Spiral Read Free Page A

earliest criminal impulse. In this one thing man was frighteningly consistent, and incorrigible.
The sun was steadily rising overhead, pushing the shadows farther back into the gloomy drive. The cheap suit was dusty. Whoever had put him here had wrestled him around in the caliche until they had maneuvered him into the position they wanted. Though they hadn't bothered about the ashy blotches on the dark material, they had taken the pains to straighten his coattails so that they were not tucked up under the dead man's back. Haydon noticed too the socks. See-through gray nylon with dark vertical stripes. Tropical.
It wasn't an ugly scene, but it was definitely disconcerting, because of the peculiar lead pallor of the bloodless olive flesh, and, of course, the nail and the tethered ant.
"You ever see anything like this before?" Mooney asked. He was holding between two fat fingers the last bite of a fried pie he had bought from a vending machine as they left the station.
Haydon shook his head as his dark brown eyes studied the corpse with a singularity of concentration that precluded any further response. He stood with his arms crossed, his straight lean frame seemingly at odds with the inherent disorder of a homicide scene. His thick sable hair was neatly barbered, the temples beginning to have enough gray in them now so that it was one of the first things you noticed about him. He was conscious of the broad band of sun falling across the shoulders of his suit, penetrating like a heat lamp, drawing the perspiration from the pores beneath the high collar of his shirt. Ever correct, his silk tie tightly knotted, his shoes polished, he stood over the shabbily dressed corpse and tried to place the dead man's odd mien within the framework of something sensible.
    Behind him, outside the area of the crime scene roped off with Day-Glo yellow plastic tape, he could hear the four uniformed officers talking to the crowd of fifteen or twenty people that had gathered on the sidewalk and street blocked off by the patrol cars. Haydon did not like to be overheard at a crime scene. Every patrolman who knew anything about working homicides knew that.
    In fact, Haydon's reputation for adhering to a personal, and sometimes eccentric, code of conduct was notorious, and reached far beyond the police department. Foremost was his obstinacy in demanding absolute privacy for his investigations, as well as for himself. He sustained a relationship of constant tension with the news media, and detested having either his cases or his name mentioned in any context. He considered having his picture reproduced the ultimate desecration. This obsession had been strained to the breaking point in the past by the fact that he had been the principal investigator in a number of sensational cases.
    In addition, Haydon's personal life was guaranteed to attract media attention at the slightest opportunity. He was the only son of a respected and prosperous international lawyer whose death had left Haydon with a considerable inheritance. Aside from his work, he lived a very private life with his wife, Nina, an architect, in the family's old and spacious residence in a fashionable part of the city near Rice University. It was the natural inclination of those who did not know him well to wonder why he worked at all, much less as a homicide detective. But at age forty, and after thirteen years in homicide, Haydon had long ago dispelled those questions among his colleagues. In the police department his reputation was quite different, though perhaps no less enigmatic.
    "You figure it's some kind of gang deal?" Mooney reached into his pocket and took out the waxed-paper package the pie had come in. He wrapped the piece of pie in the paper, dropped it into his pocket, and sucked the sweet off his fingers.
    Haydon shrugged. "If it is, they're being uncharacteristically creative."
By now there were a few flies coming around, even though there was nothing to attract them. There was no