Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  With their inspection of the storage compartments complete, Jason meanders around the backyard shining the powerful LED beam of his police-grade flashlight into various nooks and crannies, and behind a collection of old washers and dryers. He even lifts a piece of rotting plywood to make sure it doesn’t conceal a trapdoor. When he catches Jan watching him, he just shrugs, saying, “You never know.”

  Five minutes into the search, Nate is still sifting through the first layer of nastiness on the back part of the table when he suddenly exclaims, “Geez! What the—!” and leaps backward.

  My first thought is that he stumbled upon the body parts I’d expected to find in the fridge. Stepping to the side, I let Jimmy hurry past. He cocks his head to the side as his eyes search for the cause of the outburst.

  “Right there,” Nate says, pointing accusingly toward a large rectangular lump that’s completely covered by the remnants of a tattered yellow bedsheet that used to be white.

  Lifting the edge of the sheet a few inches, Jimmy peers inside a moment, and then peels the cover back, exposing a three-foot-long wire cage like those used for guinea pigs, hamsters, and, well … rats.

  “Freak show!” Nate says, gesticulating wildly toward the cage. “That’s not normal, right? I mean, what the hell’s the guy thinking?”

  Grasping the wire handle at the top of the cage, Jimmy gently jostles it free from the pile of debris, careful not to dislodge or jumble the contents, and then walks backward several paces before turning and setting it on the kitchen counter.

  The cage itself is unremarkable. It’s old and beat-up and has a metal base that shows as much rust as paint. The wire sides are distorted by years of abuse, and the latch that holds the door closed looks like it hasn’t been used in years.

  Despite the neglect, it’s not the cage that concerns us; it’s the contents.

  Inside are the carcasses of seven desiccated rats, each one posed in a different position, as if they were stop-motion characters caught between photos. One is on the hamster wheel, its chin lifted high as its left front leg and right back leg are frozen in midstride. Another is reclining in a Barbie chair, its dead fingers folded around a miniature plastic bottle. The other five are scattered throughout the cage, each in a different pose more reminiscent of human activity than rodent, except for a juvenile rat who appears to be drinking from the empty water bottle.

  As I stand behind Jimmy, looking around him at the strange diorama, it’s not the rats that draw my attention, nor the odd, humanlike poses they’ve been placed in, but something far more bizarre. For a moment my head swims with the surreal image, trying to make sense of it—and then all at once the puzzle snaps together, and I realize what Murphy has done.

  At first glance, each rat appears to be wearing a white helmet fitted over its head as if it were a piece of armor and they were gladiators in a rodent arena. As I look more closely at the rat on the hamster wheel, I begin to notice the lines and shapes, the distinct impressions, the texture of hair.

  “It’s a mask,” I whisper.

  More disturbingly, it’s a mask that takes in every detail from the nose to the ears. It looks like it was made of ordinary white plaster, and since there are no tool marks to indicate it was carved I can only assume that Murphy made a mold of the rat’s face and then used it to cast the mask.

  Two short lengths of cotton string are attached to the macabre veil through tiny holes on either side. These, in turn, are tied together under the rat’s lower jaw to secure the mask in place. The plaster perfectly captures the bulging eyes, erect ears, and whiskered nose of the dead creature.

  “Jimmy?” I whisper. It’s both a question and a horrified exclamation.

  Nate is still flustered, and the longer he stares at the display, the more animated he becomes. Shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, he waves his arm intermittently and without words until finally turning squarely on Jimmy and saying, “That’s not normal. Even in your world, that’s not normal, right?”

  “My world?” Jimmy replies with a tepid smile.

  “You know what I mean,” Nate shoots back in an apologetic tone, waving away the inferred insult. “You guys run into a lot of serial killers and sickos doing what you do.” He points to the cage. “Is that the kind of stuff you see, or is this guy just … special?”

  Jimmy starts to shake his head, but then thinks better of it and transitions to a hesitant nod, saying, “It’s always different, but, yes, this is the kind of stuff we run into.” He spends a moment explaining to Nate some of the horrors we’ve seen, things far worse than dead rats. “This”—he waves a hand over the display—“is nothing.”

  Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, Jimmy takes at least a dozen photos of the cage and the individual rats with their individual rat masks.

  When he finishes, I move in closer, so that my face is barely a foot from the cage. I’d noticed something while Jimmy was taking his evidence photos. Now, up close, I see that my suspicions are correct.

  “The masks are different,” I say.

  Jimmy just looks at me and shrugs indifferently.

  “It’s a lot of work to make a mold,” I persist. “Why wouldn’t he just make multiple masks from the same mold?”

  “You’re saying he made a mold from each rat?” Nate interjects.

  “Looks like it.”

  Jimmy is suddenly interested and leans in for closer inspection. He doesn’t say anything for a full minute as he turns the cage this way and that, vying for a better view. “Why would he do that?” he finally whispers to no one in particular.

  “That was my question,” I mutter, knowing his words are rhetorical.

  Jimmy turns to Nate, who’s now keeping his distance. “We need to book this into evidence. It’s probably just an oddity and unrelated to the investigation, but we can’t be certain.”

  “Book it into evidence?” Nate asks incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes,” Jimmy repeats, a bit more forcefully this time.

  Nate knows the drill, even if he’s not thrilled with the rats. With heavy shoulders, he pinches the oblong metal handle at the top of the cage and lifts it from the counter. Maneuvering its awkward bulk through the trailer, he steps out into the brisk winter air and moves quickly toward Jan’s patrol car.

  * * *

  Criminal investigations are a bit like playing ping-pong in the dark with marshmallows: no one ever knows the score and you spend half your time searching for the marshmallow.

  Cases that aren’t solved quickly soon become a crossroad of evidence, obstacles, deception, and data, all spilling upon the ground in a great heap so that it’s hard to tell what’s true, what’s false, what’s made up, and what’s solid.

  Making sense of this pile is what solves the case, but it can just as easily bury you.

  It’s often said that a good detective chases the lie, but in my experience a good detective also eliminates possibilities, winnowing down the pile. An investigation may tease you a hundred times with a promising new clue, a suspicious comment, or an alleged eyewitness, building hope and then dashing it to pieces.

  The promising new clue isn’t promising after all; the suspicious comment was misheard; and the eyewitness was drunk and only repeated what he heard from his friend. Detectives may suffer a hundred such disappointments before they finally get their first hallelujah. But that’s how cases get solved: one disappointment at a time. It’s this elimination process that’s the undulating pulse of the investigation: sometimes slow and unrevealing, other times frenetic.

  It’s how cases get solved—and why they go cold.

  Disappointments carry weight. Sometimes this weight builds up and bears down. The hallelujah never comes.

  * * *

  When it comes to evidence, the general practice during a search is to take anything that might be connected to the case, even if the link is still a bit murky. Sometimes the clue is obvious:
a recently fired .357 Magnum lying on the ground at a gun-related homicide would be a good example; it’s a no-brainer. Even then, you don’t know if it’s the suspect’s gun or the victim’s.

  Other times, the supposed evidence is less solid, less sure.

  A fingerprint recovered from a stolen truck may belong to the suspect, or it may belong to a long list of others who have been in the vehicle: the owner, the owner’s friend, a coworker, a valet, a relative, even the guy who last changed the oil.

  Every law enforcement agency has a secure space where they keep evidence items, whether it be a broken synthetic fingernail or a dump truck. In some cases it’s a single room, but for larger agencies it could be a giant warehouse. The expensive items—drugs, cash, high-end jewelry—often go into a safe within the evidence room, and firearms may have a separate spot all to themselves, but everything else, including wire cages filled with dead rats, belongs in the common area. Bigger items are tagged; smaller items often go into a box or even an envelope.

  Everything is tracked and audited.

  Thank God for bar codes.

  * * *

  We finish the search just after midnight. By this time, everyone has had a go at the nasty pile festering in the back of the trailer, but nothing else of note is discovered. For the last twenty minutes, Mrs. Cotton has been hovering just outside her back door, alternating between puffing on her cigarette and glaring at us.

  Clearly, we’ve worn out our welcome.

  Retrieving our gear and locking the door to the fifth-wheel, we start for the car, exhausted and smelling a bit like old garbage. A moment later, I realize that Jimmy’s not with us, and turn to see him talking to Mrs. Cotton. I don’t hear the words, but she shakes his offered hand and they part on good terms. She even waves and smiles as he jogs to catch up.

  That’s Jimmy: always trying to leave on a good note.

  Jason holds the gate open for me as I approach, and I’m just about to go through it—I really am—when I stop cold and turn my gaze to the left … to the row of coin-operated gaming machines lined up like parked cars against the fence; seven gaming machines, to be precise.

  Seven victims; seven dead rats; seven machines.

  Each one large enough to conceal a body.

  The wiser me, the one I never listen to, tells me to keep walking, that we’ve already wasted too much time at Murphy’s, but the gaming machines are problematic. They’re problematic because their sum is a coincidence, seven is a coincidence, and I don’t generally believe in coincidences.

  As Jimmy comes up beside me, no doubt wondering why I’m lingering, I tip my head at the games and say, “There are seven.…”

  It only takes a moment for my meaning to register.

  As I take a few hesitant steps toward the machines, Jimmy follows. Then Nate sees what we’re up to, and Jason and Jan, and soon they’re circled behind us as I fiddle with the front panel on the first machine—some game called Gorf—and try rattling the piece loose. It doesn’t budge.

  “Help me turn this,” I say to Jimmy.

  Together we twist the machine away from the fence, turning it a good ninety degrees so we can access the back panel. “It’s certainly heavy enough to hold a body,” Jimmy grumbles as the unit comes to rest.

  “Probably just waterlogged,” I say. “Who knows how long it’s been sitting here?”

  This time it’s Jimmy who tries accessing the inside of the machine. Gripping the pressboard panel that covers most of the back, he begins to pull gently and looks up in surprise when the board crumbles in his hand. The next attempt meets with the same results, and now we have a pretty good view into the interior.

  A sweep of my flashlight reveals nothing unusual; it’s just an arcade game.

  “One more?” I suggest, and Jimmy gives a wordless nod.

  Next in line is a Galaga machine. Of the seven machines in the sad line along the fence, this is the only one that looks remotely familiar. Perhaps I placed some quarters in one just like it at some distant point in time, perhaps it was this very machine. I vaguely remember visiting a few arcades as a kid, back in the day when they were still a thing, before Xbox and PlayStation reinvented the concept.

  Galaga proves to be just as heavy as Gorf, but we manage to get it turned away from the fence without bulging any vertebrae. Jimmy grasps the back panel as before, and it crumbles in his hands as before. The seven arcade machines were probably worth thousands when they were placed alongside the fence too many years ago. Now they’re worth the value of their scrap, which isn’t much.

  When I shine my flashlight into the innards of the second machine, we can see that it’s just as empty as the first. “Worth a shot,” I mutter, trying not to sound disappointed.

  Jimmy insists that we turn both machines back the way we found them. This is probably because Mrs. Cotton is at the back door again, glaring once more. I’m too tired to argue, so the gaming consoles get turned to their original positions, no one gets a hernia, and Jimmy gives a cordial wave to Mrs. Cotton as he hurries us along.

  Aside from a cage of dead rats, the evening’s been a bust.

  I don’t know why I’m disappointed. Murphy obviously has some serious mental issues and probably doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Still, we listened when he told us Charice Qian was number eight, and Charice certainly believed him when he told her that seven other women were waiting for her to join them. We listened, and we believed, not just because Murphy was compelling, but because the case was just that bizarre. The idea of seven other victims seemed to fit.

  Things may have played out differently if Murphy had been operating by himself. His rambling, semi-coherent statements would have been easier to disregard—another mental imagining impossible things.

  Anyone listening to him could have easily written him off, and probably would have if not for Charice Qian. The petite brunette was adamant that she hadn’t seen Murphy until that morning, and that it was another man who had kidnapped and held her. That made Murphy part of something bigger, something more sinister.

  Faceman and the Onion King: two suspects who’ve never met.

  That’s a new one.

  * * *

  We’re feeling a bit beaten and deflated as the four of us toss around ideas during the short flight back to Port Angeles. Nate keeps sniffing at the funk coming off his clothes, while Jimmy tries to talk some enthusiasm back into us.

  “We know that Charice was kidnapped at her home in Tumwater,” he says. “We know that she was held in a cell for days if not weeks, and then she was handed off to Murphy in the woods, probably at a preselected drop location or—” He suddenly freezes, and for a moment he looks like he’s contemplating a particularly difficult puzzle. He turns to Nate. “Where’s the backpack?”

  “What backpack?”

  “Murphy’s backpack; the one he stashed in the cabin.”

  “I gave it to one of the deputies,” Nate replies. “We were tied up with Murphy and the ambulance, so I asked him to book it into evidence.”

  Jimmy nods. “We need it back.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Monday, December 15

  The two-story farmhouse rests at the edge of an open field that looks like it’s been raked with a giant comb. Long rows run east to west in perfect symmetry, each exactly four feet from peak to peak, filling the rectangular forty-acre field with ordered precision. It’s hard to tell what crop the even rows will yield come spring, and the vegetation that lingers at the crest of each row is covered in frost, blurring it into a white haze.

  A large barn with faded red paint occupies a spot perhaps two hundred feet from the house, and a long driveway connects the homestead to the nearest paved road. Little traffic interrupts the bucolic setting, and if one were to take a black-and-white photo of the farm, they might easily pass it off as an image from the 1930s or ’40s.

  We saw none of this last night, in the dark.

  It was one A.M. when we arrived back in Port Angeles. Nor
mally we would have dropped Nate and Jason at the airport and continued on to Bellingham, but there’s more work to be done here. What was the point of flying all the way home, only to return in the morning?

  Nate made the choice easy, offering to let us rack out at his place. He even extended the invitation to Les and Marty, but they’d already checked into a motel in Port Angeles that afternoon. Nate assured us that he had plenty of room, which seemed dubious considering his status as a bachelor. I was imagining a one-bedroom apartment with a love seat, a La-Z-Boy recliner in the corner, and room for two sleeping bags on the floor near the kitchen.

  The farmhouse was a surprise.

  Bachelor or not, Nate wasn’t kidding when he said he had room: five fully furnished bedrooms, plus a living room and family room, both with large fold-out sofas. It may not be the Hilton, but it’s a refreshing change from our normal routine.

  * * *

  “Fresh-brewed,” Nate offers, hoisting a mug of coffee into the air as I shuffle into the kitchen still half asleep, with my hair pointing in thirteen different directions.

  “I’m not much of a coffee person,” I manage. “Don’t suppose you have any orange juice?”

  “Will grapefruit juice do?”

  “It will.”

  Pointing to a plate on the counter next to the toaster, he says, “We also have English muffins. You look like a butter-and-strawberry-jam kind of guy, but there’s also grape jam, honey, and Nutella. If none of that works for you, feel free to dig through the pantry.”

  Somehow that seems like too many choices this early in the morning, but then I realize it’s not early at all, it just feels that way. It was early in the morning when we went to bed; now it’s the same morning, only later. We haven’t even transitioned into the next part of the day. It almost seems cruel.

  Jimmy is standing at the dining room window with a mug of coffee in his hands. He looks as beat-down as I feel, sipping intermittently—almost dutifully—at the coffee, letting the steady infusion of caffeine work its way through his system. Ten minutes from now he’ll be raring to go, and I’ll still be wiping sleep from my eyes. I’ve tried to like coffee, I really have. At times like this, I wish I’d tried harder.