Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls

“Our inaugural ball, partner. There’s a body downtown looking for a head.”

Harry and I were homicide detectives in Mobile’s first district, partners, our job security assured by the mindless violence of any city where the poor are abundant and tightly compressed. That shaped our world unless, according to the recently revised procedures manual, a murder displayed “overt evidence of psychopathological or sociopathological tendencies.” Then, regardless of jurisdiction, the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team was activated. The entire PSIT, departmentally referred to as Piss-it, of course, was Harry and me and a specialist or two we could enlist as needed. Though the unit was basically a public-relations scheme—and had never been activated—there were those in the department not happy with it.

Like me, right about now.

“Get there as fast as you can,” Harry said, reading me the address. “I’ll meet you out front. Use siren, flashers. Gun it and run it, don’t diddle around.”

“You don’t want me to pick up a quart of milk and a loaf of bread?”

The phone clicked dead.

I jumped into jeans and pulled on a semi-clean dress shirt, yanking a cream linen jacket from the rack to cover the shoulder rig. I stumbled down the steps, climbed into the unmarked Taurus under the house, and blew away in a spray of sand and crushed shells. The flasher and siren stayed off until I’d crossed the inky stretch of water to the mainland, where I cranked up the light show, turned on the screamer, and laid the pedal flat.

The body was in a small park on the near-southwest side of Mobile, five acres of oak and pecan trees surrounded by a turn-of-the-century neighborhood moving from decline to gentrification. Three flashing cruisers fronted the park, plus a tech services van. Two unmarkeds flanked a shiny black SUV I took as Squill’s. The ubiquitous news van had its uplink antenna raised. Harry was forty feet ahead and walking toward the park entrance. I pulled to the curb and stepped out into an ambush, a sudden burst of camera light in my eyes.

“I remember you now,” came a vaguely familiar voice from behind the glare. “You’re Carson Ryder. You had something to do with the Joel Adrian case, right?”

I blinked and saw the woman reporter from the morgue rededication. She was in full TV-journalist bloom, lacquered hair, scarlet talons gripping a microphone like a condor holds a rabbit. Her other hand grabbed my bicep. She lifted the mike to her lips and stared at the camera.

“This is Sondra Farrel of Action Fourteen News. I’m outside of Bowderie Park, where a headless body has been discovered. With me is Detective Carson Ryder of the—”

I scowled at the camera and unleashed a string of swear words in three real languages and one invented on the spot. There’s nothing reporters hate worse than a sound bite that bites back. The reporter shoved my arm away. “Shit,” she said to the cameraman. “Cut.”

I caught up with Harry at the entrance to the park, guarded by a young patrolman. He gave me a look.

“You’re Carson Ryder, aren’t you?”

I looked down and mumbled something that could have gone either way. As we passed by, the patrolman pointed at his uniform and asked Harry, “How do I get out of this as fast as Ryder did?”

“Be damned good or damned crazy,” Harry called over his shoulder.

“Which one’s Ryder?” the young cop asked. “Good or crazy?”

“Damned if he ain’t a little of both,” Harry yelled. Then to me, “Hurry.”

Chapter 2 (#ulink_0ec503e5-3b9b-5778-bfe8-d9faa0a64c13)

The scene techs brought portable lights with enough wattage to guide in a 757, all focused at a twenty-by-twenty area spiked with head-high bushes. Trees surrounded us and blotted most of the stars. Dog shit lurked beneath every step. Two dozen feet away a sinuous concrete path bisected the park. A growing audience pressed against the fence where the park met the street, including an old woman twisting a handkerchief, a young couple holding hands, and a half-dozen sweat-soaked runners dancing foot to foot.

Two criminalists worked inside the taped-off area, one kneeling over the victim, the other picking at the base of a tree. Harry trotted toward the onlookers to check for witnesses. I stopped at the yellow tape and studied the scene from a dozen feet away. The body lay supine in the grass as if napping, legs slightly apart, arms at its sides. It seemed surreal in the uncompromising light, the colors too bright and edges too sharp, a man incompletely scissored from another world and pasted to this one. The clothing was spring-night casual: belt-less jeans, brown deck shoes without socks, white tee with an Old Navy logo. The shirt was drawn up to the nipples, the jeans unzipped.

Bending over the body was the senior criminalist on the scene, Wayne Hembree. Black, thirty-five, thin as poor-folk’s broth, Hembree had a moon face and a sides-and-back fringing of hair. He sat back on his heels and shrugged kinks from his shoulders. His forehead sparkled with sweat.

“Okay walking here, Bree?” I called, gesturing a line between my shoes and the body. I didn’t want to stick my feet into something important. Dog shit either. Hembree nodded, and I slipped under the tape.

An old street cop who’d seen everything this side of downtown hell once told me, “Find a head without a body, Ryder, and it’s weird, but there’s something whole about it. Find a body without a head and it’s creepy and sad at the same time—just so alone, y’know?” When I looked down on that body, I understood. In four years with the MPD I’ve seen shot bodies, stabbed bodies, drowned bodies, bodies mangled from car crashes, a body with a pile of intestines squirted beside it, but never one without a head. The old cop nailed it: that body was as alone as the first day of creation. I shivered and hoped no one saw.

“Killed here?” I asked Hembree.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. I can tell you he was decapitated where he’s laying. ME folks thinking two or three hours back. Puts time of death between eight and ten.”

“Who called it in?”

“Kids, teenagers. Came back here to make out and—”

Footsteps behind me; Captain Squill and his hulking, omnipresent shadow, Sergeant Earl Burlew. Burlew was chewing paper as usual. He kept a page of the Mobile Register in his pocket and fed torn pieces between his doll-sized lips. I always wanted to ask was there a difference between sections, Sports tasting gamier than Editorials, maybe. Or did they all taste like chicken? Then I’d look into Burlew’s tiny, oyster-colored eyes and think maybe I’d ask some other time.

Burlew said, “Look who’s here, Captain: Folgers instant detective. Just add headlines and stir.” He swiped his hand down his sweating face. Burlew’s centered features were too small for his head, and for a moment he disappeared beneath his own palm.

“Fag revenge killing,” Squill said, glancing at the body. “Love to hack, don’t they? Good place to do it, park’s copacetic after dark. It’s a yuppie-puppie neighborhood; Councilwoman Philips lives two blocks down; street gets over-patrolled to keep her in happy world…”

I’d heard Squill had a speech mode for every crowd. With uniformed cops a dozen feet away he was spewing cop-movie jargon. Disheartening, I thought, a seventeen-year police administrator acting like a cop instead of just being one.

“…killer thumps the vic’s melon or pops a cap. The perp pulls his blade and scores a head.” Squill pointed to the bushes around us. “Unsub dropped him here so the body’d stay out of sight.”

I fought the compulsion to roll my 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.”