Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy)

by Lis Wiehl

  Dani picked up the phone to call Stuart Metz, the assistant DA. She’d dialed the first three numbers when her cell phone rang. She glanced at her caller ID.

  “Stuart,” she said. “I was just about to call you.”

  “You heard?” Metz said.

  “About Abbie Gardener?” Dani said.

  “They took the body straight to the medical examiner. He said he’s never seen anything like it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Just telling you what Banerjee said. How soon can you be there?”

  “They need me?”

  “Casey asked for you,” Metz said. Detective Philip Casey had been the lead detective on the Leonard murder. “If you’re feeling up to it. I know you’re still on leave, but this is just a little consulting. I think he has some questions about Alzheimer’s.”

  “I never evaluated Abbie,” Dani said. “There must be someone at the nursing home who knows more about her condition.”

  “Yeah, but you’re on the payroll.”

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Forty with traffic.”

  The county medical examiner had never seen anything like it? Baldev Banerjee had seen a great deal. Dani wasn’t sure she wanted to see what had happened to Abigail Gardener. She’d been a brave soul who deserved a peaceful ending. Dani doubted she’d gotten one.

  5.

  Tommy drove his father, Arnie, and his father’s caregiver, Lucius Mills, to the airport and put them on a plane for Texas to stay with Tommy’s Uncle Sid, Arnie’s kid brother. Tommy’s Aunt Ruth, the middle child, was the East Salem librarian. Arnie suffered from a kind of cognitive impairment called Lewy Body Dementia. He had good days and bad days, more bad than good lately, and Tommy was concerned about having to keep one eye on his dad with everything else that was going on.

  When he returned home from the airport, he punched in the code on his security keypad, drove through the gate, and was glad to see Carl Thorstein’s motorcycle parked in the courtyard. Tommy put his Jeep in the garage and greeted his friend who, in addition to knowing the code to open the gate, had his own key to the house. He was sitting on the back steps. He’d been a kind of second father to Tommy—not a substitute, Tommy liked to say, but a close second.

  “Feel like riding?” Carl said.

  “Where to?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Might rain.”

  “Might.”

  Carl, a die-hard enthusiast who rode year-round and wore a snow mobile suit to keep warm during the winter months, rode his motorcycle for some of the same reasons Tommy turned to exercise. It was where he got his best thinking done. He rode when he was troubled or sad. He’d ridden to Mexico after his daughter, Esme, drowned in a boating accident. Today Tommy knew Carl was thinking about Abbie.

  Tommy had three motorcycles: a Harley-Davidson 883 Sportster for light riding, a more muscular black Harley-Davidson Night Rod Special for longer highway trips, and a white BMW R1200 GS for going off-road. He rolled the Night Rod out of the garage and followed Carl’s chrome yellow Fat Boy west on 35 to the Taconic Parkway and then north to Taconic State Park and Copake Falls, where they stopped to stretch their legs.

  The only other visitor at the park was an older man in a trench coat and black beret, walking a large black poodle. Tommy and Carl were looking at the falls when the rain started. They rode their motorcycles under a nearby picnic pavilion and sat on a table. Tommy thought about the first time he’d put his arms around Dani, waiting out a thunderstorm beneath a bridge.

  “Bad for us but good for the waterfall,” Carl said, taking off his gloves. Sections of an old New York Times sat on the picnic table next to a can of lighter fluid, near a blackened charcoal grill and beside a box of dry kindling. Carl slid the sports page across the table to Tommy, who glanced at a story about one of his former teammates demanding to be traded to a championship team and then pushed it aside.

  “Are you sad about Abbie?” he asked.

  “I shouldn’t be, right?” Carl said. “It’s not like her life was cut tragically short at 102. Tough old bird—isn’t that what they say? I’m sure the Lord was glad to finally meet her face-to-face.”

  “And vice versa.”

  Esme had been seventeen when she died, several years before Tommy had met Carl. “You don’t get over it,” Carl had told him. “You move on, and you keep living, but you carry it with you forever.” Carl had dedicated his life to helping others and had thrown himself into his work as a way to cope with his loss, but Tommy knew the pain came back from time to time, particularly when the days grew short and the nights grew longer.

  “Your text said you had something to tell me,” Carl said.

  “I do,” Tommy said. “About what happened last night at the exhibition.”

  “Did you see the painting?”

  “Up close.”

  The old man and the poodle were making no effort to get out of the rain, the man throwing a stick, the dog joyously chasing it. Tommy wondered if the old man had a wife. Perhaps the dog was his sole companion.

  “Do you see that guy?” Tommy asked. “Do you think he has a guardian angel?”

  “Sure,” Carl said.

  “What do you know about angels?”

  Carl considered his answer. “Personally?”

  “Yeah. Have you ever seen one?”

  “Never been so lucky,” Carl said. “I can think of times when I would have loved to. One time in particular.”

  Tommy knew Carl was referencing the day he’d lost Esme. “Why take her and not me?” he’d said. “That just never made any sense. But not everything makes sense, I guess.”

  “What do they do?” Tommy asked. “I mean, I know the stories in the Bible. I know about Daniel, and the angel that rolled away the stone from Jesus’s tomb . . .”

  “Boulder,” Carl corrected. “Big one.”

  Tommy nodded. “I mean recently. What do you know about what angels are doing now? Today?”

  “Hard to say. Most of the time they work unseen. Billy Graham called them ‘God’s secret agents.’ But there are plenty of stories.”

  “About what?”

  “Angels helping man,” Carl said. “People have seen angels carrying children from burning buildings. I read about a platoon during World War I that got lost in no-man’s-land in the fog of battle, and an angel showed them the way back to their line.”

  “Why?” Tommy said. “I mean, why save those men and not others? A lot of platoons probably got lost in no-man’s-land.”

  “God’s purpose regarding who receives help isn’t something we can know, except that each man in that platoon was served in a way unique to him.”

  “Are they born?”

  “Angels? No. But they’re created by God.”

  “Can they be killed?”

  “No.”

  “Are they omniscient? Like God?”

  “No. They certainly know more than you or I do. But they’re not lesser or miniature versions of God. We don’t worship them or pray to them.”

  “And they can take human form, right?”

  “All the time.”

  The man with the dog walked slowly toward the only car in the parking lot, a black Mercedes Benz coupe.

  “So that guy could be an angel and we wouldn’t know it.”

  “I suppose,” Carl said. “Though I’m not sure an angel would put a wet dog in a CL600.”

  “Do they feel what we feel?”

  “By the way,” Carl said, climbing down from the table to stretch his back, “I’m telling you what I’ve heard and read and what I believe, but I’m not going to pretend I’m the ultimate authority on the subject.”

  “I know,” Tommy said, “but I value your opinion.”

  “I think angels have feelings,” Carl said. “They weep. They even eat—Genesis talks about three angels sitting down to break bread with Abraham. I’d like to think they can laugh too. And they love—they love God. And they love
us. Not all of us, of course—First Chronicles tells of a single angel who destroyed Jerusalem when David defied God’s command. If they’re sent to carry out God’s punishment, that’s what they do.”

  “But mostly they help, right?”

  “That appears to be true,” Carl said. “Deliver messages. Offer guidance. Give us a gentle nudge when we need it—or a stern warning. The Bible says people tremble in fear at the sight of them. More like awe.”

  He sat down on the picnic bench and leaned back against the tabletop. Tommy moved to the table opposite and sat facing him.

  “And demons are fallen angels, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And they can take human form too? Does that mean they can be killed? Though if you killed one, where would it go? It’s already in hell.”

  “Maybe someplace worse,” Carl said.

  “Like Winnepeg?”

  “Possibly,” Carl said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “I know there’s a reason why you’re asking me all these questions.”

  “I’m trying to decide something.”

  “What?”

  “If I tell you what it is, you can’t go back to not knowing,” Tommy said. “And if you know, your life could be in danger. The same way Abbie’s was. So do you want to know?”

  “Is your life in danger?”

  “Maybe,” Tommy said. “Dani’s too.”

  “If you need my help, count me in,” Carl said. “Is this about the angel you saw when Abbie came to your house? The one who looked like a biker?”

  Tommy nodded. “He was there last night, at the exhibit.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I did,” Tommy said. “I’ll tell you what happened, but first I need to tell you a story. Dani and I discussed it last night, and we decided we’d ask you to join us. You know about the Julie Leonard murder, right?”

  “Amos Kasden,” Carl said. “I know what you told me.”

  “Part of it we haven’t told anybody, because most people would think we’re off our rockers. Something’s going on in East Salem, Carl. Something really big, maybe as big as it gets. Which is about all we know for sure. And we could use your help figuring out what’s going on.”

  “I’m all yours,” Carl said. He gazed out at the sky and the rain. “It doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “Do you remember me telling you,” Tommy began, “that Dani kept waking up from her dreams night after night at exactly 2:13? And the dreams were about blood and water?”

  “I do,” Carl said.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Tommy said, “because this is going to take awhile.”

  Dani drove through town, stopping briefly at her office on Main Street to check her mail. The shops were open but no one seemed to be shopping. The gazebo in the middle of the green was still decorated for Halloween; rotting old pumpkins had faces curling in on themselves like old men with their dentures out, and soggy black-and-orange crepe paper streamers clung to the pillars and balusters. She saw Eddie, the owner of the Miss Salem Diner, coming out of the hardware store with a pair of eight-footlong fluorescent lightbulbs over his shoulder, finally replacing the two that had burned out two or three years ago, if she remembered correctly. Eddie had told Dani his motto back when she waitressed at the diner in high school: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it is broke, don’t fix it.

  She took the Saw Mill Parkway to the Sprain Brook Parkway and parked in the DA’s reserved space outside the medical examiner’s office on the New York Medical College’s Valhalla campus. The building was nondescript. The ME was not. Dr. Baldev Banerjee was a British ex-pat with an Oxbridge accent and a Monty-Pythonesque sense of humor, dark and often absurdist. He stood six foot two, with dark skin and jet-black hair. His dark brown eyes seemed to drill deep, but his most startling feature was the crescent-shaped scar on his cheek, which he’d told Dani in jest was a dueling scar. Metz had told Dani the real story, that Banerjee, who’d grown up in the Upton Park section of East London, had been hit with a beer bottle in high school after taking on a group of skinheads after they’d called him a Paki.

  “He’s pretty tough, for a doctor,” Metz had said.

  It was raining hard by the time Dani arrived, so she ran from the car to the entrance. In the hall outside the ME’s office Metz greeted her with a venti vanilla soy latte. He was Dani’s age, with a keen legal mind and an underdeveloped social intelligence. Detective Casey was checking something on his phone. He was sixty, with a gray flattop and a brusque approach that concealed a heart that was equally brusque. Where Dani and Stuart were Starbucks people, Casey was Dunkin Donuts all the way. He logged off his phone and nodded to Dani.

  “Good morning, Detective,” she said. Casey smiled grimly. “Can you give me an idea of why I’m here?”

  “We may be looking at a homicide. You knew Abigail Gardener?”

  “I met her once, in the fourth grade. Tommy knew her.”

  Banerjee waved them in before the detective could ask any more questions.

  The medical examiner’s office was the size of a high school classroom, with multiple workstations and four five-foot-long lab tables with stainless steel legs and black chemical-resistant epoxy tops on a clean bare linoleum floor.

  Banerjee greeted Dani with a smile. Today he was wearing a gray cardigan sweater over gray pants, a blue oxford shirt, and a pale yellow tie.

  “Nice to see you, Dani,” he said. “I missed you last night.”

  “You were at the opening?”

  “My wife and I arrived late.”

  “And we left early.”

  “It was an interesting talk,” Banerjee said. “If you can give me a minute, we’ll be meeting in autopsy. I just have to print something out first.”

  The autopsy room contained a single stainless steel dissection table in the middle of the room. The table had side drains and a stainless steel catch basin at the head, with rinse and suction hoses cradled by their nozzles above the basin. A stainless steel cart next to the table supported a tray of dissecting tools, a saw, shears, scalpels, and forceps. The transport cart had been pushed against the wall, where Dani saw shelves of glass sample jars filled with formalin. The fixtures in the ceiling provided a cold, washedout, neutral light, supplemented by a pair of movable lamps, one ultraviolet and the other incandescent, suspended from armatures fixed to the ceiling. The body on the table was covered by a sterile white evidence sheet.

  Banerjee snapped on a pair of latex gloves and turned on the ventilation fan. As he took hold of the sheet, he advised Dani, Metz, and Casey to step back. “This may be more unpleasant than usual,” he said, “but I wanted to show you something.”

  He pulled the sheet away from the body. Dani saw the familiar cuts, a V-shaped incision starting at the top of the shoulders and meeting at the sternum, a T-shaped cut from the shoulders to the breastbone, and a vertical cut from the neck to the pubic bone. The body had been reconstituted, organs restored minus the usual histology samples, skin flaps back in place. The legs and arms were blue and bruised everywhere, the torso as well, as if the poor woman had been beaten from every angle. Dani was shocked at how loose the skin seemed, as if the body inside it had shrunk.

  “I had to work quickly because of advanced cell deterioration,” Banerjee said, moving around the body and occasionally referring to his clipboard. “External and internal. Decedent ate a meal at six o’clock, so by the progress of the stomach contents, I would place the time of death between eleven and twelve. Cause or causes of death may include hypovolemic shock, a collapsed airway and suffocation, and/or compression fractures of the vertebrae and skull. I anticipated advanced osteoporosis in a woman this old but found only the expected loss of bone mass. Structural damage is severe, with a qualification that I will explain in a minute.”

  Banerjee glanced briefly at his clipboard. Dani heard thunder rumble through the walls. With the body on the table and the storm outside, she thought of old black-
and-white horror movies and mad scientists reanimating corpses.

  “My preliminary blood work,” Banerjee said, looking up from his clipboard. “I’ve sent samples to FBI serology; I’ll let you know when I hear from them.” He read from the clipboard. “Elevated electrolytes, myoglobin metabolites, elevated potassium and phosphate ions, and uric acid released by damaged muscle cells. Histology indicates high methohemoglobin infarction, excess lactic acid . . . Her bladder was empty.”

  He pulled the sheet down again to cover her and faced them.

  “Questions so far?”

  “Can we get that translated into English?” Casey said.

  “I’ll cut to the chase,” Banerjee said. “I called my sister Nalini to confirm. She’s a thoracic surgeon and a very good one. She flew down to Haiti after the earthquake, where she treated a number of people for traumatic rhabdomyolysis, which is another way of saying they were—”

  “Crushed,” Dani said. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard the word, but she knew what it meant.

  “Abbie was crushed?” Metz said. “By what?”

  “Before I speculate, I want to show you something,” the medical examiner said. “As you know, the body’s failure after death to release myosin and actin results in muscle contraction—”

  “Rigor mortis,” Casey said.

  “Yes. Maximizing about twelve hours after death and dissipating at about seventy-two. It has been less than twelve hours since TOD. She ought to be stiff as the proverbial board. And yet . . .”

  He walked to the end of the table, pulled the sheet back briefly, and lifted one of Abbie’s legs by the toe. Instead of being rigid, the leg rose the way a rope would, limp and flexible.