The Alibi Man

Chapter 5

“What a fucking mess,” Landry muttered as he watched the ME’s people load the various pieces of the girl into a body bag. Everyone was sweating and swatting at flies. It had to be eighty-five degrees, with wet-blanket humidity. His hands were sweating inside the latex gloves he wore.

A floater, a dump job, no crime scene, and Estes was involved.

“Why was she here?” Weiss asked with an edge to his voice.

“‘Cause somebody dumped her here,” Landry said, purposely misconstruing the detective’s question. Weiss was a pain in the ass, always with the chip on his overly developed shoulder. The guy spent so much time in the gym his arms stuck out from his sides like he was a blow-up doll.

“I meant Estes. What was she doing here?”

“She found the body. Turns out the DB was someone she worked with.”

“Yeah? How do we know she didn’t do it?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I don’t like her being around,” Weiss announced.

“She didn’t ask to find someone she knows dead in a canal.”

“She’ll be a problem.”

Landry said nothing. Weiss was right. Elena would be a problem. She wouldn’t stand back and let the detectives do their job. She knew their job. She’d done it herself, and she’d been good at it. Irina was someone she’d worked with every day. She was going to take the girl’s murder personally. She was probably doing something she shouldn’t be doing on Irina’s behalf at that very minute.

Frustrating, maddening, difficult, attitude up to here. It pissed him off no end that he wanted to be with her. Had wanted-past tense. That was over. Thank God they had been discreet. No one in the SO knew (at least not for a fact) they’d been seeing each other, therefore no one knew they’d split.

“Did she call you?” Weiss asked. “You weren’t up. I was up. Why didn’t I get the call?”

Landry rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake. You have a bug up your ass because you didn’t catch this case? We got no murder scene, no evidence, no witness, no suspect, a dead body mutilated by an alligator. Say the word, Weiss. You can have this gem. And you can deal with Estes too. She’ll be so glad to cooperate with you, I’m sure.”

“I don’t want it,” Weiss said. “I’m just saying. The call didn’t come through the channels.”

“Well, you go tell the teacher on me,” Landry said sarcastically, as he went toward an evidence tech making a mold of the shoe print Elena had pointed out to him along the bank.

“Why’d she call you?”

Landry looked over at him. “What’s the matter with you? She called me because she knows me. If you found a friend of yours dead-assuming you have any-who would you call? You’d call someone you know. You wouldn’t take your chances on getting the first incompetent moron up on the board.”

Weiss puffed up. “Are you calling me incompetent?”

“I’m calling you a pain in the ass. Just shut up for once and get your mind on the job. Jesus, you act like some jealous woman.”

The shoe print. Landry looked down at it. Maybe it belonged to their perp. Maybe it belonged to some redneck who dumped his used motor oil into the water a week ago. It didn’t tell them anything, didn’t give them anything to go on. The only good it would do to have the cast would be once they had a suspect and could get a warrant to look in the guy’s closet.

“Looks like a boot,” the evidence tech said without looking up. “A work boot. Round toe. Blundstones or something like that with a medium-deep tread.”

“Are you doing the tire tracks?” Such as they were. A few ridges in the powdered shell along the other side of the canal. A stiff wind would blow them away.

“Grant is on her way. She’s better with the fragile ones.”

Landry jammed his hands at his waist and looked around. They had stretched the yellow tape across the road from his car to the bank. Behind the barrier was a bottleneck of white-and-green county cruisers, unmarked sedans, the ME’s van. News vans had rolled in to further choke off the only way in or out of this backwater shit hole.

The reporters swooped in on a death scene almost as fast as the buzzards and were just as hungry and noisy. A corpse to feed on? Their favorite fodder. They didn’t get that many in the Wellington environs, though the statistic climbed a little each year. The area was growing fast. Construction was constant. And with the influx of people came an increase in every kind of problem, including crime.

“The natives are getting restless,” Weiss said, nodding at the growing crowd.

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Hey, Landry,” another of the detectives called from farther up the bank and back into the scrub. “Got something here. A purse.”

The bag was small, cylindrical, gold encrusted with rhinestones.

Landry snapped a photo of it with his digital camera. The crime-scene photographer took half a dozen shots from varying heights and angles. One of the crime-scene guys took measurements from the purse to where the body was found, and from the purse to the boot print.

When the evidence marker went down to mark the spot, Landry picked the purse up and opened it. A cherry-red lip gloss, a compact, an American Express gold card, three twenties, two condoms.

“Guess we can rule out robbery as a motive,” Weiss said, loudly enough to catch the attention of a reporter or two on the other side of the canal.

Landry gave him a look. “Girls don’t get dumped in canals because they carry too much cash.”

“I’m just saying.”

Weiss was always just saying. The man never had a thought cross his mind that didn’t fall out of his mouth.

“There’s no driver’s license,” Landry said. “No cell phone.”

“Haitians have been stealing cell phones,” Weiss said. “They’ve got a racket going. My brother-in-law got a bill from Verizon that was twenty-seven pages long. Calls to Zimbabwe, the Ukraine, all over the world. The farthest he ever called was his mother in Astoria, Queens.

“So maybe some Haitians followed her out of a club, grabbed her…”

Landry tuned him out. Another couple of sentences and Weiss would be into his theory that Castro was behind the influx of criminal types from the islands to South Florida. Maybe he was, but Landry didn’t want to hear about it. He had to deal in the present, the here and now, the corpse du jour. The anti-crime unit could worry about Castro.

He opened a little zippered compartment in the purse. Inside was a foreign-looking coin. The girl was Russian. It was probably something from the old country to bring her luck.

The ME’s people came past with the body bag.

So much for that theory.

“All right,” he said on a sigh. “I’m going to go deal with these people and get it over with.”

As he made his way to the other side of the canal, he dug in his pants pocket, came up with a couple of extra-strength Excedrin and choked them down without water, shuddering at the bitter taste left in his mouth.

Like hogs at a trough, the reporters tried to muscle one another out of the way for the honor of being the first to stick a microphone at him.

“Detective!”

“Detective!”

“Detective!”

The pushiest was the blonde from the NBC affiliate in West Palm. “Detective, what can you tell us about the victim? What can you tell us about the murder?”

“I can’t tell you anything about the victim, and we don’t know yet that this is homicide,” he said. “The ME will determine cause of death.”

“But clearly the body was dismembered,” the woman said.

“We don’t know when that happened. We don’t know how long the body has been in the water.”

“Are you saying this is another alligator attack?”

Excitement swept through the group, raising voices, as if some poor soul being eaten alive by a giant reptile was a better story than a regular person-on-person murder. The media seemed to want to promote the idea that the alligators were conspiring to take back their habitat, like something from a bad horror movie.

Three area residents had recently died in separate incidents with gators. One swimming in a pond, one walking a dog on a jogging path along a canal, and a drunk who had the misfortune of passing out on the bank of another canal within easy striking distance for the predator. Even if he’d been conscious, the drunk probably wouldn’t have gotten away. An alligator can charge short distances as fast as thirty-five mph, nearly as fast as a thoroughbred racehorse running full out.

“No, I didn’t say that,” Landry said.

“But it could have been?”

It could have been aliens, he wanted to say, but sarcasm was not looked on with a sense of humor in the sheriff’s office.

“I can’t speculate as to the cause of death” was what he said. “At this point we have no idea how the young woman died or how she came to be here. The sheriff’s office will be releasing a sketch of the victim later today, and we’ll ask for help from the public in trying to ascertain her whereabouts the last few hours of her life.”

“A young woman?”

“How old?”

“Who was she?”

“Have you found the murder weapon?”

“Was she sexually assaulted?”

“We won’t know that until the autopsy is complete,” Landry said.

The blonde leaned ahead of the pack. “Who found the body?”

“A local resident.”

“Will you release his name?”

“No.”

“When will you be able to give us more information?”

“When we have some,” Landry snapped. “Now you’ll have to move the vehicles so we can get on with it. We’re burning day-light.”