Mary Jane's Grave

by Stacy Dittrich

  “Max, it’s CeeCee Gallagher.”

  “CeeCee! Hey, glad you called! You got something for me on this murder?”

  “Not yet. I actually need something from you. I was just reading your article in the paper on the murder and one of those excerpts jumped out at me—the one from Brian. I want to look at his whole story, Max. Can you tell me where the website is?”

  “It’s not a website, CeeCee. It came from a chat room.”

  “How’d you get it?” I prodded.

  “Interestingly enough, one of the girls who works here took part in a chat room discussion on Mary Jane’s Grave. The website was called Grave Addiction I think, and it was up maybe three years ago. She likes that spooky stuff, so she printed out the chat room transcript that day and hung on to it.”

  “So only the people who’d logged on to the chat room that day would’ve heard these stories?”

  “I guess, unless the other people saved it, too. But I’d say it’s unlikely. Why? It sounds like you’re onto something. Give me a hint. I need it for a story I’m writing.”

  “Not yet, Max, but you’ll be the first to know when the time comes.”

  It was highly doubtful that Nathan O’Malley had logged into the chat room three or four years ago. At the time, he would have been only twelve or thirteen years old. But as far as I was concerned, it still didn’t matter.

  Stories like that, once heard, are passed around for years. I was sure Nathan had heard the crying- baby story from somebody, but why he felt the need to throw it in after the murder I had yet to figure out. I would definitely have to talk to those kids again.

  I spent the next hour on the phone with the highway patrol trying to find out if they still had the fatal accident report Coop had told me about. The guys assured me that if they found it, they’d fax it to me at once.

  I knew it would still be some time for the preliminary lab results to come in, so I thought I’d go see the accident survivor in person. Coop had given me his name and I was getting antsy, sitting around feeling useless.

  Now thirty-one years old, Gary Fenner was a sales manager at a local car dealership. I didn’t call ahead for fear he’d hang up on me. After all, it was probably one of the worst experiences of his life and one he likely wouldn’t want to talk about.

  It didn’t take me long to track him down to the new car lot. According to the salesman who greeted me at the front door, Gary was showing a young couple a sleek new SUV. He pointed to a tall, gangly, borderline homely guy whose nose took up most of his face. I walked over to him and pretended to look at a red Honda Accord. I always did like red cars, even though statistically they cry out, “Give me a ticket!”

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. Anything special you’re looking for?”

  “Are you Gary Fenner?” I asked, even though I figured it had to be him.

  “Yes, ma’am. Are you here on a referral?”

  “Actually, no. I’m Sergeant Gallagher with the Richland Metro Police Department.” I handed him my card. “I need to ask you a few questions. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  He paled, his friendly smile replaced by apprehension. “Can you tell me what this is about, Sergeant? I’m working.” He looked around nervously.

  I explained what I wanted to talk about and watched his face go two shades lighter. I felt bad about making him talk about his past experience. It had to be hard for him. But it had to be done.

  “I read about the murder today. I don’t know how I can help you.” He looked somber. “I don’t know how my accident could be of any help to you at all.”

  My instincts told me he had more information than he was willing to share—information that could be helpful.

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that, Gary,” I said soothingly. “Look, I just want to hear your recollection of events from that night.”

  He looked around again, as if searching for a way out. He didn’t appear to be the type to take off running, but it was clear that the thought had crossed his mind. He began scratching the red hives that had appeared all over his neck. This guy was a walking ball of nerves. I did my best to try to calm him down.

  “Gary, really, there’s no reason for you to be nervous—you’re not in trouble. I’m getting strange stories from these kids about the night of the murder and I just want to see if there’s any basis in fact.” I lowered my voice to what I hoped was an intimate tone. “I was told you had somewhat of a strange experience there, and I need you to tell me about it. Then I promise I’ll get out of your way, okay?”

  He sighed, then suggested we go inside to the employee break room. “I’m due for a break anyway,” he said, “but I need to tell my boss I might need a longer one.”

  He ushered me into a small room that contained a coffeepot, about a dozen chairs, and some pastries. Forcing myself to ignore the Danish, I gratefully reached for a cup of coffee while Gary went off in search of his boss. He was gone only for a few minutes before he returned and shut the door. I took out my tape recorder and explained that I’d be taping our conversation for his own protection. He slowly nodded.

  “Gary, I want you to tell me everything you remember about the night of your accident. I know it was a long time ago, but anything you recall will be helpful.”

  He sighed. “You know, I’ve tried everything known to man to forget that night, Sergeant. I never thought I’d have to relive it. Even though it was a long time ago, I remember everything.” He started playing with a pen that he pulled from his shirt pocket.

  Gary began his story. He’d been a teenager at the time, and that previous July he and a few of his friends had gotten beer from their parents’ refrigerators and gone drinking on Trease Road, a stone’s throw from Mary Jane’s Grave. Trease Road was a dirt road with little to no traffic on it, a prime drinking spot for local teens. I remember visiting it a couple of times myself in high school. The kids were going to a party later on, but it was his friend Jesse Walters who suggested they go down to the grave.

  “Everyone was all for it, except me. I was always chicken when it came to stuff like that. The place gave me the creeps, even in daylight.”

  But Gary finally relented, giving in to his friends’ taunts. After standing at the site for only ten minutes, Jesse suggested they all urinate on the grave.

  “He said, ‘Did ya hear that if you piss on her grave, you’re cursed for life?’ We were all laughing, still drinking, and Jesse walked right over and pissed on it. Cameron and Stevie did, too.”

  “But you didn’t?” I asked. “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t about the curse and all that horse shit. It was just that I’d been raised to respect the dead, and I didn’t feel right about pissing on anyone’s grave.”

  Gary grabbed a coffee, threw in five packets of sugar and took a sip. He continued, explaining how the four of them had stayed a little longer, drinking and telling ghost stories. It was when they got into Jesse’s car to leave that he got spooked.

  “On my way to the car, I passed through an area that was freezing cold—I mean, I could even see my breath, and it was summer! No one else said anything, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to sound like an ass.” He started to rub his temples with both hands. “I remember Stevie asking if any of us smelled something burning. None of us did, and at first I thought he was just trying to scare me, but when I saw the look on his face I knew he wasn’t joking. Right then, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.”

  Gary suddenly excused himself and dashed to the restroom just outside the door. I had a feeling he was going to lose his coffee. So far, nothing he’d told me was outrageous or unexplainable. Everyone’s perceptions of sight, smell and sound can vary greatly, and being teenagers, one person’s imagination could scare the hell out of the rest of them.

  It was a good fifteen minutes before Gary came back into the room. I was beginning to think he’d finally decided to take off, his nerves getting the better of him. I reminded him where he’d left off, and he began
to talk about the car.

  “Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to leave. I felt better when we were finally in the car. Then Jesse turned the key in the ignition and the damn thing wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. That’s when I got scared. I kept telling Jesse to let me out—I was in the backseat—so I could walk out of there, but he was swearing at his car. It was brand-new. All of a sudden, the car just blared on. Jesse hadn’t even turned the key again.”

  “If you were in the backseat, how could you see that Jesse didn’t turn the key in the ignition?” I asked.

  “He said he didn’t, that’s all. Stevie was in front and said Jesse didn’t, too.”

  “Then what?”

  “We left. Jesse drove like a bat out of hell down the road. When we finally came to the stop sign, they were all laughing like crazy. That’s when I decided they were all pulling my chain.” He paused.

  “Go on.”

  “We had just made the turn when Jesse floored it. He got up to about eighty when I looked up at the dash to see how fast he was going. That’s when I saw the woman.” He stopped, and I saw he was beginning to sweat.

  “Tell me about the woman, Gary.”

  “She was just standing in the middle of the road, wearing a long white nightgown. She was holding something wrapped in a blanket, and she was smiling.” He bit his lip, the image clearly as vivid as the night he’d seen it. “She had really long red hair, and she was pretty but…”

  “But what?”

  “She was pretty but scary. I don’t know how else to explain it, but once I saw her I yelled to Jesse, ‘Look out!’ That’s when he jerked the wheel to miss her. That’s the very last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital and found out that everyone in the car but me was dead.”

  I waited a few moments, absorbing everything Gary had told me. Unfortunately, no woman had been found at the scene, and no other witnesses were alive to confirm his story.

  “Gary, do you remember how much you drank that night? Were you drunk?”

  “I know what I saw, Sergeant,” he said firmly, looking offended.

  “I’m not insinuating that you don’t, Gary. I just want to know how much you’d been drinking or if you’d taken any drugs.”

  “I had, maybe, five or six beers, and yeah, I was buzzing. But I didn’t do any drugs that night. Never have, never will.”

  I had asked Gary this question for several reasons. Alcohol consumption, drugs, and lack of sleep are just a few things that can cause hallucinations. I remember several years ago when I was working night-shift road patrol. I was so tired I thought I saw birds flying at my windshield and people ducking behind bushes. This was right before I fell asleep at the wheel and almost hit a telephone pole.

  A sudden flash of light from an oncoming car could’ve caused Gary to think he was seeing a woman in white. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself, since his story was so illogical. He was scared after being at the grave. Mix the fear with alcohol and I was surprised he didn’t see the woman fly right at their car on a broomstick.

  “Gary, I’m almost done. How many people have you told this to?”

  “My parents and the state trooper who took my statement,” he said matter-of-factly, but I knew he was lying.

  Obviously, he had told more people than that. Coop told me about it, saying he’d heard it from his little brother. After Gary claimed he had told me everything, I got up to leave. “Thanks for your help,” I told him briskly, ready to move on to other possibilities. “You can get back to your job. Looks like some folks out there may be in the market for that red Honda I had my eye on.”

  Gary murmured something and raced out to the lot, ready to assume the role of Supersalesman once again.

  As I drove back to the department, I thought about our conversation. Gary hadn’t told me anything that couldn’t be explained rationally, and now I was more convinced than ever that Kari Sutter’s friends had been connected to her murder. I just didn’t know how yet. But gunning my engine, I swore that I’d find out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When I walked into my office, Naomi was waiting for me.

  “Take a deep breath, CeeCee. We’ve been totally bombarded with calls since this article came out this morning.” She was holding the paper out to me. “Every quack in the entire county has been calling about their experiences at the grave, thinking it’ll help the investigation.”

  “Fantastic,” I muttered, throwing my bag on my desk and sitting down. Just as I had predicted—damn, I hated being right.

  “We’ve had two psychics call and say that Mary Jane contacted them this morning and told them who the killer was.”

  “Great, that’ll save us a lot of work. Did you keep their numbers?” I asked, only half kidding, picking up my phone to check my messages.

  She stood there patiently while I listened to my messages. There were twenty- three of them. Twenty were from the people Naomi was talking about, and I started to delete them, then changed my mind. They might be entertaining sometime if I was bored.

  The other three were important. One was from Michael, another from the crime lab letting me know the preliminary test results were back, and the third was from Kyle Latham. He said he wanted to talk to me again. There was something he hadn’t told me the first time.

  “Gotcha now, you little bastards,” I muttered while saving Kyle’s message.

  “Come again?” Naomi asked, perplexed.

  “Kyle Latham just left me a message. He wants to talk again and said he didn’t tell me everything. I just know those kids had something to do with the murder, and I think Kyle’s going to be the first to break.”

  “Let me know what you find out,” she said. “I’m outta here.”

  My first call was to Michael, to tell him I anticipated being home late. We now had both the girls and Sean, so I told him to order a pizza; I’d grab something to eat on my own.

  My next call was to the lab. I was anxious to hear the results. Bob, who was out at the murder scene, answered on the first ring.

  “Bob, it’s CeeCee. Lay it on me.”

  “Wait a sec. I need to grab the file,” he said. I waited impatiently till he came back with the information. “Okay, here it is. The victim died from manual strangulation with burn marks over her upper torso. They appear to have been inflicted postmortem, most likely from a fireplace poker. None of the soil at the grave site matches any on the shoes of the teens at the scene, except for Nathan O’Malley, and there’s no match for any dirt inside the car. We couldn’t find any blood traces inside the car or on any of the kids’ clothing, and there was no sexual assault. So far, the DNA swab of the victim’s neck turned up nothing.”

  To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. “So, to sum it up, you’re telling me we don’t have shit,” I bit out.

  “Sí, senora.”

  I was deflated and majorly pissed off. These kids couldn’t be so smart that they wouldn’t leave any evidence. Either that, or Bob was an idiot and did a terrible job of processing the crime scene, which I knew wasn’t true.

  “You’re telling me you don’t think any of those kids got out of the car?”

  “Nope, only the Irish kid. Keep in mind, CeeCee, these are just the prelims.”

  I sighed, knowing I’d just hit a brick wall. It would be a miracle if the final results differed from the preliminaries. Now it was a matter of waiting for a break, from Kyle Latham I hoped. I thanked Bob and hung up. Then I had another thought and called Michael back.

  “Michael, I forgot to ask if you came up with anything profile-wise on a suspect. There was no evidence left at the scene.”

  “Honestly, Cee, I haven’t had much time to work on it. I’ve come up with a little bit if that helps.”

  “Just tell me this,” I urged. “Is it possible that the four teenagers are responsible?”

  “I highly, highly doubt it,” he said firmly. “This was organized, sophisticated and well planned. Even if those kids watched
every crime show on television, they’re not sophisticated enough to stage that kind of scene. They wouldn’t know that by just putting bare hands around a neck, more DNA than needed can transfer in a split second.”

  “But you still can’t rule them out, right?”

  “No, but I’d be looking for other suspects.”

  I thought about this for a moment. If there was a way for these teens to commit this murder and get away with it, I was going to find out. I was putting a lot of hope into Kyle Latham.

  “Cee, you still there?” Michael asked.

  “I’m here. I’m just extremely frustrated. I need to get going, honey. Are the kids okay?”

  “They’re fine. Isabelle is driving Sean around the yard in her Barbie jeep, and Selina is on the trampoline. We’re waiting for the pizza. Get back here as soon as you can, okay? Even police officers need to eat.”

  “I’m practically on my way. See you soon,” I promised.

  Next, I called Kyle Latham’s house and got the answering machine. I waited half an hour before trying again. This time, Kyle answered. We agreed that I would come to his house to talk to him since coming to the station made him nervous. I could understand that, and there was nowhere I wouldn’t meet this kid, my only hope for vital information.

  When I arrived at Kyle’s house, I found him—and his parents—waiting for me. The three were seated around their dining-room table, an unmistakable look of anxiety on their faces. I felt a surge of hope, knowing their nervous ness meant they were ready to reveal something that Kyle hadn’t yet told us.

  Kyle’s father directed me to another room, his home office, and told me I could talk to Kyle in there. Evidently, Kyle wanted to talk to me alone. As he walked in, his father gave him a piece of sound advice. “Tell her exactly what you told us, Kyle. Don’t sugarcoat any of it!”

  I was now dying to hear what Kyle was going to tell me, but he wasn’t exactly dying to tell me. When he closed the door and sat down, he began rubbing his palms across his jeans. I looked closer at him than I had the night of the murder. He was nice looking, his baby face starting to thin out with his age, and he seemed quite thoughtful.