by Noel Hynd
The usual dirtball New Hampshire stuff:
One, a Hispanic teenager from Holyoke had been shotgunned in a Nashua parking lot the previous Sunday morning, a drug deal gone sour, his brains splattered across the concrete wall of a bar.
Two, an aged couple in Bennington-the husband had Alzheimer's-found dead in their beds at home. Bullet wounds. Double suicide, murder-suicide, or double murder? The assembled evidence pointed in various directions. So which was it? Hint: Their ne'er-do-well forty-year-old son didn't seem much upset and had already embarked on a spending spree.
And three, a chump-change stickup at a convenience store in Wilton. The counterman had been shot dead with a smallcaliber handgun. This one had the signature of a couple of inner-city types out to see autumn foliage and looking to score a few bucks along the way. When the counterman produced a deer rifle, things went bad.
It took O'Hara the early part of the afternoon to review the three cases. He went for a sandwich about 4 P.M., but spent part of his lunch hour in the frigid parking lot, letting his Pontiac's engine idle so that it would start later. Then he came back to his office.
On his desk he found a preliminary Missing Persons list of women under the age of fifty. It had eighty-six names on it for New Hampshire, one hundred seventy-six for New Hampshire and Vermont combined, and three hundred eighteen for New England. And none of that included New York. New York victims had a way of landing in New Hampshire.
O'Hara scanned the list, sighed when it gave him no insight, and flipped it back onto his desk. Then he went downstairs to his car, treaded carefully across the ice in the parking lot, and cursed the glacial wind from Canada when it stung his face.
The sun had dropped and the temperature was on its way to the single digits, the territory of frozen fuel lines and dead car batteries. And there probably wasn't a lake or river in the state that couldn't be crossed on foot. Too bad that didn't help.
O'Hara found his Pontiac and forced the old engine to turn over. The Pontiac responded, and O'Hara began his slow drive across the snow-clogged Nashua streets to his next destination, the office of Vincent Paloheima, M.D.
The medical examiner was seated in his workroom finishing dinner when his visitor arrived. The doctor looked up.
“Ah! O'Hara!” Dr. Paloheima said. “Glad to see you. I'm not supposed to go home until I've spoken to you. Captain Mallinson's orders. So you came by just in time.”
The room was tomb-like and frigid, much like a butcher's storage room, but less cheerful.
“Just in time for what?” O'Hara asked.
“Just in time so that I didn't get bored,” the doctor said. “Time to talk. You and I.”
Paloheima was using a steel examination slab as his dinette set, a body sheet for a tablecloth, and God-knew-what for a tray and plate. He set aside a scalpel that he had been using as a knife and rose from his meal. Ham and eggs. He dabbed at a corner of his mouth with a sleeve of his lab coat. Beneath the half open lab coat, the doctor wore a Boston Bruins sweatshirt.
O'Hara's eye travelled the room and settled upon Table Five, the main examination table. The center ring of Dr. Paloheima's gory little circus. There lay the remains of Jane Doe, NH:11-20-93 A. O'Hara felt a shiver coming on. He suppressed it. Paloheima's office contributed little to the gaiety of police work in New Hampshire.
O'Hara remembered coming to this same room as a recruit in the police academy too many years ago and witnessing his first autopsy-that one done by this same Dr. Paloheima. On that distant day, half the recruits had vomited or passed out. O'Hara, who had seen much worse in Southeast Asia, had done neither. He remembered this because he was fighting off such impulses again today. The odor of death was strong, thanks to the advanced state of decomposition of Ms. Doe. There was also the vague distant scent of marijuana in the room. Paloheima occasionally indulged.
“I got some pictures to show you,” the M.E. said, moving to a Mr. Coffee on a side table. “Want some coffee first?”
O'Hara declined.
“You sure?”
“Just show me the pictures, okay?” O'Hara said.
The doctor looked at him with mild reproach as he crossed the room. “Lighten up, would you, O'Hara? By the time you're dealing with me, there's not much you can do for your victims. So maybe you ought to do something for yourself. Develop a sense of humor. Ever thought of that?”
The advice was offered in friendship. Paloheima liked O'Hara.
“I'm out of this job in another two months, Doc. And if I can wrap this Jane Doe I might even be able to get out a few weeks early. So let's get moving. Okay?”
Paloheima stopped a few steps short of the coffee maker. He turned. “What? Leaving a great job like yours?” O'Hara didn't answer, unable to tell whether Paloheima's remark was predicated on sarcasm or genuine surprise. Meanwhile, the doctor's eyebrows moved toward the ceiling. Then, after a moment's pause, he continued across the room.
Paloheima moved the way many large fat men do, rocking slightly side to side as he lurched forward.
The doctor also had a prominent forehead and deep-set dark eyes. From time to time, he also had a smile, but it was stark and gaunt, almost frightening-suggestive of a bloated skull that was forcing itself into mirth.
Many years ago, following graduation from a medical school in Honduras, Paloheima had nearly lost his medical license as fast as he had obtained it. He had been practicing at an abortion clinic in Brattleboro, Vermont, helping out college girls at fifty dollars a pop. But one girl had left the clinic with a perforated uterus and another had nearly died of infection. There were some nasty lawsuits.
Insurance money silenced the victims and Paloheima agreed to leave the state on probationary status as a medical practitioner. He looked for employment in neighboring New Hampshire, but the only opening was in the state M.E.'s office. There, it was theorized, he could do no lasting damage to his patients since they were already dead. Plus the only talent Paloheima had ever displayed as a doctor was the ability to cut.
So he was hired as the assistant state M.E. He kept free of any other serious screw-ups and ascended to the main position in the office by 1979. By then his aspirations were no higher than where he already was. In truth, he was lucky that a career in any sort of medical practice had been salvaged. So there he stayed, the Ben Casey of the cadavers, the Marcus Welby of the murdered.
Paloheima arrived at the Mr. Coffee. Steam rose from both the coffee maker and a plastic cup when Paloheima poured.
“Sure you don't want some coffee?” Paloheima asked a second time. “You're going to be up late.”
“Why?”
“You're going to be up late thinking,” the doc said softly. “What you got here is an impossibility. When I see an impossibility it makes me stop and ponder. So I figure you'll be doing some thinking. “
“Just show me what you have.”
“Gladly.”
The doctor led O'Hara to a wall where he had affixed some X rays and photographs. The doctor had two display screens arranged on the wall. He turned on a light behind a set of photographs.
“First off, Jane Doe was killed ninety to ninety-five days ago,” the doctor said. “I can tell from the flesh on the hands and feet. See, when the killer cut the hand off and put it in the box, he kept it clean. It looks like some wildlife messed with the rest of the corpse. Look at this here. Teeth marks around the rib cage. And the rest of the body was exposed to air and elements. Not so with the hand.”
“So the time of the murder,” O'Hara said thinking back and making mental notes, “was sometime in August. Maybe the tenth to the twenty-fifth?”
“That's how I see it,” Dr. Paloheima said. Then he told what else he saw.
Female Caucasian, probably of northern European extraction, aged twenty-four to thirty. Blood type O, which narrowed things down to half the population of the United States and Canada.
“No other blood types found at the scene,” Paloheima said, “even under her fingernails. So
I can't give you a lead on your killer that way.” The doctor paused. “Some monster spilled every drop of this girl's blood without losing any of his own.”
O'Hara nodded. No sign of a struggle anywhere in the cabin. No sign of blood anywhere on the girl's clothing. She had stripped, left a neat pile of her own things, and assumed a position on the floor for her executioner.
Just like the Ledbetter case.
Why, O'Hara kept asking himself. Rough sex? A kinky form of love play? Kneel before me while I hold a sword above you? And then the fiend had gone ahead and snuffed her anyway.
Paloheima's words broke in upon Ledbetter's thoughts.
“It was impossible to tell if the girl had been raped,” the doctor said. “The decomposition was much too advanced to tell of any vaginal assault or even the presence of semen.”
Jane Doe had not been pregnant. The doctor couldn't find any traces of narcotics anywhere in the body and guessed she wasn't a junkie. He couldn't offer anything further except for the fact that she may have had a poor choice of acquaintances. O'Hara thought of offering his own conclusions that he'd made from looking at the girl's clothing, but didn't bother. No point.
“It looked to me that she was executed there,” Paloheima said. “The blood pools on the ground would indicate as much. I guess that's your feeling, too.”
“Yeah. It is,” O'Hara answered.
“Pretty obvious, huh?”
“Pretty obvious, Doc.”
“Get a reading on any fingerprints in that cabin?” Paloheima asked next.
“Forensic went back to do a second dusting,” O'Hara said. “They don't know if they've got anything or not.”
O'Hara grimaced, usually when the armada of technicians arrived on the scene their first accomplishment was to trample everything in sight.
“What about an ID on the victim?” the doctor asked.
“Not even a lead. What about you? Fingerprints?”
Paloheima said that he had rolled the frozen hand and had obtained a clear set of prints, plus palm impressions. The prints had been sent to the FBI central computer in Virginia. No report back yet. Fed match-ups would take twenty-four hours minimum, and the batting average was low for a potential connection from that source: maybe one time in ten.
Then the conversation turned to the modus operandi of the murder, and once again Dr. Paloheima had some theories.
“This one has strong resemblance to the Ledbetter case, doesn't it?” the M.E. asked.
“Uncanny.”
“I did the dice-and-slice on that last Ledbetter victim. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“So do I,” Paloheima said. Paloheima stepped to the second display screen and flipped on the lights. He turned to O'Hara, his gaunt smile gone. “So since we both remember, what do you think?” he asked, motioning to two sets of autopsy examinations.
O'Hara drew a breath. “What am I looking at?”
The detective's eye drifted back and forth between two sets of photographs, showing the incisions made by the swords. Dr. Paloheima looked at him expectantly. The medical examiner said nothing. He only waited.
“Same thing, right?” O'Hara asked, looking back and forth. “Jane Doe right hand, Jane Doe right hand. No?”
On closer examination, the hands were different from the first screen to the second. Two different right hands.
“Jane Doe, November '93,” said the doctor, indicating the first set of prints. “Karen Stoner, December '85,” he said, indicating the second.
O'Hara's eye nervously fluttered back and forth. “So?”
“Same killer,” said the doctor.
It took a second for it to sink in. “No. Impossible,” O'Hara answered.
“Not impossible. Same killer,” Paloheima insisted softly.
“It's made to look like the same killer,” O'Hara said. “Gary Ledbetter was executed.”
“Then that's a shame.”
“Why?”
“The man who killed Karen Stoner also killed our new Jane Doe. My computer tells me so. Ninety-nine percent certainty. I'd swear to it in court based on this evidence.”
“Doc . . .? How? What are you talking about?”
It was a question for which Dr. Paloheima had been salivating worse than one of Pavlov's mutts. The M.E. put on his very own slide show.
“Check out these hack marks, Frank,” he said, as if to take the younger man into his confidence. “Look at this and don't reject what your eyes tell you.”
Hack marks. Sword impressions. Close-in photographs of a nightmare. In his lifetime, O'Hara had seen a lot and forgotten very little. But this was something else: The angle the sword had come down on Karen Stoner was the same as a similar sword had come down on Jane Doe.
“Same force, same angle . . .” Vincent Paloheima said. “I was so struck by it-you'll excuse the pun, right?-that I fed it all into the computer. Same pair of hands.”
O'Hara stared at the evidence before him. “Can't be,” he insisted again.
“Why?”
“Gary Ledbetter killed Karen Stoner.”
“Never convicted of the Stoner murder,” the doctor reminded O'Hara. “He was convicted in Florida of a separate and associated crime. Frank, my computer has more integrity than anyone in this state. It doesn't take bribes, it shows up for work every day and it never lies,” the doctor said. “Comprenez?”
Paloheima extinguished the lights that illuminated the display, but O'Hara continued to stare at the photographs. The detective drew a long, confused breath and looked to the doctor. He felt the presence of the mutilated corpse on Table 5.
“You said ninety-nine percent certainty,” O'Hara finally said. “What about the other one percent?”
“It's theoretical bullshit.”
“Where does it figure in?”
“Statistically, you have to count it. Margin of error, one to two percent. But know what? I been doing pm's here since 1972 and I haven't seen the 'one percent' surface yet. Mr. Computer's got a perfect game going.”
The doctor looked at O'Hara, then looked back and forth to the pictures again.
“You can take the X rays with you,” Paloheima said. “Take them home. Study 'em. They're yours. I can make more. But they only tell you one thing.”
He looked back and forth again from Jane Doe to Karen Stoner. Hand to hand, neck to neck. With the edge of his white coat he dabbed at his lips, a small yellow particle of egg left over from his meal.
“Same killer, Frank,” he said. “Bank on it.”
*
Midnight. Frank O'Hara lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. On the bedside table were the remains of his second shot of bourbon and water.
As the bourbon wrapped its tentacles around him, O'Hara listened. Sinatra sang on the tape deck across the room. Sad Sinatra. Moody, tormented, mid-1960s Sinatra, gripping the blues the way only he could, creating and releasing more tension than a Hitchcock movie.
One of the great things about living alone, possibly the only great thing, was that O'Hara could play Sinatra as much as he wanted, as loud as he wanted and whenever he wanted. And no one would give him any heat about it.
His ex-wife had hated Sinatra. “Isn't that man a gangster?” Barbara used to ask him. Not a prescription for a long and happy marriage.
“People named Frank do things their own way,” O'Hara always answered.
Barbara speaking: “Doesn't mean it's the right way.”
O'Hara answering: “Doesn't mean it's the wrong way, either.”
O'Hara lay back, relaxed, and listened to the more famous Frank. And as Francis Albert crooned, O'Hara sorted through the events of the day, plus their implications:
The same hand that had killed Karen Stoner had killed Jane Doe. The doc was convinced of it. Well, well, well. Where could that possibly have fit into anyone's orthodoxy?
Three scenarios presented themselves. O'Hara liked none of them.
Number one, Gary had killed Jane Doe. But the body wa
s much, much older than Dr. Paloheima had attested. Paloheima was off by, say, one thousand percent. This theory had two aspects of it that worked: Paloheima was not beyond making a major error. And second, it accounted for the matching sword strokes.
Number two, Gary had worked with an accomplice. Strange that this would never have come out after Gary's arrest or during his trial. Would Ledbetter have taken a solo fall to protect a partner? Doubtful, based on what was known of Gary. Ledbetter had seemed like a textbook lone wolf psycho. This theory further disintegrated because none of the five witnesses against Ledbetter in Florida had ever mentioned seeing Ledbetter with anyone other than his victims.
“An ultimate, incorrigible loner,” one state shrink in Florida had testified of Gary. “He roams and kills.”
Sinatra intruded gloriously. “I've Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps Frank's most perfect recording. The emotional context ranged from a whisper to a primal orgasmic scream. O'Hara stopped thinking about Gary and concentrated on Old Blue Eyes. Funny how well Sinatra went with a good bourbon.
The song ended. Silence now. Empty tape running toward the end of its reel. O'Hara's thoughts returned to Ledbetter.
Then O'Hara checked himself. He caught himself thinking of Gary in the present tense. Wrong to do that, he reminded himself. Gary belonged to the past.
The third theory. Gary had not been guilty in Florida. An innocent man had gone to Florida's hot seat. The Stoner murder resembled the others but wasn't part of the Ledbetter spree. There had been two different killers committing the same brand of murder. Now the other killer was in New Hampshire. Or has been.