South of Nowhere: A Mystery

by Minerva Koenig

  “No, it’s not what we’re supposed to do,” Benny agreed. “But nobody becomes a cop solely because they want to enforce the law, out of the goodness of their virtuous hearts. That shit’s just glurge for public consumption.”

  I felt my face turn into one big question mark.

  “‘Every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints,’” he quoted, grinning.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I groaned.

  “If you developed some kind of professional relationship with law enforcement, you might not have to worry so much about your own security.”

  “Yeah,” I snorted, “because the Brotherhood would find me a hell of a lot faster.”

  “But you’d be a much more difficult target. You wouldn’t be some random woman on the street. You’d be one of ours.”

  “If you think that would stop them from killing me, you don’t know much about their organization,” I said.

  Benny sighed and got up. “Fine. But think about it, OK?”

  I didn’t say so, but I had a feeling that I was going to think about it whether I wanted to or not.

  CHAPTER 42

  Liz Harman’s office was in her house, a big ramshackle place at the very edge of the old part of town, to the north. She’d taken advantage of the house’s two front doors—typical for its age, which I guessed to be about seventy-five—by using one as the entrance to her medical practice, which occupied two front rooms of the house. She didn’t have any staff, you just walked in and there she was. Her office was nicely decorated with vintage furniture and an eclectic collection of artwork, including a large framed print that looked like it might be an original Picasso.

  She got up and shook hands with me across her desk, and indicated I should have a seat while she pulled over a tablet computer that was lying nearby.

  “Nice setup,” I said.

  She retrieved her glasses from the top of her head and put them on, glancing over at me with a grin. “I’m old-school, baby.”

  “That’s good, because I don’t have any insurance.”

  She tapped on the tablet, pursing her lips. “Hm. Not a problem for me, but I’m not sure how Jean works all of that.”

  I made a face, and she said, “Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it. First, tell me what-all’s been going on with you.”

  “You know,” I said.

  “I only know generally. Give me the specifics.”

  I sighed and told her about the high, cool feeling, the olfactory hallucinations, the feeling of morning suffocation. She already knew about my dissociative episodes, but I described them in more detail including the stuff I’d told Connie and mentioned that I’d experienced an associated decline in radar. Balking at that last, she asked what I meant.

  “I’ve just always been good at picking up on what other people are feeling and thinking,” I explained, “but since I’ve been having these episodes, not so much.”

  “Everybody thinks they’re good at that,” she chuckled, raising an eyebrow in my direction. “Most of it is wishful thinking. You’re just getting old enough to stop believing your own crap.”

  It felt like a slap in the face, and I had to take a breath to keep from losing my temper. I wondered if she were that dismissive with all her patients.

  She continued to tap on her computer keyboard for a few minutes, then got up with a grunt and said, “OK, let’s have a look at you.”

  She gestured toward the door behind me, which led into a small exam room. I got undressed and put on a worn cotton gown. She had me lie back on the exam table so she could poke and prod, asking me the usual doctor questions: any shortness of breath, dizziness, weird bleeding, new appendages, etc. I copped to some dizziness but told her I was pretty sure that it wasn’t physical. She had me sit up, listened to my heart and breathing, took my blood pressure and temperature, and then went over to a small chest in the corner of the room and pulled open the top drawer.

  “I’d like to get a full blood profile on you,” she said, taking out a pad of lab orders. She scribbled on the top one, hesitated, then tore it off, crumpled it, threw it in the trash, and started another.

  “The address is on the back,” she said, handing me the form. “You don’t need to make an appointment.”

  She seemed suddenly disturbed and jerked the drawer open again to replace the pad. Instruments clinked as she shoved it closed, harder than was necessary.

  “Give it to me straight, Doc,” I said. “How long have I got?”

  She snorted a short laugh and didn’t answer right away. I got the feeling she was looking for something to use as an excuse for whatever was really bothering her. “Those lab tests are expensive. I just get pissed off every time I think about it. People are going without basic health care because they can’t afford to pay doctors anymore. Meanwhile, most of my colleagues are driving from the golf course to the country club in thousand-dollar suits behind the wheel of this year’s Mercedes.”

  “How come you’re not doing the same thing?” I asked her.

  “Because I have ethics,” she snapped. “I became a doctor because I wanted to help people, not bleed ’em dry. Somebody like you, if you get cancer, you get the very basics, if you’re lucky. But Joe Millionaire, he can afford a Cadillac insurance plan that pays for nutritional support, exercise program, spa treatments, and private rooms for his chemo. How is that morally defensible?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “I was raised by wolves.”

  That made her laugh. “OK, get out of here. If anything weird comes up on your blood test, I’ll call you.”

  CHAPTER 43

  I was on my way to the lab when it hit me. I pulled into the nearest driveway and did a 180 to head back to town.

  Benny was still in his office, on the phone behind his big desk. When he saw my face he told whoever he was talking to that he’d call them back, and hung up.

  “What?” he said.

  “The kids,” I said. “What happens to their kids?”

  “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

  “The feminicidios. You said they were mostly working mothers. What happens to their kids after they die?”

  Benny looked puzzled. “I don’t know, I guess they go back to the family or something. That would be the typical thing where most of these gals are from.”

  “Underpaid factory workers, country girls, you said,” I reminded him. “They’re poor, barely making ends meet, away from their families. If their kids had someone else to go to, wouldn’t they be there already?”

  Benny just frowned at me, keeping his mouth shut.

  “You said it yourself, when we were looking at Finn’s record,” I said. “Pedophiles, they grab the most susceptible children. Along the border, that’d be illegals with no guardians, wouldn’t it?”

  “OK, just wait a minute.” Benny held up both hands. “You’re way out in left field here.”

  “If you build a fence and stop whoever’s killing these women, the supply of vulnerable kids—undocumented kids—across the border stops. That’s the connection. You said yourself, anybody with half a brain could figure it out if they tried.”

  “Jesus, Julia,” Benny said, with feeling.

  “Mikela said that Jenny discovered there were people on record as supporting the border fence who didn’t really support it,” I said. “Why would someone kill her just for that, unless it was connecting to something bigger?”

  Benny sighed, looking away, and I stepped closer to his desk. “No-fault red-light districts along the border. Nine-year-old Mexican girls working in whorehouses. International sex tourism. That’s an American industry just as valuable as steel production or building cars or coal mining, and it’s surely got a lobby just as powerful.”

  Benny shoved his chair back, leaving one arm on the blotter, and said, “Even if Jenny Floyd discovered that Baxter was somehow helping, or looking the other way, or even messing with their kids himself, you can’t take that all the way to personally killing a
ll these women. At worst, he’s taking advantage of an awful situation.”

  “What if his lobby money is helping the Mexican government look the other way? Don’t you think that makes him at least partially culpable?”

  Benny continued frowning up at me, his expression black.

  “Look,” I said, leaning toward him, “we’ve got a woman who fucking changed her identity to join a group that avenges this kind of thing. The identity she stole just happened to belong to a woman whose husband was going to work for someone who—maybe—funds it? That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “It’s a wild hair, Julia. Leave it.”

  My frustration had reached terminal mass. “Why? Why should I leave it?”

  “Because there’s nothing we can do about it, even if it’s true,” Benny said.

  Our eyes met across the desk.

  “It’s how the American sausage gets made,” he said. “Supply and demand. You take down one fucker, and people think, oh, OK, we’ve fixed that problem. You haven’t. He’s just one fucker among thousands of others. As long as there’s a demand for kids, or dope, or snuff porn, or shark fins, or rare rain forest wood—anything”—Benny’s hand shot out, and he paused to look at it as if it weren’t part of his body, then let it drop—“anything there’s a market for, someone, somewhere is gonna supply it. It don’t matter how many people you put in prison. The suppliers are not the problem.”

  Benny stopped talking. He was breathing hard and looking right through me. I leaned back off the desk, a little out of breath myself, and gave it a couple of minutes to see if he’d say anything else, but he didn’t. He just closed his eyes and sat back in the chair. I turned and left.

  CHAPTER 44

  The brain was still processing what Benny had said when I got to the lab and handed my paperwork to the receptionist. She gave me a quick professional smile and told me to take a seat in the waiting room.

  I did, but I couldn’t get comfortable. My head was going about a hundred miles an hour, arguing with Benny after the fact. OK, yeah, maybe taking out one fucker wouldn’t do any good, but did that mean you should just let him run wild? You don’t dig a tunnel out of prison all at once. You do it grain of sand by grain of sand.

  I had my little notebook with me and I got it out to update my timeline, but the only new thing I had was Jennifer Floyd’s cause of death. I ripped out the page and tore it into small pieces. I still didn’t know who’d killed Orson Greenlaw. I knew something much bigger instead, something I couldn’t change. So much for my detective days. If this was how it worked, I wanted no part of it.

  A young black girl called my name from the doorway next to the reception desk, and I got up to follow her into a tiny white cubicle with a padded chair in it that looked disturbingly like a medieval torture device.

  “Which arm, do you care?” she asked me, snapping on some rubber gloves.

  I shook my head, my bad mood still clattering around my head like loose change. The girl took my left arm in her cool gloved hand, and ran her finger lightly over the inside of my elbow.

  “Hm,” she said. “Let’s see the other one.”

  I gave it to her and she made an approving noise, then went over to the small counter where she’d left my paperwork. She chuckled. “Looks like you tried to do it yourself, huh?”

  I glanced at her, reluctant to tear myself away from the cacophony inside my skull, annoying as it was. “What?”

  She held up the form that Liz Harman had given me, indicating a small brown splotch along the edge. “Paper cut?”

  “Must have been the doc,” I said. “Wasn’t me.”

  “Lucky,” she replied, coming over to my right side with a couple of syringes. “I hate those things.”

  She slid one of the needles through my skin and into a vein, and as I watched my blood jump into the glass cylinder, I felt another dissociative episode coming on. For once, I thought ruefully to myself, it was happening at a convenient moment.

  However, when the mental tornado suddenly shut off this time, it left a single, blazing thought standing: Orson Greenlaw hadn’t died from a paper cut. He’d been full of holes, and not only that, someone had dug the bullets out of those holes. That meant there had been a great deal of blood, way more than most people—people who’ve never seen anyone get shot—know. Wherever he’d been killed had to have looked like a slaughterhouse when the thing was done. Unless he’d been killed in a bathtub or some other conveniently cleanable location, he’d left a nice big spot.

  Of course, that spot would be long gone by now, but with that much blood involved, if anyone had seen the scene of the crime, it would have made an impression.

  The lab tech pressed a cotton ball against the end of the needle and withdrew it, and my brain kept going. Since the killer had gone to some pains to hide Orson’s body, they’d almost certainly also cleaned up after themselves, which meant bloodstained rags, towels, and/or clothing—a lot of it. Yeah, you could throw it all in the washing machine, but blood isn’t that easy to get out, and if I was right about the quantity involved, it would require more than one load of laundry. Myself, I wouldn’t feel that comfortable leaving a basketload of bloody clothes lounging around the utility room waiting for its turn in the washer. I’d want to get rid of it pronto.

  On my way out of the lab, I called Benny to ask him where the city garbage collection was and, who would talk to me if I wanted to ask some weird questions. He wasn’t there, but Stella told me where it was, and said she’d call ahead to let them know I was coming.

  Azula Solid Waste was housed in yet another corrugated-steel agricultural building, near the river east of town. A chain-link fence surrounded the concrete parking lot where two garbage trucks were parked. It was midafternoon, and the place was deserted except for a couple of middle-aged black guys sitting on upended plastic buckets next to the open overhead door on the loading dock. I walked over and asked them where I could find the boss.

  “He’s gone home already,” the one who looked like the older of the two said. “Night shift coming on right now … we help you with something?”

  He was wearing a faded plaid snap-front shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a red-and-white gimme cap perched on top of his natural. He had an open, friendly face, a ready smile, and a badly chipped front tooth. His companion was younger, maybe in his mid-forties, with shoulder-length cornrows hanging out from under a paisley do-rag. Both of them wore stained tan khakis and steel-toed boots.

  “Are y’all collectors?” I asked them.

  “Yes, ma’am, official,” Chipped Tooth acknowledged with a grin. “We do the night commercial run.”

  “Were either of you working here this last winter?”

  “Shee-it,” Cornrows said, shifting on his bucket. “Been at this damn job since I graduated high school.”

  Chipped Tooth nodded agreement, and I asked them, “Did you happen to hear about any of your coworkers picking up some bloody stuff in early February?”

  “Bloody stuff?” Cornrows said, glancing at Chipped Tooth. “What you mean? Like field dress? City don’t let nobody put that stuff in the trash. It’s gotta go to biohazard now.”

  “No, I mean towels or clothes, things like that.”

  Chipped Tooth pursed his lips and shook his head, but Cornrows said, “Not February, but there was a pickup on the west side last summer, hoo-wee. You remember that, man?” He poked his companion’s bare biceps.

  “You talking about that Dumpster over on Porter?” Chipped Tooth said.

  Cornrows nodded. “Yeah, yeah, man. You remember.” He looked back at me. “I thought it was paint at first ’cause it looked brown, you know? But then that smell.” He shook his head. “Damn. Like spoiled meat, you know what I’m saying?”

  “When was this?” I asked him.

  “August sometime. Man! That stuff stunk so bad. Big bag of clothes and stuff, sitting up in that Dumpster all day in the heat.”

  “Where’d you pick it up?”

&n
bsp; “Porter Street,” he repeated. “Just west of downtown.”

  “Can you remember which block?”

  Chipped Tooth was rubbing his stomach up under his shirt, listening to us talk. Cornrows looked out past my head, squinting and thinking. “Man, you testing me now.”

  He made a motion at me to follow him and got up. I stepped up onto the loading dock and we went through the overhead door into the warehouse, where a stained city map with the garbage routes marked on it in different colors was tacked up on one wall. There was an old punch clock next to this, and time cards in one of those steel slot holders.

  The odor of garbage and bleach wafted around us as Cornrows stepped up to the map and traced the route with a finger thick as a tree branch, stopping at a spot two blocks west of downtown. “Yeah. Two hundred block. Dumpster. The stuff was in a bag, but they ain’t put a tie on it, so it just sorta fell out when we did the pull. I hadda get in after it.” He shook his head. “Nasty.”

  I looked at the map again, trying to remember what was there. It was the next street over from the one that ran behind the bar, home to a row of nondescript office buildings whose occupants I’d never paid any attention to.

  “Did you notice whether it was men’s or women’s clothes?” I asked Cornrows.

  “Now, how am I gonna tell the difference?” he chided me, clicking his tongue. “I mean, I didn’t see no evening gowns or nothing, it was shirts and pants, some towels and sheets, too, all of ’em soaked through. Looked like somebody had tried to mop up after the Alamo or some shit.”

  “Did you report it to anybody?”

  “The boss,” he said. “Dunno what he did about it, though. Ain’t my job to ride him, goes the other way up in here.”

  I ripped a sheet out of my little notebook and wrote down my phone number. “Would you ask him to call me when he gets in?”

  Cornrows took my ad hoc business card, looking apologetic. “He ain’t gonna be back ’til tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said with a sigh. “I doubt I’ll get to the bottom of this before then.”