The Headsman

by James Neal Harvey

  “You can stay off Buddy Harper’s back.”

  He could picture Ternock sitting with telephone in hand, dark eyes cold beneath his shock of white hair. “Are you representing Buddy, George?”

  “The Harper family have been my clients for a long time. Three generations of them. Do you have a charge you want to bring against the boy?”

  “He’s not charged with anything. All I did was have him in for a talk. He was one of the last people to see Marcy Dickens alive, which certainly made him important to the case, and maybe a suspect.”

  “Ayuh, and that’s reasonable. But now you’ve had two cracks at him, and that’s enough.”

  “I had him in once, George.”

  “So did Inspector Pearson, which makes two times he was questioned. The boy’s under a lot of strain, without the police adding to it. Marcy’s death was a terrible shock to him.”

  “It was to everyone.”

  “So if you have anything further you want to ask him about, you better have a good reason.”

  “An unsolved homicide’s a good reason, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly is. But disrupting the boy’s life amounts to harassment, and you have no right to do that. You have absolutely nothing to indicate he was inside the Dickens house that night, do you?”

  Jud wondered if Ternock was probing and decided he wasn’t. The lawyer didn’t bluff, and he didn’t operate on hunches. “Like I said, George, we’re not charging him with anything.”

  “Of course you’re not. There’s nothing to charge him with.”

  “That’s true for the moment, anyway. But even if it is, we may need him as a material witness at some point.”

  “That’ll be up to the county attorney,” Ternock said. “Not you. First a case has to be presented to a grand jury.”

  “I understand that.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll expect you to let the boy get on with his life. His parents are quite upset with all this, as you’d imagine they would be.”

  “I know they are. I’ve spoken with his father.”

  “So he told me. Let me point something out to you, Jud. You should keep in mind that after you break this case, if you do, you’ll want to go on being an important part of the community. Wouldn’t do to rub people the wrong way. Braddock is a small town.”

  There it was again. Ternock was being more subtle than the group at Sam Melcher’s home had been yesterday, but not much. Certainly the message was the same. Do your job, solve this dirty problem, but respect the station of those above you.

  “Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, George. You do.”

  “Good. I wish you luck in your investigation.” There was a click and then the hum of the dial tone in Jud’s ear.

  2

  In the afternoon Jud drove over to Dr. Reinholtz’s office for a copy of the coroner’s report and also one on the autopsy, which had been conducted that morning. The doctor was brisk and businesslike, but despite his manner and his jaunty bowtie there was a touch of sadness about him that Jud caught. Which was certainly understandable. Reinholtz had been a doctor in this town for decades; there was hardly anyone he didn’t know, and a great many of the locals were his patients. That probably had included Marcy Dickens.

  Reinholtz confirmed it. “I delivered her, you know.”

  “No,” Jud said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, yes. Saw her through measles and flu, and a broken wrist when she fell off her bike. She was about seven when that happened. Great kid. Had her whole life ahead of her.”

  “You confirm what killed her?”

  “I’d say a blow from an ax, just as we suspected.”

  “Couldn’t have been from some other kind of weapon?”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t know what it would have been. Had to be very sharp and very heavy. Sliced her larynx and severed her spine at the fifth cervical vertebra. Death was almost instantaneous.”

  “What do you mean, almost instantaneous?”

  Reinholtz shrugged. “When someone’s decapitated, the brain stays alive for a few more seconds.”

  Jud felt a crawling sensation at the back of his neck. “Let me get this straight. Are you saying she was conscious afterward?”

  “Probably. But only until the blood drained away and the brain was deprived of oxygen. That would have been just a moment or two later.”

  “So in other words, she could have thought about what had happened to her? After her head was separated from her body?”

  “She could have had an impression, yes.”

  “Holy Christ.”

  The doctor waved a hand impatiently. “For all practical purposes, she died instantly.”

  Not quite, Jud thought. Not quite. He was silent for a minute or so, numbed by what he’d learned. Then he shook himself out of it. “You find any sign of a struggle?”

  “Just one. There was a bruise on the underside of her jaw.”

  Jud hadn’t noticed it when he saw the body, but that probably was because of the way the head had been sitting on the dresser. “What caused it, could you tell?”

  “Could have been a lot of things. A club, or a fist.”

  “But fresh?”

  “Yes. Inflicted at the same time.”

  Jud tried to picture it. “Sounds as if he knocked her down, then swung the ax.”

  “Probably, yes.”

  “What about time of death?”

  “Between midnight and two A.M.”

  “You find anything else?”

  “There was semen in her vagina. We don’t have a lab report on that yet, but I expect it’ll be confirmed. She must have had intercourse not long before she died.”

  Jud thought of his talk with Buddy Harper, and another idea came into his mind. “You think she was raped?”

  “No, although it’s hard to say, under the circumstances. Wasn’t forcible rape, anyway.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Condition of the mucous membranes in the vaginal tract. When a woman is sexually excited in a normal situation, she’s lubricious. The juices flow, the penis slides. But when she’s frightened and angry, as in a rape, she’s dry. Even if the rapist uses some kind of lubricant, which would be unlikely, there can be damage. So what happens is, there are abrasions and sometimes even tears in the tissue. I found no evidence of anything like that.”

  “So rape is out.”

  “Not altogether. She could have been threatened, and then submitted without putting up resistance. But I don’t think so. She had intercourse, but in my opinion she wasn’t raped.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She had a boyfriend, right? The Harper kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so that could explain the semen. Inspector Pearson said they’d want a DNA analysis, and that’ll give us the answer.”

  “How reliable is that?”

  “Very. Before we had it, all the lab could tell you about a semen sample was blood type. Which made it pretty general. But now semen’s as good as a fingerprint, because the DNA can be identified. DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid—the basic chromosonal material that reveals somebody’s hereditary pattern. Chances are something like one in ten billion that any two people would have the same DNA fragments. So you can positively identify somebody a female had sex with.”

  Jud again thought of Buddy. The boy had admitted that he’d made it with Marcy that night, so the test would only confirm what Jud already knew. But what if she’d been raped after that?

  “Let me ask you, Doc. This DNA test—would it work if she’d had intercourse with two guys?”

  “You mean if there was semen from two different people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure it would. The test would distinguish between them and still identify both. What made you ask that?”

  “Nothing, I was just curious. When will you have the results?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I’ll call you as soon as I get them.”

  Jud than
ked him and went back to his own office. What he wanted to get going on now was questioning more of Marcy’s friends. One of the unfortunate side effects of trying to conduct an investigation in a small town was that you couldn’t say good morning to someone without everybody else knowing all about it, but that couldn’t be helped. A little later on he’d go over to the high school. He looked at his watch. It was still early; he flicked through the reports on his desk.

  One of them caught his eye. Philip Mariski had called yesterday and insisted the cops drag Kretchmer’s pond. Jud wondered why that had come up now. He noted that Grady had agreed to look into it. Jud made a mental note to stop by the pond before going to the high school.

  3

  An ambulance and a police car and three other vehicles were parked beside the road when Jud arrived. He pulled up behind the cruiser and got out, looking across the snow-covered field at Kretchmer’s pond. He could see a boat on the pond with several occupants in it and a small group of people standing at the water’s edge.

  He trudged through the snow to where the onlookers were gathered. When he got there he saw that the men in the boat had used poles to break up the ice on the pond. He recognized Philip Mariski among the people in the group on the shore and nodded to him. Overhead the sky had turned leaden once again and there was a threat of more snow in the air. A slight wind was blowing out of the east and it was raw and cold and Jud turned up the collar of his jacket.

  As he watched, the men in the boat poled the vessel toward the shore. One of them was a cop, Charley Ostheimer. The other two were men who worked for Braddock’s department of public works. They were silent and grim-faced, and as they came closer Jud saw something lying on the bottom of the boat, covered by a blanket. When they reached land the men got out and lifted the bundle from the boat. An ambulance attendant raised one corner of the blanket.

  The boy’s face was bloated, but not as much as it would have been, Jud realized, if the water had been warmer. The skin was pasty white, the lips blue. His eyes were half-opened slits in the swollen face. Philip Mariski pushed close and groaned, then turned away. The men carried the small body to the ambulance.

  Mariski walked alone to his car, a battered Chevy sedan. He bent over the roof of the vehicle and buried his face in his arms, his shoulders shaking. Jud went to him and stood by, wishing there was something he could do to ease the man’s pain and knowing there wasn’t.

  After a minute or two Mariski pulled himself erect. He got a bandanna out of the back pocket of his blue work pants and blew his nose loudly. He noticed Jud standing near him and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Jud said. “I’m really sorry.”

  Mariski’s eyes were redrimmed in his dark face. He wiped them with the bandanna, then blew his nose again. “She knew,” he said. “She knew.”

  “Who knew what?”

  “That woman. That goddamn woman. She knew where he was. She knew he was drowned in there. She knew right where to look.”

  “What woman?”

  “Said her name’s Karen Wilson. Works at Boggs Ford. I’m telling you, she knew.”

  4

  Driving to Braddock High, Jud thought about what Mariski had told him. He’d never heard the woman’s name before, he was reasonably certain. And with the emotional state Mariski was in, Jud couldn’t be sure that what he’d said about the woman’s visit to his house was accurate. But he’d check it out when he had time. He parked his cruiser in front of the school and approached the building.

  As he made his way up the walk he thought about his own schooldays. He’d gone to Norwich High, not so many miles from here, in a town even smaller than Braddock. At that time he was sure he’d either become a guitar player or a professional athlete. The idea that he’d wind up as a cop, let alone chief of a small-town police department, had never occurred to him.

  But then he’d learned the hard way that he’d never be able to hit a curveball at a level above Class C, and that put an end to seeing himself as another Mike Schmidt. And his work with the guitar had gone no further than playing with a few pickup groups. The most he’d ever made in one night was twenty dollars in a bar, trying to be heard above the loud talk and clinking glasses.

  So when he’d gone into the MPs after basic training it was like backing into a career almost without realizing it was happening. As it turned out he had an aptitude for police work, and he liked it. Which was more of an advantage than many young guys had, especially the ones whose lives seemed to just drift along in no particular direction.

  While he was in the army his father died of a stroke, and a year after that pneumonia took his mother. His father had been a foreman with a construction company, a big rough guy who drank too much and got nasty when he was loaded, but who was capable of gentleness with Jud’s mother. Maybe he was afraid of her; Jud was never quite sure. The only time the old man had shown much interest in Jud was when he had been playing ball, but even then there hadn’t been a whole lot of communication.

  There was one other child in the family, Jud’s older brother Roger, who had gone out to the West Coast and was now an electrical contractor in Oregon. He was married and had a son, but Jud had never seen his sister-in-law or his nephew. He spoke to his brother once a year, in a telephone call on Christmas day.

  After his parents died Jud began to take life a little more seriously, at least to the extent of thinking about what he was going to do. He figured as long as he was in police work and enjoying it, he might as well stick with it.

  At the time of his discharge from the army he realized he’d need an education. So right after he’d signed on as a rookie in the BPD he enrolled in an adult program at one of the New York State University branches. Even applying his army credits, it had taken seven years of hard work to get a degree through the courses he’d taken on a catch-as-catch-can basis. But when he made chief of the Braddock force it seemed for once he’d really put it all together.

  Until the Dickens case had flipped a quiet Saturday morning upside down. Now he had a feeling he could be walking blindfolded through a minefield.

  The Braddock High principal was David Baxter. Jud went to him first, out of courtesy. On his way to Baxter’s office the kids he passed in the corridors were wide-eyed at seeing him. There couldn’t be doubts in anyone’s mind why he was there; all anyone in Braddock was talking about was Marcy Dickens’ murder.

  Baxter was a little guy with a prissy mouth and beady eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He was polite enough, even unctuous, when Jud entered his office. He asked the chief to sit down and offered coffee, which Jud declined.

  It was terrible, Baxter said, about the Dickens murder. The students were stunned and grief-stricken, and so was the faculty. The school would be closed tomorrow to show respect for Marcy, so that anyone who wished could attend the funeral. In all his years with the Braddock educational system, he’d never seen a tragedy like this. True, they’d lost students to accidents of various kinds, especially in automobiles. But murder? And especially one as bizarre as this? It was unheard of.

  It was also unfortunate that so many people in Braddock believed the headsman legend, he said. That wasn’t at all healthy, in his opinion. No rational person should swallow such an absurd story. But still—it was strange, wasn’t it, that the poor girl had been decapitated? And with an ax, at that. How was the investigation coming along, by the way?

  “We’re looking at every possibility,” Jud said. “The reason I’m here today is to get a better understanding of what Marcy was like. I thought it would help to talk to some of her friends.”

  Baxter squinted through his glasses. His voice dropped a few levels. “You think one of them might have been responsible?”

  “Not necessarily. I’m just getting background information.” Jud was used to people angling for information. “Preliminary fact-gathering, you could call it.”

  The principal seemed a little disappointed. “There are so many difficulties with our young people today. Ver
y little discipline at home, you know. That’s the main thing. Parents don’t seem to care what their children do so long as they don’t have to get involved. That’s one reason we have such a drug problem, in my opinion. It’s just about impossible for us to control it. And frankly, Chief, I wish your force would be a bit tougher in that area.”

  “We’re doing the best we can,” Jud said. Baxter was like a lot of other people he knew. Ready to point out that drugs were a blight, and just as quick to say that solving the problem was somebody else’s responsibility. “Maybe a better drug education program in the schools would help.”

  “Oh, I agree. We’re trying now to get more funding for just that purpose. Both from the federal government and the state. But all politicians do is talk. There’s very little action.”

  So here we go round in a circle, Jud thought. It’s still everyone else’s fault. “Getting back to Marcy.”

  “Yes?”

  “What was she like as a student?”

  The principal pursed his lips before answering. “Above average, I would say. Not on the honors list, but close to it. Did her work, got it in on time. I went through her transcript after you called this morning, and also talked with a couple of her teachers. By and large she was doing a good job, academically. Liked history quite a bit, I understand. Her weakness was math.”

  Mine too, Jud thought. “How about her personality—what was that like?”

  “Sunny and cheerful, most of the time. A willing participant in classroom discussions. Quite articulate, and not afraid to express herself.”

  “I understand they were discussing the headsman in her English class on Friday morning.”

  Baxter’s jaw dropped. “Really? I wasn’t aware of that. Let’s see, that would have been Mr. Hathaway’s class.”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange that would have come up. And on that day, of all days.”

  “Struck me as odd, too.”

  “Although that old story has always been part of the local lore. Perhaps that might explain it.”