A Hard Death

by Jonathan Hayes

  Shit. She smiled to herself. An office with a 270-degree view over some of the priciest real estate in the world, a hundred grand a week in base salary (not including syndication residuals or royalties from the American Crime books and video game), an $8,000,000 duplex on Central Park, and she was feeling restless? How spoiled she’d become!

  When Amanda had checked in at the reception desk at her Georgia State Law ten-year reunion in January, the coordinator had playfully refused to give her a name badge, insisting everyone already knew who she was. And of course, they had known, particularly since she and Nancy Grace had shared the cover of People that October (“New Southern Justice: Amanda and Nancy Lay Down the Law”), and then half of America had been glued to her show through November and December, between her relentless coverage of the Sheldon cult child abduction in Sedona and the Inquisitor killer in New York.

  Her numbers had slipped during the spring—they always did as the days got warmer—but the night before, she’d had to squeeze the juice out of the divorce of a Hollywood producer and his Russian mail-order bride. She’d slapped around her usual panel of slimeball divorce attorneys and entertainment reporters like the pro that she was, but her heart hadn’t been in it. The producer’s name was very Armenian, and the trophy wife’s accent incomprehensible, and caller response had been dismal—her show just didn’t sparkle without some spicy incest/rape trial, or a callous mom/missing tot combo, or even just a contentious appeals trial for some remorseless serial killer.

  That’s what we need, she thought—another sexy serial killer. In America, everyone loves a serial killer.

  She sat at her desk, pulled out a legal pad, and tried to drum up ideas for the following week. Ray Goldberg, her show runner, coordinated the guests, but Amanda had a lot of input into what topics they’d cover. She sat there tapping her pen for about fifteen minutes, but the page stayed blank.

  She looked at the trophies from her past. Hung in neat rows on the far wall were mug shots of the forty-seven scumbags she’d nailed as a Clark County ADA in Vegas, where she’d moved with Holly after her marriage failed. It was in Vegas that she’d been shot, targeted for her participation in the prosecution of a soldier from the Sacramento wolf pack of El Eme, the Mexican Mafia. The shooting had been a blessing in disguise, bringing her national media attention and ultimately a new career.

  With a sigh, she put down her pad and turned on her TV. She settled on CNN, where the police were recovering bodies from the Everglades. She unmuted the set and listened to the anchor—some kind of multiple-homicide story. Sources were saying four adult males, which wasn’t perfect but the number was good—mass murder always put butts on seats.

  Ray came rushing into the room, beaming. “Amanda!” He glanced at the TV and nodded. “Good! CNN! Did you see it?”

  She shrugged and gestured at the screen. Helicopter footage of body bags being carried out of the woods on an island in the Everglades.

  “Multiple homicide, but all grown men. Worth a look, but I don’t know if there’s really anything for us…”

  “No, not the victims. Watch this bit, they’re showing it again.”

  She turned back to the set.

  On screen, the helicopter moved in very close, and the trees and bushes began swaying wildly, and then she saw a tall man in a blue police-type windbreaker and a blond woman in olive green angrily waving away the helicopter.

  She sat up in her chair. “Oh my fucking God!”

  Ray laughed out loud. “I knew you’d love it!”

  “Dr. Edward Jenner, as I live and breathe…” She shook her head, grinning from ear to ear. “So that’s where you’ve got to, my precious!”

  “It gets better…Apparently he’s been working down there a couple of weeks now, filling in for the chief medical examiner. Nothing exciting there, but you know who he just autopsied?”

  He paused dramatically. Amanda muttered impatiently, “Go on!”

  “The chief medical examiner! He autopsied his own boss!”

  “No. Fucking. WAY!”

  “Yes! His own boss—murdered!” He shook his head. “What the hell is it with this son of a bitch? He runs away, takes a job in East Assfuck, Florida, and the next thing you know, everyone’s dropping like flies!”

  She pounded the table with her fist. “Oh Ray Goldberg, you old goat…—I could just blow you!”

  He pretended to fumble at his belt buckle. She shook her head with a grin. “I can’t believe this—it’s just too perfect!”

  Goldberg said, “We’ll find someone from one of the local stations for tonight, set it up for an in-depth on tomorrow’s show. We’ll have a segment producer and crew down there by morning.”

  She turned to him. “Screw that! As soon as we wrap tonight, American Crime is going on location to…” she turned to the TV, couldn’t see what she was looking for, then turned back to Ray. “We’re going on location to East Assfuck, Florida!”

  CHAPTER 28

  In the shadow of the gatehouse eaves, Adam Weiss waited for the manager at La Grulla Blanca. It was the first farm on the short list he’d made from Ricky’s notes about the reception he’d received at the different estates. Adam had found four farms where managers had treated Ricky roughly. At two—Pinewhite’s and UFL Tomato—Ricky had been threatened with a weapon; Adam had marked those names with a star.

  La Grulla Blanca immediately struck Adam as different from the other farms he’d visited. For a start, the central compound, a quarter-mile-wide strap of land that separated the road from the marsh, was unusually heavily fortified, with high fences topped with razor wire and the free-standing gatehouse where he stood waiting. Inside the wire, he didn’t see anything that looked particularly precious, just run-of-the-mill farm machinery.

  Then there were the bunkhouses. At every other farm he had visited, the laborers lived in and around Bel Arbre, and were ferried in shifts to the farms and fields by bus. It was a real racket—the farmers often owned the little shacks, charging outrageous rents the workers could afford only by sleeping six to a room. For some reason, the men who worked at La Grulla Blanca also lived here.

  He shrugged—he supposed it saved the cost of running buses. The rent was probably just as obscene.

  The most overwhelming thing of all, though, was the smell. Adam had recognized that high, greasy, pungent reek instantly from a summer spent on a farm in Pennsylvania: pig shit. It had hit him as he approached the compound; corrosive and vile filth settling invisibly to coat his skin, his hair, his clothes.

  He wondered how the pigs managed in the heat: a white fence surrounded a sloping field that held a couple hundred dirt-covered hogs, many of them rolling in gray mud constantly misted by water spraying from pipes that rose from the earth like saplings. Near the mud pit were a couple of long concrete block structures, open on the sides, with a corrugated metal roof: shade for the pigs.

  Adam shielded his eyes to look back to the pig field. Workers were hosing down the concrete floor. God, he wouldn’t want that job.

  “What do you want?”

  He turned to see a deeply tanned man in khakis and a white polo shirt bearing the blue Grulla Blanca crest, carrying a thick yellow plastic case labeled REMOTE DETONATOR.

  “Mr. Brodie? My name is Adam Weiss, I’m with the Workers’ Solidarity Movement and was hoping to speak with some of your workers. During their break, of course.”

  Brodie looked at him with open disgust. Behind Brodie, a pale man with stringy blond hair bleached acid-yellow trotted up, a bulky VHS video camera at his side, a clipboard wedged under his arm.

  “Mr. Brodie, want me to videotape this conversation?”

  Brodie shook his head.

  “But you might need documentation!”

  Brodie snapped, “I said no.”

  He turned to Adam. “You can turn around and leave right now. No one here wants to talk to you. No one has anything bad to say about this place.” He scowled. “No one’s come running to you, saying we treat ’e
m bad, have they? That’s ’cuz everyone here is happy.”

  The blond man nodded vigorously. “Very happy!”

  “Shut up, Tarver.” Brodie turned back to Adam. “So you can just turn around and get back on your bicycle and pedal the fuck out of here back to Boston or New York or wherever the fuck you’re from. We don’t like it when assholes like you come down here to stir shit up. People here work hard, and get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.”

  Behind him, Tarver was smirking.

  Brodie was turning to leave when Adam blurted, “I was wondering if you’d heard about the bodies recovered in the Glades today…”

  Brodie stopped and turned back to him. “What bodies?”

  Adam said, “On the news, they said the police have found four bodies out in the Glades. Rumor is they’re farm workers.”

  “Oh, farm workers, are they?” Brodie was sneering again. “Well, we aren’t missing any farm workers, are we, Mr. Tarver?”

  “No sir, Mr. Brodie.”

  “Y’see? All present and accounted for.” He glanced at Tarver, who was fiddling with the camcorder lens cap, twisting it and tugging it, obviously dying to pull it off and shoot something. He said, “Tarver, get the dynamite and the det cord—I said that barn will be demolished by the end of the day, and I meant it.”

  He turned back to Adam.

  “Now get the fuck out of here. I got a farm to run.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Alone in the quiet of the morgue, Jenner sat on a steel stool, filling in the paperwork. He’d finished the two autopsies, and done the initial charting and prep work for the skeletons, then sent everyone home. He’d look at the skeletal remains in the morning with fresh eyes, and give Annie Carr a call; Annie was one of the best forensic anthropologists in the country and had been pretty much the best thing about working in New York.

  New York. A thousand million miles away. Home. What the hell was he doing in Florida? Whenever Jenner and Douggie Pyke had polished off a few single malts at the Temple Bar, Douggie would lean back expansively and say, “New York, New York, Jenner! If you can make it here, who the fuck cares if you can make it anywhere else?”

  According to that logic, since Jenner had done okay in New York (mostly), anywhere else ought to be easy. But, Jesus, Florida had been hard.

  He was exhausted. He scraped the stool back across the terrazzo floor, stretched, and looked at the clock at the end of the room; he had to squint to make out the time—maybe he was just getting old.

  Nine fifteen p.m. Fuck.

  Jenner undressed in the locker room and climbed into the shower. The facility was still pretty new, and the water pressure was fantastic. The hot water blasted his skin like a fire hose; he stood there, arms over his head to embrace the torrent, feeling the grime of his day wash off him, drain away. The lack of sleep, the hangover, the slog through the swamp, the bodies, waiting for the cops and crime lab, back into town, the autopsies, all of it, all of it loosening up and sliding off him.

  As he scrubbed, he thought about the next day. The skeletons were pretty far gone; to really analyze them properly, he’d need to deflesh them completely. He wondered what equipment they had in the office; probably nothing. He’d find a restaurant supply store in the morning, put something together.

  As he was drying off, his cell phone rang. The sheriff, no doubt.

  “Jenner? This is Deb Putnam, from this morning.”

  He smiled. “Deb Putnam! It was just a few hours ago, of course I know who you are—after the day we had, we should probably go out and get matching tattoos.”

  She said he sounded like he was in a good mood; exhaustion always made Jenner a bit manic. He said, “Yes. Because I’m finishing up here, and getting the hell out. How can I help you?”

  They talked about what he’d found, but he soon realized she had something else on her mind. As the initial conversation faded, she paused and then said quickly, “I was thinking you’re new here, probably don’t really know too many people, so I thought maybe we could get together and I could show you the town a bit. If you feel like it, that is.”

  Jenner could almost hear her blush. He pressed the phone to his ear with his shoulder and pulled his belt tight. “Well…” The leather went through the buckle at an odd angle and wedged; Jenner yanked it to the side to free it, then struggled to pull the leather back a bit.

  She interrupted his silent battle with a hasty “Of course, I’m sure you’re really busy with these cases. Maybe some other time.”

  “Oh, no, no—I’d really like that.”

  She sounded pleased. “Well, we could go out tomorrow, my treat. Cormo’s on the Bay has a swordfish special.”

  “Your treat? I already owe you for the chai!”

  Jenner could hear the smile in her voice. “This is Port Fontaine, Jenner—we’re known for our hospitality. How’s about I pick you up five p.m. at your office? They start serving at five thirty p.m., and we want to get there early to get a seat on the dock.”

  “I’m looking forward to it—I have so much more to learn about gator holes.”

  She laughed as she hung up; he was grinning again.

  Closing his locker door, he thought, Who the hell eats dinner at five thirty p.m.?

  CHAPTER 30

  Jenner dropped the paperwork in the office, then sat at his desk and logged the four men into his casebook.

  He was totally wired now—he loved cases like this. Not the sensational side—all deaths are sensational at some level or another—but a group of four hanged men? He’d never seen a hanging homicide before. And this wasn’t just one homicide but four. And it wasn’t just four hanged men but four men hung in two separate pairs weeks or months apart—an absolute first.

  This was murder planned calmly and executed rigorously and repeatedly. There had to have been more than two killers—two grown men wouldn’t have stayed still for a single assailant when it became clear what was happening, even if they were held at gunpoint. The noose would’ve had to be on one neck first, then up over the branch to be tied to the other man’s neck. And then they would have had to get them up on the chairs. So several men, then.

  And Christ—killing two men, hanging each by the other’s weight? Jenner was already imagining the presentation he’d give at the National Association of Medical Examiners annual conference. Where was it next year, somewhere good, he thought—Chicago?

  Through his open office door, Jenner heard a quiet, wet, shivering sound.

  Someone was crying in the lobby.

  Jenner stepped out into the hall. The lights were off—the facility had been closed for hours. How had they got in? He walked down the corridor toward the sound of sobbing. He stepped through the door into reception, emerging behind the counter to see her there, sitting in the dark.

  She was a small, undistinguished-looking young woman, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. She wore jeans and an ill-fitting black top, her glasses dangling from a strap around her neck; she dabbed at her nose with a balled-up Kleenex. There was something familiar about her face.

  She jumped when he turned on the light.

  Jenner leaned toward her. “Excuse me. Can I help you?”

  She stood slowly and walked over to him.

  “Dr. Jenner? You won’t remember, but we’ve met. I’m Sheree Roburn.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Their conversation was brief—there wasn’t much to say, and she didn’t have to say anything at all to make Jenner feel the knife twist.

  No, the police had no new leads. Yes, there were only five detectives in the county, but they’d all known her mom and dad, and they were really working the case hard.

  Yes, it was true that the hanged men were putting extreme pressures on the squad, but that didn’t mean the investigation into her parents’ murders had stopped or been put on a back burner.

  She just nodded mutely at everything Jenner said.

  What did she want him to say? She’d seen the media feeding frenzy over the han
ged men, watched her parents’ deaths get shoved aside. Her dad had been an ME—she knew the score.

  Sheree closed her eyes; Jenner could see her fading. He said gently, “You’re tired. You should get some rest.”

  She nodded, then dragged herself sadly to her feet, lifted her bulky black handbag off the seat, and asked him if he’d say something at the memorial service in three days’ time.

  He promised he’d call as soon as there were any new developments. Again, the silent nod.

  He showed her to the door, her steps slow and heavy, her head bowed with grief.

  Jenner turned off the lights in reception, but waited by the glass door in the dark, watching Sheree Roburn make her way across the parking lot to her car. He didn’t move until the taillights had disappeared into the dark on the far side of the cordon of camera trucks.

  He couldn’t go home now.

  CHAPTER 32

  Jenner flicked on the lights in the garage. Marty’s car, covered with a weathered green tarp, had been moved to the far side, away from the loading dock. He cut the plastic ties on the tarp and dragged it off.

  The car was dry now, blotched with fingerprint powder; as expected, Crime Scene had found no usable prints.

  He opened the front door to pop the trunk; the passenger compartment reeked of mold, the soaked carpeting now furred with splotches of black and gray down.

  The trunk was just as moldy. Jenner peered into it, shone his flashlight around, unsure what he was looking for. He lifted the rotting floor mat; under the carpet there was no wheel well, just a film of settled black mud. He examined the undersurface of the trunk hood, and found nothing.