The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  Head-On Crash on the Matanzas Bridge.

  Search for “Mystery Hiker” Called Off.

  Tragic Loss for the Entire Community.

  Also killed were:

  Barbara Redding, 28, local resident.

  Katy Redding, 4.

  Redding told the Accident Reconstruction guys that Barbara said she saw someone standing in the middle of the Matanzas Bridge, a pedestrian who might have seen, maybe even caused, the accident.

  Flagler County and all the State guys spent hours looking up and down A1A, stopping truckers, checking out the all-night diners. The local TV stations did PSAs asking anyone who had seen a hitchhiker on A1A around that time to call in.

  No one called. No one had seen a lone person walking on A1A that night. They checked security cameras at gas stations and traffic lights for ten miles in each direction. They got all sorts of images and not one of them kicked out a workable lead. They even dragged Matanzas Inlet on the theory that the walker might have gone over the side along with the Jeep and the Benz. Nothing. Nowhere. They never got so much as a breath of this elusive walker.

  Time passed.

  Other bad things drove the story off the evening news. After a while everybody decided that Barbara Redding had simply been tired, that it was a foggy evening and everyone knew that the lights on that bridge cast weird shadows at night.

  As for Anson Freitag why had he swerved at exactly the same moment? What made him do that? What had he seen? Like all orphaned questions that don’t have an answer, the question gradually went away, and everybody—well the ones who were still living—went on with their lives.

  Everybody but Jack Redding.

  * * *

  Redding took the side entrance by the ER gates so he wouldn’t have to walk past the huge Anson Freitag Tribute Memorial that took up most of a marble wall at the entrance to the Anson Freitag Wing of Immaculate Heart Hospital, where Freitag had worked for thirty-eight years, healing thousands of patients, saving countless lives and winning hundreds of medical awards and citations.

  Most of these awards and citations were up on the marble wall, along with pictures of Dr. Freitag with an assortment of wealthy benefactors and famous local celebrities and media people.

  In the center of this memorial was a large oil painting of the great doctor himself, seated in a burgundy leather club chair, a leonine old man with a full head of silvery hair, wearing a navy-blue pin-striped suit, holding a stethoscope in his hands, his dark eyes in half shadow but touched by an inner light, smiling down benevolently on everyone who passed through the lobby. Redding had only looked at it once, but that had been more than enough.

  * * *

  Julie Karras was in a secure wing you only got into if someone opened the steel doors for you. Redding knew that Karen Walker would be somewhere in the same sealed wing, probably in Pod Three.

  The hall was dim, lit only by the glow from the nurses’ hub at the head of a T-shaped section. It smelled of bleach and hospital cooking and gave off that late-night hospital hallway vibe, a mix of insomnia and boredom and fear. The duty nurse, April Cotton—her husband, Luke, was a Flagler County Deputy—watched him coming up the hall over the top of her reading glasses. Redding was a good-looking man and he always hit her girl radar with a silvery little ping.

  “Jack, honey, you look like shit.”

  “Thank you for that, April. I feel much better now.”

  “I’m sorry. I just mean you look so tired. Did you get the runner?”

  “Not yet. But we will. You’ve got Karen Walker checked in, right?”

  April gave him an eye roll, but all she said was “Yes. The little dear is in Pod Three.”

  “How is she?”

  “A handful. They’ve sedated her. With a brick, if I’d had my way.”

  Redding took that in.

  “How far down is she?”

  “She’s okay. It was just an Ativan. You going to talk to her?”

  “In a minute. Is Mace around?”

  “Not now. He went down to talk to the ME. They’re doing the PM on the sister, Rebecca?”

  “That was fast.”

  “The ME was available and Mace wanted all his ducks in a row before they got into it with Karen.”

  “They doing toxicology?”

  “Oh yes. Behavior like that is pretty extreme. They’re looking to see if she had anything spiking her up.”

  “Anybody do that with Karen?”

  “Yeah. We did a work up on her. Other than some intermittent asthma, she’s perfectly healthy. No sign of drugs. We did all the blood work. She’s been drinking a lot lately, but there’s nothing in her veins that explains her behavior, if that helps?”

  “It clarifies things. She on a watch?”

  “Suicide?”

  “Occurred to me.”

  “No. But she’s scheduled for a psych eval tomorrow. You think she might?”

  Redding gave it a moment.

  “No. Murder, maybe.”

  “Yeah, me too. They’ve got a camera on her, but no restraints.”

  “Okay. By the way, I saw Luke down at the site.”

  “Yes. He and Danika Shugrue and most of Day watch are doing the house-to-house thing. He called me a while ago, asking about Julie, how she was doing.”

  “And how is Julie doing?”

  “Head traumas worry everybody. They’ve done an MRI and an EEG. Comes up nominal.”

  “Nominal? That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah. It is. She had a brutal headache and she was pretty wired up. You can’t give a head wound any sedatives, but LQ came out a while ago and said she had finally gotten to sleep.”

  She hesitated, looking up at him.

  “Can I ask...is she in trouble?”

  “No. It was a by-the-book shooting. She put three rounds center mass. Stopped at three. Lot of experienced cops wouldn’t have done as well. If there’s any grief coming, it belongs to me.”

  “You? Why you?”

  “I left a rookie to deal with two kidnap victims while I took off into the woods after the runner.”

  April leaned back in her chair, shook her head.

  “Jeez, you Catholics. Don’t hunt guilt. It already knows where you live.”

  “We’ll see. Where’s she at?”

  “Four oh six. Down the hall to your left. Tippy toes, okay?”

  Redding gave her a look. She smiled at him.

  “You know what I mean.”

  * * *

  Redding pushed the heavy door open as quietly as he could. Marsh was in a chair, tapping at his iPhone, looking dead beat. He tensed up, and then relaxed when he saw it was Redding.

  Karras was on the bed, covered with a pale yellow blanket, her eyes closed, her head wrapped in a gauze bandage. Her lips were half-open, her face slack in sleep. She was hooked up to a heart-and-vitals monitor, her heartbeat slow and steady.

  They spoke in whispers.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Marsh looked tired. He needed a shave and his uniform shirt was rumpled. Redding was surprised to see that his beard was partly gray. He’d come on duty at eight that morning, sixteen hours ago.

  “She’s finally got to sleep, no more than an hour back. She’s pretty wrecked about the shooting.”

  “Good for her.”

  “I got my portable shut off. You have any luck with the runner?”

  Redding let out a breath, watching the monitor numbers flicker and pulse.

  “No. Marine units went back and forth. Nothing.”

  Marsh shook his head.

  “Whole thing has me a little freaked out, Jack. I can’t see how that bitch could have lost us so fast. It was...”

  “Creepy?”

  “Yeah, a little. And the thing with the dogs? What was t
hat all about?”

  “No idea.”

  “Forensics get anything off the truck?”

  “I haven’t been back at Depot yet. I just left the scene. You want me to bring in one of the night guys? You look pretty tired.”

  Marsh suppressed a yawn.

  “I am, but I promised her I’d stay. I want to be here if she wakes up.”

  Karras stirred under the blanket and they both turned to look at her. Her eyes were open.

  “Sergeant Redding—”

  Redding walked over, looked down at her. She looked maybe fourteen right then.

  “How you doing, troop?”

  She smiled, or tried to.

  “Head hurts. And I’m having trouble...remembering details.”

  “That’s shock,” said Redding. “Normal reaction to stress.”

  “Did you get her?”

  “No. She’s in the wind. But we’ll find her.”

  Karras closed her eyes for a moment.

  “What about the sister? Karen?”

  “She’s in a lockdown unit down the hall.”

  Julie looked a little surprised.

  “Under guard?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got two PWs on her door.”

  “Good. Keep them there. Got any charges?”

  “Pending. Right now we’re telling her she’s in Protective Custody.”

  Karras smiled weakly.

  “You’re trying to get her to talk. Without a PD there.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Karras nodded, seemed to drift. Redding and Marsh were easing away when she opened her eyes.

  “Have you talked to her yet?”

  “No. Just left the Intracoastal.”

  “That where you’re going now? To see her?”

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes again.

  “Will she be cuffed? In restraints?”

  “Restraints? Probably not, if we’re trying to sell her on Protective Custody and get her talking.”

  Karras was almost gone now. In a voice they could hardly hear, she said “I’ve been lying here awhile. I’ve been thinking about that girl, Karen. Be careful around her, Sergeant—”

  “Hey, after today? Call me Jack.”

  “Just watch yourself. There’s something really wrong in there. Jack.”

  * * *

  Pod Three was a serious change of state from the rest of the lockdown wing, originally intended as a containment area if ever any of the various extinction-level plagues the CDC was always gleefully predicting actually happened. Until that happy day it was being used as an informal Psych Ward and Observation Unit.

  Cameras everywhere and every door had a double-walled glass window reinforced with chicken wire and a pass-through slot to use if the patient inside was in quarantine. As Redding slid his magnetic card through the lock slot on the entry gates he could see a state trooper tilted back in a chair halfway down the dimly lit hall.

  As the doors hissed open the trooper got up, hitching her duty belt and arching her back to get the stiffness out. She was a sergeant, just like him, a tall blonde named Pandora Jansson. She smiled at him as he came down the hall. As Raymond Chandler once said, it was a smile Redding could feel in his hip pocket.

  One of the Flagler County guys had made the mistake of cracking the obvious joke about her first name while she was close enough to hear him. He only did that once, and no one ever came anywhere near that joke again.

  “Hey, Jack,” she said as he passed through the light column of an overhead halogen. “Man you look like shit.”

  “Well, that makes it unanimous,” he said, taking her in because he was a guy and couldn’t help it. In the Before Barbara years she and Jack had spent six months in a kind of carnal close-quarters combat that had nearly killed them both. The heat was still there, but banked down deep.

  “How’s the kid?”

  Jansson rolled her eyes—Redding was getting the idea that Karen Walker had that effect—

  “Ever see that old movie The Exorcist?”

  “That bad?”

  “Well, so far no projectile vomiting. But the night’s young. Let’s go see.”

  She used a key card to open the door, shoved it back. “Hey, Karen, sweetie pie, somebody to see you.”

  The room was dimly lit by a bedside lamp, and decorated in anemic pastels. It smelled of Lysol and floor wax and whatever hormones the kid in the bed was putting out. There was a dresser on one wall, bolted down, and a couple of lime-green plastic lawn chairs, too fragile to use as a weapon. A one-piece stainless-steel sink and toilet set stood in a corner, partly shielded by a curtain.

  As they stepped into the light, she sat bolt upright, her face in a red knot. They had gotten her into a set of Hello Kitty pj’s. The effect was pretty jarring when she finally got her outrage in gear.

  “I want a lawyer,” she snarled. “I want one right now! And where are my parents? Why aren’t they here already?”

  That got Redding’s attention.

  Was it possible that she didn’t know?

  Yes. It was.

  “We’ll get to your folks in a minute—”

  “Lawyer. Now. I want a lawyer. And I want my parents. Why aren’t they here yet? They have to fix this.”

  “Honey, you don’t need a lawyer,” said Pandora. “You’re not charged with anything. You’re in Protective—”

  “Can I leave right now?”

  “Well—”

  “Then get me my parents and a fucking lawyer. My Dad works for the US Government and he can really fuck you over if you don’t—”

  “Yeah?” said Jack, interested. “What part?”

  “What part of what?” she said, distracted from her rant.

  “What part of the government does your daddy work for?”

  “He works for the Army Corps of Engineers. He does frantic archaeology stuff—”

  “Frantic?”

  “She means forensic archaeology,” said Jansson, who had read the Fernandina PD report on the family while she was sitting out in the hall.

  “Remember Kennewick Man? That skull they found at a dam they were building? If they find bones or historical remains at a construction site or a pipeline route, Walker and his team are called in to analyze and preserve it.”

  “Yeah,” said Karen. “That stuff. He’s a big deal in the federal government and you’re not. So get me a fucking lawyer!”

  “A lawyer to do what?” said Redding, pulling up a chair and sitting down beside the bed. Jansson went back to a wall, leaned up against it, folded her arms.

  “To get that thing shut off, for a start,” she said, pointing at the camera in the far corner of the ceiling. Redding was watching her and there didn’t seem to be any trace of fear in her. And if she kept asking for a lawyer with the camera running, they were going to have to get her one.

  “Karen, we can’t shut that camera off. You’ve been through a terrible experience and we need to monitor your—”

  “Where’s Becca?”

  Redding studied the kid for a moment. She gave it right back. Eyes like blue stones.

  “She’s downstairs.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “Time for that later.”

  “What are they doing for her?”

  “Not a lot. She’s still dead, so that’s a problem right there.”

  He heard Pandora Jansson shift her feet, her belt leather creaking, a theatrical and disapproving sigh. Pandora could pack a lot of meaning into a sigh and a belt creak.

  Karen didn’t flinch.

  “That fucking bitch cop shot her.”

  “That’s right. Three times.”

  “She could have just aimed for her knee or something. She didn’t have to kill her. We were both
, like, traumatized and in shock and stuff. Becca didn’t know what she was doing, and that fucking bitch cop shot her dead anyway. My parents are gonna sue your whole stupid—”

  “Your sister used a steel club on my trooper. Tried to kill her. Getting shot is what happens when you assault a police officer. And there is no such thing as shooting to wound. My trooper could have shot your sister in the shoulder and she still might have died. You ever drop a big rock into a pond, and watch the waves go out? That’s what the body does with a bullet. The body is packed with lots of stuff that goes bad when it gets hit by a bullet. If you were kidnapped, why did your sister attack the officer who was rescuing you?”

  Long silence here, and Jack let it run.

  “It wasn’t like that. It was...complicated.”

  “So she didn’t kidnap you?”

  “No, well, like in the beginning, no...but then she got all control freaky on us.”

  “So you weren’t free to leave, then?”

  “No. She had all the money. The keys. The phones and stuff. We had no choice but to stay.”

  “Okay. Tell me how it all started.”

  “Look, I really want to talk to my parents.”

  “When was the last time you saw your family?”

  A flicker, a shadow across her face.

  “I don’t know. Couple weeks ago. Why?”

  “Where was that?”

  “At our place. At Amelia Island.”

  “What were they doing, last time you saw them?”

  She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, looked down at them.

  “They were... We weren’t getting along so good.”

  “No. Why not?”

  “We wanted to take a trip. They didn’t want us to go. We had a fight.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “To New Orleans. Diana was paying for the whole trip. Mom and Dad weren’t crazy about it, but Diana convinced them it would be, like, educational. A history thing, you know, the Old Quarter and all that Civil War stuff. Diana knew all about history, antiques and jewels and lockets. She was, like, an antiques dealer? Diana is... She was in the truck with us? She’s the one who...like, kidnapped us.”

  “She have a last name?”

  “Bowman. Diana Bowman.”

  Jack didn’t have to tell Pandora to run that name. She already had her iPhone out and was logging in to NCIC.