A Room For The Dead (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 3)

by Noel Hynd

  Within four weeks, the case seemed made, particularly when O'Hara got a call from Delaware where Wilmington cops had been stuck with a similar investigation. And the Wilmington force knew about one in Virginia.

  Some fiend, as much of tabloid America knew by this time, had allegedly left a string of four girls up and down the east coast. Decapitated and dismembered by the “Pink Ribbon Chopper.” One had been disemboweled. All five had been working-class, and the theory was that the killer had made love to each of them, promised them marriage, then lured them off to isolated spots where he did them in with heavy cutlery after making them crawl. They were all found in the same sorts of places with the same wounds and in the same positions on the ground.

  The people who wrote texts about psychopaths had a field day. So did the two-bit four-color tabloids as well as their equally disgraceful television counterparts. Gary had so much of the lowbrow press covering his arrest that he bordered on an environmental hazard: all those trees becoming newsprint just to write about him.

  “No, sir. I didn't kill any of them girls.” Over and over, such had been Gary's refrain when O'Hara questioned him in Nashua. “I may have romanced them some, but I didn't hurt them none.”

  “Who did, Gary?” O'Hara had pressed.

  “Can't tell you that. Sir.”

  “You know? “

  “Yeah. But I ain’t talking.” A pause, then again with contempt, “Sir.”

  Things snowballed. Georgia found a pink ribbon decapitation, too, making it a quintet, counting Florida. Then, working backwards, O'Hara sent around Gary's picture and got a positive ID out of friends of three of the five female victims. Then when the state attorney general, a snotty, little political hack named Ben Ashton, brought the official charges against the suspect, the detectives celebrated by going on a world-class drunk. One of the sergeants had to pull O'Hara out of a snowbank hours later and take him home to his long-suffering wife before he froze to death.

  “Crazy bastard,” the sergeant had said.

  “Me or Carl or Gary?” O'Hara had asked.

  “All of you. In your own ways.”

  The case marked the high point-to date-of O'Hara's career as a detective. It also marked the end of Reissman's. A grand jury indicted Ledbetter for second degree murder. Two days passed. The prisoner failed to make bail. Then Reissman checked out of work one day and-as friends later pieced it together-spent the evening with an eighteen-year-old mistress in Keene whom his best friend O'Hara didn't even know he had. Reissman went to a bar, put down four vodkas, and went home. It was O'Hara who found him the next morning, a bullet through the head from his own revolver and a suicide note pinned to his chest. Sayonara, world. In keeping with the decade of the heater, it appeared that Reissman had shot himself.

  It was January 1986. Winter, naturally. O'Hara sat on his partner's doorstep for a half hour. Crying. Feeling the tears freeze on his cheeks before other state police cars could arrive.

  Reissman's death hit O'Hara like an express train. Few had noticed, but Reissman had slowly been going crazy on the job. It had all been too much, deeply rooted cynicism combined with daily examples of how the cynicism was justified. There was speculation that something about the Ledbetter case had pushed him over the brink.

  “There's an emotional line in police work,” Captain Mallinson had said to O'Hara two days after Reissman's death. They sat in the captain's office, just the two of them. “Once a man goes over it, I'll be damned if he ever comes back. Know that?”

  “And Carl went across it?” O'Hara said, half question, half statement. “Is that what you're telling me?”

  “It's half of what I'm telling you,” Mallinson said.

  “What's the rest?”

  “I'm not letting you go across it, also,” the captain said. “I'm taking you off Ledbetter and putting you on restricted desk duty. If you start walking around like you got screws loose-like lying out in a frigging snowbank again-I'll take away your gun.”

  “Captain, you can't-”

  “I just did.”

  “Who's going to guide the Ledbetter case?”

  “I am,” Mallinson answered. “And don't sweat it too much. You're going to see some strange jurisprudence on this case. But Gary's going to get what he deserves in the end. Mark that much, Brother O'Hara.”

  O'Hara began to drink like a fish. He began to quarrel with his wife who, in turn, suggested that he find another line of work. And it was at this time, too, in reaction to all this, that he walked the straight and narrow at work, kept in his commander's good graces, and buried himself ever more obsessively in New Hampshire homicide.

  Then followed the strange form of jurisprudence that Captain Mallinson had augured.

  The two statewide newspapers in New Hampshire-particularly the New Hampshire American, which became increasingly shrill on the subject-started bellyaching about Ledbetter potentially “getting off' with a life sentence if he went on trial in New Hampshire. Too good for him, the editorials said. The populace agreed and soon the governor started feeling some heat. So New Hampshire cut a deal with Florida, allowing Gary's extradition.

  The official excuse was that Florida was the chronological start of Ledbetter's murder spree, so the first trial should be there. The real reason was so that Ledbetter could be executed.

  Florida tried him and made damned well sure to convict him. Then they made sure that they could fry him, too.

  More than any other crime, more than any other murder, Frank O'Hara could see the Ledbetter case in his sleep. It was the one that had never gone away. The case that had changed him from a man who solved murders to a man obsessed with homicide.

  Pretty, innocent Karen Stoner stared down at him off the wall of Carl Reissman's old office, the office O'Hara now occupied, even long after her case was solved and her portrait should have returned to the Closed file. For O'Hara, on some days the entire world was the color of Karen Stoner's eyes. He would have felt better, much better, about it if at least the case could have come to its legal conclusion in New Hampshire-if he could personally have closed out his final questions and suspicions about the case. But the whole mess had been whisked away to Florida. A sense of the incomplete coalesced with O'Hara's obsession with the crime, itself.

  Yet not everything that followed was bad.

  Upon Reissman's death, O'Hara had twelve years seniority. He had the luxury of picking a new partner or flying solo. He chose the latter. He would miss his old partner, however, and life would have turned out differently had the talented Reissman retained his sanity and lived.

  Working by himself, O'Hara quickly had his baptism under fire. On his first day of solo duty he drew the assignment of some backwoods sorehead who shot his best friend one night, then fixed up the body to look like it had belonged to an intruder and a tragic mistake had been made. It didn't take long for the forensic evidence to indicate that the deceased had been shot some fifty yards from where the body had been found, which was a long way for a man to stagger after taking a bullet through the temple. O'Hara had a confession by nightfall.

  Then there was Mrs. Hulburt who poisoned her neighbor's cat, then the neighbor's dog as a lead-up to the real thing, poisoning her husband while trying to lay blame on the neighbor. And, to mix low comedy with tragedy, O'Hara also drew the case of a couple of stickup men from New York who blew over a convenience store one night in Peterborough and-for sport-shot the high-school kid on counter duty.

  The kid died.

  O'Hara put together a license and car description from three partial witnesses, two of whom agreed to be hypnotized. O'Hara had another pair of collars by the end of the week.

  But all of this was prosaic stuff. Just basic get-in-touch-with-your-feelings-and-kill-someone jobs. It was never far from O'Hara's mind that homicide was the felony most frequently committed by amateur criminals. Look for the half-wit aspect of most slayings and you can wrap your investigation. Yet in O'Hara's mind, the Ledbetter case had always been one apart: t
he one that left a bad taste of uncertainty in his mouth and left his partner-mentor dead.

  And, oh, yes, it had been snowing hard the day they found Karen Stoner's body in a basement. Just like it was snowing the day O'Hara came around with a couple of local deputies and put handcuffs on Gary. Just like it had been snowing the day in 1990when Barbara Godfrey O'Hara, with her husband increasingly consumed by alcohol and his work, announced she was leaving him “for a while” to attend law school in Illinois.

  “What the hell does 'for a while' mean?” he had asked.

  “'For a while' means until I can file the divorce papers. You love your female victims more than you love your own wife.”

  A week later, Barbara packed and walked out of his life forever. Thus the further legacy of the Ledbetter case: Shattered lives all around. Collateral damage in every direction. No one normal ever again.

  And just like it had been snowing today, in November of 1993.

  In a near-dream, another image of Gary reappeared to O'Hara. A quasi-acid flash.

  The accused killer sitting in a cell in Nashua, awaiting extradition to Florida. Gary rapping angrily:

  I didn't kill no girls, sir. And 1 know some real big shots in this state. You be careful of me!

  Yeah, Gary. Sure, O'Hara thought to himself. A low-rent Lothario, that's all you are. A common killer with a sadistic pink signature.

  Not me, man.

  Terrific. Would human psychology never cease sinking to new depths? And now, here on a snowy November day in 1993, it was freshly served on O'Hara's plate.

  “Yeah, Gary. Sure,” O'Hara repeated aloud. “You're dead. So why are you still bothering me?”

  Somewhere deep in O'Hara's subconscious, Ledbetter only laughed.

  O'Hara's body jumped, as it might in a bad dream.

  “You okay?” asked Jack McConnell. He spoke in the front seat of the state police jeep.

  “What?” O'Hara answered. His mind was foggy. His eyes fluttered open. He had been miles away and was surprised to find himself in a moving vehicle.

  “I said, are you okay?” the driver repeated. McConnell turned his head for a moment and glanced at his passenger.

  “Oh, hell,” O'Hara answered, snapping back to attention. “What's going on?” He blinked. Their jeep was on a snowy road. O'Hara's mind leaped into a forward gear. Where were they? It looked familiar.

  “You haven't said nothing for forty minutes,” McConnell explained. “I didn't know whether you was asleep or just dreaming.”

  O'Hara drew a breath. “Neither. Just thinking,” he answered.

  McConnell grinned. “Yeah,” he said.

  O'Hara recognized the location. They were about a quarter mile from Hancock, his hometown. His mind had drifted as McConnell had driven him home. O'Hara knew he had had his eyes closed and had that punchy feeling of having been half asleep. But, as they drove for another few minutes in silence, he wasn't even sure of that.

  “Did I doze off?” O'Hara finally asked.

  “Think so,” the driver said. “Anyways you weren't saying nothing and your head was slumped. Figured that as long as you hadn't had a stroke or somethin' you'd wake up again.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  McConnell grinned.

  “Anyways, we're here,” McConnell said next.

  The jeep turned into a driveway in which there was about a foot of virgin snow. The headlights of the jeep travelled across the blanket of white and then illuminated a house.

  It looked alien to O'Hara's tired eyes, an ominous structure rising out of the storm. Then his eyes settled on the building. Its details became more familiar and O'Hara realized that he was home.

  Chapter Five

  O’Hara entered his house through the garage. He left his boots near an outside door and walked to the kitchen. He was exhausted.

  He pulled a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table. He listened to the silence.

  O'Hara was still shaken. What he had seen could not have really happened. Gary Ledbetter all over again.

  Not possible.

  The ugly details pursued him. How could anyone replicate such a hideous crime? Worse, how had anyone known so many details of the Ledbetter slayings? How could anyone other than Gary Ledbetter, the convicted murderer, have arranged the crime scene perfectly in the Ledbetter style?

  O'Hara sipped his beer and sunk into an unsettling line of thought. What had he really seen in that remote cabin? And what had he felt? What was that chilly fearful sense that had been sneaking up on him in that place?

  And beyond that, more questions: Who had been this victim? Why had she died? His mind raced back for any women who had turned up missing in the area during the past summer.

  There were always reports, but none stood out in his memory. He groaned. If this was his case-and Captain Mallinson had already determined that it was-there would be hundreds of Missing Persons reports to wade through.

  And what about the “quality” of the victim? A good girl from a good family and the case would merit more attention than if she were some whore or hophead from Boston or New York.

  Then again, did good girls from good families just disappear? Usually not without a Missing Persons report, even though there was not a damned thing illegal-public impression to the contrary-about a citizen going missing of her own free will.

  O'Hara's eyes drifted to the window. Snow still falling. November, and it was already winter. He had been right. The snow always brought death.

  He pondered the elements. A decomposed body, a ritual slaying. More satanism? Vampirism? Witchcraft? Another memorably repressed New England psychopath enacting executioner fantasies? A would-be Charlie Manson?

  Great!

  His mind circled back: Why, why, why, the contrived parallel of the Ledbetter slayings? What was this killer trying to say? What was he trying to prove?

  And why now?

  O'Hara set down the bottle of beer again. He reached for it after several more seconds of thought, lifted it to his lips, and found it empty. So much for the first brew of the day. Why did they always go so quickly?

  He went to the refrigerator and found another. He opened it and knocked down half the bottle almost immediately, then remembered that two was his quota.

  Two of anything containing alcohol. A promise he had made to Dr. Steinberg during the summer. A way of keeping away from throwing a good solid drunk whenever he got anxious or depressed.

  Yeah, Dr. Julie, he thought to himself. I know you're watching. I'm thinking of you.

  Visits to Dr. Steinberg were still scheduled once a week. There was some at-home follow-up that he was supposed to do. If he had more than two drinks in the evening she had asked him to write down a record of it and present it to her on the next visit. Similarly, if he spent too much time talking to himself he was supposed to record that, too.

  He sat down again and leaned back, half a beer to go. As the alcohol settled into his system, his eyes travelled the room. His gaze settled again upon the kitchen window and the snow that was piling against it.

  He felt himself in some sort of tomb, with snow blanketing him. He finished the second beer and began to think about food. His stomach gnawed at him. He hadn't eaten all day.

  Then another thought was abruptly upon him. The thought that he was not alone in his house. The thought that somewhere there was some sort of living presence not far away from him.

  Then, as if on cue, there was another one of those creaks from somewhere off the kitchen. Somewhere on the ground floor of his house. He felt his own pulse quicken in response.

  O'Hara finished the beer and reached for the automatic pistol on his hip. Quietly he unclipped it from its holster. He raised it in his hand, aloft, ready to fire if necessary. A bullet was already chambered, with a full clip waiting behind the first round.

  O'Hara turned slightly where he sat and his eyes focused upon the doorway beyond the kitchen. Yes. Someone was upstairs. A biza
rre notion was upon him, in spite of its lack of logic. The intruder was Gary Ledbetter.

  The passage to his dining room and living room was dark. O'Hara heard another creak and felt himself start to sweat. There was no way he was imagining this, he told himself.

  O'Hara stood. The feeling was unbanishable now. There was someone in the house with him. And sure enough, no sooner had this thought formed than there was another sound, something similar to a footfall on old floorboards.

  O'Hara swore softly. He took two cautious steps forward, stopped, and listened again. Nothing. Then came another creak, farther away, closer to the staircase at the front of the house.

  O'Hara's stomach had ceased churning, but only because all of his nerves were now in his throat. The palm of his hand was suddenly sweating against the grip of the pistol.

  He moved forward again.

  “'Anyone there?” he called.

  No answer.

  O'Hara came to the doorway at the rear vestibule. He reached around it to the light switch. The overhead came on and as O'Hara cautiously turned the corner it revealed an empty room.

  He stood, hand aloft and ready, weapon pointing upward. He looked toward the living room. Another creak. No, he wasn't imagining this. This was real. He was really hearing something.

  He stepped to the living room, moved his free hand to a wall switch, and turned on another light, still holding his weapon upward.

  He scanned. The usual furniture. The sound system. The old piano. Again, he saw nothing unusual.