Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  For that, he’d rewarded them nicely. Built them a new high school, three access roads to I-40, got the Cherokees a casino. Pisgah County was working now, staying in school. Hell, even the sheriff who called about Lisa sounded like he’d graduated from Harvard.

  “And this is how you pay me back?” He whispered, his vision growing blurry again. “This is what you do to my little girl?”

  He stood there with his hand on the map, swaying like an old tree in a windstorm. As awful as he’d felt when Marian had died, this was worse. With Tootie gone, he would now die alone, without any of the people who loved him. Softly, he began to cry.

  “Sir?”

  He heard a voice behind him. Wiping his eyes, he turned. Three young patrolmen stood at attention, uniforms spotless, brass buttons shining. They saluted him at once, snappy as a color guard.

  “Sir, we’ve just received clearance from the tower. We can leave anytime you’re ready.”

  He looked at the three young men, soldiers here to do his bidding. Suddenly he realized: he was not some washed-up old geezer. He was Jackson Carlisle Wilson, twice governor of North Carolina. He’d put books in the schools, money back in the taxpayer’s pockets. He’d dragged Pisgah County off its mules and into the twentieth century. How dare they hurt his little girl?

  “Okay, boys,” he said, straightening his shoulders, feeling the old starch returning to his spine. “Let’s go find out what the hell happened in Pisgah County.”

  As Carlisle Wilson boarded a plane, Jerry Cochran sat at his desk, studying the interns’ interviews. While the two girls had been weepy and scared, they’d told basically the same story—that the group had changed their usual Asheville club plans to spend the night at the haunted cabin. They’d hiked up there, explored the place, listened to Chris Givens’s account of the Fiddlesticks legend. After dark they built a campfire and passed around a bottle of tequila. Tony Blackman claimed to have seen somebody in the woods, but when the boys gave chase, they’d found only an old tree that gave the impression of a person when viewed from the right angle and aided, they admitted, with a fair amount of liquor. When it started to rain, they’d retreated to sleep inside the cabin.

  “Lisa hated every minute of it,” said Rachel Sykes, tears rimming her dark eyes. “The woods, the cabin, everything. She was just counting the minutes until she could get back to the dorm. And Nick.”

  “Did she and Nick have a special relationship?” asked Saunooke.

  “Her old boyfriend had dumped her right before finals. So she glommed onto Nick as soon as she got here. She was really into him.”

  The less pretty Abby Turner corroborated the story. “The Fiddlesticks story really spooked Lisa. Then when Tony claimed he saw somebody up there, I thought she was going to run back down the mountain right then.”

  Two thoughts occurred to Cochran as he listened to the girls’ interviews. The first was that Stratton wasn’t admitting the full extent of his relationship with Lisa. The second was, in a way, more troubling: What if the Blackman kid had seen somebody up there? Somebody with hideously wide eyes and a rictus of a smile?

  “Oh, come on,” Cochran said to himself as he ejected the girls’ disk and reached for the one with the boys.

  The first track was Ryan Quarles, a muscular blonde who fought to keep his chin from quivering. He told the same story as the girls, adding that he and Lisa had slept in the same sleeping bag. “But we weren’t into each other,” he explained quickly. “It was just really cold, and we were both a little freaked out.”

  Next came Tony Blackman, a handsome boy who had the stunned look of someone who’d walked away from a train wreck. His narrative was disjointed, always returning to Lisa Wilson’s corpse. “I’ve never seen anything like that … she didn’t look human … flies were crawling inside her mouth.”

  “When did you see her?” asked Whaley.

  “I found her first—I walked up there to go to the bathroom. She had things carved all over her body.”

  “And didn’t you claim to see someone up there the night before?”

  “I saw someone hiding behind the trees, I really did. It looked like a man, watching us. We chased him, but nobody was there.” Roughly, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think some bird had pecked at her eyes.”

  “They do that,” Whaley said matter-of-factly. “Crows usually get the juicy pieces first.”

  Blackman completed the rest of the interview in tears. When it was over, Cochran stood up and paused the machine. “That one’s going to need a little therapy,” he whispered as he headed to the break room.

  He poured a cup of coffee and grabbed a slice of the pound cake Geneva had brought in. When he came back and inserted the last disk, Chris Givens’s face appeared on the screen. The boy sat slouched in his chair, lank brown hair combed back, his gaze insolent and sly.

  “I’m Christopher Andrew Givens,” he replied churlishly to Whaley’s first question. “And I want a lawyer. I’ve been here since noon, with nothing to eat.”

  “Well, sure,” Whaley replied agreeably. “It’ll probably take us a few hours to get one off the golf course.” He looked at his watch. “But we should be finished by midnight.”

  “Midnight?” Givens cried. “What the fuck kind of police department is this?”

  “The kind that has your little hiney in jail,” Whaley replied. “This ain’t Law & Order, son. You’re on our clock now.”

  “Where are my friends?” the boy asked.

  “I think they’re eating pizza. They just gave their statements, no big deal.” Whaley shrugged. “They didn’t have anything to hide.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide, either.” Givens snapped the bait like a bass hitting a grasshopper.

  Whaley smiled. “Then I don’t see that we have a problem. All I’m asking for is your version of what happened last night. No lawyer tricks here.”

  Givens squirmed in his chair for a moment, then he caved in. “Okay. Let’s go ahead and get it over with.”

  Whaley turned to a fresh page on his legal pad. “Let her rip, buddy.”

  Cochran watched as Givens recounted his version of the story. They usually went up to Asheville for the weekend, but it was going to be a full moon and he wanted to film this haunted house.

  “Why did you want to do that?” asked Whaley.

  “There’s this ghost show on TV. You can make a lot of money if you send them some good film.”

  “So you’d given this little expedition some thought,” said Whaley.

  Givens shrugged. “I’ve got a low-light video cam for shooting owls. The moon was going to be full that night, so I figured, what the hell.”

  “And you talked the others into it?”

  “I didn’t have to twist any arms.”

  “Not even Lisa Wilson’s?”

  “Actually, I was kind of surprised she came.”

  “How come?”

  “She was into Nick. I figured with the rest of us gone, it would be fuck-a-rama time for them.”

  Cochran sat up straighter. This was the third person to mention Nick Stratton by name. He backed the scene up, played it again. Something in Givens’s eyes made him think the kid looked jealous.

  “That piss you off?” Whaley asked the boy, apparently sensing the same thing as Cochran.

  Givens gave an oily smile. “Not enough to kill her, if that’s where you’re going.”

  Whaley backed off. “So tell me what happened next.”

  Givens told the same story as everybody else—he’d videoed them exploring the cabin, building a campfire, running after the figure Tony claimed to have seen lurking in the woods. “That really spooked the girls,” he said.

  “But not you?” asked Whaley.

  “No, I figured Tony was just bullshitting. By the time everybody calmed down about that, it started to r
ain. So we went inside the house.”

  Whaley gave the boy a cold-cop stare that even chilled Cochran’s blood. “Where you conveniently set up your camera.”

  “Yeah. Everybody spread out their sleeping bags. I put the camera up on the mantel, then I went to bed. The next thing I knew Tony was yelling that something terrible had happened to Lisa.”

  “That’s pretty sound sleeping for people on a ghost hunt. Aren’t you supposed to stay awake all night, listening for chains being rattled?”

  Givens rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I tried to stay awake. But I guess I was too tired. We’d worked all day, and it took us four hours to hike up there. Plus we’d killed a bottle of Cuervo.”

  Whaley pressed on. “What did you do when you heard Tony yelling?”

  “Honestly, I thought he was playing another joke. I tried to go back to sleep but everyone else was awake. The girls said Lisa had vanished, so I went outside to see what was going on. Tony was at the fire pit, pointing to a big tree, screaming his head off. I ran up there to see.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Lisa. She was dead.”

  Cochran watched the boy’s image on the screen. Recalling Lisa’s maimed body did not seem to cause him any particular distress. “Tony was really freaking, so I told him to go call 911. He had to run halfway down the mountain before he could get a signal.”

  “Why were you so sure she was dead?” asked Whaley.

  “I’ve cut up mice and rabbits all summer,” said Givens. “I know what dead looks like.”

  “What did you do after you decided she was dead?” asked Whaley.

  The boy shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. “I stayed up there a few minutes. Then I went down to the cabin. Tony came back and said the cops were on their way.”

  Whaley returned to the same statement that had caught Cochran’s attention. “You say you stayed up there a few minutes. What did you do up there?”

  The boy’s eyes slid away, as if he were embarrassed. “I don’t know. I guess I … I kind of looked at her.”

  “Ever see a naked girl before?”

  “I’ve seen plenty of naked girls.” Givens licked his lips, trying to maintain his fading bravado. “I’ve just never seen one cut up like that.”

  Cochran knew exactly what the boy was trying to say. Where Lisa’s body had simply terrified Blackman and Quarles, Givens had dipped a toe into that monstrously seductive stream that flows between sex and death. Cops knew it but never spoke of it. Killers thrived on it, needed it no less than an addict needs a fix. Though Givens might forget the details of the morning he saw Lisa Wilson dead, the memory of her body would revisit him the rest of his life, whispering words he could not yet dream of.

  Nine

  “Something carved her up, but that didn’t kill her, Jerry.”

  Cochran leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on his desk. Though it was just past six a.m., he’d called the state forensic office, hoping to catch pathologist John Merkel before he left for the day. Merkel was a strange kid Cochran had known in pre-med, at Carolina. While Cochran had to drop out of the program when his father died, Merkel had gone on to become a forensic specialist. He’d become, however, no less strange. He gave his clients pet names, did autopsies at night with Puccini blaring through his iPod, claiming that the cool, slightly green light of the morgue allowed him to truly commune with his subjects. Despite his eccentricities, Merkel’s professional reputation was impeccable, and Cochran always requested him whenever he sent a body to the state lab.

  “Then what did kill her?” asked Cochran. “The girl’s father is going to show up any minute. He’s going to ‘roast my balls over a slow fire’ if I can’t explain what happened to his daughter.”

  “Ugh.” Merkel groaned. “I’ve seen roasted balls. They aren’t pretty.”

  “So give a guy a break, okay? Give me something to tell him.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Cochran heard shuffling on the line, then Merkel spoke again, his voice high-pitched and nasal.

  “I don’t have all the data in, but I’m fairly certain that Sweet Sue died from being sequentially strangled by a single piece of some non-abrasive material.”

  Cochran flinched at Merkel’s nickname for the girl. “What do you mean, sequentially strangled?”

  “Somebody strangled her to unconsciousness several times with something about an inch wide that lacked texture,” explained Merkel. “They carved her up while she was out. When she started to wake up, they strangled her again.”

  “Wow,” said Cochran. “That sounds a lot like torture.”

  “Sweet Sue would not have found it fun. The cuts would have been painful, but the killer was not going for exsanguination. I’m guessing they used her to send a message.”

  “What kind of message?” Cochran looked at the grisly close-up photos the SBI had dropped off.

  “Beats me. The shapes make a repeating pattern, but they aren’t recognizable letters in any known alphabet.”

  “It looks sort of cuneiform to me,” Cochran replied. “I wonder if it’s some kind of code.”

  “If it is, it’s none my computer’s familiar with.”

  Cochran swallowed hard, wondering how he could avoid telling the governor about this. “So after they finished writing this message, they killed her?”

  “You got it, Sherlock.”

  “Had she been sexually assaulted?”

  “Nope. Neither vaginally nor rectally.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  “Nope.”

  Cochran sighed—Merkel just trashed both his sex game and his pregnant girlfriend theories. “Any defensive wounds?”

  “Fibers and dirt under two fingernails. Red clay soil with traces of mica, both indigenous to western North Carolina. And denim.”

  Cochran sat up a bit straighter. “Denim? As in blue jeans?”

  “A thin weave of denim, made in China. Walmart sells them under the Levi’s brand. Your perp was wearing cheap jeans when they killed Sweet Sue.”

  Again Cochran sighed. Most of Pisgah County wore cheap jeans, purchased at the new Super Walmart. “That’s it?” he asked Merkel.

  “That’s all I’ve got so far.” Merkel rattled some papers. “Look, I know you’re probably going to go the FBI/VICAP route on these figures carved into her body, but I’ve got a pal over at Duke who might be able to help us out faster.”

  Cochran was skeptical. “He studies messages carved into corpses?”

  “No, the guy’s a cyber cryptologist. He has an IQ of about five thousand and is working on a new enigma machine. I think his Duke job’s a cover for NSA.”

  “So why would he care about this?” asked Cochran.

  “He wouldn’t. He would just think it was fun.”

  “Thanks but no thanks, Merkel.” Cochran knew if some spook leaked a photo of Lisa’s body, he might as well take up residence at that cabin and pray that Fiddlesticks came for him. “Your buddy might find it fun, but my balls are the ones on the barbie.”

  “No, wait. He’s a good guy who can keep a secret. How about I send him a picture of just the writing? No names or identifiable body parts.”

  Cochran still didn’t like it. “I don’t know.”

  “Jerry, it’s your best shot at finding out what these figures mean. I don’t have a clue. Usually the only messages I see on people’s bodies are four-letter, one-syllable words. Your killer’s written a novel.”

  Cochran considered Merkel’s suggestion. Though having photos of the body sent to some geek at Duke felt a lot like losing control of his evidence, if the guy could identify those figures, it would be worth it. That much, he owed the poor girl. “Okay,” he finally said. “But for God’s sake, don’t give him anything he can link back to the governor.”

  “Wilson’s already called this
office a dozen times,” said Merkel. “I don’t want him down on my ass any more than you do.”

  Cochran looked at his notes from their conversation. Though he had no real news to report, at least when Wilson showed up he could tell him that the best experts in the country were working on his daughter’s case. “Okay, buddy,” he said. “I appreciate your help. I’ll buy you a beer next time I come over there.”

  “Could you bring me a couple of bottles of that kombucha they make in Asheville?”

  Cochran remembered Merkel’s drink of choice, a thick, soupy health drink that looked like swamp sludge. “You got it. Let me know ASAP what your pal at Duke says, okay?”

  Cochran hung up the phone, disappointed. He’d hoped Merkel would have given him a fingerprint, or DNA from one of those kids at the haunted house. Cheap Walmart denim wasn’t going to convict anybody of anything. Now the attack on the girl seemed even more bizarre. Repeated choking took strength, hard work. That kind of furious action connoted deep-seated rage. Yet the girl hadn’t lifted a finger to defend herself.

  He was considering that when his phone rang. He picked up the receiver to find an urgent male voice on the line.

  “Sheriff? This is Scott at the front desk. I just wanted to give you a heads-up … Carlisle Wilson is on his way to your office.”

  Cochran felt his stomach clench. The ball-roaster had arrived. “Thanks, Scott. Geneva will take care of him.”

  “I don’t think she’s come in yet,” Scott replied. “The guy’s got a trooper with him and they both look like they could spit nails. They’re already halfway down the hall.”

  Cochran dropped the phone and scooped up the photos of Lisa Wilson’s puckered, blood-spattered body. He stuffed them in a single manila envelope and shoved them in the bottom drawer of his desk just as his door burst open.

  “You the sheriff?” A burly highway patrolman, looking official to the point of ridiculousness, strode into his office, side arm strapped around his waist, a Smoky-the-Bear hat pulled low on his forehead.

  Cochran rose from his chair, irritated. “Yeah, I’m the sheriff. Who the hell are you?”