,” Foster said. “Got anything you could get jammed up for?” I asked.
“No. Haven’t done anything. Haven’t seen anything.
Don’t know anything. Don’t want any trouble. Won’t say anything else.”
Merrill stepped toward him.
“You can’t scare me or threaten me or coerce me into telling you something I don’t know. I ain’t gonna make shit up. And I won’t stand here and just keep saying the same thing over and over.”
He then walked away and we let him.
Chapter Forty-two
Clarissa was crying.
The small apartment was sad and dingy and smelled of years of cheap food, cigarette and pot smoke, dogs, cats, birds, people, paint, perms, bleach, air freshener, carpet cleaner, and a thousand other things in layer upon layer of lives lived in a cramped, inexpensive place.
The apartment was right off Balboa in Panama City, just a couple of miles from the college.
Clarissa King lived here now and was adding a new layer of her own.
She was a short, round black girl in her early twenties, nearly as wide as she was tall.
I was here because she had filed a missing person’s report recently of a young man I was pretty sure was the victim who had been found by the loggers in the hunting trailer.
His name was Andy Bearden. He was her roommate.
And the more she told me about him, the more I became convinced it was him.
“But Andy didn’t hunt,” Clarissa said. “He wouldn’t’ve been out there hunting. He could never shoot anything. Couldn’t hurt a fly. One of the gentlest souls you’d ever want to meet.”
I nodded.
“Do you really think it could be him?” she asked, dotting tears from the corners of her eyes with the tips of her fat fingers.
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out.”
“But who would kill him? No one would kill him. He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
She thought about it. “Can’t be sure exactly. Our schedules are so different and we stay so busy and I just got back from visiting my people in Louisiana. I’ve been gone a week and it was probably a few days before that. I’m just not sure.”
“Tell me some more about him.”
“He was the sweetest, kindest boy,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, he’d fight like hell for the underdog, for what he believed in. He was sort of scrappy, but he couldn’t do much. He was so little.”
“He been scrappin’ with anyone in particular lately?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But he was always taking up lost causes, helping the helpless and hopeless, sharing and giving what he had until he ran out. Perfect example––this is his apartment. He’s just letting me stay here and pay what I can, which isn’t a lot. We’re in college together over at Gulf Coast. He’s on scholarship, gets grants and shit. Me, not so much. He shares it all until it runs out.”
“What’s he studying?”
“Theater. We both are. It’s how we met. He’s such a great performer. So dramatic. So brave and committed. Was always blowing me away with the places he would go––so vulnerable, so brave.”
“Are you two romantically involved?”
She laughed a little and shook her head. “I don’t really go for white guys––especially if they weigh less than one of my legs––and he didn’t go for girls of any color or size.”
“And you can’t think of anyone who’d want to hurt him?”
“No. No way.”
“Nothing he was mixed up in that might have caused him to cross paths with dangerous people?”
“No. Absolutely not. He was a straightedge, a real clean kid, you know? Never got involved in anything illegal or even sketchy. Only thing he ever did that was the least bit edgy was gay pride stuff. Marches. Sit-ins. Protests.
Marriage equality rallies. Stuff like that. But even then, he was so sweet about it, so gentle and kind––even to the ignorant assholes on the other side of the issue.”
“Does he have a boyfriend?”
“He’s single. Has been a long time. He’s got friends. Lots of them. He sleeps with some of ’em sometimes, but it’s more cool and casual than you can imagine.”
“Where’d he work?”
“Full-time student. I mean, he did some performances. Shows, plays, musicals. Like that. Never makes more than beer money and he actually loses money when he does the drag shows at places like the Fiesta in town and Splash Bar on the beach. The costumes are so elaborate and expensive. Wait. I just thought of something.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s got a thing for straight guys and . . . oh wow . . .”
“What is it?”
“Where’d you say he was killed? He used to meet a closeted country boy from Pottersville out in the woods between here and there. Called him Roughneck Redneck.
This was a while back. Hasn’t mentioned him in forever . . . I thought he had stopped seeing him. Think he had. But what if he met him again?”
“Can you think of anything else about him? A name? Description? Anything?”
She thought about it. “It’s been a while. He was married. Paranoid. Petrified of being found out. Ron. I think one time he said Ron the Roughneck Redneck . . . but I can’t be sure. Got the feeling he was a pretty big guy. Or maybe he just had a big dick. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” I said. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. If you think of anything else . . . please give me a call.”
I gave her my number and a hug and left. Walking back to my car, I called Richie Cox.
“Don’t tell me we’ve got another political event,” he said. “I honestly think I’d shoot myself in the face rather than face another one of those dreadful things.”
“Calling on a different matter.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
I told him.
“I’m completely out of the closet,” he said. “I’m as gay as a Christmas pageant and everybody knows it. But I truly sympathize with those who can’t come out––or don’t feel like they can. It’s a l
ot more guys than you think. Public figures. Married men. Preachers. Men who would lose their families and jobs and more if they ever dared to be truthful about who they really are.”
“Wish we lived in a different world,” I said. “We’re making it one,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Thing is,” he said, “guys living double lives, hiding so much of who they are, can be full of rage and self-hatred. That kind of compartmentalized duality . . . Wouldn’t surprise me if someone like that snapped. You know if they loathe themselves then they loathe who they’re involved with even more.”
“Can you think of anyone in our area who fits the description?” I asked. “Maybe or maybe not named Ron. Maybe a big guy.”
“There’s something . . .” he said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. No one’s coming to mind, but I feel like some part of me knows something and I just can’t remember it right now.”
“Think of something else,” I said. “Call me when it comes to you.”
“Will do. And John.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for caring about us fags.”
I had reached my car and was about to get in when Clarissa yelled to me from her door.
She loped over toward me, the massive mounds of her belly and breasts bouncing about as she did.
“His brother.”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “Wasn’t gonna say anything ’cause I’m a little scared of him, but . . . his brother’s a crackhead meth dealer. He was always in trouble––and always tryin’ to get Andy to bail him out, help him out, give him money, let him crash here. I wonder if something his sketchy ass is involved in got Andy killed. If he got Andy killed, I’ll kill him. Swear to God.”
“Any idea where I can find him?”
“He works at some shady clinic. When he works at all. Just does it to steal pills. Why does someone like him get to live and a sweet boy like Andy get murdered? The fuck is wrong with this world?”
Chapter Forty-three
Merrill and I were on our way to Alverez’s clinic when Lawson called.
“It’s Inspector Lawson. They rushed the autopsy and we got a conference call goin’. Gonna patch you in.”
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