The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (3 page)

Drinks flowed and the details blurred. Expectant faces, waiting for the punchline to a joke. The same faces open in laughter. The joke changed, the comedian changed, a dozen times or more. A pack of guys from the department and a handful of amusing anecdotes from the recent past. Found myself briefly trapped with complete strangers and all anyone seemed able to ask was “What business're you in?” and "What do you drive?” Scored points with my answers on both counts, but I moved on before everyone’s reserves of small talk ran dry. I ended up standing in circles with the guys I knew best, the same guys I always ended up standing in circles with at parties, telling the same stories as every other time we were together. At midnight, Gemma slipped her arm around my waist and whispered, “Let's go home.” Free. We made our excuses and walked the three-quarters of a mile back to my apartment, and then we belonged only to each other again for a time.
 

Sunday passed quickly despite my efforts to hold it back, and all too soon night was falling and Gemma had to leave me for another week.

On Monday, Webb’s mother gave me what little her son had sent her over the past year. I wasn’t surprised to see he hadn’t written often — “He mostly called,” she said — but I
was
a little surprised by the level of genuine affection he obviously had for her. Not something I’d expect from someone who’d willingly disappear unannounced. Two letters and a couple of cards. The latter weren’t anything much, but in the letters he wrote about working in upstate New York — Buffalo and Albany. In the first it seemed he was working at the rough end of the repo business, but a call to Buffalo PD told me his boss from back then was now in the middle of a year-long stretch for fraud. Adam sure hadn’t gone back to work there. In Albany he’d only been able to land a job flipping burgers and he’d hated it. That left his few remaining friends in Boston as the only available leads I could work from here, and that was — I knew — likely to be diving to, or beyond, the bottom of the barrel.

Late in the afternoon, Gemma rang. I told her how much of a blank I’d drawn. “Well, I still hope he won’t show up here. I sent copies of the photo you gave me to Burlington, as well as every regional and assistant ME and hospital I could think of. I should hear back from most of them in a day or two.”

“Thanks.”

“Just one of the perks of going out with a pathologist.”

“And such a gorgeous one, too.”

“Very smooth. When do you want to come up to look for this guy?”

“Well, I'll be seeing you at the weekend, so why don't I stay on for the first few days of next week as well? If it's OK with you.”

She laughed. “Of course it is. The more time I get to spend with you the better. I can thank you properly for all those compliments you keep paying me. I doubt you'll have the ideal weather for wandering around Burlington — it's been snowing on and off since the end of last week. Are you sure Rob trusts you to get any work done while you're here?”

“He suspects I'll be too distracted to go trawling around town for missing people.” I glanced across the office, where my partner was shaking his head.

“Tell her I'll have you fired if she keeps you from doing your job,” he called out.

I relayed the message. Gemma said, “I’ll be at work myself so he needn't worry. I'd better go now. Duty calls. Love you.”

“I love you too,” I said, and hung up.

Rob rolled his eyes. “It's enough to make you hurl.”

I finally caught a break of sorts the next day at one of the two addresses listed for friends of Adam. The first was a run-down brick duplex in an equally run-down street. The box-like front yard was overgrown with yellowing grass and creeping weeds, most of them dying off as winter set in. Posted on the front door was a notice that said the property was being repossessed and its occupants evicted. The place was empty. The second was an apartment in a dingy building at the end of a strip mall. The stairwell reeked of piss. My knock was answered by a scrawny guy I guessed around Adam's age. He was wearing a Metallica T-shirt five or six years past the point where the band had been relevant to anything, stained jeans and had bare feet. A mop of blond hair topped a pale, tired-looking face.

“Yeah?” the kid said.

“Justin?”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “What you want?”

“I’m trying to find Adam Webb — his mom wants to get in touch but she doesn't know where he is. Have you heard from him recently?”

He stood still, thinking, or so I hoped. Then he nodded once. “I got a call from him maybe two, three months ago. I think. Said he had the two hundred bucks he owed me. Is that recent enough? He in any trouble?”

This was the only outside confirmation I’d had that Adam even existed two months ago. “It's recent enough, and he's not in any trouble. What else did he say?”

“We talked a bit, y'know. Asked how he was doin'. I mean, he borrowed the money years ago when he first took off. I'd forgotten, but I guess he hadn't. He sounded like he was doing pretty good for himself, up north.”

“Did he say what he was doing?”

The kid shrugged. “Not really. Got the impression it might not have been totally on the level, but I didn't ask. He said he was working with some chick called Jessie, sounded like he maybe had a thing for her. At least, they were friends n'all.”

“Did he say anything else about her?”

“Nah, not to me. Sent me the two hundred, though. I hope he's OK.”

“Why wouldn't he be?”

“I dunno.” He sniffed. “Just that when people need to come asking about someone, they usually end up on the evening news, y'know?”

“I hope he doesn't. Look, if he gets in touch again, or if you remember anything else, give me a call. He's not in any trouble, and I'm not a cop.” I handed the kid a business card wrapped in a fifty.

“Sure, man. No problem.”

Downstairs, I called Adam’s mom and asked if she ever heard him mention a girl called Jessie. “No,” she said. “I don't think so. You think he could be with her, whoever she is?”

“It’s possible.” I played safe, didn’t want to get her hopes up. “All I’ve got, though, is her first name and the notion that she was maybe with him in Burlington. I’ll need more to have any real chance of finding either of them.”

“But you’re going to try, aren’t you?”

“Sure. I’ll be going up to Vermont next week to see what I can find out on the ground. I’ve eliminated a few possibilities, but who knows what else will turn up. I’ll keep you posted.”

She thanked me and I hung up. I felt a little bad, sounding so optimistic when I spoke to her, but I guessed I wanted to put her mind a little at ease. No sense making things out to be worse than they were before they were.

I spent the walk home after work making a list of places where he might have stayed or worked around Burlington. I was hoping that the more I completed before I left, the more extra time I’d have with Gemma. The idea of a night or two spent by the fire with a bottle of wine instead of trawling dive bars had a lot of appeal.

At eight thirty in the evening the phone rang and I listened, stone-eyed, as a total stranger told me Gemma was dead.

In my memory, the air was full of the taste of spruce bark, dry and earthy and bitter. It mingled with the scents of a hundred other plants and flowers I couldn't name, combining in harmony to form a singular perfume which, for some reason I couldn't place, reminded me of old wine casks. Grass stalks rattled beside my head. July sunlight flushed warm against my skin. The hum of insects going about their daily lives formed a chorus line for the sound taking center stage: a woman's laughter.

I knew that if I opened my eyes now, I’d see a pair of red-brown butterflies marked with patterns like orchid blossom skipping through the air above me in a complex, whirling, mating dance. Then I’d shade my eyes against the glare of the sun, watching them until they passed behind the tall grass. And then I’d hear...

“Mr Rourke.”

I wouldn't. I wouldn't hear a thing except the sound of my own thoughts beating against the inside of my head. There were no butterflies and that sun went down a long time ago. I couldn't go back to that hiking trail near Smuggler's Notch, not without going alone and in the cold. The memory was all I had.

“Mr Rourke.”

I looked up at the white-coated figure in front of me. A grey-haired woman in her sixties. Lined face, wide brown eyes with the studied sympathy of a professional. She had blue doctor's coveralls beneath her lab coat. “Mr Rourke,” she said, “I’m Dr Kingsley, the Chief Medical Examiner. If you're sure you want to do this, follow me.”

I said nothing, just stared bleakly at her as I climbed out of my seat. She led me down the hallway to a small office. A couple of desks with computers sitting on them. Textbooks, papers. Everything was clinically clean and so tidy you'd have thought no one ever worked here. The air carried the faint ammonia odor of disinfectant. A door in the far corner led through into what looked like a laboratory. The adjoining wall had a large window running a good ten or twelve feet along it. There was a surgical screen across it but bright blue-white light bled around the edges. A set of aluminum double doors led from the office into the room beyond the window: the mortuary proper.

“I know how hard this must be for you,” Dr Kingsley said. It was an off-the-peg platitude but didn’t care much about her words anyway; they didn’t seem to matter next to the awful knowledge that this wasn't some dream I was about to wake up from. “It's always terrible when something like this happens. It's cruel and senseless, and obviously we do what we can to accommodate the wishes of loved ones. Her family haven't contacted us, so if you're not sure you want to do this...”

“Her mom and dad are on vacation,” I muttered. “They aren’t going to be back until Friday. I don't know about the others.”

She nodded. “Well, OK then. We'll start slowly. We can stop at any time.”

Dr Kingsley opened the file she was holding, pulled out a pair of glossy photos and handed them to me. I glanced at them, swallowed once and said, “I’m not interested in pictures, Doc.”

She took them back. “You'd still like to see her?”

“Yeah.”

She pushed a button on the desk. Inside the morgue, a technician in blue coveralls drew back the screen that blocked out the window to reveal a gurney draped in white.

“I’d like to go in,” I said.

The disinfectant smell was even stronger in the mortuary, and the fluorescent lights in the ceiling seemed to throb and hum louder than they should. Gemma lay with her eyes closed, skin nearly as pale as the thick, heavy sheet that ran almost up to her chin. Her hair hung in limp drifts around her head. There was a faint bluish tinge to her lips, which had opened the tiniest fraction, just like they used to do when she was asleep.

For a long, long time I stared down at her lying there, cold and sterile and dead. My mind stayed empty. Blank, fled to some happier place, leaving me alone without any thoughts of grief or comfort, sorrow or anger, anything at all. I knew I should be in tears, or railing in anger against the unfairness of the world, or doing something to express my grief. But my head stayed silent and hollow and all I had left was a gut-tightening sense of longing that could never be fulfilled.
 

I trudged out of the mortuary. Dr Kingsley said something to me in her office, and I had the vague memory of signing a piece of paper, but I don’t remember hearing the words or reading the form. I just found myself back in the corridor outside, alone, and everything was done. The hallway seemed gloomy after the stark, dead light of the morgue. Tubes spaced along its length spat out a yellow glow so dirty I couldn’t tell if the walls were genuinely beige or just badly-lit plain white. The reflection on the uneven surface of the polished floor made dark whorls and pools collect like a desert mirage. I walked up the corridor and slumped into one of the chipped chairs back where I’d originally been waiting. Dropped my face into my hands and stared emptily at the liquid blackness beneath me, wishing I could fall into it.

Then I heard footsteps, heeled shoes rapping against the floor, the walls distorting the sound so much I couldn’t even tell if they were coming or going. “You must be Alex,” a voice said next to me.
 

I looked up to see a woman, maybe in her late twenties, wearing a thick coat over a sweater and jeans. Brown hair tied back in a ponytail, thin features and green eyes. There was a note of genuine sympathy and warmth in her voice which Dr Kingsley — and everyone else I’d spoken to since that first phone call, despite their best efforts — hadn't been able to match. The woman dropped into the chair next to me.

“I’m Bethany,” she said. “Gemma was my friend.”

“Oh.” I couldn't remember if Gemma had ever mentioned her to me or not. “Did you work together?”

“No, not really. I have a job here with the OCME. I heard that she was... y'know. Dr Kingsley said you were coming and that you might like a friend to be here. Have you been in yet?”

I nodded, slow and leaden. “Yeah.” I tried to show interest, feign normality, and added, “How did you two meet? Work the same case?”

“No,” Bethany said. “There was a meeting for OCME staff here in Burlington a few months ago. We were both new to everything around here, so we got talking. We met up a few times after that.” She sighed. “Do you know what happened to her?”

My throat clamped shut and talking was a heavy struggle. “The police told me she was driving home. Someone shot her, they think through the windshield. She got hit in the throat. They reckon she died instantly.” Breathe. “When the cops saw her car, they thought it was just someone gone off the road in the snow. They didn't realize what'd happened until later.”

She was silent for a while, then said, “Do they know who did it?”

An orderly walked past pushing a cart full of cleaning equipment. He stared strangely at me for a moment, then saw me looking back and his eyes flicked forwards and stayed there until he was out of sight.

“I don't know,” I said. "The State Police are handling it. It was the county sheriff’s department who called me with the news. The VSP will question me tomorrow. Did she have any enemies, any trouble at home, et cetera. The usual.”