The annual unveiling of the new tourism poster made Sparky Harper neither controversial nor unpopular. As far as anyone could tell, it was the only tangible thing he did all year to earn his forty-two-thousand-dollar salary.
As for the murder, Keyes thought of the usual cheap possibilities: a jealous husband, an impatient loan shark, a jilted girlfriend, a jilted boyfriend. Nothing seemed to fit. Sparky was a divorced man with a French poodle named Bambi. When he dated at all, he dated widows or hookers. He had been known to get bombed on occasion, but he never made an ass of himself in public. And he wasn’t a gambler, so it was unlikely that the Mafia was into him.
Keyes guessed that whoever killed Harper might not have known him personally, but probably knew who he was. With garish methodology the killer had seemed to be making a very strong statement, which is why Keyes couldn’t dismiss the “Nights of December” letter, nutsy as it was.
Keyes decided that he needed the autopsy. He drove to the medical examiner’s office and asked for a copy. Dr. Joe Allen wasn’t in, so Keyes decided to wait. As he sat in a tiled room that smelled sweetly of formalin, he started to read Allen’s report line-by-line. Halfway through, his curiosity got the best of him and he unsheathed the color slides. One by one Keyes held them up to the light.
The more he studied the gruesome photographs, the more Keyes was convinced that Ernesto Cabal was telling the truth: he’d had nothing to do with B. D. Harper’s murder. It was beyond Ernesto’s stunted imagination to have conceived something like this.
“Don’t smudge up my slides!” Dr. Joe Allen stood at the doorway, laden with files.
“ ‘Mornin’, Doc.”
“Well, Brian. I hear you’ve hit the big time.” Joe Allen had always liked Brian Keyes. Keyes had been a solid reporter and it was a damn shame he’d given it up to become a P.I. Joe Allen wasn’t crazy about private investigators.
“This was no robbery, Joe.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Dr. Allen said, “except that it was definitely death by asphyxiation.”
“Have you ever heard of a B-and-E artist to show such flair?” Keyes asked.
“It seems the police are of that opinion.”
“I’m asking for yours, Joe.”
Dr. Joe Allen had autopsied 3,712 murder victims during his long career as the Dade County coroner, so he had seen more indescribable carnage than perhaps any other human being in the whole United States. Throughout the years Joe Allen had charted South Florida’s progress by what lay dead on his steel tables, and he was long past the point of ever being shocked or nauseated. He performed meticulous surgery, kept precise files, took flawless photographs, and compiled priceless morbidity data which earned him a national reputation. For example, it was Dr. Allen who had determined that Greater Miami had more mutilation-homicides per capita than any other American city, a fact he attributed to the terrific climate. In warm weather, Allen noted, there were no outdoor elements to deter a lunatic from spending six, seven, eight hours hacking away on a victim; try that in Buffalo and you’d freeze your ass off. After Dr. Allen had presented his findings to a big pathologists’ convention, several other Sun Belt coroners had conducted their own studies and confirmed what became known as the Allen Mutilation Theorem.
Throughout the years a few spectacular cases stood out vividly in Dr. Allen’s recollections, but the rest were just toe tags. Brian Keyes hoped Sparky Harper might be different.
The coroner put on his glasses and held up two of the more sickening slides, as if to refresh his memory. “Brian,” he said, “I don’t think they’ve got the right man in jail.”
“So how do I get him out?”
“Give them a better suspect.”
“Swell, Joe. Anyone in particular?”
“In my opinion, Mr. Harper was the victim of a ritual slaying. I’d say that several persons were involved. I would also say that neither robbery nor sexual assault was the motive. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an occult ceremony, possibly even human sacrifice. On the other hand, the body showed no common signs of torture—no cigarette burns, welts, or bruise patterns. But you can’t ignore what happened to the legs.”