The Sleepless

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Have they taken her away yet?’ he called.

  Thomas turned around. ‘No ... the meat wagon’s still here. We’re having a little difference of opinion over where to take her. Commissioner Hudson wants her over at Boston Central with the rest of the dead O’Briens. I want her back with us ... with the other young lady we found Tuesday.’

  Michael frowned. ‘What other young lady?’

  ‘Didn’t you see it on the news? We found a girl in a house on Byron Street, up by the Public Garden. She’d been hogtied with razor wire, tortured, you name it.’

  ‘So what’s the connection here?’

  Thomas beckoned him up the beach. Michael took a last quick look at the ocean and followed him. It was hard going up the dunes, and Thomas began to cough before they reached the summit.

  ‘You ought to quit smoking,’ Joe remarked.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Thomas retorted.

  The ambulance from the Essex County Coroner’s department was parked at angle on the sandy roadway. Its red lights silently rotated, as if they were lighthouses, warning of death. One of the rear doors was still open, and a young medic with a blond downy moustache was leaning against it, looking tired and bored.

  ‘Any word, lieutenant?’ he asked Thomas, as they all approached.

  Thomas shook his head. ‘This is one of those cases where politics takes precedence over common sense. These gentlemen represent Plymouth Insurance, they’re investigators. You want to let them take a look?’

  ‘You really want to look?’ the medic asked them, with an incredulity that made the palms of Michael’s hands tingle.

  ‘Just open up, will you?’ Thomas asked him, impatiently.

  ‘Whewff,’ said the medic, clearly implying that anyone who wanted to look at this particular item of human flotsam was out of their tree.

  He opened wide the second door, and climbed into the ambulance. A grey body bag lay on the folded trolley, with an identification label already attached. The medic tugged open the zipper, all the way down, and a greenish-grey arm suddenly flopped out of the bag and made Michael start in alarm. The medic must have seen him, because he said, with amusement, ‘She’s dead, don’t worry. She aint going to jump up and chase you round the beach.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Thomas, and climbed into the ambulance. Unlike most of those who had to clear up the dead, he didn’t like graveyard humour – particularly when the dead had suffered in the way that this poor girl had suffered. Death could sometimes be funny, just as life could sometimes be funny. But for some reason he could never get used to it, and it hardly ever made him laugh.

  Michael climbed into the ambulance beside him, ducking his head down. The girl’s body smelled strongly of seawater and decomposition. A young, slim girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, judging by her figure. Her hair was short, blonde and bedraggled, and flecked with seaweed. Her visible ear was filled with sand, although she was still wearing a decorative earring that looked as if it were made of glass and some tarnishable metal – possibly silver.

  Her eyes were open, and she was staring up at the ceiling. Her irises, however, were all milked over, like a poached codfish, and of course she didn’t blink. There was sand in her nostrils and sand in her slightly-parted mouth.

  It was her body that horrified Michael the most. Her small breasts were criss-crossed with deep open slices, as if she had been cut with a craft-knife. Her nipples had each been stapled six or seven times, with a paper-stapler, so that they were distorted and twisted. Her bare stomach was covered with scores of burns and scratches and lacerations, most of them pale and puffy because of her long immersion in the ocean. Her upper thighs were also decorated with burns and cuts.

  ‘This is Sissy O’Brien?’ asked Michael, his mouth swimming with saliva.

  Thomas took a colour photograph out of his coat pocket and held it up in front of him. The photograph shook and Michael had to hold it still so that he could see it clearly.

  Thomas said, ‘Sissy O’Brien, no question about it. See for yourself. Pending formal identification, of course.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, who could have done this?’

  ‘We think the same people who killed our Jane Doe on Byron Street. Same perverted m.o., same cuts and whip-marks and torture-burns ... and we released none of that stuff to the media, so we’re not talking copycat.’

  ‘What is it, some kind of s/m cult or what?’

  Thomas shook his head. He could have used another cigarette, but he knew that he wasn’t permitted to smoke inside the ambulance. Not that it mattered, the patient was dead already.

  Michael, with huge reluctance, pulled down the body bag zipper a few inches further. There were livid burns and scars between Sissy O’Brien’s legs, all around her vulva and her inner thighs.

  ‘Some joker had fun with a Zippo,’ Thomas remarked, his voice totally flat. He didn’t want to think how much Sissy O’Brien must have screamed. Or maybe she hadn’t been able to scream. There were bruises around her mouth that indicated that she had been gagged – probably with one of those inflatable rubber gags that fetishists used.

  Michael leaned over, and it was then that he saw something that made him recoil with total horror, and stare at Thomas wide-eyed. Something dark and bushy and wet, draped between Sissy O’Brien’s thighs.

  ‘There’s something there,’ he said, and his voice didn’t sound at all like his own.

  Thomas swallowed, shrugged. ‘They gave her a pretty hard time, believe me.’

  Michael didn’t dare to take a second look. He could see that Thomas was tired; but he couldn’t understand how anybody could take madness like this for granted. There was something there – something dark and disgusting and bushy, thickly matted with blood, protruding from Sissy O’Brien’s deathly white buttocks.

  ‘Damn it, Thomas, she’s got a tail.’’

  Thomas said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ Thomas barked at him, and jostled him down the steps of the ambulance and onto the sand. Joe was standing a few feet away, talking to Sergeant Jahnke, and both of them looked across at Michael and Thomas with concern.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Thomas. He took a deep breath. ‘I keep telling myself not to let this stuff get to me but it always gets to me.’

  ‘She has a tail,’ Michael repeated. He knew that he was sounding hysterical but he didn’t particularly care. ‘Thomas, she has a goddamned tail!’

  Thomas took out a book of matches from the Sunset Grill & Tap and spent a long time lighting a cigarette, cupping the flame against the breeze.

  ‘I told you they gave her a pretty hard time. They’ve done something to her ... with a cat, as far as we can make out. We can’t really tell yet.’

  ‘A cat? What the hell are you talking about, a cat?’ Michael was seriously upset.

  The wind whipped sand between them. Somebody shouted, ‘Jack! Jack! Get on down here!’

  At that moment, a thin young bespectacled man in a dark blue windbreaker appeared around the side of the ambulance. He approached Thomas and said, ‘It’s okay, lieutenant. We can take her. I talked to the coroner and the coroner talked to the commissioner and the commissioner talked to the governor.’

  ‘The governor? What did you say, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I said it was probably a serial killing, and there could be more; and how would it look on television if the police department had tried to keep it under wraps.’

  ‘You’ve got some nerve, Victor,’ said Thomas, with grudging admiration.

  ‘Anybody can have nerve, so long as they know what they’re doing.’

  Thomas said to Michael, ‘Here, Mikey ... this is Victor Kurylowicz, our new medical examiner. Moved here from Newark, New Jersey. Victor’s an expert on floaters, and fire victims, too.’

  Michael extended his hand. Victor’s handshake was cold and yielding and limp; like shaking the hand of a man recently dead. ‘Pleased to kn
ow you,’ he said. ‘I’m Michael Rearden, Plymouth Insurance. Well, actually, I invent board games for a living, and marine supplies. But Plymouth asked me to check all this out ... this O’Brien case.’

  ‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Victor. ‘This is a pretty strange case.’

  ‘What’s this about a cat?’ asked Michael.

  Victor glanced at him quickly. ‘I don’t really want to discuss it just yet. I haven’t had a chance to make any kind of detailed examination.’

  Michael’s voice was shaking. ‘The girl has a tail for God’s sake.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Victor. ‘I have a pretty clear idea of what they did to her, but I won’t be able to say for sure until I carry out a post-mortem. It’s too damned horrible to start speculating about it.’

  Michael took three or four deep breaths. His head was beginning to feel as if it were filling up with deep, black blood. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. How did Sissy O’Brien get here? And who would have wanted to hurt her this way?’

  ‘I don’t have any idea,’ said Thomas, flatly.

  ‘How can anybody even have thought of doing something like that?’

  ‘Mikey ... really, I don’t have any idea. But we’re working on it. If we can find a link between Sissy O’Brien and that girl who was killed on Byron Street ... well, we might begin to make some positive progress.’

  ‘There’s a link,’ said Victor, with complete, unemotional certainty. ‘In fact, there’s more than a link. These two killings are completely interwoven, believe me. I can smell it.’

  ‘Detective manqué,’’ Thomas remarked. ‘Could have made the grade, too, if he hadn’t been far too intelligent. They don’t like eggheads on any force, right, Victor? But they grit their teeth and tolerate them in Boston.’

  Michael glanced back towards the ambulance. The young moustachioed medic was zipping up the body bag and grinning at him. Jesus. Sometimes the saviours were just as hard-hearted as the killers.

  ‘If the O’Brien family were deliberately killed, we don’t have to pay out, you know that, don’t you?’ asked Michael.

  Thomas blew smoke. ‘The only O’Brien I’m concerned about is Sissy; and she was killed, no doubt about it.’

  ‘Somebody was seen carrying something from the wreck of their helicopter,’ said Michael. ‘That something could have been Sissy, injured or unconscious.’

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ Thomas agreed. ‘In fact, that’s the most likely possibility. I don’t believe she floated here from Sagamore Head, not for a moment. I believe she was dumped here, late last night, by the people who killed her.’

  ‘So what’s the next step?’ asked Michael.

  ‘The next step is to tie her in conclusively with the Byron Street victim, and at the same time start interviewing everybody and anybody who might have seen somebody throw something into the ocean. House-to-house questioning, but it shouldn’t be too hard, way out here. Nahant has a population of 4,200, and that includes cats.’

  ‘You think you can tie her in?’

  Thomas nodded. ‘The girl we found at Byron Street had two puncture marks in her back, just above her pelvis. Sissy O’Brien had very similar marks.’

  Michael wiped cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Puncture marks?’ he asked.

  Victor said, ‘We don’t know what they are, but they’re much less brutal than any of her other injuries. I mean they’re almost clinical.’

  Michael watched Thomas smoke for a while, and then he said, ‘What the hell do you think this is all about?’

  Thomas flicked his cigarette into the surf. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘Do you mind if I see the other girl? The one you found on Byron Street? Not in the flesh necessarily. Pictures would do.’

  ‘For sure. Give me a call and I’ll fix it for you.’

  Victor said, ‘She looks as bad as this, believe me ... and she was dead a whole lot longer.’

  ‘How long do you think Sissy was in the water?’ asked Michael.

  Victor pulled a face. ‘I don’t know yet. Eight, nine hours, maybe longer.’

  ‘Was she drowned?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it. It won’t be hard to find out.’

  Michael narrowed his eyes and looked up the pale, windswept beach. ‘Somebody took her from Sagamore Head and tortured her and brought her here, and threw her in the ocean. Now why do you think that was?’

  ‘They wanted something,’ Thomas suggested.

  ‘They wanted something? What did they want?’

  ‘I don’t know ... but nobody ever gets murdered for nothing. Ever. Maybe a husband wants peace and quiet, and kills his children. Maybe a clerk wants promotion, and kills the only guy who’s standing in his way. Maybe a mistress gets jealous, and kills her lover’s wife.’

  ‘So what could anybody have wanted from Sissy O’Brien – especially since her parents were already dead and nobody would have a paid a ransom for her?’

  ‘Well ... ‘ said Thomas, grasping Michael’s shoulder and giving him one of his famous crooked smiles. ‘They didn’t want money and they didn’t want sex and they didn’t want blood. You tell me what else they might have killed her for.’

  A seagull flew past, very low, screaming at them. ‘Maybe I shall,’ said Michael.

  It was time to go. Joe was beckoning, and Sergeant Jahnke was lifting his r/t up into the air, to indicate to Thomas that somebody was calling him, somebody urgent.

  Michael and Victor trudged up the dunes together. Victor said, ‘They’re hiding something, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The powers that be. The coroner, the commissioner, the governor. Maybe higher still.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I saw the same thing happen in Jersey when they killed anybody important in local government, or in the law enforcement agencies, or in the mob. The bodies were always whisked away, the evidence always went missing. The only murders that ever ended up with straightforward convictions were the murders of people who didn’t matter.’

  Michael thought for a moment, and then he said, ‘I saw some photographs of John O’Brien’s helicopter, after the crash.’

  ‘It was burned out, right?’

  ‘It wasn’t as burned out as the media obviously thought. You could still identify the bodies.’

  ‘I thought they were charred so badly you couldn’t tell one from the other.’

  ‘Unh-hunh, no way. There must have been a flash-fire, but that was it.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? The coroner told me they were burned up beyond recognition. Charcoal, he said.’

  ‘There were four people in that wreck – the pilot, a man named Coward; plus a young assistant from the Justice Department, Dean McAllister; plus Mrs O’Brien; plus John O’Brien himself. When I first saw the pictures, I wondered if there were two or three missing ... you know, pictures of Sissy O’Brien. But now I know that she wasn’t even there.’

  Victor said, ‘Why should the commissioner lie about it?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I have some copies of those photographs and I’d like you take a look at them. The quality’s average-to-shitty. I had to fax them out of Dr Moorpath’s office while Dr Moorpath was patching up victims from Seaver Street. As I say, they’re pretty smudgy and pretty dark. But maybe you can see something in them that I can’t.’

  Victor stopped, and took off his spectacles, and polished them thoughtfully with a small piece of crumpled-up kitchen-towel.

  ‘You’re taking a risk, aren’t you, telling me about this? How do you know that Dr Moorpath and me aren’t bosom-buddies. Medical examiners of a feather tend to stick together, don’t you know. And Dr Moorpath and I are both members of the Massachusetts Association of Practising Pathologists.’

  ‘Sure I’m taking a risk,’ said Michael. ‘And that’s because you look like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be seen dead playing eight holes at Chestnut Hill with Raymond Moorpath. Besides which, there’s no s
uch association.’

  Victor replaced his spectacles. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. He checked his watch. ‘Today’s wiped out. But meet me tomorrow – say, eleven o’clock. I have to have a haircut first.’

  Michael wasn’t sure if he’d discovered an ally in Victor Kurylowicz or not; but he liked Victor’s combination of self-mockery, toughness and weirdness. It took all three to make a good medical examiner. Michael had been totally psyched out simply by the sight of dead bodies; Victor had to spend all day cutting them up, and handling their internal organs, and lifting out their brains, and trying at the same time not to think of them as somebody’s mother, or somebody’s child – somebody who could have been talking to him, only a few hours before.

  He plodded up the dunes, and took one last look around. Joe was waiting for him, talking impatiently to Sergeant Jahnke. Behind him, he heard the ambulance drive off, with a sudden abbreviated whoop of its siren that made all of them jump.

  It was then, in the middle distance, that he saw something white. Something that shone in the gilded morning haze, like a sail.

  He shielded his eyes against the glare, but still he couldn’t be sure what it was. He turned to one of the coastguards who was standing nearby and asked him if he could borrow his binoculars.

  ‘Okay, sir, but treat them with respect, okay? They’re Zeiss, seven hundred bucks and change.’ The coastguard had a cluster of bright scarlet spots on each cheek and Michael hoped they weren’t catching.

  He took the binoculars and focused them on the white shape in the distance. It was still blurry, because of the summer-morning mist that was rising from the sea. But there was no doubt about what it was. What he had taken at first for a sail was well inland, on the top of a rough, grassy headland. On top of the white triangular shape was a black lattice balcony, and a gleaming glass lens.

  It was a lighthouse – but not just any lighthouse. It was the same squat white lighthouse that he had seen in his hypnotic trance.

  And off to the right, behind the windswept trees, a row of green-painted saltbox houses. The same houses that he had seen in his trance.

  With gradually-rising thrill of dread and discovery, he turned this way and that, and it was then that he knew for sure that this the bay – this was the bay that he had seen when Dr Rice had last taken him under.