The Little Death Read online

  “Why don’t you call Vinny?” Mel asked. “See if he knows the guy and can get us a few minutes inside.”

  Vinny Carissimi was the Lee County medical examiner and a good friend of Louis’s, and there was a fraternity of MEs across the state, just as there was for cops.

  “Let’s go find a phone,” Louis said.

  The medical examiner’s office was located around the back of the building. Louis and Mel parked in the last row of the lot, next to a jail transport bus. They watched as a county van pulled up, letting out a deputy with an orange Igloo cooler.

  A few minutes later, Barberry came around the corner of the building and disappeared inside. He reappeared forty minutes later, a little paler. Without lifting his head even to look around, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.

  Louis and Mel waited five more minutes before they went inside. The automatic doors opened with a wheeze, drawing the attention of a deputy standing farther down the hall, the same one who had brought in the Igloo cooler. Despite the NO SMOKING sign above his head, he was stealing a few puffs of a cigarette. He looked at Louis and Mel like a kid caught in the high school john, then managed to regain some sense of command.

  “Hold up,” the deputy said. “Who are you?”

  Louis paused. As a favor to Vinny, the ME was expecting them, but Louis couldn’t be sure the deputy wasn’t assigned by Barberry to guard the head from outsiders. So he lied.

  “Dr. Vincent Carissimi, Lee County ME,” Louis said. “This is Detective Landeta. We’re here about the severed head.”

  “Oh, well, then,” the deputy said, gesturing toward the door closest to Louis. “You go right ahead. Dr. Steffel is right in there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Louis held the door for Mel and followed him inside. In the large tiled room, three stainless-steel autopsy tables, empty and shiny, sat under hooded lights. Below the shout of industrial-strength Lysol lurked the sour whisper of rotting flesh.

  A door near the back opened, and a small woman in green scrubs came through it. She was about fifty, with a pretty pale face and a short, dark pixie haircut.

  “Louis Kincaid?” she said, coming forward with outstretched hand.

  “Dr. Steffel?” Louis asked.

  “Sue Steffel,” she said. She looked expectantly toward Mel, and Louis introduced him.

  “I appreciate you letting us get a look at Durand,” Louis said.

  “Vinny and I are old friends,” Dr. Steffel said with a smile. “If he vouches for you, then you’ve got to be okay, even if you are cops.”

  “Ex-cops,” Mel said.

  “There’s no such thing,” she said.

  “Point taken,” Mel said with a smile.

  Dr. Steffel crossed her arms and leaned back against a steel table, giving them both an appraising look. “Vinny says you’ve got an open mind.”

  “A mind is like a parachute,” Louis said. “It only works when it’s open.”

  “Well, in this room, I work only with the facts,” Dr. Steffel said. “And too often I find myself dealing with people who form their theories first and then try to make the facts fit.”

  “People like Barberry?” Louis asked.

  Dr. Steffel held his eyes for a long time, arms still folded.

  “We’re just trying to find out the truth about Mark Durand,” Louis said.

  She pushed away from the steel table. “Which part of him do you want to see first?” she asked.

  “Either.”

  Dr. Steffel motioned for them to follow her into a second room lined with freezers. She opened one, pulled out a gurney, and threw back the blue sheet.

  The body lay chest up. It had been washed, and the skin was pale gray, the chest, arms, and legs knotted with muscle, the belly flat. Louis swallowed back a rise of bile.

  There was something surreal about a body that was in perfect shape but had only a ragged stump of a neck. It looked like a toppled Greek statue.

  “You’ll notice a pronounced lack of color,” Dr. Steffel said. “The blood loss was massive.”

  Louis stepped closer. There were no other wounds, except for some small lacerations just visible over the shoulder. But the kneecaps were bruised and torn.

  “May I?” Louis asked, and nodded to a hand.

  “Be my guest,” Dr. Steffel said.

  Louis took Durand’s wrist and turned it so he could see the palm. It was shredded like the knees.

  “His knees and palms are torn up,” Louis said, for Mel’s benefit. “Like he was crawling around.”

  “Take a look at this,” Dr. Steffel said. She turned the body onto its side to expose the back. The red marks extended all the way around the torso. Thickest across the middle of the back, they formed a road map of welts, cuts, and tattered skin.

  “It looks like he was whipped across the back,” Louis said.

  “How bad?” Mel asked.

  “Bad.”

  Dr. Steffel lowered the body back to the gurney. Louis looked again at the bruised knees. The image of Durand groping around in the darkness with a whip cracking behind him was hard to stomach.

  “Where is the head?” Louis asked.

  Dr. Steffel moved to a smaller drawer. She paused before opening it and looked to Louis and Mel. “You want something to cut the smell?”

  Louis and Mel shook their heads. Dr. Steffel pulled out the drawer and the smell spilled out into the cold room. Louis fought back the urge to gag.

  The head was lying on its side, facing them. Unlike the body, it was well into putrefication, the flesh swollen and mottled. Part of the left jaw was missing, exposing the lower teeth, and the eyes were gone, leaving only sunken black holes.

  “You guys okay?” Dr. Steffel asked.

  Louis managed a nod.

  “Peachy,” Mel muttered from behind a handkerchief.

  “The head was found three hundred yards from the body and was out there almost a week longer,” Dr. Steffel said. “I’m pretty sure what you see here is the work of animal scavengers. I’ll be able to tell more after I get in for a good look.”

  Louis drew in three shallow breaths, not wanting to risk one deep one.

  “Come around to this side,” Dr. Steffel said.

  Louis and Mel joined Dr. Steffel on the other side of the table. He heard the snap of latex as Dr. Steffel pulled on some gloves. She carefully raised Durand’s tangled, dirty hair from his neck.

  “The first thing I wanted to know was if the head was cut off or chewed off,” Dr. Steffel said. “To do that, I needed to expose the vertebrae and look for tool or teeth marks. It was definitely cut off. Grab that magnifying glass over there and I’ll show you.”

  There was a fresh vertical incision from the base of the skull down what was left of the neck. The vertebrae glinted in the tattered tissue.

  Louis picked up the glass and held it over the neck. Even before Dr. Steffel pointed them out, Louis saw two crevices in the bone—knife nicks. One was deeper than the other by a half-inch.

  “Hesitation marks?” Louis asked.

  “Or miscalculation,” Dr. Steffel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The killer could have miscalculated the correct spot to place the weapon,” Dr. Steffel said. “Or miscalculated the strength one needs to sever a human neck. Either way, your killer took three swings. The first two are evident here, and the third was complete and fatal.”

  Louis felt Mel pressing behind him and stepped aside so he could get a look. Mel bent low over the head, lifted his yellow-lens glasses, and squinted.

  “Even I can see that,” he said. He straightened and moved back quickly, taking a breath. “Any thoughts on the exact type of weapon?”

  “I haven’t had any time to check my catalogues and make any comparison,” Dr. Steffel said, “but I can tell you it’s going to be a long blade of considerable strength and narrow width. Something that allows a wide-arc swing that would give the killer the momentum needed to sever the neck.”


  “Like a sword?” Mel asked.

  Dr. Steffel smiled. “That’s the first thing that came to my mind,” she said. “But it’s important we don’t jump to conclusions. There are many other kinds of weapons out there that could do the trick, and we need to eliminate them one by one.”

  “Do you have any idea what position Durand was in when he was decapitated?” Louis asked.

  “Unless his killer is twenty feet tall, Durand was kneeling,” Dr. Steffel said. “Again, I can be more precise later, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m estimating his killer to be between five-eight and six feet.”

  Reggie was about five-nine, Louis thought. But Reggie also looked like he had never seen the inside of a gym.

  “Dr. Steffel,” Louis said, “how much strength would it take to cut off a head?”

  “Well, it’s not easy to behead someone,” she said. “In the old days, they used axes and broadswords, and you had to be pretty experienced to hit your mark. But then they invented the guillotine to make the task easier.”

  “So, an out-of-shape guy could do this?” Louis asked.

  She nodded. “If the blade was sharp and the person swung it just right, he could lop the head off. Strengthwise, he wouldn’t have to be Conan the Barbarian.”

  A phone rang somewhere in another room, and male voices carried behind it. Louis did not want to be caught here in an unauthorized interview and end up spending the next six hours in a jail cell on a trumped-up obstruction charge. But he had one more question.

  “Do you know if any evidence was picked up around the scene?” he asked. “Cigarette butts? Candy wrappers? Anything?”

  “I know they didn’t find much,” Dr. Steffel said. “You’d have to talk to the techs to be sure. But I doubt they’ll be very forthcoming. Their supervisor is Barberry’s cousin.”

  Dr. Steffel withdrew a business card from her pocket. “Call me if you discover anything worthwhile. I’ll be glad to give you my sense of things.”

  Louis stuck the card in his pocket and started to leave, but a final question popped into his head. He turned back to Dr. Steffel.

  “Doctor,” he said, “have you ever seen anything like this before? A decapitation with torture?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been a medical examiner for fifteen years, some time here and some out west. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It takes a mean sonofabitch to whip someone when he’s on his hands and knees and probably begging for mercy.”

  Dr. Steffel looked back at the head and slowly closed the drawer. The stench lingered in the air.

  “I’d say this took a true monster,” she said.

  Chapter Five

  After he left the medical examiner’s office, the first thing Louis did was put the top down on the Mustang. Anything to get the smell of the rotting head from his nose.

  They were heading west into the low sun. Louis slowed the Mustang to a crawl as the WELCOME TO CLEWISTON, AMERICA’S SWEETEST TOWN sign came into view.

  “Is this berg as ugly as I remember it?” Mel asked.

  Louis eyed the Dixie Fried Chicken joint. “It’s a good place to pass through, I’d say.”

  “I was thinking that may be exactly what that tan luxury car was doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you were driving from coast to coast, this is an easy route. The car could have been coming over from the west coast and just passing through.”

  Louis was quiet. Mel was right but only to a point. In the three years Louis had lived in Fort Myers, he had never once seen a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley. Even out in the moneyed neighborhoods on Sanibel and Captiva, the most extravagant cars he ever saw were Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. Still, there was plenty of big money down near Naples, where a Rolls wouldn’t have been out of place.

  “We need to stop and ask where this Devil’s Garden place is,” Louis said.

  “Go a couple miles west of town, then turn left when you see the sign for the airstrip,” Mel said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I asked the receptionist back at the ME’s office while you were in the can.”

  They were out of Clewiston now, the stores lining Sugarland Highway giving way to the black dirt of the fallow fields. Louis spotted the sign for the airstrip and hung a left. They were heading due south, away from the cane and vegetable fields into pastureland divided by low wood fences. Clots of cattle stood motionless beneath the low branches of the live oaks, snow-white egrets perched on their rust-brown backs.

  Louis knew there were cattle ranches in Florida, but he had always assumed they were somewhere north, maybe by the horse farms up near Ocala. It hit him again, as it had on the drive over, that Florida was many small unexpected worlds within its one large obvious one.

  The road was deserted. Except for an occasional shed or other outbuilding in the pastures, there were no houses, no stores, no sign of human activity. It was, Louis thought, a good place to dump a body.

  But the body hadn’t been dumped. Mark Durand had been murdered out here. How had his murderer gotten him out here? And why bother to go so far from Palm Beach when any freeway drainage ditch or canal would have done the job?

  They were coming to an intersection. A small state-issued green sign said: DEVIL’S GARDEN. Louis pulled the Mustang to a stop on the side of the road.

  Mel sat up in the seat and adjusted his sunglasses. The yellow lenses maximized contrast, so Louis suspected Mel could see pretty much what he himself could see: a T-section stop sign, a cluster of gigantic live oaks swagged with Spanish moss, and miles of pastureland.

  “Why’d we stop?” Mel asked.

  “We’re here.”

  “Where the hell is the town?”

  “There is no town.”

  Mel surveyed the empty pasture and blew out a sigh. “Fucking Barberry. He knew there was nothing here. How are we going to find this damn cattle pen?”

  Louis spotted a small sign in the weeds on the other side of the road. He got out and went to it. MARY LOU’S STRAIGHT AHEAD. He hadn’t noticed any stores as they drove in. Back in the car, he turned the Mustang around and headed back north.

  “We giving up?” Mel asked.

  “Not yet.”

  A quarter-mile down the road, there was another sign with an arrow pointing right. The small cinder-block building sat back from the road in a dusty parking lot. There was an empty rust-pocked pickup truck at the lone gas pump.

  “You coming in?” Louis asked as he parked.

  Mel was squinting at the store. “Bring me a Coke.”

  The interior of the store was dark after the brightness of the sun, a cramped warren of shelves holding canned goods, cereal, motor oil, and baskets of mangoes and blackening bananas. A skinny girl of about ten in a dirty sundress and dusty bare feet was staring longingly at a display of penny candy. Louis spotted an old cooler in the back and got a Coke. As he passed the girl, he paused, fished in his pocket, and held out a quarter. The girl hesitated, then took it.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome.”

  At the counter, Louis waited until the man behind the register was finished ringing up a six-pack of Tecate beer for an old fellow with a biblical beard.

  “I wonder if you could help me out,” Louis asked as the man handed him his change.

  “You lost?” the man asked.

  “Sort of. Did you hear about the body they found out here last week?”

  The man glanced at the old geezer, who was staring out the door at the Mustang. “Everybody around here heard about it,” the counterman said.

  “Do you know exactly where it was found?” Louis asked.

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Why you wanna know?” the old man asked.

  “I’m helping the police with the case,” Louis said.

  “That so? Then how come you don’t know where the body was?”

  “I’m not looking for trouble. Just a little help.”r />
  The old man held Louis’s eye for a moment, then turned away. So did the guy behind the counter.

  Louis picked up the Coke and pushed through the door. Back at the Mustang, he handed the Coke can to Mel.

  “Any luck?” Mel asked as he popped the top.

  “We’re on our own.”

  Louis noticed the little girl coming toward the car, carrying a small brown bag. She stopped before Louis, her jaws working a wad of bubble gum.

  “I know where they found it,” she said.

  “Where?” Louis asked.

  The girl looked at Mel and back at Louis. “Five dollars.”

  Louis laughed. The girl didn’t break a smile.

  “I tell you where it is for five dollars,” she repeated.

  “Mel, give her five bucks,” Louis said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Give her the money.”

  Mel grunted, dug in his pocket, and held out a bill.

  The girl started to grab it, but Mel pulled it back, holding it just out of her reach.

  The girl pointed south down the road. “Go past the sign for Devil’s Garden. The next road you come to, turn left. Take the road to the end. The pen is there. But it’s real old, and you have to look hard for it in the weeds.”

  “You gonna trust this little extortionist?” Mel asked Louis.

  “Give her the money,” Louis said.

  Mel handed over the five. The girl stuffed the money into her dress pocket and ran off, her bare feet kicking up dust whirls in the still air.

  Louis got back into the car and headed south. He almost missed the turn. The car left asphalt for rutted gravel. The trees grew thick overhead, an arching tunnel of live oaks. They passed a sign that read state land archer preserve.

  The gravel road ended abruptly in some high weeds. Louis stopped the car. About fifty feet ahead, he saw a spot of yellow—crime tape hanging limp on old wood.

  “Why’d you stop?” Mel asked.

  “The road ends. I don’t need a flat out here. Let’s walk it.”

  Louis shut off the engine. An overwhelming quiet surrounded them, as heavy as the humid, still air. Then came the metallic whine of cicadas.

  “Watch your step, Mel,” Louis said. “The ground’s pretty rough.”