by J. A. Kerley
“Yeah,” I said. “The exhumation. It makes no sense. Marie is dead and presumably hidden underground. Why call attention to the crime?”
“Exactly. And somehow, Carson, we’re supposed to think this is being driven by thirty-five-year-old paintings from a guy who couldn’t control his bowels.”
“Rumor has it.”
Harry laughed, a high and improbable warble.
“You know, Carson, without the dead bodies, this’d be a damn joke. Come on, let’s go stare at some paper.”
We stared until eight that night. Nothing happened.
Chapter 23
The bedside phone rang somewhere in my head. I looked at the clock: 4.24 a.m. I grabbed for the phone, dropped it, retrieved it from the floor.
“Rrrdr,” I grunted.
“Cold water,” the voice said.
“Hnnf?”
“Cold water, pogie. Go splash cold water on your face, then come back to the phone. It works; do it.”
I stumbled to the kitchen sink, splashed. The pipes on Dauphin Island weren’t deep and the heat seeped everywhere; the water was tepid. Still, the motion to and from the sink brought some blood to my brain. I stumbled back to the bedroom and picked up the phone.
“Danbury, if this is some kind of joke…”
“Who’s Heidi Wicky?”
I searched my sputtering brain; the name didn’t touch anything.
“I don’t know a Heidi Wicky.”
A pause. “That’s strange. You knew Carla Hutchins.”
“Are you working toward a point here?” I grabbed the pillow and blotted drips from my face and neck.
“I just got a call on my cell. That same plastic voice said, ‘Heidi Wicky in Elrain.’ That was all. Elrain’s in Florida, right? The Panhandle?”
“Not that far,” I said. “Two and a half hours, maybe less.”
“Who’s driving, partner?”
“So Danbury got another of these messages,” Harry said as I left my car in front of his house and climbed into his. It was 5.45 a.m. I’d called him directly after receiving the alert from Danbury.
“Something’s changed,” I said. “It’s an unknown name.”
He paused; thought. “Right. It’s been us knowing the thing, the info then going to Cu—, I mean, Danbury. Now things take a reverse spin.”
“Or maybe we missed something somewhere.”
Harry jammed the car into gear. “So we’re heading over to Elrain, check out this woman, that’s the plan?”
“Uh, one stop first. Got to grab a passenger.”
Harry made a sound I’d never heard before, like a dying trombone.
Danbury lived in a well-kept brick two-story downtown near the Oakleigh Garden District. It surprised me, expecting her to be a condo-in-the-burbs type. Bright flowers encircled the base of a foot-thick magnolia tree in the front yard, a half-dozen bird feeders hanging from its branches. Azaleas and myrtles bordered the house. Danbury was on the front porch sipping coffee when we rolled up. She wore a kneelength khaki skirt and a simple white linen blouse. White socks and running shoes provided a utilitarian air. I opened my door and stepped out.
“Sit up front,” I said. “I prefer riding in back.”
She gave me a strange look, bent to look in the door. “Is that Nautilus in there? Hi, Harry, been a while.” He moaned softly as she slid into the front seat. Danbury said, “You sound a little gassy, Harry. Need some Di-Gel? Got a bottle in my purse.”
Harry put the car in gear, climbed the curb, nearly clipped a phone pole, dropped down into the street. We were on our way.
“It’s kind of like the Three Musketeers,” Danbury said, winking. “Where’s my feathered hat, guys?”
We’d estimated our arrival at eight fifteen. At nine we were raising dust across half the roads in Florida’s western panhandle. It had been a quiet trip, Danbury trying to make small talk with Harry, him grunting responses. She finally said, “Is there something wrong with you, Harry Nautilus? You’re treating me like my cologne is eau d’ratshit.”
“How well do you remember our last encounter?”
She wrinkled her brow in thought for a few seconds. “A guy got shot over by Tillman’s Corner. I said, Who was it? You said Johnny Armstrong or whatever. I filed the story, moved on. Why?”
“I got cold feet, said drop it.”
“You made nervous noises. I don’t recall a hard-and-fast don’t.”
“I flat-out said not to run it.”
“You told me you shouldn’t have told me. That I recall. You putting the kibosh on the story, huh-unh.”
“Guys,” I said.
“I nearly got my ass transferred to ticket-writing limbo, Danbury.”
“Yo, guys.”
“Sorry about the misunderstanding, Nautilus. But not my fault.”
“Not your fault? Who else would -”
“HEY, GUYS!”
Harry looked in the mirror, Danbury turned in her seat. I pointed to a hand-made sign beside the road.
“Didn’t we pass a ‘Prepare to Meet God’ sign like that a few miles back?” I said. “Same bullet holes?”
Harry grunted. “A little help here, reporter lady.”
Danbury unfolded the map. She spun it one direction, then another. “Borg always reads the maps. These things confuse me. N is north, right?”
We saw a mirror-bright dot a couple miles down the road, an object seemingly constructed of chrome. Approaching, we discovered it was a gas station - or so they’re called - gleaming architectural whores screaming Look at Me!
“Stop for directions, Nautilus,” Danbury said. “Before we drive up our own tailpipe.”
“Me?”
“I’m not the one who took the wrong exit.”
“There was no right exit, Miss Danbury. They all dump you into this endless damn nowhere.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, hoping they didn’t kill one another while I was inside.
Of all the abominations contemporaneity has visited upon the South, one of the worst is the gas-station-cum-convenience-store-cum-restaurant. The old stores-slash-fill-up stations were magic places, shady and comfortable, a good ol’ boy or two hanging out, sipping a pop, stopped on the road between hither and yon. If you needed a stars’n’bars flag, a Jesus Saves bumper sticker, a decent machete, a box of twelve-gauge shells, there it was. There’d be a stack of melons outside, maybe some tomatoes and okra. If the pop machine stole your money, you always got it back.
They’re disappearing fast, the stores near the main roads nearly extinct. It seems like a huge mother craft floats softly through the night skies, searching for the remaining ones. When it spots them, it hovers above, makes a shivering electronic sound, and drops a sparkling new BP or Exxon or Shell station over the old store and whisks away for new conquests.
In the morning no one seems to notice.
I bought root beer for Harry, a Dr Pepper for myself and a Diet RC for Danbury, asked the sullen lady at the counter for directions, then hustled outside. Harry and Danbury stared out their respective windows.
“The lady at the checkout said she thinks it’s about five miles thataway,” I said, pointing and climbing into the rear.
Harry said, “She wasn’t sure?”
I shrugged. “Someone from the mother ship might have known, but they’re long gone.”
Danbury looked at Harry. “Mother ship?”
“You get used to it,” Harry sighed, putting the car in gear. Asphalt turned to gravel. The double lane turned single. We pushed forward another mile or so, slowing at a railroad crossing.
I said, “The woman mentioned tracks. We’re close.”
We slowed to a crawl and banged over the poorest maintained crossing in the Western hemisphere as a treeful of buzzards looked on. Danbury reached into her outsized bag and produced compact binoculars. She lifted them to her eyes and studied the leering creatures as we approached their roadside haunt.
“Turkey vultures,” I ventured.
Harry drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Both are carrion eaters, Cars. But black vultures got a taste for live meat, too. The menu includes fresh-born calves, which doesn’t make them real popular with ranchers.”
Danbury turned to Harry, raised an eyebrow. She started to say something, but closed her mouth. His eyes didn’t stray from the road. We continued down the gravel lane at fifteen miles an hour, piney woods on one side, fallow field on the other. We took a slight curve and I glimpsed an old house trailer tucked into a gnarl of brush a hundred feet from the road. The battered mailbox said WICKY, painted in an unsteady hand.
“Who do you think Heidi Wicky is, Danbury?” Harry said. “Why did you get the call? Why do you get any of these calls?”
She stared uncertainly at the trailer and shuddered. “I don’t know, Nautilus. All I know is it’s got to be eighty-five degrees in this car and I feel cold.”
“Must be contagious,” I said. “Pull in and let’s see what there is to see.”
We edged into an overgrown yard. The screen door of the trailer hung open, half off its hinges. The door behind it was ajar an inch or so. We climbed out to a welcoming committee of hungry skeeters.
“I spent all last night growing new blood,” Harry said, slapping his neck. “There it goes.”
I walked to the trailer carefully, peeked in the front windows. Harry headed around back. Danbury skirted past me, up the steps of the trailer. She knocked, called inside.
“Hello? Anyone home? Hello?”
“Stay back from there,” I said. “Let me take a look.”
Danbury called into the trailer again, then pushed open the door and stepped inward. “Damn,” she said. “The place stinks like a -”
“Don’t,” I yelled. “Stay out until -”
Danbury screamed and exploded from the trailer backward, as if fired from a cannon. Black shapes hurtled through the door behind her. She tumbled down the steps and rolled into the weeds. The shapes resolved into shrieking
vultures winging furiously away. I ran to her.
“Are you all -”
“Yes, yes,” she gasped, jabbing a finger toward the trailer. “Inside, Ryder. Jesus! Look inside.”
She was shaken but unharmed. I climbed the steps, knowing too well the stench issuing from the door. Holding my breath, I stepped inside.
Chapter 24
Lieutenant Dorrel Ames of the Florida State Police looked up from his notepad. He’d removed his sunglasses to speak with us, a professional courtesy. The hat stayed on. Sweat beaded his frown-creased forehead and fell to his barrel chest.
“And you say you were here to…”
I said, “An interview, that’s all. Questions about a thirty-year-old case.”
He paused, lifted a sun-bleached eyebrow. “Still open?”
“Closed. We’re not sure what we’re looking for. One of those name-came-up sort of things.”
I didn’t mention our tip had come from the woman beside me. I didn’t see how that would add anything but obfuscation. Maybe Ames would step into this hall of mirrors, see something we hadn’t, more power to him.
Ames shot the cop eye at Danbury. “You say you’re a TV reporter over in Mobile, ma’am?”
Danbury shined the pearly whites. “Channel 14.”
Ames looked between me and Harry, his eyes splitting the difference between confusion and suspicion. “You fellas always travel with reporters?”
“It’s temporary,” Harry said. “Like a hurricane.”
We turned to watch grim-faced local boys haul the body bag out the door and toward the ambulance, its lights pulsing red and white against the blue sky. They didn’t have a hard time with the bag; there wasn’t much left to carry. Ames pushed a pinch of snuff under his lip and shook his head.
“Doggone, that body got tore up good.”
“The back door was open,” Harry said. “Must have been how the Coragyps atratus got to her.”
Ames said, “Beg pardon?”
“Black vultures,” Danbury interjected.
Ames looked confused, so I offered him familiar cop words. “Did you know the deceased, Lieutenant? Is there anything in her past to suggest foul play here?”
Ames shook his head, tipped back his hat. “She wasn’t open to getting known. Not nasty about it, just kept to herself. Never any kind of trouble here. I stopped by a time or two to see if she needed anything…”
“Hey, Lute,” an evidence tech with a camera yelled from the door of the trailer. “Got something strange here.” The guy stared at an object in his hand. “Taped to the ceiling right above where her body was, like she was looking at it when she died.”
His gloved fingers displayed a small snippet of art, a few inches square. Heavy glazing, rich color, dense texture. Little wriggles of gold spun from what might have been the eyeholes of a crushed skull, or maybe it was just the effect of the shadowing.
“Is that some kind of worm?” the tech said, pointing beside an eyehole. “Or just a weird shape?”
“I don’t know what the hell any of it is,” Ames said softly. “But damn, I can’t keep my eyes off it.”
“We’ve got to get to Hutchins,” I whispered to Harry. “Fast.”
We turned onto Hutchins’s road after only two white-knuckle hours of Harry with his foot deep into the floor. There was a line of dust in the air from a postal carrier chugging down the road, the snubnosed white van stopping beside the sparse mailboxes. Harry bleated the horn and shot past the van. We pulled into Carla Hutchins’s front yard and Harry drove to the front porch, almost up the steps.
“Carla,” Harry bayed, thundering up the steps. “Miz Hutchins! It’s Detective Nautilus. You inside?”
The screen door slapped open and Hutchins stepped onto the porch, her eyes quizzical. She was in a white tee and jeans, a blue bandana holding back her long hair.
“Are you all right?” Harry asked. “Everything fine here? We’ve been trying to call, but couldn’t get through.”
“Internet. I leave it on, no one calls but people selling things.” Hutchins’s eyes found Danbury. “She’s that reporter. Why’s she here?”
Harry said, “She knows about the case, Carla. Not much, but she knows. But Ms Danbury pledges not to use your name in anything without your written approval or she goes right back to the car and stays there until we’re done. Right, Ms Danbury?”
Danbury wasn’t happy with Harry’s ad hoc rules. But she nodded and said, “Right.”
Hutchins said, “What’s going on?”
“It’s about a woman named Wicky. Heidi Wicky. Ever hear that name?”
Hutchins’s eyes stared into Harry’s for several seconds. “I knew a Heidi once. Back in the you-know-when.”
“I thought you didn’t go by regular names, you made up -”
“Demeter. That’s what most people knew her as. But she spoke French and English. Some German too, I think. I asked her about it once. She said she was Swiss. The only Swiss name I could think of was from a movie I saw when I was a kid, Heidi. I joked about it, asked if her name had been Heidi. She said yes, thought it was funny. She never mentioned her last name. I guess by that time it didn’t mean anything anymore.”
“By that time?”
“She’d been with…him from the start, from the Paris days.”
I shot Harry a look; Marie Gilbeaux had also been with Hexcamp’s original contingent.
“Who else was in from the start?”
“Persephone - Marie. Calypso, of course; she may have been the first to attach to him. Heidi. There were a couple of others, but I think they just drifted away. Why do you want to know?”
Harry took a deep breath. “We’re just back from Ms Wicky’s place over in the Panhandle. She’s been living in Elrain, just a few miles above -”
<
br /> The postman rolled up, honked, waved a few pieces of mail. “Be right back,” Hutchins said, striding the hundred feet to the roadside. She took the mail from the carrier, made a few seconds of small talk.
“How much you want to tell Carla?” I said to Harry, keeping my voice low as Hutchins started toward us, shuffling through the letters.
“At this point? Whatever keeps her safe.”
“But from what?” Danbury said.
We heard a piercing wail. Carla Hutchins stood a dozen steps away, pointing at the ground and making nonsense noises. Harry got there first, me on his heels. Hutchins held an opened brown envelope. I recognized the block lettering. My eyes followed her hand to the ground. There, in the grass, lay a strip of art on canvas, so deliciously bright it looked wet. Harry pulled her away from the scrap.
“Easy, Carla. We don’t even know what it is.”
“I know what it is,” she keened. “And I know who made it. Something horrible’s happening, isn’t it? He, they, something’s found me?”
“It’s all right, Carla,” Harry said gently, keeping her hand in his. “You’ll be fine.”
“I’m out here in the middle of nowhere,” she wailed.
Danbury stepped up and took Hutchins’s arm, moved her gently from Harry and toward the porch.
“No you’re not, Carla. As of this afternoon you’re staying in Mobile in a big secure house. Mine. I got enough alarm systems to call J. Edgar Hoover out of his grave.”
“It’s not your place to…I can’t let you do -”
“You can and will. Let’s go get you packed.” Danbury steered Hutchins toward the door. “Besides, Ms Hutchins, it won’t be for long. You’ve got the pogobo twins on your side, the golden hounds of the PSIT, and they got their picture in the paper to prove it. They’ll clean up this little matter in a day or two.” Danbury shot a worried look over her shoulder at Harry and me. “Right, boys?”
Chapter 25
Harry and I waited while Danbury helped Hutchins get packed. Hutchins was too shaken to drive, so Danbury handled the chore. We escorted them to Mobile, then broke off and headed for Forensics. Hembree was pouring a cup of tea from a beaker. I handed him the bagged piece of art and gave him a quick synopsis of our day.