“What shall we drink too?” I ask, staring into the green liquor.
“A happy DA,” he says, downing his shot, pouring another.
I drink mine, set my glass down on the desk. He pours me another.
“That was him behind the glass, wasn’t it?” I ask, picking up my glass.
“It wasn’t the fucking Wizard of Oz.”
I sip the whiskey instead of chugging it. It’s not even nine in the morning after all.
“You were nervous,” I say. “That’s not like you, Miller.”
He sips his whiskey, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“The way I’ve been handling this case . . . it hasn’t exactly been textbook.” He shakes his head, stares at the wall-mounted bulletin board to his left. A board containing full-color photos of both Albany’s and the nation’s most wanted criminals. “I suspected all along that the McGoverns were up to their neck in something not quite right. But then his lawyer’s head ends up on their lawn.”
“The severed rose heads were disturbing enough,” I say.
“It’s not the murder that bothers me, so much as the message it sends.”
“What kind of message, Miller?”
“If you had to pick one group on the planet besides those ISIS barbarians who take great pleasure in chopping off heads, who would it be?”
It doesn’t take me long to figure that one out.
“Mexican drug cartels.”
“Very close,” he says. “Their Russian counterparts use the practice to great effect also.”
“Okay, so Terry has gotten the message and dropped his case against Anatoly’s daughter. Now he can go back to being a broke, philandering, news anchor. Mr. TV is back.”
“Not so quick,” he says. “If the blood on that knife you provided us matches up with Megan Barker’s, and if the prints match Anatoly’s, then we got our killer.”
“I’m sensing a but here, Miller.”
“But busting him for murder won’t be enough. What I want is his whole operation.”
“How do we do that? The men who work for him are his firewall.”
“We get to him and his operation through his weak spot.”
“Weak spot,” I say like a question.
“We get to him through Janice and Terry McGovern, the newest employees in his heroin-for-profit organization.”
In my head, I see the phone records sitting out on Janice’s desk inside their kitchen. I see the photo of Natalia receiving her US Citizenship, proud papa Anatoly in attendance. So too are Terry and Janice, her American sponsors. Christ almighty, how is it that I didn’t put two and two together before?
“No wonder the McGoverns can be broke and still afford the niceties of life.”
“Broke as far as the books go,” Miller says. He downs the rest of his drink.
His smartphone rings. He sets down the glass, retrieves his phone from the jacket hanging on the hat rack behind him, and looks at the readout.
“I gotta take this,” he says, sitting back down. “It’s pathology.”
I down the rest of my whiskey, set the glass back onto the desk.
“Good news, Georgie?” Miller asks the resident Albany Medical Center Chief of Pathology, Dr. Georgie Phillips. “Depends how I look at it, huh? Okay, I’ll be right over.”
He gets up.
“Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll drop you back off at the McGoverns. Your precious Mustang will be waiting for you there. But first, we gotta make a stop at Albany Med Pathology.”
“Fun stuff,” I say.
“Death is inevitable, Jobz,” Miller says, grabbing his jacket and hat. “But I’ve never before heard it referenced as fun.”
Driving, if not speeding down Central Avenue, eastbound toward the city downtown business district, I pose, “So, what do you think motivates two upper-crusters like the McGoverns—two prominent if not locally famous citizens with two sons in college—to get involved in the drug trade?”
Miller cocks his head, stares at the road ahead. A road filled with morning commuters.
“People do desperate things during desperate times,” he says.
“Janice seems to like her money and her life,” I say.
“Terry does too, I imagine,” he says. “Selling illicit drugs is quick cash.”
“But to get mixed up with a murderer,” I say. “It just doesn’t add up.”
“Terry crossed the line when he sent those pictures to Natalia Brezinski,” he says. “Then when he sued her to save his reputation, no matter how bogus the lawsuit, he upset whatever delicate balance had been established between the McGoverns and The Flower Man organization.”
“A delicate balance that also included Janice servicing The Flower Man himself.”
My phone vibrates in the chest pocket on my flannel shirt. I pull it out, peer at the screen. A text from Kate. My pulse elevates, and I feel my face flush. Me, at my age, in the clouds over a text from a girl twenty plus years younger than me.
I open it.
It’s Kate’s pretty face. She’s smiling. The smile makes me melt.
Good morning, Jobz, the text below the picture reads.
If only she knew how my night and morning have gone thus far, she wouldn’t be smiling. But damn, it feels good to see her face.
Good morning sunshine, I text back.
Been doing a little more snooping for you. Something else you might want to see.
She sends me a link. A portion of the HTTP// link reads FOXNewsBrezinksiTeen.
Miller pulls into the hospital parking lot, drives around the back of the giant facility where the maintenance facility and the morgue are located.
Got it, I type. Will check out and contact you later. Thanks.
I have to admit, for a brief second, I mull over adding an X and an O after Thanks. But then, what the hell am I thinking? Kate is just being nice. She’s helping me. Assisting me not only with my day job but with my new side job as a subcontractor cop. She’s a gem, a real go-getter. The fact that I’m falling for her hook, line, and heavyweight sinker in every Romeo-and-Juliet-tragically-impossible-romance way, should be beside the point.
Pocketing the phone, I exit the cruiser along with Miller. Together we head through the automatic sliding glass doors into the dimly lit corridor, the walls of which are covered with old bone-colored tiles and an exposed ceiling that supports a spaghetti of colorful wires, aluminum conduits that angle in all directions, along with PVC and cast-iron piping of all lengths and dimensions.
The place is eerily quiet until we come toward the end of the corridor. That’s when we can both make out the sound of orchestral music playing. The music is lush and romantic. Something an English officer might have listened to on his portable Gramophone while hunkered down inside a bunker deep in the embattled trenches of World War I France. Ralph Vaughn Williams is the composer. I know this because I’ve been down in this house of the dead before when Chief Resident Pathologist Georgie Phillips has been spinning this particular CD.
When we come to the wood and glass Pathology doors, Miller pushes them open.
He steps inside.
I step in directly behind him, eye the body laid out on the stainless-steel table. My body undergoes a shock, stomach twisting and turning inside out. Every bit of food and liquid that I ingested over the past couple of hours comes up on me like Old Faithful. I clamp my jaws shut as tightly as I possibly can to prevent myself from yacking my brains out all over the floor.
Out the corner of my eye, I spot a blue Medical Waste bin, and I hurl into it. I feel like all my organs are pouring out of my mouth, including my stomach. When I finally come up for air, I see Georgie Phillips and Detective Miller gazing at me like I’m a science experiment gone exceedingly wrong.
“How is it you were ever a cop?” Miller asks. “Every time you enter this place you hurl?”
“Don’t bust his cojones, Nick,” Phillips says in my defense. “Some people just can’t take the sight of dead peo
ple.”
I breathe in the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol. The toxic odor when combined with the sweet smell of death alone is enough to kick in my gag reflex. But when you add in the fact that Megan Barker is, at present, laid out naked on her back on the closest stainless steel examination slab, and that her head is not attached to the body where God and anatomy designed it to go but, instead, resting on her belly, you create the perfect recipe for instantaneous and automatic Jobz regurgitation.
When you further add in that her scalp has been pulled down over her once beautiful eyes, her cranial cap sawed away exposing her pink brains, I find myself counting my blessings that thus far today I’ve hardly eaten a thing.
“Mama mia, Georgie,” I say, averting my eyes from the body. Or shall I say, body parts, “can’t you cover her up?”
Georgie is wearing his white lab coat. His long, gray, Doobie Brother’s lead guitar hair is tied back in a tight ponytail. As usual, he’s wearing worn Levi’s over brown leather cowboy boots. The cheeks on his face are concave, the skin somewhat pale and covered with a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and his eyes are brown and big. He suffers from skin cancer, but lately, it’s been in remission.
“Sorry, Jobz,” he says, throwing a sheet over Megan. “I was only expecting the dick.”
“Don’t call me that, please,” Miller grouses. Then, “So, what’s with this third blood type?”
Georgie turns, goes to the 1970/80s-era stereo system he’s got set up on one of the stainless-steel counters, and lowers the volume dramatically.
“Here’s the deal, fellas,” he says. “There’s, of course, the tox information that I won’t have back from the lab for days or even weeks, but one thing I do know is this. In the course of my blood analysis, I found not one or even two blood types surrounding her wound—”
“—Two blood types would automatically suggest defensive wounds sustained by the murderer,” Miller jumps in.
“Or maybe he cut his hand on the knife,” I suggest.
“That too,” Georgie says, nodding. “But in this case, I found three blood types, indicating or suggesting anyway, that it could have taken more than one man or woman to kill Megan. Let me show you something.” He steps back over to the body, lifts the sheet. “Jobz you don’t have to look at this you don’t want.”
He does something with Megan’s head. Only when he steps away from it, do I realize that he’s quickly pulled her scalp back over the opening in her skull. As if that small gesture will make the viewing that much easier. Once again, I see Megan’s head, her now closed eyes, her dark hair draping her face, her whiter than white skin. The way the head rests on her belly makes the scene feel like I’m caught up in a nightmare. I half expect her eyes to open, and her voice to speak to me.
Georgie stands at the far end of the table. He pulls a pen-light from the breast pocket on his lab coat, shines it on the jagged neck wounds, and the butchered spinal column.
“Whoever did this horrible act to her was a total amateur,” Georgie says. “It takes great strength to sever a human head, not to mention a very sharp blade, and I suspect our killer possessed none of these things.”
“Christ, she must have suffered,” I say, swallowing something dry and bitter.
“Once the major artery was severed, and she started bleeding out profusely—like an open faucet really—she would have passed out and quickly died from asphyxiation and blood loss. Her suffering would have been minimal, relatively speaking.”
“Relative to what?” I ask while in my head I recall retrieving the big knife inside The Flower Man store and how I initially assumed it was very sharp.
“Relative to the time and effort that went into making a complete decapitation.”
Miller takes a step forward, his chin resting on his index finger and thumb like it helps him to think and deduce things.
“So, what you’re saying, Georgie,” he says, “is that it’s possible the killer actually had to stop his work, even after she was dead, to enlist the help of someone else.”
Georgie shines the light on a particularly jagged piece of flesh and spinal column.
“I’m guessing someone actually held the body down while another person switched from using a dull knife, to a saw. They were so sloppy about their business, they must have cut up their own hands and fingers. Just like OJ did.”
In my head, I’m recalling the many saws and knives inside The Flower Man store.
“So, it would figure that whoever did this would have cuts and abrasions on their hands.”
“Just pointed that out,” Georgie says. Then, pulling the green sheet back over the body. “You’re aware of what we found during her internal, Jobz.” A question.
I nod.
“I was with her not long before this happened,” I confess.
“He was questioned in front of the DA,” Miller says. “He’s no longer a suspect.”
I turn quickly to Miller. “Was I ever really a suspect in my own investigation?”
“SOP, Jobz,” he says. “Don’t be so sensitive.”
Georgie smiles, pulls a half-smoked joint from his pocket, fires it up with a Bic lighter. He inhales a long toke, fills his lungs, then exhales a brilliant blue cloud.
“I can’t believe you nailed that primo ass, Jobz,” he says, offering us a hit off the joint. “I’m impressed.”
Under normal circumstances, I would not indulge in a little marajahoosie in front of Miller. But seeing as this is my second case with him, and the case itself has been a traumatic train wreck, I take the joint and inhale a long, sweet drag. Handing the joint back to Georgie, I can’t help but lock eyes with Miller. He’s issuing me a look like, you gotta be shitting me.
“Come on,” I say. “One hit can’t hurt.”
He just shakes his head in disgust.
Georgie has his eyes locked on the green sheet-covered body.
“She was truly a beauty,” he says. “Such a shame.”
“Listen, Jobz,” Miller says, “you saw Anatoly this morning. Did he have any bandages on his hands and fingers?”
I try and recall. I saw him in the doorway but quickly had to avert my eyes. I also saw him seated behind his desk. I also averted my eyes then too, so I couldn’t exactly get a clear picture of him. But I don’t recall any bandages. It’s exactly how I explain it to Miller.
“I’m sure he’s the Charlie fucking Manson in all this,” he says. “He ordered the beheading without actually taking part in it, which makes him just as culpable. But whoever did the actual butchering is still out there.”
“Be nice to know why the butchering occurred too,” I point out. “You know, the M word. Motive.”
“It didn’t happen because of a silly lawsuit,” Miller says.
“There’s some bad stuff happening in the city right now,” Georgie says. “Brutal stuff.”
“It’s Albany, Georgie,” Miller says while heading for the door. “What the hell did you expect?”
Miller drops me back off at the McGoverns. My Mustang is parked in the driveway as promised. Judging by the outward appearance of it, it looks undamaged. Thank the Lord for small miracles.
Before I open the door, he says, “Same deal as before. There’s evil afoot, and you’re here to keep an eye on the place. That cop parked out there is added protection. But I want you to dig deeper, get a sense of how deep Janice and Terry are in Anatoly’s drug business.”
“Evil afoot?” I said. “What is this, Agatha Christie?”
“Okay, how about this? There’s fucking evil afoot.”
I issue him a “Haha,” open the door, go to get out.
“Oh, and Jobz,” he says.
“What is it?”
“Stay safe. In all seriousness, The Flower Man is a butcher. He won’t hesitate to take you out if he knows you’re standing in the way.”
“That’s not what has me worried,” I say.
“So, what’s got your panties in a tussle?”
“What worries
me is if both The Flower Man and Terry think I know too much.”
I get out, close the door, head around back to the cottage where I make a face-plant on the bed and fall immediately to sleep.
In the dream, I’m seated inside Megan Barker’s office. She’s half sitting, half standing on her desk, her legs open enough that I can see up her dress. It’s a lovely sight. She slides off the desk, slowly drops to her knees, begins unbuckling my belt and unbuttoning my pants. It’s all I can do to contain myself.
But then a man enters the office. He’s tall, barrel-chested, his face covered in a big gray beard. It’s Anatoly Brezinski. He grabs hold of Megan by the hair, pulls her up off her feet. Another man enters the office. He’s the Wool Overcoat man. He’s holding a long knife in his leather-gloved hand.
Anatoly throws Megan over the desk. She screams as Wool Overcoat approaches her with the knife. Three more people suddenly appear in the office as if Scotty beamed them up. It’s Natalia , Janice, and Terry.
“Daddy!” Natalia shouts. “Please don’t do this!”
But Wool Overcoat begins to cut. Megan is shrieking from pain and horror, the blood squirting out of her neck and onto the wall and floor. But then something even more horrifying happens. Megan stops shrieking and starts laughing. Or perhaps she was always laughing, and I just assumed that someone who’s getting their head cut off with a dull knife would scream like crazy.
The Flower Man Page 16