by Sarah Graves
But nothing else did. He made out the stone baptismal font and a rack of church literature. A little farther in, he found the bank of light switches in the vestibule and snapped them all on. Overhead, the bell continued its horrendous tolling.
Everything in the vestibule and the sanctuary and on the pulpit were all as they should be. To the left of the pulpit was the sacristy; Bob peered in, found the vestments on their hangers just inside the door. A little office area held a desk, a small file cabinet, and a bulletin board with notes and phone numbers on bits of paper thumb-tacked to it.
Bong, bong … Jesus Christ, Bob thought, wouldn’t somebody please turn off that fricking … But then he stopped, because of course he shouldn’t be taking that name in vain here.
Still, he had to get the thing silenced somehow. Though the sound was well muffled by his ear protectors, he could feel it in his teeth, loosening his fillings and shooting a rhythmic stab of anguish into the root canal he’d just had finished last week.
And even if he couldn’t get it turned off, he had to go up and find out why it was ringing in the first place, because the bell hadn’t started up all by itself, that was for sure.
No, somebody had started it: maybe by accident, more likely for a prank. And when Bob found out who it was, which he would because in Eastport there were a very limited number of possible suspects for anything, and Bob knew all of them—
Well, then. He would have the culprit’s butt. And he would kick it, too, if the culprit gave him even the slightest excuse.
Kick it hard, Bob decided balefully, because his kid was sick, his wife was worried, he was so short of sleep he felt like a mad scientist’s experiment, and there were things on his mind; life-changing things he didn’t want to think about right now.
And on top of it all, that damned bell was trying to beat his brains out. Shut up, shut up, he thought, striding angrily down the center aisle of the old church. He’d have to get outside, call Jeb Harmon, the custodian, and ask Jeb to get down here as quickly as possible. Because this had to be, needed to be—
The thought cut itself off as he reached the stone baptismal font at the rear of the church. Because his ears might be plugged so no sounds but the bell’s muffled thunder reached them, but his eyes still worked, and so did his nose.
And his gut worked. It told him now that more was wrong here than a screwed-up bell. Behind and to the left of the baptismal font, a door stood open. Beyond, he could see the first few steps of the stairway leading up to the bell tower.
And on the first one—yep, he thought, feeling his heart sink, that was a pool of blood, all right. As he stared at it, a fat, dark droplet plopped down into it from somewhere above, and then another.
“Oh, Jesus.” He said it aloud, not fearing any blasphemy this time, feeling his shoulders sag with sadness and the weight of a dead person up there somewhere; nobody lost that much blood and lived.
He drew out his duty weapon and, with its heft steadying his hand, approached the stairway’s door. The narrow wooden steps led away up into the darkness. Groping, he found another switch and flipped it. A bare bulb lit up.
In its dim glow he could see dark smears on the old plaster wall, once painted cream but now a sad sort of brownish-yellow, and on the stair treads with the brittle shreds of rubberized material still clinging to them, held on by rusty carpet tacks.
The carpet tacks, some of them, had wet, red heads and dark stains spreading around them in the aging gray wood. Someone had stepped in blood, gotten it on their hands, too, which meant that there might be a fingerprint or footprint. Bigger, indistinct brushlike marks on the wall might’ve come from someone’s sleeve.
Bob kept his own arms close to his sides and his hands off the metal rail that was bolted as a banister through the stairwell’s plaster and into the framing behind it, because, please God, there would indeed be prints. He’d have just gone straight outside, not risked confusing this scene with his own physical presence at all, if he’d been sure that the owner of all that blood was dead.
Medically sure, that is: cold and pulseless. But he wasn’t, so he began climbing the stairs, being very careful where he put his feet. The blood kept leaking down the wall beside him, first on his right side for a flight of stairs, then on his left for the next flight, flowing freely in the light of the twenty-five-watt bulbs screwed into ceramic fixtures set head-high on each landing.
Just as he reached the top one and found the wooden ladder leading up through the tower’s trapdoor, two things happened. First, the bell stopped ringing, a sudden silence opening up all around him, a vast, stunned-feeling void like a universe so empty it might just suck itself inside out.
And second, a woman’s body half-fell down through the open trapdoor, first her long hair and then her shoulders, her flannel-sleeved arms flopping bonelessly and her bloodstained fingers dangling. Startled, he staggered back, one foot finding only the thin air of the stairwell before he righted himself.
Then, as he stood trying to catch his breath, the body began sliding the rest of the way down the old ladder. The skinny blue-jeaned thighs followed the upper body out of the hatchway, then the knees and at last two sneakered feet. The ladder’s splintery rails caught the body’s clothing, slowing its descent; the rungs pulled the jeans down slightly, exposing pale hipbones that looked bird-fragile; a girl’s bones, he realized.
Not even a grown woman. A child. Filled with horror and pity, he reached out to slow her fall, not caring anymore about what he might do to any evidence. He just couldn’t …
He couldn’t let her fall. Seizing her thin shoulders, he eased her body over the rungs, its weight a mere nothing, like an infant’s weight, or a leaf’s, until at last it reached the floor and puddled there, pathetically limp. By the time he released her, he was shaking.
Jesus, he thought. Twenty years a cop, he’d seen everything, or he’d thought he had. Shootings and stabbings, beatings and car crashes, drownings and hangings and smotherings, carbon monoxide poisonings and wrist slittings.
Everything. But nothing like this. Gingerly, with an index finger that still trembled, he hooked her collar down a little. The wound was a meaty smile. He snatched his hand away, looked up through the trapdoor.
Dark up there. “Police!” he yelled, then yanked his cell phone out, speed-dialed Jenny Margolin in the dispatcher’s office. He didn’t want this out on the radio.
“Washington County 911.” The phone rang in Jenny’s kitchen, on the Shore Road overlooking the Cherry Island lighthouse. By now it was one in the morning, but as always, Jenny sounded wide awake. “What is your emergency?”
“Jenny, this is Bob.” He kept his weapon trained on the trapdoor opening. “I’m in the All Faith Chapel on Two Church Lane in Eastport. There’s a girl’s body here.”
“Oh, Lord. Do you know who it is?”
Jenny’s kitchen radio was tuned to the Eastport high school station, WSHD. Bob knew it because it was the only radio station in Maine where you could hear Tibetan throat singing at one in the morning—or at almost any other time, really—and that was what they were playing now.
Well, with the exception of WERU in Blue Hill, of course, but that signal didn’t get all the way up here. Meanwhile, Jenny was a good woman and an excellent dispatcher, but she was related to practically everyone in the county.
Including this victim. “We’ll deal with that later. Right now I want you to call the state boys, the M.E., and all my guys.”
His Eastport officers, he meant. “Get them all here, please, as fast as they can, except Toby Farrell.”
Stolid and unimaginative, Toby was as big as a bull moose and just as unstoppable when he needed to be. And there was only one way off the island by car.
“Tell Toby I want him to get out to the causeway in his squad car and just sit there, stop anyone trying to cross and get a good, solid ID and a story out of them unless they’re in the middle of having a heart attack or a baby. Make sure he gets that, okay?”
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“Yes, Bob, I understand.”
At this hour of the night, there was hardly anyone driving around, anyway. He’d worry about complaints later.
“Call the Coast Guard,” he went on. “No vessels leaving the harbor or the boat basin, not even a rowboat. And I want Bobby Roth to get out to the airport.”
Bobby was the city council member who headed up the airport committee. “Nothing takes off. Not until I say so. Oh, and get whoever’s on call for Customs and Immigration on the phone. Say I might need enforcement help if anyone at the port gets sniffy.”
Freighters came in and out of the harbor all the time, from all over the world. For all Bob knew, one might be getting ready to cast off right this minute.
With, for all he knew as well, his perp aboard and thinking himself safe. Or the killer could be some local person, taking a shower at home by now, burning up bloody clothes in a woodstove, with no one to see or know.
In short, it could be anyone. “Bob? That it?” Jenny asked.
He looked down at the dead girl, and the blood. Whoever had done this most likely believed he had gotten away with it. So he thought. “Yeah,” Bob said. “For now.”
He snapped the phone shut. Above, the trapdoor’s opening gaped blackly. Bob didn’t know why the bell had stopped ringing, but he had a bad idea about it, and before he could go back down all those stairs again, he would have to check it out.
The very idea of sticking his head into the darkness up there made his gut clench sourly. If she knew what he was about to do, his wife, Clarissa, would be up one side of him and down the other.
But she didn’t know. And even if she did … Sighing, he put a foot on the ladder’s first rung, hauled his weight—which was getting to be considerable lately, but that was another story—up to the second rung, and then quietly to the third.
Softly, softly … It was a line from one of the Kipling stories he’d been reading to his little girl, on the nights when he got home before she was asleep. And it seemed like a good idea now, too, not letting whoever else might still be up there know he was coming.
A good idea, just not very doable. The ladder creaked, and the things on his duty belt—Mace, whistle, handcuffs, baton, weapon holster (he still had the gun in one hand, too, which made climbing the ladder even harder)—it all clanked, rattled, and clunked as he made his way laboriously up the wooden rungs.
Nothing he could do about it, though, or about the wheezing of his own breath, either, like tiny high-pitched whistles inside his chest. Partly they were due to his extra poundage, but most of the internal sound effects were because he, too, had asthma.
Just like his daughter. He’d just never paid any attention to it before, figuring that everybody had some damn fool problem or another, and doctoring for it was a waste of time and money.
Lately he felt differently, wishing that over the years he’d stayed in better shape, that he was a better physical specimen as a husband and father, and—let’s face it—as a cop, one who once in a while was required to climb a ladder, find out whether or not a girl-murdering scumbag was hiding up there in the dark.
Hell, there might even be another body lying up there, or—
Just as he was about to stick his head through the hole, the first Eastport squad car pulled up outside. Bob recognized the sound of the old Crown Vic’s engine, the little thweep-thweep squeal of the fan belt keeping time with the knocking from either a valve or a rod.
Then came the solid thud of the Vic’s door slamming, and a voice from the church vestibule. “Bob? You inside?”
“Yeah. Up here. Look around outside, Paulie, stop anyone you see looks iffy. And watch where you step and so on.”
“Got it” came the reply, then the sound of Paulie Waters’s boots heading out again. Waters was a young guy, in his twenties with not much cop experience, but a quick study and he read a lot. He’d know how to proceed. Bob aimed the flashlight up, then followed its beam into the huge, silent darkness of the bell chamber.
Directly above him hung the bell, a bronze behemoth with a silver ring in its rim, pitch dark inside where no moonlight penetrated. Railed catwalks went all the way around the inside of the wood-framed belfry, bolted to the walls. Above the catwalk, tall, narrow arched windows slatted over by shutters loomed on all four sides; the openings between the slats let the sound out.
Over hill and dale, Bob thought irrelevantly, the phrase from another of the children’s books he read. But the image of his little girl’s bedroom didn’t belong here; he shoved it away, knowing someone else’s child lay below him, bloodied and dead.
He knew whose child, too. Bob wasn’t sure which of his duties he hated most tonight, finding her or telling her father about it. Not that it mattered; he’d done one, and he would have to do the other. Mine is not to reason why … Christ, though, Hank Hansen was going to be a crazy man when he found out.
Pouring between the slats of the big shutters piercing the walls, the moonlight formed a striped pattern on the old floor. Bob hauled himself the rest of the way through the opening into the belfry, his flashlight’s beam picking out the long-forgotten items lying around: a coil of ancient rope, a pipe wrench lying in a mess of rust flakes.
On the floor near the rope spread another pool of blood, and then a smear mark. Because he dragged her. The son of a bitch cut her and then he—
“Bob?” It was Waters, calling from below. “One of the girls at the Boarding Hostel saw someone, maybe. And I found something.”
Nobody up here. Bob aimed the flashlight around once more to make sure. “Waters,” he shouted down, “don’t—”
“Yeah, first I picked it up and handled it,” Waters cut in before Bob could finish, “got my prints all over it and messed up anyone else’s, and then for good measure I spit on it.”
In addition to being smart, Waters was a smart-ass. “No, I marked it and left it,” he added in conciliatory tones. “You all right up there?”
Bob climbed down the ladder. At the foot of it, a local girl named Karen Hansen lay dead. From the color of her face, white as a page from one of Bob’s own little girl’s storybooks, almost all of the blood had been drained out of her.
“Yeah, I’m just ducky,” Bob managed. “You got the boarding home woman squared away?”
He didn’t want her talking to anyone before he got to her. When people in Eastport started gabbing, what started out as an unusually dressed tourist snapping vacation snapshots at one end of the island would be a squad of terrorists taking surveillance photos in preparation for an imminent invasion by the time the story got to the other end.
He descended the stairs, careful as before not to step in any of the blood pools or touch the smeared walls. Outside in the Vic, Tiffany Whitmore sat in the front passenger seat smoking a cigarette and poking at her cell phone.
Tiffany wore a blue scrub suit, white sneakers, and a zipped navy hoodie. Her peroxide-orange hair was skinned back in a ponytail held by a fabric scrunchy. She was a nice woman and a hard worker, and those cigarettes were the worst of her habits, but she had a big mouth and on top of that the car was going to smell like an ashtray.
At least she had the door open. “Hey!” Bob yelled. “Put the phone away, Tiff, would you? And get out of the car if you gotta smoke.”
She scowled, but grudgingly did as he asked. On top of not wanting her to tell anyone else her story before she told it to him, he didn’t need half the town here standing around gawking at everything, which he would have if Tiffany got yapping.
Would anyway before long, he realized glumly, turning to Waters. “What do you think you found?” he asked, imagining a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt.
Waters aimed his flashlight into the evergreen shrubbery by the church steps. Crammed up between the dark, gnarly twists of the box-hedge roots lay a wad of tissue, a faded Hershey bar wrapper, a plastic bag from the IGA, and—
“Huh,” said Bob. The thing Waters had spotted had a taped wooden handle, an index finge
r groove for improved grip, a short row of rip teeth near the guard that divided the blade from the handle. And a trailing swage point, wickedly tipped.
All of which made it a professional-grade hunting knife, its blade stained thickly with …
Blood. Lab tests would say for sure, of course, but to Bob’s eye there was no question about it. And he knew who owned this large, very distinctive-looking knife, too, because he’d seen it before.
Oh, hell, he thought as an approaching Maine State Police cruiser’s distinctive high-low siren howled eerily.
“Don’t touch it. Let the state guys deal with it,” Bob told Waters, then left the young officer standing over the weapon while he went to talk with Tiffany Whitmore, before the presence of her cell phone became just too much of a temptation for her.
“So are you coming, Dweeby, or are you gonna sit there like a scared little kid?”
Flicking away his cigarette, Bogie Kopmeir hopped onto the bike he had just stolen out of a garage on Evans Lane and pedaled it in a circle, his oddly babyish face gleaming greasily under the streetlamp.
“Put it back, Bogie.” David Thompson sat hunched on the front steps of the house that the garage belonged to, wishing he’d stayed home. Across town, church bells were ringing and the sound of police sirens rose eerily in the thickening fog.
David wished he was in bed under the covers, unable to hear them. He hated these late-night outings with Bogie, hated being jolted awake by stones tossed against his bedroom window, hated the way his heart thumped anxiously from the time he slipped out until the moment, always way too much later, when he sneaked back in again.
And he hated being called Dweeb. In fact, there wasn’t much about hanging out with Bogie—crude, cunning in an animal way, and possessed of a temper that could explode into spitting rage for no reason at all—that David didn’t hate. But what choice did he have?
It was that or get the crap beaten out of him every morning at school, where David was a sophomore on the honors track and Bogie, despite being sixteen and a year older than David, was still a freshman. Slight, bookish boys like David were fresh meat for the guys who played sports and went deer hunting, many with their own guns. They regarded David as merely another variety of prey animal.