Free Air Dance Iguana by Tom Corcoran Page A

fatter wallet. The large, elevated home sat on raised ground on a double lot. Beyond its white five-foot fence, healthy palms, and new shrubs sat a dark green BMW convertible and a black Ford Expedition. Two edgy but quiet Yellow Labs paced around stakes in the side yard. A Carolina Skiff with a Yamaha engine rested on a trailer under the house. The oversized mailbox was awash in surreal, hand-painted tropical fish. I parked across the street, shut off the motorcycle but remained seated. Gawkers hovered two houses away.
    Bobbi Lewis had set up a mobile office on the hood of her Crown Victoria. She was surrounded by uniforms. She looked up, perplexed, and said, “You’ve surprised me, Alex. Liska said he wasn’t sending you. He asked me not to call you.”
    “Are you the only one here who knows that?”
    “I assume so.”
    “Why would the sheriff make that decision?” I said. “I’d have been the only person to view all three crime scenes.”
    She bought time, looked around, scratched her neck. My words forced her to confront a fact that already bothered her. “You can hang,” she said, “but please stay over there.” She pointed to the next house to the north, a ground-level bungalow built before insurance companies, via the feds, mandated elevated living spaces. “Leave your camera bag in my trunk so nobody will mess with it.”
    “Including me?” I said.
    “Orders are orders.” She reached through her car-door window and pressed the remote trunk-release button.
    I set the kickstand and put the bag in her car. She told the uniforms I didn’t require an escort.
    The first thing I learned was why they didn’t need me.
    Bixby, the new city photographer, paced the concrete apron behind the high house. In cargo shorts, zippered vest, and hiking boots, he was a 170-pound peacock in high strut. He screwed a lens onto his camera body, changed his mind, chose a shorter lens. He half-crouched, fired off eight or ten clicks on his autowinder. His moves and mock decisions may have looked professional, but his positioning sucked. He was wasting film. Wasting a crime scene.
    The victim looked well fed; his neck had stretched perhaps twice as much as Kansas Jack’s or Milton Navarre’s, and his eyes bulged as if he had tried to stare down death as it approached. He wore bathing trunks and what looked like a pajama top, though, with Keys styles, it could have been a formal supper shirt. I took him to be in his late forties. No duct tape, smashed teeth, or ripped buttons. The rope was the same color as that used on Ramrod and in Marathon, but it wasn’t knotted to a true noose. If there had been two fewer loops, the victim could have fallen from his death collar, fractured his ankles, and crawled away alive. I wondered if his weight had caused the rope to twist him around and around until he quit saying to himself that he hadn’t guessed that twirling would be part of it.
    Beyond the fact that a dead man hung from a boat davit and flies had come to play, nothing here resembled the two prior deaths. Nothing but the sadness of another early exit.
    Bixby disguised his indecision as concentration. He paced off distance, then cowered when a forensic tech barked at him for encroaching on the circle of evidence. He bracketed exposures, twisted dials to change shutter speed and aperture. Duped by his camera’s meter, he shot into the bright horizon without fill, then toward the street with a flash. His pictures would flop.
    I didn’t think it mattered.
    “What do you see, Alex?” said Lewis. “Another air dance iguana?”
    I hadn’t heard her approach. “More like a strangled manatee.”
    “I just chatted with Liska. He was surprised to hear that you’d showed up.”
    “I am here by mistake and coincidence,” I said. “Isn’t that how some people die?”
    “Not the ones I investigate. Planning and malice lead to all of them, even the suicides.”
    “Was the victim married?” I said.
    “His name was Lucky