J. Kerley - The Broken Souls

“What’s up, Sal? You look like your cat got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.”

She turned, brightened. Pushed strands of auburn hair from her eyes. Smiled with false bonhomie.

“Hi, Carson.”

“You OK?”

She looked at a report she’d been filling out. Shook her head.

“I just got back from the hospital. A rape victim. Among other things. Jesus.”

“Tough one?”

“Ugliness through and through. Bizarre.”

I rolled up a chair for the vacant desk beside Sal’s. The desk had belonged to her former partner, Larry Dayle. Dayle had resigned after four months on the Sex Crimes unit, moving his family to a mountainside in Montana and stringing the perimeter with razor wire.

The floor – Sexual Crimes, Crimes Against Property, Vehicle Theft – was quiet, most of the detectives out. I took Sal’s hand.

“Want to tell a friendly face about it? I can go get Harry.”

She laughed, and the laugh cracked into a sob. She caught herself. Brushed away a tear. It was Sal’s empathy that made her so good at what she did. The downside was what poured back through the door.

She said, “A woman, twenty-five. Student. Got grabbed off the street just after dark last night. Picked up bodily and jammed into a vehicle. She was taken somewhere – a barn or stable, she thought, by the smell. Afterwards she got pushed from a moving vehicle into a hospital parking lot. That was one a.m. this morning. I was with her most of the night.”

“Strange. She was raped?”

“And beaten. Her face …it’ll be a long time before the surgeons make it a face again. She wanted children. That’s gone. Her insides were …”

“Easy,” I said.

“The guy who did it, while he was punching her, doing all the things he did, he kept laughing, yelling, ‘Look at me, bitch, can you see me?’ Then he’d hit her, scream, ‘Look at me, tell me what you see.’”

“She got a description?” I asked.

“No.”

“The perp wore a mask?”

Sally shook her head. “No.”

“What?” I asked.

Sally buried her face in her hands.

“Oh, Carson. She’s blind. Been blind since birth.”

I thought about the rape-abduction as I drove to the morgue. I’d never worked sex crimes, though as a member of the Psychopathological and Sociopathological unit had studied sexual predators. The actions as Sal described them seemed to combine the power-assertive, or entitlement, type of offender with a sadistic, or anger-excitation, type of behavior. The first behavior type humiliates the victim to increase the perp’s sense of self-worth and self-confidence. The second is brutal, often involving a high level of physical aggression, including torture.

I had no idea what to make of the anomalous gesture of dropping the woman at the hospital.

The Crown Vic started to feel crowded and I lowered the windows to let fresh air blow out too many dark thoughts. I parked in the morgue lot beside Clair’s sporty little BMW, worth more than my annual pay. Clair’s former husband, Zane Peltier, was a bona fide member of Mobile society, the old-money contingent, and some of that largesse had rubbed off on Clair during the divorce proceedings.

It hit me that Clair would certainly know of the Kincannons, maybe even know them personally. I might get a question answered, maybe two, if I could sneak them into a conversation.

Clair wasn’t in her office, so I checked across the hall in the main autopsy suite. She was gowned in green and standing against the wall as Lula Baker mopped the floor beneath the autopsy table. Lula was a former housekeeper in New Orleans, one of the vast army of transplants.

“Hi, Lula,” I said.

“Morn’, ’tect Ryd’,” she said. Lula was thirty or so, white, skinny, and had the ability to edit most words to a single syllable.

“The prelim’s out front, Ryder,” Clair said, looking up from a copy of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Monthly, required reading for pathologists.

“I wanted to ask you something else.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “I forgot.”

Clair pulled off her reading glasses, studied me with the big blue miracles.

“Maybe because you’re not getting enough sleep. You’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

“It’s the Franklin case. Nothing’s moving ahead.”

“Take vitamins and eat right. Remember to sleep.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She frowned, but said nothing. I turned to leave, then tapped my forehead, like I’d been hit with a sudden thought.

“I was at a Channel 14 party the other night, Clair. Formal, all the bigwigs. I half-expected to see you there with the social types.”

“If I never see another champagne fountain it’ll be too soon. Out of your element, weren’t you?”

“If I never see another tux it’ll be too soon. You wouldn’t know a family named Kincannon, would you?”

Her face darkened. “Why?”

“People treated them like royalty. I’ve never seen so much bowing and scraping.”

Clair turned to the housekeeper. “That’s fine, Lula. You can go.”

“Be bact’mar.”

Lula rolled the mop and bucket out the door. Clair set the CDC report on a counter.

“The Kincannons have money, Carson. It equates to power: lots of money, lots of power. Some people have an automatic reflex when they get near power. Their knees bend.”

“A lot of politicos were there, too.”

“Political knees bend further and more often. She was there, too, wasn’t she: an older woman, white hair, chunky, aloof?”

“Yes. May-bell-line?”

“Maylene. Yes, she would have been. She’ll always be there, in some way or another.”

I heard something off-key in Clair’s voice, anger maybe, or resignation.

“Some way or another?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She looked at her watch, frowned. “I’ve got two pathologists down with the flu. I’ve got the day’s second post in three minutes. Look, the Kincannons do a lot of giving to the community and the region. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for parks, health-care institutions, schools, law enforcement …an incredible amount of money.”

“And so …?”

“The Kincannons …well, only some of the truly wealthy can give with both hands, Ryder.”

Her words seemed cryptic; Clair was rarely cryptic.

“You mean the Kincannons have so much they can shovel it hand over hand into the community?”

“Think about it. But elsewhere, please. I’ve got to get to work.”

I sucked in a breath, said, “How about Buck Kincannon?”

“Is there a specific question there?”

“No,” I admitted. There are about a hundred.

Clair picked up the phone on the counter, asked for the body to be brought to the table. She turned to me.

“Buck Kincannon is the current golden boy of the family, forty-eight karats of flawless Kincannon breeding. Last month’s Alabama Times magazine listed him as one of the top ten eligible bachelors in the state.”

Not what I needed to hear.

“Current golden boy, Clair?”

“Maylene Kincannon runs that family like a competitive event. Next month it may be Nelson on the pedestal. Or Racine, unless he gets blitzed and slips off. Race likes women and liquor, probably not in that order. Now, unless you’re going to assist, it’s time to skedaddle.”

I nodded, headed for the door. I was stepping into the hall when she called my name. I stopped, turned.

“The Kincannons, Ryder. They haven’t stepped outside any limits, right? You’re not investigating anything, anyone?”

“Just natural curiosity about a lifestyle I’ll never know.”

She gave me the long look again. “It’s mostly fiction. Stay away from those folks, Carson. There’s nothing to be gained there.”