A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  “On the breakwater.” She sniffled theatrically. “Why’re you being so mean to me, Sam? I didn’t do anything, I just wanted—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He knew what she’d wanted, and ordinarily it wouldn’t have been a big deal, a couple of joints or whatever. Although—

  “It was just pot, though, right? I mean you’re not using—”

  The hard stuff, he meant to finish. She sniffled again. “No. I mean, yes, I wanted a few joints and he had them, so I said I’d come back down here with the cash. Sam, why is he doing this? Did you make him mad, somehow?”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, smearing her mascara. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I wanted to ask him about that girl, the one Chip Hahn’s in trouble over.”

  Outside, Spratt and his boys were arguing. The wind blew bits of their disagreement into the cave.

  “… don’t know what you’re so freakin’ pissed over …”

  “… get us all in a lot of …”

  “… didn’t even see her after the breakwater …”

  And then: “Shut up! You all better just shut your mouths and do what I say. Or I’ll make damn sure you all go to prison, right the freak along with me!”

  It was Spratt. “What’s he talking about?” Carol whispered worriedly, easing up closer to Sam. For warmth, he realized; it was getting colder in here. Also, the tide was coming in.

  “I don’t know.” Sam did the math: The tide rose three feet per hour, it was only a dozen or so feet now from the mouth of the cave to the waterline, and the cave’s interior sloped down sharply from front to back.

  There was another brief flurry of guys’ voices from outside, and then nothing except the waves and the sound of wind moving past the cave’s mouth, a low musical fluting like someone blowing across the top of a large bottle.

  “I don’t know what Harvey’s talking about,” Sam repeated. We never saw her after the breakwater …

  But he did know. He just didn’t want to scare Carol.

  He’d been, he realized, an idiot to come here.

  Lizzie turned left onto a twisty, unmarked road leading into Quoddy Village, once a World War II settlement of Seabees and other Navy personnel. Now the area was a patchwork of mobile homes, small bungalows, and tiny lots where only cellar holes remained.

  “Sissy lived out here somewhere,” she said, scanning as she drove. But no distraught man walked along the road’s shoulder, or lay in the yellowed weeds beside it.

  “Nicki was just a baby then, though,” said Lizzie.

  A short stretch of graded dirt road ran through an area of abandoned house lots; she turned onto it, thinking that if she were the distraught dad of a newly murdered child, she might want just this kind of desolate-feeling privacy.

  Dylan sat up. Deep ditches bounded the road on both sides, and its washboard texture made the car judder unpleasantly even at slow speed.

  “Hey.” She slowed further. “Is that …?”

  “Yeah.” He craned his neck toward the ditch on his side. “Damn, that sure looks like—”

  A body; of course it was. And no big surprise; she’d known when she agreed to Bob Arnold’s request that a recently bereaved dad of uncertain mental status might end his own life.

  From behind the wheel, all she could see was the one shoulder clad in a black windbreaker, and a shock of brown hair. When she got out and peered into the ditch, it was clear this victim would not be getting up again.

  “Dylan, call this in, will you? Nine-one-one, and tell dispatch we’ve found Bob Arnold’s … no, wait a minute.”

  “Wait?” Dylan looked impatient. “You mean so you can do some detecting?”

  The sour twist he put on the words reminded her that he must be in misery, and that he could have stayed at the hospital, where they’d have kept him pain-free for another day at least. But he’d rushed back here instead; she wanted to wonder why, but she was afraid she knew.

  Not that it felt very important right this minute. Crouching at the edge of the ditch, she found to her surprise that the victim was not Hank Hansen, after all. This guy was only in his late teens; she examined the weedy area all around where he lay.

  No weapon. She picked up a thick branch and gingerly shifted him with it. Christ … It wasn’t a body after all. It was two bodies. And the one underneath was breathing.

  Hurriedly she hauled the still-living victim from under the deceased one, laying him out flat by the side of the road and checking him over swiftly for anything first aid might be able to fix. Meanwhile she ran through the obvious:

  Unconscious young white male, chinos and athletic jacket, his pulse, airway, and breathing all adequate for now, no active bleeding or other obvious acute distress, multiple cuts, bruises, and abrasions to the face and head, and … she noted the dark, sodden mess of his hair at the back of his skull at the same time as she took in the Red Sox patch on his sleeve … severe blunt-force head trauma, or possibly a gunshot wound.

  But probably blunt force. You didn’t beat somebody that way when you could shoot them. When she was done, she gently let the body down again, turning the head to the side so the blood oozing from the battered mouth wouldn’t obstruct the kid’s airway.

  Dylan was in the car making the call. “Tell them it’s not the guy Bob Arnold’s looking for,” she said, glancing around again. No drag marks, no smeared or spattered trail led out of the wooded area. But if the victims had been assaulted here—especially the dead one—there’d have been more blood.

  A lot more; at first glance the mark on the deceased kid’s throat was barely visible, covered by the windbreaker’s neckline. But when she’d shifted the body, his head didn’t move, because it had been almost severed, attached only by a strip of skin and gristle.

  Dylan got done describing their surroundings and made sure the dispatcher understood their location—the road had no street sign—then snapped his phone shut.

  “They want us to wait here,” he said.

  Well, of course they did. To wave the cavalry in, and the surviving victim might still need emergency CPR, for Pete’s sake, or the perps might even come back. Had Dylan always been one to state the obvious like that? Or had she just not noticed before? She got back in the car, keyed the engine on, cranked the heat, keeping an eye on the kid’s slowly rising and falling chest.

  Dylan shifted uncomfortably, trying to arrange himself so that his collarbone didn’t grate so painfully, she supposed. They sat in silence that way while she averted her mind’s eye from the nearly severed head and instead thought about how easy it would be, faking a postmark.

  Having a rubber stamp made was all it would take, and it would not even have to resemble a real one precisely; after all, who looked at postmarks closely enough to detect a phony?

  Not me, she reflected bitterly. And Dylan hadn’t had to.

  He’d already known. The sky darkened stealthily, mist beading on the car’s windshield, and the branches in the softwood scrub clattered ominously in the rising breeze.

  “You know,” said Dylan, apropos of nothing, “I never stopped thinking of you.”

  “Really,” she said flatly, and if he thought that was odd he didn’t say so. In the distance a siren wailed, coming nearer. The rain thickened, blurring her view of the body lying where someone had thrown it, tossed away like trash.

  Like Sissy’s, only she ended up in the water. The siren got louder abruptly as the squad car rounded the corner and blasted toward them on the unpaved road, its tires flinging wet stones.

  “Whoever did this, though,” Dylan declared, gesturing at the manila envelopes with the photos in them, “we’ll find out who it was. That’ll be one good thing, you have to admit that much.”

  Funny way to put it, she thought. And—No. No, I don’t have to admit it.

  She looked down at his hand, now resting atop her knee. Only a day earlier, his touch would’ve been thrilling whether or not she had wanted to admit it. But now …

  “Take your hand off me.” T
he squad car skidded to a halt and the driver jumped out, hand on his sidearm. As she’d expected, it was Paulie Waters, his handsome face grim and alert.

  “I said get your hand off me,” she repeated, not bothering to see how Dylan took this.

  It didn’t matter how he took it. “Or,” she added in the same mild tone, “I’ll break your other freaking collarbone for you.”

  Slowly he did as she asked. “Okay. If that’s the way you—”

  Paulie crouched by the ditch. “I don’t understand, though,” said Dylan. She put her window down, called to the frowning cop.

  “Hey. Thanks for coming out. We were just cruising around, Bob Arnold asked us to let you guys know if we spotted the girl’s dad, Hank Hansen?”

  Paulie nodded. “And instead we found this,” she finished.

  Later, after they’d given brief statements and Paulie had sent them on their way, Dylan tried again. “Listen, Lizzie, I know you’re still angry about the way I abandoned you, back in the city.”

  Along the water on the way back toward town, foamy waves broke on the weed-strewn beach, the tide rising swiftly and the dark clouds on the horizon looming high, like massive boulders getting ready to cascade down.

  “What?” She glanced briefly at him, still thinking about the victim back there, the surviving one. “No, I’m not angry about that,” she replied. “I mean, it’s what people do when they go back to their wives, isn’t it? They cut off all contact.”

  She took the S-turn at speed, pushing it until the Honda’s rear end lost a bit of traction. His good hand clenched the seat edge slightly.

  Good. He deserved to be scared. “It bugs me a little, though, to hear you were thinking about me. Obsessing, even? Would that be a fair way to put it?”

  At the Mobil station, she slowed for the 35 MPH sign, got a full breath at last in past the fury that had a stranglehold on her. “While she forgave you. While she was dying, even. I was on your mind even then, do I have that part right?”

  Getting one of those manila envelopes delivered to Dylan had been easy, of course. He’d simply put it into his own pocket.

  The one to her, though; somehow finagling it into a pile on the table in her building’s lobby, where the doorman on the day shift sorted the heap into a stack for each tenant. That had been a lot more difficult to do, but hey, even difficult things could be accomplished when you were a cop.

  Back in town, she pulled into the motel’s parking lot. “You didn’t come back here today to be with me, though, did you?”

  She bit the words off. “To help me in my time of need,” she added, “in spite of the awful pain you were in.”

  He stared straight ahead. “But Dylan,” she went on. “Listen, now, it’s important. I want an answer to a question, but before you do answer, think. Make sure your answer is truthful.”

  She reached inside her jacket. “Because I’ve given up a lot, you know? My home, my job …”

  She angled her head at the manila envelopes, which either did or did not contain photographs of her only living relative. Of her murdered sister Sissy’s child, a little girl by the name of Nicki. If she was alive and Lizzie didn’t find her, the girl might grow up in conditions even worse than the ones Sissy and Lizzie had endured, back when they were children.

  And that, while Lizzie herself was still alive, could not be allowed to happen. “So I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to answer, and if I get any sense at all that you’re lying to me, Dylan …”

  He began looking alarmed, too late. In the old days, he could’ve charmed his way out of this. But now when she brought out the .38 auto it was already aimed at his kneecap. “Ready?”

  One in the chamber, safety off. “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” she said. “So start talking, and don’t stop until you’ve told me absolutely everything about what you’re up to.”

  A full day had passed since Bob Arnold had handed Chip over to the Maine State Police investigators, and for all that time, other than brief bathroom trips with a cop watching, he’d been in this small room. Concrete-block walls, acoustical-tiled ceiling, fluorescent lights whose faint buzzing seemed to be coming from somewhere inside his head …

  The hard straight chair he sat on was a torture device, the table where he rested his head on his arms only a little less so. At regular intervals, they asked him if he was hungry (he wasn’t) or thirsty, which he was, but those trips to the bathroom with the cop watching him were so creepy he tried to limit his liquid intake.

  “Mr. Hahn, will you get up and hold your hands out for me, please?”

  Confused, he shook his head to clear it. “What? Uh, wait a minute, why do you want me to—?”

  The detective’s face was impassive. “I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Karen Hansen,” he said, not in answer to Chip’s query but because the script he was following required him to say this.

  The detective, a dark-skinned man of about fifty, had short salt-and-pepper hair and a lot of old acne scars. He wore a good blue suit over a blue-striped dress shirt and a maroon tie. His aftershave smelled expensive, and his nails were neatly clipped, each tipped with a slender white crescent.

  He’d been the one questioning Chip all this time, and until now Chip had liked him well enough. Or as much as you could like someone who was trying to get you to confess to slaughtering a teenaged girl, anyway.

  Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t even known the girl’s age, for instance, until this guy—Osbourne was his name, not that it mattered—told him. But then Osbourne had managed to work it around later so it seemed Chip had known.

  Now Osbourne stood waiting. “Come on, Chip. Let’s just do this thing, okay?”

  Shakily Chip got to his feet. Moments ago he’d been worried about Carolyn, back in Manhattan. Was she eating? Was she staying at home, wondering where he was and waiting to hear from him? And what had happened about the attorney she’d asked him to call—did she still need one? And if so, why?

  “Look, just let me make my call first, okay?” Confident that sooner or later they would release him, he hadn’t called a lawyer himself, which he now realized was a huge mistake.

  “Absolutely. You want to make a call, that will of course be arranged. Phones are out right now on account of the storm, but as soon as they’re up, you can use one, no problem.”

  Osbourne held the handcuffs ready. Chip stared at them as if they were a pair of poisonous snakes, poised to wrap themselves around his pulse points. “But …”

  The detective leaned over the table, snapped the cuffs onto Chip’s wrists. “Come on, son. There’s no way around this, okay? And anyway, it’s just a hearing we’re headed to now. Just a prelim for the judge to say where you’re going next, is all.”

  Osbourne’s voice, Chip noted dully, had changed subtly. It had been kind, even confidence-inspiring, before. A guy like Chip, it had said, could depend on Osbourne not to screw him over.

  But now it had lost its veneer of friendliness. “Get up, bud,” said Osbourne. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Chip met Osbourne’s gaze, which had been bright with feigned personal interest and now did not give a damn as long as the prisoner did what Osbourne said he should do, went where Osbourne told him to go, and didn’t get anything on Osbourne’s good suit in the process.

  “Can I just ask you something, though?” Chip paused halfway to the door. “Why are you all so sure I killed that girl?”

  Osbourne looked down at the small yellow steno pad he’d been taking notes in throughout Chip’s interrogation. He flipped back several pages until he found his place.

  “Let’s see, now. ‘Girls Dying Badly,’ ” he recited. “ ‘Stab City.’ ‘Underage Screamers.’ Oh, and here’s a good one. You can upload your own videos. It’s called ‘Slice Her and Dice Her.’ ”

  He looked up. “Thirty-seven homemade videos on this site, of real girls being killed. Including one from you.”

  Osbourne snapped
the notebook shut. “Does that answer your question?” He ticked off on his fingers: “Access to the weapon, a sick Internet habit, no alibi …”

  Stricken, Chip let his head fall forward. It was the price of being admitted to that disgusting secret chat room, that you had to upload a violent video of your own or the guys wouldn’t trust you, they’d think you were a cop trying to bust them.

  Which in a way Chip was; he’d pirated his video from another website, of course, but good luck getting anyone here to believe that. He doubted they’d be any swifter at corroborating his claim that he’d told the Wisconsin authorities about the sites, either.

  Hey, there were a zillion nutballs in the world, and for all they knew, he was just another one of them. He moved obediently to the door of the small, bare room.

  “Good man,” Osbourne said approvingly. “Now, before we go out, there’s one thing I need to caution you about.”

  Chip balked in the doorway but Osbourne gripped his arm and hustled him on through toward an open stairwell at the end of the cellar corridor.

  “There’s people up there,” said Osbourne. “Word’s gotten out that you’re here, see. Reporters, curious citizens …”

  Angry citizens, Osbourne didn’t have to add. Chip could hear raised voices and clomping footsteps from upstairs.

  “But they’re all at the rear of the building, in front of the courtroom you’re scheduled to be in. So they won’t see …”

  “What?” They started up the steps, paused to let a deputy hurry past them on his way down, and began climbing again.

  The cuffs were already beginning to hurt, and Chip was starting to wish he’d drunk more of that last soda Osbourne had offered him, too. Then he’d need to visit the bathroom again, and could put off whatever was coming for a little longer.

  “What do you need to caution me about?” he persisted as they reached the first stairway landing. A plump, gray-haired lady in a skirted suit, pleasantly grandmotherly-looking, began a smile as she approached them, then realized who Chip must be.