by Steven James
He popped the trunk.
She motioned with the gun. “Now get inside.”
You can’t get in there. You can’t let her do this. You have to stop her. You have to kill her.
“No. I won’t do it.”
“Yes.” She came closer. “You will. But you get to decide if you’ll do it with a bullet in your stomach or not.” She took careful aim. “Which do you choose?”
Though still a hundred yards away, the approaching car must have hit a pothole because the lights suddenly tilted up into her eyes. As she winced, Timothy threw his keys at her face. Instinctively, she flinched, and when she did, he lunged at her. The gun went off. He didn’t feel any pain, but adrenaline might have been masking it if he were hit.
You’re shot. You’re shot. You’re shot.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Then he was fighting her and the gun was on the ground. She had only one arm to use, but her muscles were cable tight and her grip was unrelenting.
As the car neared them, Timothy grabbed Julianne’s shoulders and threw her to the road. She clawed at his face, but he pushed her back down, hard. The crack of her skull on the pavement was thick and moist and sickening.
She won’t fight so much now.
Her eyes rolled back, and she went limp.
You did it. You killed her.
“No, no, no. I didn’t want to. I wasn’t trying to.”
But you did.
“Maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she’s not.”
Make sure. Use the gun. Or the letter opener.
“No!”
Timothy patted himself down, looking for blood, for an entry wound, but found none.
That car. Hurry. You need to hide her . . .
He quickly dragged her body behind his car to get her out of sight. Part of him wanted to feel her pulse to see if she was alive; part of him didn’t want to, just in case she wasn’t.
He retrieved the gun and hurried back to the trunk to close it before the other car stopped, but he was too late.
With the headlights on and glaring in Timothy’s eyes, the driver’s face was obscured. “You okay?” the man called.
“Yeah.”
“I thought I heard a gunshot.”
Timothy might have heard that voice before, but he couldn’t be sure. Nerves. “No, no. Nothing like that. I’m fine.”
Julianne moaned softly, and Timothy’s heart jackrabbited in his chest.
“You hear something?” the man said.
“Just the wind.”
A pause. “Got a flat?”
“A flat?”
“Your trunk there.”
Behind the open trunk, Timothy held the gun in his left hand, the letter opener in his right.
“All good. All fine. I’m sure.”
Another pause, longer this time. “Alright,” the man replied. “If you’re sure.”
At last, he pulled forward, and Timothy let out a deep breath and slid the gun beneath his belt.
As he watched the car drive away, he tried to read the license plate, but the numbers had been covered with duct tape, which he found both surprising and, obviously, suspicious.
Just get out of here.
He walked to Julianne’s body.
She was bleeding from her head. Fresh blood.
Her heart’s still beating. And she groaned a moment ago. She’s still alive.
“But that’s good, though, right?”
Now what are you going to do? You have to take care of this. You have to solve this, before someone else comes along.
“I could just leave her here. No one would suspect me. Why would anyone suspect me?”
That man saw you, Timothy. You have to get her out of here. When she’s found, he’ll know you did it. He saw your car. He might’ve seen the plates. He’ll send the police. They’ll come looking for you.
Timothy wished he were Lonnie from his novel. Lonnie always knew how to take care of things. He always knew the best thing to do.
For a moment, Timothy considered dumping Julianne into the river, but eventually she would be found. Conversely, the cold water might just revive her, wake her up, and then what would he do?
He glanced at the open trunk, then down at her body.
Use the letter opener. It’s just what you need.
But this time he resisted the voice.
He knew what he needed to do instead. He would take care of things. Just like Lonnie would’ve done if he were here.
He is here, Timothy. Lonnie has never been far at all from your side.
* * *
+++
I could see that the Trinity Church Cemetery was surrounded by a sturdy, metal, spear-topped fence two meters high.
Bare-limbed trees protruded from the manicured gardens, now withered and dried out in summer’s wake.
In the daylight, the cemetery might have been a tranquil and peaceful place, but there in the nighttime, it had a foreboding feel.
The church was closed and so was the cemetery entrance, so I scaled the fence and dropped to my feet on the other side.
Here I was, on my second visit to a graveyard in as many days.
Tired, brown grass covered most of the property wherever there wasn’t a walking path or flowerbed. By the looks of the ancient, weathered headstones, I doubted that anyone had been buried here in decades.
I wasn’t sure which gravestone was Leeson’s, but from what Tessa and I had been able to uncover online about the stone, it would be located somewhere near the Soldier’s Monument that rose grandly in the northeast corner of the cemetery near where Pine Street intersected with Broadway.
Crunching across the frozen grass, I angled my Mini Maglite down and began inspecting the area, looking for the grave.
32
It didn’t take me long to find it.
Yes, it was near the monument and approximately five meters from the perimeter fence.
At first, James Leeson’s gravestone didn’t jump out as distinctive in any way from the other old headstones in the cemetery, and I guessed that most people would just walk right past it, oblivious to its historical significance.
However, at the top of the granite were the enigmatic carvings of the cryptogram Mannie had used. A wavering crack and chipped section across the headstone obscured any images that might have been engraved on the bottom third, but the symbols near the top were still clearly visible, even after all these years.
Below the code were three additional carvings—a winged hourglass, a smoking urn, and two overlaid symbols of the Freemasons.
I figured that the hourglass with the wings symbolized how time flies. The urn, I wasn’t so sure about. Though I wasn’t a Mason, the compass and the level and plumb line were common enough symbols for me to recognize.
As I scanned the area, the light from my Maglite glinted off something that lay nearly hidden under a mound of freshly overturned dirt roughly the size of a human head. A white glimmer. Shiny and smooth, like clean, sun-bleached bone.
I expected it to be a skull, but when I knelt and carefully brushed away the soil, I found that it was the head of a mannequin. It’d been detached from the rest of the body and now stared up at me with its blank, unblinking eyes.
Blake and his silent ladies.
Mannie directing me to a grave that had a mannequin’s head beside it couldn’t be simply a coincidence.
It wasn’t unusual for Blake to have female mannequins stationed around him where he worked—or where he played. Often they were dressed in lingerie. A psychologist would’ve probably had a field day analyzing him and his fixation with them.
Memento mori.
Remember death.
Yes.
But what significance did it carry?
I tilted the mannequin’s head in my
hand. Hollow. Clean and unblemished. Mimetic. How did this fit in with the rest of the case?
After setting it down, I began scouring the area for any other body parts from mannequins and any observers in the shadows, then called for a forensics unit to analyze the soil and the head. Thankfully, the nearest NYPD precinct had a CSI team, and they told me to plan on a six-minute arrival time.
I checked my watch.
9:56.
Okay, well, if ten o’clock was significant in any way, then it looked like I would be here in the graveyard when the team arrived.
Then a thought struck me—maybe there wasn’t someone waiting here for me, but maybe this was a tactic to get me out of the apartment and away from Tessa at a specific time so Mannie or Blake could make a move on her there.
With haste, I called the officers who were stationed outside our building and told them to go in, and to proceed with caution. “Make sure the girl is okay and no one else is there. I told her not to open the door for anyone. You’ll need to show her your badges.”
I texted Tessa that two cops were on their way up and to open the door for them. She replied: What?!
Just let them in, I typed back. I’ll be home soon.
I kept a close watch on the graveyard but saw no one. Less than two minutes later, a call came back from one of the officers at our apartment. “The place is clear. You want us to stay here?”
“Just wait outside the door. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“The girl was not happy.”
“I expect not.”
Rather than call Tessa, I decided I would clear things up with her when I got back home.
As I was keeping watch on the graveyard, I caught sight of a person approaching from the other side of the cemetery. Male. About my size.
When I angled my light toward him, he bolted before I could see his face.
I took off after him, calling for him to stop.
He made it to the street before I did and was already on his way down the block toward the Wall Street Station subway stop for the 4 and 5 lines.
He descended into it.
I followed.
He launched himself over the turnstile ahead of me, and by the time I was past it as well, he’d jumped down from the platform toward the track and, avoiding the third rail, started sprinting into the darkness.
I made the leap as well.
A greasy smell tinged the air. With my flashlight, I caught sight of him, maybe twenty-five or thirty meters ahead of me, running with a harsh limp on his left leg. Calling out, I identified myself as a federal agent and shouted for him to stop.
It reminded me of my chase yesterday morning through the graveyard trying to catch that woman, although this guy wasn’t nearly as fast as she was and I was gaining on him rapidly. But a light beyond him and a rattling on the tracks told me that a train was coming.
I studied the tunnel. It didn’t look like there was enough room on either side to flatten myself against the wall and avoid getting hit. Or, if there was, it was going to be close.
Close worked.
Glancing behind me, I doubted I’d be able to make it back to the platform either. I debated for a second which direction to go—back or forward.
But only for a second, then I decided.
Forward.
The man I was chasing disappeared to the left, and I realized there must be a connecting tunnel or walkway. With the train closing in on me, I picked up my speed, darting toward it.
As the train rocketed closer, time seemed to slow, and even the roaring clatter of its approach was slower and more drawn out than it should have been.
The pathway the man had found was close.
Another few strides and I leapt to the side. Only a moment later, the train careened past, the rush of air whooshing over me.
The rattle-clack of the tracks became deafening. The rock and drift and sway of the train sailing by so close to me made me feel off balance.
As I was dialing my light deeper into the tunnel that the limping man had escaped into, he grabbed my arm from where he’d apparently been waiting for me. And now, with the train racing past less than a meter behind my back, he slammed my hand against the wall to knock the light free. I would’ve reached for my gun, but with the way he had my arm twisted, that wasn’t going to happen.
In the flickering, pulsing darkness, I still couldn’t get a good look at his face.
I tried to push forward to get away from the train, but he held his ground. As I twisted to yank my arm free, he drew a gun, but rather than firing at me, he swung the butt of it toward my head.
Impact.
A burst of stars.
Then darkness.
33
I woke up alone in the tunnel, my head throbbing. I had no idea how much time had passed while I’d lain there in the dark.
My flashlight was still on, its light skewing off to the side across the ground in front of me. I snatched it up and searched the area, but the man who’d knocked me out was nowhere to be seen.
Checking the time, I realized I’d only been out a minute or so, but it’d been long enough for him to get away.
The train had passed, and silence loomed around me. I swept the light through the main tunnel, saw no one, and quickly returned to the subway platform.
By the time I made it back to the cemetery, the CSI unit was arriving.
I passed the mannequin’s head along to them so they could check it for prints, then directed them to sort through the top layer of dirt surrounding the grave to search for other body parts from mannequins. “Let me know if you find anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Maybe I should’ve been checked out at the hospital, but I’d been clonked on the head more than my fair share of times over the years, and once I felt regrouped and clearheaded, I left for home.
During the drive, I considered what Mannie might have been trying to communicate to me by pointing me to that specific grave. Was he the one who left the head there? If so, when? It seemed extraordinary for him to have written me that cipher, and then, trusting that I would decode it in time, traveled here to bury the head. However, if he’d placed it here prior to his apprehension, then did it mean he’d gotten himself arrested on purpose?
And why ten o’clock? Did the time carry any significance to what was happening?
And who was that man I’d chased?
At this point, there were simply too many questions and not enough information to bring me closure, not enough “routes to the truth, paved with the facts,” as my mentor, Dr. Calvin Werjonic, sometimes said.
Once again I was reminded of my lunch with him tomorrow.
Well, it would be good to see him. Maybe I could even kick some ideas around with him on how to approach this investigation.
Back home, I found one officer waiting outside the building and the other upstairs in the hallway leading to our door.
I asked him if he’d seen anything.
“Nope. After we cleared your apartment, there hasn’t been a peep from inside. No one else has been up here except for an elderly couple heading down to their place at the end of the hall.”
“Alright. Thanks.”
“That’s a feisty girl you’ve got in there.”
“Yeah.”
I dismissed him, took a deep breath, and entered our apartment.
“Tessa?”
She was standing beside the couch, hands on her hips.
“You alright?” I asked.
“I’m fine. You told me not to open the door for anyone.”
“I know.”
“What the hell—and I almost said something a lot worse than hell—is going on?”
“I’m just trying to do all I can to keep you safe.”
“And why would I be in any danger?”
/> “You’re not. I mean . . . Maybe I’m just being a little paranoid.”
“A little? You sent two cops in here to check on me! One of ’em went in my room, looked in my closet, under my bed. That is a complete invasion of my privacy. You do understand that, right?”
“It’s been a long day, Tessa. Why don’t you head to bed. We can talk about this more tomorrow.”
She shook her head in exasperation and stomped off to her room.
Man, it was going to be good to have Christie home again tomorrow night.
I processed what was happening as I iced the side of my head and then tried to get some sleep, but whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that mannequin head staring at me and then winking. Then her lips curved into a sly smile and she mouthed words to me, but despite how hard I tried to concentrate on my dream, I couldn’t decipher what the decapitated head was trying to tell me.
34
Julianne Springman felt consciousness returning to her slowly.
At first, she thought she was at home in her own bed, but it was cold, and she was going to pull the covers up but found that she couldn’t move her one good arm. It seemed strange and part of a dream, unable to move.
Perhaps it was just a nightmare. She’d heard about lucid dreams and wondered if she could change the direction of this one. Once, she’d fallen asleep beside a floor lamp that came on with a timer every night. In her dream, the sun was glaring in her eyes, forcing her to try to turn away. Only after she woke up did she realize that what was happening around her in the real world was seeping down, impacting the dream she’d been a part of.
The cold didn’t go away, so she tried to move again, and this time she found herself on the verge of waking up. Why can’t I move?
Julianne blinked and attempted to focus, but everything was dim and indistinct. A faint smear of light was crawling over her shoulder but hardly illuminated anything around her. The musty smell of rain-dampened carpet tinged with the reek of oil and grease surrounded her.
Her right arm was drawn back behind her and somehow secured in place with a rope that’d been tied off around her waist. Although her left arm was free, since it’d never developed properly, it was of no use to her at the moment.