The body lay frozen in the snow, fully clothed; heavy winter parka, fur lined hood pulled tight around her face, blue jeans, black knee-high boots and, though she was not now wearing them, a pair of blue mittens beside her body, half buried in ice. A pair of boys’ ice-skates lay off to the side of the body, as if thrown carelessly. Dojcsak fixed Pridmore with a questioning glance.
“Doesn’t mean a thing,” Sara said now, speaking finally, as if her lips had just thawed. “They belong to her. Girls wear them all the time.” She looked skyward, through the driving snow. “Just like Missy Bitson, Ed.”
“The ice skates?”
“The weather,” Pridmore explained. “Only that day it was rain, remember?”
Dojcsak kneeled by the body, out of the wind, in much the way Doctor Ward Fallon had done more than thirty-years previous, over the body of Frances Stoops. He raised his light to the victim’s face. Her expression was clear and unperturbed; as if this was destiny and all that passed before simply prelude to a final destination. Dojcsak did not search for vital signs; it was pointless. Pridmore, the State Police or both would have done so earlier. Still, Dojcsak touched his palm gently to the girl’s forehead, as if checking for fever.
“Has anyone touched her, conducted a body search?” he asked Pridmore without turning to her.
“No,” was the muted reply. “We’re waiting for the ME.”
Dojcsak focused the flashlight beam on the girl’s bare hands. They were frozen solid into small, tightly clenched fists. Unable to defend herself, Breanne had made a show of it nonetheless. Dojcsak pried at the knuckles of her left hand. Nothing. Next, he forced the index and middle finger to her right, moving them slightly. The others were impossibly constricted in a death-grip he was unable to loosen. In the palm of the child’s hand, something glittered like a snowflake in the powerful beam of the flashlight. Dojcsak detected a metallic object: a valuable piece of material evidence? He looked more closely. There, embedded in the skin and dusted with a fringe of dry and frozen blood, was what Dojcsak feared, yet knew with certainty he would find; his St. Jude Medallion.
He tore at the victim’s grasp, earnestly, though not desperately, trying to loosen the dead girl’s fingers. He began to shiver, to sweat even more heavily in his parka, if it was possible for him to do so. His heartbeat became irregular: thump, then thumpity, thump, thump, then thump again, then finally skipping a beat altogether, as if his internal engine had stalled. Dojcsak’s lungs burned, the ailing tissue flash-frozen by the bitter wind.
He continued to struggle. Dead people, he imagined.
“Anything?” Pridmore asked from over his shoulder, her face half hidden in the fur collar lining her jacket.
Sure, Dojcsak almost burst out, I see dead people.
“Ed, what is it?” asked Pridmore, moving closer.
Shelly Hayden, Frances Stoops, Lisa Diorio, Missy Bitson; other girls whose names he could not recall or had never known. Jordy Bitson, though he did not fit the profile: the first time ever Dojcsak could recall being motivated by pure self-interest. (Or was it shame, at what Jordy had witnessed in the alley and threatened to reveal?) No remorse, Dojcsak thought, none of them: no remorse, no shame and no guilt. While me? I am burdened with all three.
“What have you found, Ed?”
But Breanne Tauser would not relinquish her precious treasure so easily. Sensing the futility, Dojcsak stood finally to his feet, unsteady against the pounding wind. Resigned, he said to Sara, “Nothing. I need a smoke.”
Ed Dojcsak walked from the crime scene then, away from the body and through the snow.
He did not hear Sara Pridmore when she called out, “Ed, Ed! Where are you going?” He did not hear Sara when she muttered under her breath, “Jesus, Ed, I thought you’d stopped smoking.”
Dojcsak turned his back to Pridmore, the Troopers and the body. He walked slowly but purposefully toward the river, along a footpath to the dam and a barrier that had been erected years earlier in an effort to keep curious visitors and reckless teens from wandering too far along the break-wall. In summer, when the water was low and conditions dry, it wasn’t so dangerous. But in the early spring and late fall, when water levels became elevated, the drop in temperature caused a thin film of ice to accumulate on the concrete, making the surface treacherous.
Standing alone in the snow, Dojcsak wondered at the number of suicides here who had been classified mistakenly as accidental death. After all, he knew a walk along the break wall at any time between December and March guaranteed, to someone looking, virtually the same result.
Dojcsak mused, imagining himself a novelist tying up loose ends. As the author, he was quite satisfied with the outcome. If given the opportunity to rewrite, some things he would change but mostly leave unaltered, like the Ten Commandments carved indelibly in a tablet of hard stone. As with many things in his life and despite his best effort, Ed Dojcsak was locked into a pattern of simple behavior of which he was unaware and powerless to change.
END
THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE Page 45
