The Christopher Killer

by Alane Ferguson

  Cameryn heard a snap as her mammaw pushed the button on the toaster. “You reap what you sow,” she said. “Now let’s talk about something more pleasant, like the weather, for instance. If you’d look out the window you’d see it’s like summer outside, warmer than it’s been this time of year for as long as I can remember. Here, girl, take this!” Her grandmother reached out the plate, loaded with food, and Cameryn took it and set it in front of Pat on the yellow gingham place mat. Yellow was her grandmother’s favorite color, one she wove through the room like a golden thread. “I like my kitchen cheerful,” she’d say, “because the kitchen is the soul of the house.” True to her word, the round oak table always had fresh yellow flowers in the middle, the blooms nodding lazily in the sun like sleepy heads.

  Now Cameryn stole a glance at her grandmother, who had at this point turned her attention to running water into a pot.

  “What is it, Cammie?” Patrick asked.

  Startled, Cameryn could only look at him blankly.

  Patrick focused his gaze on her with sudden intensity. “You’ve got a strange look on your face and you’re chewing your nails again. I know you,” he said, wagging a piece of toast at her, “you’re up to something. What’s in your head?”

  Cameryn pulled her fingers away from her mouth, a habit that betrayed her when she was nervous. Shrugging, she smiled and said, “Nothing.”

  “Come on, now, it’s not like you to play games.”

  She shot a quick glance at her grandmother, who was now engrossed in her scrubbing. Her father leaned toward her and she lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “All right. I have this idea. Actually, I’ve had it for a long time, but—that doesn’t matter. Anyway, what I’m going to say is going to sound crazy but I want you to hear all of it before you say no.”

  He munched his toast. “How about I just say no now and save the time.”

  “Come on, Dad! Listen, the sheriff got an assistant to help him when you’re the one who could use a hand. You always say you’ve got too much to do and not enough time to do it in. You need your own assistant.”

  He whispered now, too, leaning in conspiratorially. “Right. Except there’s a problem: There’s not a lot of coroner material in Silverton.”

  “But I know a person. I’m thinking of someone who’d be ready to go at a moment’s notice,” she went on eagerly. “Somebody who understands the field. Someone you could trust.”

  “And just who is the miracle worker of Silverton?”

  Cameryn paused for just a moment. Glancing over to make sure Mammaw wasn’t listening, she whispered, “Me.”

  “You!”

  “Yes, me. Let me work for you.”

  Her father pulled back in order to stare at her full in the face, his blue eyes squinting at her as though he’d never seen her before. Forgetting to keep his voice low, he said, “Oh, baby, you don’t know what you’re asking. It’s a hard job—different from what you see in your books. What I do is real life. We’re just a tiny operation, which means I do it all. I’m the one who has to pull dead people out of cars and lift waterlogged corpses out of bathtubs. You don’t want to see that. Besides, your grandmother’s worried enough about you as it is….”

  Cameryn knew this would be his first line of objection, but her mind had already worked it through and she was ready with her defense. “But there’s nothing to worry about. I’m a straight-A student. I don’t do drugs or smoke or do any of that stuff. And I already know what I want to do with my life: I want to go into forensics. You’re always saying we don’t get enough time together and this would change that. Dad, my plan makes sense—you know it does.”

  “Except you’re too young to be sure that this is your future,” he countered. “Why don’t we wait and see if that’s what you want later, like, say, when you’re out of college?”

  “So you’re penalizing me because I already know what I want.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, his brow furrowed with concentration. “I’m saying seventeen is still young, Cammie. Death is a hard business. Why subject yourself to it?”

  She stood, silent, because there was no way to answer. Since she was a science geek she was of course drawn to its absolutes, and those would be her tools in forensics. What happened when a person died and the puzzle of death was part of it, too. But it was more than that. In her books she saw bodies in every conceivable level of decay, some felled by their own biology while others had been taken at the hands of a killer, and yet the dead all had one, tragic thing in common: They had no voice. At times she wondered at the parallel between herself, her past, and the dead she wanted to serve. It was a strange thought, really, because she had a perfectly good home with loving people watching over her. And yet…a whole section of her life had been buried along with Hannah’s memory. How did that make her feel? In a way she felt silenced, too. It was the power to give voice that had drawn her to forensics. The dead told a story that the pathologist, if she were good enough, could hear, and Cameryn wanted to be that person. She wanted to be the translator. And maybe, when she learned that language, she could in turn speak for herself. But all of that was too complicated for the morning’s question. When pressed by her father again, she just shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to. And I want to start learning now.”

  “Absolutely not!” her grandmother roared from her station behind the sink. Cameryn’s head jerked up in time to see the pot clatter into the porcelain sink. Her grandmother’s hands were planted firmly on her hips and she looked taller, Cameryn realized, than she had just moments before.

  “Patrick, tell her no!” Mammaw’s finger pointed at Cameryn. “And shame on you for even asking such a thing! It’s out of the question!”

  Her father leaned back in his chair so that it balanced on just two legs. He seemed to stare at his half-eaten eggs as though he could divine the answer from them, as though they were entrails read by the prophets of old. Something was going on in his mind, and that something gave Cameryn hope. He hadn’t said no yet. In fact, he didn’t say anything.

  “Come on, Dad,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “You can’t be considering this—Patrick, it’s taking her down the wrong path. Are you listening to me? She needs to stay away from darkness. You know what I’m saying. Are you listening to me?”

  Slowly, Patrick’s chair tipped forward until it came to rest with a thump on the wooden floor. “I’m listening,” he answered quietly. “And I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

  “You can’t mean that!”

  “Ma, you and me, we’re both too afraid. How many years has it been?” He shook his head wearily. “We’re running around, chasing ghosts, and we’ve got to stop.”

  “You’re making a mistake!” Mammaw cried, but Patrick didn’t seem to hear.

  “We’ve got to stop,” he said again. “We’ve got to let Cameryn decide who she wants to be.” Her grandmother stood frozen, waiting, while Cameryn felt her own blood thaw as her heart beat again. Finally, her father slapped his knee and said, “All right then.”

  “All right?” Cameryn asked, elated.

  “Yes. All right,” he told her. “Cameryn, you’re officially hired as assistant to the coroner of Silverton, Colorado. How does ten dollars an hour sound?”

  “I love you, Dad!” she cried, sliding onto her father’s lap. His strong arms encircled her, pulling her tight. She could hear the gurgle of his stomach beneath his shirt. She heard something else, too: her grandmother’s slippered feet as they stomped across the floor and the slam of the door as she left the kitchen.

  “How mad is she?” she asked in a small voice.

  “She’ll get over it—Cammie, she’s a good woman. She’s tried to be your mother, to do what’s best for you. She’s worried you’ll go too far into the macabre.” With his finger he pulled up her chin, and his blue eyes looked worried. “You won’t, will you?”

  “No.” She returned his gaze, unflinching. “I just like the science.�
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  “I like the way the dead don’t talk back. Makes for a lot less friction on the job.”

  “Oh, but they do. They still tell us their stories.”

  “You’re right. I guess I just never thought of it that way.” He slid her from his lap and stood, picking up his folder with the two death certificates inside. “We’d better move. There’s a dead man waiting for us,” he said. “Let’s go find out what he has to say.”

  Chapter Two

  “WE’RE GOING TO NEED a tarp, just in case,” her father said, flipping down the backseat of their station wagon to make room for the body they’d be picking up. His voice sounded muffled as he added, “We’ll need a sheet, too. And heavy gloves. The guy’s skin might have come off in the water and we’ll have to fish it out of the drain, which is a job you’ll want the long gloves for. You okay?”

  “Sure. I already told you, I can handle it!” Cameryn answered with more confidence than she felt. When her father’s head reemerged from the car, she asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Smooth this down in the back.” He tossed her a heavy tarp. “It’s an added protection against body fluid leakage, although if we do our job right none should seep out of the bag. I’ll get the gurney and then we’re out of here.” Patrick’s feet crunched on gravel as he disappeared into the Mahoney garage, a small one-car affair crammed to the gills with boxes and storage shelves. There was barely enough room for Mammaw’s gold Oldsmobile in the center of the garage; from the outside looking in, the car looked like a giant pig-in-a-blanket. Both Cameryn, who had a 1987 Jeep Cherokee, and her father, who owned the station wagon, were forced to park outside year-round—fine in the summer but hard in winter. Some mornings it took Cameryn half an hour to scrape away the heavy mountain snow that settled on her windshield like a thick shroud, a common occurrence at ten thousand feet.

  Cameryn crawled into the back of their station wagon and patted down the plastic sheet. Her father reemerged with a gurney.

  “Your wheel’s got a squeak,” she told him, hopping out to join him.

  “Yeah, but my customers haven’t complained yet.” With one smooth motion, her father collapsed the gurney flat and slid it and the body bag into the car’s bay. The hatch slammed shut with a resounding thud. “Okay,” he said. “It’s showtime.”

  It was Patrick Mahoney’s job, Cameryn knew, to pronounce the Silverton residents formally and legally deceased. Most of those who died were sent on to funeral homes, but if he had any doubt at all concerning the cause of death, her father would order an autopsy, which would be performed in Durango, the closest place with a forensic lab. That also meant transporting the body in their family station wagon. Many a corpse made its final trip in the back of the car the Mahoneys did their grocery shopping in, a fact that seemed to trouble Cameryn’s friends. Her best friend, Lyric, was so convinced she’d seen a ghost’s pale face pressed into the station wagon’s rear window that she’d vowed to never ride in their car again.

  “But why,” Cameryn had asked Lyric, “would a ghost haunt our station wagon? Why would it waste a perfectly good afterlife tooling around Silverton in that old beater?” Lyric never answered, but she never got in the car again, either.

  Now, as her father pulled out of the Mahoney driveway, Cameryn tried to quell the nerves fluttering inside. “Do you think you’ll need to order an autopsy on this floater-guy?” she asked.

  Her father sighed as he shifted the station wagon into forward. “Possibly. I sure hope he turns out to be a natural. Makes my job a heck of a lot easier.”

  “A ‘natural’?”

  “Oh, so you don’t know everything about this business just yet?” he said with a sly smile. “That’s good. It means I can still teach you a thing or two. Calling a person a ‘natural’ is a bit of coroner shorthand—means the person died from natural causes.”

  “How can you tell if they’re a ‘natural’ if the body’s not autopsied?”

  “Well, there are protocols I follow. If it’s an attended death or if there’s a known medical condition, well, that would explain why the person died. If that’s the case, they’re considered a natural and my job is done. Remember the time you found me in the rest home when I was processing that old lady?” He glanced at her and said, “She was a classic natural, so no autopsy.”

  Cameryn nodded. She’d found him in the room of an elderly woman, his head bent in concentration as he filled out forms only two feet from the corpse. She remembered drifting over to the woman’s bed, not afraid, but curious to look at death up close. The woman’s skin and hair were as white as parchment; blue-veined hands rested lightly on the blanket’s edge, her yellowed fingernails touching as if in prayer. It was the woman’s eyes, though, that Cameryn remembered most. Still open, they stared at the ceiling with an expression that was serene but vacant, as though she were nothing more than an empty husk with its insides removed.

  “So that old lady died from pneumonia,” her father went on, flipping on his blinker. “She’d been under a doctor’s care, so I released her and she was sent straight on to the funeral home. With any luck this guy’ll have some sort of condition and we’ll be able to skip the autopsy, which can get pretty dicey when it’s a decomp. Otherwise”—he made a cutting motion with his hands—“we’re going in.”

  They turned onto Greene Street and headed west. Cameryn knew it wouldn’t take long to travel the entire length of the town, since Silverton was home to only seven hundred people. A tiny, inbred community, her town was populated with an odd mix of working men and women, leather-skinned ranchers, and upscale shop owners who wedged American flags into their flower boxes like patriotic quills.

  By all rights Silverton should have died years ago like so many other mining towns scattered throughout the West, but against the odds it had clung to life. When Silverton’s gold, silver, and copper veins finally played out, the miners who worked them were forced to leave camps that had existed for over eighty years. But the miners’ free-flowing money had been Silverton’s lifeblood, and without their cash, the bars and gambling halls began to close their doors. Desperate, the mayor convinced the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad to haul a more lucrative payload to the town: passengers.

  It was then that Silverton reinvented itself as a haven for tourists. With the stroke of a politician’s pen, the town became a mandatory two-hour stop at the end of the D & S tracks. Cameryn’s grandmother remembered what it had been like in Silverton before its transformation into respectability. “In the old days we had a red-light district on Blair Street, with many a bordello and speakeasy. Mind you, it was a place of terrible sin,” she’d said. “But I remember the flavor of it. Oh, I’m glad it’s gone, but we’ve lost something, girl.”

  Now Silverton’s Greene Street was studded with quaint shops, hotels, and old-fashioned eateries. The new, improved Silverton looked as polished as its name—clean and scrubbed bright as a lighted Christmas village.

  Patrick turned south, away from the born-again buildings, and then made a quick right onto Copper Street and a moment later he stopped in front of a run-down motel built in the shape of an L. A hand-painted sign declaring CHILDREN SLEEP FREE tipped drunkenly from the motel roof, while the parking lot, paved only in gravel, boasted a mere two cars. One room at the end of the long side of the L was decked with yellow plastic tape emblazoned with the words DO NOT CROSS. A slender young man, looking barely older than Cameryn, paced just beyond the tape. His dark hair was almost too long to be an officer’s, curling gently as it did over his collar. He wore a pair of jeans instead of khakis, although his shirt was regulation. A small badge on his breast pocket glinted in the light. He seemed to be waiting for them.

  “There’s that fool deputy,” her father said. His voice came out in a growl.

  “Why don’t you like him?” Cameryn asked.

  Patrick’s eyes narrowed as he ran his hand along the back of his neck. “Let’s just say he pokes his nose into things he shouldn’t and t
hen tries to make like he’s doing you a favor. Stay away from that one, Cammie.”

  She glanced back at the deputy, who by now had stopped pacing. He stood with his boots firmly planted to the ground, his fists shoved into his jeans pockets, his shoulders squared. When he saw they were looking at him, he pulled one hand free in a halfhearted wave, then returned to pacing.

  “All right, let’s get back to business,” Patrick said. “First thing you do is write down when we arrive.” He put his hand on her arm. “What time is it?”

  Cameryn looked at her watch. “It’s seven thirty-seven. I marked down seven thirty as my starting point since that’s when we left the house, which means I’ve already made”—she did some swift mental calculations—“almost a dollar twenty-five without lifting a finger. I knew I’d like this job!”

  “Ah, there’s my girl, always ready to put the screws to the establishment. And what is that I see in your hand? Is that Vicks?”

  “Uh-huh.” She held up the small blue cylinder, proud that she’d thought to bring it, and said, “I’m going to smear some under my nose, you know, in case there’s a bad smell.”

  “Good planning, but here’s the thing. Using Vicks will open up your sinuses, which actually lets in more of the odor.”

  “Really?” Cameryn could feel herself wilt. She’d managed to make a mistake without even getting out of the car.

  “It’s a rookie error. You don’t want to inhale more of the guy, do you?” He reached behind the seat and retrieved a plastic bag. “Use peppermint oil. And put on these gloves. We’ll save the heavy ones to use if the need arises.” Handing her a small vial of the oil and a pair of thin latex gloves—the kind doctors used—he said, “Don’t forget the camera.”

  “Not a problem.”