Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls - J. Kerley A.

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types? Skinheads? Tattooed bubba boys. Like that? The other cops already asked me. I see weird characters all the time.”

      “Anyone set off alarms?”

      She tented her hands and her fingertips tapped together like butterfly wings drying in the sun. “Just one little thing. Two days ago I saw a car parked across the street from the office. I had taken the trash out about a half hour earlier and I saw the same car going down the alley as well.”

      “What kind of car?”

      “A Jaguar. XJ series. With the three-seventy horsepower Super V-eight and the long wheelbase.”

      I gave her a look.

      “Hey, even us tree-hugging, ball-busting, feminazi communist anarchists can dream.”

      “Your titles on the paper’s masthead?”

      She sighed. “From my mail.”

      “How much did you see of the driver?”

      “I only saw it side-on and it had the deep window tinting. Nothing.”

      “Plates?”

      “I looked at it for a half second and thought about it for two. Then something else grabbed my thoughts and…” Her hands made flyaway motions.

      “You recalled the car because it’s your dream machine?”

      “Partly. But there’s nothing across the street from us but a second-hand clothing shop and a busted-down Laundromat. The car didn’t belong. It was just a tiny wrong note.”

      Wrong note, wrong note…Ms. Olivet-Toliver’s words echoed in my head all the rest of the day and on the way home. They pursued me through the stand-up fueling from a bowl of cold red beans and rice, and out to the deck, where I propped my feet on the rail. The sun was fading and several beachcombers sifted the surf with their little white nets. Watching them sift, I slowly realized Abraham Lincoln’s message: This case was discordant.

      Discordant. The wrong notes, maybe. Or the right notes played incorrectly, something awry in timing or interpretation. I’ve always been attuned to discord, sensitized, perhaps, so that even slight akilters can be measured.

      Something about this case had been out of true from the first moment I laid eyes upon the topless corpse of Jerrold Nelson. It was not so much the incongruity of the body lacking a head that tilted my psychic equilibrium, but rather the lack of expression in the crime or the scene. If the motive was, as Squill sold and resold at every opportunity, vengeance killing, where was the vengeance, the anger? Not in the textbook-precise removal of the head, nor the time-consuming inscriptions on the flesh. Both seemed more the work of a ghoulish accountant than a hate-charged spree killer or ritual-driven murderer. And if so, where was the sense of spree, of abandonment to savage and wanton destruction?

      The more I thought, the stronger my sense of discord grew.

      I grew up attuned to discord, my child’s antennae sifting the air for the subtle vibrations that presaged violent change, much as seismologists use lasers and mirrors to measure hair’s-breadth motion between mountains. We all want warning before the earthquake strikes.

      I learned to want it more than most.

      Truth be told, my first memory is of a kind of earthquake. I had no warning and no one outside of our house felt it. Though it was twenty-fours years ago, I remember the event with a clarity unmarred by time, perhaps even sharpened by its passage.

      It’s night. I rise from bed and walk in dreamlike detachment through a narrow gray corridor that seems to span miles. Ahead is a black square set into the wall that reaches to the sky. It is the hall of our house outside of Birmingham, and it is gray with moonlight through glass and the dark square is the doorway to my brother Jeremy’s room. Screaming pours from the dark square.

      I am six and my brother Jeremy is twelve.

      I stand at the threshold and listen quietly, knowing somehow I must not enter. I need to visit the bathroom and, continuing down the hall, pass my mother’s room. She is a seamstress specializing in wedding dresses. My mother sits at her sewing machine as white fabric flows through it like liquid. Her hands are motionless above the cloth and her eyes are focused on sewing. The high whine of the sewing machine mutes the grunts and shrieks from down the hall. A floorboard creaks beneath me and she turns. Her eyes are wide and wet and she speaks, not knowing that I will remember her words, keep them forever.

      “I know it’s wrong,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “But he works so hard. He’s a professional man, an engineer. Who would think that someone like me could marry an—” A scream slices down the hall like a scythe. My mother’s brow furrows and for a moment her hands fly out of control like startled sparrows.

      “And what could I ever do anyway?”

      Mother contains her hands and turns back to her sewing but becomes still and her head droops. White fabric covers her lap like a deflated ghost. She whispers, Go back to bed, it will be quiet soon…

      At an age when most children are learning to handle a bicycle, I became a student of the transformations that preceded these events, every two or so months at first, then with accelerating frequency. It seemed I could feel the air in the house charge with negative particles that gathered in force and intensity until discharging in a night of black lightning. I learned to take shelter at the first hint of the gathering storm, to hide in my treehouse in the woods, or in the backseat of the car at night. After the storm’s passage I would seep back inside, antennae quivering for vibrations of the next explosion, ready to run.

      And then, in the lazy span of a summer’s afternoon, it was over.

      …the woods behind our house are thick with slash pines and loblollies, the ground covered with a soft mattress of brown needles studded with fallen cones, and I spend my days sheltered by the soft-spoken trees. I built a tree fort in an ancient live oak and though the fort is a rickety jumble of chipboard and two-by-fours and other rescues from construction site burn piles, the heavy branches of the oak hold it securely. I feel safest in the woods, in my tight and shadowed fortress a dozen feet above the ground. Lately my father has been making me more scared than ever. He is starting to see me and he’s never done that before.

      His eyes are so angry. He says I’m stupid.

      I am nine.

      Once from behind the boards I saw my brother…

      Jeremy is fifteen.

      Once, from behind the boards of my fort I saw my brother come running into the woods with a squealing shoat under his arm, a baby pig from the Henderson’s farm down the road.

      I laid flat on my belly and watched my brother wire the pig to a tree and do loud things to it with a big knife. I was sure he looked up and saw my eyes between the broken wood and leaves. But he must have been looking at something else and started up with the pig again. It took a long time, and then he buried the red things deep in the pine-needled ground. He wiped the knife on leaves and stuck it in his pocket…

      Then, one day not long after, 1 saw flashing lights at our house. I was alone in my tree fort and ran to find the county police right in front of our house.

      Up close the flashing lights hurt my eyes and I looked instead at the policeman’s hands. The knuckles were like rocks and he held his hat over his privates. His eyes were hidden under mirrors. Jeremy watched from the porch glider, one foot on the floor, softly swinging the glider to and fro.

      “We don’t know how it…”

      “Close down the county roads until we find…”

      “Coroner there now, he’s…”

      “You don’t want to go there…your husband…it’s not a fitting sight for…”

      “We’ll find this madman, ma’am. I’m so sorry for your…”

      After a while, the policemen pulled

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