Music of Ghosts

by Sallie Bissell

  A young man in jeans and a white tee shirt spoke up. “What if we bring him to justice ourselves?”

  “Bring ’em in alive, the money’s yours!”

  The crowd gave a collective gasp.

  “Shut up!” Mary cried, almost banging on the window. “You’re going to turn every stupid redneck in the county into a bounty hunter!”

  But the governor went on, now fielding a question from a reporter from NBC as a CNN guy jostled for another microphone. Mary finally turned away, disgusted.

  “Poor Cochran,” she groaned, feeling a wave of sympathy for her old friend. Murder investigations were tough enough. Having a million dollars and a crazy man riding on this one was not going to make things any easier.

  Eleven

  “Hey, Sheriff! How’s it going?”

  Cochran looked up from a photograph of Lisa Wilson’s left clavicle to see Ginger Malloy peeking around his office door. A pleasurable jolt ran through him—though it had only been about twelve hours since he’d last seen her, it felt to him like several years had passed.

  “May I come in?” she asked. “Geneva thought it might be okay.”

  Cochran turned the photograph over and grinned. “It is absolutely okay.”

  She slipped into his office, closing the door behind her. She wore a green dress that revealed long, well-shaped legs, and she carried a signature paper sack from Sadie’s, Hartsville newest coffee shop.

  “Brought your favorite—apple strudel,” she said as she came over to the desk. Turning his chair toward her, she kissed him in a way that zinged electricity all the way down to his toes.

  “Wow,” he said, breaking the kiss only when he began to feel the insistent beginnings of an erection. “You take supporting your local sheriff to a whole new level.”

  “How’s it going?” she asked, wiping a smudge of lipstick from the corner of his mouth.

  “Not so hot,” he replied.

  “Have something to eat.” She pulled the strudel from her paper sack, slyly casting a glance at the evidence files that lay on his desk. “I started over here with three of these, but Jessica Rusk stole one on the way over.”

  Cochran bit into the flaky, still-warm pastry. “Who’s Jessica Rusk?”

  “This utter bitch I used to work with at the Richmond Times. She’s climbing her way to the top via the dead and dismembered.”

  Cochran thought of the sea of reporters who now clogged Main Street. “Why is the Richmond Times covering this?”

  “They aren’t. Rusk quit the Times to work for the Snatch.”

  Cochran blinked. “The Snatch?”

  “The name real reporters have fondly given to The Snitch.”

  “That tabloid thing? What the hell are they doing here?”

  “A politician’s daughter getting murdered at a haunted cabin is huge. Add some famous pol like Wilson ponying up a million bucks and they get orgasmic. I’m surprised Jessica’s eyes didn’t roll back in her head when he announced it.”

  Cochran went cold inside. “What million dollars?”

  “Didn’t you know? Wilson just held a press conference in front of the courthouse. He offered a million-dollar reward for his daughter’s killer and gave out your phone number.”

  “My phone number?” cried Cochran.

  “The department’s number.” Ginger shook her head. “I figured a former chief executive would know that rewards only muddy the water of an investigation, but apparently not.” Again she glanced at his evidence file, now under the sack from Sadie’s. “Any new developments?”

  Cochran didn’t reply. Instead, he was thinking that he needed to call Tuffy Clark. Clark was already on the phone, interviewing Lisa Wilson’s college pals, now he would have to field all the crackpot tips this million-dollar purse would generate.

  “Wilson didn’t elaborate on her actual murder, did he?” Cochran thought if that old fart had revealed that his daughter had been mutilated, he would go strangle him on the spot.

  Ginger frowned. “What do you mean her actual murder?”

  “I mean did he give details?”

  “What details are you talking about?”

  “None in particular,” said Cochran. “I’m just asking my local reporter what he said.”

  “And your local reporter is asking you what details you’re talking about. I have a job to do, too, Jerry. A story to cover.”

  He sighed. He didn’t want to be accused of favoritism, just because he and Ginger were together. But he might need Ginger if Carlisle Wilson truly began his threatened ball-roast. He decided to give her the tiniest scoop. “I can’t release any details about the murder, but I can tell you that all the interns are retaining counsel.”

  “So they’ve gone from persons of interest to suspects?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Ginger whipped out her notebook, ready to take notes. “Any one you like better than the others?”

  “No. Anyway, we’re looking at other people beyond these five students. They just happen to be the closest thing we’ve got to eyewitnesses.”

  “Do you think this murder might be politically motivated? Wilson made a lot of enemies while he was in office.”

  “He doesn’t think so,” said Cochran. “But I’m still looking into it.”

  She started to ask him something else when his cell phone beeped. He pulled it out. Whaley had texted him. Found something interesting in the Givens movie. Please God, thought Cochran. Anything interesting would be good, at this point.

  “Gotta go,” he said, snapping his cell shut. “Duty calls.”

  “I know.” Ginger put her notebook back in her purse. “I’ve got to get down to the paper.” She leaned forward and kissed him again. “Will you call me later? If you find out anything?”

  He laughed. Even while kissing she still thought of the story. “I’ll try my best. Thanks for the strudel.”

  “Just be careful, okay?” she called over her shoulder as she walked toward the door. “And if a skinny blonde in a white Armani suit shows up, I strongly urge you to run the other way.”

  Cochran frowned. “Why?”

  “Because it will be Jessica Rusk, the great succubus of trash journalism.” In a chilling gesture, Ginger comically drew one finger across her neck. “Once she gets her hooks in you, it’s all over.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  After Ginger left, his thoughts returned to Carlisle Wilson.

  “Fucking asshole,” he whispered. He couldn’t believe the old bastard had been in town for less than three hours and had held a press conference and offered a million dollar reward. With the current economy, that could make for an awfully dicey situation. People already had far too many assault rifles in this county—add a rich reward and a killer running loose, and things could get tragic fast.

  Disgusted, Cochran locked his office and walked up one flight of stairs to the “war room”—a large room they used for special investigations. He swiped his ID through the lock and the door opened, revealing Buck Whaley gazing at an oversized computer screen, a pile of empty Mountain Dew cans under his chair. He looked up when Cochran entered.

  “What’s the matter?” Whaley asked. “You look like you just ate a shit sandwich.”

  “Wilson held a news conference. Put out a million-dollar reward.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Whaley’s mouth drew downward. “My dad hated that fucking old socialist. Said he wanted the government to run everything.”

  “Well, he apparently wants to run this investigation,” said Cochran. “What did you find in that movie?”

  “Sit down and I’ll show you.”

  Cochran pulled a chair up next to Whaley.

  “The first couple of hours are just kids farting around that cabin,” the big man said. “I’ll start where it ge
ts interesting.”

  Cochran waited. In a moment, Chris Givens’s ill-shaven face filled the screen.

  “We’re back inside the Fiddlesticks cabin.” Givens spoke into the camera with a hushed voice, trying to sound serious over some ill-concealed giggling in the background. “We’re going to bed now, but I’m keeping the camera rolling, in case Fiddlesticks comes in the night.”

  The picture fluctuated wildly, finally panning around the room to show the indistinct lumps of bodies on the floor. One of them lifted a hand, waved at the camera, calling “Hi, Mom!”

  “Great picture,” Cochran said, impressed by the sharp images in the dim light. “But I don’t see anything other than kids in sleeping bags.”

  “Hang on,” said Whaley.

  Cochran watched as the campers settled down to sleep. Then the angle changed as Givens put the camera on the mantel. The sleepers were no longer visible, only a wide shot of a seemingly empty room, alternating between near dark and a hazy gray twilight.

  “Why’s the lighting so weird?” asked Cochran.

  “High mountain clouds,” Whaley replied. “I checked the weather. A front moved through, dumped a little rain up there.”

  Whaley fast-forwarded the video. “This is fifty-six minutes after they go to bed.”

  For a moment, Cochran still saw an empty room, then suddenly, someone’s head appeared at the far right of the screen. Cochran recognized Lisa Wilson’s curly blonde hair immediately. She tilted her head toward the window, a moment later lifted up on one elbow. Cochran leaned forward, holding his breath as he watched the murdered girl peer out into the darkness, then look around the room. A moment later she stood up, her boots in one hand, and started tiptoeing toward the door. She opened it slowly, looked around the room once more, and then stepped outside, closing the door behind her.

  “That’s it.” Whaley stopped the film. “She never comes back. Until 5:32 a.m., all we see is an empty room.”

  “What happens at 5:32?”

  “The batteries in the camera die.”

  “Play it again,” Cochran ordered.

  For the next two hours, they dissected Givens’s movie, frame by frame, timing it, making notes. At 2:44 a.m., Lisa Wilson wakes up. She looks out the window, around the room, out the window again. At 2:48 a.m., the girl who reputedly fears the forest at night gets up and tiptoes into the darkness, alone.

  “What do you make of that?” asked Whaley.

  Cochran tapped his pen on the yellow sheet of notes he’d taken. “I don’t know. We can’t tell what anybody else in that room is doing. Are they all there? Have they all gone out to play a trick on her? We only see Lisa.”

  “Pretty clever of Givens, to put the camera like that,” said Whaley.

  Cochran nodded. “Run it again.”

  Once more the two men bent close to the computer monitor. At 2:45, as Lisa turns from the window for the first time, Cochran stopped the film to study the girl’s face. “You think she looks scared there?”

  “Maybe.” Whaley squinted at the screen. “But maybe excited, too.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Cochran. “Bright-eyed, anyway.”

  Frame by frame they watched as Lisa Wilson looked around the interior of the cabin.

  “She doesn’t seem scared there,” said Whaley.

  “I know,” Cochran agreed. “So her pals must be there. She would look scared if they’d left her alone.”

  “Unless she just thinks they’re there.” Whaley smirked at Cochran. “Didn’t you ever pull sheets over your pillows so you could sneak out at night, when you were a kid?”

  Cochran grunted, unwilling to admit that he’d never done such a thing. He’d spent most of his boyhood nights under the covers, reading by flashlight. “I don’t think five kids could sneak out of that cabin without waking her up. They said she’d had the least to drink. She would have been the lightest sleeper.”

  Cochran re-started the film. He leaned close to watch Lisa Wilson gaze out the window, then he turned to Whaley and frowned. “Are you hearing a buzz on this machine? A high-pitched kind of whine?”

  Whaley shook his head. “I can’t hear shit anymore. Fired my pistol too many times.”

  “Never mind, then. Let’s keep watching.”

  Once more, they studied the last moments of the girl’s life.

  “She doesn’t call to the others,” Cochran noted. “She doesn’t want to wake them up.”

  “For a scaredy-cat like her, that’s huge,” Whaley said.

  “Unless she’s not scared at that point,” replied Cochran. “Maybe she sees somebody she knows outside. Somebody she trusts.”

  “Like loverboy Nick Stratton?” asked Whaley.

  “Possibly,” Cochran agreed. With Lisa Wilson gone, they saw nothing but frame after frame of an empty room. Growing annoyed by the hiss of the machine, Cochran reached to turn the speakers off when abruptly, the extraneous noise stopped on its own. Cochran ran the video for another three minutes, but the noise never returned.

  “Wait a minute.” He turned to Whaley. “Back it up.”

  “Where to?” asked Whaley.

  “To where she wakes up.”

  Whaley did as Cochran ordered The two men leaned forward as the movie started again, but this time Cochran turned the speakers up full blast. He put his ear to one as Lisa Carlisle Wilson woke up, looked around the room, and then tiptoed out the door to her death.

  “Holy Fuck!” cried Cochran.

  “What?” asked Whaley.

  “Back it up five minutes!”

  Whaley backed the video up even farther, to where there was nothing but an empty room on the screen. With one ear pressed to a speaker, Cochran nodded for him to start the video. He listened for a moment, then held up his hand.

  “There!” he said, pointing at the clock/counter in the right corner of the screen. “It’s starts at 2:39 a.m.” He kept listening until Lisa Wilson left the cabin. “And it fades away at 2:54!”

  “What starts?” cried Whaley, his face red with frustration. “What the fuck are you hearing?

  “Exactly what you’re supposed to hear up there.” Cochran gave Whaley an odd look. “Fiddle music.”

  Twelve

  Mary was late picking Lily up at Camp Wadulisi. She’d handed all the desperate parents off to other defense attorneys and after that she’d had to thread her way out of a town newly congested with news vans and satellite uplinks. She caught a glimpse of DA George Turpin giving an interview on the courthouse steps, no doubt assuring the media that Pisgah County law enforcement was swift and would soon bring the killer to justice.

  “A few years ago that was you,” she said, a wave of nostalgia washing over her. Her boss, Jim Falkner, hated being on television, so he always made her comment on whatever case Atlantans found alarming. At first the bright lights and microphones intimidated her, but she soon learned the art of the sound bite, and ultimately started enjoying it. Criminal law, was, for her, like nothing else. She loved the excitement of starting a new case—piecing together the evidence, figuring out motive. Then going to trial and playing out the drama in front of a jury. Your heart raced a million miles an hour, your brain right along with it. It was almost better than sex, as best she could remember.

  “Oh, stop it,” she told herself as she turned on to the access road that led to Camp Wadulisi. “You don’t do that anymore. Get over it.”

  She pulled into the pickup area to find Lily long-faced, the last Brownie still waiting for her ride. “I’m sorry I’m late,” Mary apologized to the camp director as Lily climbed into the car. “My day got busier than I’d planned.”

  “Don’t give it a thought.” Mrs. Crawford smiled. “Lily was telling me all about the owl you rescued last night.”

  “Did you call about the owl?” Lily asked as they pulled away from camp.
>
  “Not yet.” Mary replied, wondering how Nick Stratton had spent his day, caught up in this intern mess. “But we can call after supper.”

  “She’ll probably be dead by then,” said Lily sourly, her face falling into the tight lines she’d acquired in Oklahoma.

  Mary gripped the steering wheel tightly, wanting to remind the child that had it not been for her, the owl would most certainly be dead, but she kept her silence as they headed home. She’d learned that arguing with a nine-year-old was an exercise in futility.

  Jonathan was in the kitchen when they got home, cleaning a string of rainbow trout. He looked up and frowned when she walked into the room.

  “Hey,” she said, walking over to hug him. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. What’s up with you?”

  “Big news,” said Mary. “Old Carlisle Wilson’s daughter was murdered here the night before the sports park opened.”

  “Governor Carlisle Wilson? What was his daughter even doing up here?”

  “Working at Nick Stratton’s rescue center.”

  “The guy who flew the eagle yesterday?”

  She nodded. “The guy Lily and I took the owl to last night.”

  Jonathan ignored her reference to the injured bird. “Cochran on the case?”

  “I’m sure he is.” She dropped her purse on a kitchen chair. “I think I’ll go change my clothes.”

  “Dinner’s in half an hour,” he replied absently, returning to his fish.

  They ate on the screened porch as thick, purplish clouds rolled in from Tennessee. The mood at the dinner table was as sullen as the sky. Lily had a long list of issues with Brownie camp, while Jonathan shared his own complaints about his fishing clients. Mary finally got up and started clearing the table, deciding that the clatter of washing dishes was more cheerful than their dismal carping. She was elbow-deep in soapsuds, when Lily came into the kitchen.

  “Can we call Dr. Lovebird now?”

  “Sure,” said Mary. “Bring me his card—it’s in my billfold.”

  Lily retrieved the card. Mary dried her hands, then punched in the number. Unsurprisingly, an answering machine advised that they’d reached Pisgah Raptor Rescue Center and to leave a message. To Lily’s disappointment, Mary left her name and number and asked Stratton to call them back.