King of Swords

'The King of Swords,' Javier explained, looking down at the foot of the mortuary slab. 'The card represents a man of great power and influence, an aggressive man also. It can mean a valuable ally or a fearsome enemy, depending on where and how it turns up in the reading.'

'Is that right?' Gemma said. 'So what does it mean when it turns up in someone's stomach?'

4

'Preval Lacour,' Max read off a photostatted report as Joe drove. 'Forty-four years old. Haitian. Became a US citizen in 1976. Taxpayer, registered Republican, churchgoer, married, four kids. Good credit score, home owner, modest Amex debt. Recently became the proud owner — with his business partner, Guy Martin — of a lot of real estate in Lemon City.

He was plannin' to redevelop it. No priors, no record, no nothing. I don't get it.' He looked at Joe over the pages.

'Here's a guy well on his way to getting his piece of the American Dream. No history of mental illness, or violence.

No drugs or alcohol in his system. How and why the fuck did it all go so wrong?'

'People go crazy, Max,' Joe said. 'Sometimes somethin'

just slips. You know how it is. We see it all the time.'

'I'd say somethin' more than just “slipped” with this guy.' Max continued reading from the report. 'He killed his business partner and secretary. Why? These were childhood friends, godfathers to each other's kids, never known to have had a serious quarrel, business was on the up.' Max turned the page. 'Then he puts the bodies in his trunk and drives over to Fort Lauderdale and kills Alvaro and Frida Cuesta. Then he drives over to Primate Park, breaks in and chokes to death on his own vomit — all in seventy-two hours.

'The other people he killed, the Cuestas: they were his main business rivals. They went head to head over the Lemon City project. But the Cuestas lost out. Why kill 'em?

And there was a third guy in the running too — Sam Ismael, Haitian, Lemon City local, runs a voodoo store. He was the lucky one. He was out of town the day Lacour went on the

rampage, otherwise he might've been murdered too. The whole thing's insane. Don't make sense.'

'Sometimes it just never does.' Joe sighed.

They were on USi, driving towards Kendall. It had been two weeks since they'd found Preval Lacour's body in Primate Park. The incident had made the national news, thanks to the hundreds of monkeys which had escaped from the zoo and run riot all over Miami and beyond.

Lacour's fingerprints had been taken at the morgue and run through the computer. Five days later the machine had matched them to the murders of Guy Martin and Theresa Morales in a Hialeah motel and to the Cuestas in Fort Lauderdale. Lacour's car — a black Mercedes saloon — had been spotted speeding away from the scene. A witness had taken down the number plate and phoned it in.

Lacour had dumped the Mercedes in a car park in North Miami Beach, where it had stayed until the weekend before the Primate Park discovery. A caretaker had noticed a horrific smell coming from the car and called the police who had found the decomposing bodies of Lacour's business partner and secretary.

Now Max and Joe were going to Lacour's home address.

Max had called the house before heading over to North Miami, but there had been no response. He'd checked with Missing Persons. Nothing on record.

'And what about that shit they found in his stomach?'

Max flicked through to the autopsy notes and read out the inventory. 'A tarot card, sand - mixed with bits of ground-up bone, possibly human, as yet unconfirmed — plus vegetable matter, also as yet unidentified.'

'Sounds like some kind of potion,' Joe said.

'His lips had been sewn up, nose too.' Max closed the report and threw it on the back seat. 'What d'you think about that? Some kinda ritual?'

'I ain't thinkin' too hard 'bout this one,' Joe answered,

“cause it ain't gonna be our problem after next week.'

'True.' Max lit a cigarette and wound down the window.

As of the following Monday, North Miami PD took back the case, which had been theirs in the first place, as the body had been found in their jurisdiction and the matter wasn't deemed either urgent or sensitive enough to be dealt with by the Miami Task Force — commonly known to cops and the press as the MTF — which Max and Joe worked for.

North Miami PD, sinking under the burden of a record number of unsolved homicides, had begged MTF to handle the Primate Park stiff, but they for their part were under exactly the same pressure, if not more so because, as Dade County's supposed elite task force, they were expected to solve crimes at lightning pace. Max and Joe had thirteen unsolved homicides and twenty-two missing persons on the case board in their office. And Eldon Burns, their boss, was breathing down their necks hard, screaming at them to bring him 'Results, results, results - GOOD. SOLID.

FUCKEN'. RESULTS!'