Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
and handed it back. “Even the damn temperature was day and night. I cooked at the park and froze at Deschamps’s.”
I thought about it a moment. “It was cold there, wasn’t it; not just me.”
“I put on my jacket. It was an icebox.”
The plucking of a distant string, soft, but distinct. I said, “Even with the door opened and closed, people coming and going. Maybe the killer bottomed out the AC to keep the body fresh as long as possible.”
“I got an uncle could live naked in a meat locker, you can see your breath in his house. Maybe Deschamps was the same way.”
“His fiancée step-hopped from the West Coast on Thursdays. Miss a step and she’s hours late. What if the killer knew it?”
“What about Nelson’s body—what preserved it? Sprawled in the park on a hot night? If it wasn’t for a couple horny kids, Nelson would have cooked for hours.”
While Harry wrinkled his nose at the thought, my mind focused on Bowderie Park. The body in the light. The deserted park. The fright in the faces of the onlookers. The sweat-soaked runners at the periphery, legs pumping as they watched from the street, staying loose.
Runners.
The winding path that ran the length of the park.
I almost ran to the phone booth for the directory. “Philips, Philips, Philips,” I said, my finger dropping down the listings.
Harry frowned. “The councilwoman?”
“She lives in the Bowderie Park neighborhood.”
I called councilwoman Norma Philips and explained myself. She was concerned and polite and excused herself to check her neighborhood’s phone list. She said the person I wanted to speak to was Carter Sellers, adding to call back if there was anything else she could help with. I made a mental note to vote for her.
“Sellers residence,” the voice on the phone said. I heard a TV low in the background.
I identified myself, then jumped into it. “I understand, Mr. Sellers, you’re one of a neighborhood group who run on a regular basis.”
He chuckled. “The Night Rangers, we call ourselves. Nobody has time during the day, so we get together a couple times a week and knock out some Ks in the neighborhood.”
“Regular route?”
“We measured out a five-kilometer route, or close.”
“Does it take you through Bowderie Park?”
“Be a shame to set up a route and not go through the park. Sure.”
“Would you have run through it Sunday night if the murder hadn’t occurred?”
“At ten forty-five p.m., or damn close.”
“Pretty precise, Mr. Sellers.”
“An old guy who sits on his porch calls us Mussolini’s train; we always run on time.”
“Every Sunday?”
“Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, rain or shine.”
I made one more call to a person I did not enjoy disturbing, then turned to Harry. “Cheryl Knotts, Deschamps’s fiancée, says the thermostat had been dropped to fifty degrees. She couldn’t explain it, said the temp was the one thing she and Peter used to argue about: she liked cool, he was warmer blooded.”
Harry nodded, started feeling it. “The killer couldn’t control the temperature at the park, but his surveillance told him that the Night Rangers would chug through at ten forty-five.”
“On the dot,” I said. “He spotlighted his merchandise not just to show off…”
“But to get it to the cooler as quick as possible. Didn’t want the meat to spoil.”
“Who watches after a body’s found?” I needed to hear it said.
Harry ticked the participants off on his fingers. “Cops show up. The ME’s office shows up. Criminalists show up. Fingerprints. Techs. Detectives. Ambulance drivers. Passersby.”
“Take it to the morgue.”
“Attendants. Pathologists. Doc P. More forensics types, maybe. Cops. Then the afterward folks; funeral homes.”
“Maybe the killer’s sending messages to someone in the chain, Harry. I think we can write off passersby and the shifting cast of fire department and ambulance personnel. They’re transients. Ditto the afterward folk.”
“Leaves morgue and criminalist folk. And us.”
I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Do you hear it, Harry?”
He flicked a nail against his glass.
Bing.
“I started drinking when my brother died. Two years ago. Heavily, that is. I’d always liked it, from the first time I had a beer when I was sixteen. It made me feel, I don’t know, smart. I got the grades and did all the right things, but always felt dumb. Like I was faking it.”
Ava and I walked slowly along the beach. It was midnight deserted, just us and the waves and the slightest thread of breeze. Our footsteps crunched in the dry sand. I said, “Your brother, you mentioned him once. Lonnie?”
“Lane. He was four years older than me. I called him Smoke. It was my pet name for him because he moved so softly and quietly. I’d be sitting on the porch reading and he’d drift up and point at a cloud and begin describing the shapes in it…”
She’d started talking when I walked through the door, a flood of disparate thoughts connected only in that she wanted them out. I also felt she wanted to talk about her drinking, to pick it apart and study it. She wanted to understand how to ground herself when shadow lightning hissed and sizzled in her head, how to channel the current harmlessly into the earth.
“We could spend an entire afternoon studying the clouds. Or I’d watch him draw…”
We started toward my house, crossing the roll of the small dunes.
“As early as I can remember he was an artist; not a kid who did art. He’d amaze people with his insights and skill. I have six of his paintings at home.”
I recalled the brilliantly crafted abstracts on her walls, controlled explosions of color, joyous. “I saw them. No, that’s wrong: I was pulled into them.”
“The one by the couch? Red and gold and green? It’s called Crows. Most people see dirty black birds, Lane saw beyond, into their beauty. That’s how I felt when he was with me, he saw places where I was beautiful that were hidden to me. He used to call me or even come visit when I was in school. He kept me going, focused. I felt so alive when he was here.”
“How did he die?”
She stopped. Behind her, far down the strand, I saw whirling stars. Kids out burning sparklers, the Fourth wasn’t too far away.
“He committed suicide,” she said. “It turned out he had been seeing a psychiatrist for years. Depression. It tore our family to pieces.”
I watched the sparkling stars, said nothing.
“I thought back through all the times he’d seemed so happy, so alive. But he had this—this mental cancer in him, a thing with tentacles that kept growing until it tore him away from me, from our family, from everything.
“That was when I first fell apart. My anger turned to drinking and I took leave from school and stayed drunk for a semester. Sick, rotten drunk. The school knew about Smoke, about Lane. They thought I was just taking time off to deal with it.”
I