J. Kerley - Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3 - The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls

No, not a club…

The light flickered twice and failed.

When the autopsy was transcribed to printed form, transcriptionist Marie Manolo was uncertain whether to include Dr. Caulfield’s final six words. Trained by Dr. Peltier to be clinically detached and thorough, Marie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued typing:

My fingers. Where are my fingers?

“A guy’s walking his dog late one night…”

I watched Harry Nautilus lean against the autopsy table and tell the World’s Greatest Joke to a dozen listeners holding napkin-wrapped cups and plastic wineglasses. Most were bureaucrats from the city of Mobile and Mobile County. Two were lawyers; prosecution side, of course. Harry and I were the only cops. There were dignitaries around, mostly in the reception area where the main morgue rededication events were scheduled. The ribbon cutting had been an hour back, gold ribbon, not black, as several wags had suggested.

“What kind of dog?” Arthur Peterson asked. Peterson was a deputy prosecutor and his question sounded like an objection.

“A mutt,” Harry grunted, narrowing an eye at the interruption. “A guy is walking his mutt named Fido down the street when he spots a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight.”

Harry took a sip of beer, licked foam from his bulldozer-blade mustache, and set his cup on the table about where a head would be.

“The dog walker asks the man if he’s lost something. Man says, ‘Yeah, my contact lens popped out.’ So the dog walker ties Fido to a phone pole and gets down on his hands and knees to help. They search up and down, back and forth, beneath that light. Fifteen minutes later the dog walker says, ‘Buddy, I can’t find it anywhere. Are you sure it popped out here?’ The man says, ‘No, I lost it over in the park.’ ‘The park?’ the dog walker yells. ‘Then why the hell are we looking in the street?’”

Harry gave it a two-beat build.

“The man points to the streetlamp and says, ‘The light’s better here.’”

Harry laughed, a musical warble at odds with a black man built like an industrial boiler. His audience tittered politely. An attractive red-head in a navy pantsuit frowned and said, “I don’t get it. Why’s that the world’s greatest joke?”

“It has mythical content,” Harry replied, the right half of his mustache twitching with interest, the left drooping in disdain. “Given the choice of groping after something in the dark, or hoping to find it easily in the light, people pick the light ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

Peterson lofted a prosecutorial eyebrow. “So who’s the hundredth guy, the one always groping in the dark?”

Harry grinned and pointed my way.

“Him,” he said.

I shook my head, showed Harry my back, and walked to the reception area. It was loud and crowded, local VIPs churning like a bucketful of mice as they scrambled for position beside an Even More Important Person or in front of a news camera. Guests huddled three deep around the buffet table. I watched a heavy woman in evening wear slip two sandwiches into her purse before puzzling over meat-balls in gravy. A dozen feet away a florid county commissioner babbled proudly for a news crew.

“ …like to welcome y’all to the dedication of the new faculties…one of the uniqueist in the nation…proud to have voted the fundage…the tragedy of Dr. Caulfield should remind us to be ever viligent… .”

I saw Willet Lindy across the hall and plunged into the roiling bodies, excusing and pardoning my way his direction. A reporter from Channel 14 stared, then blocked my path.

“I know you, don’t I?” she said, tapping a scarlet talon against pursed lips. “Weren’t you part of, like, a big story a few months back, don’t tell me…”

I spun and ducked and left her puzzling over my fifteen minutes of fame. Willet Lindy stood against the wall, sipping a soft drink. I pulled myself from the current and joined him.

“It’s Wal-Mart three days before Christmas, Will,” I said, loosening my tie and wincing at something dark dribbled on my shirt; following the same cosmic dictum that buttered bread always falls sticky side down, the stain was impossible to hide with my sport jacket. Lindy grinned and scooted sideways to give me a piece of wall for leaning. He was four years past my age of twenty-nine, but his gnomish face and receding hairline made him look a decade older. Lindy managed the nonmedical functions of the facility, such as maintenance and purchasing. I’d known him a year or so, starting when my detective status made me privy to the secrets of the morgue.

“Nice renovation of the place,” I said. “Looks brand-new.” Lindy was a shorter guy, five seven or eight, and I had to speak down half a foot. Not hard, I was told I stooped naturally, a large puppet on slackened strings.

Lindy nodded. “Cosmetic changes aside, we replaced much of the equipment. Plus we have things we didn’t have before”—he pointed to a flyspeck dot in a ceiling tile—”security cameras. Miniaturized. If something like the Caulfield incident happens again, the bomb squad can inspect the scene from a distance.”

Caulfield was the first-timer pathologist whose hand had been mutilated by a bomb meant to kill a man already dead; a horrifying event, unsolved after six months. “Not a lot of cops here, Will,” I said to change the subject.

Lindy raised a dissenting eyebrow. “The chief and deputy chiefs, a captain or two.”

I meant cops , but didn’t have the time, or maybe the words, to explain the difference. As if cued, Captain Terrence Squill walked by, saw me, backed up. Squill and I had barely exchanged syllables in the past; he was so far up the ladder I squinted to see the bottoms of his shoes.

“Ryder, is it? What the hell are you doing here?” His eyes noted the blot on my shirt and his nose wrinkled. The director of Investigative Services was a compact and dapper man whose precise features and liquid, feminine eyes recalled a fortyish Orrin Hatch. The knot of his tie was so tight and symmetrical it seemed carved from marble. I knew nothing of gray suits but suspected I was looking at one fitted by a tailor.

“I got an invitation, thought I’d come and represent the department, sir.”

He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “This is not an affair for junior personnel. Did you con some City Hall bimbo into slipping your name on the list? Or did you sneak in the back door?”

I was amazed at how much anger was in his eyes while his mouth remained smiling. Anyone out of earshot would figure we were talking football or fishing. “I never sneak,” I said. “Like I told you, I got an—”

Lindy spoke up. “Excuse me, Captain?”

“What is it, Mr. Lindy?”

“Detective Ryder was invited by Dr. Peltier. She also invited his partner, Detective Nautilus.”

Squill pursed his lips as if preparing to speak or spit, shook his head, and disappeared into the crowd. I shrugged off the incident, said I wanted to thank Dr. Peltier for the invite, and dove back into the crowd.

Clair stood at the door of her office, speaking with Alabama’s attorney general and his satellites. A simple black dress set off her skin, velvet over china, and I enjoyed watching her dominate her audience. A striking forty-four-year-old woman with cropped anthracite hair and ice-blue eyes, Dr. Clair Peltier, director of the Mobile office of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, needs only spear and helmet to claim center stage in a Wagner opera. The effect is enhanced by about fifteen extra pounds, which she wears in her thighs and shoulders. When the AG and his retinue paraded away, I stepped up. With high heels she was almost tall enough for her eyes to level into mine.