The next morning I awoke to keening gulls and amber sunlight behind the curtains. Like most days I awakened a few minutes ahead of my 5.45 a.m. alarm, probably because it made an ugly sound, like a pig trying to chirp. I started coffee, slipped grudgingly into swim trunks, and walked to the water. I swam straight out for nearly a half mile, then turned and dragged myself back toward the cluster of beachfront houses. My standard four-mile beach run stretched to six as I tried to exorcise Jeremy’s call. I slipped on a pair of faded jeans and white shirt, pulled on a beige thrift-store jacket to cover the shoulder holster, and hit the road north to Mobile.
When I got in, a half-dozen cops sat in their cubes, a couple discussing cases, most on phones. Harry was off at a meeting with the DA’s office on a case in progress. No sooner had I sat than my phone rang. Calls to the detectives went through Bertie Wagnall.
“Guess what, Ryder?” Bertie said. “The local TV stations did a morning piece on that dead hooker. That Danbury bitch on Channel 14 talked about candles allegedly found at the scene. She’s called for you twice, wants a statement.”
“Candles, Bertie?” Harry and I’d requested all scene details be kept tight.
Wagnall belched; a liquid sound. “Alleged’s what she said. People been calling ever since, wanting to talk to you or Nautilus. They saw your picture in the paper and want to give you the benefit of their insights.”
I sighed. “The usual nutcases?”
He chuckled. “I’m surprised at your cynical self, Ryder. These are upstanding citizens with important concerns. Here’s a sample…”
“Bertie, I’ve got too much to do. Just take their numbers and -”
The clicking of a call transfer. Then a woman’s voice, elderly, yelling over a television real close or real loud.
“Hello? Someone there? This the man what handles the lunatics? Weren’t no crazyopaths killed that dead whore…that temptress got harvested by the sword of Almighty God, is what happened. Says right here in my Bible that…”
I set the phone down and massaged my temples. Last month Harry’d gotten called by a man who’d assigned numerical values to the letters in Fluoridated Water. The letters totaled 666. The caller was amazed we wouldn’t arrest everyone in the Water Department.
After a minute I lifted the phone to my ear. Silence. I set it down and it rang immediately. Cursing Wagnall under my breath, I picked it up.
“Christ, how long you people keep citizens on hold?” a male voice said, strong, but with a sub-note of age. “Tell me about the hooker in the motel room, Cozy Cabins. I heard it on the news, the candles. But what about art? You find anything like that? I’m not talking covered bridges on the walls, I mean something small: a drawing, maybe, or paint on canvas.”
“Art?” The woodwork seemed especially porous this morning.
“A-R-T. Maybe you’ve heard of it, bubba - pictures, color, shapes?”
I closed my eyes; it was looking like a twelve-aspirin day.
“Hello? I know you’re still there, sonny Jim, I hear cops farting in the background. It’s the lousy diet; fiber would help.”
I affected my official voice. “No, sir. I personally inspected the room for over an hour. So did our crime scene people. No artwork was found. Thanks for your inter-”
“An hour ain’t much. You’re absolutely sure?”
“A hundred per cent, sir.”
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” my caller said. He clicked off the connection.
I hung up the phone and sighed. Somewhere across the room one of my colleagues broke wind.
Harry didn’t know his ETA, so I headed to Forensics. Beakers bubbled. Printers churned out paper. Panels blinked. The place smelled like bleach with a background scent of rancid meat. Hembree was beside a small centrifuge in the main lab. He popped the top and extracted a ballpoint pen. I wondered what ugly use the pen had seen.
Hembree dropped the pen in his pocket, winked. “Run a dry ballpoint at three Gs for ten seconds and you’ll get another week of writing out of it, Carson.”
I nodded like my life had changed for the better. “Get any print hits in on our motel lady, Bree?”
“To paraphrase the old joke, that was no lady, that was my Jane Doe.”
“No hit?”
“Nothing in the system. Maybe she was just starting her career. I saw a news story last week about how folks in their fifties and sixties are going back to college just for fun…”
“Don’t go there, Bree. Anything from the other prints?”
“Still got a bunch to process and run. Won’t be long.”
Hembree leaned his bony frame against the long white counter and smiled coyly. I’d seen it before, always an irritant.
I said, “You’re waiting for me to ask something else, right?”
He jiggered his eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”
“You got something on the candles?”
“Common, available at a zillion places. We did a burn-rate study last night. Looks like the candles still lit had burned for eight to ten hours.”
He kept the coy smile on his moon face. More to come.
“How about the jewelry?” I asked.
Hembree whistled. A slender young woman appeared seconds later. In her late teens or early twenties, she had orange-blue hair and a wide assortment of piercings. There was a patch of unviolated real estate atop one ear, but maybe she was saving that for something special, like a Christmas ornament.
“This is Melinda. She’s doing work-study with us this semester. Melinda, this is Carson Ryder. The Mayor’s Officer of the Year, and he still can’t figure out how to comb his hair.”
“I like it,” Melinda said, studying me. “Punk’s retro, but cool on the right face.”
“It’s not a style,” Hembree chuckled, “it’s drying your hair by driving with the window down. Melinda, tell Detective Ryder about the jewelry on the victim.”
“Cheesy junk. Stamped, not cast. Real low quality.”
“The symbols mean anything?” I asked.
“A mish-mash. Some stuff is Goth, the swords, pentacles; some’s more New Age, faeries and things. There’s cross-over between the two, but not much.”
“She wasn’t making a personal statement, like a Satanist message?”
“If she was, she didn’t know the language.”
Hembree dismissed our ornamentation consultant. She walked away rather gingerly and I wondered what else she’d pierced.
“You’ve got one big question left, Carson,” Hembree said.
“What was the henna-colored substance in the creases of the skin?”
“Bingo! That’s the big question. What it is, Carson, is nothing more than red clay.”
His previous reference to zombies suddenly made sense. I said, “You’re thinking this woman was buried and exhumed before coming to the motel?”
He grinned. “Some people can’t make up their minds, I guess.”
I returned to the office and told Harry the news.
“Freaky and geeky,” he said, tugging on a tie so yellow it shamed lemons. “Candles and flowers, OK, the perp’s got a thing for dressing a scene. But the back-from-the-grave bit jumps things up a level.”
The phone rang and I grabbed it up. Hembree.
“The woman in the motel’s still a cipher, Carson. But I got a print hit from the room. AFIS picked it up from a passport application three years back. Name’s Rubin Coyle. Lawyer with Hamerle, Melbine and Raus. Blue eyes, brown hair. Forty-four years old. Five-ten in height, weighs one hundred and -”
“How’d you get all that info?”
“He’s been listed as Missing. By the Mobile Police. You folks ever talk to one another over there?”