Double usage

by Christine Bols

  ‘But that predictability made her an easy victim,’ David said.

  ‘I’m afraid it did.’

  They closed the door behind them and stepped back into the kitchen. Dolan and Lois arrived at the same time.

  ‘We are done here,’ Dolan said while clapping Tim on the shoulder as if they were long time friends. His breath reeked of garlic.

  The bungalow on the opposite side of the road, where they had seen the woman with the baby, was a bit bigger than Bodini’s and was painted white. When David rang the doorbell the door opened almost immediately. The woman had the baby in her arms again and looked at them in a questioning way.

  ‘Something happened to Beatrice?’ she asked, even before the inspectors asked her a question.

  ‘Did you know her?’ Tim asked.

  ‘Did….’, the woman repeated sadly, ‘past tense.’ She kissed her agitated baby. ‘I didn’t really know her all that well. I only moved here a couple of months ago, since my divorce,’ she added in an excusing way. ‘She is dead, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m afraid so ma’am. Her body was found last week in Corvallis.’

  The woman sighed and looked very dismayed. Her lips trembled and she constantly rubbed her babies head. The child clearly couldn’t appreciate that because it started to cry loudly. Further questioning didn’t reveal a lot. She couldn’t remember when she had last seen Beatrice nor had she ever seen a white van in the street. The inspectors thanked her and went back to their car. Claire Simmons had planted herself next to the vehicle, making sure she would hear the news first hand. She did seem worried but the main expression on her face was curiosity. When Tim told her Beatrice had indeed died, she opened her mouth and put her hands in front of it. She was still standing like that when the inspectors drove away.

  When Tim came home that evening, the house was dark. Cam’s cabriolet wasn’t in the drive. A nasty feeling came over him as he turned on the light in the hall and threw his jacket over the bannister. He went straight to the kitchen. No light there either. Three steps at a time he flew up the stairs. Maybe she hadn’t been feeling well and had gone to bed. Or maybe she had to go on a business trip and hadn’t told him. That would be understandable, he hadn’t been very accessible lately. But when he opened the wardrobe he knew. Defeated he sat down on the bed and put his head between his hands. All of a sudden he saw the yellow note on the bed stand. On top of it lay a silver ankle chain. ‘Good luck,’ it said, ‘you don’t seem to need me anymore. Please don’t call.’

  He felt his heart skip a beat. He never expected this. He had blown it. He had driven her out of the house because of that stupid night with Susan, of which he didn’t even remember anything. That dammed business with Sean hadn’t helped things either. He felt the tears poor over his face, but in a strange way he felt relieved too. He remembered the moment he had met Cammy. It was at an art exhibition in Albany three years ago. Slowly but surely he had climbed out of the valley after Gwen died and he had felt open for a relationship again. At first they were just good friends, but soon it became a passionate affair. Five months later she left her rental apartment in Albany and moved in with him. He had had to get used to having a woman in his house again, to see all the female stuff in the bathroom, to the aroma of tasty food coming out of the kitchen every day. After Gwen’s death he had not taken care of himself very well. He had gone from take away Chinese to hamburgers, pizza and French fries and back to take away. Cam had given him all the time he needed to adjust and had done her best to please him. But even with her pampering, he felt the void that Gwen had left. He still missed her. It wasn’t the same with Cammy. He got irritated with small things. The biggest problem was the fact that Cammy had decorated the house the way she wanted it, and had taken all of Gwen’s things to the attic. He never mentioned it, but it ate his heart away. Slowly he went down the stairs and took the half pack of Marlboro’s out of his jacket that was still hanging over the bannister. Then he took a bottle of whisky , dropped down on the couch and filled his glass almost to the top. With trembling fingers he took a cigarette out of the pack.

  CHAPTER 8

  The penetrating beep of the alarm clock woke Tim. By touch he shut it down and struggled to sit up. His eyes seemed glued together and behind his eyelids he felt grains of sand. Finally he opened his eyes and saw the empty bottle of whiskey on the floor next to the bed. His grey cells slowly started to rearrange themselves. Cam was gone. It was a mystery how he had gotten from the couch downstairs into his bed. By the feel of his head the bottle must have been full when he started it. An acid taste filled his mouth and he assumed his breath would even make a brewery smell good . When he tried to get up, painful twinges reverberated through his head. He moaned and dragged himself to the bathroom. Seeing he was still fully dressed, he took off his clothes and opened the shower tap. He fought the upcoming nausea, but lost the battle. Just in time he opened the toilet lid, and like the last time this happened he swore he would never drink again and like that last time it would go wrong again, like all other things in his life seemed to head for a disaster. A pale man with dark messy hair and watery eyes looked at him from the mirror. Although he was thirty five, this man looked at least fifty.

  The blinding headache had devolved into a throbbing buzz. His stomach still protested at the thought of food, but it was livable with. Before he left he had drunk a few glasses of tap water, but had skipped breakfast anyway. Just the thought of it made him retch.

  Traffic wasn’t too bad but he kept his eyes fixed on the road. It started to rain. The monotonic sound of the wipers made him sleepy. He turned on the radio and tuned to a pop station. The last tones of ‘Telephone’ by Lady Gaga faded and Britney Spears started her ‘Oops’, when she got suddenly interrupted by a news flash. He turned the volume up.

  ‘On Wednesday June2, the dead body of a woman was found in Pioneer Park in Corvallis. According to a senior police source it is the body of twenty two year old Beatrice Bodini from Salem, a psychology student at Corvallis University. She had been missing for a few weeks. Stay tuned for more to come.’

  ‘Dammit Foster’, he shouted out loud. Luckily his boss hadn’t given more details, because that would have really set things off. They could do without this crap. When he thought about it, it was surprising that the news hadn’t leaked sooner. He turned left on Harrison Boulevard and a few minutes later he drove into the police parking lot. While he was locking up the car he saw Foster hurry towards him.

  ‘I just heard’, Tim said rather coolly when they shook hands. Foster had that really annoying habit of shaking hands with every officer as if they hadn’t seen each other in months. Puzzled Foster stared at him.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to affect you overmuch,' Foster said. ‘By the way, how come you heard about it already?’

  ‘Well’, Tim said laconically, ‘I belong to this select group of people with a radio in the car, and it even does news flashes.’

  Foster shook his head. ‘No, this is not about Bodini. It’s something completely different.’

  ‘Oh, and what might that be?’ His words sounded harsher than he intended them to. He saw Foster hesitate.

  ‘Halloway had an accident last night. It’s rather bad.’

  Tim looked at him in disbelief and didn’t know how to respond. This had to be a bad joke but Foster looked serious.

  ‘He and Frank came home from dinner in the Bento Oriental. They drove head-on into a pick-up which swerved from his lane. Frank died on the spot.’

  ‘And David?’ His voice trembled.

  ‘Halloway was taken to Good Sam with several fractures, a collapsed lung and severe internal bleeding as far as the medics could tell. The doctors seem …’ He didn’t finish his sentence and looked at Tim helplessly. Tim had never seen Foster this way, all shaken up.

  A gloomy atmosphere hung in the office. Juan Rodriguez was talking in a low voice to his partner Dale Johnson. Both had a cup of coffee in front of them of which they took a sip now and t
hen. On the other desk were Andy Covacz and Liz Hawkins. They all looked up when Foster and Tim entered the room. Foster sat down on the corner of Rodriguez’ desk and looked around as if he was inspecting his troops. Tim sat down at his own desk and was painfully aware of the empty chair opposite him. They had been partners for five years now, and although the relationship was awkward in the beginning they soon got used to each other and it got better with every passing day. David wasn’t chatty and rarely took the lead in an investigation, but he was loyal and reliable. He wondered what was going to happen now.

  ‘Deborah’, Foster said softly in the telephone, ‘call Doctor Jones in Good Sam and pass him on to Rodriguez’ extension.’ Without waiting for her answer he put the receiver back on the hook. A few minutes later the phone rang. Foster put it on speaker as he picked up the call and asked the person on the other end how David was doing.

  ‘Well inspector, going by the circumstances he is doing well. He came out of theater an hour ago and is in intensive care at the moment. He is out of danger now but still critical.’

  ‘And the prospects?’

  ‘It’s hard to say at this time. He is on an artificial lung right now and we will keep him in a coma for a few day. His fractures will heal, that isn’t the problem. We also took out his spleen, and that could give complications like infections. I fear it will be a long recovery and after that he will have to be very careful.’

  ‘Thank you doctor. I really appreciate it.’ Foster ended the call and went to his office without saying anything more.

  Without enthusiasm Tim started his PC and checked his mails. Then he went on to the print David had made the week before about the other cases on the West Coast which resembled the Bodini one. According to the list several suspects were interrogated in every case. Only the one in Redding California and the one in Portland Oregon had the same man as a suspect, later released. He leafed through the document but couldn’t concentrate, and decided to make an appointment with the University dean instead, so he could get out of the depressing office. The man was very helpful when he heard what it was about. Anna Wickmeyer had already told him about it and he had heard the news this morning. They arranged to meet at two in the afternoon.

  It was only a short drive from the center of town to the campus. When he passed the library on Monroe he wondered if Lilly Fitzpatrick had turned up yet. When her colleague reported her missing he had phoned her parents. Her mother had told him her daughter called them to say she was going on holiday to Florida and that she had left the cat with a neighbor. They were expecting her back this weekend. Fitzpatrick’s colleague had been very puzzled when he told her this news, and although she didn’t understand it at all, she was reassured slightly.

  Only a few minutes before two he arrived at the main entrance of the building. Thanks to the detailed instructions from the dean he had no trouble finding it. It had stopped raining and a watery sun peeked through the clouds. On a stone placard were the different faculties with next to it the number of the building. Beside it was a ground plan. The university was a village on its own and was spread over several blocks. Psychology was in H314. The central administration building was very large. The entrance hall was contemporary and clean. Behind the desk he saw a woman in her thirties. She was dressed very trendily in white jeans and a white top. A bright red and white shawl hung loosely round her neck. Big silver earrings completed the picture. She clearly had Mexican roots. When he told her he had an appointment with the dean she left her desk and knocked on one of the three doors that gave out onto the hall. The name on the placard was ‘John Henderson – dean.’

  ‘Inspector Sackley for you sir’, she said with a smile on her face. She showed him in and almost inaudibly closed the door behind him. Tim was surprised to see a man his own age. He seemed too young for this job. He had assumed he would be in his fifties. Henderson left his desk and shook Tim’s hand. He looked like a younger version of Michael Douglas. He shoved back the chair in front of his desk and invited Tim to sit down. The desk was covered with all kinds of colored folders and pens. On the side was a picture of a blonde woman who smiled at a toddler on a red tricycle. ‘My wife and son’, the dean said when he saw Tim look at the picture. ‘I’m rather a family man as you can see’, he added. ‘Do you have children inspector Sackley?’

  ‘A daughter of thirteen’, Tim said with a knot in his throat.’ My wife died a few years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that’, Henderson said. Tim nodded. ‘But you wanted information about Beatrice Bodini I believe.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘You have to understand I didn’t know her personally, or knew I mean’, he corrected himself. ‘We have so many students that it’s impossible to know them all. After your call I looked up her file, but I’m afraid it won’t make you any the wiser. She seemed to have been a perfect student, good marks, never any incidents, at least no reported ones. She was in Psychology, but you probably knew that already.’

  ‘When was her last class on Fridays?’

  ‘Let’s see’. He looked at the screen and struck a few keys. ‘Here we are. Last one at four, biological psychology. It ends at five.’

  ‘And most students go home for the weekend I take it?’

  ‘I think most of them do, but there are lots of them that leave on Saturdays or even stay for the weekend. I can’t really say how many. But not all students live on campus you know. There are quite a lot of them who share flats in town.’

  ‘Bodini had a room in the dorm I take it’, Tim said.

  ‘I looked that up already before you came. Yes, she was in the central dorm, room P421. If you want I can ask someone to take you there and show you her room.’

  ‘That would be nice, thank you.’

  Henderson dialed a number on his phone and a few minutes later a young man with a goatee and a baseball cap appeared. He nodded at both men. ‘This is Kevin, representative for the psychology students.’

  Tim thanked Henderson for his help and followed goatee. They took Tim’s car and drove to the dorm. The boy wasn’t very talkative. When Tim asked him if he knew Beatrice Bodini he shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window.

  ‘What do you mean by knowing?’ he asked all of a sudden when Tim wasn’t expecting an answer anymore. ‘I saw her sometimes, but…’

  ‘But what?’ Tim insisted. Kevin shrugged his shoulders again.

  ‘She was rather, how shall I say, a private person. She was very good-looking, but she never went to parties or anything.’

  Tim assumed Kevin had wanted to date Beatrice, but kept his mouth shut. It didn’t matter. He directed his car towards the narrow parking lot. The dorm was a big complex with four floors. The right hand side had been added recently. The bricks were lighter in color. Kevin went inside and pushed the lift button. With a light buzz it came down and when the doors opened a few giggling girls came out. Almost inaudibly the lift zoomed to the fourth floor where they got out. The long corridor had lots of daylight coming through a glass dome in the roof. They stopped at the door of room P421 and Kevin unlocked the door.

  ‘There you are’, he said. ‘Just take the key back to administration when you’re done.’ He turned around and walked away. Tim opened the door and went inside the room. It wasn’t very big. Against the left wall he saw a single bed with a night stand next to it. A small desk was pushed in the corner and had a chair in front of it. On the surface a laptop and some books stacked neatly on top of one another. In the wall next to the door was a built in wardrobe, next to that a small sink, two blue towels on the rod. The shelf over it had a deodorant, a hair brush and some kind of cream. Tim supposed there was a shared bathroom, because there was no toilet or shower in the room. He opened the wardrobe which wasn’t even half filled. Sweaters and T-shirts were neatly folded on the bottom shelf. The shelf above it had a toilet bag with shower gel, shampoo and a few packs of tissues. Next to it a pile of towels. The hangers held a few trousers and jackets, all classi
c and good quality he noticed. At the bottom he saw a light grey track suit with a pink band along the legs, next to it a pair of jogging shoes and two pairs of slippers. Nothing unusual and certainly not very frivolous for a young girl. But he already knew she was respectable. He closed the wardrobe and went on to the desk. He fired up the laptop and in the meantime looked in the drawers. Aside from a few textbooks, pens and a notebook there was not a lot to find. The PC-screen flickered with the Microsoft logo. She had gone with the traditional wallpaper that pictured the desert. No personal touch. He looked at the icons and opened Internet explorer. The history program was empty because Microsoft only kept it for two weeks. Then he looked at the URL’s. He saw tripadvisors.com, youtube.com, holidaylettings.com and a few others he didn’t recognize. He opened Findmadeleine.com, unknown to him too. Immediately he recognized the picture of the angelic face of Madeleine McCann with the coloboma in her right eye. ‘Missing since May 3, 2007. Help us find her’, he saw in big letters. He was familiar with the story of the three year old toddler that had disappeared into thin air from a holiday apartment in Portugal while her parents were dining with friends in a nearby restaurant. It had been covered in the news worldwide, but he had never believed the parents claim she had been abducted. She still hadn’t surfaced and with regular intervals the parents pleaded on TV for money to find her. Then he opened ‘itsyourturn.com’. It was a game site. It was clear her favorites were backgammon, checkers and chess. A few games were still waiting for her move, but most of them she had lost through time outs. On her favorites were the Oregonian on line, the local newspaper, Wikipedia and Amtrak Cascades. The last one she probably used to purchase her train tickets on line. He shut down the PC and decided to take it to the office for further examination. On the nightstand were two books with the stamp of Corvallis library on the inside of the cover. He thought it was strange she didn’t make use of the University library, but looking at the titles he understood why: ‘Doctor to the rescue’ and ‘Love behind closed doors’ were hardly the kind of books she would find in University, not even in the recreational sector. He didn’t understand why an obviously intelligent woman would read this shit. In the upper drawer he found lingerie, solid and practical as he expected. As he went to close the drawer he saw a glimpse of something pink. Startled he pulled out a string with matching push-up bra. This was hardly solid and practical. Maybe she had had a boyfriend after all. It would have been normal but he couldn’t make the connection between that and what he knew about her so far. He put the pink lingerie back in the drawer. In the bottom drawer he found a small photo album and leafed through it. There were mostly pictures of her parents and her aunt. The last one was of Beatrice herself with a white fluffy poodle in her arms. He recognized the background as her bungalow in Salem. When he put the album back in the drawer, he saw another picture in the back, on it a young man in jogging shorts and bare upper body, smiling broadly into the camera. He stood in front of a large billboard and covered part of the name on it. He only saw the letters TIMB on the left side. Probably the sports club Timberhill. Had she worn this pink lingerie for him? Was that the reason she stayed in Corvallis on Friday evenings? It was intriguing. He would have to find this guy. With a shock he realized he would have to find this out all by himself. Since this morning he didn’t have a partner anymore, no more sounding board to try his theories and solutions on. Same at home, no partner anymore. How cruel could life be to make him lose two people in one day? He put the picture in his jacket pocket, shoved the laptop underneath his arm and locked the door again behind him.