The Hanged Man Read online

  He stepped into the marble hallway and saw Paula Crick at the end of it, a silhouette against a burst of sunlight behind her, the only black coroner in the state. She spoke quietly into a mini cassette recorder, then turned it off when she saw him and hurried over.

  “I thought I heard your heap farting up the driveway, Shep. What’d they do, take away your cruiser?”

  “You got it. We aren’t even a month into the new fiscal year and they’re doing more than just trimming fat.”

  “Shit, tell me about it. I lost two assistant positions and that’s going to mean three days minimum for an autopsy.”

  The grapevine already buzzed with rumors that certain positions in the sheriff’s office had been earmarked for elimination. If they made this decision on the same basis as the allotment of cruisers, then he was screwed.

  “What’ve we got?” he asked as they walked up the hall, deeper into the house.

  “White male, late forties, shot through the chest. My guess is that it happened sometime yesterday morning; he’s been dead at least twenty-four hours. Name’s Andrew Steele.”

  “The criminologist?”

  “The same.”

  “Christ.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not well. He taught a couple of workshops back in the days when no one worried about the budget. He wasn’t just a criminologist, he was also a shrink.”

  “What’d you think of him?”

  “Brilliant man. I admired him.” And envied his sophistication, smoothness, his obvious breeding.

  Crick didn’t offer an opinion about Steele. “His four-year-old son was found in the kitchen, unconscious and curled up in a fetal position. The housekeeper says he’s a diabetic. She had the presence of mind to give him a shot of insulin when she found him, which may have saved his life. He’s at Holy Cross Hospital now. The mother is missing.”

  In other words, Crick believed the mother was the primary suspect. “She shot him and split, leaving her injured son behind? Is that what you’re saying, Paula?”

  “Honey, no conclusions yet. I’m just telling you what I know so far.”

  “Where’s the housekeeper?”

  “Out by the pool, waiting for you. She had Thursday off and came in around eight this morning. She’s been working for the Steeles since they got married ten years ago, and comes in five days a week. Cleans, picks up the son from preschool, helps with dinner.”

  “Any relatives?”

  “Maternal grandmother in California. The housekeeper has a call into her.”

  “What kind of work does the missus do?”

  “The worst imaginable, if you don’t include what we do. High school English teacher. Rae didn’t show up for work yesterday.”

  ABC, she laid it out. Paula Crick had been Broward County Coroner for almost twenty years, was now pushing sixty and sharper than ever. Very little got past her. People respected her, but found her abrasive and opinionated, the very qualities that Sheppard liked about her. The standing joke was that Crick preferred the company of the dead because they couldn’t argue with her.

  The hall opened into a magnificent room that overlooked a swimming pool and deck and the grand sweep of the ocean. The Savould rug in the center had probably cost more than his annual salary. A small fortune in jade and crystal figurines graced a display case against the wall. Lithographs and paintings adorned the walls.

  And there, next to a hewn stone coffee table, sprawled on the marble floor, lay Andrew Steele. Fruit flies hovered over him, an army of ants marched from the sliding glass doors to the corpse and then over it. They swarmed across his face, into his nostrils and out, busy little fuckers marching across the bloodstain shaped like Sicily on the front of his silk pajamas. Steele’s head was turned toward the sliding glass door, as though he had hoped to glimpse the ocean one last time.

  Sheppard said, “I knew Steele was well off, but I didn’t realize it was this kind of money.”

  “Family money on his side. His grandfather owned half the county back in the thirties. Rae was his second wife, their son is his only child. With him dead, they inherit everything.”

  “How much is everything?” he asked.

  Crick threw out her arms, a gesture that embraced not only the house, but the whole complex package. “Shit, I don’t know. Twenty million? Fifty? A hundred? More than we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.”

  He would have to live as long as Moses to even take a baby step close to twenty million. Get off it, Shep. One second at a time. Right. Be in the moment. Focus, for Christ’s sake. Focus.

  He walked over to the body and moved around it slowly. How many corpses had he seen in his life? Three years on the streets of Miami, five with the FBI, five with Broward County: the bodies added up. You had to shut off the part of you that cared and he did it by counting backward from a hundred. It kept his left brain busy and calmed him.

  He began the countdown and by eighty-eight, Steele looked pretty much as Sheppard remembered him: lean, solid, sinewy. A runner’s body. Once, he’d been Cary Grant handsome, hair fading to white at the temples, sensuous mouth, bold bone structure. Now his bloated body looked sickly white.

  Judging by the angle of his body, the way he was lying, and the spatter of blood, Sheppard figured he’d been shot from maybe fifteen feet. He probably had stumbled back and tripped over the hassock that stood about six inches from his feet. Blood had seeped around him, thick and dry now.

  He thought about Moses again, nine hundred years of burning bushes, burning seas, burning miracles, and he thought about how fast and brightly twenty or a hundred million would burn. Andrew Steele, brilliant and wealthy, at the apex of his life, had seemed invulnerable to Sheppard, protected somehow by his wealth, his opportunities, his silver spoon. But here he lay, just one more corpse, one more goddamn South Florida statistic.

  “When can you autopsy him, Paula?”

  “Like I said, hon, these budget cuts …”

  “C’mon.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Barring a catastrophe, I should be able to do him by Monday at the latest. I don’t anticipate anything unusual, but you never know. Maybe it’ll be easy and I’ll find coke in his blood.”

  “His secrets smell more complicated than that.”

  “One thing’s for sure. Anyone with this kind of money has all different problems than we do.”

  “We’d deal with the problems, Paula, if we were in his shoes.”

  Paula Crick folded her arms at her waist, nodded slowly. “This girl hears you loud and clear, Shep honey. I play the Lotto every week, same as you. But c’mon, if we won, we’d fuck it up, same as he did.” Her arms unfolded from her body like wings and made a gesture that encompassed the house, the beach, the rarefied air of Steele’s world. “The only difference is that we wouldn’t end up murdered, you and me, because it’s something we know more about than he did.”

  Sheppard’s head began to ache. He didn’t want to be standing here. He didn’t want to be in this house, having this particular conversation with the coroner while Andrew Steele’s corpse lay at his feet. It reminded him of his own mortality, which had gotten all mixed up with money issues.

  “Any idea how much alimony goes out to the ex?” he asked.

  “No alimony, at least according to the housekeeper. Wife number one lives in Boston, has remarried, and hasn’t had any contact with him for at least twelve or thirteen years. Wife number two met him when she was teaching at Manatee Correctional up the coast. She’s ten years or so younger. The housekeeper hinted that things weren’t going too well.”

  They had moved past the body to make room for the police photographer and stopped in the kitchen doorway. She pointed at a black X on the marble floor. “That’s where the son, Carl, was found. You want to talk to the housekeeper?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to poke around first.” He needed to be alone in these rooms, to pull the silence into himself, to mull it over. Ma
ybe, just maybe, the silence would tell him something about why Steele had been murdered.

  Sheppard pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket inside his windbreaker. “See you in a bit.”

  The house was—what? Six thousand square feet? Eight? Ten? Whatever the exact measurements, it would take a team of cops days to search it well. But any home search could be narrowed down initially to just two rooms, Sheppard thought, the victim’s bedroom and office.

  Sheppard climbed a winding staircase from the second floor that opened into a large cupola made almost entirely of glass.

  The astonishing view of the glistening Atlantic and the beach three floors below literally stole his breath. Gulls wheeled past the glass, their shrieks echoing in the morning stillness. French doors, also glass, opened onto a wide porch that wrapped around either side of the cupola. Wicker patio furniture, painted the same shade of blue as the sky, stood under an awning.

  He walked out onto the porch and peered straight down into the swimming pool area. He glimpsed a pair of brown legs poking out from under an umbrella that covered a patio table. Probably the housekeeper. Toys floated at the shallow end of the pool.

  Sheppard stepped back inside the cupola. He wondered what it would it be like to wake up every morning in a house like this, walk into this office in the morning and feast on this sky, this ocean, this sunlit paradise?

  Money: hello again. The grim reality depressed him. He was pushing forty, two thousand bucks stood between him and bankruptcy, and the credit card companies loved him so much they kept sending him new cards with lower interest rates and higher limits.

  The two grand he’d managed to save had been marked for a trip to the Peruvian Amazon. Every day it became increasingly apparent that the trip wouldn’t happen within the next six months. If he lost his job, the only way the Peruvian trip would happen at all would be if he lived as long as Moses.

  Sheppard pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket and jotted notes. When he glanced up, his own reflection gazed back at him: that of a muscular man with sandy-colored hair who stood six-four in his bare feet. The slight stoop to his shoulders had started in eighth grade, when he’d shot up a full foot and towered over every other kid in his class. The stoop irritated him. It was a throwback, a habit, one of many that he had trouble breaking.

  He straightened his shoulders, cracked his knuckles. Another habit. Trace that one back to his last cigarette years ago.

  The moment, he reminded himself. Live in the moment. Sure. The Zen of homicide. Forget the corpse, forget the millions, forget his imminent unemployment.

  He turned, his gaze sweeping through the office. Books.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw books. The things a man read, the books he collected, often told more about him than what he kept in his desk drawers. Sheppard climbed the wooden library ladder that moved from wall to wall along a metal track. The books ranged from true crime to a large collection on metaphysics to heavy psych tomes. Freud, Jung, Adler, all of them accompanied by numerous pop psychology books.

  Sheppard had started out as a psych major and after a year of boring bullshit, switched to criminology. It had its share of bullshit, too, but it had held his interest. After three years as a Miami cop, he’d found the stress unbearable and had gone to law school. He’d come out of the University of Florida with a degree, a wife, and the certainty that he and the practice of law would soon part ways. It, too, was riddled with bullshit. But his law degree had gotten him into the FBI.

  By the time he’d quit the Bureau, his marriage had fallen apart. He’d saved quite a bit of money, so he traveled around for a while. He had taken up running and regular workouts at a gym as ways to deal with stress. He had ceased pouring energy into what had gone wrong and had tried to define what had gone right in his life. By the time he’d put himself back together again, he was ready to move on and had ended up in Fort Lauderdale.

  Now, as one of two floaters in the department, he worked wherever he was needed. He’d been assigned to every major department, he liked the variety. And the floater spots, he thought, probably headed the budget shitlist.

  None of the women in his life fell into the “special” category. He traveled even when he couldn’t afford it and preferred foreign destinations. His passion for very old places didn’t quibble about continents, as long as the site held mystery.

  He collected things when he traveled and now had an impressive array of pre-Columbian artifacts. He hoped to open an import/export business someday, which would allow him to indulge his need for travel and his fascination with ruins. But that dream seemed about as close as the moon.

  Sheppard had been on several archaeological digs as a volunteer, had seen the sunrise over Machu Picchu, and he had spent four hours alone inside of the Great Pyramid, listening to the whispers of a civilization that had been dead for millennia. Those kinds of experiences constituted his vision for the future, on a full-time basis and not just as some expensive hobby.

  Homicide work bore an uncanny resemblance to digging around in ruins; the past told its secrets to those who listened. Perhaps in this way he and Andrew Steele differed only marginally and the secret lay in finding their commonality, however small.

  So Sheppard selected several of Steele’s books, set them to one side of the desk to take with him. The desk, he noticed, was probably the most normal object in the room, wood-paneled, six feet long, with two shelves at the back and six drawers. The arrangement of contents smacked of an organized, efficient mind, everything just so: pens and pencils, Scotch tape, computer supplies, paper supplies, printer cartridges, two boxes of Christmas cards.

  He found a small photo album with pictures of a striking young woman and a small boy, probably Steele’s wife and son. Sheppard looked more closely, noting the strain in the wife’s smile, the hesitancy in the boy’s eyes. A bad day? Or a life that hadn’t measured up?

  He knew the feeling, all right. He’d felt like this when he and his wife had split. Even Steele’s money would not have fixed the marriage. Then again, money wouldn’t have fixed Sheppard’s marriage, either.

  He opened the deep bottom drawer on the left side. No files, no papers, nothing that he’d expected. Instead, he removed two colorful tins of chocolate; a jewelry box that held a lady’s silver watch studded with amber and lapis lazuli; a second jewelry box that contained a deep green emerald set in gold; small velvet bags that held a jade monkey and an elephant made of some black stone, maybe obsidian. The last item was a pendant of quartz crystal.

  Sheppard set everything on the desk and popped open the lids on the tins. None of the chocolates had been touched. But resting on top in the first tin was a plain white envelope. Inside he found a sheet of paper wrapped around seven cards. He recognized them as tarot cards, but knew nothing about them.

  He smoothed the paper flat. Someone, presumably Steele, had listed the cards one through seven and next to each had jotted REC’D, a date, and one of the items now sitting on the desk.

  He felt that first familiar ripple of excitement at discovering something that clearly didn’t fit. That was the thing with police work; you never knew when or what you might stumble upon that would lead you somewhere. He enjoyed the hunt, piecing together the seemingly disparate parts, the search for the whole picture. It fit that part of him that continually searched for answers to his own dilemmas.

  Sheppard removed the empty trash bag from the wastebasket next to the desk and put everything inside of it. He included several of Steele’s books and half a dozen patient files.

  He started to boot up the computer when he heard someone coming up the stairs. Crick stopped in the doorway. “A girl could kill herself on these stairs,” she said, her voice slightly breathless.

  “Some room, huh?”

  “I’d never get a lick of work done up here. Listen, the housekeeper’s chafing at the bit. You’d better talk to her while you have the chance.”

  The computer would have to wait. �
�I’m finished in here for now.” He pocketed the envelope, tucked the trash bag under his arm, and carried it downstairs. He set the trash bag down in the kitchen, then walked out to the pool area with Crick.

  She introduced him to Augusta Lee, a middle-aged black woman whom Sheppard pegged as Trinidadian. “I realize you’ve been through a terrible experience, Mrs. Lee,” he said. “But I only have a few questions.”

  “And I have no answers.” She held a pink handkerchief to her nose and blew. “Except that Mrs. Steele did not do this.”

  “No one has accused Mrs. Steele of anything.”

  “Not in so many words. But I know how it looks. A young woman who has disappeared, an older, wealthy husband …”

  “When was the last time you saw the Steeles?” he asked.

  “Wednesday evening. She and I fixed dinner, he was doing laps in the pool. He exercised a lot.”

  “Did they act unusual in any way?” Crick prodded.

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “What time did you come in this morning?” Sheppard asked.

  “Eight. I … I found Carl first. He’s a delightful boy, very polite, very smart, we … I …”

  Her composure broke, her voice cracked, tears leaked from her eyes. “He was still alive. Still breathing. I … I picked him up, set him on the couch. I … I knew he was in insulin shock. In my country, I was a nurse. I sometimes gave him his injections.

  “I ran to the refrigerator for the insulin, gave him the shot, then… then called 911. The cord stretches a good ways and that’s when I… I saw him. Mr. Steele. I knew just by looking at him that he wasn’t alive. But… but after I hung up, I went over to him and felt his wrist. His robe had fallen open and I found something strapped around his waist. Then … then I backed away from him and waited with Carl until the paramedics arrived.

  She set an object on the table that resembled a remote control device for a television. Sheppard didn’t pick it up.