We fought the traffic to Forensics, out by the campus of University of South Alabama. Hembree was at a meeting, due out in twenty minutes. I told Harry I was heading over to the morgue and he opted to keep company with a half-full box of doughnuts in the Forensic Bureau’s employee lounge.
Clair was at her desk, book in hand, her lanyarded reading glasses in place. She hadn’t heard me walking the hall, and I watched her read for a few moments: study the page, lick the tip of her china-smooth thumb, lift the edge of a page, turn the page as she moved the book slightly to the left so as to begin reading before the page was fully flat on the left-hand side of the book. Efficient. She even anticipated the wetting process, pink tongue tip slipping out as her thumb lifted.
After a minute of study, I cleared my throat. Stepped to the threshold.
“Hi, Clair. What’s got your attention? A tome on bullet wounds? Blowflies?”
Her neck reddened with embarrassment. Grimacing, she held up a tattered paperback romance novel, the cover illustration of a muscular and shirtless man staring into the eyes of a raven-haired woman in Victorian garb, wind-whipped trees in the background, like a typhoon was blowing through. The title was A Storm of Passion.
“Clair?” I asked. “Are you studying meteorology?”
She tossed the book to her desk. It fell front cover up. She quickly turned it over.
“Idiot things. My aunt goes through them like candy, then gives them to me. Not to read, Ryder, to pass on. There are a couple women in the office who scoop them up the second I set them in the break room.”
“You weren’t reading?”
“I picked it up two seconds before you walked in. Read maybe a half-paragraph. Infantile stuff. Enough chit-chat, my lunch hour’s almost over. What do you need?”
“You did a post on the woman burned in the fire, the one with her hands cuffed behind her back?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I was on my way to work that morning, saw the fire, headed over. I was there when she was discovered, took a look at the scene, what was left. It’s just a passing interest.”
“She was savaged,” Clair said. “There’s no other way of putting it.”
“Explain.”
Clair pushed aside A Storm of Passion, snapped a sheaf of papers from her desk.
“Here, you know enough medical terminology …read about it yourself.”
She handed me the preliminary autopsy report. I sat, flicked on the light beside the chair, started reading. After a long three minutes, I handed the report back. My stomach felt like I’d eaten a sack of cockroaches.
“Whoever did that is a sado-sexual terrorist. Someone who despises women. The word sick doesn’t even kick it off.”
“The flesh was deeply burned, as you noted. But the insides could still tell part of the story. Especially the damage to the vagina and uterus, what remained, that is.”
“All while she was alive?” I asked.
“While I was performing the autopsy I kept praying she’d passed out at some point, missed the worst. What do you think, Carson? You’re experienced here.”
I sighed and rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. “From what I know, Clair, it’s often the agony that keeps the perpetrator torturing the victim. If the victim passes out, the perp loses interest. Her mouth was probably taped so no one could hear.”
“Where do monsters like this come from, Carson?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “Can people be born with broken souls?”
“They’re not born, Clair. They’re made. And in many ways they’re barely a step distant from us.”
“Now there’s an ugly thought. There was torture with the woman in your case, Ryder. The Franklin woman. Think there’s a link?”
“Ms Franklin’s fingers were broken. It’s sad to say, but on a torture index, she got off much lighter than Ms Hibney. Ms Franklin was in her car, Ms Hibney at home. Ms Franklin appeared to be a crime of opportunity, Ms Hibney’s death probably involved planning.”
“So they’re not related.”
“Anything’s possible in freakland,” I said. “Could be our boy liked sticking Taneesha Franklin with a knife and breaking her fingers. He just cranked it up a couple notches with Ms Hibney. Who showed up at her autopsy?”
“Detectives Logan and Shuttles.” She frowned. “Detective Shuttles asked interesting questions, sharp. Kid’s got a future. Logan did like he always does.”
“Which is?”
“Sit in the chair behind me and stare at my ass.”
I returned to Forensics. The doughnut box was almost empty. Harry saw my frown.
“A couple techs gobbled them down. I just had one.”
I frowned harder. He said, “Two.”
I handed him a copy of Carole Ann Hibney’s autopsy prelim in an envelope. Her name was on the envelope. Harry looked at me.
I said, “Save it for later. It’s not pretty.”
He sighed and reached for another doughnut, solace.
Hembree escaped from his meeting ten minutes later and met us in the main section of the lab: white counters, computers, beakers. There were several vials of fluids, some like colored water, the more disturbing ones resembling stew.
Harry held up the cassette. “We were hoping someone could take a look at this, Bree, maybe give us an enhancement.”
Hembree grinned. “Had many lucky days, lately, Harry?”
“None. Why?”
“Because today you caught one.”
Hembree led us to the computer-oriented part of the Forensics lab, a recent addition. A long counter held monitors, keyboards, various electronic devices. The guy who’d pseudo-shot Hembree a few days back was sitting on a stool at the counter. Up close he was seventyish, thinning gray hair brushed back, age-freckles on his pink face, reading glasses strung from his neck with kite string. His forehead was large and high, his eyes a jolly green. He wore sandals over white socks below his khakis and a silky aloha shirt, electric-pink seahorses galloping through a fluorescent blue sea.
“Thaddeus Claypool, our new digital cowboy,” Hembree said.
I stared. I think Harry was too busy admiring the shirt to notice anything else. Claypool laughed, stuck out his hand.
“I know. The manual says all CGs are supposed to be twenty years old.”
“CGs?” I asked.
“Computer geeks.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that your age …ah, that is …”
“Got my first pocket protector at MIT in 1957, Detective. Worked on direct keyboard input, associated algorithms. Drifted to Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies. Went to IBM to make some money in the mid-seventies, felt straitjacketed by the culture. Still managed decent work over eight years. Finished out with twelve years of consulting, running between the two poles.”
“North and South?” Harry asked, confused.
“Apple and Microsoft.”
Hembree said, “Thad’s a Mobile native, returned to be with the kids and grandkids. He volunteers with Forensics twelve hours a week. If we had to pay him based on his consultant’s salary, we might afford two weeks a year.”
Claypool tapped his bulbous forehead, his eyes sparkling. “You don’t keep it busy, your big oyster turns to chowder.”
I handed him the cassette. “I suppose enhancing a videotape is a pretty boring project?”
“Algorithms,” he exalted. “Numbers dancing with numbers, the enhancement program basing choices on statistical probabilities. I made a few tweaks to the software, tricked it out, as the kids say. I love this cop stuff.”
He slipped the cassette into a machine, punched buttons on a keyboard. A monitor came to life, the tape displaying the blond man in one of his few visible frames.
“It’s like he’s built from shadows,” I said. “Anything you can do?”
“Let me establish a balance.” Claypool caused a bright square to outline the tire of the vehicle, as distinct as fog.
He tapped a few keys, mumbled to himself, tapped a few more. I saw numbers race across the screen. Claypool nodded at the numbers like they carried a pleasing message. He finished with a dramatic flourish on the enter key.
The tire shape shivered and disappeared. Seconds later it returned, so clear I saw tread and the valve stem.
“I think I love you, Mr Claypool,” I said. “How about doing that trick with the guy’s face?”
“Faces are more difficult,” he apologized as the bright square surrounded the smudge of head. “More choices to make, less definition. And it’s not a real facial blowup, it’s a statistical assessment of what it might be.”
Claypool reprised the triumphant press of the enter key.
“Lawd,” Harry said, staring at the result.
I scowled at the screen. Though the face was defined, it remained elusive. But I knew it from somewhere.
“How about it, Cars?” Harry asked. “Tell me you’re making a connection.”
“I can’t. But it’s so close. Like it’s on the tip of my brain …”
“Did you see him in the BOLOs?” Harry asked. “Maybe he’s wanted.”
I memorized hundreds of faces on Be On the Look-Out sheets, put together displays of perp photos to show victims, paged endlessly through mug-shot books.
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“How about I flip the image?” Claypool said. “Give you a different orientation.”
Claypool tapped twice on the keyboard. The right-looking face swooshed into a black dot in the center of the screen, swooshed back a second later, now looking to the left.
I closed my eyes and saw the curly-haired blond man. But not on the walk in front of the funeral parlor. Sitting to my right, looking left. A phone to his mouth. Talking through a Plexiglas window to a hulking, scar-headed monster.
“I know where I saw him,” I whispered. “He sat beside me the day Leland Harwood exploded.”