Murder Comes by Mail

by A. H. Gabhart

  Michael surveyed the rest of the men and women scurrying around the basement. It was one big open area with tables covered with white paper runners and metal folding chairs now pushed willy-nilly out of the way by the police. A couple of the blue artificial flower arrangements in the middle of each of the tables had fallen over. Behind the gray counter that served as a kind of room divider, an old refrigerator and stove stood against the concrete walls. A coffeepot rested upside down on a towel beside the sink in the middle of the counter. The fingerprinters had been through and left a film of fingerprinting dust on everything. A woman stood at the far end of the counter, sorting and labeling plastic evidence bags.

  A corner of a black cover sheet stuck out from behind the counter, but Michael couldn’t see any part of the girl from his spot by the stairs. The body could have been there when the church met Sunday. The old tile flooring matched that in the picture. The killer might have expected the body to be found before his pictures made it to Hidden Springs. The envelope had to have been mailed on Saturday at the latest, which meant the girl likely was killed on Friday.

  The coroner’s report would pinpoint a time of death and determine whether she was killed here or just dumped here because of the name of the place. Had there been forced entry? Michael could think of a lot of questions to ask, but he kept his mouth shut. Nobody owed him any answers. He might have given the murderer the chance to kill again, but that didn’t make it his case.

  The technicians gathered up their equipment and Whitt beckoned to Michael. The detective pulled on some plastic gloves and muttered, “I hate putting on these things. Nothing good ever happens when you or anybody around you puts on plastic gloves.”

  “You’re spot-on there.” The coroner laughed as he knelt down beside the body and pulled back the plastic sheet.

  “That the one in your pictures?” Whitt asked Michael.

  Her skin had darkened and purple streaked out around the wound in her head now. Her eyes were still open, but they’d lost the shine they’d had in the photograph.

  “That’s her.” Michael was glad when the coroner dropped the sheet back over the girl’s face.

  “Well, let’s have a look.” Whitt pulled the pages out of the envelope. He laid them all out in a row, not taking them out of their protective plastic bags. “How come there are two envelopes?”

  “This bunch came to the sheriff’s office in this envelope.” Michael pointed without touching them. “The others went to the local editor.”

  “Is he planning to run them?”

  “The Gazette only comes out once a week on Wednesday.”

  “Wish we could say the same up here. Would make life simpler, wouldn’t it, Harold?”

  “You can say that again. The hounds are probably outside by now. A little yellow police line draws them like ants to a picnic.” The coroner stood up. “Can I load her up now?”

  “Have at it,” Whitt said.

  The man left to get his gurney. Michael watched him go up the stairs and wondered if Whitt had planned it that way so they would be alone in the basement.

  “You ever see the girl before, Keane?”

  “No. Have you made any kind of ID?”

  “She wasn’t wearing a name tag, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You think her name might really be Hope?” Michael stared down at the body on the floor.

  “I doubt it, but you never know. This guy might be just cute enough to hunt down a Hope. He makes me think he might be the hunting type, and that he’s not bagged his limit yet. What do you think?” Whitt’s eyes burned into Michael in the bare-bulb light of the basement.

  “I think you need to talk to Dr. Colson at Eagleton General. This Jackson walked out of there on Thursday, but the doctor had him under his care for a couple of days. He might have some information that might help you. Me, all I know is I should have let him jump.”

  12

  Michael followed Detective Whitt back to the Eagleton police station, where Whitt commandeered an empty office while Chekowski, as anxious to please as a lap dog, hurried to fetch coffee. Michael had yet to catch her smiling, but the generous cut of her mouth and a trace of dimples hinted at a stunner smile. From her clear blue eyes to the curves her dark suit couldn’t hide, Chekowski looked more like a beauty queen than a homicide detective, which was why Michael doubted he’d see her flash any kind of smile with Detective Whitt around to see it.

  “Where exactly is Hidden Springs?” Whitt leaned back in the chair behind the desk and began flipping a pen through his fingers.

  “Not far from Eagle Lake,” Michael said.

  “Nice lake. I’ve been there, but I don’t remember a town.”

  “The name is on the exit sign, but sort of as a footnote. Tourists don’t pay much attention since they’re looking for the lake, not Hidden Springs. Besides, most people heading for Hidden Springs already know the way.”

  Chekowski brought in three Styrofoam cups of coffee and handed them around. Whitt stirred two packets of sugar in his. “Sounds like you think this Jackson was a hometown boy.” Whitt looked up.

  As Michael started to answer, Whitt interrupted to set a recorder on the desk between them. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  It wouldn’t matter if he did. Whitt was trying to play up the fellow-officer, good-buddy feeling, but it wasn’t working. Michael felt more like some lowlife pulled in off the street. Somebody they suspected of knowing more than he was willing to admit about the whole thing.

  Michael’s eyes slid from the recorder to Chekowski in the chair beside him with her pen poised over a small notebook and back to Whitt who continued to lace the pen through his fingers.

  He might not like Whitt’s attitude, but that was no reason not to answer his questions. “I haven’t found anybody who says they knew him, but I figure he must have been there before some time or other.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because he knew about the bridge.”

  “Couldn’t he have just happened upon it?” Chekowski asked.

  Michael looked at her, surprised not by the question, but that she’d spoken up at all. Whitt’s pen went still between his fingers for just a second before he began twirling it again. “Good question, Chekowski.”

  The young woman’s cheeks burned as she dropped her eyes back to her notebook.

  “He could have.” Michael directed his answer toward her, but she didn’t look up. “But I got the feeling this was something he’d been planning, and most folks don’t leave much to chance when they plan their own deaths.”

  “So you think this Jackson did that?” Whitt kept his eyes on the pen he was twirling. “Made this plan to come jump off your bridge and end it all in Eagle River?”

  “It seemed that way to me.”

  “And then you come along and play the hero and give him another chance?”

  The detective didn’t say it, but Michael heard the echo in his words. Another chance to off little girls. “He looked harmless enough. Just some poor guy down on his luck.”

  “That’s one of the bummer parts of being a cop. The worst killers can look the same as you and me.” Whitt stopped twirling the pen for a minute and picked up the plastic sleeve containing the picture of the girl alive and laughing. “She doesn’t look worried about anything bad here. More like she’s on some kind of picnic with not the least inkling that she’s the basket of goodies. What do you think, Deputy?”

  “I don’t think she looks frightened, but definitely excited.”

  Whitt studied the picture a minute. “Yeah, but if I had to wager a guess, I’d say not high on alcohol or drugs. More thrilled like she just got off a roller coaster or knows she’s got a winning lottery ticket in her pocket.” Whitt put the picture down and began with the pen again. “Okay. Let’s start from the top. Tell me everything you remember from the minute you spotted him on the bridge.”

  So Michael went over it all again and then answered Whitt’s questions at the end. Ch
ekowski took notes and once or twice looked tempted to ask a question but bit the corner of her lower lip and kept silent.

  The tape clicked off, and Whitt flipped it over to the other side. He let it record the silence in the room for a minute before he asked, “Now why was it you chased this suicide wannabe to Eagleton?”

  Any illusion that they were colleagues had long fled the room as Michael began to feel more and more as if the detective was trying to somehow unbalance him and get him to confess to something, though what Michael couldn’t imagine. It was already obvious he’d saved a killer. What more could Whitt want him to say?

  Michael shifted in his chair and thought about telling Whitt to just rewind his tape and listen to his first answer again. Instead he swallowed his irritation and went through it again. “It bothered me. What the jumper said about me wishing I’d pushed him. I thought if his doctor would allow me to speak to him, I could figure out whether or not what he said meant anything.”

  “But the shrink wouldn’t let you talk to him?”

  “Right. I told you that already. The doctor felt Jackson wasn’t in stable enough mental condition to talk to anyone.”

  “This doctor. Colson, wasn’t it? At Eagleton General?” When Michael nodded, Whitt glanced over at his partner.

  “Got it.” Chekowski scribbled down the information.

  Whitt switched off the recorder and stood up. “Well, you’ve been a big help, Mike.” He leaned over the desk to offer his hand to Michael. “Give your telephone number to Chekowski here. We’ll keep you informed.”

  The woman turned to a fresh page in her notebook and handed it to Michael, who jotted down the sheriff office’s number. He looked back at Whitt. “Do you think he might kill again?”

  “Who knows?” Whitt shrugged. “If I could predict the criminal mind, I’d write a book and be on the daytime talk show circuit getting rich instead of stirring through the slime on the bottom of the food chain, trying to get a lead.”

  Chekowski walked out with Michael as if she had the unspoken assignment to be sure he left the building. Outside on the street, she touched his arm to delay him walking away. “Don’t mind Aaron. He can be a pain, but he closes out a lot of cases.”

  “How long have you been working with him?”

  “Long enough to know when to keep my mouth shut, but I forget sometimes. He has to be top dog, and that’s the way it should be. He’s very good at what he does.”

  “And what’s that?” Michael asked.

  Chekowski looked surprised by the question. “Coming up with leads. Making arrests. I mean, most homicides are by known-to-the-victim people where you take a look around and arrest the person holding a smoking gun or so random you could look forever and never find a reason to it.”

  “And which one do you think Hope is?”

  “We don’t know that Hope is her name,” Chekowski protested. Then as if she felt her protest had been too strong, she explained, “Aaron says you can’t think about the victim as a person with a mama at home worrying about her little girl’s choice of boyfriends or a kid brother she promised to take to the park on Sunday afternoon or you’ll be too busy crying to ever figure anything out. Until we know her real name, she’s homicide number thirty-three.”

  She sounded like Michael’s old partner in the city. “Then when you know her name?”

  “It doesn’t make that much difference. It’s just another piece of the puzzle that might help us find the name that matters more. Her killer’s name.”

  “Good hunting.” Michael turned away.

  “Hold on a minute, Deputy.” She waited till Michael looked back around at her. “I don’t guess you could get your editor to squash that story Wednesday. You know, the ‘hero saves a killer’ bit.”

  “I’ll talk to him. He’s a decent enough guy, but he likes selling newspapers. And headlines like that sell newspapers even in little towns like ours.”

  “Yeah. You’ll be wasting your breath.” She fanned herself with her notebook. The sun was beating down on them there on the sidewalk. “I guess the best we can hope for is no more envelopes in the mail.”

  He was in his car ready to get on the interstate when he realized he didn’t want to go back to Hidden Springs. What was he going to do there besides sit around and wait for that next set of pictures? And unless Aaron Whitt was able to pull rabbits out of hats, another set was going to show up in the mail. That terrible certainty settled inside Michael like a heavy stone.

  He had to do something to stop it, but what? He hadn’t exactly been invited into the investigation. No, it was go back to your little town and let the big dogs take care of the mess you made by grabbing some psycho back from the edge.

  Michael drove past the entrance to the interstate. Instead he made a left turn, then a right, and a few miles later was in the parking garage beside Eagleton General before he really let himself think about what he was doing. What would it hurt if he talked to the doctor again? He could surely think up some reason that might sound halfway official. Maybe he could question the nurses who gave Jackson his medicine or the aides who brought him his food. If he came up with the right questions to ask, he might get a clue as to where to look next.

  Michael was still wondering exactly what questions those might be and how he would explain the fact that he was asking them, when he spotted Detectives Whitt and Chekowski striding across the parking structure toward the elevator.

  Whitt hadn’t wasted any time taking Michael’s advice, but then in a homicide investigation, the first twenty-four hours were critical. Every day after that increased the odds in the killer’s favor until after a year, the killer was usually sitting free on his pile of bones. Not that the police quit looking for the perpetrator. Homicides were never filed away, but cold cases where the leads had dried up got pushed off the front burner by new crime investigations.

  After Whitt and Chekowski disappeared through the hospital entrance, Michael started his car and drove slowly back out to the street. He was not only out of his jurisdiction, he was out of his league. Facts Whitt would be sure to forcefully remind him of if he caught Michael stepping on the trail anywhere.

  Still, he needed to do something, talk to somebody. There was always Aunt Lindy. She had a clear-eyed view of most things, but what did she know about psychos? Who knew anything about psychos? Michael thought of the doctor again, but even though he’d like to talk to him, maybe even look over his records of Jackson’s treatment, Michael couldn’t think of any way to make that happen without Whitt’s cooperation. And Whitt wasn’t the type to consult.

  Besides, even if he did talk to Dr. Colson, he might not learn anything. Just because the doctor treated mental problems didn’t make him an expert on the criminally insane. That was the kind of person Michael needed to talk to. Someone who might help him predict the killer’s next move. An expert on serial killers.

  Alex popped into his mind. While that wasn’t unusual lately, this time as he started to shove her aside to keep from being distracted, he realized she might know a psycho expert. As far as Michael knew, she had never defended a serial killer, but he was confident her firm, which had at least twenty-five names down the side of their letterhead, had experts lined up for every potential contingency. She’d be able to give him a name.

  He waited until he was close to the interstate to call. After waiting impatiently through her recorded message, he asked her to meet him at Wayland, West Virginia, a halfway point to Washington and about four hours for each of them. When Alex first started working in DC and was struggling to get her foot in the door of the elevator that went up to the floor with the private offices, she met him at Wayland once a month or so. She needed to talk to someone she could count on always being on her side, even when he didn’t exactly agree with her.

  That had been a few years ago, while he was working in Columbus and she still thought he’d do something that mattered instead of hibernating in Hidden Springs. She was glad when he quit the Columbus job, h
ad actually let out a cheer when he told her he’d given notice. She wanted him to get on with the FBI or go back to school. He could even study law like she had. That would open up all kinds of opportunities, propel him up to the big time. He listened to her dreams for him and had to laugh. Later, he was never sure which had made her angrier—the fact that he had quit the Columbus force to go back to Hidden Springs or the laugh.

  He sometimes thought about chasing the big time just so he might have a chance to catch Alex, but he didn’t even like to fish with artificial lures. He liked using crickets, grasshoppers, mealy worms. He couldn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t.

  Halfway to Wayland, he called the office.

  “Where are you?” Betty Jean demanded.

  “Just crossed over into West Virginia,” Michael said.

  “I can’t believe this.” Silence hummed on the phone for a minute before she let out a tired sigh. “You picked a fine time to run away from home.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow. Something going on you can’t handle?”

  “Everything’s going on I can’t handle.” Betty Jean’s voice went up an octave. “Hank has called me fifteen times to see if you’ve gotten back. What am I supposed to tell him?”

  “That I’ve taken the rest of the day off and I’ll talk to him tomorrow. He doesn’t have to have a headline till he goes to press.”

  “I wish you’d taken him with you. He’s driving me crazy.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Then what am I supposed to tell Uncle Al? I thought I was going to have to call Dr. Hadley to come with the ambulance when he saw those pictures.”