Dead River

by Fredric M. Ham

  The car door opened wider. Adam watched from the shrubs as an over-weight man with a dark, long-sleeved shirt emerged. Adam’s heart raced like a rabbit as he moved further back into the thick bushes. The man walked around the car to the passenger side and opened the other door. What is he doing? Adam thought.

  Suddenly a woman appeared. The man helped her out of the car, and they kissed. Then they walked hand-in-hand down the sidewalk in the direction Adam had been heading. He stepped out of the bushes and continued to walk, watching the pair. He glanced down the street and saw cars lined up on the opposite side of the road.

  It was a party, a soirée.

  Two happy-go-lucky lovebirds out partying.

  A damn party.

  51

  IT WAS NOON on Tuesday when Goldman got word. Averly called him at his hotel room. Goldman had just finished an early lunch in the lobby restaurant and was at his desk poring over some other case files.

  “Goldman.”

  “This is Averly. I have good news.”

  “You hit the number.”

  “Sure did, one that didn’t answer the first time we called.”

  “Whose number is it?”

  “Jack McCarthy, lives in Atlanta.”

  “You get the address?”

  “Yup, I’ve already contacted the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department. They’re on their way to McCarthy’s apartment. I told them to contact you immediately after they talk to him.”

  Goldman hung up the phone and leaned back in his desk chair. I’ve got a good feeling about this.

  Two strapping deputies from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department questioned Jack McCarthy at length. McCarthy told the officers his permanent residence was Atlanta. They questioned him in his new one-bedroom apartment off Peachtree Street near the sprawling campus of Georgia Tech in the heart of Atlanta. He’d moved there only a month ago. His prior residence was a studio apartment in a shabby part of town west of campus.

  It was five-thirty when Goldman’s phone rang again.

  “Goldman speaking.”

  “Mr. Goldman, this is Deputy Alonso De La Rosa, Fulton County Sheriff’s Department,” a voice said with a slight Hispanic accent.

  “Did you find Jack McCarthy?”

  “Yes, sir. He lives in an apartment by himself. Two of us talked to him for quite a while.”

  “And?” Goldman asked impatiently.

  “I think we have a possible connection for you.”

  “You think it’s McCarthy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what the hell’s the connection?”

  “Well, he’s a graduate student at Georgia Tech, been living here for the past two years. He moved into a new apartment about a month ago from the other side of the campus and had to change his phone number.”

  “So he’s been giving out his new number.”

  “That’s right. To a couple of students and his parents.”

  “Where do his parents live?”

  “Port St. John, Florida.”

  “No shit, I think that’s close to where the Riley girl’s body was found.”

  “The first victim.”

  “Right. The parents would have written down the new number and his name, but only the first name. Makes sense.” Goldman tapped his fingers on the desk. “So you’re certain Jack McCarthy’s not our man? Maybe he came down here to Florida, stayed at his parent’s place. Wrote down his new number for them on the pad of paper—”

  “I don’t think so. We checked on campus. He works in a lab with a couple of other students doing research. They all see each other every day, even on the weekends. One of the students said McCarthy hasn’t been down there to see his parents for a couple of months.”

  “I can check that out when I pay the McCarthys a visit. But I want to see something first.”

  “What?”

  “McCarthy’s phone records. Can you check them for the past four weeks? I’d like to see the calls in and out of his place.”

  “No problem.”

  “Maybe he gave it to someone else in Florida besides his parents.”

  “Maybe. I should have the report later this evening.”

  “Sooner the better. What are his parents’ names?”

  “Joe and Sally McCarthy.”

  52

  DAVID SCOOTCHED CLOSER to Carla Jean in the front seat of his 1970 Chevelle parked on Widow’s Bluff. She sat motionless, staring straight ahead, not budging even a little. She just gazed out of the lightly fogged windshield. The moon was full and hung dead center between two clusters of large trees. Its bright beams bounced off the shapely leaves of the grand oaks.

  Between the two clumps of trees was the bluff, Widow’s Bluff, as it was called by the local teenagers. According to urban legend, a grieving woman, widowed only two days before, performed a perfect swan dive off of the cliff, down two hundred feet to the rocks below. A week after her death, two teenagers necking in a car on the bluff late one night claimed they saw the widow appear out of thin air, walk to the edge of the cliff, and perform another dive. After that night there were countless sightings, each time another dive.

  “Will you go with me to the centennial fair next weekend?” David asked. He leaned in even closer, his face only inches from Carla Jean’s left cheek.

  She finally turned slightly toward him and stuck out an arm to halt the advance. “Get away from me. You’re an asshole. Did you really think I was going to come up here with you and make out?”

  David retreated to his side of the car. “But you said—”

  “I said I would ride out here to Widow’s Bluff with you, and that’s all.”

  “But you said that you liked me and—”

  Carla Jean rolled her eyes back like a slot machine and jerked her body in the passenger seat. A scowl formed on her face and she glared at David. His hands gripped the steering wheel, and his upper body began to rock forward then backward.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “I told you I wanted a ride in your car. That’s all.”

  “No, you didn’t, you told me you—”

  “Listen, David Sikes.” Now Carla Jean turned her entire body toward David. Her right index finger moved like a metronome, keeping beat with each word she spoke. “You wanna know why I asked you to drive me up here?”

  David released his grip on the steering wheel and slowly turned to face her. “Sure.”

  “Do you see that red Ford over there?”

  Carla Jean’s beating finger now wagged over David’s left shoulder as he turned. He saw the red Ford Galaxie parked no more than thirty feet from his car.

  And then it hit him. That’s Darren Winston’s car! Carla Jean and Darren, the quarterback of their high school football team, broke up two weeks ago. And that had to be Regina Foley with Darren. David had been had by a jealous ex-girlfriend.

  “You fucking bitch.” The back of David’s right hand struck Carla Jean’s cheek. Her head snapped back and pounded into the car window with a dull thud. Her arms quickly covered her face.

  “You asshole!” Carla Jean screamed. “You fucking asshole!”

  He started his car and pulled it into drive. As he carefully drove down the gravel road that led to Widow’s Bluff, back toward Magee, he looked over at his cowering passenger. “You’re a whore, just like my mother told me. You’re all whores.”

  Carla Jean moaned and sobbed, her arms still wrapped around her head.

  53

  TUESDAY MARKED Adam’s second day back at work. He struggled both days to keep his mind off the trauma that had besieged his family. There was only partial success on that front.

  The haunting image would come from nowhere. It rattled around inside him like bolts in a blender, a vise tightening on his skull, freezing his muscles into knotted bundles. The mental image was becoming more vivid, a slowly-developing picture of a monster, an evil, hell-born animal. It was Gabriel. The man he wanted dead.

  Tuesday was Valerie’s first day
back in the classroom, and she also had trying times. Twice she called the principal’s office asking for someone, anyone, to watch her students before she rushed to the teacher’s lounge to regain her composure, tucking herself away in a partitioned corner of the room on a tattered, cloth-covered chair. Both times she made it to the chair before bursting into tears.

  What caused her two anxiety attacks, with the accompanying hyperventilation, was simple. There was no need for a $185-per-hour psychiatrist with an array of framed certificates on the office wall, glorifying the affiliations, fellow status, and board certifications. The personal wall of fame. It was plain and simple, nothing buried deep in her psyche, nothing that would be teased out in multiple sessions of analysis. The trigger was the Thompson twins in her class, the cute, sweet, adorable Thompson twins with shoulder-length blond hair and crystal blue eyes. In her mind she saw Sara Ann.

  The second phone call from De La Rosa came at ten forty-five. Goldman was still going through the cases he’d neglected for the past several days.

  “What did you find out?” Goldman asked.

  “There were several local calls that showed up on McCarthy’s phone records,” De La Rosa said, “and one long distance call from Port St. John, Florida, received August 9. I already checked. It came from his parent’s house.”

  “We need Jack McCarthy to tell us who made that call.”

  “Already did that.”

  “Who was it?

  “His parents. They called to let him know they were going to Boulder, Colorado, to visit Jack’s aunt and uncle.”

  “For how long?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “When did they leave?”

  “He said Friday, August 17. Apparently they decided to stay a few extra days, so they just got back Monday.”

  “You mean yesterday?”

  “Right. Do you want their address in Port St. John?”

  “Already have it. It’s 504 South Fifth Street.”

  “Did you see the other listing for Joe McCarthy?”

  “Sure did, it’s his business, an electrical contracting company.”

  Goldman hung the phone up and checked the time. It was a little after eleven. The McCarthy’s have to be questioned tonight. He had to set this up the right way, get the right people involved. This whole thing’s going to break loose.

  Averly was off duty, and probably feeling no pain about now. Goldman was guessing Averly’s method of attack on his brain cells was Jack Daniel’s, Old No. 7, a popular brand with cops that need to take it down a few notches when not on the clock.

  Goldman called Detective Wilkerson at home. They agreed to meet a block down the street from the McCarthy house at twelve-thirty. Goldman had Wilkerson call the Brevard County Sheriff’s Department and request two units to meet them there.

  There’d be no sleep tonight. But Goldman was used to that, especially when things were beginning to unfold like this. It’s all about getting the bad guy, the anticipation and adrenaline cranking through his veins was enough to keep him going. No caffeine was necessary.

  There was minimal traffic on the 528 Beeline as Goldman raced for the beach side. He only slowed down twice for tollbooths. After paying the last toll, he punched the accelerator and set the cruise control at seventy-five. He was on a long, dark stretch of 528 heading east to U.S. One. Once on U.S. One, he’d head north to Port St. John. He was beginning to feel like he knew the area. He was beginning to like Florida.

  Goldman never listened to the car radio when he drove. Shock jocks were out of the question in the morning, he despised rap, and the alternative shit was a close second, as were heavy metal and rock. Blues and jazz he could listen to all day, Billie Holiday, Sara Vaughan, and of course the fervent Nina Simone, but not on the radio. No one played his music. So usually he settled for the drone of the tires on the pavement.

  Port St. John is a cozy little town about twenty miles south of Scottsmoor, where Sara Ann Riley’s body was found. Goldman drove slowly down Fifth Street past the McCarthy house; there were no lights on inside. He turned his car around and parked along the side of the road. He was a few minutes early. He leaned back and waited and thought through what he knew and what he suspected.

  According to Jack McCarthy, his parents had left just before the abduction of Sara Ann Riley and returned a few days after the murder of Tami Breckenridge. A coincidence? How about Joe McCarthy owning his own electrical contracting business? And his son’s first name and new phone number showing up on the first page of the letter written by Sara Ann Riley? Maybe the McCarthy’s never left town? That would be simple to check out. Goldman couldn’t convince himself Joe McCarthy was Gabriel. Something just didn’t fit.

  54

  GOLDMAN, WILKERSON, and two deputy sheriffs approached the McCarthys’ ranch-style house. The four men stood on the porch with their handguns drawn. One of the deputies rang the doorbell. No answer.

  “They’re probably asleep,” Goldman whispered. “Or maybe they’re not even here.”

  The deputy rang the doorbell again then followed with five violent raps on the wooden door with his knuckles. Still no answer.

  Goldman motioned with his hand for Wilkerson to head to the back of the house. The deputy tried a third time, striking the door several times with the butt of his Mag-Lite.

  A light finally came on inside the house. They could hear someone approaching the front door. Suddenly the footsteps stopped. The three men moved to the side of the door. The front door creaked open and then stopped—there was a chain latched on the other side.

  A man’s voice came from the crack. “Who is it? It’s after midnight.”

  “Mr. McCarthy? Joe McCarthy?” asked the deputy that had been beating on the door.

  “Yes, I’m Joe McCarthy. Who’re you? What do you want?”

  “Brevard County Sheriff’s Department. Open up. I have three other men with me. We want to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Sir, you need to open the door.”

  The door suddenly closed then opened again, slowly.

  One, two, three. Goldman counted three rolls of skin tucked under the man’s large chin. He was considerably overweight and appeared to be in his late forties. His short-cropped black hair covered a giant cranium. In spite of his enormous size, his head still seemed out of proportion. He wore a v-neck T-shirt and a pair of light blue boxers. The T-shirt didn’t even cover his whole stomach, which was thatched with dark body hair.

  McCarthy turned on the porch light.

  “You Joe McCarthy?” Goldman asked.

  “Yes. Good God, what’s with the guns?”

  “May we come in?”

  “I want to see some ID.”

  The three men holstered their handguns and flashed their badges. McCarthy stared at Goldman’s the longest. “You’re with the FBI?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Is there somewhere we can all sit and talk, Mr. McCarthy?” Goldman asked.

  “In the kitchen,” he said rubbing his eyes. “I’d like to know what this is all about.”

  “I’ll explain in a minute,” Goldman said.

  McCarthy was about to shut the front door when Wilkerson appeared. “Jesus Christ, how many of you are there?” McCarthy asked.

  “Four,” Goldman said.

  The four men followed McCarthy to the kitchen and sat down at a pine table with an extended leaf. Goldman stood at the head of the table.

  “There’s another chair here,” McCarthy offered.

  “I’m fine.”

  Goldman watched McCarthy nervously shift around on the wooden kitchen chair. “Is your wife home,” Goldman asked.

  “Yes, she is. Do you—ah—want to talk to her too?”

  “Not right now. She asleep?

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll let you know if we need to talk to her.”

  “Okay.”

&nb
sp; Goldman asked Joe McCarthy about their trip to Colorado, when they left, who they visited, when they returned. Then he shifted gears and jumped into the Gabriel case.

  “Why are you telling me this? I had nothing to do with those murders,” McCarthy explained.

  “We think you might know something,” Goldman said.

  “I don’t know nothing, except what I saw on TV and heard around town.”

  Goldman continued to probe and observe, gauging McCarthy’s responses and reactions to the questions, checking his body language. McCarthy squirmed a lot sitting on the wooden chair. Sweat beaded up on his face and streamed down his cheeks.

  After a while it was clear McCarthy wasn’t their man. Goldman finally got to the critical issue.

  “Mr. McCarthy, I’m puzzled by something.”

  “What?”

  “Remember I mentioned the will written by the murdered girl, Sara Ann Riley.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The paper the will was written on had a phone number imprinted on the first page. The phone number of your son, Jack.”

  McCarthy reared back in his chair, shocked. “What the hell? You’re not implying that … you don’t think that … you don’t suspect him, do you? This can’t be.”

  “No, we don’t,” Goldman assured McCarthy.

  McCarthy sunk into the chair. “Thank God.”

  “But that’s what doesn’t make any sense. Why did Sara Ann Riley write her letter on a pad of paper that had your son’s name and phone number imprinted on it?”

  “Lord almighty, I don’t know.”

  “The only conclusion that I can draw, Mr. McCarthy, is that the pad of paper came from either your house or your business. I understand you own an electrical contracting company here in town.”