King of Swords

Theoretically they shouldn't even have been out here, working the Primate Park case, but Max had wanted to get out of the office and do something simple to accomplish and tick off. He and Joe always did this whenever they hit a wall with their cases — look for something easy to do and solve and then come back to their problems with renewed confidence and a fresh perspective.

They headed down North Kendall Drive, passing the Dadeland Mall. The previous July the mall had been the scene of one of the worst shootings in living memory. A posse of cocaine cowboys had rolled up on a rival and his bodyguard and sprayed them with submachine-gun fire in the middle of the day when the place was crowded with shoppers. The incident had put Kendall on the map. Prior to that it had been one of Miami's best kept secrets, known only to real estate brokers and locals.

If you had money and craved attention you lived in Coral Gables, where guides would point out your house to tourists with Instamatics, otherwise you made your home in Kendall.

Part of its appeal lay in its anonymity. Drive through it and you wouldn't know you were there. It could have been anywhere residential, its main streets lined with modest houses sporting flagpoles and the occasional motor boat outside. Beyond the main streets lay larger, more expensive houses, but you'd need to know where you were going to find them. The area appealed to the retired or semi-retired, who liked the fact that it was far enough away from the beach to avoid the hustle and bustle of tourism, but still close enough to central Miami for shopping, socializing and emergencies. Kendall was also especially popular with ex-dictators and their henchmen, fugitive foreign embezzlers, exposed conmen, political exiles, lapsed criminals and disgraced public figures from all walks and stumbles of life.

Before he'd spun out of control, Preval Lacour had been doing OK. He'd lived on Floyd Patterson Avenue, a road lined with arching banana palms where all the houses were situated inside gated compounds with their own private security, closed-circuit cameras and individual hotlines to the emergency services. This way of living — away from the street and under armed guard — was becoming more and more popular with upper-income Miamians scared by the city's escalating crime rate. Home invasions had risen by 150 per cent in the last six months alone, and they'd become far more violent: where once criminals would have tied up the homeowners before making off with their money and belongings, now savage beatings and rapes were commonplace, as were murder and arson.

They stopped outside the entrance to the Melon Fields estate, Lacour's address. Max badged a security guard behind a double gate and told him who they'd come to see.

'Now this is some livin',' Joe said as they drove into a wide

cobbled courtyard with an ornate water fountain in the centre, depicting four dolphins, back to back, frozen in a midair leap, water coming out of their open mouths and landing in a wide round shallow pool filled with pink and yellow flowers.

The three storey houses with their tiled ochre roofs and shuttered windows were partly hidden behind bushes and trees like shy, magnificent beasts. The Lacours lived in the second from last house on the right. Max and Joe headed up a short driveway and parked next to a white Volvo station wagon which was covered in leaves and burst seed pods — debris from the recent rainstorms.

Joe rang the bell. Gentle chimes, but loud enough to hear outside. Max looked through the window to the left. He saw a room set up for a party: gold tinsel hanging across the ceiling, deflated balloons, a fully laid dining table with several bottles in the middle and two jugs but no food and no people. But Max swore he could hear something behind the window, and there were shadows moving about the room.

Max drew his gun and stepped away. Something crunched under his shoe. He looked down and saw he'd just obliterated part of a long procession of green-bodied hister beedes making its way into the house. He followed the line as it disappeared under the door. He was about to go on when he noticed another column of the same beetles on the opposite side of the steps, except this one was exiting the house and moving at a slower pace. When he looked closer he saw the insects were carrying small scraps of pale matter and live maggots in their mandibles.

Joe rattled the letterbox. A dozen blowflies whizzed out, carrying with them a gust of air so foul it made him gag.

Max turned around sharply. He saw his partner backing away from the door with his hand clamped over his mouth and nose.

Then he smelt it too.

'There'll be more'n just one this time,'joe said over his shoulder, as he hurried down the steps to call it in.

They found six bodies.