“The poor bastard has no pants,” the agent observed. “What do you make of that?”
“Sunburned testicles is what I make of that. If we don’t haul him down soon.”
Agent Hawkins nodded seriously. He gave the coroner a card. The feds, they loved to hand out cards.
The man from the medical examiner’s played along. “I’ll call if anything turns up,” he lied. The FBI man said thanks and headed back toward his car; he was easy to track—a blocky gray suit moving through a bright sea of Hawaiian prints and Day-Glo surfer shorts. A dog in a flower bed.
The amused coroner soon was joined by an equally amused trooper from the Florida Highway Patrol.
“Nice day for a hangin”,” drawled the trooper. His name was Jim Tile. He wore the standard mirrored sunglasses with gold wire frames.
“I don’t see a rope,” said the coroner, gesturing at the dead man high above them. “What the hell’s he hanging with?”
“That would be fishing line,” Jim Tile said.
The coroner thought about it for several moments. Then he said, “All right, Jim, what do you think?”
“I think it’s a pretty poor excuse for a suicide,” said the trooper.
A tanned young man in a crisp blue shirt and a red necktie worked his way out of the crowd. The man walked up to the coroner and somberly extended his right hand. He wore some kind of plastic ID badge clipped to his belt. The coroner knew that the tanned young man wasn’t a cop, because his ID badge was in the shape of an animal head, possibly a raccoon or a small bear.
Charles Chelsea gestured toward the dead man without looking. In a voice dripping with disgust, he said, “Can’t you guys do something about that?”
“We’re working on it,” replied the coroner.
“Well, work a little faster.”
The man from the medical examiner’s looked down at Charles Chelsea’s animal-head ID and smiled. “These things can’t be hurried,” he said.
A jurisdictional dispute had delayed the removal of the offending body for most of the morning. It was a tricky geographic dilemma. The middle of the Card Sound Bridge marked the boundary line between Dade and Monroe counties. The Monroe County medical examiner’s man had arrived first on the scene, and decided that the dead man was hanging in Dade County airspace and therefore was not his responsibility. The Dade County medical examiner’s man had argued vigorously that the victim had most certainly plummeted from the Monroe County side of the bridge. Besides which the Dade County morgue was already packed to the rafters with homicides, and it wouldn’t kill Monroe County to take just one. Neither coroner would budge, so the dead body just hung there for four hours until the Monroe County medical examiner announced that he was needed at a fatal traffic accident in Marathon, and scurried away, leaving his colleague stuck with the corpse—and now some whiny pain-in-the-ass PR man.
The coroner said to Charles Chelsea: “We’ve got to get some pictures. Take some measurements. Preserve the scene, just in case.”
“In case of what? The poor jerk killed himself.” Chelsea sounded annoyed. Preserving the scene was the opposite of what he wanted.
Trooper Jim Tile removed his sunglasses and folded them into a breast pocket. “I guess I can go home. Now that we got an expert on the case.”
Charles Chelsea started to rebuke this impertinent flatfoot, but changed his mind when he took a good look. The trooper was very tall and very muscular and very black, all of which made Chelsea edgy. He sensed that Jim Tile was not the sort to be impressed by titles, but nonetheless he introduced himself as a vice president at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills.
“How nifty,” said the trooper.
“Yes, it is,” Chelsea said pleasantly. Then, lowering his voice: “But, to be frank, we could do without this kind of spectacle.” His golden chin pointed up at the hapless corpse. Then he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the chattering throng of onlookers.
“All these people,” Chelsea said urgently, “were on their way to our theme park.”
“How do you know?” asked Jim Tile.