JL02 - Night Vision Read Online Free PDF

apartment buildings. This one was called Flamingo Arms and consisted of a series of curved walls, glass blocks, and cantilevered sunshades that looked like stucco eyebrows. The paint was the color of a ripe avocado. Two metal flamingos formed a grillwork on the front door, and the same motif was picked up in the lobby with a mural of several of the pink birds high-stepping through a fountain.
    The three of us—the coroner, the shrink, and the mouthpiece— were let in by a uniformed cop who recognized Charlie Riggs. We climbed a winding staircase with a looping metal railing to the second floor. It was a corner apartment facing Ocean Drive with just a sliver of a view of the Fifth Street Beach. Nick Fox stood in a corner of the living room, his face drawn into a tight mask. Whispering in his ear was a cop in plainclothes. Nick Fox shook his head and didn’t move. The cop came over to us.
    “Alex Rodriguez,” he said, shaking my hand, and nodding to Charlie Riggs and Pamela Maxson. He looked just right for a detective, which is to say he looked like your average forty-two-year-old, middle-class man who sells power tools at Sears. His dark hair was beginning to thin at the crown. He was of average height, average weight, and average demeanor, except for his nose, which, he later told me, had been head-butted one direction by a drugged-out citizen and smashed the other way by his partner’s errant nightstick while quelling a domestic dispute.
    “I’m glad you’re here, Dr. Maxson,” Rodriguez said. “You too, Charlie. Lassiter. Give Nick a minute. Then he’ll talk to you. Now…”
    He left it hanging there, and we all turned toward a desk in a corner of the room where a young assistant medical examiner was still snapping his photos. The ME nodded toward Charlie but kept at his work. His pale hair was parted high on his head and clipped short on the sides, a style favored by the current crop of young professionals.
    In rebellion, I keep mine unfashionably long and shaggy, and when in the company of callow youth, I incessantly hum Joan Baez tunes. He wore a white lab coat with a name tag. He didn’t look old enough to be a doctor, but I figured, no matter what, he couldn’t kill the patient. His little kit was open, and he had lined up his sketch pads, gloves, sponges, plastic bags, thermometer, trowel, chalk, and tape recorder.
    Charlie walked straight to the body. She wore a black silk camisole and nothing else.
    She was sprawled—legs akimbo—in her chair at a desk.
    Her head was jammed through a computer monitor. The keyboard was pulled open.
    Maybe Charlie Riggs was used to homicide scenes. Maybe it was just another day at the office for him. But not for me. The aftermath of violence chilled me. I didn’t know this woman, didn’t even know her name. I had no sense of loss for a loved one. I would not miss a laugh I had never heard. But I knew someone—a mother, a lover, a friend—would cry out her name. And somewhere, I knew, was someone who didn’t cry for anyone or anything. Someone so foreign to me as to be unfathomable.
    My life has been circumscribed by rules. I tried not to hit after the whistle, and I never lied to a judge, though I’ve been tempted to take a poke at one or two. But there are games people play without rules. The hard-eyed cops know the players, stare them down every day. Could I do that? At the moment, filled with a mixture of anger and dread, I didn’t know.
    I looked at Pam Maxson, who seemed to be studying me. “Of course it’s dreadful,” she said, “but scientifically, Mr. Lassiter, it’s quite fascinating, too.”
    Charlie Riggs took control. He gently pulled the body back into the chair. “Lividity of the face and lips, engorgement and petechial hemorrhages in the conjunctivae.”
    He examined her neck. “No sign of a ligature. Crescentic abrasions on the skin, most likely fingernail marks. Probable cause of death, hypoxia due to throttling.”
    Charlie Riggs turned