Chapter 5
As expected, Slidell skipped any of the greetings typically used to open phone conversations.
“They found another goddam dog. Maybe a dog.”
“Good afternoon, detective.” In the background, I heard the soft sputter of a police scanner with the volume turned low. Beyond the static, muted traffic sounds. I assumed Skinny was in his car.
Slidell offered one of his guttural non-responses.
“I hope your day is going well,” I said, chipper as Mr. Rogers.
“I spent the last two hours risking a stroke standing out in this freakin’ heat. So, we gonna waste time chewing the fat, or you wanna listen?”
Having reached the bottom tread, I stepped onto the patio and moved off a few feet, making room for Balodis, who was clomping down behind me.
“Go on,” I said.
“The nine one one came in around noon. A counselor from an outfit called Thundercloud or Thunderclap or something.”
“Thunderbird? The YMCA camp outside the entrance to River Hills?”
As a preteen, Katy had spent parts of her summers at Thunderbird, grooming horses and sweeping shit from their stalls. Riding them, too, I assume. Currently, my best friend, Anne, lived in River Hills, a lakeside community down the road from the camp.
“Yeah. That’s it,” Slidell said. “The kid, Huggy Ronstall—who the hell goes by Huggy? Anyway, Ronstall was out in the woods hiking or smoking weed or whatever it is those nitwits do and came across what he thought was a human body. He went home, considered his options, then dimed it.”
I heard the pop of a plastic water bottle being gripped too tightly. Waited out the glugging as Slidell rehydrated.
“The captain had me listen to the audio. The mope sounded like he expected to see his face on Dateline for nabbing the next Charlie Manson.”
“Ronstall seemed believable?” I prompted, hot and sticky and wanting to wrap this up and get into my air-conditioned car.
Slidell ignored my question.
“The case being of subterranean priority, the assignment fell to yours truly. I got the pleasure of schlepping out to south bejeezus.”
A bee, maybe attracted by the scent of my rose hips shampoo, maybe by the earthy reek of my sweat, began circling my head. I batted it away with my free hand.
“Ronstall was right, and he was wrong.” I heard rhythmic clicking, figured Skinny had activated his turn signal. “His fifteen-minutes-of-fame discovery was a headless corpse, all right. But it wasn’t human.”
“He’d found a decapitated animal.”
“Give the lady a cigar.”
“I assume the scene was processed properly?”
“I knew you’d ask that, what with this sicko beautifying the county with parts of Fido and Lassie.”
“And?”
“We took videos and stills and the techs collected everything that looked suspicious. I did the overseeing. Which was about as much fun as fuc—”
“Where are the remains now?”
“Making their way to the morgue.”
“Thanks, detective. You did good.”
Not at all sure that he had.
The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner used to be housed in uptown Charlotte, an easy ten-minute drive from the Annex. The facility is now located farther out on Reno Avenue, so the trip from Weddington took almost an hour.
That’s where my mind was. Tallying lost minutes like a taximeter tallies up miles.
Anyway, it was after four by the time I pulled in behind the building, a featureless box with all the architectural whimsy of a Stalinist apartment block. One upside. The structure is surrounded by enough asphalt to pave Cincinnati, so I lost no time searching for a parking place.
I killed the engine, and we got out of my car.
Yeah, we. To my surprise, Balodis had offered to accompany me.
During the trip, I’d explained that the cops were now involved in investigating the animal killings. Balodis nodded sadly, then asked if the lab would allow him access to a laptop and scanner.
Assuring him those items would be available, I asked why they might be needed. He responded with a single word. “Chip.”
My car’s AC tries hard but often fails to live up to its job description. Nevertheless, emerging from the semi-cooled auto interior was like entering a plasma field around a black hole. Heat rose from the pavement in rippling waves, creating the illusion that my sneakers were underwater.
The lot held few vehicles that late in the day. An ancient black Chevy suggested that Joe Hawkins, the oldest of the death investigators, was still clocked in. Nguyen’s Volvo was nowhere to be seen.
Balodis and I mounted a few stairs and entered the eco-friendly brick building through centrally positioned doors and crossed to a reception window on the left.
A woman, aptly named Mrs. Flowers, beamed us all the way to the glass.
Her over-bleached hair was permed into curls tight enough to cushion the reentry of a Titan 2 missile. Her teeth weren’t great.
Mrs. Flowers had been a fixture at the MCME for as long as I’d worked there. When first we’d met, I’d guessed that she was pushing sixty. The severe perm. The wonky dentition. Actually, she hadn’t yet closed out her forties.
Of late, Mrs. Flowers was in what I thought of as her “blush” phase. Today’s cardigan was a shade of pink that matched the rosy flamingos in her shirtwaist dress. Her nails featured a polish probably named Miami Beach Sunset.
“Dr. Brennan.” Vowels broader than grits and pecan pie. “What a lovely surprise.”
“Something came up unexpectedly.”
“Involving another unfortunate pooch?”
“Mm.”
“My goodness, it’s hot out today.”
“It is,” I agreed.
Mrs. Flowers’s eyes drifted to Balodis. Returned to me.
I asked what number had been assigned to my new case.
The Beach Sunset nails worked a keyboard.
“MCME-727-25.”
“Joe is still here?”
“He is, but I believe he’s preparing to depart.”
Of course he was. Joe Hawkins was like a German train. He arrived every morning at precisely 6:50, left every afternoon at precisely 4:20. Had for decades.
“Could you phone and ask Joe to bring the remains to room four?”
“Certainly. Shall I register your guest?”
“Please.”
Balodis provided ID and was issued a pass saying VISITOR in large block letters.
“You attach it to your shirt with that little clippy thingy,” Mrs. Flowers offered with a flick of one manicured finger. In case Balodis couldn’t figure out the obvious.
“You two just come on in.”
I scanned my badge and the lock buzzed. Balodis followed me through.
We crossed into a small vestibule and continued through a second set of doors.
To the left was Mrs. Flowers’s command post and four work carrels.
To the right, groupings of upholstered furniture and wooden tables.
Magazines. Plastic plants. The universal waiting room motif. At that moment, no one was waiting.
Behind Mrs. Flowers’s desk was a mountain range of gray filing cabinets. Opposite the cabinets, on the far wall, hung an erasable board divided into a grid.
Numbers and dates filled some of the grid’s cells, the digit-letter combinations representing suicides, homicides, accidents, flukes. Deaths that had earned tickets to Y-incisions.
One corpse had been designated MCME-727-25. The letters NH-B had been penned beside that. Nonhuman. Brennan.
The MCME went digital years ago. Every case is now entered into the computer system upon intake, every detail added to the file as the cold process of death examination unfolds.
Still, Nguyen keeps the old-style display.
Explains that she likes eyeballing the visual summary every day upon her arrival. I do, too.
I showed Balodis the door to the men’s locker room, then proceeded to the smaller one reserved for women. Minutes later we reconvened in the hall, both suited up in surgical scrubs.
Room four was as I’d left it the day before. With one exception.
A different black plastic bag lay on a different gurney. The bulge it contained was significantly larger than the one created by yesterday’s Frog Pond skull.
I dictated the basics. Marked an ABFO ruler. Took the standard pics.
Balodis waited, face neutral, arms crossed on his chest. His body language suggested anxiety, but I hadn’t a clue what the man was thinking.
Preliminaries completed, I gloved and withdrew a pair of scissors from a drawer.
“Ready?” I asked.
Balodis nodded.
Raising my mask to my face, I cut the plastic and spread the segments flat, exactly as I had the day before. It felt like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, except for two differences.
One, Balodis was there peering over my shoulder.
Two, the stench of putrefaction was as powerful as any odor I’ve ever encountered. It caused my eyes to burn and my breath to catch in my throat.
Behind me, I heard Balodis inhale sharply.
I stared at the thing I’d exposed, considering how to describe it.
For a full minute, I dictated nothing.
Then I began.
“The remains are those of a headless quadrupedal male mammal, probably a dog.
“The coat is wavy and of medium length. Though matted and blood-caked, the color appears to be a solid chocolate brown.
“Both forelimbs and the left hindlimb terminate in claw-tipped paws.
“The right hindlimb is missing distal to the mid-femur.
“The claws are densely black and appear to have been mechanically ground down.
“The tail is short—”
“It’s a spaniel,” Balodis said. “Probably a Boykin.”
“You’re sure?”
“On the spaniel part, yes. As to the Boykin, this dog’s body is longer and rangier than that of a Cocker, and more compact than that of a Springer. I’d estimate the animal weighed around forty pounds and stood about sixteen inches at the shoulder.”
“Measurements consistent with yesterday’s Frog Pond skull?”
“Absolutely. As are the color and length of the coat.”
Before I could respond, Balodis stepped forward and lifted the left hind limb for my inspection
“Look at the paws. See that slight webbing between the toes?”
“I do.”
“Boykins were bred to work in lakes and swamps. That webbing allows them to swim well.”
“Bred by whom?”
“Waterfowl and wild turkey hunters down in South Carolina. For years nobody outside the state knew about Boykins. Now the world loves the breed because they make great pets.”
“You think this dog had an owner.”
“Its nails have been trimmed.”
“Meaning someone had him groomed.”
Balodis crossed to the counter, on which a tech had placed a scanner. The thing was about three inches wide and six inches long, white, with a round antenna at one end, a screen and orange buttons below on the handle.
When powered up, the screen offered four options: Scan; View History; Clear Records; Upload. Choosing the first, Balodis ran the gadget in a slow, S-shaped pattern over the dog’s upper body, just tailward of the putrid tissue edging the truncated neck.
I know how scanners work; still Balodis felt compelled to explain. Sensing the man was firing on nervous energy, I let him talk.
“A microchip is a small glass tube roughly the size of a rice grain that functions as a tiny transponder. When its radio waves are picked up by a scanner, the chip is activated and transmits an identification number, which is displayed on the scanner’s screen.
We’ll know we’ve hit pay dirt if we hear a beep. ”
Nothing.
Balodis moved down each of the dog’s front legs.
“That would be an odd place for insertion,” I said.
“Indeed, it would. Microchips are implanted directly under the skin, usually between the shoulder blades. But the little buggers often migrate.”
The words had barely left his lips when the scanner gave off a high little chirp. Balodis raised the device to his eyes.
“Bingo.”
“This is a first,” I said.
“So you are familiar with the technology?”
“Actually, we did scan the others.”
“Forgive my mansplaining, then. None of the other displayed animals had chips?”
“Nope.”
Balodis turned the scanner so I could see. A nine-digit sequence filled the screen.
Opening his laptop, Balodis brought up a website called
, entered the number, and checked a list. Shifting
to one of dozens of registry sites, , he input the number
again.
“Bingo bingo!” Stepping back to allow me a better view.
The dog’s name was Bear. His color was brown. His gender was male. As suspected, his breed was Boykin Spaniel.
Bear’s owner was a guy named Crawford Joye. Joye lived on Archdale Drive in Charlotte.
“Good God in heaven.”
I turned.
Balodis’s right hand covered his mouth. All color had drained from his face.
“What?” I asked, surprised at such strong emotion.
“I know that man.”
“Crawford Joye?”
Balodis nodded. “Joye’s a cigar smoker. I met him through a group that gathers at McCranies.”
“The pipe shop at Park Road Shopping Center.”
Balodis nodded again.
“What’s his story?”
“He’s a lawyer. A solo practitioner, as I recall. Does mostly divorce work. That’s about all I know.”
“Were you aware that Joye had a dog?”
“He never spoke of a pet.”
I was considering that when my gaze fell on an irregularity in Bear’s neck. Unnoticed until now, the dark cleft seemed wrong amid the ravaged flesh.
Using one gloved finger, I palpated, then probed the small hollow.
Sonofabitch
I knew what had happened to Bear.