Читать книгу: «The Apostle»
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Jack Kerley 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover design and typography © Blacksheep-uk.com
Cover photographs © David Wile/PlainPicture.com (Main Image): (Bible) © iStock.com: (candles) © Francois Dion/Gettyimages.com
Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007493692
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007493708
Version: 2014-11-29
Dedication
To Floyd and Addie Richardson –
And the house where the trains rolled by
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by J.A. Kerley
About the Publisher
1
Miami, April
“I’m putting in the last of Christ’s blood.”
Raoul Herrera studied the slender needle for a long moment, assured himself it was the right choice, then bent forward, his skilled fingers guiding the needle into flesh, adding a bright highlight to a plump drop of red dripping from a thorn. Herrera dabbed a cotton ball in antiseptic, blotted his client’s scapula, then leaned back and studied his work.
“Done,” he said.
Herrera flicked off the instrument and admired the most fantastic tattoo he’d ever created, a masterwork of detail that had stretched his talent to its limits, making him develop new ways of adding depth to color, motion to stillness, beauty to horror.
Yet all the tattoo consisted of was the back of a head. Not inked on the back of a head, an illustration of the back of a head.
The client had entered Skin Art by Raoul six weeks ago. The tattoo artist was alone in the back room, sanitizing equipment and preparing to close for the evening when he’d walked into the reception area. Though the door rang when opened, the bell had not sounded. Yet a man stood in the center of the Oriental carpet, utterly still, eyes staring into Herrera’s eyes, as if knowing the precise space the tattooist would occupy.
Herrera’s heartbeats accelerated. There was nothing but night outside his window and the neighborhood was dangerous in the dark. He kept a .38 pistol in back and Herrera mentally measured his steps to the gun.
“I’m closed,” he said.
The man seemed not to hear. He looked in his mid-thirties, hard-traveled years, lines etched into his angular face, his eyes tight and crinkled, as though he’d spent a lifetime squinting into sunlight. He was small in stature, wearing battered Levis and a faded Western-style shirt with sleeves rolled up over iron-hard forearms. His face was small and flat and centered by a nose broken at least once, the hair a tight cap of coiled brown that fell low on his forehead and gave a simian cast to his features. His eyes were the color of spent briquettes of charcoal.
“I said I’m done for the day, man,” Herrera repeated. “Come back tomorrow.”
Again, the man seemed deaf to Herrera’s words. Work-hardened hands unfolded a sheet of paper and held up a richly detailed illustration of Jesus inked into a man’s bicep, a work by Herrera that had been featured in a tattoo artists’ publication.
“Did you do this?” the man said. “Do you claim it yours?”
“It’s my work. Why?”
“It ain’t quite real yet, is it?”
Despite his uneasiness, Herrera felt his ability challenged. “You won’t find better, mister. Not that I figure you could afford it.”
The man balled the page and tossed it to the floor. “It ain’t there yet. It looks like Him. But He ain’t in it.”
Meaning Jesus.
“Use the door, mister,” Herrera said. “I’m closed.”
Eyes locked on to Herrera, the man turned to the sign switch and flicked off the neon display. He pushed the door closed and set the lock. Herrera inched closer to his gun. The man lifted his hands.
“I mean you no harm. Look here …”
The man eased a hand into his pocket and produced a roll of paper money. He crossed to the artist, took Herrera’s hand and pressed the roll into his palm.
“Count it up.”
Herrera did. Over five thousand dollars in fresh, clean bills.
The new client pushed through the beaded curtain to the work area in back and the tattoo artist followed. The man withdrew his tails from his pants, unbuttoning the shirt and throwing it to the floor. He turned to display his back, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. When he moved, the muscles twitched with sudden electricity, as if hidden power had been awakened. The man sat in the tattooing chair and stared over his shoulder at Herrera.
“Turn a mirror so I can see. This time you gonna get it right.”
Herrera shook his head. “That’s not how it works. I make drawings. Get your approval.”
The man closed his eyes and retreated inside his head. After several long moments he nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You want me to do Jesus, I take it?” Herrera asked.
“The back of His head from the bottom of my neck down. His exact size and as real as His tribulation.”
“How do I know if I’m representing the, uh, subject correctly?”
“He’ll guide your hand,” the man said, meaning Jesus.
Herrera had felt no hand but his own on the needles through a dozen sessions, but something seemed to have driven him to a greater height of art than ever before. The back of Christ’s head appeared dimensional, a tumble of brown and shadow starting at the base of the client’s neck and feathering out on his lower spine. The crown of thorns seemed so real that wearing a shirt would be impossible, the fabric tearing on the horrific spikes, stained by the bright blood dripping down curling locks of tangled hair. The project was beautiful and awesome and terrible in equal measure.
And now it was complete.
The man stood from the chair and reached for his shirt. When he turned toward Herrera the tattooist’s breath froze in his throat. A gulley had been cut into his customer’s chest, an inch-wide strip of flesh and tissue running from below one flat nipple to the other. It was a recent wound, the furrow red and puckered and weeping yellow fluid. Herrera swallowed hard, wondering if the visor-like cut went all the way to bone.
“Um, what happened there?” he asked.
The man pulled on his shirt and left the top half unbuttoned, the raw slit visible in the V. His dead-charcoal eyes bored into Herrera and he shook his head like the tattoo artist was the village idiot.
“He’s gotta be able to see out now, don’t He?”
Meaning Jesus.
2
Mobile, Alabama. Mid May
“Carson. Yo, brother. Wake up.”
“Mmmf,” I said, trying to slap a big hand shaking my shoulder. I missed and slapped my own cheek.
“Come on, Cars … time to get hoppin’ and boppin’.”
The only reason I opened my eyes was because I smelled bacon. Say what you will about alarm clocks, bacon is better. I looked up and saw blue sky filtered through tree branches. I tried to sit up, made it on the second try. I was in a lounge chair on Harry Nautilus’s back patio. The picnic table beside me looked like a launching pad for beer bottles. A pedestal fan on the patio was blowing air across me. Harry switched the fan off.
“Good morning, merry sunshine.”
I studied the chair beneath me, gave Harry a look.
“You fell asleep there, Carson. I kept the fan on you to keep the skeeters off.”
“A polite host would have carried me to a real bed and tucked me in.”
“A smart host would have coffee. And these.” His right hand held out a steaming mug and his left opened to display a half-dozen aspirin. I grabbed both, chewing the pills and washing the paste down with New Orleans-style coffee, brewed black with chicory and cut with scalded milk.
“Want a bacon-egg sandwich?” Harry said.
I shot a thumb up as Harry retreated into the kitchen and the previous night returned to me, the major scenes at least. Flanagan’s bar decked out for a party: blue balloons, two long tables weighted down with cookpots of chili and sandwich fixings – ham, turkey, barbecue, cheeses – plus bowls of chips and nuts and pretzels. A twelve-foot banner over the bar said simply, 436 is 10-7.
It meant badge number 436 was out of service. Harry was badge number 436.
It was his retirement party. A surprise, Harry lured there by me and Lieutenant Tom Mason, our long-time leader and apologist. I don’t often get misty-eyed, but when we’d walked into Flanagan’s and I saw the sign, it got a little blurry.
Harry was my best friend and had been my detective partner for years. It was Harry who’d convinced me to join the force when I was a twenty-seven-year-old slacker wondering what to do with a Masters Degree in Psychology gained by traveling to every max-security prison in the South and interviewing homicidal maniacs.
Harry was ten years older than me, a year and some shy of fifty. He’d started on the force young, and when adding in unused sick and vacation days, plus time credits when he’d been injured in the line of duty, it added up to thirty years in service, all but five of them in Homicide.
The bash at Flanagan’s had been an alcohol-fueled semi-riot. Harry was a legend in the MPD, and his friends had come to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was leaving. We’d stayed two hours, neither big on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, slipping away to Harry’s place on the near-north side of Mobile, a trim bungalow in a quiet neighborhood overslung with slash and longleaf pines and the snaking branches of live oaks. His back yard was slender and long and landscaped with dogwoods and banks of azaleas. It was centered by a looming sycamore, from which Harry had strung a half-dozen bright birdhouses.
He’d fetched bottles of homebrew from his closet, channeled mix-tapes of Miles and Bird and Gillespie through the speakers, and we’d sat beneath a fat white moon and had our kind of party, long beer-sipping silences broken by stories from the streets, good and bad and blends of both.
Harry stepped out and handed me six inches of warmed French bread filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, melted cheddar and heavy lashings of Crystal Hot Sauce, and I went to work supplanting beer with food, something I probably should have done more of last night.
Harry’s eyes went to the bottle collection on the patio table.
“Happy to see you liked my homebrew.”
When I’d accepted the position in Florida, Harry’d started brewing beer, saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
“Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”
“It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”
I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.
“You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”
Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.
“It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”
“For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”
“Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”
“You didn’t say who the lady was.”
Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”
“She’s in the Mafia?”
“It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”
“Who you think I’ll tell?”
“Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”
That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”
“I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”
“Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”
“Driver,” he corrected.
3
I bought a Miami Herald for the flight and returned to Miami. The headlines hadn’t changed much since Friday: “No Progress in Menendez Murder” blared the main story, with another headline, inches below, saying “Miami Mourns Loss of Favored Daughter”.
Last Thursday had been a horror for local law enforcement. Roberta Menendez was an MDPD administrator who’d started as a beat cop, putting in eight years before a fleeing felon’s gunshot shattered her hip. Undaunted, she worked a desk at the department while pursuing a degree in accounting – delighted to find an unrealized ability with numbers – and becoming a supervisor in MDPD’s finances department. Balancing books was work enough, but Menendez gave her remaining time and talent to a host of social and charitable organizations throughout the region, helping volunteer organizations manage their finances on a professional level.
I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.
Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.
It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.
I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.
“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”
My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.
“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”
“No doubt. We in?”
Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”
“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.
“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”
Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.
We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
“Is that a cocoon?” I said.
“If so, this is the butterfly.” Vince passed me a second photo and I saw a woman on an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.
“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”
I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”
“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”
I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.
“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.
“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”
“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.
“Nothing right now.”
It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”
Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”
“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”
“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”
“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”
When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.
Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”
“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”
Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”
“Uh, what?”
But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.
Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.
“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.
“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”
The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.
“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”
Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.
“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”
It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.
I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.
4
Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.
Fifteen years ago, give or take, Nautilus had sat in this same room with a half-baked man-child named Carson Ryder when the kid had asked Nautilus why he listened to “all that old music”. Nautilus had dosed the kid with Waller, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, Henderson … they started at sundown and met the morning with Miles.
Along with the intro to jazz, Nautilus convinced the kid his degree in Psychology and eerie ability to analyze madmen would be a gift to law enforcement. The next week Carson Ryder signed up at the Police Academy, blowing through it like a firestorm, impressing many, pissing off as many more. He’d put in three years on the street before solving the high-profile Adrian case, advancing to detective and Nautilus’s partner. They’d been the Ryder and Nautilus Show for over a decade. But today Carson was in Florida and Harry Nautilus was a retiree.
The show was over.
And tomorrow morning, Harry Nautilus was going to the home of Pastor Richard Owsley to meet the man’s wife and try for a gig as a driver. Last week’s interview with the Pastor had taken all of fifteen minutes, the man like a thousand-watt bulb in a room that only needs about a hundred, pacing, smiling, gesturing … all assurance and zeal and – like Southern preachers everywhere – stretching one-syllable words into two and often using larger words than called for, which Nautilus ascribed to latent insecurities perhaps caused by going to schools like West Doodlemont Bible College rather than Harvard Divinity School.
It had all happened so quickly that Nautilus realized he knew little more about Richard Owsley than the stacks of books he saw at local shops, the man smiling on the cover with bible in hand.
He took another sip of brew, set his computer on his lap, and checked YouTube for the Pastor’s name. There were several dozen hits, sermons, it seemed. In his youth Nautilus had been dragged from church to church by a procession of severe but well-meaning aunts, and figured he’d had enough sermonizing for a lifetime. He continued scanning the videos until he found a six-minute piece titled, Highlights: Richard Owsley on Willy Prince Show. Prince had a talk show out of Montgomery and was a regional favorite, a smug little fellow in his forties with shaggy, fringe-centric hair, and a slight mouth permanently puckered toward sneer.
Nautilus hit Play and the screen showed two men sitting at a round table in a television studio dressed with a pair of bookshelves and artificial plants. Nautilus figured someone once told Prince that slouching would make him look more like William F. Buckley, so he resembled a boneless puppet dropped into a chair. Prince sat on the left and was speaking.
“… then to recap, Reverend Owsley, you hold that Jesus wants people to have fine cars, boats, luxury items?”
Pastor Owsley was to the right, a dark-suited figure with narrow shoulders and a touch too much weight at his waistline, slightly pearish. His round and cherubic visage was topped by back-combed black hair. He looked pleasant and not particularly commanding, a small-town insurance salesman whose ready smile is part of the tool kit.
“Jesus wants people to enjoy abundance, Willy,” Owsley said in a Southern-inflected tenor and pronouncing the word in three distinct syllables, a-bun-dance. “In biblical times, abundance might mean having a donkey, chickens and a warm hearth. Today, it might be a new pickup truck and a house with a white picket fence.”
A chorus of handclaps and Hallelujahs from the audience. A raised eyebrow from Prince.
“Or a Mercedes-Benz and a mansion in Miami Beach?”
“If that is your yearning and you honor God, God will hand you the keys to the Benz, the keys to the mansion and then, finally and best of all, the keys to His Kingdom. It’s in John 10:10: ‘There I am come that they might have life, and they might have it more abundantly.’”
The audience again expressed satisfaction with the answer. “Perhaps the abundance comes in the afterlife, Reverend,” Prince said. “In Paradise.”
Owsley nodded vigorous agreement. “Our prosperity in Heaven is boundless, Willy. We’re also supposed to taste of it in this life. Proverbs 15:6 … ‘In the house of the righteous is much treasure.’ Then there’s John 1:2 … ‘Beloved, I wish above all that thou prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospers.’ When your soul prospers, so shall you.”
“So why did Jesus hang around with poor people, Pastor Owsley? I mean, Jesus wasn’t prone to spending his days with the wealthy, right?”
“Of course not, Willy. He treasured the poor.”
“But you just said—”
“Jesus Christ loves the faithful, Willy. If you have ten billion dollars and believeth not in the Lord, you are as poor as a cockroach. Conversely, if you have nothing and turn yourself over to the Lord, you have wealth beyond measure.”
“But you’re still poor, pocket-wise.”
“‘Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.’ That’s Deuteronomy 29:9. It’s said even more directly in Proverbs 28:20: ‘A faithful man shall abound in blessings.’ Do you know the Greek translation of the word ‘blessings’, Willy?”
“Oddly enough, no.”
Owsley’s pink hands came together in a thunderclap. “Happiness! Blessings are happinesses. God wants His faithful children to abound in happinesses. It’s a three-step process, Willy. One, surrender your soul to Christ. Two, cast your bread upon the water. Three, watch the bread returneth a thousand-fold.”
A chorus of amens and hallelujahs. Prince studied the audience and turned to the preacher with an uplifted eyebrow. “You have a lot of followers here tonight, Reverend. Did you pack the crowd, as they say?”
A split-second pause from Owsley, followed by who-me? innocence. “I noted on my website that I was to be a guest. That’s all.”
“Really? I’d like to go to some video we took earlier in the day outside the studio, if that’s OK with you.”
“It’s your show, Willy,” Owsley said. The smile stayed as toothy as a beaver, but Nautilus detected irritation as the screen behind the interview table filled with two large buses emptying to the pavement a block from the studio, an attractive woman with a haystack of blonde hair organizing the passengers into a queue.
“All those folks went directly from the buses to the studio. I’ll ask again: Did you pack the crowd, Reverend?”
Murmurs of irritation from the audience. Owsley replayed the innocent face. “All I can say, Willy, is that I’m delighted so many faithful Christians chose to honor me with their presence.”
Applause. Whistles. Amens.
Prince tented his fingers and frowned in apparent confusion. “Faithful Christians, you say, Reverend Owsley. But what about people of other beliefs? Can they not be equally faithful to the creator of the universe?”
Owsley smiled benignly. “I can only preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, who I hold to be the creator of all that is and ever will be.”
“So other religions are wrong?”
“I judge not, lest I be judged, Willy.”
Prince shook his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, Reverend.”
“No, Willy, I am not. It’s all in my owner’s manual.”
“Owner’s manual?”
Owsley reached to his side and picked up a bible, holding it high with both hands, the thousand-watt grin ramping up another hundred.
The audience went wild.
“Thanks, Mama,” Teresa Mailey said, patting her child on his pink forehead as her mother pulled the baby blanket closer around Robert, just seven months old the day before. “It might not be like this much more.”
Jeri Mailey thumbed graying hair back under the red headscarf and smiled. “Like I care, baby.” Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice.
“Me waking you up at four thirty in the morning when I come to pick Bobby up?” Teresa said.
“Hush up that stuff. I go right back to sleep.” Jeri paused as her smile shivered and her eyes moistened. “I never thought I’d have days like this, baby.”
“Come on, Mama, not again,” Teresa said, her voice gentle.
Her mother brushed a tear from the corner of an eye. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s like every day has been a gift this past year. Taking care of you and Bobby is a gift from God.”
Teresa kissed her mother’s cheek. “It’ll keep giving, Mama.”
Teresa’s mother nodded and pulled Bobby tight as she crossed to the door. “See you later, baby. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
The door closed and Teresa Mailey was alone in the tiny first-floor apartment, the bulk of the rent paid by a charitable organization that helped the fallen regain their feet. She looked out the window and watched her mother put Bobby in the child seat in the rear of her blue Kia Optima and snug him tight. Just before her mother closed the door, Bobby waved goodbye.
OK, only a waggle of his arm, but it looks like he’s waving bye-bye to his mommy.
Teresa went to the mirror and straightened her uniform, the fabric flat and wrinkle-free, the uniform immaculate. Satisfied that she was a suitable representative of her employer, she glanced at the clock, 9:32 p.m., and headed to the door. Pausing, Teresa ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her necklace, a tiny gold chain holding a small cross, and put it around her neck.
I’m ready for this again.
Teresa exited to a third-hand Corolla. She had to be at work at ten, and the Publix was twenty minutes distant. She was to do night restock until four a.m. Yesterday her supervisor had spoken of moving Teresa to daytime as a permanent deli worker. Permanent!
“You’ve gotten noticed by a lot of people upstairs, Teresa,” the super had said. “Your attitude, work ethic, ability to shift positions … we’d like you as a permanent member of the team.”
The year had been a gift, Teresa thought as she drove through the warm Miami night. Of finding out who am I, and that I have worth.
The traffic was thick with homecoming day workers, but Teresa pulled into the Publix lot with eight minutes to spare, aiming toward the far edge where the employees parked. She grabbed her purse, exited the vehicle, and started for the store when she felt a tingle on the back of her neck, like eyes were watching.
Teresa turned to see a light van parked three slots distant, a hard-worked vehicle judging by the dinged body and dented hood. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, face hidden behind a newspaper, the halogen-lit lot bright enough for reading. He was tanned and ropy and shirtless, a line running across his upper chest, a weird tattoo.
No … not a tattoo …
A nasty, puckery scar.
The man shifted in his seat and the scar stared at Teresa. Feeling an odd void in the base of her stomach, Teresa turned and hustled toward the supermarket.
5
It was eight a.m., the oblique sun lighting a soft mist that rose from a brief morning rain, giving a ghostly cast to the tree-canopied streets of Spring Hill, Mobile’s finest old neighborhood, many of the homes dating back to antebellum times. Harry Nautilus pulled to a two-story house set back a hundred feet from the avenue, a square, white, multi-columned Greek Revival monster Nautilus thought as charmless as it was large, redeemed by the landscaping: oaks and sycamores standing in hedge circles further bordered by azaleas and bougainvillea. Lines of dogwoods paced the high fence of the side boundaries.
He blew out a breath and pulled into the long drive. His red 1984 Volvo wagon had recently expired at 377,436 miles and he’d found a 2004 Cross Country model truly owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays, the odometer registering 31,000 miles.
Nautilus parked behind a gleaming red Hummer with smoked windows and was rolling his eyes when he realized it was probably what he’d be driving. He exited the Volvo wearing the suit he’d worn to the interview with Richard Owsley, coal black, the suit he wore to court and funerals. His shirt was blue with a button-down collar and the tie a red-and-blue rep stripe. The whole drab get-up was already beginning to itch.
Nautilus patted his hair, a one-inch natural with a sprinkling of gray, licked an index finger and smoothed his bulldozer-blade mustache, took a deep breath and walked to the front door. The knocker was a cast-iron version of the three crosses of Golgotha – currently unoccupied – hinged to slam the base. Nautilus gingerly lifted a thief’s cross and let it drop.
A harsh metallic clank. Nautilus stood back as the door opened to reveal one of the most impressive stacks of hair he’d seen in years, a cascade of blonde-bright ringlets that bounced atop the shoulders of a slender, and apparently confused woman in her early forties. Her make-up was old-school-thick, early Dolly Parton, but her face was model-perfect, with high cheekbones, a pert nose and lips like pink cushions. With her dress, white and embroidered with creamy flowers, she looked part porcelain angel, part country singer from the seventies. Nautilus immediately recognized her from the Willy Prince Show, the woman organizing the bused-in audience.
“Mrs Owsley, I’m Harry Nautilus. You’re expecting me, I’m told. Or hope.”
The woman stared, as if Nautilus was a unicorn. “Mrs Owsley?” Nautilus said, resisting the impulse to wave his hand before her wide, blue-shadowed eyes. “Did your husband tell you I’d be by today?”
“You’re black,” she said, just shy of a gasp.
“Since birth. Is something wrong?”
A brief pause and the woman’s startled expression flowed effortlessly into a glittering smile, teeth shining like marquee lights. “Goodness, no,” she said, reaching to touch Harry’s sleeve and tug him over the threshold. “It’s just such a surprise. All my other drivers were, well … do you folks prefer the term white or Caucasian?”
“It doesn’t really matter, ma’am. It’s more what you prefer to call yourselves.”
She canted her head in thought, followed with a tinkly laugh. “Of course. Come inside, Mr Nautilus, please.”
She led Nautilus through the wide entranceway and into an expansive living area, the walls a soft peach, the French Provincial furniture having matching cushions and looking delicate and expensive. The room was vaulted, twenty-feet tall, a pair of ceiling fans whisking high above. One wall held family photos, one the front windows. The third held a cross of dark and rough-hewn beams, a dozen feet tall, eight wide. It had been thickly coated in shellac or varnish and gleamed in the in-streaming sun.
Nautilus said, “You have a beautiful home, Mrs Owsley.”
“God gave it to us,” she said, looking to Nautilus as if expecting an amen.
He said, “Indeed and fer-sure, ma’am,” and found his voice failing. “Might I trouble you for a drink of water? I seem a bit dry.”
“Right this way.”
The kitchen was straight from Architectural Digest: beaten copper sinks, twin refrigerator-freezers, an island with a maple chopping block. The countertops were richly textured marble. Above, an eight-foot rack was hung with cooking implements.
“There’s water, of course,” Celeste Owsley said. “I also have sweet tea.”
“Tea then, please.”
A crystal vase of tea was produced from a refrigerator seemingly sized to hold sides of beef. Celeste Owsley poured a glass and handed it to Nautilus. He sipped and studied the vast kitchen.
“You must truly like to cook, ma’am.”
The woman frowned at the rack festooned with pots, pans, colanders, whisks. “They all do something, but I’ve no idea what. Thankfully, our cook likes to cook. You’ll meet Felicia, I expect. She’s a precious little Mexican girl.”
“Girl?” Nautilus asked. “How old is she?”
Ms Owsley canted her head sideways, perplexed. Somehow the huge beehive ’do remained centered. “I never asked,” she said, a scarlet talon tapping a plump lower lip. “Forty? Fifty?”
Girl, Nautilus thought, holding back the sigh as Celeste Owsley gestured him toward the wide staircase. “Now let’s meet our daughter and see how she is today.”
Owsley clicked the high heels across the floor to the foot of the broad staircase and clapped her hands as if summoning a pet poodle. Seconds passed and Nautilus heard a door opening upstairs, looked up to a teenage girl staring down, her brown hair shoulder length and a pouty look on an otherwise sweet face.
“What?”
“Well, come on down.”
The girl sighed dramatically and headed down the steps. Nautilus knew she was sixteen – research again – and her name was Rebecca. Owsley’s face lit to a zillion watts as she pointed to Nautilus like he was door number three on a game show.
“This is Mr Nautilus, hon. He’s our new driver.”
The girl scowled. “But he’s bl—”
“He’s your Papa’s choice,” Owsley interrupted, “and that means he’s the best there can be.”
The girl stared at Nautilus. A smile quivered at the edge of her bright lips.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Becca!” Owsley snapped.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” the girl said, looking pleased. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck …”
“Get upstairs! Now!”
The girl slowly climbed the stairs, repeating her mantra until it ended with the slamming of a door. Owsley sighed and turned to Nautilus.
“I’m sorry. It’s a stage. I can’t wait for it to be over.”
The meeting seemed to have reached a conclusion, Owsley leading Nautilus back to the front door. Her hand was on the knob when she turned, her eyes searching into Nautilus’s eyes.
“You have been saved, of course, Mr Nautilus.”
The same question had been asked by Reverend Owsley, early in their meeting, as if, answered improperly, the interview would be over. Ten years back he and Carson had been chasing a trio of murderous dope dealers through a dilapidated warehouse, their leader a psychotic named Randy Collins. Nautilus had been following Collins down a rotting flight of stairs when they collapsed, Nautilus tumbling ten feet to concrete, gun spinning from his hand as the maniac spun and lifted his weapon, the nine-millimeter muzzle staring straight into Nautilus’s chest as a tattooed finger tightened on the trigger.
Until the front of Collins’ face disappeared, Carson firing from forty feet away, a perfect shot in the shadowed warehouse.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nautilus replied, just as he’d done with the mister. “I was saved years ago. It was a beautiful day.”
Nautilus returned to his vehicle thinking about his interview, the written part and subsequent face-to-face sessions with Owsley. A good third of the questions had – in veiled fashion, mostly – been about his discretion, the ability to handle secrets. He’d answered truthfully, meaning that he didn’t disburse private information. There would have been other vetting, he now realized – probably a private-investigation firm – but even his enemies would have said something akin to, “Harry Nautilus doesn’t carry tales.”
Twenty bills an hour, he told himself as he buckled into his car. Drive ’em around, stay uninvolved, cash the checks. The gig is worth it, right?
6
I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of dreams made of flames and punctuated by screams. Breakfast was strong coffee and stale churros and I was at the department an hour later, hungry to track down the maniac who’d killed Kylie Sandoval. Roy was in his office, the muscular Miami skyline looming outside the windows of his twenty-third-floor office, Biscayne Bay visible to the east.
I gave him an anything happening? face, meaning Menendez.
He shook his head. “I figure this will be solved by snitches and shoe leather. It’ll come. Like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.” He gave me a curious look. “I take it you haven’t been to your office yet.”
“No, why?”
He closed his eyes and began whistling “Rule Britannia”.
Wondering if my boss had gone around the bend, I headed down the hall to my office, finding the door ajar. I used to share space with Ziggy Gershwin, but Zigs had impressed Roy enough to get his own office and assignments last month, so I was the sole occupant, generally leaving it unlocked.
I pushed the door open quietly, seeing a light-skinned woman of African heritage sitting in the chair opposite my desk, her back to me. She was leafing through a book I had contributed to some years ago, The Inner Cultures of Sociopaths, more for academic than general audiences. She wore a taupe uniform and though only a small portion was visible, I recognized the shoulder patch of the Miami-Dade PD.
I cleared my throat and she jumped, the book skidding from her lap to the floor.
“Bloody hell,” she said, standing. “You scared the piss out of me.”
Her voice sounded closer to London than Miami. I scooped up the book from the floor and set it back on the shelf, then sat, head cocked. My visitor was a petite woman in her mid-to-later twenties, brunette hair tugged back in a ponytail. Full lips framed a small mouth that was now pursed tight. Her eyes were large and brown and watching me as intently as I was watching her. I had the feeling I was being weighed.
“And you would be?” I ventured.
“Holly Belafonte. I’m an officer with the MDPD.”
I didn’t point out that, as a detective, I’d already deduced it by the uniform, though the accent seemed misplaced. “Did I mis-park my car, Officer Belafonte?” I said, a shot at humor that went wide, judging by the narrowed eyes.
She nodded to the chair. “Can I sit?”
“I suspect you can, since you were sitting when I entered.”
The stare again. Humor didn’t seem her métier. “Please,” I sighed. “Sit. And tell me why you’re here.”
She sat tentatively, reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope.
“I’m told this will explain things.”
I opened the envelope and saw Vince’s card clipped to two sheets of paper, the top one in his jagged handwriting.
Hey Buddy – Meet H. Belafonte, your official departmental liaison on the Sandoval case. She’s all I could scratch up on short notice and I picked her because she knew the vic personally. I cleared this with the Chief – at least I shoved it under his nose while he was screaming at everyone. The head of Investigative signed off as well, so you’re clear to proceed and I’ll lend a hand whenever possible. This place has gone nuts.
The second sheet of paper was typed:
This document authorizes Of. H. Belafonte to serve as official contact between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Florida Center of Law Enforcement in duties relative to Case 2015/6 –HD 1297-B.
Below that was a hastily scribbled signature, the line tailing off the paper, like the signer was running while signing. Even the top brass at MDPD were in sprint mode due to Menendez.
“You know what this stuff says?” I asked Belafonte. “The notes?”
A prim nod. “We’re to work together on the Kylie Sandoval murder.”
I stared at the face; handsome but expressionless. “How long have you been with the force, Officer Belafonte?”
A frown. “Long enough.”
“I’m talking about measured quantity, as in time.”
She stared evenly without speaking.
“Well?”
“You asked, so I’m thinking.” Five more mute seconds passed. “One hundred and sixty-seven days. I’m counting days on duty but not counting today yet. Tomorrow will of course make one hundred and—”
I held up a hand to cut her off, barely resisting banging my head on my desk. Instead of working with the typical seasoned investigator, I’d be dragging around a uniformed newbie a half-step above writing traffic citations.
“We’re done here,” I said, standing.
That put expression on the stone face. “You’re bloody dismissing me?” she said, eyes wide. “Just like that?”
“I’m dismissing nothing,” I said, giving her a come-hither jerk of my head. “We’re adjourning to the coffee shop in the atrium. I need a triple espresso. Or maybe a shot of whiskey.”
We reconvened below, where I ordered my coffee, Belafonte a tea, declining to allow me to pay for her tinted water.
“That’s not a typical Miami accent,” I noted. “At least not in MDPD.”
“My childhood was in Bermuda. It’s a British territory.”
“Oddly enough, I knew that.”
“I’ve met people who think it’s one of the fifty states, along with Puerto Rico and Nova Scotia.”
I started to laugh, then realized she wasn’t making a joke, just transferring data. “I lived in Hamilton,” she continued, “the capital, until I was twenty-one, when my father and I moved to Miami.”
“Why here?” I said. “Both to the US and Miami?”
“Shouldn’t we be discussing the Sandoval case?” she said.
So much for get-acquainted talk. “You knew her, I take it?”
“I work out of South Division and arrested Kylie twice for prostitution. And nearly a third time but, but …”
She paused with tea in mid-air and set it back on the table, her eyes serious, as if looking inside her head and not liking the pictures there. Belafonte swallowed hard and turned away. I realized I’d seen a glisten of tear in the expressionless eyes.
“Take your time,” I said.
“The third time I arrived as a john propositioned her, an obese businessman who stank of gin and sweat and had greasy hair and vomit on his lapels. When I told the arsehole to bugger off he gave me a big smirk like Big deal, copper, I’ll go find another one. I cuffed Kylie to a pipe, followed Mr Businesspuke around the corner. I let him get in his car and turn the key and busted him for drunken driving.”
“And then took Kylie to the lockup.”
“Actually, I took Kylie to an all-night diner and bought her a meal.” She paused. “My shift was over, of course.”
“I don’t care about your timecard, Belafonte. But why the kindness, may I ask?”
She looked out the window a long moment. “The john was a disgusting lump of ugliness, like some hideous disease taken human form. I then realized how these girls … don’t simply sell their bodies. They have to pretend to like these scumbags. I was new to that world and wanted to understand how they did it time and again, night after night.”
“Drugs,” I said. “It shows their power.”
Belafonte nodded. “At first Kylie played the hardcore working girl, every third word a curse. But subsequently, as I was driving her back to her cheap flat, I saw tears rolling down her cheeks. Kylie broke down like a, like a … little girl dressed in hooker clothes. I realized many of them are little girls in hooker clothes. Childhood doesn’t end when they go on the street, it gets packed away under layers of numbness. But sometimes it breaks out. And there’s nothing before you but a terrified little girl.”
It was beginning to seem Belafonte wasn’t quite the robot she’d initially appeared. “You befriended her, right?”
A sigh. “I tried to get her into therapy, but the free clinics are booked for months. I brought her home with me, told her to stay until she got herself together.”
“How long did it last?”
“Three days. Kylie had had something broken inside her, Detective. I don’t know what happened, but someone or something had torn everything from her, every bit of self-worth. Kylie lived with a horrific hurt buried inside her and I pray she didn’t die in pain.”
I fished the investigative reports from my briefcase and reluctantly handed them over. My day was about to reach its low point.
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