18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  She’d heard about this witness already, and she knew that the staff at Elmwood did not consider her credible. Still, it was a story that could not be reconciled. No one was around to mop floors on Sunday mornings. If she really had seen somebody, they could not have been part of the regular staff.

  The nursing home employed surveillance video, but not at all entrances and not between the nurses’ stations and the emergency exits, which included the area between Andrew Markey’s room and the stairwell where he happened to fall down.

  “Mac.” She caught a glimpse of her sergeant passing by her door. He stepped back slowly, cautiously.

  “You try an Identi-Kit on Mrs. Campbell?”

  “No,” he said dryly.

  O’Shaughnessy just looked at him.

  “She didn’t know what race he was, Lieu.”

  O’Shaughnessy cocked her head. “She said he was white or that if he was black he was light-complexioned.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “That’s what I said. Look, Lieu. I didn’t blow her off. I spent an hour talking to her the day of the accident.”

  O’Shaughnessy waved a hand across the air. “Oh, Mac, I know. I know. This daughter thing is really bothering me, though.”

  “It bothers me, too, Lieu, and if it’s any consolation Mrs. Campbell has made eleven rape complaints since she’s been in the home. The suspect is always the same dark-complexioned male. One time she pointed him out on the television, screaming ‘That’s him, that’s him, that’s the man who raped me.’”

  McGuire, in a rare attempt at levity, cried out in falsetto, shaking his arms above his head.

  O’Shaughnessy cocked her head expectantly. “Go on,” she said flatly.

  “George Hamilton.” He grinned.

  She laughed.

  “Lieu, you want me to take an Identi-Kit over there, I’m on my way.”

  O’Shaughnessy shook her head. “No, Mac. No, you’ve got plenty on your plate already.”

  McGuire shrugged and started to back out of the door.

  “Send Randall,” she muttered, picking up her coffee cup, scowling to find it cold.

  She thought she heard McGuire sigh as he walked away.

  She closed her door and headed for the break room.

  “How about Smyles?” the chief asked as O’Shaughnessy scooped coffee into a filter.

  “I don’t think he’s the guy,” she said. “We spent an hour with him last night. He can barely tie his own shoes, let alone chase a seventeen-year-old down in the dark.” She poured water into the machine. “Everyone I’ve talked to says he’s the real thing. What you see is what you get.” She pushed the on button and turned to face him. “You know him?”

  He nodded. “I know about him.”

  “He has an old arrest, 1996, Peeping Tom.”

  Loudon nodded. “I wouldn’t give that arrest all that much credence. I don’t think he knows to this day why he was brought in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of our rookies turned into the alley and saw Smyles standing by an apartment building in the dark. He stopped to check him out and there’s a naked woman in a tub in the basement apartment below them. Can’t imagine what conversation passed, but the officer calls for Sergeant Dillon, who arrives on the scene and orders the officer to lock him up.”

  “You don’t think he was guilty?”

  Loudon looked at her, trying to decide what to say. “Let me tell you what I think, Kelly. If I’d been walking down that alley and saw a naked woman below me through an open window and she looked halfway decent, I might have stopped myself for a peep. What I don’t think is that he was out looking for it.”

  She smiled, staring into her empty cup. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I had your job at the time. I made it a point to keep my nose out of uniforms’ business. Just like you are trying to do now.”

  “What about the women’s underwear they found in his room and his landlady, who swears he stole panty hose from her dryer?”

  Loudon shrugged. “I’m not saying he’s put together right, Kelly. I’m saying he’s a severely challenged man. The question should be, could he kidnap a girl and dispose of a body that a city full of supposedly talented people can’t find?”

  She nodded in agreement. “That’s about what his supervisor said.”

  “How’d he take it when you brought him in?”

  “He didn’t have a care in the world—smiled away like we’d invited him to a tea party. I sat through sixty minutes of statements about there being more green gum wrappers than red ones on the beach and how he can cut his own hair with a knife. I let the polygraph guy look him over and he all but laughed in my face.”

  “So what did you end up doing?”

  “I cut him loose.” The coffeemaker started gurgling and puffing out steam. “We can always get Clarke to open a grand jury if we need to rearrest him. He’ll have Dillon’s testimony, Carlino’s ring, and the women’s underwear.”

  “You have all that now.”

  “And I think it’s weak.”

  She poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “I’m not arguing with you, Kelly. I’m playing devil’s advocate. What are you going to tell the press when they ask you why he’s out on the streets again?”

  “That there’s no clear evidence to suggest he was responsible. He’s a material witness because he found a piece of evidence.”

  “Stick to it. What’s this business about Dillon calling Jason Carlino?”

  O’Shaughnessy leaned against a stack of unopened copy paper and folded her arms. “He was on the scene when McGuire arrived. Apparently Dillon called him and told him about his daughter’s ring.”

  “He strike Jeremy Smyles?”

  She nodded.

  “Any damage?”

  “He’s got a black eye, but I don’t think he remembers how.”

  “Thought about charging anyone?”

  She formed the slightest smile. “Not the right timing, Chief?”

  “Now you’re catching on. You leave Dillon and Carlino to me. Your job is to find out who kidnapped that girl.”

  She poured more coffee. “Can we walk?”

  “Sure.” They started back toward her office.

  “What happened to Smyles?” she asked.

  “Bus accident. He and seventeen other boys were coming home from a football game in Cape May in the fall of 1976. A policeman was chasing a kid in a high-speed pursuit; car ends up head-on with the school bus and runs it off the road. Worst tragedy ever to hit this town.”

  “My father was chief.”

  “Your father was the case. The defense tried to argue that the police caused the accident by pursuing the kid. Your dad coerced the DA into charging murder two instead of manslaughter and they walked him through two trials and convicted him—got life times two. First of its kind for a traffic death in the state.”

  She led him into her office and pulled the blinds. Taking a pack of cigarettes from the drawer, she said, “Here, you smoke and I’ll watch.”

  Loudon took a cigarette from the pack and picked up the matches. The chief was known to smoke only on crime scenes and when someone offered him one. If it took a year for either of the circumstances to come around, he waited. She hated that smoking made no difference to him.

  “God, I miss those things,” she said dreamily. “Gus said there were no other survivors.”

  Loudon shook his head.

  “You said the question was whether Smyles could kidnap and dispose of a body,” she went on. “What were you thinking?”

  The chief blew a circle at the ceiling. “Get him tested.”

  O’Shaughnessy squinted. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Get Clarke to write an order to have him tested by a psychiatrist. Dunmore Psychological Institute in Vineland does a lot of work for the courts. Physical ability, capacity to understand right and wrong—all that stuff.”

  She smiled in appreciation.

  Dete
ctive Randall knocked at the door. “Phone, Lieu, it’s Gus.”

  She nodded and the chief stood. “Stay away from those cigarettes, Kel.” He closed the door behind him.

  She punched the speakerphone. “It’s O’Shaughnessy, Gus. I wanted you to check something for me.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Can you put your hands on the city’s fleet vehicle registrations?”

  He thought a moment. “Yeah, I don’t see why not. You got something in mind?”

  “Last night at the fire we brought a suspect in with Anne Carlino’s ring. I was talking to one of the Public Works department supervisors. His truck was orange.”

  “I’ll call you,” Gus said.

  O’Shaughnessy drove the downtown streets for an hour, chewing gum and thinking about Jeremy Smyles. The jewelry they’d found in his treasure tin was mostly junk. There were a few nice pieces—a ring, an earring, and a watch that had some value—but no engravings and no hits on the stolen property inventories in their database. Jeremy had other problems, however. He couldn’t account for his whereabouts during either of the kidnappings. He had no friends to vouch for him, no one who saw him coming or going from his rooming house, no one who could explain what he did with any of his time.

  Jason Carlino had called him the primary suspect in his daily interview with the Patriot, and it was getting harder each day for the city manager to ignore him.

  Yes, Smyles had been in possession of something belonging to one of the victims, but his explanation was plausible, O’Shaughnessy told reporters. He’d taken detectives to the place where he said he’d found it and it was the same place O’Shaughnessy herself had found the girl’s wristwatch. They’d just missed it the first time around. That was all.

  But to Jason Carlino that meant only that Jeremy Smyles knew where the crime scene was. Well, of course he knew where the crime scene was.

  Policemen investigating the death of Tracy Yoland had been walking the boardwalk continuously since her disappearance. They showed pictures of both her and Anne Carlino, trying to find anyone who might have seen them before they fell off the face of the earth, anyone who might have seen a suspicious orange vehicle near the boardwalk.

  O’Shaughnessy was saddened to hear that Tracy Yoland’s parents had separated back in Nebraska. Things like this could break up a marriage. She’d seen that happen more than once.

  She stopped at the corner drugstore next to Tim’s office. She used to meet him there for lunch and thought for some absurd reason that he might be sitting there when she walked in. She would make some big to-do about bumping into him and they would end up sitting together for coffee and she would finally break the ice.

  She ended up eating an egg salad sandwich alone and glancing at the door every time it opened, hating herself for missing him and hating herself more for letting him go. She didn’t want to go on like this any longer. She was tired of being without him. The girls were tired of being without him. This was 2005. Presidents made mistakes, astronauts, preachers, sports stars…If she wanted blind devotion, she could have gotten a Labrador, not a human being.

  She knew it hadn’t been easy for him to confess what he’d done; she knew that he’d also been honest with his mother, which must have been hard as well. She hadn’t given him any repose for it; he hadn’t deserved that yet, she thought. But he had a conscience, and that, she had to admit, was another of the many things she loved about him.

  He was only a few buildings away; she bought a package of peanut butter cups to share with him. They used to make tents under the sheets and split them with the girls when they were very young. It was a silly game, but over the years one or the other would suddenly come home with a package and the two of them would dive under the covers and eat chocolate and kiss and end up making love with peanut butter on their breath.

  She pocketed the candy and stopped by the car to drop off her purchase of Nicorettes, and saw the message light flashing on her phone. The first call was from Gus; he had her vehicle records and wanted her to call him. The second was from Tim; he wanted to know if she could drop the girls at his mother’s instead of the apartment tonight. He had a commitment. A commitment! Was that supposed to be code for a goddamned date?

  The third was from Clarke Hamilton, who wanted to know if she could take a ride up the coast. Goddamn right she could. She didn’t have any commitments.

  Gus Meyers was waiting in her office when she got back. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

  The rumors were no longer rumors. Agnes had less than three months to live.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope. He handed it to her. “There are five trucks in Wildwood that fit the profile, unless they junked them in the last three months. That’s when the last inventory was turned in. Now, this doesn’t mean they match the paint I found on the watch. Only that they’re the right years and models. Okay?”

  She nodded. “So I need to get a scratch off one of them to compare?”

  “Yes. If you have a particular vehicle in mind, go for it, but I think that any one of them should do. Find the fleet first and then you can look for a scratch on a particular vehicle. You want me to send one of my people over, or is this a secret?”

  “I think I’d like to keep it quiet just a little while longer. How long will it take to turn around a paint sample?”

  “Weeks.” He shrugged. “Maybe months. The bureau has the only archives of this type and they work on prosecutable cases first. Put a suspect’s name with your request and it’ll get done a whole lot faster. That’s my two cents.”

  “Thanks, Gus.” She felt deflated. Months?

  “Don’t thank me. You thought of it.”

  TUESDAY, MAY 31

  “I heard there was a pentagram on the beach this morning.”

  O’Shaughnessy looked over her shoulder. The chief was walking just behind her and not looking cheerful.

  “It’s Memorial Day weekend,” she said.

  She stopped at the mailroom and grabbed a handful of envelopes, then started back to her office. “It came from the tip line,” she said. “I hate to admit it, but it had me scared for a hot minute.”

  “So what did it turn out to be?”

  “Well, to begin with, it was drawn on the sand by the band-shell where everyone has to walk. Someone wrote the word ‘whore’ in the center and the letters AC and TY on all five sides. If you ask me it’s a bunch of sickos want to read about themselves in the paper.”

  “Anything else around?”

  “A couple of kiddie sandcastles and a one-legged seagull.”

  “Did it look possessed?”

  “They all look possessed.”

  “What about phone calls?”

  “Galore. Everyone who jogged by must have called. It started at five and ended about an hour ago. They said the Pagans were in town.”

  “The Pagans don’t play in the sand,” the chief said. “Not in all the years I’ve known them.”

  “We also got a call about a coven on Marshland Road, one of the old summer cottages. I sent a car over. There were shades pulled on all the windows and three couples inside. Spiked hair, black nails, black lipstick, you know the type, lots of black.” She turned into her office. “Caught them eating chocolate cereal. Everybody needed a bath. Other than that, they were normal.”

  Loudon smiled.

  She took a seat behind her desk and he sat on the edge.

  “My assistant said you called?” Loudon asked.

  “I need help.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “You know anyone in Public Works I can talk to?”

  “Concerning?”

  “The kidnappings.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “This about Jeremy Smyles?”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m looking for a truck.” She told him about the paint scratches and the city inventory.

  “Ben Johnson,” he said quickly.

  “I met him.” She n
odded. “He was on the scene when Carlino poked Jeremy in the eye.”

  “He’s the glue that holds that place together,” Loudon said. “Not very tactful when it comes to the politicians, but he’s outlasted four administrators. I’ve known him since I was a rookie.”

  Loudon reached down and put a finger on a pencil on her desk, spinning it around in circles. “Carlino’s attorney filed a formal complaint against us. The city manager is taking it seriously. He wants a written response.”

  She turned to look at him. “About what?”

  “Smyles,” he said. “He’s accusing us of putting a murderer back on the street. He’s threatening the city with a lawsuit.”

  “For doing our job?”

  “For negligence. Sergeant Dillon claims he has two teenagers who will swear they saw Smyles on the beach the night Yoland was abducted. Were you ever able to pin him down for an alibi?”

  O’Shaughnessy looked down and shook her head. “He said he went for a walk.”

  “A walk?”

  “A walk,” she repeated softly.

  The chief groaned. “You give this to Clarke?”

  She nodded. “He agrees that it doesn’t help, but Smyles still isn’t capable.”

  “You talk to Clarke about a shrink yet?”

  “Saturday the fourth, one o’clock. They were booked through the week. Look, Chief, you were right. Whoever took those girls from the boardwalk needed the strength to overpower them and the means to get them out of there, not to mention the brains to dispose of them. That person is not the Jeremy we interviewed.”

  He shrugged. “So get it into Clarke’s hands. Find out who these kids of Dillon’s are and get their stories on paper. You’re not going to accomplish anything with Carlino on your back.”

  She nodded.

  “Kelly. No matter what anyone tells you, myself included, don’t eliminate Jeremy Smyles. Not unless you can do it conclusively. If it turns out one day that he was the guy, we’re going to take a fall. A hard fall.”