She looked out the tiny window above her sink. It was still wet outside. She didn’t know when this damn storm front was going to finally move offshore. Emma then thought of something Ben had said the day before as they were both leaving work. He’d mentioned that he needed to go see Sally Tatum this morning. She found it odd that he’d said “he” and not “we.” She knew Ben wanted to give his condolences for the death of her husband, but Emma assumed the meeting with Sally was also important for the case against Bobby Tatum. She’d probably witnessed the hostility between her late husband and her son. Of course, there was always the chance she’d refuse to testify against him at his inevitable trial. Mothers often had a way of overlooking the flaws in their children, even when they’d committed crimes against other family members.
Emma wondered whether or not Ben intended to take her with him to the meeting with Sally. She didn’t know if there was there some reason he might not want her there. She’d been partners with him for a long time, but in many ways he still seemed like a mystery to her. It was true that Ben had an outgoing personality, but she didn’t know how many people were actually close to him. She felt like she might be, but then she thought more about their typical conversations and realized she probably wasn’t. Their talks were mostly about the job and seldom ventured into the personal. When they did, it was always at her prompting, and he usually found a way to quickly bring the discussion back to whatever case they were working. She knew things about Ben that others didn’t, but she suspected that was simply because she was around him more often than other people. It certainly wasn’t because he’d shared those thoughts or experiences with her. Emma had long thought that his friendliness was a strange form of self-protection. He would smile at you, but he’d never let you get too close.
Emma’s phone rang just as she reached for it to check the time. It was Ben, and she wondered why he was calling so early.
“Hello.”
“Help me,” Ben said.
The voice didn’t sound like his. It was clearly in distress, but the quality of the voice was also different. It almost sounded like Ben had been speaking through something like a wet cloth. Still, it had come from his phone.
“What’s wrong?”
There was no answer.
“Ben, what’s wrong?”
Still no response.
“Where are you?”
She looked at the time on her phone. It was only six forty-four. He was more than likely still at his house.
“Ben, are you there?”
Emma ended the call and ran across the kitchen to get her car keys. She grabbed her coat, which was draped across the back of a nearby kitchen chair, and rushed outside to her car. It took her about fifteen minutes to get to his house. She immediately noticed the wide-open front door. Emma pulled into the driveway. She climbed out of the car and jogged to the front door.
“Ben?” she called out.
There was no answer, so Emma entered the house. She placed her hand on the butt of her service weapon.
“Ben, are you here?”
Emma had been to his house a few times, and she knew the general layout. She walked through the foyer and headed toward the den.
“Ben, where are you?”
She saw him as soon as she entered the back room. He was seated on the sofa, and his head was pointed toward her. She recoiled in horror as she saw that one side of his face had been crushed.
“Oh my God, Ben!”
Emma rushed over to him. His face was a mask of gore. Emma could see his shattered skull through the torn flesh. Several of this teeth were broken, and bloody pieces of skin and teeth were lying on the bottom of his shirt where it tucked into his pants. She looked down at the cushion and saw his cell phone in his open hand. She didn’t see how he’d managed to call her.
Emma pulled out her phone and called emergency services.
“This is Detective Emma Ross with the Gloucester sheriff’s department. We have an officer down. Twenty-one Henderson Lane. I repeat, officer down, twenty-one Henderson Lane.”
Emma looked back at Ben. He was gone, just like Bill Tatum. She stepped back and looked around her. She immediately spotted a trail of blood on the tan carpet leading into the other room. She followed it and found a large pool of blood on the tiled kitchen floor. She saw what looked like more pieces of his flesh mixed in with the blood. There were also footprints in the outer edges of the blood pool. They were only partial prints, so she couldn’t get a feel for what kind of shoe or boot had made them.
“Jesus,” Emma said.
She couldn’t believe there was so much blood.
Bobby Tatum had been locked up when Ben had been killed, but she wondered if Ben’s murder had been revenge for arresting Bobby.
She looked back at the pool of blood. In addition to the footprints, she saw there were also drag marks in the blood. It looked like Ben had been killed in the kitchen and then his body had been dragged to the den where he’d been propped up on the sofa. She didn’t know why the killer would have done that.
Emma suddenly noticed the extreme heat in the house. Her adrenaline had been pumping so much that she hadn’t taken note of it before. It must be close to one hundred degrees, she thought. She walked into the hallway to look at the thermostat. It had been set to over ninety degrees. She doubted Ben had done that, which meant the killer had changed the setting. Why, though? Had the killer been trying to contaminate the medical examiner’s findings when he studied Ben’s body temperature? She quickly dismissed that theory since it had most likely been the killer who’d phoned her. He’d also left the front door wide open. That had to have been a signal for the neighbors to realize something was wrong and to investigate the matter. The killer wanted the body to be found quickly. There was no other explanation.
Emma waited for the emergency team to arrive. Two sheriff’s deputies, Joe Debney and Jackson Potter, were the first to the scene. She showed them Ben’s body and asked them to be on the lookout for the forensics team. Emma said she wanted fingerprints taken from Ben’s cell phone, as well as extensive photos of the den and kitchen, including the partial footprints in the blood. She also told them to print the thermostat in the hallway, as well as the doorknob of the front door.
Emma walked outside and examined the windows on the front of the house. Nothing looked disturbed. She was about to walk toward the back of the house when Joe Debney rushed out the front door. He leaned over the porch railing and vomited into the flowerbed below. Emma knew he was embarrassed, especially since he’d done it right in front of her. She was about to tell him not to worry about it when she heard sirens down the street. She turned and saw the ambulance approaching. Emma asked the deputy to call the forensics team again and get an estimated time of arrival. There was nothing for the paramedics to do but wait for the body to be examined. There was no bringing Ben back from this one.
Emma walked around to the rear of the house. She walked onto the wooden deck and checked the back door. The door was firmly shut, and the lock didn’t appear to have been tampered with. She climbed off the deck and checked the windows. She found what she was looking for on the fourth window. The window was still shut, but a small section of the window pane just below the inside lock had been broken.
She turned and looked at the rest of the backyard. Ben’s lot wasn’t very wide, but it did extend far back into a patch of thick woods. Emma didn’t know what was on the other side of the woods, but she thought it might be another road where the killer could have parked. She walked to the edge of the woods and looked around. It didn’t take her long to find a set of footprints in the mud from the previous day’s rain. They were in both directions, so she assumed they were prints of the killer walking to and from the house. She followed the prints into the woods. They only extended for around five feet before they disappeared in the thick carpet of brown and yellow leaves that had fallen in the last month or so.
Emma assumed the killer had walked in a relatively straight li
ne, so she proceeded deeper into the woods. She walked for another one or two hundred yards before she began to see the end of the woods. She didn’t hear any cars on the other side, so she wondered where this led. She finally reached the edge of the trees and saw she was at the bank of a small waterway. She walked as far as she could before the ground turned to thick mud. She looked down at the tall grass along the bank but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She was about to return to the house when her cell phone rang. She assumed it was a member of the forensics team calling. Instead, she saw a name she hadn’t heard from in years: Alex Penfield. There was no time to talk to him now.
The forensics team was there by the time she made her way through the woods. She entered the house and saw the flashes of Canon cameras. She watched as the forensics team took numerous photos of Ben’s body, as well as the blood patterns in the kitchen. Emma walked over to the deputy who had vomited in the front yard. He still looked green in the face.
“Looks like the killer got in the house through the back window. Have them print that window as well.”
The deputy nodded, and Emma made her way to the master bedroom. She walked over to the window in question and saw the curtains had been pulled across it. She reached into her pocket and removed an ink pen, which she used to pull one of the curtains back. She could see the broken pane and the unlocked latch. Ben wouldn’t have noticed it with the curtain drawn, even if he’d made his way to his bedroom before he’d been attacked.
Emma searched the room but nothing looked disturbed. The intruder had come to the house for one purpose: to murder Ben Hall. She walked back to the den. She approached Max Reiner, who was one of the forensics team members. He was only twenty-five years old, but he carried himself like a veteran. The man knew his stuff.
“Have you had a chance to print the phone? I think the killer used it to call me,” she said.
She could see the immediate look of surprise in his eyes.
“He called you?”
“I think so. It was hard to understand what he was saying.”
“I did print the phone. There were several prints, but that’s what you’d expect.”
“Did it look like they were different sets of prints?”
“Hard to say until I get a better look at them. I’ll make it a priority,” he said.
“Thanks. Do you have an extra set of gloves?”
Max reached into his jacket pocket and removed a pair of blue latex gloves. Emma pulled them on and picked up Ben’s phone. She hit the home button and then scanned through his call log. She immediately saw the outgoing call to her phone that morning. The call before that was an incoming one. It had been made the night before. She didn’t recognize the number, so she took a photo of the phone’s display with her own phone. She reviewed the other calls from the previous day. She saw he’d called her number the previous morning. She remembered he’d called her as he was getting close to the department headquarters. She also saw a few other work phone calls around the same time.
She turned back to Max and saw he was holding a crime scene evidence bag. She slipped Ben’s phone into the bag, and then Max zipped it closed.
“Thanks. Don’t forget that window in the master bedroom.”
“I’m going there next,” he said.
“There’s also some muddy prints at the edge of the woods. Photograph those soon before it starts raining again.”
Max studied her for a long moment.
“You okay?”
Emma ignored the question.
“Let’s nail this guy fast. We can’t let him get away with this.”
Emma turned and looked at Ben’s body once more. She couldn’t even recognize him. The killer had butchered him.
She dialed the sheriff’s department as she made her way back to her car. Bobby Tatum might not have killed Ben, but she thought he might know who did. She told them to move Bobby to one of the interview rooms so he’d be there by the time she got back.
Emma got a return call ten minutes later just as she pulled into the parking lot.
“This is Ross.”
She didn’t get a response.
“Hello, this is Ross.”
“He’s gone,” the female voice said.
“Angela?”
She thought she recognized the voice as one of the deputies.
“He’s gone,” Angela said again, her voice panicked.
“What the hell do you mean he’s gone?”
“I went to get him and found him hanging in his cell. He tied the bedsheet around the bar in the window and then wrapped the other end around his neck.”
Emma slammed her fist against the steering wheel.
“Emma?” Angela asked.
“I’m on my way in now,” she said, and she ended the call before Angela could say goodbye.
Emma pulled into a parking space and turned off the ignition. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. She didn’t know what new disaster this day could possibly bring. She regained her composure and exited the car. Emma headed straight for the section of the building that housed the prisoners’ cells. She saw a small crowd of people gathered around the cell that housed Bobby Tatum. The group parted as she approached. She walked into the cell without saying a word to anyone. Bobby was on his back on the cement floor. Someone had untied the bedsheet around his neck, and it was now a few feet from his head. She looked up at the window and saw the other end was still connected to the bar. Emma turned back to the crowd.
“How the hell does something like this happen? Why wasn’t anyone watching him?”
No one responded. Emma turned from them and walked back through the crowd.
Three deaths in less than twenty-four hours, including the one person who might have been able to shed light on what was really happening. It was all too much to process.
The next few hours were a blur of grief, finger-pointing, and accusations. She knew it was a predictable reaction to the dramatic events in such a short period of time. No one could believe Ben Hall was gone. It was like the entire sheriff’s department was in a state of denial. Emma couldn’t get the bloody image of Ben’s face out of her head. She even began to question whether it was really him since the face was such an unrecognizable mess.
“The news has broken,” a male voice said.
Emma looked up from her desk and saw Sheriff Lucas Slater standing in front of her. Slater was in his early sixties. He was tall with wispy gray hair and a muscular physique that defied his age. Emma knew he’d been a longtime friend of Ben’s, and she chided herself for not expressing her condolences to him earlier.
“We’ve already had three reporters contact us. They know about Ben,” Slater said.
It wasn’t hard for her to see the look of sorrow in his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know you two were close.”
Slater nodded.
“He was a good man.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Have we got a time of death yet?” Slater asked.
“Not yet. I spoke with the M.E. an hour ago. She says she needs more time.”
“Remind her that Ben was one of ours. This is a priority.”
Emma didn’t think the doctor needed to be reminded, but she agreed with Slater’s request.
“Let me know what you need. Whatever you want, it’s yours,” Slater said.
Joe Debney approached her desk just as Slater walked away. He still didn’t look much better than he had at Ben’s house that morning.
“There’s a guy in the lobby for you.”
“Not now, Joe. The media is the last thing I want to deal with right now.”
“I don’t think he’s with them. He said he was a friend.”
“A friend? What’s his name?”
“Penfield. He didn’t give a first name.”
Emma thanked Joe and walked out to the lobby. She saw Alex Penfield through the glass doors before she entered. It had been a decade since she�
�d last seen him, but he still looked the same. Penfield turned to her just as she walked through the door.
“I’m sorry about Ben. I heard about it on the news.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and she instantly regretted how the question came across.
“His death, is it connected to the murder at the marina?”
“Alex, what’s going on? Why are you asking about this?”
“This might sound crazy, but it’s something about a man missing part of his face.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“There’s one more thing. The name Sally. I thought it was a person, but then I learned it was the name of the boat.”
“It’s also a woman. They named it after her.”
“Who named it? The victim?”
“Sally is his wife. I think you better come back to my desk.”
Penfield followed Emma to the back. She sat behind her desk, and Penfield took a chair on the other side. He looked around the busy room. It was the first time he’d been in a law enforcement building since he’d left his job. He’d thought he’d feel comfortable being surrounded by the types of people he’d spent most of his life around, but he didn’t.
“What’s your involvement in all of this?” Emma asked.
“I got a call a couple of nights ago. The guy, he’s kind of hard to describe, but he told me about Sally and the man with part of his face missing.”
“Who is this guy?”
“He’s not part of this. He didn’t do it, and I’m sure he has no idea who did.”
“You’re not making any sense, Alex. Those details about the case weren’t publicized. I could see the name of the boat getting out, but not the other part.”
“So the face thing is connected somehow?”
Emma hesitated a long moment. Then she told him about the deadly injures to Bill Tatum’s head, as well as Ben’s. She also told him how Bobby Tatum had tried to blame the murder on his deceased brother, someone who had some kind of facial disease that caused the flesh of his face to become deformed.
“Is it possible for me to speak with Bobby Tatum?” Penfield asked.
“No. He’s dead. Hung himself in his cell this morning.”
Dead Rise: An Alex Penfield Novel Page 5