Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (31 page)

He shook his head. “If I knew I wouldn’t be here.”

I’d forgotten. In the post-resurrection interviews it turned out many of the Returned didn’t remember their deaths, especially the sudden violent ones. And none of them remembered what happened between death and resurrection.

“What do you remember?”

“Not much of that last day. I know I had a meeting with my business partner. After that, a young National Guardsman with a nasty looking weapon was saying something about crispy critters.”

I wanted to go further, but then I realized that I might be dealing with a closed case. His murder might already have been solved.

“Mr. Foreman, I am going to look into this, but first I’m going to have to pull the report. Give me you number and… ”

While I was talking he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a folder. He handed it to me. It was a BPD case file, complaint number 06-4G97810. Under the number was the heading “Homicide – Foreman, Terrence.”

“Where did you get this?”

He smiled, “It’s one of the few rights we have left.”

Of course. The Victim’s Rights Bill of ‘03. When the City Council passed it zombie rights weren’t a consideration. The bill specified that crime
victims
had the right to review their case folders. And while Foreman might not be a citizen under the law, there was no doubt he was a victim.

I opened the case folder and took a quick glance. On the first page, stamped in red, was the word “Open.” That meant it hadn’t been solved or otherwise disposed of. I leafed through the rest of it––police and crime scene reports, lab results, witness interviews––it looked like it was all there. I put it on my desk to read later.

“Who wanted to kill you, Mr. Foreman?”

“I can’t think of anyone.”

The trouble with questioning zombies is that they show little emotion. Their faces generally don’t move much unless they want them to. And with a near expressionless voice it’s hard to tell if one of them is lying. I fell back on one of the givens in detective work––everybody lies.

“Mr. Foreman, when I look through that folder I’m going to find two or three people with a reason to have wanted you dead. Why not save me the trouble and tell me yourself. Let’s start with the obvious––wife, girlfriend?”

The answer came too quickly. I started tapping the case folder with one finger. If he were telling me the truth he’d see the tapping as a nervous gesture. If not…

“She’d been having an affair.” Something showed on his face that time, a sorrow so deep it had to come out. A sadness that death couldn’t ease.

I stood up with the folder and made copies. When I came back he was standing. He took his originals with his left and offered me his right. I took it, asking as I did, “your wife, ex-wife, is she…” I fumbled for the right term. Words like “alive” and “dead” are losing their meaning.

Foreman forced a smile. “She’s alive, not a zombie like me.”

My face must have shown my surprise, the undead don’t usually use “Z” word. Foreman kept his smile. “I am what I am, Detective. Thank you for your help.”

There was a lot I could have said back. Comments about his large size, small IQ or doubtful parentage came to mind. I even thought about the ever popular “He wanted directions to your mother’s house. I told him to expect at least an hour’s wait and have his two dollars ready.” Instead I turned the other cheek, took the laughter that came my way and went back to my desk.

I called Homicide and told them what I had.

“Foreman, Foreman,” muttered the harried detective as he searched through a year’s worth of computer entries. “Oh yeah, here it is. It’s been dropped into the Cold Case bin. No one’s really working it right now, but if you want to bring him down I can see him,” I heard him paging through a calendar, “Tuesday a week.”

“So soon?” I asked, not trying to disguise the sarcasm.

“Listen, Scott, I don’t know what it’s like up in the great Northeast, but down here in the real world we’re swamped. The murder rate’s been going up ever since the dead returned. Word on the street is that it ain’t murder if they come back after you kill them. And you try getting a homicide conviction after the so-called victim walks into the courtroom. Baltimore juries never were the brightest, and there’s always one of the twelve who can’t tell the difference between alive and undead.”

He rambled for another few minutes. When he paused to breathe, I made my offer. “Look, if it’s that busy how about I look into it? If I get any where I’ll give you a call, say, Tuesday next.”

I got a “Yeah, you do that,” and then he hung up.

I slipped a CYA memo into the case folder noting the date and time that I had been given permission by the Homicide Unit to investigate one of their cold cases then sat back and started reading reports.

Ten months and three days before the Righteous started leaving us, Terry Foreman was found dead in his car. The car was parked in his driveway, the motor running. Foreman was slumped over in the driver’s seat, having died from a close-contact gunshot wound to the head.

Foreman’s body was discovered by a curious neighbor who noticed the car idling for about twenty minutes before going over to investigate. According to his wife, Debbie (nee Lochlear), Foreman had left the house forty minutes prior to the discovery of his body.

No gun, casings or bullets were found on the scene. The Medical Examiner did recover a .38 bullet from the inside of Foreman’s head. The bullet was suitable for comparison should a suspect weapon be recovered. The Crime Lab did a nice job of photographing and diagramming the scene. The lab techs also dusted Foreman’s car, recovering quite a few latent prints, all of which were matched with Foreman, his wife, the neighbor and the first officer on the scene.

The area was canvassed and of course, no one heard or saw anything. Foreman’s wife and business partner were both questioned, routinely it seems, with no mention of either infidelity or embezzlement. But then, that’s not the sort of thing one brags about to police investigating a murder.

Updates filed one, two, three and six months after the murder reported little progress in the case. The last update listed “solvability” as “poor,” and recommended that the case be placed in the “Pending” file to wait further developments.

There were none, not until the dead returned and one of them walked into my office.

I started with the wife, the ex Mrs. Foreman and now Debbie Lochlear. She’d moved out of the Hamilton duplex she’d shared with her husband into a pricier Perry Hall condo. Perry Hall was in Baltimore County and out of city jurisdiction, but I was only going there to chat, this time at least.

I’d called ahead and she was expecting me. So when I rang the bell she buzzed me in right away.

“Ms. Lochlear,” I said when she opened the apartment door, “I’m Detective Scott.” She let me in and offered coffee. I took a cup and we sat at the kitchen table and talked.

She shook her head. “I knew it was possible, but thought maybe he’d call. When he didn’t, I thought that he’d been one of those that… didn’t come back.”

“How did you and Terry get along?”

It must have been the way I asked the question, because right away she said, “He told you, didn’t he––about the affair?” I nodded and let her continue. “It was one of those things. Terry was a good man, the best. He loved me dearly, gave me everything. But he wasn’t––exciting. One day I decided that I needed some excitement and went out and found it. Terry was never supposed to find out.”

“But he did.”

Her “Yeah,” came out like a curse, and her following words grew bitter as she came near tears. “Someone who knew us, a ‘good friend’ of ours, saw me with my boyfriend one day. I guess we were being a bit obvious. Anyway, he thought Terry should know, so he told him. That night he when came home, Terry asked me about it. I never was a good liar.”

“How did he take it?”

“Sat there and cried like a baby. Blamed himself for not being what I needed. We talked and I said all the right things, the things he needed to hear. Told him I’d end the affair, that I’d make it right between us again.”

I halfway believed her. She might have just been someone who made a mistake. We all make them. But then she might just be telling me “all the right things” hoping I’d believe her like her husband did. “Did you make it right?” I asked.

“Why not? You were his. You might have told him you loved him. He didn’t want to lose you. With Terry out of the way…” I let that hang and changed direction. “When your husband died, you got the house, the bank account, everything. Right?”

“Someone did. Somebody put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Why not you or Chavis? You both got something out of it. He got you and you got,” I looked around the room, “a condo in Perry Hall.”

She called me a name, one I’d been called before. “I did not kill my husband,” she repeated. “You want someone with a reason to kill Terry, talk to his partner. Talk to Ronald Morrison. That bastard stole from Terry, then was going to leave the firm and take most of their clients with him. Terry was going to sue. He wanted to give Morrison one last chance to make it right. He had a meeting with him the night he died. He never got there. Go see Morrison, and get out of my house.”

It was the weekend before I could do any follow-up work. A rash of B&E’s in the Glenham area combined with a string of armed robberies along Harford Rd. kept us all busy. Then I got picked for a special detail.

Friday, City Hall. The first Zombie Rights rally here in Baltimore. Anyone who didn’t expect something like it sooner or later hasn’t been paying attention to the last 100 years of American history.

I got “volunteered” as part of the security taskforce, to make sure the prominent undead brought here from other cities weren’t killed––again. It had happened in other places, one speaker shot by a sniper, two more blown up in a car. It didn’t stop the cause, only slowed it down while everyone waited for the deceased to come back from wherever the newly dead go these days. The terrorism backfired. Nothing feeds a cause like martyrs, and having living (sort of) martyrs makes the cause stronger still.

There was the usual rhetoric––Zombies should give up their old identities and adopt “post-existence” names. There was a call for a Zombie Nation, where the undead could dwell in peace. Even the name “Zombie” was attacked as insulting, a slur based on beliefs fostered by horror fiction and the movies. “Revenant” and “Non-breathing American” were the best replacements offered.