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

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eyes. Unsub was short for “unknown subject” and the FBI types used it a lot. Unsub was fedjarg.

      “Killed and beheaded here?” I asked.

      “Something wrong with your ears, Ryder?” Squill said.

      Though the body lay partly beneath a bush decorated with small white blossoms, it was free of petals. Just outside the scene tape was a stand of the same bushes; I walked over and fell into them.

      “What the hell’s he doing?” Squill snapped.

      I stood and studied the drifting of petals down the front of my shirt. Hembree looked between me and the body.

      “If the vic fell through the bushes he’d have petals on him, but they’re”—he studied the corpse and the ground—“they’re around the body but not on it. The perp brushed aside the branches, so nothing fell on the corpse. Like maybe our friend here was pulled into the bushes.”

      I looked deeper into the vegetation. “Or out of them.”

      Squill said, “Delusional. Why pull the body out of deeper cover?”

      Hembree’s chunky assistant produced a flashlight and bellied beneath the bushes. “Lemme see what’s back there.”

      Squill glared at me. “The unsub lured the vic here and dropped him where the body stayed hidden in the bushes, Ryder. If it wasn’t for a couple horny teens, it would’ve stayed hid until the stink started.”

      “I’m not sure it’s hidden,” I said, cupping my hands around my eyes to blot the scene lights and looking through oak limbs and Spanish moss at a bright streetlamp fifteen yards distant. I crouched beside the body and saw the streetlamp boxed between branches.

      “Can we cut the lights?” I asked.

      Squill slapped his head theatrically. “No, Ryder. We got work to do and can’t do it with white canes and leader dogs.” He looked at the uniforms for his laugh track but they were staring at the streetlamp.

      Hembree said, “Lights turn back on, y’know.”

      Squill had no control over the techs and hated it. He turned and whispered something to Burlew. I was sure Squill’s mouth shaped the word nigger.

      Hembree yelled to an assistant in the forensics van. “Tell the EMTs and cruisers to douse their lights. Then kill these.”

      The lights from the vehicles disappeared, leaving only the portable lamps. When they went black it took our eyes several seconds to adjust. I saw what I’d expected: The streetlamp sent a thin band of light through the branches and between two large bushes, a spotlight on the body.

      “It’s not hidden,” Hembree said, checking angles. “Anyone coming around the bend in the path looks right at it. Hard to miss with the white shirt.”

      “Speculative bullshit,” Squill said.

      The tech squirming through the bushes yelled, “Got fresh blood back here, bring me a kit and a camera.”

      “Dropped in the dark, dragged into light,” Hembree said, winking at me. The uniforms nodded their approval. When the scene lights snapped back on, Squill and Burlew were gone.

      I did an end-zone shuffle, spiked an invisible ball, and waggled my hand at Harry for a high five. He jammed his mitts in his pockets, growled, “Follow me,” and stalked away.

      Harry Nautilus and I had met in the Alabama state pen five years before; visitors, not inmates. I’d driven from Tuscaloosa to interview several prisoners as part of my master’s in psychology. Harry’d come from Mobile to pump info from an inmate whose jugular had, unfortunately, been slashed a couple hours earlier; Harry was having a rotten day. He passed me in a tight hall and we bumped elbows, spilling his coffee. He studied my clothing—denim intensive, red-framed mirror shades, faded ballcap over self-inflicted haircut—and asked a guard who let the big, dumb hillbilly out of his cell. I’d come from two hours with a boasting pederast and transferred my sublimated aggressions to Harry’s nose. The laughing guards broke it up as he was choking me out.

      Afterward, we both felt shoe-staring ridiculous. Mumbled apologies turned to explanations of why we’d both been at the prison that day, and what had conspired to give us the temperament of dyspeptic pit bulls. Stupidity gave way to laughter, and we ended the day drinking in the bar in Harry’s motel. After a few belts Harry launched into cop stories, amusing and intriguing me. I countered with tales from recent interviews with the South’s preeminent psychopaths and sociopaths.

      Harry dismissed my interviews with a wave of his hand. “Behind every one of those pieces of busted machinery is a megalomaniac that loves to talk. Reporters, shrinks, college boys like you—the craze-o’s tell them anything they want to hear. It’s a game.”

      “You know the Albert Mirell case, Detective?” I asked, referring to the psychopathic pedophile I’d spent an ugly two hours with.

      “His last vic was in Mobile, college boy, remember? If you talked to Mirell, all you got was smirks and bullshit. Right?”

      I lowered my voice and told Harry what Mirell had revealed to me as spit gleamed over his teeth and his hands squirmed beneath the table. Harry bent forward until our foreheads almost touched. “There’s maybe ten folks in the world know that stuff,” he whispered. “What the hell’s going on here?”

      “Guess I put Mirell in a mind to talk,” I said, pretending that’s all there was.

      Harry studied my face a long time.

      “Let’s keep in touch,” he said.

      This was when my mother was alive and I was an impoverished student at the University of Alabama. Still, every couple of weeks I’d drive to Mobile or Harry’d make the run to Tuscaloosa. We’d grab a bucket of chicken and talk about his crumbling marriage or my fading interest in studenthood after six years and four majors. We kicked around aspects of cases bothering him, or discussed my wilder interview sessions. Sometimes we sat quietly and listened to blues or jazz and that was fine too. This went on for three or so months. One night Harry noted my usual at-home meals consisted of beans and rice, and going for a beer meant digging under couch cushions for change.

      “Teaching assistant’s not a high-pay industry?” he asked.

      “It’s basically a no-pay industry,” I corrected. “But what it lacks in compensation it makes up for in scarcity of job possibilities.”

      “Maybe one day you’ll be a famous shrink, Carson Freud, driving around in a big old Benz.”

      “Likeliest thing I’ll be driving is pipe on an oil rig,” I said. “Why?”

      “I think you’d make a good cop,” Harry said.

      Ten minutes after we left the park, I followed Harry to a back booth in Cake’s Lounge, a dark bottom-dwellers’ saloon wedged between factories and warehouses near the bay. Several ragged loners drank at the bar, a few clustered in booths. Two unsteady men played pool.

      “Why here, why not Flanagan’s?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. Cake’s smelled like the air hadn’t been changed in a decade; Flanagan’s served cheap drinks and decent gumbo and pulled a lot of cops.

      “Squill might have been there, and Squill’s what we’re gonna talk about. That was a dumbass hot-dog trick with the flowers and lights. Why did you want to outshine him in front of everybody?”

      “I wasn’t outshining, Harry, I was detecting. We had a guy with no head and Squill spewing anything that came into his. What was I supposed to do?”

      “Maybe you could have canned the drama and suggested things to Squill, made him think it was his idea. Didn’t I hear you used to study psychology?”

      “Beaming thoughts into Squill’s head would be parapsychology, Harry, one of the few things I never majored in.”

      Harry narrowed an eye.

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