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

by Noel Hynd

  Mallinson gave a look toward the ceiling, as if searching for some divine intervention. O'Hara answered. “We've had the investigation for less than a week.”

  “What does that mean, Officer?” Negri continued. “My wife's been murdered and. . . .”

  At this point of any homicide investigation, it was O'Hara's custom to ask the questions, not duck the accusations. Custom and proper procedure. Part of him told him to shut up. Another part of him told him to counterattack.

  O'Hara's first thought: Why was Abigail Negri lying out in an abandoned cabin for two months? Where was the Missing Persons Report? And how about the May-October aspect of this: Did the eye deceive, or didn't Wilhelm Negri look two dozen years older than his dead bride?

  Had this been a factor? An element? And where did Gary Ledbetter filter into this? O'Hara's instincts began to surge forward, like a hound catching a scent.

  O'Hara was poised for a counterattack, seconds away from launching it, when the divine intervention arrived.

  “Wilhelm! Oh, Wilhelm, I'm so sorry.”

  Through the open door came a navy blue wave of police brass. The State Commissioner, Paul Vogelman, rarely wore his uniform but had dusted it off for this occasion. With him were a couple of night-shift harness bulls in bulky parkas, slinging sidearms the size of short rifles. With them was a deputy inspector whose name O'Hara recognized from some commendation he had once been awarded. Someone, either Mallinson or the governor, had launched an armada of brass to baby-sit for Negri.

  The publisher never finished his sentence. The commissioner took him under arm and ushered him out of the room. Negri never gave O'Hara another look or even another word. O'Hara was left with his captain, with whom he exchanged glances of exasperation.

  “Thanks for keeping your mouth shut,” Mallinson finally said when Negri was safely down the hall.

  “I couldn't have slipped a word in edgewise once that guy got going.”

  “Thanks for not even trying,” Mallinson said.

  “I'm going to have to talk to him eventually,” O'Hara said. “Can't avoid that.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Mallinson found one of his damnable cheroots. He lit it. “Just wait for the right time and place. Give him a few days to settle down.”

  “Was he estranged from his wife?” O'Hara asked. “Or did she just have this habit of disappearing for months at a time?”

  Mallinson gave him a hunch of the shoulder to indicate how the hell should he know.

  Dr. Paloheima appeared at the door, his coffee cup replaced by photographs, a stack of forensic gore shots.

  Mallinson eyed him with irritation. “What's going on, Doc?” Mallinson asked. “Run out of big toes to tag?”

  “No, I was just wondering if you guys needed any souvenir body parts,” Paloheima asked. “I've got some extras. I mean, with Christmas coming and everything. . . .”

  “Very frigging funny,” Mallinson answered.

  “Actually, I'm going for breakfast,” the medical examiner said. “Anyone want to join me?”

  “Yeah, I'm in,” O'Hara said. “As long as you're not eating off one of your steel stretchers again.”

  “Hey, what do you think I am? A barbarian? We're talking about across the street over there in 'Heartburn Heaven.'“

  Predictably, with all the upper brass from the department on the premises, Mallinson declined.

  O'Hara and Paloheima walked to the Sunrise Coffee Shop situated adjacent to the M.E.'s office in the shadow of two taller buildings. The Sunrise had never seen a sunrise in its existence.

  O'Hara had put down many quick meals there following autopsies, though not as many as Paloheima. As they sat down, O'Hara's instincts were already churning on the case before him.

  Jane Doe had turned into Abigail Negri. A case which could have gone no-profile or low-profile was now the highest in the state. Paloheima explained that the ID had come from dental records, a long shot that followed an anonymous telephone tip a few weeks earlier that Mrs. Negri had gone missing the previous summer.

  Paloheima also had the gossip:

  Officially, the young Mrs. N. had taken leave of her husband to visit parents out West. But the rumor mill had it better. The couple was estranged, and the high-priced divorce lawyers from New York were already wheeling the artillery into place.

  An estrangement explained how Abigail could have vanished with no Missing Persons for all those weeks. But estrangement also posed a lot more questions, particularly the unpleasant ones that had to do with motivation.

  “Why did the marriage split?” O'Hara asked. “Anyone have any spin on that?”

  “There's one story around that says that Mrs. N. had some nasty personal stuff to snitch on her husband,” Paloheima said. The doctor hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Abigail was only married to him for a few years and then looked to be going for a million-dollar payout. So how does she look, even if we learn that he likes to be spanked?”

  O'Hara pondered it. “Any truth to the rumors?”

  Another shrug. “About the spanking? No. I made it up.”

  “About the nasty personal stuff,” O'Hara said.

  “Why does any marriage split when the husband's a couple of decades older than the wife?” the M.E. asked. “Maybe she figured she'd banged him long enough to nail the big divorce settlement. And she was tired of feeling old age creeping up on her every night.”

  “You got a cheerful way of looking at everything, Doc,” O'Hara said.

  “Hey, I'm in a cheerful line of work, Frank. Same as you. I see what people do to other people. It'd drive me nuts if I couldn't understand why they done it.”

  “Same as me,” O'Hara agreed.

  But Paloheima always was a man with an example that needed to be given. This morning's was a hooker snuff from a by-the-hour motel in Hampton Beach. A mocha-skinned Hispanic girl, probably about twenty, had been strangled with an electrical cord after she had been shot six times.

  “Why strangle a girl after you've shot her? Why kill someone twice? Frank, to me that connotes a very warped psyche. That or extreme vengeance, know what I mean?”

  O'Hara knew. And the stack of forensic gore shots-prom photos by Leonard, natch-that Paloheima had under his arm were from this case, which had broken two days earlier.

  But O'Hara began to tune it out. Over bad coffee, as a cold dawn finally broke behind the grayness of downtown Nashua, O'Hara felt a headache coming on as Paloheima rambled forward on life and death and the implications of the latter. O'Hara's headache intensified as he ate. And yet, the worst of the day's events had still not presented itself.

  O'Hara did, however, run four-square into those events as he sat in his office an hour later. Mallinson arrived in the office on foot, and, by the look on the captain's face, O'Hara knew instantly that they were ready to travel again.

  A car was waiting. A big state cop four-wheel with a driver. Mallinson sat in the front seat and stewed while O'Hara assumed a safer position in the rear.

  “So what's this?” O'Hara asked.

  “More of the above,” was all Mallinson would say.

  They drove out to Devil's Glen at a mad speed, considering the ice. And O'Hara, had he not guessed what he was about to be shown, surely would have known from the encampment of police vehicles along the highway. And farther down the road, down at the bottom of a gully in Devil's Glen, there was a single green Ford Fiesta, flanked by another pair of cop cars.

  Mallinson's four-wheel stopped by the road, its large wheels crunching onto a shoulder of snow. The captain jumped out of the car and led O'Hara fifty yards into the woods. They advanced on a position that was swarming with state bulls i11 blue parkas.

  And swarming with obscenity.

  There, under a low gray sky, O'Hara stopped short. The cold was so sharp that it felt as if it were slicing his face with little razor blades.

  “I found this,” a local patrolman told O'Hara.

  The cop showed O'Hara the contents of a woman's pur
se, notably her driver's license and other identification. O'Hara looked at what the officer held. Then his eyes travelled to the carnage.

  There was a large clump under a canvas in a clearing between some trees. It wasn't enough that this woman had been murdered. But the same rules of the game seemed to have applied as in the Abigail Negri killing, formerly known as Jane Doe.

  There was a frozen river of blood on the snow. There was also the rosewood box with the pink ribbon. O'Hara didn't have to ask about a decapitation because he already knew. There was another canvas about ten yards farther on from the first one. And something much smaller than a body beneath it.

  Something about the size of a human head.

  “Oh, no,” O'Hara said. “No, no, no.”

  He braced himself. A uniformed officer lifted the first canvas and showed O'Hara the mutilated remains of Stacey Dissette. The officer, in his blue cloak, reminded O'Hara of a U.S. cavalry man, alleging an atrocity to the Indians on the snowy plains of the upper Midwest.

  But then O'Hara's thoughts hurtled back to the present. He was sorry he had bothered with breakfast. He suppressed the urge to vomit. He felt Captain Mallinson's eyes upon him.

  “No, no, no,” O'Hara said again. The uniformed officer gently let the canvas settle again, covering the remains of the torso, saying nothing. It was not yet ten o'clock in the morning. So much had already happened. None of it good.

  O'Hara stared at what was before him. He tried to correlate it back to Abigail Negri, but failed-aside from the fact that in searching for the killer of one, he was now searching for the killer of both.

  Then, as the wind whipped into him, and as other officers huddled in their parkas, O'Hara was beset with an image of his late partner, Carl Reissman, a suicide years earlier. He imagined Carl standing right there, taking this all in. O'Hara wondered how Reissman would have attacked the case.

  He knew that nothing would stop this fiend from striking again. And he wondered how all this-all these brutal deaths in this frozen Hell-circled back to Gary Ledbetter.

  Gary Ledbetter. A dead man, who was his chief suspect. Try telling the captain that a guy who had taken the hot seat in Florida was the numero uno suspect in a pair of New Hampshire homicides. Try feeding that one to the state's attorney. Why not tell them that he'd seen Gary, too?

  Why not advertise that he, O'Hara, was going completely nuts, losing his mind like Carl Reissman had?

  The police parkas moved methodically around him; big, bulky, humanoid, blue bears making clumsy tracks in the snow. Not talking to him. Not disturbing him. Their words hibernating along with their thoughts. The harness bulls were waiting for him to come up with answers. So was everyone else.

  But O'Hara had no answers. Only questions that grew more complicated and paradoxical each day. And to top it all off, as he stood looking at Stacey Dissette's blood in the snow, he felt himself not just losing his mind. He was freezing, also.

  Sure, he thought again. He was freezing to death. The image was fully upon him.

  The cold in this state and the relentless pursuit of homicide would finally drive him nuts and kill him. Just as it had disposed of Carl Reissman. Drove his former partner so crazy that he'd pulled the trigger on himself.

  Or, he wondered, was insanity a perfectly logical response to the boundless inhumanity inflicted by some human beings upon others?

  He blew out a breath, losing his focus upon the other cops around him.

  Oh, this slide into looniness wouldn't be complete today, O'Hara knew. Or tomorrow. Or even the next day. But it was down the road waiting for him, like a black beast in a dark tunnel where he would inevitably have to travel. O'Hara was certain that he was embarking upon his final journey to a frozen, lonely death. And these murders, inspired by a dead man, were the first steps of a descent into insanity and destruction.

  Steps? Call it a push. Like a shove out of a top-story window, complete with a concrete kiss onto the sidewalk.

  What else could it be? The feeling was upon him. And O'Hara knew that he was helpless to stop it.

  Not far away, someone was talking. The words were distant and didn't register. After several seconds, the same phrases came again. “You all right? You all right?”

  O'Hara turned. “What?” he asked.

  Captain Mallinson, standing only a few feet away from O'Hara, addressed him. “Talk to me. I asked if you were all right,” Mallinson said.

  “Why wouldn't I be?” O'Hara heard his own voice as if it were being played back to him.

  “'Cause I'm standing here frigging talking to you and you're not answering me,” the captain said. “What planet are you on?”

  “Sorry,” O'Hara said. “I was trying to assess this.”

  “Yeah, well assess fast, okay? I'm freezing my nuts off.”

  Then there was the stench of a freshly lit cheroot, one of the real cheap stinkers made in Guatemala. Smelled like horse hair on fire. Then, “Got to call Forensic, Frank,” the captain said, his tone relenting slightly. “No point all of us standing out here freezing again. Got to get to work.”

  “Yeah,” O'Hara said. “I'll make the calls. Got to get to work.”

  Chapter Twelve

  In the house on Oswell Street, Carolyn Hart lay in the silence of her bedroom. She tried to make some sense out of her thoughts. She knew that it was time to fulfill her mission.

  It was early on a Sunday morning. Her house was very still. So was the city that surrounded it. The stillness allowed her to follow her own patterns of thought, her own stream of ideas.

  Crazy ideas. That's what some people said. That's how certain people had thought of Carolyn. Maybe they were right, she pondered. And maybe they weren't. Maybe she alone knew what was best for her.

  Carolyn did know that she wanted to feel alive again. She felt distanced from the world around her and had felt that way too long.

  She drew a breath. She could hardly feel herself breathing she was so silent. Well, it was time to break that spell, she told herself. Time to return to. . . .

  To what?

  She thought of her parents, who were deceased, and wondered where exactly she would find their spirits.

  She thought of her brother. . . .

  She cringed. In the comfortable bed where she lay, a wave of extreme sadness washed over her. She spoke aloud, but very softly. Like a whisper on the wind, subverting the silence in the room.

  “Yes, definitely,” she said. “Now is the time.”

  Nutty talk from a lonely woman with no one to listen? The restlessness of a human spirit? Or dedication to one's beliefs.

  More than anything else, she wanted to return again to the real world. She also knew what else she wanted to do.

  She wanted to make love with a man. It had been a long time since she had done so. Too long. Making love would make her feel alive again. She was sure.

  Her right hand slipped under her nightgown. Gently, as a sexual intensity grew within her, she found the spot between her legs. The spot that her strict mother had always told her never to touch, but which brought her such pleasure when she touched it. Or when a lover toyed with it.

  If only she had a lover, Carolyn thought.

  She considered Adam Kaminski. The rental agent had been watching her from a distance. Did he think she was so foolish that she did not notice?

  She knew he had feelings for her, and in a way she was flattered. Maybe she would give Kaminski his opportunity. She could flit in and out of his life, and neither would be the worse for it. But she couldn't picture herself in bed with him. Adam wasn't a man with whom she could feel comfortable.

  Saddened, Carolyn sighed. Then she relaxed and escaped into a fantasy. In her mind, she was a seventeen-year-old girl again. She was in the South on a warm summer evening and taking a handsome stranger as a lover. . . .

  She drifted with her thoughts. Her hands focused upon giving herself pleasure. Without much difficulty, she brought herself to an orgasm. Then afterward, for as many moments
as she could, she continued to go with that feeling of satisfaction. She drifted sleepily until she could hold the fantasy no longer.

  But then she was left instead with the unhappy reality: What she really wanted was a real man to do these things for her. To love her-both spiritually and physically. To give himself to her so that she might do the same for him.

  She rose from her bed. She stared out of her window, looking down upon the street. The street was quiet as a tomb. And for that matter, so was her entire existence.

  “Yes, very very definitely,” she said aloud. Time to return to the real world.

  She turned. Where was that name? The name of the man she had never met but whom she wished to see?

  She had it written down somewhere. But instead, she searched her memory. He was a policeman in New Hampshire. She recalled his name. Frank O'Hara. He was still a detective with the state police last time she had inquired.

  If she could contact him, if she could see him and if he could see her, maybe Carolyn could set things right. If she could draw him to Philadelphia and set him on the proper course of investigation. . . .

  Carolyn smiled. She heard the sound of small voices not far away. Children's voices.

  She gazed out the window again. Two young boys, aged maybe seven and five, had come out to the empty narrow street to play with a large red ball. Their father was with them.

  Carolyn smiled again. The city was waking. So was she. She would find this man she had never met, this Detective Frank O'Hara. Through him she would be able to get on with her life.

  *

  O'Hara arrived home that night angry enough to smash furniture.