The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (4 page)

“Did she?”

“Enemies? No, of course not. They speak to you at all?”

“I don't know if they will. I hadn’t seen her for a while.” Silence for a while. Then, “Gemma said you were in the FBI. Can you help the police?”

“Don’t be stupid. Cops don’t let civilians. especially the victim's loved ones, in on the show.” I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped. I’d like to catch whoever killed her, I really would, but it doesn't happen that way. Even when I was in the Bureau and my parents died, all I did was answer the standard questions. Cops worked the case, not me. Much good I’d have been even if they’d asked. You can't stay focused, not that close to things. Not when your world’s been smashed to pieces.”

“Will you try if the police get nowhere?”

I didn’t answer. This wasn’t a talk I wanted to have, and the scratchy feeling around my heart meant if we carried on with it there’d probably be an argument. And I’d probably be the one to start it.

Bethany rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’m supposed to be at work in about eight hours. It was nice meeting you, Alex. I’m just sorry it was like this.”

“Sure.” I looked up as she adjusted her coat. “Thanks for talking to me, I needed it. I’m sorry I’m not in the best of moods right now.”

“You've got nothing to apologize for. If you need me, here's my number.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Take care.”

I stayed in the chair for some time after her footsteps had faded, still dazed, before an internal autopilot suggested I find a motel and try to sleep. My legs felt weak like all the life had been kicked out of them, and I didn’t want to leave Gemma behind. Dark, dirty slush and ice blanketed the parking lot outside, but although the sky above was utterly black, cloud cloaking the stars, no fresh snow fell. I was too numb to feel the cold.

The nearest motel was a local chain franchise called the E-Z Rest. Burlington was dead at two thirty in the morning and I saw almost no other traffic braving the conditions. The motel wasn’t at the absolute bottom end of the accommodation food chain but it was close. They had vacancies, though, and a bored night manager on desk duty. The light in my room buzzed and flickered a while before holding. I turned on the TV and emptied my pockets before collapsing into the only armchair to doze.

The voicemail symbol was showing on the screen of my cell. I almost dropped the thing when I heard the voice on the message. It was Gemma.

“You have... one... new message. Message received... yesterday at... five... thirty-three... PM.”

“Hi, honey, it's me.”

Gemma was calling from the car; I could hear the vibration of the engine in the background. There was no steady traffic noise around her, so I guessed she must have been out of Newport already, on the backroads.

Her voice made me miss her all the more.

“I’m just calling to ask you about the weekend. Susan's invited me to a party in St Johnsbury on Saturday and I said I’d see if you wanted to go. It's more of an evening on the town, apparently. Some friends of hers are going to be taking over a bar for the night, so I guess there must be a lot of them. But she said it's like an annual thing. It sounds kind of fun.”

I could hear the high-pitched watery noise of the car's wheels cutting through snow on the road. The whirr of the heater. The squeak in the seat she was going to get fixed but hadn’t.

“But I don't know if you fancy doing that after driving up all this way, even if you're not going back on Sunday. I don't think you've ever met any of the people who are going, though I know I've mentioned them to you before. Again, it's up to you whether you want to or not.”

Her tone changed. She was smiling and I could hear it, almost see it. “Even though you
do
owe me for that bash for your police friend. Maybe I'll make you repay me. Oh, and what do you want to eat when you're here? I don't have much in the house right now, but I can make a trip to the store after work on Friday, I thought I might make some kind of Thai thing in the evening, but I haven't decided what, and I’m open to suggestions for the rest of your stay. Anyway, I'd better go because it's just started snowing again and I need to keep my eyes on the road. I love you, honey and I'll—”
 

Crack.

I could almost feel the bullet hit. The noise itself was enough to make me double up with pain, hugging myself tight as if I’d been kicked in the gut, dimly aware that tears were streaming down my face. My girlfriend, dead, the whole thing available to play over and over again. It hurt as much as when I got the call to tell me she'd been killed — worse, because this time I didn't have the half-hope to cling to that it was a joke, or a dream, and that she was really OK.

If there was anything after that on the message, I didn’t hear it, just let it bleed out on the floor. I didn't dare pick up the phone again in case I found out that Gemma didn't die straight away, in case I heard her last shuddering, painful breaths. Eventually, when enough time had passed, I collected it from the floor and heard the distorted sound of the automated message looping.
 

“... three. If you would like to hear the message again, press one. If you would like to save the message, press two. To delete the message, press three. If you would like ...”

My first instinct was to wipe it and never again have to face the agony of Gemma's final moments. For a moment my thumb hovered over the ‘3’ button, but then I hit ‘1’ instead.
 

“Thank you. Your message will be saved for thirty days.”

I couldn't do it. Couldn’t erase her last words on this earth. Maybe I’d have someone download them onto a computer so I’d have something lasting, something more concrete than memory. Maybe time would dull the hurt that came from knowing I could listen to her, but couldn't talk back ever again.

Sleep, unlikely before, was going to be impossible after that, and I didn't even try. I just sat in the armchair until daylight leaked weakly through the window behind me, then left.

State Police headquarters was in Waterbury, twenty-five miles or so from Burlington and about as non-touristy as Vermont got. A bunch of government agencies including the VSP were based out of the Waterbury Complex, a renamed section of what was once the State Hospital for the Insane. Trees gone brown and bare with the onset of winter dotted the asylum's campus, surrounding each patch of snow-covered open ground. Past use gave it a walled-off, prison feeling, even though it was busy with admin workers. I wondered what it must have been like to be a patient here. I wondered if I was ever going to sleep again. If I’d ever want to.

When I swung out of the car, the cold hit me like I’d fallen into a river. I wedged my hands in my pockets and hurried to the doors. Inside the air smelled acrid, overly warmed by a heating system that recycled every cup of bitter coffee and every sour armpit. The woman at the front desk directed me down the hall and said I’d be meeting Detective Sergeant Karl Flint. I recognized the name as that of the cop I’d briefly spoken to about Adam Webb. I found his office at the end of a long, echoing corridor. He was somewhere around forty, pale and more or less clean-shaven, with close-cut dark hair and wide, watery brown eyes. He wore a dark grey suit and burgundy tie like he was born in them. He stood when I came in and we shook hands, but his bedside manner felt straight out of a textbook and I got the impression he didn’t use it much.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Detective Sergeant Flint.”

“Alex Rourke. We spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”

“We did?” A blank look crossed his face.

“Adam Webb. Missing person.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Small world, isn't it?” he said. “Mr Rourke, I know this is a tough time for you, but I need to ask you some questions that might help us figure out what happened to Dr Larson and why. We’ll record the conversation so we can refer to it later. OK?”

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

“Good.” He smiled. Uncapped a pen. “When did you last speak with Dr Larson?”

“Monday.”

“What did you talk about?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much. The usual, just about our days at work, things like that. Are you married, Detective Flint?”

“No.”

“Well, imagine what married couples talk about when they come home from work. That's what we did.”

“OK. And that was the last occasion you spoke to her?”

“She called me yesterday, but my phone was engaged so she left a message on my voicemail. We didn't talk.”

The chair creaked as he leaned forward. “What time was this, Mr Rourke?”

“Just gone five-thirty.” If he noticed a touch of hoarseness in my voice, it didn’t show. “Right up to the point she died.”

Flint's hand hovered. “What did she say?”

“She was talking about the weekend — I was coming up to stay with her. Some stuff about a party in St Johnsbury, what she was going to be cooking. Nothing strange. Then she said it had started snowing again so she was going to hang up to concentrate on the road.” I paused. Breathed. “Then I heard her window splinter.”

“Did you hear a shot?”

I shook my head. “No, just the glass breaking.”

He leaned back in his chair. “And that was all? Do you still have the message?”

“No.” I wondered as I said it why I was lying. Keeping Gemma's last moments private, maybe. It didn’t matter anyway; since there was nothing on the message that I thought would help the police, I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. “I erased it,” I said. “I didn't want to hear it again.”

“God damn it,” Flint said, shaking his head. “There could have been something useful on it.”

“Like I said, I didn't want to hear it again. She was driving along and then the bullet hit. That's all.”

He paused for a moment. “Moving on. Did Gemma sound upset or agitated in any way when she spoke to you, not just on the last occasion but at any time recently?”

“No, she never said anything to me about being worried. I don't know of anyone who might have wanted to kill her. She hadn't had trouble with anyone lately, or ever, that I can remember. She wasn't the sort. Is that what you were looking for?”

“No strange occurrences, at home or at work?”

I shook my head. “Everything was normal.”

“What about your relationship? Were there any problems there? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I do, but I expected it. And no, our relationship was great.” My throat closed up again around the words. I wanted to make the guy understand how one day we were going to be married, maybe even have a family, but the thought of either of those things just brought the threat of angry tears. I just said, “We were happy.”

He nodded and dropped his pen on the desk. “That seems to be the picture we're getting from everyone we've spoken to.”

“Have you got any leads, anything to go on?”

“inquiries are progressing.”

“Meaning no.”

“It’s very early days, Mr Rourke, and we’re still trying to develop leads.” He sighed. “She was found by a Lamoille County Sheriff's Department cruiser, but they thought she'd gone off the road in the snow and it wasn't treated as a crime scene until someone from the medical examiner's office got there. We haven't found any witnesses who could tell us what happened yet — that patch of Route 100 is pretty quiet. We’re trying to collect information, but until something comes up, since she had no enemies and nothing was taken, we're currently looking at a motiveless crime or a freak hunting accident.”

“An accident? You’ve got to be goddamn kidding.”

“A rifle slug can carry a long way. If someone took a shot and missed... it's possible.”

"Wouldn't they have come forward? Have you found the bullet?”

“We're out of season for most animals, so it may have been someone poaching, which is why they wouldn't want to tell us what happened. And no, we haven't found the bullet. The state of the ground where she went off the road made it hard to know where to look. That’s about all I can tell you, and even that’s too much. Let us do what we have to.” Flint leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. “Look, Mr Rourke. I know it's hard to accept, but shit does happen, and it sometimes happens for no good reason. You've got to leave it to us to figure out the truth. We’ll get there in the end.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

I didn’t feel very thankful, trudging back out to the parking lot. And I still hadn’t heard anything else about what the VSP had — or hadn’t — found by the time we buried Gemma in a cemetery near Bangor in northern Maine three days later.

A cold, hard morning. A blanket of ice like shattered glass covered the ground, broken here and there by frozen tufts of straggly grass. It snapped and crunched beneath my feet as I moved to the front of the small crowd of mourners gathered by the side of a dark casket strewn with red and white flowers.

The sky was a brilliant pale blue, with hardly a wisp of cloud to be seen. The sun weak, bright but distant. A clean, icy breeze blew in a constant stream across the top of the low hill on which we stood, turning pale faces paler still, clenched hands whitish-purple. Gemma's family were all there as well as several of her closer friends. Some I knew, some I didn't. Her mom and dad, both nearly sixty, crying softly as the white-robed priest conducted the burial service. His voice was low and nasal, but I wasn’t listening. Too busy thinking about Gemma, all we had together and all that could have been. Trying my best to burn her face, smile and laughter into my memory, not to let them dance away from me.
 

The reverend finished speaking as the coffin vanished slowly into the earth. The wind almost carried away his final syllables; 'dust to dust' was no more than a whisper. I swallowed hard and closed my eyes.
 

Footsteps crunched through the ice, people filtering away. Most said a few words to Gemma's parents, then made their way slowly back towards the cars. A couple, including her elder sister Alice, did the same for me too. Her brother and one or two others stayed for a while at her graveside, silent.

I walked away, feeling hollow. There was a figure standing fifty yards away among the tombstones. Bethany was waiting near the bottom of the hill, dressed all in black with a white flower pinned to her lapel by a silver brooch shaped like wings. She was looking uncertainly up towards Gemma's resting place.