Bad Monkey

Yancy tossed down the phone and gunned his car toward a gap in the traffic, heading up the Overseas Highway.

Thirteen

When Yancy was younger, he’d briefly considered joining the U.S. park service, like his father. “Why didn’t you?” Rosa Campesino asked.

“I was too lazy. And the pay sucks.”

“Andrew, you’re full of shit.”

“Look at it this way. If I’d become a ranger in the Everglades, we would never have met.”

“Unless an alligator got you, and I was assigned to do the post.”

“Assuming there was something left of me,” Yancy said.

“Oh, there would be. Gators are sloppy eaters. By the way, you’ve healed magnificently.”

“I was hoping you’d notice.”

Rosa was massaging him on an autopsy table. It was half past midnight at the morgue and they were alone in the main suite, which had twelve forensic workstations. Each narrow table was made of eighteen-gauge stainless steel. Rosa had spread some towels, removed the headrest and instructed Yancy to lie still on his belly.

“What happens if somebody walks in?” he asked.

“Just play dead. I’m serious.”

She was wearing a lab smock, rubber-soled white shoes, and nothing else. In theory Yancy should have been wildly aroused, but the venue creeped him out. He’d made love to women in all sorts of odd places—with Bonnie Witt, of course, high on the tuna tower of her husband’s boat, but there had been other memorable trysts inside a windmill on a putt-putt golf course, the second-to-last car of a Metrorail train, an unoccupied toll booth on the Rickenbacker Causeway and a self-photo kiosk beside the manatee pool at the Miami Seaquarium. He understood the thrill of semi-public sex, but doing it among the deceased seemed more dark than daring.

The Miami-Dade morgue had been designed with a contingency for a worst-case airline crash; its five coolers were made big enough to hold all the passengers and crew from a fully loaded jumbo jet—a total of 555 bodies. Tonight there were only sixty-six in refrigeration. Yancy had declined Rosa’s offer of a tour. It felt good when she pressed her knuckles into the meat of his back, but he was having trouble unwinding. The cold filtered breath of the morgue didn’t smell like death, but it wasn’t exactly a breeze off Monterey Bay.

“Roll over, Andrew.”

“Then I can’t play dead if we’re caught.”

“And why not?” Rosa said.

“Because dead guys don’t get boners.”

“Do what the doctor says.”

She turned off the overhead light and climbed on top of him. The autopsy platform wasn’t comfortable but it was sturdy. Soon Yancy loosened up and his thoughts began meandering, which sometimes happened when a smooth physical rhythm was established. It was no reflection on his partner; he had an incurably busy brain. Rosa herself seemed happily diverted, so Yancy kept pace while sifting through the day’s events.

Except for a colorful exchange of profanity with a meth-head tanker driver on the turnpike, the ride to Miami had been uneventful. Yancy had first stopped at the Rosenstiel marine lab on Virginia Key, where an earnest young master’s candidate examined the shark tooth extracted from Nick Stripling’s severed arm and confirmed the species as Sphyrna tiburo, a common bonnethead that typically feeds inshore. The finding proved that Eve Stripling and her accomplice had placed the stump of her husband’s limb in the shallows and chummed up some resident predators in the hope that their gnashing would add verisimilitude to the drowning story.

The pale shards Yancy had plucked from the shower drain at the Striplings’ condo were definitely pieces of human bone, not stone crab shells as Caitlin Cox had claimed. Rosa made the determination visually over a paella at the Versailles, Yancy introducing the fragments in the same funky nest in which he’d found them. Rosa promised to order DNA tests on both hair and bones, and compare the results to the swab taken from Stripling’s arm by Dr. Rawlings in Key West. Yancy had no doubt of a match. The hatchet, presumed instrument of dismemberment, he had discreetly conveyed in a Macy’s shopping bag.

Later, over flan and Cuban coffee, Rosa had presented him with the only number dialed on Dr. Gomez O’Peele’s cell phone the night he died. She’d obtained this key information from a North Miami Beach detective who was striving to seduce her. The call had been made minutes after Yancy had left O’Peele’s apartment.

Yancy took down the number and went outside to make a call of his own, and soon he had a name: Christopher Grunion, no middle initial. The billing address on the telephone account was a post office box in South Beach. When Yancy returned to the table, he swept Rosa into his arms and kissed her exuberantly until the other diners broke into cheers. He was soaring because Christopher Grunion was the same name that Rogelio Burton had found on the charter contract for the Caravan seaplane Yancy had seen behind the Striplings’ house on Biscayne Bay.