James Patterson - Cross Justice

Drummond took a left onto a spur road. A sheriff’s cruiser was parked in the turnaround ahead, lights flashing. The county medical examiner’s van was parked beyond it. The sergeant climbed out of the rig, and Johnson followed him.

Deputy Gabrielle Holland got out of her cruiser, said, “Got her all taped off for you, Sarge. We’re just lucky a gator didn’t get to her before I did.”

“You identify her?” Drummond asked.

“Francie Letourneau. She’s from Belle Glade. Haitian immigrant. You know her?”

Drummond shook his head. “I don’t know the Glade like I used to.”

“Nice lady, for the most part. Worked over in Palm, cleaning castles.”

Johnson said, “You were professionally acquainted with the deceased?”

“We got Francie on drunk-and-disorderly a few times, but really, she was just blowing off steam.”

“You got an address for Ms. Francie here?” Drummond asked.

“I can get it,” Holland said.

“Please,” the sergeant said. “We’ll go down and take a look.”

“You might want your boots,” the deputy said as she climbed into the cruiser.

Drummond went to the rear of the unmarked and got out a pair of knee-high green rubber boots. The sergeant glanced at Johnson’s shiny black shoes, said, “You’re gonna need a pair of these for working the west side of the county.”

“Where do you get them?” Johnson asked.

“Best price is that Cabela’s catalog,” the sergeant said as he put them on. “But you can pick up something local at the Bass Pro Shops in Dania Beach.”

Drummond led the way around the cruiser, behind the coroner’s van, and over the bank of an irrigation ditch. Holland had taped off a muddy path that led down to the water.

“That’s the blackest mud I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said.

“Some of the richest soil in the world,” Drummond told him, skirting the tape through thigh-high swamp grass.

Johnson followed. Three steps in, he sank in the mud and lost his shoe.

“Cabela’s,” Drummond called over his shoulder.

The young detective cursed, dug out his shoe, and wiped it on the grass before joining the sergeant down by the ditch. Francie Letourneau’s body lay faceup in the muck, head at the water’s edge, feet oriented uphill. Her eyes were open and bulging. Her face looked particularly swollen. And her feet were bare and muddy.

“Cause of death? Time of death?” Drummond called to the assistant medical examiner, a young guy named Kraft who also wore green rubber boots and stood on a folded blue plastic tarp next to the body.

Kraft pushed back sunglasses, said, “She was strangled thirty-six to forty hours ago. Ligature is deep, and looks like there’s fibers in the wound.”

“She’s been here in this heat the whole time?” Johnson said.

“I don’t think so,” Kraft replied. “She was killed somewhere else and dropped here, probably last night. A fisherman found her at dawn.”

The sergeant nodded. “She got a phone on her?”

“No,” the medical examiner said.

Drummond looked around before crouching to study the body from six feet back. Then he walked up the bank along the tape and looked at the path and the marks in the mud and the footprints, most of which were filled with murky water.

The sergeant gestured to shallow grooves in the mud.

“Her heels made those marks,” he said. “He drags her downhill, holding her under the armpits. Right there, where the grooves get smaller, her shoes come off. Killer dumps the body and goes back for the shoes. So why doesn’t he push the body into the water?”

Johnson said, “Maybe he meant to but something spooked him. A car out on the main road. But why take her shoes? A fetish or something?”

“He didn’t take them,” Drummond said, gesturing across the ditch. “He tossed them. There’s one of them hanging on a branch over there.”

Johnson frowned, saw the shoe, and said, “How’d you see that?”

The sergeant said, “I looked, Detective. They taught you how to do that down in Dade, right?”

An hour later, Drummond and Johnson were back in Belle Glade and parking in front of the Big O bar, which, according to Deputy Holland, was where Francie Letourneau liked to party.

The Big O was a dive fallen on hard times. The cement floor was cracked and irregular. The blue paint was peeling and chipped. Most of the chairs, barstools, and tables had been carved on. The only part of the place that looked remotely cared for was behind the bar. Hundreds of photographs of happy anglers holding up largemouth bass looked down on the four patrons dressed for fishing and the bartender.

“Cecil,” the sergeant said.

The bartender, an older man with a big potbelly, started laughing. “Drummond. You want a drink?”

“I think you enjoy being my temptation.”

“Hell, yeah,” Cecil said, coming over to shake the sergeant’s hand. “Everyone’s got a job, right?”

“Amen, brother,” Drummond said. “Cecil Jones, meet my partner, Detective Richard Johnson. Miami boy.”

The bartender shook Johnson’s hand, said, “You coming up in the world.”

The young detective smiled, said, “I like to think so.”

Jones looked to Drummond and said, “You gonna set him straight?”

“I’m trying,” the sergeant said.

“I heard they found a body out on the island,” the bartender said.

“Why I’m here,” Drummond said. “Francie Letourneau.”

Jones’s face fell. “Shit. That right? Shit.”

“She’s a regular, then?”

“Not a full-time subscriber, but often enough.”

“She been in recently?”

“Sunday, around noon,” he said, glancing up at the clock. “Had herself an eye-opener, Bloody Mary, double vodka, and then another for courage.”

“Courage?”

“She was heading over to Palm,” Jones said. “Said she had an interview for a new job that was gonna pay her four times what her old one did. I asked her what she needed a job for after hitting the Lotto twice in a month.”

“That right?” Drummond asked.

“Five grand on a scratcher, seven on her weekly play,” Jones said.

“Twelve K’s a lot of money,” Johnson said.

“It is,” the bartender said. “But she said she still needed the work. She’d lost two or three of her regular clients recently. No fault of her own. One got electrocuted in her bathtub.”

Drummond said, “Let me guess: another was murdered.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jones said. “Wife of that plastic surgeon you see advertising on television all the time. You know, the Boob King.”

Twenty minutes later, they pulled up in front of Francie Letourneau’s small apartment with renewed purpose. The now-dead maid had worked for two now-dead wealthy women from Ocean Boulevard. Ruth Abrams’s death was clearly a murder by strangulation. Now Drummond and Johnson were questioning whether Lisa Martin really had accidentally dropped the Bose radio in her bathtub. Had she been killed too?

They got the landlord to open the maid’s apartment, stepped inside. Johnson gagged at the smell coming from a makeshift altar in the corner.

A rooster’s severed head had been placed upright in the dead center of a tin pie plate. Two inches of chicken blood congealed and rotted around the head. The bird’s feet were there too, set with their talons facing a doll made of bound reeds, stuffed burlap, and cornhusks.

A long thorn of some sort jutted out of the doll’s groin. There were two more thorns in the heart. A fourth one penetrated the top of the head.

“Santeria.” Drummond grunted. “She must not have left it behind in Port-au-Prince.”

“Who’s the doll supposed to be?” Johnson said.