White Ghost Ridge

by Carol Coffey

  Poolbeg

  ALSO BY CAROL COFFEY

  The Butterfly State

  The Penance Room

  Winter Flowers

  The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe

  The Pact

  Published by Poolbeg

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organisations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published 2019 by Crimson

  an imprint of Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle,

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  Email: poolbeg@poolbeg.com

  © Carol Coffey 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright for editing, typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978178199-7765

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the Author

  Carol Coffey was born in Dublin but now lives in West Wicklow. A teacher by profession, she has worked in the area of special education for over thirty years.

  Carol has used her extensive background in special education throughout her writing. Her first book, The Butterfly State, centres around a young girl, Tess Byrne, whose communication difficulties caused by autism result in her incarceration in a psychiatric institution for so-called disturbed children.

  Since then she has written four more critically acclaimed novels. The Penance Room is set in Australia where she lived for over ten years. It is multifaceted but provides an insight into the impact of deafness and its resultant isolation on the emotional well-being of a child. Winter Flowers explores the impact of generational dysfunction on the development of children. The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe, set in America, delves into our perception of identity, about finding out who we are and where we truly belong.

  Carol’s fifth novel, The Pact, introduced her readers to a new character, Detective Sergeant Locklear, a Native American cop whose battle with his own demons is matched by the strange and complex cases he faces working for the Richmond PD.

  White Ghost Ridge sees the return of the maladjusted and socially awkward Locklear and his trooper, Josefina Mendoza, as they battle to save their friend Lee Carter from a murder conviction.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A sincere thank you to all the staff of Poolbeg Press for their support. In particular, I’d like to thank Paula Campbell for her encouragement over the years. Thank you also to David Prendergast and Caroline Maloney of Poolbeg Press. As always, a special thank you to Gaye Shortland for her keen observations and humour during the editing process. Finally, thanks to my husband David for his endless patience.

  For my late aunt, Maura Coffey,

  for kindnesses never forgotten

  Chapter 1

  It was the suspect’s hands that Locklear first noticed as he entered the interrogation room where the man sat on a hard plastic chair, his fingers splayed out, tense and claw-like on the table in front of him. A narrow bandage was wound around his left hand and his head was bowed so low it appeared that he was sleeping.

  Locklear placed his coffee cup gently on the table and quietly acknowledged the young cop who stood on guard with his back to the wall of the windowless room. A fluorescent light above the table flickered periodically and, at that early morning hour, the only sound to be heard was the distant hum of the station’s air-conditioning system. Locklear took his notebook and small pen from his back pocket and pulled a seat out from the table, lowering his tired body into its ill-fitting frame.

  The suspect looked up. His bright-blue eyes were wide open but Locklear had already known that the man had not been sleeping but was praying.

  Lee Carter had changed since the last time Locklear had seen him. His thick blond hair was cut tight to his scalp. He was thinner and his face had lost that boyish look which had irritated Locklear when they had first met in Dayton on a case. The ex-trooper had later taken up a research post at Virginia Commonwealth University. He had tried to keep in contact with Locklear since he moved his family to Richmond two years previously but, aside from spending some time together on one or two outings their mutual friend Josefina Mendoza had begged Locklear to attend, they had not seen each other much.

  Right at this moment, Locklear was glad he had rebuffed Carter’s more recent invitations to join him and his close-knit family for gatherings in his cosy backyard. The sheer domesticity of those get-togethers, the ordinariness of them, was too much for him. Kowalski, the station’s boss, was on vacation overseas and would know that Locklear had what could be described as a personal relationship with the suspect which would preclude his involvement in the case. But Benson, Kowalski’s loud-mouthed stand-in who was trying to make a name for himself in the force, did not.

  Looking over the evidence, Locklear knew Carter didn’t stand a chance of being found innocent. Not with what the cops had on him. Only Locklear and Mendoza knew that there was no way their gentle friend was involved in a serious crime, that there was no way he was guilty of murder. Sooner or later though, Benson would figure out the link and Locklear would be moved off the case. Locklear already knew that so he wanted to waste no time before he was replaced with some second-rate detective like Diaz or Hill who wouldn’t recognise an important lead if it walked up and slapped them.

  Locklear thought over the murder scene he had just come from and where his trooper Mendoza was still bagging up the evidence.

  Richmond University professor, Alec Holton, had been found dead at his desk in his upmarket apartment on Creek Avenue with a four-inch hunting knife in his neck. Neighbours had said that the single man lived alone with only the old grey cat who had hissed at Locklear from a nearby armchair. According to one neighbour, visits from occasional male partners whose relationship with Holton rarely lasted more than a few months had become rare in recent weeks with the man spending much of his downtime alone.

  Holton was roughly sixty years of age and had a shock of white, wiry hair. His complexion was as pale as his hair and he had the physique of a man who spent many years sitting behind a desk. His stomach bulged over his grey polyester pants and his legs and arms were the thin and wasted extremities of a man who was unaccustomed to physical exercise.

  Locklear had focused on the victim’s facial expression as the crescendo of Pagliacci boomed through the opulent office. Alec Holton’s open green eyes looked shocked. A half-empty bottle of brandy sat on his desk beside an empty glass. There was no sign of forced entry so Holton had most likely known the murderer well enough to allow him or her entry to his home, or else the person had keys and had let themselves in and taken the man, whose desk faced away from the office door, by surprise.

  More startling than the neck wound was the neat horizontal cut along the British-born man’s hairline, as though someone had tried to scalp him. The old rusted knife did not have a handle and the exposed section of the blade was covered in blood. The coroner at t
he scene said, based on the high volume of blood on the victim’s face, the hairline cut was made while Holton was still alive but most likely after the knife had been plunged into his carotid artery.

  “Looks like the Indians are on the warpath,” one cop quipped.

  Locklear glanced at Jo Mendoza who stood on the periphery, surveying the scene. He watched her tense at the cop’s comment but she had no need to be worried. He was not easily offended and the cop, like most people he encountered, hadn’t registered his Native American features.

  He noticed that his trooper looked tired. He observed that she had gained a few much-needed pounds but her large bosom remained at odds with her lean body and gained her the unsolicited attention of male cops who then took offence when his sharp-tongued trooper rightfully put them in their place. Mendoza’s sexual orientation heightened the interest from some of the dumber cops who had been heard on more than one occasion making inappropriate comments to the tough trooper. Kowalski’s intervention had not put an end to the jibes completely. Locklear’s offer to knock some heads together was met with scorn from Mendoza who insisted she was well able to stand up for herself. Some men, Locklear reasoned, were pigs. He noticed Mendoza’s normally shiny hair looked dull and was tied in a tight bun on top of her head. She wore no make-up save for the thick line of black eyeliner which accentuated her deep brown eyes and brown skin.

  Locklear shifted his focus to his surroundings. Alec Holton’s apartment was expensively decorated. Modern art covered the stark white walls, and antiques, placed on expensive oak furniture, seemed to adorn every corner of the apartment. Even the tall steel columns that supported the high ceilings were decorated with artwork. Two seemingly identical, lavish Persian rugs covered either end of the dark-oak office floor.

  Locklear moved to an even larger reception room directly across the hall which was decorated in much the same way. The bathroom next door was, on the other hand, functional and was dismally decorated with the tiny black and white tiles seen in thousands of apartments across the country. A towel hung halfway outside the laundry basket and the air in the windowless room was damp and musty.

  The small kitchen to the rear of the apartment was similarly tiled and held only a couple of worn dusty cupboards, a small dining table which was covered with a long, old-fashioned oil tablecloth and two chairs. Locklear opened the fridge but there was nothing inside except a half loaf of stale bread and a container of sour milk.

  The bedroom adjoined the kitchen and faced the side of the building. Nothing had been disturbed in the clinical white room whose only contents were a neatly made bed, a bedside locker and an ornate antique wardrobe which was too large for the room. There were no paintings or other ornaments which was in stark contrast to the other areas of the large apartment.

  Mendoza lifted a photo of Holton and an old lady from the top of the locker.

  “Must be his mother,” she said, more to herself than Locklear. “How sweet.”

  Her boss made no response.

  Locklear opened the bedroom window which led onto the apartment’s fire escape. Heavy rain had continued to fall from early the previous evening and the pavement surrounding the exclusive building glistened in the early-summer downpour. The floor inside the bedroom was completely dry and the window had been locked so the perp had not gained access to the apartment through the fire escape.

  “I take it there’s no other way into this apartment?” Mendoza asked the janitor who had been roused from his bed to answer any questions they might have.

  Mateo Moretti looked like he should be long retired. The man was around seventy and had hobbled into the apartment on two bad hips and a knee that clicked as he walked.

  “No.”

  Locklear dismissed the janitor back to his bed and sighed. He opened the wardrobe which contained a row of equally dull but expensive tweed jackets and an array of polyester pants in varying shades of grey. Locklear lifted a shoebox down from the top shelf and lifted its loose lid with gloved hands.

  He showed the contents to Mendoza who placed her gloved hands into the box and rummaged through the loose one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “There must be thousands of dollars here. Well, at least we can rule out robbery.”

  Locklear returned to the victim’s office and stared at the body from the doorway. He was known to spend longer at crime scenes than any other detective at the station. He moved slowly across the room and circumnavigated the body six times slowly – three times clockwise and three times in the opposite direction – much to the bemusement of the other cops in the room. All except Mendoza. His trooper knew his ways and knew he would see something no-one else would.

  Locklear knelt and examined the phone which lay on its side at Holton’s feet. He pressed the redial button to check the last number phoned from the line. It was the emergency services. Someone had tried to call for help. He phoned 911 and asked for the tape to be replayed to him. He listened as a man’s voice asked weakly for the police. The next few words were muffled followed by the word Carter. Locklear thought he recognised the voice or, if not the voice, the intonation. It was an American accent and therefore not the voice of the British-born professor who lay dead in front of him and who, in any event, would more likely have asked for an ambulance than an apartment full of cops.

  The victim’s computer, which sat in the centre of the desk, pulsated with white light. An open box used to store USB sticks lay empty on the desk. The sticks scattered on the ground around the victim’s comfortably shoed feet were broken. One, which was smeared with a bloodied thumbprint, was sitting in a port in the computer. Locklear gently pushed the stick in further and beckoned for Mendoza to assist him. He knew nothing about computers and had refused Kowalski’s requests for him to attend training. He had only two years left in the force and didn’t see any point in an old dog learning new tricks, not when there were young pups to do it for him and not when his particular skills could be put to better use.

  He stood back as Mendoza ran her long, gold-varnished fingernails across the keyboard.

  Six files appeared on the list. All were named INTENT and were numbered from 1 to 6.

  “Do you know what INTENT means?” Locklear asked.

  “Apart from the generic meaning of the word? No. Must be a company or an organisation he was dealing with.”

  Locklear stood back and thought while the three cops at the other end of the room shifted from foot to foot, obviously bored and wanting to get back to the station and their paperwork before their shift ended.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little too convenient that this one stick was left unbroken and happens to be sitting in the computer?” Locklear said.

  Mendoza nodded.

  Locklear lifted the man’s right hand and inspected his thumb which was bloodstained.

  “Someone wants us to think Holton took the time to put this key into the computer while he was trying not to bleed to death,” he said. “Bag it and take the computer too. Tell O’Brien to check it.”

  “OK.”

  “And tell him I said it’s a priority!” Locklear barked.

  He couldn’t deal with the precinct’s computer nerd who had recently joined the station. His staring brown eyes and monosyllabic responses to open-ended questions frustrated Locklear who was also not known for his conversation skills. The large dark-pigmented indentation on O’Brien’s left cheek also unnerved Locklear, the result, he assumed, of the removal of a birthmark or mole. Its darkness in comparison to the man’s pale, washy skin coupled with his short jet-black hair only served to make O’Brien look weak and sickly and, to Locklear’s mind, odd.

  From his seat in the interrogation room, Locklear shifted his focus from memories of the murder scene to the suspect in front of him. He lifted his cup and grimaced as the cold, bitter taste of the station’s cheap coffee hit his palate. He tried to read Carter’s expression. It was fear. Locklear studied the bloodied pattern on Carter’s shirt and the discernible handprint smear
ed across the right side of his chest. His pale face was splattered with small dots of blood.

  Locklear reached forward and turned the ex-trooper’s left hand over. He lifted the bandage to reveal a long, deep wound to his palm.

  Locklear sighed. Carter rested his eyes on the tabletop and said nothing.

  “You’re lefthanded, right?”

  Carter nodded and moved his injured hand onto his lap.

  “You going to tell me what happened tonight?”

  Carter looked at the guard who stared impassively at the wall on the opposite side of the room.

  “You can go, trooper,” Locklear said quietly.

  The young cop hesitated.

  “Don’t worry,” Locklear reassured him. “I think Mr Carter knows he’s safe with me.”

  Carter nodded nervously.

  The cop left the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

  Locklear reached to turn on the tape recorder but paused as Carter gestured towards it.

  “Doesn’t the station have a more up-to-date recording system than that old thing?” Carter asked.

  “That’s what you want to ask about, Lee? Seriously?”

  Carter shrugged.

  “We do,” said Locklear, “but the one in this interview room isn’t working.”

  Carter leaned forward. “I need a lawyer,” he said urgently.

  Locklear nodded and exhaled. “Yes. You do. Is that Holton’s blood on your shirt?”

  Carter nodded. Locklear could see tiny tears rise in the mild-mannered researcher’s eyes. He looked down and focused on his unopened notebook.