N.L. Bryar

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Special Agent Nicole Lange and her partner sped along the highway out to Eddie Main’s mansion in the desert. Lange stared out the passenger window, her mind headed somewhere toward the horizon, her eyes missing yesterday’s optimism. Twelve hours after she last talked to Main, he was gone. Four hours before she and Main were scheduled to meet in person — he was gone. Nikki and her partner, Special Agent Will Barrett, now drove out to play tag-along at someone else’s murder investigation, hoping Main left crumbs behind that wouldn’t get held-up in an evidence-locker for Homicide to process first.

As one of Harlan Cord’s top lieutenants, Eddie Main’s information — or better yet, his testimony — could have tied up countless loose-ends, connected countless misdeeds, coaxed countless other Cord associates to come forward. As close to a fission chain reaction as criminal testimonies could get. Er, fizzled reaction now.

Well, this is what happens when you get your hopes up. She rested her forehead against the window and took a deep-breath, the only decibels she’d uttered this morning. Will glanced at her, but turned back to the road a moment later.

They drove past a small town named Carefree, which struck her as an ambitious name to live up to. Casinos dotted the landscape here, so maybe you’d be carefree if, … well, if you owned one.

Cord owned a hefty share of several — high cash-volume businesses, after all, make for excellent money-laundromats. In fact, Main’s house came from his bonus package as an “executive” at Cord’s Grand Silver Cholla casino, further east.

Beyond town, the desert vistas were heavy with saguaro cacti, their normally deep-pleated troughs now stretched flat, looking like what you get from bailing out a sinking raft with an accordion. Just three heavy rains this week did this.

Good. We needed rain.

Will Barrett turned to look at her. She sensed this, not really saw it. He usually had to keep his glimpses brief—Nikki had an uncanny sense of being observed—but this time, empathy moved him to look on a while. She appreciated the connection, unspoken and un-obligating, which otherwise would have made it short-lived. She closed her eyes, shook her head subtly at circumstance, and a lock of hair tumbled forward.

To Will, Nikki’s hair had the gold-red color of Vermont maple syrup poured in wavy lines. He admired it framing her profile.

Thunderous clattering from the tires hammering the bituminous rumble-strip at the road’s shoulder snapped him back to the moment. Will over-steered a bit sharply, jostling Nikki’s head against the glass. She sat up, more centered in the seat, rubbed her forehead a little, and, sparing Will the embarrassment of catching his blushing, red face, said her first words this whole drive.

“Well, I guess we should’ve expected this.”

“From what the officers on scene report, I don’t think we should’ve expected anything like this. Whoever did it went far beyond grisly.”

“No one would dare move on him without Cord’s blessing,” she said. “God, I hope the assassins screwed-up and left something pointing that way. That or Main had sewn-up all the books into his mattress for us. Slow case until Main raised his hand.”

“Yeah, don’t get your hopes up on that. Your note from last night said only that he’d reached-out you. Anything beyond ‘hi’?”

“Not really. Played it close to the vest until I could offer my side of the deal. Scared — for good reason, it seems. In fact, Main’s last text to me was… weirdly unnerved. He said, ‘It will make him as powerful as Judas Iscariot.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He asked, but she just shook her head, watching the wind throw sand like a breaking surf.

They finally reached Main’s mansion, swarming with local cops. Nikki shook loose her tension and straightened out her clothes. It wouldn’t do to have the local LEOs seeing FBI agents looking sullen. Time to put on the game face.

“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” she said.

“FBI, baby!”

Rolling up to the entrance, Nikki sensed an odd out-of-placeness. Crime-scenes can give impressions like this, every experienced agent has felt it, an eels in the gut feeling as the subconscious struggles to digest something seen. But right away, before walking in the door? Granted, this was a death-scene, not just a crime-scene, but hardly her first. Another deep, slow breath dispelled her knotty throat.

She recognized some police-officers out front, men that she knew for a fact would celebrate Main turning up as a corpse. Nearly every cop in the county had probably heard the story of how the Chinese entourage checked-in to Main’s casino hotel for business meetings and six days later a group of Mexican drug runners turned up arranged at a poker table, bodies stripped of flesh and preserved stiff, like in that controversial, touring Human Bodies exhibit … which, coincidentally, Main’s casino had hosted the year prior. Anecdotes like these gave Main the reputation that his heart only pumped in the same sense as does the stinger of a bee.

Nikki and Will got out of the car. For bodies going sour to be so pungent this far from the house surprised her. The dead can smell within six hours, faster in heat (which the desert winter didn’t yet have), but also faster with open wounds. Like a lot of open wounds.

“I’ll grab the VapoRub,” Will said. This seemed a wise decision after a young cop dashed out the door to hurl behind a row of hedgehog cacti.

They spread the counter-pungent VapoRub beneath their nostrils, then put on their PPE: Booties, Nitrile gloves, goggles, and sleeves, the typical precautions for investigators entering a scene rife with blood or other infectious- or hazardous-material.

The front door was undamaged, the foyer clean, suggesting another ingress or perhaps someone in Main’s crew welcomed the assassins in. All the activity occurred in a wing off to the right, which led to a grand salon already buzzing with flies.

“Holy … shit.”

Four murder victims came into view before even rounding into the room. Nikki and Will recognized them as Cord mob enforcers, all with military or mercenary backgrounds. All armed, all having burned tons of ammo before they died.

Each body bore cavernous wounds, torn open by raw force, excavating a trachea here, a heart there, or intestinal viscera yonder. Carnage like this begged to be explained by explosives. But no. Nearby tables stood undisturbed, lamps upright, a water glass un-spilled, and a sultry plaster flamenco dancer with sinewy posture continued tapping through the desolation as if defying it to ruin her fiesta.

Harlan Cord, if he did this, just surpassed the grisliness of his remarkably grisly career. But the hit seemed … impetuous. Granted, Main talking to Nikki might have made this a rush-job. Cord’s customary assassins, however, wouldn’t just stand toe-to-toe, army-to-army, burning ammo in all directions. Nor then waste time extracting organs when any moment cops might come roaring their direction. She’d have guessed they’d just fire a few RPGs into the house if pressed for time (as Cord had had done before … with insufficient evidence to indict). Sub-contracted? Wanted to send a message that bad?

Stranger yet, the ripped-apart corpses still clutched weapons with rounds in their mags. They weren’t held-down and eviscerated, they were carved hollow while they stood fighting. While their buddies still stood popping-off rounds at the killers. Impossible. Yet the evidence suggested that’s what happened.

“I wonder,” Will said, face tinting a little green while pointing to a glob of viscera, “what the coroner will say was the cause of death.” No one laughed or even smiled, but it did help break the hold of the surreal. One tech appeared to find comfort in the FBI guy trying to normalize this in some way.

Nikki tip-toed to the perimeter, avoiding splatter-patterns, even though she knew CSI had already taken photos and samples before she and Will arrived. Looking from the outside risked less chance of damaging something, but, honestly, it also felt nice to have a carnage-free escape route at your back. Her meticulous procedure for gathering notes then had her moving inward toward victims, one by one. She’d shaken off the initial shock, at least to a functional degree, and gotten into the flow of analyzing the scene.

Soon she got to Eddie Main himself, near the middle of the room, three more dead enforcers on the far side of him. The seven armed men had formed a defensive ring here, oriented to give four men a clear, intersecting field of fire toward each of the room’s two entry points. They were prepared to face their attackers … who overwhelmed them, nonetheless. Each defender now lay amid a thicket of brass shell-casings, dense, reedy things in a blood-red swamp.

All the shots fired seemed to go outward, with no littered brass outside their perimeter and no visible bullet-holes to the couch, chairs, or center-table within the perimeter, nor to the walls at the front of the house. All men bore similar garish wounds. She couldn’t tell yet how many protectors had taken hits before being ripped open — but, surely, some must have died of gun-shot wounds. Surely. Oddly, no big pools of blood lay outside the circle of Main’s guys. All those spent rounds, yet they hadn’t bagged even one of their attackers. Didn’t seem to even hit one.

“Hey, was the power off when you guys got here?” Nikki asked a uniform.

“Nope. Lights on in the living-room here and patio outside. No clocks flashing twelve or anything either.”

“And no evidence of smoke-grenades, flash-bangs?”

“No. Not just no cannisters, no scorches to suggest any had burst, … of course we don’t know yet what’s underneath all this blood.”

She looked at the patio’s giant sliding-glass panels, where, clearly, the fighting started. Bullet-holes marred every pane of glass, stark and thick like measles, one pane fully shattered from hits, but again no blood within, on the glass, or without. Comparatively little glass had come into the room, suggesting no shooters firing in from the outside. She couldn’t see footprints, no wakes amid the shards, no blood-red sole-stamps headed outwards on the carpet. How do you disembowel someone and walk away without leaving tracks?

The south side of the room had a rammed-earth wall with frieze-band windows running along the top. The earthen stone wall had a pocked look to it naturally, nonetheless, bullet holes showed up plainly. One of Main’s guys used a shotgun in that direction, leaving some odd beige fibers in the rock, and some sort of fine, gray dust on the floor that smelled rancid. Lange made a note to investigate this later.

Farther on, opened double-doors led to a media room, with one final corpse to check.

Catching sight of it pumped Nikki with fight-or-flight adrenaline, like hearing then feeling then seeing the slither of a dark and scaly serpent brushing past her toes. The ‘why’ of it made no sense; rationally, she should tamp it down. Yet her mind screamed with it. Survival beats accuracy, she reminded herself, this feeling was just the subconscious saying something’s off. She scrutinized the body from where she stood, riveted. But he looked simply, and safely, dead.

She scanned around the room, trying hard to pick-out what weird subliminal signal unsettled her so much. But there was nothing out of the ordinary — not that ‘ordinary’ applied to this place.

The corpse in the media room, he was sitting-up, though crumpled, like he’d fallen-over dead while — what? Praying? Begging? Propped up by a stone-table beneath a poster of Uma Thurman as a samurai-sword-wielding bride with attitude.

An outlier to the violence, the corpse didn’t wade in a pool of his own blood, didn’t have internal organs unreeled like a garden hose, didn’t drop spent ammo like acorns from a tree. Only a neck-wound, and not even a grievous one, suggested he met an untimely end. It bled, enough to resemble an old-fashioned, burgundy-red ascot, but nowhere near a fatal blood-loss. Yet dead he was, showing the signs of facies Hippocratica: temples sunken, lips pendent, and skin a cold, bloodless gray. The corpse stared upward with milk-glass eyes, brows raised in what struck her as rueful surprise.

Nikki’s unease rose the longer her eyes stayed trained on his. He had her undivided attention but he offered no answers. It seemed her heart-rate hovered above one-forty now, and her training told her to dial that down, start the slow ‘box’ breathing technique: inhale for four, hold four, exhale four. What’s stressing me out? Is he holding something? Sitting in front of something?

When her eyes lit on his again, she nearly gasped. He’d trained his eyes on her, cloudy-white pupils lined-up square with hers, and his face furrowed in concentration, same as hers (except not now going wide with fright). She couldn’t move, couldn’t dare look away, yet couldn’t stand to look on. Sweat ran into her eye and forced a blink, and in those briefest milliseconds, the corpse had knit its brows to frown in hate.

Oh, God, he moved his eyes!

She rested her hand on her Glock 19, despite the absurdity of pulling a weapon on a corpse. Her hand felt slick with sweat, her grip uncertain with numbness. Fight-or-flight.

“Barrett,” she called over her shoulder in hoarse tremolo, not allowing herself to blink despite the sting. “Can I get your eyes on this guy in the TV room?”

Will made the circuitous route through blood splatter, occasionally stretching or hopping in avoidance, her intense focus making him choose as direct a route as he dared. The body looked unremarkable to him, in fact, his lack of gore made him a more comfortable sight than any of the others. Of course, intuition sometimes notices what logic has yet to label, and Nikki had keen intuition.

“What?”

“Hey, I think this one might be alive,” she said.

He looked at the body, frowned in disbelief, then looked at her. “I’ll go take a pulse.”

“No, it’s me with the heebie-jeebies; I’ll go do it. Keep me … well, … covered.”

She approached the body, obliquely, keeping distance from his right hand, her left hand held low as an obstacle to him using his left. Drawing closer, she brought her gun down to a palm-on-stomach posture, to make it harder to deflect or grab and turn against her. Her eyes were glued to his, as they had been the entire walk here, but his eyes continued their glassy stare to where she first stood. That wasn’t comforting; she knew he could move them.

She knelt with left shin forward and propped her elbow defensively on her knee, pivoting her foot a tad to keep his right side in her peripheral vision. She extended her fingers toward his carotid. Revulsion raced her heart and stopped her reach short, but she insisted.

She sensed no pulse in his neck, which the hours had made cold and thickly sticky. Nerves — she was sure that must be it — let numbness creep up her fingers and into her palm. Never had her touch turned insensate like this before, yet she could still feel his whiskers, even through Nitrile, well enough to satisfy her she’d also pick up a pulse were it there. She forced her fingers to stay on him though the numbness grew to burrowing and then to draining, at last she pulled her hand back, flexing and clenching until normalcy returned. Nerves. Gotta be.

“My bad. Guy’s a memory,” she said, backing away, and eventually turning around to face Barret.

“Okay, ‘cause I’ve got something over here…,” he said, walking toward the wall behind a sofa near Main.

Nikki suddenly felt some terrible menace rushing behind her, and it felt as if some killing blow already arced toward her. She whipped around to a sight that left her breathless: The corpse, his head swiveled her way, cocked in some patronizing disgust, his milky-white eyes burnished amber and squinted with hatred. His lips retracted to show a rabid foam of blood-red. One hand placed on his neck where her fingers had been.

She gasped, backed-up in horror, and slid in a puddle of blood. She fell partially behind a chair, which blocked her view. In what seemed a helpless eternity, she finally managed to get her knees beneath her, yet it took a force of will to command herself to put her gun-sights over the chair, as if catching sight of those amber eyes again could turn her to stone like the gaze of Medusa. Will caught the action in his peripheral vision, saw his downed partner, saw her frantic draw, and he let his notepad and pen fall to the floor in desperation to reach his weapon. Now both agents had their guns trained on the corpse there beneath Uma Thurman’s fierce feminism.

But he’d returned back to his prayerful, eyes-raised pose of resigned anguish, a middling medieval portrait of a suffering penitent.

On making his way over to her, he whispered “Nick, sweet Jesus, I nearly pissed my pants.” Then he pointed at hers, blood saturating below the knees and across most of one thigh. She cursed.

“Will, … I don’t … I don’t have an explanation. Don’t tell anyone back at the office I drew on an inanimate object, please.” Her slip-n’-slide through evidence, well, that was certain to make the rounds, but … God, idiot, idiot, idiot. Should I shoot my own shadow next? She holstered her Glock and examined her shaking hands before clenching fists and eyes tightly closed. It took visible effort to master herself, worse than any time Will had seen her shaken before, which was rarely.

Nikki normally had a 30 Second Rule: call yourself a dumb-shit and record what you need to do better next time, wallow that way for 30 seconds, then it’s behind you. Sounds all healthy and psychologically adaptive … except a corpse’s snarl doesn’t let itself get forgotten.

“Hey, it’s okay. This is a way gruesome scene and we, you know, had upfront emotion about it. Don’t forget the LEO puking in the foliage. It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “And if word does get out, I’ll just tell folks you’re pregnant.”

She huffed a single-syllable laugh she didn’t truly feel, but casting a sideways squint his way did ease her nerves. Oh, he seemed so pleased with his witticism. She mouthed mock hilarity back at him, smacking him in the gut with the back of her hand. And tried to move on.