LITMIR.BIZ

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report on Leland Harwood. I headed toward the small conference room to get some quiet, but Harry followed, still singing the glories of Buck Kincannon.

      “Good-looking fella, too. Probably has to shovel the ladies out the door in the a.m …”

      We went to the small conference room. I dialed the prison, ran the call through the teleconference device, a black plastic starfish in the center of the round table. Malone was on a minute later.

      “Leland Harwood died two hours after he was stricken in the visitors’ room. Never regained consciousness.”

      “Poison?” I said.

      “A witch’s brew of toxins. Organophosphates, the report says. I’d never heard the term. Pesticide, herbicide, some industrial chemicals.” I heard paper rattling in Warden Malone’s hand as he read from the page.

      “Where did all that stuff come from?” Harry asked.

      “All available inside, Detective,” Malone said. “Cleaning supplies, rat poison, roach paste, paint thinner. They’re kept tucked away, but …”

      “So someone squirted a bunch of stuff on Harwood’s scrambled eggs and he drops dead later?”

      “The docs say it took some mixing of compounds to get the right effect, the maximum bang for the buck, to be crass.”

      “Harwood got banged hard,” I noted. “He have any enemies?”

      “I’ve checked around and the answer is, not really. He was a smart-ass, but managed to stay out of major confrontations. Wanting to appear angelic for the parole board will do that.”

      “Got any poisoners up there?” Harry asked.

      “Several. But we keep them real far from the pantry, so to speak. The docs said anyone with access to the right supplies could have mixed the brew …with a little help from someone with bad thoughts, the right formula, and high school chemistry.”

      “Info that could have come from outside.”

      Malone laughed without humor. “Imagine a couple guys in the visitors’ room. The one on the outside says, ‘Soak twenty roach tablets in alcohol, let it sit two days, mix in …’”

      “Got the point,” Harry said.

      We asked Malone to keep us in the loop. Harry clicked the starfish off. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

      “The next time I decide to race Logan to a scene, how about you strangle me.”

      “I was just thinking that. Where from here?”

      “Let’s check into Harwood some more, call up the man’s sheet. Talk to folks that knew the deceased. Maybe figure out Taneesha Franklin’s interest in a guy like Leland.”

      I sat at the computer, pulled up overviews on the incident as Harry leaned over my shoulder, reading ahead.

      “Bernard Rudolnick was Harwood’s victim,” Harry said, frowning at the computer screen. “Dr Bernard Rudolnick.”

      “Killed in a bar, right?” I scrolled the screen to the correct info as Harry recited particulars.

      “The Citadel Tavern. A low-life joint. Got into a scuffle at the bar, the men went outside. A gun goes bang in the night. The shooter lit out, but Mobile’s finest grabbed Harwood a few hours later.”

      I studied the screen. “Doctor? Like in M.D.?”

      “Psychiatrist,” Harry said. “Bet they didn’t get a lot of shrinks at the Citadel. A pity the one they had didn’t last the night.”

      Time for me to pick up the prelim from Taneesha Franklin’s autopsy. I took the stairs, looked into the second floor, and saw Sally Hargreaves sitting at her desk, staring blank-eyed at the wall. Sally was a detective handling sexual crimes, a tough gig on the best days. I continued down the flight, realized Sally wasn’t the wall-staring type. I climbed back up, went to her desk.

      “What’s up, Sal? You look like your cat got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.”

      She turned, brightened. Pushed strands of auburn hair from her eyes. Smiled with false bonhomie.

      “Hi, Carson.”

      “You OK?”

      She looked at a report she’d been filling out. Shook her head.

      “I just got back from the hospital. A rape victim. Among other things. Jesus.”

      “Tough one?”

      “Ugliness through and through. Bizarre.”

      I rolled up a chair for the vacant desk beside Sal’s. The desk had belonged to her former partner, Larry Dayle. Dayle had resigned after four months on the Sex Crimes unit, moving his family to a mountainside in Montana and stringing the perimeter with razor wire.

      The floor – Sexual Crimes, Crimes Against Property, Vehicle Theft – was quiet, most of the detectives out. I took Sal’s hand.

      “Want to tell a friendly face about it? I can go get Harry.”

      She laughed, and the laugh cracked into a sob. She caught herself. Brushed away a tear. It was Sal’s empathy that made her so good at what she did. The downside was what poured back through the door.

      She said, “A woman, twenty-five. Student. Got grabbed off the street just after dark last night. Picked up bodily and jammed into a vehicle. She was taken somewhere – a barn or stable, she thought, by the smell. Afterwards she got pushed from a moving vehicle into a hospital parking lot. That was one a.m. this morning. I was with her most of the night.”

      “Strange. She was raped?”

      “And beaten. Her face …it’ll be a long time before the surgeons make it a face again. She wanted children. That’s gone. Her insides were …”

      “Easy,” I said.

      “The guy who did it, while he was punching her, doing all the things he did, he kept laughing, yelling, ‘Look at me, bitch, can you see me?’ Then he’d hit her, scream, ‘Look at me, tell me what you see.’”

      “She got a description?” I asked.

      “No.”

      “The perp wore a mask?”

      Sally shook her head. “No.”

      “What?” I asked.

      Sally buried her face in her hands.

      “Oh, Carson. She’s blind. Been blind since birth.”

      I thought about the rape-abduction as I drove to the morgue. I’d never worked sex crimes, though as a member of the Psychopathological and Sociopathological unit had studied sexual predators. The actions as Sal described them seemed to combine the power-assertive, or entitlement, type of offender with a sadistic, or anger-excitation, type of behavior. The first behavior type humiliates the victim to increase the perp’s sense of self-worth and self-confidence. The second is brutal, often involving a high level of physical aggression, including torture.

      I had no idea what to make of the anomalous gesture of dropping the woman at the hospital.

      The Crown Vic started to feel crowded and I lowered the windows to let fresh air blow out too many dark thoughts. I parked in the morgue lot beside Clair’s sporty little BMW, worth more than my annual pay. Clair’s former husband, Zane Peltier, was a bona fide member of Mobile society, the old-money contingent, and some of that largesse had rubbed off on Clair during the divorce proceedings.

      It hit me that Clair would certainly know of the Kincannons, maybe even know them personally. I might get a question answered, maybe two, if I could sneak them into a conversation.

      Clair wasn’t in her office, so I checked across the hall in the main autopsy suite. She was gowned in green and standing against the wall as Lula

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