GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1)

by Noel Hynd

  But they weren’t there anymore. Her gaze traveled around the room until she saw them on the lowest shelf of the china cabinet. She must have moved them. She was constantly doing that, misplacing scripts and books that she meant to read.

  Annette might have easily risen to go fetch one of the scripts. But in truth, she didn’t feel like reading. She was thinking of what she thought had happened. If it had been a dream, she decided in the half light of her wakefulness, it had had a terrible, terrible clarity. So she remained on edge.

  She counted the quarter hours. Outside, very gradually, the sky lightened. She sat motionless, thinking and rooting for the sunrise, her eyes trying to close, half expecting something else to happen.

  But nothing did. A bright clear morning dawned instead.

  Chapter Five

  Timothy Brooks shifted his red Jeep Wrangler into third gear. On his dashboard the local FM station played a twenty-five-year-old ballad by James Taylor. Beneath the dashboard, a concealed police radio squawked intermittently. It had been a report on that radio six minutes earlier that had detoured Brooks from his plans: some early morning basketball, one-on-one with his friend, the endlessly quirky Rev. George Andrew Osaro, pastor and spiritualist. On Saturday mornings, the minister made a worthy hoop opponent. Next to Brooks in the front seat of the Jeep, a basketball rolled slightly with the movements of the small automobile.

  Brooks slowed his car and looked across an otherwise vacant field to an assemblage of vehicles. There were two private cars, a cream-colored ambulance with orange and blue markings, and an armada of dark blue law enforcement vehicles, an equal representation of Nantucket town cops and Massachusetts State Police. Thus Brooks knew he was in the right place.

  He shifted the Jeep back into first gear and turned off the road and onto the grass. Very slowly, very cautiously, he drove across the field. It was shortly past seven A.M. on Saturday morning, July 11.

  This was Brooks’ favorite time of the year. It was midsummer on a resort island where no two summer days were alike, but each was usually a gem in its own way. Low humidity, bright sunshine. Clean clear air. Twenty-five miles at sea off the southeastern coast of Cape Cod. Unique beaches, many of them unspoiled. There was an air of leisure combining with one of sophistication, a place where painters, bankers, vacationers, surf bums, yachtsmen and everyone else could hang out in peaceful coexistence.

  Typically, the sun was strong and the sky was a brilliant blue on this July morning. Had there not been the scent of premature death in the air, this might have been mistaken for a day created in Heaven.

  Brooks continued across the field, stopping a hundred feet short of the other vehicles. A cordon of yellow ribbon had already been set up around a crime scene. The perimeter had been established by two Massachusetts State troopers—one male and one female.

  Brooks stopped his car and stepped from it. Heads turned in his direction at the sound of his door closing. Then the heads turned back to the business before them.

  This morning, Brooks wore a sailor’s yellow windbreaker, a light blue T-shirt, red sweatpants and four-year-old sneakers. He looked fit and strong, like a lifeguard on his way to work, and would have appreciated that suggestion had anyone made it to him. But Tim Brooks was in a different line of work, altogether.

  He walked toward the conclave of uniformed and non-uniformed men. They surrounded something bulky and lifeless that lay beneath a gray blanket in a grassy patch of field. A state cop in uniform, a big hulking bear of a man whose nameplate proclaimed him to be R. Hennessy, stepped in Brooks’ direction and put up a large hand.

  “Sorry, sir!” the trooper said brusquely, sorry about nothing. “Crime scene. Have to ask you to leave.”

  Brooks stopped short. “I don’t think so,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket. “How long have you worked on this island?”

  “Eight weeks,” the trooper answered.

  “I’ve been here seven years,” Brooks said.

  The state cop didn’t move until Brooks pulled out a small flat black leather case. Brooks flipped it open. A silver shield therein identified him as a detective of the Nantucket town police. The state cop, thoroughly unimpressed, glanced at it, then reacted to it as if it were day-old bread.

  “Okay,” Hennessy said. “Go ahead.” He allowed Brooks to pass. Brooks walked through the wet grass to the small cluster of men and women. He was in time to see a paramedic from the ambulance pull the gray blanket away from the victim’s head. Brooks peered downward and looked for the first time—but not the last time—into the face of Mary Elizabeth DiMarco.

  “Oh, my God,” Brooks whispered.

  Several of those assembled—cops and medical people and one reporter from the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror—glanced back. Then they looked away from him again.

  Bill Agannis, a paunchy, gruff man with a weathered face and prematurely white hair, was the Lieutenant of Detectives. He was Brooks’ ultimate boss, as well as the assistant chief on the island. Agannis stood a few feet from the dead woman. Through some sort of personal radar, Agannis knew Brooks was there.

  Bill Agannis wore no expression at all. He just stared at the dead girl, his thoughts alternating between the needlessness of this having to happen, the solemnity of the personal tragedy and the amount of trouble the death would inevitably cause for his department.

  Not too far from Agannis was the lieutenant’s inevitable shadow: a big, amiable dog named Boomer. Boomer was part German Shepherd and part Labrador Retriever with a little heaven-knew-what-else sprinkled in. He was a big friendly mutt who liked everyone except, for some reason, Reverend Osaro, whom he wouldn’t go near. Boomer lay in the grass about fifty feet from his master, relaxed and dispassionate, eyes alert, ears attentive. Boomer was always happy to be part of things, as long as Bill Agannis was present.

  There were two other detectives, Al Rodzienko and Dick Gelman, both in civilian clothes. Gelman held a walkie-talkie. They were militantly blue collar, fortyish men with sullen brown eyes. Facially, they vaguely resembled each other, but Rodzienko, a Russian-American, was four inches taller. Gelman, the smaller man, had thinning hair, slicked back. He looked like a villain from a 1940’s movie and he knew it. They made no effort to conceal their distaste for Brooks or his arrival. They spoke to each other in low tones and immediately stopped talking when Brooks drew too close.

  “We don’t need you here, Brooks,” Gelman said.

  “I thought I’d see if you morons needed help,” Brooks answered.

  “We don’t,” answered Rodzienko. “So beat it.”

  Lieutenant Agannis finally turned. He looked with annoyance at the entire contingent of plainclothes detectives on his small force—all three of them, bickering as usual. They were a triumvirate of men who routinely split two-to-one—Gelman and Rodzienko vs. Brooks—over any issue, from police procedure to whether the sun would rise the next day.

  The lieutenant’s gaze swept back and forth over Brooks, Gelman and Rodzienko. “Shut up, will ya?” he snapped. “All three of you!”

  They did. For a few moments.

  Agannis reached to his pocket and found a pack of cigarettes. He was the last Marlboro Man on the police force, a chain smoker who didn’t believe the Surgeon General of the United States any more than he trusted any other representative of the federal government—and he had a persistent, hacking, phlegm-laden cough to prove it. He lit up with no apologies whatsoever and inhaled deeply.

  A female ambulance attendant pulled the blanket from the dead girl’s seminude corpse. Brooks angled for a clearer view as the paramedics prepared a body bag.

  Brooks could see that the victim had been a very pretty girl. From her face and her body, he guessed that she was around twenty, maybe a shade older. And he could see that her head was at an impossible angle, like an owl whose neck had been wrung. There was blood caked upon her hair and through her mouth.

  Brooks grimaced. He was no stranger to death. But he sometimes felt himself shrinking f
rom his job when confronted by the violence inflicted by some humans upon others. He often wondered whether that aspect of his personality—a weakness in the face of the worst that a policeman’s job could offer—was why he’d chosen to be a small town cop instead of a big city one. Yet he had no difficulty accepting even the lowest and most uncivilized forms of social behavior.

  Brooks stared downward. There was an expression on the dead girl’s face that chilled him, one of torment and terror unlike any he ever had seen.

  “She saw an emissary of the Devil coming to cart her away!” said an unwelcome mysterious voice that Brooks was surprised to hear inside him. “Dumb broad!”

  What was she doing out here in the field overnight, anyway?

  He shivered. Where had that thought come from? He felt himself recoiling. Then he suppressed all the other unwelcome, unwarranted notions. Blaming the victim was wrong. This was someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Just a college kid out for a good time, but who had run afoul of the wrong person.

  What a world sometimes, he thought. A flutter of fear went through him, wondering about the perpetrator who could have inflicted this on someone.

  And yet, he felt a creeping sense of a larger fear, a foreboding of massive danger. A small, distant, terrified instinct somewhere deep within him told him that this was something far out of the ordinary. And he wondered as he had wondered many times in the past, how would he act, how would he bear up, when facing an adversary that was greater than he.

  Books drew a deep breath. His courage rallied. He looked again at the death scene.

  Karma! That was it, Brooks told himself as he gazed upon the wreckage of a recent human life. Brooks was a cop who believed in a lot of things that he could not directly see. Like karma, for example. Vibrations.

  Things had auras that humans could sometimes sense. And there was enough of the bad stuff in the air here to bottle and ship out of the country. That was what bothered him, along with that horrible expression on the dead girl’s face.

  A young doctor whom Brooks didn’t recognize knelt beside the body. His name was O’Neill, Brooks overheard, and he was on call from the island’s only hospital.

  Brooks guessed that O’Neill had figured he’d be treating second-degree sunburns, broken bones, poison ivy and cuts from fish hooks. Instead, he had drawn the task of confirming the death of a pretty young girl.

  “Where’s Doctor Youmans this morning?” Brooks asked the ambulance driver. “He normally does the pronouncements.”

  “Fishing,” said Rodzienko, intentionally overhearing. He answered loudly and pointedly cut off the ambulance driver, who was an older black man. “Youmans is a fisherman. Blues are running off Eel Point.”

  “Normally we call him, anyway,” Brooks said. “Have for years.”

  “Youmans is in his seventies and the lieutenant thinks he’s slipping,” Rodzienko said with a soft snarl. We started working in a few other doctors.”

  “This is a homicide. Dr. Youmans has the experience,” Brooks said.

  “If you got a beef, see Lieutenant Agannis,” Gelman answered.

  Brooks sighed and moved nearer the doctor. He could see the jitteriness of the young physician’s hand. Brooks squatted beside him.

  “Broken neck?” Brooks asked sympathetically. He looked carefully and saw no other trauma to her body.

  “Maybe.” The doctor was noncommittal.

  Dr. O’Neill was dark-haired but dewy cheeked. He looked to be about a year out of medical school. Brooks pursed his lips. The girl’s skin had been very fair and very pretty, as had her hair. Brooks was conscious that he had his own nervous tic at a time like this. The fingers of his left hand were slowly and gently fidgeting with the school ring on his right.

  “How long’s she been dead?” Brooks asked.

  “Tough to tell. “

  “Give us a guess.”

  “When I’m ready, all right?”

  Brooks waited two seconds. “Ever pronounced a crime victim dead before?”

  The doctor glanced at him with mounting irritation.

  “What do you make of the facial contortions?” Brooks asked.

  “Normal.”

  “Hardly looks normal to me,” Brooks said.

  “The facial contortions stem from neurological trauma to the head, neck and the brain,” the doctor answered angrily. “Look. If you went to med school, then you can do this!”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then push off. I know what I’m doing, okay?”

  The gauntlet was down. Lieutenant Agannis spat on the ground. He watched without yet interceding.

  After several seconds the doctor spoke again “She’s been dead a couple of hours, maybe,” the doctor said.

  “Can you do any better than that? Your pronouncement right here is likely to end up as official.”

  The doctor looked up at him. “You in charge here or do you just think you are?”

  “Hey, Brooks! Leave the man alone,” Lieutenant Agannis finally growled. “State law: A physician has to pronounce her dead before we can move her. Or is there finally a sticky point of law that you’ve forgotten?”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I’m just curious what her temperature is,” Brooks said, standing.

  “They’ll do a complete postmortem in Hyannis,” the doctor said.

  “Yeah,” Brooks said. “And it’ll take us three days to get it and half the time the PM’s from Hyannis are loused up. Right?”

  Lieutenant Agannis considered the point through a long cloud of smoke.

  “So what’s her temperature right now?” Brooks asked, still standing. “Did anyone take it?” He looked around. “Seems to me that might be useful,” he suggested.

  “I’m not taking a temperature,” Dr. O’Neill said. “Dead is dead. But I’d say she died sometime shortly before dawn,” O’Neill said. “Two to three hours ago.”

  “So between four and five A.M.? That’s your guess?” Brooks asked.

  “That’s my guess,” O’Neill answered without looking up.

  “What’s your point, Tim?” Agannis asked.

  “What do we get here, Lieutenant?” Brooks asked. “Only an occasional homicide, right? Usually it’s a gunshot. Sometimes vehicular. Get a stabbing now and then, too, don’t we? We even had a poisoning about five years ago.”

  Brooks looked at his chief and the two other detectives. “But when’s the last time we found a body out in a field from overnight?”

  No one answered, so Brooks continued. “I don’t remember one and I’ve been here for a few years now.”

  There was an uneasy movement of feet in the wet grass.

  Brooks stooped down again.

  “So what?” Rodzienko asked.

  “I used to work in a different part of the country on a different police force,” Brooks said to the physician. “We had bodies all over the place. A corpse cools at one and a half degrees per hour.”

  “What are you? A med school flunk-out?” the doctor asked.

  Rodzienko couldn’t miss his opportunity. “No,” he barked. “Timmy’s a law school flunk-out. Became a cop instead.”

  Rodzienko and Gelman laughed, as did the team from the ambulance.

  Brooks continued undeterred. “It’s up to you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bill Agannis. “But if we get an accurate temperature right now,” he said, “rather than later, when the chances of inaccuracy are greater, we’d know exactly when…”

  “Detective Brooks has a point,” Agannis said quietly. “Take the temperature, Doctor. It won’t hurt.”

  The physician made no secret of his anger. Then he placed a mercury swatch above the dead girl’s left breast. A minute later, a reading of 91.8 suggested that the time of death might have been shortly after two A.M.

  “This is not the most accurate form of measurement,” the doctor said irritably to Brooks.

  “This usually works for us.”

  “Then you’re in the dark ages out here.”

  �
��What pocket of enlightened civilization do you normally live in?” Brooks asked.

  “New York.”

  “Figures.”

  “If you hate the place, that’s your problem,” the doctor answered. He stood and removed a pair of latex gloves. He signaled that the ambulance staff could place the body in the bag.

  “Hey, doc?” Rodzienko asked.

  The doctor looked to the more receptive member of the Nantucket Police Department. “Don’t worry much about Timmy Brooks. He never misses a chance to show someone up. It’s just that normally he ends up showing himself up instead.”

  “Figures again,” the doctor said.

  Lieutenant Agannis snarled again. “You got a dead college kid lying here! Would you guys shut up?”

  “I just thought we might want some ball park numbers,” Brooks said softly.

  “It shouldn’t matter much to you,” Gelman said. “First, it’s not your case. Second, we already got a suspect.”

  “Yeah,” Rodzienko added. “Hate to break your heart, Brooks. But this one just may have been wrapped without you.” Detective Rodzienko motioned toward a police cruiser twenty yards to their right, parked at the edge of the field where it was bordered by the stone wall of the cemetery. There two uniformed officers stood with a distraught young man who looked to be about the same age as the dead female. He had red hair, wore jeans and a University of Michigan sweatshirt and had the build of a college athlete in a fast noncontact sport. Brooks knew he was from off-island. He had never seen him before.

  “Who is he?” Brooks asked.