Sergeant Deputy Kirt Johannsen was a terse man. “What big picture am I missing?”
Decker started his story while Johannsen snapped gum. Talking outside in almost complete blackness, the only illumination being nickel-colored light coming from the shack’s dusty side windows. The sergeant appeared to be in his early fifties—six-two with a stomach bordering on a beer gut. Round face, thick lips, a ruddy complexion, blue-white eyes that were almost transparent and a scalp glazed with white, thin hair. He wore sheriff khakis and held a wide-brim brown hat. After he had given the sectioned corpse a single glance, he had suggested they get some air.
Decker had gotten halfway through the saga when one of Johannsen’s men approached. He was a freckle-faced kid with a gaping mouth, making him look stupid even if he wasn’t.
“Sir?”
“What?” Johannsen had been listening intently, and was irritated by the interruption.
Freckles blushed. “The little guy over there…the one named Pluto, yellin’ more than talkin’—”
“Get to the point, Stoner,” Johannsen interrupted.
Stoner fidgeted. “Well, sir, he says we can’t take Benton to jail till his lawyer gets here.”
Johannsen sneered. “I don’t need nobody’s permission to arrest a man who has body parts in his kitchen cupboard. Take Benton in and lock him up in the A cell.”
“What about…Pluto?”
Johannsen gave a near-smile. “Since Abner ain’t sleeping one off tonight, you can put Pluto in the B cell.” He turned to Decker. “What’s his part in all this?”
“He’s a high-ranking member of the Order of the Rings of God. Just like Nova was.”
“Nova’s the guy in the cabinet?”
Decker nodded.
“What’s Pluto’s part in all this?”
“I don’t know. I’m not saying he couldn’t have done it, but he’s been with my detective for the last nine hours.” Decker pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one for Johannsen and then for himself. “I know you have to detain Pluto for questioning. And you probably have grounds to book him, too. But he’s feisty. He won’t go down without a fight. And the Order type of fighting is lawsuits.”
Johannsen growled, “Damn weirdos. I told Horace and Mary Jane not to sell to them.” He sucked in nicotine. “Not that I blame them. They got a real good price.”
“The Order’s complaints wouldn’t stand up in court.” Decker took a drag on his smoke. “But they could cause you interim grief.”
Johannsen considered his options. “Stoner, this is what you do. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir—”
“I mean really listening.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You, Hal and Doug take Benton in and leave that weirdo Pluto feller to Lieutenant Decker’s people.” He regarded Decker. “Is that okay with you?”
“That’s fine with me.”
Johannsen said, “I’ll be at the jailhouse shortly. Keep Benton comfortable, but don’t go asking him questions. You can’t ask him anything until his lawyer’s there. All you gotta do is make sure he don’t escape. You think you can do that, Stoner?”
“Do we take the cuffs off of him, sir?”
Johannsen frowned. “No, Stoner, you don’t take the cuffs off. You leave the cuffs on him at all times.”
“Even when he’s in jail?”
“Yes, even when he’s in jail. Got it, Stoner?”
“I got it, sir.”
“Then go do something.” Johannsen waited until Stoner had left. He took a deep inhale of his cigarette, blowing out a thin wisp of smoke. “Don’t go thinking badly about Stoner. Our jails are mainly for drunks…maybe an occasional husband who gets nasty with his wife. We don’t get things like body parts in cabinets.”
“Not my usual homicide either. What can you tell me about Benton?”
“A loner. But most of the people living on farms here mind their own beeswax. I see him when he comes into town to buy supplies. He don’t cause any trouble.” Johannsen took another puff on his cigarette. “He’s got a woman.”
Decker raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Who?”
“Ruth Young. She’s maybe fifty. Divorced. Lives about fifteen miles from here. She owns a pecan orchard.”
“Do they do overnights?”
“I never paid much attention to their social life. But I guess I have seen his truck at her place at night.” He shrugged. “Guess I should call her. First off, to make sure she’s still alive. And second, maybe she’d want to know about Benton. You only found the one body, right?”
“So far. But I haven’t done a thorough search. I wanted to call you first.”
“Think there’re others buried here?”
“No.”
Johannsen looked surprised. “So you don’t think that Benton’s one of those serial killers?”
“No.”
“Any psychology ideas why he did something like this?”
“I’m not even sure he did it.”
“Glad to hear you say that. Benton isn’t gonna win any genius awards, but even he wouldn’t be that stupid to stuff a body in his own house.”
Decker didn’t argue, but he knew the fallacy of that kind of reasoning. Over the years he’d had seen dozens of examples of egregious idiocy. “It’s not the stupidity. Sergeant. It’s the body. It was positioned. Someone was sending a message.”
“What kind of a message?”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Well then, I’d say he got his point across pretty damn good. So you gonna grill Pluto?”
“Yep.”
“The boy impresses me as a harmless fool.”
“Perhaps.” Decker ran his hand through limp hair. “So you never met Nova…the man in the cabinet. He’s been up here before. He takes eggs and chickens down to the Order.”
“Well, I’ve never seen him. Not that I recall.”
Decker finished off his cigarette. “Did you ever meet Jupiter?”
“A couple of times.”
“What was he like?”
“Friendly feller. Looked you straight in the eye when he talked. And damn could he talk—mostly about the stars and the planets. Some of it was over my head, but he seemed to know what he was saying. Benton told me he was a famous scientist once.”
“Once.”
“Benton also told me that Jupiter was in the process of inventing a time machine. ’Course I didn’t give that much thought. You gotta take Benton with a grain of salt.”
Decker took it all in. “Interesting.”
“Is that possible? A time machine?”
“I don’t know. Time machines had been one of Jupiter’s pet projects back when he was Emil Ganz, the renowned scientist. His crazy ideas caused him lots of ridicule. Then he suddenly disappeared for ten years. When he returned, he was reincarnated as Father Jupiter the spiritual leader of the Order of the Rings of God. When did Benton tell you about Jupiter’s time machine?”
“Mebbe six months ago.” Johannsen crushed out his cigarette. “I dropped by the place during one of my usual passes. The two of them had the telescope out. Matter of fact, Jupiter showed me the planet Jupiter. It was out back then.”
“And this all took place about six months ago?”
The sergeant nodded. “Could be Jupiter was returning to his old passion.”
“Seems like it.” Decker thought a moment. “Not that I see any direct connection between time machines and Nova’s corpse in the cupboard.”
“Sir, this is beyond my ken.” Johannsen donned his hat. “Look, Lieutenant. You come up here, you give me a call. You act real respectful. You share your cigarettes and talk to me like we’re buddies. I appreciate it. But we both know I’m not equipped to handle a full-scale homicide investigation. Which this is.”
Decker waited.
Johannsen popped a stick of gum into his mouth. “I know I’m in charge. Which means I could do two things. I could call up Bakersfield, which I would do if there was no history. But since there is a history, I might as well give it to you. Do what you slickers do. Bring in your men and your techs and all your people. I won’t get territorial.”
“You’re a gentleman, Sergeant.”
“Just smart enough to know what I can and cain’t do.”
“Fortuitous that you should call.”
After having removed Nova’s head and the limbs from the cabinet, Deputy Coroner Judy Little worked on liberating the torso, moving slowly and meticulously. The heat had caused the stump to swell in its habitat, making its removal without tissue damage a tedious process. Dr. Little wore a mask. Decker could barely understand her muffled words even though he was kneeling beside her.
“Why’s that?”
“Got a prelim report on Emil Euler Ganz aka Father Jupiter. He had arsenic in his system.”
Decker felt his heartbeat quicken. “He was poisoned to death?”
“No, that’s not what I said. When all the tests are concluded, I predict death by respiratory depression due to barb-alcohol combo. His BAL was .14, plus Nembutal and Seconal—both soluble in alcohol—were floating around in his system. The findings are consistent with what your detectives pulled up at the crime scene—the empty vodka bottle and the barbiturate vials. But, as a side story, there was arsenic in the hair and skin. Now, arsenic’s a naturally occurring element in the body. It’s always there in trace amounts. But he had more than normal.”
“But not enough to kill him?”
“Can’t answer that because I don’t know what his LMD is.”
LMD—lethal minimum dose. Decker asked, “Someone was poisoning him slowly?”
“Could be.” She grunted as she sweated. “You know, if we could blast some air-conditioning in this hole, we could shrink this mother, making it easier to remove.”
Decker said, “I have a couple more questions.”
“Thought you might.” When Little stood up, her knees cracked. She leaned against the counter. “Go ahead.”
“You found arsenic in Jupiter’s hair and skin.”
“Exactly.”
“But you don’t think arsenic was the cause of death.”
“That’s right.”
“If you had to go on record today, you’d say the cause of death was depression from barbiturates and alcohol.”
“Three for three.”
Decker thought a moment. “Could it be that somebody was trying to kill him with slow arsenic poisoning…so as not to arouse suspicion. But it wasn’t working fast enough so he or she substituted barbiturates?”
“Conjecture is your bailiwick,” Little said. “But sure, it’s plausible. You know as well as I do that an OD on alcohol and Nembutal arouses far less suspicion than death by arsenic.”
“According to Venus, Jupiter had been complaining of headaches and stomachaches for the last six months.”
“Headaches and stomachaches—you know, nausea, cramps, diarrhea—are consistent with heavy metal poisoning in small doses. Substantial doses would have given him horrible abdominal pains, motor impairment, dizziness, nervous twitches. He would have been jumping out of his skin because heavy metals can cause exfoliation of the derma. You kick it up even further, he croaks. And it’s not a pleasant death.”
“Dr. Little?”
She turned around. “Hey, Anna. What’s up?”
Anna was a young Asian tech, wearing blue scrubs, her features obscured by a face mask. She was holding a vial of red, viscous liquid. She said, “The blood isn’t human.”
“Chicken blood?” Decker asked.
“I haven’t typed all the proteins yet so I cannot say what blood it is. Only that it is not human.”
Little turned to Decker. “You don’t look surprised.”
“If the living room had been Nova’s kill spot, the walls would have been spray-painted red.”
“So you discovered this body based on a pool of chicken blood?”
“Dumb luck.” Decker regarded the bloody glob of flesh still stuck in the niche. The nipples had been stained brown by dry riverbeds of blood. With the head and limbs gone, the torso was easier to stomach.
Head and limbs.
Abruptly, an image popped into his brain. Another skull and crossbones found in a box sitting on the shelf of a tool shed. He asked, “Arsenic’s common in rat poison, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“It also has a bitter taste.”
“You can hide it. Just mix small amounts in Coke or sweetened iced tea…like the Mensa killer did in Florida. George whatshisface? He did it with thallium.”
“George Trepal.”
“You can also inhale the powder. Maybe he snorted it in cocaine, or smoked it in crack.”
“Possible.” But Decker was thinking about the dozens of bottles of vitamins found in Jupiter’s medicine cabinets. He said, “Or you could put the rat killer powder in a gel-cap and tell someone it was vitamins.”
“That would work.”
“Have you done any toxicological analysis on the bottles we pulled from Jupiter’s medicine cabinet?”
“Nope. No reason to do it.”
“Until now.”
“How many bottles are we talking about?”
“Two dozen—”
“That’s going to take a long time, Lieutenant. You’re talking about opening up each capsule and sending it through gas chromatography. Plus, even if you find arsenic in the capsules, what new thing is it going to tell you? I’m already telling you he had arsenic in his system. The capsules aren’t going to tell you who put it there.”
“I still need it done.”
“No problem. Just letting you know to settle in for the long haul.”
“How long can you last with arsenic poisoning?”
“If it’s done slow enough in small doses and at irregular intervals, you could last a while.”
“Six months?”
“Sure.”
“A year?”
“Possibly.”
Little knelt back down and resumed working. She wedged her hands between the confines of the cabinet walls and the flesh and began tugging the torso.
“Like I said before, arsenic’s a natural element. It doesn’t disintegrate, doesn’t flush out of the body, so there’s buildup. In excess amounts, the first place it’s usually laid down is in the hair and skin because of the rapid cellular turnover. To really see how long the poisoning had been going on, I’d have to section Jupiter’s bones. Bone growth is like tree rings. If there’s poison in the bones, you know it’s been going on a long time.”
“But he’d be sick during that time.”
“Most definitely. Slow poisoning is a good way to keep someone incapacitated.” One final pull and the bloodied clump was birthed from its partical board womb. “Yes!” Holding a red stump in her gloved hands, Little looked as pleased as if she were an obstetrician. “I need a double plastic morgue bag stat!”
Decker grimaced at the sight, but kept talking. “So you think someone wanted Jupiter alive, but out of commission?”
“I don’t think anything. I’m just throwing out possibilities,” Little said. “You know, Jupiter still could have killed himself, Lieutenant. The terrible effects of the poisoning could have driven him over the edge. He may have wanted to end his own misery.”
“Sure, that’s possible.” Decker stood up. “Anything’s possible. Even so, I’m liking Jupiter’s death as a homicide a whole lot better than I did a few days ago.”