She paused to light another cigarette, continuing her story from a roiling nimbus of smoke.

“Patti’d get them boys to drive her out to some place in the country, rubbing against them all the way, promising they was gonna get the fuck of their lives. But when they pulled off the road somewhere, the rest of her crew would jump outta the bushes and give the guy a beating.”

I shook my head at how pathetic it all was; the rural version of rolling gays. I thought a minute, added like an afterthought, “You ever hear of the Alliance? Or Arnold Meltzer?”

She took a suck of beer. “It got started a few years ahead of me, but right in our very own school. Ever’body knew someone in it. The Alliance was on our side, like you and me. Mostly it was older guys makin’ sure people knew America was for us and not them. Kickin’ ass when they had to. Lib’rals and communists and such.”

“How’d Patti wind up with Reverend Scaler?”

A shrug. “I dunno. Just one day I heard she was getting married to Reverend Scaler. That surprised me, cuz I’d heard she had the hots for some lawyer-boy. But then I figgured she’d doped out that the Reverend could be somebody big if she grabbed control of things. That girl loved to control. If you ask me, she controlled him all the way to being rich and famous.”

“The Reverend’s church was nearby?”

“Just over in Siler, little white wood place. Scaler was in his early twenties.”

“Mrs Scaler’s a big deal, being on the television and all. This story you told…” I shot a look at a stack of People magazines on the floor. “No one ever passed this story on?”

“There was one girl in our class, she went on to college and everything. Writes those books you see at the Winn-Dixie, romance things? She was going to do a book about Patti Selmot. She was gonna write a…a…”

“Biography?”

“Yep. But when she started going back and asking people what they remembered and all, this whole car full of lawyers showed up and told her if she wrote the book, she better have proof of everything, or they were gonna make her so poor she’d think a can of beans was a Thanksgiving meal.”

“The writer dropped the project, I take it?”

“She didn’t want to be poor. But who fucking does? Patti sure didn’t.”

Dr Matthias put the label on the tube-like container, checked the information for accuracy, slipped the tube into the shock-damping package in his briefcase. It was full. In the morning he’d FedEx the package to the lab to get the tests started, the results on his desk when he returned to Mobile.

He began packing his clothes, the long journey over, a longer one about to begin.

Chapter 46

I got back to the office, downloaded my information from my head to Harry’s. Mrs Scaler was looking more and more like a woman whose troubled past reached straight into today.

The desk sergeant rang my phone.

“You got a caller, Carson. Some drunk. Wants to talk to, and I quote, the skinny white guy who can’t comb his hair, that cop who goes around with the big black monster.”

“Hang on a sec, Sarge,” I said, punching a button. “Lemme put it on speakerphone so the monster can hear.”

Harry rolled his chair close. I pressed talk.

“Detective Ryder.”

“This is Arch Fossie,” he said, his words slurred. “I think you better get over here, Detective. The, uh, Scaler household.”

“What is –”

The phone clicked off.

The front door of the Scaler home was open. We called inside, got no response, went in cautiously, guns drawn. Fossie was in a chair in the corner, head drooping, lips wet, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. His hair stood out in puffs where he’d been scratching at his head. There was a white residue beneath his nostrils. He was a half-step short of totaled.

“What is it, Doctor?”

He waved the bottle toward the study, whiskey splashing out. Harry walked to the study door, looked inside.

“Cars? Better come here.”

I left Fossie to his whiskey and walked over. Senator Hampton Custis lay sprawled on the floor, prone, face turned to the doorway.

His face had been mangled by repeated stabbings. His lips had been sliced away. One of his ears was missing. A shotgun blast had pretty much removed one leg. The torn limb had left a wide swash across the peach carpet as Custis had tried to crawl from where he’d fallen. A series of small red triangles and dots accompanied the swash: bloody high heels. Custis’s tormentor had probably shot his leg first and followed with the knife as he’d crawled, performing the insane surgery.

“There’s only two things cause this kind of damage,” Harry said, his voice quiet.

I nodded. “Hate or love.”

Custis’s eyes were wide and glazed and his cheeks puffed out, a white strip of paper emerging between his lips. I put on latex gloves and tugged the paper out, a wad that someone had tried to jam down his throat. I pulled it open.

The fake, computer-generated, post-surgery Patti Scaler. The beautiful Patti, where she was smiling with the breathtaking new face.

“Where is Mrs Scaler?” I asked Fossie.

“Upstairs. Locked in her room.”

I looked at the bedroom door at the top of the stairs, heard nothing. “What happened?”

Fossie started to put the bottle to his lips. I stopped it.

“What the hell happened?”

“Patricia called Hampton Custis. Told him to come here alone, she had news. When Hamp ran inside she showed him some picture of herself, said it was what she was becoming. Just for him. They could be together, the Washington power couple.”

“Washington pow…?”

“She said they no longer had to meet in secret. Life was perfect.” Fossie choked out a sound; a laugh, I suppose.

I looked at the room where Hampton Custis’s body lay torn asunder.

“The senator had other ideas?” I said.

Fossie tilted the bottle to his lips, got about half in his mouth. “He obviously hadn’t figured on whatever she had planned. But it made sense to Patti. Richard was dead and the two of them could finally be together.”

Nona Jett’s words about Patti Selmot rang in my head: I’d heard she had the hots for somelawyer-boy. Custis had started out at a law office in Silar thirty years ago.

“Custis and Patricia Scaler were lovers?”

Fossie slurped down another drink. “On and off. She was always trying to get on him, he was always trying to keep her off. Hampton kept his distance, mostly. She scared the shit outta him.” He laughed again, a drunken gurgle. “I used to give him Viagra mixed with yohimbe so he could get his pecker hard enough to slip into her.”

It hadn’t escaped me that Fossie seemed to know the senator on a first-name basis. Not what I’d expect from a guy who presented himself as a part-time purveyor of vitamins and herbs and low-fat diets.

“So why did Custis visit?”

“The only way he stayed in office was the votes provided by Richard’s flock of robots. When the great Richard Scaler said, ‘Vote for my buddy Hampton Custis,’ they voted in lockstep. Patti probably told Hampton if he stopped fucking her, she’d tell Richard he was fucking her.” Fossie gurgled with mirth.

“I take it Scaler didn’t know of the affair?”

“If he knew, Richard was probably happy it kept her away from him.”

I said, “You must have been close to hear all this, Doctor.”

“I’ve known Patti for decades.”

Decades? I filed that fact alongside the first-name familiarity with the senator.

“No, I mean today, Mr Fossie. To hear everything that was happening between the pair.”

Fossie frowned through the substances in his head. “Oh. I was working on her meds.”

“Medicines?”

“Uh, vitamins. She needed them to help her through what she said would be a busy day. She said she wanted her head to sparkle. I did an injection, headed downstairs. I stopped to fix a drink and get a few sparklies in my own head. A few minutes later the front door opened. I…” he paused, mouth open, like his engine was sputtering. It seemed my nutritionist had other medications in his bag.