Death Beam by Robert Moss

Author:Robert Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub

18

MIAMI, October 14

Fuck it, Sergeant Tom Ryan of Homicide had said to his chief, I want to grill this limey.

No way, he was told. The Bureau's taking over this one.

I say it stinks, Ryan had said. This is our bag.

Leave off, the chief had warned him. Ain't you got nothing else to do?

So Tom Ryan sat there and glowered at his desk, munching on an onion roll, while a procession of worried outsiders traveled in and out of the chief’s office. He could pick the Agency guys at a glance: the short, Latino type in a dressy blazer, with a pencil-thin moustache; the lean, waspy one who looked, in his gray suit, as if he’d just come off a commuter train from Wall Street. He wondered what they were all hatching in there.

A cover-up. He could smell it. They wanted to make sure everyone got his story straight and called it suicide. Well, he thought, they better not ask me. It weren't no suicide.

Tom Ryan got up, tucked in his shirt tail, and reached for the report he had made out earlier that day on another murder case. He’d been called out to the bank of a canal in southwest Miami to look at what a couple of Cuban fishermen had hauled in. It was the naked, decomposing trunk of a white male. Someone had hacked the dead man’s legs off just above the knees, maybe using a saw. The arms were missing too, severed at the shoulders. The sawblade must have broken when they tried to cut off the man’s head, because they hadn’t quite finished the job. The butchery had been carried out four or five days earlier, since the fish—or maybe the rats—had had time to strip a lot of the flesh away from his face. And his genitals. There was no sign of the missing limbs. But someone had called in from Monroe County to say that some tourists had come across a pair of severed and rotting legs out on Duck Key. Maybe they would fit. Hell, what did it matter, Tom Ryan said to himself. The guy had no use for them anyway. “Victim unidentified white male,” his report noted. “Perpetrators unknown. Case is open pending.” There were plenty of murder cases in the files marked “open pending.” Eight or nine out of ten. It helped to depersonalize them, to use words like “victim” and “perpetrator” inside your head as well as when filling out forms. You got less angry that way.

Ryan, with his face like a slab of raw beef, looked like a man who could get pretty angry. Years of frustration had trained him to get a bridle on his temper, not to get angry every time a case had to be marked down as “open pending” or a junkie knocked someone off for the price of a fix. More and more, his anger was focused on the big things that made his job impossible, things he was so powerless to change that they were almost abstractions.

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