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ear let me know that Deborah had toldSteban to come in and turn on the
lights.Which moments later he did, as the small off-voice whisper rose in a
sudden crescendo of rattling jolly humor and good-natured horror.
What is it?I asked politely. My only answer was a surge of hungry amusement.
I had no idea what it meant. But I was not greatly surprised when the
screaming started.
Stebanwas really terrible at screaming. It was a hoarse, strangled grunting
that sounded more like he was being violently sick than anything else. The man
brought no sense of music to the job.
I opened my eyes. It was impossible to concentrate under these circumstances,
and anyway there was nothing more to hear. The whispering had stopped when the
screaming began. After all, the screams said it all, didn't they? And so I
opened my eyes just in time to seeSteban catapult out of the little closet at
the far end of the arena and vault onto the rink. He went clattering across
the ice, slipping and sliding and moaning hoarsely in Spanish and finally
hurling headlong into the boards. He scrabbled up and skittered toward the
door, grunting with horror. A small splotch of blood smeared the ice where he
had fallen.
Deborah came quickly through the door, her gun drawn, andSteban clawed past
her, stumbling out into the light of day. What is it? Deborah said, holding
her weapon ready.
I tilted my head, hearing one last echo of the final dry chuckle, and now,
with the grunting horror still ringing in my ears, I understood.
I believeSteban has found something, I said.
CHAPTER 22
POLICE POLITICS, ASIHAD TRIED SO HARD TO impress on Deborah, was a slippery
and many-tentacledthing. And when you brought together two law enforcement
organizations that really didn't care for each other, mutual operations tended
to go very slowly, very much by the book, and with a good deal of
foot-dragging, excuse-making, and veiled insults and threats. All great fun to
watch, of course, but it did draw out the proceedings just a trifle more than
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necessary. Consequently it was several hours afterSteban's dreadful yodeling
exhibition before the jurisdictional squabbling was straightened out and our
team actually began to examine the happy little surprise our new friendSteban
had discovered when he opened the closet door.
During that time Deborah stood off to one side for the most part, working
very hard at controlling her impatience but not terribly hard at hiding it.
Captain Matthews arrived with DetectiveLaGuerta in tow. They shook hands with
theirBrowardCounty counterparts, Captain Moon and Detective McClellan. There
was a lot of barely polite sparring, which boiled down to this: Matthews was
reasonably certain that the discovery of six arms and six legs in Broward was
part of his department's investigation of three heads lacking the same pieces
in Miami-Dade. He stated, in terms that were far too friendly and simple, that
it seemed a bit farfetched to think that he would find three heads without
bodies, and then three totally different bodies without heads would turn up
here.
Moon and McClellan, with equal logic, pointed out that people found heads in
Miami all the time, but in Broward it was a little more unusual, and so maybe
they took it a bit more seriously, and anyway there was no way to know for
sure they were connected until some preliminary work had been done, which
clearly ought to be done by them, since it was in their jurisdiction. Of
course they would cheerfully pass on the results.
And of course that was unacceptable to Matthews. He explained carefully that
the Broward people didn't know what to look for and might miss something or
destroy a piece of key evidence. Not, of course, through incompetence or
stupidity; Matthews was quite sure the Broward people were perfectly
competent, considering.
This was naturally not taken in a cheerful spirit of cooperation by Moon, who
observed with a little bit of feeling that this seemed to imply that his
department was full of second-rate morons. By this point Captain Matthews was
mad enough to reply much too politely, oh, no, not second-rate at all. I'm
sure it would have ended in a fistfight if the gentleman from the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement had not arrived to referee.
The FDLE is a sort of state-level FBI. They have jurisdiction anywhere in the
state at any time, and unlike the feds they are respected by most of the local
cops. The officer in question was a man of average height and build with a
shaved head and a close-cropped beard. He didn't really seem out of the
ordinary to me, but when he stepped between the two much larger police
captains they instantly shut up and took a step back. In short order he had
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