Time of Death

by Shirley Kennett

  From the beginning, PJ had incorporated decision-making into the simulations, artificial intelligence that let the computer extrapolate sketchy events into complete scenarios. Sometimes she was leading the simulation, and sometimes it led her. What the computer came up with sometimes gave her valuable tips that nudged the investigation one way or the other. Not all the time, though. Although the computer had a huge reference database available, it didn’t have the judgment to use that information wisely. Taking things too literally meant that aliens or mythological beings sometimes popped up in a simulation as the computer was speculating on what could have happened. Her whole team had gotten a kick out of the angel who flew in and rescued a person from a burning building, or the time a killer had used X-ray vision to stalk his victims.

  For her first immersion, she decided to be a FOTW, fly on the wall. She could observe what was going on, but not affect the action. She switched on the helmet, putting herself in the blue surround of the null world.

  “Run riverfront,” she said, and added a password. Voice activation certainly beat jabbing her fingers around blindly on the keyboard hoping to hit the right key to start the simulation.

  The scene leapt to life from one blink of her eyes to the next. She was standing at the edge of Leonore K. Sullivan Boulevard, looking east toward the Mississippi. The fog that had given Arlan Merrett’s body a natural shroud was absent. A waning, third quarter moon and a few of the brightest stars were visible in a sky washed out by city lights. To her right, the Arch glittered coldly, steel streaking upward and then hurtling down, like a rocket that couldn’t escape the earth’s pull. To her left, the floating casino moored at Laclede’s Landing was a fountain of light and life, with indistinct figures moving in and out. Two bridges, one on either side of her, carried a small amount of traffic to and from Illinois—small only because of the day and hour. The cars were either headlights or taillights, with no vehicle detail shown. She could hear the noise of the passing cars. The Landing was a jumble of restaurant and nightclub signs. Most of the windows in the multi-story Embassy Suites Hotel had curtains drawn, but some were bright rectangles. Anyone looking down from those windows should be able to see if a car was moving around on Sullivan, if not specifics.

  A low rumble of engine noise alerted her to the approach of a car traveling toward her. She curled her right forefinger slightly, changing the path of the optical fibers in the data glove. The programmed response was to walk across the street in the direction she was looking. When she reached the other side, she straightened her finger. Moving around using the gloves was something that even Schultz picked up with a little practice.

  The car, a black four-door Taurus, rolled to a stop. The moon, reflected in the car’s hood, seemed submerged in a deep, black pool. The killer was a man dressed in dark clothing, and he was checking that all was quiet around him. Although PJ was standing close by, he didn’t react to her—she was invisible to the characters in the scenario. PJ moved up to the car and stood next to the trunk, where she expected the body would be.

  The killer stepped out, but instead of moving to the trunk, he opened the rear door on his side of the car.

  What gives? The body’s always in the trunk.

  She walked around to look in the rear passenger’s side window. Sure enough, there was something large and dark lying across the back seat. The killer grasped a pair of handles, one on each side, and tugged, grunting with the effort. Once the object started moving, it slid easily over the upholstery. PJ hurried around the car to see what the killer was doing. He was pulling on the handles of a body bag.

  Of course! A corpse is awkward for one person to handle, and leaves blood and other evidence in a car, but a bag has handles and sealed seams to contain blood. Some even have wooden slats on the bottom, between layers of plastic, to make a stretcher. Instead of dealing with a freshly killed body flopping around and bending in the middle, all a person had to do was pull one end of a stretcher, letting the other end drag. The stretcher-bag could even be tilted and levered into position, as the killer was doing now, using the side of the passenger seat.

  In no time at all, the bag was on the street, aligned parallel to the car. The killer opened the long zippers, tilted the stretcher up on one side, and out rolled the body, down the levee toward the river. Blood was left on the cobblestones, as in the crime scene photos, but none on the street, where the stretcher was. The killer zipped up the bag and maneuvered it into the back seat, an easy task now that it was empty, and drove away.

  The simulation fit the facts of the crime scene and added an important piece of speculative information. PJ ran through it again, putting herself in the role of a female killer. Arlan was heavy—she felt the computerized resistance when she tugged the handles of the bag—but feasible to move with a woman’s programmed strength.

  The killer could be a woman, at least as far as disposing of the body was concerned. Abducting Arlan, keeping him captive, and doing the killing was another story, and she’d deal with that some other time.

  Ideas were forming in her mind of a two-person killing team. Two people could be united in their motivation for wanting Arlan dead and scheming together to get rid of him. For example, June and a lover who wanted to marry her. Or people with differing motivations could have come together and formed an alliance of convenience, perhaps for business reasons. The whole elaborate setup that made it look like Arlan was killed by a psycho could be nothing but a smokescreen, intended to direct the attention of the investigators away from a couple of business partners who just figured they could divide Arlan’s cut of the profits between them. A quite ordinary, greed-motivated killing dressed in the handiwork of a serial killer.

  PJ peeled off the gloves and removed the helmet. She folded her arms on her desk next to the remaining apple, lowered her head onto her arms, and fell asleep.

  A persistent pinging sound woke PJ. She raised her head and looked around, trying to determine where it was coming from. She hadn’t set an alarm. She was alone in the room. Logic, of which she was barely capable, left the computer as the source.

  An animated graphic of a smiling face greeted her on the screen.

  “Oh, God, I don’t think I can take perky,” she mumbled.

  “Merlin here. What’s the buzz, Keypunch? You are awake, aren’t you?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Merlin, it must be the middle of the night.”

  “It’s 9:02 p.m. Sunday evening. Am I not welcome? You in the middle of some hot and heavy sex?”

  PJ stretched, noticing a kink in her neck. She’d promised Thomas she’d be home by eleven, and it looked like she was going to make it only because Merlin woke her up. “Hardly. At least let me get coffee started.”

  She shuffled over to the coffee maker, grabbed the carafe, and stepped out into the hall to get water. The women’s room was down at the end of the hall, which to PJ looked like a very long trek. No one was around, so she went into the men’s room across the hall from her office. She’d been in there once before, when she cornered Schultz in a stall and had an argument with him.

  The place smelled as though it had been freshly vacated by a man with intestinal flu. Or maybe it smelled that way all the time. Wishing she’d walked down the hall after all, she filled the coffee carafe at the sink and made a quick exit.

  With coffee brewing and her head rapidly clearing, she sat back down to converse with Merlin. They went back a long way, the two of them. She’d met him when she was in college, twenty years ago, although she’d never met him in person. He called her by her old college nickname, Keypunch Kid, which she’d earned by her proficiency and accuracy using a keypunch machine to punch programs and data into cards that were fed into the computer. Keypunch machines were anachronisms in the current technological climate. Merlin chatted with her, encouraged her, got her through rough times, and served as a sounding board for her ideas. A mentor who popped in and out of her life.

  They’d started talking when online communicati
on was the province of geeks, and moved forward as the technology did. Sometimes ahead of it. Currently they talked over secured VoIP, voice over Internet protocol. PJ had slyly suggested adding video, but Merlin predictably declined.

  “So what’s new, dirty old man?” she said.

  “I resent that. I bathe on a regular weekly basis. Besides, I asked you first.”

  “You took advantage of me when I was groggy,” PJ said. There was one apple left on her desk, so she picked it up and started munching it.

  “Not the first time, won’t be the last. I say again, what’s up?”

  “A new case. You’ve probably read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you don’t read newspapers.”

  “I prefer more direct sources. Heh, heh.”

  PJ pursed her lips. She’d wondered dozens of times before how Merlin picked up the threads of stories. She pictured him as a spider with the Internet as his web, information thrumming along the strands to the center, where he felt the sensations with his eight feet.

  “Keypunch? You fall back asleep?”

  “No, I was just imagining you as a spider.”

  “You definitely need to get out more.”

  “Hah! If only,” she said. “I seem to spend more time in the company of the dead than the living.”

  “I told you Schultz wouldn’t make a good lover. But did you listen?”

  PJ chuckled. “Stay out of my sex life.”

  “Is there any to stay out of?”

  Not much, lately. “Changing the subject, have you heard of the body found on the riverfront?”

  “The guy with no dick? I thought we were staying out of your sex life.”

  “Merlin!”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that murder,” Merlin said. “Are you sure you’re old enough to handle these sex cases? After all, there was the time when …”

  “When I had to put back the beer I was trying to buy. That’s beyond lame.”

  PJ knew there were legal issues with her discussing an open case in detail with a man she couldn’t identify. She might have passed Merlin on the street and not known it. But all that was beside the point. He was a sympathetic ear, and she trusted him. She poured out all the recent events.

  When she finished, he was quiet for a time.

  “June could have hired someone to go to Kansas City for her to establish an alibi. It would be tricky, but it could be done.”

  PJ sighed. “I felt sorry for June at first. Now I don’t know what to make of her.”

  “Psychos can be very charming when they want to. You should know that.”

  Before she could respond, her office door burst open and Schultz strode in.

  “Good, you’re awake. A bloody knife was found during the search of May Simmons’s home,” he said. “It’s got her husband Frank’s fingerprints on it and Arlan Merrett’s blood. We found the murder weapon.”

  Chapter 9

  DEAR DIARY,

  These are things that happened to me, cross my heart and hope to die.

  The earliest memory I have of my sister is from a time when I’m two years old. She is considered responsible enough to baby-sit for me while our parents have a getaway. All I know is that they are leaving and that I’m going to be alone with my sister. I hear my momma say that big word a lot, “responsible.”

  I’m terrified that I will die before they come back.

  As soon as they drive away in the black car, she ties me in my booster seat. When I try to wiggle free, the rope or tape—I don’t know now—cuts into my arms, so I cry. I am sitting across from her at the table, big tears rolling down my cheeks and my throat hurting from crying. She’s eating something that I want, because I’m hungry, too. My parents are gone and I don’t think I will see them again, or get something to eat because my stomach hurts.

  When she’s done eating, she leaves. Then I cry harder because I don’t want to be alone. She’s gone for a long time, a forever time.

  When she comes back, she has a pretzel for me. I love pretzels. I like to bite them because my mouth hurts sometimes. Momma says I am a big girl, getting new teeth. I want the pretzel. She puts it on the table but doesn’t untie my hands. I try to reach it with my mouth, I reach far and then stretch some more. My tongue touches the pretzel. That’s when something bad happens. The chair with my booster seat on it falls over, and me with it. Suddenly I am sideways on the floor, still tied in the seat and screaming. Screaming.

  Everything moves very fast when she pulls the chair up hard, and that scares me some more. But now she seems sorry. She cuts whatever is holding my hands and gives me the pretzel. I don’t remember what happens next.

  Later I am crying for Momma and my sister puts something in my mouth to make me stop. It smells bad and I choke on it. She puts me on the bed and pulls my clothes off. I stay there looking up at her as she moves around the room. I remember she’s humming.

  The next thing I remember is that I’m in the water in our pool. I’m holding on to a tube around my stomach that’s holding me up. I’m inside it, like I’m the hole of a doughnut. If I let go, I will slip down into the water and never come up. I can’t think of anything but holding onto that tube. I hate the water.

  My sister is close by, moving through the water, forward and backward in the pool. I can’t figure out how she does it. It looks like she’s pulling herself through the water. I don’t know how to do that. If I let go of the tube, I will go down under the water. She stops by me and presses my nose and gives me a big smile. I smile back because I think she’s going to take me out, so I won’t lose the tube.

  She puts her hands on the tube and I’m very happy. Then she pushes down. The tube goes under the water. I’m holding on and I go down, too. I scream and water pours into my mouth. My eyes are open and I see her legs under the water. She’s right there. I reach for her and the tube slips away from me. There is nothing holding me up and water is in my mouth and nose. I scream, but I only get more water in my mouth.

  I feel her hands grab me. She pulls me up and puts me in the tube. I am spitting water out of my mouth and I can’t get any air. I’m so sick and scared. She starts to go forward and backward in the pool again. I know that soon she will stop by me and push my tube down. I can’t do anything. I can’t get away. I’m sick and scared.

  That’s the first memory I have of my sister.

  Chapter 10

  PJ HADN’T SEEN HER son since early in the morning, and that was only a quick glance into his room, where he was sprawled across his bed. As usual, Megabite had claimed his pillow, causing Thomas’s upper body to hang off the bed to avoid disturbing the cat. That was the image of him she’d retained all day.

  She pulled her faded blue VW Rabbit convertible into the driveway of her home. It was a story-and-a-half on Magnolia Avenue, one of the smaller homes in the Shaw neighborhood. That made it affordable for a newly-divorced professional woman. PJ had started out renting the place, but fell in love with it and bought it when the owner decided to sell. It had wood floors, stained glass windows, a fireplace, and two bedrooms upstairs. The private yard had an intimate feel and beautiful perennial plantings that PJ had maintained. She could walk to Tower Grove Park, and often did when the pond lilies were in bloom.

  And there was that driveway, allowing her off-street parking.

  The house was dark, but a porch light had been left on for her around back. She touched the pane of glass in the back door out of habit, the pane shattered by a bullet that saved her from a psychopathic killer. Some people would have moved to get away from the reminder of an event like that, but in PJ’s case, it strengthened her.

  Track lights in the kitchen bathed the space in light. The smells of pizza and popcorn greeted her nose, and she smiled. The smells of normality.

  Megabite appeared from nowhere and rubbed against her leg, meowing and showing off her honey-gold eyes. Obediently, PJ bent down to pet her. The cat rose on tiptoe and arched her back under PJ’s hand. The young cat looked like different
cats depending on the angle of viewing. Seen from the top, she was gray tiger-striped. From the underneath, she was pure white. Seen from the side, there was a horizontal band of orange fur on all four legs that neatly divided gray and white. The white tip of her tail was very expressive, and at the moment, it was expressing Food.

  “Oh, Meg, I’m sure you’ve been fed a dozen times today,” PJ said. Thomas loved the cat as much as she did. Being a teenager, he assumed that the cat needed to eat every hour, like he did. PJ put down a bowl of remnants of a roast beef sandwich. Megabite purred her approval and went to work.

  PJ walked further into the house, looking for Thomas. The study door was closed, but there was a line of light underneath the door. She knocked and opened it, to find Thomas bent over the desk, working on the homework that was due the next day. Obviously he’d played around all day and left his schoolwork for the last minute. Typical, but she wished he’d get the important things done first.

  Not that I did any better at his age. Then along came the to-do lists that run my life.

  Feeling old and stodgy, she went over to him and tousled his straight black hair.

  “Hey, you’re messing up my look,” he said.

  “No, I’m creating a new look. You can be the first one in school to have it.”

  “Yeah, right. We’re out of soda and frozen pizzas, and there’s only one bag of microwave popcorn left.”

  PJ sighed. Sometimes her relationship with her son boiled down to a grocery list.

  “I’ll be back when I smell better,” PJ said. “We can talk about the school week coming up.”

  Thomas grunted, but at least it was a social grunt.

  The hot bath was wonderful, but PJ didn’t linger. She tossed on a clean sweater and jeans over fresh underwear. She made a phone call and then went back downstairs with her hair dripping from a thorough scrubbing. Thomas joined her at the kitchen table. He was eating a granola bar.

  “I’m going to be really busy the next couple of days. I just called Mick’s mom,” PJ said. “She said you could spend tonight and Monday night at her house and she’d take you to school with Mick. Megabite’s going, too.”