Speak the Dead

by Grant McKenzie

  Buying the condo was one of the smartest moves Jersey had made. Old Town had been in the early stages of transformation from forgotten to trendy when he raised enough for a down payment and locked himself into a long-term commitment he never thought he’d have the nerve for.

  Located a short walk from popular Waterfront Park and nestled in an inner-city neighborhood that boasted some of the best restaurants Portland had to offer, Jersey’s condo was now worth close to double what he paid for it. If he had actually known what he was doing, rather than being blessed by dumb luck, he could be the new poster boy for police smarts.

  With hair still dripping from a quick shower, Jersey dashed out the front door and climbed into the passenger seat of Amarela’s unmarked, department-issue, four-door cruiser parked illegally at the yellow curb.

  Dressed in clean blue jeans, white sneakers, plain black T-shirt, and a midnight-blue blazer, Jersey looked like a huskier version of Billy Joel from his Glass Houses tour. Unlike the piano man, however, Jersey wore the jacket to cover a regulation Glock 17 automatic attached to his belt in a flat combat holster specially designed for concealed carry. The jacket also helped move eyes away from the unwelcome bulge of his belly.

  Jersey liked to think of the Glock 17 as his deterrent gun since it had the size and heft to make the smarter criminals think twice. They didn’t always have that reaction to his backup piece, the so-called Baby Glock, even though it was just as deadly. Perception can be everything.

  Jersey finger-combed his wet hair. “Thanks for the pit stop. I feel human again.”

  “No problem.” Amarela put the car in gear. “Dressed like you were, I would’ve had to make you ride in the back.”

  “Now that’s cold, I know what kind of people ride back there.” Jersey paused for effect. “Mostly your exes, right?”

  Amarela’s right hand was a blur as she released it from its two o’clock position on the steering wheel and punched Jersey hard on the upper arm. Her knuckles were like tiny pickaxes.

  Jersey winced as his muscle spasmed from the attack, but he covered it with a laugh.

  “Why so sensitive?” he asked. “You and Clarissa break up again?”

  “Don’t talk to me about Clarissa.” Amarela repositioned her hands in the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions. “That bitch is out of my life for good.”

  “Isn’t that what you said last month before you took her back?”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  Amarela pouted. “It just was.”

  Jersey saw he was treading in dangerous water and decided to back down.

  “This why you couldn’t sleep?” he asked in a gentler tone.

  Amarela shrugged.

  “After work,” Jersey continued, “we’ll go to my place, order pizza, open a bottle of Scotch, and trash talk the fairer sex until you turn straight.”

  Amarela laughed. “It’ll take more than a bottle.”

  “I’ll open a cask,” said Jersey.

  Amarela released one hand from the steering wheel and held it palm up to her partner. Jersey slapped it in a high five.

  “SO TELL ME about this girl you met.” Amarela steered out of the busy downtown core, heading for the crowded interstate. “She gorgeous?”

  Jersey grinned. “More exotic, actually, with spiky blonde hair that I swear is as white as my kitchen cabinets, and she has the most amazing green eyes.”

  “Ooh, la, la. She sounds out of your league, partner.”

  Jersey shrugged. “Probably is, but…”

  “But?” Amarela prodded.

  “But there was something… a connection. It was weird, but we met over a dead body, and it just seemed right. She wasn’t freaked out by it, you know?”

  “Because she works with dead people in the funeral home?”

  “Yeah,” Jersey agreed. “I guess that’s it.”

  “So your ‘special connection’ is being cool around corpses?”

  Jersey scowled. “It’s more than that. She… I…”

  “Spit it out.”

  “I kissed her,” said Jersey. “It was a crazy impulse and a shock to both us.” He winced. “I just hope I haven’t scared her away.”

  “Well, well, aren’t you the romantic? A first kiss over the body of a warm corpse, how can this be anything but destiny?”

  Jersey slumped in his seat. “I’m not talking to you if you’re going to mock.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m happy for you. Really. What’s the point in looking good in leather pants if you’re not getting laid?”

  Turning his head away, Jersey gazed out the window. “That’s your apology?”

  “Come on, Jers,” she coaxed, stifling a laugh. “I’m sorry. What can I do to prove it?”

  Jersey shrugged.

  “Breakfast,” she said. “I’ll go through the drive-in and get you one of those greasy egg pancake things you like.”

  “With a hashbrown and large coffee?”

  “Yes!”

  Jersey turned forward again. “That’s a start.”

  the late Mr. and Mrs. Higgins owned a modest four-bedroom, two-story home in the tiny city of Maywood Park perched high on the east bank above Interstate 205.

  Surrounded on all sides by the sprawling city of Portland, Maywood Park was a unique, all-residential community that boasted a population of fewer than eight hundred, yet was still tenacious enough to fight several attempts over the years to be annexed by its expansive neighbor.

  With only three hundred homes spread across a total area of 0.17 square miles, it didn’t take Jersey and Amarela long to arrive at the Higgins’ residence. Amarela parked in the empty driveway of a double-car garage, the ubiquitous basketball hoop in the peak looking lonely and disused.

  “You bring keys?” Jersey swallowed his last sip of coffee and dropped the empty container into the dashboard cup holder—one of only two in the whole vehicle. Felons were not invited to enjoy backseat beverages during transport.

  Amarela lifted a clutch of keys from her pocket and made them jangle. “I left the ignition key in the car and took the rest.”

  Jersey looked up at the gleaming, power-washed vinyl siding and sighed. “Let’s go see what suburban bliss was trying to hide.”

  The home’s open front porch was wide enough to accommodate a couple of slope-backed Adirondack chairs and a round table perfectly sized for a pitcher of lemonade, a plate of tuna-fish sandwiches, and a bowl of potato chips on lazy Sunday afternoons.

  Amarela tried the keys in the front lock, while Jersey surveyed the quiet street lined with mature trees and mowed lawns.

  The neighborhood wasn’t cookie-cutter fresh like the latest subdivisions that continued to spring up around Portland’s borders. In fact, some of the homes were in sore need of TLC, but the mature shrubs, wide roads, and solid concrete sidewalks gave it a bygone character that Jersey found appealing.

  It was the kind of place where kids could still play street hockey without worrying about being run over by short-tempered drunks or drag-racing punks. Then again, judging by the age of the curious faces that peered out at him from behind twitching polyester curtains, Jersey didn’t know if there were any actual kids left in Maywood Park.

  “Got it.” Amarela pushed open the front door. “Don’t see an alarm system, so we’re good to go.”

  Jersey turned to follow his partner inside the house. “The neighbors are nosey. We may get company from the county sheriff’s office. This is their jurisdiction.”

  “Oh, goody,” said Amarela with a lascivious smirk. “I love me a girl in uniform.”

  “Oddly enough,” said Jersey. “So do I.”

  Amarela rolled her eyes. “I’ll take upstairs.”

  Jersey proceeded through an open archway on his right that led into the living room. Even though Mr. and Mrs. Higgins hadn’t been expecting unannounced company in the form of two homicide detectives, the place looked perfectly and unexcitingly normal.

 
; The square room was carpeted in a stain-resistant shade of milk-coffee Berber with matching three-person couch and two reading chairs. The furniture was aimed at a wood-burning fireplace with a dark-stained oak mantle, but the twin chairs could also catch good reading light from a large bay window dressed in elegant, though out-of-date, floral curtains. There was no television.

  Instead of the high-definition delights of real fake housewives, fly-by-night psychologists and naked, bug-eating survivalists, the Higgins’ main form of entertainment was found through a second archway at the rear of the room. Where a formal dining room had once been set to accommodate a large family, the solid oak table and eight matching chairs had been sent packing to the garage and replaced by wall-to-wall IKEA bookshelves.

  Each shelf was loaded with an eclectic assortment of non-fiction tombs, most of which focused either on obscure Biblical studies or historic sea voyages to the Arctic Circle. Jersey wondered why there didn’t appear to be a definite His and Hers division in the reading material, but decided there was a possibility they actually shared the same interests.

  There was also no obvious sign of discord in either room. No broken furniture, smashed plates, blood spatter, or torn-up credit card receipts for binge shopping or lunches with mistresses. Whatever had led Mr. Higgins to drive over his wife, it hadn’t started here.

  Jersey returned to the living room to study family photos spread out along the fireplace mantle. The photos told him the Higgins took great pride in their two grown children, one of each gender, both university graduates. The daughter’s photos were all semi-professional, individual portraits with flattering light and airbrushed skin, while the son preferred random snapshots showing a split-level family with a beautiful wife, teenage daughter, and a baby boy.

  The baby looked like his grandfather—especially around the eyes—except for a darker olive complexion and sharp Persian nose descended from his mother. The teen didn’t resemble either side of the family as a single extra chromosome had given her a flat face, slanted eyes, and small ears that bespoke the telltale characteristics of Down Syndrome.

  The smiling teen appeared in a majority of the other photos, and it was clear to see the love her grandparents lavished on her.

  It’s hard to imagine doting grandparents turning their hand to murder and/or suicide but, as Jersey well knew, it happened.

  Jersey moved into the kitchen that, like the living room and library, was clean and normal and boring. There wasn’t even a dirty cereal bowl in the sink to get somebody’s morning off to a bad start.

  The house’s main phone rested in a wooden hutch beside double-paned glass patio doors that led to a beautifully landscaped, and surprisingly secluded, backyard. Jersey crossed to the phone and picked up a leather address book. He flipped it open to ‘H’ and saw the names of the Higgins’ children. The son lived in Portland, but the daughter had moved to New York.

  Jersey wrote their phone numbers and addresses into his notebook as Amarela descended the stairs.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nada. Clean, tidy, nothing out of place. They shared the same bed, so they must’ve got along. You?”

  “Same.” He held up the notebook. “ I got the NOKs, at least.”

  Amarela scrunched her nose. Nobody liked to inform Next Of Kin that a loved one was gone.

  “So what you thinking here?” she asked.

  Jersey shrugged. “Based on what we’ve seen, I’d write it up as domestic murder-suicide.” He paused. “Except for location, timing, and choice of weapon.”

  Amarela nodded. “Why get dressed up and go out on the town in the middle of the night to a secluded, yet still public, spot when you could kill your wife in the privacy of your own home?”

  “And why use a car if you own a gun?” Jersey added. “The hit-and-run angle only makes sense if you wanted it to look like an accident.”

  “And you would only do that if you hoped to get away with it,” Amarela interjected.

  “And if you planned to get away with it,” Jersey released a heavy sigh, “why kill yourself after?”

  12

  The man with the slippery eye and shark-fin nose broke the lock on the rear entrance to the punk club and made his way inside.

  The club—so anti-trendy it was simply called The Club, although its signage boasted a wooden bat adorned with sharp iron spikes dripping with blood—was empty except for the lingering and pheromone-rich stench of booze, rage, sex, and sweat.

  It was a stink only humans could exude.

  Assured by the silence that he was alone, the man crept down a narrow hallway until stopped by his reflection shimmering in a large full-length mirror where the performers took a few final seconds to adjust themselves before taking the stage.

  In front of the mirror, he removed a tiny squeeze bottle of artificial tears from his pocket.

  His face drooped with the waxy pallor of a decorative candle placed too close to a neighboring flame. The left side was nearly flawless so long as he didn’t try to smile or otherwise pull on the overly tight skin. His left eye was a glassy brown marble flecked with fiery orange, its dark iris so intense few people could stare directly at it without feeling a shiver run down their spines.

  The right side didn’t fare so well. Although his strong nose was unmarred, the area that ran from hairline to the far corner of his mouth was a rippled mass of sagging skin. His wrinkled forehead drooped over his right eye, which resembled a smoldering ember adrift on an infected red tide; his cheek had collapsed inwards, the plump muscle eaten away, leaving only a sunken hollow of corrugated flesh.

  The right ear was missing its outer flesh and cartilage housing, leaving only a dark hole.

  An eye patch would have gone a short way to making his façade less frightening, but the man knew his deformity made people so squeamish they could barely look at him. If a witness to his many crusades ever came forward, they would only be able to articulate one singular thing about him: ugliness. And as he had witnessed many times in this world, ugly was not a rare commodity.

  The man squirted the saline solution into his dead eye and returned the bottle to his pocket before moving on.

  Inside the manager’s office, a quick survey revealed no videotape or digital recorder for the security cameras. Instead, a coiled mass of black USB cables snaked down from holes drilled in the ceiling and into an eight-port hub. The octopus hub, in turn, was plugged into the back of a squat mini-tower computer nestled under the desk.

  The man hit the power switch on the PC and waited for it to boot. Within a few seconds, a monitor flickered to life and the Windows icon appeared. The man waited patiently while the computer ran its checks and balances. When the floating Windows icon finally disappeared, it was replaced by a flashing security sign. The sign asked for a finger to be placed on a print scanner. To one side of the keyboard, a flat plastic pad, no larger than a credit card, pulsed with a soft red glow.

  The man would have smiled if his skin had allowed it.

  Scrounging around the office, he picked up a roll of transparent tape and a pencil sharpener. With strong hands, he broke open the sharpener and dumped a thin layer of graphite dust onto the shiny curved surface of the computer mouse. The fine dust clung to the oily swirls and sworls left over from the owner’s hand. He blew the excess away with a gentle puff from the side of his mouth.

  The man tore off a tiny strip of tape, placed it over a clean, dark print of the mouse-clicking index finger and placed the tape on the scanner. He covered the tape and scanner bed with the back of a plain white business card to turn light escaping transparent into readable opaque.

  After hitting the Enter button, the scanner read the lifted print without a single hiccup, and the computer’s welcome screen appeared.

  From there it was a simple job to locate the digitally encoded video files for the rear entrance camera and find the time-coded entry. A double-click opened the tiny movie while a tap on the spacebar made it fill the screen.

>   The man watched in passive silence as the large sedan mowed down the screaming woman. She had simply stood there, not believing her husband could possibly do what the man told him to. She hadn’t known just how convincing the man could be.

  After the car sped away, the man watched as Sally entered the alley from the mortuary. She had grown into a beautiful woman with the inherited shock white hair of her father and the mystical green eyes of her mother. The straight razor looked cumbersome and silly in her small, delicate hand, but the man was pleased that she possessed a fighting spirit.

  When Sally crossed to the discarded woman, the man tensed and leaned forward to peer even deeper into the monitor. The scene was darker than he had hoped, the funeral home’s security lights focused too narrowly to encompass all of the body, but there was enough ambient spillage to read the cosmetician’s body language.

  The man watched Sally reach out and touch the body.

  Sally froze. Her body became as rigid as a statue, and the man wished he could see her eyes, but the camera’s resolution was too low and the light too dim.

  The moment finished too quickly as the heavyset leather-clad punk broke Sally’s trance, but the man felt a stirring deep in his soul.

  Had she seen?

  She must have.

  But could she understand what she saw without the interpreter?

  He lifted his cellphone and dialed.

  The phone was answered on the second ring.

  “Yes?” An older man’s voice. Alert and awake.

  “I’ve found her.”

  “Are you sure this time, Aedan?”

  “It’s her,” he said confidently. “It has to be.”

  The phone was covered and Aedan heard whispered voices conferring.

  After a few moments, the older voice returned. “Bring her home. We’ll be waiting.”

  13

  Jersey’s phone rang as he and Amarela wound their way out of the suburban maze of Maywood Park in an effort to avoid the traffic jam that made up the interstate.

  The locals liked to blame the continual congestion on the Canadians as they flooded across the border into Washington and down through Oregon to California in a greedy blitz for bargains and sunshine. But from what Jersey could see, most of the license plates still boasted Pacific Northwest roots.