The King of Swords Read online

  ‘The other people he killed, the Cuestas: they were his main business rivals. They went head to head over the Lemon City project. But the Cuestas lost out. Why kill ’em? And there was a third guy in the running too–Sam Ismael, Haitian, Lemon City local, runs a voodoo store. He was the lucky one. He was out of town the day Lacour went on the rampage, otherwise he might’ve been murdered too. The whole thing’s insane. Don’t make sense.’

  ‘Sometimes it just never does.’ Joe sighed.

  They were on US1, driving towards Kendall. It had been two weeks since they’d found Preval Lacour’s body in Primate Park. The incident had made the national news, thanks to the hundreds of monkeys which had escaped from the zoo and run riot all over Miami and beyond.

  Lacour’s fingerprints had been taken at the morgue and run through the computer. Five days later the machine had matched them to the murders of Guy Martin and Theresa Morales in a Hialeah motel and to the Cuestas in Fort Lauderdale. Lacour’s car–a black Mercedes sedan–had been spotted speeding away from the scene. A witness had taken down the number plate and phoned it in.

  Lacour had dumped the Mercedes in a car park in North Miami Beach, where it had stayed until the weekend before the Primate Park discovery. A caretaker had noticed a horrific smell coming from the car and called the police who had found the decomposing bodies of Lacour’s business partner and secretary.

  Now Max and Joe were going to Lacour’s home address. Max had called the house before heading over to North Miami, but there had been no response. He’d checked with Missing Persons. Nothing on record.

  ‘And what about that shit they found in his stomach?’ Max flicked through to the autopsy notes and read out the inventory. ‘A tarot card, sand–mixed with bits of ground-up bone, possibly human, as yet unconfirmed–plus vegetable matter, also as yet unidentified.’

  ‘Sounds like some kind of potion,’ Joe said.

  ‘His lips had been sewn up, nose too.’ Max closed the report and threw it on the back seat. ‘What d’you think about that? Some kinda ritual?’

  ‘I ain’t thinkin’ too hard ’bout this one,’ Joe answered, ‘’cause it ain’t gonna be our problem after next week.’

  ‘True.’ Max lit a cigarette and wound down the window. As of the following Monday, North Miami PD took back the case, which had been theirs in the first place, as the body had been found in their jurisdiction and the matter wasn’t deemed either urgent or sensitive enough to be dealt with by the Miami Task Force–commonly known to cops and the press as the MTF–which Max and Joe worked for. North Miami PD, sinking under the burden of a record number of unsolved homicides, had begged MTF to handle the Primate Park stiff, but they for their part were under exactly the same pressure, if not more so because, as Dade County’s supposed elite task force, they were expected to solve crimes at lightning pace. Max and Joe had thirteen unsolved homicides and twenty-two missing persons on the case board in their office. And Eldon Burns, their boss, was breathing down their necks hard, screaming at them to bring him ‘Results, results, results–GOOD. SOLID. FUCKEN’. RESULTS!’

  Theoretically they shouldn’t even have been out here, working the Primate Park case, but Max had wanted to get out of the office and do something simple to accomplish and tick off. He and Joe always did this whenever they hit a wall with their cases–look for something easy to do and solve and then come back to their problems with renewed confidence and a fresh perspective.

  They headed down North Kendall Drive, passing the Dadeland Mall. The previous July the mall had been the scene of one of the worst shootings in living memory. A posse of cocaine cowboys had rolled up on a rival and his bodyguard and sprayed them with submachine-gun fire in the middle of the day when the place was crowded with shoppers. The incident had put Kendall on the map. Prior to that it had been one of Miami’s best kept secrets, known only to real estate brokers and locals.

  If you had money and craved attention you lived in Coral Gables, where guides would point out your house to tourists with Instamatics, otherwise you made your home in Kendall. Part of its appeal lay in its anonymity. Drive through it and you wouldn’t know you were there. It could have been anywhere residential, its main streets lined with modest houses sporting flagpoles and the occasional motor boat outside. Beyond the main streets lay larger, more expensive houses, but you’d need to know where you were going to find them. The area appealed to the retired or semi-retired, who liked the fact that it was far enough away from the beach to avoid the hustle and bustle of tourism, but still close enough to central Miami for shopping, socializing and emergencies. Kendall was also especially popular with ex-dictators and their henchmen, fugitive foreign embezzlers, exposed conmen, political exiles, lapsed criminals and disgraced public figures from all walks and stumbles of life.

  Before he’d spun out of control, Preval Lacour had been doing OK. He’d lived on Floyd Patterson Avenue, a road lined with arching banana palms where all the houses were situated inside gated compounds with their own private security, closed-circuit cameras and individual hotlines to the emergency services. This way of living–away from the street and under armed guard–was becoming more and more popular with upper-income Miamians scared by the city’s escalating crime rate. Home invasions had risen by 150 per cent in the last six months alone, and they’d become far more violent: where once criminals would have tied up the homeowners before making off with their money and belongings, now savage beatings and rapes were commonplace, as were murder and arson.

  They stopped outside the entrance to the Melon Fields estate, Lacour’s address. Max badged a security guard behind a double gate and told him who they’d come to see.

  ‘Now this is some livin’,’ Joe said as they drove into a wide cobbled courtyard with an ornate water fountain in the centre, depicting four dolphins, back to back, frozen in a mid-air leap, water coming out of their open mouths and landing in a wide round shallow pool filled with pink and yellow flowers.

  The three storey houses with their tiled ochre roofs and shuttered windows were partly hidden behind bushes and trees like shy, magnificent beasts. The Lacours lived in the second from last house on the right. Max and Joe headed up a short driveway and parked next to a white Volvo station wagon which was covered in leaves and burst seed pods–debris from the recent rainstorms.

  Joe rang the bell. Gentle chimes, but loud enough to hear outside. Max looked through the window to the left. He saw a room set up for a party: gold tinsel hanging across the ceiling, deflated balloons, a fully laid dining table with several bottles in the middle and two jugs but no food and no people. But Max swore he could hear something behind the window, and there were shadows moving about the room.

  Max drew his gun and stepped away. Something crunched under his shoe. He looked down and saw he’d just obliterated part of a long procession of green-bodied hister beetles making its way into the house. He followed the line as it disappeared under the door. He was about to go on when he noticed another column of the same beetles on the opposite side of the steps, except this one was exiting the house and moving at a slower pace. When he looked closer he saw the insects were carrying small scraps of pale matter and live maggots in their mandibles.

  Joe rattled the letterbox. A dozen blowflies whizzed out, carrying with them a gust of air so foul it made him gag.

  Max turned around sharply. He saw his partner backing away from the door with his hand clamped over his mouth and nose.

  Then he smelt it too.

  ‘There’ll be more’n just one this time,’ Joe said over his shoulder, as he hurried down the steps to call it in.

  They found six bodies.

  Most of them were strewn around the living-room floor, contorted, twisted, bloated, skin stretched out to a greyish near-translucence, big balloon people, bursting out of their clothes–tuxes for the men and glittering designer gowns for the women–threatening to float off up out of the room, over the house and into the Miami sky.

  The room was decked out
for a party. A gold and red tinsel banner was strung from either wall over the room reading ‘Felicitations Preval!’. Bunches of balloons, wilted and wrinkled by the evil heat and poisoned air, hung from pieces of string fixed to the four corners of the room. A lot of the furniture–armchairs, a sofa, a black granite coffee table–had been moved out into the hallway. They’d been planning to dance after dinner.

  They’d been shot dead to a record called The Joys of Martinique by the Swingin’ Steel Band. It was still playing, after a fashion, because the needle was stuck in the run-off groove and the album had warped a little so the turned-down edge was scraping the side of the turntable, making a sound like a spitball hitting a hotplate–TAK!–pffsssttt…TAK!–pffsssttt…TAK!–pffsssttt…TAK!–pffsssttt–a warped metronome keeping time over the scene.

  Max and Joe walked around the room with plastic covers on their shoes, rubber gloves on their hands, nets over their hair and menthol-scented surgical masks over their noses and mouths. The window hadn’t yet been opened because a woman from forensics was dusting it for prints. Plenty had turned up under the black powder.

  Max picked up a spent shell casing from its chalked circle, numbered with a marker on the floor and compared it to a blown-up photograph of one of the casings found at the Martin/Morales murder scene. Same strike marks on the end.

  ‘Six bodies. Twelve shots fired–at least,’ Max said, holding up a glassine evidence bag with a fragment of the shell that had been dug out of the windowsill. As with his previous two murders, Preval had used hollow-points on his family–bullets with quartered tips, which fragmented on impact, flying off at four different angles, causing maximum damage. Back in patrol Max had known a cop who’d been shot in the kneecap with a hollow-point. It had blown his lower leg clean off. ‘Someone musta heard something.’

  ‘These houses are too far apart.’

  ‘He killed his whole family, Joe, with a .38. That’s a lotta noise.’

  ‘Then there’s the time of day this happened. Late enough and everyone woulda been sleepin’. Dunno ’bout you, but when I sleep, man, I sleep. I’m Lazarus. Take Jesus himself to rouse me.’ Joe looked out of the window at the activity in the driveway–paramedics with stretchers, uniformed cops keeping back a news crew, curious neighbours.

  ‘What about the guard? What they pay him for?’

  ‘Keep the bad guys out,’ Joe said.

  Lacour had been as systematic as he’d been merciless. He’d killed them anti-clockwise, beginning with the old woman in the black and green dress to his left nearest the door. She’d been sat at the end of the table. He’d shot her twice in the forehead, once from a distance and then the second time from very close up, the muzzle practically touching the skin. Then he’d turned on his two teenage sons, sitting side by side in the middle, their backs to the window. The first–and oldest–had tried to shield his brother and had been shot first in the shoulder, and then executed like the woman he’d been sitting close to. His brother had been grazed in the neck by the bullet fragment Max had found embedded in the windowsill. He’d crawled under the table Max guessed, following the small morse code of bloodstains on the floor. The old man in the wheelchair had then tried to protect him by swinging one of his two thick walking sticks at the gunman. Lacour had shot at the man mid-swing and blown his stick apart. There were splinters and slivers of wood buried in the old man’s face, as well as part of a bullet which had entered his head through his eye. He’d then been shot one more time for good measure, before his murderer had dispatched the boy on the floor. Most of the corpses still had the gold cardboard party hats they’d been wearing at the time of their deaths stuck to their ruptured heads.

  Apart from the turntable and Max and Joe’s whispering, it was utterly quiet in the room. Five forensics staff were working on the scene, scraping, bagging, stoppering glass tubes, lifting prints, lifting hair, lifting lips to look at teeth, lifting hands and legs, lifting bodies to one side, left and right. They measured holes in the wall, distances between bodies, sizes of entry and exit wounds, range of spatter. Everyone worked efficiently and precisely, but also very quickly and without pause, as if they couldn’t wait to get away.

  The hister beetles were moving freely and unimpeded throughout the room. Once inside the house they’d branched out into two trains, one making for the stairs, the other going into the living room. There, a few feet into the room, they’d forked again, four subdivisions taking a body apiece. They crawled up fingers and feet, shoulders and necks and disappeared under hems and collars, up sleeves, through rips and tears in fabric. Meanwhile, from each corpse, a separate string of beetles exited from another aperture and made its way back across the living room, gradually linking up with other departing bug lines to form a pulsing shiny green caravan out of the house and back to the earth it had come from. From up where Max was standing, the bugs seemed like a network of veins, pumping in and out of the earth, a conduit straight to its deep dark heart. He thought for a moment how he too would one day be reduced to a lump of rotting, seeping meat and this troubled him enough to think of insisting on being cremated. Fuck the headstone.

  ‘I don’t get this one, Joe. This–this family, this house, this kinda life–this is something you kill for.’

  ‘That’s the second thing I hate about this job.’ Joe nodded. ‘Shit you never get to understand ’cause the perp took all the answers to hell with him.’

  ‘What’s the first?’

  ‘The ones that get away, the ones you never catch, the ones that are still out there, lookin’ for the next kill, the invisible monsters.’

  ‘Well, it’s like you once told me back in patrol, Joe…’

  ‘Way it is, partner. Do your best and learn to live with it, ’cause it’ll always be a lot worse tomorrow,’ Joe finished the sentence Max liked to quote back to him, and to every pale-faced rookie who came up to him and asked him for advice after they’d found out what being a cop was really about. Joe hadn’t learned those words off anyone. They’d just come to him, the effortless way wisdom does to someone who’s had to struggle for everything in his life from the day he was born.

  They looked around some more. There was a drinks trolley near the stereo system. On it stood a large punch bowl, part-filled with thick, sticky bright pink syrup. The top was completely covered with a crust of drowned blowflies.

  They looked over the eight-foot-long dining table and its white cloth and full dinner service–fine heavy silver cutlery and china crockery, immaculately laid out with small ivory winged rests for the knives, silver rings for the napkins and three different-sized crystal glasses at each place setting. In the middle of the table were uncorked bottles of red wine, a magnum of champagne and, either side of them half-empty jugs of water. A large framed colour photograph stood near the bottles: Lacour to the left, Guy Martin to the right and the mayor of Miami in the middle, beaming. There were thin lines and spots of dried blood all over the table–impact spray from the bullets.

  ‘He killed his own first,’ Max said. ‘Then he went after the others.’

  The two detectives looked at each for a brief moment, one seeing the other’s horror and revulsion and the thought that informed the looks: just when you figured you’d seen it all–the very worst thing man could do to his fellow man–something that little bit more horrific came shimmering down the pipe, a big bloody grin on its face. They left the room.

  A black, open-toed high-heeled shoe stood upright at the foot of the stairs. It had a diamanté pattern of creeping ivy around the heel and diamanté laurels around the toe opening. It was surrounded by a chalk mark. There were two more bodies on the hallway stairs, one on top of the other, lying in a wide pool of dried blood, which had soaked the boards and dripped off the side of the steps onto the ground below, some catching on the wall. A woman, shot in the back and then behind her ear, was lying face down on top of a little girl, no more than seven or eight, executed in the same way as the others. The mother had been trying to protect her daug
hter. Her long black hair partly covered her daughter’s face. The beetles were busily working their way through them both.

  Lacour’s study was next to the living room–a large mahogany desk faced the door as they came in, behind it a plush leather reclining chair and lampstand. On one wall hung a crude painting of giraffes in a dense forest, while on another was a large posed family photograph in a gilt frame. All the victims were there. Lacour was in the middle of the second row, his hands on the shoulders of his two teenage sons, beaming proudly. His wife sat in front–a good-looking, if slightly plump dark-skinned woman smiling an unforced, good-natured smile. Next to her was the old man in the wheelchair. Max guessed, from the strong resemblance, that he was Lacour’s father. He was holding a baby in his lap. To his left, was his wife. Lacour’s young daughter was sitting up on the floor between them.

  ‘No sign of the baby?’ Max asked Joe.

  ‘No,’ Joe said. ‘Maybe someone was lookin’ after it while they partied.’

  ‘I don’t think so. This was a family party. Just them celebrating the Lemon City deal. The baby would’ve been there too.’

  ‘So what do you think? He took it with him?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Max said.

  Joe walked away to check out the rest of the study. Max continued examining the faces in the portrait. They wouldn’t hold the slightest clue as to what had happened and why, but he wanted to imagine them alive, going about their day-to-day business, what their voices sounded like ringing around the house, what their habits were, what united and separated them. He’d always done this, humanized the dead, summoned their ghosts and listened in on them. Thinking about them as people instead of statistics helped keep him focused on the job and what it was really about. A lot of cops working homicide became so jaded and indifferent, so numb inside, that death was a numbers game to them–one they were resigned to losing before they’d even started playing. They forgot they were dealing with people just like them, people whose lives had been cut short before their time. Yet, looking at the Lacours, Max felt for the first time a sadness and something collapsing within himself, a support giving way and an ideal crashing to the ground: if this is what people were doing to each other now, turning in on themselves and those closest to them, there was no hope any more. And if there was no hope, there was no point in being a cop.