Authors: J. A. Kerley
Dawn was at the curtains when my vagabond dreams evaporated. My eyes focused on Ava, turned toward me with her head snuggled into the pillow and slender hands tucked to her chin. I moved slowly getting off the bed, keeping her safely in sleep.
I awoke fully in the surf, the waves chilled by an offshore current, saline taste in my mouth and salt sting in my eyes. The sun was hazed, the air already curdling with heat. I sluiced off the salt in the cold-water shower beneath my house and went inside to the scent of coffee. I dressed and came out to find Ava at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. A glass of orange juice and plate with toast crumbs sat by her elbow.
“I was watching you swim,” she said. “Why so far out? Why not back and forth along the beach?”
“I swim straight out until I’m breathless and can’t go another stroke, then turn around.”
She gave me a raised eyebrow.
“I hate exercising,” I explained. “I either keep swimming or drown. It’s good incentive.”
She shook her head. “I actually understand that.”
I studied her. “You look better.”
She gestured at her garb: pink ribbed tank top, white jeans, hair held back with a golden scrunchy. “DKAA. Casual wear for the recovering alky.”
“I meant you,” I said. “You’re getting color. Your “
” hands aren’t shaking as much,” she said, holding her OJ semi-steady in front of her. She took a sip and set it down. “I slept good,” she continued. “Other … bad times, I no, dammit, on other drunks I always sleep rotten after quitting. But when I woke up, I heard you breathing and I thought, I’m safe, and went back to sleep.”
I walked behind her and my fingers found her shoulders, lightly kneading. She spun a kink from her neck, let her cheek rest against my hand. The sun crested the roofline of the house to my east and the kitchen slowly brightened through my curtains. Dust motes glittered in the sunlit air like pinpoint flares. I watched them burn and felt strangely at peace.
Ava said, “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the first night. It’s a little fuzzy, but I remember discussing the physical similarities between Deschamps and Nelson; how they were basically the same, just that Deschamps had a more pronounced musculature.”
I sat beside her. “Twins, or brothers, you said, one worked out more than the other.”
“Something else popped into my head.” Ava sipped juice and probed her memory. “We had a head trauma victim the second day the new facility opened. A nineteen-year-old boy from a party in the north end of the county. The county police brought the body in and I did the post.”
I remembered the incident, but it was out of our jurisdiction and I hadn’t paid much attention to it.
“He had the same basic body type, tall and long-limbed, plus his skin was smooth and unblemished, non hirsute as well.”
“Musculature?”
“Very similar to Nelson. Probably high-rep lifting of lighter weights resulting in more definition and less bulk, especially in the arms and shoulder.”
“Cause of death?”
“He was struck in the head with a round, blunt object. A softball-sized stone, judging by the wounds. Or something similar.”
My connection to Sergeant Clint Tate of the Mobile County Police was a patch-through and the signal struggled to reach his cruiser in Citronelle.
“There’d been a rave, buncha kids in a watermelon field,” Tate said, a constant crackle beneath his words like someone crumpling a pretzel bag. “Never seem to find out about raves till they’re done, couldn’t do a helluva lot if we did. They pay some farmer a couple hundred bucks to rent a few acres, haul in a generator for lights and music, and it’s a party. The vie you’re talking about’s a kid named Jimmy Farrier, a student at University of South Alabama. No brushes with the law, nothing. A decent kid that heard about a party and thought he’d give it a try. We’re still digging but we’re spread kinda thin.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Nearest we can come up with is he must have pissed someone off. Blunt-force head trauma in a dry creek bed in the woods, about three hundred feet from the rave proper. He took a while to die.”
“Who found the body?”
“Anonymous call about two a.m. Fake voice. Kid voice, girl. Scared. Probably off in the woods stoned and fell over him.”
“Anything unusual about the body? Maybe marks on the neck where someone tried cutting?”
“All I recollect is that the clothes were” there were a few loud pops and Tate sounded like he was drowning in flames “… bit … zipped … neck.”
“I missed that, Sergeant. Repeat please.”
“I said, his clothes had been pulled around a bit. Pants unzipped. Shirt yanked up to the neck.”
“Any leads?” I said, yelling over the electronic warfare. For a moment the signal cleared enough for me to hear Sergeant Tate sigh.
“Got about two hundred half-naked dope-addled kids dancing in a little circle of light with nothing beyond but woods. A killer’s dream party, Detective.”
“When you get done, Carson, just drop ‘em off to my desk.”
Vera Braden left me and the three files in one of the morgue’s small meeting rooms. Neither Clair nor Will Lindy were in this morning, something to do with a budget meeting. Vera didn’t know when they’d be back.
I pulled a facial shot of Farrier from the shots taken when he entered the morgue. A square and beardless baby face with eruptions of acne. Prominent ears and shave-sides haircut. There was dirt on his lips and teeth from the field where he’d fallen. I traded the facial for a full-length photo and held a similar shot of Jerrold Nelson beside Farrier.
I saw the bodies of twin brothers. Size, muscles, definition, skin tone, all similar. Even navels and nipples seemed interchangeable. There was a quarter-sized tattoo of a leaping swordfish above Farrier’s left nipple. Nelson had also been tattooed, the oriental dragon above his right shoulder blade.
I pulled a photo of Deschamps from its file and held it beside the others. It was like a third brother entered the room, older perhaps, stronger, with bulk added to the arms, shoulders and thighs. I pushed Deschamps’s photo aside and concentrated on my twins.
Why behead Nelson and not Farrier?
I studied Nelson’s frontals. Like Deschamps, he’d been supine, facing upward. The discoloring livor mortis was confined to his back. I noticed Farrier had two darker stains in the livor mortis and shuffled through his file. In the close-ups they looked like bruises.
Footsteps by the door. I resisted the urge to hide the photos. The door opened with Walter Huddleston, the diener, behind it. His eyes pierced me like scarlet lasers, then traveled to the photos. He grunted and pulled the door shut, heading back to his coffin, maybe.
I read Farrier’s autopsy report, hearing Ava’s voice declaim it into the air for transcription. “Contusions over the rib cage indicative of sharp blows delivered before death, and consistent with semi-rounded shoe, athletic style or similar conjecture: two hard kicks as body lay on ground … “
I gathered the materials and took them to Vera at her desk. I snapped my fingers as I was turning to leave. “Just remembered, Veer I’m putting together a timeline and need to see the May post schedule.”
She looked over her reading glasses. “All that monthly stuff gets put in a file and goes direct to Dr. Peltier. They’re locked in the credenza in her office.”
I shrugged. “No big thing, I’ll check ‘em next time through.”
I passed Clair’s office on my way out. The door was open and I looked inside, not looking for anything more than a sense of a woman I admired and thought I knew.
“I
didn’t go to the rave,” Dale McFetters said, stroking an emaciated mustache. “Working that night. Pizza Junction.” McFetters had a shaved head, a recent defoliation judging by the way he kept reaching to twist invisible locks. He paced the living room, working his absent hair and tugging a silver ear loop. His jeans appeared to be entering a second decade without laundering. He was shirtless and skinny, ribs countable to anyone so inclined. A blue tattoo resembling barbed wire circled one broomstick bicep. “It could have been me, y’know. I’d have gone if I hadn’t had to work.”
McFetters and Jimmy Farrier shared a shotgun duplex near the university. Furnished with twenty bucks and a blue-light special on yellow paint, the place was like walking through the interior of a lemon.
“It wasn’t you,” I said, leaning against a bright wall. “It was Jimmy. I need to know why.”
McFetters threw his hands up in the air. They were grubby hands and I hoped he’d never made a pizza I’d eaten. “I told all this to the state police,” he protested.
“Now you get to tell me. Merry Christmas.”
He flopped into a battered recliner, probably rescued from a Dumpster. “I don’t know nothing else.” A computer-science major.
I crossed the room to a cork board beside the phone, carry-out menus thumbtacked to it. There were some photos. One showed Farrier and McFetters sunning in a lawn chair in the small front yard of the duplex. I leaned close and studied it. The boys were shirtless, squinting from the bright sunlight. Jimmy looked bemused while McFetters affected a “white-boy-as-gangsta-rapper” pose. McFetters’s body was pasty and anorexic, Jimmy Farrier’s tan and toned. His face looked soft, closer to child than adult beardless, a vulnerability in the eyes, acne on his cheeks and forehead. It was obvious he worked out. His biceps and triceps were firm and expanded, his shoulders thick, his pecs blocking out. Washboard lats above his denim cutoffs. A small bright swordfish leapt above his nipple. The dated photo was almost a year old.
I turned back to McFetters. “Was Jimmy going to the rave to meet someone, Dale?”
He shrugged. “Never said. Maybe.”
“No regular girlfriend, female acquaintance?”
McFetters studied the citrine ceiling and stroked his lip-cirrus. “Chicks? He had, like, a lot more hope than luck.”
“Not a pick-up artist.”
His laugh resembled a seal’s arwk. If he’d slapped his hands together I’d have tossed him a fish. I said, “He ever try and meet girls through the personal ads?”
McFetters gave me an odd look, then slid out of the chair and went to Farrier’s bedroom. He returned with an old copy of the News Beat bent open to the personals ads.
“By his bed,” McFetters said. “He was always scoping ‘em out. Sending letters, but ” McFetters twitched his bony shoulders.
I said, “You don’t know about responses?”
“Huh-uh.”
I said, “His stuff still in his room?”
“His mom said they was gonna come over and get it, but they haven’t.”
I stood. “Mind if I take a look?”
He waved toward Jimmy’s door. “Knock yourself out.”
A typical student’s room. Posters for some band I’d never heard of, skinny androgynes wearing black clothes and mascara-enhanced sulks, nihilism with a beer sponsor. The bed was made. A desk in the corner had a computer atop it. A shelf held textbooks, papers jammed between pages. Free weights sprawled around a lifting bench. The standard clothes in the closet, plus a skim board and some snorkeling gear, decent stuff.
I opened the top desk drawer. Pencils and pens and paperclips, Post-its. Class schedule. A small framed photograph of Farrier with Mom and Dad and Little Sister. Mountains in the background, everyone smiling, arms clasping one another’s shoulders. There was genuine warmth in the faces, a closeness. Beneath that was a loose photo Farrier and his mother on high school graduation day, the kid in his black gown, mama beside him with her head on his shoulder. Proud smiles. They looked comfortable together, happy. I noted the photographs weren’t atop the desk where his roommate or visitors might see them, but not upside-down in the bottom of the closet, either. I tried the side drawers. The top one held notebooks from various classes, the bottom a six-pack of Coors Light and a twelve-pack of Ramses condoms, unopened.
Party on, Jimmy, wherever you are.
I fired up the computer and did a name search of files: Personals, ads, News Beat . nothing. I shifted to a file-by-file scan and under Misc. and discovered a sub-file, Per Lets It turned out to be short for Personal Letters and held responses to ads in the News Beat seven in the eight months since the NewsBeafs redux.
Jimmy’s response to each was a variation on a basic theme:
Dear (ad number)
I saw your ad in the News Beat and would love to meet you. My name is JIMMY and I’m a student at USA studying Computer Science. I LOVE the beach and would be there every day if I wasn’t in school or studying. I’m kind of quiet but I can also be wild if I’m with the right person. I have dark brown hair and blue-green eyes and like to work out with weights. I’d LOVE to meet you and maybe we could meet soon. There’s a place near USA called THE CUPPA where they have coffee and live music on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Maybe we could get together there or anywhere else you want. I hope to hear from you. Jimmy
I printed the letters and Jimmy’s list of response dates, and left Dale McFetters sitting in his lemon world.
“Cutter advertised for them, Carson?”
I crossed my arms behind my back and studied the car’s gray ceiling. There was a footprint beside the dome light. It seemed my size. A horn behind us honked and Harry accelerated.
“It’s a thought. Deschamps met Talmadge through the personals in the News Beat Now Farrier turns out to have used them.”
I handed one of Farrier’s letters over the seat to Harry. He studied it while driving, which always made me nervous. He flipped the letter back a minute later.
“OK, Cars say the killer selected Farrier from this. Then why’d he reject him?”
“I don’t know. Something about Farrier wasn’t right.”
I stared at the treetops passing by. Something was bothering me, some discord, but it was at the edge of my consciousness, indistinct. My mind kept returning to a picture of the tattoo on Farrier’s chest: crisp and prominent, bright as a Sunday newspaper cartoon. I saw the smiling faces from the photos in Jimmy Farrier’s desk. Heard his mother’s worried voice …
“Jimmy, a tattoo? You didn’t. It’s not you.”