Michael Gruber - Tropic of Night

“Not that I saw, unless somebody snatched it before we got here.”

“Okay, I’ll ask. You done in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, then paused. “Jimmy, you’ll want to catch this guy.”

“We want to catch all of them, man.”

“Uh-uh, Jimmy,” said the technician. “I mean you’ll really want this one.”

He left and Paz went into the bedroom. There was nothing in the tiny room but a cheap white-painted “brass” bed, a white pine bureau, and two people, one of whom was dead and one of whom was Paz’s partner. Cletis Barlow was a fiftyish white man built on Lincolnesque lines, one of the ever fewer representatives on the Miami PD of the original population of Florida, an old-time cracker. Barlow looked like a redneck preacher, which he was, on Sundays. He had been a homicide detective for nearly thirty years, and had in common with Jimmy Paz little more than street smarts and a strong stomach.

“The M.E. been yet?” asked Paz, staring at the thing on the bed.

“Been and gone. Where were you?”

“It’s my regular day off, Cletis. Monday? Yours too, I thought. I was going to my mom’s. Why did we catch this thing?”

“I was hanging around and picked up the phone,” said Barlow. Paz grunted. He knew that Cletis Barlow refused point-blank to do servile labor on Sundays, so he often filled in the hours he would have been docked during what would otherwise have been his regular day off. Paz asked, “What did the M.E. say? Who was it, by the way?”

“Echiverra. He figures she’s been dead a couple of days. This is Deandra Wallace. She was supposed to go over her momma’s house this morning. Her brother come by to see her when she didn’t show or answer her phone. And he found her like this. They were going to go shopping. For the baby.”

“Uh-huh,” said Paz, and moved closer to the bed. The remains were those of a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, with smooth chocolate skin. She was nude, lying on her back, arms at her sides, legs extended. There was a gold bracelet on one ankle and a gold chain around her neck, with a tiny golden cross on it. Her breasts were solid, round, and swollen. Her hands were encased in the usual plastic bags, in the event that she had touched her killer in some evidentiary fashion. When murdered she had been in the most advanced state of pregnancy. The flowered sheet on which she lay was red-black with blood and there was a pool of solidified blood on the floor. Paz was careful not to step in it.

“There’s no baby,” said Paz.

“No. The baby’s in the sink in the kitchen. Take a look.”

Paz did. Barlow heard him say, “Ay, mierditas! Ay, mierda! Ay, Dios mio, condenando, ay, chingada!” which, as he understood no Spanish, meant nothing to him. What Paz said when he came back was, “My goodness, what a terrible thing!” When you worked with Cletis Barlow, you did not use the name of the Lord in vain, at least not in the official language of the state of Florida, nor utter any foul speech. Cletis would not work with anyone who did not conform to his standards, and Jimmy Paz could not afford to annoy the only detective in the homicide unit who did not actively dislike him. Paz didn’t actually know how Cletis felt about him personally, although coming as he did from five generations of the most viciously racist people in the nation, one might assume that his very first choice of a partner would not have been a black Cuban. On the other hand, no one had ever heard Barlow use a racial epithet, something that made him fairly unusual in the Miami PD.

“Uh-huh, terrible,” Cletis agreed. “You know, you read about abominations in the Bible, but Satan is usually more roundabout in his works, these days.” Cletis mentioned the name casually, as if the Prince of Darkness were a suspect now hanging out in some local pool hall.

“You think it’s a ritual killing?”

“Well, let’s see now. No signs of forced entry. No one heard anyone holler the night we think she died, which was Saturday, or not that we heard about yet, although we’ll check some more. Then there’s the body. Look at that girl. What do you see? I mean besides what they did to her.”

Paz looked. “She looks like she’s sleeping. I don’t see any abrasions on her wrists or ankles …”

“There ain’t any. I checked. And the doc said she was alive when the cutting started. So …” Barlow paused and waited.

“She knew the people. She let them in. They drugged her unconscious. And then they cut her. Je … um, gosh, what in the world did she think was going to happen to her?”

“Well, we’ll just have to ask the boys who done it when we find them. Oh, yeah, another thing. What do you make of this here?”

Barlow took a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket and handed it to Paz.

It contained a pear-shaped, woody thing an inch or so across, like the thick shell of some nut or fruit, dark and shiny as a piano on the convex surface, dull and rough on the concave side, which bore a straight ridge down its center. Paz saw that two tiny holes had been drilled through either end.

“Looks kind of like a piece of a nutshell, drilled. Part of some necklace?”

They heard steps and a metallic rattle and the two guys from the morgue came in with their gurney.

“Holy fucking shit!” said the lead man when he saw what was on the bed.

“Watch your mouth, son!” said Barlow. “Have some respect for the dead.”

The ambo man, who was relatively new on the job, was about to come back with some smart remark when he wisely took in the expression on Barlow’s face and the expression on his own partner’s and decided to keep his mouth shut and get on with the job.

As he watched them place the remains of Deandra Wallace into a black plastic body bag, Paz reflected, not for the first time, that humor and cheerful obscenity were what made it possible for normal people to endure daily exposure to horror. That Cletis Barlow did not so indulge demonstrated that he was not a normal person, which Paz knew already, but neither did he seem to have any trouble bearing up. Paz liked figuring people out and had found that most of them were as simple as wind-up toys. The major exceptions to this in his experience were his mother and Cletis Barlow. Another thing that kept Paz willingly at his side.

“There’s another one,” said Barlow. “A baby. In the kitchen.” The morgue guys looked startled. The younger one went into the kitchen. There was silence, and the sound of slamming cabinet doors. He came out holding a white kitchen trash bag with a dark bulge at the bottom.

“No,” said Barlow. “Get a body bag.”

“A bod … for Christ’s sake, it’s a fu … it’s a fetus,” said the ambo man.

“It’s a child and it’s the image of God,” said Barlow. “It goes out of here in a body bag like a human being, not like some piece of garbage.”

The older ambo man said, “Eddie, do like the man says. Go down to the bus and get another bag.”

The two detectives waited in silence until the dead were removed from the apartment. They left the bedroom. Paz pointed to the wall. “There’s a picture missing.”

Barlow looked. “Uh-huh. And somebody went to some trouble to draw our attention to it. We’ll ask the family about it.”

“We know who the father is?”

“They will,” said Barlow.

Outside the building, the crowd had dispersed somewhat, or rather had moved across the street to where a couple of television vans had parked, and its younger members were posing for the cameras. Paz and Barlow walked down the street away from this. A PI officer would supply vague semifalsehoods for the twenty seconds of coverage that Deandra Wallace’s death would get on the local news that night, absent some more spectacular carnage involving whiter people.