The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (7 page)

Up to the highway, to where the she stood by her cruiser. Her face was flushed pink by the cold now she was out of the heated interior of the red-and-white Impala by the roadside. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said when I reached her. “Can I help you?”

“We had a report that there was someone wandering the highway in this area,” she said. Her tone suggested she wasn’t sure how to phrase the ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ question occupying her mind. “Are you out here hiking, sir? Are you living or staying somewhere local?”
 

I wondered who’d reported me to the LCSD. “Was the guy who gave you the call driving a red pickup?”

“I couldn't say.”

“I was taking a photo from the road over there and was late seeing him coming. That's all. I'm not hiking and I am staying somewhere local.”

The officer nodded. I knew I looked pretty ragged and this probably wasn’t helping my case. “And what exactly are you doing out here, sir?” she said.

I glanced behind me at the trees, then over at the road. I answered like I was speaking to myself. Couldn’t help it. “This is where she died.”

“That's a police matter, sir.” Emphasis on the ‘sir’ in that way that meant the next stage in our conversation would be a threat to arrest. “I’d appreciate it if you left it for the authorities to handle and don't go disturbing things. Let us do our jobs and let the victim rest in peace.”

“My name's Alex Rourke. She was my girlfriend.”

That threw her. Her expression changed, hard-nosed authority fading to the soft, dead-eyed smile of pity reserved for overwrought relatives. I’d seen it plenty of times already. When she spoke, though, there was real warmth and compassion in her voice. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for what happened to her, I really am, and I do know what you're going through isn't easy. But you've got to let the professionals work through this.”

“What makes you think I'm not here just to pay my respects?”

“People who do that don't normally take photos,” she said. “And I saw you digging around down there. A crime scene team from the State Police already went over the ground where we found her. If there was anything there to find, they'd have got it already. That’s their job.”
 

“I used to be an FBI agent. I was trained for that sort of thing as well, and I've done it plenty of times. I know you're giving me the ‘distraught loved ones getting in the way’ speech, and I understand why. But I’m not some stricken accountant who's watched too much CSI. I just want to understand what happened.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Maybe so, but if you start hunting around on your own you're liable to end up being arrested for interfering with an investigation.”

"I spoke to Detective Flint. The State Police think it was either a hunting accident or that there was some wacko wandering out here with a rifle and she was just the first person he saw. Both of those are a crock. Who hunts
at night
around here, this time of year? Why has no one noticed there's a lunatic living in town? I’m not interfering because I don’t believe there’s much to interfere with.”

I looked back at the woods, got my calm back. “Besides,” I said, “the scene's been released. I'm not breaking the law coming out here. You said ‘where we found her’. I spoke to a guy called Ed Markham in the bar last night and he said he knew what had happened to Gemma because he'd talked to Sylvia... Ehrlich in the Sheriff's Department.”

“That's me.” She looked surprised.

“You found her?”

“I was on patrol shift that evening. I saw that someone had plowed into the trees.”

“And you went down to check out the car.”

Ehrlich nodded. “It looked like she'd gone off the road in the ice. You could see where the car rolled into the woods. It looked bad, and... when I checked for a pulse there was nothing. Wayne — Officer Cevik, sorry — arrived a couple of minutes after I called it in. He'd just finished with a breakdown south of Bleakwater. We waited for the ME and the ambulance to show up. We only realized what had actually happened after they came.”
 

“And they saw she’d been shot.”

“Mr Rourke, I don't think I should be going into details with you. I probably said more than I should already.”

“I’m just trying to get a clear picture of how the woman I loved died, and if you can't help me then I'm going to have to go on guessing and imagining and never knowing for sure. Let me tell you what I know so far, and you can fill in anything you feel happy to.”

She didn’t look convinced. I carried on anyway. “It had just started snowing again. She was somewhere right about here on the highway, probably not going very fast because of the weather, when she was shot through the windshield. The bullet hit her in the throat. The car swerved off the road and into the trees. If it had gone off the other side, it'd have rolled to a stop straight away. But it went downhill, so it still had a little speed when it hit the tree. Not much, or there'd be more damage to the bark. So I'm guessing the car wasn't too badly smashed when you found it. Maybe you were surprised that the impact seemed to have killed her.”

Ehrlich frowned, confused. “How do you know it had started snowing?”

“She was leaving a message on my voicemail when she died. I got it later. She told me.”

“Oh boy, that must've been so awful,” she said and it sounded like she meant it. “You've got more guts than me to go through this after hearing... well, after hearing it all.”

I tried a smile. Didn’t know if it worked. “So how did it look when you found her?”

“The windshield was a mess, the front end was all out of shape and the radiator had ruptured,” she said. “It was still steaming. The back window was smashed and there were still bits of glass on top of the trunk. It looked like it had hit hard enough to hurt.”

“And Gemma?”

“You sure you want to hear it?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed hard.

“She was face down over the wheel. The airbag had fired. I could see blood on the front of her coat, but nothing else. The driver's side door had popped open a fraction from the impact, but the glass was intact. I opened the door so I could lean in and find out if she was alive or not. Then I went back up to the road.”

“Was there any sign that anyone else had been near the car — footprints, things like that?” I asked, unwilling to dwell long on the image of Gemma slumped dead in the wreckage.

“Did you hear something on the message?”

“No,” I said, thinking that she had a point. If I could stomach it, maybe there’d be more on the recording after the shooting. “Wondering was all. How about up on the highway?”

She thought for a while before deciding to answer that, and I figured we’d reached the line of what she’d consider sharing. “I don't remember seeing any tracks in the snow, but it was dark and I was looking at a car wreck, not a murder scene. I think the State Police examined the road when they took over, but I'm not sure. By that time, there'd been me, Wayne, the doctor and a couple of paramedics there.”

The radio in the Impala crackled into life. Ehrlich leaned into the car and had a conversation with the dispatcher. Then she turned back to me and said, “That’s as much as I can say, Mr Rourke. And now duty calls. Gotta go.”

“No problem. I appreciate you helping me.”

“Have you got a number I can reach you at if we get any further calls about men poking around in the woods?”

“Sure.” I gave her my cell and she climbed into the cruiser. “If I come across anything I’ll call your department.”

She nodded, then said, “Just remember what I said. This is a State show and they’re not going to go easy if you get in the way. I can sympathize, maybe more than I should, but don’t expect the same from them. If I were you, and don’t think bad of me for suggesting this, I’d find another way to deal with your grief.”

“No offense taken.”

“Take care, Mr Rourke. Be safe.”

Once the cruiser had vanished down the road I looked up beyond the blacktop to the wooded mountain spur to the south. If I’d had to choose a spot to shoot someone driving through the dip where Gemma died, that was it. Plenty of cover, good view straight down the road because of the way it jinked between ridges. Not far from the road the slope steepened considerably, with jumbled boulders interspersed through the forest. I tried to imagine a line between the rocks and the spot Gemma’s car would’ve been in before it swerved off the road. I wondered why the cops hadn’t been able to find the bullet; it should’ve been in the car, in the road surface, or else fallen out somewhere between one and the other.

I climbed the frozen slope, looking for the killing spot among the rocks. The woods thinned out over the difficult ground, and this in turn had opened up the space beneath for thorns and tough, scrubby weeds. I wasn’t much of a woodsman but even I could see that someone had been this way before. Here and there were broken and crushed stems leading in a coherent trail uphill. They weren’t close enough together to form a continuous set of tracks — the woods were still too packed for the wiry plant growth to have spread far — but what there was had been perfectly frozen in place, like the land itself wanted me to find it.
 

Forty feet or so above the level of the highway, I came to a weathered outcrop of rock which looked out along the road. I brushed away some of the snow that coated the stones and the dirt of the forest around them, hoping for something that would confirm my theory. There were scrapes in the lichen on the rocks, though maybe I’d caused them myself. Wedged between a couple of stones a few feet away, though, was a plastic wrapper from a disposable chemical hand-warmer. It didn’t look like it had been there longer than a few days. Nothing else, but at least this showed for a fact that someone had been here, and it looked like they’d maybe been waiting a while.

For the right car. The right shot. The kill.

“What do you want?” The man’s voice was guarded if not actively unfriendly. I guessed I didn’t look much like a salesman or a religious nut.

“I’m calling about the woman who lived across the street. Did you notice anything strange in her behavior, odd people hanging around the neighborhood? Anything at all that was out of the ordinary over the past couple of weeks.”

The guy regarded me suspiciously, an unspoken ‘No, but I sure am now’ clearly running through his head. He was middle-aged and a little pudgy. There was a newish-looking SUV on the driveway. Classical music was playing in the house behind him. “I already spoke to the police when they called by,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name's Alex Rourke. I'm a private detective and I am — was — the woman's boyfriend.”

He didn’t tell me to get lost straight away, but I had the impression was trying to figure out a way of politely bidding me goodbye without seeming insensitive. In the end he just said, “I didn't see anything, like I told them.”

“Nothing at all? You didn't see anyone you don't know in the street, no one called on her?”

“Not that I saw, not in the last couple of days before...”

“Did you see anyone before then?”

He folded his arms. “Last time I saw anyone call on her must’ve been a week or so before it happened. I was cleaning out my car. She spoke to some guy on the porch. It looked like she knew him. He gave her a folder, which is what made me notice, I suppose. Official-looking. Apart from that, the last person I remember seeing there was you, or at least someone with the same car as you. If you're looking for any more than that then I’m sorry, I can't help you.”

In an afternoon spent canvassing the neighbors, this was the first useful information I’d had. “What did the man she spoke to look like?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Regular guy. Middle-aged. Wore a tie and a long coat, one of those expensive wool ones. Might have had a suit as well. His car was silver, new-looking. I don't remember the make. That's all I know.”

The front door closed an inch or so as he finished answering. I figured my time was up so I thanked him and left. It sounded like the visitor was maybe a colleague of Gemma’s, and since she hadn’t mentioned it last time I’d seen her I suspected it wasn’t anything important, but at least it was
something
. Maybe there’d been something going on with her job she hadn’t told me.

Back in the house, the first thing I did was check Gemma’s mail and the unopened personal letters I’d left alone when I arrived. One had a handwritten address, the other was printed and was just a bill. The written letter was a couple of pages of tight, neat script folded around a photograph. From her parents, letting her know how their vacation in San Francisco was going. It was postmarked the previous Wednesday. Gemma was already dead by the time it was sent.

The notes by the phone in the kitchen didn’t amount to much. Aside from a couple of scribbled phone numbers with 'Bob K', 'Celia' and other cryptic names next to them, there were times and a couple of numbers for the St Johnsbury party and two responses — both negative — to inquiries she’d made for me about Adam Webb: 'Brattleboro - don't recognize' and 'Chief - not as far as she knows'.
 

There was nothing much more on her computer upstairs at first glance. Notes from work she was typing up, some email correspondence with a couple of other pathologists that mostly went clean over my head. Two more responses from other regional medical examiners saying they’d not seen anyone resembling Webb. A pair of messages from her sister Alice. The first asked if Gemma and me were planning on taking a vacation this year. The second had arrived on Tuesday evening at about the time I was driving up the interstate to see her body.
 

Gem,

I tried to call you earlier but I guess you must be out. You doctors, always partying! Let me know what you and Alex decide about doing for Mom’s birthday. I know Dad wants everyone together for the big six-oh. Maybe Al will have popped the question by then - you never know! Have you got any time off next month? Talk soon sis.
 

- Alice

I reread the last couple of sentences, then closed her mail and moved on, keeping my mind carefully blank. I didn’t want to let slip a fresh heap of emotional baggage about a future we’d never have. An icon on her desktop caught my eye and spared me from falling into melancholy again. ‘OCME Gateway Services’. Remote login to the OCME intranet. An intranet, if her user account hadn’t been deleted, on which I could access the report on her own murder, probably crime scene stuff too if it was linked to the VSP’s forensics service. It took less than a minute to find her username and password details on a notepad full of similar reminders in the desk drawer.