Shockwave, page 6
About five seconds passed before he understood that he was wasting his time. Still, he said, “What’s the big deal?” with more hostility than he probably realized.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. This guy’s got a guaranteed insanity defense, no matter what he might have done, right up to murder. So they put him back in some crazy-house, how does that hurt him, really? You said yourself, he comes and he goes. At his age, the way he lives, who knows how long his next visit would have lasted, no matter what the reason for it.”
“Homer’s terrified of being locked up.”
“Don’t they have drugs for—?”
“Homer doesn’t need to be locked up to be on medication. He’s got his disability check, and it’s sent to us. We bank it, and we only give him so much a day—after someone watches him take his meds. That way, he knows he always has a place to go. And we’re always sure he’s taking his meds. The right meds, not something that’d turn him into a zombie.”
“There’s more, Dell,” my wife said. “If Homer didn’t kill that guy—and even the cops don’t really think he did, but they had to take him when he showed them that watch—somebody else did.”
“Dolly, I’m not trying to act cold-blooded, but … so what? Guy like that—the tattoos, his record—probably a lot of people could have a reason to kill him. That’s a job for the cops.”
“Which cops?” Dolly shot back. “The locals? The Sheriff’s Office? The State Police? Knowing where a body was found doesn’t tell you where a murder happened. Or even if it was a murder.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” Dolly and Mack, speaking as one.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
That made it Dolly’s turn. “Dell, couldn’t you … kind of find out something? Maybe it didn’t happen around here—and you’re probably right, that body was just another kind of driftwood—but if it did, there could be something really dangerous still out there. Something close. We have to make sure.”
“We.” Once Dolly said it that way, she was making it mine, too. And telling me it was time to take my turn.
Maybe I tried only because I didn’t want Dolly to lose face—who knows what she might have told this guy about my … capabilities.
Or maybe because I couldn’t resist that trusting look in my love’s eyes.
That video ninja had been my one hope. And I hadn’t banked on it. Sure, I knew it had to be him who took that picture. But I also knew he wouldn’t have had his videocam trained on the ocean, so he wouldn’t have tape of the body being thrown up on shore. He’d have nothing that would clear this Homer guy.
Plus, I’d never get that video man near a witness stand. His image capturing was another version of the movie those psycho mass-killers watch in their heads as they randomly mow down targets. For people like that, suicide is always their exit strategy.
So some other need had driven him to send that photo to the papers. That was the only hand I had to play, but winning such a small-ante pot hadn’t amounted to much. Sure, I’d confirmed that the video ninja had been there when the ocean threw up that body, but I knew he would have been long gone before Homer arrived—he wasn’t the kind of man who’d hold up under questioning, and he was smart enough to know it.
And, from what Mack said, if the beach hadn’t been deserted, Homer never would have gone anywhere near the body.
No point in asking Homer what time that wristwatch was showing when he took it, or even if he actually took it off the dead man’s wrist. I didn’t speak whatever language a schizophrenic does, but maybe Mack could get some answers from him.
My best guess was that one of the local papers got the e-mails—no message, just the attached photo—before the cops knew anything about a body on the beach. But even if the first paper to check its e-mail that morning thought the picture was some kind of hoax—the composition was so intricate that it could be a Photoshop-aided prank—they’d still call it in.
Playing it safe. If the photo turned out to be real, they could run the story later. And the last thing they’d want to do was get on the wrong side of the local police—they were a great source of press releases.
The cops would have moved quick on this one: dead bodies on the beach weren’t part of the town’s image. The photo was anonymous, so the papers couldn’t say they were protecting a source. Not that they’d ever hold anything back, not around here. Every elected official, every government office, every funded “program” … they all worship the same three idols: Cooperation, Collaboration, and Consensus. None of that requires any of them to actually do anything, but it’s great for making it look as if they’re all devoted to serving the public. And it’s not like some “investigative reporter” is going to find out otherwise.
There was no way to know if the body was still wet by the time Homer took the watch, but that didn’t matter. The video ninja said he’d seen the body thrown up by the ocean. And he had the total reliability of any sex spy—as long as he didn’t feel judged for what he was, he’d tell the truth.
So what could Homer add? He hadn’t actually seen anything happen, or he never would have shown the cops the watch.
Or would he? There’s all kinds of crazy. Some people are really sick in their heads past the point of any cure. But Mack said Homer was on some kind of medication.…
I let it go for now. It was daylight, and I was a legitimate person—Adelbert Jackson, with plenty of paper to prove it. I was even a local, although I doubt anyone in town would recognize me. Except maybe those kids Dolly always had around, and they wouldn’t likely be prowling that section of beach at this early hour.
So I put Dolly’s ancient Subaru into gear and went to take a look for myself.
Damn!
I’d been hoping for a long stretch of sand, but it was actually kind of an inlet, with high promontories of rock on both sides.
I shrugged off that hope—easy enough, what with all the practice I’d had. So I climbed out of the car, dressed like a walker. Walking, that’s a big thing around here—one of those “retirement hobbies” that some people really get into. There’s special gear for it and everything.
And if that wasn’t enough, I had a digital camera hanging from a strap around my neck. Taking pictures of the ocean, that’s another thing people do—dentists especially, for some reason I couldn’t even guess at. And tourists for sure—who knows, they might actually get a shot of a whale.
I picked the highest of the promontories. Noticed there was already a well-worn path going up. Not that it was paved, or even cut-through brush—just a path it would have taken a lot of years to make by walking up a hill of solid rock.
I wasn’t worried about cops staking out the place to see if the person who’d created the crime scene would show up to view it. Finding good spots wouldn’t be easy in daylight, and it wasn’t as if they had a surplus of manpower, anyway.
Even if a cop was watching through a telescope, so what? Plenty of people must have passed this same way since the body had been removed, and the camera was all the camouflage I’d need.
The climb wasn’t that steep, but I kept to a slow pace. When I got to the top, I could see it wasn’t uniformly jagged—it flattened out to a mesa big enough to park a few cars on. More than enough for a couple of guys to kill a man and toss his body into the ocean, provided they knew what they were doing, and how to work together.
The camera’s zoom lens helped me scan the area. I made sure to snap off some shots while I was looking around, in case I needed to show why I was there to anyone who asked. Although it looked tall from sea level, I guessed the flat-topped peak was, at the most, maybe three hundred meters high.
I’d already taken some pictures from the ground, so I could be a lot more exact later, when I pulled them off the card and onto a computer screen. There’s a program that will tell you the distance between any two points on a digital photo—all you have to do is input the focal length of the lens. And I’d already paced off distances on my way to the rocks and during the climb, so I was confident I’d be close even without the computer’s help.
What I didn’t know was the depth of the ocean just beneath where I was standing. But I knew that would vary with the tide, and I could find those tables easy enough.
That was as far as I could go without asking questions. I knew a lawyer who’d give me a letter saying I was working for him as an investigator. A lawyer who’d been nothing before I’d hired him to defend MaryLou McCoy. Now he was the heavy hitter for the whole county—a criminal-defense specialist who’d won an impossible case. But without a case, why would there even be a lawyer?
So I’d have to talk to Mack again.
Damn.
“What would I have to do?”
“Just be yourself.”
“There’s no such thing. I’m not asking you what to be; I’m asking you what I’ll have to be to get them to talk to me.”
“I already told you.”
“So as long as I’m with you …?”
“Yeah. You already look like you’ve got more than enough mileage on you, and I don’t guess you walk around in a suit and tie.”
“So I’d be your—what?—assistant, maybe?”
“My friend,” Mack said. “That’s the only kind of person I’d ever bring along. They all know that.”
“You ever do it before?” I asked him.
“Not with a man.”
“You took Dolly along?”
“More than once. Living the way they do, they get cut. And sick sometimes, too. But none of them would go near the hospital.”
“But … Okay, maybe I don’t get it. Even kids, some of them, they’re crazy, right?”
“Sure.”
“And crazy people, they can be dangerous.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So if one of them thought Dolly was … I don’t know, maybe a witch or something, he could … You know what I mean.”
“Some people you don’t even have to guess about. Not the crazy part, the dangerous one.”
“So you think Dolly can protect herself?”
“What are you really asking me?”
“Dangerous people who aren’t crazy, if you’ve got something they want, if you get in their way, if you even—”
“I get it. So does Dolly. The good thing about people who aren’t crazy is that they calculate. Compute the odds.”
“So Dolly’s safe with you, is what you’re saying.”
“That’s true. But it’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you’d have to be howling-at-the-moon insane to think you could get past Minnie.”
“Minnie?”
“My dog. She goes everywhere with me when I work outside. Everywhere. I know Dolly brings her own dog other places, but when she goes with me, it’s better if I bring mine.”
“She told me you had a pit bull. Adopted from the shelter.”
“Yep. That’s Minnie. She’s a sweetheart. Just finds a spot, lies down, and watches. You don’t move, she won’t move. You do, she will.”
“Doesn’t that make some of your … whatever you call them, clients or patients or—”
“I call them by their names.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, This one probably doesn’t know all the signals he gives off. “Doesn’t that make some of them nervous?”
“I don’t know. If they’re there for the right reasons, they get over it real quick once they start talking about why they came.”
“You don’t have any dog with you now.”
“No.”
“And I’m a stranger to them, right? So the dog will be coming along?”
“No.”
“You’re saying …? Never mind. You carry a gun?”
“No.”
“I’m no expert on homeless camps, but I’ve been in some. Ridden some freights, too. Hitched rides. They’ve always got something to protect themselves with. Usually a knife, but there’s other stuff.…”
“You do carry a gun, right?”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t flash it, they won’t pick it up by scent or anything.”
“I never do that.”
“Meaning …?”
“If I bring it out, it’s going to get used.”
“You don’t look like you spook at shadows.”
“I don’t shoot at them, either.”
“Tomorrow morning, then. I’ll pick you up. Around seven, okay?”
“I knew you could do something, baby.”
“Dolly, I haven’t done anything. I’m just having Mack take me around so I can get some answers … provided there’s any answers to get, and I wouldn’t bet too heavy on that.”
“Well … Anyway, I got those depth charts. Even when the tide’s on full ebb, there’s still a good eight, ten feet of offshore water before you hit those razor rocks. But that’s tricky. Some of the underwater rocks rise much higher than others, like stalagmites in caves.”
“So it could be even deeper—the water, I mean—at night?”
“Sure. Why does it matter?”
“If that body was thrown off the top of the rocks, depending on the time that was done, it could just stay underwater until the tide rolled it in.”
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
“I’m not there yet, honey. First, I have to look at what couldn’t happen, see?”
“I think so. But that may not be so important. Let’s see what comes back on the … dead man. If he was on parole, or even if he was a registered sex offender, there’d be an address for him—although it doesn’t seem like they check those out. But if he really lived, say, fifty miles away, his body could have just drifted down. Or up—I’m not sure which way the current runs; I’m pretty sure it depends on the season.”
“Fifty miles, that’s an hour’s drive.”
“Meaning …?”
“Meaning that even if he was one of those guys on some list, and even if he actually lived where he told the law he did, he could make the trip to where his body was found pretty quick.”
“But there was no abandoned car—”
“Why would there be? It’d take at least two men to throw him over, so one of them could just drive his car away.”
“Oh.”
“Dolly, can you get a copy of the autopsy? The photos, too?”
“A look—a good, long look—that I can get, no problem. And I’ve got a good memory. But an actual copy … that’s another thing.”
“There’s a way. You visit one of the nurses you’re pals with, okay? She just happens to have it all on her desk. You signal her—she has to use the restroom or something. But even if there’s a copy machine in her office, there’s no guarantee someone wouldn’t know. The way these hospitals run, they probably have all the machines connected to the billing department, so they’d know if copies had been made. Not what was copied, but that the machine was used.”
“That’s about right. Now even the morphine pumps are connected to the billing department. The patient—his insurance, I mean—they pay per hit, like the pump was a slot machine. But I could probably Skype a pretty decent shot with my—”
“No. Those things show too flat a perspective. There wouldn’t be enough detail. And you’d trigger whatever wireless connection the hospital was using.
“There’s a better way. I’ve got a cell phone you can use. Open it up, push the ‘on’ button, then use the volume button like it was a camera lens—zoom to macro. You’ll be able to fit an entire image on the screen, or just a tiny piece, if that’s what you want to highlight. When you’ve got everything, push the ‘off’ button. That’ll store everything. This one’s got a hundred-shot chip—should be more than enough, right?”
“Dell, where do you get these …? Ah, never mind. I just thought I knew all the different stuff you had.”
“You did, girl. This gadget, it’s new.”
“When did you get it?”
“Right after you told me about the body.”
“Oh.”
“It’s kind of an experiment. But I tested it—it’ll work.”
That wasn’t a lie, I thought to myself. I would never be the master jeweler–turned–bombmaker that Luc had been, but he’d taught me as much as possible before he had to go. Passing knowledge from father to son, the way it must have been done for eons. My inheritance.
I know Luc would have been proud of my perimeter-protector strike. It was preemptive, but not by much: a dangerous pervert had already worked himself inside, one of the boys who were always hanging around Dolly’s flock. He’d already demonstrated his love of torture and worship of fire. I knew how that would play out, but I didn’t know which of the boys was the afflicted one.
Planting the signal senders inside the staples of a magazine I’d carelessly left in my den had been Luc’s craftsmanship, as had the explosive charge deliberately disguised as amateurism. “Very simplistic,” their expert had declared. “You can get instructions on how to build one on the Internet.”
An unfortunate accident. Jerrald had been a “deeply disturbed” teenager who’d filled his blog with the “creative fiction” that his therapist had deemed an “outlet” for his rape-torture-kill fantasies.
His therapist hadn’t seen the crow-raven hybrid Dolly had named “Alfred Hitchcock,” because he had such a dignified way of carrying himself. I found him in the woods behind our house—one leg had been wired around a heavy rock before the gasoline had been poured over him and ignited. It had probably taken him a long time to die.
When he stopped coming around, Dolly figured he’d gone off to find a mate.
When I came across his body, I recognized it immediately for what it was—that wasn’t Luc’s training, any mercenary would have seen that kind of thing many times. So I left the scene untouched, and went hunting. I wasn’t seeking “justice” for Alfred Hitchcock. I wasn’t after revenge. I was responding to a cancerous tumor that had already grown too close to my Dolly. I couldn’t kill the tumor, but I could kill its carrier.
“And it looks like a cell phone?” Dolly asked me.
“Like your cell phone,” I said, taking the duplicate from my pocket and holding it out to her.
