The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Henry prepared to walk back up the sidewalk to find Officer Jackson, but as he turned, he caught sight of a figure at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, in front of Number 11. It was a man, lean and tall but otherwise obscured by shadows. It seemed to Henry that he had positioned himself midway between the pools of light from the lampposts so as to conceal his face. Henry approached. The figure remained stock-still, left hand in his pocket.

  “Good evening. I’m Detective Pastern.”

  “Investigating the killing?” The voice was gravelly, and Henry judged the man had a cold or other throat infection, perhaps from smoking.

  “Yes. Are you Mr. Devereau?” Henry guessed.

  “Yup.”

  “So my colleague, Detective Mohlman, spoke with you earlier?”

  “He did.” The man had yet to move. There was no hostility in his posture, but his voice was a different story, projecting, in only a few clipped words, contempt and dismissal.

  The point had come for Henry to run down his list of generic police questions, but he hesitated.

  Devereau said in a flat tone, “What qualifies you to investigate this street?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “No, I don’t mean the West Valley Police lack authority to be here. But do you know this community personally, officer?” Devereau spoke in a monotone. He seemed indifferent to any response Henry might give.

  But Henry didn’t bother to answer this patronizing question, merely allowed a silence to take over. He had enjoyed having the whole street to himself, and in his territorial mood, he wanted Devereau to know that the Homicide Squad ran the show. He was already tired of the residents. Wooski had said that Devereau might be Mormon but the man betrayed no sign of it. Henry observed the strange fellow as best he could. Devereau could claim a handsome face, a cowboy’s face, weathered and tempered by outdoor work. So why was he living in suburbia?

  “Do you like living on the street?”

  “Sure.”

  “I have to move on, Mr. Devereau.”

  “Okay.”

  Henry took a step towards the stone-gated entrance, but turned. “Sir, did you see any unusual activity in the days leading up to last night?”

  “No, Detective Pastern, like everyone else, I wasn’t aware.”

  No smile, no inflection. The man hadn’t moved an inch.

  He isn’t aware. Henry almost challenged him to justify his presence on the sidewalk, but he knew what Devereau would say: he was a Hollis Street resident merely taking the air on a summer evening. It’s all part of the street’s collective indifference, thought Henry.

  Henry expected to find Jackson in his patrol car or else in the Watson home but as he approached, he spotted a silhouette in the Second House. Henry dodged under the yellow tape and entered, only to be pushed back by the bitter residual smell of blood and bodily fluids. Young Jackson came out of the kitchen. He wore pale blue rubber gloves.

  “Detective, you see the lamp out front?”

  “Somebody smashed the bulb. Yeah, I saw it. All the other lawn lamps are working.”

  “Concealed the hit team’s arrival and flight, I’m thinking.”

  Henry came farther inside. The room offered no place to sit down, and the reek of blood only got worse. Though the technicians had mopped up the liquid, the stain in the centre of the living room would never come out of the wood floor. The house now felt haunted.

  There didn’t seem to be a reason for Jackson to be in here. “What are you up to?” Henry said.

  “Hoping to figure out why and how the killers slaughtered Gabriella Watson next door, then brought her over here. Did they wrap her in plastic? Where’s the plastic?”

  The stripped-out house was loathsome and dispiriting, and Henry saw no point in staying inside. The Utah State Crime Lab would complete the preliminary DNA work within twenty-four hours, but the volume of blood made it obvious: two people had bled out in this room. Henry would have preferred that Jackson leave the crime scene alone.

  But the patrolman wouldn’t be denied. “The slicer was right-handed. Tom Watson is right-handed.”

  “How’d you know that?” Henry said.

  Jackson moved around the room to the far side of the bloodstain. “Detective Mohlman called a few minutes ago to update me.”

  But he didn’t bother to brief me with that detail twenty minutes ago. Was this a snub, or was Mohlman simply trying to lock in Jackson’s loyalty by confiding in him?

  “What else did Detective Mohlman tell you?”

  “The taxes and power on this place are being paid by a finance company in Denver.”

  “Denver?”

  “According to Mohlman, no one in the Denver office seemed aware of the condition of the house or what it was being used for.”

  Henry looked at the barren walls. “Jackson …”

  The young cop noticed Henry’s change in tone.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Why kill anybody? Why not do the opposite? Rat on the Watsons with a phone call. Now the gang has multiple police forces coming down on them.”

  “For that matter, why not just torch this house to make your point? Skip the executions.”

  Henry nodded. “The ledger doesn’t balance, as my wife would say.”

  Jackson had heard about Theresa’s illness. He skipped a respectful beat, then retrieved a sheet of paper from his breast pocket. “Oh, Detective, the techies left an inventory of the pipe bomb parts.”

  Henry scanned the typed list:

  Low-grade improvised explosive device/pipe bomb

  Custom pine box, 12 by 16, machine buffed, screw holes at corners, screws missing

  2 12-inch wrought steel pipes, threaded both ends, with tight-fitting caps

  C4 or equivalent explosive compound (to be verified)

  Military-style detonator, detonation cord

  Red electrical wiring, some with alligator clips, some with soldered ends

  Two small plastic/polymer custom carved pieces belonging to detonator trigger

  Inner plastic lining (soft)

  Soft gel pad suffused with chlorate

  Cheap digital clock/timer

  Henry was carried back to his trainee classroom at Quantico. This bomb was an amateur’s work, inexpensive and limited in its ambition. The parts could be bought at a hardware store, while the detonator was an easily obtained mail-order item. With a second read-through, Henry decided that the bomber would have been lucky to set the house afire with this device. The room had been empty of flammables, and he had used no accelerant. The forensics team would try to trace the serial numbers on the detonator and the timer, but everything about the bomb was generic, almost primitive. The timer was simple, yet the bomber had fouled that up, too. He should have been able to set the clock at his leisure after he was done killing, yet he had botched it.

  It felt late. It was time to desert this Caligari house before it closed in on them. “Let’s go, Jackson, or our dry cleaning tab’ll be huge,” Henry said.

  Henry’s cell phone chimed. Jackson retreated to his cruiser while Henry took the call in the vestibule.

  “Henry?” Theresa’s voice was thick.

  “Are you alright?”

  “I had a premonition.” Theresa’s meds delivered exotic nightmares, but never had she called him at work. “Are you safe?” she said.

  “Safe? Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the grow house.”

  “See? You’re in a danger zone.”

  “The bad guys are long gone. I’m almost ready to come home. Are you safe, dear?”

  “Sure.” He sensed her calming down. “What is it your English friend says, Henry, ‘safe as houses’?” I dreamed about him.”

  “Peter Cammon? You really are having weird dreams …”

&nb
sp; But then a figure of the aging British detective, as clear as the Utah night, hologrammed before him. Oh so suddenly, he wished that Peter was by his side. Why did I never take up the firm invitation from his wife, Joan, to visit England?

  “Yes, Henry. He and I were on a viewing stand next to Hollis Street when a flood swept through those stone gates. It gained speed and crushed the houses all in sequence, drowning the neighbours and turning over cars.”

  “What happened when it reached the bottom of the cul-de-sac?”

  “I don’t know. I woke up.”

  “Funny you should mention Peter. I sent him a text earlier … I’ll be home in an hour.”

  “Are you safe?” Theresa repeated. She was calm now.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Henry hung up and prepared to abandon the fetid house at Number 5 Hollis. A pair of bright headlights swept the vestibule, but before he could get outside, the vehicle was past and on its way to the bulb of the cul-de-sac. Jackson was waiting by his car. The square truck turned at the end of the street and slowly rolled back towards them. Steel rods poking up from the roof rotated to face the houses along the “even” side of Hollis as the FLIR wagon charted the neighbourhood. The truck halted before Number 8 and the antennae swept the façade; the scan was repeated before the empty house at Number 6.

  “How subtle is that?” Jackson sneered. “If the neighbours weren’t on the alert before, they are now.”

  Henry trotted down the sidewalk and crossed the street. He held forth his ID as he went. There was no point in getting a pistol pointed in his face. The driver motioned for him to come around to his side. Lord knew how many technicians were in the dark back of the cube.

  “Valley Homicide,” Henry said.

  The driver nodded. “Quiet night.” He wore navy overalls. Henry wondered if he occasionally posed as a cable repairman. “Just the way we like it for an uncontaminated scan.” Somehow it was important to the driver that he project cool as he piloted what resembled a Brink’s truck bred with a robot.

  “Just doing these two houses?”

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” the driver said. “We’ll make one more pass. These two are vacant, right?”

  “Yes. Did you guys already get any readings for 6 and 8 from Utah Power?”

  “Yup. No excessive consumption at either place. That’s why this is a waste of time. Don’t tell DeKlerk I said that.” He pulled away and turned around at the mouth of the street, and as he made his second pass he waved to Henry, who was already double-thumbing a text to Mohlman.

  The night was quiet, as the cynical FLIR tech had said. It was also hot and dry, with no tsunamis in sight.

  CHAPTER 9

  Three days later, a fisherman found Tom Watson snagged in a tree in the Lower Provo River, up in the Wasatch Range. By then, West Valley Police knew he was dead; the lab people had verified that nine tenths of the blood soaking the living room floor at Number 5 Hollis was his.

  “We’re lucky he’s got his head,” Phil Mohlman said when he summoned Henry over the phone.

  It took Henry ninety minutes to drive to the right spot along the river. As a child, he had fished the Provo with his father, and he knew that man-made obstructions segmented the watercourse into three distinct stages. The third portion, the Deer Creek Reservoir, formed the Lower Provo, and farther along, it emptied into Utah Lake. Along this section, where the body had been found, the shore alternated between the steep walls of Provo Canyon and the flatter, accessible stretches favoured by fly fishermen.

  Police and rescue vehicles cluttered the dirt road access to the river, and Henry had to walk the last hundred yards. Two state police cars, an ambulance, and Phil Mohlman’s plain Buick blocked his view of the river until, approaching around the vehicles, he caught sight of both the water and the corpse. In the shallows, mostly out of the river, bloodless, perched Tom Watson in the branches of a drifting tree, stranded like a scarecrow on a barbed wire fence. Henry saw that the killer hadn’t dumped the body here; it had to have floated from upstream.

  Phil turned to greet him, a self-satisfied smile on his face because he knew that Boog DeKlerk had no claim over this homicide scene. Of course, the Staties, as Phil called them, represented a fresh jurisdictional threat, and accordingly Phil was working the cluster of troopers on the riverbank. Henry was surprised to see them, after a lot of nodding, crowd into their two cruisers and leave. He saw why. Phil turned to caucus with a familiar figure in blue coveralls and hip waders, a senior techie named Collins, with whom West Valley Homicide often worked. A pathologist, he was a Bostonian, like Mohlman, and revered for his expertise and his willingness to get his hands dirty in the field. More important, Collins was fair and wouldn’t automatically pre-empt control of the investigation to the benefit of the state police. For now, the troopers were content to let Collins secure and explore the crime scene.

  He began to stretch out police tape along the shore, and Henry moved in to help.

  Collins’s rescue team began to dislodge Watson from the tree, and the pathologist himself waded out to join them. He trod carefully so as to minimize footprints in the mucky pools between the rocks. The ambulance waited up the bank, its roof bulb turning.

  Henry noticed that Watson’s truck was not among the parked vehicles.

  “Goddamn crucifixion,” Mohlman said cheerfully as Henry joined him. Tom Watson’s arms were spread, and a bullet, maybe two, had opened his breastbone. A small branch had penetrated his left side. Not really a crucifixion, was Henry’s thought; maybe St. Anthony’s agony.

  “No sign of the truck?” Henry said.

  “We’ll find it. The fisherman found the corpse three hours ago.”

  “He wasn’t dumped here,” Henry opined. Their talk was even-toned and only mildly speculative. They were content, this particular morning on the damp riverbank. They contemplated the tree, which now entangled a struggling Collins.

  “Surprised it took so long to discover the body,” Phil stated. “This part of the river is lousy with fishermen.”

  Henry added, “Yeah, the killer took a big chance of being seen by some super-keen angler out on the river before dawn, vying for the best spot.”

  “They catch brown trout here, so I’m informed,” Phil said. Fly-fishing was an alien and effete hobby, not for urban East Coasters.

  “I used to fish here myself. Brown, rainbow, and cutthroat trout.” Henry didn’t reveal to his partner that the last time he had fished these parts was the summer before embarking on his two-year Mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He hadn’t gone out on the river since.

  Collins and his team had the body now and were pulling it out of the shallows.

  Phil grew tired of pretending he was interested in fishing. “So where the hell are we, Henry?”

  “Well inside the Wasatch Range. Between Deer Creek Dam and the Olmstead Diversion.”

  Phil waited, deferring to Henry, the native son, as he worked through the logic of the river and the mountain range. Phil prompted: “Less than ninety minutes from town, you’d say, Henry?”

  “Yeah. That was the appeal, quick disposal. But he took a huge risk. There’s a surprising amount of private waterfront land along the Lower Provo, and everybody has a gun in these parts.”

  It had started to rain lightly. Collins and the attendants manhandled Tom Watson onto the pebbly shore. They took their time carrying him to the ambulance. The irritant wasn’t the river bottom or the rain, but rather the clouds of midges that had settled in with the moist air. Everyone gathered around the back of the ambulance and an attendant uncovered Watson. The first feature that struck Henry was the whiteness of the body. The bullets had penetrated the heart, likely nicked the lungs too, but the gusher had been caused by a prior slashing of a stomach artery. It was evident that Watson’s executioner had attacked in a frenzy with gun and knife. The head sho
wed bruises, but these didn’t amount to major trauma. The fish had left the eyes intact.

  The ambulance departed, leaving Collins and the two detectives standing in the rain. The body would be taken directly to the morgue, but Collins was staying behind to comb the shallows for any bits of evidence that might have fallen from Tom Watson’s body. Since he was the only one with rubber boots, Mohlman and Pastern could only offer solidarity by waiting on the shore. They took refuge in Phil’s sedan.

  “Think we’ll find the spot where they dumped him in?” said Phil.

  “We have to search,” Henry sighed, “but it’s the truck we want.”

  “If the killers abandoned it, how did they get back to town?” Henry noticed that Phil referred to killers plural, while he had fallen into using the singular.

  Henry turned to his partner. Both men wanted to be in a warm coffee shop somewhere. “Let’s back up. It’s likely the killer — killers — used the truck to get back to the highway, yet I still think it’s important to try to find the dumping site. The selection wasn’t as easy as it might seem. This area is getting crowded. Fisherman and tourists, but also new residents. Park City is just a few miles off. Why trek up here at all?”

  Politics had just invaded their calculations. In winter, when visitors came to the Wasatch Front for the Sundance Film Festival and for the skiing, the population of Park City grew several-fold, and Utah promotional brochures switched from desert to snow scenes. Tourism was huge for the state, and no one wanted to see lurid headlines like “Sundance Murder!”

  Henry continued. “There’s more to think about. The mountains around here are full of old silver mines. A much better place to make a body disappear. Why didn’t the killers use them?”

  “Because they weren’t familiar with the mountains?”

  “Maybe, but it bothers me that they took the risk of running into early risers, including security patrols coming to and from the Canyons Resort and other rich housing developments. And there are game wardens out there watching for hunters jacklighting deer.”

  “Maybe they just didn’t care. They would have been heavily armed. Maybe they’re simply chancers, damn the hazard.”