1
LANGSTON HOSPITAL’S CRITICAL CARE UNIT
SATURDAY MORNING, MARCH 12
On the twelfth of March, at 8:45 in the morning, Detective Natalie Lockhart took a deep breath and let it out. The private hospital room was full of humming, beeping equipment. She’d been sitting in the same chair for hours now, watching the early morning sunlight play across Lieutenant Detective Luke Pittman’s handsome face. He looked so vulnerable lying there, it made her feel all tender and protective inside. She leaned forward and stared at him intently, willing him to come out of his coma, to emerge from wherever it was he had gone.
Luke’s right hand twitched, the fingers moving delicately as if striking piano keys, and she felt a ray of hope. “You’ll survive this,” she whispered with conviction. “You will wake up, Luke.”
Several hours ago, one of the nurses had explained that he’d scored a fifteen on the Glasgow Coma Scale. “That’s a good thing,” the older woman said. “He’s responding to stimuli and behaving in an agitated way, trying to remove his IV line. Usually, patients who’ve scored fifteen on the Glasgow scale have more than an eighty-five percent chance of a good recovery.”
A good recovery.
Eighty-five percent.
Natalie liked those odds—and yet, what was considered a good recovery? Low-grade amnesia? Partial paralysis? Post-traumatic stress disorder?
Luke had a ruddy, weathered face and an athletic body. He ran and lifted weights. He was physically fit. His heart was strong. He would pull through in good shape—she just knew it. Natalie squeezed his hand, but he didn’t respond. Where was he?
She watched him a little while longer, then settled back against her chair. Across from her was the closed door. She could hear activity on the other side. They were on the third floor inside a small private room of the Critical Care Unit. She’d been watching over him all night long. Protecting him. Her coat was unbuttoned and she’d unsnapped the holster of her service weapon. She wanted to be able to access her gun at a moment’s notice, just in case. She sensed that unknown forces were gathering against them, but perhaps she was wrong. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep and too much caffeine that made her feel so ill at ease. She couldn’t tell anymore. Her paranoia was intense.
Four days ago, a beloved, practicing local Wiccan named Veronica Manes had been murdered in one of the most barbaric ways imaginable. On Tuesday morning, March 8, Veronica had woken from a drugged stupor only to realize she was dressed in a Halloween witch costume and chained to the railroad tracks north of town. She’d tried desperately to escape, while the morning express came barreling down on her. She didn’t make it.
Natalie and Luke had been working the case nonstop when Luke suddenly went missing yesterday afternoon. Nine hours later, his unconscious body was found two towns over at the bottom of a ravine by state troopers. He’d been beaten and left for dead. His condition was stable, thank God, but none of the doctors could tell her when he might come out of his coma.
She’d learned to her surprise that the medical establishment couldn’t agree on anything when it came to comas. Outcomes varied from patient to patient. Some people recovered completely, without any mental or physical disabilities, whereas others suffered irreversible brain damage or sank into a vegetative state.
Natalie wasn’t the praying kind, but she had prayed last night. Luke was her touchstone. Her rock. A solid presence in her life going all the way back to her troubled childhood. He’d saved her sorry ass more than once over the years. She needed him in her life. No, it went deeper than that—Natalie couldn’t imagine her life without him.
Outside, it had stopped snowing. Inside it was warm and toasty. The room smelled of medicine and perspiration. She couldn’t help loving Luke. Whenever she looked at him, she saw herself stretched across the decades—her childhood self, her teenage self, her young adult self—always with feelings of adoration and overflowing love for Luke Pittman. They’d known each other since she was five and he was thirteen. They were so close, it felt almost forbidden to love him. He was her mentor, her trusted colleague, her best friend, possibly the only man in the world who truly understood her … so how could she be confused about this? About anything?
Now the door swung open and thirty-six-year-old Rainie Sandhill stood on the threshold, looking slightly surprised. A slender blonde, Rainie possessed the kind of natural beauty that required very little effort to achieve. “Natalie?” she said breathlessly. Her cheeks were vivid pink. “Do you mind if I come in?”
“Of course not.” Natalie stood up and hid her service weapon underneath her coat.
“How’s he doing?” Rainie asked hopefully. “Any improvement?”
“He’s getting restless, which they tell me is a good sign.”
Rainie brightened. “Maybe I’ll sit with him for a little bit.”
“Sure, take my seat. I’ll go grab a cup of coffee. Want anything?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.” Rainie sat down and reached for Luke’s hand, pressing it between hers. Tears filled her eyes. She was casually dressed in sweats, with her long blond hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail, and she seemed totally unaware of her own loveliness. “Luke?” she whispered. “It’s me, Rainie. Can you hear me?”
Natalie left them alone together.
Out in the corridor, residents, doctors, and nurses flashed past, their rubber-soled shoes making squeaky sounds on the polished floor. At the other end of the ICU, a maintenance man was mopping up a pool of vomit or blood.
Through the patterned glass, Natalie could see Rainie talking softly to Luke, and it felt like she’d been stabbed with a knife. She lightly caught her breath. She had no right to feel that way. Natalie was with Hunter now, and they were in a committed relationship.
Thirty-three-year-old Hunter Rose was funny, charming, generous, and wickedly seductive. He cared about her. He claimed to be wildly in love with her. He wanted to marry her. He wasn’t shy about it. He was busy plotting their future together.
They’d been living together for four months now, and his overwhelming determination to win her over completely, heart and soul, had pulled her into the murky current of her own primitive, subliminal desire to nest and be loved and have a family. Sometimes she felt as if she were suffocating, especially when she could feel her own arousal in response to his touch, the throbbing of her inner blood workings, the stirring of vessels and nerves and hormones. She wasn’t used to this. She had no road map. She only knew that Hunter was the physical place where she’d been losing herself lately.
Natalie’s mouth was dry as toast. She spotted the vending machines at the other end of the corridor and headed toward them. As she was rummaging in her bag for loose change, her phone buzzed. “Lockhart,” she answered distractedly.
“We got a D.B. call, Detective,” Dennis the dispatcher said. “You’re up.”
2
Natalie drove to Murray’s Halloween Costumes on Route 151, then got out of her car and took a look around. The sky was clear and blue. The snow drifts were sooty. The property was vast, composed of several outbuildings, storage containers, a huge parking lot, and the sprawling two-story nineteenth-century warehouse. She got her crime kit out of her trunk and headed for the main entrance, where a police cruiser was parked, its blue-and-red lights bouncing off the brick façade of the building. She knew the responding officers by their car number—Marconi and Keegan were good men.
As she approached the store, one of the officers came outside and lit a cigarette, his silhouette casting a long shadow in the morning sunlight. As soon as he saw her, he put out his cigarette and nodded crisply. “Morning, Detective.”
“Morning, Andy. What’s up?”
Officer Andrew Marconi was six foot three and by-the-book. “Keegan’s inside taking down statements. We arrived fifteen minutes ago and found two witnesses milling around the crime scene. We immediately cordoned off the area and isolated them in a back office. Their names are Stevie Greenway and the owner, Murray Gallo. Stevie’s an employee. She called her boss before calling 911. He got here shortly before we did.”
She nodded. “Who’s the victim?”
“Randolph Holmes. A long-term employee, age sixty-four. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” Natalie ducked under the crime scene tape and went inside, where the cold quickly penetrated her skin. There was an organic smell of decay in the air. She tried to prepare herself psychologically, but it was always a kick in the gut.
Murray’s front lobby was as large as a high school gymnasium, full of attention-grabbing animatronic displays and mannequins dressed up as witches, ghosts, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, pirates, characters from The Purge, Jason from Friday the 13th, and so on. The cavernous lobby branched off into dozens of other rooms connected by a series of mazelike corridors. Each room was stuffed with merchandise. It was fairly easy to get lost at Murray’s. Natalie had been coming here since she was a girl, and not much had changed.
Now she followed the yellow crime tape down a dusty aisle, where a few items were scattered across the hardwood floor—Halloween masks with their neon green price tags attached, a dozen bags of balloons, and a few packets of fake vampire teeth. Natalie put on a pair of latex gloves, picked up a zombie mask from the floor and studied it. It was concave, as if it had been stepped on.
She placed the mask carefully back down and headed toward an animatronic display of a graveyard with dozens of rubber bats dangling from the ceiling. As she got closer, the bats fluttered their wings and screeched like banshees. Beyond this display, about twelve feet after the aisle ended, was the western-facing side door.
The dead body was contained within a makeshift corral of orange traffic cones and yellow crime scene tape. Natalie put on her disposable foot covers and stepped over the tape, careful not to walk on the trail of blood. She knelt down beside the corpse and examined the victim. It appeared that death was due to ligature strangulation. The wire had cut deep. The body was room temperature, with fully developed rigor mortis. He’d been dead for at least twelve hours now. The victim’s open eyes reflected the morning sunlight coming in through the glass door several yards away.
Looking every bit of his sixty-four years, Randolph Holmes had a silver ponytail like a string of saliva spitting out the back of his head. Natalie parted some of his thinning hair and found a deep laceration on his scalp caused by crushing force, indicating a blow to the back of the head.
It was a gruesome visage, one that would surely burn itself into her dreams. The victim’s head was swollen and blue, and there were hemorrhages on his face and eyelids, minute blood clots called petechiae. She carefully peeled back an eyelid, since the presence of petechiae on the inner surface of the eyelids was presumptive evidence of death by strangulation. And there they were.
She could now assume that he’d been clubbed on the head, and then strangled.
She took a moment. The way she approached a dead body was to look at it as the victim’s final communication to the living. This is who I am, this is how I died, this is the end of my story. She wanted to honor the victim’s life by absorbing all the grisly details of their death. It was the reason she didn’t flinch or look away.
The strangest thing about the crime scene so far had to be the rubber clown nose. Judging by the way the elastic band fit over the wound on the back of the head, Natalie surmised that the clown nose had been secured postmortem. She interpreted this as a final act of humiliation for the victim. The store sold these novelty items, and therefore the killer didn’t have to bring one with him. It was most likely an act of spontaneity, meant to mock the dead.
Randolph Holmes wore a short-sleeved green polo shirt, khaki pants, and white sneakers. His wallet was in his back pocket. She held up his left arm and gently turned it over. She did the same with the right arm, searching for defensive wounds, but there were no obvious signs of a struggle. Conspicuously absent from the torso and limbs were any abrasions, bruises, or scratch marks, which meant he hadn’t seen the attack coming.
Natalie stood up and stepped outside the perimeter of orange cones and crime tape so as not to disturb anything. Then she followed the cordon of yellow tape north toward a rack of colorful costumes about twenty feet away. On the floor beneath the rack was a bloody hammer.
She had a working theory now. The killer snuck up behind Mr. Holmes and bashed him on the back of the head with the hammer, rendering him unconscious. Once the victim was incapacitated, the killer strangled Holmes with the ligature until he was dead. Finally, the killer secured a red rubber clown nose to Holmes’s face and left the premises without triggering any alarms or leaving any bloody footprints behind.
Officer Keegan came walking toward her just then, triggering hysterical screams and howls from the animatronics. This made Natalie realize that if the displays had been switched on last night, then Holmes would have heard the killer coming. Given the evidence, it appeared that the animatronics had been turned off.
“I’m all done, Detective,” Keegan told her. “The witnesses are in Gallo’s office. I told them to wait for you.”
“Thanks, Bill.” She stood up and brushed off her hands. “I’ll go talk to them.”
3
Murray Gallo’s office was situated behind the cashier station down a dimly lit hallway. Natalie knocked on the open door. Murray and Stevie Greenway were drinking tea together.
“Come in, Natalie.” Murray was in his early seventies, a stout, ginger-haired man with an angular, intelligent face and a phlegmatic voice.
“Sorry to inconvenience you,” Natalie told them. “But I’ll need a little more of your time. Murray, can I talk to you first?”
Stevie excused herself and left.
“Have a seat,” Murray said. “Would you like a cup of tea, Natalie?”
“No thanks. I just have a few questions.”
His old-school office was full of club chairs and tarnished brass ashtrays. On the wall behind him was a bulletin board full of memos, sticky notes, inventory spreadsheets, and a marked-up calendar.
“I’m usually better dressed than this,” he said with an embarrassed smile. He was wearing a faded South Park T-shirt and sweatpants instead of the usual rumpled business suit. “This morning, I stumbled out of bed to terrible news and came racing over here to find Randy like that out there.” He sounded loudly amazed. “My head is still ringing. I can’t believe it.”
“It must’ve been quite a shock.” She nodded sympathetically, then asked, “How long has he worked for you?”
“Almost thirty years now.”
“That’s a long time. When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday afternoon. He had the ten-to-six shift. I was here noon to four.”
Natalie took out her notepad and jotted it down. “And he seemed okay to you?”
“Fine. We chatted for a bit, then I put him to work doing inventory. Business is slow this time of year, you know? Very little foot traffic. The store closes at four in the winter, and we’ve been having a bug problem, so I asked Randy to fumigate the basement after he was done with the inventory. I told him he could stay late, and I’d pay him for his time.”
“When did he finally clock out?”
Copyright © 2023 by Alice Blanchard
