“Suggesting what?”
“The victim was kissed, certainly licked. A lot.”
Nick absorbed this. “Can you get a DNA workup from saliva?”
“I wish we could.”
Nick Fowler stared down at the body. “The wounds suggest a strong person, don’t you think?”
“I can’t be sure.” Koenig said, peering up. “But that’s your department, Lieutenant.”
Fowler felt the bite of Koenig’s remark because he knew it was true. “Thank you, Doctor. I have one question.”
The doctor looked up, startled.
“There were bloodstains in the hallway . . . lots of bloodstains. Would the victim have bled profusely after being hanged?”
“Not as much as while he was alive, naturally.”
Nick Fowler was thinking. “Let me know as soon as you have anything else.”
Edwin R. Koenig smiled slightly, nodding his head. “I will.” The circles under his eyes became the shadows of a half moon when he ducked his head.
When Nick Fowler returned with Bill Rodney in tow, the afternoon light on the fourth floor of Ardsley was streaming through the windows. The phone rang in the office. It was Marty saying that the garbage cans had been emptied the afternoon prior to the crime, about 5:00 P.M. Fowler covered the mouthpiece while he thought for a moment; he knew most of the boys on the hall had been interviewed and printed. He wanted to review the statements. He put the phone back to his ear.
“Marty, I want you to roam around and talk to students the rest of the day.”
The voice crackled through the receiver. “About what?”
“Anything. What do they think? What do they care about?”
“I found out where the kids smoke—that interest you?”
“Yeah, where?”
“In the tunnels.”
“Tunnels?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. Some kids from Ardsley Hall told me about it. They were built during the war when the school was used as a military base for two years.”
Fowler listened intently. “What did they say was down there?”
“Cigarettes and rats—but I think the kids do things and talk about stuff down there that they can’t talk about up on campus.”
“Great. Put that in your report, and try to find anything you can about Crawford—what he was doing yesterday, who was the last person to see him alive. Like that.”
“Whatever you want . . . sir.” There was a slight insinuation in the tone, then a click on the other end.
Fowler frowned, asked Bill Rodney to take a scheduled 2:00 interview with a student.
He needed quiet.
He ambled up two flights and, finding a metal door unlatched, stepped out onto the roof to get some air. He took deep breaths, leaned against the south wall, looking out across the immense green lawns, all edged with Belgian block. When he felt a tacky sensation underfoot, he lifted up the soles of his shoes, touched tar, cursed, and scraped his shoe on a clean shingle.
He got a weird feeling then, a vibe that was unmistakable. He turned around, his eyes panning the roof, the walls, cornices, chimneys, the false pediment on the west wall—a nineteenth-century homage to Greek architecture facing the stone arch that stretched across to Booth Hall. He looked the other way, more chimneys, the old water tower, more cornices and rooftops stretching into the distance.
He walked around the water tower and looked over the hill that slanted down into town. Suddenly he felt a cold wave, a heavy dark feeling, a shudder up and down his spine. There it was again, a cold wash, a hollowness, an empty chill. He leaned against the tower. The feeling left him.
The door to the roof whined as he latched it. When he walked down the stairs, another eerie sensation overtook him. The wheels in Fowler’s head were spinning. He stood up on the railing, looking under the stairway for places where a loss of paint or rubbed wood might indicate a rope had supported the weight of a body.
Nothing.
He doubted that Crawford had been hanged on the stairs—possibly on the floor itself. He came down another flight of stairs to the fourth floor. Looking at the bloodstains along the wall unsettled him. He wondered if the patterns on the wall had a ritualistic significance. But why? And why all the blood?
He studied the ceiling fans, glanced at the light fixtures above the old blades twisting in the half-light. His eyes dropped. High up on the walls, above a strip of molding, there were water sprinklers. Fowler pulled a chair out of room 401, the nearest to the bloodstained wall. He stood up on it and examined a sprinkler head jutting out above the door. The fixture was bent down slightly as if pressure had been exerted on it. He stood down on the floor, his eyes still on the sprinkler valve.
His gaze moved slowly down the wall. He studied a series of bloody handprints on the plaster: blots instead of palm prints that looked—from the snakelike imprint of veins—like the top of a hand. A boy’s hand. These were enclosed by smudges that looked like gloved fingers. All along this area, the white wall above the wainscoting carried the same odd imprint.
Drops of dried blood trailed away in spirals across the floor. Fowler now climbed the stairs to see if the swirls spelled out something. All he could determine was that the trails of blood drops seemed to travel in oblong shapes, distorted figure eights, moving away from the wall toward the garbage can.
He walked back up to the wall, his mind a blank. He sat down in the middle of the swarms of dried red blots and—gazing down at the dirty floor—saw a fresh indentation in one of the floorboards.
On his hands and knees now, he decided the notch in the wood might be from the end of a knife. Inside the impression, some unvarnished wood peeked above a small cavity of dried red blood. His mind kept thudding up against the same dull question: Why the overkill? He was still kneeling down, staring at what looked like a place of sacrifice.
It was then he realized the killer had brought the boy to this spot during the night, strung him up to the sprinkler while he was still alive, partially slit his throat, and flung the knife so it stuck in the floor, while he—this was where it all collapsed—walked the body around? The body was not dragged. There were no smears, except for the occasional skid of a heel mark.
Suddenly Fowler got an eerie sensation. Goose bumps rose up on his forearms as he reread the report, documenting the position of the stains on the victim’s clothing. The blood had poured down the front of the boy’s shirt, and carried impressions of another garment, the killer’s, forced against it. From these marks, he had decided the killer was wearing a dress shirt or blouse with buttons down the front. Then he saw it.
On the shoulder of the boy’s shirt were gloved palm prints from a left hand with long thin fingers. Fowler stood up, rested his own left hand, as if he were the killer, on some air the size of a boy’s shoulder, this leaving his right hand free. Sure enough, the fingers of his right hand copied the odd imprints above the wainscoting. There was no palm print between the finger smudges because that was where the top of the boy’s hand was pressed against the wall.
He held the imaginary boy in his arms and moved out across the floor following the trail of drops, and back. That was when he realized he was dancing. YOU SLIT HIS THROAT, AND WHILE THE BLOOD POURED DOWN BETWEEN YOU, YOU DANCED HIM AROUND THE FLOOR, YOU SON OF A BITCH.
Nick Fowler knew in his bones that’s what had happened. The rickety ceiling fans must have muffled the steps. Something bothered him, though, as he moved above the constellations of blood on the floor. The hands were reversed. It appeared as though the victim had been leading.
8
BALLARD WALKED UP the limestone steps to Dr. Clarence’s office on High Street. His legs wanted to give way as he thought about discussing the personality tests. Dr. Clarence had said they would get to that.
Nathan Clarence answered the door the same way he had each Tuesday. He pulled opened the door, smiled slightly, dropping his eyes beneath the clear pink frames of his glasses, then—as he pressed the screen doo
r open—Ballard would slip in.
Ballard always sat in the corner of the office on a stuffed sofa, while Dr. Clarence sat at his long mahogany desk where he could peer through the venetian blinds down at the quiet street. Ballard had often looked at the side of the doctor’s head, studying the hair that was cut so close it seemed nearly shaved. The doctor had, on many occasions, offered Ballard the choice of lying down if he so desired, but the boy hadn’t done that yet.
As always, there was a long silence, but today Ballard really didn’t feel like talking. His head felt as though it were full of explosives.
“What are all those thoughts?” the doctor said finally. The words seemed to drop out of the sky like napalm.
“Nothing,” Ballard said.
“Seem to be doing a lot of thinking over nothing.”
“Yeah.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Another silence. Ballard realized he was angry as he recalled what the headmaster had said to him a month before, but he wasn’t going to be the one to bring up the tests. Then he thought about the fear.
“Want me to ask what’s bothering you?”
“No.”
“Well,” Dr. Clarence said quietly, “let me try.” Ballard was silent. “You’re upset about what happened last night.”
Ballard wondered what Dr. Clarence was referring to. “What?” he managed to murmur.
“The murder.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“Well, what is bothering you?” Dr. Clarence said.
“Whatever you want to know about me, you end up finding out.”
The doctor leaned forward. “Did that ever happen to you before—with your parents?”
“Never mind,” Ballard said, the desultory whine in his voice turning harsh suddenly.
The doctor’s tone changed. He said sharply, “Why are you afraid to tell me about this?”
“Because I don’t want to!” His voice rising.
“Why not? Which parent did that to you?”
Something detonated inside. Ballard leapt off the couch, stalked to the venetian blinds, and turned so he was facing the doctor. “My father, okay!” His face was red, his hands shaking. “Are you satisfied?”
Dr. Clarence blinked, but looked evenly at him. “How did he do it?”
“Different from you!”
The doctor put down his pencil. “Why are you so angry?”
“You thought I shouldn’t be admitted to the school—because of some tests!”
“Who told you that?”
“The headmaster. Second day of school.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“How do you think?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Ballard clenched his fists. “I was angry!”
Dr. Clarence smiled slightly. “You may sit down now, Ballard. That was very good.”
“Maybe I won’t.” He stared at the doctor defiantly, their eyes locked on each other. The doctor was the first to look away. Ballard abruptly slumped back to the couch, lay down, and fell silent.
Dr. Clarence wheeled around in his chair and was surprised that Ballard was lying down. It was the first time. He began again, his voice now low and soothing. “You were about to tell me how your father found out your secrets.”
“What?” Ballard said impatiently.
“How did he do it?”
Cary Ballard saw his father standing in a sea of color. He started talking. “In the flower shop, he would dote on the tulips or the mums, the hydrangeas, the geraniums. He would—I don’t know—just talk to them. Take care of them.”
“Why?” said Dr. Clarence.
“Because they were good—they did what they were supposed to do.”
“They—what?”
“Grew up, straight and tall, they bloomed. Had colors.”
“And you didn’t?”
“. . . I guess not.”
“What did your father look like?”
Cary thought about that. “Hefty. Kind of bulky. Dressed like a typical florist—green slacks, a green jacket. He drove a green truck.”
“I thought you were going to say he was dressed in black.”
The room grew very quiet. “Why would I say that?”
“Before you mentioned seeing a large shape of some sort in black. I thought it was your father.”
“I never said that.” Ballard felt his voice rise.
“You identified some black shape—some figure—in unconscious ways. First in the tests.”
“Here we go.”
“Do you want to tell me about the figure?”
“It doesn’t exist.”
“It doesn’t?”
“I have these thoughts, that’s all. I see this figure, this thing. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid. Now it’s back. Someday I’m going to be free of it.”
“It? Isn’t it you?”
Ballard was silent for a long time. “That figure is my future,” the boy said finally, his voice far away, a plaintive whisper in the distance. “It won’t let people hurt me.”
“How?”
“. . . It stops them. I have to sleep now.” Ballard’s breathing worked now into a steady rhythm.
“How does it stop them?”
“. . . I don’t know—I can’t tell—I . . .”
As Dr. Clarence began asking Cary questions about his test responses, he noticed the boy’s uncanny ability to fall in and out of a deep sleep. He decided the boy was dissociating.
They talked about pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test. At one point, the doctor thought he had identified some violent behavior. It occurred to him certain desensitization techniques might help.
Ballard felt better when the screen door closed behind him. Walking back down the limestone steps, he rubbed his eyes. All he knew was he felt lighter.
SCHWERIN PRESSED HIS glasses up nervously and squatted down near the fire. “Why did you bring me down here?” he asked. No one answered. The glow illumined the old railroad ties spanning the shaft. The ties that held up the tunnel flickered far into the distance.
Schwerin watched the boys’ faces glow, their eyes strange, even translucent. They were sitting, in silence, gazing into the fire they had built out of wood shavings, branches gathered from the woods.
“Tell him about the ghost,” muttered Finkelstein, a red-haired boy sitting cross-legged by the fire.
Schwerin looked up. “Ghost?”
“Tell him, Gluckner.”
The big football player looked up, shrugged. “You tell him—you saw it.” He was lighting a cigarette, staring down the tunnel. “Hey, Goodson, you saw it too, didn’t you?”
Goodson leaned forward, as if on cue, rolls of fat creasing his shirt. “Yeah, but not until I got initiated.”
They all smiled. Finkelstein poked the fire. “See, Schwerin, this ghost was a student we figure died when the other tunnels collapsed.”
The pupils of Schwerin’s eyes were expanding. “What does the ghost look like?”
Chung leaned forward and laughed silently, sucking air. “Uh-uh, not yet. First you’ve got to do something.”
Gluckner snorted in the boy’s direction. “Schwerin found fucking Crawford’s body. He’s not scared . . . are you, Schwerin?”
Schwerin pushed up his glasses. “NO.”
“What a dick.” Gluckner was disgusted. He looked the other way.
Walsh, a skinny kid from Philly who still wore a Chicago duck’s ass, pulled out his comb. “Shut up, Gluckner.” He combed his greased hair back, was up on his knees. “Look, Schwerin, the ghost is still dressed like a student, right, Fink?”
“He’s older,” Finkelstein nodded. “But still dressed the way students dressed a long time ago. But his face is white.”
Schwerin was squirming. “What do I have to do to see him?”
Gluckner threw a wood shaving at him. “You gotta write something on a bathroom wall, okay, douche bag?
”
Schwerin looked confused. “What?”
Finkelstein smiled at Gluckner, whose eyes were gleaming back at him. “Think he could do it?” They traded meaningful stares.
Schwerin was looking around, calculating his exit. Gluckner stretched over, seized Schwerin by the collar, whispered in his ear. “It’s real simple: you write something about Ms. Coates on the wall in any bathroom, okay? We check it out—then we show you the fucking ghoul.”
Schwerin was panicking. “Wh—what do I write?”
“Whatever moves you,” said Finkelstein, laughing.
The grip around his neck made Schwerin’s teeth lock. “You mean, about her body?”
“Do we have to spell it out, stupid?” Gluckner was twisting the collar, beginning to cut off Schwerin’s air.
Finkelstein leaned over. “‘The words of the prophets are written on subway walls . . .’”
“And bathroom stalls,” Gluckner said. “Remember that.”
“Oh?” said Schwerin. He looked around at the boys. They were grinning. “You want a poem about . . . the last time Coates and I did it?” He rolled his eyes. Laughs echoed through the shaft. Slaps on the back, his hair jostled, noogies from Walsh, tits pinched.
Schwerin had arrived.
Finkelstein and Gluckner clapped hands in the air.
9
THERE WAS A pause on the other end of the phone line. Nick Fowler had just called down to the state police station, asking them to run a check on dancing schools in the Hudson Valley area.
Judy Bayard, the dispatcher, had taken the call. She had just spent the day listening to certain comments, mostly out of jealousy, by some officers working out of the station to cover Reliance County. She knew these cops and understood their gripe. The first really unusual killing in years and it got farmed out to a rookie lieutenant from upstate.
She had drunk coffee with these policemen, had sucked down beer chasers with them down at the Thirsty Moose. She had dated two of them. One cop she had even slept with until she found out the fussy roommate he complained about all the time was really his wife. Still, they were all pretty decent guys and she was a loyal person.
Kiss Them Goodbye Page 4