She sidestepped beside the corpse as the light revealed a body toned and powerful, with melon-round shoulders and hawser-thick trapezoids. The chest was deep, the waist slender. The legs were spread wide.
She tripped as I had done.
“Point the light to the floor. What’s down there?”
The light found a heavy and outdated electrical conduit snaking from a wall socket toward the body. The light tracked the conduit upward to the bed where it disappeared beneath the victim’s thigh.
“Get over here and put some illumination between the glutes,” the woman said.
“Excuse me?”
“Light the guy’s asshole.”
The cop angled the light into the crevice between the victim’s buttocks. The cord entered a wooden handle protruding from the anus. I heard hissing, like water boiling, and saw red-brown rivulets running from the body’s rectum to the mattress as steam misted upward. It was the second most bizarre sight I’d ever seen. The first was what was happening a couple feet upward.
“What’s up his ass?” Beale said.
“An industrial soldering iron,” Caudill said. “My granddaddy had one. They’re about sixteen inches long and glow red-hot when they’re plugged in.”
The woman said, “Then unplug the damn thing. Get the suspect outside and stick him in my cruiser for the time being. I’ll call Frankfort for a forensic unit.”
Beale manhandled me outside and jammed me into the back of an unmarked cruiser as the woman tapped at her cellphone. I leaned forward and looked through the Plexiglas divider into the front of the cruiser, relaxing a bit at seeing familiar turf. There was the usual radio equipment, miniature computer terminal and input pad, about the same as Harry and I had back in Mobile.
A stack of books on the passenger seat caught my eye and I sat forward to read the titles on the spines. All were on law enforcement, with most of the books written by people familiar to me. The third volume down was a just-published compendium featuring case histories of sociopaths penned by the cops who tracked them down. Written for law-enforcement agencies, the book had sold quite well for a special-interest publication.
I looked up. The woman was at the corner of the porch and thumbing her cellphone. She studied the screen and rolled her eyes. I took it there was no signal to be found.
In the light the woman was in her early thirties, an inch or two above medium height, slender. She wore a blocky black pantsuit that looked straight from the rack at Wal-Mart, black cross-trainers, with a gold badge slung around her neck on what appeared to be a length of clothesline. Her hair was an unruly shag à la early Rod Stewart, red, probably the real thing given her creamy complexion and dusting of freckles.
She looked my way. Stared, like making a decision. She walked over, her eyes a mixture of curiosity and contempt, her voice pure country.
“We caught you standing over the body, fella. Anything you wanna talk about?”
She was hoping for an on-scene confession. Instead, I nodded toward the book in the passenger seat. “Interesting-looking book up there, Detective. Serial Killers by Their Captors. Is it yours?”
She glanced at the stack of books, then back to me, figuring I was working some kind of angle. Or playing with her. I noted her sea-green eyes looked in slightly different directions, a mild strabismus. Though the declination was subtle, it was unsettling, like one eye was looking at me, the other at something on my shoulder.
“The book’s mine,” she said. “Why? You figuring to add to it?”
“Did you read the case history of Marsden Hexcamp and his followers? The cult from coastal Alabama?”
She stared at me for a five-count. “I read that chapter.”
“I wrote it,” I said, leaning forward to jiggle my cuffs. “Can a brother get a little love here?”
We were in a bilious yellow meeting room in the Woslee County Police Department. It smelled of boiled coffee, tobacco smoke, and drugstore aftershave. Donna Cherry, head of Eastern Kentucky Combined Law Enforcement, Region 5, sighed and dropped the phone into the cradle after checking my background with the Mobile police. She leaned cross-armed against the wall and stared at me with the offset eyes. The call hadn’t made them any friendlier.
“Let’s start again, Ryder.”
“Come on, I’m not really a suspect, am I?” I argued. “You just verified that I—”
“I verified you’re a cop. What I didn’t verify was how you happened to be on the scene of a murder before the locals arrived.”
“You called me, dammit. My cellphone rang and you gave me coordinates. Asked for help.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie, Ryder. I never called you.”
“You have a distinctive voice,” I said, mentally adding nails on a blackboard.
She glared at me, angry I wasn’t breaking down and confessing to God-knows-what, then stood with the eyes still hammering hard. I felt the silent pounding as she paced behind my back. She sat across the table, her question bag re-filled.
“You said the call confused you, Ryder. If so, why didn’t you call back to ask for more information?”
I was getting irritated. I’d received a cryptic call for help, ran to offer assistance, was being grilled for the effort.
“You blocked your number. But you know all this, don’t you, Detective Cherry? You’re gaming me for some reason.”
“I AM NOT GA—” She caught herself and took a couple seconds to compose, tapping clear-polished nails on the desk. I saw anger in one eye, bewilderment in the other, averaged it out into exasperation. “How could I call you without knowing your number, wise guy?” she asked.
“I’ve told several locals I’m a Mobile detective, gave them my cell number. The people at Compass Point Outfitters. A lady at the service station in Pine Ridge. Dottie Fugate at the cabin-rental company.”
“So what?”
“I know how the country grapevine works. One of them called you, said ‘Guess what, there’s a homicide dick vacationing in the area.’”
She gave me incredulous. “You’re saying when faced with a homicide my first thought was to call the big-city detective?”
I gave her my most sardonic smile. “You called me, lady. I didn’t call you.”
She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “If I called you, why didn’t anyone expect you on the scene, Einstein? You figure that one out?”
Actually that one bothered me a bit. But I was working on theories. “The cell connection was lousy. You didn’t realize your message got through. When you found me with the body, my face under a bandana, you figured me for the perp.”
“And not the hotshot hard-on from Mobile.”
“Your words, not mine,” I said. “But let’s get back to my question: Why are you gaming me?”
“I am not running a game here, Ryder,” she said slowly, as though explaining something to a child. “I did not call you anonymously because you’re a big-time detective who writes books and all. What I am trying to do is reconcile your story with your actions.”
Cherry seemed truly convinced she hadn’t called me. I wondered if the woman had two personalities, each with its own line of sight. I decided to bag my confrontational attitude and appeal to her rational side, if there was one. I pulled out