Keyes wondered if Ernesto Cabal had seen the newspaper. He hoped not. Wiley's column would absolutely ruin the young man's day.

Assuming Ernesto was innocent—and Keyes was leaning in that direction—the next step was figuring out who would have wanted B. D. Harper dead. It was a most unusual murder, and robbery seemed an unlikely motive. Dumping the body in a suitcase was like the Mob, Keyes thought, but the Mob didn't have much of a sense of humor; the Mob wouldn't have dressed Sparky up in such godawful tacky clothes, or stuffed a rubber alligator down his throat.

Finding a solid suspect besides Ernesto Cabal wasn't going to be easy. B. D. Harper had not risen to the pinnacle of his trade by making enemies. His mission, in fact, had been quite the opposite: to make as many friends as possible and offend no one. Harper had been good at this. He positively excreted congeniality.

Sparky had lived and breathed tourism. His singular goal had been to lure as many people to South Florida to spend as much money as was humanly possible in four days and three nights. He lay awake nights scheming new ways to draw people to the tropical bosom of Miami.

As a reporter, Brian Keyes had come to know B. D. Harper fairly well. There was nothing not to like; there simply was nothing much at all. He was an innocuous, rotund little man who was jolliest when Florida was crawling with snowbirds. For years Harper had run his own successful public-relations firm, staging predictable dumb stunts like putting a snow machine on the beach in January, or mailing a ripe Florida orange to every human being in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This was in the boom days of Miami and, in a way, Sparky Harper had been a proud pioneer of the shameless, witless boosterism that made Florida grow.

In later years, as head of the Chamber of Commerce, Harper's principal task was to compose a snazzy new bumper sticker every year:

"Miami—Too Hot to Handle!"

"Florida is ... Paradise Found!"

"Miami Melts in Your Mouth!"

Brian Keyes's personal favorite was "The Most Exciting City in America," which Sparky propitiously introduced one month after Miami's worst race riot.

Harper shrewdly had peddled his lame slogans by affixing them to color posters of large-breasted women sunbathing on the beach, sprawling on the bows of sailboats, or dangling from a hang-glider—whatever Sparky could arrange. The women were always very beautiful because the Chamber of Commerce could afford to hire the top models.

The annual unveiling of the new tourism poster made Sparky Harper neither controversial nor unpopular. As far as anyone could tell, it was the only tangible thing he did all year to earn his forty-two-thousand-dollar salary.

As for the murder, Keyes thought of the usual cheap possibilities: a jealous husband, an impatient loan shark, a jilted girlfriend, a jilted boyfriend. Nothing seemed to fit. Sparky was a divorced man with a French poodle named Bambi. When he dated at all, he dated widows or hookers. He had been known to get bombed on occasion, but he never made an ass of himself in public. And he wasn't a gambler, so it was unlikely that the Mafia was into him.

Keyes guessed that whoever killed Harper might not have known him personally, but probably knew who he was. With garish methodology the killer had seemed to be making a very strong statement, which is why Keyes couldn't dismiss the "Nights of December" letter, nutsy as it was.

Keyes decided that he needed the autopsy. He drove to the medical examiner's office and asked for a copy. Dr. Joe Allen wasn't in, so Keyes decided to wait. As he sat in a tiled room that smelled sweetly of formalin, he started to read Allen's report line-by-line. Halfway through, his curiosity got the best of him and he unsheathed the color slides. One by one Keyes held them up to the light.

The more he studied the gruesome photographs, the more Keyes was convinced that Ernesto Cabal was telling the truth: he'd had nothing to do with B. D. Harper's murder. It was beyond Ernesto's stunted imagination to have conceived something like this.

"Don't smudge up my slides!" Dr. Joe Allen stood at the doorway, laden with files.

" 'Mornin', Doc."

"Well, Brian. I hear you've hit the big time." Joe Allen had always liked Brian Keyes. Keyes had been a solid reporter and it was a damn shame he'd given it up to become a P.I. Joe Allen wasn't crazy about private investigators.

"This was no robbery, Joe."

"I don't know what it was," Dr. Allen said, "except that it was definitely death by asphyxiation."

"Have you ever heard of a B-and-E artist to show such flair?" Keyes asked.

"It seems the police are of that opinion."

"I'm asking for yours, Joe."

Dr. Joe Allen had autopsied 3,712 murder victims during his long career as the Dade County coroner, so he had seen more indescribable carnage than perhaps any other human being in the whole United States. Throughout the years Joe Allen had charted South Florida's progress by what lay dead on his steel tables, and he was long past the point of ever being shocked or nauseated. He performed meticulous surgery, kept precise files, took flawless photographs, and compiled priceless morbidity data which earned him a national reputation. For example, it was Dr. Allen who had determined that Greater Miami had more mutilation-homicides per capita than any other American city, a fact he attributed to the terrific climate. In warm weather, Allen noted, there were no outdoor elements to deter a lunatic from spending six, seven, eight hours hacking away on a victim; try that in Buffalo and you'd freeze your ass off. After Dr. Allen had presented his findings to a big pathologists' convention, several other Sun Belt coroners had conducted their own studies and confirmed what became known as the Allen Mutilation Theorem.

Throughout the years a few spectacular cases stood out vividly in Dr. Allen's recollections, but the rest were just toe tags. Brian Keyes hoped Sparky Harper might be different.

The coroner put on his glasses and held up two of the more sickening slides, as if to refresh his memory. "Brian," he said, "I don't think they've got the right man in jail."

"So how do I get him out?"

"Give them a better suspect."

"Swell, Joe. Anyone in particular?"

"In my opinion, Mr. Harper was the victim of a ritual slaying. I'd say that several persons were involved. I would also say that neither robbery nor sexual assault was the motive. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an occult ceremony, possibly even human sacrifice. On the other hand, the body showed no common signs of torture—no cigarette burns, welts, or bruise patterns. But you can't ignore what happened to the legs."

Keyes asked, "What didhappen to the legs?"

"The legs were removed after death occurred, probably so the body could be concealed in the suitcase. But it's the way the legs were removed that's so interesting."

Keyes said, "Joe, are you doing this just to make me sick?"

"The legs weren't just hacked off with an ax, which is the most efficient way," said Dr. Allen, pausing to choose his words. "It appears from the wounds that Sparky's legs might have been removed by a large animal. They might actually have been ... twisted off."

"God! By what, wild dogs?"

Dr. Allen shook his head somberly. "Judging from the bite pattern, it was no dog. It was something much bigger. Don't ask me what, Brian, because I just don't know."

"Joe, you always brighten my day."

"Happy hunting, my friend."

Brian Keyes's office was on the sixth floor of a dreary downtown bank building off SW Second Avenue, near the Miami River. The consulate of El Salvador was located down the hall, so most of the other tenants lived in perpetual fear of a terrorist attack and behaved accordingly. They all had chipped in to hire extra security guards for the lobby, but the security men had turned out to be professional burglars who one night looted the entire building of all IBM office machinery.