The Killing of Bobbi Lomax

by Cal Moriarty

  Dougie followed Clark’s gaze out the window to Edie. She waved at them, smiling, friendly. Dougie waved back. Winked at Clark. ‘Having fun, ain’t ya, son?’

  ‘Seven hundred. They’re all first editions, Dougie. They’re worth a good eighteen hundred dollars retail.’

  ‘You wanna get retail on ’em, son, then you need to go buy yourself a store.’ Dougie took out a wad of cash, and with a dramatic flourish slowly and loudly counted $450 on top of the books.

  Clark didn’t touch it. Instead, he turned back to the bookcase. ‘Let’s say five hundred — to mark our new relationship — and I’ll take that Poe. First edition, I’m assuming.’

  Dougie balked, emitting a strange grunting sound through the cigar. ‘That’s worth five hundred.’

  ‘Retail.’

  Dougie smiled. Touché. ‘Rob a man, why don’t you?’ He took a bunch of keys from his pants pocket and moved toward the cabinet.

  *

  As Edie and Clark moved away from the store, hand in hand, the Poe stashed safely in the attaché case and the five hundred, in fifties, buried in his wallet, a voice called out behind them. Clark turned. Dougie was standing at the door rejigging a display case. ‘Hey Cliff, this is Vegas – don’t forget, everything that glitters isn’t gold!’

  Clark looked back, nodded, smiled. ‘See you again, Dougie.’

  Edie looked up at him. ‘Why’s he calling you Cliff?’

  Clark shrugged. ‘Who knows what he’s got in that cigar.’

  *

  Inside the auditorium, the curtain still down, the sound of a happy holiday crowd eager to have even more fun. Clark looked at the sign at the side of the stage: The Strange Cabinet of Dr Marvin Mesmer. He turned to Edie. ‘Some surprise. A magician?’

  ‘I thought it looked like fun. You like magic don’t you, Clark?’

  Clark raised his eyebrows at her. He had been doing magic tricks since he was about three. Watching someone else doing them, probably badly, was not his idea of fun. ‘OK, but if it’s no good we’re leaving in the break.’

  ‘There isn’t a break,’ said Edie. ‘It’s eighty minutes straight through.’

  Clark rolled his eyes, burrowed down into his seat. At least he might be able to catch up on his sleep. It had been a real long drive. The sound of barking woke him up. Human barking. Up on the stage a group of volunteers were being activated by Dr Mesmer. Not so much a magician, but a hypnotist. Judging by the raucous reaction from the crowd, these were their friends up on stage. Clark stared open-mouthed at the spectacle. He watched Mesmer as he touched each volunteer to activate them, connecting with them as he stared into their eyes, enforcing ideas and suggestions with his gentle but authoritative tone which Clark assumed must be peppered with control words. Watched him until two grown men were waltzing beautifully together, joining the woman on all fours, barking, scurrying, snarling as another man and woman swam furiously away from an imaginary shark while the theme tune from Jaws played loudly in the background. Clark leaned in towards Edie. Hopefully she was enjoying it. She didn’t answer him. Or move when he touched her. Clark shook his head, bemused. Edie was under Mesmer’s spell. Whatever that spell was, Clark was amazed that it wasn’t a sham. Edie was suggestible. An easier mark. At least he wasn’t under. Or was he?

  3

  Marty watched as the ambulance, siren on, edged its way out through the hastily abandoned cruisers and fire trucks and past the gathering news crews. Al was always better with victims than he was. Hell, Al was better with everyone than he was. Probably why he was still married to wife number one despite the onslaught of four kids and the recent arrival of a high-maintenance mother-in-law from Puerto Rico.

  ‘Hey, Detective, you need this?’ Whittaker from the crime lab was a few feet away from him holding out a bunch of evidence bags and a pair of oversized tweezers in the familiar sealed baggie.

  ‘I know beauticians get through less tweezers than this,’ said Marty.

  ‘Yeah, and they make more money.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Marty looked around. The whole street was buzzing now with cops, fire guys. And there were at least ten times as many gawkers. And hacks. Bad news travels fast. Through the noise of all the engines and fire-truck pumps he could hear the hacks calling his name. He ignored them.

  Whittaker handed him the kit. ‘Me and the boys were still over at the Gudsen site when we got the call. We’re gonna be there ’til at least tomorrow. That thing sure did its job alright.’

  ‘The nail bomb?’

  Whittaker nodded slowly. ‘Yep.’ He didn’t have to explain its horrors. Marty had been the first detective on the scene yesterday. Al was late in. He’d gone to the dentist. Lucky him. The bomb had gone off in the corridor, right at the entrance to Gudsen’s new office, blown him from one side of it to the other. The Forsythe Building was old. Practically ancient for this town. Mid-Victorian. Its strong thick walls had ensured the explosion’s shockwaves and shrapnel had nowhere to go but back in on itself and whatever poor fucker was in the vicinity. In that space it was like the bomb was a boomerang, it exploded out and then came right back in again. Gudsen didn’t stand a chance. And whoever planted the bomb didn’t want him to. Nails in a bomb aren’t decoration. They’re there to kill. Like switchblades traveling at 900 mph. He remembered Big Tex from the bomb squad telling him that yesterday. Tex loved bombs, talked about them as if they were living breathing things. He could wax lyrical on their beauty for hours. Tex’s guys had swept the rest of the building a couple of times before giving it the all-clear. That was before they had got the Bobbi Lomax call and had to take off over there.

  One of the nails had gone right through Gudsen’s eye, the explosion forcing it into his brain. The ME said he’d died within seconds. Not quick enough, thought Marty, the pain would have been unbearable. Like Bobbi Lomax, Peter Gudsen must have unwittingly tucked the white shoe-box bomb, all tied up with red gift ribbon, into his chest. A fatal move. There’d been no nails in the Bobbi Lomax bomb, close proximity had been enough to kill her. No nails in Houseman’s either by the looks of it. The guy was lucky to survive this, thought Marty, particularly if he’d been in the car with it when it exploded. A nail bomb inside a car? Instant death. If that’s even Houseman. Guy’s got nine lives, if so. When they’d moved him onto the stretcher, Marty had noticed them check for the victim’s wallet, for ID. There wasn’t one. Maybe it was in his car.

  The nails told Marty one thing. Someone hated Peter Gudsen more than they hated Bobbi Lomax and Houseman. Lomax had a husband. Things in the Lomax household had been strained. Financial meltdown, disintegrating business, maybe even bankruptcy on the cards. And his business partner, ex-business partner, was Gudsen. Marty smiled. Too neat, too easy, too obvious. Especially if you add in Houseman and his claims about Hartman. Marty had spoken to Arnold Lomax yesterday, wasn’t your typical wife killer, all crocodile tears and blubbed regrets. His tears seemed genuine. But, even so, Marty told him not to leave town. Just to stay somewhere a bomber might not find him, with a random cousin or something. He’d also warned him that with Gudsen and Bobbi Lomax both dead it was probably a wise idea to tell his family, friends and colleagues to get out of town, change their patterns of behavior and generally use extreme caution. So, was this Houseman guy another friend or associate of Lomax? If he was, he obviously didn’t get the get-out-of-town-now memo.

  Marty followed a trail of what looked like confetti, right up to the trunk of the car, the lid blown clean off. He peered in. A bunch of papers, charred and burned, floated in enough water for a child’s paddling pool. Documents dealer? Wasn’t that what Al had said? Strange place to put your documents, particularly if they were valuable. And surely they would be if you were a documents dealer. People were dumb. What if someone rear-ended you? ‘Hey Whittaker, get some pictures of this for me, would ya?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Whittaker moved slowly, cautiously, over from where he was picking up short lengths of wire and other bomb f
ragments strewn across the pavement. Just as Marty had, he instinctively followed the main paper trail from the centre of the street to the trunk. Shot off a few of the interior. ‘I can’t get much in there, Mart, not with all that water. Don’t take anything out of there, will you? Marty shot him his how-dumb-do-you-think-I-look glare. Whittaker smiled, raised his eyebrows: ‘I’ll have the car taken to the Shed as quick as I can. I’ll have to drain the water all out of there, see what we got. I don’t want to destroy anything the water hasn’t already.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Marty bent down, tweezered up a piece of the confetti, no bigger than a thumbnail. He looked at it. Charred around the edges, and on it, handwriting in a sepia-colored ink. ‘What do you think this is?’ He pushed it towards Whittaker’s nose.

  Whittaker peered at it. ‘Old letter or something. See how brown the ink is, rusty-looking?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That fancy writing looks like it’s a good century old, at least. Might even be older than the city.’ He laughed and shook his head at the thought.

  Paper older than a city, stored in the trunk of a sports car. Now, that was asking for trouble. Water and paper, never a good mix past the pulping stage. ‘Shit,’ Marty mumbled to himself as the water reminded him of something. He shouted over to a uniformed cop standing guard near the crime guys’ truck. ‘Hey! Get on the radio, right now. Get someone from the City on the line. I need to shut down the block, the sewer. Shut off everyone’s water.’ The kid looked confused. ‘This block. The sewer, go through dispatch. Quick! Before our evidence gets washed the other side of the canyon.’

  Right then, before Marty had time to dodge it, a news camera was pushed in his face and a microphone shoved towards his mouth and the familiar female voice said urgently, ‘With a third victim, the city in fear, its people need answers. Do you have any answers, Detective?’ And, before he could even think of answering her, ‘Are you losing control of this case, Detective Sinclair?’

  ‘Get off my crime scene, Patricia. If you want answers, justice, it’s best you don’t destroy the evidence.’

  The microphone seemed to be almost in his mouth now and then it was gone. And just as quickly as she’d appeared, Patricia Kent also disappeared, followed by her cameraman, to where, right at the edge of the cordon, the Sheriff had materialized. Marty caught it, just a sleight of hand as a man in a black suit pressed a sheet of paper into the Sheriff’s pocket as, around them, a clutch of advisors and City Hall hangers-on pushed forward. Fast approaching them a swarm of hacks, cameras and pens ready, desperate for any broadcastable or printable clue. Marty didn’t fully see the face, just enough of the retreating shoulder and slack jawline to recognise the man in the black suit as Duncan Hemslow, the Faith’s press officer.

  Marty went back to work. A few minutes later he noticed the Sheriff, flanked by the Captain, hold aloft the thick computer printout with the names of all the investors in Lomax’s soon-to-be defunct property company. All three thousand of them. When Marty had left the precinct, less than thirty minutes ago, that very same printout was sat on top of his desk. Jesus. On the wind he heard the Sheriff say that these would be their first suspects. Marty wondered if that was what Hemslow’s note had said, or if the Sheriff had come to that conclusion all on his own. If the latter, it was a good thing the Sheriff got voted in, because if he’d been relying on his detective skills he wouldn’t be running security in a mall. And, thought Marty, relieved, if you get voted in, at least you can get voted out.

  Marty’s pager beeped, damn thing. He popped it out of his belt so he could read it better. He scrolled across the screen two slow words at a time.

  PATIENT CRITICAL. SEIZURES. BRAIN INJURY. I FORGOT: SHUT DOWN THE SEWER!

  4

  July 30th 1982

  The Last Call Tavern high on the cross-county line, scores of miles away from Abraham City, had always been his favorite, a spit-and-sawdust dive where you could drink without fear of being seen by any of the Faithful. And if they were here, like Vegas, you’d be in an immediate secret society where no man spilled another man’s secrets. The Faithful were great at keeping secrets. For Clark it was the best thing about them. He was drinking, like he did most every week, with his old school friend Kenny, the kind of guy who looks like he got lost on the way to the surf. They stood up at the bar drinking beer from long chilled glasses and feasted on unshelled nuts they cracked open themselves, dropping the shells on the floor to be ground underneath by another year’s customers. Clark was trying to make sense of the Mesmer episode. Kenny looked doubtful. ‘Sounds like a bad trip. I’ve got a buddy could get you pills that would do better.’ Kenny always had a buddy that could get you something. Mostly illegal. ‘Sounds like Mesmer’s in the Order of the Twelve Disciples – they can tell you did something bad, just by looking at you.’

  Clark smiled. ‘God’s Faithful Disciples?’

  ‘Yeah, and they reckon they can do it without hypnosis.’

  ‘So they’d have us believe.’

  ‘Do you think it was real though, man? The hypnosis? Think people can really do that shit?’

  Clark remembered Edie being under. He shook his head, lying. ‘No, course not.’

  Hours later they emerged bleary-eyed and blinking from the darkened bar into the blinding light of day. Across the street, Clark spotted a bookstore. ‘That’s new.’

  ‘Yeah, opened a couple weeks back – when you were in Vegas.’

  ‘I’m gonna take a look.’

  As he moved away from Kenny, an attractive blonde got slowly out of her shiny black Trans Am, walked toward Betty May’s beauty parlor. Kenny’s eyes followed her. ‘Take your time, man.’

  *

  Clark struggled with an armful of books towards the cashier, but as he moved through the narrow walkways piled to the rafters something on a shelf up high caught his eye. Edging nearer to take a closer look he kicked over a large bargain bin, accidentally tipping several books out onto the floor: Valley of the Dolls, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and some huge leather-bound volume. Clark stared down at it. Interesting. He bent down to pick it up. Slowly, incredulously, he began turning the pages. This is old, real old. It shouldn’t be in this bin thing in a million years, obviously someone didn’t know its value. An original 1638 King James Bible. Cambridge version. English Cambridge. Not Boston Cambridge. A smile crossed Clark’s face. Printed in the city after a decades-long face-off between the university printers and the church who wanted full control of the good word. Finally, the university won and they set to printing. A major victory against the church’s invidious rule. Clark stared at it. How did it wash up here? It’d certainly seen better days, but you’d look a little tatty after almost 350 years in existence. Clark was almost frightened to move in case he woke himself from this amazing dream. He turned it over in his hand considering its possibilities. He looked around to make sure no one was looking, then tucked it in at the bottom of the pile of books he’d already chosen. On top, he put One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Clark stood at what passed for the cashier’s desk. The teenage assistant looked up, and smiled. Probably pleased to see someone under sixty in the place. ‘Did you find everything you were looking for today, sir?’ Without waiting for a reply she began ringing up his purchases on the clunky old cash register.

  ‘Yes, I think I got everything, thanks. Great store.’

  ‘Glad you like it, it’s my parents.’ She picked up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘This is great. Did you see the movie?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘The lunatics taking over the asylum?’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ said Clark.

  She had reached the Bible. But Clark knew she had no idea what it really was – all she saw was a dusty old Bible. ‘I’ve never been religious myself.’

  ‘I’m finding, Karen . . .’ She looked up, surprised. He indicated her silver necklace, which clearly spelled her name in swirly silver lettering. ‘There’s just not that
many people loving Our Lord Jesus Christ these days. It was in the bargain bin.’ He smiled at her. She touched her necklace, smiled back.

  ‘Oh, the bargain bin? Those are two for a dollar.’

  ‘Cool. Don’t worry about a receipt.’

  While Karen put everything else into a shiny plastic branded bag, Clark picked up a brown paper bag from the counter and carefully wrapped the Bible in it before tucking it safely under his arm.

  Outside Kenny stood, almost draped, over the back of the car, still staring at any woman who passed or drove by. Clark half walked, half ran across the street from the bookstore. The plastic bag in one hand, the brown paper bag now clutched in the other. ‘C’mon, let’s go. Quick.’

  ‘What’s the rush, man?’

  Clark looked back over the street toward the bookstore. Karen was looking out of the window. He smiled at her, she smiled back. Maybe even waved. Clark threw the plastic bag in the back seat. ‘I just remembered I gotta pick Edie and the kids up from her sister’s.’

  He jumped into the driver’s seat, put the wrapped Bible carefully on his lap. Kenny knew better than to ask. Clark reversed the car fast out of the spot, trying not to let the tires screech. As they left the town behind, Clark reached over, took a small breath-freshener spray out of the glove box. Sprayed once, twice and a third time for luck.

  Kenny turned, smiled at him. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re teetotal.’

  They passed a WELCOME TO CANYON COUNTY sign. Clark turned to him. ‘Only in the Canyon . . .’

  5

  Halloween 1983

  ICU, Lumina Hospital

  The uniform stood aside. He was Ed Grady’s kid. Ed had been on Homicide thirty years. Retired last year. Dropped dead the next day. Grady Jnr put his finger up to his lips. Ssssh. Marty looked at him. He nodded toward the corner of the room. Marty could see Al sitting and kind of slumped, his head drooping toward the sleeping patient. ‘Hey buddy! Wake up!’