The Alibi Man Read Free Page A

about voicing them. I respected that. And she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
    “Do you want me to take you home?” Landry asked.
    “No. I’m staying.”
    “Elena—”
    “I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
    I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
    “Do you know anything about her family?”
    “No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
    “She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
    I gave him a look.
    Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the workforce in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter, just like the owners and trainers of the five or six thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
    From January to April the town’s population tripled, with everything from billionaires to barely-getting-bys. The main show grounds—Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club—was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
    “You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
    By
people
he meant detectives from the sheriff’s office—not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision—against orders, of course—a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
    I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
    “I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
    Not,
I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know the person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
    Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
    Some sooner than others.

chapter 4
              MURDER VICTIMS are afforded very little dignity at the scene where their bodies are found. Someone finds them, is horrified by the sight of them, calls the cops. Uniformed officers show up, then detectives, then a crime-scene unit with a photographer, someone dusting for fingerprints, someone measuring the distances between items at the scene. The coroner’s investigator arrives, examines the body, turns it over, looks for everything from lividity to exit wounds to maggots.
    By necessity, the people who work these scenes—and have worked hundreds before, and will work hundreds more—aren’t able to allow themselves to acknowledge (not openly, at least) the victim as someone’s child, mother, brother, lover. Whoever this person might have been in life, they are no one as they lie there while the scene is being processed. Only when the investigation begins in earnest do they come back to life in the minds of these people as father, sister, husband, friend.
    Bodies found in water are commonly referred to as “floaters.” There is nothing worse than a floater that’s been in the water a few days—long enough for decomposition to begin internally, filling the body with gases, bloating it to grotesque proportions; long enough for the skin to begin to slough off; long enough for fish and insects to feed on and invade the body.
    I had last seen Irina Saturday afternoon. It was Monday.
    I didn’t look as she was pulled out of the water—not straight on, anyway. I could have let Landry take me home and leave me out of this process, but I felt an obligation to stay at least for a little while. She had been part of my ersatz family. I felt a certain strange need to protect her.
    Too