An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  “No, I don’t carry any of that. What’s an ALS?”

  “Alternate light source,” Carrie said.

  “Like, fluorescent bulbs? I got them.”

  “Ultraviolet light. The blue kind,” Carrie said. “It’s kind of a specialty item. Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you had all this stuff.”

  He squished up his lips, thinking about it. “I got an industrial bug zapper in the back. You hang it outside and it zaps the bejeezus out of any bugs that touch it. From what I recall, that’s got a blue lightbulb. I’m pretty sure it says it’s ultraviolet.”

  “How much is it?” Carrie asked.

  “Well, I’ve only got one, and they’re hard to come by right now,” he said, scratching the side of his face. “Some kind of supply issue with the warehouse, or something. It’s extremely powerful, though. Very high end.” He glanced down at the credit card, stamped District Attorney’s Office, Vieira County, Pennsylvania. He chewed the inside of his cheek, his right eye twitching with hesitation, before announcing, “Three hundred bucks.”

  “I’ll take it. Long as it’s ultraviolet light.”

  His face dropped a little as he realized he could have asked for even more money. He told her he’d be right back with it.

  LUNATIC DETECTIVE USES BUG ZAPPER IN COLD CASE HOMICIDE. Now that’s the kind of headline you frame outside your office door, Carrie thought.

  * * *

  Carrie spread the items across her hotel room floor, seeing what she would need. Someone had taken the room next to hers. A woman was talking: “You have to tell me you’re a cop if I ask you three times, you know that, right?”

  “Not true,” Carrie said aloud. She used the karambit’s tip to slice open the first roll of tape. It was like the older, stronger brother of duct tape. Clear, with threads woven through it, almost impossible to tear.

  “How much if I don’t want to wear a condom?” a male voice asked through the wall.

  “Yikes. Bad idea,” Carrie said, picking out the smallest cardboard box and assembling it. She covered any seams or gaps in the box with tape, sealing it up tight, except for the lid. She pulled the coffee warmer out of its packaging and plugged it in, keeping her fingers against the surface until it started to get hot. She set the coffee warmer down inside the box, decided it would be big enough to hold the rest of the items, and cut a small slot in the upper corner for the electrical cable.

  She pulled off a length of aluminum foil and crumpled it into a small bowl, then set it on top of the coffee warmer. She grabbed a small paper cup from the bathroom, cut off everything except the lower rim and a half inch of its walls, and filled it with water. She set the cup in the opposite corner, careful not to spill it.

  Now came the moment of truth. Carrie pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and went over to the table where her evidence lay. She picked up the switchblade, inspected its blade in the light once more, trying to decide if she really wanted to stick the thing inside a fuming chamber made out of a cardboard box.

  She didn’t need to tell herself that if she fucked this up, she was ruining a potentially vital piece of evidence. She didn’t need to tell herself that if she fucked this up, and anyone found out, they might fire her for being incompetent. For not waiting until someone more experienced could take over.

  “It’s so big, oh my God, I can’t stand it,” the woman said, her voice flat. The headboard on the opposite side of the wall slapped hard and fast.

  Carrie blew a length of hair out of her face, held the knife at both ends, and lowered it inside the box, tilting it at an angle so that the glue would get under it and around it and cover it from all sides. “Here goes nothing,” she said.

  She squeezed a puddle of superglue down inside the foil bowl and it immediately began to smoke. Fumes from the glue, evaporating, bind to the oils and acids left behind by a human fingerprint, clarifying it enough to be identified. It would bind to more than that, she thought, moving quickly to shut the lid. If she got her face too close to the fumes, she could accidentally glue her own eyeballs.

  She sealed the lid with tape, covering any remaining gaps, and sat on the floor. Now was the tricky part. In a real fuming chamber, the walls were glass. The person processing the evidence could see how it was going, make sure the print was not being overdeveloped. If she waited too long, so much glue would bind to the print that it would be unreadable. If she opened the box up too quickly, she’d interrupt the fuming process, lose containment, and have to start all over again.

  I’ll take option number two in that scenario, she thought. The headboard was slapping again, followed by a series of moans, male and female. Someone had gotten a second wind.

  She made note of the time, thinking that she still had a few minutes. She looked at the bug zapper, still in its box, and thought it could wait. It said, in big bold letters, For Outdoor Use Only. She didn’t want to deal with potentially burning down her motel room and overgluing the switchblade at the same time.

  Carrie grabbed the last file folder out of the safe and sat down, leaning against the bed as she flipped through it. It was the one with the letters written on official Liston Borough Police Department letterhead. The first was written to the major in charge of the nearest State Police barracks, asking him for assistance with a missing child investigation.

  I believe that something has gone horribly wrong for this child, the letter said.

  “You weren’t kidding, buddy,” Carrie said. She scanned through the rest of the letter, and stopped at the bottom part, staring at the name of the man who’d written it.

  Oliver J. Rein, Chief of Police.

  Jacob, you bastard, Carrie thought. Who the hell is Oliver Rein to you?

  There had been a look on Rein’s face at the diner when she told him about the police bulletin, she’d just been too tired to pick up on it. He’d gone running out the moment he heard they were looking for a cadaver dog. He knew, she thought. He knew they’d found Hope Pugh. Hope Pugh went missing in 1981. She was twelve years old.

  “Holy shit,” Carrie gasped. “You two are the same age. You didn’t know her name from some old case. You knew her.”

  She picked up the next letter and began to read. It said the same exact thing as the first, but was addressed to the special agent in charge of the nearest FBI office. I believe that something has gone horribly wrong for this child.

  Oliver J. Rein. Chief of Police.

  “It’s no wonder he did what he did,” Mrs. Pugh had said earlier that day, before her husband silenced her.

  What did Oliver Rein do? Carrie wondered. What was the big secret?

  This place has a bad record with chiefs of police, Carrie thought. Right after Hope Pugh goes missing, Steve Auburn’s dad gets killed in a shootout of some kind. That’s a lot of drama for such a small area, and in such a short amount of time. She didn’t believe in coincidences. This puzzle was a pain in the ass. Something stung her nose, coming right up through her sinuses like a hornet, and her head shot up. Black smoke was leaking out of the corners of the cardboard box. Carrie tossed the letters aside and scrambled for her knife. She had visions of the coffee warmer being engulfed in flames as she sliced the tape open across the lid. Luckily, it was just the glue melting through the foil bowl, burning on the surface of the coffee warmer. She grabbed the switchblade, pulled it out of the white cloud of fumes, and yanked the warmer’s electrical cord from the wall. The other side of the wall had gone silent. Carrie hoped the woman didn’t have any more clients that night.

  She carried the knife over to the light and inspected the blade. The glue had bound to the fingerprint, sure enough, but done little to clarify any parts of it that she could not see before. Still, it was something, and now, if she tried to lift the print, she didn’t have to worry about wrecking it. Its outline was locked on the blade, for better or worse, until the end of time.

  She looked inside her tactical bag and pumped her fist when she saw a brush and tub of fingerprint powder at the bottom
. She swirled a light sprinkling of black powder across the blade, and saw several more prints that had been developed by the fuming. They were smaller, and maybe just smudges, but they were something. She twirled the brush, adding a little more powder, then covered the length of the blade in one piece of tape and yanked it free. She laid the tape on a white glossy card and inspected it in the light.

  Are you here? she thought, seeing the ridges of someone’s fingerprints in several places across the surface of the card. Did I just find you, you bastard?

  She did the other side of the blade, and the handle as well, finding nothing else that appeared of any value. She marked all of the index cards as evidence, recorded them in her log, and secured them in evidence baggies.

  The stuffed bear, sock, and blanket were still sitting on the table. Carrie grabbed the box for the bug zapper and sliced it open, tossed aside the index cards warning For Outdoor Use Only, and pulled the fixture free. She plugged it in and turned off the lamp. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to turn this thing on now, and everything is going to go nice and smooth. Nothing is going to burst into flames. It is all going to be fine. Just perfectly fine.”

  She lifted the bug zapper by its handle, holding it as far away from her and high above the table as she could, and pressed the ON button. It hummed to life, vibrating as it built up an electrical charge, until the large bulbs housed within it glowed hot with bluish purple light. The room hummed with electricity, and Carrie flinched as it flickered and popped across the surface of the glass bulbs. Her arms were shaking as she hoisted the lantern over the table, this hot and sparking contraption that was made out of metal and getting too heavy to hold, clearly meant For Outdoor Use Only and not cold case homicide investigations, and then she saw it.

  A luminescent smear, glowing bright in the ultraviolet light.

  Droplets were splattered along the stuffed bear’s fur, invisible to the naked eye, but revealed in brilliant blue relief by the bug zapper. More, much more, appeared on the little girl’s sock. Carrie knew that only organic fluids would react in such a way. Blood would glow, but unless it had been tampered with, it could be seen long after it dried. The sock was dirty when she’d inspected it, but she hadn’t seen any blood.

  Now, half of the sock looked like it had been painted fluorescent. Carrie knew of only one biological fluid in the world capable of presenting in such a way. “Motherfucker,” she whispered.

  Something buzzed near her hand, louder than even the humming of the bug zapper, and she saw a hairy black fly land on the surface of one of the bulbs. Electricity arced outward, filling the dark room with sizzling sparks that billowed the curtains back. Carrie screamed, nearly dropping the entire contraption, as the fly’s dead body tumbled down in front of her, smoking and charred. She raced over to the outlet and yanked the cord out of the wall, set the zapper on the table, and bent forward, thinking, That is exactly why you shouldn’t do this shit unless you have the right equipment.

  Still, she’d seen what she needed to see. Serological residue was splashed across the child’s sock and stuffed bear, and it was most likely semen. She looked at the photograph taken in the woods again. That’s the crime scene, she thought. A rape, then a murder, and if the finding of her foot in the woods was any indication, maybe even a dismemberment to hide the body afterward.

  Show everybody you can handle a nice, simple call for assistance without turning it into an enormous shitstorm, she thought. Yeah, right.

  CHAPTER 8

  Carrie put on fresh gloves and lowered the sock inside a fresh paper evidence bag. She sealed the bag with tape and wrote her name and the date across its fragile red surface without tearing it. Evidence tape is designed to split apart easily, so that anyone trying to tamper with it is caught. All it really does is break into pieces between your fingers when you’re trying to seal something, or tear in half when you’re trying to sign it. Maybe the true purpose of fragile evidence tape is to sell more goddamn evidence tape, she thought.

  She took off that pair of gloves and tossed them in the trash, then slid on a new pair to safeguard against any cross contamination. She put the stuffed bear inside a larger paper bag and sealed it the same way, running multiple strips of evidence tape across the flaps to keep them from breaking open. She repeated the same process to secure the blanket.

  When all was packaged and secured, she stepped back and looked it over. She had the fingerprint on the knife, she thought. Potential serological evidence on the stuffed bear and sock. Whatever they could find on the blanket. They could search that for semen and vacuum it for hair fibers, she thought. With all of that, they should be able to get something.

  If the bad guy’s ever been fingerprinted, and the fingerprint on the knife has sufficient ridge detail, he’s done. If he’s a convicted felon, and his DNA is on file, and the semen on the sock hasn’t degraded so much it’s useless, he’s done. He’s arrested.

  The entire process could take sixteen to eighteen months, once the State Police crime lab got around to analyzing everything. That was if they decided to take all of the evidence she gave them. More than likely, they’d refuse to take so much at one time. Just give us one piece, whatever you think has the most potential, and we’ll work on that for you. Sorry, that’s policy. Only one lab for the entire state, and we can’t just shut everything else down for your investigations, detective.

  Then, after they got around to analyzing the bear and found nothing, she’d be allowed to send in the sock. After they got around to analyzing that, she’d get to send in the blanket.

  With her luck, all of the evidence would come back either unreadable or with no match. The bad guy had probably been so filled with shame after the murder, he’d turned over a new leaf and never gotten in trouble again. Or he’d moved to another country, one that doesn’t share its criminal databases with the United States. Or, fuck it, maybe he was just dead. It’s been forty years, after all. People get old, or maybe crash their cars, or get drunk one night and blow their brains out.

  She cleaned up her supplies and sat back down on the floor, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand. Her arms and legs and lower back hurt. She was tired from the long drive earlier that day and then running around this crappy small town, talking to all the weirdos who lived there. She felt zeroed out. Too tired and cranky to even bother taking a shower. Screw it, she thought. I’ll take one in the morning. Maybe a layer of the day’s grime will protect me from whatever kind of hepatitis is living in the sheets of this bed.

  She picked up the stack of letters from the file on the floor and flipped through them once more. They were all to various agencies and department heads, federal, state, and local, in the surrounding area, all bearing the same Liston Police Department letterhead, all containing the same plea for help, all signed by a man named Oliver Rein.

  The file did not hold a single response to any of the letters. If the men Chief Rein had appealed to had come racing to render aid, she found no record of it, and Carrie doubted she’d ever be able to track down anyone from any of those agencies willing to dig through their archives to find out.

  As she stuck the stack of papers back into the file, gold leaf lettering on the last page caught her eye. She pulled it out and saw it was from The Liston Borough Office of Chief of Police—Chief Walter C. Auburn.

  It was dated February 16, 1981. That was the same date on his plaque, Carrie thought. The day Auburn was killed.

  Dear District Attorney and Chief of County Detectives:

  It is my sad duty to report that Chief Oliver Rein has died as a result of suicide, and I am temporarily assuming command of the Patterson Borough Police Department’s jurisdiction, in addition to my own. I anticipate this will soon become a permanent position.

  Chief Rein is survived by his older brother, Benjamin, whom I have spoken to. If you should choose to call their house to pass along your condolences, I advise you to speak to Benjamin’s son instead. I have known Ben Rein a long t
ime, and he is an unstable man. His son was very close to Chief Rein, and you will do better talking to him. The boy’s name is J.D.

  I do not wish to cast aspersions on the character of Ollie Rein. He was a good man, and I considered him a friend. We do not require any assistance with the matter. It was obvious what occurred, and we handled it accordingly, making sure to keep it as quiet as possible. I owed Ollie that much.

  Sincerely, Chief Walter C. Auburn

  Carrie reread the letter several times, then tossed it aside. A boy called J.D. Rein. His uncle dead of suicide in the middle of a child abduction investigation. Another chief dead on the day the letter was sent.

  She leaned her head back against the bed and muttered, “What the fuck is going on?”

  * * *

  The house was a small two-story affair, with rotting shingles on the roof and two flags hanging from rusted poles, mounted to the porch. One, an American flag, was so faded it was translucent, and the other was a tattered US Army flag. The railing on the porch had once been white, but the paint had cracked and peeled away long ago, leaving bare wood along most of its lengths. The second step was split in two. Carrie stepped over it, coming up to the house’s screen door. She knocked and waited. An old, creaking voice within the house barked, “Who the hell is that?”

  A dark-skinned woman in a pair of bright purple scrubs answered. “Can I help you?” She was a head taller than Carrie, with flabby arms that jiggled as she held the door a few inches open.

  Carrie raised her wallet, letting the flap fall to reveal her golden badge. “Is Mr. Benjamin Rein home?”

  “He’s sick,” the nurse said.

  “Who is it?” the man inside the house shouted, his voice swallowed by a fit of gurgling coughs.

  “I need to speak with him,” Carrie said.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just not possible,” the nurse said. As she moved to close the door, she said, “He’s at the end of his care. It’s only going to be a few more days, and I can’t let you disturb his rest.”