by L A Dobbs
"That place that looks like an old church," Noah added.
"Holy Spirits?" Jo asked. Holy Spirits was an old decommissioned church turned into a bar complete with original pews and altar. It was quirky and somewhat of a local hangout that made the best burgers in Coos County.
"Yeah, that’s the place. Anyway, Lynn met some guy there, and they seemed to hit it off. He came back here afterwards. I don’t know if he was camping out or lived around here," Noah said.
"What did the guy look like?" Sam asked. He knew all the locals that hung out at Spirits.
Amber screwed up her face as if trying to conjure up an image. "Kinda long hair… and he was wearing a baseball cap. Flannel shirt, untucked."
"Was his name Jesse?" Jo asked.
Julie snapped her fingers. "Yes! That was his name."
Jo looked around at the group. "So, one of you isn’t Lynn’s boyfriend, then?"
"You look like couples," Sam added.
"We’re not all couples." Amber clutched Noah’s arm. "Me and Noah are together, and Tara and Josh are together. Everyone else is single."
"We work together at my company." Noah’s voice was tinged with pride. "We make video games. We’ve been working our asses off to put out a new version of the game. You know, nights, weekends, hardly any time off. Our reward was to take four days off and come camping. We left a skeleton crew back at the office to keep things running." His face crumbled as if he was realizing what the reward had cost them. "Lynn worked the hardest, and she was really looking forward to kicking back and letting off some steam."
"So you saw Jesse here with Lynn?" Jo asked.
Julie made a face. "I’m not sure about that. We were partying in the bar. Then we brought the party back here. Some other people joined us for a little while. Some from that campground over there." Julie slapped at a bug on her knee then pointed through the woods to a patch of blue tent and wafting campsite smoke. "I think that guy from the bar was here, but I’m not positive."
"I am," Amber said. "I think he followed us back. I saw him with Lynn, but I’m not sure if he was still here after I went to bed."
"So, who was the last person to see her? This guy from town?" Jo asked.
They all looked around at each other.
"Hard to say. I wasn’t really paying attention," Josh said.
"What do you think would make her go in the water without her clothes on?" Sam asked.
"Swimming? She did that at night. Undies only." Tara’s eyes turned misty. "I always warned her not to do it alone. And she was drunk, and the river has a lot of rocks… I mean, it was an accident, wasn’t it?"
Sam didn’t answer. Instead, he slapped at the high-pitched whine around his ear. A mosquito. Up here, once the bloodthirsty insects got a bead on you, they came in like a squadron of fighter planes. They made a noise like an incoming missile, had the sting of a harpoon, and their bite left a lump the size of a golf ball.
Here in the dense woods, both mosquitos and black flies were out in full force, and their conversation was punctuated by waving arms as the campers swatted at them. Sam had to stop himself from scratching, or he’d have a lump five times bigger than the tiny bug that had caused it.
He glanced through the patch of woods toward the river. There was a thin path leading from the campsite toward it. "Is that where you go swimming?"
"Yeah." Noah swatted at a bug in front of his face. "But her body wasn’t found there."
"She could’ve been carried downstream." Sam walked down the path. The beach was about fifty feet away. Very small, with a thin sandy patch hardly big enough to put a towel on. Good enough for getting your feet wet, though. He studied the area, looking for anything out of the norm. The water ran faster here. Lynn could have entered the water here. The current wasn’t strong enough to sweep away anyone that could swim, but if she’d been unconscious, it would have carried her away. Maybe she’d been so drunk that she’d passed out and drowned.
"Do you see anything?" Julie ventured.
"No." Sam spun and looked at her. "But I’m wondering if Lynn went swimming on her own, then where are her clothes?"
Julie frowned and looked around. "I don’t know. She was wearing a red tie-dyed shirt and cotton pants. But she could’ve taken them off in her tent."
"And walked half naked through the campsite?" Jo asked. "You guys must all be really good friends."
Julie frowned. "No, she wouldn’t—"
"Woof!"
Sam turned to see a large, scraggly dog. It had the markings of a German shepherd, but it was bigger. Some kind of mix, he guessed. Maybe Rottweiler… or bear. The coat was matted, and the dog was thin, as if it hadn’t eaten in a while.
A pang of sympathy for the dog shot through him. They’d seen their share of strays. Usually, they took them in and Reese posted their picture on Facebook, then Sam or Jo dropped them at the shelter. Between him and Jo, they tried to make sure extra effort was made to find the dogs’ families. But this one looked as if it might not have a family.
"Is that your dog?" Sam asked.
"No. Never seen it before."
Sam turned back to the dog. Its whiskey-brown eyes looked at him as if it knew something he didn’t.
The dog turned and walked a few paces into the woods back toward where they had found the body.
"I think she wants you to follow her." Jo had come to stand beside him.
Sam didn’t take his eyes off the dog, who had stopped a few feet into the woods and was now looking back over its shoulder.
"Well, if you’re not going to follow her, I am." Jo started after the dog.
Sam shrugged and followed. How did Jo know it was a girl? The fur was so long and matted, Sam couldn’t see any of the parts that might give a clue as to the dog’s gender.
The dog didn’t walk far. It stopped near another beach away from any of the campsites. It pawed at something on the ground at the base of a birch tree. A pile of clothes that contained a red tie-dyed shirt.
Sam and Jo squatted to inspect the clothes. Jo pulled a latex glove out of her windbreaker and poked through the pile. Thin cotton pants, the red shirt, and a red lacy bra.
Julie had followed them. They turned to her. "Is this the shirt?"
Julie nodded, her eyes filling up. "Those are hers. Those are Lynn’s clothes."
"She must have taken them off here and gone for a swim from the beach there." Jo nodded toward a thin stretch of sand at the edge of the river. Here the river was wider and deeper. Probably about four feet in the middle.
Sam stood and turned around, assessing the area. It was away from other campsites. Private. "If she were meeting someone and wanted some privacy to go skinny-dipping, this would be the place."
Jo squinted up at him. "If she was meeting someone, we need to find out who. He could have been the last person to see her alive."
Sam’s eyes met Jo’s. "Or the first person to see her dead."
Chapter Four
Sam drove back to the police station after interviewing the people at the surrounding campsites. They’d given a similar story. No one had been paying attention to Lynn. They’d all been busy drinking and partying it up. They’d all gone to bed around two a.m., or so they said. Since Sam had no idea when Lynn had died, he couldn’t very well be pressing them for alibis.
Not that he needed alibis at this point. The death could simply be an accident that wouldn’t require an investigation.
According to the campers, Lynn Palmer had been from Massachusetts. Too far for him to do the notification to her family. It broke his heart to think that somewhere down there the local cops would be informing Lynn’s parents of her death. He hated leaving that job to someone else, but the best thing he could do for them now was figure out what had happened in the last hours of their daughter’s life.
Downtown White Rock was your typical northern New Hampshire town. Brick and concrete buildings accented with fine architectural details lined the main street. Most of the buildings dated
to the early 1900s, but the town had been kept up, so they weren’t in disrepair.
In the middle of Main Street, a grass median ran the length of the block where most of the town offices stood. In the center of the median sat a statue of the town’s first mayor, Hiram White, mounted on a horse. Little kids liked to climb on the horse. The statue was often pranked by older kids who would outfit the long-dead mayor with quirky hats and, sometimes, stick mannequins or straw dummies on the back of the horse.
It was mostly all in fun, except for the time someone put a naked blow-up doll on the back and almost caused a fit of the vapors amongst the town biddies. The police station phone had rung off the hook that morning.
Like most small towns, the government offices had to make do with what they had. The police station had recently moved from the basement of the town hall to the old post office. The post office had gotten its own fancy new building. Apparently, mail was a priority over crime fighting in White Rock.
Sam liked the post office building. The building dated to the 1930s and had somehow managed to retain the black-and-white swirly marble floors and original oak moldings with carved details. It still smelled of old paper and stamp glue, which was a welcome improvement over the musty basement of the town hall.
As an added bonus, the post office had left most of their furniture behind. Even the old bronze post office boxes still sat in their oak wall, creating a partial divider between the reception area and what had become the squad room. Each box had twin dials at the top with gold numbers on a black background. Below the dials, a fancy embossed eagle with a US shield on its chest sat proudly amidst fluted rays that extended to the edge of the box. Below the eagle, a small beveled glass window let you see how much mail was inside.
Sam couldn’t understand why the post office had opted for ugly new plain metal boxes instead of taking the old ones, but he didn’t question it. Some people had no taste. The bank of one hundred twenty boxes made a perfect divider, and Reese used them to organize the various pieces of mail, tax payments she collected, and copies of the permit applications she issued.
Beyond the wall of post office boxes was the squad room. It used to be the mail sorting area and was one open room with three oak craftsman-style desks. The desks were scarred from decades of use, but the honey-colored stained wood still glowed. They were solid wood, not like the plywood junk they had today.
He rounded the bank of post office boxes and stopped short. Jo was on the floor, hand-feeding pot roast from the diner across the street to the dog.
"You know we’re supposed to turn him in to the shelter," Sam said.
"Her."
Sam looked at the dog and raised a brow. Jo sounded sure of the dog’s sex, so he went with it.
She continued, "And technically we’re supposed to turn them in at the first available opportunity."
More brow raising from Sam.
Jo shrugged. She was used to his unspoken messages. After four years of working closely together, they could practically read each other’s minds. "I haven’t had an opportunity yet. I’ve been following up on some of the things we learned this morning."
As if to corroborate this, the dog looked up at Sam with innocent eyes.
"Seeing as we’re shorthanded now, I may not have time to bring her for a while." Jo’s words had them both glancing at Tyler’s empty desk. Sam’s stomach tightened. Not only had he lost a good friend and a damn good officer, but now they were shorthanded, meaning they would have to work extra.
He thought about Lynn Palmer. If she’d been murdered, he wanted to be able to do right by her, and that would be harder with one less officer. On the other hand, he couldn’t even think about someone else filling Tyler’s shoes right now. It was too soon.
"Where’s Kevin?" he asked.
"He left for the day. You know how he is. Doesn’t like to put in a lot of hours." Jo pushed up from the floor and dusted off her pants. She had taken off her police belt, and it lay on her desk with all the bulky accoutrements. "Are you going to bring him on full time?"
Sam pressed his lips together. The dog finished lapping up the pot roast and came over and pressed herself against his leg. He rubbed her silky ears absently. Though the dog’s fur was dirty and matted, the ears felt like fine satin sheets on Sam’s fingertips. "I suppose so. Seems like the right thing to do since he’s been here with us for a while now."
"Yeah. Don’t know if he’ll want it, though." Jo went over to her desk and plopped into the old Naugahyde-and-steel chair that had been left there when the post office vacated. Sam had a chair just like it. He thought they dated to the 1950s, but they were comfortable and still did the job. Why get new ones when these worked just fine?
Jo was right about Kevin—he wasn’t exactly ambitious, though he did do an adequate job. Truth be told, Sam wouldn’t be disappointed if Kevin didn’t want the full-time job, but he’d offer it to him just the same when he was ready because it was the right thing to do.
"So what do you make of it?" Sam didn’t need to elaborate. Jo would know that he was referencing the campers and the body from the river.
"Could just be an accident. She could’ve gone swimming and passed out or slipped and hit her head. But I’m having Reese do some digging into the friends she was camping with just in case."
As per protocol with a death that was not natural, they’d blocked off the areas where Lynn’s body and clothing had been found with crime scene tape. They weren’t sure if it was a crime scene yet, but better safe than sorry.
Since Kevin had left before they’d discovered the pile of clothes, Sam had shot pictures of the area with his cell phone. Kevin would have to go back and take better pictures later. He used a Nikon digital camera, and the pictures came out a lot better than Sam’s blurry ones that were usually marred by a close-up of his thumb obscuring the subject of the picture.
"I got that information you wanted." Reese peeked around the corner of the post-office-box wall, and the dog trotted over to her, her burr-infested tail swishing back and forth enthusiastically.
"Good girl, Lucy." Reese bent down, scratching the dog behind her ears. The fur on the edges of her ears was matted, and the insides of her ears red.
"You named her?" Sam asked.
"We can’t just call her ’it,’" Reese pointed out.
"She’s not going to be here that long. We have to take her to the shelter." Sam didn’t like the way the dog narrowed her eyes at him, the whiskey-brown color turning to a sad shade of brown in the slanting light coming in from the windows.
Lucy switched her attention from Reese to Sam. She trotted over and pressed herself against his leg, looking up at him with those pleading eyes. Sam tried to resist the look. He was good at resisting it in women, and he figured resisting it in dogs should be even easier. It wasn’t.
"I posted her on Facebook already." Reese had sat in an empty chair, her laptop in her lap. Her bloodred fingernails clacked on the keyboard. "Hopefully, someone will claim her soon and she won’t have to go to the shelter. Jo said she helped you guys find a clue—she deserves special treatment. Anyway, check out the information I found."
"Information?" Sam tried to ignore the way Lucy was putting her head under his hand, trying to force him to pet her.
"Jo asked me to look into this gaming company that the campers work at. Lyah Games." She turned the computer screen toward him.
"And?" Sam asked. Reese was a fairly new addition to his staff, but Sam had already noticed she had above-average computer skills. Even though he couldn’t let her do field work, there was no rule about letting her use the Internet.
"The company is legit. And the people Jo had in her notes are listed on their ’about’ page. Well, most of them are." She angled the screen toward Sam, and he recognized five of the campers’ names on the list of the company’s officers:
Noah Brickey - CEO
Lynn Palmer - COO
Tara Barrett - CFO
Joshua Moore - Director, Software
Engineering
Julie Swan - Director, Human Resources
"That’s most of them. Guess the others didn’t rate," Sam said.
"They do make video games just like they said, but check this out." Reese swiveled the laptop back to face her, tapped on the keyboard some more, then swung it back to Sam. The screen showed a bunch of figures that were like Greek to him.
"They’re not doing very well financially," she explained.
Sam squinted at the screen. "Is that what that means?" He frowned up at Reese. "Did you get this information legally?"
Reese rolled her eyes. "Of course. It’s a company prospectus. Public knowledge."
"That’s interesting," Jo said. "But why would that motivate one of them to kill her? Lots of companies are doing poorly, and he did say they just worked really hard to get a new release out."
"Good question. But least now we know they weren’t lying about their work," Sam said. "Whether or not they were lying about anything else remains to be seen."
Chapter Five
Sam’s office was large. It had three ten-foot-tall windows with round tops that looked out over the town toward the White Mountains. The floor was wide pine boards scuffed by decades of use. The walls were thin strips of oak wainscoting on the bottom and a municipal green paint on the top. The old oak-paneled door with smoked glass window was original to the post office. Only the gold-and-black lettering had been changed from Postmaster to Chief of Police.
His desk was a long double-wide partners desk made of oak. By the amount of staples embedded in it and the blue-ink postmark stamps that tattooed the surface, it seemed the post office must have used it to sort and stamp mail. Sam used it to spread out his case files on.
It was late in the afternoon. Sam was leaned back in his office chair with his hands clasped behind his head and his feet propped up on the desk, thinking about the girl in the river, when John called with the bad news.
"I got the time of death. Between 2:15 and 2:45 a.m. Your victim didn’t drown, though. No water in the lungs."
