Fact or Fiction - A Sam Prichard Mystery (Sam Prichard, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Private Investigator Book 13)

by David Archer

  On the second day of their visit, Sam had taken everyone involved out to dinner. He even called up Detective Moore and Jason Garrity to invite them along, and was pleasantly surprised when they showed up together in Moore’s car.

  “Well, hell,” Moore said when Sam grinned at him, “you wanted me to give the kid a chance, right? After what he did to help you on this case, I figured he might be worth trying to salvage. We spent half the afternoon with the sheriff, and he’s agreed to hire this punk. He’s going to be stuck in dispatch for quite a while, but it turns out the office has a little money for educating and training new deputies.”

  Sam congratulated Jason, and they all went into the restaurant to eat.

  At dinner, with a dozen people in his party, Sam felt like he had actually accomplished something. It was a wonderful evening, and by the time it was over, Sam realized that there was only one loose end left that he needed to tie up.

  “So, I’ve got to know,” he said during a lull in the table conversation. “When Moore asked us who Beauregard was, you actually said he was just a figment of your imagination, this time. I’m still trying to figure out what I believe, but I want to know why you said that.”

  Everyone in the party had finally been told that Sam’s mysterious client had hired him to track down the descendants of an old Civil War soldier named Henry Thomas Beauregard. When Sam asked that question, they all turned and looked at him expectantly.

  Kim sat there for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts. She looked at Sam, then looked at Indie and smiled. She looked at Grace and the smile got a little wider, and then she looked at her granddaughter and it spread completely across her face. Then she looked at all of the others sitting there, and the smile turned into something thoughtful.

  “I said it,” she began, “because it’s true. When Marcy grabbed me, I hadn’t heard Beauregard in more than a day. I was actually afraid he was gone forever, but it turned out he wasn’t. He had been digging around in my memories and found some that I had apparently suppressed a long time ago. I guess it was because I watched my mother lose so many of her own memories. I saw her go from this vibrant, happy woman to someone who couldn’t even remember the way to the grocery store, and it was only three blocks down the street. I guess that hurt, and so for some reason I started burying a lot of the memories I had of her.”

  She looked at all of their guests. “You see, for many years I was convinced that Beauregard was a ghost that had somehow attached himself to me. At first it kind of scared me, but then I learned that he could often tell me things that were going to happen, or he could give me answers to questions I didn’t even know needed to be asked. Once, when Indie and I were struggling just to survive, he told me to go into this old abandoned house, because there was something there that would help us out. In that house, that seemingly belonged to no one, we discovered a box of silver dishes and such, very old and very valuable. We lived on that money for quite a while.

  “Anyway, just about everyone else who knew me thought I was a bit on the crazy side, and I guess that’s understandable. What they couldn’t deny, though, was that whatever Beauregard told me always seemed to be true. When Sam and Indie got married, Beauregard started helping him out a bit, telling him things about his cases that made it possible for him to solve them, or to save lives. Sometimes it even saved Sam’s life.”

  “That’s absolutely true,” Sam said. “More than once.”

  “Well, anyway, when Marcy had me and I was so scared, Beauregard came back. This time, though, he told me to just sit quietly and try to remember some things. And do you know, suddenly a lot of those old memories began to come back. I remembered when I was a very little girl, and my mother would pull me up onto her lap and tell me these wonderful stories. They were stories that her mother had told her, she said, stories that were passed down from generation to generation in our family.”

  She took a deep breath. “Some of the most important stories she told me were about my great-great-great-I don’t know how many greats-great-grandfather. And his name—his name was Henry Thomas Beauregard. He had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and he had never come home, but he had such a rich and powerful personality that he was incredibly well respected by everyone who knew him. I don’t remember everything she told me about him, but I do know that I probably heard those stories over and over throughout my early childhood. It wasn’t until Mom’s mind started really going that she stopped telling me about him, and that’s probably when I started to suppress those memories. I guess I missed those moments, and because it was painful to think about them, I simply put them away.”

  She reached out and touched her daughter’s face. “Then one day, right after Indie and I had moved into this terrible old house, I suddenly knew that if I didn’t take her out of her playpen, something bad was going to happen. I hurried into the room where she was at and snatched her up, and it was only seconds later a big part of the ceiling fell in and landed right where she had been. Well, I’d always been taught that anything supernatural was probably evil, so some part of me subconsciously wanted to blame my supernatural knowledge on something even more supernatural. And I guess that’s why, when I had to come up with something, those buried memories of Henry Thomas Beauregard surfaced a bit.”

  She looked around the table again, smiling at each person. “They say that when someone suffers a great trauma, they sometimes create a whole new personality to deal with it. Abuse victims do that, prisoners of war have been known to do that, and I’m sure there are other examples, but I don’t know them. Well, I guess that’s what I did. Beauregard became a part of me that could handle knowing the future, because I couldn’t. Now, though, since I finally know the truth, I’m no longer afraid of this gift. If it continues, then I’ll simply accept it. But that’s why I say Beauregard is not a real ghost, that he is nothing but a part of myself that was created when I needed him.”

  Everyone sat there in silence for a moment, just looking at her, and then Sam cleared his throat.

  “Is he gone?”

  Kim looked at him for a moment, then closed her eyes. She opened them a moment later and smiled.

  “He says not to worry, Sam,” she said. “You’re not quite free of him yet.”

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  EXCERPT OF BOOK FOURTEEN...

  1

  Ten Years Earlier

  A call came in requiring a homicide detective, and everyone else was already busy. Karen was sent out alone for the first time. She found her way to the alley behind a 7-Eleven store, where three squad cars had everything blocked off. She had to park on the street outside the alley and then walked down to where a half-dozen uniforms were standing around.

  “Karen Parks, homicide,” she said, flashing her ID. “What have you got, guys?”

  “Over here, behind the dumpster,” said one of the officers. His name tag said Dennison. “Three kids were cutting through the alley this morning on the way to school, and they saw a dog trying to rip a plastic bag open over here. They figured the dog was after something to eat, so one of them decided to help him out. He tore the bag open and suddenly realized he was looking at a human hand. They all freaked out and called us.”

  He pointed and Karen saw four blue plastic trash bags. One of them had been torn open and she saw the hand in plain view. The others had been carefully cut, and their contents almost made her throw up.

  The first bag contained what looked like both arms from a small woman. Karen assumed the victim was female because of the nail polish, and the small size and general shape of the hands and arms seemed to confirm it. Another bag contained a pair of legs, both cut off halfway up the thigh. Based on the size, they appeared to be from the same victim.

  It was the other two bags that were so nauseating. Each of them contained half of the torso, and there was no doubt about the gender. The torso had been cut in half just under the breastbone, and it looked like it had been done with some kind of saw. The cuts on the bones were smooth, rather than jagged as they would have been with a knife or some kind of chopping tool.

  The intestines were loose in the bag, and it appeared that the organs from the upper chest had also been torn out. They were present, or so it appeared, but they were definitely not attached to the inner chest cavity.

  “Holy geez,” Karen said. She was holding the back of her hand against her lips, trying to stifle the urge to be sick. “Anything to suggest identity?”

  “Not that we’ve seen. Crime scene is on the way, and so is the Medical Examiner. Personally, I wouldn’t even have cut the bags open till you guys all got here, but the rookie over there thought he needed to inventory the contents.”

  Karen looked over at a young officer who was leaning against a utility pole. He looked as green as she felt, and there were some obvious stains on his shirt. “Yeah? How’d that work out for him?”

  “Puked all over himself,” Dennison said with a grin. “At least he managed to get away from the scene before he did it, though. That woulda been a mess if he’d puked into one of those bags.”

  Karen nodded. “Okay, where’s the kids at? I’ll talk to them first, and when CSI gets here, you guys can all start canvassing the neighborhood. See if anybody saw who dropped the bags or noticed anything else suspicious, and find out if there’s any missing women in the neighborhood.”

  “We got them sitting in the back of my car. They’re a little shook up, but they managed to keep their wits about them. They knew not to touch anything else until we got here.” He looked around at the rookie. “Too bad not everybody is that smart.”

  Karen had managed to force down her gag reflex, so she walked over to the squad car and opened one of the back doors. “You kids want to climb out so we can talk?”

  The three of them, two boys and one girl, got out of the car and then leaned against it once the door was shut. All three of them appeared to be a little nervous, but Karen figured that was normal when teenagers had to deal with police.

  “How about you tell me what happened here this morning?” Karen asked. “Wait, let’s start with your names.”

  The boys were Todd Gray and Eric Burton, both fifteen. The girl gave her name as Emily Summers.

  Todd seemed to be their chosen spokesman. “We live back over there,” he said, pointing toward some apartment buildings, “and we always cut through here on the way to school. Sometimes when we come by the dumpster, there’s a couple of local strays that we sometimes see digging around for something to eat. They’re friendly dogs, so we usually take a look in the dumpster and drag out any food they might’ve pitched out. This morning, one of them was trying to rip open a big plastic bag on the ground, so I thought maybe it was full of some of their leftovers from the store, right? I thought I’d help the dog out and ripped it open, and that’s when I saw what was in it.”

  “What did you actually see?” Karen asked.

  “Looked like a hand,” Todd said. “At first I thought it was, like, off a manikin or something, but it looked too real. I told Eric to take a look and he just about crapped his pants, so Emily got her phone and called 911. We ran out the dogs and stood over here till that first cop got here, and then he opened all the other bags.” He glanced at the rookie and snickered. “Then he threw up all over himself.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Karen said. “I almost did the same thing when I saw what was in the other bags. Be glad you didn’t open one of them first.” She looked at Eric and Emily. “Either of you got anything to add?”

  Eric shook his head, but Emily took a step toward Karen. “There was fingernail polish,” she said. “That was a girl, wasn’t it?”

  “Looks that way, yeah,” Karen said. “You know of any girls or women who’ve gone missing lately around here?”

  Emily shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m just thinking that I hope you catch whoever did it.”

  Karen smiled at her. “We will,” she said. “You can count on it.”

  She gave each of the kids her card and let them go on to school. She told them to let their teachers and principal know what had happened, and that they could call her to verify it if necessary. The three of them thanked her and hurried away.

  The crime scene technicians had arrived, along with the medical examiner, and Karen went to watch as the scene was photographed and inventoried. The ground around the bags was soft, but the only visible footprints appeared to belong to the boys and the rookie patrolman. They were photographed anyway, so that they could be compared on a computer later. That would tell them if there might be a fourth set, which might conceivably belong to whoever had dumped the body parts.

  Establishing a time of death, the medical examiner told her, would be very difficult. Normally, they would measure the internal core temperature of a body, but that wouldn’t help in this case. “At a rough guess,” the ME said, “based on the general condition, I’d say this woman has been dead at least twelve hours but not more than forty-eight. That’s about the best I can tell you at the moment.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Karen said. She looked up to see Dennison approaching and walked over to meet him. “Get anything?”

  “Nobody around here saw anything, or so they say,” he said. “I found one guy who said he walked through the alley about ten o’clock last night, and he didn’t think those bags were there then. Couldn’t be sure, though.”

  Karen nodded. “Anybody know about anyone who might be missing?”

  Dennison shook his head. “Not so far. Personally, I’m guessing we’ll find out this gal was whacked over some kind of drug deal or something like that. Chopping her up might’ve just been to make it easier to get rid of her.”

  “Could be,” Karen said. “But the fact that the head is missing could mean somebody is trying to keep us from identifying her. We’ll run the fingerprints, but I suspect they are not going to give us any information.”

  “Yeah,” Dennison agreed, “probably not. God, I hate things like this. Poor thing probably has family out there somewhere that has no idea what happened to her.”

  “Yeah. There’s a lot of that, nowadays.”

  Karen went back to the station and wrote up a report,
but there was little she could do until she got the medical examiner’s conclusions. In the meantime, she went back to working on paperwork catch up and hoped the victim’s head would turn up sometime soon.

  It was two days later when she got the next call on the case. The medical examiner had found traces of oxycodone and methamphetamine in the remains, and had confirmed that the body had been cut up with some sort of power saw. The cuts were too smooth for anything else, he explained, and there were definite marks indicating that the reciprocation of the blade had been very fast.

  An hour later, though, came the call she had been hoping for. The victim’s head had been found at the landfill. It would have gone unnoticed, but one of the bulldozer operators had been waiting for the truck to dump its load and saw what looked like blonde hair. He had jumped down off his machine and walked over to look, then radioed the office to tell them what he found.

  The medical examiner arrived at the same time Karen did, and the two of them walked through the stinking piles of refuse together. “Well, we might not get much information,” he said. “If the head got dumped into the compactor, it’s going to be pretty contaminated.”

  “All I’m really hoping for is an identification,” Karen said. “If it’s not too badly mangled, we’ll get photos and have an artist draw up a sketch of what she might have looked like alive. You guys can work your magic on dental records and such while I’m trying that.”

  When they saw the head, Karen felt nauseous. It had apparently gotten caught in the mechanism of the compactor truck and part of the flesh had been torn completely off the face. She took photos anyway, and then the ME carefully picked it up.