Past Due

by Richard Stockford

  “In a perfect world, we’d find him dead under a bush somewhere when the sun comes up,” said Clipper, but I’m afraid it won’t be that simple.” He sensed Janice’s shiver of revulsion as he turned into the State Hospital drive. “You can stay at the security desk while I check around,” he offered, knowing her answer in advance. He called the hospital switchboard on his cell phone to let them know they were outside and then, lights off, idled out back towards the cemetery.

  Clipper parked in the shadow of the main building a hundred yards from the old mortuary. He had long ago disabled his dome light, and they were careful not to slam the doors as they slipped out of the truck into the darkness. The night was warm and alive with the sounds of crickets and cicadas as they crept silently by the edge of the cemetery, pausing to check the lock on the mortuary building, and up to the crypt door, closed, but with no padlock in the hasp. Clipper stopped to listen, then stepped back, Kimber in his right hand, flashlight in the left, and nodded for Janice to open the door from the side. She reach around and jerked it open as Clipper dropped prone into the entrance. The crypt was empty except for the coffins, still massed against the left wall where they had been moved to make room for the recovery of Sloater’s remains.

  Clipper called in Peters, several uniformed officers and two k-9 units to assist hospital security in sweeping the grounds, and they searched the mortuary building, room by room, but all to no avail. Murch had vanished.

  The sun had just cleared the eastern horizon when Clipper, Janice and Peters settled into a table at Cleo’s for breakfast and a council of war. Amy Young, the owner, was in and recognized the little group’s weariness and frustration. “Looks like someone had a tough night,” she said setting down a coffee pot and three mugs. “You guys hungry?”

  “Nah,” said Clipper, “just bring a thousand eggs, scrambled, and all the bacon you got. Oh, and a piece of toast.” Chuckling, Young left for the kitchen and Clipper stretched out in his chair and looked at Janice and Peters. “Ideas? Options?” he asked tiredly.

  Janice spoke up. “The answer’s got to be at the State Hospital,” she said. “Can you set up some kind of alarm, or stakeout, or something around that cemetery?”

  Clipper nodded. “Yeah, we can keep an eye on it, but he’s not there now, so he must have found some place to lay up.”

  “We got his apartment covered,” said Peters, and we’re looking for his girlfriend to see if she has any idea where he might go. You know,” he said, sighing, “he might have boosted a car last night and be halfway to Boston by now.”

  Breakfast arrived in the form of a gigantic platter of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage and home-made biscuits with another steaming pot of coffee, and for the next twenty minutes, what little discussion there was centered on the food.

  By midafternoon, the search for Colin Murch had settled into a routine patrol operation, with Clipper and his crew pushing their street contacts for information and running down reported sightings. The timing was off for the newspaper, but local radio and television stations were airing bulletins and pleas for assistance every half hour, and there were the usual flood of helpful calls from the public. The law enforcement alert had gone nation-wide, and Janice had settled into Clipper’s office reading through the Edgewink file material confiscated from Murch’s apartment, looking for any possible lead.

  Wanda Lambert had been located at work and Clipper drove to the State Hospital to interview her.

  “I don’t know where he’d go,” she said blinking nervously and hanging her head. “He doesn’t have any family around here, I think there’s an Aunt in New Hampshire.”

  “Friends? Ex-girlfriends? Hunting camp, anything?” probed Clipper.

  “No. He just worked and hung out with me or at the hospital.” She looked up sadly. “I came here just to get my degree, but after I met him I thought maybe we’d stay, settle down here. I guess I didn’t know him as well as I thought,” she said. “Can I go back to work, now?”

  “Yeah,” Clipper said, getting up to go. “Oh, by the way, we’re done with your apartment. We’ll be watching it, but I wouldn’t advise you to stay there alone right now.”

  Lambert was already shaking her head. “I’m not going back there ‘til you find him. I got a room at the Quality Court,” she said, eyes wide.

  Chapter 2.18

  Nine days after Colin Murch’s disappearance, a brittle sort of normalcy prevailed in Bangor. Clipper had installed a sophisticated intruder alarm in his home, and his little Llama .380 now lived in Janice’s purse. He had also stood a loaded Winchester model 12, twelve gauge in the corner of their bedroom and with four range sessions with both weapons behind them, Clipper was reasonably satisfied with Janice’s ability to defend herself in a pinch.

  Clipper had taken Janice to visit Ann and her brood in Orono, delivering the new bookcase, and sharing a beer with Ann’s husband, Gil, on the porch while the two women planned the rest of his life the in the kitchen. “Nice lady,” Gil had observed.

  After an exhaustive search of her house, which turned up no sign of the jewels or further evidence of their whereabouts, Janice spent a couple of days moving some of her personal items into a storage unit, then called a realtor and started the process of putting the house up for sale.

  Clipper pretty much closed out the homicide investigations, and the state had formalized its multi-count indictments against Murch. An arrest warrant had been issued, and Murch was now proposed for inclusion on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. Scores of reported sightings had been investigated across the state without success, but it had been four days since the last and a series of three vicious purse snatchings in as many days had diverted public attention to the huge mall on the edge of town.

  Clipper and Chief Norris maintained an uneasy truce, avoiding each other when possible, wary and reserved when not, allowing their relationship to find its own level by unspoken accord. Nothing more was said about Clipper’s work assignment, but with just nine days to go to the Founders’ Day celebration, he happily split his time between Ed Bass’ office and his own, enjoying his role as police advisor, and both he and Janice were starting to look forward to seeing history reenacted.

  On this late Friday afternoon, Bass had dropped by with the final draft of the event’s program, and Clipper was embarrassed to see the item entitled ‘Police Award Ceremony’.

  “Relax and enjoy it,” advised Bass when Clipper started to object. “You earned it, and the town needs something to celebrate.”

  “I guess, but I’d feel better about it if we’d put Murch away,” Clipper said. “Feels like he’s always going to be out there, waiting to pounce.”

  “What you need to do,” said Bass, sprawling in a chair, “is find them damned jewels. Take away his reason to ever come back here.”

  Clipper chuckled. “I find those jewels, and I’m never coming back here!” he said with a grin.

  “Well, maybe you’ll get your chance. I spoke to the State Hospital Director and the City Manager. There’s a whole closet full of hospital hill historical stuff that was collected by Able Owens, some of it dates back to the Civil War, and there might be some funds to organize it into a sort of museum display at the hospital. The historical society’s says they’re willing to help. It would include the whole Edgewink gang story, and we were thinking Janice might like to take it on, given Bill’s family history. It would give her a little income, and you could continue in your expert advisory role.”

  “She is looking for something to do, why don’t you ask her?”

  The days ran on towards the heat of summer, and on Sunday, July sixth, the holiday weekend was capped off by Bangor’s annual Founders’ Day celebration.

  The first white man known to visit the area around Bangor was an explorer named Rodrigo Santiago, somewhere around 1590, and his stories of friendly Indians and lush fishing and fur trapping prompted Samuel de Champlain to lead an expedition up the Penobscot River in 1605, but it wasn’t until 1761 that Ba
ngor was officially settled. The founder of Bangor was a fur trader named Honus Abernathy, late of the Massachusetts Colony. Local lore held that he actually settled there by accident when he broke his leg fleeing from an irate Penobscot Brave, whose wife he had enthusiastically befriended, and was forced to lay up in a cave for the winter. A family of settlers found him in the spring, and together they established the trading settlement that would become Bangor.

  Founders’ day was a day of games, barbeques and speeches, and this year it centered on Cleo’s Diner. The area had grown up a little since Lester Edgewink stopped at the roadhouse in 1937, but the building and parking lot with its fringe of undergrowth remained largely unchanged. Over the years, the hay field across the street had morphed from wood lot to factory to vacant urban lot, which was handy for the spectators, and closing of the road for a couple of hours was no great inconvenience.

  Clipper waited impatiently behind the diner as the Mayor gave his welcoming address, pacing back and forth, vaguely aware of the loud, angry chittering of a gray squirrel in a tree overhead. He had two dozen men clad in 1930’s dress and armed with a variety of old rifles, pistols and shotguns ready to take their positions around the parking lot. He had managed to find blanks for a few of pistols, which he made sure were in the hands of police officer volunteers, and had enlisted the aid of a high school kid to create a gunfire cd and an amp and speaker system to play it.

  After the Mayor’s welcome, Chief Norris related the Edgewink gang history, setting the stage for the play and when he finished, Ed Bass chivvied the participants into position and then joined the chief by the right front corner of the lot.

  In minutes, an antique ford sedan pulled into the lot follow by an old farm truck, and the actors dismounted. The first blank was fired, cuing the gunshot cd, and for a couple of minutes, chaos reigned and bodies dropped realistically all over the parking lot.

  Clipper, playing the part of Lester Edgewink himself, stood in the middle of the lot, a few feet away from the old Ford. Even though the pair of Smith and Wesson’s he drew from his waistband were loaded with blanks, he was concentrating on aiming high as he began returning fire.

  Suddenly, even as he registered the heavy ‘plonk’s of real bullets striking metal and the sound of the Ford’s windshield shattering, he felt the sharp tug of a bullet passing through his jacket between his elbow and his ribs. He was already, instinctively, diving to the ground as he recognized the distinctive live chatter of a full automatic weapon from the rear of the lot. When the steady pounding gunfire abruptly stopped, he scrambled to his feet and began a twisting, jinking run towards its source. Clipper heard a car start in the distance ahead of him, and when he skidded into the bushes, Kimber in hand, no one was there, only a scattering of empty .45 brass marking the spot. John Peters came pounding up and the two of them swept cautiously through the light underbrush and into the neighboring back yards, found nothing, and then returned to the spot the shooter had occupied.

  Peters pushed back his borrowed fedora. “Man, we were lucky,” he said, peering through the bushes. “A whole magazine, thirty rounds, and only a couple hits on the car and a broken windshield.”

  “Yeah,” Clipper mused inspecting the hole in his jacket. “It had to be a Thompson… rode up on someone who wasn’t expecting the recoil.” He took a last look around. “Oh, well. At least it shut up that damned squirrel.”

  Patrol had moved quickly to contain the shooter, but the thin fringe of bushes at the back of the lot opened onto a crowed residential neighborhood and the shooter and vehicle were long gone by the time the cruisers swarmed into the area.

  Twenty minutes later, with officers going door to door seeking witnesses in the neighborhood, and after ensuring that there had been no injuries, Ed Bass grabbed the mike and forced the celebration back on track.

  “Well! Now we all know just how the Edgewink gang felt in 1937,” he said to the crowd’s appreciative laughter, “but now, if Lieutenant Thomas Clipper will come up here for a moment, we’re going to talk about the real thing.”

  Clipper walked to the mike, muttering under his breath. “Keep it short, Ed. Got no time for this,” he whispered.

  “One behalf of the Bangor City Council, it gives me great pleasure, and Thomas great annoyance,” Bass said grinning at his friend, “to present the Bangor Police Medal of Valor to Lieutenant Thomas Clipper for his actions in the June ninth, 2014 shooting of a fleeing felon who, but for those actions, would undoubtedly have killed or injured others in his escape.” Bass handed a small box to Clipper and shook his hand. “That said,” he hollered, “I believe they’re serving in the beer tent across the street.” Amidst cheers and applause, Clipper and John Peters shouldered their way to Clipper’s truck.

  Clipper frowned at the empty spot on the wall in Murch’s den. He and John Peters had left the Founder’s Day celebration and used the key that had been in Murch’s possession at the time of his arrest to get into his apartment. The police seal had been removed weeks prior, and the apartment remained unoccupied, its contents intact, with Wanda Lambert still refusing to stay there.

  “The son of a bitch had me convinced it was a replica,” Clipper muttered, gesturing to the spot where the Thompson sub-machine gun had hung.

  Peters grimaced. “Christ! He’s back and he’s got us outgunned.” He sobered. “And it looks like he wants you.”

  Chapter 2.19

  The hunt for Colin Murch intensified again but, as the days, then weeks, passed without progress, it once more slipped in priority, giving way to the urgency of the moment.

  Janice Owens had taken the position of Bangor State Hospital Historian and, by the second week in September, was well into the design of the hospital’s first historical tour and museum. She had planned a self-guided outside walking tour which included a map with pictures of the grounds as they were in the early 1900’s. The path wound around the buildings and through the old cemetery, neatly groomed in preparation, and ended at the mortuary, the ground floor of which was being renovated as museum space. Visitors would be able to walk through the morgue with its ceramic topped autopsy table, imported from England in 1925, and macabre surgical instruments on display, and take their rest in the small chapel seats. Several rooms contained artifacts from the hospital’s early days, depicting advances in patient handling and treatment, with shackles and straight-jackets on prominent display, and others were devoted to the Army garrison that had preceded the hospital on that ground. One large room, complete with a 1932 Ford roadster, on loan from the Downeast Antique Car Association and several mannequins in period clothing and life-like poses, told the story of the Edgewink gang. Their weapons, newspaper articles and photos were all on display along with a life-size picture memorializing FBI agent Penn Sloater.

  Clipper found himself drawn to the photo. “Poor bastard,” he muttered shaking his head.

  “Well, at least he wasn’t a suicide like everyone thought.” Janice thought it barbaric that human remains could be lost, not properly interred. She had pestered local funeral homes for donations of services that resulted in Penn Sloater’s remains being interred in the first new grave in thirty years in the hospital cemetery. It would be followed in the coming weeks with new graves for the twelve coffins occupying the crypt. It was only after the burial that they realized that Sloater’s remains were resting for eternity only steps away from the grave of his killer, Abel Owens.

  It was a Saturday morning, and Clipper and Janice were at the mortuary, sorting through artifacts for the museum.

  “Speaking of agent Sloater, have you decided whether or not to include the crypt in the tour?” asked Clipper.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess it is part of the story. Once it’s cleaned out, I thought perhaps some more mannequins, a recreation of the murder… Oh, speaking of the crypt, I found some old letters from a man named Sarge Dennison. He was an old Civil War soldier who was here when the hospital was built, and it appears that he’s where the Underground Rail
road rumor comes from. Before he died, he claimed to have built a hidden room somewhere around the old garrison building, he mentions it being near the crypt.

  Clipper laughed. “Well, we’ve remodeled and painted damn near every room in this building. I think we’d have noticed an Underground Railroad cell,” he said.

  Janice reached into a cupboard and produced two large flashlights. “Yeah,” she said, “but we’ve never really explored the cellar.”

  The mortuary cellar was a rabbit warren of small alcoves and dusty clutter. Stacks of old lumber threw grotesque shadows as the powerful flashlights eclipsed the few ancient bulbs dangling from cobwebbed wires. Old tools and cast-off furniture littered the floor, and an ancient, long dead, coal-fired furnace hunkered in the center of a medusa’s nest of rusted heating ducts. Flimsy board partitions chopped the large area into smaller areas that had probably made sense a hundred years before.

  Janice and Clipper picked their way carefully across the floor. “It stands to reason that it would be against an outside wall.” Clipper said. “None of these inside walls are thick enough to hide anything.”

  “Or in the floor,” said Janice, “Like a trapdoor.”

  “Hoping he wouldn’t have to shift all the junk on the floor searching for a trapdoor, Clipper began walking the perimeter of the cellar peering closely at the walls and tapping with a piece of pipe. It took him a half hour to complete the circuit. “Nothing,” he exclaimed, tossing the pipe onto a bench. “Those walls are solid.”

  Janice sighed. “Well, it’ll take forever to get this floor clean enough to see a secret door, so I guess we’re done, but it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Did you see those old kerosene lamps on that shelf? I want those upstairs.” She walked over to a ceiling high bookcase-like set of shelves against the wall and stretched up for the ornate glass lamps. “Can you reach these for me?” she asked Clipper.