Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  ‘What were your impressions of the scene?’

  For a moment Harry forgot his animosity. They were just two investigators, talking a case. ‘It felt like a blind to throw us off, you know? The madman writes on the mirror and all that, I thought it’s going to be the ex. You?’

  Percy, he was pleased to hear, agreed.

  ‘There was something … controlled about the crime scene. I was thinking, would you like to meet back where you found the body?’

  Harry checked his watch. He could keep working away. On the other hand, he was ahead of what he’d been tasked and the Brit was one hell of an investigative brain. Even though his old pal from the Yard, Dougal Gray, had never heard of him. Of course Harry had called him. He’d been retired for a couple of years now, said he would ask around.

  ‘I’ll meet you there,’ said Harry.

  It was already growing dark, headlights pushed against the gloom like lanterns amid ruins. Holmes hoped he would have enough money for the cab fare. He was tired of living like a pauper. He needed to pay his debts. But first …

  Why would you move the body?

  Examine Feeney’s speculation: Because it might be known that the killer, he or she, was visiting the apartment? Perhaps, but how did that really help?

  The killer could simply say, ‘I turned up and found her dead’. Then he did not risk being discovered while moving a corpse. But if the killer is a madman, moving the body seemed at odds with leaving a message scrawled on a mirror. Mathew Mahoney had not moved those he had killed. Nor Jack the Ripper.

  Examine the next logical question: Why risk getting a body out of the apartment and into a vehicle only to dump the body in the river?

  No, there was something off with this murder, which Holmes now admitted to himself he had taken far too lightly because of his Noah obsession. Moving the body could have been ritualistic, washing it in the river. But why all the way over near Astoria Park?

  The cab hissed to a halt where Harry’s car waited. Flaky snow was drifting. Holmes paid and stepped into the cold. Harry’s passenger door opened. Holmes couldn’t see him until he stopped and looked inside.

  ‘Climb in,’ said Harry, who was wearing a fake-fur hat with ear flaps and a heavy overcoat. ‘You must be freezing.’

  His suit jacket ruined at the pier rescue, Holmes was wearing only a rain slicker he’d found in the wardrobe. He had been lulled by a life indoors with continuous heating.

  ‘I had given that not so much as a passing thought.’ Which was the truth. He’d been too preoccupied to think about mere physical comfort. Now he did notice how cold it was. The two men faced off. Harry, reluctantly, it seemed to Holmes, congratulated him on the Noah case.

  ‘I apologize for not keeping Georgette and Simone further from the scene. We had intended to …’

  Harry held up a hand. ‘What’s done is done. I don’t want my daughters in danger and you seem to make a habit of putting them there.’

  In other words, thought, Holmes, not done at all.

  ‘Lives were at stake,’ said Holmes and left it at that.

  ‘Shoot,’ Harry said.

  Holmes recounted how on the cab ride across town he had been thinking through the case and agreed with Harry that it seemed staged. He then ran through the reasons.

  ‘What I can’t fathom though, is why you stage that kind of thing unless you are an obvious suspect: husband, neighbor …’

  ‘Me too. “Save Me”, like “Please stop me before I kill again”. Almost as if he’s preparing his defense before he is caught.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Holmes, ‘but why move the body? Why take that risk?’

  ‘Perhaps to delay discovery.’

  ‘But it didn’t, did it? How did you find out about the body here?’

  ‘Anonymous phone call. They tried to trace it, no luck. It looked like the body was dumped in the water. It was my job to follow up a lead on a powerboat stolen from Brooklyn that morning. I also got a lead on another boat in the vicinity at the time. That boat was moored in Far Rockaway. I interviewed the owner. The day the body turned up, the owner was showing some out-of-town guests around. He saw a boat near here and gave a description. The description fitted the boat stolen from Brooklyn. We later found that boat, burned out up the Jersey coast.’

  It seemed an elaborate effort. You have to steal a boat to dump the body.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Harry. ‘Why go to that much trouble? Plus, the body was stored for a day in a freezer. Maybe he was wondering what the hell to do. Maybe he thought he’d bury the body but the earth was too frozen.’

  That’s right, Georgette had said the body had been frozen.

  ‘So he stored the body, stole a boat, dumped the body, burned the boat …’ Holmes running through the steps.

  ‘Yeah, and on my first day back, thank you very much.’

  Holmes stopped, a retriever that smelled duck. ‘You had been on leave?’

  ‘Couple of weeks, every year.’

  Holmes sat back with all the tension in his shoulders and back suddenly gone.

  ‘What is it?’

  Holmes said, ‘The only logical reason for the body to be dumped here was for you to be involved. This is about you, Harry.’

  ‘Me?’ Harry was clearly perplexed but Holmes was already sifting his memory.

  ‘You mentioned this place being the exact same spot as twenty years earlier where you retrieved another body.’

  ‘That’s right. It was the accident I told you about. Two boats collided out there. One had been stolen, couple of teenagers. They weren’t showing lights. I was down here in my squad car, just a routine check. I heard the crash. I called it in, jumped in and swam. Nearly drowned myself. Lucky it wasn’t so cold as this year. I found a girl floating, grabbed her, swam her back. She survived. I went back out, found another girl in the wreckage, she was still breathing but by the time I got her back, she’d passed. The paramedics worked on her but they couldn’t bring her back. Her mother was killed too. The father had taken the young brother to the movies. Imagine, stepping out and learning that.’

  ‘So the girl whose life you saved …’

  ‘One of the teens who stole the boat. Her boyfriend walked away without a scratch but went down for manslaughter, Joseph Levich. Girl was fifteen, no priors, got a caution. Levich died of a drug overdose about six years ago.’

  ‘The girl’s name?’

  ‘Becky Borello.’

  It has to be, thought Holmes, and asked Harry if he had a copy of the crime scene photos from the Rebecca Chaney homicide in his phone.

  ‘Where you going with this?’ Harry called up the photos and passed the phone to Holmes.

  ‘Could that be Becky Borello?’

  Drained of life, the face of Rebecca Chaney stared up at Harry. It was twenty years on, he’d never even seen the girl’s face when he’d swum her in from the accident. It was dark and it took all his strength to fight the current. Others had taken over and he’d headed out again, ultimately to retrieve a body. He’d likely never have made it back that second time without help. He had seen Becky Borello months later in the courtroom. The mind plays tricks. It could be her. Only fifteen, she would have no record unless she had reoffended. He took his phone back from Holmes and dialled Feeney.

  ‘Yes, Harry.’

  ‘Could you check on a Becky Borello, see if there was a name change … to Rebecca Chaney.’

  Georgette couldn’t stop the tears this time. She was able to stem them but everything just seemed so hopeless. She imagined herself as a tiny figure standing in front of a huge sheer wall. How could she scale it? The only hope was to go public on Holmes. Every specialist in the world would be on it, but she knew what Holmes would say: how many other people might die as a consequence because these specialists were devoting their time to save him? But these things always produced positives, new breakthroughs …

  Her phone buzzed and she saw it was Simone and was flooded with gratitude.
/>   ‘How’s it going?’ asked Simone, and Georgette couldn’t help it, she started crying again.

  ‘Hopeless. There’s a vaccine that might help but I can’t get it because the clinical trial has expired. There are suggestions of diets, or taking him to Tibet or …’

  ‘Settle down, Georgi.’ Simone’s voice was soothing, mature. Funny how the roles had changed. ‘… And turn right here. Sorry, I’m in the middle of Ambrose’s lesson. How’s Percy?’

  ‘As far as I know he’s alright.’ She told Simone about the collapse, blabbed about going public but realized they couldn’t discuss it freely with Ambrose in the car. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just nice to speak with someone.’

  ‘… And shift down and then boom! Hit the pedal. Good. I can come over later? I’ve got this audition, super secret, out of the blue … down Rockaway looking for Newport, good …’

  Georgette felt bad. Simone was heading to some important audition and here she was burdening her. Simone would be hurting too.

  ‘I’ll let you go.’

  ‘Tomorrow, Dad’s, Thanksgiving, right? You and Sherlock. I’ll bring salads.’

  ‘Yes of course. Break a leg.’

  ‘I’ll break two. Love you, sis.’

  When Georgette ended the call, she felt empty and even more alone. Tempted as she was to call Holmes, she let it go. That wasn’t going to help. She needed to find a solution here. If that giant wall didn’t topple on her first.

  Harry had started driving back towards the station house. The growing warmth of the car seemed at odds with the increasingly heavy snow. So much better than a hansom cab, thought Holmes, as Harry spoke again.

  ‘Something else. That accident. It was Thanksgiving. Same time of the year.’

  The radio crackled. By now Holmes recognized Feeney’s voice.

  ‘You were right. Rebecca Chaney was formerly Rebecca Borello. She kept the married name and used her full Christian name.’

  Harry thanked him. Holmes met his gaze. And now his brain, so slow to grind into motion, was moving like a locomotive. Harry’s phone was on the seat between them.

  ‘May I?’ he scooped it up but did not wait for a reply. He found the crime-scene photos again, knowing he had seen something earlier. There. He stopped at the photo of the mantelpiece. Placed upon it was the figurine of an ice skater. His skin was on fire.

  He checked back again at the other photographs on a corkboard: pictures of three young women in front of Rebecca’s mantlepiece. Expand.

  No figureskater on the mantlepiece in those photos, everything else the same.

  Every cell of his body was crawling terror.

  ‘Rebecca Chaney’s flat: on the mantlepiece is an ice skater. It is not in the other photos. The “Save Me” on the mirror, Harry, is written directly above it. It’s not the murderer asking to be saved. He’s taunting you. He’s saying, “Save your daughter”. His target is Georgette.’

  Sapped as she was, Georgette wasn’t stopping. She had been reading studies that had sought to increase the life span of hamsters through diet and was now in the process of dividing her hamsters into specific food groups. There was a knock on her door. Wearily she got up and opened it. It was Dwayne the security guard.

  Her phone began to ring.

  25

  Simone was upset by the way Georgette had sounded on the phone. She’d let Georgette down before and she would have asked to reschedule except that the casting agent, Keely, had called and asked her if she could basically come straight away to do a script read for a producer who was only in town for a few hours. It had to be someone from Hollywood. Keely had asked if she was alone, and of course she lied because obviously the answer he wanted was ‘yes’, and every actor knows you always say ‘Yes, I can ride a horse bareback, yes I can speak fluent Romanian’, and then you bother about the consequences later. He told her the A-lister didn’t want to be recognized so he’d had to find a rehearsal studio at short notice. He’d said he was trying to reschedule meetings and if he wasn’t there, not to worry, just to go in.

  ‘But you can’t tell anyone. They impressed that on me. You are to come alone and not tell a soul.’

  Simone hadn’t dared say she was doing a driving lesson. Surely the casting meeting wouldn’t take that long? She had to get Ambrose back, he was getting picked up from St Christopher’s for Thanksgiving. The address was in a dumpy block in Brownsville, past body-repair shops and locked garage doors. Keely had told her there was a space around the back she could park. She told Ambrose to drive slowly over the narrow entrance lane. It was cracked and broken. Luckily she had on her shortest, sexiest skirt because earlier in the day she’d been to see the letting agent about how she had fallen behind in her rent, and a high hemline worked wonders. They came to a quiet stop. There was one other car in the small lot, an early model Taurus.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked Ambrose, checking herself in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘You look hot but, remember, you don’t need to flaunt your body for this, Simone, you are a talented actor. If he suggests a private photo shoot, you walk.’

  ‘Thank you, Ambrose. Wish me luck.’

  ‘You don’t need it. You’re a star.’

  She saw him looking around nervously, didn’t blame him. The neighborhood sucked.

  ‘Lock the car after me.’

  Simone stepped out of the car. She wondered who might be behind the door. This was the most important day of her life.

  They were speeding over a bridge crossing into East Harlem. Harry had activated the siren, Holmes gripped the phone so hard his knuckles popped. Each unanswered ring pumped more terror into his heart. How stupid, foolish, arrogant of him to –

  ‘Percy?’

  Her voice!

  ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. The security guard told me he’d been ordered to stay with me. What’s going on?’

  Holmes turned to Harry Watson, understood he was no less fearful.

  ‘She is fine,’ he told him. ‘The guard is with her.’ He saw Harry mouth thank God and then pick up his own phone and dial.

  ‘Tell me,’ Georgette said.

  Holmes told her then. They thought somebody was out for revenge on Harry by targeting her. Squad cars would be there any minute.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Possibly the man who lost his wife and daughter in the boating accident, where your father rescued a young woman.’

  ‘William Burgess,’ Holmes heard Harry shout into his own phone. ‘He’d be about my age. Lived in Queens. Near Jamaica Bay. Call Gomez, tell her this is the likely killer of Rebecca Chaney. Call me back. We’re heading to the Upper West Side.’

  Georgette told Holmes that police had just arrived.

  ‘We shall be there presently,’ he said and ended the call because he would have felt foolish hanging on, even though it was what he desired. He told Harry the police were there now.

  ‘I owe you,’ Harry said.

  ‘You owe me nothing.’

  ‘Well, I could have been more understanding. Her mother was stubborn too.’

  Harry’s phone buzzed. He answered, driving with one hand. ‘What have you got? – Where’s he been the last three years? … Okay send it through. And can you copy it to Georgette? Maybe she’s seen him hanging around.’ He stopped the siren, told Holmes, ‘Feeney has the most recent license photo on William Burgess.’

  Holmes spoke thoughts his brain had long processed. ‘He must have kept Rebecca’s body frozen so he could deliver it when you were back at work.’

  A few minutes later Harry’s phone pinged. He glanced at the photo. ‘I doubt I would have recognized him without knowing who he is.’ He handed the phone to Holmes. ‘Three years ago. Seen him hanging around?’

  A man close to Harry’s age, a wide face. There was nothing distinctive about him.

  ‘What is his occupation?’

  ‘At the time he had a video business, weddings, that kind of thing. Those businesses died when everybody go
t a camera in their phone.’

  When Dwayne had appeared in her lab, Georgette’s first horrified thought was that Holmes had had some kind of relapse. After Avery Scheer and Morgan Edwards, the news that she could have a killer targeting her was less alarming than it would have been a month earlier. She was toughening up. Plus, she had an armed security guard. A text came through from Feeney with a note that said this was the most recent photo of William Burgess.

  She stared at it. Was she imagining that he looked familiar? No. She had seen him. Where? Not looking exactly like that. Her phone buzzed. Sherlock.

  ‘We are about seven minutes away. Do you recognize him?’

  ‘I think so but he might look different now. A beard maybe. Where the hell have I seen him?’

  ‘Was it recently?’

  ‘I’m fairly sure.’ But where had she been? A couple of restaurants with Holmes. Otherwise stuck in the lab … Edwards jumped into her memory like a home invader. It wasn’t Edwards though but it was something about that night …

  Holy shit!

  ‘It’s the casting agent who came to see Simone. And right now she’s on her way to some script reading.’

  I have given Harry Watson more than a fair chance, he thought. A lot more than was ever given him. He had been obeying the rules, minding his own business when fate had broadsided him. Not his fault or that of his beautiful Stephanie or their little princess, Lee. Yet they had paid the full penalty. And he had not been spared: the instant terrible pain and loneliness that burned your gut from morning till night, then those lost years; the drinking, the collapse of his business, the estrangement of his son. How many times had he contemplated suicide? But something had held him back. Not fear, for he had nothing to lose. No, it was the stupid conceit that behind all this, hidden from him, might be a plan, a role for him. Bit by bit he had scraped himself back together. Sobriety, a new job, new name – that, a necessity because of the money he had owed in Cleveland. But still that emptiness plagued him. Until a year ago when he had seen the news story about the brilliant young female scientist who had survived after drowning. Of course, any story about drowning perked up his interest. If a parent could be spared what he had suffered, that was to be celebrated. And here was this young scientist saying that she believed people might be able to be revived days after being believed dead. The sort of situation where Lee had lost her life.