“You’re really pushing the ice cream today, aren’t you?” Rebecca Owsley said.

36

I spent a solo night at Vivian’s, she on her third all-nighter in a row. I couldn’t sleep, bedeviled by pictures of young women burned alive, so I found a cell-phone app offering sleep-inducing sounds, like white noise, rain, waves, waterfalls, and so forth. I used the white noise, fearful my weariness and the sound of running water might make me wet the bed. I had a meeting with the department attorneys on another case, which took ninety minutes, with me mostly sucking down coffee and confirming the account of events.

I had fully awakened when I hit the office at 10.30. Belafonte was in the conference room poring over the cases like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was barely in my chair when my cell went off, the call from Dr Ukulele Johnson, an expert in trace evidence. Johnson was Jamaican, about eleven feet tall and, though he’d left behind his Rastafarian religion when he entered college, he’d kept the goofy pot grin and dangling dreadlocks. As for the name, his mother liked Hawaiian music.

“Where you at, Uke?” I yawned.

“The morgue, helping set up new equipment. Got something for you to think about, maybe.”

“On my way.”

Belafonte and I headed to meet Ukulele under a sky so richly blue it couldn’t have heard of the murders. We met in Ava’s office, a modest room with two chairs, a desk, and a wall of handbooks and tomes. Like my pathologist friend Clair Peltier back in Mobile, Ava favored a vase of flowers on her desk, something bright amidst all the death and decay. Ava had a superbly analytical mind, and I wanted her in on anything to do with forensics, medical or otherwise.

Ukulele – pronounced ookoo-lay-lay – was already there, his elongated frame seated on a cushioned chair, hair cording down his back, legs crossed at his ankles. He wore bright pink slacks and a Hawaiian print shirt under the lab jacket and I figured that’s how Harry would have looked as a forensics expert, just a bit shorter and sans the dreads.

Ava was at her desk, Belafonte took the other chair, I closed the door and leaned against it. Ukulele pulled reports from a manila envelope and passed them around. “We started with the standard microscope,” he said, his voice rich and musical and with a reggae backbeat. “Then moved to the scanning electron scope, then to various chemical analyses. We found carbonate stone on four of the teeth. And, in one broken-off tooth, an actual piece of carbonate stone about the size of a grain of sand.”

“Carbonate stone?”

“Limestone’s the most likely source, Carson. Gypsum, perhaps. Or dolomite. Found anywhere there’s Karst geology. One big indicator of Karst is sinkholes.”

“Which are everywhere in South Florida,” Belafonte said.

I shook my head, perplexed. “You’re saying she was hit in the mouth with a rock, Ukulele?”

“With enough force to break four teeth off at the gumline.”

My mind saw a tomahawk, the kind in the old Westerns, a stick with a stone axe-blade lashed to one end. Then I recalled Ava’s use of the word “gauntlet”, which gave me an even worse image, the victims forced to run while someone or someones thudded at them with a tomahawk.

“We found black cotton fibers on two teeth, microscopic,” Ukulele continued. “It’s possible they came from a gag.” He paused and thought. “Or a cotton wrapping on her head.”

“If cloth was over her mouth,” Belafonte said, “how did the rock get on her teeth?”

Ukulele punched himself in the mouth in slow motion. “The rock hits the mouth and the teeth tear through the fabric. Like I said, we just have trace.”

Ukulele had to resume his work, the installation of radiology equipment. He unwound from the chair and headed back to his task.

“Limestone?” I said. “Rocks? What does it mean?”

Ava put a finger to her lips, the sign she was in deep thought. After several moments she grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen, scrawling for a few seconds. “A basic schematic of the tissue-damage sites …” she said, displaying a drawing loosely resembling a target, the centering circle fully shaded in, the next lighter, the third and outside circle lighter still. “The center represents the highest amount of broken vessels, capillaries, hemorrhage. The next circles represent diminishing damage.”

Belafonte stared at the shapes. “Always rounded?”

“Generally a circular or ovoid configuration. And in this general size as well. Think about it.”

Belafonte figured it out and sucked in a gasp.

“What?” I said, my sleep-deprived mind running at sixty per cent.

“The Bible,” Belafonte said. “Think punishment.”

It took a three-count.

“She was stoned,” I said. “Pelted with rocks.”

Nautilus and Rebecca lunched al fresco in the shade of a wide sycamore and ate lamb kebabs from the park’s Jerusalem Café. They were almost alone outside on the picnic tables, the day having climbed into the upper eighties and most of the faithful preferring the air-conditioned version of the Holy Land.

“Do you think this is where the lambs from the Ark go when they’ve misbehaved?” Rebecca said, twirling a cube of meat in her hand.

“I doubt it,” Nautilus said. “This is not bad lamb.”

It took the kid a moment to get the joke and she laughed. “This is more fun than I thought it would be.”

“There’s actually a lot to see. Like the—”

Rebecca shook her head. “Not because of all the Bible stuff. Because I like how you look.”

Nautilus set down his skewer and raised an eyebrow. “Pardon me?”

“When I look at your eyes I see you looking all around, like your eyes are taking pictures.” The kid demonstrated, eyes flashing side to side, seeming to linger on something for a moment, moving on.

“I’m simply observing,” Nautilus said. “This is a different experience for me and it makes me think.”

“I like to observe,” Rebecca said. “I like to think, too.” She paused. “But whenever I do, I get in trouble.”

“Which probably indicates that you’re thinking correctly,” Nautilus said, then wondered if he should have said it.

“What do you mean by that?”

He’d used up the ice-cream shtick. “I’ve got to hit the restroom,” Nautilus said. “I’ll be back.”

The restrooms were at a far corner of the food court. As he got to his feet, Nautilus saw Tawnya talking to a woman dressed in a rough-spun cowled robe. They were standing beside a pair of large trash containers on the far side of the restroom building, away from the walkways.

He was almost at the restroom door when he saw Tawnya’s hand slash out and slap the woman’s face. Nautilus moved closer, using a large bush as cover and pausing two dozen feet from the mini-drama.

“Shut up, bitch,” Tawnya said, not wearing her toothy, sun-bright Welcome-to-Hallelujah-Jubilee face. This one was screwed up in anger.

The other woman said something back. Tawnya’s finger jabbed toward the woman’s eyes. “Fuck that. You do what I say or I’ll have your sorry ass on the bricks.”

Mumbled response. Some kind of challenge.

“You can try,” Tawnya said. “Who’s gonna believe a stupid hillbilly? WHO?”

More mumbles. The other woman sounded like she was crying.

“Leave?” Tawnya spat. “Be my guest, bitch. There’s the fucking gate. See how long you can make it on the street. I’m happy to have your sorry ass gone.”

More crying. Apology. The voice of subservience.

“That’s what I thought,” Tawnya said, in the cold voice of someone in total control. “Make that threat again and your bitch ass gets sued by more lawyers than your simple mind could count. Wash your face and get back to work.”

Nautilus backtracked to the restroom. Another observation.

37

“Stoned,” I said, still reeling from Ava’s supposition.