by Roy Johansen
What was in that room?
He stepped into the doorway and froze. He thought he was prepared for anything, but he was wrong.
Suspended high on the far wall, a man was impaled by a large spiked sculpture.
The sight was so odd, so out of the realm of belief, that Joe looked away, then back, as if another glance would help it make sense.
It didn’t.
He was staring into a large room with tall ceilings, perhaps fifteen feet high. There were grand bookshelves, two towering windows, a seating area, and a grand piano. The corpse was suspended at least eight feet. The chrome sculpture, a skyline of gleaming spikes, was driven downward into the victim’s chest, sticking him to the wall like pushpins into a paper doll. A pool of blood had collected on the floor below, along with one of the man’s shoes.
“Unbelievable,” Joe murmured.
“Is that your professional opinion?”
He turned to see a tall, tanned, fiftyish detective standing next to him. The man didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Are you Bailey?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Mark Howe, Homicide. Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No.”
“How did this happen?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
Howe clicked his tongue. “That’s not the answer I wanted to hear. You’ve never investigated a homicide, have you?”
Joe shook his head. “No, I’m in bunco.”
“Right. The Spirit Basher.”
Joe sighed. “The Spirit Basher” was a nickname he’d picked up after several high-profile busts in which he had debunked phony spiritualists and psychics. The local papers championed the headline-ready nickname whenever he ventured into that territory.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Some people call me that.”
Howe made a face as if he had just bitten into a lemon. “For the record, I didn’t ask for you. It was my boss’s idea to call you in.”
“I’m glad we got that straight.”
“No offense, but you spend most of your days breaking up insurance scams, gas station pump fixes, and auto repair con jobs, am I right?”
“And you spend most of your days investigating drug deals gone bad and domestic disputes settled at the end of a firearm. I’d say we’re both in foreign territory here.”
That shut him up.
Joe glanced around the room. Two fingerprint specialists were dusting every flat surface, and a medical examiner was walking from side to side, staring up at the corpse. A photographer was snapping pictures of the scene.
Joe studied the corpse’s face.
It wasn’t possible.
“Christ. I know this man,” Joe finally said.
“What?”
As if this weren’t bizarre enough. “I know him. This is Dr. Robert Nelson.”
“That’s right,” Howe said, surprised.
“He was a professor at Landwyn University. He cochaired the parapsychology program.”
“Friend of yours?”
“He despised me. I do some part-time work for the university. The head of the humanities department doesn’t believe in that stuff, and he brings me in to debunk the psychics and spiritualists they study.”
Joe couldn’t take his gaze from Nelson. The professor had been in his early fifties, and his strong chin and cheek bones were tensed in a horrible grimace. It almost appeared as though Nelson were still feeling the agony of that sculpture rammed through his chest. Blood had run down his blue oxford-cloth shirt to his khaki slacks and dripped from the cuffs. Another bloodstain ran down the wall behind him, obviously from the exit wound.
“Who found him?”
“Girlfriend. Eve Chandler. She’s in the next room. She let herself in around eleven and found him. She said there have been some disturbances here the past few nights.”
“What do you mean?”
“Objects moving around, furniture shifting, and that piano tipping over. All by themselves.”
“Did she see these things happening?”
“That’s what she says. She’s sure they were caused by the same person who made the statue fly into her boyfriend’s chest.”
“And who would that be?”
“An eight-year-old boy.”
—
“That little bastard murdered him, I know he did.”
Eve Chandler leaned back on Nelson’s sofa. She was an attractive woman in her early forties, and she had obviously taken a heavy dose of sedatives. She was slurring her words, and her eyes were thin slits. Tears streamed down her face, and she occasionally wiped them from her neck with the back of her hand.
“Who is this boy?” Joe asked.
“It’s a kid Robert was studying. His name is…Jesse Randall. He makes objects move with his mind.”
“Even five-foot sculptures?” Howe asked skeptically.
“All kinds of things. Robert was very excited about him. He said this boy was like no one he had ever seen.”
“Why would the boy want to hurt him?” Joe asked.
She stared at Joe as if he were suddenly speaking a foreign language.
Howe leaned forward. “Miss Chandler, are you on medication?”
She nodded. “Valium. Lots of it. I have a prescription. Wanna see the bottle?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Joe said. “I know this is hard for you, but we need you to focus. It’s important.” Eve nodded, but Joe still wasn’t sure she understood. He spoke slowly. “Can you tell us why the boy would want to hurt Dr. Nelson?”
“He and Robert had some kind of disagreement. I’m not sure what happened, but he didn’t want to see Robert anymore. That’s when the shadow storms began.”
“What?” Howe asked.
“Shadow storms,” Joe said. “Supposed psychic phenomena caused by angry or emotional dreams. While the telekinetic sleeps, objects will move around, flying off shelves and smashing against walls—that kind of thing.”
She nodded. “It always started just after nine o’clock, which Robert said was Jesse Randall’s bedtime. All hell broke loose after nine o’clock.”
“You saw these objects moving around?” Joe asked.
“Mostly we heard them, but a couple of times we saw things flying through the air.”
“Can you show me what you actually saw moving?”
“They were both downstairs.”
“We’ll go down with you.”
Howe shook his head. “We have some other things to sort through first.”
“Now,” Joe said.
“I have a few other questions first,” Howe said.
“They’ll keep,” Joe said. “This is evidence that could be tampered with, stolen, or otherwise compromised.” He stood. “Please, Ms. Chandler, will you show us?”
She led them to a sitting room adjacent to the foyer, where she picked up a small decorative musical instrument made up of five bamboo reeds tied together by red twine. She handed it to Joe. “We heard this playing from the next room. Every time we went in to look, the playing stopped. Once, when Robert went to look, it flew out of the room and almost hit him.”
Joe inspected the instrument, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. “Did either of you see it rise from the shelf?”
“Hell, we saw it flying toward his head.”
“That’s not quite the same. Did you see it rise from the shelf?”
She thought for a moment. “No. He may have though.” She wiped more tears from her face and neck. “Jesus, I can’t believe this.”
Howe offered her a handkerchief, but she waved it away. “Keep it,” she said. “I gotta be pretty close to running dry.”
Joe sympathetically pressed her arm. “Can you tell me what else you saw?”
She nodded. “It was in the kitchen. I’ll show you.”
They followed her into the large, magnificently decorated kitchen, which was centered by a ten-foot marble-topped island. A rack hung above it with dozens of pots and pans.
<
br /> “Sometimes, during the night, these pans would swing by themselves and start banging together.” She shuddered. “They’d make a terrible sound.”
Joe pushed some of the pans, and the eerie, hollow clanging sounded like dozens of out-of-tune gongs.
“Imagine hearing that in the middle of the night,” Eve said. “We came downstairs, and as we got closer to the kitchen, the pots started to bang together harder and harder. By the time we made it in here, a few of them were even flying off the hooks and hitting the island and the floor. We watched them swinging and clanging into each other for more than a minute, making that horrible sound. Then they just stopped.”
“You have no idea what caused it?”
“Robert had an idea.”
“The little boy and his shadow storms,” Howe said sarcastically.
“Yes.” Eve’s expression hardened. “Can you arrest him?”
Howe shook his head. “There’s the matter of proof. We don’t have any evidence that links the murder with Jesse Randall.”
“How else could it have happened?”
Howe turned to Joe. “You wanna take that one?”
Joe faced Eve, but he was speaking to Howe as much as he was to her. “Ms. Chandler, in my experience, telekinesis does not exist. Part of what I do in my job is to expose con artists who try to convince others that they have paranormal abilities. I’ve never seen a psychic claim that couldn’t be explained in another, more plausible way.”
Her face flushed. “I know who you are and what your feelings are, Mr. Bailey,” she said fiercely. “Robert told me how difficult you made his job. I loved that man, and his life’s work was based on the fact that this phenomenon does exist. If you refuse to believe that, then maybe they should throw you off this case.”
Howe put a comforting hand on her arm. “There’s no need to get upset. I’m in charge of this investigation. We’ve just asked Detective Bailey to come here and see if he can help explain what happened.” He turned to Joe. “Do you want to take another look at the scene?”
Joe nodded. Howe would obviously have better luck finishing Eve Chandler’s interview alone.
He left the house and walked toward his car. It was colder now, and a harsh, biting wind had kicked up. He opened his trunk and pulled out a large black suitcase. Its leather finish was worn and scuffed, and the brass latches and hinges were tarnished. It was his spirit kit, which he used to inspect the scenes of séances and psychic demonstrations. Made up of an odd assortment of sophisticated test equipment and ordinary household items, he generally kept it in his car trunk, where it would be handy for both his police investigations and his debunking work for the university. The last time he left it at the station, some joker had plastered a Ghostbusters “no ghosts” insignia on its side, and the sticker had adorned the case ever since.
He carried it back into the study, where the police videographer was filming every inch of the room with a digital camera. The still photographer was now chatting with a few of the officers who came to gawk at the site.
The nervousness among the officers had given way to morbid humor. Joe overheard cracks about Nelson’s taste in decorating, and how a nice tapestry might have been a better match for the wall.
They were trying to be funny, but he could hear a slight edge in their voices. Lieutenant Powell had probably been right about his men getting the shit scared out of them.
Joe had just popped open the suitcase’s lid, when Howe walked into the room. “Where’s Eve Chandler?” Joe asked.
“Passed out downstairs. Between the Valium and you running her all over the house, she was wiped out. Thanks for neutralizing my witness, Bailey.”
“You’ll get more out of her tomorrow anyway.” Joe pulled a small black box about the size of a hardcover book from the spirit kit. Its high-impact plastic case surrounded a five-inch view screen.
Howe squinted at the instrument. “That looks like a bomb squad gadget.”
“It is. It’s a McNaughton handheld sonar pulse reader that I grabbed from the bomb squad’s scrap heap. It’s a little out of date, but it still does the job.”
“What job?”
Joe attached a battery pack to the unit’s top edge. “It tells me if there’s anything on the other side of these walls I should know about. It throws out sonar waves that detect any mass behind scanned surfaces. It was made to find explosives, but it also works to detect flying rigs, projectors, or anything else phony spiritualists use.” He screwed a telescoping rod onto a bracket on its base and extended the rod out to its full eight-foot length. He flipped the red power switch, and the unit revved to life with a high-pitched whine.
The other cops in the room stopped talking as he slowly swept the reader across the walls and ceiling.
Ping…ping…ping…
Joe took note of a few spots where the sonar reader detected areas of greater mass. He was hoping to find some evidence of a contraption that could have sent the sculpture flying into Nelson, but the readings indicated only support beams.
He glided the reader along the wall where Nelson was impaled. No significant variances.
Damn.
He put down the reader and pulled out a large aerosol can. He turned toward the other cops. “Are you guys finished in here?”
One of them nodded. “Knock yourself out.”
Joe sprayed the can high on each wall and over the entire ceiling.
Howe snorted. “If it’s the smell you’re worried about, that usually isn’t a problem until the corpse has been around for a few days.”
“It’s not room deodorant. It’s phosphorous clearcoat.”
“What?”
Joe was used to the smart-ass comments and questions. Most cops had only the vaguest notion of what he did, and he always tried to patiently explain the tools of his trade. “It coats everything with phosphors that will show up under an ultraviolet light. If there are any thin wires or mesh up there, this will light them up.”
Joe reached back into his kit and produced a high-wattage battery-operated fingerprint lantern. He switched it on. A faint purple light emanated from its rectangular lens plate, and the phosphors that had settled on his sport jacket took on an intense white glow. He aimed the lamp toward the ceiling and slowly walked around the room. Except for a few cobwebs in the corner, nothing showed up under the light.
He turned off the lantern.
Howe’s lips twisted. “Well, that was impressive.”
“It wasn’t meant to impress you.” Joe’s patience was almost at an end. “It was only supposed to narrow the field of possibilities, which it did.”
“Uh-huh. So what you’re telling me is that you’re no closer to figuring out how it was done.”
“You’re always closer if you can eliminate some of the possibilities.”
“Now I’m sure you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re actually spouting the bullshit that McCarey and Stevens teach at the academy.”
“McCarey and Stevens?” Joe smiled faintly. “They must have been before my time.”
“Screw you.”
“This isn’t their bullshit. It’s mine, and it’s what made your boss call me at one in the morning when you couldn’t even begin to figure out what was going on here.”
“I can handle this.”
“I’m sure you can, and after tonight, I’m sure you will. I’m just here to scope things out and help where I can.”
“Which doesn’t appear to be much.”
“We’ll see.”
Howe relaxed slightly. “Hmm. Were McCarey and Stevens really before your time?”
“Yep.”
“Damn, that’s depressing.” Howe turned toward the door. “I’m gonna rouse Ms. Chandler and see if she needs a lift anyplace. I’ll check back with you.”
“Fine.”
Joe pulled out a tape measure and extended it to the base of the sculpture, which was angled up at a forty-five-degree angle. Eleven feet four inches from the floor.
&n
bsp; He measured the entire room, noting the height and width of the one door and two windows. The measurements could come in handy later, when comparing various heavy lifting methods typically employed by magicians and psychic scam artists. He could immediately eliminate the Harrison winch due to the rig’s large size and lack of portability, and others, like most pulley systems, would not work due to the high center of gravity necessary to drive the sculpture so forcefully into the wall. And he knew of no rig that could explain Nelson’s elevated position.
A sharp crack sounded in the room.
Joe spun around.
It was Nelson’s other shoe. It had finally slipped off his foot and fell on the floor, spattering blood against the wall.
As Joe walked out the door, no one was making cute comments about Nelson or anything else. It was obvious they just wanted to get the hell out of there.
He headed downstairs, trying to make sense of what he had just seen. Even if he could figure out how it happened, who would kill Nelson in such a bizarre manner? And why?
He stood in the foyer, jotting down a few last impressions of the crime scene, when Howe came through a doorway with Eve.
“Any ideas?” Howe asked.
Joe put his notebook away. “Not yet. I need to do some checking around.”
Howe nodded. “I’m going to take Ms. Chandler home. We’ll touch base tomorrow.”
Howe said it more like an order than a simple statement. Joe let it pass.
Eve walked toward him until her face was only inches away.
“Just what do you believe in, Mr. Bailey?”
He stared back, unsure how to respond.
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