“You brought this on yourself, Ryder,” Chief Plackett said, demoting me from detective to surname. He turned from the window behind his desk to face me. It wasn’t a happy face.
“It came out of the blue is all I’m saying, Chief.”
He put his knuckles on his desk, leaned toward me. “I didn’t know the reporter would contact you so early. I was going to call you in this morning, give you the news about the agreement with Channel 14.”
I glanced down at the globe, saw Siberia, looked away. “You didn’t expect that the first thing she’d do would be to -”
“I’m not happy with the entire situation. I’m even less happy that you’re trying to shift the emphasis from you to me.”
“Nor did you mean to manhandle the camera guy -”
“Videographer.”
Plackett narrowed an eye at my correction. Where was Harry when I needed him? He would have heard what I was about to say, faked a sneeze halfway through the first syllable. Or simply punched me. The chief would probably have jumped Harry to lieutenant. Instead, Plackett turned back to the window, as if the oily morning mist was more attractive.
“Here’s the way it’s shaken out, Ryder. The station is forgetting you attacked one of their personnel. In return, one of their reporters - this Danbury woman - gets in the door. She wants first shot at a story on this case, and that’s what we’ve agreed to allow her. Don’t give away company secrets, but don’t be prickly about sharing the other info. And make sure Nautilus is singing off that page, too.”
“She’s already stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. If she does it again, it might -”
He spun back to me. “Zero,” he snapped.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Your argumentation allowance on this, Ryder. It’s zero. With a zee, as in zip your damn lips and keep them that way.”
I nodded. He glared at me like he thought I nodded too loud. He jerked his thumb toward the door. I did the quietest nod possible, then crept out. I headed back to the detectives’ room. Harry stood in Roy Trent’s cubicle, Roy sitting long-faced with his arms crossed over a pile of files. When I walked up, Roy pushed back dark hair falling to his eyebrows, pointed to his brow.
“How’s my forehead look, Carson?”
“Uh, looks fine, Roy. Why?”
He let the hair fall back. “I’ve been banging it into walls for a week. That backshooting ten days back, Orange Lady? It’s not panning out the way I thought. We’re missing something.”
“You got our sympathy,” Harry said. “But we got our own bucket of worms to untangle.”
“Wanna trade buckets?” Roy asked, only half-joking. “Fresh perspectives, all that?”
“On one condition,” Harry said. “There’s no art involved, right? You didn’t have any art laying around the body, did you? Shiny little pictures?”
Roy shook his head sadly. “Nope. Only thing near my vic’s body was a pool of blood. And an orange.”
Harry and I made our way back to our desks. It was quiet on the floor, a couple guys on phones, the rest out on individual trails of misery. Summer’s heat was near peak, which always upped the homicide quotient. It didn’t help that Plackett had assigned our open cases to the other dicks, letting us full-throttle this one - not that it was making a difference.
“The chief bang on your head a little?” Harry asked when we were out of Trent’s earshot. “Thump you and lump you?”
“Shat on me and spat on me.”
He mulled it over. “Not bad.”
I said, “You no doubt heard rumors of an unholy alliance…”
“If you mean us and a certain lady reporter, I heard. We’ll keep her inside just enough to make her think she’s inside, but really…”
I shot a thumbs-up. “She won’t get to know jackshit.”
“There you go.”
I looked up and saw my desk a dozen feet ahead of me. The desktop was a paper junkyard: files, folders, sticky notes, timelines, interviews, photos. But nothing had sparked that Aha! Moment - finding the single fact that pulls one event into alignment with another, then another and another…and the sound of falling dominos is like a twelve-string guitar set on High Anthem Rock.
All I saw was a silent pile I’d swam through a dozen times from six different directions. If I sat in front of it again, I’d drown.
I stopped dead in the middle of the floor.
“Carson?” Harry said. “You all right?”
“I need to see water,” I said.
We were on the causeway fifteen minutes later, and I felt better than in days. A slender strip of land crossing northern Mobile Bay between Baldwin and Mobile counties, the causeway borders on holy. Wider stretches are home to fish camps, crab shacks and ramshackle bait shops. Here and there, vehicles park beside the two-lane, pickup trucks and station wagons predominant. Somewhere near the vehicle you’ll see an old fisherman - black more often than not - kicked back in a lawn chair, rod in hand, hoping for a little luck. Sometimes entire extended families fish together, generations drawn to the water, to the causeway.
Another reason I love the causeway is that it bends to the whim of nature. Scant feet higher than the waves, the causeway occasionally gets flooded over. For a few days, it’s home to flounder and specs and scuttling crabs. When it dries, we humans get sway of it again. Still, now and then, a big gator crawls from the Bay intent on taking a walk on the pavement. Traffic slows or stops until the sheriff’s department sends someone out to relocate ol’ snaggletooth. I love such moments.
Paralleling the causeway is the Bayway, an elevated conduit built to facilitate the passage of workers and goods to and from Mobile with the greatest possible dispatch. No floods, no gators, no families relaxing with a line in the water. I drive the Bayway only when speed is necessary or the causeway is closed. Like many contrivances designed to outwit nature and expedite commerce, it’s a soulless creation, the antithesis of the causeway.
Harry pulled in behind an old junker either abandoned or awaiting repairs. We were at one of the wider pull-offs, a good twenty feet to the high reeds at the water’s edge. The low waves slapped the shore. A pair of crabbers were pulling traps a couple hundred feet out in the Bay, dragging the rectangular baskets to the surface, checking for blues. They followed a rigorous pattern: check a trap, pull a few draughts from their beers, putter twenty or so feet to the next trap. I admired their methodology.
Harry and I leaned against the side of the car, drank convenience-store coffee, and stared at the crab fishermen. The sun was pushing higher and the water sparkled. I said, “I had to get away from my desk, bro. I’m getting sucked under by details.”
Harry sipped, thought. He studied the abandoned wreck down the way, pasted with bumper stickers: I’m On the High Road to Heaven, Jesus Saves, Read Your Bible.
“Strip it down to bumper stickers for me, Cars.” He said, pointing at the junker, “Just like that.”
“Do what?”
“Leave out the details. Tell me what’s gone down in the fewest possible words.”
I studied the crabbers and gathered my thoughts. “In 1970, Marsden Hexcamp kicks off a killing spree that lasts almost two years. He creates a collection of paintings and drawings based on at least six murders: his ‘Art of the Final Moment’. Fast-forward to approximately two weeks ago. A man named Rubin Coyle is -”
“How big a bumper you got?” Harry said. “Edit.”
I did some mental Cuisinarting, said, “Two weeks back, negotiator Coyle gets art in mail. Disappears shortly thereafter.”
“That’s better. Keep going.”
“Marie Gilbeaux killed the following Saturday or Sunday. Buried.”
“Good,” Harry said. “Then, on Monday -”
“We’re made Officers of the Year,” I joked.
Harry shot me the eye. I said, “Sorry. Monday or Tuesday, Marie Gilbeaux is dug up. Tuesday night her body is left in the Cozy Cabins. A strange and carefully crafted scene. Body found Wednesday, the same day someone mails art to her at the convent.”
Harry popped the lid from another coffee, poured in three packets of sugar, two of cream, stirred it with his little finger. “Art possibly created by the same artist who killed a half-dozen folks thirty years earlier. What else?”
“If you mean facts, that’s all there is.”
Harry shook coffee drips from his finger, sucked it. “You know, Cars, with all the loose wires cut off, one thing screams at me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The exhumation. It makes no sense. Marie is dead and presumably hidden underground. Why call attention to the crime?”
“Exactly. And somehow, Carson, we’re supposed to think this is being driven by thirty-five-year-old paintings from a guy who couldn’t control his bowels.”
“Rumor has it.”
Harry laughed, a high and improbable warble.
“You know, Carson, without the dead bodies, this’d be a damn joke. Come on, let’s go stare at some paper.”
We stared until eight that night. Nothing happened.