by Neil Clarke
Beyond the autopsy you go to the evidence analysis reports. Computer printouts, since most detectives still worked with paper. Tech addenda and photos. All this under a time and cost constraint, the clock and budget always ticking along. “Investigative prioritizing,” the memos called it. Don’t do anything expensive without your supe’s nod.
So he went to see his supe, a black guy two months in from Vice, still learning the ropes. And got nothing back.
“The Feds, you let them know about the Centauri connection, right?” the supe asked.
“Sure. There’s a funnel to them through the Mobile FBI office.”
Raised eyebrows. “And?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Then we wait. They want to investigate, they will.”
“Not like they don’t know the Centauris are going out on civilian boats.” McKenna was fishing to see if his supe knew anything more but the man’s eyes betrayed nothing.
The supe said, “Maybe the Centauris want it this way. But why?”
“Could be they want to see how ordinary people work the sea?”
“We gotta remember they’re aliens. Can’t think of them as like people.”
McKenna couldn’t think of how that idea could help so he sat and waited. When the supe said nothing more, McKenna put in, “I’m gonna get a call from the Anselmo widow.”
“Just tell her we’re working on it. When’s your partner get back?”
“Next week. But I don’t want a stand-in.”
A shrug. “Okay, fine. Just don’t wait for the Feds to tell you anything. They’re just like the damn FBI over there.”
McKenna was in a meeting about new arrest procedures when the watch officer came into the room and looked at him significantly.
The guy droning on in front was a city government lawyer and most of his audience was nodding off. It was midafternoon and the coffee had long run out but not the lawyer.
McKenna ducked outside and the watch officer said, “You got another, looks like. Down in autopsy.”
It had washed up on Orange Beach near the Florida line, so Baldwin County Homicide had done the honors. Nobody knew who it was and the fingerprints went nowhere. It had on jeans and no underwear, McKenna read in the Baldwin County report.
When the Baldwin County sheriff saw on the Internet cross-correlation index that it was similar to McKenna’s case they sent it over for the Mobile ME. That had taken a day, so the corpse was a bit more rotted. It was already gutted and probed, and the ME had been expecting him.
“Same as your guy,” the ME said. “More of those raised marks, all over the body.”
Suited up and wearing masks, they went over the swollen carcass. The rot and swarming stink caught in McKenna’s throat but he forced down the impulse to vomit. He had never been good at this clinical stuff. He made himself focus on what the ME was pointing out, oblivious to McKenna’s rigidity.
Long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh laced around the trunk and down the right leg. A foot was missing. The leg was drained white, and the ME said it looked like a shark bite. Something had nibbled at the genitals. “Most likely a turtle,” the ME said. “They go for the delicacies.”
McKenna let this remark pass by and studied the face. Black eyes, broad nose, weathered brown skin. “Any punctures?”
“Five, on top of the ridges. Not made by teeth or anything I know.”
“Any dental ID?”
“Not yet.”
“I need pictures,” McKenna said. “Cases like this cool off fast.”
“Use my digital, I’ll e-mail them to you. He looks like a Latino,” the ME said. “Maybe that’s why no known fingerprints or dental. Illegal.”
Ever since the first big hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, swarms of Mexicans had poured in to do the grunt work. Most stayed, irritating the working class who then competed for the construction and restaurant and fishing jobs. The ME prepared his instruments for further opening the swollen body and McKenna knew he could not take that. “Where . . . where’s the clothes?”
The ME looked carefully at McKenna’s eyes. “Over there. Say, maybe you should sit down.”
“I’m okay.” It came out as a croak. McKenna went over to the evidence bag and pulled out the jeans. Nothing in the pockets. He was stuffing them back in when he felt something solid in the fabric. There was a little inner pocket at the back, sewed in by hand. He fished out a key ring with a crab-shaped ornament and one key on it.
“They log this in?” He went through the paperwork lying on the steel table. The ME was cutting but came over. Nothing in the log.
“Just a cheap plastic thingy,” the ME said, holding it up to the light. “Door key, maybe. Not a car.”
“Guy with one key on his ring. Maybe worked boats, like Anselmo.”
“That’s the first guy, the one who had those same kinda marks?”
McKenna nodded. “Any idea what they are?”
The ME studied the crab ornament. “Not really. Both bodies had pretty rough hands, too. Manual labor.”
“Workin’ stiffs. You figure he drowned?”
“Prob’ly. Got all the usual signs. Stick around, I’ll know soon.”
McKenna very carefully did not look back at the body. The smell was getting to him even over the air conditioning sucking air out of the room with a loud hum. “I’ll pick up the report later.” He left right away.
His supe sipped coffee, considered the sound-absorbing ceiling, and said, “You might see if VICAP got anything like this.”
The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer would cross-filter the wounds and tell him if anything like that turned up in other floaters. “Okay. Thought I’d try to track that crab thing on the key chain.”
The supe leaned back and crossed his arms, showing scars on both like scratches on ebony. “Kinda unlikely.”
“I want to see if anybody recognizes it. Otherwise this guy’s a John Doe.”
“It’s a big gulf. The ME think it could’ve floated from Mexico?”
“No. Local, from the wear and tear.”
“Still a lot of coastline.”
McKenna nodded. The body had washed up about forty miles to the east of Bayou La Batre, but the currents could have brought it from anywhere. “I got to follow my hunches on this.”
The supe studied McKenna’s face like it was a map. He studied the ceiling again and sighed. “Don’t burn a lot of time, okay?”
There were assorted types working in homicide but he broke them into two different sorts.
Most saw the work as a craft, a skill they learned. He counted himself in those, though wondered lately if he was sliding into the second group: those who thought it was a mission in life, the only thing worth doing. Speakers for the dead, he called them.
At the crime scene a bond formed, a promise from the decaying corpse to the homicide detective: that this would be avenged. It went with the job.
The job was all about death, of course. He had shot only two perps in his career. Killed one in a messy attempt at an arrest, back when he was just getting started. A second when a smart guy whose strategy had gone way wrong decided he could still shoot his way out of his confusion. All he had done was put a hole through McKenna’s car.
But nowadays he felt more like an avenging angel than he had when young. Closer to the edge. Teetering above the abyss.
Maybe it had something to do with his own wife’s death, wasting away, but he didn’t go there anymore. Maybe it was just about death itself, the eternal human problem without solution. If you can’t solve it you might as well work at it anyway.
Murderers were driven, sometimes just for a crazed moment that shaped all the rest of their lives. McKenna was a cool professional, calm and sure—or so he told himself.
But something about the Anselmo body—drowned and electrocu
ted both—got to him. And now the anonymous illegal, apparently known to nobody, silent in his doom.
Yet he, the seasoned professional, saw no place to go next. No leads. This was the worse part of any case, where most of them went cold and stayed that way. Another murder file, buried just like the bodies.
McKenna started in the west, at the Mississippi state line. The Gulf towns were much worse off after getting slammed with Katrina and Rita and the one nobody could pronounce right several years after. The towns never got off the ropes. The Gulf kept punching them hard, maybe fed by global warming and maybe just out of some kind of natural rage. Mother Earth Kicks Ass, part umpty-million.
He had the tech guy Photoshop the photos of the Latino’s face, taking away the swelling and water bleaching. With eyes open he looked alive. Then he started showing it around.
He talked to them all—landlords and labor in-between men, Mexicans who worked the fields, labor center types. Nothing. So he went to the small-time boosters, hookers, creeps in alleys, button men, strong-arm types slow and low of word, addicts galore, those who thrived on the dark suffering around them—the underlife of the decaying coast. He saw plenty of thick-bodied, smoldering anger that would be bad news someday for someone, of vascular crew-cut slick boys, stained jeans, arms ridged with muscle that needed to be working. Some had done time in the bucket and would again.
Still, nothing. The Latino face rang no bells.
He was coming out of a gardening shop that used a lot of Latinos when the two suits walked up. One wore a Marine-style bare-skull haircut and the other had on dark glasses and both those told him Federal.
“You’re local law?” the Marine type said.
Without a word McKenna showed them his badge. Dark Glasses and Marine both showed theirs, FBI, and Dark Glasses said, “Aren’t you a long way beyond Mobile city lines?”
“We’re allowed to follow cases out into the county,” McKenna said levelly.
“May we see the fellow you’re looking for?” Mr. Marine asked, voice just as flat.
McKenna showed the photo. “What did he do?” Mr. Marine asked.
“Died. I’m Homicide.”
“We had a report you were looking in this community for someone who worked boats,” Dark Glasses said casually.
“Why would that interest the FBI?”
“We’re looking for a similar man,” Mr. Marine said. “On a Federal issue.”
“So this is the clue that I should let you know if I see him? Got a picture?”
Dark Glasses started a smile and thought better of it. “Since there’s no overlap, I think not.”
“But you have enough sources around here that as soon as I show up, you get word.” McKenna said it flatly and let it lie there in the sun.
“We have our ways,” Dark Glasses said. “How’d this guy die?”
“Drowned.”
“Why think it’s homicide?” Mr. Marine came in.
“Just a hunch.”
“Something tells me you have more than that,” Mr. Marine shot back.
“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
They looked at each other and McKenna wondered if they got the joke. They turned and walked away without a word.
His bravado with them made him feel good but it didn’t advance his case. His mind spun with speculations about the FBI and then he put them away. The perpetual rivalry between local and federal always simmered, since the Feds could step in and capture a case when they thought they could profit from it. Or solve it better. Sometimes they were even right.
He prowled the Latino quarters. Hurricane damage was still common all along the Gulf Coast, years after the unpronounceable hurricane that had made Katrina and Rita look like mere overtures. He worked his way east and saw his fill of wrecked piers, abandoned houses blown out when the windows gave in, groves of pines snapped off halfway up, roofs ripped away, homes turned to flooded swamps. Weathered signs on damaged walls brought back to mind the aftermath: LOOTERS SHOT; on a roof: HELP; a plaintive WE’RE HERE; an amusing FOR SALE: SOME WATER DAMAGE on a condo completely gutted. Historical documents, now.
Hurricanes had hammered the coast so hard that in the aftermath businesses got pillaged by perfectly respectable people trying to hang on, and most of those stores were still closed. Trucks filled with scrap rumbled along the pitted roads. Red-shirted crews wheelbarrowed dark debris out of good brick homes. Blue tarp covered breached roofs, a promise that eventually they would get fixed. Near the beaches, waterline marks of scummy yellow remained, head high.
Arrival of aliens from another star had seemed less important to the coast people. Even though the Centauris had chosen the similar shores in Thailand, Africa, and India to inhabit, the Gulf was their focus, nearest an advanced nation. McKenna wondered what they thought of all the wreckage.
The surge of illegal Mexicans into the Gulf Coast brought a migration of some tough gangs from California. They used the illegal worker infrastructure as shelter, and occupied the drug business niches. Killings along the Mobile coast dropped from an average of three or four a day before to nearly zero, then rose in the next two years. Those were mostly turf wars between the druggies and immigrant heist artists of the type who prey on small stores.
So he moved among them in jeans, dog-eared hat, and an old shirt, listening. Maybe the Centauris were making people think about the stars and all, but he worked among a galaxy of losers: beat-up faces, hangdog scowls, low-hanging pants, and scuffed brown shoes. They would tell you a tearful life story in return for just looking at them. Every calamity that might befall a man had landed on them: turncoat friends, deadbeat buddies, barren poverty, cold fathers, huge bad luck, random inexplicable diseases, prison, car crashes, and of course the eternal forlorn song: treacherous women. It was a seminar in the great themes of Johnny Cash.
Then a droopy-eyed guy at a taco stand said he had seen the man in the picture over in a trailer park. McKenna approached it warily. If he got figured for a cop the lead would go dead.
Nearby were Spanish-language graffiti splashed on the minimart walls, and he passed Hispanic mothers and toddlers crowding into the county’s health clinic. But the shabby mobile homes were not a wholly Hispanic enclave. There was a lot of genteel poverty making do here. Pensioners ate in decrepit diners that gave seniors a free glass of anonymous domestic wine with the special. Workers packed into nearby damaged walk-ups with no air conditioning. On the corners clumps of men lounged, rough-handed types who never answered questions, maybe because they knew no English.
McKenna worked his way down the rows of shabby trailers. Welfare mothers blinked at him and he reassured them he was not from the county office. It was hard to read whether anybody was lying because they seemed dazed by the afternoon heat. Partway through the trailer park a narrow-chested guy in greasy shorts came up and demanded, “Why you bothering my tenants?”
“Just looking for a friend.”
“What for?”
“I owe him money.”
A sarcastic leer snaked across the narrow face. “Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I got a job for him.” McKenna showed the photo.
A flicker in the man’s eyes came and went. “Huh.”
“Know him?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You don’t lie worth a damn.”
The mouth tightened. “You ax me an I tole you.”
McKenna sighed and showed the badge. After a big storm a lot of fake badges sprouted on the chests of guys on the make, so this guy’s caution was warranted. County sheriffs and state police tried to enforce the law and in byways like this they gave up. Time would sort it out, they figured. Some of the fakes became hated, then dead.
To his surprise, the man just stiffened and jutted his chin out. “Got nothin’ to say.”
McKenna leaned closer and said very fast, “Y
ou up to code here? Anybody in this trailer park got an outstanding warrant? How ’bout illegals? Safety code violations? I saw that extension cord three units back, running out of a door and into a side shed. You charge extra for the illegals under that tent with power but no toilet? Bet you do. Or do you just let it happen on the side and pick up some extra for being blind?”
The man didn’t even blink.
McKenna was enjoying this. “So suppose we deport some of these illiterates, say. Maybe call in some others here, who violated their parole, uh? So real quick your receivables drop, right? Maybe a lot. Child support could come in here, too, right? One phone call would do it. There’s usually a few in a trailer park who don’t want to split their check with the bitch that keeps hounding them with lawyers, right? So with them gone, you got open units, buddy. Which means no income, so you’re lookin’ worse to the absentee landlord who cuts your check, you get me?”
McKenna could hear the gears grind and the eyes got worried. “Okay, look, he left a week back.”
“Where to?”
“You know that bayou east about two miles, just before Angel Point? He went to an island just off there, some kind of boat work.”
Floating lilies with lotus flowers dotted the willow swamp. Tupelo gums hung over the brown water as he passed, flavoring the twilight. The rented skiff sent its bow wash lapping at half-sunken logs with hides like dead manatees.
His neck felt sunburned from the sour day and his throat was raspy-dry. He cut the purring outboard and did some oar work for the last half mile. The skiff drifted silently up to the stilt house. It leaned a little on slender pilings, beneath a vast canopy of live oaks that seemed centuries old. The bow thumped at the tiny gray-wood dock, wood piling brushing past as he stepped softly off, lashing the stay rope with his left hand while he pulled his 9mm out and forward. No point in being careless.
Dusk settled in. A purple storm hung on the southern horizon and sheet lighting worked yellow magic at its edges. A string of lights hung along the wharf, glowing dimly in the murk, and insects batted at them. Two low pirogues drifted on the tide and clanked rusty chains.