Neville’s outrage swelled as he appraised the stinking mess. “I fed up wit your foolishness!” he snapped. “Come den, let’s go see your new momma.”
The monkey stopped gnawing on his leash and looked up. His upper lip wormed into a reflex sneer, but his rosy bald brow furrowed in consternation.
“Dot’s right,” Neville said. “Dis is good-bye.”
The owner of Big Luke’s Lobsteria was Luke Motto, a former Thoroughbred jockey who stood five-two. He was called Big Luke because he was the tallest among six siblings.
The Lobsteria was Yancy’s first official stop after a ten-day sick leave (ordered by Lombardo), during which Yancy went fishing alone every morning. For privacy he chose the Content Keys, and wore only his boxers while poling the skiff. The salt air hastened the healing of his gouged ass and also the mangrove scrapes on his limbs. His headaches ceased shortly after the bruises disappeared. As a treat he landed several good bonefish and an eighty-pound tarpon. Twice Rosa drove down after work and stayed the night.
“You double-clicked that fucker,” Big Luke said accusingly.
“I’m afraid not.”
They were arguing about German cockroaches, which Yancy was required to count during all restaurant inspections. The pest census was a challenging aspect of the job although Tommy Lombardo, Yancy’s instructor, had provided little guidance. For reasons unclear to Yancy, the state of Florida required that live roaches and dead roaches be tabulated separately. Perhaps a deceased roach was deemed less repellent to diners than a crawling one, but in truth the contamination differential was negligible—insect parts versus insect droppings.
Yancy himself favored dead roaches because live ones were too quick, a coppery flash disappearing beneath a shelf or baseboard. During his first week on the job, and uncertain of protocol, Yancy included in his live-specimen tallies only those he was able to corner and kill. Many others escaped, and he was nagged by a sense of falling short in his duties.
So, to the dismay of unsanitary proprietors such as Luke Motto, Yancy developed a method of herding and capturing live roaches that allowed a more precise accounting. In his right hand he wielded a billiard cue to which he’d bolted the head of a badminton racket. In the other hand he carried a DustBuster, a lighter, updated version of the device he had ingloriously deployed against Dr. Clifford Witt in Mallory Square.
One brisk pass through the kitchen of Big Luke’s Lobsteria filled the vacuum with a pulsing, melon-sized mass of roaches that Yancy neutralized by vigorously shaking the filter compartment until the captives were too addled to mount an escape. He then dumped his catch on a butcher-block cutting board, and got down to business with tweezers and a thumb-activated ticket counter he’d bought on Amazon for $2.99.
“That one right there—you did him twice!” Luke Motto insisted.
The total of live roaches was up to sixty-eight, which in Yancy’s view qualified as an infestation. “And I haven’t even checked the pipes under the sink,” he remarked through his hospital mask.
“Don’t!” Luke Motto bleated.
“I got five bucks says we break two hundred today.”
“And I got a C-note and a free shrimp hoagie says you cut me some slack.”
“If you had half a brain, Luke, you’d spend that money on an exterminator.”
With every click of the counter, Yancy dropped another dizzy roach into a large Ziploc baggie. Lombardo hadn’t instructed him to preserve the insects as evidence, so he didn’t. Customarily, after presenting his inspection report to the disgruntled owner, Yancy would dispatch the roaches by placing the baggies under a tire of his car and flattening them on his way out of the parking lot. It wasn’t an authorized technique for disposal, but so far none of the restaurateurs had lodged a complaint.
“You can’t just barge in here and shut me down!” Luke Motto protested. “This ain’t Nazi Russia!”
Yancy tuned him out while completing the order for a temporary suspension. He offered the phone number of a Marathon pest control company and told Big Luke he’d be back in three days for a re-inspection. Then he squashed the roaches with his Subaru and drove to Duck Key to view the condominium belonging to Eve and Nicholas Stripling.
The building superintendent gave up the key as soon as Yancy displayed his health department credentials. For a weekend condo it wasn’t bad. The living room featured a balcony view of the Atlantic, while the bedrooms overlooked a polyp-shaped swimming pool with a slightly discolored kiddie pond. In the closets of the condo Yancy found men’s and women’s outdoor clothes, fishing rods, spearguns, flippers, dive masks, snorkels and a roll of clear Visqueen poly sheeting of the type used to protect carpet and furniture from splatters while a room was being painted—or a human body was being chopped to pieces.
The second scenario occurred to Yancy after he spotted a hatchet, scoured clean, inside the dishwasher. It made sense that if a woman was involved, the hatchet would have been rinsed of gore before being placed in a dishwasher rack amid wine glasses and salad bowls. Yancy reached into the opening of the garbage disposal and carefully probed the movable blades. All he recovered was the fractured chip of an olive pit.
Next he went to the double shower in the master bedroom and unscrewed the drain cover. He employed a bent coat hanger to explore the pipe, which yielded a clot of jet-black hair. Ensnared in the yucky clump were three sharp-edged, whitish fragments no larger than kitten’s teeth. Yancy deposited the entire tangle in another baggie, locked up the condo, put the key under the mat and returned to his car. There he phoned Caitlin Cox and said, “I believe I know where they murdered your father.”
Her reply caught him by surprise: “Actually, Inspector, we need to talk.”
Yancy cranked up the Subaru’s fitful AC and waited.
Caitlin said: “Look, I was wrong about Eve. There’s no hot boyfriend in the Bahamas—she stopped there on the way home from Paris to visit one of her uncles. And Dad’s wedding ring? The only reason she swapped it out for a cheapo? She didn’t have the heart to leave it on his hand inside the coffin. She got a jeweler in Bal Harbour to hang it on a necklace and, God, I feel like such an a-hole. The more I think about it? Seriously.”
Yancy was miffed at himself for not seeing it coming. “Caitlin, listen to me. Eve bought that replacement wedding band in Nassau before anyone told her your dad was missing, much less dead, which means she already knew. And, just so you’re up to speed, the nonexistent boyfriend tried to kill me the other night. I’m pretty sure he was wearing your father’s wristwatch.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Okay, I made it all up. Because, truly, I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“Look, man,” she said. “I’m super sorry I got you involved, but I was so bummed about losing Dad I guess I didn’t want to believe the truth. He swamped his boat and drowned, end of story, just like the Coast Guard said. I mean, bad shit happens to fishermen all the time, right? The perfect storm, whatever.”
Yancy told her about the plastic sheeting and the hatchet he’d found in the condo. “And also some white bony fragments in a shower drain.”
“Oh please,” said Caitlin. “Broken stone crab shells, probably.”
“What about the hand axe?”
“Dad used the flat side to crack the claws. Just a couple of taps is all it took.”
Yancy knew he couldn’t bring Caitlin around, but he was curious to learn how the deal went down. “So you’re not mad anymore about Eve getting the whole two million from his life insurance?”
“No way.”
Then came the edgy pause. Yancy smiled and put the car in gear.
“Anyhow,” Caitlin continued, “turns out Eve and I are what you call co-beneficiaries. We split the money fifty-fifty. So I guess Dad wasn’t so pissed at me after all.”
“When did you find all this out? Because last time we spoke, you expressed the view—and I’m quoting more or less faithfully—that your ‘greedy slut of a stepmother’ was screwing
you over.”
Caitlin said, “Because I was super upset, okay? I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Until?”
“I saw Eve, and there was Dad’s wedding ring on her neck. Then she told me about the insurance policy and other stuff.”
“Other stuff?”
“You know. Inheritance stuff.”
Yancy thought: All that’s missing is a winning Lotto ticket. “And where did this healing conversation take place?” he asked Caitlin.
“She took me to lunch.”
“Yes, I can picture it. Where are you now?”
“At the courthouse.”
“Let me guess: Where you just finished telling the judge you totally agree with Eve—your dad should be declared legally dead.”
“Yeah, so?” On the other end, Nick Stripling’s daughter seemed to be clearing a chunk of cactus from her throat. After the guttural delay she said: “What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? You never heard of closure? Families are supposed to come together, no matter what.”
“And nothing says closure like a million bucks.”
“Dad died when his boat sunk, just like they said. Let it go, dude.”
“Not possible, Caitlin. We’ll chat again, you and I.”
“Why? No, we won’t!”
“Then tell me his name.”
“Who?”
“The mystery uncle in Nassau.”
Caitlin said, “You’re such a dickhead.”
Yancy tossed down the phone and gunned his car toward a gap in the traffic, heading up the Overseas Highway.
Thirteen
When Yancy was younger, he’d briefly considered joining the U.S. park service, like his father. “Why didn’t you?” Rosa Campesino asked.
“I was too lazy. And the pay sucks.”
“Andrew, you’re full of shit.”
“Look at it this way. If I’d become a ranger in the Everglades, we would never have met.”
“Unless an alligator got you, and I was assigned to do the post.”
“Assuming there was something left of me,” Yancy said.
“Oh, there would be. Gators are sloppy eaters. By the way, you’ve healed magnificently.”
“I was hoping you’d notice.”
Rosa was massaging him on an autopsy table. It was half past midnight at the morgue and they were alone in the main suite, which had twelve forensic workstations. Each narrow table was made of eighteen-gauge stainless steel. Rosa had spread some towels, removed the headrest and instructed Yancy to lie still on his belly.
“What happens if somebody walks in?” he asked.
“Just play dead. I’m serious.”
She was wearing a lab smock, rubber-soled white shoes, and nothing else. In theory Yancy should have been wildly aroused, but the venue creeped him out. He’d made love to women in all sorts of odd places—with Bonnie Witt, of course, high on the tuna tower of her husband’s boat, but there had been other memorable trysts inside a windmill on a putt-putt golf course, the second-to-last car of a Metrorail train, an unoccupied toll booth on the Rickenbacker Causeway and a self-photo kiosk beside the manatee pool at the Miami Seaquarium. He understood the thrill of semi-public sex, but doing it among the deceased seemed more dark than daring.
The Miami-Dade morgue had been designed with a contingency for a worst-case airline crash; its five coolers were made big enough to hold all the passengers and crew from a fully loaded jumbo jet—a total of 555 bodies. Tonight there were only sixty-six in refrigeration. Yancy had declined Rosa’s offer of a tour. It felt good when she pressed her knuckles into the meat of his back, but he was having trouble unwinding. The cold filtered breath of the morgue didn’t smell like death, but it wasn’t exactly a breeze off Monterey Bay.
“Roll over, Andrew.”
“Then I can’t play dead if we’re caught.”
“And why not?” Rosa said.
“Because dead guys don’t get boners.”
“Do what the doctor says.”
She turned off the overhead light and climbed on top of him. The autopsy platform wasn’t comfortable but it was sturdy. Soon Yancy loosened up and his thoughts began meandering, which sometimes happened when a smooth physical rhythm was established. It was no reflection on his partner; he had an incurably busy brain. Rosa herself seemed happily diverted, so Yancy kept pace while sifting through the day’s events.
Except for a colorful exchange of profanity with a meth-head tanker driver on the turnpike, the ride to Miami had been uneventful. Yancy had first stopped at the Rosenstiel marine lab on Virginia Key, where an earnest young master’s candidate examined the shark tooth extracted from Nick Stripling’s severed arm and confirmed the species as Sphyrna tiburo, a common bonnethead that typically feeds inshore. The finding proved that Eve Stripling and her accomplice had placed the stump of her husband’s limb in the shallows and chummed up some resident predators in the hope that their gnashing would add verisimilitude to the drowning story.
The pale shards Yancy had plucked from the shower drain at the Striplings’ condo were definitely pieces of human bone, not stone crab shells as Caitlin Cox had claimed. Rosa made the determination visually over a paella at the Versailles, Yancy introducing the fragments in the same funky nest in which he’d found them. Rosa promised to order DNA tests on both hair and bones, and compare the results to the swab taken from Stripling’s arm by Dr. Rawlings in Key West. Yancy had no doubt of a match. The hatchet, presumed instrument of dismemberment, he had discreetly conveyed in a Macy’s shopping bag.
Later, over flan and Cuban coffee, Rosa had presented him with the only number dialed on Dr. Gomez O’Peele’s cell phone the night he died. She’d obtained this key information from a North Miami Beach detective who was striving to seduce her. The call had been made minutes after Yancy had left O’Peele’s apartment.
Yancy took down the number and went outside to make a call of his own, and soon he had a name: Christopher Grunion, no middle initial. The billing address on the telephone account was a post office box in South Beach. When Yancy returned to the table, he swept Rosa into his arms and kissed her exuberantly until the other diners broke into cheers. He was soaring because Christopher Grunion was the same name that Rogelio Burton had found on the charter contract for the Caravan seaplane Yancy had seen behind the Striplings’ house on Biscayne Bay.
Although Grunion had no criminal record, and not even a Florida driver’s license, Yancy felt certain he was Eve’s secret boyfriend and co-conspirator. O’Peele had likely phoned him to demand hush money after Yancy’s unexpected visit, and got shot for his greedy play. “It’s Poncho Boy!” Yancy had exulted, waving a mango Popsicle while he and Rosa were driving to the morgue. “The guy who killed Phinney—the same fuckweasel who tried to drown me!”
The massage on the autopsy table had settled him a bit. Now, as he was boosting Rosa up and down with his hips, she reached up and fastened her hair into a primly perfect bun, an Elizabethan effect that revealed the flawless slope of her caramel neck and shoulders. For all her lithe athletics she stayed remarkably quiet, as if she were afraid to awake somebody in the building, which would have been quite a trick.
One advantage to fucking on immovable steel was that it didn’t squeak, unlike Yancy’s sagging bed at home. The first time they’d had sex there, Rosa was so distracted by the noise that she couldn’t make it happen. She said the box spring sounded like a chipmunk being skinned alive. Now, astride him on a slab where hundreds of homicide victims had been meticulously disemboweled, she shuddered suddenly, smiled and teetered forward. Pressing a moist cheek to his chest, she said, “Okay, this is pretty warped. I should probably get some counseling.”
“Well, I thought it was fantastic.”
“Don’t lie, Andrew.”
“Are you kidding? I came like Vesuvius.”
Rosa sighed. “It’s a freaking HBO miniseries. All I need is fangs.”
Yancy kissed the top of her head. “I would’ve been a wor
thless park ranger,” he said. “Disappearing for weeks at a time with just a tent and my fishing rods. The other thing? Poachers. If I caught some asshole jacklighting a fawn, I’m not sure I could restrain myself, arrest-wise. My dad, he’s a very disciplined guy. I did not end up with that gene.”
“I definitely don’t want children,” Rosa murmured. “Does that make me a selfish rotten person? Never mind. Not a fair question while you’re still inside me.”
“Christ, you cut up dead people for a living. Don’t be so tough on yourself.”
She sat up sleepily. “I should really make an effort to put on my clothes.”
“Do you have video in this place?”
“Of course.” Rosa pointed to a small camera mounted above the table. “Don’t fret, Andrew, it has an Off switch. I’m not that twisted.”
“Some weekend we should go camping down at Flamingo, just the two of us.”
“You’re very sweet,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here.”
Yancy drove back to Big Pine the next morning and was surprised to see a car in his driveway—an old Toyota Camry with a crooked Oklahoma license tag. He took the tire iron out of his Subaru and ran through a hard rain toward the house.
Bonnie Witt stood in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. She was wearing a Sooners jersey, and her toenails had been painted gold. The fugitive life had taken a toll on her tan.
“I’ve still got a key,” she said pertly.
“Another oversight on my part.”
“I can explain everything, but first I want you to meet someone special. Honey?”
“Hey yo.” A shirtless man was sprawled on the couch watching ESPN. He looked up and gave Yancy some sort of faux bro salute.
Bonnie said, “Andrew, say hello to Cody. Cody, this is my dear friend Andrew.”
Yancy propped the tire iron in a corner and shook Cody’s waxy hand. Whatever he might have looked like in high school, back when Bonnie was blowing his mind, the kid had grown up to be a lump—mottled skin, thinning hair and a gut that hung over unstrung board shorts. Yancy insisted on taking over breakfast duties so that the two of them could share their love story, which he anticipated to be a high point of his day.