The Haunting of Rachel Harroway- Book 1

by J. S. Donovan

  “Lastly was Tristan Ball. He’s the current Parks and Recreation director. Still bland looking. Still has the mustache. He was happy to cooperate and told me that most of the school thought that the girls were being murdered even though that’s not the official town narrative. He told me to look into the cop on the case. But you were already a step ahead in that regard. Ball seemed available to discuss the case later.”

  They turned back to the news broadcast.

  “It’s a start, at least,” Rachel said.

  Peak drank his beer. “If any of these killings links back to these officials or their families, we’ve just swatted the hornets’ nest. They paid off cops then, they can do it now. Old money’s a dangerous thing.”

  Rachel saw Dakota and the six other girls watching from the back of the room with their blood-red eyes and raw necks. Cocky from her drink, Rachel locked eyes with her partner and smiled. “Let the hornets come.”

  “I’ll toast to that,” Peak raised his tall glass.

  And, together, they killed their beers.

  In the master bedroom of her two-story 1892 Queen Anne manse, Rachel lay awake in her large bed. Outside, the wind whistled and rattled the old house’s loose gutters. She pulled up her covers and rolled on her side. God, she missed Brett. She wondered if her ex-husband ever thought about her in the late hours of the evening. Probably not as he had a wife of his own, another artistic type. If there was any plus to the divorce, it was that Rachel got the house.

  Something moved downstairs. The walls groaned. A faint laughter echoed through the house. Orphans, Rachel groaned. She needed her smoothie. It was the only thing that shut them up.

  Around 4 a.m., Rachel’s phone rang. She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until she answered.

  “Harroway,” she said with a tired, quiet voice. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

  “This is Dispatch. We have 10-67 on Horse Cove.”

  Rachel forced herself up and pulled her lamp chain, wincing at the sudden burst of light. “More bones?”

  “No,” the operator replied. “This one is fresh.”

  6

  The Trophy

  Outside the Hudson Library, under the pulse of police lights, lay the girl.

  She wore a dirty sweater, yellow skirt, and black leggings. Silky brown hair flowed over her purple face like a mop head. Dry, cold and lifeless, one visible eye looked out to the gathering spectators.

  Finishing off her tea, Rachel Harroway parked on the opposite side of the street in front of a strip of mom and pop shops, and approached the library as the caution tape was tacked and spread. Sifting by a few late-night spectators, Rachel ducked underneath. Officer Jacob Jones approached her. His blond hair was in a rut and his thick golden mustache hung heavy above his frown.

  “A local called it in,” Jones explained. “It’s not pretty.”

  “What do we know?” Rachel asked, nearing the limp body.

  “The librarian was heading over to unlock the door when she spotted the body,” Jones explained. “We’re looking into surveillance cameras now for further better details.”

  Rachel knelt beside the woman while Detective Peak approached from her right, slinging on his jacket over his shoulder.

  “That’s her?” Peak said.

  With pursed lips, Rachel nodded. She recognized the outfit and delicate features. It was the honor student Rachel saw in the library less than fifteen hours ago. Why she’d been discarded outside of the library and how she died, Rachel was determined to find out.

  Curling her finger, Rachel gestured for the coroner to flip the facedown cadaver. After the chalk lines were marked on the asphalt, the coroner’s gloved hands grabbed the girl’s body and gently turned her on her back. The teenager’s neck rolled lifelessly to the side and the tip of her tongue peeked out of her purple lips.

  “Strangulation, without a doubt,” the squatting, grey-haired coroner said, pointing his finger at the deep, raw circular wound around the girl’s thin neck. “Hemp rope, by the looks of it.”

  “Is her neck broken?” Rachel asked, noting that the other victims neither had snapped or dislocated vertebrae, excluding the damage dealt by forty years in the elements.

  The coroner gently lifted the girl's neck and massaged his fingers up and down the cervical spine. He looked up to Rachel with his ice-colored eyes and shook his head. “Still intact. He didn’t hang her. The perpetrator choked her with the rope in his hands.”

  It fits the pattern. A chill dancing up Rachel’s spine. She thanked the coroner and fished her hand into the girl’s jacket pocket. She withdrew a wallet with a twenty-dollar bill, family photo, and driver’s license inside.

  Maxine Gunther. Murdered at seventeen years old. Organ donor.

  “There’s dirt on her ankles,” Peak pointed out. “And she’s missing both shoes.”

  Small leaves and barbed seeds clung to Maxine’s hair and stuck to her clothing. Thin scrapes decorated her pale forearms; a hostile encounter with thorns, most likely. She was running... no, struggling through a wooded area when she was killed. Is that how the killer treated all his victims? Like prey to be hunted and slaughtered? The idea sickened Rachel.

  Peak paced. He rubbed the corner of his mouth with his finger and thumb. “This is a warning,” he said soberly. “If not, he would’ve concealed the body, not displayed it like a dead rat on the town’s doorstep.”

  Rachel studied the dead girl while listening to her partner. “You’re saying that she is dead because of us?”

  “We unmasked the mound. We started asking questions. Logically, yes. We share in that responsibility.”

  Never before had a death been on Rachel’s hands. How did one reconcile? How can one? Rachel stood up and looked back at the gathering spectators and disrupted town. “A warning would’ve been a threatening letter to the police. This is a promise. How this killer wants us to know that he’s back.”

  They studied the scene a few moments longer, discovering tire tracks that peeled out into the main road and not much else. Peak interviewed the witnesses. They told him about the car and the shadowy figure that pushed the body onto the asphalt. Rachel sought after a different witness.

  She meandered around the parking lot outside the library, subtly casting glances at nearby trees or behind street lights. Her results were unfruitful. More so off to the side of the library building. Hands on her hips, Rachel studied the dozen spectators filming the crime scene with their smartphones from the other side of the yellow tape.

  Amidst the elderly onlookers, honeymooners, and curious youth stood Maxine. Trembling and terrified, her red-rimmed eyes stared at her lifeless corpse twenty feet away. Her right hand held the raw skin of her throat, disbelieving. As Rachel approached, Maxine locked eyes with her like a bird of prey. Her fear turned to anger and she released a rattling cry that escalated to envelop all the surrounding noise. Straight-faced, Rachel continued forward. Maxine slipped into the crowd.

  “Who’s the girl?” a bystander asked as Rachel ducked under the tape. Rachel ignored him and scanned the back of the crowd. No Maxine.

  She met with Peak inside the library to review the parking lot footage.

  “Did she say anything?” Peak whispered as an officer fast-forwarded the tape.

  Rachel sighed. “She vanished before I could get anything out of her.”

  “If there’s going to be another murder, you need to find her quickly.”

  The footage played in real time. A 1975 Ford Granada--a bulky four-door sedan the color of wet sand--reversed into the library and popped the trunk. Its license plate had been removed. A man stepped out. He wore a plaid shirt, dark jeans, and muddy boots. A burlap sack covered his head, tightened around his neck with a drawstring. Two eye holes were cut into the sack.

  The officer with the remote cursed under his breath. Rachel flipped open her sketch book and studied her replica of the doodle from the fogged mirror. She showed the crude sketch to Peak, who bounced his coal-colored
eyes from the page to the screen, unable to deny the shocking similarities.

  The man wearing the burlap sack grabbed Maxine’s wrists and dragged her body out of the vehicle, where she plopped on the ground like a bag of potatoes. Leaving her where she lay, the man slammed the trunk shut, climbed into the driver’s seat, and sped down the road.

  “We need footage from every surrounding building and traffic light, stat,” Rachel said twice before the officer rushed out of the room.

  “This happened two hours ago,” Peak said, tapping the time stamp on the screen.

  The footage captured from the surrounding shops didn’t do too much in tracking the vehicle, which wasn’t unsurprising in a rural area even in a post 9/11 world. Most of the surrounding roads going through and to Highlands were labyrinths of hilly slopes and tree-flanked streets. The few houses that they visited on the predicted path had no recollection of any car passing by late at night, because all were asleep during that time.

  Undercover patrol cars returned to town in case the old Ford returned. Also, Lieutenant James McConnell encouraged the media to blast images of the car and the sack-wearing killer across the news and websites, in hopes that the constant stream of coverage would bring out the killer, or at least frighten him. The name that was given to him was The Roper.

  After driving down a few back roads in the direction which she thought the ‘70s Ford had gone, Rachel pulled off to the side of the street and rubbed her head. Dakota and the other six Orphans watched her through the window. When Rachel looked at them, they vanished.

  “What are you thinking?” Peak asked.

  “I think that I need to find Maxine.”

  “Can’t you asked the other Orphans to scout for you?” Peak asked.

  “They don’t work like that. I cannot control their actions. Sometimes they can interact with the physical world and other times they can’t. The supernatural is chaotic and unpredictable. What makes perfect sense to them doesn’t mean anything to us, and vice versa.”

  “So there’s no rules or order?”

  Rachel shrugged. “There might be, but it seems like the only solid is that they won’t leave until I give them closure.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because I’m the only one that can interact with them. Speaking of which, get me some whiskey. Intoxication helps me see them better.”

  Peak chuckled. “Trustworthy results.”

  Rachel glared at him. “We can solve this case the old-fashioned way, i.e. wait for the killer to escape or murder again so we can find more useless evidence, or we can do it the pragmatic way. Now let’s visit the liquor store before we get to the morgue.”

  “Medical Examiner” was carved on the sign outside the inviting and well-maintained coroner's office. However, only a few hours after the murder, the town of Highlands was all but peaceful. There had been a few murders in the past, yes, but these were domestic disputes or second degree charges. With a serial killer on the loose, the size of the town didn’t matter. It was terrifying news.

  “The honor students’ murders were forty years old,” Peak stated what they both already knew as they pulled into the small parking lot and found a spot near the back. “We could be dealing with a copycat.”

  “It’s possible,” Rachel said doubtfully, pulling out the bottle of whiskey from the paper bag. “But to act this fast? Also, how would he know about the killer’s ensemble? The mask’s sack is exactly what the girls drew on the fogged mirror. The copycat would either have to have met the killer before and seen his get-up, or got a peek at my sketch book.”

  “He could be law enforcement, or he could be related to the original killer,” Peak suggested. “In an eighteen-month period, this Roper systematically strangled seven girls and then stopped without reason. What’s a better explanation than that he died and now someone else takes up his mantle four decades later in his memory, or for fame or some other petty reason?”

  Rachel took a big gulp of the amber liquid and winced. The whiskey went down like fire. “Why are you so against this being the same killer?”

  “The average age for a serial killer is thirty-one. Thus, the man in the video would have to be in his seventies, give or take a few years. Do you really think he’d be up for chasing a girl through the woods and then essentially strangling a girl with his own strength? No. He’d break a hip.”

  “What if he wasn’t that old?” Rachel took another swing. She was feeling it now. “He could’ve been in his early twenties. After killing Dakota, he had to go college or something, that ended his spree. I would’ve said that his only targets were the first seven girls from the honor roll, but now that there is a new death, a personal vendetta doesn’t seem to be the cause.”

  “Copycat or not, the corrupt cop you talked to was paid off big time, so we know that the original killer had money and ties with law enforcement.” Peak researched the town history on his phone and then cursed. “None of the town’s chairmen died in 1977.”

  After a final sip, Rachel wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and slid the bottle back in the bag. “We’ll need to look into those who had ties to the honor students back then and see what changes they underwent after March of 1977. But first let’s talk to Maxine before my buzz runs out.”

  “That doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon,” Peak replied with a sly smile.

  Air conditioning chilled the interior of the medical examiner’s office, and everything smelled sterile within the white washed walls footed by glossy tile. The coroner approached them from the hall. His grey hair combed over the patchy bald spot on his crown, and his eyes were almost silver. Wearing sky-blue scrubs, he smiled kindly at Rachel and Peak.

  “Apologies. I wasn’t expecting anyone from the precinct so soon. The autopsy will be underway shortly,” he explained.

  “We would like to see the body of Maxine Gunther,” Peak said.

  Rachel stood by him, feeling lightheaded and finding it hard to stay still.

  “Ah, yes,” the coroner twisted his heels and gestured for them to follow. “I’m afraid you will not learn much from the cadaver. There’s not a droplet of blood under her fingernails nor anything that alludes to the identity of her killer.”

  “We’ll see,” Peak faked a smile. He lent a supporting hand to Rachel as they navigated the hall until they reached the examination room.

  Seventeen-year-old Maxine lay on a metal slab with a sheet covering up to her neck. There was a desk in the back of the room and a body locker to the side. The coroner slid on disposable gloves from a box outside the door and handed a pair to both Rachel and Peak. Rachel hesitated for a moment before putting them on.

  “You feeling ill, Detective?” the coroner asked genuinely.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Rachel replied. Her words weren’t slurring. That was a good thing.

  “Good,” he replied. “Otherwise, I would have to refrain from letting you enter.”

  They pushed through the door, and more than a half dozen Orphans bombarded Rachel’s sight. An old man huddled in a corner, a woman pacing about the room talking to herself, a middle-aged businessman smacking his head against the wall, and someone thrashing inside the cadaver shelf’s drawer. Rachel froze, careful not to look any in the eye. Their appearance hadn’t been this bad since when she first moved into her 1892 Queen Anne manse, where she learned about her powers.

  Peak wandered over to Maxine’s cadaver while Rachel looked about the room until she spotted Orphan Maxine curled up under the examiner’s desk. Rachel batted an eye at Peak. He picked up the signal and began to BS the coroner. Rachel moved to the desk and grabbed a pen off the top. She knelt to eye level with the girl.

  “Maxine,” she whispered.

  In a split second, the girl went from hiding her head in her knees to glaring while backing farther into the chair well beneath the desk.

  “I want to help you,” Rachel asked, not taking her eyes off the girl. “I’m a detective. I can catch the person
who did this to you.”

  Maxine trembled. Her eyes were wide and terror-filled like a petrified animal.

  “Maxine. Let me give you closure.”

  The girl shook her head rapidly.

  “You okay, Detective?” the coroner asked.

  Rachel grunted and turned back, presenting the pen. “Dropped this. Do you mind if I talk to Peak?”

  The coroner stepped out of the room and watched from the glass window on the hall. Rachel spoke quietly to Peak. “She is barely responding to me.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s terrified. I don’t think she knows she’s dead. Sometimes it takes them minutes to understand the revelation, and for others it may take decades or centuries.”

  Peak set his jaw.

  Rachel chewed on her inner cheek. “There is another way.”

  Peak turned his coal-colored eyes on her.

  “I can live the murder.” According to Mom’s journal, that is.

  Peak scoffed.

  “Out of all the stuff you’ve seen me do, you don’t believe it?”

  “There’s an explanation to your Gift, or what you call it, science just hasn’t uncovered it. But living a murder sounds like a stupid and dangerous idea, real or not.”

  “That’s because it is,” Rachel agreed. “I believe there’s a chance I could die.”

  Peak thought for a moment, hands in the back of his pockets. “You confident this will work?” he asked.

  Rachel nodded. “Yeah.” She wasn’t sure if she truly was or if that was the whiskey talking.

  “… Okay,” Peak said. “Do it.”

  Rachel was taken slightly aback by the casualness of her partner’s reply. If he were Brett, there would’ve been a speech and heavy protest. Alas, the decision was hers alone. They could keep pursuing leads like the girl’s parents and classmates, but if Maxine’s death was on her hands for uncovering that mound, then it was her responsibility to find the killer before another person died.