The jump site on Beaudry was a rush-hour logjam, but the cops at the roadblock could have cared less about anyone getting to work on time. They were already at work, and it wasn’t any fun at all. The way they chose to see things, they were performing a civic duty by manning a roadblock that spared their fellow citizens from a similar fate that they themselves were presently suffering.
It was barely after seven in the morning and the cool winter night was quickly becoming a warm, sunny day. It was muggy like New Orleans usually was, and the sunrise breeze was already petering out. Black uniforms, body armor and an endless stream of pissed-off commuters wasn’t exactly their idea of a jolly way to start the day.
Mas rolled up alongside the line of cars and paused at the roadblock, sweeping away the hem of her jacket to show them her badge. The cops smiled and let her through – any chick on a hot bike packing a gun and a badge intrigued them.
They watched her drive into the cordoned area, weaving around the swarm of response vehicles and parking at the curb. They waited until she removed her helmet, and were satisfied that they hadn’t been snookered into being distracted by a skank or a dyke. She was neither, they concluded, and they both felt that they just had a good, solid moment of guy time, well spent.
During their brief distraction, a pushy reporter and her intrepid cameraman tried to slip past them, but they were halted in mid-stride. Their newshound colleagues nearby swapped grins with them – nice try.
Mas clipped her helmet to the frame, shook out her hair and looked around, assessing the scene. The media was already on hand, pressing against the police tape cordon set up around the impact site. They still had a camera trained on the bloody patch of concrete, although Fareed’s body was no longer there. It was in a body bag now, on a gurney parked at the open back doors of the coroner’s van.
Mas spotted Captain Thorrington leaning on the hood of his prowler, the door open and the coiled mic cord stretched to the limit as he barked at someone on the other end. He was in his sixties now, as trim and fit as a drill sergeant, but lately his patience had been wearing thin. He liked to say that Katrina washed away his social veneer. It was as likely a reason as any. He paused in his radio diatribe to scowl at the crowd of lookie-loos and media surging against the police tape over by the roadblock.
“For Christ’s sake, keep those people back!” he snapped at his lieutenant. The officer nodded and turned to his men. “You heard the captain...”
They nodded back. No one could miss the Cap’n’s booming voice. He had learned the trick of being heard over a Harley’s throbbing mufflers a long time ago.
Mas stepped around a drunk lounging in the grass along the curb. An officer was interviewing him, since the derelict claimed to have seen the entire thing. He lay in the grass all night long and woke up at first light. While he was gazing at the condos above, Fareed took that particular moment to climb over his railing. The drunk was the first one to spot him, but now that he had to repeat his rambling story for an official police report, his mouth had suddenly dried up. He badly needed a drink.
“Damn! I’m thirsty,” he grumbled. The cop signaled his partner, and she tossed him a bottled water. He offered it to the drunk, but the man sneered and waved it away.
“Water?” he groused. “The fish fuck in it!”
The cop and his partner laughed, and so did Mas as she passed them by, crossing the street and angling toward the captain. A yuppie standing by his Porsche was giving another pair of cops a hard time. Their cruiser was parked in the street right behind his ride, and that simply would not do.
“Why am I even paying taxes?” he demanded to know.
The cops had no idea – he looked like a tax cheat to them. But he was a citizen and he wanted them to move their car, so they did. One of them hopped in the cruiser and parked it even closer to his Porsche.
The paramedics were swapping clinical notations with the coroner and his assistant, standing around the gurney by the back of the coroner’s van. Dr. Osborn saw Mas and nodded hello. They had worked on several of these cases over the past five years, and all professional detachment aside the killings still creeped him out. The others with him felt much the same way.
The Captain was still on the horn, so Mas approached the group behind the van. She noted their somber tone, and it lent weight to her suspicion that the body in the bag was indeed another Branding Killer victim.
She nodded good morning and gestured toward the corpse. “Hi, Dr. Osborn. May I?”
He unzipped the bag, exposing Fareed’s bloated face. His arm was broken in the fall and lay twisted over his chest. His fingers were relaxed now, revealing a small crucifix clutched in his fist.
Mas studied it for a moment. “Coptic,” she said.
Osborn frowned, puzzled.
“Christian sect in the Middle East,” she explained to him. He nodded, and then he shrugged. In his book, dead was dead. It never seemed to matter what kind of trinkets they held onto.
Mas took a digital thermometer from her jacket pocket and slipped it under Fareed’s tongue, and then glanced around, waiting for a reading. Everyone was watching her. All the civilians were puzzled, as were most of the cops and paramedics, but the coroner knew what was up. He’d been down this road with her before.
While everyone else watched Mas, Osborn glanced at a black Maybach stretch limousine parked at the curb. The top was rolled back and the chauffeur was behind the wheel. He was looking straight ahead, but someone in back was looking at Osborn.
Osborn nodded to the man in back, and the man nodded in reply, then said something to his chauffeur. As the chauffeur maneuvered out of the parking spot, Mas noticed someone sitting behind the wheel of a perfectly preserved ’76 Land Cruiser, parked across the street.
The man had a police scanner in his lap, and the building address was neatly printed on a notepad attached to his dashboard. He had arrived well before Fareed jumped, even before the cops could establish control of the area. He usually got up before dawn to pray, and when he heard the building’s street address on his scanner, he drove right into town to bear witness. 1147 was the Bible code that meant “The will of God.”
Mas thought the man looked familiar somehow, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He was in his fifties, perhaps older, a nervous type who gripped the steering wheel with both hands like he was still negotiating traffic. He was watching her, almost staring, agitated and intense.
She stepped off the curb and began crossing the street towards him. Seeing her approach, he fired up the Land Cruiser, dropped it in gear and lurched away. Since he was already inside the cordoned area, the cops were only too glad to let him leave. They lifted their tape and he sped away, staring back at Mas.
SCREECH! She instinctively hunched and turned to the sound. The Maybach limousine had come to a nimble halt mere inches behind her. It was leaving as well; she just stepped into its path.
Mas looked around, embarrassed. Everyone was watching her again, but this time they were grinning. She screwed up. Red-faced, she nodded at the chauffeur and stepped out of the way. The cops at the roadblock lifted their tape and the Maybach glided away. She noticed that the limo had Consul plates from Vatican City. She recited the plate number to herself as a matter of habit: 2315.
Thorrington was watching her, standing in the middle of the street. “Oh, Jeez, Chrissy...” he mumbled to himself, and caught her eye. She grinned sheepishly at him, and he just shook his head.
She stepped out of the street and retrieved her thermometer from the corpse’s mouth. “One oh two,” she whispered to herself, and glanced at Dr. Osborn. He nodded; he could read her lips.
“When did he jump?” Mas asked him.
“About half an hour ago,” he said.
“And when did you guys get here?”
Dr. Osborn checked his watch. “Twelve minutes ago.”
“What was his temp?” Mas asked, already knowing the answer.
“One oh six,” he told her quietly. “Same as the last one.”
“Notify CDC?” she asked him, and he nodded. The CDC always wanted to examine any corpse that manifested something as strange as a post-mortem fever, and after ten Branding victims they still hadn’t determined the cause. Mas suspected that they wouldn’t be able to determine anything this time, either.
She slipped the thermometer back in her pocket and looked at the corpse’s face. The eyes were closed, with blood caked around them. Mas gestured to the coroner’s assistant, and the woman handed her a pair of gloves. Mas slipped them on.
“Okay,” she said. Here goes nothing. She took in a breath to steady herself and pried open Fareed’s eyes, cracking apart the dried blood that had sealed them shut after Osborn’s initial inspection.
The pupils of both eyes were neatly seared, as if they had been carefully branded with a hot iron.
The men around her found it difficult to confront. Mas and Dr. Osborn felt the same way, but they kept their reactions under wraps.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Mas said quietly.
Osborn nodded and zipped up the body bag, while Mas removed the gloves and tossed them in the waste bin inside the van.
She turned away and went over to Thorrington, who was watching her. She nodded hello, and he returned it.
“Cap’n, could you have your guys check if anyone taped the jump?”
“We already checked,” he told her. “Come around later, I’ll show you the clips.”
Mas glanced up at Sergeant Henry Lassiter and his young partner, standing on Fareed’s balcony. They were chaperoning the CSI team now, and killing a moment of idle time by watching the goings-on below.
“Mind if I talk to your men upstairs?”
Thorrington glanced up at his men and caught Henry’s eye. They both had their cell phones in hand, and Thorrington toggled his. “Agent Mas is coming up,” Thorrington informed him. Henry nodded, and snapped his cell phone shut.
Mas headed for the lobby of the building, glancing back over her shoulder at Thorrington. “What was his name, anyway?”
“Fareed Aly.”
The one-bedroom condo wasn’t anything special, but then not many people in the city could afford even a halfway decent home, much less hold a lease on one. At least this place was clean and dry and had a view. Although it served as a testament to Fareed’s success, modest though it was, Mas suspected that the reason Fareed jumped was a testament to another thing entirely. Just what, at this point, she had no idea, and neither did anyone else.
A dried-up Christmas tree without presents sat forlornly in the corner. There was a large hand-woven tapestry on the wall over the couch, with a swirl of Arabic writing stitched in gold thread. A hookah sat on the coffee table.
The CSI team was dusting the place for prints and nosing around with magnifying glasses, collecting God knows what from the oddest places, gently placing their tiny treasures in little jars and baggies, using sterilized surgical tweezers and gloved hands. One of them was dusting an antique brass pyramid and a gold Sphinx on the fireplace mantel. Another was dusting the cordless phone, still lying on the carpet where Fareed dropped it less than an hour ago.
“Hey, Bob,” Mas said, greeting the CSI leader. Bob smiled and nodded. He expected to see Mas on the scene, but he was surprised she showed up so soon. Then he remembered why – not only was she ex-NOPD, but she was a close friend of Captain Thorrington as well. The man had more or less adopted her on the same day her father was shot. He’d probably given her the heads-up.
“Can you guys get the phone logs over to me?” Mas asked him. Bob saluted her and got back to work.
Out on the balcony, an EMS technician was concluding a check-up on Henry, but the cop felt fine. The technician shrugged and Henry shrugged back.
Mas stepped out to the balcony. The sky was clearing and it was destined to be a beautiful day, but somehow it didn’t seem right. Still, there it was. Mother Nature embraced death and destruction as serenely as she cherished every delicate tendril of life. It was a recurring observation that would strike Mas at the oddest moments, and this was one of them.
Henry nodded hello, and so did the technician before going back inside. Henry and his partner were still visibly upset over losing the jumper, but Mas chose not to offer any commiseration. She knew cops. They processed the horrors of their job in their own way, on their own time.
Henry recognized her. He had seen Agent Mas coming out of Captain Thorrington’s office several times over the last few years. He knew they were still close, even though she’d gone on to become a Fed. His younger partner stood aside and kept his mouth shut, watching and learning.
“Morning, Henry. How you feeling?” Mas said.
“Morning, Agent Mas,” he replied. “I’m fine now. The weirdest thing happened to me right when he jumped. Like something grabbed my heart, or something.”
Mas just nodded and filed it away. She watched people’s eyes when they spoke, where they flitted to or if they strayed at all. Whether the pupils constricted, when, and to what degree, along with dozens of other subtle and largely unconscious movements and muscular contractions. Anything could telegraph a hint of what the person was thinking, unless they were trained to throw curve balls. Few people were, and probably not a beat cop in New Orleans.
She started with a couple of neutral questions to get a good read on him. “What time did you guys get here?”
“Oh, about six fifteen or so.”
“Did you have to bust in?”
“No, the building super had a key.”
“Where was he when you walked in?”
“Standing right here outside the railing, hanging on for dear life.”
Mas noted the odd choice of words. On reflection, Henry thought it was strange as well. So did his partner.
“Did Fareed say anything?” “Yeah, that someone was making him jump.”
Mas frowned, a little puzzled. “Did he say who?”
Henry shrugged, and took a wild guess. “Some guy down below, I think, from the way he was talking.”
“Did you have eye contact with Fareed?”
Henry nodded, and so did his partner.
“Close eye contact?”
Henry nodded again, and his partner glanced at him, wondering what’s up. Henry had an idea, but he waited for Mas’ line of questioning to play itself out. He heard that she was top notch, so he didn’t give her an attitude like most of the Feds he had to deal with.
“How did his eyes look?”
Henry shrugged again, a little puzzled, although he heard about the Branding Killer from the guys in the locker room. This was the first BK case he had been on.
“Frightened,” Henry replied. “He wasn’t more than ten feet away.”
“Did he say anything else?” Mas asked him.
“Yeah. He said he didn’t want to jump.”
Mas nodded. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see through the glass slider into the condo. The phone was still lying on the carpet. CSI was taking photos of it now, their print work finished.
“Was he on the phone?”
“Not when we got here,” Henry told her. “I think he was hearing voices, though,” he offered.
“Is that why you thought he had a bomb?”
Henry was embarrassed and didn’t reply.
“Anything else?” Mas asked him.
Henry’s partner finally piped up. “Right before he jumped, he said ‘Jesus, where are you when I need you?’”
Mas nodded, digesting this last bit, and looked away to the city. The sun was shining brightly now. Puffy white clouds were lazing in from the Gulf. Sometimes, on a perfect day, a person could almost forget that New Orleans was still a crippled, moldy, crime-ridden disaster area. Almost.
Mas leaned against the railing, still dusty from CSI’s fingerprint hunt, and gazed into the distance, watching the planes land and take off at Louis Armstrong International Airport across town. Thousands of people were coming and going, and they had no idea what had just occurred here. None at all. Even when they read it in tonight’s papers, Mas thought, they still wouldn’t get it. They never do.
“Yeah,” she finally remarked, her eyes on the distant planes. “Well, I guess Jesus took the day off, huh?”