Ghost Dance

by Mark T Sullivan

  She snapped another picture. ‘So who are you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Patrick Gallagher. I’m filming a documentary on the spread of Hinduism, using the construction of the ancient temples to tell the story.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, putting her hands on her hips. ‘I just published a book of photographs on the temples.’

  ‘You’re Beckworth?’

  Emily Beckworth was legendary for going native in various cultures around the world, then using her insider status to take intimate portraits. In the past ten years she’d published award-winning books on Japanese Zen monks and their monasteries, aboriginal tribes in Australia’s outback, the Yak herdsmen of Outer Mongolia and the Stone Age peoples of Papua New Guinea.

  ‘I am,’ she said. She cocked her hips to one side, which triggered a strange busing in Gallagher’s head.

  ‘You wouldn’t be interested in acting as guide and commentator, would you?’ he managed to croak.

  ‘Depends on what the pay is.’

  A flash on the coppery surface of the Bluekill startled Gallagher from the memory.

  It is rare, but during big runoffs, lunker brown trout will sometimes leave their carrying positions behind rocks and under banks to flare up to seize grubs, worms and even mice that have been swept into the rivers and churn at the surface. Gallagher cast twenty feet below the flash and stripped line. Instantly there was a surge, then a series of twitches as the hook rattled along the protrusions of a bony mouth. He let the fish chew on it for a count of two, then jerked his wrist back to set the hook. Gallagher’s rod bent nearly in two.

  Monster! he thought. Bluekill monster brown trout! A fish like this could salvage a fortieth birthday if not erase the memory of an ex-wife!

  Gallagher tried to play the fish on the six-weight line, but he felt twelve, fifteen pounds. Maybe more! He would have to wait until the beast tired to have any chance at landing him. The spool gyrated. The line screamed through the ferules. The fish headed straight downstream toward a silver ash tree that had crashed into the river during the previous night’s storm.

  If the fish swam into the submerged branches, the tippet might snap. Gallagher stumbled forward, trying to close the gap, fingering the line like some voodoo priest preparing for exorcism.

  The rod bent again, then suddenly snapped back, and the line lay limp on the water.

  ‘You’ve got to be shitting me!’ Gallagher shouted and slapped the water in disgust. ‘Damn it!’

  You wait a lifetime to hook a fish like that. Gallagher knew it. And the lost opportunity made him want to sit in the shallows and cry. He stood there for a long time just staring at the cupped water surface before sighing and starting to reel in the line. Somehow the fish had shaken the fly free of his jaw, or he’d gotten his teeth into the leader and sawed himself free. Gallagher had brought in perhaps eight feet of the slack when the line tightened again and a great weight rolled toward him, caught the current, then tugged away.

  He was still on! But very sluggish. Had he become tangled? Was he swimming in slower and slower circles around a hidden branch as a dog might wind a chain around a tree?

  With the wading stick Gallagher eased his way forward, stopping every few yards to reel in the coils until he came to the end of the floating line. The butt section of the tapered leader disappeared under the caramel water just in front of the half-submerged ash.

  Gallagher ignored the image of a big brown’s razor-sharp teeth, put his hand around the leader and followed it down under the water knot by knot to where it met the tippet. The line was as strained and vibrating as struck piano wire. His fingers found the streamer’s hackle, then groped forward, searching gingerly for the hook and the slick flesh of the fish.

  Gallagher’s fingers brushed what felt like stiff cloth and he startled and jerked back. His heart pounded. He reached down again to feel what lay beyond the hook

  It was stiff cloth.

  Gallagher grabbed a handful of the fabric and pulled, feeling that weight roll toward him, catch in the current and jam back into the limbs of the downed ash. He wedged the cork butt of the fly rod tight among the exposed limbs of the tree, then crouched in the chill water. He reached deep, got hold of the cloth with both hands and pulled upward with all his might. The weight came up. It turned over just below the surface, and as if through an opaque, rust-stained shroud, a face appeared.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GALLAGHER WAS SCREAMING EVEN before he was aware he was screaming and he let go of the green fabric. The head and upper body of the corpse slipped back under the water, bumped against him, then disappeared. Gallagher dry-heaved, choked and spun, his only thought to get away from what was in the river. He tried to sprint toward shore, flailing at the surface with his hand and the wading stick.

  But the current caught him and dashed him face down in the rapids. Gallagher flipped twice, then surfaced, gasping at the sudden immersion. He stumbled to his feet only to vomit up the brackish water he’d swallowed. The shell-shocked numbness that had surrounded Gallagher for nearly a year had been swept away in an instant. Now every nerve cell in his body fired nauseatingly hot. The white birches around the cabin in the dim woods ashore stood out like frozen flashes of lightning.

  Gallagher swallowed at the sobs that threatened to strangle him and struggled toward the birches, unable to shake the crimson vision flooding through his mind. The man had been mutilated. The wounds to his body were frequent, deep and oblong-shaped. Gallagher tripped his way into the shallows and crawled up the bank before taking off in a mad sprint across the muddy cut cornfield toward the River Road and Andie Nightingale’s house.

  The detective was working in her garden, pitching compost with a fork. She wore knee-high green boots, tattered jeans and a tan barn coat. Gallagher staggered out of the field and across the road into her yard, only to fall to his knees short of the garden and gag at the aluminum taste of the adrenaline surging through his mouth.

  ‘Mr Gallagher!’ Nightingale cried.

  ‘Dead,’ he choked out. ‘There’s a dead man in the river.’

  Ten minutes later Nightingale spun her beat-up Toyota pickup into the cabin yard. She leaped out, ran through the electric-white birches and jumped off the bank straight into the water. Gallagher halted at the Bluekill’s edge, unable to enter.

  ‘Show me!’ she demanded.

  ‘No,’ he said, feeling a twist in his gut.

  ‘You have to,’ she insisted.

  ‘I … I can’t.’

  ‘I know this is hard,’ she said, managing a professional’s smile of understanding. ‘But please, just show me where you found the body before it’s washed away and I have to bring in a team of divers to search.’

  Gallagher felt the cramping again, but for some reason Nightingale’s sympathetic demeanor bolstered him enough to move woodenly out into the river, once his liquid refuge, now a sinister current. They waded into the swift flow and with each step Gallagher fought to stamp out the wild fire of panic burning in him. They reached the downed ash tree and he pointed to the eddy where the fly line disappeared

  ‘He’s down there.’

  ‘You’re going to help me, Mr Gallagher.’ It was more of a command than a statement. A strange, cutting pressure built behind his eyes, but he nodded. They went hand over hand down the line. Gallagher focused on the gentle curve of her neck as they pulled. This time the body floated quickly.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Nightingale whispered in horror.

  He wore a green camouflage coat and a matching fleece knapsack. He was nude from the waist down except for a thick wool sock dangling from his left foot. The carnage that had been inflicted on him was like looking at a Rorschach test devised by the darkest of minds, and Gallagher desperately wanted to flee toward shore again.

  ‘Hank Potter,’ Nightingale said, giving wavering identity to the body shifting in the current. Gallagher’s head spun. He feared the river would drag him down and never let him breach again for air.


  Over her shoulder came the flashing blue lights of a state trooper vehicle, followed rapidly by another cruiser and then an ambulance. Nightingale had called them before driving back to the cabin. At the sight of the vehicles, her jaw quivered. The first break in her professional composure.

  ‘We’re going to bring him in,’ she said at last.

  Two young rawboned troopers realized they were pulling the body ashore and waded out to help. One of the troopers turned completely white when he saw the disfigurement.

  By the time they reached the shallows, three more vehicles had pulled into the yard around the fishing cabin. One was a green but otherwise nondescript sedan. The second was a midnight-blue, four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban with ‘Lawton Police’ emblazoned on the door. A new gray Dodge pickup brought up the rear.

  The doors of the Suburban and the green sedan opened simultaneously. Two men got out of the Suburban. The driver wore a gray athletic sweatshirt with a blue ‘Lawton’ printed in an arc across his chest. He tugged on a blue baseball-style cap with gold embroidery that said ‘Chief’ and popped a grape lollipop into his mouth. His sidekick wore a conventional tan police uniform. He was portly, in his late twenties, with a mop-top haircut, a wispy mustache and a sleepy expression. A bleached-white-haired woman in her early fifties sporting a khaki trench coat climbed out of the green sedan. Then the door to the pickup opened and a sharply dressed, pink-faced man with a dramatic silver handlebar mustache exited. He was barking orders into a cell phone. ‘I don’t care what those bankers down in Boston say—it’s a legitimate deal and it’s going through. Lawton’s depending on it. You hear me?’

  ‘Gang’s all here,’ Nightingale mumbled and she ran her fingers awkwardly through her hair.

  She turned to Gallagher and gestured toward the cabin. ‘Wait over there out of the way. I’m going to want to talk with you.’

  Gallagher shambled to the steps, sat and slumped against one of the support beams that held up the sagging porch roof. The ambulance drivers had already lain a sheet over the body, which now rested on the lime-green grass between two of the birch trees. Talons of chilling ground fog groped through the trees toward the sheet and the body. Gallagher shivered. The shivers turned to chatters. He went into the cabin to get out of the waders and into something dry. He dragged himself upstairs and as he was getting into a pair of flannel-lined khakis and a fleece pullover, he felt suddenly seasick, so he opened the double-hung bedroom window to breathe and watch the crowd gathering in the cabin yard outside.

  The white-haired woman in the trench coat had led Nightingale away from the others. They stopped right below Gallagher’s window, unaware of his eavesdropping.

  ‘Sergeant,’ the white-haired woman said.

  ‘Lieutenant Bowman,’ Nightingale replied, smiling stiffly. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you here so soon.’

  ‘I was only twenty minutes out and thought you could use a hand,’ the lieutenant replied. Brigid Bowman wore swaths of makeup that almost concealed acne scars and accentuated a pair of distrusting, pale blue eyes. Her white hair had been razored short at the ears to draw attention to pearl stud earrings and a matching necklace.

  Nightingale squeezed her hands into fists. ‘Or maybe you hustled along because you didn’t want me here alone.’

  ‘Maybe a little of both, Andie,’ Bowman replied coolly.

  Before Nightingale could respond, the hulking man in the Lawton sweatshirt and the ‘Chief’ baseball cap approached, followed by his sleepy deputy and the nattily dressed chubby fellow with the silver walrus mustache who was snapping shut his cell phone.

  The chief’s name was Mike Kerris. He was roughly Gallagher’s age, but taller, more muscular, with stainless-steel eyes and a shock of thick brown hair. He had one of those pronounced and chiseled jaws that suggests steroid use. He popped the sucker from his mouth. ‘What do we got?’

  Nightingale turned flinty at the question. ‘Hank Potter. The body’s been mutilated.’

  The pudgy man with the silver mustache waved the cell phone overhead and cried, ‘Hank Potter! The man’s a dentist. He doesn’t have an enemy in the—What do you mean, mutilated?’

  ‘Cut up, Mayor, badly,’ Nightingale said. ‘Looks like he was hit ten, maybe fifteen times with a heavy, sharp object before he was dumped in the river. Care to see?’

  Mayor Bruce Powell’s pink skin went as pallid as a trout’s belly. He ran his hand across the top of his shellacked sterling-colored hairdo. ‘There hasn’t been a killing in Lawton in twenty years.’

  ‘Twenty-eight years, Uncle Bruce,’ the chief corrected. He had the grape lollipop lodged in the pocket of one cheek like a chipmunk working an acorn.

  ‘Whatever, Mikey,’ the mayor said. He waved the cell phone at them all. ‘Listen up: I want this solved and solved fast, you hear me? Lawton doesn’t need this kind of adverse publicity. Especially not now while we’re in the midst of delicate, delicate negotiations.’

  Lieutenant Bowman tapped her rubber-bottomed boot in the muddy driveway. ‘Our bureau has one of the best solving rates in the country, Mayor Powell. As far as publicity is concerned—’

  ‘Mutilated!’ Powell shouted incredulously before Bowman could finish. He shook his entire arm at the lieutenant. ‘You’ve got to keep that part quiet. Away from the reporters. Damn it, it makes it sound as if there’s a madman on the loose in Lawton! I won’t have that. Not in my town.’

  Gallagher watched as the whole lot of them glanced at the sheet, as if they could not believe it was possible. Gallagher had seen the body first. He believed it was possible.

  ‘We’ll keep that part of it as low-profile as we can,’ Lieutenant Bowman promised.

  ‘Lawton’s a small place,’ the deputy with the mop-top haircut offered. ‘Tough to keep secrets here.’

  A sardonic smirk passed over Nightingale’s face. She looked at the mayor and the chief and said, ‘And here I’d always considered Lawton a town full of secrets.’

  The mayor rubbed a finger under his handlebar mustache and glared at Nightingale. The chief licked his lips. The lollipop had turned his tongue purple. His eyelids went drowsy, the way a lizard’s do before it strikes at an insect. He turned to Bowman: ‘Who’s gonna be your lead? No offense to Sergeant Nightingale, but we all know, given her past, that she might not be up to the—’

  ‘How dare you!’ Nightingale cried.

  ‘That’s quite enough, Sergeant!’ The lieutenant cut her off. ‘Sergeant Nightingale will lead for the time being under my close, close supervision. Fair enough, Chief?’

  Kerris glanced at his deputy and then at the mayor, who shrugged. The chief’s expression turned smarmy. ‘I’m sure the sergeant and I can figure out a way to work together.’

  Nightingale said nothing. The light in the birch glade turned suddenly flat as a storm cloud advanced on the river. Rain fell again. An evidence technician drew back the sheet and took pictures of Hank Potter’s body. The flashes of brilliant metallic light made the birches look iridescent and shimmery, as if they were part of an old black-and-white photograph printed in silver tones.

  ‘Solve it fast,’ Powell said. ‘That’s all I want.’ The mayor waddled off to his truck, his fingers already punching numbers in the cell phone.

  Now a green van bounced its way into the clearing and parked. A short, bushy-haired and bushy-eyebrowed man with a big nose and hairy nostrils stepped out. Melvin Allen, the state’s assistant medical examiner.

  They all walked toward Allen. By the time Gallagher got on hiking boots and went down the stairs and out onto the cabin porch, they were gathered around the body. The medical examiner was tugging at his ear and jerking his head from side to side at the sight of the body. The deputy, whose name was Phil Gavrilis, leaned against one of the birches with his eyes shut. Chief Kerris acted as if he were not a small-town cop, but a hardened New York City homicide detective. He never even blinked.

  Nightingale asked, ‘Can you tell me what he was hit with, Mel, and how lon
g he’s been in the river?’

  The medical examiner shook off his initial shock at the grisly wounds and knelt next to the body. He cradled Potter’s head in latex-gloved hands and tipped it left and then right. He used his fingers to pry at one of the lacerations that showed through the camouflage. Gallagher couldn’t watch any longer. He stared up at the sky and imagined himself out on the Taylor Fork River south of Bozeman, casting to cutthroats on a hot July Montana day.

  ‘Can’t say for sure until I can get him up on a table under the lights,’ Allen said at last. ‘But if I had to make a guess, I’d say some kind of crudely made machete or hatchet. See those little elliptical irregularities in the wound? The blade was hand-filed.’

  Allen studied the wounds again, then moved his attention lower. ‘Given the lack of bloating, I’d say he’s been in the water no more than eight hours. And, much as I hate to say it, it appears he was raped as well as killed. He lead some kind of secret life?’

  ‘You mean like—?’ Deputy Gavrilis began.

  ‘Hank Potter?’ Chief Kerris cried. ‘No way. The guy played halfback at UVM.’

  Allen shrugged. ‘Whatever. I’ll know more once I get him on the table. Autopsy Monday morning. Six-thirty a.m. sharp.’

  There were groans all around. Allen was known for calling autopsies at the crack of dawn.

  ‘Who found the body?’ Bowman asked.

  Nightingale pointed toward Gallagher who had returned to the porch. He waved weakly and all of them came over save the deputy, who heard static on the radio and ran to the Suburban. Gallagher stood up and Kerris gave him a sort of weight-room look that he ignored. They asked several preliminary questions—where Gallagher was from, what he did for a living, why he’d rented the cabin. Gallagher stupidly chanted the highlights of his résumé like an Alzheimer’s patient trying to maintain his last handhold on identity—that he had a PhD in anthropology from Cornell, where he had specialized in comparative mythology. He had spent a year teaching undergraduates at Harvard before bugging out of academia to join The Boston Globe as a cultural reporter, aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe. Three years later Gallagher won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that looked at the lives of children caught in the battle zones of religious wars. For the past seven years he had written and produced documentaries for National Geographic, PBS and the Discovery Channel. Most of his work focused on the interplay of culture and creed.