Malice (11 page)

Alex picked up a picture of the dead man and stared at it, his cheeks growing warm. He wanted to switch his attention away, but he couldn’t.

“So, what’d you find?” he asked, happy to let the picture flutter back onto the pile.

“First off, the lacerations to Peter Hume’s wrists match those found on the sheriff’s wife.”

Alex sat forward. “And the eyes?”

“In both cases, it appears the thumbs were inserted passed the zygom—uh, the outer eye sockets—and torn out.”

Alex produced a file folder of his own and handed it to Dorothy. It was the McMurphy police report from more than fifty years ago.

“What’s this?”

“You know that pesky habit I have of going through cold case files when things are slow?”

Dorothy gave him a queer look. “Yeah. You mean those three cases Millingham police never solved.”

She was joking, of course, and Alex laughed. “Looks like we have a fourth. One no one ever found out about. Now, it’s a long shot, I know, but I wonder if it might not be related somehow to what’s been going on.”

Dorothy scanned the file. Her face paled. “Oh God, Alex! I never knew the McMurphy family was murdered.” She flipped the page over, thinking she’d been the victim of a prank. But this was far too real. “You hear stories growing up. You know the way it is, old wives’ tales, but you never really believe them. Why on earth was this covered up?”

“The man’s status maybe,” Alex said, shrugging. “Could a small town like Millingham handle their shining star losing his marbles and chopping his family into tiny bits?”

“You found this how?”

“Not long after Diane’s death, I got to thinking that if I went back far enough in the records, I might just find other cases with questionable suicides. I’d plugged all the parameters into the computer and nothing came up. Then I started searching the filing room. I was gonna be real methodical, since the cases in the system only go back six or seven years. Box by box if I needed to. Then I found this one little carton that had no history. Box 263. It was as if they’d collected the evidence but never entered it anywhere.”

Dorothy brought her coffee to her lips and took a shallow sip. “And based on a handwritten note left by some sheriff fifty years ago, you think there’s a connection with Peter Hume and Diane?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Only one way to prove that.”

Dorothy’s eyes sparkled. “McMurphy’s autopsy report.”

***

Randy, the large-bellied security guard, found Lysander in the filing room near the back of the medical examiner’s building. He poked his head in. “I’ll be closin’ her down in half an hour, Lysander.”

Lysander was gripping his lower back, feeling as though something had slid out of place, but more importantly he was cursing Sam and her bright ideas.

A smile spread on Randy’s face. “For what they’re paying you, I don’t know why you do it.”

“I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment.”

Randy’s belly shook as the two of them laughed. The man’s full name was Randolph Hefler III and it struck Lysander as ironic that someone with a name that could get him on a dinner list with the Queen of England tended to scratch his balls when he spoke.

“Listen,” Randy said. “I’m gonna be up front filling out the log book, you just come see me when you’re done.”

Lysander nodded, bent down and heaved up another box.

The filing room was a misnomer if ever there was one. Nothing here was filed. Instead, over the years, documents had been dumped into boxes and shoved into a corner. Luckily, the boxes were scribbled with dates, creating some semblance of order. The chaos made his task of finding McMurphy’s autopsy report much harder.

When he was hired, Mrs. Olsen had offered him a touch over minimum wage to lug over five hundred boxes from here to the basement, where a new temperature controlled storage system had been built, complete with shelves, filing cabinets and a computerized labeling system.
Welcome to the twenty-first century
.

He had agreed to it—not just to help Sam—but in part because of the promise that once this was done, other work might follow. That meant he wouldn’t have to rely on his parents for handouts and the barbed strings that came attached.

That the boxes weighed a ton didn’t bother him one bit either. That the ones closest to the floor had suffered water damage and were apt to crumble in his hands did. Trying to shift under the weight of an unstable box, he had come to discover, could do more harm to your lower back than picking it up with straight legs.

Lysander had decided to start at the back of the room, with the boxes labeled 1930-1935. By the time Dorothy had left for the night, he had begun approaching the 1950s. He had developed a system of stacking two boxes, one on top of another and was making good progress when disaster struck. He was near the bottom landing when the box on the bottom split between his fingers and emptied everything before him. For several seconds the only sound he could hear was hundreds of pages spilling to the ground at his feet.

“DAMMIT!” he screamed when it was empty, but the words didn’t make him feel any better. There were papers everywhere. One seesawed lazily by his feet and he kicked at it. He was getting ready to gather them together, tie them into bundles with rope and drop-kick them into the new filing room downstairs when the name on one of the pages caught his eye.

Delores McMurphy.

He bent down and shuffled through the pile. There were half a dozen pages with the name McMurphy on them, dated November 2, 1965. He picked up the first one he’d found and read it.

Delores McMurphy, autopsy report.

Cause of death: Homicide. Sharp force trauma.

Weapon: axe.

Lysander’s heart skipped in his chest. The coldness of the words on the page left him uneasy. He let the page slip from his hand and flutter back into the pile. He grabbed another one nearby. Thomas McMurphy. Cause of death identical. Within seconds, Lysander had found three more just like it. The whole family was here, except—

Lysander stared down at the name for a long time before he stooped over to pick it up. James McMurphy. All the moisture suddenly left his mouth.

Cause of death: Suicide.

Weapon: 12 gauge shotgun.

So, the guy had blown his brains out, just as the police report in Alex’s desk had stated. He remembered that crazy story Sam’s aunt had told her about James McMurphy’s dispossessed spirit lurching around town. Lysander had assumed at the time it had been the kind of story designed to frighten little children into eating all of their brussel sprouts.
You know what James McMurphy does to children who don’t finish everything on their plate, don’t you?

But something else here made the blood in Lysander’s veins drop by thirty degrees. Before James McMurphy had air-conditioned the back of his skull with a five-inch hole, he had slit his wrists and gouged his eyes out with a screwdriver.

***

“So if a nut’s running around killing people,” Alex was saying, “I can’t believe he’d be going so far to hide his tracks. I mean, creating the illusion that the victims are doing it to themselves. Come on!”

“Keep your voice down.” Dorothy glanced over Alex’s shoulder. Several booths over, a large man wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was staring at them. “You’re right. The only real key we have are the wounds.”

Alex was shaking his head. “But would a serial killer do that? Try to trick us, I mean. Wouldn’t he want people to know what he had done?”

Slowly, the man at the booth returned to his meal. “Maybe he’s trying to buy time,” Dorothy whispered. “That’s what you have to find out.”

“What else did you find on Hume?”

Dorothy searched through her papers. “I have a friend in Boston who owed me a favor. He sent me the lab report on the boot print you found. Couldn’t get over the fact it was made by a pile of dog doo.” Dorothy couldn’t help but smile as she said it.

“It was only a partial print, of course, so there was a lot he wasn’t able to tell, like exact size and …”

“And …”

“It looks like a standard combat boot. Hard to tell if it’s male or female, but the thing was fairly narrow.” She kept glancing through her notes. “I also sent the tissue we found under his fingernails to Boston.”

Alex raised an eyebrow.

“Blood traces all match our victim,” she said. “Now what about the weapons? Have you found the knife yet or whatever caused that head injury?”

Alex shook his head. “Nope.”

“Well, the blunt-force trauma to the midline face was fairly extensive. I found depressed fractures of the maxilla and zygomatic bones. Several of his teeth were chipped or fractured, two of them he swallowed altogether. And there was mucosal hemorrhaging in the intraoral cavity.”

Alex shook his head. “Speak English.”

“It means that whoever did this was very angry.” They both glanced at the crime-scene photo of Hume’s face again, or what was left of it.

“Hume’s hands had something strange I hadn’t seen at first. There was bruising and chaffing on his palm and fingers. The same kind of marks left from swinging something heavy through the air.”

“So what are you saying, that he bashed his own face in?”

“If you recall, the back of Diane’s neck had a pattern of bruising consistent with having pulled her own head underwater.”

Alex leaned forward, trying to read Dorothy’s notes upside down. “What about trace signs from the weapon?”

“We’re probably looking for a wooden bust or something similar.”

“You think the killer might have taken it with him?”

“Not sure, could have been a trophy of some kind.”

Alex studied a picture of the victim again, his face becoming flushed. “So let me get this straight. Someone shows up at Hume’s door after dark, Hume lets him in. They walk around a bit and then Hume starts bashing his own face in, plucking his eyes out and carving himself up like a turkey dinner?”

Dorothy shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, the sheriff’s gonna have a field day with this.”

“The murderer seemed to have known both his victims well enough that they didn’t panic when he showed up,” Dorothy said. “Something worth looking into.”

“Well, none of the neighbors we’ve talked to said they’d seen anything unusual. Neighbors say it wasn’t them. Apparently, this guy kept pretty much to himself, especially when his wife went away. We don’t even know if he had any friends.”

She grew quiet. “How’s Steve doing with all this?”

Alex scanned the parking lot again. “Oh, he’s stressed. I can see it’s beginning to wear on him. In his mind at least, he’d closed the books on his wife’s death. Now he’s facing the possibility he was wrong.”

“Media’s been quiet so far?”

“It’s going to be a regular bonanza, just you wait. They’ll be withholding some stuff, though, like where he was found and the gory details that no decent person really has any business knowing. As far as I can tell, I think they’re gonna call it a burglary gone bad. If people find out the guy’s eyes were carved out, and his head mashed to a pulp, it’s liable to start a panic.”

Alex finished the last of Dorothy’s coffee and reached into his pocket smirking. “Good coffee.”

She slapped two dollar bills on the table before he had a chance to grab hold of his loose change.

“Next time it’s your treat,” she said.

Outside Dorothy stopped him. “Oh, I almost forgot.”

He was halfway in his cruiser. Puzzled, he stood back up, leaning over the roof.

Dorothy fumbled through her papers and pulled out a black-and-white picture. She held it in the air. “Ever seen this before?”

He leaned forward. It looked like a child’s drawing of an eye and a shiver ran up his spine. “Never,” he said quickly. “Where’d you get that?”

“Found it on Hume’s chest. Looks like you were right. Our guy does have something to say.”

***

LYSANDER!

Lysander was still searching through the McMurphy family’s death certificates—the theme from the Family Guy oddly stuck in his head when he heard the voice. Lysander turned expecting to find Randy, telling him it was time to close up. But that wasn’t the case. The room was empty. Overhead, the neon lights were buzzing away indifferently.

He paused.

The voice had been quite distinct, spoken with the delicacy of someone leaning over to whisper affectionately into—

LYSANDER!

He dropped the papers into a nearby box. The room remained silent for another few agonizing moments. He decided to weave through the boxes to the storage room doorway and peer down either end of the long hall. To his right, where the stairs rose to ground level, he could see a faint glimmer of light shining through the cracks of the closed door.

Thinking back, he wasn’t sure how, with his arms aching under the strain of the boxes, he could have closed that door even if he had wanted to. A fan of chilly air brushed his left cheek. He turned in that direction. In another room, not twenty paces away, he saw the glow from a light. Diffuse and harsh, it reminded him of the kitchen freezer and his mother removing leftovers.