The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Joan and Peter took their vacation in the form of day trips from Coppermount Drive to the national parks to the south; three times, Henry came along, and they stayed overnight in motels. They toured the Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, and Monument Valley. Joan enjoyed every minute. She had needed this trip, for Peter’s full retirement had left her at sixes and sevens, although the arrival of Joe had filled her heart and kept her busy. She hoped to reset the marriage, knowing that this could be Peter’s last case and, if he still believed what he had told her that day at the cottage, his last chance to do battle with evil before lapsing (his word) into retirement. A summons from the centre of the United States was a funny kind of courtship, she had to admit, but he had seduced her.

  Joan became Henry’s nurse and confidante. She changed his bandages daily and accompanied him to physio sessions in Salt Lake. By the middle of the second week, Henry could comfortably flex his left shoulder. He remained underweight but ongoing heartache partly explained that, and she didn’t fret. More worrisome were the nights she found him weeping on the patio. With her help, the desert became a therapy pool for him. They walked along the dunes, or sometimes up and down the roughed-in streets of the housing development. As she talked him through the stages of grief, she grew to love the desert. She didn’t see the roadrunner again.

  As Joan took over these ministrations, Tynan visited less often, but Joan and Peter often saw him, a mere dot on the horizon, searching for Lord knew what in the Utah barrens.

  “Would you call him a mystic?” she asked.

  “I suppose, if you mean a Mormon mystic with a hammer,” Peter suggested.

  Joan wasn’t ready to label Tynan a hermit. He wasn’t terribly reclusive, however quirky his roaming ways. He had an ascetic streak, for sure, but also loved his truck and his tractor and had been labouring well before Henry and Theresa had moved into the big house up the street.

  Without Tynan or José around, the Coppermount household became a tad dull. Peter and Joan’s sleeping patterns began to clash. She liked to stay up late to watch the sunset, while he was usually awake to mark the dawn. One evening, Joan caught sight of Tynan strolling way out towards the vanishing point, and she walked out to waylay him. She halted and breathed deeply; to her, recently of the damp Cotswolds, the air was a potion.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Mrs. Cammon,” Tynan said.

  “‘Joan’ is better. But I don’t know your first name.”

  “It’s Thomas Abraham.”

  “And what am I thinking?”

  “You’re wondering how you ended up in the company of all these wounded men.”

  He had it right.

  “I focus on my husband. He’s not nursing any wounds and he knows what he’s doing. You’re correct, though, about the others, that’s what I thought the first day. Now what I think is this: All these men are survivors, and Peter relies on them just as they follow him. Therefore, they have earned my loyalty. I place my trust in Henry and Phil. I even trust José.”

  “True of all of them. I trust your husband most. I also worry about him most.”

  Not a mystic, perhaps, but definitely a philosopher. And he’s a wounded man, too, even as he conceals the reason. “What does that mean?”

  “Peter understands better than the others what a police detective must do. He’s ready to make the tough decisions. Mohlman’s like that too. I have no doubt Peter will be present at the finale with Devereau. He’s driving towards the climax of this case, and even the Fates won’t deny him his destiny. Imagine trying to find a killer who leaves no fingerprints and no photographs. I hear that the name Kelso Vyne hasn’t turned up much. Even so, Peter will find him. That’s what I’m waiting for.”

  “Even before he came over here, Peter told me that he was coming to deal with evil. Do you think Vyne qualifies as evil?”

  Tynan nodded. “But Peter wants the evil of this man to be pure, unadulterated, easy to condemn.”

  “He never was quick to forgive where murderers were concerned,” she mused.

  “But tell me if I’m wrong, Joan. As he grinds away at a case, he learns from the things he discovers along the way, the mitigating and aggravating factors, the human dimension. It’s not that he’s particularly warm and fuzzy, it’s that the humanizing of the criminal helps him make the arrest. That’s what makes him a great policeman. But what happens to Peter’s method when he starts by announcing that his man is evil? Maybe Peter is afraid that humanizing Devereau at this point will dilute his resolution.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. “He’s restless, that’s for sure.”

  The amazing spectrum created by the setting sun, red and gold and indigo, had made them contemplative.

  “Of course, Vyne is a psychopath,” Tynan said.

  “I shouldn’t disclose this, but Peter has started a biography of Kelso Vyne.”

  But Tynan appeared to be stuck in his own train of thought. “Psychopathy isn’t considered a medical category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.”

  She shrugged. “That suits Peter fine. Mental illness won’t save him from Peter or Henry or Phil. Peter hasn’t much use for the psychiatric profession in any case. He’s thinking in terms of evil.”

  “In Mormon theology, the most significant moral principle is Agency, based on the idea that human beings will inevitably encounter good and evil in their lives and will have to choose between them. Before humanity was created, good and evil were at war in Heaven, in a battle between Satan and God. Humans will be called upon to involve themselves in a mortal and a divine struggle.”

  “Does that authorize the pursuit of revenge?”

  “Mormonism is like any other faith. It doesn’t countenance revenge or vigilantism.”

  The air remained steamy; there was no breeze. Joan noted again that Tynan’s forehead remained dry, while hers was beaded with sweat. She wondered about the rest of him: under that swathing, did he perspire? In the twilight, his face remained pale, and Joan concluded that Tynan suffered from some form of skin disease. But she couldn’t place it. Erysipelas? Melanoma?

  “Forgive my asking, Thomas, but are you well?”

  There they stood in the empty plain, like two hermits debating doom and divine judgement. Tynan swung about and looked at her. A tear formed and ran down his otherwise dry face.

  “I have an ailment called Ross syndrome. It’s a disease of the autonomic nervous system, characterized by anhydrosis.”

  “The inability to sweat.”

  “Yes, but with Ross, it affects only certain areas of the body — in my case, everything above the neck. To compensate, the rest of me perspires twice as much as normal.”

  “Can they treat it?”

  “Not really. There are medications, but I rarely take them. You see, I abused narcotics in my youth, and that contributed to my … problem.”

  He almost said “curse,” Joan detected.

  With his sweat glands out of balance, the sun threatened heat stroke. Joan couldn’t imagine that the LDS church had shown much sympathy for his addiction. His expiation was to walk the wilderness and endure the furnace heat.

  “Is it safe for you out here?”

  “I mostly walk at night. Too hot in the day.”

  His answer evaded her point. “Peter and Henry see you in the day,” she replied.

  “Only when the need for atonement seizes me.”

  CHAPTER 42

  It was Joan who insisted on the Great Salt Lake when no one else wanted to go. “It’s an icon, they named the city after it. We should go.”

  There were never two men less in the mood for iconic time wasters. Henry, who hadn’t sailed the lake since his teenage years, declared that “it stinks.” Peter saw no need to play tourist again. Joan argued that she had had her fill of rock formations, “and the lake will be different.”

  She made an ex
pedition of it, inviting Tynan and Phil Mohlman along; the detective demurred, saying that his leg was distressing him, but the Mormon Elder accepted. Joan fixed the outing for the next Monday and reserved two motorboats from a marina on Antelope Island. That morning, she and Henry packed the F-150 for an 11 a.m. departure, but Peter, who had left the house in Henry’s Subaru before she got up, did not return until quarter to noon.

  Peter had failed to inform Joan that he was dropping by Hollis Street, because he couldn’t have justified his impulse. The night before the trip to the Salt Lake, he had hauled out Henry’s first-round interview notes in the hope of discovering something new. Their notice in the Deseret Star had produced no response, and Furst and Ordway (“Futile Headway,” Mohlman now called them) hadn’t nabbed their quarry. He remained convinced that the key to the massacre lay hidden inside the Hollis Street community. Hollis was the street where nobody knew anything — from Maude Hampson at one end to the Wazinskis at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. They had sunk back into complacency, creepier now that fire had hollowed out one property and two others were being referred to by real estate brokers as haunted houses.

  What was the absolute, basic reality of the street? Jerry Proffet’s chart was a treasure map, an archaeologist’s schema, a brainteaser. Peter stared at it for ten minutes, and then saw it: the essence of the Hollis layout was its sightlines. Every resident could spy on every other. Ronald Devereau entered the houses at 3 and 5 in full view of every inhabitant, if only they had been looking. He carried Gabriella’s body across no man’s land and loaded Tom Watson’s corpse into his truck there in the driveway. So who was in the best position to observe not only the murders that night but the grow operation over the preceding year? Peter ruled out Maude Hampson, who confused real life with her soap operas. Stan Chambers had been re-interviewed but had added nothing useful.

  But there at Number 10 lived Carleton Davis, almost the closest neighbour.

  He dug out Henry’s notes from the day after the murders. His questioning of Davis had been astute. The one-eyed Vietnam vet had resisted, expressing little sympathy for Gabriella Watson and denying that he had observed any untoward activity. This was interesting: Davis guessed that the killer had beheaded her — Henry had commented, “I never had a witness guess a decapitation” — and went on to speculate that the murder houses contained “buckets of blood.” Perhaps sensing that he was sounding too insightful about the crime scene, Davis changed the subject: he mused at length on Tom Watson’s grow op, calling it “small-scale competition” for the big drug dealers. Here was a man who knew an awful lot about his neighbour’s cottage business.

  Peter had no intention of accusing Carleton Davis of conspiring with Kelso Vyne to eliminate the grow operation, but maybe a forced tour of the Second House would shake up his memory. Peter wondered if Carleton and Vyne were keeping in touch.

  The visit proved uneventful. Davis masked his surprise at Peter’s foray with a curmudgeonly denunciation of the police. He declined Peter’s invitation to a private tour of Number 5, flattering as it might be. “I don’t want my privacy invaded; why would I abuse the Watsons’ privacy?” Peter departed convinced that Carleton Davis hadn’t conspired with the killer.

  But one small thing stuck in Peter’s detective brain. Phil Mohlman had furnished the combination for the lock box at Number 5, but when Peter climbed the stairs at the Second House to check it out, he found a notice declaring, “The West Valley Narcotics Unit controls access to this site.” He was left to consider why DeKlerk rather than Homicide had continued in this custodial role.

  Joan made him change into his Hawaiian shirt. The foursome drove north from Salt Lake City and followed the signs to the shore of the massive lake, crossing into the state park as the sun was reaching its zenith.

  The Great Salt Lake, which in 1847 caused Brigham Young to halt his wagons and declare that here he would build a great temple and a city to go with it, may have persuaded Young’s road-weary acolytes but was a hard sell to modern tourists. Once they got over their amusement at being able to float on its saline waters, visitors found little to do except rinse themselves off and gaze at the 1,500-square-mile expanse of brine and dull shoreline. There were no fish. Bird watchers fared better, charting pelicans by the hundreds, cormorants, gulls, and herons, all feasting on the endless supply of saltwater shrimp.

  The setting was peaceful, and Joan intrepidly led them out into the channel by Antelope Island, she and Peter in one small boat and Henry and Tynan putt-putting behind in the other. She made sure that Tynan wore a floppy straw hat with his white shirt and black pants, thereby shaping the group to resemble a Renoir boating party by way of Whistler and Don Ho. Peter and Henry sat immobile and bored in the forward seats. Joan was the only one to read the plaque on the dock listing all the flora and fauna inhabiting the island, and consequently she was not surprised to see a shaggy, full-grown American bison walking the shoreline of the park.

  They floated alone on the inland sea. The fact that the Great Salt Lake had no outlet made it feel frozen in time. One section of the coast was as bleak as another; white salt deposits coated the shore, recalling rime on the parched mouth of a castaway, or — Joan hoped Henry’s thoughts didn’t drift this way — cocaine around the nostrils of an addict. But she began to appreciate the subtle variations in the Dead Sea of the West. In many spots, the still water formed dense wetlands that provided havens for flocks of birds. She turned off the motor and watched a turkey buzzard ride a high thermal on the windward side of a set of burnt hills. She would look up the Latin names when she got back and email them to Sarah.

  Joan had been monitoring Peter closely over the last two weeks and had begun to worry that he was retreating into himself. “Where did you go this morning?” she asked, non-confrontationally.

  Peter’s smile was conciliatory. “Over to Hollis Street. I should have told you I was going. I needed to get back in touch with the crime that started it all. I guess I can’t believe that Vyne lost it like that after ten years of living quietly in the suburbs.”

  “Psychopaths don’t mend, you’ve said it yourself. Did you visit the grow house?”

  “Briefly. Mainly I went to talk to Carleton Davis.”

  “At Number 10?”

  “Right. Maybe it didn’t matter who I reconnected with, but Davis was one of the more straightforward residents, it seemed to me. He lived nearby and served on the executive committee. I thought I might prompt memories.”

  “Did Davis recall anything?”

  Peter shrugged, causing the boat to wobble. “He did admit that he had heard Tom Watson arguing with someone in the middle of the night, about three weeks before the murders.”

  “What was Davis doing up in the middle of the night?”

  “He was an MP in Danang during Vietnam and often worked the night shift. Old habits. I wonder what was so urgent that Watson had to be confronted at that time of night.”

  “Does Davis think Watson and Vyne were partnering?”

  “He never went that far. Perhaps Davis was a poor choice, but I wanted to get the neighbours talking again. I’m sure they were watching.”

  Joan saw that Tynan had turned off his motor but slyly stayed in earshot. “I know you want to keep up your momentum, Peter, but it’s time to let the police agencies handle this.”

  He gave her a harsh look, but she didn’t back down.

  “I’ve got half the country searching,” he said.

  “Peter, don’t you see? I read Fire and Brimstone. You’re dealing with a lonely, repressed misfit. You and Henry tried to track him down. Well, now is different. No more cowboy rigmarole. You have Henry and Mohlman and Brockhurst and Maddy to consider.”

  “I agree.”

  “You know what else, Peter? This is about you and your brother and your father. You say you discovered that they both had a Good War. They were part of big, historical efforts where
they made themselves indispensable. Well, dear, you need to absorb the fact that you had a Good War for forty-five years. Bartleben, Tommy, the whole Yard relied on you for the collective good. Don’t go off on your own tack.”

  Embarrassed, Peter smiled and said, “You sound almost Church­illian.”

  Joan awkwardly came forward and kissed him.

  Both boats had drifted to the centre of the bay, far from the marina. Henry’s shout crossed the water. “Hey there!”

  Joan and Peter turned to see Henry standing in the small boat. He pulled off his shirt. Joan expected him to vault into the water, where the brine would certainly excoriate his almost healed wounds. Henry ripped off his shoulder bandage and tossed it over the bow, but didn’t jump. Tynan, Joan perceived, was about to call out to him, but then the Mormon Elder stood up in the stern, putting both men in peril. He stripped off his own shirt, leaving the two men like hapless sailors in a tub.

  Tynan displayed the most epic body tattoo Joan and Peter, both familiar with mortuary slabs, had ever seen. Even at this remove, Joan could see that his skin, neck to waist and probably lower, told the Mormon saga in full. Wagon trains rolled, cathedrals reached to the clouds, and choirs gathered. Even Lucifer was represented, crouching on Tynan’s left shoulder. Bared to the sun, his body cascaded sweat. Only Joan understood how difficult this revelation was for him. Tattooing, in LDS teachings, was considered a desecration of the body, like graffiti defacing the human temple. She now understood something more about his neurological affliction: it had probably been caused by the ink.

  On a sand dune on the Antelope Island shore, a narrow-faced figure watched the boats through a pair of powerful military binoculars. He didn’t know or care about the tattooed man. The tall, half-naked cop and the short man in the flowered shirt were more interesting. He had seen them eye-to-eye in Denver, and the latter was the one Carleton Davis had called him about.

  CHAPTER 43