Ghost Dance (4 page)

‘Mr Gallagher!’ Nightingale cried.

‘Dead,’ he choked out. ‘There’s a dead man in the river.’

Ten minutes later Nightingale spun her beat-up Toyota pickup into the cabin yard. She leaped out, ran through the electric-white birches and jumped off the bank straight into the water. Gallagher halted at the Bluekill’s edge, unable to enter.

‘Show me!’ she demanded.

‘No,’ he said, feeling a twist in his gut.

‘You have to,’ she insisted.

‘I … I can’t.’

‘I know this is hard,’ she said, managing a professional’s smile of understanding. ‘But please, just show me where you found the body before it’s washed away and I have to bring in a team of divers to search.’

Gallagher felt the cramping again, but for some reason Nightingale’s sympathetic demeanor bolstered him enough to move woodenly out into the river, once his liquid refuge, now a sinister current. They waded into the swift flow and with each step Gallagher fought to stamp out the wild fire of panic burning in him. They reached the downed ash tree and he pointed to the eddy where the fly line disappeared

‘He’s down there.’

‘You’re going to help me, Mr Gallagher.’ It was more of a command than a statement. A strange, cutting pressure built behind his eyes, but he nodded. They went hand over hand down the line. Gallagher focused on the gentle curve of her neck as they pulled. This time the body floated quickly.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Nightingale whispered in horror.

He wore a green camouflage coat and a matching fleece knapsack. He was nude from the waist down except for a thick wool sock dangling from his left foot. The carnage that had been inflicted on him was like looking at a Rorschach test devised by the darkest of minds, and Gallagher desperately wanted to flee toward shore again.

‘Hank Potter,’ Nightingale said, giving wavering identity to the body shifting in the current. Gallagher’s head spun. He feared the river would drag him down and never let him breach again for air.

Over her shoulder came the flashing blue lights of a state trooper vehicle, followed rapidly by another cruiser and then an ambulance. Nightingale had called them before driving back to the cabin. At the sight of the vehicles, her jaw quivered. The first break in her professional composure.

‘We’re going to bring him in,’ she said at last.

Two young rawboned troopers realized they were pulling the body ashore and waded out to help. One of the troopers turned completely white when he saw the disfigurement.

By the time they reached the shallows, three more vehicles had pulled into the yard around the fishing cabin. One was a green but otherwise nondescript sedan. The second was a midnight-blue, four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban with ‘Lawton Police’ emblazoned on the door. A new gray Dodge pickup brought up the rear.

The doors of the Suburban and the green sedan opened simultaneously. Two men got out of the Suburban. The driver wore a gray athletic sweatshirt with a blue ‘Lawton’ printed in an arc across his chest. He tugged on a blue baseball-style cap with gold embroidery that said ‘Chief’ and popped a grape lollipop into his mouth. His sidekick wore a conventional tan police uniform. He was portly, in his late twenties, with a mop-top haircut, a wispy mustache and a sleepy expression. A bleached-white-haired woman in her early fifties sporting a khaki trench coat climbed out of the green sedan. Then the door to the pickup opened and a sharply dressed, pink-faced man with a dramatic silver handlebar mustache exited. He was barking orders into a cell phone. ‘I don’t care what those bankers down in Boston say—it’s a legitimate deal and it’s going through. Lawton’s depending on it. You hear me?’

‘Gang’s all here,’ Nightingale mumbled and she ran her fingers awkwardly through her hair.

She turned to Gallagher and gestured toward the cabin. ‘Wait over there out of the way. I’m going to want to talk with you.’

Gallagher shambled to the steps, sat and slumped against one of the support beams that held up the sagging porch roof. The ambulance drivers had already lain a sheet over the body, which now rested on the lime-green grass between two of the birch trees. Talons of chilling ground fog groped through the trees toward the sheet and the body. Gallagher shivered. The shivers turned to chatters. He went into the cabin to get out of the waders and into something dry. He dragged himself upstairs and as he was getting into a pair of flannel-lined khakis and a fleece pullover, he felt suddenly seasick, so he opened the double-hung bedroom window to breathe and watch the crowd gathering in the cabin yard outside.

The white-haired woman in the trench coat had led Nightingale away from the others. They stopped right below Gallagher’s window, unaware of his eavesdropping.

‘Sergeant,’ the white-haired woman said.

‘Lieutenant Bowman,’ Nightingale replied, smiling stiffly. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you here so soon.’

‘I was only twenty minutes out and thought you could use a hand,’ the lieutenant replied. Brigid Bowman wore swaths of makeup that almost concealed acne scars and accentuated a pair of distrusting, pale blue eyes. Her white hair had been razored short at the ears to draw attention to pearl stud earrings and a matching necklace.

Nightingale squeezed her hands into fists. ‘Or maybe you hustled along because you didn’t want me here alone.’

‘Maybe a little of both, Andie,’ Bowman replied coolly.

Before Nightingale could respond, the hulking man in the Lawton sweatshirt and the ‘Chief’ baseball cap approached, followed by his sleepy deputy and the nattily dressed chubby fellow with the silver walrus mustache who was snapping shut his cell phone.

The chief’s name was Mike Kerris. He was roughly Gallagher’s age, but taller, more muscular, with stainless-steel eyes and a shock of thick brown hair. He had one of those pronounced and chiseled jaws that suggests steroid use. He popped the sucker from his mouth. ‘What do we got?’

Nightingale turned flinty at the question. ‘Hank Potter. The body’s been mutilated.’

The pudgy man with the silver mustache waved the cell phone overhead and cried, ‘Hank Potter! The man’s a dentist. He doesn’t have an enemy in the—What do you mean, mutilated?’

‘Cut up, Mayor, badly,’ Nightingale said. ‘Looks like he was hit ten, maybe fifteen times with a heavy, sharp object before he was dumped in the river. Care to see?’

Mayor Bruce Powell’s pink skin went as pallid as a trout’s belly. He ran his hand across the top of his shellacked sterling-colored hairdo. ‘There hasn’t been a killing in Lawton in twenty years.’

‘Twenty-eight years, Uncle Bruce,’ the chief corrected. He had the grape lollipop lodged in the pocket of one cheek like a chipmunk working an acorn.

‘Whatever, Mikey,’ the mayor said. He waved the cell phone at them all. ‘Listen up: I want this solved and solved fast, you hear me? Lawton doesn’t need this kind of adverse publicity. Especially not now while we’re in the midst of delicate, delicate negotiations.’

Lieutenant Bowman tapped her rubber-bottomed boot in the muddy driveway. ‘Our bureau has one of the best solving rates in the country, Mayor Powell. As far as publicity is concerned—’

‘Mutilated!’ Powell shouted incredulously before Bowman could finish. He shook his entire arm at the lieutenant. ‘You’ve got to keep that part quiet. Away from the reporters. Damn it, it makes it sound as if there’s a madman on the loose in Lawton! I won’t have that. Not in my town.’

Gallagher watched as the whole lot of them glanced at the sheet, as if they could not believe it was possible. Gallagher had seen the body first. He believed it was possible.

‘We’ll keep that part of it as low-profile as we can,’ Lieutenant Bowman promised.

‘Lawton’s a small place,’ the deputy with the mop-top haircut offered. ‘Tough to keep secrets here.’

A sardonic smirk passed over Nightingale’s face. She looked at the mayor and the chief and said, ‘And here I’d always considered Lawton a town full of secrets.’

The mayor rubbed a finger under his handlebar mustache and glared at Nightingale. The chief licked his lips. The lollipop had turned his tongue purple. His eyelids went drowsy, the way a lizard’s do before it strikes at an insect. He turned to Bowman: ‘Who’s gonna be your lead? No offense to Sergeant Nightingale, but we all know, given her past, that she might not be up to the—’

‘How dare you!’ Nightingale cried.

‘That’s quite enough, Sergeant!’ The lieutenant cut her off. ‘Sergeant Nightingale will lead for the time being under my close, close supervision. Fair enough, Chief?’

Kerris glanced at his deputy and then at the mayor, who shrugged. The chief’s expression turned smarmy. ‘I’m sure the sergeant and I can figure out a way to work together.’

Nightingale said nothing. The light in the birch glade turned suddenly flat as a storm cloud advanced on the river. Rain fell again. An evidence technician drew back the sheet and took pictures of Hank Potter’s body. The flashes of brilliant metallic light made the birches look iridescent and shimmery, as if they were part of an old black-and-white photograph printed in silver tones.

‘Solve it fast,’ Powell said. ‘That’s all I want.’ The mayor waddled off to his truck, his fingers already punching numbers in the cell phone.

Now a green van bounced its way into the clearing and parked. A short, bushy-haired and bushy-eyebrowed man with a big nose and hairy nostrils stepped out. Melvin Allen, the state’s assistant medical examiner.

They all walked toward Allen. By the time Gallagher got on hiking boots and went down the stairs and out onto the cabin porch, they were gathered around the body. The medical examiner was tugging at his ear and jerking his head from side to side at the sight of the body. The deputy, whose name was Phil Gavrilis, leaned against one of the birches with his eyes shut. Chief Kerris acted as if he were not a small-town cop, but a hardened New York City homicide detective. He never even blinked.

Nightingale asked, ‘Can you tell me what he was hit with, Mel, and how long he’s been in the river?’

The medical examiner shook off his initial shock at the grisly wounds and knelt next to the body. He cradled Potter’s head in latex-gloved hands and tipped it left and then right. He used his fingers to pry at one of the lacerations that showed through the camouflage. Gallagher couldn’t watch any longer. He stared up at the sky and imagined himself out on the Taylor Fork River south of Bozeman, casting to cutthroats on a hot July Montana day.

‘Can’t say for sure until I can get him up on a table under the lights,’ Allen said at last. ‘But if I had to make a guess, I’d say some kind of crudely made machete or hatchet. See those little elliptical irregularities in the wound? The blade was hand-filed.’

Allen studied the wounds again, then moved his attention lower. ‘Given the lack of bloating, I’d say he’s been in the water no more than eight hours. And, much as I hate to say it, it appears he was raped as well as killed. He lead some kind of secret life?’

‘You mean like—?’ Deputy Gavrilis began.

‘Hank Potter?’ Chief Kerris cried. ‘No way. The guy played halfback at UVM.’

Allen shrugged. ‘Whatever. I’ll know more once I get him on the table. Autopsy Monday morning. Six-thirty a.m. sharp.’

There were groans all around. Allen was known for calling autopsies at the crack of dawn.

‘Who found the body?’ Bowman asked.

Nightingale pointed toward Gallagher who had returned to the porch. He waved weakly and all of them came over save the deputy, who heard static on the radio and ran to the Suburban. Gallagher stood up and Kerris gave him a sort of weight-room look that he ignored. They asked several preliminary questions—where Gallagher was from, what he did for a living, why he’d rented the cabin. Gallagher stupidly chanted the highlights of his résumé like an Alzheimer’s patient trying to maintain his last handhold on identity—that he had a PhD in anthropology from Cornell, where he had specialized in comparative mythology. He had spent a year teaching undergraduates at Harvard before bugging out of academia to join
The Boston Globe
as a cultural reporter, aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe. Three years later Gallagher won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories that looked at the lives of children caught in the battle zones of religious wars. For the past seven years he had written and produced documentaries for
National Geographic,
PBS and the Discovery Channel. Most of his work focused on the interplay of culture and creed.

‘Well, la-di-da,’ Kerris said when Gallagher had finished. He had a hooded way of looking at you that made you feel as if you could be humiliated in his presence. ‘What are you doing here? There’s no strange religion in Lawton.’

‘Fishing,’ Gallagher said sharply. ‘But I’m also doing research on Father D’Angelo—the one who died doing miracles here eighty years ago.’

‘What about him?’ the chief asked, his brows becoming even more hooded.

‘D’Angelo’s up for sainthood,’ Gallagher replied. ‘I’m thinking about doing a film on the process of Catholic canonization.’

At that moment, Kerris’s deputy shouted over from the Suburban. ‘Chief, the office just got a call from Paula Potter. She’s reported Hank missing. She thinks he’s broken a leg out turkey hunting.’

Bowman clicked her ruby-red fingernails. She turned to Nightingale. ‘Can you handle it?’

‘I’ll go right up there,’ Nightingale said, making furtive glances at the rest of them.

‘That’s not what I asked.’

Nightingale’s shoulders rose. ‘I can handle it, Brigid.’

Bowman did that clicking thing with her fingernails again. ‘You’ll call me if you find anything up there?’

Nightingale gritted her teeth. ‘I will.’

Kerris tongued his lollipop from one cheek to the other, obviously enjoying her discomfort. He said, ‘I’ll have my men begin a search of the riverbank this side of town. Maybe we can find the rest of his clothes.’

‘I’m done?’ Gallagher asked.

Nightingale managed a genuine smile that warmed him. ‘Yes. But don’t leave Lawton without telling us. I’ll need you to answer some more questions.’

‘In the meantime?’

‘In the meantime, research your film and fish,’ she said.