Glimpse

by Stephen B King

  Mike Roundtree wheezed and shook his head, motioning for Rick to follow him out of the taped area. Thirty meters away, he sat on an old oil drum, dropped his bag, and took out a packet of cigarettes. With trembling hands, he struck a match and cupped his hands around it as he lit up. He took a deep inward breath and then slowly puffed out a huge cloud of smoke.

  “I fucking needed that.” He shook his head. “I’m just getting too old for this shit.”

  “It’s a dog eat dog world, Mike. What can you tell me?”

  “Not fucking much at all. I daren’t open any more packages here and risk contamination. There may be fingerprints we can use on the plastic, so I only opened one to confirm it’s human. And it is. The rest you’re going to have to wait for until we get back to the lab. I want to help you get this fucker, so I will work on it overnight, and have a report for you in the morning.” He took another deep pull on his cigarette.

  “Male, female, old, young?”

  “Female, I could see the head through the plastic. That’s all for now, but by the looks of things, she has been dead only a matter of a day or two. Now, don’t quote me, but I’d say this woman was malnourished.”

  Rick raised an eyebrow. “You mean like a homeless person?”

  “Possibly, or someone who had been starved. The skin had contracted on the portion of the arm I uncovered. Also, there were minor cuts and stab wounds; I’d say it’s a fair bet she was tortured before death.”

  “Oh, I see. Give me one of your smokes, Mike.”

  “I thought you quit?”

  “I did. And I will again, this is just a momentary relapse.”

  ****

  Rick watched as the suitcase was lifted out of the pit and set gently inside the coroner’s vehicle. He turned and walked gingerly to the witness, who looked like he could cry at any moment. “Mr. Broughton, is it? I’m Detective Sergeant Richard McCoy, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you feeling?”

  Harvey shook his head and blinked back tears. “I never seen nothing like it. Jesus, I’m gonna have nightmares about this.”

  “Is there anyone at home, Mr. Broughton? I don’t think you should be on your own, this kind of thing can be quite a nasty shock.” He gripped the man’s arm to show empathy.

  “The wife is there, waiting for me. This lass phoned her so she wouldn’t worry.” He pointed at Helen, whose name Rick recalled from a party some weeks before.

  “Good, good. Now Mr. Broughton, I hope you understand I need to ask a few questions. Did you see who left the suitcase, or notice anyone suspicious hanging around who might have dumped it?”

  “I wish I did. It gave me a nasty turn opening it up and seeing that mess. When I was backing up my trailer, there was a white van leaving, but I’m not saying that was who did it. It’s just that that was the only other vehicle here.”

  Rick nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, so just to clarify, can you think back for me? You were backing up your trailer when you noticed the van, are you saying that it left from the area where the suitcase was located, or somewhere else?”

  “Well, I’m parked over that side.” He pointed to where his beige colored Chrysler was parked, “and the van was over that way. It could have been. But I couldn’t say exactly, because he was driving away as I was driving in.”

  “So, it was a man driving?”

  “Oh no, sorry, I just assumed it was a man, you know, driving a van and going to the dump. Well, it’s hardly something a woman would do, is it? The sun was reflecting off the glass so I couldn’t see who was inside, not that I really looked, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I suppose that’s a fair assumption, Mr. Broughton. So, just to confirm, you didn’t see anyone else around, and you didn’t see the driver of the van, but it was a white color? Do you recall what make or model it was?”

  He looked blankly back at the detective. “It was just one of those Japanese ones that look like an oblong box on wheels, I’m sorry.”

  “So no stickers, or signwriting on it, you wouldn’t have noticed part or all of the license plate?”

  “Not that I can remember, no.” He shook his head, emphatically, but still looked close to tears.

  “All right, Mr. Broughton, that will be all for now. You go home and have a nice cup of tea. This is my card—” he took one from his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. “—If you think of anything else, especially about this white van, please, give me a call. I will visit you tomorrow to see if you’ve recalled any other details and take a written statement from you. I will also bring a book full of images of vans to see if can recognize a make or model.”

  They shook hands and Rick walked him to his car. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive home, Mr. Broughton?” He opened the driver’s door, and watched as the man gingerly climbed in.

  He nodded, and grimaced climbing into the seat. “As you say, a nice cup of tea will help.”

  Rick thanked Helen for spending time with the witness, then watched as he drove away, with her alongside him, acting as his chaperone to see him out of the gates. Poor old bugger, not the best Sunday he’s ever had.

  He spoke with the senior Crime Scene Investigator and confirmed his earlier thought that no significant evidence had been found so far. Nor are they likely to find anything no matter how long they search.

  Rick’s next stop was to the transportable building which served as an office and lunchroom for the staff. He knocked on the door and entered without waiting for a reply. Inside a man sat with his feet up on a desk, reading a dog-eared adult magazine. The office had a dusty and damp smell to it, and clearly hadn’t seen a cleaner for weeks.

  “You’re the police I take it?” he said in a disgusted tone, tossing the magazine back onto the cluttered desk. “Harry Melton, site supervisor. I was told to wait around till you showed up.” Harry was a big man. Rick was shocked that he could be so overweight and still hold onto his job, as he seemed incapable of being able to walk too far without being out of breath.

  “Detective Sergeant Richard McCoy, thanks for waiting. What can you tell me about the operation here? I’m trying to narrow down a time frame of when the suitcase might have been left.”

  Melton sat up, waddling his body from side to sit to gain leverage. He shook his head and took the card Rick offered to him. “Since the council cut back on staff we don’t have the manpower here like we used to. So, what we do is this: We run two tip faces, one for the weekend warriors, where you’ve come from now, and the other, on the Western side, for during the week, mainly for commercial and councils. At the end of each shift, and twice during the day, we come along with our D9 Dozer, the one parked out back, and crush everything in, cart away what we need to, and tidy up the area by burying everything under sand. That’s how the tip face moves every day.”

  “So, as the case wasn’t buried, the only thing I can tell you is that it was dumped there sometime this afternoon, but as to what time?” He shrugged. “I’d say it was quite recent, as I’m sure one of us would have seen it sitting there on our walkthroughs, but I couldn’t swear on a Bible exactly when. Occasionally, we wander through to make sure everything is okay, and see if we need to run the D9 over the area specially. People are often messy with how they leave their stuff. But, we didn’t today because it was quiet. We probably got only three to four hundred vehicles through.”

  “Three to four hundred?” Rick couldn’t keep the disbelief and frustration from his voice.

  “Yeah, some Sundays it’s much higher than that. Well, we don’t count them as they drive in. Being rate payers we don’t charge patrons to dump, so anyone can enter during the hours of seven and four. I’d say three to four hundred conservatively, but it might be five hundred for all I know.”

  “And, stupid question I’m guessing, but no CCTV?”

  “What, at a dump? What are they going to steal, rubbish?” He laughed.

  Rick could see this was another dead end. Fuck it. I hope there is some forensic help from the body or s
uitcase.

  He looked at his watch and realized with a sinking heart that it was too late to go past his old house. On weekends, when he wasn’t working, or had rights to see Amy, he liked to go and sit in his car on the far side of the playground and see if she was there, with her mother. Sometimes, if the weather was nice, Juliet would take Amy to the park, across the road from their house, and Rick could watch and remember when his life was good. He knew that by the time he got there, it would be too late, and yet another week had gone by without him seeing his beautiful daughter.

  “Thanks for your help, and hanging around to talk to me, I appreciate it. I’ll be back around tomorrow to interview everyone who worked here today, so if you think of anything that could be useful, please let me know.”

  Rick left the transportable building and made the decision there was little point in staying any longer. As he walked back to the car, bitter and twisted at the situation that had seen him estranged from Juliet, his mobile phone rang. He took it from his jacket pocket and pulled the aerial out if its socket so hard it almost came off in his hand.

  He barked into it, “McCoy.”

  “Boss, its Tyler, sorry I missed your call, I was at the movies with Bette and the kids. What’s up, do you need me there?”

  “Nah, it’s Ok. Enjoy your family time, mate. Not much else to do here. It’s a dead end until we get forensics and an ID. I’m about to leave.”

  “Have you eaten boss? Drop in, Bette would love to see you, come and have dinner with us.”

  Rick was tempted, very tempted. “Give Bette my apologies, tell her I have a date, otherwise I would.”

  “You’ve got a date? That’s fantastic.”

  Yeah, a date with a bottle of scotch.

  “See you in the morning.” Before his partner could answer, he hit the end button, and shoved the aerial closed.

  Chapter 2: My Memoir Entry - The First Glimpse

  I was five years old, when I first saw someone bleed out. Bleed out was one of my father’s expressions. I remember it as if it was yesterday. But, what I remember most, wasn’t the sight of the blood, and boy, there was lots of that, but how it affected me; how it made me feel. If I had to use one word to describe it, it would be euphoric. I hasten to add, that at that age I didn’t know what the word euphoric meant; that was an adjective I came to learn much later when I analyzed my feelings after my first kill.

  I had been out at the country fair with my dad; he was a big man. When we walked, he would always hold my hand, and when I looked up at him to answer a question, or ask him one, his face would often be haloed by the sun. It would make me blink and I always thought of him as a saint. During Sunday school, at Father Charles’s Church of The Immaculate Conception, we used to color in pictures of the Disciples, with worn down stubby pencils that had been sharpened repeatedly over the years. Those holy people always had a halo, just like my dad did in the noon-day sun when I looked up at him.

  He was a butcher by trade, tall, with huge sideburns and a haircut that has been described since as a ‘mullet.’ He had his own shop in Mundaring, which is in the Eastern hills of Perth, in Western Australia, and all the locals loved him. This was back when it wasn’t part of the metropolitan area as it is now with urban sprawl. It was treated as a day trip to visit the National Park, which people did then for a picnic and a bush walk.

  Sometimes, when he worked, he would let me watch him cut up the big carcasses of pigs and cows as they hung upside down on a long chain that ran along the roof in the cool room. I used to sit on the cold floor, with my favorite collection of Matchbox cars, and make roads in the sawdust, while he cut joints of meat from his babies, as he called them.

  Looking back now, that was where it all started. The first spark, if you will, that eventually became a conflagration—an obsession that went on to rule my life. It began with dreams of using a knife to hurt and dismember my victims, and later, became a reality.

  I sat surrounded by my toy cars, in the sawdust which was there to absorb any spilt animal blood, as my father lovingly, seductively even, used a cleaver to cut through bone and muscle. I loved watching him. The harsh overhead lighting used to glint and flash off the polished steel as he sculptured his carcasses into jointed slabs of meat.

  I often wondered why the carcasses didn’t scream when he cut them into big chunks, so I asked Dad that very question. He had his arm up to his elbow in a sheep, as it hung upside down from the chain at the time. Just for a moment he looked at me, then burst into a hearty laugh. He must have seen I was serious, and he told me that the animal most certainly would have screamed, if it wasn’t already dead.

  Naturally, that evoked a long conversation about death, and how the animals he cut up every day had been killed. He explained that that was why there was minimal blood dripping on the concrete floor beneath the swinging sheep: it had been humanely dispatched in an abattoir. That, he explained, was a place where death was the only outcome for those beasts that went in. Once dead, it had been bled out, that was how he described it, bled out, and then had been eviscerated. He went on to say that his babies were no longer animals, they were meat for the dinner table.

  I suppose he meant well. I was an inquisitive child, always bombarding him and Mother with questions. That was before she left us, which she did suddenly one stinking hot March weekend, when the temperature had climbed to forty degrees Celsius for the third day in a row. He was trying to show me, at the tender age of somewhere between four and five years old, that all things die, and, sometimes there is a purpose in death. I don’t think he meant to indicate we should find pleasure in killing and carving up animals, but forever after that conversation, I had dreams.

  I didn’t dream every night, and if I did, not all dreams luridly involved flashing knives, scarlet rain drops, and screaming animals. But some did. And the older I got, the more colorful and detailed they became. Is it any surprise that as time went on, in some dreams, the incidence grew to where I was the one wielding the blade? And, when people made me angry, I imagined it was them hung upside down on the chain, as I hurt, and cut them up.

  I suppose it is no shock to you reading this missive, with all that has since transpired that when I first saw the blood drenching, as I always referred to it, rather than bleeding out, as my Father called it, that it resonated. And I think it was because of that conversation that the pleasurable link between bleeding and dissecting was formed within my imagination.

  Of course, being a boy child, I had my fair share of bumps and grazes growing up. Although, unlike Johnny Mortimer down the street, I had never broken a bone. Johnny fell off his dad’s motor cycle while pretending he was riding it and broke his left leg. We all wrote things and our names on the plaster cast he wore for weeks afterward. I couldn’t write my name at the time, so I drew, in purple crayon, a pirate with a curved sword. Johnny said he liked my picture and named me Pirate Prince Paul. I loved that name; it made me feel special.

  So, I don’t mean to infer I had never seen blood; I had. There was always some at dad’s shop from the babies. Once I saw dad cut himself shaving, which I always thought as ironic, him being a butcher, when I was old enough to know what the word meant. And, I had my own injuries in minor doses throughout my early childhood too. But, during the drenching…well, that was something else.

  It happened on the weekend of the Mundaring and Districts Country Fair. Mum had been gone several months by then and I still missed her. Dad got fed up with me asking when she would come home, and he lost his temper one night and hit me, I lost count of how many punches. When he was done, he slammed the bedroom door on his way out, and forgot to leave my night light on. I cried myself to sleep, in a fetal ball, and that night the dreams were in Technicolor. I never asked about her again, and years later, when I found her body, it no longer mattered.

  On the day of the drenching, Dad had shut up shop at three o’clock and told me to put away my cars, and that he was taking me to the fair. Usually he closed at five on a Sa
turday, but that day he promised me fairy floss, a hot dog, and, if I was very good, a ride on the carousel.

  It had rained the night before and right up to about ten o’clock that morning, but then the sun had come out and it was quite warm when dad paid our fee at the main gate and we walked into the show grounds. The grass had turned muddy in some areas, and once I almost slipped over and would have if dad hadn’t yanked my arm half out of its socket to stop my fall.

  He led me first to the judging section, and we looked at lots of animals that had won various color ribbons, for breeding and appearance. The area stank to high heaven, and I could barely breathe. Dad’s animals never smelled of excrement, and I could hardly wait to get away from the fetid stench.

  Then, we traipsed into a huge tent where we saw cake decorating, pies with intricate pastry designs, and even sausages, which hung by their strings. They smelt wonderful after the stink of the animals. But it was crowded in the marquees and I kept getting jostled, and dad got angry as the human snake of viewers slowly weaved its way in and around the display tables in the hot and humid tent. His grip on my hand got tighter and tighter until finally we got outside in the last of the evening sunshine. My hand hurt quite a lot by then.

  I suppose I got used to Dad hurting me. Now, I’m not saying he deliberately did that, it was more like I was…a distraction. Most of the time he was a loving, caring dad, but other times it was like he was someone else. And when he was like that, he lived in some sort of fugue. I didn’t exist as his son, but as an annoyance. And then he would hurt me.

  For me, that was normal. I didn’t know any better; that was just the way it was, especially living with my father after my mother had run off. I suppose the thing that hurt me the most about her, was that she never even said goodbye.

  So, once we got outside the big tent with all the pies, we followed the throng to side show alley. Oh, it was fantastic. The noise, the neon lights, rides that whizzed around and up and down while loud music tried to overpower the screams of teenagers, thrilled me to my soul. Everywhere was the smell of fresh popped corn, and cooked doughnuts dipped in cinnamon sugar.