pulled herself together enough to speak movingly at the podium under the lawn tent. Chance and Chase Cornbright were up next, dressed in matching cashmere top coats. They stood side-by-side reading alternate paragraphs from a eulogy that scrolled on a teleprompter laced with black crepe. The Potussies agreed that Kiki Pew would have been embarrassed by her sons’ torpid performance.
Mastodon didn’t attend the chilly seaside event but he sent the Vice President, who’d never met Katherine Fitzsimmons but warmly praised her as a martyred patriot. The VP then launched into seven-and-a-half minutes of stock diatribe about the immigration crisis, citing Kiki Pew’s death as worst-case proof of the dark menace lurking on the edge of America’s borders. If the other mourners were bothered by the naked political exploitation of their friend’s funeral, they didn’t let on. Several chased down Sean Hannity to have their prayer cards autographed before he boarded a Fox helicopter back to Manhattan.
The town of Palm Beach sent an elaborate flower wreath but no official representative. Council members feared setting a costly precedent; scores of prominent part-time residents died every season, and the municipality’s modest travel budget would be sapped by April if the mayor and his wife flew north for every funeral.
As the last crumbs of Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons were being sprinkled from a New England bluff into the Atlantic Ocean, Palm Beach Police Chief Jerry Crosby sat twelve hundred miles away watching videotapes of the back street leading to the service entrance of Lipid House. The footage had been recorded by a security camera at a neighboring generic mansion, but the owner had been vacationing in Bali when Mrs. Fitzsimmons vanished. Once he returned to town, he voluntarily turned over digital files holding a week’s worth of surveillance loops.
The images were of better-than-average quality, and Crosby immediately advanced the time-stamped sequence to the night of the White Ibis Ball. Angela Armstrong’s python hypothesis could be dismissed if Kiki Pew had been recorded alive and well, departing the Lipid House grounds through the rear gates. The videos showed a flurry of party trucks, florist vans, and catering vehicles, but no lone person could be seen leaving on foot from the service driveway from sunset until dawn. Crosby clicked on fast-forward to the end of the file, speeding through the herky-jerky frames until he noticed one particular car turning into the back entrance:
A white Chevy Malibu Super Sport, arriving on the third morning after Mrs. Fitzsimmons disappeared.
It stayed less than an hour. The broken front headlight was easy to spot when the Malibu pulled out, driven by a white male. A companion, also white, sat on the passenger side. The chief froze the video, but the car’s grimy windshield made it impossible to positively identify the occupants as Keever Bracco and Uric Burns, whose most recent mug shot—complete with dented forehead—lay on Crosby’s desk near the railroad conch pearl.
Unfortunately, the recovered Malibu had already been cubed for scrap. The county’s overworked auto-theft squad had elected to spend zero time searching for microscopic evidence in a vehicle that had been submerged for days in murky water. A corpse in the back would have piqued their interest, but the Malibu’s trunk was empty. “Except for a mudfish,” the owner of the impound lot had told Crosby.
And no one, of course, would have found it noteworthy that the SS insignia was missing from rear end of the vehicle.
Another item on the chief’s desk was the Fitzsimmons autopsy report. Kiki Pew was ruled to have died from asphyxiation caused by massive trauma from an unknown source or sources. She was drunk at the time of her death, and blood tests additionally revealed a .18 g/L plasma concentration of the drug MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. Because she had been purposely entombed in concrete, the coroner’s speculation about her final hours did not include the scenario of a random reptile attack. In any event, testing a victim’s skin and garments for digestive python enzymes had not yet become standard post-mortem procedure in Florida.
Finally, stacked on Jerry Crosby’s desk beneath the autopsy findings, was a file detailing the short, peculiar criminal record of Angela Christine Armstrong. The case had received almost no publicity because the media paid little attention to wildlife agencies, the poaching of a deer being of less interest to the public than gang shootouts at the county fair.
If a regular road cop had forcibly severed the limb of a criminal suspect and fed it to an alligator, it