Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  "Jesus H. Christ."

  The second cop, standing in front of her, reacts immediately to the alarm in his partner's voice, glancing over his shoulder. "Rich? What's going on?"

  "Cuff her."

  The second cop frowns, straining to see beyond the bloodstained backseat without turning completely away from Sue. "What is it? What's back there?"

  "Cuff her, cuff her now!"

  The urgency in his voice is contagious and for an instant Sue is irrationally compelled to make a run for it, jump back in the Expedition and go screaming off into the night. Of course this is idiotic, only morons try to outrun cops, and morons with dead bodies in the backnever get away. Besides, the second cop is already turning her around, pulling her arms together, tightening cold steel at her wrists. He leads her around the back of the Expedition and Sue watches him join his partner, both of them shining their lights down on Marilyn's corpse sprawled on its back, mouth open, eyeless sockets facing up.

  "Holy fuck."

  "Yeah."

  "Holyfuck. "

  Without speaking another word to Sue, the second cop takes her back to the cruiser. Inside it's warm and smells like coffee. She steals a glimpse at the dashboard clock, feeling the minutes flash by. She tries not to think about this but knows she can't help it. Where has the time gone? The night which just moments ago seemed endless is already draining away from her at an alarming speed, and Veda is that much closer to dying.

  Eventually another cruiser pulls up, along with an ambulance and a tow truck. An unmarked sedan is the last car to arrive and she sees an older man with a beard step out, wearing a parka and holding a cup of coffee. He talks to the cops, looks in the back of the Expedition, then glances in Sue's direction. She watches as he scratches his beard and gets back in his car. The tow truck driver hooks the Expedition to the winch, and the others all return to their cars. The whole process takes a little over twenty minutes.

  The sedan leads the procession back to town, followed by the ambulance, the other cruiser, and the tow truck hauling the Expedition. The two cops and Sue bring up the rear. They drive in silence for several minutes until, up ahead, Sue sees the sign along the side of the road:

  ASHFORD

  ESTABLISHED1802

  They drive past the sign, the road winding lazily into town. Unlike the other towns on the route, Ashford is still populated. The windows have glass in them. The streetlights work. The houses and shops along its main drag are dark, of course, but neon shines down from either side-shoe repairs and tanning salons-and the roads have been cleared recently. Two churches stand guard on either side of the main intersection, glowering down at the local Blockbuster. There's a park up ahead and Sue sees the statue exactly where she expects it, the man on his pedestal, except this time the figure is not only missing both arms, he's also minus a leg. He holds his head cocked proudly, like some flightless seabird.

  "Isaac Hamilton," she says.

  The cop behind the wheel looks back at her. "What?"

  "That's him, isn't it?"

  Neither of them replies, and that's all right. At this point she takes nothing for granted. As they roll through town she begins to feel something, light-headedness along with a flutter of nausea, and waits to see if it's going to get worse. But within seconds it's gone again. It's almost like a kind of mountain sickness, as if the air is thinner here but her body is learning to adapt more swiftly each time she passes through it.

  At the Ashford Police Station the tow truck pulls her car around to the impound lot and the cruiser parks in front. The cops lead her up the steps and inside, bypassing the officer behind the booking desk, who buzzes them through. There's a TV and VCR under the desk, and Sue sees the booking sergeant is watching an old Clint Eastwood movie with the sound turned down. To her right she spots a bulletin board full of missing children posters.

  They take her down a long white hallway that looks like it was recently constructed, past several darkened cubicles with computer monitors playing screensavers. At the end of the hall one of the cops opens a door for her, takes off her handcuffs, and ushers her inside, closing the door and locking it from the outside. Sue looks at her watch.

  It's already four in the morning.

  Veda, I've still got so far to go.

  She looks around. The room is nothing but four white walls and a table with two chairs. She hears the climate control hum to life, pumping warm air into the room. It's already too hot in here. From the other side of the door she hears voices but can't tell what they're saying. Then it opens and the man with the beard walks in carrying a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Up close he looks even older than she thought, late sixties, past retirement age, dressed in a wrinkled white oxford with an ink stain on the breast pocket. He's got wintry gray eyes, caved-in cheeks, and the beginning of a gut sloping over his belt, and smells like cigarettes. He motions for her to sit and then sinks into the chair across from her and frowns.

  "I'm Detective Yates, Ms. Young. We found the second body in your car. Want to tell me what's going on, or do you just want to call your lawyer?"

  "You have to let me go."

  He looks at her, raises an eyebrow.

  "I can't-" She stops. He actually seems to be paying very close attention to what she's about to say and it makes it that much harder to talk. "There's no time to explain. If you let me go, I promise, I'll do whatever you want. I just have to get Veda back by tomorrow morning."

  "Veda is your daughter?"

  "She's been kidnapped. The kidnappers gave me very specific instructions." She waits for him to interject with a question but he waits her out with that same one-eyebrow-raised expression. "There was a dead body, the one in garbage bags. I had to go dig it up."

  "From a grave?"

  "No. It was buried under a bridge, back in Gray Haven."

  Yates flinches at the name of the town. "And these kidnappers told you where to find it?"

  For a half second Sue hesitates, not so much because she wants to tell him the truth but simply because it almost slips out on its own. Then she nods. "They told me on the phone that I needed to go get it and drive it through this route, and when I got there they'd give me my little girl back."

  He wrinkles up his eyes at her. "When was all this?"

  "Earlier tonight."

  "And you didn't call the police?"

  "He said not to."

  Yates doesn't move, doesn't even look at her, processing all of this.

  "What about the other body, the girl?"

  "She's my nanny. They killed her after they kidnapped Veda, then they brought her body back and put it in my car." She forces herself to look into the impenetrable frown cut into the detective's face. "Look, I know how it sounds, but if I don't do exactly what they tell me, they'll kill her."

  Yates looks at her for a while longer and stands up. He appears smaller now, shrunken. Something's been taken away from him. "Have you seen his face, any kind of a vehicle, anything like that?"

  "It's a gray van. I don't know the license plate number."

  He nods, once. "I'll be back."

  "Wait, you can't leave me-"

  The door swings shut and locks. Sue sits there and waits. And waits.

  4:10A.M.

  Ten minutes later Yates returns, smelling freshly of cigarettes.

  He's carrying something in a transparent evidence bag and drops it on the table in front of Sue. She instantly recognizes it as the map with the route highlighted and the wordPUNISHED scrawled across the top.

  "Where did you get this?" he asks.

  "They gave it to me. It's my route. The kidnappers, they left it with Marilyn's body."

  He puts his elbows on the table and rubs his temples. In the fluorescent lights his skin appears almost blue, the fine veins beneath it darker still. "Tell me, Ms. Young." His fingertips tremble as he turns the map around to look at it. "Are you from Massachusetts originally?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know about the Engineer?"

 
"What's this got to do with…?"

  "Just answer the question."

  Sue gazes at him flatly, this tired-looking stranger with the gray seen-it-all eyes. Once again she feels the impulse to tell him everything. It would be so much easier, telling the truth to someone, and he already thinks she's crazy so why not give him the whole story? But again some mental circuit breaker clicks into place and she catches herself, holding back. Whether or not this decision is common sense or self-defense or simple instinct is not clear to her. At this point her motives-beyond the obvious one to get her daughter back safely by sunrise-are nebulous to her. But she holds back just the same.

  "Of course I've heard of him. I was a teenager when it happened. I remember seeing it on the news and hearing my parents talk about it." She shakes her head. "But I don't understand how that's got anything to do with me or my daughter."

  Yates holds up two long fingers, like he's ordering a couple drinks. Sue notices that his nails are yellow and in need of trimming-bachelor's nails, she thinks. "There are two reasons I bring it up. First, as you probably remember, in the summer of 1983, the murderer that they called the Engineer abducted and killed thirteen children. Second…" He points at the map in the baggie. "This is the exact route that he traveled, east to west, through these seven towns, beginning June 12, 1983, in White's Cove and ending with the disappearance of the last child on August 22 in Gray Haven. So what's the connection?"

  "I don't know," she says. "Honestly. I have no idea."

  Yates frowns at her, obviously not buying this. But there's something else in his expression besides incredulity, something both simpler and more complex, and Sue sees it. She sees it in the mesh of wrinkles around his eyes and the eyes themselves, the way they've fastened themselves to her. It's like a hunger, a fever to find out.

  She thinks about what he said, about the Engineer, the ease with which he reeled off the specifics of the case, the exact number of children and the precise dates. Despite his disclaimers and the affectation of uncertainty Yates has linked the route to the Engineer, at least to his own satisfaction. Going over these things in her mind it occurs to her that he might have his own connection to what happened that summer, just as she does. "Did you investigate the disappearances here?" she asks.

  Yates's eyes flash to her. "Not officially, no."

  Sue blinks. The answer doesn't make sense. Then she realizes it's because it's only half the answer. And the rest of it hits her with the clarity of winter light.

  "Your child," she says, "was one of his victims."

  Yates's silence confirms more than any words. All at once Sue feels a connection to the tired old man across the table. They've both lost a child-permanently in Yates's case, more immediately in her own-to a force that they're both still struggling to comprehend. It explains why a detective in his late sixties would refuse to retire, she thinks, just as it explains the unhealthy intensity burning behind his weary face. Out of the blue she thinks this cannot be a coincidence. Not because someone planned it: How could they? But simply because she is on the route, and there is something about this combination of back roads and towns, something ancient and frightening and explicitly unreal, wherein certain connections happen because they must.

  "Her name was Rebecca," Yates says finally, the name seeming to take everything from him as he speaks it. "She was eleven years old that summer. That was almost his cutoff, you know. He never killed anyone older than twelve."

  "I'm so sorry."

  Again he doesn't seem to hear. "I'll never forget how my wife sounded when she called me at work that afternoon to tell me she was missing. It didn't even sound like her." Yates is shaking his head slowly, not looking at Sue, not looking at anything, really. This featureless, white-walled room is perfect for that. "Then three days later some hikers found Rebecca just outside of town. Most of her, anyway. He'd shot out her eyes, like he did with all the others." He pauses for a fraction of a second. "Like the body of the woman we found in your car, your nanny. And do you know the worst part?"

  She waits.

  "After we buried her? Someone dug her up. They dug up her coffin and took my daughter's body. Since then I've discovered that that's what happened to a lot of the kids from that summer. Nobody knows where they went, they're just gone."

  Sue just nods. She's thought all of this already. Then the question pops out of her mouth before she even knows it's there. "Who was Isaac Hamilton?"

  Yates-if it's possible-becomes even paler than before. "Isaac Hamilton?"

  "The name on the statue, the one with one leg and no arms."

  "Who told you about him?"

  "Nobody. His statue's in every town along the route, starting with Gray Haven, and each time he's missing another extremity. Does that have anything to do with the Engineer?"

  "No," Yates says definitively, but his eyes have wandered away from her. Then, in a softer voice: "Not unless you believe in a lot of superstitious bullshit."

  "What kind of superstitious bullshit?"

  "That's not important right now."

  "I think it is."

  Yates sighs. "We spent a long time following up the idea that the Engineer was somehow influenced by Isaac Hamilton. There's obviously a connection: the Engineer only killed children in towns where Hamilton's statue was erected, and Hamilton himself was a historic child-murderer, two hundred years ago. Even now there are a lot of nuts out there who think that…"

  "Think what?"

  "Who seem to think that Hamilton was controlling the Engineer from beyond the grave," Yates says. He does a pretty good job of keeping the inflection from his voice, all things considered. "Putting voices in his head or something. They come out of the woodwork with these theories, thinking that local police, state troopers, and the FBI haven't noticed the connection. But frankly we're a little hesitant to accept that the Engineer was only a tool for Isaac Hamilton's eternal evil."

  "How come I never heard any of this before?" Sue asks.

  "You wouldn't," Yates says, "unless you were an avid reader of theNational Enquirer and theWeekly World News. The mainstream media couldn't do much with it, except to make the comparison and let it drift. The supermarket tabloids, though, had a field day."

  Sue opens her mouth to say something and snaps it shut again. The words she was about to speak, and whatever happened to them before they reached her lips, have eluded her entirely now, leaving a mortal coldness in their wake. Somewhere in the police station, a drawer slams shut, and she jumps so suddenly it hurts.

  Yates clears his throat, sounding like he could use another cigarette.

  "We don't traffic in horror stories and speculation, Ms. Young, we deal in facts, and in this case, the facts are pretty plain. There were two dead bodies in your car and a lot of unanswered questions. You'll forgive me if I'm not completely convinced you're telling me the truth about why you're involved in all this. You have to realize you're only hurting yourself by holding back. Why would whoever kidnapped your daughter want you to go and dig up a body, and then place another body in your car?"

  Sue feels her voice slipping a bit. "I told you, I don't know. All I know is that my daughter's in danger, she's going to die in three hours if I don't do exactly what they told me, and we're wasting time sitting here talking about it."

  "We'll do absolutely everything we can to get your daughter back-"

  "That's not enough." She's on her feet now, though she doesn't remember standing up, and she's practically yelling. "What if it were your daughter and you had another chance to save her, what would you do?"

  "Itisn't me," Yates says, not sounding particularly offended by her outburst. If anything his voice, his whole demeanor, has softened, become more sympathetic. "Itisn't me, Ms. Young."

  "But if it were? Wouldn't you do whatever it took to get her back safely?"

  Yates, to his credit, seems to weigh the question seriously. "If it were my daughter? My Rebecca?"

  "Yes."

  "I never would've let them br
ing me in. I would've drivenover those two officers before I let them stop me from doing what I had to do."

  She nods, wearily. Getting him to admit this doesn't make her feel any better. It only makes things worse.

  "But youdid let them take you in," Yates says, "and now you're here. And regardless of how I might feel about the matter personally, it's my job to make sure you stay here until some of these questions are answered. I'm sorry. If you want to make a phone call, you're entitled to one." He too stands up, makes an oddly gentle lifting motion with his palm; it is an invitation, she realizes, to make the call. Sue goes to the door, and Yates taps on it once. Another police officer's face appears outside, an absurdly young-looking man with the wispy beginnings of a blond mustache, as the door swings open so Yates can guide her to the phone mounted on the wall. He gets a line out and hands her the receiver.

  Sue dials the first number that comes to mind, her attorney David Feldman, and gets his answering service. She leaves the number at the station and hangs up, then lets them take her back to her little white room. She half expects Yates to follow her in, but he only gives her a nod and says he'll be right back.

  The door closes; the door locks.

  Sue sits and stares at it, trying not to think of the minutes as they dribble past. She starts to visualize Veda in the dark interior of the van and deliberately snaps the thought off. She can see her daughter just as clearly as before, but it no longer provides even the most fleeting succor.Dear God, get me out of here.

  Ten minutes later she hears the screams.

  4:41A.M.

  They coincide with a series of slamming sounds, like kitchen cupboards banging shut. The silence that comes afterward is seamless. After a span of seconds it's interrupted by a distant but distinct tumbling noise, something falling down heavily-it'sgot to be heavy if Sue can hear it here, at the end of the hallway. Then from somewhere in the guts of the police station she hears a man's voice yell:"Holy shit!" There are two more flat bangs. Then nothing. No bangs, no shouting. Not breathing, Sue moves toward the door, almost reaches it, and stops short.