Chapter Nine
“If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise…” Clare part hummed, part sang the tune as she walked through the woodland of southernmost Holden, only a mile along the BB&G from the crossing by her house. Yet as close as it was, this part of town was a whole world away from the rural peace of her home.
She had taken the time for refreshment and a pit stop before calling a cab. The walk wasn't that far, but the weariness was taking its toll so much that after only a few minutes into a very brief cab ride to Laurelwood Road, Clare found herself dozing.
“You all right, miss?” The cabbie, a graying man nicknamed 'Chin' for past boxing glory, had asked. Clare opened her eyes; he looked worried and unsure of what to do.
“Chin, I'm fine. It was just a bit of a late night.”
“We're on Laurelwood. Where is it you wanted to go?”
“This will do for me, thanks.”
Clare paid and got out. He would only be a call away. So she entered the deepest and darkest part of town, home to the real reclusive, humming a tune that seemed ironic given the mystery surrounding the death of Luke Morris.
Just for a second, the trees opened out and she could see the hills beyond, that out of town monstrosity 'The Big Y' dominating the ridge amidst the beautiful Massachusetts skyline. It was only across the train track, not really all that far away. Yet the development of that grocery giant was a whole different world.
The gargantuan shells of houses began to emerge from the woodland as she neared the end of Laurelwood Road. There was no movement from within but the houses were so huge that to see anybody would be unlikely. Even wildlife was avoiding this dark place today.
The road curved back on itself in a loop. Clare had reached the end of Laurelwood. A disused basketball hoop on a pole of rusted black metal stood in the middle of the road, the plastic base into which it was planted cracked and leaking sand. Someone didn't want visitors. She was undeterred; the overhanging trees and resulting gloom led to memories of the night her parents were found. Could that have been Harley on the radio?
The Morris house was right at the end of the switchback, shrouded by the trees. “You really did appreciate your privacy,” Clare muttered in an attempt to break the silence. It resumed just as quick, and she concluded that since she was about to break and enter, which could get her thrown on the wrong side of the prison bars, maybe she should remain silent.
“Help you?” called an elderly voice from within the trees. A gray-haired woman in a blue blouse embroidered with daisies and a brown skirt had come onto the road from one of the other houses.
Getting used to the lie, Clare flashed her credentials, hoping the woman didn't get too close. “Police. I'm just here to do a little follow-up. Do you know what happened here? Did you see or hear anything suspicious in the last twenty-four hours?”
Squinting in the gloom under the trees, the woman pushed back loose strands of gray-streaked brown hair in an unconscious way. “Not anythin' that would point to who did this, that's for sure. Your people though, they were very unusual. Turned up in black cars they did. No flashing lights, nothin'. If paramedics hadn't shown up to remove poor Luke's body, you could have been mistaken for thinkin' someone was bein' arrested.”
“What did they look like?”
“Suits mostly, black. It was gloomy when they showed up, no fuss, no ceremony. The parents were taken away in one car, body in an ambulance. Then the trucks arrived.”
“Trucks? Down here?”
The woman pointed at the branches above and for the first time Clare saw damage. Branches snapped off, twigs hanging loose. “Two of them. Came through like ghosts. It damn near looked like an eviction with what they were emptying out. Then one of those Feds starts knocking on all the doors, yelling that we oughta leave for a few days. He spooked Mary over there with all the fuss, and the family are all probably away hunting deer.”
“What about you?”
She smiled. “Me? I've lived here all my life. No Fed in a suit's making me get up and out of mine. Laurelwood was named for my great gran-pappy. Laurie Oaken.”
The name was familiar. The Oaken Clan had been in these parts since the founding of the town. This must be… “Alice?”
The woman smiled, revealing a mouth of decaying teeth, totally at odds with her smart sense of dress. “You know me?”
“I think you knew my pop, Ched Rosser?”
“Ahh, know him I did. You're young Clare then. Dreadful shame what happened to him and your mom.”
This time it was Clare's turn to self-consciously brush her hair over her ear. The run in with Jonathon Finely came to mind. Who could she trust? “Well, if truth be told, I think this might be same thing. I've no basis in fact. Not yet. Just a hunch.”
Alice's smile fell, fear replacing the welcome in her eyes. “Tell me you aren't serious.”
Clare leaned back against the trunk of a pine. “I am. I just have a feeling.”
Alice stepped back. “Be very careful, young Clare Rosser. The Mandigon is dangerous. It's best left alone, if that's what it is.”
“The what? Mandigon?” It was too late; Alice Oaken disappeared back into the woodland. No closer to any answers, Clare turned back to the Morris house.
Pushing through the crowded branches, Clare found she barely had space to move about outside the house. Branches tapped on the windows in the gentle woodland breeze. In some cases, they were bent across and many were snapped with the force of the removal from the night before. Evidence would be contaminated. Someone had been in a hurry.
She made her way to the front door, noting that already the yellow crime scene tape hung loose at the side of the entrance. Clare pushed on the door. It creaked open.
That's great. Way to let everybody know I'm here.
She slipped inside. The scene gave her a bad case of déjà vu. There was no hallway, so the main door opened directly into an extended living room, utterly devoid of any furnishings. The walls, painted a pale shade of lilac, had darker patches where once there must have been paintings. Dusty chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Several piles of boxes were piled without care on cement flooring edged with spike-studded gripping. By the way they were partially ripped up, they had recently held carpet. Only the hearth showed any evidence of recent use, a residual heat in the ash.
“Not much to go on,” said Terrick from a doorway to the left, making Clare jump. “Don't ask the obvious question, girl. I knew you'd find your way here as soon as you heard about young Luke.”
“I might have gone to the other house.”
The sheriff grinned. “No, you wouldn't. Take a look round here while they're preoccupied elsewhere. That's what I'd do, so I assumed it's what you'd do too.”
“It's logical,” Clare agreed, fingering the small button depicting logic she still wore from her days at university. “But why do you need to look around?”
“Because this happened in my town, and the Feds came in without so much as a word. That irks me. They haven't finished though. Look around. Talk me through what you see.”
Clare looked about the room. “It's messy. They were disturbed. If this were the only crime scene, it would be spotless. My parent's room was sterile. Not like this. I can only assume that if I'd not gotten to the house when I did, the same would have happened. Every trace presumably removed.”
“And that takes us to the scene of the crime,” Terrick concluded. “Come with me.”
Upstairs, the bedroom that must have belonged to Luke was the only door that was shut, more crime scene tape plastered across it. Terrick reached through the tape and pushed the door open.
Being careful to avoid the web of tape, Clare ducked low and entered the room. Inside, all that remained of the boy's possessions was the metal bed frame. The walls were grimy with mold, the windows clouded. “It's funny,” she observed. “This looks a lot like the warehouse I visited yesterday.”
Terrick peered through the window, sniffed, and
stood back. “What's that scent?” The sheriff kneeled so that his head was level with the window ledge. “There's a residue here. How is it that they missed it?”
“I don't know. Maybe it's an embarrassment of riches. The Feds went elsewhere because a fresher kill places them closer to the killer.”
“In this case, let's expect the fox to return.” Terrick scratched at the residue. “Smells like polish remover.”
“Maybe that's why I can't smell it,” Clare decided. “I'm too used to the scent.”
Terrick pulled on the window, causing it to protest for just a moment as the residue held it down. After coming free, the window shot up in its runners, the old style cord holding it aloft. “That ain't no polish remover. Not if it can do that. There's more out here,” he said as he leaned out, “Look.”
Clare peered over his shoulder. There was a gap in the woodland, where branches had been pruned back and the dirt trodden into a path. “So there's a path leading into the woods. Maybe that's how the Morris family get in and out. That must go down toward the railway. Want to climb down?”
Terrick pulled back in. “After you, girl. There's a door downstairs. I'll be using that.”
What was I thinking? Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment over this sudden departure from her usual logical approach to her analysis of a situation, Clare followed Terrick down through the empty house. The door in question had no fingerprint dustings on it, as if it hadn't been touched. Clare pulled a latex glove from her pocket, a leftover from the Walgreens testing kit, and tried the handle. It gave easily. Terrick took the lead, crouching down where the gravel of a semi-finished concrete pathway became woodland dirt. “No footprints, at least nothing under a day old. There are scuffs leadin' into the woods and look.” He stood and pointed at a series of gashes on the bark of a pine that had all of its lower branches cut right back to the trunk. Residue had formed in the cuts, pine sap off-colored by a foreign agent. Clare pulled her mini forensics kit from her backpack, scraping some of the residue from the tree into a small jar. “There's an organic smell to that, not just pine sap.”
It was on the tip of her tongue.
Terrick wet his forefinger and started to rub at the pine.
It hit her. “No, Sheriff, stop.” Clare's hand shot out, grabbing at Terrick's wrist and pulling hard. “That's Mescaline. I'd stake my life on it.”
Terrick pulled his hand away. “How can you tell?”
“There's a scent about the fluid, organic, natural. Yet it's markedly different to the pine. It's from the Peyote cactus, that's where the scent comes from.”
“You can tell all that from a scent?”
Clare smiled, eyeing the scratches. “It's a guess, but I bet if you touched that, pretty soon you'd be seeing pixies. We had a case once, not too long ago, where a mescaline addict killed a family by setting their house on fire. It was the drug that led us to him.”
“Thought they don't make mescaline any more. It's not economical.”
“True. He was chewing Peyote buttons, dried out cuts of the cactus. His hideout stank of them. When the detectives caught him, he was staring at a garbage can. I doubt he ever realized that he had killed that poor family.”
Terrick sniffed at the gash. “It doesn't smell like the residue in the house.”
“The scent isn't exactly right, like it's mixed with something else. It would make sense that the scent should be in the house too, unless it's from a different source.” Clare took one more sniff of the pine-scented residue and sealed the jar. “What else is there?”
Terrick pulled his gun from its holster, holding it low in front of him. “Nail polish remover and mind bending drugs being found in trees. This is too damned weird for me.”
Clare took a long swig from her water bottle. “Don't you love a good mystery?”
“I like crime the way it should be. There's a crime and a criminal. I catch the criminal and they go to jail. I'm old school, girl.”
“No, those alpha males in Worcester are archaic in a bad way. You're more of a John Wayne type of old school. Right is right and all that.”
Clare took the lead along the path through the woods. The narrow leaf-covered track opened wider as they walked away from the house. There was a crisp scent in the air, more fresh than musty and overbearing as it had been at the Morris house. Clare almost felt as though this were just another pleasant walk in the woods, were it not for the nagging sense of something wrong in the back of her mind and her companion wielding a handgun.
Occasionally, Terrick would stop and comment on footprints. There were no more scratches, probably because of the wider path, she supposed, and then the path ended.
Clare stepped out onto the tracks of the BB&G railway. Silence. The bright sun shining down on her gave no warmth.
Terrick scuffed around in the nettles at the side of the track. “That's it then. End of the line. Our killer could have gone anywhere from here. Worcester for instance. Or your house.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Goes past your place, this track,” Terrick added. “Just an observation. So what do you want to do now?”
“Get these samples to the lab and do a little digging around of my own. It's time to find out where the fox stores its kills.”
Chapter Ten
Another restless night and Clare was back in the precinct. The events of the weekend had conspired to make her forget that she had a fixed and ultimately futile interview only three days before. While she expected the lewd references and chauvinistic putdowns just out of earshot, this time she was on a mission.
The labyrinthine hallways of Worcester Police Department were uncharacteristically clogged with refuse, fallen bulletins lying like leaf litter on yesterday's forest floor. Discarded plastic coffee cups and stirrers in nooks instead of bins, the stale liquid within full of congealed creamer. She gulped her water instead. It was not that people couldn't move about, but having been used to a certain level of disarray in her place of work, Clare was surprised the standard had fallen yet further.
Getting into the lab before anybody else, Clare was afforded first crack at the equipment in some measure of privacy. The samples were prepared and in the mass spectrometer before Alison showed up with Helen and Sunny close behind.
Helen nodded toward her office, the offer of privacy unspoken.
“No thanks, I'm fine. I just needed a little time away from this place.”
“Are you sure? I can't have my team working at any less than a hundred and ten percent.”
Clare indicated her desk, information spread about in haphazard fashion. “I'm already on it. Maybe I should just forget about detective work. I was always best at this job, anyway.”
Helen smiled. “Good. Well, work hard, team. Drinks are on me tonight. Daniel's playing the Lucky Dog.”
“Acosador? The medical examiner?”
Quietly, Helen added, “He's got a soft spot for you, Clare. He phoned up earlier asking for you.”
Clare controlled her breathing, feeling perspiration sprout on her brow. Helen had already been in? Did she know what Clare was doing? In silence, she hoped the flush would be mistaken for embarrassment over male interest.
“Always the matchmaker, aren't you? I have to go down and see him, actually. Thanks for the information, boss. That'll make everything comfortable down there.”
'Down there' was not all that far away. One flight of stairs and about a hundred meters led Clare to the morgue, home to Daniel Acosador, the resident Medical Examiner. There had been others over the years, but Daniel had risen to prominence following his transfer in.
Other than his medical prowess, Daniel was an acclaimed musician. The multiple facets of his personality were a mystery to women. Many had hoped to unlock them, only for him to show disinterest. So how Helen knew he held an interest for her was beyond Clare. She pressed the buzzer, feeling the vibration as she held the button a little too long.
The door opened inward, Daniel Acosador motioning her thro
ugh. Not one to waste time on words, he turned away. Clare couldn't help but notice the way the muscles of his shoulders bunched through his greens beneath that long brown ponytail; what was most alluring about the man was he appeared to have no conscious understanding of how wild he drove women. Even Clare was not unaffected.
“I'm glad you came,” he said in that rich baritone that melted hearts. Daniel never turned, only halting at the wall of drawers in which rested the unfortunate deceased. His jaw clenched and unclenched beneath the beard that threatened to sprout in all directions, yet accentuated his allure. The twelve stainless steel doors were spotless, much as the rest of the room. They reminded Clare of one of those gameshows. Pick a box and win a prize, she thought as she looked the room over.
Daniel turned and Clare realized she was staring again. She pushed the ever-loose strand of hair back over her ear. “What was it you needed? I don't normally get summoned to the 'cradle of death'.”
Daniel smiled at the honorific. Everybody used it. “I wish you were down here on purely social reasons, Miss Rosser. However, we have a quandary. One you might well be interested in.” He pulled open the second drawer from the right, middle row. The steel slab rolled out in near-silence, respectful of its passenger. Clare was thankful for the sterile and frigid nature of the room. This should have reeked, she thought, but nothing overlaid the scent of industrial cleaner.
“That's awfully small,” Clare said of the sheet-covered lump on the slab.
Daniel poked at the body with dispassionate hands. “True. Wait 'til you see it. There's not a lot left. Our unfortunate friend here would have suffered at the end.” Daniel turned back to the sheet. “Have a look but be warned, this is not your usual victim.”
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