STORMY WEATHER By CARL HIAASEN

A ruddy, gray-haired man in a lab coat stood at the head of the steel table. He nodded cordially and took a step back. Holding her breath, Bonnie lowered her eyes to the corpse. The man was potbellied and balding. His olive skin was covered from shoulder to toe with sprouts of shiny black hair. In the center of the chest was a gaping, raspberry-hued wound. His throat was a necklace of bruises that looked very much like purple fingerprints.

“It’s not my husband,” Bonnie Lamb said.

Augustine led her away. A tall black policeman followed.

“Mrs Lamb?”

Bonnie, on autopilot, kept moving.

“Mrs Lamb, I need to speak with you.”

She turned. The policeman was broadly muscled and walked with a hitch in his right leg. He wore a state trooper’s uniform and held a tan Stetson in his huge hands. He seemed as relieved to be out of the autopsy room as they were.

Augustine asked if there was a problem. The trooper suggested they go someplace to talk.

“About what?” Bonnie asked.

“Your husband’s disappearance. I’m running down a few leads, that’s all.” The trooper’s manner was uncharacteristically informal for a cop in uniform. He said, “Just a few questions, folks. I promise.”

Augustine didn’t understand why the Highway Patrol would take an interest in a missing-person case. He said, “She’s already spoken to the FBI.”

“This won’t take long.”

Bonnie said, “If you’ve got something new, anything, I’d like to hear about it.”

“I know a great Italian place,” the trooper said.

Augustine saw that Bonnie had made up her mind. “Is this official business?” he asked the trooper.

“Extremely unofficial.” Jim Tile put on his hat. “Let’s go eat,” he said.

In the mid-1970s, a man named Clinton Tyree ran for governor of Florida. On paper he seemed an ideal candidate, a bold fresh voice in a cynical age. He was a rare native son, handsome, strapping; an ex-college football sensation and a decorated veteran of Vietnam.

On the campaign trail, he could talk smart in Palm Beach or play dumb in the Panhandle. The media were dazzled because he spoke in complete sentences, spontaneously and without index cards. Best of all, his private past was uncluttered by slimy business deals, the intricacies of which taxed the comprehension of journalists and readers alike.

Clinton Tyree’s only political liability was a five-year stint as an English professor at the University of Florida, a job that historically would have marked a candidate as too thoughtful, educated and broad-minded for state office. But, in a stunning upset, voters forgave Glint Tyree’s erudition and elected him governor.

Naively the Tallahassee establishment welcomed the new chief executive. The barkers, pimps and fast-change artists who controlled the legislature assumed that, like most of his predecessors, Clinton Tyree dutifully would slide into the program. He was, after all, a local boy. Surely he understood how things worked.

But behind the governor’s movie-star smile was the incendiary fervor of a terrorist. He brought with him to the capital a passion so deep and untainted that it was utterly unrecognizable to other politicians; they quickly decided that Clinton Tyree was a crazy man. In his first post-election interview, he told The New York Times that Florida was being destroyed by unbridled growth, overdevelopment and pollution, and that the stinking root of those evils was greed. By way of illustration, he cited the Speaker of the Florida House for possessing “the ethics of an intestinal bacterium,” merely because the man had accepted a free trip to Bangkok from a Miami Beach high-rise developer. Later Tyree went on radio urging visitors and would-be residents to stay out of the Sunshine State for a few years, “so we can gather our senses.” He announced a goal of Negative Population Growth and proposed generous tax incentives for counties that significantly reduced human density. Tyree couldn’t have caused more of an uproar had he been preaching satanism to preschoolers.

The view that the new governor was mentally unstable was reinforced by his refusal to accept bribes. More appallingly, he shared the details of these illicit offers with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that manner, one of the state’s richest and most politically connected land developers got shut down, indicted and convicted of corruption. Clearly Clinton Tyree was a menace.

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