Ruins of the Mind

by Jason Stadtlander

  “Mr. Chance. Doctor Braxton again. Forgot to mention something—something rather important.”

  Shep pulled his concentration away from the photos, paying closer attention to Braxton’s voice. “Something important? What’s that?”

  “Time of death. When I arrived at the scene on the fifteenth, the time of death determined by rigor mortis and internal temperature was approximately 2:30 that afternoon.”

  “Okay—and why is that unusual?” Shep inquired.

  Braxton responded in a voice that hinted at a revelation. “Take a look at the police report.”

  Shep shuffled through the file sitting on his desk and found the report. The approximate time of the accident was listed as 7:45 p.m. “But that doesn’t make sense—are you sure about this?”

  “Absolutely. I assumed you would find that interesting.” The doctor waited for Shep’s full reaction to this information.

  Shep was duly puzzled. “Strange,” he said. “Thank you. I appreciate your calling me back on this.” He hung up the phone.

  Shep sat for a moment rereading the police report. There had been three passengers in that vehicle in addition to the driver. Three passengers…and the time of death occurred five hours before the accident? The only way that was possible would be if the passengers had actually been killed prior to the accident. It was the only logical explanation.

  Shep searched the file for photographs taken on location at the scene of the accident but couldn’t find any. That was odd. The police usually included site photos along with accident reports to provide a more detailed forensic analysis. Shep thumbed through the file one more time. Finding nothing, he picked up his phone and dialed the number on the business card Braxton had given him.

  A stern voice answered. “State Police. Sergeant McCarthy.”

  Shep introduced himself and explained how he had hooked up with Braxton. Then he went on to explain the surprising details concerning the time of death of the accident victims. McCarthy informed him that he had been notified of those details as well. He had meant to call Shep, of course, but hadn’t had a chance due to a triple homicide in Roxbury.

  “I do have some photos for you,” McCarthy said nonchalantly. “I’ve only glanced at them, but I didn’t really find anything of consequence. I’d be happy to send them your way if you’d like to take a look.”

  Yes, indeed, he wanted to take a look. Shep gave him his email address and hung up the phone.

  AN HOUR LATER, Shep received an email from McCarthy’s office along with a zip file containing ten photographic images. Most of the photo evidence included shots from numerous angles of the car while it was still jammed underneath the semitrailer. The remaining shots were taken after the car had been extracted from under the trailer.

  Shep looked at the images in chronological order. The first one showed the back end of the vehicle. The accident scene was well lit, and he noticed a light boom sitting nearby, similar to those used on construction sites at night. The car’s rear lights were not illuminated, and only two feet of the car protruded out from under the trailer. There was a rumpled, peeled-back roof pointing straight into the air, still attached to the back of the vehicle. Blood was dripping down the sides of the truck in various spots. Shattered glass and broken plastic littered the accident scene. The car itself was silver in color, a 2000 Toyota Camry with a Massachusetts license plate. Both of the rear tires were flat, probably from impact as well as the heavy weight of the semitrailer.

  Shep moved on to the second photo that showed a right angle of the car. He could see the entire length of it more clearly in this image because this position showed where it had disappeared under the truck. The car was surprisingly unharmed below the line of impact with the semi.

  Shep imported the vehicle shots into the ImageRight document imaging system and set them aside to look at the police report again. Something wasn’t hitting him right. How could the accident victims have died almost five hours prior to the accident—murder? And if it was murder, why go through such extreme efforts to cover it up? Shep had questions, and the only person who could provide the answers lay in a hospital room over at Mass General.

  After studying the photos for another fifteen minutes, Shep decided there was nothing more that could be determined today. There were too many fragments of the puzzle that just didn’t make sense. So at 5:00 p.m., he packed up for the day and headed home.

  SOMETHING HIT SHEP the next morning regarding the shattered vertebrae. He looked at the X-rays again and then at the car accident photos. He had a hunch and began searching each of the photos for something—something that might fall in line with his suspicions.

  Quite suddenly, he found it. Lying in the lap of each of the victims was a black strap, easily overlooked upon first viewing. He picked up the phone and called the medical examiner. “Doctor Braxton, I need you to confirm the cause of death for each of the three victims in the Parker car accident.”

  “Confirm them? Although the time of death is off, it’s pretty evident that cause of death is decapitation,” Dr. Braxton replied, somewhat annoyed.

  “Please, doctor. I know it’s extra work on your part, but I’m following a hunch here. It could be important.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to you,” the medical examiner agreed, albeit reluctantly.

  Several hours later, Shep got a call from Dr. Braxton confirming his suspicions, but he asked the doctor not to inform the trooper just yet, as he wanted to check one more thing before he finished fitting the puzzle pieces together.

  Shep picked up the phone and called Trooper McCarthy, who picked up after only one ring. “State Police. Sergeant McCarthy,” he answered.

  “Sergeant, this is Sheppard Chance from Hubert Insurance. I may have a break in the Parker auto accident case. I’d like you to meet me in room 605 at Mass General. Can you do that?”

  McCarthy didn’t know what to make of this. “What break? Mass General—why?”

  “I’ll explain when we meet, but first we need to confirm something,” Shep said cryptically.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes.”

  Shep printed the pertinent photograph, grabbed his coat and headed for Mass General Hospital.

  THE TROOPER WALKED through the door at 1:03 p.m., Shep having arrived just minutes before. Shep started immediately, explaining the details as he saw them. “Sergeant, this is…”

  McCarthy cut him off in mid-sentence, impatient. “Yes, I know who it is. I already interviewed Mr. Parker. Why is he still here in the hospital?”

  “He’s still under observation for a possible head injury. And yes, I know you already interviewed him. But I have some new information,” Shep said, curious as to how the impatient trooper would respond.

  Shep turned to face Jeffery Parker, propped up in his hospital bed. “Mr. Parker. I need your assistance here. Can you explain to us exactly how the accident occurred?” Shep inquired.

  “Sure…I…um—I mean we were heading south on 1A to attend a friend’s party in Revere. I didn’t see the truck pull out into the road because it had no lights on the trailer, and we slammed right into it.”

  Shep wasted no time zeroing in. “Well, there are a couple pieces of your story that don’t quite fit, and the evidence itself doesn’t completely support your story, Mr. Parker.”

  Unrestrained panic flashed in Jeffery’s eyes for an instant before abruptly switching to feigned surprise. “What are you talking about?” he asked, a bit disingenuously. “What I just told you is the truth.”

  Shep pressed on. “Mr. Parker, first you said you didn’t see the lights. It’s apparent in the photos, however, that the streetlights were working fine—so even if the truck’s trailer lights were out, you still would have seen the truck, as that entire stretch of Lynnway was lit up like a Christmas tree. Second, time of death for all your passengers was actually five hours prior to the recorded time on the accident report, and a person has to wonder—why would you be taking three dead friends
to a party in Revere?”

  Shep paused briefly to take in Parker’s reaction. He was starting to squirm. Shep continued. “Third, and most important, the autopsy shows that each of your friends had an advanced illness that was more than likely going to cause their deaths soon anyway. The man in your front passenger seat had stage four malignant liver cancer that had metastasized to organs in his body. The passenger seated behind you was in the final stages of AIDS, and the person next to her was dying from lung cancer. So . . . I ask you again, Mr. Parker, would you like to change your half-cocked story to line up with the evidence we’ve uncovered?”

  The trooper stood slack-jawed, looking somewhat annoyed with Mr. Jeffery Parker, perhaps more because he had not been the one to uncover these incongruent details himself. As it turns out, he had been a bit too hasty in believing this to be an open-and-closed case.

  A convicting moment of silence passed between the three as they allowed the truth of the accident to sink in. Then Shep looked at Parker accusingly and said, “You killed them didn’t you, Mr. Parker? You were trying to help them put an end to their pain—help them meet death on their own grounds. I’m right, aren’t I, Parker?”

  Not surprisingly, Parker’s response was one of vehement denial. “No—no! I didn’t kill them,” he protested. “They asked me—they asked for my help.” He realized instantly that the truth had just crossed his lips, and there was nothing he could do to take it back.

  Parker continued, his voice sounding desperate. “They came to me through a mutual friend, a nurse. I agreed to help them. They all ended their own lives in my car…in the driveway at my home.”

  “And did you get the sodium pentothal from the nurse?” Shep asked.

  McCarthy spoke up, sounding incredulous. “Sodium pentothal? Isn’t that what they use for truth serum?”

  Shep answered. “Yes. The medical examiner called right before we came here to tell me that all of the passengers had a high concentration of sodium pentothal in their systems. He missed it initially because testing for it isn’t standard procedure.”

  Parker protested. “The nurse gave it to them. My only part in this was to drive the car with them in the passenger seats, causing the crash but making it look like an accident. We did some research and found out that a container truck departs from a warehouse near the Garelick milk plant every Tuesday around 7:30 p.m. They each said a prayer first and then injected themselves in their arm at around three o’clock that afternoon while sitting in my car…it was very peaceful,” Parker added as an afterthought, as if this disclosure made all the difference.

  “How noble of you,” the trooper replied sarcastically. Then after pausing briefly, he added, “There is one thing I don’t understand. If those people were already dead, how was it they had been sitting upright?”

  “I think I can answer that,” Shep said. He held up the photograph he’d printed just before he left and pointed to a particular spot on the photo paper. “These black straps sitting in their laps,” he said, “were tied around their necks and secured to the headrests.”

  Parker’s head whipped to the side to face Shep. “How could you possibly know that?” he snapped.

  Shep tried not to look smug, but a hint of a smile crossed his face. “Because the fractures in their necks were inconsistent with decapitation,” he said. “If their neck muscles had been holding their heads upright, only the vertebrae at the point of decapitation would have been fractured. But there were additional fractures lower than the point of decapitation, indicating that an incredible force had been applied to that area of the neck.”

  Trooper McCarthy stood grinning, a clear look of satisfaction on his face, as if he were the one who had broken the case. “Amazing,” he said. “Good work, Mr. Chance.” Then he looked over at Jeffery Parker with the look of a cat who had just cornered its prey. Drawing out the drama of the moment, he said, “You do realize, Mr. Parker, that this makes both you and your nurse friend accessories to murder?”

  Jeffery Parker opened his mouth to speak in protest but closed it again. His defense had already crumbled. There was no point in attempting to convince anyone of the nobility of his cause now. The only words he could come up with were, “…but I was trying to help.”

  Parker was now sitting despondently in his hospital bed. McCarthy looked down at him and said in an official-like voice, “It’s that best of intentions thing.” The trooper was making his best effort to provide closure for the case and wasn’t feeling much empathy for Parker.

  Shep was delighted to deliver this time-consuming case over to McCarthy to close. He reached out and offered the trooper a perfunctory handshake, saying half seriously, “I leave him in your capable hands, Sergeant McCarthy. Have a good day.”

  Shep turned and walked out the door of the hospital room. He was smiling as he sauntered down the hall, pleased to place this conundrum behind him. Now he could delve into all those other invigorating claims that were stacked high on his desk, begging for his attention. Shep’s smile morphed abruptly into a frown of concern as he pondered the pressure of too much work and too little time.

  For some inexplicable reason, an intersecting thought of Rita, the laughing secretary, flashed through Shep’s mind. Contemplating the absurdity of the woman’s inappropriate cheer, he merely smiled at first. Then the smile gave way to a chuckle, and that chuckle erupted into full-blown laughter.

  Turns out, he could learn a lesson from Rita after all. Perhaps it was time to adopt a new work paradigm.

  Marietta stood studying the inscription on the great stone wall that had surrounded the village of Akalee for a long time. She kept turning over the words in her head, attempting to comprehend their exact meaning, but no matter how many times she looked at them, substituting one word for another, she could not create a coherent sentence out of it. Who wrote it and what were they trying to say? The disjointed words simply stared back at her with gaping holes where their continuances should have been. Stones that had long ago held the needed pieces of the puzzle were now dust at the feet of the wall, forever lost.

  Marietta had visited here off and on over the years, feeling an inexplicable connection to the words. She recalled many occasions where she would sneak out of the village, peering up at the ridgeline surrounding the wall to make sure no one was lurking above. She would walk quietly, carefully, making her way downward along the wall’s edge to the inscription. The villagers called them the olim-words; they had been carved in the stone wall by some long-ago people, and the Akalee word for the past was olim.

  A bird screeched in the distance, rustling in the ridgeline of trees behind her. Marietta spun around to look up at the trees ahead. Her village had not been attacked during her lifetime, but since early childhood she had heard stories of the hordes of barbarians that had plundered the village in years past. The barbarians had stopped at nothing—stealing food, jewelry, even women and children.

  Although the thought of these barbaric raids had frightened her as a child, she was sixteen now and the abject fear that was ever-present as a child had dissipated, leaving only a habitual, instinctive alertness in its place. She now believed the stories were only exaggerated tales told by frightened, overprotective elderly villagers.

  Marietta looked around. She didn’t see anyone approaching the area near the forest and began her descent back to the gate. The wind was strong. It tore down the ridge and slammed into the wall, causing an updraft that nearly blew the large-brimmed hat off her head. She reached up and pressed her hat to her head with one hand, lifting her dress slightly with her other hand so as not to trip over it.

  Marietta paused briefly, turning to look behind her yet one more time. She sensed that someone might be watching her. When she reached the bottom of the path, she disappeared quietly through the small man-sized door in the large wooden gate.

  A weathered old man sat on a wooden bench by the fountain next to the entrance of the village. He was hunched over, leaning forward and supporting himself on a
n intricately carved wooden cane. The man’s eyes watched her as she secured the heavily hinged door. He sat patiently, waiting for her to notice him, smiling fondly as he studied her. He was filled with an appreciation for her youth and the promising full life this young woman—his granddaughter—had in front of her.

  After closing the door, Marietta turned back toward the village and saw him sitting there. The old man acknowledged his granddaughter with a nod and a smile, but he also had a hint of dismay in his expression. She walked over to him, bathed in the waning golden light that would color the village for a little while longer.

  “Eppa, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  The old man spoke. “I think the better question is why were you…out there? How many times have I reminded you not to venture outside the village?” he chastised, but there was a hint of a twinkle to his eyes.

  Marietta sat down beside her eppa and looked into his aging face. Her bright green eyes pierced his heart. They were the eyes of her mother, who had not so long ago looked at him in this exact same way. Marietta’s long brown hair cascaded off her shoulders and down her back, nearly reaching the bench itself. She was very beautiful, and he was grateful to have her as his grandchild, for she possessed a heart full of kindness and wisdom beyond her years.

  “Marietta,” he persisted, “I have told you many times not to leave the walls of Akalee. I am concerned for your safety—the horrific stories are not tales told by foolish old men who simply desire to frighten you. I remember well a time when the peace in our village was fleeting, and just as easily as we sit here now, that peace could be broken again.”

  Marietta attempted to douse her grandfather’s concern. “But there have been no attacks on our village since I was born, Eppa. Why are you still so worried?”

  The old man lifted his chin and with absolute certainty declared, “No one will dare attack as long as the Sheadroch remains watching over the village.”