Peter May - Snakehead

She stood up and thrust both hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Mark, I’ve told you before — it’s Doctor, or Margaret. Ma’am makes me sound like a…well, like a schoolmarm.’ And she immediately saw the irony in that. Because here she was, a teacher being cornered after class by a pupil with a crush on her. She smiled. ‘Just call me Margaret.’

But Mark clearly wasn’t comfortable with that. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot, Dr. Campbell, you know, after your classes and all, about what it is I really want to do.’

Margaret grinned and set off along the corridor. He loped after her. ‘And today you finally figured it out,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘Autoeroticism. Cross-dressing and oxygen starvation.’

He blushed to the roots of his hair. ‘No…I…I…didn’t mean…’ he stuttered. ‘I mean, what I meant was…I think I’d like to be a pathologist.’ And he added, unnecessarily, ‘You know, like you.’

They had reached the entrance hall, lights reflecting off red tile floors, flags representing all the foreign students at the college hanging limply above the stairwell. Margaret was losing patience. She turned on the young man, white sneakers squeaking on the glazed tiles. ‘If you want to be a pathologist, Mark, you should be at med school. But, frankly, I’m not sure you’d have what it takes.’ His face fell. But Margaret was unrelenting. ‘And, Mark…go chase someone your own age.’ She turned and hurried out past a photo portrait of the kindly looking silver-haired man after whom the college had been named. In the car park she paused for a moment, filled with regret. George J. Beto, she was sure, would not have spoken to a student like that. But Margaret had a propensity for harsh words. It was only too easy to hurt others when you were still hurting yourself.

Margaret’s house was on Avenue O at the top of the hill, a spit away from the university campus. It was built of red brick, like the college, and had a grey tile roof. Sprawling on one level, it was set in a lush green garden, screened from the road by trees. It had made sense at the time to take on the rental. The plan had been to settle for a quiet life of academic seclusion. Then, after only three months, the job in Harris County had fallen vacant. Chief medical examiner of the third largest county in the United States, taking in Houston, the fourth largest city. She had thought long and hard about it, and the dean had been very supportive, even encouraged her. She could always, he said, guest-lecture one morning a week. He had grinned and in his clipped New York accent told her it would be quite a feather in his cap to have the CME of Harris County lecturing at his college. She never knew how much influence the dean had had with the appointees, but one of them had told her later that the job had been hers from the moment she applied.

Margaret checked her watch as she drove up Seventeenth Street. There was just enough time to shower and change before heading back to her office in Houston, a good fifty minutes’ drive if the traffic on the freeway was moving smoothly. But her spirits dipped as she drew her Chevy in behind a bright red pick-up with oversized wheels parked outside her house. Her landlord was standing on the porch with his arms folded across his chest. A young man in overalls and a baseball cap crouched at the open front door, a bag of tools on the stoop beside him.

Margaret slammed the door of her car and strode up the path. ‘What do you think you’re doing, McKinley?’

The young man looked alarmed and got quickly to his feet. But McKinley stood his ground defiantly. He was a redneck with money. Owned several of the houses on the hill. ‘That ain’t very’ ladylike kinda language now,’ he drawled unpleasantly.

Margaret glared at him. He was a walking, talking cliché. Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a checked shirt and a scuffed white Stetson pushed back on his head. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

The younger man glanced from one to the other. ‘Maybe I should go.’ He stooped to pick up his bag. Chisels and screwdrivers rattled inside it.

McKinley put out a hand to stop him. ‘You stay where you are, sonny.’ And to Margaret, ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady.’

Margaret turned to the carpenter. ‘You want to know why?’ He looked like he’d rather eat his baseball cap. But she was going to tell him anyway. ‘Because when I was out he was going into my house and going through my stuff. Left his big oily fingermarks on the bras and panties in my underwear drawer.’

McKinley’s face reddened. ‘Now that ain’t true. You got no cause goin’ sayin’ stuff like that.’

The carpenter was examining his feet now with great interest.

‘You want to see the proof?’ Margaret asked McKinley. ‘Two hours of video footage from the camera I hid in the closet?’

It was a bluff, but it proved to be a winning hand. McKinley paled. Then his mouth tightened. ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady. And that’s a contravention, plain and simple, of the terms of your lease. I want you outta here.’

Margaret’s cellphone rang and she fumbled in her purse to find it. ‘What,’ she barked into it.

‘Been trying to get you for the last hour.’ It was Lucy, her secretary, a God-fearing middle-aged Presbyterian lady who disapproved of Margaret.

‘I always turn off the cellphone when I’m lecturing, Lucy. You know that,’ Margaret said. ‘Why didn’t you try the college?’

‘I did. And missed you.’ She heard Lucy sigh at the other end. ‘Dr. Campbell, we got a call from the sheriff’s office in Walker County up there. They need your help out at a Tex-Mex eatery on Highway 45. Seems they got a truck full of ninety-some dead people.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said, and she could almost feel Lucy’s disapproval all the way down the line from Houston. ‘I’m on my way.’ She hung up and pushed past McKinley into the house. She always kept an emergency flight case at home packed with all the tools and accoutrements of her profession.

‘I mean it,’ McKinley shouted after her. ‘I want you outta here.’

‘Tell it to my lawyer,’ Margaret said and shut the door in his face.

Margaret drove northwest on Interstate 45, past the Wynne and Holliday Units of the Huntsville prison complex, the tiny municipal airport that sat up on the right, the spur that took off west to Harper Cemetery. She passed several billboards advertising positions as correctional officers for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In Huntsville you either worked for the prison or the university. The warm October sun bleached all colour out of the sky and she could see the cluster of blue and red flashing lights in the distance identifying where the truck had been found. Strictly speaking, this was out of Margaret’s jurisdiction. But the Walker County Coroner simply wasn’t equipped to cope with something like this. Which was why the sheriff had called her office.

She turned on to the 190 and took a left on the access road to the Mexican diner. Three crows stood on a white picket fence gazing curiously across the scrub toward the parking lot where police officers moved, antlike, around its taped-off perimeter. More than a dozen vehicles choked the entrance to the lot and Margaret recognised a Pontiac driven by one of her investigators and a couple of white forensics trucks. The centre of all the activity was a huge refrigerated container, the door on the driver’s side of its tractor unit still lying open, just as Jayjay had found it. The Walker County sheriff crossed the crumbling asphalt to greet her. He was a big man in his late fifties, with a grey suit and a white Stetson. His badge was pinned to a breast pocket from which poked a red and yellow re-election flyer. His big hand enveloped hers and crushed it.