by Noel Hynd
But the murderer hadn't stopped there. Or maybe he hadn't started there, either. The victim's right hand had been cut off, too. Then the instrument of death, which appeared to have been a sword, had been laid across the area of the neck where the neck would have joined the head.
The head had been placed on a dresser before the body, much the way something holy would be placed on an altar. At the foot of the dresser was a wooden box. A neat, little, rosewood affair, made up as a tiny coffin.
O'Hara blew out a breath and looked at the container.
“The hand, I assume?”
The young cop had had the misfortune to delve into the rosewood and discovered the contents. He would never forget it.
“The hand,” the young cop said, choking back a major league projectile of vomit. “The killer”-he drew a brave breath-”apparently mutilated the corpse by-”
“I can see what he did, Officer,” O'Hara said softly. “I've seen this before. Similar case several years back.” He shook his head.
Samuelson stood by awkwardly. O'Hara looked back to the torso and somehow knew that this type of scene could only come with a winter blizzard. It always seemed to.
Captain Mallinson appeared again from somewhere, foul-smelling cheroot and all. “Samuelson,” he said, mercifully dismissing the younger officer from the room, “get out of here before you barf on my boots.”
“Yes, sir,” the kid said, gratitude suggested by his tone.
“Now you see why I called you, huh, you dickhead,” said Mallinson. “I wanted you to take a good, hard look at the crime scene before the local flatfoots come in to trample the evidence. Before the M.E. goes to work, before our camera guy arrives to take the 'prom photos.’”
“Yeah,” O'Hara answered. “I see.”
“I want to hear it from your own mellifluous vocal chords,” Mallinson said. “Can you do that? Talk to me.”
“It's a Gary Ledbetter job all over again,” Frank O'Hara said. “Can't mistake it. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“I didn't wake up this morning wanting to hear that, no. But it's what I thought you'd say,” Mallinson said. He pondered the point for a moment. “And Gary Ledbetter sat down in the electric chair in Florida this past summer. I'm right about that?”
“He's dead, Captain. Dead and presumably buried.”
“So why do we get a copycat killing all these years later, huh?” Mallinson asked. “You tell me that.”
“I can't.”
O'Hara continued to stare at the body. He tried to picture what had happened. A ritual slaying, and a brutal one. The victim probably made to crawl and beg for mercy. The killer stood above her with a sword, medieval executioner style. Then when he had the impetus, the sword came swiping down and. . . .
O'Hara looked more closely at the side of the corpse. There were teeth marks on what remained of some of the flesh. Animal teeth marks, O'Hara guessed, probably made by some feral wildlife-a fox, a mink, or one of the eastern coyotes that now roamed the region-sometime within the first two weeks of the slaying. The smell of carrion would have driven any hungry carnivore to break into the old shelter. Plus, O'Hara thought further, the doors and windows had both been broken. It would have been strange if some wild animal hadn't. . . .
“I understand you're retiring,” Mallinson said, mercifully intruding upon O'Hara's reenactment of what had happened. “Don't want to share your life with us state cop yokels any more?”
“Now that you mention it, no. I don't.”
“You moron,” Mallinson said. “No one walks away from a fine job like this. Shit. You're being groomed as my successor.”
“Screw that.”
“Screw it, yourself, Frank,” Mallinson said from within a cloud of exhaust from the cheroot. “I'll outlive all you pansy-assed death dicks, anyway. My undertaker hasn't been born yet.”
O'Hara's gaze rose from the old bloodstains on the floor and settled into Mallinson's older eyes.
“Word travels fast, doesn't it, Captain? My name just went on the 'sixty day' list this morning.”
“And I read the frigging list every day before lunch. I mean, how can a man not want to spend his time crawling through the New Hampshire wilderness looking for psychopaths?” The captain paused. “Before you retire,” Mallinson said, “close this case.”
“What?” O'Hara asked.
“You didn't hear me the first time?”
“Captain, the body's probably been here since summer. The trail's got to be colder than the weather, if there's any trail at all.”
“Yeah. So?”
“An investigation like this can take months.”
“Want your frigging pension? You want to leave with an honorable retirement? Then kick ass. A retirement present from you to me: Find out who this girl was. Then send me the mutt who did it.”
“Captain, you have to be-”
“Kidding? Hey, bullshit, I'm kidding, Frank!”
“How can you throw it at me? There are priorities and jurisdictions. Who was the first detective to arrive?”
Mallinson grinned like a big bear. O'Hara felt the trap close upon him. Reynolds had been sent to speed him up the mountain. The only other cops on the scene were locals and uniformed Staties. The captain had seen to it: O'Hara had been the first detective on the premises.
O'Hara felt his spirits sink.
“Frank, listen to me,” Mallinson said. “You're familiar with the Ledbetter case. So you'll bring that much insight to a copycat case. And there's something else, too.”
“What's that?”
“Until you retire, Frank, you're still the best on this force. In your sleep you got more smarts than my other zombies. Granted, you got your head scrambled with these neurons or neuroses or whatever you got. And Lord knows, you're probably hitting the Irish penicillin pretty hard in your free time.”
O'Hara didn't feel like listening to either the compliments or the misstatements. “I'm off booze almost completely.”
“That's what I hear. I called that Jewish girl from Boston you been seeing.”
“Dr. Steinberg?”
“That's the one. The psychiatrist.”
“She's a psychologist.”
“She says you're fit for complete duty. In fact, a big case might help you. That's all I want to hear.”
“So I win today, huh?”
“Fly solo on the case if you like,” Mallinson said. “Or I'll assign a couple of officers to help you. It's your choice. Wrap it up by Christmas and I'll see that an extra couple of weeks of vacation pay lands in your envelope when you leave.”
O'Hara listened, and Mallinson forged ever onward.
“Maybe you can find out fast who the victim was,” Mallinson mused. “You know how it works. If she was trash, the case is lower priority than if she's someone's wife or daughter.”
The usual crap, O'Hara thought, where the “quality” of the victim became a factor in how many detectives were assigned. “Thanks, Frank,” the captain concluded. “Talk to me when you have something. That's all.”
O'Hara watched the big man leave the death chamber. Alone with the cadaver, O'Hara suddenly felt awkward. He supposed it was nerves. Moments later, a police four-wheel jumped to life outside. Mallinson had accomplished everything he'd set out to do at the crime scene. Now the captain was going home.
Not so with O'Hara. He spent the next half hour with his attention turned to the mutilated female corpse, suddenly aware again how brutally cold it was.
He borrowed a notepad from Reynolds, and his better forensic instincts shifted into gear. From long habit, he set aside the notion that the mutilated remains had been someone's daughter-and maybe someone's wife, sister, mother, or lover.
There would be time for those thoughts later, when and if he needed an extra impetus to continue on the case. It was his job now to take the first steps that would lead to the discovery of a murderer. So he trawled for clues, vigilant for perhaps the one mistake that the killer had made, before the
backup teams came in and walked all over the evidence. As he worked, visions of Gary Ledbetter tap-danced not so attractively before his eyes.
Why would someone copy a psychopath like Gary? And how would someone have known Gary's modus operandi so well? How, when Ledbetter had appeared to be a typical “lone wolf” killer?
By quarter after six, O'Hara was finished.
It was no more than eighteen degrees in the cabin and, upon O'Hara's conclusion of work at the scene, the ancillary people were ready to come in and mess things up.
A police crime photographer-a fat guy named Leonard without whom no such corpse scene was complete in southern New Hampshire-was first to enter the cabin. The prom photos, Mallinson liked to call them. The photographer took the usual eight-by-ten color glossies, then returned with a camcorder and repeated the procedure. The photographs and the videotape would become reference pieces for the police investigation. They could also serve as evidence in court.
Then the Medical Examiner, Dr. Vincent Paloheima, went to work. Paloheima was a big, hulking, insensitive Finnish American with white hair, who still spoke in the accent of the old country. He was usually adept but was not above major blunders.
O'Hara hated to watch Paloheima work almost as much as Paloheima enjoyed fussing with dead people. Gloved fingers in the eyeholes, coming out with a gelatinous substance that defied the temperature. Then there was some gunk with a minty medicinal odor that Paloheima rubbed on the flesh of the dead woman's arms. It smelled like the deodorants that people spray in public latrines, creating the stench of pine-scented toilet seats. All this mixed with the residual stink of Captain Mallinson's cheap cheroot.
The examiner made his way down the cadaver, working with cotton swabs, taking measurements, rubbing ointments, and finally using a scalpel to take a small sample of the remaining flesh. He dipped the skin in and out of the shadows created by the emergency lamps, then placed it in a plastic bag with no label. When Paloheima came to where the right wrist had been severed, O'Hara had seen enough. He turned and left the room.
There was a loud rumbling noise outside.
At first O'Hara thought it was an engine, maybe a helicopter arriving. But when he arrived at the broken cabin door and looked out, he realized that it was the wind again, howling out of the north with another great, big, wintery roar.
And again he felt his stomach churn. As O'Hara had inspected the death scene, the blizzard had only heightened. How the hell, when the hell, were they even going to get the body of the dead woman out of there?
Yet he already knew the answer: after the storm had subsided. A day from now. Two days, when the roads reopened. Three days, maybe. The snowfall looked as if it might never stop. Then O'Hara realized that with Captain Mallinson's departure, he, O'Hara, was the ranking officer on the scene. He was in charge. And he knew damned well he couldn't dismiss himself for the day.
O'Hara stared at the storm and cursed violently to himself. Why couldn't this grisly discovery have waited two months? If the murder had gone undetected by the time the mountain was impacted by snow, well, no one might have found the dead woman until spring. By that time O'Hara would have been gone. Instead, this death had reached out and grabbed him by the lapels.
He wished he had a flask of bourbon. He could have handled one hell of a belt right then. Like half the flask, and Dr. Julie be damned.
Then he caught himself: depression from work and the weather. Professional pressure. The urge to take a drink. Galloping paranoia. These were all the things that he and Dr. Steinberg had worked for the last few months to overcome.
Don't let yourself regress now, he told himself. He and the lady shrink had worked too hard to get his head screwed back on nice and tight. He would not regress, he told himself.
O'Hara's gaze drifted back to the damnable snow which fell as mercilessly as it did silently, dropping a heavy white mantle over the assemblage of police vehicles.
Partially to prove that he was not intimidated by it, and also to momentarily escape the death cabin, he stepped out into the snowfall. He walked several paces, inhaling the frigid air, feeling the snow sweep against his face. When he looked up again and surveyed the area, something else caught his eye. Absurdly, young Samuelson was busy with thick yellow tape, marking off the cabin as a crime scene. As if a bunch of Boy Scouts or tourists were going to come tramping through and want to wander in.
Samuelson's actions were so wasteful of police time that O'Hara opened his mouth to tell the young cop not to bother. But then O'Hara remembered that the kid was simply going by the handbook or acting upon Captain Mallinson's instructions, whichever had come first. So O'Hara let it go.
Then his smile changed abruptly to a shiver. Some unpleasant feeling stirred within him, something that made him uneasy. He realized what it was. An internal snapshot from one of those disturbing dreams he had endured the previous summer had suddenly emerged.
Along with the dream came its soundtrack. Words and music by an unknown author. Certainly not Sinatra.
Ask yourself, what is your greatest fear?
What are you truly afraid of? What is it that could happen that you fear the most?
O'Hara looked again at the cabin. He stared at it for several seconds, feeling the storm upon him. He began to sense an aura around the place, something deeply disturbing and unnatural.
Something very similar to that night the previous August when he had awakened and sensed a presence in his home. He had from time to time in his career felt similar strong sensations around death scenes.
But never this strong. Never this distasteful and repugnant. Never quite like this one. And he hadn't even been drinking.
Chapter Four
At eleven P.M. that same evening a state trooper named Jack McConnell drove O'Hara back down the mountain. O'Hara began to reflect on all that touched upon Gary Ledbetter. One might have thought that the murders would have stopped the previous summer when executioners in Florida finally had their way with Gary.
But even that was proving wrong.
Fatigue hung over O'Hara. The snow had eased off, but only slightly, and no plow had yet touched the rural routes. McConnell drove a state police jeep that followed the tire tracks of the police vehicles that had come and gone earlier that day.
“How much snow did we get today?” O'Hara absently asked his driver. “Anybody hear?”
“Ten, eleven inches,” McConnell answered. He glanced from the jeep. “Pretty ain't it?” he offered.
“I hate it.”
“Yeah,” McConnell said, suddenly agreeing. “A damned pain if you have to go anywhere. To be honest, I hate it, too.”
But O'Hara wasn't even listening. He stared out the side window, his eyes heavy. But his mind was far away, rattling skeletons from the past.
Seven years ago? A lucky number for an unlucky case. But that was how far back O'Hara's involvement in the Ledbetter case had begun. In 1986.Taking a longer view, of course, some might have said that the Ledbetter murder spree might actually have begun a dozen years earlier, closer to 1981when the first of Ledbetter's purported victims met her demise.
But this was not O'Hara's moment for understanding human behavior, particularly in its depths of homicidal depravity. What sort of bent pathology prompts a man to behave like Ledbetter, he wondered. To murder a woman, decapitate her, then hack off a hand as a coda. And why would . . .?
Then O'Hara caught himself.
Don't be crazy, he thought. The case in this cabin is fresh. Maybe six weeks or two months old. This slaying echoes the Ledbetter murders but it is in no way associated with them. It cannot be! Ledbetter was locked on Death Row for three years before his execution. I helped put him there, O'Hara reminded himself. Gary is dead. We all understand that as well as the finality of death. To think otherwise is preposterous.
Consoled by this argument, O'Hara then moved his thoughts to their next logical plateau. If Ledbetter was dead, what sicko had made such a careful study of him that he could rec
reate a Ledbetter crime scene with such perfection? Who could have found inspiration in Gary Ledbetter?
Who, indeed? And why?
And, considering how many weeks had evidently passed since the murder, how many thousands of miles away might that killer now be? Is he out there somewhere killing again? Selecting another victim? Or is he very close? Still in New Hampshire. Just biding his time . . .waiting. . . .
In the jeep, O'Hara closed his eyes for a moment and thought about it. . . .
Gary Ledbetter. The case that would never rest. The lynchpin of Frank O'Hara's twenty-year career. And here it was bubbling up again in O'Hara's final months as a cop.
A few of the facts came back. So did the chronology of O'Hara's life.
Frank O'Hara had always been viewed as a cipher, even to those who knew him. A cipher and sometimes-like Ledbetter-a man who fit nowhere perfectly.
He had grown up in Chicago, the only son of an electrician and a City Hall secretary. As a kid in one of Mayor Daley's favorite wards, he was too open-minded to be a good redneck, racebaiting Irishman, too agnostic to be a good Catholic, and yet too hard-nosed to be considered suspiciously sensitive. His scholastic record was excellent, and he was the best percentage hitter on his high-school baseball squad.
But the universities he liked were into minority recruiting at the time and, unable to get past his name and address, saw him as a blue-collar yahoo. The places that liked him, institutions that specialized in straight-arrow Catholic kids, he perceived as finishing schools for anti-intellectual bigots. In 1965 at age twenty, he found his way into the United States Navy, instead.