The Sleepless (24 page)

‘Was that all they said? That they’d found her; and that she was dead?’ 

‘That was the length and breadth of it.’ 

Michael caught sight of his skinny pale naked reflection in the mirror, tousled brown hair, loose-wristed arms and legs, cock hanging down. He cleared his throat, and then he said, ‘Nahant Bay, that’s Essex County, right? So who’s handling it? Not Wellman Brock, surely?’ 

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Joe. ‘But I very much doubt it. Poor old Sheriff Brock couldn’t find a turd in a sewage plant’ 

Michael said, ‘Pick me up in twenty minutes. Let’s go take a look at Nahant Bay.’ 

‘What? It’s only a quarter after three.’ 

‘What are you worried about? It’ll be light by the time we get there.’ 

Michael and Joe parked at an angle amongst the dunes and climbed out of the car. Joe turned back and said, ‘Shit. You know what that goddamned sand can do to your paint finish?’ 

They slid – walked – slid down the dunes. Joe cursed when the sand got into his Gucci loafers. He cursed when the sand blew into his eyes. Michael was used to the sand, and had a way of turning his face away when the wind gusted. 

For two hundred feet north of East Point the beach had been cordoned off with fluttering orange pennants, even though there was nothing left for anyone to see. The morning sky was pale mauvish. The Atlantic Ocean was mauvish, too, but broken up, and a little angry, and it bitched at the shore, and sulked, and bitched again, and dragged up seaweed, and dragged it back again. 

Michael’s nostrils were all scoured out with salt, and cold, and the air-conditioning of Joe’s Seville. He was wearing his maroon fisherman’s sweater and he was glad of it, while Joe was shivering in his emerald-green Italian jacket and his sand-stained Gucci shoes. 

Two patrol cars from the Essex County Sheriff’s department were still parked here; as were three unmarked automobiles, including a dark-maple Caprice and a pea-green Buick Century with a spectacular dent in the offside fender. Close to the shoreline stood a very tall man in a crumpled fawn raincoat, and a younger man with a sweptback hairstyle and a suit, and a heavy-built, blodgy-looking man with a Boy Scout hat, whom Michael recognized almost at once as Sheriff Brock. 

Joe lifted the pennants and an acne-blotched deputy came toward him and lifted his hand. 

‘I’m sorry, sir, restricted area.’ 

‘Tom!’ Joe shouted, and gave a wide-sweeping wave to the very tall man in the crumpled fawn raincoat. 

The very tall man in the crumpled fawn raincoat waved back, and Joe dropped the pennants behind him and continued to walk across the sand. 

‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ the deputy repeated. ‘This area is really restricted. I mean, that means that it’s – ‘ 

Joe turned and glared at him and snapped, ‘Screw you,’ and continued to walk towards the shoreline. He turned again, and snapped again, ‘Screw you!’ The deputy shouted, ‘Stop!’ and unfastened the snapper on his holster, but Michael came up and laid a hand on top of the deputy’s hand. In spite of the cold – or because of it – the boy was trembling. 

‘Listen,’ Michael told him, out of the side of his mouth, as if he weren’t talking to him at all. ‘We all get caught in no-win situations. This is one of them. You’re doing your duty and you’re doing it good, but none of those people will see it that way. That tall guy in the raincoat is Lieutenant Thomas Boyle, right?, of the Boston Police Department; and that’s your boss Sheriff Wellman Brock, right?, whose every whim is your command; and that’s Joe Garboden of Plymouth Insurance who doesn’t actually
own
me
,
balls and all, but everything but. So let’s think of our pensions, you and I, and let the big guys tromp around the sandbox. Our turn will come, believe me.’ 

The young spotty deputy stared at him as if he were mad. But then he said, ‘Okay ... ‘ as if he hadn’t quite understood, and fastened up his holster. 

Michael squeezed the boy’s arm. ‘Your time will come, believe me, when those guys are ail sitting in sunset homes, and forgetting they ever ate food out of aluminum saucepans.’ 

The deputy nodded, and toothily grinned. ‘Right,’ he agreed. He turned right around on his heel, and kept on grinning. 

Michael walked across the moist sand towards the shore, his left cheek turned against the wind. ‘Giraffe,’ he said, extending his hand to Lieutenant Boyle. ‘How’s Megan keeping? I saw her article in
Boston
magazine. The one on pot roasts, or whatever.’ 

‘Well, well, Mikey Rearden,’ said Thomas, smiling. He looked tired. His cheeks were white and his nose was pinched red by the wind. ‘They told me you’d given it up.’ 

‘Psychological problems,’ Michael admitted. ‘A simple case of the fruitcakes.’ 

Thomas sniffed, and dragged out his handkerchief. ‘I heard that,’ he said. 

Michael tapped his forehead. ‘It wasn’t too serious. I just couldn’t stop the outside from getting inside. Know what I mean? But I’m pretty much cured. I’ve been going through hypnotherapy.’ 

‘Yeah? Does that really work?’ 

‘It depends. I guess you have to want it to work.’ 

‘I was wondering about hypnotherapy for Megan,’ said Thomas. ‘You know, just to make her feel more positive. She gets pretty damn down sometimes. She doesn’t tell me. But
I
would, if I were her.’ 

‘I don’t know,’ Michael shrugged, and he really didn’t. ‘I guess she could discuss it with her doctor. But sometimes I think that hypnotherapy can open up more cans of worms than it’s worth. I didn’t even know that I was afraid of the dark until I was hypnotized.’ 

Joe looked uncomfortable. So did Sheriff Brock – a huge, wobbling jelly of a man in a sandy uniform and a blatantly artificial toupee. His eyes flicked from side to side and he looked like a man who desperately wanted his breakfast, and his office chair, and a lengthy continuation of last night’s sleep. 

Thomas squeezed Michael’s elbow. ‘Let’s talk about this later, okay? These guys have been up since three.’ 

‘Where’d they find her?’ asked Joe, in an unnaturally loud voice. 

Thomas led the way down to the smoother sand of the shoreline. There was a simple wooden marker in the surf – a stick, no more. Every trace of Sissy O’Brien’s arrival here had already been washed away by the sea. 

‘Did you talk to the coastguard?’ asked Michael. 

Thomas looked up at him and nodded. ‘You’re thinking about winds and tides and currents, right?’ 

‘That’s right,’ said Michael. 

‘Well ... the coastguard have promised me a tidal survey right from the moment the helicopter came down. They may even try floating a dummy body from Sagamore Head to see what happens ... you can judge the winds and the tides mathematically, but a floating body won’t always do what you expect it to do.’ 

‘You’re telling a fisherman,’ said Joe. 

Michael looked around. There was something oddly familiar about this curve of beach, although he couldn’t think why. He walked down to the shoreline until the surf seethed around the welts of his shoes. He shielded his eyes with both hands and stared out toward the horizon. He had been here before, he was sure of it. When he was a child, maybe, with his father. Every time his father completed a whaler that he really liked, he would sail it up to Marblehead, or down to Plymouth, and take Michael along with him. They carried hot chocolate in Thermos flasks, and brown bags of cheese and baloney sandwiches, and they had sung sea-songs together, old traditional shanties, or silly sea-songs that they had invented themselves. 

We sailed on the good ship Bum
 

With a huge supply of rum
 

The Bum didn’t sink but it sure did stink
 

We should have called her some-
 

thing else that wasn’t so rude
 

But that’s our problem, we’re just crude.
 

He smiled to himself, although he felt like crying, too. He looked back up the beach towards Joe and Thomas and Thomas was lighting a cigarette. 

‘Have they taken her away yet?’ he called. 

Thomas turned around. ‘No ... the meat wagon’s still here. We’re having a little difference of opinion over where to take her. Commissioner Hudson wants her over at Boston Central with the rest of the dead O’Briens. I want her back with us ... with the other young lady we found Tuesday.’ 

Michael frowned. ‘What other young lady?’ 

‘Didn’t you see it on the news? We found a girl in a house on Byron Street, up by the Public Garden. She’d been hogtied with razor wire, tortured, you name it.’ 

‘So what’s the connection here?’ 

Thomas beckoned him up the beach. Michael took a last quick look at the ocean and followed him. It was hard going up the dunes, and Thomas began to cough before they reached the summit. 

‘You ought to quit smoking,’ Joe remarked. 

‘Tell me about it,’ Thomas retorted. 

The ambulance from the Essex County Coroner’s department was parked at angle on the sandy roadway. Its red lights silently rotated, as if they were lighthouses, warning of death. One of the rear doors was still open, and a young medic with a blond downy moustache was leaning against it, looking tired and bored. 

‘Any word, lieutenant?’ he asked Thomas, as they all approached. 

Thomas shook his head. ‘This is one of those cases where politics takes precedence over common sense. These gentlemen represent Plymouth Insurance, they’re investigators. You want to let them take a look?’ 

‘You
really want
to look?’ the medic asked them, with an incredulity that made the palms of Michael’s hands tingle. 

‘Just open up, will you?’ Thomas asked him, impatiently. 

‘Whewff,’ said the medic, clearly implying that anyone who wanted to look at this particular item of human flotsam was out of their tree. 

He opened wide the second door, and climbed into the ambulance. A grey body bag lay on the folded trolley, with an identification label already attached. The medic tugged open the zipper, all the way down, and a greenish-grey arm suddenly flopped out of the bag and made Michael start in alarm. The medic must have seen him, because he said, with amusement, ‘She’s dead, don’t worry. She aint going to jump up and chase you round the beach.’ 

‘Thank you,’ said Thomas, and climbed into the ambulance. Unlike most of those who had to clear up the dead, he didn’t like graveyard humour – particularly when the dead had suffered in the way that this poor girl had suffered. Death could sometimes be funny, just as life could sometimes be funny. But for some reason he could never get used to it, and it hardly ever made him laugh. 

Michael climbed into the ambulance beside him, ducking his head down. The girl’s body smelled strongly of seawater and decomposition. A young, slim girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, judging by her figure. Her hair was short, blonde and bedraggled, and flecked with seaweed. Her visible ear was filled with sand, although she was still wearing a decorative earring that looked as if it were made of glass and some tarnishable metal – possibly silver. 

Her eyes were open, and she was staring up at the ceiling. Her irises, however, were all milked over, like a poached codfish, and of course she didn’t blink. There was sand in her nostrils and sand in her slightly-parted mouth. 

It was her body that horrified Michael the most. Her small breasts were criss-crossed with deep open slices, as if she had been cut with a craft-knife. Her nipples had each been stapled six or seven times, with a paper-stapler, so that they were distorted and twisted. Her bare stomach was covered with scores of burns and scratches and lacerations, most of them pale and puffy because of her long immersion in the ocean. Her upper thighs were also decorated with burns and cuts. 

‘This is Sissy O’Brien?’ asked Michael, his mouth swimming with saliva. 

Thomas took a colour photograph out of his coat pocket and held it up in front of him. The photograph shook and Michael had to hold it still so that he could see it clearly. 

Thomas said, ‘Sissy O’Brien, no question about it. See for yourself. Pending formal identification, of course.’ 

‘Jesus Christ, who could have done this?’ 

‘We think the same people who killed our Jane Doe on Byron Street. Same perverted
m.o.,
same cuts and whip-marks and torture-burns ... and we released none of that stuff to the media, so we’re not talking copycat.’ 

‘What is it, some kind of s/m cult or what?’ 

Thomas shook his head. He could have used another cigarette, but he knew that he wasn’t permitted to smoke inside the ambulance. Not that it mattered, the patient was dead already. 

Michael, with huge reluctance, pulled down the body bag zipper a few inches further. There were livid burns and scars between Sissy O’Brien’s legs, all around her vulva and her inner thighs. 

‘Some joker had fun with a Zippo,’ Thomas remarked, his voice totally flat. He didn’t want to think how much Sissy O’Brien must have screamed. Or maybe she hadn’t been able to scream. There were bruises around her mouth that indicated that she had been gagged – probably with one of those inflatable rubber gags that fetishists used.