Chapter 8

Leaving Harry to talk baby this-and-that with the blonde doc, I told him I’d meet him at the car and set off down the hall to the can, remembering to limp to keep the weight off my wounded extremity. The orderly who’d rear-ended me was leaning beside a hand-dryer and talking on a cellphone. He glanced up, mumbled, “Gotta go, Miriam. We’ll talk later.” He snapped the phone shut and ducked out the door without acknowledging my presence.

Outside I found Harry leaning against the car, beaming like a child at Christmas.

“Isn’t it great,” he said. “The kid’s gonna pull it off.”

“Pull what off?”

“Live. Have a life.”

“Sure,” I said. “Who’s driving?”

We were cut off by the dispatcher. “Harry? Carson? We have a call regarding a possible 10-54D at 824 Bellewood. You anywhere close?

The code for a dead body. I grabbed the mic. “Ryder here. Harry and I are maybe four miles. Why us specifically?”

“Caller is Hispanic and not speaking entirely in English, but she keeps screaming about trabajo de diablo…the work of the devil. Plus she’s screaming sangre. Blood. Sounds like a weird one, so I figured we’d best have the Piss-it boys check it out.”

“Let’s hit and git it,” Harry said, jumping behind the wheel and pulling a 180 in the street. It was a maneuver he loved but had never mastered. The rear tire banged the curb, jumped up, burned rubber, dropped back into the street and screamed like a scalded banshee until the tires bit. “We’re en route,” I told the dispatcher when my breath returned.

I hung up the mic and held tight as Harry put the pedal to the floor. He switched on the siren and in-grille lights and we blew past other vehicles like two tons of rabid metal.

The address led us through a wide white gate, down a long lane canopied by trees, and into a circle of a dozen single-story cabins surrounding a bonfire pit. The cabins were simple and rustic. The land was studded with live oaks veiled in Spanish moss. Longleaf pines towered above. It was a clean and pastoral setting, radiating calm.

On a slight hill behind the cabins were three crosses made from telephone-pole-sized logs, the center cross taller than the others. A grouping of white rocks at the base of the rise proclaimed Camp Sonshine. We were in a church camp, one of many in southern Alabama.

“Over there.”

Harry pointed to a larger cabin outside the circle, two stories tall and set in its own copse, almost hidden in the dense green canopy. It was more house than cabin; the director’s quarters, I figured. I saw a woman in front of the structure, her face in her hands. We roared up the drive and bailed. I ran to the woman, Hispanic, in her forties.

“What is it, ma’am? What happened?”

She jabbed fingers toward the house, speaking Spanish through her tears. She bordered on hysteria and I couldn’t catch a word. I put my arm around her shoulders, walked her to the end of the porch and eased her into a wicker chair.

“Calm down, ma’am. Speak English if you can.”

I held her hand as she took a few trembling seconds to gather herself.

“I clean cabins,” she said. “When I come I find a man ees muerte, dead. Madre di Dios. Es de trabajo de diablo.

“Is anyone else inside?”

“I saw no one.”

I patted her shoulder again, thanked her. Harry had eased open the door and was peering inside. Harry called, “Police.” Waited. Called again. No response, the cabin as silent as an undersea tomb.

We entered and saw why the woman had been screaming.

A man was hanging upside-down beneath a suspended staircase, a rope tight from his ankles to a hardware-store pulley on the upper staircase. His purple and blood-swollen head swayed a foot above the plank floor. His eyes bulged hideously, the whites turned red by gravity-exploded veins. Rivulets of blood ran from his eyes to the floor.

The man was wearing lacy women’s panties and metal clamps bit into his nipples. A black ball gag filled his lipstick-smeared mouth, and something like a black cucumber was lodged in his anus. His toneless, fatty back and buttocks were striped with welts. His hands were bound behind his back with a red scarf. His hair was wild, like whirlwinds had blown across his scalp. Six dead candles lay at points around the carpeted floor, white and thick, the wax pooled and hardened on the carpet. It looked like a scene from a demonic Tarot card.

“Lord Jesus,” Harry whispered.

I crept to the body, pressing a puckered thigh with my index finger and studying a pool of congealed brown on the floor.

“The blood’s caked and rigor’s gone. He’s been dead for hours.” I looked closer. “A lot of blood, but I don’t see any wounds beyond superficial: lashes on his back and ass, broken skin on his nips.”

“Every time I find one of these scenes it creeps me out for days,” Harry said. “I never understood B&D.”

“More like S&M,” I corrected. B&D was Bondage and Discipline, a sexual practice where people get a kick out of being restricted in their motion and spanked or whatever. Sadism and Masochism was like B&D on steroids. Some people liked to see how much pain they could take; for them the pain was mixed up with pleasure – the more it hurt, the better the sex.

It was all way beyond me.

Harry walked to the front door, checked side to side. “The housecleaning lady’s booked. She’s not coming back, at least not for a while.” He ducked back inside, started a visual inspection. “Let’s you and me take the place apart. I’ll toss the back rooms.”

Harry stepped through the doorway and took a fast stutter-step, grabbing the door. He muttered, “Shit.”

“What is it, bro?”

“Water on the floor. I just about slipped on my ass.”

I walked over, saw a puddle about two feet around. I got on my hands and knees and sniffed.

“Weird,” I said. “It smells like sea water.”

I wondered if there was a broken pipe in the walls and what in the pipe would give leaked water the scent of the ocean. Harry stepped around the puddle and headed to the back bedroom. I returned to my inspection of the front room and the area around the body.

I found the guy’s clothes in a side closet, brown silk, custom made. No ID. I picked up the jacket and bingo, felt a wallet in the breast pocket. I shook the wallet from the clothing to the floor. Alligator skin and slim, a designer billfold. I riffled a corner of the bills and watched a parade of hundreds flash by, followed by fifties and ending with a single plebian sawbuck. Well over two grand.

I noted a driver’s license tucked in a pocket of the wallet, picked it free. I stared at the ID a long moment before walking back to the body. I spun the head to face me.

“Harry,” I called toward the back.

“What is it, Carson?”

“You ever wonder what TV preachers do in their spare time?”