Strawman's Hammock (15 page)

Eight

The hearing got Barrett home early. Time to throw the boys some football. Tyndall took naturally to the ball's odd shape and spiral. Ben competed gamely. Barrett hustled his boys off to schoolwork after their short recreation, spilled some coals onto the backyard grill, and rummaged with a pocket knife into the well-tended garden. Laura Anne came home to find hamburgers and fresh tomatoes waiting.

“How was school?” Barrett asked.

“I'm scratchin' that itch,” she admitted.

“It's doin' you good.” Barrett pulled her over for a sailor's kiss and the boys giggled at their mother's embarassment.

Barrett and Laura Anne made love that night. It started in the shower.

“Come here,” she invited him in. Took him in her hand.

They coupled like adulterers against the fiberglass shell of the shower. Then Barrett picked her up in a store's worth of cotton towel and took her to bed. That was the night's reward. Rising early the next morning gave Barrett a chance to tell his boys they'd be getting a puppy for birthdays well anticipated. The squeals of excitement greeting that guarantee and the hugs around his neck sent Barrett Raines off to work.

“Have a good one.” He tugged on the seat belt that snugged Laura Anne into their Dodge Caravan.

“I will!” She backed out to the blacktop with the boys waving in concert, two little hands like windshield wipers, back and forth.

Barrett wiped the arm of his blazer briefly across the hood of his Malibu before climbing into his cruiser. Work, this morning, meant a drive to Gainesville, and promised to be interesting, for this morning Bear would rendezvous with Cricket and Midge at the C. A. Pound Human Identification Lab, located in Gator country at the University of Florida.

Barrett took a left at the light in Mayo, put his vehicle on cruise control, and headed down Highway 27. Twenty minutes later he saw the Branford bridge. The Suwannee River swept majestically beneath the bridge, its high cliffs looking over bass boats and jet skis and a chocolate swath of water. The river was low, very low. A telephone pole mounted near a spring on the south side of the bridge was marked to indicate floodlines from the late '30s to 1998. The yellow or whitewashed stripes with their crudely lettered histories reminded Barrett how mercurial this wild river could be. As late as '98, the Suwannee had risen from its slow torpor sixty feet below the bridge to overflow the banks high above and flood thousands of acres around.

Too bad there wasn't some way to save that water, Bear thought.

He saw a man and woman in wetsuits loading their tanks onto a pontoon boat. Cave divers. They came from all over, California, New Jersey, crazy folks with scuba gear, to dive the springs on the banks of the Suwannee, squirming with a pair of tanks and a light through narrow chutes to explore the spectacular limestone caves that were secreted beneath the cold, cold water. Barrett shivered. He could never do that.

It was not yet nine o'clock. Bear rolled past Branford and through High Springs and never saw a chain restaurant or a golden arch. This was the Florida Barrett loved, a place still roughed out, its small towns offering a single red light, a pair of cafes, its forests and lowlands not yet gridded off into Holiday Inns or theme parks and not overrun with tourists. Fishermen came here in reasonable numbers to share with local sportsmen. Hunters. Those crazy divers. That was about it. That was about all anybody wanted. This region, like the Suwanee that flowed like an artery through its heart, needed to remain untamed. It needed to be wild. But not savage.

The crime he had witnessed in his home county bothered Barrett more than the usual homicide for a variety of reasons. There was a racial component that could not be ignored. Latin workers were already experiencing in the year 2001 the sort of prejudice that African Americans had endured since Reconstruction. Was this crime in any way a result of racial hatred? That bothered Barrett greatly. But what bothered him even more was the feeling that this elaborate homicide was somehow another indicator that the culture he knew and respected as a child was being subsumed into something much more amorphous and alien.

The crime provided one more indicator to Bear that his rural haunt was no longer immune from the influence of the culture at large, the same culture digested in Miami or Jacksonville or Daytona. Young people, particularly, took their cues for life off satellite dishes, not front porches. The old vices, bad as they were, had always been constrained in this region by a powerful consensus about what was right and what was wrong. And folks didn't hesitate to tell you when you stepped out of line. But that consensus was disappearing, and as it did Barrett wondered how long he could claim that his special part of northern Florida was different from the rest of the state.

“Your culture will be assimilated.” Ben and Tyndall mocked the Star Trek fantasy. “Resistance is fu-tile.”

Past High Springs, Bear turned to catch the interstate. Forty minutes later he was in Gainesville. The C. A. Pound Lab, though part of the University of Florida complex, was located northeast of the main campus, off Radio Road. Alice Lake steamed nearby, home to alligators and future mascots. The lab was constructed without a lot of money and no pretense at grandeur, a single-story Butler building, green and metal and prefabricated. Set on a slab in a virtual forest of bamboo. You had to come looking to find the place. Even if you knew where you were going, the facility was easily missed.

Barrett turned hard into the narrow drive that led to a scattering of parking slots. He got out of the car in a hurry, eager to get inside. The Pound Lab, as it was commonly called, boasted some of the most accomplished forensic experts in the state, though many of those associated with the university's faculty rarely referred to their research as forensic in nature. A fair number of these academic types were tenured in departments like anthropology, zoology, or botany. Their curiosity regarding hominids or insects or plants just “happened” to find a forensic application.

Dr. William Maples had made the lab famous throughout the southeast, combining theoretic pursuits in spectroscopy and biologic sciences with a passion for forensic application. His
Dead Men Do Tell Tales
was a book Barrett had thumbed to death. The doctor's death saddened many at the university, and in law enforcement, but his down-to-earth manner still reigned at the Pound Lab, and legions of academics inherited his passion for science and criminal investigation.

There were some odd ducks at the lab. It was interesting to Barrett that the same professor who might on a Wednesday morning lecture to a group of budding anthropologists comparing mitochondrial DNA in populations of ancient Neanderthals with those in modern chimpanzees, would that afternoon complete a similar analysis that could convict a killer in Jacksonville, or exonerate a man facing death in Raiford.

As Barrett approached the lab's utilitarian door he noticed a young woman in running shoes and jeans leaning into a common hedge that Barrett recognized from his nursery days to be photinia, family Rosaceae. Rosaceae—the scarlet fruit? The shrub appeared to be infested with aphids. Late in the year for aphids. Then Bear saw the parasites being gently removed from the hedge's shining green leaves and realized that the infestation was exogenous and purposeful.

He went inside. The jukes in the weather had fooled the A/C, which was still pumping cold air, even though it was barely fifty degrees outside. There was nothing so formal as a receptionist's desk, though an open office was occupied. A university employee reigned, her sweater draped across the back of her chair. Barrett waited patiently to announce his arrival. A message was relayed and Midge Holloway emerged shortly from a narrow hallway, waving him on over with even more kilowatts of energy than was her usual.

“It's fantastic, what he's done!” She shoved Barrett down a sheetrocked hall. “You won't believe it! Fantastic!”

The lab was divided into something like large bays. Faculty and graduate students were engaged in a bewildering variety of tasks. With a murmured apology, the gardener from outside edged past Barrett bearing a tin of aphids.

“Barrett. I'd like you to meet Dr. Nguyen Tran.”

Barrett turned at Midge's voice to find an Asian face staring straight into his own. For a moment Bear had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being inspected. The anthropologist was taller than Bear expected. A fine mesh of French and Asian features. Delicate, but not feminine. Straight black hair receded from the forehead. Deep, hazel eyes.

“Nguyen, this is Special Agent Barrett Raines.”

“Doctor.” Barrett extended his hand. “I can't tell you how much we appreciate your help.”

Barrett kept his eyes steadily in the center of the small, delicate skull before him. He tried to ignore the fact that Dr. Tran had no ears.

That impression did not give an accurate description, of course. The doctor could hear. There were orifices, certainly, allowing waves of air to beat onto the tympani within. But the visible ears had been savagely removed. From where the lobes should have been, and extending to the temples above, only a ragged vestige of tissue remained, like the rims of dead volcanoes.

Dr. Tran cleared his throat.

“A schoolboy's revenge, I am afraid. Enacted, unfortunately, by a gang of men. In prison.”

“I have some scars of my own, Doctor.”

“Nothing so visible, I trust.”

Midge was embarassed. “This is my fault. It didn't occur to me to tell him.”

“Of course not.” The doctor laid a firm hand on her shoulder in obvious affection. And then to Barrett, “She sees through the eyes of love.”

Barrett smiled. This man knew what to keep and what to chuck.

“Come see my work.” The academy-trained crime fighter swiveled abruptly for a set of double doors. Barrett followed Tran and Midge to find an open, high-ceilinged studio littered with mannequins and plaster casts. A set of cubicles roughly divided an otherwise open interior. Barrett saw body parts floating in formaldehyde or lying exposed all over the damn place. The hands, Barrett knew, had been sent so that their owners could be identified. Frequently it was cheaper for a sheriff seeking a John Doe's identification to amputate a hand for delivery to the FDLE rather than bear the expense of shipping an entire corpse. Tallahassee normally received those gifts by Federal Express. A similar procedure, Barrett assumed, was followed here.

He saw a hand hirsute as a chimp's lying casually on a silver tray, a wedding ring still in place. A phallus occupied its own tray nearby.

“Sometimes we get a print,” Tran quipped. “Sometimes not.”

Barrett found himself chuckling.

Moving on they passed beneath a skeleton and anatomical chart that looked over dozens of prosthetics, hands and feet fashioned from combinations of Kevlar and titanium and even more exotic materials.

“We are experimenting with neural impulse from the brain.” Tran led them weaving through the artificial landscape. “Very promising work.”

Then they entered the anthropologists' studio. Ancient hominids and other animals gazed from stools or tables. Everything was coated in a white dust of plaster. Dr. Tran led Barrett and Midge past a dozen partial reconstructions before he stopped to drape a delicate hand over a mannequin's shoulder.

“Jane Doe.”

Dr. Tran stood aside to allow Barrett's inspection.

Barrett could not believe what he was seeing. This was no static display. There was expression here. A sense of life. There was tension in the muscles of her face. Her mouth was opened slightly, head turned, as if she were responding to a summons or sound. An opened door?

“I have a wig.” Dr. Tran rummaged through an ordinary cardboard box. “We are confident she was Latin American. Probably from Mexico. See for yoorsef.”

She had been beautiful. A high brow and wide-set eyes. High cheekbones. A nice mix of Spanish and Indian in that sad face. And straight black hair.

“It's … it's unbelievable,” was all Bear could say.

Tran allowed a smile. “We've had an artist from the lab draw a composite from this cast,” he said.

Midge beamed with pride. “Over here.”

Barrett turned to find what might have been a portrait in pen and ink. A finely detailed, fully living being looked out at him now, reconstructed from flesh and bones mangled in a terrible death.

“Somebody has got to know a face like this,” Midge declared.

“Several somebodies,” Barrett affirmed grimly. “Now maybe we can get a shot at finding out who.”

*   *   *

Hezikiah Jackson looked sternly at the supplicant at her door. “I tole you it'd take some time. Not gonna get well overnight.”

She shivered in the wind like a tuning fork. A thin blue line drawn in the sky from horizon to horizon was all that kept a Canadian front from freezing Strawman's Hammock. Hezikiah could feel it coming on, a blue norther. There would be a bitter drop in temperature. A hard frost. Ice in the barrel. She glanced to her gourds and pumpkins. Better make 'em into pies. Hezikiah always knew what climate was coming. She felt it in her knees, her back. It made her irritable.

“You been usin' that salve I give you?” She wrapped a blanket tighter against her emaciated frame.

“I have another sickness.” The barrel-chested Latino known as El Toro kept his hands folded over his cap.

“You a busy boy.”

“Not that. Of the soul. A sickness of spirit.”

“That girl, though, ain't it? Something to do with you' whore.”

“She iss not my whore.”

Hezikiah cackled. The Bull reached inside his shirt. A crucifix was strung by a silver strand of chain about his thick neck, a cheap thing inlaid with lapis lazuli, warped with heat and humidity.

“She needs a shrine.” He kissed the cross. “So that her soul may rest in peace.”

“Or mebbe yours?” Hezikiah asked shrewdly. A bony hand snaked out to snatch the
crux ordinaria.
She thrust it like a nail into her bony chest. Breathed deeply.