East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  Passed between them.

  Something physical and tangible. It was as if she’d been suddenly filled with a certain knowledge that this boy, this man, who held her in his arms, who all the other girls thought was so perfect, was, in fact … perfect … but only for her and no one else. Even odder than that was the sense, the surety, there was no denying it, that Tommy Gunderson felt the same way about her.

  And then she’d panicked, broken away from his embrace, waved to the crowd, and told her dates—she’d come with two of her girlfriends—that she wanted to go home because she was feeling hypoglycemic. She didn’t even know what hypoglycemic meant, but she needed an excuse to leave, because it was all too much too soon and the future she had in mind for herself was only going to happen if she got as far away as possible from Tommy Gunderson immediately.

  The only person she’d ever told was her sister, who then, of course, was able to torment her about it for the rest of her life.

  “Oh, shut up,” Dani said. “What are you doing today?”

  “Well,” Beth said, “first I spent the morning very carefully combing the girls’ hair because we got an e-mail blast from school saying they had a kid with head lice. Now I’m on my way to a barn call. Red Gate Farm.”

  Beth had been a full-time large animal veterinarian before giving birth to her girls. Now she worked part-time, trying to maintain her client list and be a mom at the same time.

  “Mad cow?” Dani asked.

  “Mad horse,” Beth said. “Except they’re not mad—just slightly annoyed. The owner thinks they’re allergic to hay. They can’t stop sneezing.”

  “Horses allergic to hay?” Dani stepped back into the elevator. “That can’t be good.”

  “Better than fish being allergic to water, I suppose,” Beth said. “Say hi to Tommy for me.”

  Dani pressed the down button and rode the elevator to the basement. She recognized Tommy immediately, even with his back to her—partly because he was dressed in the same basic outfit he’d worn in high school. A pair of black sweatpants and a black-and-gold hooded East Salem High sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and curling at the elbows, with a black down vest over the sweatshirt. Broad shoulders, muscled calves and thighs, powerful arms, a bodybuilder’s build.

  Why are you looking at his thighs? Be professional.

  It had been awhile since she had read any stories about Tommy Gunderson in the tabloids. She preferred to remember the Tommy she’d known in high school, the golden boy, All-State as a wrestler in the 198-pound division and a high school All-American in football. He was the boy no girl could resist. His hair then had been a kind of Bon Jovi shag/mullet. It was more sensible now, still long enough to hang over his ears and the same light brown it had been back when her own hair was not exactly the expertly highlighted light auburn it was now.

  The police officer talking to Tommy cocked his fist behind his ear, opened his hand, and made a throwing motion. Of course they were talking football. A second cop laughed, both cops clearly awed by the famous athlete, a man the newspapers had once called the most feared linebacker in the NFL. Dani was aware of his other reputation, that of the unrepentant cad who’d left his bride at the altar. The tabloid fodder had never sounded like the Tommy from high school, but people could change. How much Tommy Gunderson had changed remained to be seen.

  The cops barely noticed her as she approached.

  “Hi, Tommy,” she said, standing a few feet behind him.

  He turned and smiled to see her.

  “You still go by Tommy?”

  She knew he had a lot of nicknames. T.G., Mister T, Teej, T-Bone, Tommy Gun, Gunner. She felt like she might be sick, or perhaps those were just butterflies in her stomach.

  “Hey, Danielle,” he said.

  “Dani,” she corrected him.

  “Dani,” he agreed. “Claire told me I might run into you.”

  “Small world,” she said. For some reason, she didn’t want him to know this was her first day flying solo.

  “I apologize if I smell bad,” he said. “When Liam called, I rushed here without grabbing a shower.”

  “You smell fine,” she said.

  Why were they talking about how he smelled? When had she ever talked to anybody about how they smelled?

  “I have a cold,” Tommy said, sniffing. “You look like you probably smell good.”

  Now what was she supposed to say?

  Dani had been to Tommy’s fitness center only a few times—for a niece’s birthday party and once for an aerobics class. Each time she was glad she hadn’t run into him, because the fact was that she wanted to run into him. Beth had pointed out that that made no sense. Beth had an irritating habit of doing that.

  “How’s your family?” she inquired.

  “My aunt’s still full-time at the library,” he told her. “My dad’s had a bit of a decline.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s not Alzheimer’s,” Tommy clarified. “It’s called Lewy body dementia. LBD. Some days he’s got the attention span of a housefly, but not every day. I was really sorry to hear about your mom and dad.”

  “Time heals all wounds,” she said, her usual lame response.

  “Claire told me you used to babysit for Liam,” he said. “He asked me to meet him here. We’re pretty close. Guys talk to each other when they’re working out. He’s a good kid.”

  “Do you think he’d do drugs?” she asked. She recalled a case study she’d read about a high school wrestler who’d raged out of control. “Steroids, maybe?”

  “Absolutely not,” Tommy said. “He’s a straight arrow. Plus, he’d be out of the gym in a heartbeat if I caught him taking anything more than aspirin.”

  “There was a murder last night up on Bull’s Rock Hill,” Dani said. “I don’t have the details.”

  “I know. They found the victim on the rock with some markings on her body, written in blood,” Tommy said. “That’s what the cops just told me five minutes ago.”

  It annoyed her that Tommy already knew more about the crime than she did. She remembered the way his celebrity, even in high school as the Big Man on Campus, had opened doors for him that other people had to work hard to open. It wasn’t that he had a big head about it. He still seemed self-effacing and ego-less. After their big moment on the dance floor, or whatever it was, she’d been worried that he might call her, and then she’d have to explain her behavior, to herself if not to him. She’d been standoffish when she passed him in the hall and even a bit rude. She focused on her goals, to go to college and then medical school, and nothing was going to distract her from that. And Tommy was nothing if not distracting.

  “It’s good to see you,” she began, when she was interrupted by the uniformed officer monitoring the door to the parking garage, calling out, “Look busy, people!”

  Irene Scotto strode through the door the way a bull enters a bullring, alert and ready for a fight. Stuart Metz walked behind her, carrying a cardboard tray from Starbucks in both hands. Irene, in a double-breasted navy suit with white piping and white buttons, smiled at Dani as she passed. Stuart handed Dani her coffee as he hurried to catch up to his boss, for whom the elevator door opened as if it knew she was coming.

  “Time for me to get to work,” Dani told Tommy.

  “Can I tell you something?” Tommy said. “Whatever it was that happened up there on Bull’s Rock Hill, Liam didn’t do it. Not in a million years. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Well,” Dani said, “I hope you’re right. See you around, maybe.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m waiting for Liam’s mom.”

  “Oh yeah, you said that,” Dani said, feeling awkward now and anything but professional. “So then …”

  She got on the elevator before she said anything stupid.

  5.

  “You look like you probably smell good.”

  Tommy wanted to kick himself. He hadn’t really said that, had he?

&nbs
p; Back in high school, he’d spent an hour staring at the telephone, summoning the courage to ask the formidable Danielle Harris out before realizing it was a losing battle. The East Salem High newspaper had called the homecoming pair “Beauty and the Beast,” but he’d gotten a report from a reliable source that others were calling them “the Princess and the Pea-brain.” Given how she’d fled from him on the dance floor, she must have agreed. She was even prettier than she’d been in high school, but how was that possible? Her eyes seemed bigger, maybe just because she wore makeup now. Some girls peaked in high school. Dani wasn’t one of them, even though she’d been more interesting in high school than the girls who were peaking.

  He took a seat on the bench by the water fountain. He refreshed the screen on his phone and Googled “Danielle Harris.” He clicked on a link to the home page for Ralston-Foley Behavioral Consulting, then on the bio for Dani. She’d graduated from East Salem High School the same year he did— that much he already knew. She’d completed her undergraduate degree at Brown two years before he’d taken his BA from Stanford. It didn’t surprise him to learn she’d finished four years’ worth of college classes in two—from what he remembered of her, he wondered what took her so long. She’d made a similar rush through Harvard Medical School and had spent two years as a psychiatric intern in Senegal, West Africa, with Doctors Without Borders, where she’d helped child soldiers reintegrate with society. She’d interned at Maclean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and she’d worked with troubled youths at the Blair-Hudson School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her bio listed scholarly papers she’d written or coauthored— several, Tommy noted, on the uses and misuses of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other psychotropic medications for the adolescent or developing brain.

  “A lifelong resident of East Salem and Westchester County, Dr. Harris brings a welcome medical component to the practice and an expertise experientially comparable to physicians twice her age.”

  Her bio added that she also taught part-time at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  She’s still out of your league, Gunderson. But knowing you’re doing something stupid never stopped you before … Why let it stop you now?

  He returned to Google and typed in “Abigail Gardener” + “East Salem, NY.”

  A link brought him to the book pages of Amazon, where he found four titles attributed to Abigail Gardener: The History of East Salem, The Ghosts of East Salem, The Witches of East Salem, and The Natives of East Salem. None was still in print. Used copies of the first three could be purchased for $1.97 each.

  Hard to imagine how a person’s lifework could be had for $5.91.

  He recalled the time she’d visited his class, her energy and the enthusiasm she had for her subjects. He’d driven past the Gardener Farm countless times, a property described by some magazines as the most valuable undeveloped land in Westchester, 150 acres on the southern shore of Lake Atticus.

  With Abbie in a nursing home, the old house would now be occupied by her son, “Crazy George.” Tommy’s house was on a direct line from High Ridge Manor to the Gardener Farm. Had Abbie been trying to get home?

  Bull’s Rock Hill was on the line too.

  Was she a suspect? Nobody would guess a woman her age was capable of such a crime, but then, no one would expect her to have the superhuman strength he’d experienced when she’d attacked him. Almost as if she’d been possessed.

  By what?

  It was something he intended to look into.

  6.

  The DA’s office was the only one in the suite with windows, albeit bulletproof ones, with a view of the hospital across the street and what was surely the biggest elm tree in the state of New York.

  “Dani Harris,” Irene said, “this is Detective Phillip Casey. He’ll be my lead investigator on the case. Detective Casey, Dani Harris.”

  Phillip Casey gave her a smile so weak it would have been taken for a frown in any country outside of Scandinavia, accompanied by a grunt that may have been the detective clearing his throat but seemed more like an expression of disgust.

  “The detective was just telling us that in his years of experience with Providence law enforcement, forensic psychiatrists did nothing but let bad guys off the hook by saying they were crazy,” Stuart said. “We told him you and Sam and John have been invaluable to us.”

  Dani appreciated Stuart trying to break the ice on her behalf.

  “How old are you?” the detective asked her.

  Dani tried not to bristle outright. She’d had an instructor in medical school, a man who was ex-military by-the-book and a bit of a bully, but he’d liked Dani because she stood up to him. Dani guessed Casey might be of a similar ilk.

  “Twenty-nine,” she said. “What do you weigh?”

  Stuart smiled, then wiped the smile from his face before Casey noticed. The senior detective was of medium height but had clearly spent more time at the pasta bowl than the salad bar. He had a gray brush cut that reminded Dani of pictures she’d seen of mystery writer Mickey Spillane. He was clean-shaven, pushing sixty, and wore a plaid sport coat that made him look like a sportscaster at a local affiliate in rural Canada.

  “I can’t resist my wife’s risotto,” he told her flatly. “You look twenty.”

  “Thanks,” Dani said, though she wasn’t sure he’d meant it as a compliment. She decided she liked him, and she suspected he liked her too, though it would probably take both of them awhile to admit it. “Can somebody tell me what happened last night?”

  Stuart dimmed the lights. There was a 50-inch flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall to the right of the district attorney’s desk. Detective Casey stared a few moments at the screen, then at the computer used to generate the PowerPoint presentation. Dani watched the cursor move tentatively from field to field as he manipulated the mouse, unsure how to operate the program.

  “Allow me,” Stuart offered, taking a seat at the laptop.

  Casey turned his attention to the picture on the screen, an image of a wooded uphill path. “This is Bull’s Rock Hill,” he said. His delivery was dry and matter-of-fact. “I gather you people know where this is.”

  “It’s about four miles from my house,” Dani said.

  “Is it?” Casey said. “I actually wasn’t wondering where you live. The body was found this morning by a yoga instructor, a little before sunrise, which was …”

  “7:01,” Stuart said, adding, “AM.”

  “Thank you,” Casey said. “AM? You’re sure? So she gets about forty feet away when she sees this …”

  Dani had seen plenty of crime scene photographs before, twenty-megapixel images that could be enlarged to show the smallest details, but she’d never seen anything as brutal as this. Casey let the picture speak for itself before gesturing to Stuart to click through a series of similar photos taken from different angles.

  “Your ME is working on the details, but we think the victim is a girl between fourteen and twenty. Blond or light brown hair. No way to tell eye color, obviously.”

  Stuart zoomed in on the victim’s eyes, now just blackened sockets, burn holes in a ghoulish Halloween mask.

  “We don’t know what the killer used for fire. Preliminary indications suggest possibly a blowtorch. We had a guy in Providence once, friend of mine’s informant, who got caught ratting out the boys on Federal Hill—we found him in a pizza oven. Apparently they put him in it alive and then turned on the flames. I used to think nothing could top that, but now I ain’t so sure.”

  Stuart zoomed out again, clicking to a slightly more distant view of the next slide, then zoomed back in. Dani noted the position of the body, the victim’s head and neck. Her training in anatomy gave her the names of the exposed tissues, ligaments, and bones, but she was more interested in the mind of the killer than the body of the victim. Considerable trauma had been done to the body, but for some reason Dani didn’t think she was looking at mindless violent actions. Rather, this seemed to be the work of
a killer who was brutal, deliberate, and methodical. The things they’d said about Jack the Ripper.

  “No clothing at the scene, but no preliminary indications of sexual assault either,” Casey continued. “The ME can tell us more.”

  “Signs of struggle?” Irene asked.

  “Nothing so far,” Casey said. “Nothing under the fingernails, but again, we’ll know more after we get the labs. The body appears to have been repositioned postmortem.”

  “Moved?” Irene said. “Hard to imagine somebody carrying a body up that hill.”

  “We don’t know.”

  Dani tried to put herself in the mind of the victim. The absence of resistance, John Foley had told her once, indicated that either the victim was unconscious when she was killed, was surprised by a stranger, or was killed suddenly by someone she knew and trusted. The blood of violent crime victims often showed elevated stress hormones secreted to produce a fight/flight response. Banerjee could test for that.

  What would it feel like, she wondered, to know you were about to die? More specifically, what did the girl on Bull’s Rock Hill experience? Had she gone willingly, or was she forced? Tricked?

  Casey turned to Stuart Metz. “What do we have next?”

  Stuart clicked to a picture of the victim’s toes, the nails painted a bright red, then to a picture of the victim’s hands, the nails done in the same color. She wore a red-and-black braided friendship bracelet around her right ankle.