by Tim McGregor
“Good man,” she said. “It’s Monday. It’ll be a slow night. People don’t kill each other on Monday nights.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Just an observation.”
A uniformed officer poked his head into the Homicide bullpen. He held a note in his hand. “We got a body! Sort of.”
Mockler fired a harsh look at his boss. Gibson just shrugged before hollering at the uniformed officer. “Sort of? What does that mean, officer?”
The uniformed officer shied and looked at the note. “Partial body is what it sounds like. Ribs.”
“There you go, Detective.” Gibson tucked a file under her arm, fired a smirk back at Mockler and headed off. “A challenge. You’re primary on this one. Do me proud.”
Mockler closed the binder on his desk and reached for his jacket, muttering under his breath.
“About friggin’ time too.”
He knew it wouldn’t happen overnight but two years was a long time to wait. He’d been patient, supporting other homicide detectives as they worked the cases that came in. Like everything else in this world, there was a pecking order and, as the youngest member of the squad, he had to earn out first. Tonight would be his first as primary investigator, which was good but it was only by the fluke of every other detective being otherwise occupied.
Doesn’t matter, he told himself. This was an opportunity. Knock it out of the park.
The address he’d been given was on Essex Street, a potholed road in the old industrial quarter. Pulling into the roughshod yard, he found two cruisers on scene with their lights flicking in quiet mode. One uniformed officer leaned against his car while another stood before the double doors of an old building that looked forgotten by time. Something about the way the red lights of the cruisers twinkled against the brickwork fired a red flag in Mockler’s gut. This didn’t look good.
He nodded hello to the officer waiting near the door. “Hey Walton. How are you?”
“Bit queasy, to tell you the truth,” Officer Walton said. “You working solo?”
“Tonight I am. What do you got?”
“Anonymous call came in about an hour ago. Caller said they found a body at this address.”
Mockler looked up at the building before him. An old warehouse from the Edwardian era, shuttered a long time ago and tilting with age. There were still rails left in the cobbled pave. Most of the tall windows had been broken and the roof had collapsed near the south end. “The caller leave a name?”
“No. Dispatch said they sounded young. Probably just some kids goofing around where they’re not supposed to.”
“All right,” Mockler said. “Let’s see what you got.”
Officer Walton reached for her flashlight. “Check your gut. It isn’t pretty.”
The interior of the building was dark and smelled of old diesel and rotting wood. Walton lead the way through piles of debris to a door that led down to the cellar. Here the darkness thickened to the point where their flashlights did little but bore holes through solid night. Twice Mockler felt the step crack under his foot and wondered if the whole staircase was going to collapse under him.
“Watch your step,” Walton said. “There’s crap everywhere.”
The detective moved around the broken glass and fragmented machinery on the floor, trying not to land on a nail. “Who took the call on this?”
“Me and Chen.”
“Chen? I thought he was on parental leave.”
“He was. Came back early.”
“So you two came rooting down here? Was anyone hanging around?”
Officer Walton shook her head and continued on into the darkness. “Nope. We looked around outside first, thinking whoever made the call might hang around to see if we showed but we didn’t see anyone. Ah, here it is.”
Mockler followed the beam of the officer’s flashlight as it trailed across the floor and something flared up in the light. He stopped cold.
“Jesus.”
The officer looked back at the detective. “Like I said, it ain’t pretty.”
It was little more than a torso and nothing but bone. A spindly ribcage and a few pieces of vertebrae, filthy and wet like it had been down here in the dark for a very long time. As he stepped closer, Mockler could see that three of the ribs were broken and the spine barely held together.
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“Don’t know,” Walton said. “Chen wanted to look around for more but I figured we’d better leave it untouched till you got here.”
“Good call.”
There was no skull nor arm bones. No pelvis or legs. Just a rack of human ribs settled into a grimy corner of a deserted building.
Mockler stuck the flashlight under his arm to snap on latex gloves and then he bent down over the remains. The bones were old and brittle but other than that, they told him very little. Training the light over the floor around the bones revealed nothing. There was a rusting nail and some machined bolts but these pieces were everywhere and had nothing to do with the remains.
“So what do you think?” Walton asked. “Natural causes?”
Mockler guffawed. Gallows humour was common among the officers. Coping by way of detachment. “Clearly. Heart attack or stroke.”
The momentary levity dissipated quickly in the gloomy atmosphere and both officers resumed their game faces.
Mockler stood up. “Guess we better get the forensics truck out here.”
“I called ahead, told them to get prepared.”
“Thanks. Let’s have a look around.” Mockler took a step back and studied the remains again. “Ask Chen to get another cruiser here. Then he can come down and help us look.”
“Sure.”
Mockler waited until Walton radioed her partner before moving to the far side of the remains. “Slow sweep across the floor. Watch where you step.”
They moved slowly on either side of the bones, training their flashlights back and forth over the floor as they went. More nails and bolts and rusty debris flared up in the light but nothing unusual appeared.
“Bingo,” said Walton.
Mockler picked his way carefully to the officer’s location. Lit up in Walton’s lightbeam was a gnarled piece of vertebrae. “Good eyes, Walty. See anymore.”
“Yeah. There’s another piece here.” Her light picked out another knob of bone on the floor. Beyond that was a third piece.
“Looks like it’s been scattered around,” Mockler said.
“Do you think an animal’s been at it?”
“Maybe. Let’s follow the trail.”
Like breadcrumbs strewn through a dark forest, more bony artifacts flared up in their collective lights. Femurs and ulnas, then the broken pelvic bone. They both stopped when they located a jaw bone.
“Damn. The poor guy’s all over the place.”
Mockler swept his light up ahead. They had traversed most of the floor space and now stood before what Mockler guessed was the south wall.
“What is that?” Walton asked.
A tumble of bricks were piled up near one section of the wall where the masonry had collapsed, leaving a dark gap in the building’s foundation. A few stray articles of bone lay tumbled among the bricks.
“That doesn’t look good.”
They moved closer, minding where they stepped and both officers bent down to examine the breach in the wall. Three feet tall by a few wide. Large enough for a person to squeeze through.
Walton covered her nose. “Stinks, whatever it is.”
Mockler aimed his light into the gap. The darkness within was deep, as if there was a tunnel or chasm behind the wall. “I can’t see anything in there. Shine your light in there too.”
The officer did as she was asked and, combined, their lights cut away the darkness. More bones flashed in the light, a tangled mess of skeletons, silent and still in the darkness of some mouldy tomb.
5
THE JOLT CAME out of nowhere, knocking Billie sideways out of the present. An electr
ic charge that ripped down her spine and numbed her brain cells cold.
It wasn’t her ability to sense the dead that had tweaked. That cold feeling she was familiar with. This had been something else and that worried her. Was it some new aspect of her abilities manifesting itself or something more mundane? Like an aneurysm?
Someone was speaking her name but her brain was too numbed to make any sense of it. Everything went fuzzy as she blinked her eyes, trying to ground herself to the here-and-now.
“Earth to Billie?”
Reality snapped back instantly and she remembered where she was. In a bar with Jen and Adam. Kaitlin and her boyfriend, Kyle. One other person at the table with them. A guy. A friend of Adam’s that Jen had invited, playing match-maker.
She wondered if she could jolt herself away. The cold numbness was preferable to Jen’s overbearing attempts to play cupid.
“You in there?” Jen waved her hand before Billie’s eyes. “Where did you go just now?”
“Somewhere else,” Billie answered.
“Well stop it. You scare me when you space-out like that.”
Billie felt her back go up. “I don’t do that.”
“You’ve done it since we were kids.”
That was news to Billie. She didn’t pursue it. “Sorry.”
The bar was loud, crowded with people shouting across their tables as loud as possible. Of the group seated around her own table, she’d had to strain her ears to stay in the conversation.
“You need to give Nick a chance,” Jen said. “Talk to him.”
Billie tried to flag down the waitress as she passed by but the woman ignored her. “I did. He seems nice.”
“More than a two-minute conversation, Billie. He’s an interesting guy. I think you’d see that if you made the tiniest effort to get to know him.”
“Why do you do this? I’ve asked you not to and you still do. Do you like being disappointed?”
Vexed, Jen gave out a lengthy sigh. “I just think you should try and meet someone. And you’re not going to do that spending all your time alone.”
“Maybe I like being alone.”
“No one likes being alone,” said Jen.
Stalemated, Billie kept her mouth shut and let the topic dry up and blow away. She looked across the table to Adam, who was deep in conversation with his friend Nick.
“How are things with Adam?” she asked. “You still worried?”
“No,” Jen replied. “I don’t know. I think I was just having a moment.”
“Did you guys talk?”
Jen shook her head sharply. As if such an idea was ludicrous.
Billie wasn’t all that surprised. Jen was overly fond of doling out advice and trying to “fix” everyone’s lives for them but she often failed to follow her own advice. Then again, Billie noted, everyone did that. Herself included. It was dead easy to identify a problem or a flaw in others and yet be completely oblivious to the problems in one’s own life.
“We are all of us blind,” Billie muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Give him another chance,” Jen said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Billie promised she would and Jen excused herself to find the loo. Her chair was barely cold when Kaitlin dropped into it and clutched Billie’s arm. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
Billie sensed trouble and looked for a way to derail Kaitlin’s urgency. “Did you cut your hair? It looks different.”
“Like a few days ago. You didn’t notice at the barbecue.”
“I like it,” Billie said. Of her three friends, Kaitlin was the most put-together. She blew buckets of money on clothes and hair. A simple compliment on her outfit would send Kaitlin into an intense discussion on the topic.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Kaitlin said, checking her reflection in the mirror behind their table. She gripped Billie’s arm again. “But that’s not what I needed to talk to you about. I met the coolest people yesterday.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Paranormal investigators!” Kaitlin beamed, clearly expecting a big reaction.
“Who?”
Kaitlin frowned. “They investigate paranormal stuff, you know? Like ghost hunters.”
Billie felt her anger tick up a notch. This had become Kaitlin’s newest obsession; the paranormal. Since Billie had admitted her newfound abilities to her friends back in the summer, Kaitlin had become seized with the idea. At the time, Billie was grateful that at least one of her friends believed her. Jen refused to even consider the idea and Tammy was on the fence. Kaitlin, however, had gone completely the other way. From an idle believer to an obsessed devotee. She had confessed to a lifelong interest in the subject and now she wouldn’t stop pestering Billie with questions about it. It was almost as if she wanted to learn how to do it too, like it was a skill one could acquire.
“Ghost hunters? Kaitlin, please.”
“No, they’re really cool,” Kaitlin gushed, eager to divulge. “They investigate places that are supposed to be haunted. And they have all this gear to try and document evidence of the paranormal.”
Billie reached for her drink. “Why would I care?”
“They’re doing a TV show. For, like, the History channel or something. They want to meet you.”
“Me? Why?”
“I told them all about you,” Kaitlin said. “That you were the real deal. They were fascinated. They want a medium on the team for the show. They have one now but their not happy with him.”
“Why would you do that? Don’t tell people about me.”
“I thought you’d be happy,” Kaitlin replied, taken aback at her friend’s lack of enthusiasm. “It’s an amazing opportunity. You should talk to them.”
“It’s not a circus act.”
“It’s a skill,” Kaitlin said. “A gift. One you should use to help others.”
This was something Billie had heard before. That she had a duty to do something with this ability she hadn’t asked for. “I don’t even want it.”
“That’s just being selfish.”
“So what if it is?” Billie groused. “Why don’t you be their psychic, Kaitlin. I’m sure you could pull it off.”
“Believe me,” Kaitlin said, rising up from the chair. “I would if I could.”
Kaitlin returned to her spot beside Kyle. Billie reached for her drink but it was empty. The waitress was nowhere to be seen.
She was about to go to the bar to get herself a drink when the empty chair next to her became suddenly occupied.
The new guy at the table. Nick. He smiled at her. “You planning your escape?”
“Was it that obvious?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “Your eyes keep straying to the door.”
He seemed nice enough, Billie thought. There was nothing to mark Nick as unusual or off-putting. In fact, just the opposite, he seemed to fit in too well with his beard and his tattoos and his urban lumberjack style of dress.
“Is there somewhere else you’d prefer to be?” Nick asked.
“No.” She stopped, unsure of what she was trying to say. “I’m just not good company.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Dunno. Just am.”
“Maybe,” he suggested, “you just haven’t found the right company.”
“Is that a line?”
He laughed. “Depends. Is it working?”
When she didn’t respond, he turned to her. “Hey. You all right?”
Everything faded to black as the jolt from before came screaming back. That same cold numbness enveloped Billie in a bubble that blocked out the world around her. Stronger than before. Something about the first zap had felt familiar but it was too brief to lock on to what it could have been. This second, stronger episode brought it all into sharp clarity.
It was Mockler. Something was wrong.
6
THE VAST SPACE of the cellar was illuminated with floodlights set up by the forensics team. Constabl
es hurried up and down the steps, assisting both the forensics unit and the sole investigator on scene. Mockler stood back and watched the men in white coveralls clear away the rubble from the floor before dismantling more brickwork to widen the breach in the wall. When the opening was big enough to crawl through, someone handed Mockler coveralls to change into.
Zipping up, he looked at the broken section of wall. Widened as it now was, he would still have to crawl through into a dark tomb filled with dead bodies. “They failed to mention this in the job description,” he groused to the man beside him.
Sozen, lead officer on the forensic unit, adjusted a glove. “Go on, pretend you don’t live for this stuff.”
It was like crawling headfirst into hell. The air was sour and humid, the chamber claustrophobic and everywhere he looked were bones. In the bouncing flare of the flashlights, the hollow eyes of the skulls seemed to follow him everywhere.
“Hold this,” Sozen said, handing him a portable light. One strong enough to light the cramped interior.
The chamber was small. Mockler put its dimensions at twelve by fourteen feet. It felt like a root cellar the way the ceiling pressed down on them, forcing both men to lower their heads. He held the light steady while Sozen snapped a few initial photographs.
The bones lay scattered and tangled in a haphazard pile like some unholy game of pick-up sticks. Mockler studied the remains but the only way to determine the number of deceased was to perform a literal head count. Six skulls in all, strewn about like lost soccer balls. The one found in the cellar proper brought the number of skulls to seven.
There was no meaning to the positioning of the remains that Mockler could see. Nothing matched up from where they lay. No playing along to that old hymn about the foot-bone connecting to the heel bone, the heel bone connecting to the ankle bone and so on.
“What do you think, hoss?” said Sozen.
Mockler pulled at the coverall. The crinkly plastic suit was too hot. “The mess they’re in? I don’t have a frigging clue.”
The forensic leader nodded in agreement. “A mess it is.”
