Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  “You think it was because he seized Jace Denboer’s car for five minutes?”

  “It’s the theory.”

  “The Denboers killed him?”

  “I didn’t get that far. It could be anyone. There are some guys . . . he could have gotten crosswise of them. And you can be sure nobody else in the sheriff’s department wants to prove it. Half the force is corrupt, and the other half is running scared.”

  “Why are you on the run?”

  “Because I was the one assigned to investigate Danny’s death.”

  She opened a drawer and produced a lightweight laptop. “Rand gave me this to use. The files are already on here.”

  She showed him the murder book for Dan Atwood. A description of the crime scene, sketches of the body, aerial view, a list of physical evidence, grisly photographs.

  Atwood’s body had decomposed considerably. Atwood was shot execution style—a .22 slug, placed right at the junction box. That didn’t mean he’d been shot by an expert. Anybody with a television set would know that a .22 to the head at close range did the most damage. Every cop show in the history of the world had gone over that ground at one time or another.

  Jolie’s theory was that the hole had already been dug and he had been kneeling at the time, shot in the back of the head, and fell forward into the shallow grave.

  So she’d looked for enemies. Atwood wasn’t popular. For one thing, he was a rookie. A freshman, basically, in a high school full of jocks. Jolie recalled some awkward moments, some practical jokes, the usual hazing. The “kick me” sign on his back.

  He’d been partnered with three different deputies, and none of them could stand him. Policing was a dangerous job. A cop needed good backup. That bond was very important.

  No one wanted to partner with him.

  Still, when he’d had the opportunity, he’d made the big move. He’d taken Jace Denboer’s Camaro.

  And then he was gone. He didn’t officially quit, but it was assumed he’d taken the coward’s way out.

  Jolie said, “But why would he leave all his possessions? Why wouldn’t he try to get back some of the money he’d paid on rent? I was making headway, and then, just like that, I was reassigned. The sheriff gave the case to Jacobs, probably the worst detective we have, does the very minimum. A few of us have a saying: ‘If you want to bury something, give it to Jacobs.’”

  “So what do you think about this kid? What was going on with him?”

  “I think Dan Atwood found out something he shouldn’t have.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They went through the murder book.

  Atwood had disappeared in late spring. May 8th to be exact, when he didn’t show up for his shift. They’d tried his cell and his home phone: nothing. Sent a deputy to cruise by his house. Two days later, it turned out that he had formally quit— by letter. It was a short, typed letter of resignation, pleading an emergency at home. In Sitka, Alaska.

  His reason for quitting: his brother had cancer. He left an address for the sheriff’s office to send him his last paycheck.

  Then his body was found in October by a farm worker.

  Jolie’s theory was some kind of animal had dug him up. The burial site was only a few yards in from the roadside fence. Not in a row of beans, but in the patch of dirt and tall grass by the fence. The confrontation between Dan and his killer might have happened on the road. Maybe someone had pulled over; maybe there was some kind of altercation. Of course this was all conjecture. There was little evidence left, since it had been months between the time Atwood disappeared and the time he was found.

  “If it was a bean field, wouldn’t someone find him pretty fast?”

  “The field was fallow.”

  Landry remembered the drive to Branch, the big agricultural farms that stretched for miles alongside the road. Three of them in a row, and two smaller ones, mom and pop concerns, on the opposite side. “Which farm?”

  “Valleyview Experimental Agricultural Station.”

  Landry said, “The one nearest to town. There was a lane with poplar trees. And an airstrip. And bean fields.”

  “You have a good memory. That’s the place.”

  “Who found him?”

  “One of the farm workers checking irrigation ditches. He smelled it, thought an animal had died out there, and went looking for it.”

  She described the scene. Something had been out there digging—“An animal of some sort. Maybe a dog, or a coyote. Or a bobcat.”

  According to the interview with the worker, he’d smelled decay, and then he saw something brown, the dark soil clinging to it—a bone. Disarticulated, probably dug up by a predator. They’d pulled the arm out. The body was degraded, part of it mummified. And clinging to the corpse was a tan shirt—the color deputies wore. And a badge, smeared with dried mud but still reflecting the sun.

  Landry pictured the farm. Rows and rows of dried, reddish-brown beanstalks—at that time of year they would look a lot like shredded wheat cereal. A corpse would fit right in. Muddy brown from the dirt, hard to see. Hard to see, but easy to smell. Still, who went out that far into a fallow field?

  “May,” he said.

  “Yes, May.” Jolie turned the laptop toward him.

  Landry looked at the corpse again. There was the bean field. Just as he had imagined it. The row of tall poplars way in the background. Sheriff’s deputies and detectives standing around.

  More photos. Atwood in situ in the grave. Atwood placed on a tarp to be moved. Atwood zipped into a body bag.

  Photos of the grave from every angle. An aerial view of the farm as well.

  Evidence markers had been placed here and there. One next to a rusty nail. A fast-food wrapper that had been wadded up and blanched white from the wet, coated with mud. But inside one fold it was bright yellow.

  Landry said, “I saw someone sitting outside near the Walmart the other day. At a taco place. The wrapper was yellow.”

  “The Chimi Brothers has wrappers like that,” Jolie said. “Atwood disappeared in May and wasn’t found until October—that’s five and a half months. I interviewed the servers at Chimi Brothers. I asked them if they recognized Dan Atwood and if they’d ever served him. It was a stretch, but I asked them if they had ever served him in May. I even asked them if Atwood might have been with somebody.”

  “Let me guess,” Landry said. “You got nothing.”

  “No one remembered serving him, or even seeing him. It was too long ago. Whatever encounter they’d had with him—if they did at all—wouldn’t have been memorable. And for all I know there’s another three or four Mexican chain restaurants with yellow wax paper.”

  “There are another three or four Mexican chain restaurants.”

  She shook her head. “There you go, correcting people’s grammar again. It’s like you have Tourette’s syndrome.”

  “It’s habit.”

  “It’s a bad habit.” She grinned, to let him down gently. “There’s other stuff you need to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “I went out on a date with Jace Denboer.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Unpleasant. Awkward. Weird.”

  “Did he ask you out again?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you go in the first place?”

  “Why do you think? To check him out.”

  “And what did you find out?”

  Jolie told him.

  Chapter 12

  Everything about their “date” went wrong. Jace showed up at her door with flowers. She asked him in and put the expensive red roses in a vase. Roses always reminded Jolie of funerals—although usually they were white. These had a moldy smell, as if they’d been kept in the back cooler at the Safeway for too long.

  She a
sked him to sit down and he sat on her couch. He wasn’t much for small talk, so Jolie found herself having to fill the gap. Imagine a rich kid like him not being able to hold up his side of the conversation, but that was how it was. He wasn’t shy; he wasn’t awkward. Maybe the word for him was “distracted.”

  As they walked out to the car, he rested his arm around her shoulder. It lay there like a dead animal. Jolie knew then that this was a bad idea. Worse than a bad idea. It would be a long evening, and she was already making plans to find a way to duck out after the main course.

  And that was when she saw the car for the first time—up close. How hideous it was. In the late afternoon sunshine, she could see the uneven paint job, almost like a lava flow only sanded down. Whoever had painted it made mistake after mistake, slapping on more coats of paint to cover it up, and finally they just sprayed another two or three coats on, really rough—almost like powder.

  “It looked like a chunk of charcoal.”

  This was his pride and joy? Jolie would have unloaded it ages ago.

  They went to an upscale restaurant. The Cliffs was up in the foothills where the tony places were. California Fan Palms, their trunks ringed with white fairy lights, led to a circle around a fountain. The restaurant consisted of three brown stucco cubes scattered among beautiful gardens and tall palms, and they all looked down on the small city through walls of glass. So nice, but to her the glass fronts made her think of ice. It made her feel cold.

  Maybe it wasn’t the place so much as the person she was with.

  Of course there was valet parking. Jolie noticed that the valet was courteous and treated Jace’s car like a freshly laid egg, despite its condition. He must have seen it many times.

  But Jolie couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between the expensive restaurant and Jace’s chariot.

  She described the car again to Landry. Almost as if she had to get it right.

  It was so ugly. Something you’d see at a chop shop. The way the paint was slapped on it, so dull that it seemed to swallow the light. Jolie thought it was some kind of primer, although she’d always thought of primer as gray. An eyesore.

  This was the precious car Dan Atwood seized?

  Hard to wrap her mind around.

  The date—and it really had all the awkwardness that the word date implied—lurched on from there. There was very little in the way of conversation. It was strange. The waiter, the maître d’, the table settings, the sparkling glasses, the linen, the view, the low voices and clink of silverware—it should have been a magical evening. The exquisite lighting, and the food, which was excellent. Perhaps the best meal she’d ever tasted.

  But the company . . . Jolie said she was probably not the best conversationalist in the world, but compared to Jace Denboer, she was brilliant. She tried a half-dozen times to get him to talk about something, before realizing that she was trying too hard and probably came off like a performing monkey.

  “To say it was small talk would be insulting to all the small-talkers out there,” Jolie told Landry. “He had virtually nothing to say. He just stared at me and kept asking me about myself. He just phrased it in different ways.

  “Honestly. I don’t even know why he asked me out. Except for talking about the car, and asking me inane questions, like where was I from, was I a good shot, did I like cars, who were my friends. Like he was testing me, somehow.

  “He just kept staring at me, as if he expected me to produce a litter of kittens. It was like he didn’t want to be there at all—I got the impression this was something he had to do. Like an arranged marriage. He excused himself partway through dinner and went off to the bathroom and God only knows what he did in there. If he was jerking off, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of me. It was a total waste of time, on his part as well as mine. I’m surprised we lasted an hour. It was like he had to be there. He definitely didn’t want to get me in bed”—she shuddered at the thought—“and I don’t think he made eye contact with me the whole evening. The only thing he did to impress me was to let me ride in his car. And that strange stunt with the shirt.”

  “His shirt?”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  At one point during dinner, Jace grimaced and said, “What’s that smell?”

  Jolie didn’t smell anything except the food. But Jace became increasingly agitated. He called the waiter over and questioned him at length. That’s when it came out: he believed there were cardamom seeds in the salad.

  The waiter told him there weren’t. Jace became even more agitated. Jolie didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. He questioned the waiter at length about it. The waiter even brought the chef out to explain the ingredients, but Jace didn’t believe either one of them.

  “The cardamom seeds were the most important thing he talked about all night,” Jolie said. “Between the flat affect and the paranoia, I’m wondering if there’s something medically wrong with him. He’s in his midtwenties—twenty-four, to be exact—and that’s about the age when schizophrenia begins to take hold in young men. The weirdest thing was that damn car.

  “But it gets even weirder than that.”

  She told him.

  Their dinner didn’t take long. After Jace’s minitantrum, he tersely ordered the check and they left. He drove her straight home, without saying a word. Still agitated.

  Angry.

  Seething. Jolie could feel it. She could almost smell it. Like an animal backed into a den.

  The last of the sunset lost its color. They reached her street. The one thing the neighborhood had was good streetlights. Probably put in years ago when the tract houses were built.

  He insisted on walking her to her door. It felt like one of those old movies from the fifties or sixties—she was surprised he didn’t ask to see her dad.

  Jolie thanked him for the evening. Again, like the 1950s. Maybe Father Knows Best. He stood there, looking at her, his face pale in the dusk. She couldn’t read him.

  “The flat affect. There’s something really wrong with him. He said, ‘Just a minute.’”

  He walked back to the car. He turned his back on her and ducked through the open window of the Camaro, as if he were looking for something. Reaching in, fiddling with something.

  Jolie carried a gun in a specially made compartment in her purse, built for concealed carry. She unzipped the bag and curled her hand around the stock, finger on the trigger. She didn’t want to turn her back on him to go into the house. Jace and his butt-ugly car were approximately twenty feet away. As a cop, Jolie knew the “twenty-one-foot rule.” If a man threatening you was within twenty-one feet, you had to shoot immediately to stop him from getting to you. He could get to you in an instant, across twenty-one feet.

  Heart thumping. Mouth dry.

  But determined. She’d been trained always to shoot to kill.

  His back was still to her as he leaned into the car. He was stretched forward; she could see the waist of his jeans pull down just a little. Jolie wondered if he was reaching into the glove compartment, even now grabbing his own weapon. Was that his plan? To shoot her? Why?

  Why would he take her out to dinner and then shoot her at her door?

  The sky was turning darker by the minute. Jace and his shadowy Camaro were getting harder to see, even with the streetlight reflecting down on them. He remained bent, his upper body inside the car. Rummaging. Rummaging around for something. Jolie’s hand tightened on her Sig. Then, still bowed over, he reached down to his waist, rucked his shirt up and pulled it over his head. His bare back to her.

  “He took off his shirt.”

  Jolie could see the faint outline of what must be his head, his arms. He’d ducked in again. Now he was wrestling with something, pulling it over his head.

  He was changing shirts.

  Landry said, “He changed shirts.”

  “Yes and no.”
>
  “He didn’t change shirts?”

  “It wasn’t really a shirt . . . it was more like a poncho. But I couldn’t see it very well. Whatever he changed into, the . . . the garment, it was . . . it made him . . .transparent. I could see the interior of the car right through him.”

  Somewhere out on the water, a motorboat whined by. There was another noise, too, louder than you’d expect: a fly buzzing at the inside window. But Jolie heard nothing, saw nothing on the boat—everything she saw was interior. She was back at her house with Jace and the Camaro.

  She said: “It wasn’t the best view in the world, but I could see the interior of the car.

  “I could see it right through him. The steering wheel, the passenger window, the street scene beyond.

  “That red light on the dash, too. The infrared light. And the windshield—I could see the control panel; it was faint but I could see it. Right through him, but no interior lights.”

  “No interior lights?”

  “None.”

  Landry waited. She wasn’t done.

  “The poncho was fairly big. Hip length. I could see his legs, his feet, but I couldn’t see his waist. It was . . . disturbing. Freaky. Like something from a horror movie. I could see his jean legs, his shoes, halfway up to his waist. Above that, nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing, except . . .” She looked him in the eye. “I could see his head, from the neck up.

  “Just floating there.”

  Chapter 13

  Landry said to Jolie, “How well do you know Jerry Boam and Rand McNally?”

  “Very well.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because both Rand McNally and Jerry Boam lost loved ones to homicides.”

  “Both of them? In Branch? They were your cases?”

  “Just Jerry. He lost his adult son. That was here in Branch. I investigated the case and it came to a successful close—as successful as it could be, when you’ve lost a child you’re never getting back. We got the guy. Rand is a transplant—his sister lives out here. His wife was killed during a robbery attempt in Phoenix. They were part of a support group.”