A Hard Death Read online

  “Why didn’t you just break all the windows?”

  Norris shrugged. “You should try breaking tempered glass underwater some time.”

  He stood. “Most likely just another drunk driver—we fish a few out every summer. Welcome to Port Fontaine, doc!”

  He finished the last of the soda and crushed the can, then tossed it to the ranger with a belch. “Recycle this, Deb.”

  “Norris?” She smiled sweetly, fluidly lifting her hand, one finger raised toward him.

  She held on to the can.

  Smirking, Norris stepped to the edge, jumped into the canal, and swam to the car. He pulled the mask down over his face, took a deep breath, then dipped down to wiggle into the broken window. It was a snug fit, and Jenner saw why he’d shed his tank.

  Nash said, “So, doc, you’re from New York, right? Port Fontaine’s going to bore the heck out of you—no one ever dies here but old folks or drunk drivers.”

  He thought for a couple of seconds, then added, “And then, mebbe two, three times a year, we get a stabbing up in Bel Arbre—you been there yet?”

  Jenner shook his head. “What’s Bel Arbre? A prison?”

  “Ha, no!” He mused for a second, then his face assumed an expression so thoughtful it bordered on soulful. “Although I guess in a way, you could say that—Bel Arbre is where the migrant workers live, about forty miles north of here. Mexicans, mostly. Dirt-poor. Guatemalans. A few Haitians. People from Peru. Mostly illegals, but unless there’s trouble, we don’t interfere—who’d pick the strawberries if we got rid of the illegals?”

  He grinned brightly.

  There was a yell from below; Norris had both rear windows down. The hoist began to grind, and the car—a generic sedan, a Ford or maybe a Hyundai, the color of cream gone bad—slowly began to rise.

  Deb Putnam leaned against the cruiser next to Nash, the two of them idly watching Jenner over on the bank.

  She said, “Hey, Tom, the doc looks familiar…”

  Nash leaned in to her excitedly. “Those college girl murders in New York this winter? Doc Jenner is the one that killed the guy.”

  “Oh my gosh!” She stared at Jenner, remembering the crimes. “That was horrible.”

  Then she remembered the aftermath. “Didn’t he end up dating one of the victims?”

  “Yep. Big fuss about that—she was, like, sixteen.” Nash grinned at her slyly.

  Deb rolled her eyes. “She was in college, Tom! She had to be at least eighteen.”

  “Whatever. He’s single now—want me to tell him you’re available?”

  “No, thanks.” She laughed, and looked Jenner over. “Although, maybe I’ll tell him myself…”

  Jenner sat on the bank and watched the car slowly rise, waiting to see the body.

  His first dead body in a vehicle case had also been in Florida, back in Miami, when Marty Roburn was his boss.

  A young doctor, taking his brand-new Saab convertible for a test run on the Don Shula Expressway, made the mistake of flipping off the wrong car; Crime Scene counted thirty-two bullet holes in the side panels, and Jenner counted seventeen more in the doctor.

  They towed the car into the mortuary garage just before dark, the shroud-covered victim still strapped to his seat. The doctor’s father was a deputy police chief in Miami Beach, and the body arrived with a retinue of detectives and uniformed cops. The detectives crowded Jenner as he tried to examine the body, peppering him with questions, and getting testy when he finally stopped answering.

  Then a voice boomed out, “Officers! Step away from that damn car! Step away from that damn ME! Give the boy some room to breathe, for Christ’s sake!”

  There was some shuffling of feet, and Jenner looked up to see Marty in his vest and weathered fisherman’s hat, the madras plaid band bristling with lures, trolling rods at his feet in a green Frabill case. It was a Wednesday, and every Wednesday Marty took his boat out to go sunset-fishing for mahi-mahi and kingfish.

  He laid a hand on Jenner’s shoulder and announced, “The doctor needs room! You’re slowing him down; everyone out except for one detective and one uniform.”

  For almost six hours, Marty stayed with Jenner, watching him work. He nodded approvingly from time to time, and a couple of times leaned in to suggest a technique, but mostly he just sat back and let Jenner get on with his case.

  Afterward, they went for a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen by the Miami River. At midnight, they were sitting at a picnic table by the oily water, sweating in the heat and humidity, Marty going on and on about casting and lures, Jenner, exhausted, nodding occasionally.

  Then Marty squinted at Jenner. He took a big draft of his Blizzard, and said, “Can you keep a secret, Jenner?”

  They walked back to his car. Marty’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was approaching, he explained, and he’d had a jeweler make something special. “Bobbie knows I got her something, and it’s driving her nuts! She’s tearing the house apart, but she’s not going to find it…”

  He leaned forward, reaching deep under the dashboard to feel along the steering column; his eyes lit up and, with a flourish, he produced a small white cardboard box.

  “It’s my own design.” He spilled the contents onto his palm: there were two platinum fish hooks, each on a fine chain. Marty fiddled with them for a second, then showed Jenner that the two hooks fit together to form a heart, the point where the barbs met hidden by a large diamond. The plain hook, he explained, was for him, the one with the diamond for Bobbie.

  “Doc.”

  Jenner looked up. The car was mostly out of the canal, the passenger compartment draining quickly as water gushed from the open windows. A huge gray mass of sodden clothing and slippery, pale flesh was plastered down against the front window, now just above the water.

  The crane motor shrilled as the car rose faster, and then it was clear, swaying slightly over the canal, water sieving from the hood and radiator.

  They waited on the bank for the car to drain.

  CHAPTER 5

  The tow truck pulled the car over the lip of the canal with a loud thump. Inside the car, the body, bloated by putrefaction, had become wedged over the front seat back, the legs splayed up against the front window, the upper torso sliding into the backseat.

  Norris, now stripped to the waist, was at the driver’s-side door.

  “Shall I do the honors?”

  Jenner nodded, and Norris reached through the window and gingerly felt for the handle. There was a soft clunk, then Norris jumped back as the door swung open, water gushing from the foot well.

  The four of them stood by the open door and peered inside.

  The smell of decay was overpowering. From the patrol car, Nash got a yellow emergency blanket, used for covering car crash victims on the highway. Jenner laid it out carefully by the driver’s-side door, then stripped off his T-shirt, wrapped his cell phone and iPod in the T-shirt, then tossed it onto the gravel at the shoulder of the road. For a second, he felt self-conscious about his pallor, then realized they were looking at the livid purple scar slashed across his left arm.

  He pulled on the gloves Nash handed him, then turned and said, “So, who’s going to help me?”

  There was a momentary silence, then Norris grinned and muttered, “Well, I hope neoprene rinses out okay…What do I do, doc?”

  “I’ll drag him forward, back onto the driver’s seat as much as I can, then we’ll pull him out the side together. Stand to my left: if he starts to come out too fast, just grab him and help me support him so we can ease him down.”

  Deb Putnam asked, “Anything I can do?”

  Norris shook his head. “We got it, Deb.”

  Jenner said, “Can you keep an eye on the water that comes out with him—we don’t want to lose any possible evidence.”

  “Got it.”

  Norris zipped up the wetsuit top and called over to his partner, now lolling against their patrol car, “Nash, you owe me, buddy. You owe me big time…”

 
Nash shrugged. “Eh…You were born for this kind of work, Swamp Boy.”

  Jenner leaned into the compartment. The body was swollen, the arms spread wide as if reaching to embrace a lover. Jenner grabbed the left wrist, but lost his grip as the rotted skin slipped off beneath his fingers.

  He grasped the forearm a little higher with his other hand and tugged it forward. The body jerked toward him, then slid quickly onto the front seat.

  Jenner straightened, breathed fresh air into his lungs, and reached into the compartment again. He held the left upper arm, then leaned backward, putting his weight into it. The body started to slide toward him. Norris supported the torso as it cleared the door well. The body slithered out and down onto the shroud.

  Norris peered down at the body. He pointed to a series of vertical gashes in the skin of the chest and said, “Looks like the fish were feeding on him, right, doc?”

  Jenner squatted next to him and looked at the body. He was silent for a second, then shook his head slowly. “Call Crime Scene. These are knife wounds.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Jenner straightened. “You guys got a camera?”

  Nash, now somber, said, “No, sir, just the dashboard video.” Deb Putnam shook her head.

  Jenner found his T-shirt and pulled out his cell phone. He stood over the body and took photos to document its condition.

  Norris said, “You think he was killed, doc?”

  Jenner ignored the question. He stepped back to get an overall sense of the victim. The swelling made the body look like every other badly decomposed body, the bloated features round and generic, like a pumpkin.

  The victim was male, probably heavyset, maybe five nine, five ten. Caucasian—at least, nothing left to suggest he was any other race. Whatever hair he’d had on his head had slipped off; the chin still had clumps of short white beard. An older man, then. The eyes were bulging and leathery, the irises ruddy brown—who knew what color his eyes had been in life?

  Jenner flapped the man’s shirt closed onto the torso. At first he’d assumed the man had lost a knife fight, but the shirt had no holes—it would have been open when the man was cut.

  There were a dozen or so roughly parallel, raking cuts on the chest, vertical to oblique, each about eight to ten inches. During their time underwater, they’d flared open, and the bases of the wounds were bloodless and pale, filmy like some weird white algae. The incisions were very clean, obviously made with a sharp blade; since they were of different lengths, it was clear they’d been inflicted by multiple separate cuts of a single-bladed weapon. None of the cuts looked deep.

  The rightmost wound was different: it descended along the victim’s flank as a straight line, but just above his hip it curved off abruptly toward his back, a pattern of broad scrapes interrupted by finer parallel lines. A big knife, then, with a regular blade, and alternating serrated and smooth edges on the back. It had to be some kind of Rambo weapon, but the wounds were unusual, even for a survival knife. One thing was certain: if Jenner ever saw the blade, he’d recognize it instantly.

  Jenner tipped the head back; it moved freely, as if hinged, exposing a yawning hole across the upper throat.

  He heard Deb Putnam murmur, “Oh my God…”

  He turned to her. “You okay?”

  She nodded quickly, slightly annoyed. “I’m fine.”

  Jenner looked down at the neck. “The poor bastard—it looks like they tortured him, then cut his throat.”

  Norris called over to Nash, who was by the patrol car, talking on the radio. “What’s the ETA on Crime Scene?”

  “At least an hour—they’re all the way over by Dade, processing a burglary.”

  “Tell them to move it—they know it’s a Signal 7?”

  Jenner turned out the victim’s shorts pockets—empty, no wallet, no ID. No defensive injuries on the hands—most likely he’d been incapacitated somehow, bound or restrained in some other way. The legs and feet were also unremarkable.

  Jenner felt a fleck of water against his cheek, and looked up. It had darkened, and the breeze was picking up. Across the canal, out over the Glades, the sky was a bruised purple-black, and the bare trunks of battered cypress trees, lit by the western sun, were bone-white over the brilliant green saw grass.

  “Nash, tell Crime Scene they can just do the basics out here—we’ll take the whole car back to the ME office, and examine it there.”

  The rain wouldn’t destroy anything the river hadn’t already taken care of. Fishermen were using the feeder road constantly and, because it was summer, it rained every afternoon; judging from the body’s condition, the vehicle had been in the water a couple of weeks, so any tire-mark evidence was long gone.

  A look inside the car told Jenner nothing. A coffee cup and some pieces of white paper floated in the flooded foot wells, but there was no weapon, no bindings, no blood stains, nothing but the dank odor of decay and oily river mud.

  He peered into the backseat; nothing there other than a broad sheet of sloughed skin stuck to the driver’s headrest, curling like used carbon paper.

  Jenner started toward the cruiser, then stopped and leaned into the driver’s compartment to press the trunk lock.

  The first spatters of warm rain were tapping the roof and trunk as he popped it open.

  The body of a woman was stuffed inside. An older woman, white or Hispanic, with straight white hair, her dark, bloated flesh straining against the now taut clothes and loops of duct tape that bound her. Jenner caught a glint and looked closer; spilling out of her filthy brown shirt was a fine necklace. He reached into the trunk and lifted the chain. A pendant hung from it, and he turned it to see an elegant platinum fish hook, a gleaming diamond hiding the barb.

  Jenner stepped back and sank to his heels, hands to his face, oblivious to the staring deputies and the ranger, oblivious to the sheeting rain.

  CHAPTER 7

  Adam Weiss was thinking: This is bullshit. This guy is lying. He’s telling me this story because he wants money.

  The man was in the bathroom now: a couple of minutes earlier, he’d stood abruptly and stumbled quickly to the restroom, and now Adam could hear him puking.

  The man was puking because he was drunk, very drunk. No, more than drunk: this guy was high—coke or speed, some stimulant. The man had to be coked out of his gourd to be telling him this story, snorting speed for days to get this fucked up, this fucking paranoid, this fucking out of his mind…

  What was Adam supposed to do with that story?

  He looked around the sorry excuse for an office—a desk, a desk chair, two battered armchairs salvaged from God knows where, all crammed into one end of a double-wide so shitty it made the chairs look fancy. Behind the desk, a stand fan feebly stirred a big wall poster showing farm workers striding bravely across the fields, arms linked in proud solidarity.

  From the bathroom, the heaves and choking gasps reached a crescendo that rose over the roar of rain pounding the corrugated roof.

  Christ. Why the hell did this have to happen when Ricky, his supervisor and the glorious founder of the glorious Workers’ Solidarity Movement, was gone?

  He looked at the generic Commie worker poster again, and wondered if the socialist propaganda meant anything at all to the workers who attended meetings. When Adam addressed them, he felt completely ridiculous—a rich twenty-two-year-old summer intern from Barnard, standing in front of a few exhausted field hands, urging them on to unionization and freedom.

  He fought a sudden urge to run out of the trailer, to get on his bike, and pedal. What the hell was he still doing here? Leave the drunk campesino to the toilet—it’d probably be less embarrassing for the guy! Adam would just cycle home to his little shack in Bel Arbre. It’d take him twenty minutes, tops; twenty minutes and he’d be home and dry. He’d play videogames on his laptop, then text with Tiff.

  It was Tiffany Coen’s fault that Adam was even in that fucking dump. He’d thought he’d impress her by getting a hardcore fieldwork internship, but
when he announced he was spending the summer in Florida organizing migrant farmers, she’d dismissed it as some romantic ego trip, and told him she and Andy Willet were going to help actually change immigration policy.

  So now Andy and Tiff were working for a plush PAC in DC—swank cocktails in a different embassy every night—while Adam was stuck in the middle of a fucking South Florida monsoon, listening to some Mexican or Guatemalan or whatever spew his guts out in the shitty bathroom of the shitty trailer.

  God, he was so fucking far out of his motherfucking depth. What could he do? Surely it was money, he just wanted some money…

  But the man hadn’t asked for any money.

  What do you do when an anonymous farm worker staggers into your aid office and tells you that at one of the estates, if you screw up, the foremen take you out into the Glades and kill you? That they videotape your execution to show new workers what happens if you screw up?

  It was insane, it was insane! What the hell can you screw up so badly they kill you?

  Drugs. Oh, Christ, he thought. It’s drugs. It has to be drugs.

  Adam suddenly realized the vomiting had stopped.

  He listened.

  Silence.

  He looked toward the bathroom and called out, “Señor? Que tal?”

  No answer.

  Oh, shit.

  Adam pushed himself slowly to his feet, the creak of the floor suddenly loud in his head.

  What if the guy had died, just keeled over from the coke and the drink?

  But he would’ve heard something.

  Adam didn’t want to have to deal with this.

  Then he started thinking: if this was drugs, if there really are men willing to kill workers just as a warning, these men would be vigilant. They would watch their employees like vultures, waiting for them to slip up. And this guy had just slipped up big-time.