Chasing the Ghost

by Bob Mayer

  Chase diverted his attention from the road briefly. "So now you're an expert on affairs as well as marriages."

  Sylvie laughed.

  Chase thought about it. "You may have a point though. The woman yesterday didn't think Rachel was having an affair."

  "Did you ask her why?"

  "She went off on some line about Rachel not needing to."

  "You mean she thought Rachel was confident."

  Chase saw a large cardboard box on the side of the road and abruptly swerved away from it, tires squealing, the horn from the car he cut off blaring.

  “Geez, Chase,” Sylvie said.

  “Sorry. What were you saying?”

  "Sounds like Rachel Stevens didn't need to have an affair."

  "Why can't it just mean that her husband was a good lay?"

  "Chase, I’m surprised. You're getting sex and love and need all confused. All I'm trying to say is it sounds like she didn't need to trade sex for love. Maybe she loved herself. Or maybe she was more important to herself and she didn't need a man to tell her that."

  This was getting too bizarre even for Chase. Rachel Stevens was in the morgue as they spoke. He didn't need to understand Rachel's psyche. He needed to find her killer. Especially now, because he didn’t know what Fortin was going to do, but one half of those who controlled Chase’s professional life were certainly not very happy with him; he definitely needed to keep the other half happy.

  Chase had to park three blocks away from Pearl Street in the municipal lot. They strolled over to Pearl Street. About twenty-five years ago, the city had blocked off a section of Pearl, between 11th and 15th. Put brick down where there had been tar, planted trees and flowers, and the Pearl Street Mall had been born. It was full of restaurants, art galleries and bookstores. With the weather, turning nicer it was full of people this Saturday afternoon. There were a lot of young ‘drifters’ wandering around, panhandling—the Rainbow People, Porter had explained to Chase. Most other places they’d be considered bums in Chase’s opinion.

  The New York Deli had good, basic food. In the TV show Mork & Mindy, the floors above the New York Deli had been where the two title characters supposedly lived. Chase considered that to be pretty historic.

  Luckily, there wasn't much of a wait. They got a table on the mall and sat on the same side. While sipping his beer, Chase slid his right hand under the table and caressed Sylvie's bare thigh.

  While his hand was one place, his mind was another. "If she wasn't having an affair, what was she doing every third Wednesday? I've got to figure out where she met her killer. The parking lot at CU? Somewhere else? It all goes back to this every third Wednesday thing. She deceived her husband on that. She had to have had a reason."

  "Why does it have to be a bad reason?"

  "What else could it have been?"

  Sylvie pondered that until the food arrived. "OK. Nothing else comes to mind. The question is who was she having the affair with, if she was having one?" Sylvie eyes widened. "Someone in her class."

  "What?" Chase muttered around his pastrami on rye.

  "It was someone in her class. They skipped every third class to be together."

  It would be easy enough to check, Chase thought. He'd have to go back to CU on Monday.

  Chase looked up at a man who put his hat upside down on a bench opposite the two of them, then climbed up on it and then stood perfectly still, hands pointing in opposite directions. Great a mime. Except this, one was more a statue then a mime. Chase had thought he'd seen it all. He was ready to go for his gun.

  Sylvie's mind had moved on. "What are you going to do tonight, Chase?"

  Sylvie had just hit on the really bad aspect of dating a stripper. He spent most of his nights alone. "I don't know. I have nothing planned. You put in an awful lot of hours in that joint."

  "It's money, Chase."

  He couldn't argue with that. He wasn't sure where all that money went and he had never felt it would be polite to ask. "Beats standing on a bench.”

  Sylvie looked at the quasi-mime who hadn't moved a muscle in the last couple of minutes. "Everybody's got some angle."

  "Can I stay at your place till you get off?"

  Sylvie gave Chase a sly smile. "I get the impression you want to go there right after lunch."

  "That wouldn't be bad. I’m real tired, Sylvie."

  Chase thought about telling her all about his conversation with Porter last night, but he was afraid to bring it up. He was indeed disturbed by it. He was beginning to realize that he hadn't been doing much thinking about anything outside of work in a long time. Everything was sort of drifting along. He was even starting to worry that his work was going the same way. After Porter had left, he’d spent an hour listening to Squires cry into his vomit about the members of his squad who’d died or been maimed in Fallujah, before getting the deputy a cab. Then Louise had been acting all weird. He’d been happy to get inside and take a hot shower, trying to wash the vomit and the past twenty-four hours away.

  He wanted to talk with Sylvie about what he had done, or more appropriately, not done—the other night in Wyoming. But the bad guys were still on the loose in Wyoming, he didn’t know what Fortin was going to do about his inaction, and he hadn’t figured out himself how he felt.

  Sylvie appeared to be done. "You ready?"

  Chase paid the check and they headed for her apartment.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chase kept seeing the head of the bearded man in his scope, the reticules centered. Most people have never experienced that feeling. The power of life and death in the crook of a finger. Chase had known the feeling and he’d exercised it in the past, seeing the results of that little twitch of muscle. A metal-jacketed, 7.62 millimeter round hitting flesh, passing through skin without the slightest disturbance, striking bone, splintering it, ripping into the delicate material underneath, spitting blood, brain and flesh out the exit wound. The body instantly dropping like a stone to the ground.

  Then he saw Jimmy Keegan. Covered in blood, reaching up toward Chase, his mouth moving, but there was no sound.

  Chase woke in a sweat, Sylvie sleeping beside him. He didn’t move, focusing on gaining control of his body.

  He’d always been drawn to stories about death. He’d made a study of it because it was an integral part of the professions he’d chosen, but now he remembered what he’d told Louise last night about libraries—even as a child he’d been drawn the subject. Probably because his father had died violently before he was born. Even the way he had died had resonated over Chase’s life with his father’s posthumous Medal of Honor being Chase’s ticket to an automatic appointment to the Military Academy.

  Chase had read once about a French scientist in the early nineteenth century. The man had been caught up in the Revolution and sentenced to die, so he decided to make a scientific experiment of his own death. He had a comrade wait close to the guillotine and when his severed head rolled into the basket the scientist blinked continuously until he no longer could. The comrade recorded eleven blinks from the head. A long time for the brain to be alive after being cut from the body. Long enough to lie in the basket and know that the body was no longer attached. That death was just a few blinks away.

  One thing that Chase always wondered about when he remembered that story was how long those blinks were to the brain inside the severed head. Chase knew time sense could change, especially under stress. When he used to jump-master, hanging out of a C-130 plane approaching a drop zone at a hundred and forty miles and hour, wind ripping into his face, the last ten seconds from the command “Stand in the door” to “Go” took a hell of a lot longer to Chase than ten seconds. Seemed like a minute or two. How long did eleven blinks last knowing the final call was coming?

  Chase stared up at the ceiling, no longer able to avoid having his mind go to dangerous places. It was all about death. When he cut to the core, that was it, the final hand to be played. Everything else was just a prelude. Death and taxes someone had sai
d, but hell, the damn Patriots didn’t pay taxes so the latter could be avoided. But not the former.

  He peeled the covers away and carefully stood, not wanting to wake Sylvie. He padded over to the sliding doors that led to her balcony and silently opened the doors. He went outside and sat, feeling the early morning chill. The first rays of the sun had just begun to come in over the Plains to the west, touching the top of the Flatirons. Boulder was a beautiful place, but the beauty couldn’t dispel his morbid thoughts this morning.

  Chase had to wonder if he’d held back from shooting the bearded man and the rest of the Patriots because that’s what would have had to follow, because he was afraid of being shot in return? He knew that’s what Fortin and the other guys on the team thought. But Chase didn’t think, didn’t feel that----

  “Chase?” Sylvie’s eyes were blinking in the early morning light, her short hair tousled.

  “Hey, babe.”

  She had a thick robe on and a blanket in her arms. She threw it over him and sat down next to him. “Chase? What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. He was so tired. He couldn’t speak. Not because Fortin had ordered him not to. It was more than that. He just couldn’t speak. Chase leaned his head into Sylvie’s chest. She wrapped her arms around him. He realized he was acting a bit like Squires had last night. At least he hadn’t puked on her.

  “Chase?” Sylvie’s voice was worried.

  Chase shook his head. She pressed Chase against her body, tighter and tighter.

  “It’s OK, Chase. It’s OK.”

  Women. They have that thing that everything could be OK just by saying it was so. Chase knew things weren’t OK.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chase was on his third cup of coffee by the time Porter dragged into the squad room on Monday morning. Chase picked on him a little bit by informing his partner that since he had spent all Sunday in bed, he felt extremely rested.

  Chase know that was cruel and a lie, but he also knew that Porter with his house full of kids had probably spent all of his off time mowing, trimming, raking and grilling. When he went to bed, it was to sleep. But Chase was in a bad mood.

  Porter was holding a hand full of reports, meaning that he had had the smarts to round up all the paperwork before coming up stairs. He tossed them down one by one: the coroner's report, forensics on the car and clothes, phone messages and witness interviews. The last was slim enough to make a detective cry. In exchange, Chase handed him one of the jelly donuts that he had picked up on the way in.

  “How was your time with Sylvie?” Porter asked.

  “All right.”

  Porter nodded and gave Chase a look he couldn’t interpret.

  Chase tapped the folder in his hand. "We need to figure out who whacked our housewife from Pine Brook Hills." To make a point, Chase carefully wiped the jelly from his fingers and opened the coroner's report with a flourish.

  “Since when are you running this case?” Porter asked. But he followed suit with forensics and for a while, neither said anything as they tried to put the technical information together.

  Chase read that Hanson had narrowed the time of death to around ten-thirty, give or take a half hour. From the blood pooling, he estimated that she was dumped within ten to fifteen minutes of her death. There was more on the semen. A lot more than Chase wanted and he knew anyone else wanted. From the initial DNA typing there seemed to be evidence that she had traces of at least four different typed ejaculates in her vaginal cavity. Just great. It looked like Donnelly was right. A sex crime. An unfortunate victim of a gang rape. They'd grabbed her and when they were done, one of them had killed her.

  Chase looked over at Porter expectantly; maybe there was something in the lab report from the car. The sullen look in his partner’s eyes told Chase that his optimism was for naught. Porter quickly filled Chase in on what he had. Basically nothing. The car had no unexpected prints.

  There were a few carpet fibers from the body. Industrial type material, rust colored. If they ever got a suspect, they could check their home or vehicle for a match but it was nothing that could be traced to a manufacturer and then a buyer. Of course, she could also have picked up the fibers at school, at home, or anywhere in between.

  There was nothing significant around or in the trashcan at the car wash. Porter decided that some Martians had dropped her body over the park and then hit the dumpster on the way out to get rid of her clothes. Chase pointed out that the DNA typing on the semen was human. Neither laughed at the weak attempts at humor.

  Chase showed Porter the paragraph in the coroner's report on the contents of Rachel's vagina. His partner frowned as his eyes moved down the page. "What's chlorhexidine gluconate?"

  Chase looked over Porter’s shoulder. "Damned if I know. Probably some sort of medicine. You know women."

  Porter read the rest of the report very slowly. "Four? What the fuck?" He slammed the report down on the desk.

  Chase said nothing, letting his partner cogitate.

  “The doctor could have hired some guys—“ Porter began, but then he shook his head. “Nah. That would be stupid.”

  Porter worked his way through the rest of it while Chase looked at forensics. Porter was right. Nothing there that was useful, other than the fibers. The only prints on the car were Rachel's and her husband's. The remote opener found in her clothes only had her prints on it.

  After a half hour, they had both read almost all of it. They put their feet up on their desks and sipped coffee, collecting their thoughts. Finally, Porter looked at Chase. "You tell the lieutenant."

  "Tell him what?"

  "That we got a random. That he was right. A sex killing."

  “Why do I tell him?”

  “You seemed so gung-ho earlier,” Porter said.

  "What about the money and the car opener?” Chase asked. “Why didn't they take that?"

  "Hell, they were raping her. They were all probably high on something. We can't expect them to be thinking too damn straight. We aren't dealing with geniuses here. Maybe she had other money on her that they did find."

  "I don't like it." Chase wasn't sure why he said that because he knew that Porter was probably right, but something in his gut said it was all wrong. The pieces didn't fit. "Where did she get picked up from?"

  "Most likely the parking lot at CU. The punks probably had a van or big car and were cruising around, looking for some young coed to pick up. Instead, they got a housewife from Pine Brook Hills. They didn't care. They didn't exactly look at her resume beyond the fact the she was female and good looking." Porter stood. “Don’t worry. I’ll brief the LT. Then I’m going to hit the streets. Check the Hill first and see if any of the druggies or Rainbow people are talking. You stay here and go through the phone messages." Porter patted Chase on the back as he prepared to leave. "Hang in there." He paused and Chase could see the question forming, then, with a brief shake of his head, Porter left the squad room without asking.

  Chase breathe a sigh of relief and gathered in the last folder. The only one they hadn't gone through yet. This one contained all the call-ins.

  Every large case that made the news seemed to inspire a whole wave of people who felt they had something to contribute. And they all looked up the number for the desk downstairs and called. And the poor duty sergeant had to listen and be polite and copy everything down. Ninety-nine percent was garbage. But it was because of that one percent that he did his job, which meant reading every one of the memos and following up on anything remotely interesting.

  There were nineteen call-ins so far. Actually, kind of low for a high profile case, but Chase figured the fact that the victim was from Pine Brook Hills and had been snatched at CU helped a bit. Not as many crazies in either of those places.

  No confessions, which was a little surprising. Porter had told him that there was usually there was at least one nut-cake who called to confess. Those people had to be checked out. Not just on the remote chance they might actually be the murderer, but
primarily because if they caught who they thought was the real murderer, a savvy defense lawyer would dig and find out that someone had called the police to confess and the cops hadn't even bothered to go talk to him or her. Looked bad in front of the jury.

  There were two psychics claiming they could help out. Chase recognized one of them. She called on every case that made the papers. He was glad Louise wasn't one of those calling.

  The seventh slip caught his eye. A woman, Beth Wilson, left a message Sunday afternoon saying she saw something from her dorm room on campus on the night of the murder. It was probably nothing, but his pulse picked up a little as he dialed the number the duty sergeant had logged in. Chase didn't expect anyone to be there, but the phone was answered on the second ring.

  "Hello?"

  "Is this Beth Wilson?"

  "Yes."

  "This is Detective Chase, Boulder Police. In reference to your phone call about seeing something last Wednesday night that might be connected to a case I'm working."

  "I was wondering if anyone would return my call. It probably wasn't anything, but the news did say that woman was killed on Wednesday night and she probably had been kidnapped from this parking lot here outside my dorm. So I just thought I'd report what I saw."

  "What exactly did you see?"

  “It was a little after ten. I was studying for finals and I happened to look out the window and I saw someone get out of a cab."

  "Could you see the person well? Well enough to recognize if it was a man or a woman?"

  "Not really. I'm up on the fourth floor you know. And it was dark. I just thought that you might be able to find the cab driver. I know it's not much, but the news did ask for anyone to report anything they might have seen."

  She was right, Chase thought. It wasn't much. But it did open two doors. One was the cab driver who was in the parking lot where Rachel's car had been just before she was killed. The other was whoever had gotten out of the cab. Slim chances, but ones Chase would have to check.