I shrugged. “What should I say? What’s done is done.” I felt a little silly for thinking Sweetness needed to get used to murder scenes. Other than that, I had no other feelings about it, one way or another.
“Sweetness is a fucking psycho.”
“I watched you kill a man. Are you a fucking psycho?”
“The circumstances were different.”
“Semantics.”
He stared at me for a minute. “That surgery changed you,” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “I hired Sweetness in part because I recognized in him the ability to commit acts of violence without angst or upset. You enjoy violence because it makes you feel like a tough guy and reinforces your self-image. But your self-image is a lie you tell yourself. If you hurt someone, you feel guilty about it, suffer, have to unburden yourself and cry on my shoulder. You probably feel bad about wrecking that SUPO agent’s face. Sweetness couldn’t give a shit less if he hurts someone, just doesn’t care one way or the other, and I don’t have to listen to his sob sister boo hoo hoo remorse.”
I pounded Milo’s ego to dust. I didn’t mean to. He stared down at his muddy boots. “You can be really mean sometimes.”
I fake smiled and held up my cane. “I can also be nice. You be nice, or I’ll tell my lion to bite you.”
He just shook his head and wandered off.
Sweetness and Moreau showed up, I introduced them to Saska, and we all went back to view the murder scene. The racists who promised retaliation proved as good as their word. First, the young men were gassed to death, and now this.
Their mother and sister were laundry-line lynched, then set ablaze. The laundry poles stood opposite each other, and cords to hang up wet laundry were stretched between them. The poles weren’t high enough for a proper lynching, so the killers had tied their ankles and wrists, cinched them tight behind their backs so they only needed about three feet of clearance, and hoisted them up the laundry poles. One body lay on the ground. The other, miraculously, still hung. The rope hadn’t quite burned through.
The bodies were mostly burned down to the bone, the flesh reduced to soot hanging on it. And in the grass near them, the words neekeri huora were burned into the lawn.
Milo shook his head in disbelief. “For God’s sake, why them?”
“It was likely the most repulsive thing the murderers could think of,” Moreau said.
Saska said, “I don’t know what they used, but it was a really powerful accelerant.”
Moreau did an impression. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like…victory.”
“Who’s that supposed to be?” Saska asked.
“Robert Duvall from Apocalypse Now. These women were soaked in homemade napalm. I know it by the smell. It’s basically just gasoline and soap. It causes the most terrible pain you can imagine. Even this homemade stuff burns at about fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And it’s obvious to me, by looking at the burn pattern on their mouths, chests, and in the lawn in front of them, that they were forced to drink napalm and it was lit while they vomited. They died spewing fire like dragons.”
Everyone went silent. Except for Moreau and myself, I believe they resisted the urges to both cry and poke.
“But why the words burnt into the yard?” Moreau asked. “‘Whore’ is singular. There are two bodies.”
“That’s directed at me, as a taunt,” I said. “I worked a case in which a black woman was murdered. Those words were carved in her torso.”
Moreau chuckled and faked a different voice. “So this time it’s personal.”
I didn’t ask which movie he quoted. “But what’s the point?”
“It’s obvious,” he said. “To up the ante. To keep you enchanted and your enthusiasm high. The horror of the violence keeps the pressure up and the case top-priority. For some reason, the killers desire this. Probably for maximum media exposure.”
Milo, Saska and I lit cigarettes.