The Wicked Hour

by Alice Blanchard

  At their high school graduation ceremony, Bella played Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor to wild applause. The Brilliant Misfits, five best friends, celebrated that night by meeting in the woods. They got drunk and stoned in Funland’s old derailed train, slid down the infamous Tongue, and ended up perched on the edge of the Bridge to the Future, predicting where they’d all be ten years from now.

  Bella’s big dream was to become a pop star and travel around the world. Nobody really knew her, she complained that night—not the real Bella. Instead, all of the adults in her life projected their own hopes and dreams on to her. Her shyness and reticence created a blank canvas on which they splashed their own delusions—they told her she was a gifted prodigy, a future superstar, a blazing comet. “But I’m not who they think I am,” Bella said bitterly that night on the bridge, one hand clutching the neck of her violin case. “I’m not this whimsical little sprite—this magical elfin genius. I’m a lazy slob. I’m a greedy monster. I want to conquer the fucking world. I want to lie in bed for a thousand years.”

  Bobby lit a joint and Max passed around a bottle of his parents’ tequila, and the five of them got stoned and drunk together, laughing and reminiscing. Eventually Natalie and Bobby wandered off to make out, and at some point, Natalie could hear Bella playing Debussy in the woods, but she assumed that Bella was hanging out with Max and Adam. Then the playing stopped, and Natalie lost her virginity.

  All hell broke loose when Bella went missing shortly after midnight. Natalie’s father, Joey, became involved in the extensive search for the missing girl, and at one point Mr. Striver came under suspicion. But the prime suspect was Nesbitt Rose, Hunter Rose’s younger brother, who’d had cognitive problems since birth and was by his own admission the last person to have seen Bella alive.

  Hounded by the media, with the town in an uproar—three weeks after Bella’s disappearance, on a drizzly rainy night—Nesbitt sucked on the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and put an end to his misery. Three months later, Bella’s father started receiving letters containing Polaroids that proved that his “missing” daughter was still alive. She was fine, she said. She just had to get away and be her own person. Natalie also received a few letters from Bella, explaining why she ran away. Mostly she blamed it on her ambitious, overbearing father. She said she didn’t want to be a violin soloist anymore. As a consequence, the police labeled her a runaway, and the missing persons case was closed.

  Eventually, the notes and snapshots from Bella stopped arriving, and no one ever saw or heard from her again. Natalie still missed her. There was a hole in her life where Bella belonged.

  “Why do you bring that up?” Luke asked now. “Do you think it’s related?”

  “No. Maybe. It’s too early to say. I just remember the pressure Bella was under to perform. To achieve. How hard her father pushed her, until he finally pushed her away permanently.”

  “Her father was a suspect, wasn’t he?”

  Natalie nodded. “Along with Nesbitt Rose. But they were proven innocent after the letters started to arrive.”

  Her phone rang. It was Augie.

  “We hit pay dirt,” he told her. “The victim’s wallet and clothing were farther down in the dumpster.”

  “We’ll be right over,” she told him and hung up.

  10

  The police impound lot was located on the outskirts of town, where historic brick warehouses sat vacant and boarded up. The cement compound was surrounded by a ten-foot security fence. Vehicles were impounded for a variety of reasons, everything from criminal activity to parking violations, but the department also used the facility to store evidence that was too bulky to keep in the station house—things like safes and snowmobiles and dumpsters.

  Natalie waited in her car for Luke to pull up behind her at the entrance of the multilevel parking garage. The guard waved them inside. They found parking on sublevel one and took an elevator to the ground floor. Luke accidentally brushed his hand against hers as they both reached for the button. “Sorry.” His voice was tight. She could feel her face flushing as she depressed the button.

  He studied her for a moment. “I saw Callahan’s truck out by your place the other day.”

  She looked at him, startled, and then looked away, trying to hide her emotions, but she could feel her neck flush a deeper shade of red. “Max Callahan? Yeah, he fixed a roof leak last summer. I’ve been thinking about renovating the house. Maybe knock down a few walls. Open up the space. Max is advising me about which contractors to hire and stuff,” she said awkwardly, more than a bit miffed at him for opening this topic of conversation right before the elevator doors dinged open.

  Luke gallantly held the door for her.

  “Why do you ask?” she said irritably, stepping out into the hallway.

  “Just curious.” His slightly amused smile bothered her.

  She stored away her mixed feelings about their relationship and put on a take-charge expression. Together they walked through a maze of hallways toward the impound lot’s processing center on the ground floor—a cavernous cement room with three large vehicle bays and a loading dock at one end. Today the air reeked of liquefied garbage.

  “Lieutenant. Natalie.” Augie greeted them at the door.

  Detectives Augie Vickers and Lenny Labruzzo wore orange hazmat suits splashed with foul-smelling juices, and the stench nearly knocked Natalie off her feet—a tough combination of oniony sweat, dirty feet, and weeks-old garbage.

  “I know, I know,” Augie acknowledged with a chuckle. “Give me a root canal. Kill me quick.” In his late forties, the hardworking detective was a lifelong bachelor who lived in a man cave of a house, crammed with sports memorabilia, comfortable broad chairs, and state-of-the-art electronics. He had a thick neck and broad shoulders from lifting weights—another fad he’d thrown himself into with abandon. Augie was dogged and methodical, and whatever he decided to do, he would see it through with grim determination to the bitter end.

  Lenny, on the other hand, was more laid-back, the type of guy who took life’s complications in stride. He’d just become a grandfather and was a few years away from retirement, and no one in the department knew what they were going to do without him. At work, Lenny and Augie referred to themselves as the Fossils.

  Lenny was on his knees peering into the empty dumpster like a cave. A magnetized flashlight was stuck to the inside wall, illuminating the grimy interior. Lenny was absorbed with his task, using delicate brushstrokes to apply iridescent fingerprint powder to the metal surfaces.

  “Check this out,” Augie said excitedly, leading them through a maze of leaky trash bags and semi-organized stacks of garbage.

  The main bay area resembled a mechanic’s shop. The large open layout contained three vehicle bays equipped with air tools and work lights suspended from the ceiling. The closer they got to the dumpster, the more nasty undertones Natalie could detect—burnt pizza, raw garlic, human sewage. The two detectives had spent the last three hours raking and sifting through the foul-smelling stuff, differentiating the useless from the pertinent, the irrelevant from the potentially important evidence.

  They stepped over assorted piles of debris—beer bottles, paper products, maggot-infested half-eaten sandwiches, clumps of human hair from a styling salon, shards of glass, broken umbrellas, fast-food containers, two dead rats, a ton of cigarette butts and scattered coffee grounds, empty pizza boxes, and jagged pieces of scrap metal.

  “Now for the important stuff,” Augie said, squatting down.

  Natalie and Luke knelt down next to him.

  Augie handed Natalie a sealed evidence bag. “We found this zipped leather purse with a set of car keys inside, along with some cash, her driver’s license and registration, two credit cards, an ATM card, and her medical insurance card. As you can see, the picture on her license matches the victim. Her name is Morgan Chambers. She’s twenty-four years old and rents an apartment in Chaste Falls.”

  “We need to get her picture ID out there as soon
as possible to the officers who are door-to-dooring,” Natalie said. “They can ask around and find out where she was staying here in town, maybe locate her car. Did you find her cell phone?”

  “Not yet, but we’re still looking. And get this,” Augie said, picking up a large see-through evidence bag. “We think this is the outfit she was wearing last night—Wonder Woman. The shop’s name is on the label. We also found a pair of gold hoop earrings, a watch, and a ring that might belong to her, plus a silver necklace with some sort of Wiccan charm on it. We’re not positive all the jewelry’s hers, but Lenny is going to take everything down to the station and process it for prints and trace later.”

  “Can I see that?” Natalie asked, and Augie handed her the bag with the jewelry inside. “If she was attacked, then her attacker didn’t take any of her jewelry, cash, or credit cards. And in fact, someone must’ve removed all her jewelry and dropped it in the dumpster. Why?”

  “It’s pretty weird,” Augie agreed.

  Natalie swiped through the images on her phone until she came to a close-up of Morgan’s tattoo, then held up the silver necklace for comparison. “The Wiccan symbol on the pendant and the tattoo don’t correspond.” She handed the evidence bag back to Augie. “So we’re looking for a Wonder Woman on the surveillance tapes, then?”

  Luke took out his phone. “I’ll let Mike know. He’s in charge of reviewing the tapes.”

  “And we have to look at the possibility that she might’ve been attacked elsewhere,” Natalie said, “then was transported to the dumpster inside a trash bag.” She shuddered at the thought. “Maybe she tore her way out of the bag before she died.”

  “We didn’t find any torn-open trash bags nearby,” Augie said. “We didn’t find any of her belongings inside a trash bag, either. It was all scattered loose around the vicinity of the body where she lay in the dumpster. We photographed and documented everything as we removed it layer by layer. It’s sort of like being an archeologist.”

  Natalie studied the evidence bag containing the Wonder Woman costume. “Nothing looks ripped or torn, except for the tights … small runs in the knees and a few spots of blood where she fell down or was pushed. It corresponds with the scrapes on the victim’s knees.”

  “There weren’t any corresponding scrapes on the palms of her hands, though,” Luke said. “If she was inebriated and fell down, you’d expect to find scrapes or bruises on the palms of her hands, right?”

  Natalie nodded. “Maybe the perp forced her to kneel.” She cringed at the thought, goose bumps prickling her arms, and then studied the evidence bag. There was a pair of women’s cotton panties inside sporting an illustration of a violin string with a few words printed above it: “This is my G-string.”

  “Huh. A violin joke,” she said, remembering Bella’s lame jokes. Violinists aren’t violint. Don’t be an f-hole. A violinist never frets. This music is R-rated for sax and violins.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed distractingly overhead.

  “Anyway, most of the trash in this dumpster came from nearby businesses,” Augie said, waving his hand over the debris. “According to the canvassing officers, most of the local establishments typically toss their trash after closing time, but last night was exceptionally busy, so they had their employees do a couple of garbage runs. So far, none of them noticed anything unusual. That area is poorly lit, and they generally use the top lid to deposit the trash, since the side door jams a lot.”

  “We need to look more closely at those surveillance tapes for anyone carrying a trash bag, and interview every single person who threw away trash last night.”

  “I’ll let Mike know,” Luke said, taking out his phone.

  “So none of the employees that the guys have interviewed so far used the side door of the dumpster last night?” Natalie asked Augie.

  “It gets stuck, so they mostly use the top lid. And the later it got, the fuller the dumpster became, until they had to leave the Hefty bags on the ground. Most of the shops closed around midnight, but the pubs and bars stayed open until two or three in the morning. Some of them didn’t close at all.” He shrugged. “Halloween’s Eve.”

  “Did you spot any other bloodstains on the clothing?” Natalie asked.

  “Just what you see on the tights.”

  “Those are preliminary findings,” Lenny said from the dumpster, his voice echoing through the bays. “I’ll be testing everything with luminol back at the station. You can’t block out the sunlight well enough here.”

  Outside, beyond the open doors of the bays, sunlight hammered down on the asphalt and the blue sky bristled with birds. “Looks like all the elements of the costume are accounted for,” Natalie said, returning her attention to the evidence bag. “Tights. Dress. Belt. Armbands. Tiara. Everything’s a size two. Size seven shoes.”

  “Did you find any weapons in the dumpster?” Luke asked.

  “No, but we’re still looking,” Augie said.

  Natalie and Luke both stood up and thanked them.

  Out in the hallway, she told her boss, “Morgan’s father is listed on her medical insurance card. I looked up his address online. The Chambers live in the same town, Chaste Falls. I need to drive up there and inform the family.”

  “Meanwhile, we’ll start tracking her time line,” Luke said as they headed for the elevators. “Find out exactly where she went last night, and who she talked to. How she ended up in this situation. I’ll have Brandon follow up on the hand stamps. He can organize a team of officers to interview the staff of all the clubs, bars, restaurants, and events she attended. Then, as soon as you’ve informed the family, we’ll get her image out to the media ASAP. We’ll use her driver’s license photograph.” He depressed the elevator button—this time she let him. “See if any other witnesses come forward.”

  They stepped into the elevator together, and it seemed to take forever for the brushed aluminum doors to slide shut. They fell silent as the elevator descended. Luke stared dead ahead, while Natalie glanced at his profile, wondering if he’d changed his mind about them.

  The first time she ever met Luke, he was a scrawny kid with a friendly smile, and every single one of his T-shirts had holes or rips in them. His sneakers were threadbare. He chewed on his nails. He was lousy at directions. He celebrated when he passed his driver’s license test at sixteen. He bought a beat-up Chevy Nova and got lost on the country roads while blasting the B-52s’ “Dirty Back Road” on his crummy RadioShack speakers.

  When they were kids, despite being eight years apart, Natalie and Luke used to sit together in the hot summer sun or on a snow-dusted porch, just talking. Just shooting the shit. Luke was the mirror opposite of her ex-boyfriend Zack. He loved old-fashioned tales of heroism and held an image in his head of what a man should be. Strong. Brave. Daring. Sometimes he walked around as if he were wearing a superhero cape.

  At the end of every conversation, he would hold out his thumb and Natalie would squeeze it. Thumb squeeze. Their old ritual. Offered instead of a hug. Sometimes Natalie held out her thumb and Luke squeezed it. A sign of loyalty and forever friendship between two mismatched kids—so close and yet years apart.

  Luke never liked Zack, which should’ve been her first clue, since he was a great judge of character. Luke could find your inflection point just by looking at you too long. He could sense deception when you just had to look away. When you could no longer return the probing stare. When it came to Zack, Luke avoided the topic, as if it were off-limits for him to have an opinion one way or the other. But his body language spoke for him. At first, she thought he was being protective like a brother; only in retrospect did she realize he was perhaps a little jealous.

  Luke was one of the few people in the world Natalie could honestly be herself around. They’d spent a lot of time together as kids, but whenever they met outside of the confines of the Lockharts’ backyard, Luke pretended not to know her. Natalie caught on quickly. She did likewise, even though it confused her.

  Now their ages di
dn’t seem to matter. Adulthood leveled the playing field.

  She sensed him now, his body, standing next to her in the elevator. She had to acknowledge there was something going on between them. Something old, but also something new. Each time she thought about it, her blood thrummed a little deeper.

  The elevator bounced slightly as it landed on sublevel one.

  They got out and walked to their respective vehicles.

  “Call me if you need anything,” Luke said, getting into his Ford Ranger and driving away.

  11

  Chaste Falls was located thirty miles north of Burning Lake, about a half-hour drive past leafy woods, sprawling farmsteads, and gray stone walls. Natalie tried to stay focused, but soon tendrils of self-doubt began to creep into her thoughts. All kinds of conflicting feelings nestled in her heart, and she burst into tears. Like a grief-stricken bratty kid, she’d dissolved all of her most important relationships, right when she needed them the most. She missed her family, which had been torn from her. She missed her friends. She imagined Luke kissing her with his soft warm lips and felt that tender spot she’d always had for him beginning to swell. He was loose-limbed and athletic, funny and ironic in just the right ways. She’d always had her pick of guys, but Luke was special. They fit perfectly together—she couldn’t explain it. Put simply, he “got” her, and she “got” him.

  Now a radical thought popped into her head. Part of her wanted to get married and have kids, to dive into a whole new life with Luke. This was no joke. She suddenly wanted the ring and everything. She almost laughed. How ironic. How corny. All her life, Natalie had strived for independence and strength. Back in elementary school, when every other girl wanted to be a princess, Natalie aspired to become like her dad, Officer Joey Lockhart, and catch the bad guys. She saw herself as the hero of her own story, not a princess bride. Certainly not a pregnant princess bride.

  Now she brushed away her absurd tears and looked around for a tissue, but there weren’t any, so she used the sleeve of her jacket to wipe her wet face. She detected a whiff of decay on her cuff and grimaced. Great, she’d forgotten to change after the autopsy. She berated herself for this oversight, then pushed aside her messy, contradictory emotions and took the next exit off the highway.