CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Damn stupid fools always make a fuss—no money! Not a goddamn penny!”

  “She’s not breathing.”

  “Sure, she is. Roll her back in the brush. Let her sleep it off. Must’ve been some party over there.”

  “Good gloves.”

  “We can use ’em. She’s not feeling a thing…”

  Jane floated, all memory twisted into a single thread dangling just beyond reach. She could feel nothing, hear nothing. Not even the buzzing voices.

  Janeness drifted away, finally. And I-ness. There was only floating, only withdrawal, only retreat into a past that refused to be remembered.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  * * *

  It was done yesterday.” Turner lay the second sketch of Jane Doe beside the one on his desk.

  “Where?” Nordstrom hovered over the two sketches, his oversized head twisted to view them right side up from the wrong side of the desk.

  “House of Charity.” Turner laughed as Nordstrom’s eyes grew bigger behind the miniaturizing lenses. “It’s a soup kitchen for transients. A do-gooder painter sets up her easel there regularly, looking for ‘life studies.’ ”

  “How’d you find it so fast?”

  “Got copies of the old police sketch to all the beat cops in town. I don’t know why the locals went with a police sketch instead of the standard Identi-Kit workup, but it helped us a lot.”

  Turner’s hands weighed the two images of Jane Doe while he studied them. “The original sketch isn’t artsy- fartsy, but it sure made the new portrait sit up and sing for the patrolman who saw it displayed in a window at the Senior Citizens’ Center. Part of an exhibition.” He put down the police sketch and studied the newer one. “That Myerson woman isn’t a bad portraitist—and there’s something arresting about the subject. That’s why it made the window—the only black-and-white piece. So it was like every lead—half routine investigative work, half gift.” Nordstrom plucked the canvasboard from Turner’s hands. “Fenced in by a few strokes of charcoal, our elusive Jane Doe. What was she doing at a soup kitchen?”

  “Maybe she was hungry.”

  “She does have a lean and hungry look.”

  “You’re hallucinating, Doctor.” Turner spun away to wrestle his overcoat off the office rack. “She looks much better in the soup kitchen sketch—more substantial, and more alive. I wish—”

  “Yes, Mr. Turner? Wishes are healthier expressed.” Turner jammed himself into his London Fog and brushed past Nordstrom on his way out. “I wish Blake had agreed to work with us—to work with her for us,” he said brusquely. “All right, let’s go see what we can turn up.” Nordstrom dropped the portrait back on the desk and trailed Turner out, smiling.

  His smile faded at the House of Charity. The dead eyes winding around the corner watched indifferently as Turner and Nordstrom shouldered past the line into the building. Forced-air heated the soup kitchen’s diverse odors of food and filth into an exquisite communal reek. Nordstrom fished an initialed white linen handkerchief from his suit pocket and pinched it over his cold-reddened nostrils.

  Turner reacted to neither sight nor smell, brushing past tattered wrecks of humanity as if he were merely moving onto a crowded elevator at Dayton’s department store. He headed straight for the red-smocked back in a far corner and wafted a newspaper clipping of Jane Doe’s original police sketch onto the easel.

  “Mrs. Myerson? You sketched this woman yesterday. Do you know where we can find her today?”

  “Of course… Jane, wasn’t it?” The woman glanced over her half-frames to Turner. “Yes, I did it yesterday… but how did you—?”

  “The manager at the Senior Citizens’ Center said you mentioned the sketch was fresh.”

  “I see.” The woman tilted back her raven-haired head and stared at Nordstrom. “Why do you gentlemen—?” Turner flipped out his ID, watching the lines on the artist’s handsome face deepen. Her short, red-lacquered fingernail rapped the leatherette case before he retracted it.

  “These people trust me. I can’t be responsible for identifying them. They’ve come here because they want to be forgotten, even by family.”

  “I’m not family.”

  The woman shook her head, resisting.

  “She’s schizophrenic, Mrs. Myerson,” Nordstrom lied smoothly, his voice deep and sincere. “She needs medication desperately. You know how many of these people have been deinstitutionalized over the past few years.”

  “Do I ever! It’s a tragedy. They’re no more fit to cope by themselves than lost puppies. Jane… didn’t seem like one of them. She was a bit shy, a bit remote maybe—”

  “She’s ill, Mrs. Myerson, and young enough so that we can treat it. You’re right. She doesn’t belong on the streets.” Nordstrom fixed his eyes on hers until the woman glanced down at the newspaper sketch. She traced the lines of Jane’s newsprint face with an articulate fingernail.

  “She came in with Hattie,” she capitulated, looking at Turner again as she spoke. “Panama Hattie.”

  “Local character?” Turner asked.

  “Very.”

  “Where does she hang out?”

  “Where do they all hang out? In caves, crevices, corners, over heating grates, under bridges. But Jimmy—” When both men looked confused, she nodded to a young and ragged Robert Redford huddled over a nearby food tray. “Gentleman Jimmy said Hattie stayed by the railroad tracks last night. Apparently, there was some… unpleasantness.”

  “City police?”

  “No, among themselves, Hattie hasn’t come in yet today. She usually does at noon.”

  “Description?” Turner poised his gnawed Venus Velvet pencil over a tiny notebook.

  The artist smiled, scarlet lips showcasing white teeth, and quickly sketched a face onto her drawing pad. “You’ll know Panama Hattie, Mr. Turner. She looks like every other bag lady you’ve ever seen—pure Central Casting, except she stockpiles hats on her head, all on top of one another. The most fantastic, Salvation Army hats! That’s what made me decide to draw Jane, that mad little hat Panama Hattie gave her. Otherwise, her clothes were perfectly ordinary and her face was—”

  “Was what?”

  “Oddly blank. It had no character, no pain lines. Of course, she’s young…”

  Turner nodded, pocketing his pencil.

  “Hurry,” Nordstrom urged in his ear. “I don’t want to lose her.”

  “Yeah, this is your moment, isn’t it? Don’t worry. I’ve got a feeling that this time we’ve got her for sure.”

  * * *

  “God. Where the hell’s the meat wagon?”

  Officer Joe O’Connor rose from inspecting the body of a naked young woman in the snow. He fought an unheard of urge to drape her with the blanket from the squad car’s trunk, crime scene or not. Instead, he stripped off a glove and wiped his runny nose. “The slimeballs didn’t leave her a stitch.”

  “What’d you expect down here?” His partner pointed to a semicircle of silently watching indigents. “Where’s the old broad with the hats? She seemed to know something about it.”

  Panama Hattie was sitting on a fallen branch, her hats and eyebrows singed. O’Connor lumbered over to take a statement. The ballpoint pen felt like an icicle in his big, bare fingers.

  “You know the deceased?” he began.

  “Jane. That’s all I know, Just Jane.”

  “She live on the streets?”

  “Guess so. That’s where I found her. Had no money.”

  “When did you find her?”

  “Oh…” Hattie had to think about it. “Yesterday, it was. Before lunch. Before teatime even. Early.”

  “How’d she end up here?”

  “Me and Boomer brought her back. Boomer made a snug place for the night. We had a party… and then— then it gets all confused—”

  “Just tell me one thing at a time.”

  “Boomer’s fire goes up, real hot and high. Caught on something—blankets maybe. It was amazing…” Hattie stared in
to the distance until Officer O’Connor spoke again.

  “Then what?”

  “Oh, we all almost burned up. But… Jane got us out, she surely did. She didn’t seem afraid of the fire.”

  “Body doesn’t look burned.”

  “I told you. Janey got us out. Her and Boomer and me. It was amazing.”

  “Then what? Ma’am?”

  Hattie opened her mouth to speak, then shut it firmly. “Then… Jane left.”

  “She say where she was going?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “No.”

  “You know what time this was?”

  “No.”

  O’Connor sighed. “You see anything, see anybody that might’ve rolled her?”

  “She didn’t have any money, I told you.”

  “She musta had clothes, lady.”

  “Oh, clothes.” Panama Hattie winced. “My best wine felt cloche with the sparkly pin. It’s gone, too. Yeah, Janey had clothes, nice clothes. That’s what I noticed about her. Her nice new clothes. But she didn’t have no money, no sirree.” A tear wavered down Hattie’s grimy face. “That’s how I’m gonna remember her, like she was last night. Not like what’s left.”

  “That’s fine. Anybody else know anything about this?” Panama Hattie looked over her shoulder at the gathered transients. Their sad faces stayed as blank as ever. Hattie’s deadened, too. “No, we don’t know nothin’. We just happened to be here, is all.”

  The rattle of a car jolting over the rough snowy ground made O’Connor turn hopefully. He shoved his notepad inside his jacket—damn ballpoint didn’t write in the cold, anyway—and pulled on heavy leather gloves. Then he saw it was an ordinary passenger car.

  “Tourists! Where the hell’s the damn wagon and the detectives?”

  The men from the car moved to meet O’Connor as eagerly as he stalked them. One flashed a government ID. “What’s going on here?” the newcomer asked.

  “Nothin’ now. Party been killed. The ME hasn’t showed yet. You hear it on the radio?”

  Nordstrom was going to say no, but Turner spoke first. “We heard about it. Wliat’ve you got?”

  “Caucasian female, early twenties maybe. No visible identifying marks. No visible marks of violence. No clothes. Could be rape, but I don’t think so.”

  O’Connor was leading them to the thin line of underbrush that fringed a crease in the white terrain. “One of the bums called it in, can you believe it? What’s your angle?”

  “Confidential.”

  “What about him?” O’Connor’s fat glove indicated Nordstrom. “He confidential, too? Detectives’ll skin me alive letting civilians mess up a crime scene.”

  “He’s a government consultant.”

  O’Connor shrugged and shifted his big, navy blue bulk. The motion revealed the crime scene, revealed the body lying naked in the snow.

  “Shit,” Turner said.

  No one noticed, not even Nordstrom.

  They all stared at Jane Doe, her skin snow white in the bright winter daylight, her arms and legs radiating out like spokes. Only the dark patches of her head and pubic hair jolted the marble coldness of the image.

  “She must have been alive when she… fell here, or was thrown,” Turner finally said. “Snow’s melted around her body.”

  “Lot of snow melted around here,” O’Connor put in. “These crazy winos are always lighting campfires— sometimes they light themselves afire. Had a close call just last night again. Guess she pulled a couple of ’em outa the fire—”

  “So she died a heroine,” Nordstrom put in ironically.

  “Any guesses?” Turner wanted to know.

  O’Connor shrugged, his nylon jacket screeching. “Not my department. But her clothes are gone. She was rolled for ’em by some drunked-out winos. She was walking back toward town, alone, when last seen.”

  Tires squeaked across packed snow behind them.

  “Here’s the coroner now, and the detectives.” O’Connor’s relief came as palpably as his frosty breath. “Good, maybe we can get this show on the road. Kinda makes you cold, just to look at her like that.”

  Turner pulled off a glove to rub his wind-scrubbed face in a bare, warm palm, then stepped back to let the police team record the death scene as his own men had done near Duluth not many days before.

  The officials surged past Nordstrom, too. He didn’t move, but stood staring into the shallow gully. Something about the psychiatrist’s carrion intensity irritated Turner. He wheeled and stalked through the snow to the watching winos.

  What bothered him was that untouchably dead body, yet another bizarre image in a case that was stacked with wild card images. First his men, fried up north. Now her, iced down here.

  “You Panama Hattie?”

  He had stopped before the stooped little old woman, her head hanging under the weight of her hats. A grimy white turban wrapped her shrunken cheeks and temples like a swami’s headdress.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Sure. About her—?”

  Pain stirred in the old woman’s guarded eyes. Turner was surprised to feel an echo of it in his own.

  “Tell me what you can,” he added more gently. “I need to know what happened to her.”

  “It’s what didn’t happen to us.” An old man had stepped forward, a baggy-pants emissary of every bum Turner had ever seen—or tried not to see—on any street corner.

  “She saved us, Jane did,” the wino said. “She jest made that dumpster rare back and get outa the way. Otherwise we would’ve been burnt bacon, Hattie and me, and Jane.”

  “Dumpster?”

  The old man turned and shuffled through the snow. Turner glanced back to see cameras pressed to faces like binoculars. No one watched as he followed the old man and Panama Hattie across the fretwork of tracks to the black span of a railroad bridge.

  A plague of dead fire sites had pocked the snow everywhere—the largest surrounded a charred dumpster not far from the hill where the bridge began. The wind whipped the fire-singed blanket pennants streaming from the dumpster’s gaping mouth.

  “This was my place,” the old guy said, smiling with his tongue tip parked in the notch of an absent tooth. “Real nice. Jammed it sideways up under the bridge there. Lean-to like.

  “We was sittin’ in it—Hattie and me and this Jane Hattie picked up somewhere. We was bendin’ an elbow or two and some of the stuff slopped into this little fire I had goin’ in a frvpan—hell, the stuff they sell nowadays would start a fire in an asbestos factory. Anyway, we were goners, for sure, with the blankets over the mouth of the dumpster aburnin’ like there was no tomorrow—”

  “The dumpster was on its side, is that right, so the only way out was through the burning blankets?”

  “I wasn’t gonna go through that!” Panama Hattie shivered until her hat feathers shook. “Boomer ’n me was done for, all choked up so we couldn’t see. But Jane, Jane just stood up, and then… well, we all tumbled out of the dumpster onto the ground. And it jest picked itself off of us and flew up in the sky and then it was gone and there was like a meteor shower—”

  “Hold it.” Turner prowled around the dumpster, peered into its empty, charcoal-dark maw. “You’re saying that Jane caused this thing—it must weigh a ton or so—to lift in the air—she lifted it?”

  “She didn’t lift nothin’ but herself,” the old-timer called Boomer said. “It lifted itself. Then we lifted ourselves right outa there, you better believe it!” The old man grinned, his beard stubble snow white against his grimy skin.

  Turner shook his head as if to clear it. Remarkable powers, they’d said in Washington. The Russians would give their cherry-red asses to have a subject with that kind of psi potential. And now she was dead. Kaput, her and all her works.

  “You just let her go, after that?” Turner demanded.

  “We was shook up, sick,” Hattie answered defensively. “We didn’t know what to make of it, what to think. And Janey
was like that anyway—she’d get a notion and off she’d go. Maybe she wanted to see that boyfriend of hers in county jail—”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Kevin, name was, she said. Some boyfriend, left her with no dough, not a nickel—I know, I tried to hit her for a crummy nickel and she didn’t have one. Then the next lady I hit on fishes out a fiver—Jane was lucky, you know? I don’t run across much luck. Guess she was luckier than I knew. ’Cept for herself…” Hattie tugged her turban lower around her ears, managing to dislodge a tear with the gesture.

  “If you tell the police about what Jane did—”

  “Tell them? Tell a uniform?” Hattie hooted. “They don’t believe us. Never believe us. You can’t imagine what a job it was to try and get someone to come and fetch Janey.” She turned and eyed the mute transients behind her. “ ’Sides, these drunken fools got it all wrong. They got as many stories as they got toes between ’em—though that ain’t many in this climate.”

  Hattie spat daintily in their direction, but Turner plodded over to them anyway. The fresh, icy air sanitized the annunciation of odor that clung to their kind. They seemed merely worn, torn rag dolls of people, rather than the unkempt outcasts passersby shied from on streets.

  “My name’s Turner/’ he told them. “Last night—when the fire broke out—did you see anything unusual?”

  Eyes studied the drift tops, gazed over Turner’s head, met his with steady vacancy. He had expected that.

  “I saw it,” finally keened one pipecleaner-thin black man. “A big dark dumpster in the sky—flying like a bird. Like a crow. It made the stars shrink, yessir. It made ever’thin’ colder. It jest hung there, with a light pretty as a treetop angel, all lilac-like. A light like the Wise Men saw in the Promised Land.”

  “I’m talking about the burning dumpster.”

  “Yessir. I know what you’re talkin’ about. I’m talkin’ about it, too. It was big up there and it hung and hung there for a long time. A long time. I don’t think that little girl did it… no, I don’t. A heav-en-ly vis-I-ta-tion, that’s what it was. We got people saved from the flamin’ furnace here. We blessed.”