Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

A few weeks after I'd been late making it in from the river and we'd missed the start of a show she had tickets for. But she didn't seem to mind and we ended up sitting here on the back porch, talking about the past. The cop stuff was inevitable, but she avoided the subject of her husband and I stayed away from my family. Part of the wall was mine. Part was hers.

I rapped lightly on the screen door and waited. Nothing. I knocked a bit harder but it sounded like a hammer in the quiet. Through a window I could see soft light in a back room, so I stepped off the porch and found the wooden gate to the yard. I flipped the metal latch to make some noise and followed a path of flagstones. I could see the glow of aqua light before rounding the corner, and then her silhouette against the light of the pool. She was running an aluminum pole with a net on the end over the surface and was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.

"A little late for maintenance," I said.

My voice made her jump, but only a little.

"I thought you'd stood me up, Freeman," she said, turning her head but keeping a grip on the pole. "Figured why waste a good wine buzz."

She made a final pass with the net, capturing a few more leaves that had dropped from the oak that dominated the yard, and then laid the pole aside.

"You're ahead of me," I said.

"I only offered coffee, Freeman. But I'll let you indulge."

She stepped up onto the wide, wood-planked porch and headed toward a set of French doors. When I started to follow she turned quickly and said, "I'll bring it out." I had still never been inside her house.

Her yard was thick with tropical plants, broad-leafed banana palms and white birds-of-paradise. The pool reflected up into some Spanish moss hanging from the closest oak limbs. Few of the plantings were native, but the effect was a soft, green, isolated place. The porch included a huge woven hammock stretched across one end.

In a few minutes she came out with a bottle and two wineglasses.

"Hey, it's not your wilderness," she said, reading my appreciation. "But it isn't bad for the city."

She filled the glasses and sat down on the top step, stretching her legs and putting the bottle next to her.

"Diaz doesn't think much of your theory, but he likes you," she said.

"Is that good?" I said, sitting down.

"Sure. It means he won't bring your name up to Hammonds for a while." She was looking into the pool.

"Hammonds approved the stepped-up patrol in the zone?"

"Yeah. But I'm not sure if he was shamed into it or if it was politics. The black city commissioner has been rattling the cages, and the newspapers are finally starting to run stories about 'A pattern of unsolved rapes and homicides in the minority community,' " she said with a pretty credible television news anchor's voice.

"I don't read the papers," I said.

"What? No delivery on the river?"

She was smiling and the space inside the circle it always created felt comfortable. I took another swallow of wine and leaned back, propped myself on my elbows and looked up through the oak. Night-blooming jasmine was on the air, mixed with a slightly sharp odor of chlorine.

"How's the leg wound?" she said, and I felt her hand on my thigh where a killer's bullet had caught me on a ricochet. She had been there when they found me bleeding in my shack.

"It'll hold up," I said, reaching up to curl a loose strand of her hair and letting the backs of my fingers brush her cheek.

She tilted her head into my hand and then leaned down and kissed me, the scent of wine and perfume spilling into my mouth and my breath catching in my chest.

The aqua glow caught just the edges of her hair and lit them. But her eyes were in shadow and I couldn't see their color.

An electronic warble pulled me out of a half sleep and Richards was up and out of the hammock before my eyes could clear. I just caught a slip of fabric and a flash of blonde hair going through the French doors as I lay there swinging, back and forth, with the force of her leaving.

It was still dark but there was a hint of dawn in the east. I could hear her voice, low and curt. Paged, I thought. A cop who is always on.

A light went on somewhere inside and a couple of minutes later she came out on the deck in a robe. Her hair was brushed and her eyelashes were wet from splashing water onto her face.

"They're calling detectives in on an overnight homicide," she said. "Some shrink who works in the jail was found with his throat cut."

Behind my eyes the dry sponge of a wine hangover was dulling both my eyesight and my brain synapses.

"He worked for you guys?"

"Not officially. We run the jail but the medical staff is contracted through a private company. But it doesn't look good having even a subcontractor get hit in your own jurisdiction."

I could see her head spinning the scene already. Motive and opportunity.

"Shit. We'll be chasing patients the guy's seen for years who are out on the street. They're going to want this one quick."

She came closer and put her hands on my shoulders and bent to kiss me. I was about to say something witty about duty calling when she twisted away.

"I gotta go. Call me," she said, moving to the doors and closing them behind her.

I spent the rest of the morning at Billy's. When I came through the lobby, Murray gave me a few more seconds of eye contact than usual and I thought I could see a slight grin playing at his mouth. I know it's just locker-room humor that people can tell, but how the hell would he know where I'd spent the night?

Billy had long since gone to his office and the apartment was immaculate. He had left a note on top of two large manila envelopes:

Max. This is the Thompson file, including a full dossier and confirmation that she did indeed have a viatical policy through a company other than McCane's and sold it to the same investment group as the others.

The other file is a full dossier on Dr. Harold Marshack, our possible middleman.

Let me know when you get in.

I showered and changed and started a pot of coffee. While I waited I started leafing through the Thompson file. The woman had purchased an inordinately large life insurance policy in 1954 and had been paying loyally for decades. She obviously liked the idea of tucking such death insurance away that in the late '70s, she bought yet another policy that gave her nearly $100,000 in coverage. But four years ago she sold both to the investment group for $40,000. They had required a medical exam, but when they found she had been diagnosed with cancer and had refused surgery, they didn't hesitate.

Different figures, but pretty much the same pattern as the others. I poured myself a cup of coffee and took the other file to the patio. Out on the ocean there were a dozen fishing boats strung out past what I knew was the third reef line. The water was flat and a huge freighter was southbound on the horizon, the visibility so clear I could see the lump of a wave being pushed by the prow of the big vessel. I sat in one of the patio chairs and opened the file on Marshack.

The doctor, who was fifty-two, had taken his degree from a small college in Louisville. The resume listed internships and hospital privileges in both Kentucky and Tennessee. A few years were then unaccounted for, but a license and three different business addresses in North Carolina made me think he must have been struggling to find a steady practice.

It was all pretty undistinguished stuff until I got to the address listing in Moultrie, Georgia. The work address was for the State Penitentiary. His title there had been head of prison psychiatric services. He had worked there for four years. There was another lapse in time before his next official work record for Health and Prison Services of Florida. His current address was in Golden Beaches, just as McCane had said.