Chasing the Ghost

by Bob Mayer

  The watch finally began beeping after five minutes of non-stop action and he stopped, bending over, trying to cough out the previous day’s cigarettes. Still breathing hard, he walked over to an upright two by four that had coarse rope wrapped around it. He began hitting it at half-power, knuckles, knife edge, open palm, with all the striking surfaces of his hands, feeling the calluses years of such work had built onto them smash into the rope. He did that for two minutes, and then stopped. His hands tingled when he stopped, and he was still breathing hard.

  He walked across the grass, still wet with dew and knelt next to a large square of turned up dirt. He gently ran his fingers though the surface, searching for new growth, but there was nothing yet.

  Chase went back inside to take a shower, picking up his hand-cruncher on the way. It was a small rubber ball that he squeezed. It built forearm strength. He took it everywhere with him.

  On the way to the shower, he stopped at the half-length cracked mirror on the bathroom door, still needing to catch his breath. Tucked in the upper right corner of the mirror was an envelope addressed to him with an APO address in Afghanistan, stained with mud, sweat and dried blood. In the upper left was a faded black and white photo of a young man in jungle fatigues with a green beret on his head bearing a Vietnam era Fifth Special Forces Group ‘flash’ sewn on the front, tilted at a cocky angle. He had a wide smile and he looked ready to go off and conquer the world. It hadn’t quite worked out that way, Chase thought.

  Chase shifted his gaze from envelope, to picture, to his image between the two. He always thought it strange to look older than the father he’d never met every time he passed the mirror. His dark hair was cut tight on the sides and flecks of gray were already sprinkled there.

  He took a moment to raise his right hand over his head and stretch that side out. There were a dozen various sized pockmark scars on the right side of his body, running from his waist to just below his armpit. He’d had the arm raised when the Taliban grenade had landed fifteen feet away and produced the holes. Signaling for the other guys on his team with the classic Infantry ‘follow-me’ hand signal, just like the Iron Mike statue outside of Building Four at Fort Benning. What an idiot he’d been, Chase thought.

  There was another scar on his stomach, left of center. A round puckered mark. He shifted his eyes from that because thinking about the events surrounding that was guaranteed to ruin his day and he already felt like shit.

  The phone rang while he was in the shower, so he stood naked and wet in the kitchen while he got a call from his partner, Porter, telling him they had a body. Porter gave Chase the location and told him to forget about the office and get his butt over. Porter told him the corpse was in Mount Sanitas Park, less than eight blocks from where Chase lived.

  "It looks like a homicide, Chase," Porter added just before he hung up.

  Chase dressed quickly. He grabbed the photo of his father and the letter from his mother and put them in his jacket pocket before leaving. He slipped out the backdoor, letting the screen door back quietly so as to not alert his upstairs landlord, as he wasn’t in the mood for a ‘reading’ today. It didn’t work.

  "Good morning!" a shrill voice echoed across the back yard and floated down the street until Chase was sure Porter must have heard it up in the park.

  "Good morning, Louise," Chase returned in a more normal tone. Her dog, Astral, an extremely dumb Collie, was already running her dripping nose up and down his pants leg.

  Louise was his upstairs neighbor and landlord. The house was an old Victorian on Pine Street between ninth and tenth. There was a dirt alley behind the house that ran the length of Pine. Alongside the alley was a ditch, the Farmer’s Canal, which old time Boulderites had dug to get water from the mountains to the fields in the Plains. There was about three feet of water in it now that the Spring run-off was beginning.

  "It's going to be beautiful today," Louise gushed.

  Every day was a good day for her, Chase now knew, whether it was twenty below and snowing or the most perfect summer morning. She was somewhere in her sixties, gray-haired and supported herself with a network of rental apartments. She supplemented that by ‘readings’. She ran a group of local psychics out of her house and the people that came and went, well, strange would not begin to describe them. Astral was an old dog and lounged in Louise’s back yard day and night.

  "Looks like it," Chase said as he pushed his way past Astral.

  Louise touched his shoulder. “I saw you looking at your garden. It’s still early, but it will happen.”

  Chase kept moving. Louise followed him to the Jeep door. She put her hands on Chase’s shoulders and peered into his eyes. "Have a most wonderful day and be open to the powers. I sense something important coming for you."

  "I'll be open," Chase assured her. The last sentence was what he took to be part of the psychic scam: important could cover a lot of ground. Hell, something was sure to happen today and then she could always claim it was important.

  “I can see through your eyes into you,” Louise continued. “You’ve spent your life making your heart like your hands, all tough on the outside, but it’s a good heart, Horace. The world needs good hearts that do good deeds.”

  Chase stared at her, and then simply nodded, unable to think of anything to say to that. He got in his Jeep and drove down the alley seeing Louise in the rear view mirror when he glanced at it. She was staring at the Jeep, smiling. The image disappeared as the alley curved slightly.

  It was less than a mile from the house to Mount Sanitas Park, but traffic on 9th Street, which he had to turn left onto, was heavy. And not just cars, there was an endless stream of bikes heading toward downtown and the University, all screaming downhill on the steep slope from Mapleton School, a hundred year old elementary school that had a great view of the city.

  Chase considered using the red bulb light plugged into the cigarette lighter, but what the hell, since it was a body he figured there wasn't much of a rush to get to the scene. To be somewhat productive he checked the basics with his partner on the department issue cellular phone while he waited for an opening in the traffic. Porter was on top of everything. He had a warrant en route and the area was closed down. The warrant was important, Chase had learned during training, just because a body was there didn't mean the cops could just waltz in and start counting bullet holes. Americans got rights after all, although sometimes Chase wondered.

  This location, at first glance, appeared simple for the warrant because it was in Open Space, which meant the city owned the land. But the way politics went in Boulder, Porter had made sure he requested the warrant, because one never knew, the wacko Open Space people could sue the police department for trespassing if the cops happened to step on a few bushes while checking out the murder scene. Sounded crazy, but Chase had seen crazier things happen in Boulder in his short four months there. In fact, he knew Open Space was the most powerful branch of the local government. They had their own funding from a special sales tax where the money went directly to their coffers, no stopping and skimming at City Hall. To get someone fired up in Boulder, just mess with the Open Space. Or try to get rid of some prairie dogs. Or smoke a cigarette, Chase thought, getting more and more irritated as he waited for an opening and his headache grew. Here in Boulder, the number one capital crime in terms of citizen outrage was smoking. It was illegal just about everywhere.

  Just thinking about it made Chase’s blood boil, so he quickly lit up a smoke to calm himself down, earning a disdainful look from the spandexed bicyclist stopped next to him at the stop sign. Chase was two steps toward the grave in the biker’s eyes, in a car and smoking a cigarette. Chase had started again a couple of weeks ago and it had wreaked hell on his daily runs, so he’d stopped running. Chase had never smoked in his life until he’d gone into Afghanistan for the first time. After a couple of month’s in country, everyone on the team had taken the habit up. He felt like telling the citizen-cyclist to take a tour over there and see what kind o
f health he came back in. If he came back at all.

  Chase spotted an opening and gassed it, leaving the bicyclist sucking his exhaust fumes. He went up 9th a block and turned left at Mapleton Elementary. He drove past the Mapleton Center for Rehabilitation. There was a thought Chase quickly pushed away and was abruptly at the end of civilization. Open Space. Boulder was surrounded by it, an attempt to have a "band of green" between the city and the rest of the world. Chase had always meant to ask Louise, who was native to Boulder, if that band of green had some sort of mental effect on the good citizens of the town, because never had he lived any place as loony. He’d fought in loonier places, granted. But bullets, bombs, blood, and guts tended to do weird things to the psyche, Chase figured. He didn’t get how green space and white-capped mountains and bubbling creeks did it.

  When Chase finally got to where Porter had said to get to, he was thirsty, hungry and slightly hung-over. Before he could wallow completely in his self-pity, he had to deal with Porter who was at the Jeep door before the parking brake was set.

  "Chase, you look like crud. You need to get more sleep."

  Chase closed his eyes at his partner’s words. "So much for sympathy. You got a wife who loves you enough to iron your shirts and get your beers and you go and make fun of a man fending for himself in this cruel world."

  Porter dressed well, courtesy of his wife, but that couldn't hide the fact that he was short and had an ample beer belly to go with his receding hairline. Contradicting the scarcity of hair in the front, he had a graying ponytail in the back that he proudly snapped a colorful band about every morning. He looked like a Harley biker fifteen years past his head-busting prime. Porter fit right in with the rest of the strange people of Boulder, Colorado in that he didn't fit in anywhere else. Chase noted that for some reason his partner had a set of mechanics coveralls on over his suit. Chase was in his usual outfit of cheap suit and wrinkled shirt.

  Porter snorted. "I got a wife who'd iron the dog before she touched my shirts. Ever heard of a drycleaner? Stop whining, Chase. You sound like one of my kids. Speaking of the kids, I got a call last night from Bennie's teacher. She says he's gonna flunk kindergarten. Can you believe that? How the hell can you flunk kindergarten? Is he napping wrong? I asked her. Maybe sleeping upside down instead of right side up? Or not washing his hands with soap? Jeez, Chase, how the hell can you screw up kindergarten?"

  Chase nodded his head and remained silent. The last time he’d seen Bennie, the kid had loaded the cuff of his pants with potato salad.

  Porter was still on it. "Know what this teacher says to me then, Chase? You're not gonna believe it: She says I'm insensitive! Typical Boulder bullshit." He shook his head in disbelief, ponytail wagging. "Well, let’s check the stiff. I’ll show you how to do a murder scene seeing as you’re busting your cherry on this one. I already did a prelim."

  Chase didn’t say anything and wasn’t surprised his partner hadn’t asked about the other night. The word must already be out, he figured. Porter was hooked in tight with the police grapevine. But Chase knew Porter was a good partner, which was why he hadn’t asked right away.

  Ben Porter was eight years older than Chase and the senior major crimes investigator for the grand City of Boulder. Since there were only six investigators, that wasn’t saying too much. One night over beers, Chase had learned that Porter had come to Boulder from the mountains of middle Colorado with a guitar and a dream. Instead, he'd picked up a wife and family and had to get practical. He'd opted for the sure pay of being a cop combined with the theory of doing society some good. Occasionally Chase could see a certain wistful look in his partner’s eyes when he was probably remembering what had blown away with the years. Porter wasn't brilliant but he was very, very thorough. Chase was partnered with him because the powers-that-be figured Porter would keep him in line and from screwing anything up too badly since no one took Chase seriously as a cop, least of all Chase.

  “You need to cover up,” Porter advised Chase, leading him to his car trunk. “Everything that enters a crime scene can become evidence and I know you don’t want to give up that finely tailored suit. I brought extra.”

  Chase took off his jacket and put on the set of faded coveralls his partner held out. He took off his low quarters and slipped on a pair of $2.99 K-Mart-special sneakers, which, given that Porter was always prepared, were his size. Porter and Chase moved out, but he'd noted the glance his partner had given him when he was changing. Porter’s opening comment had been true. Chase knew he did look like crud and he knew it was more than having a rough night of sleep.

  Chase looked around. They were parked in a small area just off Sunshine Drive, which is what Mapleton turned into once it hit the foothills. There were two black and whites there along with Porter's car. Chase looked up, which was a pretty common thing to do when in the western edge of Boulder. He could see two uniformed cops standing in the grass about a hundred yards up the gravel-walking path, but no sign of a body. Behind them, a rocky ridgeline ascended over a thousand feet. And that was just a ‘foothill’ as they called them here.

  Along the way to the crime scene, Porter told Chase the particulars he’d gotten from his prelim, no more humor or joking his voice. Female, Caucasian, about mid-thirties. Looked like her throat had been cut. The medical examiner was on the way, and she was lying as she'd been found.

  As Chase had noted when he looked from the lot, the body couldn't be seen from the road. The elevation and grass were too high. She was lying on her back in the wild flowers, hair splayed around a pale face that still showed something despite the lack of animation and blood. Incredibly deep blue eyes stared up lifelessly at the bright sun that was crawling up out of the eastern sky.

  She was nude and the front of her body had been bathed in blood. The rigid lock at her elbows and knees gave her body a stiff, rubber doll appearance. Despite that, Chase sensed that she had been lithe and graceful in life. Chase looked around, trying to get a feel for the area.

  Porter glanced back from where they’d come. “The killer probably parked just off the road and brought her up here.”

  Chase was examining the immediate area. “How many people have been up to the body?”

  “The jogger, over there, who found her, and the responding patrolman. And me.”

  Chase pointed. “The jogger came from that way. You and the patrolman came up the same way we did. There’s no blood other than what’s on her, so she was killed elsewhere and carried here. But I don’t see any other tracks.”

  Porter looked about, apparently trying to see what Chase was seeing, and failing. “You can read tracks?”

  “After I was in Special Forces a couple of years, I was sent on a training exercise to Malaysia, to the tracking school run by their military.”

  “A tracking school?”

  “Run by ex-headhunters.” Chase could see the look Porter was giving him. His partner was wondering if he was joking. “No shit,” Chase continued, realizing he was going to have to explain. “The instructors at the Malaysian Army tracking school didn’t speak a word of English and myself and the other three SF guys going through didn’t speak a word of their language, but it didn’t matter. What they were teaching us didn’t require talking.

  “The first three days all they had me do was sit still in a blind and watch a waterhole. The point the instructors were making was that tracking is not as much about finding broken twigs and footprints in the dirt. Although they did move on to that, but more about understanding the habits of whatever creature one was following. If the tracker could understand the prey, he could predict what path it would take, where it was going. Sometimes one could even get to where the prey was headed before it got there. Sort of like those FBI behavioral science guys profile killers. Except this was out in nature, where even men become animals.”

  Porter was just staring at him.

  “I watched the animals around the waterhole for three days, then moved into the rain forest and trailed them. The
last week of the course, I tracked the most dangerous animal, man. By that time, I was part of the jungle. I followed other instructors from the course and they used all their techniques to lose me. And did. Then they tracked me and found me every time, no matter what I did to cover and confuse my trail. I learned a lot.”

  “OK. Headhunters.” Porter slowly nodded. “How’d she get here then, if there’s no other tracks?”

  “That doesn’t mean someone didn’t carry her here and dump her,” Chase said. “You can avoid making tracks for a short distance or cover them up.”

  “So you’re thinking a headhunter did this?” Porter asked.

  Chase looked at him. “Funny guy. She still got her head.”

  “But someone sure tried to take it off,” Porter said. “Check it out. I’ll touch base with the reporting officer again.” Porter went over to talk to one of the patrolmen.

  Chase knelt for a closer look at her face; her short hair was so dark and thick that it obscured most of her neck. He pulled a pencil out of his pocket inside the coveralls and used it to lift some of the hair aside. One thing stood out immediately: a thin red line around her neck, the source of the blood. Chase stared at it and frowned.

  “Don’t touch the body. Didn’t they teach you anything?”

  Chase turned to see the owner of the voice. Doctor Hanson pushed the words around the cigar butt he had tucked in the corner of his mouth. The voice didn't go with the cigar though; high and squeaky. He was a short, fat man who looked more like St. Nick without a beard than a coroner.

  “Sorry,” Chase said, backing off.

  Hanson looked at the neck. "I'd say the neck incision would be a good guess on this one. But how about letting me do my job and you do yours?"

  Chase walked away since Hanson was ready to do the on-site on her and he’d already made one mistake. Chase was supposedly trained to investigate murders but he knew, and the people he worked with knew, that wasn’t the real reason he was here and his police training was minimal at best. He wasn’t a real cop, at least not according to the other real cops. His paycheck was cut by Washington because he was a Federal Liaison Investigator, FLI for short, which when pronounced, had gotten him more than enough sick jokes over the past four months—assigned to the grand city of Boulder, in the Rocky Mountain State of Colorado. Lucky him. He was a bastard stepchild, born of some whiz kid’s bright idea high in the Federal Government and crammed down local governments’ throats with the almighty lever of federal dollars. They thought they were killing two birds with one stone. Sometimes Chase wondered what kind of bird he was supposed to be.