A police detective investigates a particularly gruesome murder in one of the most haunted towns in America.
What are you talking about?" Jasmine whined, not wanting to play immature mind games just then. They had snuck into the room for a quickie, but she was distracted by the antique silver vanity tray sitting before her. The oval mirror was bracketed with ornate, polished scrolls and sculpted roses which matched the silver handles of the real tortoiseshell comb that popped free of its own case and the matching, heavy hand mirror. There was also a squat container on stout little legs like an especially fancy witch's cauldron gone a tad off-color in the deeper lines of the exquisite filigree. She reached for the lid, wondering what was inside. "What Indian chief? I don't see anything that looks like an Indian."
"You probably shouldn't be touching anything," Justin warned. She could see him grinning behind her, pulling off his T-shirt as he propped himself comfortably atop the knotted off-white afghan. The high, narrow bed was against the wall to her left, far enough she didn't think he could see her reflection in the tall mirror before her. "I mean, I don't think they pay you enough to cover any of this antique shit if you break it."
The lightweight lid revealed a ceramic tub set in the silver basin. It held a fluffy puff of fabric that lifted scented powder with it, reminding her of the aroma of her favorite aunt. Wrinkling her nose, Jasmine nestled the puff back in its cradle and topped it with the silver lid. "They just get it locally at junk shops, I'm sure," she retorted casually, uncertain if it was true or not. She shrugged and rubbed her elegantly long fingers together, feeling the almost oily slickness of a light sheen of escaped powder which also now dusted an asymmetrical ellipse beside the silver face powder box. When she sniffed her fingers, she made the same cute, wrinkled rabbit-nose face again, then sneezed in her annoying, slight and high-pitched way that everyone said sounded like the sneeze of Minnie Mouse.
"You've never been in here before. You're not sure about where any of this stuff comes from." On the bed, Justin absently ran a tanned hand along his own slender torso, allowing the thumb to catch gently at the waistband of his dusty beige denims. It didn't occur to him he was probably staining the antique spread with dirt. He was seventeen and didn't care much about things he assumed were easily washed in a Maytag. He wasn't so much worried about the heavy items atop the mirrored vanity tray as he was that his current girlfriend might drop one and crack the mirror beneath them. He'd accidentally broken his mother's ceramic mirrored vanity tray when they'd moved to the Cripple Creek area ten months before. It had come from Dollar General, and while very inexpensive, she'd still wept when she'd noticed the china roses badly chipped off one end. "Why does anyone need a mirror on a mirror in front of another mirror anyway?" He griped aloud.
Jasmine reached for the hand-held mirror and lifted it behind her head while she gazed into the lofty, wood-framed mirror that rose high over the tall dresser she stood before. "See? Now I can see the back of my head!" She glanced left to see the waiting teenager shrug.
"And the mirror that mirror was sitting on?"
"The tray?"
"Why so many frikkin' mirrors? What is with you women?"
The petite, almond-eyed beauty with lightly bronzed skin and cocoa-powder colored hair smiled broadly as she clutched the heavy hand mirror in both of her tiny hands. "We do it all for you."
Justin screwed up his face in thought. "Wasn't that like Burger King or McDonald's or something from a long time ago? Some kind of ad...?"
"What were you saying about an Indian chief?"
"Oh, yeah. The Indian Chief. This room is haunted, you know. Something about an Indian chief who was murdered on this spot like a hundred years ago...."
"Just a hundred? Here? In this room?"
"I dunno." He shifted on the bed as he began to work his unzipped pants down. "It's just a story. Something my uncle told me. There was supposed to be a painting of him on the wall and you could only see it in the mirror."
Intrigued, the eighteen year old gazed into the hand mirror at the walls behind her. "Which mirror?"
"The big one." The lean boy on the bed watched in irritation as the girl he was supposed to be screwing set one mirror down so she could look excitedly at another one. "I think you're just stallin'."
"You what?" She turned toward him, saw he only wore slightly oversized briefs that had once been pure white, displayed a tight-lipped smile as she slowly turned away again. She was stalling. She hadn't meant to let him think he'd have any chance with her in bed so soon after initially agreeing to go out with him once or twice. "Well, I don't think...." Jasmine Lintner trailed off, her forehead wrinkled. In the large mirror over the old wooden dresser she could see coppery patches that once had been silvered and the reflection of the small, high-ceilinged room behind her. To her right, a large window covered with layers of dusty, antique gossamer fabric in faded pastel shades. Beside that, a rustic wooden frame holding a crude pen and ink sketch of an old stone mill whose companion river had long run dry. Below that a half-circle table with spindly dark wood legs, the top draped with sunlight-stained lace that was almost brittle with age and a heavy glass oil lamp whose basin was tinted a dirty shade of dark urine. The bed had high, thin posts at each corner like they were originally designed to hold a gauzy canopy, but no visible headboard. Justin lay there with one forearm over his eyes like he'd decided if he wasn't going to get any sex, then maybe he could at least squeeze a quick nap in during her break. He wasn't even hard yet, from what she could see of his baggy underwear. Had he grabbed his older brother or father's BVDs from the clean laundry pile by mistake, or did he always like his cotton undies unattractively loose around his narrow hips and lanky frame? These were all things she expected to see if she turned around suddenly. She'd already noted them twelve minutes before when they'd first entered the newly unsealed and renovated room. But now there was something else there--something she'd failed to see at all before. Up above the bed and a bit off-center from it, near where a few lingering dust webs swayed and the old fabric that had covered the horsehair plaster beneath had rotted free in an appropriate rustic pattern for the old inn which had once housed cowboys and saloon hall girls, there was a poster.
Jasmine squinted medium-brown eyes as she leaned forward absently, resting her hands against the scarred wooden edge of the old dresser as she tried to make out what the antique sign said. It had been printed on stiff, yellowed paper with dark turquoise inks and featured a not too obvious image of a man with long dark hair in some sort of dark outfit walking toward her along what appeared to be a dirt trail over a forest-broken meadow. There were words printed around the art, advertising something or other, but not easily read by reflection and with the original ink gone all thick and blurry about the edges. "Is that the Indian Chief?" she asked as she turned around, and the next thing she uttered was a forced, wet, eardrum-shattering scream.
* * *
Albert Croom shook uncontrollably with the adrenaline that still flooded his system. Until half an hour ago, he had never been so terrified of anything in his life. Just past six feet in height and fifty years of age, he was a cartoonish figure with an almost pendulumish gut and shiny, balding head framed with the drifting wispy remains of what used to be a glorious mane of rich chestnut hair. He customarily wore cowboy boots he'd bought used with plain suits in varying earth tones and matching vests which made him look foolishly like an old-school professor who'd grabbed the wrong footwear in a hurry to exit the local whore house. The first police officer to respond to the scene sat sideways on a cane-back chair in the empty dining room, notepad open on his thigh but as blank as the look in his unfocused eyes. The only other occupants of the room were two young girls, pale and wide-eyed near panic, and Detective Crandall Schultz, who had just arrived and been pointed toward the room by a reserved and heavyset Mexican woman manning the check-in counter.
Schultz inhaled through his parted lips as he slowly entered the large room, noting everything without even trying, absorbing some of the answers he was already looking for directly from the somber atmosphere. While he didn't actually know Croom, he was aware that the man tended to fret endlessly over little things and was known for his comically explosive temper. The fact that the innkeeper was silent and apparently unaware of his presence as he approached told him the situation was dire indeed. Willa was the name of the taller of the two girls. Seventeen and a student at Victor High, she shared a few classes with his daughter, Ellie. He didn't know her last name. Talia was the other girl, a transplant from somewhere down in South America, with normally butter-gold skin tones and gorgeous chocolate eyes, she spoke accented English and sometimes helped her father at the convenience store he operated at the west end of Satin Street. Today she looked almost green as she hugged herself and bounced nervously, her blonde-streaked brown hair limp and oily looking as it drooped over her furrowed brow. Beyond them, in the kitchen, he could hear the clatter of preparation for the early-bird dinner crowd which would be composed mainly of local seniors. Bucky Burnwold was the only kid he knew in Croom's crew, but it sounded like he wasn't alone back there.
"Al Croom?" he asked pleasantly, his voice surprisingly soft and high for his size. Schultz was a stocky five nine, mostly muscle slowly giving way to gravity and time, with a permanently shadowed lower face which fractured into broad grins both when he was pleased and when he was about to introduce his huge knotty fists to something warm and fleshy. Croom didn't respond. Not in any expected way. The trembling man swiped absently at his right ear as if something had lightly caressed the cartilage, then continued to stare vaguely in the direction of the seated cop.
"I threw up," Schultz thought he heard the uniformed guy croak. As the face turned toward him, it took a moment for him to place the features of Billy Angelwiet, a former volunteer fireman turned cop twelve years before. The hazel-green eyes were red-rimmed and wet-looking as they found him, and Billy held himself tightly as he shook his head minutely from side to side.
The detective cast his own gaze aside thoughtfully. He knew there was a mutilated corpse involved. The body of a local boy, friend of one of Croom's newest girls. He knew the girl was not one of the two in the room at the moment because an ambulance had been summoned to pick her up. Now he knew that the crime scene would prove to be particularly gruesome, and he fumbled automatically in his deep pants pockets for his roll of Rolaids and popped three. "Accident or murder?"
The uniform bent at the waist like he was suffering severe gastric discomfort and gazed pleadingly at Schultz. "I don't know...what the fuck it is...." His voice trailed off weakly, almost as if he was going to give in to tears.
"Clean yourself up, Angelwiet," Schultz grumbled, embarrassed. "Go dunk your head in a sink and come back with a story."
The officer stood, his face twisting with outrage. "Why don't you go figure it out yourself?" With that, he stalked from the room, and no one had any idea if he had any intention of returning again or not.
Albert grimaced and cleared his throat. "This way," he rasped, his voice ragged and sibilant, as he fumbled in his pockets for keys. Schultz stepped forward and picked up the set laying on the nearest table and handed them to the devastated man who thanked him before shuffling off toward the door at the rear left of the room. "She...she just started working for me t-t-two weeks ago. Jasmine Lintner. The girl. With my cleaning team. With the other girls."
Schultz sighed quietly as he trailed the other man. "She's the one they carted off."
Bleary eyes turned toward him and then Croom picked up his shuffling pace again. "We only just discovered the room about a year ago. It had been walled up, and we just thought it was storage. Opposite the elevator shaft, and small, so we never gave it much consideration. Then we started with the restorations and my wife had them peel back the wallpaper and clean free the door. When they busted in, it was still furnished, but a mess. At the local paper we found old clippings about a murder that had happened there back in eighteen forty-two and figured-"
"Cripple Creek is known for its ghost stories, so why not open up and feature a sealed crime scene as a new theme room?"
Croom stiffened a little, but nodded as he finally approached the old elevator. "You don't mind, do ya?"
Actually, Schultz despised the older cage-style elevators that still functioned in town, the way they all creaked and halted and were so less efficient than the stairs. He shrugged, feigning indifference.
"So's we cleaned it up and mentioned it on our web-site with a little bit of history from the old news clipping-"
"What happened back then?" The detective grimaced as the old cage squealed to a halt and Croom fumbled with the wrought-iron latch.
"Just said a man was found murdered, s'all." The innkeeper stepped down into the misaligned box and gestured for Schultz to be careful how he proceeded. "It don't always line up right with the floor."
Lots of people were murdered for all sorts of reasons back in the days when Cripple Creek had been known as a rich source of gold, but Schultz wasn't aware of anybody sealing up a room because of it. "Wanted man? Gambling debt? Horse thief? Bank robber? Cattle rustler?"
Croom shrugged helplessly. "It didn't hardly say. Place was called The Glitter O' Her Eye back then and had a Irish family running it. Three brothers named Hennessey, one pimped out girls to the gold minin' hopefuls, one bartended, and the third played a right mean pye-anna."
"Now you're embellishing." Schultz mentioned this good-naturedly, noting that as he chattered Albert seemed much calmer.
The flustered man sighed, then coughed slightly. The cage ground to a shaky halt, and he manually parted the doors, grimly smiling as he noted the car had risen perfectly level with the floor this time. Sunlight filtered through the quiet hallway, pregnant with glittering dust motes, and the stale scent of old, but still used buildings assaulted them. Croom gestured toward the hallway with his head down, looking for all the world like he wouldn't be escorting Crandall toward the appropriate door. The detective set his jaw and stepped onto thin golden-brown carpeting, gazing to his far right where the room should be, at the opposite end of the hallway. The building had never been grandiose even by cowboy standards, so the rooms were quite small, and thus the hallway shorter than expected. A few brisk strides and he was in front of an unusually narrow door with a recently bought set of brass numbers nailed up to the left of it claiming it room 39. He could smell blood, like freshly butchered meat, and the strength of the aroma made his eyes open wider. Schultz took a quick look at the surrounding area, trying to detect anything out of the ordinary, anything that might be of interest--specifically a spot or smear of blood--but there was nothing that really seemed peculiar. It struck him odd that the door was securely shut. After all the people who had undoubtedly already strolled through the potential crime scene, it would have made more sense to just leave it open and post employees or backup police to keep gawkers out.
He swallowed, trying to brace himself for what he was about to see, chiding himself, thinking his imagination was undoubtedly making it much worse than it actually could be. He'd seen horrible things before. A beheaded five year old girl lying partially atop her blood-soaked teddy bear after a bad traffic accident. A man whose head had been mostly punched free from his neck in a nasty industrial accident. A fellow cop who'd been hit by a speeding semi while writing a traffic ticket, his body actually resembling a deflated doll. A kid who'd been creamed on his motorcycle, turned into hamburger by an oncoming produce truck. He debated using a handkerchief to grip the knob when he suddenly detected the odor of bowel. Had the kid been disemboweled? All he'd been told by the dispatcher was that some teenaged kid had been discovered all chopped up on a bed. He could smell something sour beneath it all and remembered that Angelwiet had said he'd thrown up.
There was a small vial of sweet orange oil in his breast pocket and he withdrew it to hold under his nose. Whatever he saw, no matter how horrendous, was not going to nauseate him by stench. The girl, he recalled, had been taken away by ambulance, although she had not been physically hurt. Better get it over with rather than try and puzzle it all from out here, he thought, and gripped the brass knob surely, gave it a turn, and pushed the door in.
* * *
"This is a joke," announced Denny Vodoureaux, unzipping the large, dark plastic body bag that had been laid out for him.
"No," said Schultz, knowing he really ought to look away, but compelled to observe the proceedings regardless.
"What is?" queried Denny's assistant, Zara Quintilla, as she wheeled a stainless steel cart holding assorted stainless steel implements up beside the big coroner. When she caught a glimpse of the contents, she uttered something between a squeak and a snort just before her lips curled back in revulsion. "What the hell...?"
"That's what we pay you the big bucks for," stated Schultz softly, waving his tiny glass vial of pale gold liquid beneath his nostrils to help dilute the overpowering aromas of meat and digestive residue quickly filling the room.
Zara held a gloved hand beneath her nose, apparently preferring the stink of powdered latex. She stepped back from the body and reached in her pocket for an elastic to bind back her deep auburn hair with. "Gross."
Vodoureaux was still peering down at the sticky remains like he was trying to decide which item to sample first off the buffet. He shook his head of thick, wavy, prematurely silvered hair and decided, "Nuh-uh. This isn't a corpse...it's some kind of experiment in modern psychotic art."
Schultz had always appreciated the younger man's dark, intelligent humor. He shuffled forward a few inches, trying to tell himself it was all right, it was just dead meat, just another murder victim in this small, historically volatile town. Swallowing, he mentioned, "It kind of looks like he exploded."
Vodoureaux unzipped the bag completely and grabbed a scalpel to shred as much as he could away from the body without having to lift and try to remove it first. "What's this beneath...ah--him?"
"The boys who bagged 'im had to cut away the part of the bedspread he was lying on and use it like a stretcher to lay him in the bag so he wouldn't fall apart like stew meat."
The coroner nodded. "Stew meat. Nothing here indicates an explosion. An implosion."
The brain, which had been resting more or less atop the face, slid a little to one side and the guts slowly unspooled toward the stainless steel surface below.
"He...blew up backward?"
Vodoureaux gave Schultz a smoldering look. "Nothing here indicates an implosion, either." As Zara continued to stare from over his shoulder, Denny began to prod the organs. "Start the recording." She lifted a remote which activated a series of small cameras set strategically within the room which would record the autopsy. "The organs...all of them...are outside the body. Outermost. Intact. Completely." Schultz leaned forward but still remained several feet away. The larger man wrapped his huge hand around the exposed brain and began to lift it. "The brain is intact, still pretty wet, with the cerebral cortex unblemished. Ah--hand me the scissors. The small set." He began to cut something the brain had been partially setting upon in an attempt to free the mass. "I'm cutting the optic nerves...hmm...the eyeballs are turned inward, looking down. Now I'm...wow...see this red stringy jelly-like stuff?"
Schultz's salivary glands were working overtime; a sure sign he might soon be vomiting. He nodded, thinking Vodoureaux might only be talking aloud for benefit of the recording.
"This is actually the...wow. This is extremely...the precision is far beyond anything in modern medical technology!"
"Is that the spinal cord?" managed Zara, looking fascinated, yet still horribly repelled by the mess before her. Fluids had begun to leak thickly from the scraps of plastic and bedspread, flowing in dark rivulets toward the drain at the foot of the table.
"Yes. Yes. I mean..." the man's thick fingers drew away from the clump of tissue slowly, displaying the amazingly fine and fragile lengths of nerve and blood vessel like a woman's vivid red hair. "There are no bone fragments," he marveled. "Look at how it just parts at the ends, too soft to stay intact across my glove."
"Less play, more study," mumbled Schultz, fumbling for the rest of his Rolaids. He paused in mid-grope, astonished when he saw Vodoureaux sniff the pulpy smear left across his gloved hand. "What does that tell ya?"
Denny shook his head slightly, his pale grey-blue eyes wide, but never once focusing on anyone living. "It smells so fresh. No chemicals, no metal...."
"I know I haven't attended many Bring A Cop To Work days here, but I don't think I've seen an autopsy go this weird before."
Now the coroner smiled, still gazing at his prize. "And I've never seen a human body in this condition before." He used his shiny scissors to reverently sever the brain from the spinal cord tissue. "Here, I think, is where the connective tissue to the ears ripped. Weird...considering how beautifully excised most of the organs appear."
"Yeah," muttered Schultz, belching minty chalkiness, "that's the weird bit here."
Vodoureaux ignored him. "And this is some of the soft flesh of the nasal cavities...it's all lying on a thin layer of muscle and...subcutaneous fat...and...no way."
"What?" asked Quintilla and Schultz simultaneously.
Handing her the brain, Vodoureaux asked her to clean it up and weigh it, then chose a fresh scalpel he attacked the top of the head with. Schultz was morbidly fascinated by the way he pressed it so easily into the flesh and began to unzip it. His gorge rose, and he swallowed, burped acid, tapped his breastbone with a fist. "Hair."
Asked Zara, "Hair? What hair?"
"Here...on his head. Underneath the skin."
"Skin?" Crandall repeated, inching closer still. "This thing has skin left on it?"
"It...it's all right here...underneath the...no way. This isn't possible." He straightened like he'd been poked in the ass with a stick pin. Jaw clenched, he finally turned his hawkish gaze straight on the detective and growled, "I don't appreciate my time being wasted by pranks, Detective."
Schultz took a final wide step up to the autopsy table and got a grand look at the remains in close-up. "Prank? What prank?"
No longer as cautious, the coroner pulled tufts of dark blond hair through the incision he had made and stared accusingly at Crandall.
The smaller man shrugged. "What?"
"What?" What?!" Now Zara abandoned the scale for a better look at the meat on display.
"This, obviously, is some kind of an elaborate...and very sick joke being played on me by...." He didn't come out and pin blame on the police detective who stared back at him blankly. "Someone must know an excellent taxidermist-"
"The kid was taxidermied?"
Now Denny looked confused as well. "Or perhaps the killer is a skilled taxidermist...." The baffled looks from the other two people in the small room made him doubt himself. Before going any further, he picked up the scalpel again and began to slice farther downward, through the soft lump of spongy-looking pink that dipped where the nose should have been, deep through the shiny pocked tissue that looked like toothless gums, severing the blob of meat that once served as a tongue and the rippled flesh of the purplish esophagus. Outraged, though more from total disbelief than anger, he carelessly hacked at flesh and continued his initial slit downward until he could grip the edges and pull them up and outward, revealing what looked exactly like a very lifelike human mask turned inside out. The skin was mostly spotless, with a few damp areas where bodily fluid had managed to slip between taught skin and the soft ivory bone it had lain upon. Hair escaped from the top of the scalp and the pale violet lips pulled apart, split at the center. Schultz was looking down at a human being turned inside-out and stretched back in place over his own impossibly clean and dry skeleton. The pulpy nose pulled up and out of the cavity it had been stuffed down into. A repugnant stink like freshly drilled teeth and stale spit wafted up out of the hollow skull, and the woozy detective wondered if it was possible to throw up while unconscious.
* * *
The big coroner smiled grimly and nodded in response to Detective Schultz's request. "It's just that this has never happened to me before. I'd rather it not get around."
As though the subject had never been brought up, Vodoureaux mentioned, "I've called in Chandler to verify everything I've learned thus far."
Schultz was reclining on a vinyl couch with a paper cup of water in one hand. "Which is...?"
The larger man cracked his knuckles, still looking anywhere but directly at the person he was addressing. Schultz found it one of his oddest habits. "This boy...this teenaged boy...was somehow turned inside-out and stretched back over his own skeleton with what I can only describe as...advanced surgical precision."
"Advanced...like European surgery or something?"
Vodoureaux frowned. "No, no. More like...something so advanced I've never heard of it yet."
"You are only a coroner," the detective pointed out.
"But I'm almost a forensic pathologist. Some coroners are just local yokels in small rural areas refrigerating bodies after fixing toe tags on 'em, but I'm working on several degrees."
"So, why call in Chandler?"
"He's the big cheese with the state medical examiners. He's seen everything--or at least heard about it somewhere. This is far beyond my expertise, I'm afraid." He sighed heavily as though his lack of knowledge was someone's else's blame. "I really can't get over the state of the skeleton, though. It's as cleaned and dried as if prepared for a lab specimen to be sold to some medical school."
The detective sat up and set his unsipped water on the tile floor beside the cheap couch. "I don't get you. It's not the kid's skeleton beneath the skin?"
"As far as I can tell, it probably is...except none of this makes any sense. The entire skeleton is perfectly cleaned externally, but the marrow inside the bones is still pretty fresh. I've taken samples of both the...the carcass and the marrow to compare the DNA. There are no sutures on the hide anywhere. No pins or adhesive holding the flesh together intact over the bones. And the bones are expertly scraped; every fiber of muscle and fleck of tendon and cartilage precisely removed like the skeleton came out of a maceration tank."
"So, somebody cleaned the skeleton?"
"No. The marrow would have been destroyed. There were only a few smears of bodily fluids present on the bones where they'd leaked a little through natural orifices."
"Somebody went to an awful lot of trouble," Schultz muttered, thinking the timing was off. The corpse must have taken hours if not days to prepare in such a manner. "Could you determine time of death?"
"By the state of the flesh, just five or six hours ago."
"But how long would it take to...to do this to a kid?"
Vodoureaux grinned, but his jaw was clenched tightly. "I really wish I knew. I'd like DNA samples from at least one of his immediate family members."
"Just to identify the body?"
"Yup. I tried to draw one hand free of the flesh, then turn it inside out so we could print the finger pads. The bones aren't attached by anything anymore, so we had to shake them free like dice. The most amazing thing, I think, is the remarkable condition the flesh is in. I mean, very little blood or fluids escaped the organs because they are pristine. Once I started peeling back the skin, I couldn't see any bruising or other damage at all aside from some natural discoloration--and even that's been retarded by how fresh the body is."
Schultz swallowed and nodded, his large hands clenched together in his lap. I'll need you to do a little research on this. Try and turn up any similar cases in the world from any given time."
"Zara's on the Internet doing that now." Vodoureaux was sitting backward in a metal folding chair, and he finally glanced Schultz's way. "Anyone told the parents, yet?"
"I doubt it. That's one of the worst parts of stuff like this. Some of them act like they didn't hear you and you gotta repeat yourself. Some look at you like they watched you commit the murder yourself just then in front of them. A few get angry. Really weird and really angry. I'll try and pass it off on Angelwiet. He was first on the scene. Be good practice for his future."
Denny grunted neutrally. "Do me a favor, Crandall."
"What's that?"
"You run into another one of these...I wanna be there on the scene. I want to see the whole set-up. Maybe I can pick out something you guys missed."
Schultz ran a sweaty palm across the top of his pale blond-red hair and leaned back uncomfortably for a better look at the silver-haired man. "Another one?"
* * *
The hotel staff was clueless. No one had seen anything suspicious. No shady characters were staying in any of the rooms. No new employees within the last year aside from Jasmine, the possible witness. No strange vehicles had been parked in the vicinity. No odd phone calls had been made to or from the hotel. Bucky Burnwold, the kitchen rat, had seen Jasmine sneak the other boy in through the delivery entrance. She'd been warned not to entertain personal visitors while on the clock, but she was young and playful and this was her first job so far as anybody knew. Bucky had noticed because he'd been considering his own chances with the attractive new teenager and been disappointed to find she was already toying with somebody else. He'd suspected they might've been sneaking off to a room for sex, but just chalked it up to his own bad luck and not bothered to inform anyone in charge.
The room had been photographed and dusted for prints and combed for miniscule evidence. Everything was currently being developed, catalogued and analyzed. Justin Brunshweiger's parents had not been notified that the boy was dead, but had been told there had been an "incident" at the hotel possibly involving the boy and DNA swabs were required to place him at the scene. Obviously, this had resulted in a flurry of questions and speculation Schultz was glad to escape by returning to the scene of the crime.
A uniformed officer stood guard outside the room while another accompanied the detective, making sure he didn't inadvertently foul the scene more than the dozen or so official types who had already tromped through it and touched everything.
Surprisingly little blood had soaked through the now destroyed bedspread to the bedclothes below. "How do you turn a kid inside out cleanly?"
The officer, whose brass name pin read Sarcopski, shrugged. "How do you turn a kid inside out at all?"
"The hospital said the girl is cataleptic right now. No one can get a thing out of her."
"I'd be pretty shook-up, too."
"Who asked ya?"
Sarcopski stared wide-eyed back at Schultz. "Are you rhetorizing?"
"Nah. You can answer me if you have any input at all. I need to see this thing from as many angles as possible. I want to question the girl. I can't start in on the family until they know for fact the kid is dead."
"Small room," noted the officer.
"It was sealed up until recently. Walled up for like a hundred years or so. Allegedly, there'd been a murder here."
"Similar?"
"Not enough info. News clipping just said some guy'd been found dead. Then the owners at the time sealed the place up."
Sarcopski inhaled deeply and pursed his thin lips. "Why seal it up for a run of the mill gold rush murder? Lots of folk got murdered then for various reasons. Mostly greed. You'd seal a room after a murder only if there was something particularly disturbing about it, dontcha think?"
"Or something beyond what the news back then was prepared to research or print." Schultz disturbed the already disturbed pillow, looked under the already looked under bed, scanned the ceiling directly overhead. "Room up there?"
"Attic, I should think."
"Give me your baton."
Sarcopski handed over his PR-24 nightstick.
Schultz stretched so he could poke at the high ceiling, looking for a possible trap door. He sighed, feeling stupid. "Just killing time until the girl comes through."
"If she doesn't?"
"Oh, she will. There are ways of getting to her. Injectibles, hypnotism...something oughtta work."
The cop frowned. "Do you think she actually saw somebody come in here and cut up the kid?"
"Unless they were already in here. Hiding."
"Nobody's booked the room, yet. Somebody coulda had to wait an awful long time."
"I know. Doesn't hurt to voice every option."
The cop shrugged. "The girl didn't do it?"
"You didn't see the kid. Not likely. Very bizarre."
"Didn't do it to himself somehow?"
"Impossible. Trust me. This is not suicide. Not something a high-school kid could do."
"Ah, so it's definitely the work of an adult."
Schultz turned toward Sarcopski with his lids half lowered. "It could be the work of cattle eviscerating aliens for all we know."
Sarcopski chuckled uneasily. After a long silence in which he trailed the detective to the window to inspect it and the well-inspected drapes, he asked meekly, "Not really...?"
Schultz shrugged and cruelly smiled. "Shit. Look at this dust."
"They took samples in case it's really a powder or fibers of some sort."
"Seventy percent of household dust is human skin."
The police officer laughed.
"I'm not kidding. In this case, however, I'm gonna guess they'll find dry-rotting fibers from all the antique fabric in here, some plaster dust, dead bugs, and not much else."
"Oh, that's disgusting."
"Human skin," Schultz repeated, but then he recalled vividly the sight of the boy's reversed face being peeled back from the surface of the cleaned skull and tried to think of his daughter for a moment to help clear the imagery from his mind. Did Ellie know Justin? He hated using something so gruesome as an excuse to see her, but it had been awhile since their last visit together, and he couldn't imagine her not wanting to assist him if she could. Now he stood before the high, narrow dresser. The objects atop it had yielded the most prints and been brought back to the station as evidence. He didn't bother opening and closing the drawers. They would have been emptied and examined already, too. Blankly, he gazed directly into the tall mirror which reflected him from mid-chest up. "Why would you put such a high mirror so high up?"
"People were a lot taller back then?"
"It's probably mounted wrong," the detective hypothesized, cupping his dimpled chin between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. "I've seen really old furniture like this, and they used to have the mirror tilted down a little toward you so you could see your whole reflection if you stood back a foot or two."
Sarcopski was not into antiques, so he said nothing. "No murder weapon found?"
"Oh, yeah, they found a Ronco Teen Inverter by the door." Schultz smirked, playing smartass.
"Okay."
"Why would you murder the boy and not the girl?"
"Was she raped?"
"There's no evidence anyone touched her--not even the boy."
"He was on the bed, but she wasn't?"
"Guy who owns the place said she was backed up against the door, down on the floor, screaming and crying and wheezing like she'd just run the Boston Marathon. They had to shove her along the floor on her ass to push the door in and get to her."
Sarcopski shook his head. "Wasn't the door locked?"
"They'd locked it, but all the cleaning girls and Croom have keys."
"Anyone else have keys? Copies of keys?"
"That's an idea," Schultz said. "We can check the local places that make copies of keys."
"Night Owl Locksmith, Wal-Mart, Kenneth Jones' Hardware, and Lowe's would be closest."
Schultz stamped his feet as he strolled around the confined space. "Floor seems solid. What's below us?"
"Dining room."
"No trapdoors, then." He thumped his fists along the walls, alerting the officer on guard who peered aridly within the room. "Looking for false panels."
The guard made a face and asked, "Have you ever actually seen a real false panel in your life outside of TV or the movies?"
"My aunt had a mansion," Schultz informed him as he sought pressure points, dusting his fingertips and palms with a light coating of old plaster. "There was a secret stairway for the slaves to use to get from their quarters on the third floor to the kitchen without disturbing anyone else in the house or on the main staircase."
"How did you find it?" Asked Sarcopski.
"Well, actually, the door in the kitchen was in plain sight, but it opened up beneath the main stairs through what looked like a small closet."
"Your aunt kept slaves?"
"Yeah, she's a hundred and ninety-eight years old."
"Ass," grunted the cop who'd stepped in just to check on them.
Schultz appreciated the chutzpah required to make such a comment aloud in the presence of a superior. "Your name?"
Faltering, the man straightened and mumbled, "Faldourette."
"Back at your position, Faldourette."
"Sir," he grunted, stepping back across the threshold.
Schultz sighed and checked his watch. "Maybe I can get the girl after dinner. Help me search the adjoining spaces, Sarcopski."
"Okay," said the younger man, dutifully trailing the senior officer from the room.
New chapters to be posted soon! Keep watching for Indian Chief Part Two to find out who killed high school student Justin Brunshweiger, why, and most intriguingly--how they did it! Will the body count rise as the story continues, or will it all prove just a fluke? Stay tuned for further developments in E.D. Detetcheverrie's latest foray into strange horror.
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