The Weeping Buddha

by Heather Dune Macadam

  Tension was building behind her. The air pressure suddenly dropped. O’Doherty moved. Devon’s hand twitched.

  The singing bowl let out a long mournful gong. The wood sticks clapped together. Devon did not bow to the wall; she did not want to. Instead, she scrambled to stand up, stamping her feet against the hard wood floor and straw mats, trying to wake up the flesh that had fallen asleep despite the activity of her mind. O’Doherty clapped again for kinhin but Devon dashed out of the door, grabbed her shoes and coat, and shot across the lawn to the house.

  A fog had descended as so often happened in the winter, and the privet hedge groped at her hair as she pushed through the gate and almost ran into Hans and Sam returning from their break. One look at the monk in his black robes walking through the mist was enough to completely unnerve her. “All you need is a scythe, Hans, and you’d look like death itself!”

  He held up his finger for silence.

  Devon bowed obediently as Hans and Sam disappeared into the zendo, then she headed for the thin halo of light hovering above the doorway to the house. Inside, the coffee set-up looked well used. A number of cups were in the wastebasket next to the electric pot of hot water, but no one was sitting there now. She went to the bathroom, but the door was locked. She figured Maddie or Josh must be in there, so she slipped into the kitchen. “Loch?”

  “Right here.”

  She walked across to him in the dark and stared at the velvet mist outside the window. “Anything unusual?”

  “Nothing.” He sounded bored. He’d wasted the entire night sitting around watching trees disappear into the low-riding clouds.

  “This is ridiculous. Let’s just question Maddie. Gary’s probably already talked to Godwyn.”

  “No. I just called him. He’s on his way back.”

  “I want to get out of here.”

  “What about dawn and enlightenment?”

  “Spirituality is all very nice, but it doesn’t solve anything. Life still sucks. People kill each other and no one—no one—is any more enlightened now than they were back in Buddha’s time. The illusion is that we think we’ve progressed.”

  “He doesn’t bark at some people and barks at others, why?”

  She looked out the window at Barney nosing around the garden again instead of sleeping like any normal dog should at this hour. “He recognizes the regulars here,” she told him.

  “Maddie Fong is a regular?”

  “Beka brought her and Alex a few years ago.”

  He seemed lost in thought.

  “Loch? I want to go home.” “You were right.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re right to pray,” he said.

  “Since when did prayer take the place of cold hard evidence?”

  “It didn’t, they simply coexist.”

  “You’re a Zen master now?”

  “I just wish I had your faith, Devon. I lost mine years ago.” He squeezed her hand. “Hans says enlightenment comes when you most want to run away.”

  “You’ve been speaking with Hans?”

  “He came to get a swig of brandy for his coffee.”

  She almost burst out laughing, but heard footsteps outside the kitchen door; Loch held his finger up to his lips.

  “Devon?” Maddie whispered from the hallway. “Are you in there?”

  Loch stepped back into the shadows and pointed to her pocket.She patted her walkie-talkie, then stepped out of the kitchen.

  “Hey, Maddie, I was just looking for something cold to drink. I always get thirsty in there.”

  “Listen, I’m going to go. I want to be fresh for the service tomorrow.”

  “We were looking for you earlier,” Devon told her.

  “Alex told me. I can talk to your boyfriend tomorrow after the service.”

  “Talk to me now. All we need to know is where you were New Year’s Eve and last Tuesday.” Devon tried to make her queries as nonchalant as possible

  “Is that all? Okay, can you walk me to my car? I’m a little nervous to be alone.” Illuminated by the sensor light, Maddie looked like one of Broadway Bob’s aliens, with an aura of mist surrounding her body

  They walked out of the house together. Devon dug her hands deep into the borrowed robe so that she had one hand on her gun and one on her walkie-talkie. This was the kind of set-up a murderer might go for, outside and away from everyone else.

  “I got out about one-thirty, I think. I spent New Year’s Eve with Hans at the ceremony on the North Shore. That’s where I study.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so serious about Buddhism.”

  “You never asked.” Her words hung awkwardly in the fog.

  Devon knew she had withdrawn from many of her closer friends over the past ten years, but didn’t let that sway her primary aim—to find out Maddie Fong’s whereabouts last Tuesday.

  “I don’t remember what I did,” Maddie told her. “It was my day off … Oh yeah, I drove back from my folks’ place in Rhode Island. I was up there for the holidays. I took the Orient Point Ferry. I probably still have the stub.”

  “Which ferry?”

  “Two o’clock, I think. I got home around five, so that sounds about right.”

  “See, wasn’t that painless?” Devon asked her.

  “That’s all you needed?”

  “Unless you know where Godwyn is.”

  “I stayed with him the night after dim sum and came out here this afternoon. He said he was coming out to see you this morning.You didn’t hook up with him?”

  “Nope.”

  They walked to the edge of the privet where it was darkest and the light no longer shone.

  “That’s strange.” Maddie’s hand reached into her coat pocket.Devon tensed. Maddie pulled out her keys. “I’m going to Alex’s. I’ll call Godwyn’s cellphone and see if I can find him.”

  “Give him my number. We need to talk.”

  Maddie stopped and pointed her keys at Devon, who involuntarily took a step backward as if the keys were loaded and dangerous. “You really think it’s one of us.” It was a statement of fact. She put her keys into the car door and got in. “It must be horrible to go through life not trusting anybody.” She locked the door behind her

  Devon watched the lights of Maddie’s car merge with the darkness. “It is.”

  The woods were always silent when the fog came in, and only the dripping of condensation from the branches of the trees gave her any sense of place and time. She turned around to start back to the zendo but saw dark footprints in one of the last clinging strips of snow. The ice shimmered with moisture and wouldn’t last the night if the air continued to warm; that in turn would create an even denser fog. She knelt to look at the prints and let her hand hover above them—size ten, men’s, she assessed. They were fresh, too, not overly soaked like they would have been if Hans had made them earlier in the day. And that was what was strange to her; she could understand seeing Hans’s footprints, but these prints weren’t heading toward the zendo. This person had headed back behind the house via an overgrown path that skirted Hans’s property. This was the path they took when they were dumping underbrush or wanted to go straight to the backyard …

  She hung her penlight around her neck in order to keep one hand free. The walkie-talkie crackled at her; she pulled it out. It would be such a waste not to use it at least once tonight.

  She pressed the call button again and used her throatiest voice. “Go for Devon.” He didn’t respond. “You just wanted me to say, ‘Go for Devon,’ didn’t you?”

  “You sound so sexy on radio.”

  “You sound sexier.” They were always punchy about this time of night. She stared down the path and chuckled at how much it looked like some horror movie with too much fake fog obscuring the monster in the woods. “Loch?”

  “Go for Loch,” he teased.

  She tried not to smile but couldn’t help herself. “Someone’s been back behind the house in the past couple of hours. I found footprints, prett
y fresh. I’m going to follow them. Just wanted to let you know.”

  “Wait for me!”

  “So you can ruin my fun? Forget it. Besides, you’re staking out the zendo.”

  She stooped under tree limbs, trying to avoid stepping in the tracks. Heavy billows of fog drifted in and out of the trees. She could make out the prints easily where there was still snow, but in other areas she needed to use her light to find the trail hiding in the soft ground. It was surprisingly light in certain spots, since fog always reflected light in a luminescent way, whether it was reflecting the moon, stars, or just the snow’s own whiteness.

  “Devon?”

  She pressed the button and answered him in her throaty voice, “Go for Devon.”

  “We should play with these in bed sometime.”

  “Good-bye, Lochwood.”

  She could barely see the house except for where the lights illuminated the kitchen and Loch was hiding. In fact, if it hadn’t been foggy she could have made him out quite easily. He was actually backlit, quite nicely, by the outside light. She heard something moving behind her and stopped. A low growl sounded from the undergrowth.

  “Barney. Good boy, Barney. It’s me, Devon.” She spoke in her most friendly and nonthreatening voice. Slowly she turned around. The growl came deeper from his gut and became even more insistent.She reached behind her for a stick or a tree branch to pull herself away from his teeth, but an unmistakable chill rose up through her arm.

  A phone began ringing behind her. She wheeled around. Godwyn was staring at her in unblinking terror.

  His eyes were glazed, his mouth had dried blood on it—he had been pierced through his chest with a fishing spear which held him securely up against a tree. From the touch of him, she deduced that he’d been dead at least four hours—rigor had set in. The phone rang again from Godwyn’s pocket. It was probably Maddie.

  Something moved in the underbrush.

  Barney lunged through the darkness toward her, almost knocking her to the ground as he leapt in the air.

  “Get him off me!” The voice was Josh Shapiro’s.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The act of wondering is more potent than the answer, but we cannot really deal with human evil until we’ve come to terms with ourselves.

  —HANS HOKANSEN, SENIOR MONK, SAGAPONACK ZENDO

  Jo was not happy to be up and about in the middle of the night for the second time that week, and her huffiness was plain as her heftiness unwedged itself from her Town Car. “The body’s down there?” She pointed down the allée of privet and melting snow.

  Loch nodded. “We’ve held back any activity until Devon could get in there and pull the footwear impressions. It’s a delicate scene, Jo.”

  “Fog’s a big help, too.” Jo grunted. “I better go back and put on my galoshes. Why couldn’t you two find another body in the city? I like it better when you wake up their M.E. in the middle of the night. It’s as cold as the morgue out here.”

  “Next time we’ll try to find a considerate killer who only attacks in daylight and summer months.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.” She made her way back to the car to don galoshes and heavier socks.

  Devon made her way back up the trail to where she had wrapped the yellow police tape. Frank had not arrived yet, and since working a scene at its most fresh was paramount, she had already started.

  “How’s it going in there?” Loch asked.

  “I found my beeper.” He looked at her questioningly. “It was on Godwyn’s belt, with Beka’s cellphone number on it.”

  “We’ll need to search the Shapiro house to see if we can find that.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Anyway, I’m ready for Jo to come in. I’ve taken a ton of pictures, but I’d rather not move him before Frank gets here with the van.”

  “Videotaping in this pea soup may not be worth squat.”

  “I trust his eye.” She began to walk Loch through the scene she was still busily reconstructing in her head. “Godwyn’s prints are the tracks I followed in from the street. Did you find his car?”

  “It’s parked around the corner.”

  “I wonder why he was being so secretive?” she wondered, then returned to her recitation of facts. “We also have tracks coming out here from the house and then returning.”

  Loch looked at his notes. “Eleven o’clock, Josh took his first break.We’ll know when Jo gives us time of death.”

  “The thing is, why did Josh come back if he’d already killed him?”

  “He forgot something?” Loch made a note to grill the suspect on that point as soon as he got back to the precinct.

  “The footwear impressions are definitely Josh’s shoes. You can see here that the older impressions are less defined because of the melting snow, and here’s an example of his tracks made later.” She showed Loch the shoes she’d pulled off Josh before they carted him away to the station. Doc Martens. “There were Doc Martens imprints at the studio the other night, too. I’m not sure they’re the same shoes yet, but they’re the same brand.”

  “Hans says the spear is his.” Loch filled her in on what information he had collected. “It was hanging by that whale pelvis in front of his house.”

  “Josh could have taken it on his way into the house, then gone out the back door.”

  “Did Josh know the house well enough to know where the back door was?”

  “It’s not rocket science, Loch.”

  “True, but every other murder has been meticulously planned, why not this one? And how’d he know that Godwyn was out there?”

  “They must have talked.”

  “You think Josh set him up outside to watch the zendo so he could kill him?”

  “That’s your job.”

  “Never stopped you before.”

  She pointed through the mist to where the lights in the kitchen could now be seen. “From where I found Godwyn, I could see you in the kitchen. You were backlit, very nicely I might add. Maybe Godwyn was taking your picture.”

  “Without his camera?” he asked gruffly.

  “I was staring at you when Barney attacked Josh.” Devon was still following her train of thought.

  “So they knew I was here.” He had one eyebrow raised. “How?”

  “I’m ready,” Jo interrupted. She was not dressed in Tyvek whites tonight, but then neither was Devon, she had had to make do with what she’d been wearing inside the zendo.

  “This way, Jo.” Loch held back the branches of privet that led around the crime scene. “We’re going through the garden to avoid making more unnecessary tracks.”

  “Great.” She plodded after them, expounding on her displeasure with as many guttural sounds as possible. “No offense, Halsey, but I don’t get the glamour of living out here.”

  “That’s because you’re only meeting the dead. Of course, they’re nicer than the summer people!”

  Jo pulled out her penlight and shined it into Godwyn’s obsidian eyes. “Looks like he was drugged.”

  “Did you check that?” Loch asked, pointing to a green thermos lying on its side under Godwyn’s body.

  “I’m leaving it until the van arrives. I don’t even have anything to bag with yet,” Devon told him, pointing to Josh’s shoes secured in a paper grocery bag.

  “Probably Norflex, like the last two,” Jo said under her breath.

  “Probably.” Devon appreciated Jo’s acknowledgment.

  Jo began her assessment. “Nice carving job. Just one thrust through his gut, like Gabe, only cleaner. No wounds around the eyes either.”

  “The murderer didn’t know him as well as Gabe and Beka?” Loch wondered out loud.

  “Josh and Godwyn are pretty close …” Devon started to say.

  “Maybe he came back to make sure he was dead,” Loch finished her around.

  Jo pulled out her thermometer and checked the temperature of the air. “Twenty degrees.” Then she stuck it in the ear of the body and waited. “Rigor is set and th
e body temperature is seventy-three degrees; I figure the loss is an average of five degrees per hour with this cold weather. It’s five-thirty now. We’re looking at time of death somewhere between eleven and twelve, but closer to eleven.”

  Devon checked Loch’s list of times people exited the zendo during kinhin, and nodded as he pointed to where he had written, “11:10-Josh. Back-11:40.”

  That was that.

  “The other marks were made postmortem again?”

  “Would you let somebody carve you up if you were still alive?” Jo quipped.

  “Devon, make sure you get the ideogram on his chest. You can work on that here and fax Isshu from Hans’s office.”

  “I’ll come in and finish up,” she told him.

  “By the time you’re done here it’ll be time for the service. Frank will bring the evidence back to the labs and start processing it. You stay. It’s all nuts and bolts from here. We won’t need you,” Loch said.

  “I can skip the service.”

  “Would you follow an order for once in your life? I want you on the carving and the tape. Oh, and take Beka’s uncles to the airport.”

  “That’s not police work!”

  “It’s the most important part of police work, taking care of the victim’s family. Check in with me after you get the videotape from Alex, there might be something else to nail into Shapiro’s coffin.”

  “I can hear you two whispering!” Jo chided halfheartedly.

  They moved away and watched silently as she finished her prelim. “I’m done. Get that thermos to the lab after you print it. Brennen, I’ll see you for the autopsy. Early today. I’m going straight in. What time will you be there?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  Devon opened her mouth to object but caught Loch’s eye and kept quiet.

  “Eight o’clock, then.”

  “We’ll have this wrapped up before the Mr. Imamuras leave today.” He patted Devon on the shoulder and motioned for Jo to follow him back around the perimeter of the scene. “And congratulations.”