The Equinox

by M J Preston

  “Yeah, they were running for the woods between our farms. I think I’ve got them beat. If we get into the woods, we might be able to kill them before they do any more damage. Can you grab your gun?”

  Hopper looked unsure but stepped out onto the porch to take a look. He moved almost mechanically. He couldn’t see the copse of woods from the front of the house and was about to walk around to the side as he spoke. “Okay, well –”

  Wakeman brought the gun up and planted the double barrel squarely against his neighbor’s neck. “Do not move or I will kill you where you stand.”

  Logan was only minutes away now. Van Dyke Road was twenty-four miles long and stretched over three jurisdictions. It was a concession road connecting farmers to their fields and to each other, but it was also a secondary highway. Logan guessed that Donald Wakeman was already over at Hopper’s, and hoped that he and Kennedy weren’t walking into a disaster.

  5

  “Get on your knees,” Wakeman ordered.

  “Mr. Wakeman, why are you doing this?” Hopper was shaking.

  “I’m not screwing around!”

  Wakeman shoved the double barrel into his neck hard enough to break the skin. Hopper pressed down onto his knees. His mind reeled. His neighbor must have seen him, and now the crazy fuck was going to execute him right on his porch. He stared down at the boards ready to surrender himself to death.

  “Now lay down on your belly.”

  Hopper lay down. Inside he felt some relief that this would end and that he would no longer live in fear. He didn’t protest: he just put his hands in front of him and prepared for the end.

  “What did you do to my boy?” Wakeman asked.

  Hopper didn’t respond, instead waited for Wakeman to shoot him.

  “I asked you a question, Hopper!” He shouted and cracked the side of Hopper’s head with the gun barrel.” What did you do to my boy?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hopper croaked. His eyes were ringing.

  “Did you touch him, you depraved freak?” Wakeman screamed.

  “I barely know your son. There must be some kind of misunderstanding, Mr. Wakeman! The last time I saw your son was when we talked a month ago at the feed mill,” he managed, and then thought, Why would he think I touched his son? There was a moment of silence. When Wakeman spoke again, his voice edged with doubt. “You never touched him?”

  He fell silent for almost a minute. Hopper remained perfectly still, mute but for his breathing.

  Could Wakeman be having second thoughts?

  If so, Hopper decided to drive them home. “No, I haven’t. In fact, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He started to climb back up to his hands and knees.

  “Not so fast!” Donald Wakeman planted a heavy work boot into Hopper’s back and shoved him back to the floor. Hopper grunted. “Let’s talk about what you were burying in the back of your property.”

  Oh my God! His boy must have seen me!

  “Well? How ‘bout it, Mr. Hopper?”

  “I don’t kn-”

  “Lies!” Wakeman thundered and shoved the gun hard into the back of his neck again. “You’ll tell me, or I’ll shoot you.”

  Lying there on his belly, close enough to see the paint peeling in flecks from his deck, Hopper thought ridiculously, I was going to strip and repaint this in a week or so. I guess I won’t have to worry about it now.

  “The police are on their way. Question is whether or not they will be arriving to a prisoner or a corpse.”

  “That’s murder,” Hopper mumbled.

  “It will be self-defense. It will also be justice served.” Wakeman’s voice became cold and calculated. “My boy saw you burying a body in your cornfield, Hopper. Was it Tommy Parkins?”

  Hopper said nothing. Oh, for fuck sake.

  “Here’s the thing, Mr. Hopper: my boy saw you, but you are going to confess it to me before the police arrive. My boy has seen enough horror to last him a lifetime. What you have put him through is more than I can bear, so if there is to be a trial, you will confess to me so that my boy does not have to face you. If you don’t, there will be no trial. Just the body of a murderer who tried to overpower his neighbor after the discovery of a crime.”

  “Look. Mr. Wakeman. Donald. I don’t know what –”

  “Lies,” Wakeman thundered again, and this time cracked Hopper in the cheek with the barrel of his gun. “My patience is wearing thin! Maybe I’ll just blow your balls off and be done with it.” Then he booted Hopper in the side.

  “Okay, okay. Stop,” he wheezed. “I’ll talk!”

  “Was it Tommy Parkins?” He cracked him a third time. “Was it?”

  “Yes,” he barely managed, thinking his skull might be fractured. I’ll probably die before the cops get here anyway.

  “You killed and buried him?”

  “Yes.” Hopper was shaking now. That last crack in the head had done most damage: now he swam in and out of consciousness. His eyes blurred. Part of him – a small part that could still somehow maintain his thought processes – wished that Wakeman would just shoot him. He didn’t care whether he lived or died; if he did live, the price would be hefty.

  The last thing he saw as he retreated into himself was a drop of his own blood splash down on the weathered deck. As it did, the dried wood absorbed the crimson tissue, and it spread like the grisly stain of a madman.

  I wonder how long blood would protect deck board from UV rays, he mused.

  6

  Put down the gun now!” Logan yelled. He hadn’t drawn his pistol yet. With his lowered left hand, he motioned Kennedy to stay calm.

  Donald Wakeman didn’t see or hear the cars skid into the driveway when he cracked Hopper in the side of his skull. Standing over the man he might have killed with the barrel of his rifle, he felt adrenaline started to course out of him, and he began to shake.

  “He confessed,” he said and stepped away from Hopper. “He killed Tommy Parkins.”

  “Step away from him and hand Constable Kennedy your gun, Mr. Wakeman. I’m not gonna ask you again.” Logan reached down and placed his hand on his sidearm.

  Wakeman blinked, stepped back and moved toward the young constable’s car, his arms stretched out, the shotgun in his right hand.

  Kennedy grabbed the gun first and had Wakeman lean over the hood of the car as he placed the shotgun in the front seat of the cruiser. He came back around, cuffed Wakeman, and said, “I’m only doing this until we figure out what’s going on, Mr. Wakeman.”

  Logan stopped over the body on the deck. “Mr. Hopper, can you hear me?”

  Hopper stared at Logan. Without changing his expression, he said, “Yes.”

  “Can you get up?”

  For a second, he didn’t move – then he rolled onto his back with a deep sigh. A moment after that he managed to sit up. His head still swimming, but it was easing up. The cut on his cheek stopped bleeding. The side of his bald crown had swelled up turning peroxide brown.

  “Can I have a smoke?” he asked.

  Logan was ready to knock him down if he tried anything. “Okay, go ahead.”

  He reached into his breast pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The first three cigarettes he pulled out were broken, but the last was flat and bent like a hockey stick. He straightened it out, then lit up and inhaled.

  Logan stood over him, waiting for the big man to gain his bearings, checking how Pete Kennedy was making out with Wakeman from the corner of his eye. This had been the strangest afternoon he’d ever seen, one he thought would not be topped.

  “Crush out your cigarette and place your hands behind your back, Mr. Hopper.”

  Logan pulled out his cuffs as the fat man snuffed the cigarette out on the porch. He snapped the bracelets on him and had him get up. He was leading him back to his own crui
ser when the cavalry came in lights ablaze and sirens wailing. There were four cars in all, Mick in the lead. The dust of Van Dyke Road swirled in the air dramatically around the screech of tires.

  With Hopper secured in the back of the car, he went and spoke to Wakeman. Mick stood behind Logan, listening as the farmer recounted the story about his son coming home. The tale the child had told and what Hopper had confessed to him. Logan scribbled this all down on a notepad. “Could you take us to the body?”

  “I’m not sure of the location. I could probably find it,” Wakeman said.

  “Could Derek?”

  “No! Absolutely not,” Wakeman exploded.

  “Okay, Don, calm down,” he said, then looked at Mick. “I guess it’s plan B.”

  Mick didn’t understand. “Plan B?”

  Logan turned and walked over to his own car. Hopper sat quietly in the backseat, looking straight ahead. Mick stayed with Wakeman and watched his boss open the back door of the cruiser. He was leaning in, talking to Hopper – and then without any announcement to his Officers or his 2IC he got into the cruiser and began to drive it around the back of the house toward the cornfield.

  The other Officers watched and waited.

  Logan maneuvered the cruiser through a narrow pathway in the cornfield, one side of the cruiser knocking down a stalk now and then. For the most part, the path led the way, and Hopper didn’t have to say much.

  When they came out on the other side, there was a wood line that ran parallel to the field. It was here that Hopper told him to stop: if he hadn’t he would have been right on top of it.

  “This is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Logan got out of the cruiser, opened the trunk and pulled out a roll of yellow police tape. Looking down he saw the fallen branch Hopper had dragged there only an hour earlier and used it to anchor the tape. The wind was coming up, and in the distance, he could see the threatening black clouds. He leaned in and picked up the handset.

  “Base, you have a copy,” Logan asked.

  “Go ahead, Chief,” Sabrina replied.

  “I require 11-44 at my position immediately. I will be dispatching the Duty Officer back to your location with a prisoner. Ensure that you use Land Line to pass the relevant info. Copy?”

  “Copy that, Chief.”

  Sabrina was a professional. She would contact the Coroner and have him moving immediately. Logan hoped that some of the locals with police scanners had missed the commotion, but he doubted it. In no time, word would spread like wildfire.

  He climbed back into the cruiser and drove back around front to get on with the business at hand.

  As he stepped out of the car, he could feel their eyes upon him. He took a brief glance at Hopper, then walked back up to the porch, and called his Officers into a scrum. He lit up a cigar as they gathered around. Collectively a sense of loss enveloped them, evident on their downturned faces.

  “Okay, I’m not going to mince words. We have a gravesite on the west end of the property, and I would speculate that it is the missing boy, Tommy Parkins. However, we haven’t confirmed this, so I want everyone to act like professionals and stay focused. I want rotating sentries on the hour at each end of Van Dyke Road. Nobody gets in except police and officials. Who we got out there right now, Mick?”

  “Nero and Hill,” Mick replied.

  “Okay, Mick, you brief them when they come in.”

  “Okay, Chief.”

  “Pete, I want you to transfer Hopper into your cruiser and take him into town and keep him in holding until we’re done here. Jim West can accompany you. I don’t want anybody letting their guard down. Two officers accompany the prisoner at all times.”

  “Chief, I’ve got Mr. Wakeman in my cruiser,” Kennedy reminded him.

  “I know. Cut him loose; he probably wants to get over to Emergency to see his boy. Get him into his truck if he can drive. If not, one officer can accompany him. You can tell him I want his butt planted in a chair in my office tomorrow morning.” Logan paused. “Questions?”

  “How many men are you going to require for the recovery?” Mick asked.

  “Nobody is allowed on the crime scene except me, Mick and the Coroner until we’ve secured it. Also, I want the house secured. No one enters until I give the word.”

  “Do we have a motive, Chief?” Corporal Steel asked.

  “This pure speculation, folks, but I’m guessing that the motive was sexual in nature. That said, Pete, you get onto the wire and start checking the background on this Hopper, see if he has any priors. Check VICAP, and run him through the Predators database.” Logan relit his cigar, which had gone out during the scrum. “Okay, that’s it for now. We have our work cut out for us, folks, so the last thing I want to do is be chasing people. Get to work.”

  The scrum broke off, and Collins began assigning tasks to each officer. Once detailed, they wasted no time getting to work, mindful that they were now a cog in the gears that drove this investigation. As they went about their tasks, there was a looming awareness that a dark chapter in their town’s history had been started and things would likely not be the same for some time to come.

  Logan watched his officers with a certain amount of pride. Even at this moment in time, he could take comfort in the fact that they were professionals and that the investigation was now their focal point. He crushed out the cigar and took control of the crime scene.

  ***

  Chapter 4 - The Excavation

  1

  The crime scene was secure. Officers were positioned at either end of the road, and a parameter had been set on the other side of the woods connecting to Donald Wakeman’s land. All officers from the Thomasville police department were on site except for Sandra Hardy, who had the onerous task of escorting John Parkins home. There, she waited with John and Olivia Parkins, who understood that the search for their missing son was now out of their hands. John Parkins had wanted to come, but Mick told him in the kindest terms that it would not be possible. Now all they could do was pray that they were wrong.

  “How long were you in Homicide, Dave?” Mick asked.

  “Ten years.” Logan tapped the cigar on the window ledge. “When we get in there, keep your eyes peeled. I only want the three of us there to keep our people from trampling all over the place. If you see anything in the area we are working, don’t touch it: let me know, and we’ll mark it.”

  Mick nodded and scanned Van Dyke Road for the coroner’s vehicle. It was set to arrive any minute. He must have looked at his watch at least fifteen times since Logan informed him that the three of them would be on the recovery party. Constable Nero had commandeered Mick’s vehicle to provide an escort for Donald Wakeman to get to the Emergency and see how Derek was doing. As a result, he sat beside Logan in his cruiser.

  Logan told him everything he knew, which was not much more than he’d already put together. He knew Tommy Parkins very well. He had, in fact, gone to school with John Parkins and played Softball with him in the summer. He and wife Nancy had just been to dinner with the family two weeks before Tommy had gone missing. John Parkins was a decent guy, never a wrong word to say about anyone. Tommy was a good kid, too; always polite, even-tempered, and certainly not deserving of this – but then what kid was? Two weeks ago he gave the boy ride into town and now it was almost a certainty that he was buried beneath the soil of Hopper’s farm.

  Logan was puffing away on one of his rancid cigars. Mick cared a great deal for Logan, but the cigar smoke was something he could do without. He was an ex-smoker, which in Logan’s book made him worse than a Jehovah’s Witness.

  Mick cracked the windows an inch or two, and a relieving flow of fresh air whispered in. Logan just sat there puffing and puffing, not saying a word. Mick wondered what was running through his mind. He was tough to judge sometimes. In one instance Logan could be extremely jovial, but at times severe and dark –
not surprisingly right now, really, given the circumstances. Regardless, he had grown to admire the man who replaced Chief Jim Spencer. Most of the townspeople had not taken to an outsider, but Logan came into Thomasville and turned it around by expanding the force and prying more funding out of the always frugal City Hall.

  There had been whisperings within the usual sewing circles. Many of his friends insisted that the town council should have appointed Mick to the position of chief, but Mick just smiled and kept silent. On a whim, they may have been willing to place him in power, but they would have scrutinized him for his age. And besides: it really did not fit into his career plans.

  On the day Logan took over he invited him into his office for a sit-down. He took a seat as Logan looked over a file that sat on his desk. “You have been on the force for six years? From what I see here you have an exemplary record. I also see that you’ve taken a couple of extra criminology courses.”

  “Yes,” Mick answered, “and thank you.”

  Logan looked up from the file, and an unexpected seriousness fell over his face. “Alright, I just wanna make sure that we’re on the same level here. I know that some people think you should have been up next in line for Chief Spencer’s job. But you and I both know that there is no way that an Officer with less than ten years’ service would be considered for such a position. Seeing that I’ve taken that job, I want to make sure this won’t create some kind of an issue between us.”

  Mick sighed, irritated by the question. “Look, Chief, I’ll be frank with you. Even if I were offered the position, I would have turned it down. I plan on staying in Thomasville for a few more years, gaining experience and advancing my education. My career plans are outside of here. So, to answer your question: we’re not going to have a problem.”

  Logan sat quietly for a moment or two. Then he smiled, stood up and stuck out his hand. “My friends call me Dave.”

  “Mick,” he replied shaking his hand vigorously.

  “Alright, Mick. On Chief Spencer’s recommendations I am appointing you my 2IC – and from now on you’re Sgt. Collins, so get that uniform changed up by tomorrow.”