A Bat in the Belfry (6 page)

Well, with the exception of WERU in Blue Hill, of course, but that signal didn’t get all the way up here. Meanwhile, Jenny was a good woman and an excellent dispatcher, but she was related to practically everyone in the county.

Including this victim. “We’ll deal with that later. Right now I want you to call the state boys, the M.E., and all my guys.”

His Eastport officers, he meant. “Get them all here, please, as fast as they can, except Toby Farrell.”

Stolid and unimaginative, Toby was as big as a bull moose and just as unstoppable when he needed to be. And there was only one way off the island by car.

“Tell Toby I want him to get out to the causeway in his squad car and just sit there, stop anyone trying to cross and get a good, solid ID and a story out of them unless they’re in the middle of having a heart attack or a baby. Make sure he gets that, okay?”

“Yes, Bob, I understand.”

At this hour of the night, there was hardly anyone driving around, anyway. He’d worry about complaints later.

“Call the Coast Guard,” he went on. “No vessels leaving the harbor or the boat basin, not even a rowboat. And I want Bobby Roth to get out to the airport.”

Bobby was the city council member who headed up the airport committee. “Nothing takes off. Not until I say so. Oh, and get whoever’s on call for Customs and Immigration on the phone. Say I might need enforcement help if anyone at the port gets sniffy.”

Freighters came in and out of the harbor all the time, from all over the world. For all Bob knew, one might be getting ready to cast off right this minute.

With, for all he knew as well, his perp aboard and thinking himself safe. Or the killer could be some local person, taking a shower at home by now, burning up bloody clothes in a woodstove, with no one to see or know.

In short, it could be anyone. “Bob? That it?” Jenny asked.

He looked down at the dead girl, and the blood. Whoever had done this most likely believed he had gotten away with it. So
he
thought. “Yeah,” Bob said. “For now.”

He snapped the phone shut. Above, the trapdoor’s opening gaped blackly. Bob didn’t know why the bell had stopped ringing, but he had a bad idea about it, and before he could go back down all those stairs again, he would have to check it out.

The very idea of sticking his head into the darkness up there made his gut clench sourly. If she knew what he was about to do, his wife, Clarissa, would be up one side of him and down the other.

But she didn’t know. And even if she did … Sighing, he put a foot on the ladder’s first rung, hauled his weight—which was getting to be considerable lately, but that was another story—up to the second rung, and then quietly to the third.

Softly, softly
 … It was a line from one of the Kipling stories he’d been reading to his little girl, on the nights when he got home before she was asleep. And it seemed like a good idea now, too, not letting whoever else might still be up there know he was coming.

A good idea, just not very doable. The ladder creaked, and the things on his duty belt—Mace, whistle, handcuffs, baton, weapon holster (he still had the gun in one hand, too, which made climbing the ladder even harder)—it all clanked, rattled, and clunked as he made his way laboriously up the wooden rungs.

Nothing he could do about it, though, or about the wheezing of his own breath, either, like tiny high-pitched whistles inside his chest. Partly they were due to his extra poundage, but most of the internal sound effects were because he, too, had asthma.

Just like his daughter. He’d just never paid any attention to it before, figuring that everybody had some damn fool problem or another, and doctoring for it was a waste of time and money.

Lately he felt differently, wishing that over the years he’d stayed in better shape, that he was a better physical specimen as a husband and father, and—let’s face it—as a cop, one who once in a while was required to climb a ladder, find out whether or not a girl-murdering scumbag was hiding up there in the dark.

Hell, there might even be
another
body lying up there, or—

Just as he was about to stick his head through the hole, the first Eastport squad car pulled up outside. Bob recognized the sound of the old Crown Vic’s engine, the little
thweep-thweep
squeal of the fan belt keeping time with the knocking from either a valve or a rod.

Then came the solid thud of the Vic’s door slamming, and a voice from the church vestibule. “Bob? You inside?”

“Yeah. Up here. Look around outside, Paulie, stop anyone you see looks iffy. And watch where you step and so on.”

“Got it” came the reply, then the sound of Paulie Waters’s boots heading out again. Waters was a young guy, in his twenties with not much cop experience, but a quick study and he read a lot. He’d know how to proceed. Bob aimed the flashlight up, then followed its beam into the huge, silent darkness of the bell chamber.

Directly above him hung the bell, a bronze behemoth with a silver ring in its rim, pitch dark inside where no moonlight penetrated. Railed catwalks went all the way around the inside of the wood-framed belfry, bolted to the walls. Above the catwalk, tall, narrow arched windows slatted over by shutters loomed on all four sides; the openings between the slats let the sound out.

Over hill and dale
, Bob thought irrelevantly, the phrase from another of the children’s books he read. But the image of his little girl’s bedroom didn’t belong here; he shoved it away, knowing someone else’s child lay below him, bloodied and dead.

He knew whose child, too. Bob wasn’t sure which of his duties he hated most tonight, finding her or telling her father about it. Not that it mattered; he’d done one, and he would have to do the other.
Mine is not to reason why
 … Christ, though, Hank Hansen was going to be a crazy man when he found out.

Pouring between the slats of the big shutters piercing the walls, the moonlight formed a striped pattern on the old floor. Bob hauled himself the rest of the way through the opening into the belfry, his flashlight’s beam picking out the long-forgotten items lying around: a coil of ancient rope, a pipe wrench lying in a mess of rust flakes.

On the floor near the rope spread another pool of blood, and then a smear mark.
Because he dragged her. The son of a bitch cut her and then he—

“Bob?” It was Waters, calling from below. “One of the girls at the Boarding Hostel saw someone, maybe. And I found something.”

Nobody up here
. Bob aimed the flashlight around once more to make sure. “Waters,” he shouted down, “don’t—”

“Yeah, first I picked it up and handled it,” Waters cut in before Bob could finish, “got my prints all over it and messed up anyone else’s, and then for good measure I spit on it.”

In addition to being smart, Waters was a smart-ass. “No, I marked it and left it,” he added in conciliatory tones. “You all right up there?”

Bob climbed down the ladder. At the foot of it, a local girl named Karen Hansen lay dead. From the color of her face, white as a page from one of Bob’s own little girl’s storybooks, almost all of the blood had been drained out of her.

“Yeah, I’m just ducky,” Bob managed. “You got the boarding home woman squared away?”

He didn’t want her talking to anyone before he got to her. When people in Eastport started gabbing, what started out as an unusually dressed tourist snapping vacation snapshots at one end of the island would be a squad of terrorists taking surveillance photos in preparation for an imminent invasion by the time the story got to the other end.

He descended the stairs, careful as before not to step in any of the blood pools or touch the smeared walls. Outside in the Vic, Tiffany Whitmore sat in the front passenger seat smoking a cigarette and poking at her cell phone.

Tiffany wore a blue scrub suit, white sneakers, and a zipped navy hoodie. Her peroxide-orange hair was skinned back in a ponytail held by a fabric scrunchy. She was a nice woman and a hard worker, and those cigarettes were the worst of her habits, but she had a big mouth and on top of that the car was going to smell like an ashtray.

At least she had the door open. “Hey!” Bob yelled. “Put the phone away, Tiff, would you? And get out of the car if you gotta smoke.”

She scowled, but grudgingly did as he asked. On top of not wanting her to tell anyone else her story before she told it to him, he didn’t need half the town here standing around gawking at everything, which he would have if Tiffany got yapping.

Would anyway before long, he realized glumly, turning to Waters. “What do you think you found?” he asked, imagining a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt.

Waters aimed his flashlight into the evergreen shrubbery by the church steps. Crammed up between the dark, gnarly twists of the box-hedge roots lay a wad of tissue, a faded Hershey bar wrapper, a plastic bag from the IGA, and—

“Huh,” said Bob. The thing Waters had spotted had a taped wooden handle, an index finger groove for improved grip, a short row of rip teeth near the guard that divided the blade from the handle. And a trailing swage point, wickedly tipped.

All of which made it a professional-grade hunting knife, its blade stained thickly with …

Blood. Lab tests would say for sure, of course, but to Bob’s eye there was no question about it. And he knew who owned this large, very distinctive-looking knife, too, because he’d seen it before.

Oh, hell
, he thought as an approaching Maine State Police cruiser’s distinctive high-low siren howled eerily.

“Don’t touch it. Let the state guys deal with it,” Bob told Waters, then left the young officer standing over the weapon while he went to talk with Tiffany Whitmore, before the presence of her cell phone became just too much of a temptation for her.

“S
o are you coming, Dweeby, or are you gonna sit there like a scared little kid?”

Flicking away his cigarette, Bogie Kopmeir hopped onto the bike he had just stolen out of a garage on Evans Lane and pedaled it in a circle, his oddly babyish face gleaming greasily under the streetlamp.

“Put it back, Bogie.” David Thompson sat hunched on the front steps of the house that the garage belonged to, wishing he’d stayed home. Across town, church bells were ringing and the sound of police sirens rose eerily in the thickening fog.

David wished he was in bed under the covers, unable to hear them. He hated these late-night outings with Bogie, hated being jolted awake by stones tossed against his bedroom window, hated the way his heart thumped anxiously from the time he slipped out until the moment, always way too much later, when he sneaked back in again.

And he hated being called Dweeb. In fact, there wasn’t much about hanging out with Bogie—crude, cunning in an animal way, and possessed of a temper that could explode into spitting rage for no reason at all—that David didn’t hate. But what choice did he have?

It was that or get the crap beaten out of him every morning at school, where David was a sophomore on the honors track and Bogie, despite being sixteen and a year older than David, was still a freshman. Slight, bookish boys like David were fresh meat for the guys who played sports and went deer hunting, many with their own guns. They regarded David as merely another variety of prey animal.

Hanging with Bogie—and by extension, with a crew of butt-ugly, thuggish mutts just like him, all led by the repulsive but weirdly charismatic Harvey Spratt—kept David safe.

“Hey,
Dweeb
!” Bogie yelled, circling on the bike, heedless of the lights coming on in the dark houses all around. “Dweeb, hop on!” Bogie reached back and patted the rack behind the bike’s seat demandingly while at the same time he attempted to circle around again under the streetlamp.

Bogie was especially wired tonight for some reason, but at least he wore clean clothes for once. Thinking this, David got to his feet just as a man in pajamas came angrily out of one of the houses. Hopping with fury under his porch light, he yelled what men like that always did: “Hey, you kids!”

Bogie laughed wildly.
“Hey, you kids!”
he cackled.
“Yah!”
But then the bike’s tire hit a pothole and he swerved out of control, careening into a barberry thicket that marked the lot line between two yards.

Jesus
. Bounding off the porch, David shot into the alley behind the house where Bogie had crashed. The place they’d stolen the bike from—Bogie picking open the garage door lock with a tool that resembled a dentist’s instrument, as easily as if he’d held a key—was vacant, the summer people who tenanted it gone home for the season.

But all the other nearby houses belonged to locals, year-round Eastport residents. Many of them were probably calling the police right this minute. “Bogie!” David whispered urgently, crouching to peer into the thorny thicket.

No answer, and for a moment David felt relieved. Around him the only sound was the faint rustling of dried vegetation in the summer people’s perennial gardens, the pale globes of hydrangea blooms like ghostly heads hanging against a picket fence. But then a stream of curses sputtered out of the gloom and Bogie appeared, the porkpie hat he always wore jammed down crookedly and his lip oozing blood.

“Come on,” he snarled, grabbing David by his jacket collar. Out in the street now, the householders were gathering purposefully; this wasn’t Bogie Kopmeir’s first visit to the neighborhood, apparently.

A door slammed; a car started. A cell phone jangled out a mechanized tune, and then—horror of horrors—a dog barked.

A
big
dog. “Move it, Dweeb! You wanna get us caught?”

Bogie was short, but he was built like a fireplug, and he was strong. Fast, too; gasping, David let himself be half dragged and half shoved up the alley behind the houses until the stabbing of flashlight beams and the voices of angry men had faded.

Finally they reached the cemetery, scuttling in among the mossy old gravestones where the silence was complete. David fell exhausted against one of them, not even caring that only a few feet below, human bones moldered. If he’d had his way, he’d have been down there with them, he told himself miserably.