Hornet's Nest

  "Now you know what it's like," West said to him under her breath.

  Bright yellow crime-scene tape stretched from woods to a streetlight.

  Big black block letters flowed across it, repeating the warning

  CAUTION CRIME SCENE DO

  NOT ENTER. It barred reporters and the curious from the Lincoln and the senseless death beyond it. Just inside it was an ambulance with engine rumbling, cops and detectives everywhere with flashlights.

  Video tape was running, flashguns going off, and crime-scene technicians were preparing the car to be hauled into headquarters for processing.

  Brazil was so busy taking everything in and worrying about how close he was going to be allowed to get that he did not notice Chief Hammer until he walked into her.

  "Sorry," Brazil muttered to the older woman in a suit.

  Hammer was distressed and immediately began confer ring with West.

  Brazil took in the short graying hair softly framing the pretty, sharp face, and the short stature and trim figure. He had never met the chief, but he suddenly recognized her from television and photographs he had seen. Brazil was awed, openly staring. He could get a terrible crush on this woman. West turned and pointed at him as if he were a dog.

  "Stay," she commanded.

  Brazil had expected as much but wasn't happy about it. He started to protest, but no one was interested. Hammer and West ducked under the tape, and a cop gave Brazil a warning look should he think about following. Brazil watched West and Hammer stop to investigate something on the old, cracked pavement. Bloody drag marks glistened in the beam of West's flashlight, and based on the small, smeared puddle just inches from the open car door, she thought she knew what had happened.

  "He was shot right here," she told Hammer.

  "And he fell." She pointed to the puddle.

  "That's where his head hit. He was dragged by his feet."

  Blood was beginning to coagulate, and Hammer could feel the heat of the throbbing lights and the night and the horror.

  She could smell death. Her nose had learned to pick it up the first year she was a cop. Blood broke down fast, got runny around the edges and thick inside, and the odor was weirdly sweet and putrid at the same time. The trail led to a Gothic tangle of overgrown vines and pines, with a lot of weeds.

  The victim looked middle-aged and had been dressed in a khaki suit wrinkled from travel when someone had ruined his head with gunshots.

  Pants and Jockey shorts were down around fleshy knees, the familiar hourglass painted bright orange, leaves and other plant debris clinging to blood.

  ^ift Dr. Wayne Odom had been the medical examiner in the greater Charlotte-Mecklenburg area for more than twenty years. He could tell that the spray-painting had occurred right where the body had been found, because a breeze had carried a faint orange mist up to the underside of nearby poplar leaves. Dr. Odom was reloading a camera with bloody gloved hands, and was fairly certain he was dealing with homosexual serial murders. He was a deacon at Northside Baptist Church and believed that an angry God was punishing America for its perversions.

  X9 "Damn it!" Hammer muttered as crime-scene technicians scoured the area for evidence.

  West was frustrated to the point of fear.

  "This is what? A hundred yards from the last one? I got people all over the place out here.

  Nobody saw anything. How can this happen? "

  "We can't watch the street every second of the day," Hammer angrily said.

  Vy From a distance, Brazil watched a detective going through the victim's wallet. Brazil could only imagine what West and Hammer were seeing as he impatiently waited by West's car, taking notes. One thing he had learned while writing term papers was that even if he didn't have all the information, he could create a mood. He studied the back of the abandoned brick building, and decided it had been some sort of warehouse once. Every window was shattered, and an eerie dark emptiness stared out. The fire escape was solid rust and broken off halfway down.

  Emergency lights were diluted and weird by the time they got to the thicket where everyone was gathered. Fireflies flickered around the dinging rental car, and Brazil could hear the sounds of far-off traffic. Paramedics were coming through, sweating in jumpsuits, and carrying a stretcher and a folded black body bag. Brazil craned his neck, writing furiously, as the paramedics reached the scene. They unfolded the stretcher's legs, and Hammer turned around when metal clacked. West and Brewster were studying the victim's driver's license. No one was interested in giving Brazil a quote.

  WA "Carl Parsons," Brewster read from a driver's license.

  "Spartanburg, South Carolina. Forty-one years old. Cash gone, no jewelry if he had any."

  "Where was he staying?" Hammer asked him.

  "Looks like we got a confirmation number for the Hyatt near Southpark."

  West crouched to see the world from a different angle. Parsons was half on his back and half on his side in a nest of bloody leaves, his eyes sleepy slits and dull. Dr. Odom inflicted yet one more indignity by inserting a long chemical thermometer up the rectum to get a core temperature. Whenever the medical examiner touched the body, more blood spilled from holes in the head. West knew that whoever was doing this had no plan to stop.

  X? Brazil wasn't going to stop, no matter how much West got in his way. He had done all he could to capture visual details and mood, and now he was on the prowl. He happened to notice a new bright blue Mustang parked near an unmarked car, where a teenaged boy sat in the front seat with a detective Brazil had seen before, running around, impersonating a drug dealer. Brazil took more notes as the teenager talked and paramedics zipped the body inside a pouch. Reporters, especially Webb, were obsessed with getting footage and photographs of the murdered man being carried away like a big black cocoon. No one but Brazil focused on the teenager climbing out of the detective's car and returning to his Mustang, in no hurry.

  The top was down, and when Brazil headed toward the flashy car, the teenager's blood began to pound with excitement again. The nice-looking blond guy had a reporter's notepad in hand. Jeff Deedrick got out his Chapstick and cranked the engine, trying to look cool as his hands shook.

  "I'm with the Charlotte Observer," Brazil said, standing close to the driver's door.

  "I'd like to ask you a few questions."

  Deedrick was going to be famous. He was seventeen but could pass for twenty-one unless he got carded. He would get all those girls who, before this night, had never paid him any mind.

  "I guess it's all right," Deedrick reluctantly said, as if weary of all the attention.

  Brazil climbed inside the Mustang, which was new and did not belong to Deedrick. Brazil could tell by the dainty blue lanyard keychain that matched the color of the car. Most guys too young to drink didn't have cellular phones, either, Brazil noted, unless they were drug dealers.

  He was willing to bet that the Mustang belonged to Deedrick's mother.

  First Brazil got name, address, phone number, and repeated every syllable back to Deedrick to make certain all was correct. This he had learned the hard way. His first month on the job, he had gotten three We Were Wrongs in a row for insignificant, picayune errors relating to insignificant details, such as somebody junior versus somebody the third. This had resulted in an obituary about the son, versus the father. The son was having tax problems, and didn't mind the mistake.

  He had called Brazil, personally, to request that the paper leave well enough alone. But Packer wouldn't.

  Perhaps Brazil's most embarrassing mistake, and one he preferred not to think about, was when he covered a loud, volatile community meeting about a controversial pet ordinance. He confused a place with a person, and persisted in referring to Latta Park this and Miss Park that. Jeff Deedrick, however, he had right, of this Brazil made sure.

  There would be no problems here. Brazil eyed the crime scene in the distance, as paramedics loaded the body into the ambulance.

  "I admit I had a few, am driving along an
d know I'm not going to make it home," Deedrick kept talking, nervous and excited.

  "Then you pulled back here to use the bathroom?" Brazil flipped a page, writing fast.

  "Pulled in, and see this car with lights on, the door open and think someone else is taking a leak." Deedrick hesitated. He took off his baseball cap and put it on backward.

  "I wait, don't see no one. Now I'm getting curious, so I go on over and see him! Thank God I got a phone."

  Deedrick's wide stare was fixed on nothing, and sweat was beading on his forehead and rolling from his armpits. At first he thought the guy was drunk, had dropped his pants to take a piss, and had passed out.

  Then Deedrick saw orange paint, and blood. He had never been so frightened in his life. He galloped back to his car, peeled out, and floored it the hell out of there. He pulled off under an overpass and peed. He called 911.

  "My first thought?" Deedrick went on, a little more relaxed now.

  "It's not really happening. I mean, the little bell is ringing and ringing, all this blood, pants down around his knees. And I ... Well, you know.

  His parts. "

  Brazil looked up at him. Deedrick was stuttering;

  "What about them?" Brazil wanted to know.

  "It's like they were spray-painted traffic cone orange. With this shape."

  Deedrick was blushing as he outlined a figure-eight in the air.

  Brazil handed him the notepad.

  "Can you draw it?" he asked.

  Deedrick shakily drew an hourglass, to Brazil's amazement.

  "Like a black widow spider," Brazil muttered as he watched West and Hammer duck under crime-scene tape, ready to leave.

  Brazil ended the interview, in one big hurry, conditioned by now to fear being left. He also had a question that Hammer and West needed to hear. He addressed the chief first, out of respect.

  "Has the killer spray-painted all his victims with an hourglass?"

  Brazil said earnestly and with excitement.

  West went still, which was rare for her. She did not move. Brazil thought Hammer was the most overpowering person he had ever met. She waved him off with a no comment sort of gesture.

  "I'll let you handle this," she said to West.

  Hammer headed to shadows where her car was parked. West strode to her Ford without a word, and when Brazil got in and fastened up, they had nothing to say to each other. The scanner was active and it was getting very late. It was time to return Brazil to the parking deck so he could get in his own car and get the hell out of her hair. That was the way West felt about it. What a night.

  T^' They were riding back to the LEC at almost midnight, both of them keyed up and tense. West couldn't believe she had hand-delivered a reporter to that scene. She absolutely could not take it in. This had to be somebody else's life that was happening to West on a dimension where she had no control, and she was reminded of a time she would never admit to anyone, when she was a sophomore at a very small, religious school, in Bristol, Tennessee. The trouble began with Mildred.

  Mildred was very big and all the other girls on her floor were afraid of her. But not West. She saw Mildred as an opportunity because Mildred was from Miami. Mildred's parents had sent her to King College to get saved, and to straighten out. Mildred found someone in Kingsport who knew someone in Johnson City who had dealings with a guy at Eastman Kodak who sold pot. West and Mildred lit up one night on the tennis courts where no one could see anything except tiny orange coals glowing and fading by a net post on court two.

  It was awful. West had never done anything this wicked, and now she knew why. She lost control, belly laughing and telling outlandish stories while Mildred confessed she had been fat all her life and knew precisely what it felt like to be black and discriminated against.

  Mildred was something. The two of them sat out on red and green Laykold for hours, finally lying on their backs and staring up at stars and a moon that looked like a bright yellow swing swelling with the round shadow of promise. They talked about having babies. They drank Cokes, and ate whatever Mildred had in her pocketbook.

  Mostly this was Nabs, Reese's Cups, Kit Kats, and things like that.

  God, how West hated to think about that wretched time. It was her luck that, in the end, marijuana made her paranoid. A couple tokes into the third joint, she wanted to run as fast as she could, dive into her dorm room, punch in the lock, hide under the bed, and come back out in camouflage, a Tee-9 ready to go. When Mildred decided that West was physically attractive, the timing wasn't good.

  West believed women were great. She'd loved every woman teacher and coach she'd ever known, as long as they were nice. But there were a couple of problems here. She had never really contemplated the possibility of what Mildred's interest might mean about West, or West's family, or of West's possibilities in the afterlife. Plus, Mildred grabbed West no differently than a guy would. Mildred didn't even ask, and this was unfortunate, since West was in camouflage, at least in her mind. West turned into the LEC parking deck for visitors.

  "You can't do anything with that," West said to Brazil in an accusing tone.

  "With what?" Brazil asked in a measured voice.

  "You know what. In the first place, you had no business talking to a witness," West said.

  "That's what reporters do," he replied.

  "In the second place, the hourglass is something only the killer knows. Got it? So you don't put that in the paper. Period."

  "How can you say for a fact the killer's the only one who knows about it?" Brazil was about to lose his temper.

  "How do you know it won't trigger information from somebody out there?"

  West raised her voice and wished she had never met Andy Brazil.

  "You do it, and the next homicide in this city's going to be you."

  "Yours," he helped her out.

  "That's it." West turned into the police deck. She was not going to have this squirt correct her grammar one more time.

  "You're dead."

  "I believe you just threatened me." Brazil drew attention to it.

  "Oh no. Not a threat," West said.

  "A promise." She jammed the car into park.

  "Find someone else to ride with." She was the maddest she'd ever been.

  "Where are you parked?"

  Brazil yanked up the door handle in a murderous reply.

  "Well, guess what?" he said.

  "Fuck you."

  He got out and slammed the door. He stalked off into the dark, early morning. He managed to write his stories in time for the city edition, and he pulled off 1-77 on his way home and bought two tallboy Miller Lites. He managed to drink both as he drove very fast. Brazil had a frightening habit of pushing his car as far it would go. Since his speedometer didn't work, he could only guess how fast he was going by the RPMs. He knew he was flying, going close to a hundred miles an hour, and it wasn't the first time he'd done this. Sometimes he wondered if he were trying to die.

  At home, he checked on his mother. She was unconscious in bed, and snoring with her mouth open. Brazil leaned against the wall in the dark, the night-light a sad dim eye. He was depressed and frustrated.

  He thought about West and wondered why she was so heartless.

  'e'/ W West walked into her own small house and tossed keys on her kitchen counter as Niles, her Abyssynian cat, appeared. Niles was on her heels, much like Brazil had been all day, and West flicked on her sound system and Eiton John reminded her of the night. She hit another button, changing to Roy Orbison. She walked into the kitchen, popped open a beer, and felt maudlin and didn't know why. She went back into the living room and turned on the late-night news. It was all about the killing. She plopped on the couch at the same time Niles decided she should. He loved his owner and waited for his turn as the TV played bad news about a dreadful death in the city.

  "Believed to be another out-of-town businessman simply in the wrong place at the wrong time," Webb said into the camera.

  West was restless, worn
out and disgusted, all at the same time. She wasn't happy with Niles, either. He had climbed up her bookcases while she was out. She could always tell. How hard was it? He leapt up three shelves, just high enough to knock down bookends and a vase. As for the framed picture of West's father on the farm, well, what did Niles care about that? That cat. West hated him. She hated everyone.

  "Come here, Sweetsy," she said.

  Niles made his ribs rattle, knowing how much it pleased her. It worked every time. Niles wasn't stupid. He reached around and licked his hindquarters because he could. When he looked at the lady who kept him, he made sure his eyes were very blue and crossed. Owners fell for that, and, predictably, she snatched him up and petted him. Niles was happy enough.