“The little lady must have good genes,” Harry said, scrutinizing the kid. Her skin was tawny, the eyes almond shaped, the dark hair curly.

“What race is it, Doc?” I asked.

Doc Norlin shot me a disapproving glance. “It’s a she. As far as race goes, to me it looks like human.”

I’d never had much interaction with children. They were all its to me until old enough to communicate, at which point they became interesting. But the it, combined with a racial query and what I’d been told was an accent more cracker than cosmopolitan, probably made me sound a tad cartoonish. Not a good cartoon.

“I just mean…an, uh, ethnic identity might give investigators an idea what to look for in the parents.”

“I’m concerned with her health, not her ethnicity.”

I was trying to think of something to say that would make me sound reasonable and intelligent when Harry reached for my sleeve.

“Watch out, Carson!”

Pain stabbed my ankle. I jerked around to a cart at my back, its deck piled with towels and cleaning supplies.

“Jeez, I’m sorry,” said the thirtyish guy pushing the cart, somehow looking more smug than apologetic. “I rolled around the corner and didn’t see you.”

“It’s…all…right,” I grunted, leaning against the wall and rubbing my Achilles tendon. The corner was a dozen feet away; the guy must have been temporarily blind or daydreaming hard.

I set my foot on the ground. Limped a few feet down the hall. Turned and came back. I waited for Doc Norlin to inspect my potentially broken ankle, but she seemed blind to my pain and suffering.

The guy started to roll the cart away, but paused to look at the kids. He tickled his fingers at them and smiled as though greatly pleased, then pushed on. Babies have that effect on some people.

“So you think the kid’ll pull through, Doc?” Harry asked, turning back to the window. He tapped the glass and made an eyes-wide, tongueboinging series of faces through the glass. He cooed and babbled. Harry was one of those people unhinged by babies.

“The prognosis is guarded, Detective Nautilus, but I’m hopeful. Especially with the strong immune response and general good health, given what Baby Doe must have been through.”

Harry’s goofy grin descended into a frown. “Baby Doe? Is that what you’re calling her?”

“Standard procedure. They assign the name in Records.”

Harry studied the child for a long minute. “Can’t you pick more descriptive names?”

“What’s wrong with the temporary designation?” I asked.

My partner stared at me like it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard.

“Baby Doe’s a generic name, Carson. No one should be generic.”

Chapter 8

Leaving Harry to talk baby this-and-that with the blonde doc, I told him I’d meet him at the car and set off down the hall to the can, remembering to limp to keep the weight off my wounded extremity. The orderly who’d rear-ended me was leaning beside a hand-dryer and talking on a cellphone. He glanced up, mumbled, “Gotta go, Miriam. We’ll talk later.” He snapped the phone shut and ducked out the door without acknowledging my presence.

Outside I found Harry leaning against the car, beaming like a child at Christmas.

“Isn’t it great,” he said. “The kid’s gonna pull it off.”

“Pull what off?”

“Live. Have a life.”

“Sure,” I said. “Who’s driving?”

We were cut off by the dispatcher. “Harry? Carson? We have a call regarding a possible 10-54D at 824 Bellewood. You anywhere close?”

The code for a dead body. I grabbed the mic. “Ryder here. Harry and I are maybe four miles. Why us specifically?”

“Caller is Hispanic and not speaking entirely in English, but she keeps screaming about trabajo de diablo…the work of the devil. Plus she’s screaming sangre. Blood. Sounds like a weird one, so I figured we’d best have the Piss-it boys check it out.”

“Let’s hit and git it,” Harry said, jumping behind the wheel and pulling a 180 in the street. It was a maneuver he loved but had never mastered. The rear tire banged the curb, jumped up, burned rubber, dropped back into the street and screamed like a scalded banshee until the tires bit. “We’re en route,” I told the dispatcher when my breath returned.

I hung up the mic and held tight as Harry put the pedal to the floor. He switched on the siren and in-grille lights and we blew past other vehicles like two tons of rabid metal.

The address led us through a wide white gate, down a long lane canopied by trees, and into a circle of a dozen single-story cabins surrounding a bonfire pit. The cabins were simple and rustic. The land was studded with live oaks veiled in Spanish moss. Longleaf pines towered above. It was a clean and pastoral setting, radiating calm.

On a slight hill behind the cabins were three crosses made from telephone-pole-sized logs, the center cross taller than the others. A grouping of white rocks at the base of the rise proclaimed CampSonshine. We were in a church camp, one of many in southern Alabama.

“Over there.”

Harry pointed to a larger cabin outside the circle, two stories tall and set in its own copse, almost hidden in the dense green canopy. It was more house than cabin; the director’s quarters, I figured. I saw a woman in front of the structure, her face in her hands. We roared up the drive and bailed. I ran to the woman, Hispanic, in her forties.

“What is it, ma’am? What happened?”

She jabbed fingers toward the house, speaking Spanish through her tears. She bordered on hysteria and I couldn’t catch a word. I put my arm around her shoulders, walked her to the end of the porch and eased her into a wicker chair.

“Calm down, ma’am. Speak English if you can.”

I held her hand as she took a few trembling seconds to gather herself.

“I clean cabins,” she said. “When I come I find a man ees muerte, dead. Madre di Dios. Es de trabajo de diablo.”

“Is anyone else inside?”

“I saw no one.”

I patted her shoulder again, thanked her. Harry had eased open the door and was peering inside. Harry called, “Police.” Waited. Called again. No response, the cabin as silent as an undersea tomb.

We entered and saw why the woman had been screaming.

A man was hanging upside-down beneath a suspended staircase, a rope tight from his ankles to a hardware-store pulley on the upper staircase. His purple and blood-swollen head swayed a foot above the plank floor. His eyes bulged hideously, the whites turned red by gravity-exploded veins. Rivulets of blood ran from his eyes to the floor.

The man was wearing lacy women’s panties and metal clamps bit into his nipples. A black ball gag filled his lipstick-smeared mouth, and something like a black cucumber was lodged in his anus. His toneless, fatty back and buttocks were striped with welts. His hands were bound behind his back with a red scarf. His hair was wild, like whirlwinds had blown across his scalp. Six dead candles lay at points around the carpeted floor, white and thick, the wax pooled and hardened on the carpet. It looked like a scene from a demonic Tarot card.

“Lord Jesus,” Harry whispered.

I crept to the body, pressing a puckered thigh with my index finger and studying a pool of congealed brown on the floor.

“The blood’s caked and rigor’s gone. He’s been dead for hours.” I looked closer. “A lot of blood, but I don’t see any wounds beyond superficial: lashes on his back and ass, broken skin on his nips.”

“Every time I find one of these scenes it creeps me out for days,” Harry said. “I never understood B&D.”

“More like S&M,” I corrected. B&D was Bondage and Discipline, a sexual practice where people get a kick out of being restricted in their motion and spanked or whatever. Sadism and Masochism was like B&D on steroids. Some people liked to see how much pain they could take; for them the pain was mixed up with pleasure – the more it hurt, the better the sex.