Blood Avatar

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “I wasn’t going to offer,” he said, wishing she’d quit reading his mind. “I don’t know horses. I’d just slow you down.”

  “Which is why you aren’t invited.”

  “But I wasn’t going to offer,” he said again.

  “Yes, you were,” she said, and disconnected.

  * * *

  The church was, fittingly, on Church Street. St. Andrew the Apostle New Avalon Catholic Church was blue fieldstone, with a slate roof and three spires. The lot was full, but he spotted Amanda along the curb, standing on the running board of her truck.

  “You’re just in time,” she said, and pointed. Across the lot, a neon yellow sports car with a convertible top of black canvas rumbled to a halt. The driver’s side door opened, and Ketchum unfolded himself, then walked around to open the door for his wife.

  “That’s some car,” Ramsey said to Amanda as she came up. She wore jeans, lightweight work boots, and a light blue denim blouse, and she looked fabulous.

  She did the eyebrow. “Every boy needs his toys.”

  “I’m not even touching that,” Ramsey said, and he fell into step beside her.

  Ketchum saw them coming, said something to his wife, who tossed a scowl their way and then headed for the church where Ramsey saw a few deputies, including Boaz. “Nice car,” Ramsey said to Ketchum. “Never pegged you for sports cars, Hank.”

  “You like it?” Ketchum wore a khaki-colored suit with a light blue shirt and a dark brown, braided leather bolo tie, with sterling tips and a polished agate set in a silver slide. He’d exchanged his sheriff’s hat for a chocolate-brown Stetson. “Triumph TR-75 out of Highlander Industries on Northwind before Bannson Industries put them out of business.” They talked cars for a minute, and then Ketchum asked, “So where’s the fire?” Ketchum listened as Ramsey talked, his face growing glummer by the second. He looked worse when Amanda started in and when she paused, he reached behind to give the back of his head a good scratch. “You sure about this?” he asked. “Just those three little things?”

  “They’re not little. They’re huge,” Amanda said.

  “Maybe Old Doc overlooked them.”

  “I don’t think so. His exam was complete in every other way.”

  “So?”

  “So the distribution of cranial fractures would indicate a low trajectory. The only way for that to happen is if the shot angled down.”

  “Or maybe we were wrong, and it was suicide.”

  “No. Then you aim up or straight back, but not down. And here’s the clincher.” She pulled out her noteputer and highlighted another section. “Right here.”

  * * *

  In the end, Ketchum agreed, but he wasn’t happy. “Then let’s go talk to Summers,” Ramsey said, but Ketchum was shaking his head. “Why not?”

  “One, Doc always goes to Mass.” Ketchum hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Church of Peter the Apostle down the street. He won’t be out until noon, and that’s only if the church isn’t having Sunday supper. Plus that Kodza woman comes in today.”

  Ramsey sighed. “I forgot about her. When’s she due in New Bonn?”

  “Round about four, five,” Ketchum said, as his wife, who’d evidently tired of waiting, stalked back. “Boaz’ll make the run.”

  “Oh, Boaz’ll make a great first impression,” Ramsey said then waved away Ketchum’s bemused frown. “Never mind. This is getting to be a hell of a case, Hank.”

  Ketchum’s wife pulled a face. She was a small woman with a beaky nose and snowy white hair. A gold religious medal and chain dangled around her neck and flashed in the sunlight. “We watch our language here, Mr. Ramsey.” To Ketchum: “Time to go, Hank.”

  “Just a sec, Lottie.” Then to Ramsey: “We’ll see Doc after supper. Round about five. No damn point riling up folks more’n we have to.”

  “Hank,” Ketchum’s wife said, severely, as she tugged her husband toward the church. “Please, do not blaspheme.”

  27

  “Well, that’s just great,” Ramsey said, as they made their way to Amanda’s truck. “Six hours to kill and nothing’s moving.”

  “But some things take time,” Amanda said. A breath of wind plucked a stray lock of her hair across her eyes, and she reached to tuck it behind her ear. “Hank makes too much bad blood, then he’s out of a job.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ramsey said. He jammed his hands into his jacket pockets. “What about the DNA?”

  “Ready this afternoon.”

  “Okay,” Ramsey said. It wasn’t. “This Schroeder thing bothers me.”

  “Me, too. You want to do something about it?”

  “Such as?”

  “How are you and boats?”

  * * *

  He drove his loaner, following her truck down to the harbor. They parked in a lot adjacent to the Farway yacht club, a three-story building of pale pink stucco with a red tile roof. Amanda chose a solar-powered, six-meter long console skiff with a two-fifty centimeter beam. The solar array, mounted on a diagonal lattice, attached at two points aft and astern, just behind a heavy duty rub rail. The skiff had a large forward casting deck and face-forward seats snugged against an open cockpit.

  Amanda handed him an orange life jacket, then passed him two plastic bottles of water and several plastic-wrapped muffins. “I’m pretty good, but that water’s only a few degrees above freezing. If something happens, you’d be dead in less than five minutes.”

  “So how’s a life jacket going to help?”

  “Keeps you afloat and warm,” she said. “The jacket’s got pryolene pouches of various chemicals surrounded by compressed air in a buoyant shell. When the interior sensors detect a temperature drop, the air pouches rupture and the resultant chemical reaction creates iron oxide and—” She broke off when she saw his bemused expression. “Rust. The chemicals make rust, and making rust generates heat. Trust me on this.”

  The trip to Cameron Island took a good forty-five minutes. That was just fine with Ramsey who found the ride surprisingly relaxing. As they got nearer to the island’s mainland shore, he saw strips of sand beach and individual piers but no boats. There were houses further up from the shoreline on ruddy red bluffs.

  “Sandstone,” Amanda said when he asked about the color. “There are quarries on most of the islands, but they went bust a long time ago.”

  Amanda circled to the far shore. This side was wilder and riddled with striated sandstone sea caves carved by wave action and repeated freeze/thaw cycles. They docked in a natural cove, beaching the boat on a tongue of sand bar, then clambered out. They stood, side by side, looking out over the lake. The water was blue as a sapphire and dotted with far-off islands rimmed bronze with red sand. Now and then, a solitary cloud scudded across the sky, and from somewhere, Ramsey heard the lonely cry of a seabird. The only other sounds were the faint rush of wind and the slap of water against sand.

  “This is beautiful.” Ramsey filled his lungs with air that smelled clean and wet. He looked over at Amanda. “You could spend a lot of time here and not even know it, or a lifetime and not care. All this”—he gestured toward the lake—“it might be enough.”

  “Actually,” she said, “it almost is.”

  * * *

  An hour hiking a rugged track inland took them where Isaiah Schroeder’s body had been found over three years before. They lost the sound of the water when they were thirty meters from shore, and the terrain changed abruptly from the flat open expanse of red sand beach to a dense thatch of hardwoods whose branches were bare but studded with swollen buds. The terrain was rocky, with humps of rubble displaced by massive tree roots. The going was rough, and Ramsey stumbled enough to know that tripping and accidentally discharging a rifle wouldn’t be a stretch. The track abruptly angled into a steep climb, and when they huffed to the top, they emerged on a rocky, forested plateau.

  Ramsey stepped over to a tangle of exposed roots on the lip of a bowl-shaped depression to the right of the plateau. Pulling out his noteputer, he scr
olled to a set of images taken of the scene then sidestepped down until he was ten meters from the lip. “Okay, the report says Schroeder probably tripped on his way down the hill. Rifle discharged, blew out his head and he landed with his head pointing . . . I’m all turned around. What direction is this?” He waved the noteputer to his left.

  “South.” Frowning, Amanda reached for Ramsey’s noteputer. “Let me see that.”

  “What?”

  “Now that I actually see this . . . Here, look at the pic and then look at the hill . . . you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “Isaiah’s body is nearly perpendicular to the fall line. The head’s actually uphill. Now you tell me: how do you trip downhill, presumably headfirst, and end up sideways with your head uphill?”

  “Lemme see that.” He took back his noteputer and compared the image with the hill, eyes clicking back and forth. “You’re right, and I’ll tell you something else. He’s turned around. The rifle’s under his chest on the right hand side, but his left side is closer to the top of the hill. So how did he fall, do a ninety-degree turn left, and shoot himself on the right? The blood spatter was concentrated downhill. Can’t happen unless . . .”

  “Unless he was facing the hill,” Amanda said. “On his knees. With his hands tied behind his back.”

  * * *

  Ramsey broke the silence first. “If you were Schroeder and you beached where we did and walked this track, where would you end up?”

  She thought. “The old quarry, I think. Another half hour, give or take.”

  Ramsey tucked his noteputer into his right hip pocket. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The trail was steep, corkscrewing up the quarry’s eastern rim. Ramsey had never seen a quarry before, but the hole reminded him of iron red craters gouged out by meteors on a desolate moon. The quarry was a bowl, roughly nine hundred meters in diameter, with sheer rock sides and random piles of rust red rubble like giant ant mounds. Far below, the rusted innards of an old ore car straddled a meandering rail track spooling from an arch blasted in the rock.

  He touched Amanda’s arm. “Are those doors blocking the mine entrance?”

  Amanda shaded her eyes. “Could be. Probably to keep tourists out, but I don’t know if you mine sandstone like other ores or minerals, or whatever. Might just be for storage. You wouldn’t want to leave trucks and ore cars out in the rain.”

  The way down was treacherous and slippery with spoil. The two halves of the door were heavy timber strapped with iron on corroded hinges and secured with a rust-encrusted padlock bigger than Ramsey’s fist. He yanked a few times but the lock didn’t give. If he pulled on one door, a gap about a quarter meter opened up, but when Amanda pressed her face to the opening, she couldn’t see anything.

  “But I smell something.” She gave Ramsey an odd look. “Cigarettes. In fact”—she turned, testing the air—“I smell something like chemicals only burnt. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do. Someone’s been around.” He peered at the gravel strewn in front of one door and said, “Has it rained here? Say, within the past week or so.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Why?”

  Ramsey pressed the pad of his index finger to the sandstone floor then held up the finger for Amanda. His skin was peppered with reddish-black flecks. “Rust,” he said. Then he pushed up and inspected the lock. “Look, you can just see where some of the rust’s been scraped off around the keyhole.”

  “Then someone’s been here.”

  “That’s right,” Ramsey said. He bent down again, his eyes searching the ground. “And not very long ago. And here, there’s this one pothole.” He put his nose to the rock and sniffed. “That’s the chemical smell. Like it’s been blasted.”

  “Limyanovich?”

  “I don’t know. Boaz said he’d taken the ferry to the island. But you saw those shoe shanks. Why would a guy hoof all the way out here in expensive shoes unless he’s coming to some sort of meet?” Ramsey paused, his eyes scouring the rubble. “Did they find a lighter on Limyanovich?”

  “No. Why?”

  He nudged bits of gravel aside then used two pieces of flat rock to tweeze something from the ground and showed her. Captured between the rocks was the crushed butt of a cigarette.

  * * *

  The padlock held. All Ramsey managed to break was a sweat and a rock he used to try and bash the lock free. Then they ran out of time and had to head back to meet Ketchum. They’d eaten muffins on the way in, and Ramsey used plastic wrap, wrong-side out, to carry the butt and rock samples from the tiny, chemical-smelling crater.

  They didn’t talk much on the boat ride back. Ramsey thought, guzzled the last of his water. He was sweating so much he felt basted. He’d have to shower before he met with Ketchum, and come to think of it, he had to find a laundry or get the hotel to wash his things. Between hiking and just plain living, he was running out of clean clothes.

  Then, as Farway’s waterfront swung into view, Amanda sighed. “And it started out to be such a pretty day.”

  28

  Sunday, 15 April 3136

  1630 hours

  Once on shore, Ramsey got dispatch to put him through to the crime scene people still working the car. Ramsey told a tech about the cigarette butt and the rocks, and the tech said, “Might be able to pull something off the butt. The rock, I don’t know. Explosives are pretty volatile, dissipate fast. But, maybe.”

  They had a half hour before Ramsey met Ketchum at the courthouse. Amanda wanted in on their meeting with Summers and when Ramsey objected, she said, “I work with Doc. He’ll take this better if it comes from another professional, not, you know . . .”

  “From a cop?”

  “Yes. From a cop. It’ll sound like he’s done something wrong.”

  “Well, he has.”

  “Yes, but it’s not criminal. At the worst, it’s negligence, and more likely, inexperience.”

  “You caught it.”

  “Because I was primed,” Amanda said patiently. “You tell me to look at something, I figure there’s something hinky.”

  “Hinky?”

  “Yes.” And now she looked a little defensive. “Hinky. That’s what the cops on Towne said.”

  “No wonder they didn’t catch that Kappa freak. You say hinky in New Bonn, they’ll kick your ass to,” he tried thinking of the armpit of the universe, decided there were several and finally said, “you know, somewhere like . . . Farway.”

  Now she did laugh. “Well, you’re here.”

  * * *

  They split up. He went to his hotel room, showered, changed for the second time that day, and decided that he’d either have to get stuff washed, or buy more clothes. He pulled on his last pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, then balled his dirty clothes, wadded them into a plastic bag, and humped the bag to the front desk.

  He asked the desk attendant, “How much to do three pairs of socks, underwear, three shirts, three pairs of jeans?”

  The attendant, a gum-chewing, anorectic-looking blonde with too-dark eyeliner showed him the price list. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “We have to send out. The manager’s got this contract.”

  “Yeah, but”—he studied the price list again—“you could buy a house for less. Don’t you just have a sonic washer somewhere? To do towels and sheets and stuff?”

  “Can’t do clothes in the laundry. Against the rules.”

  “Let me get this straight. You can’t do laundry in a laundry?”

  The attendant rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, thought about it, popped gum, then shook her head. “No.”

  * * *

  Fuming, he hoofed out to his loaner, pitched the laundry bag in the backseat, and was late getting to the courthouse by about fifteen minutes.

  Ketchum was waiting in his office. He’d changed back into his uniform and was nursing a mug of coffee from a pot on his bookshelf. Ramsey found a mug and helped himself. “I notice the news people left.�
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  Ketchum made a sour face. “Vultures. I know gnats with a better attention span.”

  “Be happy.” Ramsey dropped into a chair with a soft groan. His thighs ached from all that hiking. “No more bodies falling out of the sky, and they get tired showing the same holo of the same burned-out wreck. What’s the story on Kodza?”

  “Boaz called in about a half hour ago. They’re running a little late. Some kind of snarl on the Slovakian end of things. Just as well, gives us time to run out to Doc’s and back. I gave him a jingle, and he’s expecting us. Speaking of which,” he said, as Ramsey blew on his coffee and sipped, “Amanda called not five minutes ago. Imagine my surprise when she said she was going to be another fifteen minutes and not to leave without her.” He peered down his nose at Ramsey. “Your idea to invite her along?”

  “You know, this is pretty good coffee. Hey,” Ramsey said in response to Ketchum’s narrow look. “Really. Stuff we swill in New Bonn tastes like ’Mech coolant.”

  “All cop coffee tastes like ’Mech coolant.” Ketchum’s mouth twitched. “Thank the wife. Swears by egg shells. But you didn’t answer the question.”

  “Ah . . . Amanda kind of invited herself. She thought Summers might take it better coming from her.”

  “Mmmm.” Ketchum scratched at nonexistent stubble. “She said you found stuff out on Cameron Island.”

  “Might be stuff.” He dug the wrapped butt and rocks out of his breast pocket. Ketchum fingered the packets as Ramsey talked about visiting the death scene and then the pit. When Ramsey was done, Ketchum said, “Pretty slim.”

  “Not when you consider that we know Limyanovich went to Cameron Island and that Schroeder’s autopsy report is . . . questionable.”

  “Ten to one, you’d find more’n couple MEs agree with Doc. And maybe Limyanovich went to sightsee.”

  “With the wrong shoes? On the off season? And dare we forget the alias?”

  “No one said the guy was intelligent. As for the alias, maybe he’s got an angry wife somewhere.”