Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (37 page)

Tubular Bells

The sirens screamed long before Dan saw the stuttering lights and sleek cars arriving with their officers in fancy dress uniform. The first cruiser skidded to a stop just outside the fence — a little show of force, nothing too flashy. There wasn't much of an audience, after all. It was followed by a fire engine with a full crew and, finally, an ambulance to complete the set. Not that there was any chance the victim was still alive, Dan knew, but until that fact had been officially established, there would be no concession even to Death.

The second and third cruisers careened to a halt ten feet from the first, lights flashing crazily. The old police vehicles, since retired, had always reminded Dan of sharks: sleek, predatory things waiting to attack. The new twenty-first century design with its gleaming white, red, and blue motifs made him think of Crest toothpaste tubes more than anything. Slick and lean, with cavity fighting fluoride. A new breed of cop for the new millennium.

Two officers came warily toward him. Who knew, but he could be a crazy man on a killing spree. One cop was average build, youngish, probably a family man resenting the impositions of a night shift that kept him away from home. The other was oversized and fleshy, a teddy bear with a wheeze and buggy eyes. A heart attack in the making. Badges were flashed, names tossed at him. In return, Dan identified himself as the 911 caller. The three of them headed inside.

The other officers stayed outside, taping off the yard, diligent as prospectors mapping out a claim. Dan knew the rule of thumb was to cast your net large. You could always close down on an area later, but once the scene was under inspection it was too late to widen the scope. A final officer sat in his cruiser, probably writing up a request for the warrant that would allow them to make a thorough search of the premises.

With their larger and more penetrating flashlights, Dan got a better look at the slaughterhouse interior. Clearly, he'd been taking his chances wandering about in the dark. He ducked under a collapsed arch and headed into the main room where the body waited. The cops followed silently, playing their beams on the ground and over the walls, looking for who knew what. On seeing the body strung up, one of the officers made a sound of disgust; the other kept his feelings to himself, if he had any.

The corpse leered down at them. His quietus made and bare bodkin notwithstanding, the deceased's reticence stretched around them, matching the silence of the place. Death might have taken a holiday here and slept for a century or more without being disturbed.

“Hanging prisoners on meat hooks was a Nazi interrogation technique,” Dan said as they stood gazing up.

Both officers turned to look at him as though he might have been directly responsible for any number of atrocities in the Second World War internment camps. For all they knew, he could have been Goebbels' right-hand man.

The fleshy officer scribbled something in a book then aimed his flashlight back up at the victim.

“Looks like somebody was trying to make a statement,” he said to no one in particular, perhaps just tickling out a desire to become a murder profiler.

Footsteps approached. The medical officer arrived, grunted an acknowledgement to the others, then reached up and felt a limply hanging wrist for a pulse.

He shook his head: Death Acknowledged.

“Get your pictures then take it down,” he said. “Not much I can do while it's up there.”

A fourth officer entered and set up a tripod. As he fiddled with the knobs, Dan told the first two cops how he'd been hired to find someone who might or might not be the man hanging overhead at that moment, describing the anonymous call that had led him here. They listened with seeming indifference. In reality, Dan knew they were trying to decide whether to consider him a “person of interest,” waiting to see if he'd say anything that might implicate himself. No one had cautioned him or advised him of his rights, so he wasn't under oath, but anything he said could be considered a “spontaneous confession.” His profession would give his actions a modicum of credibility, but he was wary of saying anything that might flag him as suspicious. One wrong word could be the kiss of death. He was simply a missing persons investigator following the trail of a man to a burned-out slaughterhouse. Period. The fact that he was trespassing would be put aside for now. The more important fact — that he'd found a body rather than a living person — was another matter entirely. While it was unlikely that one man would kill another in such an elaborate fashion and then phone in the murder report, the police would assume nothing. At the very least, they'd let him prattle on to see if he contradicted himself or revealed anything beyond what he'd already told them. The rules of conduct in a police investigation could be as intricate as a Middle East diplomatic mission.

Camera flares lit up the walls, animating the corpse like a haunted-house zombie on the make. By now, the officer in the cruiser would have passed Dan's name back to the station to verify that he really was all he claimed. He would probably learn that Dan had helped solve other murders in the past, but it was up for grabs whether they would see him as an asset or as a guy who stuck his nose in police business when the chance presented itself. With luck someone would know him, maybe even back up his statements, then they'd all lighten up a bit. But it was nearly 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning and there was no telling who might be on the desk at that hour. Till then it was anybody's guess how things would turn out.

The forensics guys were fanning out, scouring the room for clues, the small details that might help identify the murderer. Dan's footsteps were their first concern. He'd done what every amateur sleuth did: contaminate the crime scene with his footprints but, fortunately, not with fingerprints or anything else. (
Such as?
he asked like some overeager junior detective.
Urine and feces,
he was told.
Sometimes blood and vomit
.) Thank god he hadn't had to take a leak, or worse. Also in his favour, he'd confined his trespassing to the concrete walk and wire grill, avoiding obliterating other tracks that might have formed in the ash-covered areas of the room. All by luck, of course; it wasn't as though he'd been expecting to find a corpse. If his steps had knocked anything into the troughs under the grills, they'd find it. He breathed a sigh of relief when they said that. At least his blundering wouldn't allow the killer to go free on the grounds that he'd compromised the evidence.

“Can you describe the person you saw, Mr. Sharp?”

“Not really. It was very dark and it happened very fast.”

“But you're sure it was a man?”

“I'm not sure of anything. I made the usual assumption that if someone attacked me then it had to be a man. Not true, of course.”

“So you were attacked then?”

Dan thought about it. “I can't even say that for sure …”

One of the officers sighed, foreseeing the defence in court a few months hence:
So you agree, sir, that you didn't actually see or hear anything?

“… though I'm inclined to believe I was. As I told you earlier, something whizzed past my head and I think whoever was in here took a swing at me with a bat or pipe.”

Lights were splayed over the ground, offering several choice possibilities for weapons — a blackened pipe, some rebar with concrete chunks twisted onto the end, and a lengthy piece of wood that had somehow escaped the conflagration.

The officer turned to him. “But you weren't hurt?”

Dan shrugged. “Not really. I skinned my hands when I fell, but I wasn't struck because I fell down first.”

“What made you fall?”

“I seem to remember something shifting underfoot and then suddenly I was on the floor.”

“Where were you when you fell?”

“Right here,” Dan said, without hesitation. “More or less beneath the body.”

The fleshy officer shone his light on the floor. A piece of blackened grid jutted up, just the right size and angle to trip a man wandering about in the dark like a fool.

“I thought you said you had a flashlight.”

Dan felt his face colour. “Yeah. I wasn't using it. I didn't want to alert anybody inside. I wanted to catch my misper by surprise, if he was here.”

“Do you have permission to be in here, sir?”

“Afraid not.”

“You were taking one hell of a risk wandering around in the dark.” The admonishing note at last.

The officer shook his head in a fatherly fashion. He escorted Dan from the murder scene back to the entrance, where the flashing cruisers lit up the night like a blue and red bonfire.

“Sergeant Bryson will take your statement, sir.”

The first officer left as another came up to them. This one was tall and jowly, his face grim and cadaverous from too many midnight shifts. Bryson looked gravely at his watch like an executioner about to start his work, jotting the time in a notebook. His questions were routine. He glanced up at Dan now and again, but otherwise noted his words in silence.

“Is there any chance of learning if this is the man I've been searching for?” Dan asked when he'd finished giving his report.

“Not at the moment,” the officer said.

A voice called from inside the ruined building. Bryson turned to Dan. “Wait here, please, sir.”

Dan slumped against the wall, easing down onto his heels. The evening had actually begun quite agreeably. He'd spent it with his teenage son, Ked, and his partner, Trevor. After a late dinner, they retreated to the rec room in the basement, hoping to beat an ongoing heat wave the city had endured for the past week.

Watching movies was a mutually agreed upon way of passing the time with little or no physical exertion. That night it was Ked's turn for choosing a title. He was spoiled for choice, but invariably picked something from the horror genre. Dan teased him for his selection, predicting the film would prove a snore of the first rank rather than the thrill its reputation presaged. Ked's eyes flashed a challenge at him.

Ked: “Dad,
Exorcist
was voted, like, the scariest movie of all time. Do you really think kajillions of people can be wrong?”

Dan: “Yes. Just look at Elvis. Or Madonna.”

Ked: “Okay, never mind. Just watch it, all right?”

To Dan's surprise, the opening scene at an archaeological dig in Iraq piqued his interest. He found himself engrossed. In his experience, horror films seldom boasted cultural anecdotes let alone gifted actors in leading roles; this one promised both. Before long,
the room was silent except for the film's dialogue and the eerie soundtrack that would accompany him to the slaughterhouse later that evening.

At the first sign of a break, a lump on the floor that appeared to be a lifeless bit of fur lifted its head and sniffed the air for signs of a walk or even just a few well-aimed kernels of popcorn. A thumping tail rewarded everything tossed in its direction.

“See? Even Ralph likes
Exorcist
,” Ked proclaimed.

After a pee break and popcorn refill, the movie resumed. In the intermittent scenes between thrills and chills the threesome amused themselves by formulating a list of rules for surviving a horror film. By common consent, Rule Number One was, “Don't go into a room with the lights off.” This sensible injunction — which Dan would recall with irony just a few hours later — was followed closely by Rule Number Two, “When you arrive at a deserted town, don't stick around to find out why it's deserted.” Rule Number Three was, “Never go down to the basement alone.”

As Ked passed the popcorn to Trevor, a sudden onscreen apparition made him jump, sending miniature white bombs flying through the air.

“Arggh!” he cried. “Ralph, treats!”

The dog leapt up instantly.

Dan glanced over at Trevor. “I'm particularly fond of Rule Number Four: If someone says your child is possessed by the devil and things start flying through the air, call in a priest immediately.”

Ked's eyes widened into an approximation of dem-
onic possession. “
Aaarggghhh!
” he cried, his expression more ludicrous than scary.

Ellen Burstyn had just had her second fit of over-acting as the possessed girl's mother when Ked snorted in derision. The suggestion by a credulous doctor that Linda Blair's feats of levitation might be attributable to puberty and a brain lesion brought further scorn from Ked.

“Is that supposed to be scary?” he asked when a lugubrious face appeared onscreen and faded out again.

The game continued. Trevor held up a finger. “I know! Rule Number Five: Never run from monsters in high heels.”

Dan looked over. “I've never seen a monster in high heels before.”

“Your father's a funny guy,” Trevor said, offering the popcorn bowl to Ked. “Lucky you're not warped too.”

“I know!” Ked replied.

They watched the screen in silence for a while.

“Have you ever noticed how all these horror movies happen in quiet places like Amityville or Georgetown?” Dan asked.

“Which proves indisputably that the source of all evil is suburban USA,” Trevor added.

“Hey, I know,” Ked said. “Rule Number Six: If you're stuck in a small town in Maine or Texas and everyone has a chainsaw then just kill yourself and get it over with.”

“Good one,” Trevor agreed.

The movie theme unfolded eerily, its arpeggiated tendrils of sound and distinctive tone of the bells made demonic by the film. Those repetitive notes had been the sound of evil throughout Dan's teenage years.

“Rule Number Seven,” he said, “always listen to the soundtrack to find out when the next attack is likely to occur.”

The popcorn bowl changed hands again. Onscreen, Max von Sydow wiped green vomit from his glasses and held a crucifix over the inert form of the possessed girl, Regan.