Sand City Murders (52 page)

“C’mon Joey, cheer up…”

Ironically enough, Saint Alban’s was a place that never got crowded, even at the height of the season, so I guess it was still a refuge of sorts. That didn’t make it any less creepy though. And despite Fynn’s plea, I thought this was a stupid idea and held out absolutely no hope of finding anything important. I needed some help, some extra courage to actually make this trek. Joey, sullen of late or not, was the only person I could trust. Mostly because he stood less than six feet tall. I suppose he could be Mortimer’s accomplice, but I had strong doubts about that. I met him on the bike path about half an hour later.

He was a lot more practical than me when it came to certain things: “Meet my two little friends…” Joey said and pulled out a crowbar and a big pair of bolt cutters from his knapsack. Also got two good flashlights for us.”

“Why? No way we’re staying till it’s dark,” I said.

It was a hot afternoon, still in the eighties, and around four o’clock. Our best approach was by way of Bayview Beach. We ditched the bikes and made our way north along the sea wall like it was a path, hopping over the broken, crumbling sections. When we passed the scuttled Liberty ships, Joey gave them no recognition. I briefly looked for our black Jolly Roger stencil painted there, but there was none. I still remembered his verse from the Treasure Hunt.
Shiver me timbers and blow me down. Avast and ahoy, head south to town. Land Ho is the place you want to be. And from there you must count to three.

Joey took a quick look for police cruisers when we came to the barrier plastered with no trespassing signs. We scrambled underneath a gap in the chain link fence and headed up a steep dune path that led up to the old hospital.

It must have been an upscale place in its day. There was a huge back garden, a terraced lawn, and with a fantastic view of Serenity Bay. It was all overgrown now but probably had been a formal garden at some point. On the other side, in the front, was an old circular driveway complete with a covered portico just at the main entrance. That had collapsed recently and was now not much more than a pile of debris. There was graffiti everywhere, especially on the first floor. And all the windows were boarded up with plywood. The building was actually pretty secure. Joey said he knew a place where we could get in.

“You’ve been here before?”

“Once or twice.” He led me around to the side and found a place where the plywood had been unfastened. It still looked to be intact but you could easily bend it back and enter. We did just that. Afternoon or not, it was immediately apparent that we did need the flashlights after all. No light came in from the first floor windows, but the room was huge and tall and spanned three levels. Slowly our eyes adjusted, and there was a soft suffused glow coming from upstairs, some of the windows there still had glass, I suppose. I could see pigeons fluttering around in the rafters and water was dripping from somewhere.

We walked around the once grand entrance hall. It rose at least three stories with a high raftered ceiling and a dome on top. It did seem to be more like a hotel than a hospital. There was nothing left inside though. Everything had been stripped away long ago, maybe a couple of rusted gurneys were left, but certainly not a chair or a table with four legs.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Joey finally asked.

“You heard the county court is ruling on this tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, just want to be ready, get some background, lots of pictures and stuff.” I held up my camera.

“Okay.”

We walked around the main hall for a time, looking for a door that led anywhere useful. I found an odd annex room off the main corridor. It was perfectly circular, about fifty feet in diameter, and was oddly sectioned into two concentric tiers. There was an upper ring about three feet high that circled a sunken center, almost like a stage. The floor was badly damaged but I could still make out the remnants of what was once a beautiful mosaic. In the very center was a sunlike object and that was marked off with four compass directions. In each corner, though that’s not the right word, I could make out what seemed to be pictures of the elements… a watery scene, a cloud blowing wind, burning flames, and maybe, what could be a plowed field.

Joey stepped into the room behind me.

“There you are… I was looking all over.” He glanced around the weird circular room. “What’s this place?”

“No idea. A stage maybe?”

“Oh hey, I found a door leading down to the basement.”

“Is it dark?”

“Very.”

“What’s down there?”

“Looks like filing cabinets.”

“Okay, let’s take a look,” I replied reluctantly. I didn’t exactly have a deja vu, nor did I have a memory of this place… but there was something in the back of my mind, gnawing. I felt unsettled.

Downstairs was indeed some kind of records room, but every file cabinet stood empty, drawers strewn across the floor, and most of the metal cabinets themselves had been tossed to their side long ago. Some of them had been pulled up into a circle, as if for makeshift benches around what might have been a hearth. Well, not a hearth, but at some point there had been a controlled fire in the middle of the room. Charred bits of litter, wood and paper could still be seen. I wondered were the smoke would go.

“Wow, somebody sure trashed this place.”

“Kids, probably…” I flashed my light around the room and eventually stopped it on a heavy metal door. I walked over and Joey followed. It was locked up tight with a chain and padlock. I looked at Joey.

“Let’s try it.” I said.

“You mean break in?”

“Yup.”

Joey took out his bolt cutters and snipped the chain. The crowbar did the rest and we prized the heavy door open with some effort. It creaked and groaned against its rusty hinges and stopped about midway. The sound echoed through the whole building. I peeked inside with my flashlight and could see more filing cabinets, a whole roomful, but these were undisturbed. I noticed a thick layer of grime and dust over everything. No one had been in here for a long time. I turned and found Joey wrestling with one of the fallen cabinets. He was dragging it towards me, scraping it across the floor and it made a terrible noise.

“What the hell, Joey?”

“A doorstop.”

“What?”

“C’mon Patrick, don’t you ever watch movies?” He looked at me. “We go inside, the door slams shut, and we’re like trapped inside forever.”

“Okay, see your point…” I helped him prop the heavy cabinet against our new door. I went in first and started to look around. The room was probably about thirty feet square and even darker, if that was possible. All four walls were lined with cabinets, and in the center of the room was a very large table with a few chairs. This was less like a records room and more like a library.

“How do you suppose they filed things down here?” I asked Joey who had followed me inside.

“By date?”

“I was trying to work that out. What happens if you have a patient who was here for like, decades or something?”

“See what you mean….” Joey agreed. “What exactly are we looking for, anyhow?”

“You know, I’m not really sure, anything that looks interesting or historical, I guess.” I lied for now. “Or any famous names…”

“Famous names?”

“Familiar names… maybe we can do like a gallery of guests kind of thing.’

“You mean inmates?”

“Whatever.”

Joey started to look at the drawers with his flashlight in hand. “Alphabetically…” he called out. I watched him slowly walk down the line. He stopped. “Let’s start with J…”

“J?”

“Sure. J for Joey, J for Jegal.” It was too dark to tell if he was smiling. “Hey, J for Jardel… there you go. Wanna see if any of your relatives were ever in here?”

“Funny, Joey.”

“Wow, some of these go back really far.” He took a whole drawer out and brought it to the table.

I ran through my mental list and started my own search. I found nothing on Chamblis, Gannon or Hackney… No Jason Knobblers, or Jack Leaning either. I did find several Pagors: Earnest, Edwin, George, and Andrew, one of them very possibly Donald’s dad, and his cane-wielding father before him. I was also surprised to find quite a few Woods: Annabel, Penelope, Helen, Ronald and Edward, and even Eleanor.

“Found a lot of files for James… like twenty in here,” Joey called from across the room.

“James, like in Evan, our stringer?”

“Uh-oh.” Joey said.

“What?”

His sullen looked returned. I could see it with my flashlight. He handed me a stained file. The pages inside were quite old, faded to a light brown and crumbling in my hands. Hard to read by flashlight, I glanced at the first page: Jardel, Patrick. I read it again. There was no mistake. Then I saw a date stamped in the corner: October 3rd, 1933. I was confused to say the least. I stood there in silence and I was probably swaying from side to side a little. Joey glanced over with a look of concern.

“Who is it, your grandfather or someone?”

 Wait. Am I Mortimer’s accomplice?

***

Dawn the next morning, I was rudely awoken by the alarm. Not the clock, the wake-the-dead fire alarm. Surely it was an air raid. The siren didn’t stop. I could hear the answering calls echoing from across Sand City, and five minutes later, a fleet of firetrucks roared by, horns blaring, diesels at full tilt. It seemed like they were heading up Bayview Road. I rose and sleepily walked over to my sliders. Wasn’t much to see, but I could smell something burning, and it wasn’t fish sticks or home fries. I ventured out to my deck. In the distance and to the north, I saw curls of black smoke, make that billows of smoke, white and gray as well as black. It was pouring into the sky, coming from Bayview Beach. How could the beach be on fire? I looked a little further north. Saint Alban’s was burning. I grabbed my camera and took off down my spiral stairs.

chapter 33

deputy despair

In Fynn’s world, any series of events was perfectly plausible. If I was counting right, this was a third timeline, an amalgamation of the first two I’d experienced. And it meant some victims were murdered twice.
Murdered twice?
What am I even saying here? That’s crazy talk. And yet it was undeniable. There was hard physical evidence: a collar and a set of car keys. I was going straight to Durbin with this.
With what?
What evidence did I really have? I mean, hard, physical, tangible evidence? And what would it even mean to the
good detective
?

To him it was all a question of alibis. Motive meant nothing. A psycho-killer doesn’t need one. That’s convenient. As for means and opportunity, that didn’t look so good for Fynn; he had both of those in abundance, and for all the killings. Durbin refused to consider a
frame
, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Framed by whom?

On the other side, as for real evidence, the kind that would place Inspector Fynn at any of the crime scenes, there was precious little, make that none. No DNA, no forensics, no blood stained clothes, no witnesses. This was the weak link. And, if I could cast doubt anywhere else, Durbin’s case would come crashing down like a house of cards.

Alibis... So where was Fynn at the time of each murder? Probably thanks to his nemesis’ clever maneuvers, this Mortimer guy, and even my own initial doubts, Fynn was a potential suspect for the first two murders. There was nothing I could do there, at least in terms of alibis. The damage was done. Vague assurances that he was in Fairhaven were not going to cut it. For Jane Doe number three at Sunset Park, Durbin had the taxi receipt putting the inspector near the scene at the right time. I wasn’t so sure and made a call to Bert’s cab company. I picked up a copy of their dispatch records and talked to the driver, Oscar Fuentes.

For Doctor Samuels, Fynn wasn’t so much in the picture— even Durbin conceded that. The inspector had every chance to call it an accidental killing and he didn’t. He worked hard to prove that it was indeed a murder. Not in his own best interest. As for the kennel killings, especially for its brutality, no one who knew Fynn would finger him for that either. For Durbin, saying
psycho
was enough to end all further thinking. That he was with me at Partners didn’t seem to matter. It was only remotely possible that he could have arrived at the bar minutes after those killings… and in fresh clothes.

Spooky Park? The murder of a Luis sister, the placement of her body on the sculpture, the cane mark, the Italian shoes… none of that mattered. Where was Fynn? He was in the wrong place at the wrong time: walking on the beach with no alibi that is. And finally, there was poor Lucinda. Fynn had completely disappeared, inexplicably, and to Durbin, this was the final nail in the inspector’s coffin.

I was doing the detective’s grunt work. Tracking down the things he had no interest in, but they were things he could not deny. An alibi for Lucinda’s murder was my best bet. To me, the items found in Fynn’s hotel were important. I thought I might find the coin dealer and started making calls that morning. He wasn’t too hard to track down, but he was a little hard to talk to, make that suspicious and defensive. Once I explained that I wasn’t the antiquities police, he opened up a little and actually became quite cooperative.

It wasn’t too hard to track down the bus ticket either. Fynn had ridden on the Grayline. A couple minutes on the web told me they had a depot in Doylestown, PA. And there was even a live video stream. You could see what buses were pulling in or out, or waiting. Wasn’t sure what that was worth… But, okay, so there was video, maybe video to pull. My best reporter skills didn’t get me anywhere though. Only a court order would make those records accessible. Durbin could do this, I just had to talk him into it. For that to happen, I had to plant doubt in his mind, or at worst, completely mess with it.

***

Kevin Marchand from the Historical Society gave me a ride to Fairhaven. He was heading to the
Price-Fixer
to do a little warehouse shopping, a little stocking up for the season, he told me. We talked briefly about Saint Alban’s, and especially about the fire which no one seemed to regret.