Out of the Shadows (12 page)

Jonathan reached out to steady her.

Fuming, she punched both fists into his chest. “There’s been a damn homicide, and the dead guy’s hand
broke off
, and you’re laughing!”

“Sorry. This is all just… I don’t even know,” he admitted.

“Call it in, asshole!
”

Jonathan turned and reached for his walkie as the house shuddered once more, releasing an unsettling squeal as it protested the coming storm.

“We need to get a team out here to search the yard before it’s buried under five feet of snow! Hurry up!”

Holding up one hand, he attempted to calm her down. “Just chill, Brody. I’m callin’ it in right now.” But something stopped him from following through with this promise. A noise from outside in the front yard.

A woman’s blood-curdling scream.                           

Without thinking, driven by instinct, the two cops sprinted down the steps and through the first floor of the house, guns raised and ready for trouble. Almost as though their shoes had the wings of Hermes to carry them, they flew out the door and across the lawn toward the source of the scream: the young blonde who had called in the homicide, who was now sprawled on the ground, struggling to rise.

Snow fell steadily now as Jonathan quickly swept the area around them, swinging his gun back and forth looking for movement. Christine grasped the screaming woman and helped her to her feet. “What happened?!”

The witness continued howling hysterically, her horrified eyes fixated behind the female cop. Sirens approached in the distance, finally answering the original radio call. The old man’s Chihuahua yapped feverishly at Christine’s pant leg.

Jonathan continued scanning the area, calling out over his shoulder, “Brody, what’s goin’ on?”

Christine shook the blonde woman, lightly kicking away the annoying dog at her feet. “Hey! What happened?!”

The hysterical female pointed behind Christine, tears streaming down her face, creating harsh streaks of red in the bitter cold. The cop turned her gaze to follow the woman’s finger. Standing only a few feet away was the old man, mouth opened wide, staring down the street, his eyes brimming with fear.

Frozen.

As Christine had charged from within the house and through the yard to the screaming blonde woman, she had noticed the old man in her periphery, but she had thought nothing of his lack of movement. Some elderly people just aren’t that animated. But now as she stared at the icy horror immobilized on his wrinkled face, she had felt stupid for having not immediately recognized that something was wrong when she’d stepped out onto the yard.

The steady snowfall whipped through the air as a gust of wind swept down the street, pelting the cops in the face. The blonde woman’s shrill howling had lessened and had turned into heaving sobs of fear as the police sirens grew ever closer. Christine was not sure what to think about the mysteriously frozen people. It felt unearthly and bizarre, like something out of the Twilight Zone, and yet she knew in order to get to the bottom of things, she would have to remain calm and rational.

“Colt, we got another one!” she called out to Jonathan, who had his back to the women while scanning the street for signs of life.

He spun around and took note of the old man, the Chihuahua jumping at the corpse’s feet, scratching at the icy leg, yapping and whining for his master. Inching closer to the second human ice block he’d seen in the past five minutes, he lowered his weapon slightly, his heart pounding in confusion.

Another blast of frigid wind twirled around them, forcing them to shield their eyes from the building snowfall, quickly turning itself into an unruly blizzard. The old man wobbled precariously as the gust assaulted, and before Jonathan could reach forward to steady him, he fell over onto the sidewalk, shattering into hundreds of tiny ice chunks.

The woman clasped her shaking hands against her mouth, eyes gone wide at the horrific scene before her. Another screech escaped her mouth, muffled by her hands, paling in the dangerously chilly weather. She bent at the knees and doubled over, like she had been kicked in the stomach by some unseen frozen force, heaving screams bellowing from her mouth.

Christine grabbed the woman’s shoulders tightly, hoping to give her a sense of support to get through the trauma. “Hey, I need you to calm down,” she said, foolishly hoping it would be enough to stifle the woman’s hysterics. “Ma’am, please. I really need you to calm down.”

Jonathan had already returned to a crouched position, his gun aimed forward and on high alert, searching the immediate area for an intruder. He took quick glances at the ground but saw no easily discernible footprints, as the sidewalk wasn’t yet completely covered with snow.

As two other police cruisers skidded to a halt on the street in front of the old house, Christine lowered herself to look the woman in the eyes. “Hey, it’s going to be all right. But you have to calm down and give us some information.” She saw the flicker of fear skip past the young woman’s eyes. It was a fear of which she was intimately familiar: the fear of being prey.

She closed her eyes, flashes of her past swimming through her mind, and she quietly muttered a mantra to herself: “You will not haunt me.”

Bringing herself back to the problem at hand, Christine attempted to steer the woman’s focus away from the scene of horror with easily answered questions. “Ma’am, what’s your name?”

Her eyes darted back and forth, observing the overwhelming flurry of activity around her, cops running and ordering each other around, some dashing toward the house as Jonathan gave orders and pointed toward it. The heavy snowfall flickered dizzyingly with the red and blue flashes of the police beacons. She faintly heard the female officer asking her questions, and her gaze slowly came to focus on the green eyes of the cop, intent on receiving the answers she needed.

“What’s your name?” she asked again.

“It’s…” she stammered as she regained control of her breathing. “Rita. Rita Mayes.”

Christine nodded and gave a small, comforting grin, brushing a few strands of her own auburn hair from her face. “Ok, Rita. I’m Officer Christine Brody. That’s my partner, Jonathan Colter. We’re not going to let anything happen to you, so I need you to calm down for me.”

Jonathan approached them. “What do we got?”

“I got this, Colt,” she responded without turning to look at him.

“Well, what did she see?”

“I was distracted and on my cell phone when I heard the old man cry out,” Rita explained, beginning to cry again as she was forced to relive the event. “I turned and saw a man next to him, but before I knew what was happening, I was on the ground, and he was gone.” Her gaze pointed down the street, and her brow furrowed as she tried to remember more details.

Jonathan’s eyebrows rose with interest. “A man? What did he look like?”

Rita’s strength crumbled, and she began sobbing again. “I don’t know.”

“Try to remember,” he pressed.

“I can’t remember!”

“Colt,” Christine said forcefully, gaining her partner’s attention. “Let me do this.”

He regarded her for a moment, his eyes searching hers for information. She was adept at masking her emotions, but he managed to catch a flicker of her motives flash past, and realization dawned across his face as he shook his head slowly. “Don’t do this, Brody. Not today.”

“Don’t you talk to me about today!” she spat, a fire building within her.

“I’m scared,” Rita cried. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Christine glared at Jonathan, letting a thousand silent words pass between them before turning back to the frightened witness. “Let’s go then,” she smiled softly. “I’ll take you to the station, and we’ll talk there. Is that ok?”

Rita nodded slowly, observing Jonathan for any dissent.

When he rolled his eyes and holstered his weapon, Christine turned to him and said, “I’ll take her. You stay here and help them search for clues.”

“What? No,” he shook his head. “Brody, we stay together,” he said insistently.

“Right now, we need all the info we can get from Rita, and I’m the best person to get it from her,” she rationalized, and then she pointed toward the house. “They need you here. You were the first person on the scene up there.”

“But I need
you
here,” he argued.

Raising an eyebrow, she matter-of-factly stated, “No, you don’t.” She cradled Rita at her side with a comforting arm stretched over her shoulders, leading her to the police cruiser. She glanced back at her partner, feeling a little guilty about her outburst, and she tried to reassure him. “I’ll call you with any info I get.”

And he watched as Christine helped the blonde woman into the backseat, hopped into the driver’s seat, and pulled away, leaving him standing alone in the growing winter storm.

*     *     *

Penobscot Bay was quiet, save for the shrill cry of the wind, forcing clouds of snow to blanket the small town of Rockport, Maine. The docks all groaned from the weather’s assault, their long wooden legs stationary within the solid icy waters of the bay. The early morning’s sea smoke had dissipated from the surface of the water, leaving only cracked chunks of ice to wobble on the surface in its place. The roads were white with compacted precipitation, and traffic was scarce as the residents were fleeing to their homes for shelter from Mother Nature’s fury.

At the old house where he had found the first frozen victim, Jonathan Colter stood in the dark parlor, staring pensively out the window at the front yard, now covered with snow. He had already decided that this was an inconvenient day for nature to unleash hell. He wanted to be at home with Leslie, cradling her small figure in his arms, sitting in front of the fireplace, watching one of her old Frank Sinatra movies. He also wondered how Christine’s debriefing of Rita was going. He didn’t like working without her; it felt as though one of his limbs was missing from his body, and his movements and thoughts felt unbalanced.

He sighed, going over the minute details of the day so far. Lifting the yellow police tape, he ducked under it and made his way up the stairs to where the rest of the team was working. He shivered as he neared the master bedroom where the frozen corpse stood. They had had to open the window to keep the room cold, because the statue had begun to melt. Now, the man’s features drooped and sagged with unsettling eeriness, like the actual molecular structure of his body had been altered; simply melting him to do an autopsy would not be possible, unless the coroner was able to work with a vat of liquefied flesh and organs.

“Colter,” a fellow officer called out behind him.

Jonathan turned to meet his call. “What do ya got?”

The young officer handed him a small stack of papers. “Vic’s name is Peter Sheffield. Fifty-eight-year-old white male. Born in upstate New York. Moved here twenty years ago. Been cashin’ in on unemployment for the past five.”

Jonathan scanned the info on the first page while listening to the officer spout his facts.

“Neighbors say he’s a shut-in. Mainly stays inside. Pretty much your typical introvert.”

“Thanks, Evans.”

“There’s… one more thing.”

Jonathan looked up from the papers. “Go on.”

“Neighbors also said that once a week, they’ve been seein’ the same white car parked in front of the house at the curb.”

Jonathan’s brow furrowed at this news. “Did they say which day?”

“
Ayuh
,” the officer nodded. “And I’ll give ya three guesses…”

He wouldn’t need any of them to know that at that moment, the white car was sitting outside. A sedan, in fact. He knew, because he’d seen it as he’d swept the area for clues, but there had been nothing suspicious about the parked vehicle at the time.

“Get a team out there before the snow gets too high to get into the frikkin’ car,” he told the officer, who nodded and trampled down the steps. Jonathan observed the small team of men and women inside the bedroom daintily dusting the furniture for fingerprints. “Let me know if you guys find anything,” he said to them, even though he had a hunch that they would turn up with nothing. He moseyed down the steps, ruminating on the information in the packet he’d just received. He was hoping that something tangible would come from the search of the white sedan parked out front.

He strolled through the parlor once more and scanned the furniture with his eyes, hoping to spot any fragments of clues that could be pieced together. The couch, the end table, the ashtray, the whiskey bottle, the television. He searched the bookshelves and found a surprising lack of dust. He poked his head into the first floor bathroom but found nothing immediately unusual – no hair or toothpaste in the sink, no stains in the toilet, no scum in the shower.

In the kitchen, other than the plate from yesterday’s dinner on the cheap table, the counters and cabinets were clean. Placing his stack of papers on the table next to the dirty plate, he bent to examine the stains on the laminated flooring that he’d observed earlier, and he noticed that none of them appeared to have been there long. Residue from haphazardly throwing together the meal still on the table. No dirt along the baseboards though.

“You find somethin’, Colter?” asked Evans from the kitchen entrance.

Jonathan didn’t look up, his focus remaining on the details of the kitchen. “Somethin’ doesn’t add up here.”

The other cop waited for elaboration.

Eventually, Jonathan stood, brushing his hands on his pants and exhaling. “A lazy guy past his prime, nursin’ from the tit of unemployment for five years, an entire room upstairs filled with boxes
nevah
unpacked, passes out on the couch with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other… But look at this place. The only grime is from last night’s dinner. This doesn’t seem like the type of guy to have the motivation to get up every mornin’ to clean house.”

“I’m not sure what you’re gettin’ at, man.”

“He had a housekeeper. Or at least someone that stopped by to help him out. And I’d bet my left nut that that’s their car out front.”

Evans shifted his weight and went to retrieve the papers from the table. “I’m pretty sure there was somethin’ here about a cleanin’ lady,” he mumbled, flipping through the stack to find the information.

“Keep me posted. I’m gonna call Brody to see how she’s doin’,” Jonathan said as he retrieved his cell phone from his pocket, excusing himself to the parlor and choosing the speed dial that belonged to his partner. He held the phone up to his ear and waited, listening to the monotonous ring repeat itself over and over.

Finally, the voicemail picked up: “Hey, it’s Brody. I’m busy right now. And I don’t listen to messages, so call back later.” And then the phone beeped. Jonathan hung up, his brow furrowed in thought, thinking it odd that she didn’t answer.

“Colter, I found it,” Evans announced, rejoining Jonathan from the kitchen.

“Housekeeper?”

“Yeah, for about six months.”

Jonathan retrieved a small pad of paper from his pocket and produced a tiny pencil to take notes. “I’ll check the name with the car’s owner when they figure it out.”

“Says here the name is…” Evans looked back down at the paper to read the information. “Mayes.”

Jonathan’s heart stopped, and his breath caught in his throat. “Say again?”