Chasing the Ghost

by Bob Mayer

  Chase shut down the computer and headed out.

  * * * * *

  Porter had a mechanic from the local BMW dealership standing by when Chase got there. The grease monkey was a guy who enjoyed this aspect of his job: breaking into cars legally. Chase guessed they could have gotten a spare key from the husband, but Porter said he wasn't ready to go back there. Chase tuned out the mechanic's boasting about how he was getting past all the security things the BMW people put on the car to keep the bad guy from getting in.

  The door was open in about a minute and a half. Porter shooed the mechanic away. Before they touched anything inside, Porter used the digital camera and took shots as they opened the other doors and trunk. Then they gloved up.

  After making sure they had a good set of pictures, Chase slid in the driver's side and looked around. A leather book bag was on the seat on the passenger's side. Chase unsnapped it and looked inside. Two textbooks: "Life Cycle and Human Development" and "The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy." Great, Chase thought, psychobabble.

  A large binder was in there also. Chase flipped it open and looked through. Course syllabuses and notes. The book bag in the car was a little confusing to him. Had she been nabbed before or after class? And why hadn't she been carrying it?

  Porter came around the car. "Nothing exciting in the trunk. A spare. An umbrella. Doesn't look like a body was transported there. I'll have the lab guy go over it just in case."

  The glove compartment yielded meager fare: the owner's manual; vehicle registration; paper napkins; a stub of a pencil; a broken pair of sunglasses.

  Chase reached under the driver's seat. Pay dirt. Her purse. What the hell was her purse doing in the car? He wondered. This was even more confusing than the book-bag. Chase opened the clasp. Lying on top was her key ring. He flipped through. A key with the BMW logo. He tried it in the ignition and it worked. Then he got out and tried it on the door. Worked again. He checked with Porter: the car had been locked when they found it. Chase tried the doors. He couldn’t lock them without the key. So she must have had a spare with her?

  Chase went back to the other contents of the bag. A small jewelry box invited attention. He flipped it open. Her wedding band and engagement ring, big rock glittering, greeted his eyes. Her wallet was in the purse also. Chase looked back over the seat at Porter.

  "This is getting weirder."

  Porter looked at the rings and then at Chase. "I don't figure any of this. Where did she get grabbed?" His forehead furrowed. Chase sensed a great insight coming from his partner. "She was having an affair. Using school as a cover. That's why the rings are in here. That’s why the good doctor offed her."

  Chase pointed at the texts and notebooks. "Good cover. She even took notes." Still, Chase thought, it was an interesting possibility, especially coming from Porter, family man extraordinaire.

  His partner frowned. "Well, then, where was she? How'd she get from CU to where we found her? Someone had to have taken her. Most likely the killer."

  Or she had taken herself by some means other than the car, Chase speculated. It was about three miles from the campus to the Mount Sanitas Open Space. Chase very much doubted she'd walked at night. If her car was clean, that meant someone else's car or truck.

  They went through the rest of the BMW without much luck. She'd simply parked it, locked it with a key, not the one on her key ring and walked away last night. Or the killer had parked it, taken a spare key and left all her stuff. Besides the rings, the purse contained sixty in cash and several credit cards in the wallet.

  Porter slammed the doors shut and stared at the car. “This is going to get worse,” he pronounced. He glanced at the sun setting over the Flatirons. “Quitting time. I promised Mary I’d be home in time for dinner.” He looked over at Chase. “Where you headed? To see Sylvie?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Be careful.”

  Chase nodded, wondering about the warning.

  Porter headed for his car, but paused and looked over his shoulder. “You did the right thing in Wyoming.”

  * * * * *

  Chase drove north, up Broadway to the edge of town, stopping just before hitting Open Space. The Silver Satyr was about as classy as a place can get for a strip joint outside of a big city. Originally, the building had housed a steak place called the Cleaver and Ale. The new owner had kept the London Pub exterior, but added a neon outline of a woman. She was in profile, hands on hips, head bent back, impossibly pert breasts pointing skyward. The beveled glass windows had been blacked out. It was the only strip club in town and its existence wasn't really acknowledged by the city council. They'd tried to shut it down when it opened a year and a half ago, but the owner, Nicholas Tai, was also a lawyer and he snowed them under with so much paper they'd reluctantly backed off for the time being.

  Chase sort of respected Tai for his stand. His theory, eloquently expressed in a letter to the city council reprinted in the Daily Camera, was that if the citizens of Boulder didn't want a strip club, then people wouldn't come in and he'd be out of business in a couple of months. Since that hadn't happened, Tai felt it was the will of the people that the club remain open. That was a tough pill for the city council to swallow and they solved it by ignoring it for the time being and moving on to the more important issues like voting to make Boulder a ‘nuclear weapon free zone’ and protecting the habitats of prairie dogs from developers.

  There was a hand-painted sign offering the daily luncheon special: all you can eat for $7.99. Also on special: twelve succulent women. Pay the cover and a guy could satisfy all the basic male needs in one chair. This early it was mostly empty. Another ten minutes before the dancers started up again for the evening.

  Chase ordered a beer from a waitress wearing a short skirt and bikini top and settled in the cheap imitation leather seat, mulling over what he'd learned today. Not much. They could get lucky in the next few days and forensics or pathology would come up with some startling information that would crack the case wide open. Right.

  Tai nodded at Chase from his stool at the bar. Tai was a short man, about five foot seven, with a slight build. But he exuded a strong presence, an American-Japanese version of Bruce Lee.

  Chase nodded back as he considered the case. He knew Rachel Stevens' murder had probably been on all the 5 o'clock news reports in Denver. The media people in Denver just loved it when something went wrong in the liberal bastion of Boulder. Unless a prairie dog colony was destroyed in the interim, it would be page one in the Camera tomorrow morning.

  Chase figured the case was going to cause quite a stir. Her type wasn't supposed to get whacked on the fair streets or fair Open Space. This wasn't an acceptable death for a pretty doctor's wife from Pine Brook Hills. If she had fallen down those circular stairs at her house or gotten breast cancer things would be fine. But Rachel Stevens had represented living the right life, and if someone like that could wind up dead in the wild flowers, no one was safe; or so the thinking would go.

  Chase considered that Porter's theory held possibilities: she was trying to have an affair at school and it had gone to crap in a big way. Some people got very emotional about stuff like that and occasionally they snapped. Chase had heard about things like that. The doctor was weird; Chase agreed with Porter on that.

  The only other possibility Chase could see right now was that she had just been dumb and unlucky. Chase could almost picture her walking over to a dark van late at night to give someone directions. She was probably like Donnelly, always thinking the best until the shit started piling up around their ankles or in this case their neck. Rachel Stevens had probably never met a really bad person until the night she died.

  Chase was draining the last of his first beer when he noticed the music had changed tempo. Looking over to the small stage, he could see the figure of a woman sliding seductively through the curtain that hung at the back of the stage. He ordered another draft and sat back to watch.

  She was dressed in a short black
leather skirt and a black bustier. She had a whip draped over one shoulder. A thin black leather collar was around her neck. The dancer was good in Chase’s somewhat biased opinion. Smart enough to know that the art of stripping was more mental than physical. Her body was perfect for what she did. She had found a niche and perfected it.

  The few people in the room came to attention as the cloth fell from her body with choreographed perfection. Chase was beginning to lean forward a little himself, willing the flesh into view. Her red hair was cut in bangs in the front and hung straight down to her shoulders on the sides and back.

  To Chase, her face was different. The mouth a little too wide, the nose a little too sharp, but it all fit together to make her very interesting looking in a distinctive way. Most of the patrons were not focusing on her face or hair though, as she removed her corset. Her breasts were perfect, or at least Chase thought so: slightly more than a handful topped with hard nipples. Her hips flared out sensuously to a rear that was firm and full. She certainly knew how to work the music as she got down to her thong. That was the limit. They did have laws in Boulder.

  But it was her black eyes that drew the men in the room in. They emitted something, dark and dangerous and tempting. Inviting, but with a flash that said: here there be danger. Of course, the whip she expertly snapped toward the audience also reinforced that warning.

  And of course, there was always those who didn’t catch obvious warnings and Darwinism hadn’t yet taken care of. A burly man seated right next to the stage jerked back as the dancer cracked the tip of the whip less than a foot in front of his face as he leered at her.

  “Fucking cunt,” he yelled, loud enough to be heard throughout the room.

  Chase was moving, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tai was also. The owner got there about two seconds before Chase did and that was all it took. Tai grabbed the back of the man’s neck, squeezing, and he gasped like a hooked fish. The man sitting next to him jumped to his feet and pulled back his arm to throw a punch.

  Chase grabbed the man’s forearm, leveraged it with his other hand on the guy’s elbow and the man went to his knees, the pain controlling him.

  The music was still playing loudly, but the club was perfectly still. Tai leaned close to the man he held and whispered: “She’s a lady and don’t ever use that word again.” Then he headed toward the door, the man firmly in his grasp.

  Chase lifted his quarry up and marched him behind the other. Tai shoved the burly man out the front door and Chase did the same with his. Tai looked at Chase, nodded, then headed back in.

  As Chase re-entered the club he noted that the dancer was back in her routine as if nothing had happened. When the music ended, she gathered her skirt and corset and slipped on a robe, tucking the whip into a deep pocket. Instead of going backstage, she moved out into the club. As she passed the other patrons their eyes turned to follow her so that by the time she made it over to Chase there was an audience. She stood close enough for Chase to smell her, a combination of perfume, hairspray and exertion. "Hi, Chase. I didn't expect to see you tonight."

  Chase leaned back in his chair. "I needed to see you."

  Sylvie tugged on the belt for her robe. "Did you like what you saw?"

  "I always like it."

  “You liked it earlier today?”

  “Did you?”

  Her tongue ran across her lips as she smiled. “Most certainly.” Sylvie pulled out a chair and sat down. "Is something up? No pun intended."

  "I was just thinking about you."

  Sylvie gave him a look he couldn't decipher. "What were you thinking, Chase?"

  "I think you have a pretty good idea, Sylvie.” He leaned back in the seat. “Got an interesting case this morning."

  Sylvie gestured around the bar. "I wish we could talk about it, but I've got to work. We'll talk about it tomorrow. My turn."

  Sylvie went backstage. Chase saw that Tai was looking over. He knew Chase was a cop and he knew Sylvie was involved with him. Tai didn’t mind having a cop in the place so he tolerated Sylvie talking to Chase occasionally in between acts.

  Tai came over. "What's happening, Chase?"

  "Not much," he replied. "What's new with you?"

  "City council is trying to pass another bill that would make me illegal," Tai said.

  "Assholes," Chase said. If the city council would spend as much time and money on the drug problem on the Hill as they did trying to shut Tai down, they'd have the scuzzes cleared out in two days. But naked women apparently were a much bigger issue with them.

  Tai shrugged. "I don't mind much. I feel for the city attorney having to sweep up after them all the time. They only support the law here in town when it fits their personal agenda."

  Tai was looking at Chase intently and Chase wondered what he wanted.

  "How you and Sylvie doing?" Tai finally asked.

  "Fine."

  "She's a good person, Chase."

  "I know that."

  "I don't want to see her hurt."

  "Hey, Tai, I'm not going to hurt her."

  "She hasn't been too happy lately," he said.

  "Mine and Sylvie's relationship is our business," he said, a little more harshly than he'd intended.

  Tai leaned forward. "No, Chase, it's my business too. Sylvie's my friend."

  "Your friend?" Chase said. "She strips for you, Tai. How can she be your friend?"

  "She works for me," Tai said, "but she's still my friend. She makes more money here than she could anywhere else in Boulder with her background. She doesn't strip for me. She strips for the jerks, like the assholes we kicked out, who sit in the seats here."

  Chase could tell Tai was a little pissed. He was a black belt in several forms of martial arts, which he kept current in, and for a moment, Chase thought he might reach across the table and try to give him the Vulcan death grip. It would be an interesting confrontation, Chase thought, but he knew Sylvie would not be happy.

  "Hey." Chase held up his hands. "I'm sorry I got a little angry. I'm a bit stressed out is all. Things are going all right between Sylvie and I."

  “She’s different,” Tai said. He looked into Chase’s eyes. “That makes you different. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” He stood. "I just wanted to let you know that I worry about her."

  "All right. You've let me know." Tai walked away and Chase made his way out, a little perplexed by the incident.

  * * * * *

  Chase drove home. He only made one stop on the way, at a convenience store, for Cheetoos and beer. Chase made his way inside, ignoring Astral, and sidestepping the heavy bag. It was dark and empty in his small apartment. The light on the answering machine was flickering. He popped the first beer, put the rest in the fridge, then hit the play button.

  “Matt, it’s Porter. You have Rachel Stevens’ professors at CU tomorrow. Find out what you can about her whereabouts the night of the murder. You’ve got Professor A. Silver at ten and a Professor T. Gavin at ten-thirty. Then meet me at the hospital for a re-interview with the husband at eleven-thirty in his office.”

  Chase scribbled the information down. The machine beeped and a second message played.

  "Chase. It's me. I think I’ve been pretty patient. But I need you to sign the paperwork. Bye."

  The machine beeped twice. Chase looked at the manila folder on top of the refrigerator. Anne had sent the final divorce papers via overnight FedEx.

  Three months ago.

  Chase grabbed the beers and turned on the small television to drive away the emptiness. He sat on the make-shift bed, a couple of ragged pillows propped behind his back, and drank out of the can, the rest of the six-pack resting on a footlocker next to the mattress. He paid little attention to the show on the TV, but the murmuring sound of voices was comforting and chased away the demons of an empty night.

  After a couple of beers, he grabbed his shirt off the floor and pulled out his father’s picture and his mother’s letter. Chase unfolded t
he single piece of paper:

  My Dearest Horace.

  We are both at war, but I fear I am losing mine. The cancer has spread too quickly.

  Fate has dealt you a final card from the father you never knew and the man I hardly knew. Don’t be like your father. Don’t be too brave. Come back from the war.

  I know we haven’t spoken in a long time. I know you don’t want to hear this. I blame myself for that. But maybe someday you’ll think better about me. I hope you will.

  Sometimes there are broken people. Like me. Like you. I was trying to do the right thing for you. Now I know I did wrong by giving you your father’s legacy. The Medal of Honor and the Academy appointment that came with it and all afterward. But maybe it isn’t too late.

  Even broken people should get another chance.

  Be a good man.

  With my dying love,

  Your Mother.

  PS: In my will, there’s a house. An old house. But it’s a good house in a good place. It will be yours. It’s the house we spent the summers in on Hilton Head in the Low Country. It’s from an old friend. He’s a good man. You won’t understand now and will think the wrong thing because you tend to think the wrong thing first. It’s all I can give you now.

  Chase read through, then folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. He put it, and the photo on top of the footlocker.

  Around the fourth beer, he was buzzed. His mother’s face kept intruding. And Sylvie’s. And another face. He pulled the picture of Rachel Stevens out of his pocket and stared at it in the flickering light from the television. He thought about the murder scene and the wound and was bothered in a way he couldn’t figure. This was different than combat, which he understood, even though combat was total chaos once the firing started. Finally, he put the picture away. He lay down and stared up at the ceiling.