“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Upstairs, in her room, she crashed down on her bed. She just needed an hour or so of sleep.
She had almost drifted off when she found herself jerking up again. She had to lock the door to her room.
Avery was in the house, she told herself.
But it didn’t matter.
Even when Liam was actually sleeping with her, she had to lock the door to her room. It was paranoia, she told herself. Dangerous.
No. She wanted to be in the house.
She just wanted her door locked at all times. She wasn’t sure why, but she feared sleeping to wake up and find that someone was there.
Someone staring down at her as she slept.
It was getting late in the day, but when he left Chris Vargas on the street, Liam called Franklin Valaski to see if he was still at the morgue.
He was.
Valaski, like many a Key West old timer, had taken the morning hours to attend the funeral of Cutter Merlin.
“Come on in, Liam. Come on in. I have Mr. Gary White on steel right now, and I can give you my initial findings,” Valaski told him.
As he drove toward the medical examiner’s office, Liam reflected on the events of the last several hours—finding Gary White’s corpse, and Cutter Merlin’s funeral. As long as he lived, he would never forget the look in the man’s eyes.
Had Gary had that same look? They’d never know. Gary had no eyes left in his skull.
The corpse didn’t look much better when he saw it stretched out on the gurney. Some of the skin had dried out from the sun, and was now stretched out taut, ripped in places over bleached white bone. Some of it looked like…soupy goo.
Gary White had been given the customary autopsy cuts and sewn back together.
The face was best described as gruesome. The mouth was open, contorted, as if it had frozen in a scream. A great deal of soft tissue had been eaten away by the sun, sea, salt and creatures of the mangroves.
“Not a pleasant sight, our old friend Gary,” Valaski said.
“I don’t know of any relatives. They’re working on that at the station,” Liam said.
“Well, let’s hope they don’t find any,” Valaski said.
Liam nodded. The scent in the room was a horrendous mixture of chemicals and decomposition. Valaski handed him a white mask to filter the air. Liam accepted it without comment.
“Hell of a day, huh?” Valaski asked.
“Agreed. So?”
“Well, our friend Gary died of something like a pinpoint prick to his heart. Actually, the death appeared to have been a heart attack, or heart failure, but!” Valaski announced. “I’m an old buzzard, and I don’t fall for many tricks. Even if a man is someone on the fringe of society. In this morgue, no matter how rich and powerful or poor and sad in life, we find the truth.”
“Franklin, there is no one more grateful for your honor and your expertise,” Liam told him, “but, come on. Please. Explain.”
“Well, here you go. Come here…look at the scans. It might have appeared that the heart was ripped up soon after death, the body was in such a sad state. There are bits and pieces of sharp coral in the area of the peninsula spit where he was found—probably dredged up years ago when harbors were fashioned for the ships…or, who knows? I’m no geologist or geographer. God knows how we have more of a key now than we did before, though I suppose I could—”
“Franklin. All right. We’re looking at an area where mangroves are growing, and thus it’s enlarging constantly, and away from the beach that was also dredged out long ago, we have roots, we have crabs…and there’s an occasional toss up of long-dead coral. I got that. So?”
“Well, where he was found, it just might have appeared that he’d fallen on rock, and thus causing this area—” Franklin pointed to a mass in Gary White’s chest “—where the heart itself bled out. Aha! But before the chewing and decomposition, I don’t believe there was a tear of any kind in the man’s chest, or in his heart. This looks like it was caused by a needle of some kind. I don’t think it was done by something so many centimeters in circumference as an ice pick, but…there is that possibility.”
“He was murdered, and murdered by a slim stiletto-like object, possibly a needle, and, less likely but possibly, an ice pick,” Liam said.
“Precisely!” Franklin Valaski said, looking pleased. “Well?”
“Well, a man was murdered and left to rot,” Liam said.
“Yes, yes, but at least he didn’t die like Cutter. He was cleanly murdered. No mystery—no strange look, no books or guns or talismans in his hands,” Valaski said.
“Franklin, he was murdered,” Liam said. “When?”
“I don’t know exactly. It might have been three or four days, or maybe a week.”