Nick Stone: The King of Swords

'No sign of the baby?' Max asked Joe.

'No,' Joe said. 'Maybe someone was lookin' after it while they partied.'

'I don't think so. This was a family party. Just them celebrating the Lemon City deal. The baby would've been there too.'

'So what do you think? He took it with him?'

'Perhaps,' Max said.

Joe walked away to check out the rest of the study. Max continued examining the faces in the portrait. They wouldn't hold the slightest clue as to what had happened and why, but he wanted to imagine them alive, going about their day-to-day business, what their voices sounded like ringing around the house, what their habits were, what united and separated them. He'd always done this, humanized the dead, summoned their ghosts and listened in on them. Thinking about them as people instead of statistics helped keep him focused on the job and what it was really about. A lot of cops working homicide became so jaded and indifferent, so numb inside, that death was a numbers game to them-one they were resigned to losing before they'd even started playing. They forgot they were dealing with people just like them, people whose lives had been cut short before their time. Yet, looking at the Lacours, Max felt for the first time a sadness and something collapsing within himself, a support giving way and an ideal crashing to the ground: if this is what people were doing to each other now, turning in on themselves and those closest to them, there was no hope any more. And if there was no hope, there was no point in being a cop.

'Max,' Joe called out, 'come see this.'

Joe was standing by the windowsill, holding up one of a row of photographs he'd picked up from there. It showed Lacour standing on a stretch of grass with his sons and daughter. They were all holding hands with chimps dressed in shorts and Primate Park T-shirts. When they looked closer they saw the picture had been taken at roughly the same spot on the grass verge where they'd found Lacour's body.

'Looks recent,' Joe said. 'Maybe that's why he went back there.'

'Who knows?' Max sighed. 'Who'll ever know?'

Max noticed the evidence bag Joe was holding.

'What've you got?'

'Found it in the parents' bedroom.' He handed Max the envelope. 'Smells of almonds.'

It was a small red and white striped candy wrapper.

'Where d'you find it?'

'Under the cot.'

'Babies don't eat candy.' Max gave him the bag. 'And this house is clean and tidy, orderly. My guess is, when they run prints on that wrapper they ain't gonna find any, 'cause the person who dropped it was wearin' gloves. But if they do get something, it won't belong to any of these people.'

'So you're sayin'…?'

'Yeah,' Max nodded grimly, 'Lacour didn't do this on his own. He had help.'

April-May 1981

'Man. I dunno why you keep on lettin' freaks like that out, 'cause y'all know they gonna do it again-sure as man followed monkey,' Drake murmured, passing Max Mingus a book of matches over his shoulder. They were from a motel called the Alligator Moon in Immokalee, a small town right in the middle of the Everglades.

Max memorized the address as he lit a Marlboro, and then gave the matches back without turning his head. He now had the information he needed: the child-killer Dean Waychek's whereabouts, his hiding place, the rock he'd crawled under as soon as he'd come out of prison.

Drake and Max had been doing business like this for most of the ten years Max had been a cop. Drake was by far and away the best snitch he had. The guy was plugged into the Miami criminal mainframe like no one else. He knew everything there was to know and everyone who was doing it.

Max would tell him what he needed and Drake would call him back with a time and place to meet-always breakfast at a diner, usually one that had just opened up because, Drake reasoned, the food was more likely to be better in a new joint, as they'd be making an extra effort to attract repeat custom. The two would sit back-to-back in adjoining booths and whisper to each other out of the corner of their mouths.

Today they were in a place called Al amp; Shirley's, off 5th Street in Miami Beach. Max remembered the building well. It had once been a photographer's studio. The owner had taken some shots of Muhammad Ali shortly after he'd won the heavyweight title for the first time. He'd blown up one of the photos to lifesize-Ali in his white shorts, championship belt around his waist, throwing a jab, exuberant expression on his face-and proudly exhibited it in the window, only for someone to smash the glass and steal the picture. Max and Joe had caught the thief a couple of weeks later when they'd seen him standing outside a school Ali had just opened, with the six-foot-plus-sized blow-up at his side, waiting for an autograph. The incident made the front page of the next day's Miami Herald. The accompanying photograph was a surreal sight: Joe hauling the thief away in cuffs, Max walking just behind them, carrying the Ali blow-up under his arm; while standing very clearly in the background, unbeknown to all, the real Muhammad Ali and his entourage were watching the spectacle and laughing.

Max looked through the same window and took in the desolate view of the near empty forecourt beyond, its entrance flanked by two tall but frail-looking palm trees, with weak trunks and drooping, dried-out leaves. His brown 1979 Camaro was parked in-between a white Ford pickup and a gleaming dark blue Mercedes coupe he guessed was Drake's. It had been there when he'd arrived. The sky above was thick with ash-and sour-milk-coloured clouds which broke the sunlight down to a feeble glow full of shadows. The air was dead and still. Everything was on pause, waiting on the heavens to make up their mind.

Inside were two rows of booths starting from near the entrance and ending at a glossy mural of Old Glory which filled up the back wall, shot-up and dirt-caked, but billowing defiantly-American pride and endurance at its most fundamental.

The cop and his snitch were in the last two booths at the end, to the left, away from the window, Max facing the door as he always invariably sat, even off-duty. He liked to know what was behind him and what was ahead of him as best he could.

The place was nearly empty, which wasn't surprising, given the time-just shy of 9.30 a.m.-but it felt like this was as busy as it was going to get today.

Max listened to Drake eat, the sounds of his chewing recalling a platoon trampling in time across dry undergrowth. Although Drake had once claimed to eat only breakfast, Max wondered where on his six foot three, raggedy-ass bird-leg frame he put all the calories he was wolfing down-a greasy pile of crispy bacon, sausages, ham, hamburger, beans, hash browns, grilled tomatoes, four eggs fried two different ways and toast; so much food, they'd had to serve it up on two plates, one for the meat alone.

Drake dealt coke, poppers, pills and grass to an upmarket clientele of interstate jetsetters, white-collar lost weekenders, college kids with more bucks than brains and Miami's burgeoning gay community. Max helped him by regularly busting his competition and keeping him off the police radar. He also occasionally kicked some of the coke he seized in the line of duty back to him. He didn't feel too good about the last part, but that was the way it was in Miami right now. The town ran on coke and coke ran the town. For every three kilos seized, one would make the papers and two would make it back on the street.

'Ain't no cure for that kinda evil thing,' Drake continued. 'Ain't no jail bad enough, ain't no religion good enough, ain't no shrink shrunk enough to undo that. Only a bullet can cure that.'

Drake was getting worked up, like he always did whenever Max asked him about child abusers and child killers. He hated their kind with such intensity that Max often wondered if he hadn't himself been molested when he was a boy, but it wasn't the kind of thing you ever asked a street-forged hoodlum like Drake-not that he'd ever tell anyway, because it'd make him look how he couldn't afford to be seen: weak, a victim, a sissy. If he got a rep like that it'd be bad for business. He'd have armies of rivals on his tail, and there'd be nothing Max could do to save him.