Fearless

by Mike Dellosso

  After kissing his wife and telling her to go back to sleep, he’d be back home in a few hours, Doug hopped in his pickup and headed for Cozy’s.

  Fifteen minutes later he was standing over the body of Billy Cousins. The big guy was on his back, skin as pale as paper, neck cut from ear to ear like he’d grown a second mouth—a gruesome sight. Dried blood formed a ring around his body. The whole area smelled of stale urine.

  By the Dumpster Officer Peevey talked to Ernie James, the bartender.

  Jerry Frizetti, the county coroner, stood next to Doug, nursing a coffee in a paper cup. He was a large man with a heavy brow and narrow, deep-set eyes. His shirts usually carried a smattering of coffee stains, and he was never without a necktie, loose in the knot, that hung around his neck like a noose. Frizetti held a coffee in one hand and a wrapped fast-food sandwich stuffed in his shirt pocket. “Haven’t seen anything like this around here for a while, huh?”

  “I would have liked to have kept it that way,” Doug said. “How come you don’t have that just-pulled-out-of-bed look about you?”

  “Sometimes—” Frizetti sipped his coffee. “—sleep eludes me.”

  “Maybe it’s all the coffee; ever think of that?”

  “It’s decaf.”

  “I didn’t know you drink decaf.”

  “That’s ’cause I never told you. Doc told me to get off the caffeine last year, and the wife, she makes sure I listen. Wants to keep me around for some odd reason.”

  “Must be the money,” Doug said, then motioned toward the corpse of Billy Cousins. “Billy was a piece a work, but no one deserves to go like this. What do we got?”

  Frizetti handed his coffee to Doug. “Here, hold this.” He rounded the body, squatted next to it, his big form nearly folding in half. He lifted the right side of the corpse. “Stab wound to the right kidney. Lacerated neck, deep too, hit both jugulars and carotids and almost went through the trachea. Then this . . . ” He lifted Billy’s shirt to reveal a series of large lacerations across his chest and abdomen forming the letter R. “Best I can tell, Cousins here came out back to relieve himself, someone came up from behind, got him in the kidney, cut his throat, then went to work on his chest.”

  Doug didn’t like this. Too strange, too vicious. The only other murders he’d ever dealt with had been straightforward, open-and-shut cases. This one was like something out of some crime TV show. And he hated those shows. “How long’s he been dead?”

  Jerry stood, took his coffee back, and stared at the body of Billy Cousins. “Hard to tell here. No more than three, four hours. Rigor mortis is just starting to set in. Peevey’s talking to Ernie now. He was first to respond. Should be able to give us more details on a timeline.”

  “Peevey.”

  Peevey looked up from his steno pad.

  “A minute when you’re done.”

  Peevey said something to Ernie, shook his hand, then headed toward Doug and Jerry. “We’re done.”

  “You got his statement?”

  “Every word of it.” Peevey stopped at Billy’s head and put his hands on his hips. “Billy here came in the bar after his shift at the mill. Ernie said he was his usual self, loud, stirring up trouble. Upset about some song playing on the jukebox. Got in Ed Polowski’s face about it, tried to start something, but Ed didn’t take the bait. Joe Harding was sitting with Ed. Ernie threatened to call the police. Billy finally gave up and left. That was a little before midnight and the last time Ernie saw or heard from Billy. Until the bar closed and he finished cleaning up and headed out here to dump the garbage. That was about two thirty. Bar closes at two.”

  Doug smoothed his mustache. “How many were in the bar when Billy left?”

  “Ernie said he remembered thirteen other men, no women.”

  “And he can name them all?”

  “Every one of them. Said they’re all regulars, either mill workers winding down or townies looking for a night cap.”

  Doug said to Jerry, “You said he had to be dead at least three hours, right?”

  Jerry nodded. “It’s rare for rigor mortis to set in sooner than that.”

  “So he would have had to have been offed shortly after he left. Anybody leave shortly after him, Peevey?”

  Peevey checked his steno pad. “Nope. But Jude Fabry came shortly after midnight, sat in the corner, drank a few beers, and left before closing.”

  “Jude Fabry? Don’t think I know him.”

  “He’s new in the area. Works second at the packaging plant in Jefferson. Lives out off 807. I talked to him once. Quiet guy but seemed nice enough.”

  Doug would have liked to believe this case was that easy, pin it on the new guy, but something told him it wasn’t. He also would have liked to think they could narrow down the suspect or suspects to one or a few of the thirteen, but he couldn’t be sure of that either. But it was certainly a place to start. “Okay. Peevey, I want your full report by noon. I’ll get forensics in here to comb the place. Don’t touch or move anything until they’re done, then the body’s all yours, Jerry. Get me the examiner’s report as soon as the autopsy is done. I’m going home and getting back in bed.” He turned to leave, stopped. “Did anyone tell Billy’s wife?”

  “Not yet,” Peevey said.

  Doug had half a mind to tell Peevey to do it but knew it would go better coming from him. “I’ll do it.” All in all he loved being a cop, but there were aspects of the job he just hated. Telling a wife—even the wife of a jerk like Billy Cousins—that she was now a widow was one of them.

  He returned to his car and found Jackie Hale, police reporter for the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record, standing behind the yellow police tape. Doug lifted the tape and passed beneath it.

  “Jackie Hale, star reporter, you’re up early today.”

  Jackie looked like she too just climbed out of bed. Usually a woman who appeared to take plenty of time to primp in the morning, she had no makeup on and her hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. Jackie followed Doug to the car. “Who is it, Chief?”

  “Billy Cousins. What, do you have your scanner right next to your bed or something? Or do you just never sleep, waiting up all night for something exciting to happen in Rockingham County?”

  “Ditano called me,” she said.

  Victor Ditano was the editor of the Daily News-Record and a man Doug rarely got along with. “Oh, so Vic’s the one who never sleeps, huh. Not surprised there.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “To who?”

  “Cousins.”

  Doug reached his car and opened the door. “Murdered.”

  “How?”

  “Stabbed.”

  “How many times?”

  “Hard to say. I didn’t take the time to count.”

  “So multiple times?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She scribbled something on her notepad. “Any suspects yet?”

  “You know I can’t comment on that.”

  “Any apparent motive? Was there an altercation in the bar? Did Cousins have enemies?”

  Doug sat in his cruiser. “Cousins saw everyone as an enemy.”

  “That’s a lot of suspects to weed through.”

  “An awful lot.” He closed the door and started the engine, glad to leave the reporter and her probing questions far behind.

  Chapter 19

  AMY SPENCER AWAKENED with a start. She’d had another nightmare.

  Jim slept peacefully beside her. The darkened room was cluttered with disjointed, misplaced shadows. But there was something wrong, something odd about the way the shadows were positioned. In the far corner of the room, next to her dresser, a dark figure occupied the space. The visitor’s face was shrouded in darkness, but Amy instinctively knew who it was. She said the girl’s name out loud—“Louisa”—but the child did nothing.

  She closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them, Louisa was next to her bed, at her head. She had both hands on the mattress, almost touching Amy’s shou
lder. The bedroom door was cracked open, and a bar of light from the hall slanted across the girl’s face. Those blue eyes captured the light and appeared to glow from their own inner source.

  “You’re afraid,” the girl said in a wondering voice.

  Amy thought to nudge Jim, awaken him and let him take care of this, but she didn’t. Instead she said, “Louisa, why are you in here?”

  “You’re afraid.” Her voice was small and seemed to get lost in the room.

  Behind Louisa the shadows on the walls and ceiling moved, they writhed and gyrated, as if they were alive and growing more anxious by the second.

  “Why? Why am I afraid?”

  Louisa turned her head slowly and glanced out the window then back at Amy. “He’s coming, isn’t he?”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “You don’t have to be afraid. Fear has no real power.”

  “Afraid of who? Who’s coming?”

  The girl shook her head, backing away, then disappeared through the open door. Amy sank back into her pillow, and an inexplicable cloud of fatigue engulfed her. Once again she drifted to sleep.

  Moments later Amy started awake, but this time to the sound of a baby crying. She lay in bed for a moment, listening to the sound, so foreign and distant, alien to their home. Was it a baby? Or was it Louisa, lying on her cot? Or perhaps a stray cat outside.

  The crying grew louder, urgent, desperate, and now she could tell it was definitely that of an infant. It came from another room in the house, the nursery, just across the hall.

  Amy threw off the covers, not caring if she disturbed Jim, and crossed the bedroom in four steps. Darkness hid the corners, but her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see Louisa was not in the room with her. She and Jim were alone. The depth of that thought suddenly struck her as profound. They were alone. They had no child. But the crying was still there and increasing in volume by the moment. The baby sounded to be in pain or terribly afraid.

  Amy opened the door and welcomed the light of the hallway. Across the way, in the nursery, the crying became muffled, as if someone had placed a hand over the baby’s mouth. Her baby’s mouth. She no longer cared that every ounce of reason said it couldn’t be her baby because she had no child. To her the child in her nursery was her baby, her little girl, Olivia. And something was wrong.

  She dashed across the hallway, pushed open the nursery door, and found Louisa standing next the crib, both hands in it and holding something over the baby.

  “Get away from her!” Amy cried, rushing across the room.

  Louisa yanked up what she was holding (Amy saw it to be a pillow) and stumbled backward.

  As tears sprung to her eyes and blurred her vision, Amy pushed the girl out of the way and looked into the crib.

  A baby was there, just a newborn, wrapped tightly in a pink blanket. By the light of the nightlight in the room Amy could see the baby’s skin was pale blue and that she wasn’t breathing. “What did you do?” she screamed at Louisa.

  Louisa dropped the pillow and backed away.

  Amy reached into the crib and scooped up her baby, her precious Olivia, and held her limp, lifeless body tight. The tears came in a torrent, sheets of them like the worst summer storm . . .

  And suddenly she was awake, in her own bed, in her own room, the morning sun slipping past the shades, brightening the walls. And though she was awake, she still quaked and felt a heaviness in her chest.

  She pushed back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat up. The feelings and emotions stirred by the dream remained, lingering like the after-tingle of an electric shock. She had to check the nursery, had to see for herself that it was indeed only a dream.

  The nursery was across the hall, just like in her dream, and still decorated and furnished to welcome their new arrival. Jim had wanted to sell the furniture—the crib, changing table, dresser, glider rocker—or at least put them in the attic, but Amy would have none of it. For several months the room had remained unchanged, a brutal reminder of what could have been.

  Amy crossed the hall and opened the door of the nursery. The smell of new linens and baby stuff greeted her, the aroma of new life. Sunlight hit the windows at just the right angle, causing the yellows and pinks in the room to glow, as if the light came from within and from outside. Farm animals danced across the wall, the pig holding hands with the cow, the sheep with the horse. She’d painted it herself shortly after discovering she was pregnant. Amy walked to the crib and looked in, still feeling the fright and despair and utter horror over what she’d found there in her dream, but it was empty, of course, occupied only by a neatly folded stack of baby blankets and a stuffed pig. Picking up one of the blankets, she put it to her face, felt the softness, breathed in the newness of it . . . and heard a floorboard creak behind her.

  Amy turned, expecting to see Jim there but found Louisa standing in the hallway watching her.

  Louisa took a step forward. Her face was flat, but her eyes were alive. She looked around the room as a child would after entering a candy story for the very first time and appeared to almost smile. “Don’t change a thing, Miss Amy. It’s perfect.”

  Chapter 20

  MITCH ALBRIGHT WAS in a rather good mood come morning, despite his lack of sleep and nighttime activities. In fact, he was in such a good mood he thought he’d make some coffee and toast and take the Appletons breakfast. While the coffee was brewing, he explored more of the expansive farmhouse and found himself in the study. There three of the four walls were lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Two overstuffed chairs, each with an ornately carved side table and upholstered footrest, sat on a braided rug in the center of the room. A footstool was available to reach books on the top shelves.

  At closer inspection Mitch found most of the shelves stocked with the classics—Dickens, Alcott, Austen, Shakespeare, first editions of all of Jack London’s works—and reference books of every kind and size. Of particular interest was the sizable collection of books on horses and horse racing, with particular interest in Secretariat. The wall without bookshelves was dedicated solely to this fascination with horses. Paintings and photos nearly covered the entire wall, many of Secretariat, the great champion of 1972 and 1973.

  From the kitchen a soft chime sounded, signifying that the coffee was ready. Mitch left the study, put the bread in the toaster, and prepared three mugs of steaming coffee. When the toast was done, he placed it and the coffee on a tray along with sugar and cream and three spoons, and headed down to the cellar. In his pocket he carried a bottle of Tylenol he’d gotten from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

  Bob and Clare were in the room he had constructed for them and made no sound as he came down the steps. Previously Mitch had carried three chairs to the cellar and arranged them in a triangle of sorts with a small table in the center. It was there that the three of them would sit and enjoy their coffee. He placed the tray on the table and unlocked the door to the room. The Apple-tons sat on one of the cots Mitch had provided for them, holding each other. On their faces was a look of fear and worry.

  “Good morning, folks,” Mitch said, trying to sound cordial and nonthreatening. “Would you care to join me for some coffee and toast?”

  The two looked at each other, then Bob spoke. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “I told you already, Bob. Nothing at the moment, except maybe enjoy a cup of coffee and some light conversation. Come, join me. I promise I won’t bite.” He held out his hands, palm up. “And look, no wrench.”

  They hesitated a moment before Clare broke away from her husband and walked toward Mitch. She was a brave, confident woman. Bob wasn’t far behind her.

  The Appletons sat in two of the chairs and Mitch in the third. He served them their coffee and offered them Tylenol, which they both took with a pleasant “thank you.”

  Mitch sat back in his chair, sipped at his coffee, and said, “I noticed you admire horses and the classics. A nice combination, if I must say. For fa
rmers you seem to be very cultured.”

  Clare spoke first. “Are most farmers you’ve met not cultured?”

  A bold volley, Mitch thought, and he liked Clare even more than he had before. She had spunk and knew how to wield it without coming across as bumptious or condescending. “Most are—” Mitch thought for the correct word. “—uncomplicated.”

  “Is that another way of saying they’re simple?”

  “Maybe. But not as in stupid. I meant only that they either don’t have the time or the interest in seeking out such things as the classics and horse racing.”

  Clare tilted her head and fingered the napkin in her hand. Mitch didn’t miss her quick glance toward the staircase leading out of the cellar. “You don’t know the farmers we know. Most are very cultured, learned men, but as you said, they’re uncomplicated. They do like to keep life simple, as it should be. Too much clutter wreaks havoc on the soul. We have our interests outside the farm, but I’m afraid we’re not nearly as diverse as you may think. Bob likes his fiction, yes. When he isn’t doing something around the farm, he has his nose in one of those books. And we watch little, if any, television.” Remarkably, she appeared to be of sound mind again. The fog from yesterday’s concussion had cleared.

  “Jack London is my favorite,” Bob said.

  Mitch smiled, genuinely. “White Fang, Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf. I loved them all.” He looked at Clare. “Then you must be the horse fanatic.”

  “I like to read and learn,” Clare said.

  Bob set his mug on the table. “She can’t get enough of learning. Anything really, but especially those horses of hers.”

  “I grew up on a horse farm,” Clare said. Again she glanced at the staircase on the far side of the cellar, and her hand found her husband’s. “Worked in stables all my life. When I was a child, horses were my passion. I guess I never outgrew it.”