RandomActNEWpub

by Random Act (retail) (epub)

  There was an unintelligible response and the cop put her hand on the injured woman’s shoulder. A worker came up with a blanket, the kind you move furniture with. He flapped it open and the cop helped him cover the woman, all but her head. The blanket smeared the blood across the floor.

  Two more uniforms arrived, an older sergeant and a patrolman. The patrolman helped the first cop yank the hatchet guy to his feet. They hustled him out of the sliding doors, weaving with him as he struggled. He was shouting and they drove him into the side of a cruiser, sprayed him again. The guy screamed, “Your power is nothing!”

  Rescue rolled up and two paramedics swung out of the truck and trotted inside. I could see them crouching beside the woman, the woman cop standing there with her arms folded across her flak vest. The paramedics were reaching in, touching the woman’s neck, then her head.

  She was on her side, her mouth open, her face pale. The blanket was pulled down and her right hand lay in the pool of blood. Next to her hand was a gold-painted pinecone. It was bloody, too. Behind her there was a bin of them and I pictured her picking one up, wondering if the gold would look tacky.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  I felt myself sinking. I should have stopped to talk to her. I’d walked away. “Harry, the nice man has a pony.”

  They slid the woman onto a board, still facedown, and lifted the board onto the gurney. The pool of blood showed black on the floor, like a car had leaked its oil.

  The sergeant, a balding guy with a gut, said, “Everybody out,” and started waving his arms like he was herding sheep. The woman cop looked at me and said, “Sir, come with me.”

  As the cops unrolled crime tape, she led the way to her cruiser and turned. She was young, early twenties, right out of the academy. Her hair was pulled back tight and she had a military posture with broad shoulders, strong like a gym rat. Her name tag said Hernandez.

  “You spoke to the woman here. Can you point out her car?”

  I turned. It was maybe fifty feet away. The yappy dog was sitting quietly in the driver’s seat, waiting for his mistress to return.

  “Right there.”

  “Was there anyone else with her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just the dog. His name is Harry.”

  I added, “She’s dead, isn’t she.”

  Hernandez hesitated.

  “It’s a very serious injury.”

  “Right,” I said. “You know, she was really nice. Friendly. Cheerful.” I looked toward the wreaths and bows. “She said we were early birds.”

  My mind raced. Maybe if I’d stopped to chat he would have picked somebody else. Maybe he would have been discouraged and left. Maybe I could have stopped him, grabbed him before he could get in a swing.

  I said, “You all know the hatchet guy?”

  A beat of hesitation. “We’re familiar with him.”

  “What’s with the talk about gods and mortals? Is that his shtick? Mentally ill?”

  Hernandez looked away, then said, “I really can’t go into that.”

  “I understand,” I said. “And you should know I’m a reporter.”

  She turned to look at me.

  “From around here?”

  “I live in Prosperity.”

  “Reporter for who?”

  “Myself. Freelance,” I said. “The Globe. New York Times.”

  “Christ. All we need.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just hard enough without the media making stuff up.”

  “I’m not making up anything. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  She shifted back to business, said, “So you witnessed the assault?”

  “No, just heard screams. From the register.”

  “I doubt it was her who was screaming,” Hernandez said, then caught herself.

  The sergeant came to the gate and waved her over and she said, “Just wait here,” and hurried away. I watched the cops and then walked to the woman’s car. The dog started to bark, and when I got close he started jumping up and down, clawing at the glass.

  “Easy boy,” I said. “Easy.”

  I turned and glanced back to the cops, then walked around the car to the passenger side. The dog leapt across, slammed against that window. I stood close and peered in. The dog was jumping on a stack of mail. I leaned down, saw the name on the top envelope, Lindy Hines. The envelope had been forwarded. The new address was 112 Franklin Street, Riverport. The old address was a P.O. Box, Bernard, Maine. Mount Desert Island, the backside.

  A summer house on MDI? Just moved to Riverport?

  I looked the car over, the dog still barking tirelessly. The Honda was no more than a year old, barely any snow on it. Garaged. The seats were leather, a top-of-the-line model. She’d had some money. A plan. Spend the winter in the city, head back to Mount Desert for the summer. Or maybe she’d moved to Riverport for a new job. I pictured her—a friendly person, confident, at least on the surface. Was there a Mr. Hines waiting at home? Maybe they were supposed to meet for lunch. Maybe they had kids to visit. Which cop was going to be the one to break the unfathomable, impossible news? “Your wife was buying a Christmas wreath and a stranger walked up and killed her with a hatchet. We’re very sorry for your loss.”

  And I kept on walking. Jesus.

  I went to my truck, grabbed a notebook from the console. Leaning over the seat, I scribbled the name and addresses. Glancing back, I took the plate number of the car, stuck the notebook in my jacket pocket, and started back toward the cruiser. With my phone, I took a shot of the Honda and the crime scene in the background. And as I walked past, a shot of the dog sitting in the driver’s seat. He looked at me and mustered a halfhearted bark.

  Maybe he remembered me—the guy he’d barked at, that his mistress tried to make small talk with . . . the one who went right through the automatic doors and was gone.

  So she went out to the garden shop, maybe with the guy in the boots and the black hood following her. Maybe she’d smiled at him, made eye contact. Maybe he’d noticed she was alone, that if somebody was going to be sacrificed, she’d be an easy mark. And she never saw it coming, her time on this planet ended in the most violent, random way.

  The dog yipped again.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said.

  But it wasn’t.

  6

  k

  I was back in my designated spot when the detectives rolled up in an unmarked silver Malibu. They were out of the car—a man and a woman, the woman striding ahead. The lead detective, literally. She was tall, slender, had short-cropped reddish hair. He was shorter, chunky with a barrel chest, shaved head, and a goatee. She was wearing a fleece vest; he was wearing a short jacket. I watched as they bent under the crime tape, holding the tape up so it cleared the guns on their hips. They walked to the sergeant, who was standing by the blood. The three of them looked down at it like it might hold a clue, then walked to where the hatchet still lay on the pavement.

  This time the detectives crouched. The woman detective stood and the guy followed her lead. The sergeant led them to the clerk, the woman who had screamed. The woman detective shook her hand and the guy held back. They led her to the Malibu and she sat in the front seat with the woman detective. The guy shut the car door for the clerk and then walked over to me.

  “Detective Tingley,” he said. No small talk. Abrupt. I got it. This was a murder scene.

  “Jack McMorrow,” I said.

  He looked at me and said, “The reporter? New York Times?”

  “Stringer,” I said.

  “Huh,” he said. “What are the chances?”

  “Of being killed by a stranger while you’re buying a Christmas wreath?”

  “Of a reporter standing there when somebody gets killed by a stranger while she’s buying a Christmas wreath.
”

  “I wasn’t exactly right there. I was at the register. I ran over when I heard somebody screaming. Like everybody else. Have we met?”

  “Not until now,” he said. “But I know guys in ATF. The thing in Waldo County.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The guns.”

  “And I know a guy in the fire marshal’s office. The arsons down in—where was it?”

  “Sanctuary,” I said.

  “Right.”

  He looked at me with distaste.

  “I don’t need you getting in the way.”

  “I didn’t mean to be, believe me.”

  “Your rep. You ask a million questions, don’t take our word for anything. Then you go off and do your own investigation, step all over evidence, witnesses, turn things into a freaking cluster.”

  “I like to think of it as being thorough.”

  He gave me a close look.

  “And that was when you were just a reporter. Now you’re a witness.”

  “More like a bystander,” I said.

  He looked at me, shook his head.

  “Go ahead.”

  I told him how I’d interacted with the victim. He wrote it down, and said, without looking up, “She say anything lead you to think she was in danger?”

  “No. She was cheerful. Making small talk. It’s really unbelievable. That this happened.”

  Tingley shrugged.

  “Hey, off the record—and if you burn me, I’ll cut your balls off—streets of this city are crawling with freakin’ whack jobs. Every once in a while, one of them goes totally off his nut. We come in and pick up the pieces. Tell me what you said to the deceased.”

  I did. The dolly. The barking dog. The friendly smile. I didn’t tell him I knew her name and where she lived. I didn’t tell him she wanted to chat and I kept on going.

  “You know this guy with the hatchet, don’t you. He a regular.”

  “We haven’t released his name,” Tingley said.

  “I know that. Just thinking he must be a frequent flyer.”

  He looked over toward the Malibu, where his partner was still questioning the woman, hesitated.

  “Come on, off the record. Background,” I said. “I’m just wondering. I mean, if he’s a transient, you’ve never seen him before, it’s a very different story. There’d be a very different feel to all of this. Am I right? This is way too, I don’t know, calm.”

  Tingley looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Nope.”

  “Okay, tell me if this is way off. He’s a local guy, probably homeless, at least some of the time. PD has been dealing with him for years. When he’s on his meds, he’s harmless, maybe even productive. When he’s off them, he wigs out and gets in trouble. But nothing like this before.”

  He hesitated, then shook his head again.

  “I just wonder what he was thinking?” I said. “Why this poor lady? And how did he get here? Can’t imagine he drives, so what did he do? Take the bus with his mask and cape under his jacket? Seems like that would take some planning and premeditation. Who’s Hakata? If this was his big fixation, I wonder if he had other hatchets. Do police take them away, reports of him raving on some street corner, waving the thing around? To come all the way out here—ax central—and pick one up and immediately kill somebody, the first stranger he sees, practically . . .”

  I paused. He didn’t butt in. I figured I had the green light.

  “Was he getting sicker? Maybe the meds weren’t working. I wonder if he had a guardian or anything. A mental health worker? Did anybody have an inkling he was going off the deep end? And why this lady? Did this woman remind him of somebody? His mother? A teacher? She sure didn’t look like a comic book character. And he looks like he’s what, late twenties? If he’s attacked people before, did he get off because he’s sick? Is this an escalation but not something entirely new? Should somebody have seen this coming?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, McMorrow.”

  “That your partner?” I said, looking toward the Malibu.

  “Detective Bates. She’s senior, does the bigger homicides. Don’t play games with her.”

  “Bad cop, badder cop?”

  “She’ll rip you a new one.”

  Detective Bates was talking to the store manager, who was pointing to the girders under the roof of the nursery. They both stared upward. Surveillance camera.

  Tingley looked over at me, said, “Off the record. Slam dunk.”

  We stood for a minute, feet getting cold on the frozen pavement. The sky was a new shade of gray, with dark billowing clouds off to the west. It felt like another snowstorm, like we were locked in some black orbit. Cold. Snow. Death.

  Tingley looked behind me where customers were pulling in, looking to buy wooden planters filled with balsam fir boughs and holly berries. A woman got out of a minivan, slid a door open, and kids tumbled out. Tingley started toward them, hands up in front of him.

  A red VW pulled in, a snowboard on a rack on top. A young guy got out, tucked a notebook in his back pocket, and headed for the cops. He looked vaguely familiar. I figured the Riverport Broadcast.

  I moved toward the main entrance, where a group of workers was standing all in a row, like coaches on a sideline. Some were smoking. One was off to the side, fifteen feet away. She was on her phone, pacing as she talked.

  The woman from the toilet aisle. She’d been headed through the sliding door to the nursery when the guy attacked the woman. The primary witness.

  I walked slowly, stayed close to the concrete blocks and the snow throwers. When I got close, I stopped. Looked across the lot and waited.

  “It’s just totally fucking insane,” she was saying to somebody. “He just took this big ax thing and walked up behind the lady and lifted it up and smashed it down. Like he was splitting wood . . . I was right there, like twenty feet away. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I’m saying, ‘Oh my God. This can’t be happening.’ I mean, it’s on TV all the time, people getting mowed down by some nut job. And here it is, happening right here in front of me. Unbelievable.”

  She held her phone up.

  “I got some video. People had phones out all over the place.”

  I scribbled in my notebook. Like he was splitting wood.

  The woman said, “No, just after, the crazy bastard ranting, No, not when he killed her. What do you think I am? Listen, I gotta go. No, they said I can’t go anywhere until I talk to the detective lady . . . Right . . . I’ll text you. No, we’re closed. It’s friggin’ unbelievable.”

  She slipped the phone in the back pocket of her jeans, pulled a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket, and lit one. Put her head back and blew the smoke skyward, like a whale spouting. The smoke started to drift away and she pulled the phone out again, stared at it, put it back in her pocket.

  I moved alongside her. Heard the sound of shouting. She was replaying the video.

  She looked at me.

  “Oh, the toilet,” she said. “Sorry you didn’t get it. We don’t have no say over them closing us down.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  I surveyed the scene.

  “Unbelievable, huh.”

  “God almighty, did you see it?” she said.

  “No. I was behind you. She was down when I came through the door.”

  “Unfreakin’ real. The sound. I’ll never forget that fucking sound.”

  She took a pull on the cigarette, said, “I don’t know if I can go back in there.”

  I smiled. “Give it a day.”

  “I won’t sleep for a freakin’ week. That poor lady. That poor, poor lady. Splattered her like a bug. Just standing there looking at the wreaths. I mean, what the hell? And she gets killed. What kind of whacked-out world is this, you know what I’m saying?”

  I stood for a moment while she sm
oked, took her phone out, put it back.

  “I’m Jack,” I said.

  She hesitated, like maybe I was hitting on her. And if I were, was that good or bad? She gave me a quick once-over.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Sheila.”

  She was forty, maybe much younger. Her eyes were puffy from crying, or maybe from cigarettes. Or both. A decent, weathered face. She pulled her red Home Department fleece tight around her.

  “I should tell you, Sheila,” I said. “I’m a newspaper reporter.”

  Her head jerked sideways toward me. “Buying a toilet? You working?”

  “I wasn’t when I got here. I am now.”

  “This gonna be in the paper tomorrow?”

  I shook my head—reassuringly, I hoped.

  “No, I don’t write for Maine papers. I write for other papers. New York. Boston. Magazines.”

  I said it like they were very far away.

  “I write longer stories. Sometimes they take weeks to put together.”

  Weeks. As in, no worries.

  “Why are you here? In Riverport?”

  “I live here,” I said. “Down in Waldo County.”

  She processed that, finished her cigarette and dropped it to the ground, ground it out with her Nike. Took a ChapStick out of the pocket of her jacket and lathered that on. “What a fucking nightmare,” Sheila said. “I’m telling ya.”

  “I’m sure.”

  I slipped my notebook out, said, “Mind if I take a few notes? I mean, you were right there, right?”

  “Freakin’ right behind them. They’re just walking along. Everything was fine and then, boom.”

  “He was carrying the hatchet?”

  “Yeah. Tomahawk ax. Thirty-nine ninety-eight. They’re, like, super high-quality. They use ’em in the military.”

  “Tomahawk,” I said.

  “I know. Like the Indians. Jesus.”

  “Had he bought it?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he picked it up over in Tools and was just walking around with it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Some crazy shit. Gods and mortals, and he’s shaking the hatchet up at the ceiling and talking about his power. Christ, I knew he was kinda nuts but—”