Stuart Woods - Palindrome

"He's made a will. I know because I witnessed it." There was a stunned silence. "Keir, I saw the document; he told me what it was; I signed my name as a witness. And he told me he'd done it in such a way as to keep any part of the island out of Jimmy's hands." Keir leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

"Christ, I don't believe it," he said, and then he began to laugh. "So, poor old Jimmy died for nothing; just a good dinner for a passing alligator and his brood. Christ, what a joke on him! What a joke on me!"

"On you? What do you mean?" Keir went on laughing. It was a haunted, despairing sound, and Liz hated it.

"Stop it!" she shouted, slapping him across the back of the head. "Shut up!" She hit him again. He sat up and took a deep breath.

"Oh, Jesus," he said pitifully. He turned and slipped his arms around her, put his head in her lap, and hugged her body. "The man who loves you is a pathetic creature." He sighed. "He can't love anything without destroying something else. Love and destruction, that's all he's capable of."

She leaned over and rested her cheek on his shoulder. "Shhh," she said.

"You don't know what you're saying." She didn't want him to say any more; there were some things she just didn't want to know. She stretched out on the sofa and pulled his head to her breast. "Shhhh," she breathed softly. "You don't have to tell me. I love you, whatever you are, whatever you've done." She stroked his hair until the bourbon and her day overcame her, and she fell asleep in his arms.

Lee Williams arrived at Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, a general-aviation field on the north side of Atlanta, twenty minutes after he got the call. He turned in through the main gate, and he could see, a block away, what he was looking for; two police cars, an ambulance, and the crime lab van were gathered in a parking lot, separated from a line of single-engine airplanes by a row of pine trees. He swung into the lot and stopped next to the ambulance; he could now see that the vehicles surrounded a white Volkswagen Jetta. The group of men were standing sullenly about; he had kept them waiting.

"Can we crack this car, now, Lee?" Mike Hopkins, the lab man, asked.

"Just a minute." He walked slowly around the car; here and there it was grimy with black fingerprinting powder. He looked inside. There was a nurse's uniform in a dry cleaner's plastic bag lying on the backseat. There was a black leather handbag on the front passenger seat. He didn't like that. No woman would deliberately leave her handbag in a car in plain sight.

There was nothing else to see inside the car.

"Okay," he said, "pop the trunk." He walked around to the back of the car and stood while an officer tried keys on the trunk lock.

Williams tried to breathe normally. "Here we go," the man said, as a key turned. The lid came up to complete silence from the gathered group.

They all winced at the smell. Hopkins stepped forward, looked into the trunk, and spoke into a hand-held dictating machine. "The victim was discovered in the trunk of a 1989 Volkswagen Jetta, registered in her name. The body is lying in an unnatural position, which presumes death before entering the trunk; the odor of decay is moderately present. The body is entirely nude and is cold to the touch." He manipulated an arm, then a leg. "Rigor mortis is not present." He stepped away from the car and let the photographer get on with his work.

Williams stepped away with him. "How long?"

"I can tell you better later."

"Best guess."

"Over the weekend. Saturday, probably."

"Was she raped?"

"Too soon to say. They usually are when they're found nude."

"One thing you should know: she had sex with her boyfriend, by his account, on Thursday night.

It may have been pretty rough. You might see if you can differentiate between any bruising from that session and whatever happened at the time of her death."

"Thanks, that's good information."

"When can I have some results?"

"Preliminary"-he glanced at his watch-"ten o'clock tonight. Conclusive, tomorrow, the day after."

"Give me as much as you can tonight," Williams pleaded.

"I'll try. It may be an easy one, who knows? If it'll help, I think cause of death will be a broken neck; I don't think she was strangled."

"A powerful man, then?"

"That's a reasonable assumption."

"Anything else you can tell me now?"

Hopkins looked at his feet. "She's badly beaten up, you can see that. Looks like the guy wanted to hurt her a lot before he killed her."

"Uh, huh. Do you think he just meant to beat her up, that maybe she got the broken neck from a blow to the head?"

Hopkins shook his head slowly. "I think he meant to destroy her."

Williams nodded. "Okay, that fits my senario."

Williams drove slowly from the airport. The ambulance overtook him, no lights blazing. There was no hurry for Mary Alice Taylor. It occurred to him that, in all his years as a policeman, he had never, until that day, seen the dead body of a victim he knew personally. It made a difference.

Williams arranged the chairs carefully. He had borrowed his captain's office for the morning, and he didn't want to use an interrogation room just yet; he wanted to get Ramsey on the record, first. Nervously, he picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Medical examiner's office."

"Hopkins, please."

"He's on his way, Sergeant," the woman said. She knew the detective's voice by now.

"Did he finish?"

"He's got everything with him."

"Good. Thanks." He hung up and waited impatiently. It took Hopkins another twenty minutes to get there, and, looking at his watch, Williams saw that he had only five minutes before his scheduled meeting.

"Sorry to be so late," Hopkins said, puffing as he sat down.

"It's okay; I appreciate your getting this done so quickly. What have we got?"

"Pretty much what I thought last night. She was beaten badly with fists, and her neck was broken."

"Rape?"

"Not exactly. She had some bruises which would correspond with Thursday night's intercourse with the boyfriend, but she had more recent, more serious damage to the vagina and anus, which occurred closer to the time of her death."

"Which was?"

"Some time between midnight Friday and noon Saturday."

"What was the nature of the more recent damage?"

"Not sex, not in the usual sense, anyway." Hopkins opened his old-fashioned briefcase and took out a large Ziploc bag. He placed it on the captain's desk. Williams had trouble keeping his face expressionless. The bag contained a pointed wooden stake.

"It looks like the sort of thing you'd buy at a gardening store," he said.

"It is. I don't know if you remember, but at the airport, the bit of land between the parking lot and the airplane tie-down area had recently been seeded. The area had been cordoned off with string, and a 'keep off' sign put up. I think this is one of the stakes the string was tied to."

"I don't remember it in or around the car. Where did you find it?"

"In her colon," Hopkins said. His eyes focused on the floor. "All of it. That's why we didn't see it sooner."

"Jesus God," Williams moaned. "It's twelve inches long!"

"It's fourteen inches long."

"Was she alive when it happened?"

"Yes, and she's had it in her vagina, as well." Williams looked at the stake again. It was of rough lumber, not planed or sanded. Hopkins read his mind. "There were a number of splinters present in both areas."

Williams looked up and saw Bake Ramsey and another man approaching the glassed-in office. "Anything else? I'm out of time."

"Nothing that would be of any immediate help. The car had some prints that weren't the woman's. I've given them to your people for running, but they're consistent with what might be picked up in a gas station or car wash. The driver's door handle and the trunk latch area showed signs of having been handled by someone with a cloth or gloves. That's your man, I'd bet."