The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  THE VERDICT

  ON EACH MAN DEAD

  DAVID

  WHELLAMS

  A PETER CAMMON MYSTERY

  ECW Press

  for the Tuesday night Triv Team

  PROLOGUE

  The very green lawns of the cemetery fought for traction against the surrounding desert. This was a municipal cemetery, open to all, but Peter Cammon wasn’t surprised to find that the Mormon zone dominated, larger than the Catholic, Lutheran, and Everyone Else sections combined. A strange oasis, he mused, under siege from the Utah desert but also thriving — like the church itself, its manicured lawns holding back the scrub and sand.

  The mourners fell silent. His mind wandered as he waited for the tributes to begin. On his left, the lawn fell off to a silted trench. Did this qualify as an “arroyo”? A “dry wash”? He could imagine a flash flood carrying away all this scenery in an instant …

  His reverie was refocused by the arrival of the coffin up the path to the grave. It passed, carried by six elders of the church. Peter stood with the throng, respectful, unmoving, black-suited, and bare-headed in the blazing, testing sun, and was surprised to find himself awash in bloody-minded, vengeful feelings. This flood of anger was useless, should be suppressed, he knew. None of the other mourners projected anything but sadness, except perhaps that detective at the front of the crowd, Mohlman, who had chauffeured them to the cemetery. He looked angry and still dazed from the night of the killing.

  By any measure, Peter’s professional link to Henry Pastern was a tenuous one, confined to a single investigation known in Peter’s household as the “Carpenter Affair” (Peter’s entire family had been drawn into it; one of the reasons Joan, his wife, had insisted on coming to the funeral was her own sense of connection to Henry as a fellow participant in the case). The detectives first met on a sweltering afternoon at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. Peter, who had a friendly history with the FBI, had travelled to America on the trail of a mysterious and deadly woman, Alice Nahri, and was seeking the FBI’s help. Alice was thought to have murdered a Scotland Yard colleague of Peter’s, John Carpenter, in Montreal by knocking him out and drowning him in a canal. She then fled south in a stolen car, which was discovered parked on the grounds of a yacht club on the Anacostia River in D.C. A body had been found in that same river.

  Peter remembered Henry’s sweating, shaved head as the young career agent, chattering away, conducted him out to Quantico to meet with the FBI medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on the sodden corpse. Both the veteran Scotland Yard chief inspector and the novice special agent had felt the seductive force of the strange woman, and they struck an odd alliance in their pursuit. For his part, Henry regarded Peter as Sherlock Holmes. He already knew Peter by reputation; Peter had helped the bureau with the Unabomber manhunt back in the nineties, doggedly visiting many of the sites where Kaczynski’s bombs had detonated, and coming up with a profile of the Unabomber that proved remarkably accurate in the end. Peter Cammon’s efforts earned him a mention in the case study materials used by FBI trainees at the Quantico school.

  Henry’s star-struck awe of Peter only increased as the old detective and the medical examiner quickly deduced that the woman from the river was not Alice Nahri but a prostitute Alice had killed during her flight. Henry stayed on the pursuit while Peter returned to England to wait for the murderess to reveal herself.

  Weeks later Alice surfaced in a shabby hotel in Buffalo, New York. Police from the state, municipal, and federal levels laid siege to the hotel, and Henry was given a major role in coordinating the team as it moved in to arrest the young woman. Peter flew to Buffalo for the takedown.

  It did not go well.

  Alice escaped.

  Henry wasn’t officially blamed for the fiasco, but after Buffalo his career in the Bureau quickly declined, it seemed to Peter. Henry wanted to keep in touch, and although Peter preferred not to become anyone’s mentor, he consented to periodic contact. Most of this was email traffic, but once in a while Henry called the Leicestershire cottage for professional advice. Joan had warm talks with him a couple of times. She took to the young Utahan, whose background was so different from her own, and appreciated his stories of American life, including his proud talk of his young wife, Theresa. Joan, who had never been to North America, developed an urge to see the American West. Peter’s goodwill was largely based on sympathy for Henry after his bad luck in Buffalo. In his own career, Peter had been blessed with only good fortune, having solved almost all his cases.

  When the call came from Detective Mohlman, there was no hesitation on the part of Peter and Joan. They flew at once to Salt Lake City for the funeral.

  At the urging of his daughter-in-law, Maddy, Peter had done some quick research on Mormon funerals. Joan told her atheist husband that the preparation would help him understand the ceremony they were about to experience. In fact, she had noted his bubbling anger and was trying to calm him down. What she meant was, this crime had been solved, the villain identified and dealt with, and for once Peter should leave his suspicious chief inspector’s mindset at home in England. He wasn’t consulting on an active case, she hectored. But Peter seldom denied his professional instincts and he was tempted to delve further into the record of the murder investigation. (Joan never quite understood this point: she thought his tropism towards evil and death was resistible. It wasn’t.) As he browsed online, his eye was caught by references to Blood Atonement.

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has worked hard to abandon most of its unsavoury nineteenth-century practices, polygamy being the best-known; but, Peter soon remarked, the reason for the long struggle over doctrine within the church is that many harsh beliefs have had a visceral grip on the Mormon membership. Peter knew that it was dangerous to presume insight into anyone’s theology, but his experience policing violence over fifty years allowed him to grasp the continuing resonance of Blood Atonement. It was all about murder, something Peter knew too well. At the height of his theocratic rule, Mormon patriarch Brigham Young pronounced this new dogma to his followers. Some murders are so vile, he stated, that the sacrifice by Jesus Christ of his own life cannot atone for them, and more blood must be sacrificed. Peter was taken aback by the angry underpinnings of the doctrine. Earlier, Joseph Smith, fountainhead of the LDS, had asserted: “Shoot him or cut off his head, spill his blood on the ground, and let the smoke thereof ascend up to God.”

  As Peter called up this quote in his mind, the casket stopped and he drew back, abashed. He chided himself: the concept of Blood Atonement was out of date. And today, the body almost in the ground, there was no more retribution to be achieved. Joan had it right. The killer was dead. His ashes had ascended to God for judgement. Literally. Or perhaps fallen to Hell for further torment.

  So why was Peter still attracted by vengeance?

  As he wallowed in his thoughts, the church elders got on with their rituals. The slow procession bisected the crowd. An elderly man trailed the casket. Church officials followed in monochromatic anonymity, but then, as they reached the podium, three of the oldest men moved forward and one opened a book of scripture. From his research, Peter realized that they were of the Quorum of the Twelve, a key governing body within the LDS church. The deceased had been accorded a high honour.

  The shortest elder of the three, uncomfortable in his black funeral suit, welcomed the mourners. “Heavenly Father, we understand that death is part of your plan, but sometimes death is hard to understand …”

  This was standard stuff at any funeral, but Peter’s interest was piqued by the man himself. He realized that Tyler? �
� Tynan, that was it — had been Henry and Theresa’s close friend. Detective Mohlman had mentioned him in the car. He was their neighbour, too, Peter recalled. Tynan continued in the language of the church, though his rhythm was conversational, occasionally ironic. He was like a toned-down Dudley Moore at age seventy-five. Peter reprimanded himself for this irreverent thought.

  “He has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.”

  Peter drifted in and out of the speech.

  He could see to the bottom of the steep trench on his left. A movement caught his eye. A large bird scampered impossibly up one side, then darted down into the pit and, again, near vertically back. The heat was getting to Peter. The lovely bird, a roadrunner, reminded him of those snowboard artists performing the half pipe at the Olympics. He watched it disappear.

  Joan stood quietly next to Peter as the grave was consecrated and the deceased pronounced Temple Worthy. She sighed; she had hoped to stay on a day or two to see the Great Salt Lake, but now her urge to be a tourist seemed frivolous. The flight had disoriented her. It felt as if they had flown directly to this strange cemetery from Heathrow, but of course they had landed at Salt Lake City International Airport, via O’Hare and transferred to a hotel in Ogden, a mile from Parkland Cemetery. She had wondered at the sign that read “Welcome to the Junction City.” The junction of rivers? Trade routes? Destiny? Peter and Joan would be flying back home tomorrow at the latest. They would attend the luncheon organized by the women of the church’s Relief Society and be on their way.

  Peter’s feelings of guilt returned. He was bored in retirement. He had occupied much of the last year organizing the papers of his late father and recently deceased brother, but he doubted that he would finish the project. It felt hollow now. He was full of regret for not helping Henry a lot more.

  There was nothing more to do about the Hollis Street murders. But then why did he feel that the tragedy was unresolved? The killer was dead, yet Peter wanted vengeance. Blood Atonement. It was irrational. The heat was addling his deductive mind.

  Peter’s religion was Shakespeare. Mark Antony in Julius Caesar had intoned: “Woe to the hands that shed this costly blood!” That was the way Peter felt.

  He looked around. Apparently angels were a popular motif among the Mormons. Carved angels hovered everywhere in the oasis-like cemetery. They gave him no comfort.

  He knew that the police had wrapped up the case, just as this ceremony had confirmed the end of a life. In the green island of gravestones and angels, the funeral was ending. But Peter’s deepest, if unfocused, instincts as a chief inspector of New Scotland Yard told him there was more to this saga of evil.

  PART 1

  HENRY

  A good man is a good man, whether in this church or out of it.

  Brigham Young

  Eight Weeks Earlier

  CHAPTER 1

  Corrine on the 9-1-1 desk judged the complainant, Miss Maude Hampson, to be crazy, and conveyed this conclusion, in milder language, to the assigned responder, a rookie named Jackson. There is no 10-Code in the West Valley City Police Department manual for “something very upsetting going on across the street,” and so she reframed it in her hand-off to the young patrolman. “Dispatch. Officer Jackson, can you respond to an old lady, reports ‘suspicious activity’ in house opposite? Unspecified. Confused.”

  “Any report of weapons?” Jackson replied. A spate of shootings had hit the Valley in the last month.

  “No. As said, woman was vague. She seemed a little … pixilated.” Corrine dictated Maude’s full name and her address: 4 Hollis.

  It was mid-afternoon when Officer Jackson arrived on Hollis Street. West Valley, an adjunct to Salt Lake City, isn’t all that big, but he had never been here, never noticed the street. Jackson liked to think he was an observant man. The first feature that struck him as odd was the pair of thick, incomplete stone pillars that flanked the entrance to the street, as if Hollis were a rich gated community — without the gate. The houses, mostly bungalows, formed a short, unimpressive row down to a cul-de-sac. He slowed and examined the Hampson residence, which was the first place on his right. The suspect house, Number 3, stood across the way, a mirror match of Maude Hampson’s.

  All appeared quiet. But it was a sign of Jackson’s misgivings, almost foreboding, that he looked around and wondered, “What happened to houses 1 and 2?”

  The sun beat down on his cruiser. Jackson got out and eyeballed Number 3. He hoped to earn a detective’s shield one day, and he tried to think like a detective now, taking a long moment to look up and down Hollis Street. There wasn’t a soul outside. What did the street want to tell him? Most properties were well maintained, the paint jobs recent, lawns cut. The exception was Number 5, which felt not only vacant but abandoned; the side lawn between it and Number 3 had gone to seed.

  Jackson glanced at the stone pillars and the first pair of odd-numbered bungalows. A fastidious neighbour had done the mowing from the outer avenue all the way to Number 3, then stopped. These were property owners who helped one another, he reasoned. But there was no one to ask about this, and he returned to his patrolman’s drill.

  Musing on neutron bombs, Jackson rang the bell at Number 4. Maude must have been hovering by the door, for after only ten seconds, she began to fumble with the two heavy locks; then, quiet. He sensed her moving away. Maybe only ghosts lived on Hollis Street, he thought. He pushed open the door. Fifteen feet away, at the end of a dank corridor, stood a wizened figure leaning on a cane.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he called. But Maude wasn’t afraid; she was irritated. She darted looks into her living room. “My stories are about to start.”

  I’ll never make detective at this rate, young Jackson told himself. He came fully inside and closed the door. One of the locks was a Yale deadbolt, gleaming brass, recently installed. Turning back, he confronted empty space. Maude had vanished into the ghost world.

  He entered the living room to find the woman plunked down on her horsehair sofa, a channel changer in one hand pointed into space, as if she were guiding a model airplane or a personal drone. She clicked back and forth between two soap operas. Jackson sized up the décor as that of a paranoid recluse: permanent Christmas figurines, bird plates and a bird clock, kerosene lamp chimneys with electric bulbs inserted, Toby jugs, and a Hummel collection. Maude herself, draped in layers of shawls and beads, matched the furnishings. Her cane was a carved wood shillelagh, and Jackson wondered if the Home Shopping Network sold those things, too.

  “I had to phone because my stories start at three. I need to concentrate on my programs.” Her thumb remained poised over the remote, and she never looked at Jackson.

  Maude was a watcher. That could be useful, Jackson thought. “What did you see that worried you, Miss Hampson? Was there someone breaking in across the way?”

  Maude adopted a patronizing tone that Jackson hated. “No, Officer, there wasn’t any activity near the house. In fact, it was the lack of it that struck me. Gabriella always walks Puffles at first light. Again in the late morning. Mr. Watson comes home for lunch most days. Didn’t today.”

  “Let me be clear. You called in at 12:55 p.m. Was that because you saw nothing or because you saw something?”

  She turned his way. Jackson later said that this was the moment he saw a spark in her eye that went beyond idle meddling or gossip. “I saw Puffles in the window.”

  Jackson ground it out. “Okay, Miss Hampson, what kind of dog is Puffles?”

  “Miniature poodle. Losing his hair, though.”

  Jackson stared across the road at the front window of Number 3. “A miniature poodle wouldn’t be able to see over the windowsill.”

  “He was hopping up and down. Wanted to get out and pee, I’m sure. Bouncing into view.”

  “Like a jack-in-the-box?”

&
nbsp; “Oh, do African-Americans grow up with that game, too?”

  Officer Jackson could have swallowed his badge. There weren’t a lot of black cops in Utah, and he was used to the occasional obliquely racist comment from older white residents. He fought to keep his anger under control. Utah was what it was. The fact that the Mormon church had taken its time jettisoning its racial exclusions did not fuel resentment in him, for Utah was home, and both Jackson and his wife, Wanda, were Provo-born. Utah society is evolving, he mantra’ed. What mildly pissed him off was that Maude Hampson didn’t appear to be a Mormon herself.

  “What colour?” Jackson snapped.

  Maude recoiled at the warning in his tone, then forced a sickly smile. “Oh, you mean the dog. Puffles is white.”

  Officer Jackson ambled across Hollis Street, which the hot sun had beaten into inertness. He had choices to make. He had no authority to enter an empty house, and nothing struck him as exceptional about Number 3, certainly nothing to justify an emergency break-in. The façade was well tended; the owners had painted the shutters within the past year and installed a quality aluminum door recently; the solid wooden door behind it was an attractive pale green, matching the shutters. Jackson walked up the concrete steps, opened the metal door and knocked.

  “Mr. Watson? Mrs. Watson?”

  No answer. He rapped again, called their names a second and a third time. From the top of the steps, he leaned over the iron railing towards the living room window but could see almost nothing of the interior. He knocked again.

  As Officer Jackson backed down the steps, preparing to circle the silent house, a movement caught his eye. He saw a flash of white. He moved to the lawn foursquare in front of the living room window. There! — the top of the poodle’s head. It jumped again. Its skull showed pinkish under scruffy curls, and its eyes were manic and rheumy. It trampolined a half inch higher each time. Jackson stared, fixed in place. The dog saw Jackson and found fresh energy. This time it bounced full-body above the living room windowsill.