by J. T. Lewis
Decked out in a tight skirt and white blouse, she walked around the desk to shake my hand formally, before standing up on tiptoes to peck me on the cheek, a show of affection that I had never experienced before from her.
Whispering in my ear, she murmured, “So sorry about Betty.”
I had not talked to her after Betty was murdered, before I left the country; so this rare display of caring really stunned me.
“Thanks,” I said, a little choked up, “really means a lot to me.”
She let go of my hand then, turning to go back to her desk.
“I guess you’re here to see the boss?”
“Yeah, he in?” I asked.
“He’s been more or less expecting you for days. He said that whenever you showed up, to send you right in.”
I walked across the open room toward Allen’s office, stopping dead in my tracks as something flew past my face. Following the UFO to its destination, I saw an unknown young man with brown hair in shirt and tie; catch a little plastic football with ease.
Guessing him to be in his early thirties, I noticed he was wearing a wedding band as his fingers wrapped around the small ball. Although not fat, he carried a little extra weight as happily married men were prone to do.
“Sorry, sorry,” I heard from my left. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Looking to my left, I found another, even younger man, his dark hair and skin accentuated by his bright white and fitted long-sleeved shirt. Very lean and fit, I guessed him to be of Italian or Spanish decent, and the lack of a ring confirmed he was definitely single. He also looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place where I had seen him before.
I assumed I was looking at the two parts of Allen’s ‘Staples’ team of investigators.
“Oh hey!” married guy on the right said, “You must be Gabe, Gabriel Celtic, Allen’s old investigator.”
Watching him approach with his hand outstretched, I tried to let the ‘old’ reference slide, knowing he meant ‘of the past’ and not necessarily my age. Growing old sucked!
“Hi! I’m Michael Naples, one of the new guys,” he said through a smile.
He had a firm grip and clear blue eyes that instantly instilled a confidence of someone who knew himself and what he was about. I instinctively liked him.
Pointing behind me, “And this is Nathan Stafford, the other member of the team.”
“Nate,” the younger man said, also offering his hand with a big smile, his teeth as white as his shirt. You could tell that what Nate lacked in experience, he more than made up for in enthusiasm. His dark eyes seemed raring to go, but a woman would probably see a tender side to them also. I had no doubts that our young Mr. Stafford probably had no problem getting dates.
A memory tugged at my brain then. “I believe you picked up a girl at the airport the other day when I arrived, Abby.”
“Indeed,” Nate let a goofy grin cross his face. “We’ve been dating for a few months; she has told me a lot about you also, about meeting on the way back from South America.”
His grin wasn’t as wide and bright however as he continued.
“She was also pretty impressed with you yesterday at the crime scene,” he intoned with markedly less enthusiasm, “said you saw right through the alleged accident as a murder.”
His lowered excitement puzzled me for a moment, until I realized that he may be… jealous? The thought struck me as funny, but I kept these emotions to myself.
“Just got lucky yesterday,” I said with a thin smile in answer to his remark. “Something just didn’t click about the scene, seemed staged.”
“Well, I call that some pretty good detective work!” Michael exclaimed, “Damned nice work, Gabe.”
Nodding my head in thanks, I then excused myself as I finished making my way to Allen’s office. Opening the door, I found Allen with his head buried in a law book, one of several stacked on the desk. Looking up, annoyed at the interruption, he quickly smiled when he saw that it was me.
“Gabe! Come on in!”
Setting the book aside, he came around the desk to shake my hand and motioned me over to a small antique conference table off to the side of the room.
“I was wondering when I might see you; have you made any sense out of Frank’s files yet?”
“Some,” I answered guardedly. “Although I have an important question to ask you before we continue.”
“Anything Gabe,” he answered with a questioning look.
“Can you tell me what Frank presented as a reason to exhume that first body, and of course the one after that? I figured it might be kind of an important clue as to what his mind set was, since all of his personal notes are missing. Knowing you, I assumed it would be nothing trivial for you to bite the bullet and dig up a victim.”
Allen sat quietly for a moment, before standing and walking over to a window, hands clasped behind his back. Still looking away, he started his explanation.
“I’ve got to tell you, I’ve regretted that decision in more ways than one the last few months. The biggest regret of course would be if it had anything to do with getting Frank killed.” Turning then, he made his way back to the table and sat down before continuing.
“But I’m almost embarrassed to say that he really didn’t have a substantial, airtight or legal reason for doing it. He had a gut feeling, and basically, that’s it. It’s the only reasoning I used, that he had a gut feeling about the cases, and that I knew Frank. He could smell a rat in a pile of manure, so I made a gut decision based on his gut feeling. Plus, he had been working on those dead-end cases for months, and I kind of caved in a little because of that. It’s one of the only times I’ve allowed emotions to rule a decision in this office, and I have regretted it since.”
“Surely he had to give you some kind of logic for what he wanted to do,” I said, hoping there was more, praying.
“Oh yeah, sure, but it wasn’t substantial. From the evidence we had, he could find nothing obviously suspicious. But there were three things he locked on to like a bulldog.
Number one was just the uptick of accidents and suicides in the county. No one even noticed that, except Frank, and only because he started looking. He told me he had done the math, and if you counted suicides and accidents together, our county’s numbers had increased 34%.”
“Thirty-four percent! Can you imagine?”
“If New York City had a jump like that, they would call out the National Guard! But nobody noticed. Our numbers are low, and the increases were here and there over many months.”
“How did he convert that information into murders?” I asked, confused.
“He didn’t, not by that alone. But it greatly aroused his suspicions,” Allen continued, playing with a pencil on the table.
“The next step was finding a commonality to the cases. Took him months. He told me, when it finally hit him, he was pulling into the driveway of an accident victim’s family. Hit him like a lightning bolt he said.”
“What was it?” I asked intrigued, hopeful.
“I don’t know; he wouldn’t tell me. It was really just a theory, and he said it could really blow up in his face if he was wrong. He thought it better if I had some deniability.”
A sad look crossed Allen’s face then. Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed his face with one hand before leaning back up to the table.
“And I’ll tell you another thing; I was just enough of a politician to take him up on his offer. I left him out in the cold Gabriel, and it probably got him killed; he had no one watching his back.”
Allen was quiet then, the helplessness overpowering him.
Those were feelings I could relate to.
“Listen, Allen, Frank was a big boy; you can tell he knew what he might be getting into. I’m sure he didn’t dream it would turn out the way it did, but he took the reigns of the case, while trying to protect you. It was the honorable thing to do, and Frank would have had it no other way.”
That seemed to lighten Allen’s load
slightly, but it still took him a few moments to collect himself and continue.
“Anyway, the third point of the investigation was even more of a mystery than the second, to me anyway. He told me that he charted a timeline of the cases, and found a likely time period for when they started, at least as far as we knew. Then he followed the timeline back, using the common thread as some kind of guide, trying to see what might have occurred at the juncture of the two.”
A confused look crossed Allen’s face at that moment. He got up and crossed the room to his desk, picked up a folder and returned to the table.
“He made a statement after that; I wrote it down, but the way he said it was unusual…might mean something.”
Looking through the notes in the folder, he finally found what he had written, picking up the folder and holding it up to read.
“He said…and I quote… ‘I followed that thread of commonality right back in time to the start of the murders, and found the spawn of Satan at the cusp of purgatory’.”
Chapter 33
August 26, 1998
I was dumbfounded by the phrase Allen had just read.
Frank had not been religious or even very spiritual for the most part, so the satanic utterances seemed very much out of character. He had been indoctrinated into religion as a child by his mother, who I am told was quite the stringent practitioner when she was younger.
“Wow,” is all I could say however.
“I know!” Allen returned, excited. “It was the last thing he said as he walked out the door. I wrote it down so I could figure out what it meant later, but I never did.”
I asked to see the note, writing the statement in my notebook for later study. With Frank, everything had meaning. He may not have said the statement with a specific purpose in mind; but I knew it had come out for a reason.
“Ok,” handing the papers back to him, “no insight on Frank’s investigation, but a couple of clues as to how he got there. That’s closer than I was when I walked in the door.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” Allen said as he closed the folder.
Pulling out my own folders, I handed them to him.
“These are two of the accidents in Frank’s pile; I would like to have their bodies exhumed. They are also electrocutions, so I thought, since we were already looking into one…”
Allen grimaced, “How about we just do one for now. I don’t want to get too crazy; people don’t like their families being disturbed.”
“Well…if I can only do one, can you work on the Martha Jackson case? She’s in Ripley County, so maybe the political backlash will be less. Also, she is the only case Frank had that was outside our county, which tells me he worked hard to find it.”
“Yeah, but I have to convince the county officials in the next county to do it for me.” Allen stared at the file in his hand, trying to figure out how to convince someone else to desecrate a grave for him.
Looking up at me again, he said, “Ok, I’ll give it a shot, but no guarantees.”
Taking my folder back from him, I thanked him, and got up to leave.
“Gabe,” he said as I turned my attention back to him.
“It’s great having you back; thanks for doing this. I knew you didn’t want to come back, but I also knew you would if I asked. I’m sorry I felt it a necessity to do so.”
I appreciated his candor, and I nodded in acknowledgement before turning to leave once more.
“Oh, by the way,” I had turned back again when the thought hit me, “I think you may have a leak in your department.”
A look of shock crossed his face as I explained why I thought there was a problem.
“It’s just a theory, but how else would the murderer know Frank was getting close. Also, I think the killer was at the Johnstone murder yesterday, in the crowd.”
Another shocked look appeared on his face as I pulled out the note from my pocket and handed it to him. I had transferred it to a regular clear evidence bag once I had returned home yesterday.
Reading it, Allen was at a loss as to what to say.
“I don’t know what he knows of the investigation at this point, but it would have been easy enough for him to find out when the body had been found.”
Allen actually looked scared for a minute. “I can’t believe that any of our people would knowingly share information with anyone on an open investigation.”
“Maybe they didn’t; maybe it was just a slip of the tongue, or a casual conversation with a friend. From what you have told me, Frank was keeping the investigation pretty tight to his chest. There is probably no way anybody else in the department knew enough to leak relevant information to anyone.”
Allen still had a look of shock.
“I’m keeping my records and notes under lock and key; so there is no chance of someone finding out anything from me. I just wanted to give you a heads up on my theory, just keep it in mind.”
“I will Gabe, damn; I didn’t need another thing to worry about right now.”
I couldn’t help but smile and pat Allen on the shoulder.
“That’s why the good people of the county elected you Allen, why you make the big bucks!”
Before I left, I asked him if he could get the note over to Percy to analyze for prints, and DNA if it was available to us yet.
“Maybe he could do one of his magical handwriting examinations on it,” I added as an afterthought.
He said he would take care of it. With that out of the way, I turned to walk out of the office, leaving Allen to worry over everything I had left him.
I had to get over to see the Dr.
Chapter 34
August 26, 1998
The man had returned to his quarters and started getting ready for his evening meal. He was almost too excited to eat. Although having Mr. Celtic now in the mix would complicate things slightly, he had no reason to believe that it would hamper his work in any great way.
Besides, if he became too much of a hindrance, he would just need to be eliminated.
God’s work could not be trifled with.
The man sat down, bowing over his food, and then kissed the cross hanging around his neck. Picking up a tomato, he started cutting it into seven even pieces. One of the old local farmers had given him a small basket of the juicy morsels that morning, and he was looking forward to enjoying the whole basket.
He was suddenly struck by the way God worked His mysterious ways as he cut. The old farmer just happened to be the father of one of his past projects, which exemplified to him the way that carrying out his missions blessed the families that were left behind.
The son had been addicted to alcohol, and to abusing his family when drunk. Beatings of his wife and kids were common, but the abuse extended to the son’s father and mother as well. The gift of the harvest he had received this morning was a sign, as the family would have never had an abundance to give previously, nor the peace of mind to do it freely.
A smile crossed the man’s lips, as joy welled up in his chest. He quickly got up from his repast, and went over to the small table, kneeling before it and giving thanks for allowing him to perform his missions, allowing the bereaved families to prosper after their universe had been set straight. He had never been happier in his labors than at this moment.
“The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” he finished in exclamation. He was a warrior for God, and his cause was just!
Chapter 35
August 26, 1998
Entering the morgue, I headed immediately for the coffee pot, going through cupboards until I finally found a cup. Washing it out, I heard the creak of the swinging doors behind me.
“Well, if it ain’t that scroungy looking detective.”
A smile involuntarily formed on my lips. “I’ll get to it you old fool,” I bantered back. “A hair cut is the farthest thing from my mind right now though.”
I walked over and shook hands with my old friend. “You find anything for me?”
“Yep,�
�� he said as he turned, letting the door flop closed behind him in answer. I smiled again, shaking my head as I pushed through to follow the cantankerous coroner into his lair.
Taking the glasses perched on his brow off and pointing with them, he indicated the file lying on the table.
“Read through those and then I’ll show you on the body what I found.”
I went over to the file and started skimming over it. The first thing that popped out at me was the highlighted word ‘Insulin’.
“Was he diabetic?” I called over to Doc.
“Nope, he used to be a very healthy man, nothing chronic indicated anywhere. I got his family Dr. sending over his files later, but the nurse said he hadn’t even been to the office in years.”
Going back to the file, I read on, not understanding most of what I read, but intrigued by indications Doc Elliot had added to the body image diagram.
“What do the little spots mean on your drawing Doc?”
“Come on over and I’ll show you.”
Setting down my coffee, I went over to the exam table and stood where he indicated.
Reaching across the body toward my side of the table, he grabbed the left shoulder.
“Help me roll him up toward me.”
I put on gloves, put my hands on each side of his and pushed.
“Now, look at his shoulder blade under there.”
I moved the spring-loaded examination light down to eliminate the shadows under the body. I could find nothing for a moment, but finally saw it, a small burn mark.
“Am I looking at a Joule burn?” I asked, but pretty sure of it.
“Yep, there is another one on his other shoulder blade, and one on his buttocks.”
Moving his glasses up on his brow once more, he seemed to be waiting for me to get the punch line. It didn’t take long.
“The one on his ass I would expect, but the shoulder blades…he was already laying down when the current started?”
“Yep, and who works on electric on their back?”
“So, he was disabled before that, the Insulin?”