Past Master

by Richard Stockford

  At thirty-seven, Clipper was the commander of the Bangor Police Department’s Criminal Division. With a muscular one hundred and ninety pounds distributed on a wide-shouldered, six foot, one inch frame, he often surprised suspects with his easy interrogation technique and pleasant demeanor. Those that knew him well, or had crossed him in the past, were not taken in.

  On this Saturday morning, Clipper was at the station early, checking the prior night’s incident reports. When Eddie had been brought in, he’d elected to do a quick interrogation himself rather than bother whoever was on call.

  Wishing for the hundredth time that the interview rooms had windows, and making a mental note to check on air filtration systems, Clipper went back to his office to write a quick follow-up report before going home for the weekend.

  He got the report written, but any hope of going home died with the ringing of his desk phone.

  “Hey, Clip, glad I caught you in.” Clipper recognized the gravelly voice of Max Trimble, a State Police investigator based out of Troop E in Orono. “Couple of hunters found a dead body in a camp out in the thick stuff east of Howland this morning, and I think it’s one of yours.”

  One of the hardest potential crimes to evaluate is the missing person’s report. People of all ages and all walks of life go missing for reasons known only to themselves, leaving friends, relatives, and overworked authorities to guess whether they are the victims of criminal activity.

  The most common—and often the easiest—missing person reports to unravel are those of missing teens. Kids frequently talk to their friends or, lacking friends, talk to the world via social media, often dropping conspicuous clues in their frantic quest for a more meaningful life. They can generally be tracked to their new online friend or counter-culture enclave of personal freedom with just a little digging on the part of the investigator. Often they’re found, cold and hungry, just down the street but too stubborn or scared to go home on their own.

  The scary ones are when the missing person is a beautiful, level-headed, seventeen-year-old female honor student who leaves no clues at all when she vanishes without a trace on her way home from church. Like Kristen Pollack.

  Kristen Pollack had disappeared on Sunday, September 21st. She’d been at the Congregational Church, first helping with Bible School and then attending the ten o’clock service. She was last seen waving good-bye to her best friend, Samantha Dunn, as they parted ways at the corner of French and Summerset. Somewhere between there and her home, a five-minute walk away, she vanished.

  Her parents reported her missing at suppertime, after having called all her friends and the local emergency rooms. The unlikelihood of Kristen being a runaway was apparent even to the responding patrol officer, and he contacted the on-call detective to pass on his apprehension. By seven p.m., Kristen’s description was out to surrounding towns, and interviews were being conducted with her family members and friends.

  On Monday morning, Kristen’s information was entered into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and the Justice Department’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Over the next few days, detectives would trace and re-trace her route between the church and home, knocking on doors and talking to anyone who might have seen her. The email and browser histories on Kristen’s computer were examined, and her room and school locker were turned inside out with no results. Every known sexual deviate and offender in a fifty-mile radius was hauled in and interrogated, and all Kristen’s friends were interviewed and re-interviewed, all to no avail.

  For a short time, a fifteen-year-old would-be suitor named Edmond caught the investigators’ attention, but he turned out to be heavily alibied and had no trouble passing a polygraph exam. And all too soon, there was nowhere else to look.

  Kristen Pollack was not the only teenager to go missing in Bangor that summer, but she was the one that haunted the dreams of the investigators.

  Now, Clipper’s own instincts gave him the answer even as he asked the question. “Who?”

  “Well, it’s a female, hair color and clothing match Kristen Pollack, but we’ll probably need a dental match to make the call.” Trimble’s voice softened. “I’m headed out there now, if you want to take a look.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Clipper and Trimble joined two uniformed state troopers and a state crime scene team in the clearing in front of the small hunting camp. Clipper looked through the door without entering, listening in as the troopers made their report to Trimble.

  The camp consisted of a single rectangular room with the door and two windows in the long front wall. Clipper noticed the padlock hanging open on the door hasp and a gap where one of the windows shutters had apparently been pried off and propped back in place. A battered wooden table with four mismatched kitchen chairs sat on a square of faded red linoleum in the center of the room, with an ancient wood-burning cook stove and dry sink forming a rudimentary kitchen against the left wall. Along the right wall, there was a single bed at the back, where the shed roof was lower, and a set of bunk beds closer to the front; sleeping for three with a rope and blanket room divider for privacy. There were some crude board shelves and a rifle rack hanging on the unpainted walls, and Clipper noticed a cribbage board on the table and several oil lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Aside from some dusty cobwebs and the battery-powered lighting and crime scene equipment cases, the cabin was remarkably clean and uncluttered.

  When the troopers finished with their rundown, Clipper slipped a pair of plastic shoe covers onto his feet, and he and Trimble joined a crime scene technician and an assistant medical examiner where they stood by the bunk beds. The corpse was on the top bunk, lying on its back, mummified hands neatly crossed on its sunken abdomen. Long blond hair fanned out on the pillow, surrounding a grinning skull still covered with patches of yellowing, leathery skin. The clothing—a sweater, blouse, and medium-length skirt—was all stained a muddy brown, as were the thin mattress, and the part of the mattress on the lower bunk beneath the body.

  “No jewelry or ID that we can find,” said one of the crime scene specialists.

  “And no weapon,” added the assistant ME, “but it looks like the back of her skull is fractured. “She may have fallen, hit her head and had enough left to just crawl in here and lay down to die.”

  Clipper snorted. “Yeah, and the tooth fairy may have flown her out here.” He leaned close to look at the slightly crooked tooth in the corpse’s upper jaw and mentally compared it to the photo he had reviewed before Trimble picked him up.

  The official identification would have to wait for the autopsy, but Clipper knew that Kristen Pollack was no longer missing.

  Clipper returned to the station and made calls to his lead identification technician, Dave Adams, and his second in command, Sergeant John Peters, to fill them in on the discovery.

  Dave Adams, although young, was one of the best forensic investigators in the state, and he routinely attended Bangor’s autopsies at the State Crime Lab in Augusta, observing, helping to confirm the victims’ identity, and collecting and preserving the continuity of any evidence found.

  “Dave, the State’s doing the scene and the removal, but they’re holding the scene for us, too. It’s getting late today, but I’d like you and Randy to hit it tomorrow. The post won’t be till Tuesday.”

  Kristen Pollack’s missing persons case had originally been assigned to Detective Evan Paul, Bangor’s primary juvenile investigator, but Clipper knew that John Peters had taken a particular interest in the case.

  “John, grab Evan when he comes in on Monday, and let’s get this thing back on the front burner. The State’ll share their crime scene stuff with us, but I’m having Dave and Randy go out there tomorrow, too.”

  “Who found her?” Peters asked.

  “The guys who own the hunting camp. A couple of old-timers, getting ready for the season. Max Trimble will drop the info off when they clear the scene.”

  “I’m not doing anything. Maybe I’ll come in and take
a look.”

  Clipper knew how Peters felt. Sometimes the hardest thing to do was nothing at all. “John, she’s been dead for a long time—probably since she disappeared. There’s nothing to do until we get positive ID and some idea of how she died.”

  Before he left, Clipper called Chief of Police Albert Norris at home to let him know about the case. He neither expected nor wanted any investigative help from the department’s bureaucratic head, but made the call as a courtesy and then hunted up the unfinished Pollack case book before heading home. He’d spend the rest of the day reacquainting himself with the case.

  Early Sunday morning, Clipper got a call from Max Trimble.

  “Thought I’d give you a heads up,” Trimble said. “The news got wind of our girl in Howland, so it’ll be in Monday’s paper.”

  Clipper swapped his Sunday jeans and sweatshirt for slacks and a sports coat, and went to give Kristen Pollack’s parents the grim news before they heard it somewhere else.

  Chapter Three

  Nineteen-year-old Chelsea Amburg hated Sunday nights. This was her one-night-a-week late shift at Hal’s Handy Stop, a seedy gas and suds store on Route 15 leading out of Bangor, and not only did the late hours—twelve thirty by the time she got home—wreck her for anything productive the next day, she didn’t like being alone in the secluded store after dark. This wasn’t a bad part of town, exactly, but it was damned lonely at night. Her boss had been good enough to put in a panic button alarm, and she always had free coffee for the beat cop and a can of pepper spray close at hand but, no matter how many times she chided herself for being a baby, she was still apprehensive.

  Tonight had been quiet; a couple carloads of college kids buying beer and several of her favorite kind of gas customers: the ones that paid at the pump and didn’t come into the store at all. At the stroke of midnight, she quickly stuffed the deposit into the floor safe slot and turned off all the electric except the night lights in the windows. She grabbed her purse, and at four past midnight, with the front door securely locked behind her, she hurried across the parking lot to her death.

  The call came, as they often do, just as Clipper was leaving the house. He liked to start his day early, fresh, and available when the sun wiped away the concealing darkness and the prior night’s transgressions were revealed to the world. Clipper had commanded the Criminal Division of the Bangor Police Department for the past three and a half years, and he rarely tired of each new day’s offerings. He climbed into his truck, glancing at the caller ID.

  “Hi, Allen, what’s up?”

  “We got a dead girl at the Handy Stop on outer Broadway.” Detective Allen Oaks was the on-call investigator for the week, a duty that came around to everyone in the division every ten weeks or so. “She works here. The guy who opened up this morning recognized her car in the lot when he came in to open up and found her out behind the building. I’ve got Doc Church and Dave and his crew on the way.”

  Twenty minutes later, after a quick stop at Dunkin Donuts, Clipper pulled up behind a short line of vehicles parked by the entrance of a small parking lot on the outskirts of the city. There were two vehicles, an older blue Toyota and a rusted-out Chevy pickup parked at the rear of the lot. He nodded to the uniformed officer already maintaining the crime scene log, and stepped carefully along the outside of the yellow tape that lined the lot. The thin brown grass at the edge of the woods behind the store, sprinkled with tiny wildflowers and fall’s first turning leaves, made a surreal setting for the body that Oaks and Doc Church were squatting beside.

  The slightly built woman was lying face up, pallid flesh showing dully through her torn clothing. Dave Adams was also inside the taped-off area, planting small flags in the grass. Conscious of the fragility of possible trace evidence, Clipper waited behind the tape on the edge of the pavement, sipping black coffee until Oaks and Doc Church rose and made their way back to him.

  Bertram Church, M.D. was an elderly Bangor pathologist who had served for years as an assistant State Medical Examiner, making initial crime scene observations in Bangor and the surrounding towns and freeing the Chief Medical Examiner for his duty of conducting autopsies and finalizing the cause of death at the State Lab in Augusta. Clipper liked and respected the old man, having come to rely on his canny observations and sound medical counsel.

  “Bad one, Clip,” Church said. “Looks like her skull was crushed, probably sometime between midnight and two or two-thirty; rigor’s not complete yet. Judging by the blood and lividity, it probably happened right here. There's a piece of re-bar with blood and hair all over it right beside her.”

  “Raped?”

  “Yeah, not much doubt.”

  “Any ID?”

  “Nothing I could see. No jewelry or anything, either.”

  Oaks nodded at the far side of the taped-off lot. “I saw some tire marks in the mud over there, and Dave hasn’t finished his search yet.”

  Clipper walked over to where Adams was studying some faint marks in the grass. “Anything you need?” he asked.

  “We’re okay. Randy’s on the way out with the rest of the gear. We’ll probably be here most of the day, but we finished with the Pollack scene yesterday.”

  A patrolman came up and touched Clipper’s arm. “The owner's here, raising hell out front. The guy who found her is in my car, but he's pretty much a basket case. He said that Toyota belongs to the girl who worked last night. He spotted it when he got here and saw the keys on the ground beside it. When he found the store locked, he went looking out back and found her. I think he’ll need some time before you’ll get much more out of him. I'll take him in to the station if you'll deal with the owner.”

  Clipper nodded, and he and Oaks walked to the front of the lot where a tall, bulky, balding man with thick glasses and a protruding pot belly stood ranting at a uniformed officer. He was dressed in jeans, rundown loafers, and a wrinkled green sports coat.

  “This is totally unacceptable,” he brayed before Clipper could even introduce himself. “There’s no answer at her apartment or on her cell. This is bad, totally unacceptable. She just left her car and just threw the store keys on the ground. She’s out partying and leaves my damn keys on the ground for anyone to find. I want her charged with dereliction or whatever it is.”

  Clipper showed his badge to the irate man. “Tom Clipper,” he said. “Who are you and who are we talking about?”

  “Chelsea. Chelsea Amburg,” the man replied. “Last night was her night shift. I know she doesn’t like the night shift, but I only asked her to do it one night a week, and it’s her damn job to protect my interests, right?” The man’s pugnacious tone grated on Clipper’s ears, but he kept his voice neutral.

  “Can you describe Chelsea for me, Mister...?”

  “Petersen, Harold Petersen. Listen, I own this place, and you clowns got no right to keep me outta my own store. I gotta open up and make sure she didn't rob the place.”

  Clipper caught and held Petersen's eyes for a moment before replying. “This property is a crime scene, Mister Petersen, and nobody's going to set foot in that store until I say so. Now, I'll ask you one more time to give me a description of your employee.”

  “Crime scene! I knew it. How much damage did they do?”

  Clipper glanced at Allen Oaks. “Perhaps Mr. Petersen would be more inclined to cooperate if you gave him a ride to the station,” he said.

  Petersen gulped and lowered his voice. “Okay, okay. As a courtesy. She’s nineteen. About five four, blond. A college kid. Real foxy, ya know?”

  “When would she have closed the store?”

  “Midnight, if she even bothered to stay that long. We’re open till midnight on Sundays.”

  “Do you have an outside surveillance camera?” asked Clipper, hoping for a shortcut, but not surprised at Petersen’s negative response.

  “I got one inside so the help don’t rip me off, but who the hell can afford more cameras? I put in a panic button,” he said, “and you guys, the cops, c
ome around for free coffee all night.”

  “When was the last time you saw Chelsea?”

  “When I left at six o’clock last night.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yeah. Sunday night there prob’ly ain't enough business to even cover her salary.”

  “Did you come by again last night? To check the store or cash up or anything?”

  Petersen looked away. “No. I was home all night.”

  “Were you with anyone? Anyone who could verify that?”

  Petersen bristled. “I was alone. Why the hell do I have to prove where I was? Amburg’s the one who took off.” He shrugged. “Look, maybe you just tow her car out of here and, if she didn't rip me off, we just forget the whole thing.”

  Oaks allowed his distaste for the store owner to show. “Because Chelsea Amburg was murdered last night and you’re apparently one of the last people who talked to her,” he said baldly.

  Clipper had Petersen transported to the station for a formal interview, and was just leaving himself when the first TV van showed up.

  He took a moment to talk to the reporter, confirming only that a dead body had been found, and then left the scene, mentally juggling the logistics of a second homicide investigation.

  Chapter Four

  Bangor’s Criminal Division shared the top floor of the three-story police station with the department’s administrative offices, and Clipper found himself riding up in the elevator with the chief of police.

  Chief Albert Norris was a small, fussy man, a bureaucrat through and through, who Clipper thought should be managing an insurance office rather than a police department. Hired two years before from a large department on the West Coast, and claiming twenty-five years’ experience in law enforcement, Norris had never demonstrated any investigative instincts, and the two men were frequently at odds over procedural matters. They managed a somewhat shaky truce based on Norris’s skills in keeping politicians at bay and Clipper’s higher than average case closure rate. Managing and mitigating behind the scenes, the chief’s spinster secretary, Miss Enola Elliot, kept the alliance working.