“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“Days Inn near the airport.”
“I’ll do some checking. Get back to you.”
“What do I do?”
“If you don’t hear from me by morning, go canvas the neighborhood around the office. Find out what these guys really imported and who their enemies were. I’ll get what I can from the inside.”
Louis nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“You thought about the mother? She might be in danger, too.”
“I got a cop there.”
“Good.” Joe said. She glanced at the photo in Louis’s hand. “I’ll check the morgue, too, for unidentified bodies.” The lights from inside the restaurant went out. Louis turned and started to leave.
“Hey,” she said. “I wouldn’t normally say this to a guy, but I’m going to say it to you.”
“What?” Louis asked.
“Be careful. These guys are sick fuckers, Kincaid. As mean as they get.”
“I know,” he said.
She was just sitting there, hands thrust in her leather jacket.
“I appreciate you doing this,” Louis said.
“Hell, I haven’t done anything crazy since Mel left. He almost got me killed once.”
Louis almost smiled. “Yeah, me, too.”
She turned away. Louis just stood there, watching her silhouette in the dark. She had her face tipped toward the cold wind.
“Good night,” he said.
She turned back to him, gave a small nod, and looked away, back out at the black river.
He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he heard the jarring ring of the hotel phone. He was on his stomach, still dressed in his shirt and jeans, his shoes still on. He grabbed the phone, struggling to sit up.
“Susan,” he said. “Have they
—-”
“It’s me, Joe Frye.”
He pulled himself all the way up, squinting at his watch. Four-thirty A.M.
“Yeah,” Louis said, running a hand over his face. “What’s happened?”
“You need to come down to the morgue.”
“Oh, no,” he whispered.
“I got an unidentified black juvenile, about ten or eleven. He was found in a drainage ditch out near Opalocka.”
Louis
couldn’t get a breath.
“I should’ve taken the picture,” Joe said. “I could’ve done this for you. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Give me directions.”
Louis scribbled them on a hotel pad, and pulled himself off the bed. He walked numbly to the bathroom and splashed some cold
water on his face. Grabbing a towel, he wiped his face and leaned on the counter, head down.
He didn’t know if he could do this. But there was no one else. He straightened, drew in a steadying breath, and left the room.
The early morning was cold and dark, filled with sounds he didn’t really hear. His body was tight, every muscle on fire, yet he felt strangely numb inside, like some weird force was at work keeping the fear shoved way down deep where he couldn’t feel it.
It had rained and the streets were slick and dark, the damp night air misty with the eerie orange glow of the street lights.
She was waiting for him outside the morgue. It was a big, ugly building, the concrete sides stained with Spanish graffiti. She was wearing jeans and the leather jacket, this time with a gray wool scarf wrapped around her neck. In the harsh light, he could see her face for the first time —- angular, hooded light gray eyes, with a spray of fine lines that hinted at her age as somewhere in her mid-thirties.
“You look frozen,” she said.
He shook his head. “I’m fine.”
She turned and led him inside.
Their footsteps echoed in the long, sterile hallway. Everything seemed oddly white and clean, so different from the outside. He glanced up at a clock on the wall. The numbers were big and black, the face of the clock bright white. Like it was made that way so people didn’t mistake what time it was when they made the long walk down the hall.
They walked. More halls. More lights. More clocks.
Finally, she paused in front of a large window. The vinyl drape behind it was closed. He knew she was waiting for him to tell her he was ready. That’s how it went. They always waited so you could prepare yourself. If that was even possible.
He gave Joe a small nod. She tapped on the glass and the curtain scraped open.
Louis’s eyes moved over the boy in one quick sweep. He saw ragged black hair, full lips, and chubby dark brown arms.
His breath came out in a rush. “It’s not him. It’s not Benjamin.”
Joe motioned to the man and the curtain closed. Louis turned away, leaning on one arm against the cool tile wall. He felt her hand on his back.
“Okay, we’re out of here,” she said.
They walked in silence back out into the hallway. Joe took her car keys out of the pocket of her leather jacket and started away. Louis paused, wiping a hand over his face. It came away wet. He didn’t realize he had been sweating.
Joe turned back. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. He was looking around the hallway, like he didn’t know where to go next. Joe saw it and came back to him.
“I found out a couple of things,” she said.
Louis focused on her. “What?”
“Wallace Sorrell had three broken fingers.”
She was trying to take his mind off the boy back there behind the curtain by talking about the case. He felt a surge of gratitude.
“They wanted something from him before they killed him,” she said.
“Did the office have a safe?” Louis asked.
“Yes, but it was still closed and locked. Had more
than two thousand bucks in it.”
“Find any drugs?”
“Not yet. Narcotics is on it.”
“I don’t think Austin Outlaw was a drug dealer. There’s something else going on here,” Louis said, crossing his arms.
“Then what did they want?”
“Information. Something only Sorrell knew.”
“Like what?”
“Like where something or someone was.”
“Like your friend Austin.”
“He’s not my friend,” Louis said quickly
.
Joe’s hooded gray eyes were steady on Louis. “So, you going back to Fort Myers?”
“Yeah, Susan is...” His voice trailed off as he shook his head. “I don’t know. I have to...I need to do something.”
Joe hesitated then stuck the car keys back
in her jacket “Let’s go,” she said, nodding in the opposite direction.
“Where?”
“We might as well go take a look at Wallace Sorrell while we’re here.”
Joe led him
back inside, to a small office, where a thin man in a lab coat sat at a desk, an Egg McMuffin in his hand. He looked up as Joe approached the open door.
“Hey, it’s Joe Friday,” the man said. “What you doing here so early, Detective?”
“Helping a friend do an ID,” Joe said. “You got a guy named Sorrell in the freezer?”
“The dude cut up on Eighth Street?”
“Yeah. We need to see him.”
“Right now?”
“Come on, Lenny, you owe me.”
The
diener reluctantly set his McMuffin down and got up. “A man can’t get any peace around here.”
Louis and Joe followed him back down the hall to a heavy door. Lenny yanked it open and they stepped into the cold, musty air of the refrigeration unit
. There were six gurneys. Louis could see the gray-pink flesh of the bodies through the heavy plastic. Except for one that was dark. Lenny went to it and unzipped the bag.
“He’s all yours. The doc won’t get to him till later this morning,” he said.
Joe Frye stared at the body. Louis watched her face. Not one muscle moved. He came forward.
Other than the blood splatters, Walter Sorrell’s face didn’t have a mar
k on it. But his throat had been cut so deeply Louis could see a glint of vertebra.
“They didn’t beat him
,” Louis said.
“Didn’t have to. Look,” Joe said, her eyes traveling down the corpse’s torso.
Louis looked at Walter Sorrell’s forearms. The front of the skin on his left arm had been slit open from wrist to the crook of the elbow. The skin was gone, sliced off in ragged strips. The same incision had been made on the right arm, but the skin was still there, peeled back in flaps.
“My breakfast is getting cold,” Lenny said behind him. “Zip him back up when you’re done, okay?”
Louis heard the door of the refrigeration unit open and bang shut. He moved his gaze off the body and up to Joe. She was staring at the skinned arm.
“Whoever did this took their sweet time,” she said.
“Torture,” Louis said.
Her eyes came up to meet his and she nodded. “See the bruises on his wrists. He was tied
, probably to his chair. That’s where they found most of the blood. The question is, did he tell them what they wanted to know.”
“What about the secretary? Does she have the cutting pattern on her?”
Joe shook her head slowly. “No, I read the report. They just slashed her throat. Not another mark on her.” She bent closer to the body and stared at the flaps of skin.
“It looks like the knife was very sharp, but there is little skill involved here,” she said softly. “It’s sloppy.”
Louis was quiet for a moment and Joe looked up. “What are you thinking?”
“
They’re after Austin,” Louis said.
“How do you know?”
“I just remembered something he said. He told Ben he was playing hooky from work. He didn’t tell his partner he was going to Fort Myers. Maybe Sorrell couldn’t tell them where Austin was, no matter what they did to him.”
“But secretaries always know where their bosses are,” Joe said.
Louis stared at her across the body. “Maybe she hid at first and heard what happened to Sorrell. And when they found her, she told them.”
They were both quiet. Louis turned up the collar of his jacket against the cold of the freezer and started toward the door. Joe zipped up the body bag and came out into the hall, where Louis was waiting.
Louis rubbed a hand over his bristly face. He leaned back against the cold white tiles and let out a tired sigh.
“I don’t know where to go next,” he said.
“Sometimes there’s nowhere to go,” she said. “At least for the moment. If you want to hang around until tomorrow, you can help canvas the area around the office. See who saw what.”
Louis glanced up at
the clock. It was five-thirty-five a.m. No way could he make it back home across Alligator Alley without falling asleep. And he wanted to stay. He wanted to know more. He wanted to be the one to find Benjamin, if he was here.
He nodded slowly. “All right” he said.
He followed Joe back outside, still shivering from the cool air in the morgue.
“You remember how to get back to your hotel?” she asked.
Louis glanced to his right, seeing in the foggy distance the fuzzy headlights that dotted the freeway. Shit. He had no idea. But he wasn’t about to tell her that.
“You take a wrong turn down here, you’re a dead man before dawn,” she said.
He looked at her.
“My apartment is only a few miles. Come with me. Grab a few
hours sleep and I’ll take you back to Eighth Street in the morning.”
He glanced at his car.
“It’ll be safe here. The employees start showing up at six.”
“You got any food?” Louis asked.
She laughed softly. “Food and a couch.”
He climbed
into her red Bronco, the cold rippling through him. She saw it and turned on the heater.
“Damn, it’s cold,” he said.
“It snowed here once —- 1977,” Joe said. “I came out that morning and there was friggin’ snow on my windshield.” She put the car into reverse. “Thought I left that shit behind when I left Ohio.”
She swung the car onto the empty road
and accelerated so quickly Louis was pressed back against the seat. He took a moment to close his eyes but his mind was awake, alive with images of what he had seen today. He pushed them away, but now he was seeing Susan, sitting on her sofa, phone in hand, eyes reddened. He flashed onto another woman, a faceless mother somewhere who was crying for the boy back in the freezer.
“I need to call the mother,” Louis said.
“Not a problem,” Joe said, turning into an apartment complex parking lot.
She led him up some stairs, pausing outside a heavy door that read: 3C. She opened the deadbolt first, then the lock above the doorknob, and shoved the door open with her hip.
He followed her inside. There was a light on in the corner. It was a small apartment, with a kitchen separated from the living room by a bar and a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony. He could see a sleek ten-speed bike out on the balcony.
He heard her snap shut
the two locks, then she moved by him, slipping off her scarf and jacket. She dropped both on a chair, heading to the kitchen. She was wearing a thin gray shirt with short sleeves. Her skin was pale and Louis could see a small tattoo on her upper arm. It was a lizard.
A calico cat appeared in the hall, let out a cry,
then followed her to the kitchen, jumping up on the counter. She cupped its face in her hands to rub noses with it. She was talking to the cat like it was a baby.
She reached for the bag of cat food and shook it. Another cat strolled out, and the room filled with hungry cries as she fed them.
“Two?” Louis asked.
“I used to have seven.”
She flicked on the coffee and opened a cupboard, bringing down two mugs. From the refrigerator, she took out two containers and set them on the counter.
Louis took off his jacket and came forward, picking up one of the containers she had set out.
Dannon blueberry yogurt. This was food?
He heard her laugh and looked up.
“You should see the look on your face,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I guess I was expecting eggs or... something.”
She hesitated, her hand on her hip. “I got leftover pizza.”
“That’ll work.”
She withdrew a pizza box from the refrigerator, nodding toward the phone. “Call the mother. The coffee will take a few minutes.”
Louis called Susan. She was hoarse, but calm. She told him Dan Wainwright had sent two cops and they were in the living room watching some old movie. She told him she had slept a few hours, but he didn’t believe her. He didn’t say much, just listened. He didn’t tell her where he was, or where he had just come from. There was no reason to.