Nick Stone: The King of Swords

She looked at the nose and saw a puncture mark on either side, right through the middle, very slightly encrusted with dried blood; on the underside of the nostrils was a small horizontal cut, the same width as the marks on the lips. Nose sewn up too. The object used to make the hole had been thick and long, a needle, she estimated, with an eye wide enough to hold something with the density of a guitar or violin string, which was what she thought had been used to fasten the mouth and nose. She'd seen this before a couple of times, but she couldn't remember the specifics. Once here, once in New York; some kind of black magic ritual. She made a note to cross-reference it on the computer if she had the time and that was a big if.

'Are we going to look inside the head?' Javier asked. She usually left that to him.

'Depends what the insides tell us.'

'The Look of Love' began to play as she made the T-incision from shoulders to mid-chest and all the way down to the pubis. It was around about now that the dieners would start dropping.

She opened up the body and inspected its insides. It was a predictable sight, looking a lot like a butcher's shop might two weeks after the owners had suddenly closed it up and abandoned it with all the contents inside. The organs hadn't just changed colour-reds and maroons had turned shades of grey-blue-they'd started losing their shape too, becoming viscous, and some had been disconnected from the main framework and shifted position because hungry insects had eaten through the cabling. Surprisingly Ralph and Martin had hung on in there. Ralph even looked like he was enjoying himself.

Gemma took a large syringe and extracted blood and fluid from the heart, lungs, bladder and pancreas. Then she spiked the stomach and started filling the syringe barrel with a sample of its contents-a green liquid, the colour of spinach water-but then something solid got sucked up by the needle and blocked it.

After they'd removed and weighed the organs one by one, she sliced open the stomach and emptied its contents into a glass container-more green liquid came out, murky at first, then clearing as a gritty white sediment with the consistency of sand floated to the bottom of the receptacle, followed by small shiny dark scraps of something that could have been plastic.

She noticed the stomach wasn't quite empty; there was something that hadn't come out. She opened it up a little more and saw a pale, sticky greyish ball of matter stuck to the lining. It reminded her of a shrunken golf ball. When she held it up to the light she saw it wasn't a single object, but small overlapping squares compacted into a ball.

Using tweezers she tugged and pulled at the ball until she'd managed to prise loose one of the squares. It was about a third of an inch long, made of cardboard, printed on both sides, miraculously intact despite the digestive process. One side was black, the other was multicoloured-reds, yellows, oranges, blues-but she couldn't make out the design.

She unpicked the rest of the bundle, laying out the squares one by one at the end of the slab, until she found herself staring at a jigsaw.

She spent the next hour piecingit together. Fifteen minutes in, she began to recognize the thing she was assembling.

The image she had before her was familiar, but the design differed in many ways. The drawing was more sophisticated, more detailed, the colours richer and more vibrant-what there was of it, because it wasn't complete. At least a quarter was missing. She guessed where she'd find it.

'Javier, open up his throat,' she said.

The victim had choked to death on the remaining cardboard squares.

When Javier had finished and handed her nine missing pieces, she completed the jigsaw.

It was a tarot card depicting a man sitting on a throne with a golden crown on his head. The crown was in the shape of a castle turret and studded with brilliant red rubies. In his left hand he held a blood-flecked gold sword, blade plunged into the ground; in his right fist a thick chain was wrapped tightly around his knuckles. The chain was fitted to a black mastiff who lay at his right side, head raised, teeth half bared, paws out in front. The dog's eyes were bright red and it had a forked tongue, to go with its mean, bad-tempered expression on their faces, an anger caught midway to eruption. Despite where it had been and what it had been through, and the fact that it was in pieces, the card seemed very much alive. She found herself staring at it, enraptured by its terrible beauty, unable to pull herself away. This was like no other card she'd ever seen. The man on the throne had no face. In its stead was the blank, plain white outline of a head. It seemed like it might have been a printing error, given the richness of the detail, but the more she studied it, the more she felt the design was intentional.

'You know tarot?' Javier said behind her.

'What?' She turned around, then laughed. 'No. I don't believe in that kind of stuff.'

'The King of Swords,' Javier explained, looking down at the foot of the mortuary slab. 'The card represents a man of great power and influence, an aggressive man also. It can mean a valuable ally or a fearsome enemy, depending on where and how it turns up in the reading.'

'Is that right?' Gemma said. 'So what does it mean when it turns up in someone's stomach?'

'Preval Lacour,' Max read off a photostatted report as Joe drove. 'Forty-four years old. Haitian. Became a US citizen in 1976. Taxpayer, registered Republican, churchgoer, married, four kids. Good credit score, home owner, modest Amex debt. Recently became the proud owner-with his business partner, Guy Martin-of a lot of real estate in Lemon City. He was plannin' to redevelop it. No priors, no record, no nothing. I don't get it.' He looked at Joe over the pages. 'Here's a guy well on his way to getting his piece of the American Dream. No history of mental illness, or violence. No drugs or alcohol in his system. How and why the fuck did it all go so wrong?'

'People go crazy, Max,' Joe said. 'Sometimes somethin' just slips. You know how it is. We see it all the time.'

'I'd say somethin' more than just "slipped" with this guy.' Max continued reading from the report. 'He killed his business partner and secretary. Why? These were childhood friends, godfathers to each other's kids, never known to have had a serious quarrel, business was on the up.' Max turned the page. 'Then he puts the bodies in his trunk and drives over to Fort Lauderdale and kills Alvaro and Frida Cuesta. Then he drives over to Primate Park, breaks in and chokes to death on his own vomit-all in seventy-two hours.

'The other people he killed, the Cuestas: they were his main business rivals. They went head to head over the Lemon City project. But the Cuestas lost out. Why kill 'em? And there was a third guy in the running too-Sam Ismael, Haitian, Lemon City local, runs a voodoo store. He was the lucky one. He was out of town the day Lacour went on the rampage, otherwise he might've been murdered too. The whole thing's insane. Don't make sense.'

'Sometimes it just never does.' Joe sighed.

They were on US1, driving towards Kendall. It had been two weeks since they'd found Preval Lacour's body in Primate Park. The incident had made the national news, thanks to the hundreds of monkeys which had escaped from the zoo and run riot all over Miami and beyond.

Lacour's fingerprints had been taken at the morgue and run through the computer. Five days later the machine had matched them to the murders of Guy Martin and Theresa Morales in a Hialeah motel and to the Cuestas in Fort Lauderdale. Lacour's car-a black Mercedes sedan-had been spotted speeding away from the scene. A witness had taken down the number plate and phoned it in.

Lacour had dumped the Mercedes in a car park in North Miami Beach, where it had stayed until the weekend before the Primate Park discovery. A caretaker had noticed a horrific smell coming from the car and called the police who had found the decomposing bodies of Lacour's business partner and secretary.