Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  15

  When I reached the bottom of Campus Hill, I saw that two cars had recently collided at the intersection. They still blocked the roadway. In the glare of their dueling headlights, a hulking woman wearing bib overalls and a Tibetan-style goat-herder’s cap was poking her finger at the second driver, who was dressed like a Gloucester fisherman, with a yellow rain hat and matching slicker.

  My wiper blades were fighting a losing battle to clear the windshield as I headed across Groton toward the hospital. A handful of drivers were still braving the elements, crawling along at about the same speed as the people walking bent over on the sidewalks.

  At the end of the town square, I crossed over to Seneca Street. A few blocks farther on, the lights of the Groton Medical Center slowly emerged out of the rain. I headed up its treelined macadam driveway.

  Built in the early part of the twentieth century, the place always reminded me of the military stockade at Fort Leavenworth, with dirty brick walls and forbidding windows. Up at the college, they were constructing one new building after another, thanks to wealthy alumni like Brian Razzano. But no one was ready to pony up the money for a new hospital.

  The driveway that led to the emergency room was choked with vehicles, their yellow lights flashing and their sirens wailing thinly into the savage wind. Driving my pickup right over the curb, I parked it on the grass and headed inside.

  A couple dozen people with storm-related injuries already packed the waiting area. A few were lying on rolling gurneys. Others filled the halls flanking the treatment rooms. The newest arrivals were sitting on the floor in the entrance foyer with their backs against the walls.

  Several nurses were performing triage evaluations as they worked their way through the crush, sending the most serious cases into the emergency-care stations. When I showed my security badge at the front desk, the woman checked her intake log and told me that Hoyt Palmer had been moved to room 1326.

  I trudged up the iron staircase that led to the central wing of the hospital building. On the third floor, a plastic-covered map showed the four nursing stations that could be found at each corner of the rectangular corridor. Room 1326 was on the hallway parallel to the one where I was standing.

  Aside from the muted din of the wind and rain, things seemed relatively peaceful on the top floor. At the nursing station closest to room 1326, a Groton police officer was talking to one of the nurses. Behind them, a harried-looking staff doctor was filling out paperwork at a small desk. The individual patient rooms stretched back along a well-lit corridor.

  The police officer seemed to shrink in height as I came toward him. Not more than five six, he had the steroid-enhanced development of someone who was out to maximize what little he had.

  His neck was almost as large as his head, and his pale-blue uniform was sculpted to fit tightly over every muscle in his arms and legs. A black plastic nameplate above his right breast pocket read, “Schmidt.” A Sig Sauer .40 automatic bulged on his narrow hips.

  Showing him my campus security badge, I said, “There’s a patient in 1326 who is supposed to be under your protective custody. His name is Hoyt Palmer.”

  “You got any idea how long I’m supposed to be stuck on babysitting duty?” he said, rocking back and forth from heel to toe. “We got a hurricane going on out there, in case you guys up at the college didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s tough all over. Is your backup in the room with him?”

  “Don’t need no backup . . . I got it under control.”

  “Sure,” I said, already worried. “How long have you been here?”

  “About fifteen minutes. The guy’s wife and another lady were in the room with him when I got here. I told him he was being put under police protection just like the sergeant told me to say.”

  “That must have been comforting to him. Then what?”

  “Then he asked me why he needed police protection, and so I told him about the other guy getting waxed in the same place the first guy did,” he said.

  “So why are you standing out here?” I said.

  “’Cause they asked me to leave.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can understand that.”

  He was oblivious to my sarcasm.

  “There’s no back stairs down at the end of that corridor. The only way anyone can get to him is to come through me.”

  He bulked out his chest.

  “Has anyone come or gone since you got here?” I asked.

  “The ladies that were with him left about five minutes ago. Otherwise nobody went down there.”

  “Have you checked on him since?”

  When he shook his head no, I said, “I see you’re a regular Dick Tracy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  “It means you’re an idiot,” I said, heading down the hallway to Palmer’s room.

  I heard the tap of his heels coming after me.

  “I don’t have to take your crap,” he called out.

  Room 1326 was the fifth one down the hallway on the left. The door was closed. I shoved it open and stepped inside the room. The only light came from the wall fixture in the small bathroom, but it was enough to see that the big hospital bed was empty, its top sheet lying on the floor.

  Turning on the overhead light, I looked toward the closet. Its plastic accordion door was squeezed open. A white shirt and khaki pants hung from the metal hanger rod. A pair of brown loafers rested on the floor.

  “What the hell?” Schmidt said from the doorway.

  “So no one came in or out since you’ve been here,” I said, going over to the narrow casement window. “He must have been the invisible man.”

  The window was closed and latched from the inside.

  “So what do you think, Dick?” I demanded.

  “I . . . it’s impossible,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, heading for the door. “If I were you, I’d check every room on this corridor right now. Maybe you’ll still have a job in the morning.”

  When I turned to look back at the end of the hallway, he was pushing open the first door, his Sig Sauer pointed and ready. By then I knew that if someone had been hiding in one of the other rooms, they were already gone.

  On the way back to my truck, I thought about the possibilities. What if Hoyt Palmer was the killer? What if he had done it to silence whatever Wheatley and Massey had done to put his life in jeopardy?

  16

  Checking my watch, I saw it was past five thirty and approaching dawn. Outside, the sky was still dark, but the rain had turned to a fine drizzle, and the wind was definitely slackening a bit. Getting into the truck, I remembered Ken Macready telling me that the hurricane would reach its peak later in the morning. This had to be the eye of the storm passing over us.

  The roads around the town square were flooded with six inches of water, and I wondered if the lake might have begun to overflow its banks. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I saw that my pickup was leaving a wake behind me, as if I were trolling for game fish in a power boat.

  I imagined Bug waiting for me in our cabin and decided to check on her as soon as I had a chance. What I needed most at that moment was coffee. I hadn’t slept more than six hours over the previous three nights and didn’t anticipate any change in that situation.

  Driving back up Campus Hill, I tried to focus on Hoyt Palmer’s disappearance. Even in my worn-out state, I knew that only two things could have happened to him. Either he had left his hospital room voluntarily or the murderer of Wheatley and Massey had taken him out.

  I remembered Schmidt saying that nobody had gone down there, which meant that he had probably kept a pretty good watch for anyone trying to get by him in the corridor. But he wouldn’t have expected Palmer to slip past him from the other direction.

  If it had been abduction and the killer was crafty, he could easily have created a diversion to mask his infiltration of that corridor. I would have. Once in the room, all he had to do was disable P
almer and then wait in one of the other rooms for his chance to leave.

  If Palmer had been abducted, it was a likely possibility that he would soon be headed for a rendezvous at the suspension footbridge. The first two deaths were obviously connected, and Palmer was the missing link.

  Turning on the VHF transceiver, I reached Captain Morgo and told her that our man had gone missing from his hospital room. I recommended that she issue a missing persons alert for him right away.

  She was still at the bridge with the sheriff’s investigative unit but agreed to forward the request immediately. Before signing off, I suggested she post guards at both ends of the bridge, and she promised to do so before leaving the murder scene.

  Heading across the campus, I passed by the ivy-covered dormitory in which I had lived as a freshman. The college still hadn’t lost electrical power, and through the lower windows I could see a boisterous hurricane party taking place. In one of the upper-floor windows, a young coed’s face was pressed against the glass as she gazed out at the storm. I waved to her as I went by, but she couldn’t have seen me.

  A big sycamore tree had fallen against a side wall of the campus police building, and a team of men with chainsaws were cutting it away. Pulling into the rear parking lot, I parked in Captain Morgo’s spot by the back door.

  After unlocking the tool chest secured behind the cab of my truck, I pulled out the surveillance equipment that I had found in Sal’s room at the Wonderland Motel and took it inside.

  Every desk in the squad room was occupied by security officers or members of the college’s emergency deployment team, all of them fielding phone calls or dispatching assistance. A handful of folding cots had been set up along the walls, and several officers in rain-soaked uniforms were sacked out on them.

  I needed somewhere private to view the videos and decided to use Lieutenant Ritterspaugh’s empty office on the second floor. The room was dark and tinged with the aroma of her incense burner. Setting the surveillance equipment on her desk, I went back down to the squad room and poured myself a big mug of black coffee, chugging it as I stood there.

  My mind was tracking about as well as the woolly mammoth over in Duffield Hall. There was only so much that coffee could do for me after all the adrenaline I had expended in the last twenty-four hours.

  In Afghanistan, I had often used amphetamines to get through nightlong stakeouts, but I wasn’t about to ask for one now. I glanced across the squad room. The cots along the far wall began to look like the presidential suite at the Hay-Adams. I poured myself another mug of coffee.

  On my way back upstairs, I passed Ken Macready in the hallway and asked him to bring the camcorder material he had shot at the Wheatley crime scene up to the lieutenant’s office.

  As I was connecting the recording equipment to a television monitor, another rending crack was followed by a deafening thud that made the floor tremble. Another sycamore, its shallow roots loosened in the mushy soil, had gone over.

  A few moments later, Ken brought the disc into the office and handed it to me. As he was heading out the door, an idea suddenly registered in my head, and I put down the connector cables.

  “Ken . . . when I got here yesterday morning, there were two kids sitting downstairs in the holding pen,” I said. “Check the arrest log and find out what they were initially charged with before their lawyer got here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I think it’s about time you started calling me Jake.”

  He was grinning as he went out the door.

  Fortunately, the camcorder video was digital. One of the electronic components in Sal’s metal case was a mini digital video player. I finished connecting it to the back of the television monitor and put in the disc.

  The action lasted only about three minutes, and the little bald man had shot some of the first vivid footage. He could have gotten a pile of money for it from one of the TV tabloid news shows. Billionaire Decapitated—Fun for the Whole Family. There was a dramatic close-up of Wheatley’s body as it was falling, followed by my frantic efforts to grab his head before it followed the rest of him down the gorge.

  The next images were of me as I sprinted toward the command car. The footage stopped abruptly at the point when I grabbed the camera out of his hands. The last two minutes consisted of Ken panning the camera around the small crowd of observers who were standing at the overlook.

  I had finished running it the first time when he stepped back into the office.

  “Those two boys you asked about,” he said. “They were charged with vandalism, malicious mischief, and destruction of private property.”

  “Did the log indicate what they had actually done?”

  He nodded. “They were caught defacing some cars with screwdrivers over at the administration building. Their lawyer is apparently a local hotshot. He’s trying to get the charges dropped by promising full financial restitution to the victims.”

  “What time were they arrested?” I asked.

  “According to the log, it was three thirty in the morning.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Eleven and twelve.”

  I would have gone directly to their homes and interviewed them separately, but there was no time. After telling Ken about the keyed cars I had seen in the overlook parking lot on the night of Wheatley’s death, I said, “Call their parents and explain that those kids could be material witnesses in the investigation. Tell them that if they bring them here right away, I’ll do my best to help get their charges reduced. When they get here, separate them.”

  “Done,” he said.

  I rewound Ken’s section of the footage and played it again. Unfortunately, most of the people who had gathered at the overlook to rubberneck the tragedy were standing in the shadows far away from the streetlamps. In the pale reflection of the blue emergency light, I was able to recognize the little bald man who owned the camera, as well as the two pot-bellied alumni who had recognized me. Of the remaining dozen or so figures, about half were women. The other faces went by in a murky blur.

  At one point, Ken had swung the camera in a wider arc and caught the cars parked at the lower edge of the parking lot. The camera didn’t linger at any point, and all the images sped by. When I played it a third time, however, my eyes were drawn to a figure illuminated against the backdrop of the evergreen trees that fringed the lot.

  The fourth time through, I hit the pause button as soon as the panning motion began. By continually punching the pause button, I was able to see each image as it unfolded, a split second apart.

  As the footage arrived at the evergreen trees, there was a momentary flare of light as a car or police vehicle went by on the street. For just that moment, it illuminated the trees. I kept the last frozen image on the television monitor for almost ten seconds.

  Not only was it possible to see the human face peering through the branches of the trees, but there was no doubt who it was. I had spent too many hours with him over the years not to recognize his craggy features.

  It was Ben Massengale, the fallen hero who had inspired me to make the army my career way back when I was in the ROTC program at St. Andrews. He could have been rubbernecking like the rest of the onlookers. Word would have spread fast down to the Creeker. At the same time, he was still wiry and strong. And he was an expert with military accouterments.

  17

  The office windows began rattling like castanets, and I knew the storm was rising in intensity again. I ejected Ken’s camcorder disc from the video player and pulled out the two unlabeled recordings I had found in Sal’s metal carrying case. I inserted the first one in the player and pushed the start button.

  Like the one of Jordan and the girl, it was an amateur production. This one featured an old white-haired gentleman and a pimply teenage boy. They were both naked. The boy was almost cadaverously skinny. The old man had a grotesque stomach paunch that looked like a bloated tumor.

  It had been shot at night, and the action took place in a blue
Jacuzzi tub that was set flush into a wooden deck. In the background, I could see an open sliding glass door that led into the family room of a contemporary home.

  The two participants in the foreground didn’t waste any time demonstrating their sexual orientation, and it didn’t appear that either was aware they were being filmed. About five minutes into the action, I stopped the recording and ejected it.

  The second revealed another sexual encounter. This one was filmed in daylight. It looked as though it might have been shot somewhere in the Adirondacks. Through the bedroom window in the video, I could see snowcapped peaks. There were three participants, two of them women.

  The man on the bed looked familiar to me. He appeared to be in his late sixties and in good physical condition. He needed to be. The two young blondes in bed with him were each giving him enough action for a newlywed.

  I ejected the disc and placed all three of them in Sal’s metal case, which I shoved under Lieutenant Ritterspaugh’s desk. There were probably other scintillating episodes on Sal’s videos, but I didn’t have time to review them.

  Sal had told me the truth when he said he wasn’t working for the Wonderland Motel, but he hadn’t been recording just Jordan Langford. The net was obviously wider and almost certainly involved other blackmail efforts.

  Ken Macready appeared in the doorway.

  “Jake, one of the boys you asked me to find is waiting outside in the corridor,” he said. “His father is a housemaster in one of the freshman dorms. He brought him right over.”

  “What about the second boy?” I asked.

  “When I spoke to his father, he said his son wasn’t guilty of anything and that he was being harassed because of his political views.”

  “The political views of a boy?”

  “I guess the father’s,” said Ken. “He’s the Tea Party guy who made the public statements about the Jews and Communists taking over Groton.”

  I knew which one was his son.

  “Bring the other boy in,” I said. “Tell his father to wait outside.”