High Strung Read online

  “Really! Within seventy-two hours your poor lungs can start healing!” Jeff promised. Ketchum backed into the wall of refrigerated corpses. His face was the same pea-green color as the hospital walls. Everywhere he put his hands and tried to fall to was worse than the place before. Death and body parts were every damn where.

  “Within five years, your chances of being diagnosed with lung cancer begin to fall!” Jeff insistently explained. Ketchum finally escaped the exam room and trotted, as best as his lung capacity would let him, down the hall.

  “And after ten years of not smoking, your risk of death from a cancer-related pulmonary illness falls nearly to that of a non-smoker,” Jeff persisted, leaning out of his office door, his lecture echoing down the hallway to no one, since Ketchum had successfully fled through the metal outside door and into the parking lot by the incinerators, which smelled like burning flesh.

  Today, Ketchum tolerated a need/hate relationship with the ME. He avoided interacting with him whenever possible, conducting business by phone calls instead of visits when he could get away with it. When he had no choice but to visit Jeff in person, he made sure to never turn his back on him, lest he be chided with another malfunctioning human organ scolding.

  Jeff’s white municipal van pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward downtown. That was Ketchum’s cue to enter the basement’s service entrance at the back of the old hospital and make his way down the dank corridors to the ME’s area. He walked into the familiar sickening smell of sanitized death. A manila envelope with Ketchum’s name scrawled across the front was up front and center on the secretary’s desk. Jeff knew Ketchum would show up and retrieve it, no alerting phone call necessary. They both knew the dance.

  Trudging across the parking lot back to his car, Ketchum defiantly pulled an unfiltered cigarette from his pack and fired it up. He spun, mid-walk, to blow the smoke in the direction of the hospital. This was his usual, passive-aggressive, death-defying ceremony when he left the ME’s office. He especially relished his rebelliousness when he felt Jeff was watching him from his window.

  He opened the envelope and thumbed through the papers until he found the toxicology and lab reports. Most toxicology and labs have blood, bile, spinal fluid, and urine samples to examine for a homicide. In this case, only blood, hair and vitreous fluid were available. At least the killer left this poor schmuck’s eyes in, thought Ketchum. Between the blood, hair, and the vitreous samples, there should be some good data.

  TOXICOLOGY DRUG SCREEN RESULTS:

  Blood/vitreous:

  Ethanol—0 gm/dl

  Cocaine—none detected

  Opiate—none detected

  PCP—none detected

  Amphet—none detected

  THC—none detected

  Methadone—none detected

  Benzodiazepines—none detected

  Hair sample (four inches long, representing eight months of data):

  Cocaine—none detected

  Opiate—none detected

  PCP—none detected

  Amphet—none detected

  Marijuana—none detected

  Well, okay then, thought Ketchum. We’ve either got a boy scout or a recovered addict. No adult male is that squeaky clean. Granted, alcohol and pot dissipate from the bloodstream in just a matter of hours, but the hard stuff, the stuff that gets people in real trouble, is missing. My money’s on a recovered addict, reasoned Ketchum. Once they got clean, they usually maintained acquaintances with their former running buddies, even though their recovery group tells them not to. Those folks were still just as dangerous as they’d always been, maybe even more so, because they now had no leverage or control over the former addict.

  There was no bigger zealot than a reformed anything. Ketchum had seen it a thousand times. Born-again drug users, alcoholics, cigarette smokers, or rampant sinners often chomped at the bit to convert other offenders, or to prove their newfound virtuousness. Drug dealers, with reason, were paranoid, suspicious, and jumpy. Add some illegal chemical enhancement to that state of mind, and you have someone who might easily find or create a reason to behead a person to keep him from ratting the dealer out.

  Ketchum looked for the lab report on the other, non-illegal, substances on the head. There were usually bits and pieces of environmental debris picked up by victims during a struggle, which appeared to have happened in this death. There was also an odd ashy substance, and maybe the site of the decapitation would have traces of not only the locale but the murder weapon, as well. He scanned the page down to the recap.

  —Fibers in the hair and on the severed edge of the neck consistent with automobile seating and lining material.

  —Ashy dust consistent with human cremains.

  —Flecks of shellac or coating consistent with a rust-resistant coating for metal located on the site of the decapitation.

  —Chemical on the edge site of the decapitation consistent with men’s aftershave, but none found on the face of the victim. Probably a coating on the decapitation instrument.

  —Partial fingertip pad most likely from a ring finger on a right hand of a Caucasian. Inside section of the fingertip is coated in cyanoacrylates consistent with a fast-drying, strong adhesive. Found in the victim’s hair.

  Oh, great. Now we have a head and a fingertip, thought Ketchum. Whatever happened to an old-fashioned, full-body cadaver victim? Is that too much to ask? groused Ketchum.

  He reached his car and leaned on it while he read the reports. Maybe we can run the partial fingertip through the fingerprint database and identify our head case or his killer from it. It will take two to three months to get a hit, assuming there’s a match. It’s a long shot, he admitted to himself. But what about the glue on it? Who the hell glues on a fingertip? And whose finger is it? The victim or the perp?

  Cremains on a head that was not cremated? Damn creepy, if you ask me, he thought.

  Ketchum wedged himself into his car and headed back to the precinct to check his messages. Maybe another cop shop had responded to his alerts and had a matching body to his head. Naw, that would be too easy, he concluded.

  On the way to the precinct, Ketchum decided to slowly drive along the float’s parade route. Not that he expected to find a headless torso, but the how of this case kept irritating him. How the victim was killed was apparent. But how the victim’s head ended up in the barrel of the float just kept grating on him. The obvious answer was that one of the krewe members put it there, but Ketchum’s gut told him they were all just as astonished and appalled as he was. Either that or they all should go into acting.

  Assuming the obvious, easy explanation didn’t happen, what were the alternative theories? On the parade route in the downtown area, Ketchum pulled his car over to the curb, got out, and walked to the middle of the narrow, two-way street. Cars gingerly avoided hitting him; some blew their horn as they passed by. Ketchum, engrossed in thought, ignored them.

  He looked up and down the street like he had never seen it before. The width of the street. The width of the sidewalk. The trees between the street and the buildings. The building facades.

  When all else failed, he sighed and crunched the numbers. He stood on the white line between lanes and did the calculations in his head. The float was a big target. Long and wide. The head was found in a three-foot-tall barrel with a thirty-six-inch diameter opening, on the float, on the sidewalk side of the street. The deck of a float was about five feet from the ground. Add another three feet, and that made the hole of the barrel eight feet up.

  The pedestrian zone of the sidewalks along the parade route was five feet wide. The float would have been at least four feet from the sidewalk, moving at two and a half miles per hour, or about three-and-a-half feet per second. That was a pretty slow pace for someone who might have wanted to toss the head onto the float, especially if they had a clear view and were high enough off the ground.

  The head weighed ten pounds, about the weight of a large watermelon. That was a lot of weight
for a woman to juggle. Plus, assuming the person who dumped the head was the same person as the killer, a man would have had more of the hand and upper-body strength necessary to decapitate a middle-aged man who appeared to have resisted.

  Ketchum’s new working theory: a male, above the street, had to deposit the head in the barrel. He looked along the street for places the perp could have been located to be able to toss a head at the float. There were trees along the sidewalk in many areas, but they were too frail to hold parade spectators. Furthermore, climbing a tree with a ten-pound head and then hanging on while tossing the skull five feet away was highly improbable, unless the perp was an orangutan. Hmm. An orangutan would have strong hand strength…

  Ketchum got sidetracked daydreaming about how and why a great ape would do such a thing.

  “Cap’n, you okay?”

  Ketchum was startled back into reality by one of his foot patrol officers tapping him on the shoulder.

  “Uh, yeah, Dagobert. Why?”

  “Well, youse standing in the middle of da street just looking up in da trees and laughing. So I thought…” Patrolman Dagobert tried to cautiously explain so he didn’t get in hot water with the captain.

  “So you thought I was tanked-up, right?” Ketchum crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the young patrolman.

  “Aw, naw, sir. Naw. I thought dat someone done put a gris-gris on ya.” He laughed nervously. “Ya gave me the frissons,” he continued.

  Ketchum laughed at himself and Dagobert. “No need to get all weirded out. Nobody put a spell on me. I was just deep in thought. And just in case you’re wondering, I happen to be stone-cold sober at the moment. Haven’t had lunch yet.” Ketchum laughed, performing a point-on, heel-to-toe sobriety walk simulation on the white line. “Promise.”

  “Aw righty, den. I’ll mind my own bidness. But be careful. You may not be drunk, but dis is Nawlins. There might be someone else who is drunk driving up in here.” Dagobert stepped between bumper-to-bumper cars back onto the sidewalk and resumed his meet-and-greets with everyone he passed.

  Ketchum snaked between cars and back to the curb to observe the surroundings from that angle. There were small, ornamental, leafless trees about every twenty feet on the street side of the sidewalk. The sidewalk would have been filled solid with revelers, because the French Quarter didn’t allow the ladder stands for kids that the beginning and end of the parade route allowed. It would be difficult for anyone to toss a head on the float from among the sidewalk mob. They needed more height.

  “And there it is,” Ketchum announced to himself.

  Chapter 13—The Gamut of Emotions

  Leigh awoke at her usual time to someone looking at her. She was nose to nose with Sophie and staring into her big chestnut-colored eyes. Sophie was snuggled in between her and Cafton.

  Oh, Cafton, Leigh remembered. She slowly rose up on one elbow to peer over Sophie. There was Cafton, sleeping soundly. Leigh watched him, studied him for a couple of minutes. He was peaceful. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. His ginger hair looked like cotton candy in a wind tunnel. He was on his left side, with his right arm draped over Sophie’s side as if they had been snuggling together for years. Leigh saw Cafton’s right foot had sneaked out from under the comforter and rested on top. His natty argyle sock was bunched around his ankle.

  “Shhhh, Soph. Let’s let him sleep while I get us some coffee,” Leigh whispered to Sophie as she slid out of bed and into her white terrycloth robe. Sophie agreed, choosing to stay in bed and snooze with Cafton.

  While the coffee brewed, Leigh started a cozy fire in the front room wood stove. She pulled back the drapes and saw a light snow had blanketed the farm. Snow dusted the cedar trees, making them look like they had been dipped in confectioner’s sugar. The cardinals playing in the flocked trees reminded her of scenes from those old-fashioned, boxed Christmas cards. Living nostalgia right outside her door. One of the things she loved most about living in the country was the abundance of nature and wildlife almost within arm’s reach.

  It was her little slice of heaven. She often went outside, enveloped by the pitch dark, and just looked at the stars, the same stars that twinkled above Jesus, that inspired Shakespeare, and were studied by Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, and Galileo. They guided ancient mariners like Magellan and Marco Polo. Those same stars had kept watch over her family, friends, and now her love, Cafton.

  Leigh’s farm was a sanctuary for animals. Look up the definition of “bucolic” in the dictionary, and it ought to have a photo of her farm. If Grant Wood were alive, he’d most assuredly want to venture down south to capture the look and feel of this peaceful oasis just beyond the hectic energy of Nashville.

  She had worked diligently over the years to create and maintain this refuge. Her farmhouse was surrounded by untouched farmland, and she liked it that way. People told her she should cut her fields or lease them to someone to grow hay. Again and again she politely refused, because her fields were a safe zone for the animals, and a habitat for all manner of creatures. She couldn’t bear it if someone came through with a bush hog, chopping up bunnies, field mice, and animals too young or slow to be able to escape in time, or destroying their homes. She always cringed when she saw the vultures overhead, eager to clean up the carnage after a field was bush hogged for hay.

  Leigh would rather protect than use Mother Nature. She filled several hummingbird feeders hanging on the front porch in March, right before the little dynamos arrived for the summer, and kept them full until the tiny birds stoked up for their migration back home in October. She often sat on the porch and read or just watched the flamboyant little birds in their aerobatics and midflight dog-fights for hours. She snickered at the more aggressive, thumb-sized jet packs that challenged her by flying directly in front of her nose, hovered for an eye-to-eye glare, and in essence warned her not to dare approach their feeder. “I admire your courage but pity your judgment,” she cautioned the diminutive bullies.

  From her front porch swing, at any given time, Leigh heard or saw woodpeckers, cardinals, wood thrushes, blue jays, crows, vultures, sparrows, robins, starlings, wild turkeys, doves, mourning doves, finches, hawks, starlings, mockingbirds, and more. Strategically placed birdbaths around the property assured her little friends they would always have a place to drink and to keep cool in the blistering Tennessee summer.

  The neighboring farm, about a quarter mile away as the crow flew, had a large pond Canada Geese called home. When they travelled, whether flying over Leigh’s property in their perfect V formation or the lone goose out for a spin in the sky, they greeted her with a resounding geee-onk!

  Several families of deer kept the honeysuckle at bay along her long gravel driveway fence line. They were so comfortable there they often strolled right up to the front porch or back deck and eyed the potted plants there. When Leigh accidently surprised one, they gave her a gruff huff to let her know they did not appreciate being approached.

  Several other wildlife families, including possums and raccoons, showed up regularly to snuffle through the compost pile or to see if Leigh had placed any leftovers out for them to eat. Leigh especially liked the possums. She thought they were beautiful, except for the rat-tail. But the silver face, tiny hand-like paws, and round ears were adorable. They earned their keep, though. They were voracious feeders on ticks, a scourge of the countryside. The only drawback to them was they helped themselves to the cat food Leigh put out for her barn cats, but it was a small price to pay for the tick eradication and entertainment they provided.

  Squirrels and chipmunks performed acrobatics in the back tree line and gathered up the hickory nuts from the ground.

  Other animals were not so visible, but the sounds of them sharing the property were abundant. At night, she heard coyotes singing and their maniacal yelping when they descended on their prey. A few times, Leigh heard the unmistakable growl and yowl of a bobcat, and the squeals and squeaks of fox kits. There were owls all over the farm
. When darkness fell, the hoo-hoo of the barn owls, trills and whinny of screech owls, and clicks and grunts of toads filled the air like Mother Earth’s orchestra.

  Her old farmhouse had character. Over the last ninety-five years, generation after generation had put their unique stamp on it. They added rooms here, and enclosed this and that, and partitioned rooms, most of it done by inexperienced but willing hands. You could drop a marble in the house and it would roll throughout the entire house and come right back to you if you stood still long enough. Leigh liked that. She liked the feel of the home’s interior terrain under her feet. The naturally termite-resistant poplar wood for the foundation and flooring no doubt had been hand-hewn from the timber on the farm. It didn’t feel like a gymnasium floor, all level and smooth. It felt like generation after generation of stubby baby feet, strong farmwife feet, and calloused, hardworking farmer feet had molded the floorboards into a history of the farm.

  The kitchen was sort of a parallelogram. Almost no part of the farmhouse was a perfect square. The rooms were hand built and sometimes with little more than a good eye for measurements. It consisted of a small, modernish kitchen installed in the 1930s. Then, apparently when a larger family occupied the home a couple of decades later, they knocked out the back wall and enclosed the back porch, which was wider than the actual house. Then on one side, they partitioned off a long slice of the porch from the kitchen, and fashioned a laundry room.

  The living room, added on in the 1960s, was constructed across the former front of the house, moving the front door to the new living room but leaving the old front door to permanently reside in a hallway closet that covered the former front porch.

  The original bathroom retained its original cast iron clawfoot tub that was too heavy to even begin to bother to move. So even though the bathroom was enlarged, the original plumbing was still in place and was a constant source of frustration. Sometimes it was also a source of unwanted guests. One afternoon, as Leigh sat doing her business, she felt something, barely something, drag across her toes. She looked down just in time to see the small end of a large snake disappear underneath the antique highboy she had in there to store towels.