AHMM, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Very slim,” Behrens assured her, no doubt trembling inwardly at the prospect of an official investigation. “We put a meter on the box and found the ground line intact."

  Dr. Deventer knelt beside the supine form of Dembault.

  "You can move him, Mary,” said Tredwyn. “I've already got pictures, and anyway the ambulance crew shoved him all over the place before the rest of us got here."

  With her forehead pressed against the cold fence, Ashleigh watched intently as her mother, wearing rubber gloves, examined the dead man. His eyes were only half closed, his complexion a ghastly purple. Charred areas on both palms showed where the lethal current had passed in and out.

  "Why wasn't he wearing gloves?” asked the doctor. “And why was he using a tool without an insulated handle in such a dangerous place?” When Behrens didn't answer, she twisted around and looked up at him. “Was he a drinker? On drugs?"

  "Not as far as I know. Not at nine o'clock in the morning, anyway."

  "The blood tests will settle that one way or the other.” Mary stood up. “Did he have any health problems? A record of excessive absenteeism? Any history of depression?"

  "Nothing like that. He's been with the company for more than ten years. Very sharp at his job, very dependable..."

  "But...?"

  "I might as well say it, because you'll eventually find it out. All those guys over there hated him like poison."

  "Because...?"

  "He was arrogant, abrasive, demanding, a showoff, a daredevil..."

  "The kind of person who works around twenty-three-KV equipment without gloves?"

  "Exactly."

  "And eventually gets himself murdered."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Not in so many words.” She nodded toward the big steel box. “Could this accident have been rigged?"

  The overcast autumn sky shed a feeble radiance, like the headlights of a car whose battery is too low to turn over the engine. Behrens peered into the murky interior of the box. “That's hard to say. There isn't enough light inside there for a cat to find its own tail."

  "Let's shift him out of the way,” said Tredwyn, “so we can get a better view inside."

  While her mother was busy helping Doyle and Behrens move Dembault's body from in front of the junction box, Ashleigh tagged along behind Roger Tredwyn toward the evidence van outside the fence. She didn't know all the details of the scandal he had been involved in several months ago, but she felt sure he was an innocent victim of mudslinging. For her, all crime scene investigators were automatically endowed with sterling characters and unimpeachable integrity. And she found Roger's Irish or Welsh accent or whatever it was utterly beguiling.

  From the van Tredwyn unloaded an elaborate device on rubber tires with six adjustable floodlights and began wheeling it toward the gate. Ashleigh gripped one side of it to help guide it over the rough ground.

  "Haven't you got a flashlight?” she asked.

  "You mean one of those seventy-nine-cent disposable penlights like they use in the TV shows?” His indulgent grin deepened his dimples and brought his crinkly eyelids nearly together. “Those are toys, love. Very effective for casting eerie shadows, but pretty useless otherwise."

  "What if there isn't anyplace to plug this in?” she asked.

  "No power at the power station? That would be a pretty kettle of fish. But we don't need it. This thing's got batteries inside—big ones. That's why it's so heavy."

  The body of Greg Dembault, covered with a blue plastic sheet, now lay at some distance from the scene of the apparent accident. Once Tredwyn set up the lighting device, everybody, including Ashleigh outside the fence, had a clear view of the interior of the switch and junction box. Black and white strands of insulated cable, thicker than garden hose, coiled back and forth between massive clamps. Knife switch contacts and naked copper grounding wires smoldered like old gold in the garish light. Daubs of grease, handfuls of dirt, and festoons of cobwebs completed the picture.

  "That makes a lot of difference,” said Behrens. He leaned closer to study the interior of the box, with his head tilted back and his hands rammed deep in his coat pockets as if to restrain them from injudicious probing. “And a certain amount of sense."

  "Something wrong in there?” asked Doyle.

  "Do you see that steel rod running up the right side? That's part of the switch linkage. It's operated by a crank that you put in from the outside through that hole near the bottom. Apparently a cotter key broke off or worked loose, because, as you can see, the bottom end of the rod is more than halfway off its shaft."

  "You think Dembault was trying to fix that when he got shocked?"

  "That's the way it looks to me,” said Behrens. “He must have braced himself against the side of the box with his left hand, and made a circuit with the tool in his right.” He straightened up and smoothed down his mustache with an unmistakable air of satisfaction. “This man's death is a catastrophe, of course,” he said, “but it was obviously the result of his own negligence rather than that of his employer's."

  "Which gets you off the hook with the Feds?” suggested Doyle with brutal frankness.

  "I wouldn't go so far as to say that. They're still going to rake me over the coals for not having trained Dembault properly and not making sure he used protective equipment and—"

  "What's that mark?” asked Tredwyn, pointing to a peculiarly shaped impression in the film of grease and grit on the floor of the box. “Like something was slid in or out."

  Behrens squatted, adjusted his bifocals, and stared for several seconds. Then he stood up, very bleak of feature, and glanced furtively toward the work crew, who sat or paced, chatting and smoking, at the far corner of the yard. “Make that slid in and out,” he said. “That mark is a perfect silhouette, almost a photograph, of something that had no business being in there, ever—the core of a heavy-duty overload relay."

  Lieutenant Doyle bent to examine the mark. “What's the significance of that, exactly?” he asked. Tredwyn was already shooting more pictures.

  "Why, the thing is a powerful magnet,” Behrens told him. “It'd pull the fillings right out of your teeth."

  No, it wouldn't, said Ashleigh to herself. There's no iron in a filling.

  "You're suggesting that somebody put a magnet in there so that it would attract the tool Dembault was using and cause it to touch a hot wire?"

  "Exactly. Earlier this morning, when this happened, there was probably just enough sunlight filtering in from the east for Dembault to see the loose linkage, but not enough to show the magnet, which is dull black."

  "Where would somebody get hold of one of these things?” asked Doyle.

  "Replacement units are standard equipment on all our maintenance trucks."

  "Well, then, supposing this is a homicide, one of that troupe of clowns over there must be the killer."

  "Exactly. With a relay magnet shoved up his shirt."

  "Unless,” said Mary Deventer, “he's already hidden it or tossed it over the fence."

  "Which is just what he will do,” said Doyle, “if we line them up and start searching them."

  While the police authorities were discussing strategies with her mother the coroner, Ashleigh went for a stroll around the outside of the fence. By now a substantial mob of the curious had assembled along Ruckfell Road, including housewives with squirming, squalling infants, retired seniors with pipes and canes, and neighborhood urchins with skateboards and foul mouths.

  As she came to the far corner of the enclosure, she studied with particular attention the crew whose foreman had apparently been murdered an hour ago. Seen up close they were an uncouth-looking lot, with shaggy hair and beards, beer bellies, and terrible teeth, and they leered at her like a clan—yes, she was sure that was the proper collective noun—of hyenas. In spite of that, she paraded back and forth along that side of the fence several times before completing her circuit of the substation.

  Dr. Deventer and the others were still debati
ng the best way to identify the killer.

  "Mother."

  "But sooner or later,” said Doyle, “he'll have to do something with it."

  "Mother?"

  "Sooner or later,” countered Behrens, "we'd better do something. If I know OSHA, they'll have a team on-site before high noon."

  "Mother!"

  "What is it, sweet?"

  "The man with a magnet hidden under his clothes is named Hodge. At least that's what his name tag says."

  Behrens looked at her sharply through the fence. “Hodge Cathcart? He's the one who found Dembault. What makes you think he's got a magnet on him?"

  Ashleigh showed him her survival kit with a compass in the lid. “Every time I walk past him, the compass needle jumps away from north and points to him."

  "So maybe he carries a horseshoe for luck,” suggested Tredwyn.

  "No, wait a minute, Roger,” said Doyle, “I think she's onto something. The guy who found Dembault would have had an opportunity to snatch the magnet back out of the box before anybody else could see it.” He turned toward Behrens. “What do we know about Cathcart?"

  "To me he's not much more than a name. He's not a lineman, but what we call an auxiliary."

  "In other words,” suggested Doyle, “a grunt ... no technical background?"

  Behrens conceded the point with a shrug and a nod. “According to him, he was working his way along the fence there spraying herbicide when he saw Dembault lying on the ground. He gave the alarm and the other guys came over and tried resuscitation. Then they called the paramedics."

  "I say let's get him away from those other guys and search him,” said Doyle. “You'll need to question him eventually, Mary. Why not right now?"

  Stocky, round shouldered and mealy mouthed, Hodge Cathcart was showing neither grief nor satisfaction at the death of his foreman. He answered Dr. Deventer's queries clearly and simply, but when invited by Lieutenant Doyle to submit to a pat-down search, he went berserk. A local TV crew arrived just too late to record for posterity the adroit maneuver by which Roger Tredwyn wedged Cathcart into immobility between a wooden pole and the fence.

  A search yielded two joints of marijuana taped inside his hard hat, a hunting knife with an eight-inch blade stowed in the top of his right boot, and thirteen pounds of magnetic iron in the shape of a tripper relay core rammed inside the bib of his overalls.

  Behrens bustled outside the fence to talk to Ashleigh. “Young lady,” he said, brimful of elation as if his horse had just won the Derby, “if you ever need a friend—I don't care if you're bankrupt, or in jail for setting fire to an orphanage—you come straight to me. Will you promise to do that?"

  "Sure, I guess so,” said Ashleigh with a certain reserve. She hadn't forgotten his remark about babysitting.

  "Do you see those three hoodlums getting out of that gray van over there? They're here to skin me alive for committing some hypothetical safety violation that caused the death of a worker. If you hadn't come along when you did with your compass, I'd be spending the rest of today getting the third degree. And next week I'd probably be looking for another job."

  Lieutenant Doyle loomed up beside them. “Dembault claims a couple of the other guys were in this with him,” he told Behrens.

  "Great. Fine.” Behrens rubbed his hands with grim delight. “Because if he's talking like that, there can no longer be any question of an accident or a safety violation.” He dashed off to joust with the federal inspectors, having apparently forgotten Ashleigh already.

  A fleet of three police vans arrived to take the entire work crew, including Hodge Cathcart, now in handcuffs, downtown for questioning. A hearse, long retired from active employment in the mortuary trade, bore the remains of Greg Dembault off to the morgue. The TV cameraman ventured ever closer, and a reporter was now interviewing members of the crowd outside the fence.

  When Roger Tredwyn passed Ashleigh on his way back to the van with the lighting rig, she walked along with him again. “Do you think I might get on the six o'clock news tonight?” she asked. “I've been rehearsing what I'm going to say, about how I figured out—"

  "You want to stay clear of reporters, love,” said Tredwyn. “They mean you no good."

  She fixed him with a searching look as he wrestled the apparatus into the rear compartment of the van. “Why do you say that?"

  "Look you here. It's one thing to lend a hand in a criminal investigation as a private citizen, but it's something else again to take on the risks and burdens of a professional law enforcement officer. For anything we know, this lot of ruffians were all in the plot to kill Dembault. But they won't all go to prison."

  Still mystified, Ashleigh listened intently.

  "Some of them have already told Lieutenant Doyle and me what they're going to do to us some cold dark night in January. If they had the slightest notion who tipped us off about that magnet ... you get the idea."

  Dr. Deventer, jingling car keys, broke up their session and peered with some misgivings at her daughter's saucer eyes and Roger Tredwyn's devastating dimples. “Come on, sweet,” she said. “We're going to have to hustle."

  "Are we going to the morgue?"

  "No, sweet. Lunch. Bonnie has appointments scheduled for me from eleven right on through the afternoon. And don't forget you have soccer today at two thirty."

  "When will—?"

  "Probably not until tonight or tomorrow morning. Just whenever Dr. LeMaitre is free to do it."

  "But you'll be there too?"

  "Maybe. It depends."

  "Could I...?"

  "Not this time."

  "You always say that. When, Mother?"

  "Maybe sometime during the summer, when you don't have school and soccer and math club and so many other things to think about.” Mary Deventer drove in silence for a few moments and then added, with more asperity than she had intended, “An autopsy isn't exactly a form of entertainment, you know."

  Probably, she told herself, Cal was right. Probably Ashleigh wasn't quite ready for the morgue, or amoral monsters like Hodge Cathcart, or plausible lechers like Roger Tredwyn...

  But when, Mother?

  Copyright © 2009 John H. Dirckx

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: DEADLINE EDITION by S. L. Franklin

  R. J. Carr

  "Read these,” my friend Larry told me, and since the lunch was on him I took up the newspaper clippings and read.

  The first of the pair, dated about six weeks earlier, May 5, 1994, recounted the discovery of a man's body under the arch of Council Overhang, a famous geological formation in the wilds of Starved Rock State Park in central Illinois. The clothing of the deceased was incongruous, it seemed—a shirt and tie, slacks, a sport coat, and no shoes—not hiking gear, by any means, and as described the man didn't sound like much of an outdoorsman: white male, age around seventy, five feet eight, two hundred twenty pounds, with scars from heart bypass surgery across his chest.

  A further oddity, his remains had been laid out neatly, as if in some kind of funeral rite, hands holding a pocket New Testament and folded across the chest, six candles burnt down to stubs in a circle around the body. An autopsy was planned, the story ended, and the usual appeal made for anyone with information about the man to come forward.

  The second clipping, dated May 18, began:

  CHICAGO—A pair of mysteries were solved Wednesday when the body of a man found dead in LaSalle County two weeks ago was identified as retired Chicago Star-Bulletin staff member James “Jay” Tommasin. Tommasin, age 70, was reported missing on May 11 by concerned neighbors in the condominium building where he resided in west suburban Lombard.

  The story went on to cite Lawrence Duvall of the Star-Bulletin—otherwise known as Larry, the provider of my lunch and reading material—as among three friends confirming the identification. Yet another oddity—while the autopsy revealed the cause of death to be an ordinary coronary blockage, the body had been transported at great effort after death to the C
ouncil Overhang location, described as “an elevated semicircular undercut over fifty feet high in a bluff at the mouth of Ottawa and Kaskaskia Canyons in the Park."

  This clipping also concluded with an appeal “that a solution to this third mystery might be forthcoming now that the body has been identified and the cause of death determined to be a natural one."

  When I looked up from my reading, Larry Duvall said, “One lie or maybe two in the second story. Tommasin was no friend of mine—or of the other two guys either. He didn't run to friends."

  "But you knew him?"

  "Sure I knew him. Old school journalist right out of The Front Page. Booze and cynicism."

  "Sounds like you."

  He shook his head. “You know I don't drink."

  Larry was my age, fifty-one, five-nine and one sixty with a graying crewcut and glasses. In 1957 he and I had met the first day of high school as freshmen and struck up a friendship—not close but not distant—that's still going in the new millennium. After Army service he'd entered the newspaper business and risen up on the editorial side, while I'd gone from college to private eye work and gradually drifted away from investigation toward security consulting. Once while I was still mostly a shamus—1977—I'd broken a high-profile case and given Larry the exclusive story, something he'd never forgotten to thank me for in his Christmas cards. He'd never sprung for lunch before, though, not in thirty-seven years.

  "Also,” he said, “Tommasin was married three times. Three disasters."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning I never wrecked anyone's life. Besides, after I went to your wedding I knew I could never be satisfied with mere mortal flesh."

  I decided to give in. “All right: you're buying lunch; you're complimenting Ginny. What do you want?"

  "You know what I want, R. J. A solution to the third mystery in that second article."

  "What's happened to those red-hot investigative reporters your paper brags about?"

  "Let's say ... their enthusiasm has cooled."

  "After a month."

  "After less than a month."

  "Mine would too."

  "You wouldn't take a month."