The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

“Why not? You think we’d lose?”

  “Think about it. Deitz gets free, any normal guy in his situation is gonna try for Mexico or Canada. But instead he comes straight at you and me? Even if we kill him, a lot of people are going to wonder why he did a crazy thing like that.”

  Coker mulled that over.

  “Good point. So what do we do?”

  “Somebody’s helping him, right? I mean, hiding him and backing him up. Maybe whoever it is, he’s already dead in his own basement and Deitz is using his car and his money. Otherwise Deitz would already be back in jail. So think about it, Coker. If it’s not Phil Holliman, who basically hates Deitz’s guts, who’s the next logical choice?”

  Coker thought about it for a while. Danziger went to dig out another bottle of Santa Margherita. When he came back, Coker was just shutting down his cell phone. He grinned at Danziger, a berserk light in his yellow-flecked eyes that always made Danziger feel like smiling.

  “Guess who’s not at work today?”

  Dead Man Talking

  Like most morgues, the morgue in Lady Grace Hospital was in the sub-subbasement. When the elevator doors slid back, both Boonie and Nick got that smell right away. Bad meat and Lysol and Dustbane and clammy air. Death itself. A long, narrow corridor, badly lit, filled with voices and bustle but nobody visible. As they walked down the hall they passed a couple of autopsy rooms, figures in dark green scrubs bending over something laid out on a steel table, bare feet sticking out, as blue as Indian corn, the figures talking low, heads together, hands working. Blood on their sleeves. That god-awful fluorescent bar hanging low overhead as if these guys were playing poker instead of turning a human body into a meat canoe.

  They passed on down without looking in and saying hello and nobody came out to ask them what their business was, if any.

  At the far end of the long dark hallway was a set of stainless-steel doors. No windows. When they got close, a short, blocky Hispanic attendant pushing a gurney emerged from a side hall and banged the big steel button that opened the double doors. While they hissed open he noticed Boonie and Nick coming down the hall, and his face opened up in a cheerful grin.

  “Special Agent Hackendorff,” he said, in a thick Spanish accent. “You in here again?”

  “I am,” said Boonie, as the Hispanic guy looked Nick over, Nick in his hospital gown and paper slippers and big blue bathrobe.

  “You brought one that can walk?” said the attendant. “Usually we have to roll them in. Like this one,” he said, tapping the sheet covering the corpse. The dead man’s feet were sticking out. They were still pink.

  “Looks new,” said Boonie.

  The guy nodded.

  “He’s number nine. They just lost him. We’re putting him in cadaver storage with the other eight. Hell of a thing, that Super Gee thing. Niceville gets weirder every year.”

  He looked over at Nick, smiled.

  “I’m Hector. You look familiar.”

  “I’m Nick Kavanaugh.”

  “Thought so. Seen you around. You’re with the CID, right?”

  Boonie was shaking his head.

  “Hector, Nick’s not with the CID. Nick’s not even here. Nick never was here. You follow?”

  Hector looked puzzled, and then he brightened.

  “Oh yeah. I get it. The Traveling Dude in Drawer Nineteen.”

  “That’s right,” said Boonie.

  Hector tapped his nose, turned away, and pushed the gurney through the doors and on into a large, harshly lit, and chilly room lined in steel doors, three high and covering both walls.

  Waving over his shoulder, he disappeared into what looked like a large meat locker at the far end of the room. Boonie led Nick over to a stack of drawers, the last one on the left. Each drawer had a stainless-steel door on it, marked only by a number. Number 19 was the middle door in the stack.

  Boonie stopped in front of it, sighed, and seemed to slump into himself.

  “Not sure I’m up to this,” he said, smiling at Nick. “Ever since I ran into this case I haven’t been myself. Now I’m about to do it to you.”

  Nick considered Boonie’s face, all the humor gone from it, and the new age lines around his eyes.

  “If you can handle it, so can I.”

  Boonie nodded, tugged at the latch, and opened the door. There was a body inside, naked under a sheet of plastic, lying on a steel shelf. Frigid air flowed out from the compartment and pooled around their feet. The air smelled of stale meat and frost. Boonie rolled the shelf out and stood on the far side, facing Nick across the corpse.

  “Do it,” said Nick.

  Boonie pulled the plastic sheet back, revealing the pale blue body of a middle-aged man, lean and well muscled, with an ugly purple burn scar running from his left pectoral up the left side of his neck. He might have been a good-looking man in life, but now he was a horror. His eyes were two ragged black pits filled with dried blood. Pieces were missing from his cheeks. His nose was gone, nothing left of it but torn cartilage. His left ear had been bitten off and his right earlobe was just a bloody nub. His lips were gone, revealing a set of strong white teeth in a ghastly parody of a smile.

  The autopsy docs had sliced him open from his throat down to his crotch, the classic Y-shaped incision used to open up a body. He had been stitched back together, not carefully, with thick black nylon thread. There was what looked like an entrance wound in his throat, right under the jaw, made by a small-caliber weapon.

  Nick looked up at Boonie.

  “This is Merle Zane, right?”

  Boonie nodded.

  “In the flesh. Mostly. I’ve been keeping him on ice for six months now. Let me lay it out for you, you’ll see why. Fingerprints match a Merle Zane, born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, November 17, 1968, raced stock cars—made it to NASCAR—no priors until he was booked into Angola on an aggravated assault beef after he took a tire iron to a couple of pit guys. Did five years. Out for good behavior. Was working for a couple of classic car dealers called the Bardashi Brothers. No idea how he got recruited into the Gracie thing. But this is him. They found him lying up against a tree, in that big old pine forest that runs up into the Belfair Range. Maybe two miles from the Belfair Saddlery. As you can see, he’s been chewed on a bit, coons and coyotes and such, and he’s got that hole in his throat there. It’s a through-and-through. Left a much bigger hole on its way out the back of his neck. Docs found fragments of a .38-caliber slug buried near the top of his spine. More about this slug in a minute. I’m not gonna turn him over because, tell you the truth, I just don’t want to, but he’s got another bullet wound in his back, lower right side, maybe from a nine-millimeter, and you can see here he’s got a grazing wound on his left shoulder.”

  “All from the same weapon?”

  Boonie shook his head.

  “Can’t tell.”

  Nick looked down the man’s torso.

  “You say he’s been shot in the back, but I’m not seeing an exit wound. Slug should still be in there. Too fragmented? Hit the hip bone maybe?”

  “No. Here’s where things go bat-shit. Somebody took it out, whatever it was, and then stitched him back up.”

  Nick took that in, or tried to, and failed.

  “No. Got it wrong. That makes no sense. I remember you guys put it together. They take the First Third on Friday afternoon, they run, pursuit guys get shot to shit by a third guy at the north end of the Belfair Range, and these guys lay up in the Belfair Saddlery while the whole state is looking for them. They had a dispute—you guys found brass all over the place. A lot of rounds. Zane takes one in the throat, another in the lower back, maybe as he’s turning to run, he makes it to the woods, goes maybe a couple of miles, sits down by the tree—”

  “Goes into shock and dies,” said Boonie. “State of decay and stomach contents put the time of death as somewhere between five and midnight—on the Friday. The day of the robbery.”

  “And then somebody—maybe the guy who shot him back at the Saddlery—
comes along and takes the slug out of his back?” Nick said, following it through. “But not the one in his throat? That’s just …”

  “Crazy. But that’s how it looks, Nick. Also, all the brass we found lying around at the Saddlery was nine-mill. The slug that went into his throat was a .38. Not a Special. An old Smith and Wesson slug. They stopped making those rounds back in the twenties. Not powerful enough. From the lans and milling marks on one of the larger fragments, D.C. said there was a better than even chance that the slug came from a Forehand and Wadsworth revolver. Forehand and Wadsworth was a Worcester, Mass., company that went out of business in 1890.”

  “I don’t get it. We’re saying the guy who shot him came back later, dug out his own round, sewed the wound up—”

  Boonie was nodding.

  “And then he puts a bullet into this guy’s throat using a revolver that has to be a hundred and twenty years old? Is this what we’re saying?”

  “This is what this corpse is saying. And there’s more. The thread used to sew up this guy’s back after the bullet came out? It stopped being made in 1912. It’s an old-fashioned kind of cotton twine they used to make on plantations and such. Can’t be found anywhere these days.”

  “Maybe it was from the Saddlery?”

  “Maybe. Since these guys burned the Saddlery down, we won’t ever know. Now, Nick, I got a few other things to say and you’re gonna have to stand here and let your mind take it all in. Okay?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Setting aside the whole scenario we’ve just been talking about—which in my opinion is utter horseshit and makes no fucking sense at all—the autopsy guys established that the wound in the throat was postmortem—”

  Nick started to speak, but Boonie held up a palm.

  “The wound was postmortem by as long as forty-eight hours. State of decay proves it.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. What. As in what the fuck?”

  “So whoever did the throat wound … was probably not the same guy who did the back wound?”

  “That’s how I see it. This guy was shot twice. Once when he was alive. And two days later, when he was dead. Want to hear the rest?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither. Sometime during those forty-eight hours, the guy had been bathed. Soaped down. Rinsed off.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There was soap residue in his hair. Would you like to hear what we found out about the soap?”

  “No.”

  “Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt. It’s a brand called Grandpa’s Wonder Soap—”

  “Let me guess. It’s real old.”

  “Yes. Grandpa’s Soap is still in business, but the materials in this soap residue—the oils and stuff—they stopped using them back in the twenties. Then there’s the clothes this guy was wearing. Hobnailed farm boots, lots of rough wear, from a maker in Baton Rouge who went out of business in 1911. Initials inside the boot, JR, burned in with a hot—”

  “The initials, again?”

  “J and R. In both boots. Size ten. Faded jeans in a style Levi hasn’t made since—”

  “Let me guess. The twenties.”

  “And the shirt he had on was one of those old-timey types where the collar is separate, gets pinned on with those coppery rivet things? It was starched white and bleached a lot. The material was worn so thin it was almost like paper.”

  Nick had nothing left to say, but Boonie did.

  “There was gunpowder residue on his right hand.”

  “Even after somebody washed him?”

  “Yeah. Must have been. Residue was from a kind of cordite mixture they used to make .45-caliber ammunition. First World War stuff. And now we come to the dirt.”

  “Okay. The dirt.”

  “On the back of his shirt—which by the way had no hole in it where the bullet in his back would have gone through—”

  “Somebody changed his shirt?”

  “Let me finish. The shirt had these stains on the back. Like he’d gone down hard onto his back. Forensics found pollen there, and plant material, and soil particles. Long story short, based on the combination of plant types and soil composition and pollen and a bunch of other shit I can’t understand, they figure the shirt—if not the dead guy wearing it—had hit the ground—flat on the back—somewhere up north, on the far side of the Belfair Range, probably up around Sallytown.”

  Boonie fell into a silence, going inside, his expression a mix of puzzled anger and depression. Nick wasn’t feeling anger or depression. He was feeling dizzy and, if he wanted to be honest, scared. Something was wrong in Niceville, and this traveling corpse was part of that wrong.

  “Boonie …”

  Boonie looked up at Nick, hoping there was an explanation that he had missed, and that Nick could explain to him, and then all this would go away.

  Nick hesitated.

  If he started down this road, there was no telling where it was going to end.

  “You know Lemon Featherlight.”

  “Yeah. He’s a drug squad CI. Seminole. Was in the Corps for a while. Did well in combat but not so good in peacetime. Lacy Steinert over at the probation and parole office got his Dishonorable changed to a General Discharge. Long black hair, sharp face like a hatchet, dresses like a fashion guy. Hangs out at the Pavilion, getting paid to bang the Ladies Who Lunch.”

  “Yeah. Well, I don’t think he’s still doing the escort thing—based on what he was doing with the Corps, Lacy got him into a helicopter pilot course—and he was a help to me in the Rainey Teague investigation. About a year after it happened—Rainey was still in a coma right here at Lady Grace—Lemon was in a beef with the DEA—a flake case but he was going away on it—”

  “Fucking DEA. They’ve flaked more of my CIs than I can count. Agency’s got no reason to live.”

  “Anyway, Lacy Steinert asks me to meet him, says he has background on the case … I won’t get into it … but he made a few good points.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how fucking weird the whole thing was. Think about it, Boonie. The kid disappears into a mirror—”

  “Not really—”

  “No. But that’s how it looked. And ten days later we find him inside a sealed barrow in the Confederate graveyard. Inside the barrow was a guy who was killed in a duel on Christmas Eve in 1921. The guy’s name was Ethan Ruelle. Remember that. We get Rainey out, he goes into a coma for a year. And then one day he wakes up.”

  “I follow. But where we going?”

  “On the day Rainey woke up, Lemon Featherlight was going to visit him. Right upstairs in this building.”

  “Why Lemon?”

  “He was tight with the kid. He knew the parents, used to … visit the house …”

  Boonie’s face changed.

  “Jeez. Not Sylvia?”

  Nick lied his face off and said, “No, not Sylvia.” Boonie let him. He knew what Featherlight’s rep was like. But he said nothing more on that topic. Niceville had its seamier side, even on Quality Street, just like everywhere else.

  “So every now and then he’d come to see Rainey, talk to him, figured maybe the kid wasn’t that far down, maybe he could hear voices … anyway, on the day Rainey wakes up, Lemon is coming up on the elevator, and the door opens, and there’s this guy standing in the hall, waiting. Later on, when things calmed down, Lemon described him …

  Tall, tall as me, shaved head. He had that yard boss look, or like a DI, no looking away. Straight at me, eye to eye … he was wearing farm clothes. Rough jeans, heavy boots—looked old—the boots—marked up and dirty—jeans with the cuffs rolled up. His belt was old and worn and cinched in tight, way past the last hole, as if he had lost a lot of weight, or it was borrowed from a bigger guy. Wide across the shoulders, looked real strong, thick neck with what looked like a burn scar on one side, had on an old plaid work shirt, shirt looked paper thin, like it had been washed too much. He was carrying a canvas bag, on a strap over
his shoulder. It looked heavy. It had markings on the side. Black Army stencil. First Infantry Division, and the letters AEF. He moved … funny … as if he had a stiff back …

  Boonie didn’t like this at all.

  “Lemon speak to the guy?”

  “Yeah. The guy said his name was Merle and he said something about being sent there by a Glynis Ruelle. I checked the records. Glynis Ruelle was married to a guy who was killed in the First World War. He was in the First Infantry Division, American Expeditionary Force. His name was John Ruelle—”

  “Fuck. As in J and R? The initials in those old farm boots?”

  “Probably. John Ruelle’s brother lived through the war, but he was pretty maimed. His name was—”

  “Ethan Ruelle. Who was in the grave where you found Rainey.”

  “That’s right.”

  Boonie walked away again, stood with his back to Nick, his big round head shaking back and forth.

  “Boonie, I don’t like this either. But we have to deal with it. On the back of the mirror that Rainey was looking at the day he disappeared, there was a card, with writing on it. Flowery sort of script. It said ‘With long regard, Glynis Ruelle.’ ”

  Boonie came back again, shaking his head.

  “Nick, Rainey Teague came out of the coma—”

  “On the Saturday. Right before Lemon got to him. The docs were already working on him. Later on he said that a guy named Merle had talked to him, and that’s why he woke up.”

  “Merle. Rainey said Merle?”

  “He did. He also talked about dreaming that he was on a farm with a lady named Glynis.”

  “Fuck. Fuck me sideways.”

  “That about covers it.”

  “And this is the same Merle we got here, the asshole who got his ticket punched on Friday afternoon. The day before.”

  “That’s what we’re looking at.”

  Boonie looked down at Merle Zane’s ruined face, as if maybe the guy would start talking, come up with a few answers.

  “You got Lemon’s phone number?”

  “Yeah. Somewhere on my phone.”

  “Call him. Get him down here. I think he’s yanking our chains. I think he’s behind all of this shit. He’s pulling a stunt.”