an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.
“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”
I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”
“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”
I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.
“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.
“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”
“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.
“Nothing right now.”
It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”
Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”
“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”
“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”
“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”
When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.
Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”
“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”
Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”
“Uh, what?”
But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.
Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.
“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.
“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”
The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.
“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”
Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.
“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”
It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.
I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.
Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.
Fifteen years ago, give or take, Nautilus had sat in this same room with a half-baked man-child named Carson Ryder when the kid had asked Nautilus why he listened to “all that old music”. Nautilus had dosed the kid with Waller, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, Henderson … they started at sundown and met the morning with Miles.
Along with the intro to jazz, Nautilus convinced the kid his degree in Psychology and eerie ability to analyze madmen would be a gift to law enforcement. The next week Carson Ryder signed up at the Police Academy, blowing through it like a firestorm, impressing many, pissing off as many more. He’d put in three years on the street before solving the high-profile Adrian case, advancing to detective and Nautilus’s partner. They’d been the Ryder and Nautilus Show for over a decade. But today Carson was in Florida and Harry Nautilus was a retiree.
The show was over.
And tomorrow morning, Harry Nautilus was going to the home of Pastor Richard Owsley to meet the man’s wife and try for a gig as a driver. Last week’s interview with the Pastor had taken all of fifteen minutes, the man like a thousand-watt bulb in a room that only needs about a hundred, pacing, smiling, gesturing … all assurance and zeal and – like Southern preachers everywhere – stretching one-syllable words into two and often using larger words than called for, which Nautilus ascribed to latent insecurities perhaps caused by going to schools like West Doodlemont Bible College rather than Harvard Divinity School.
It had all happened so quickly that Nautilus realized he knew little more about Richard Owsley than the stacks of books he saw at local shops, the man smiling on the cover with bible in hand.
He took another sip of brew, set his computer on his lap, and checked YouTube for the Pastor’s name. There were several dozen hits, sermons, it seemed. In his youth Nautilus had been dragged from church to church by a procession of severe but well-meaning aunts, and figured he’d had enough sermonizing for a lifetime. He continued scanning the videos until he found a six-minute piece titled, Highlights: Richard Owsley on Willy Prince Show. Prince had a talk show out of Montgomery and was a regional favorite, a smug little fellow in his forties with shaggy, fringe-centric hair, and a slight mouth permanently puckered toward sneer.
Nautilus hit Play and the screen showed two men sitting at a round table in a television studio dressed with a pair of bookshelves and artificial plants. Nautilus
