Over the Darkened Landscape (12 page)

Mike blinked. “Uh, no,” he said, pretending to pat himself down. “Got my sidearm, got my badge, didn’t think to grab a radio.”

“Dewey, grab the man a radio so he can go in!” Another patrolman ran and pulled a portable radio from a car and ran it over. Mike took it and hooked it to his belt, trying to hide the bulge under his jacket.

“Ready?” asked Simone, squeezing his elbow.

“Guess so,” he finally said, and turned and, after a brief moment of hesitation, crossed the Line.

Instantly he felt tired, run ragged, but soon that feeling was overwhelmed as he crossed out of the haze, was replaced by something approaching claustrophobia. Everything was as he remembered, but his short time out in his new life had served to change his perspective.

To his right he heard the click of a lighter being closed, smelled the sweet smell of the tobacco that they sold on this side of the Line. “I was wondering if they were gonna sucker you into coming.”

Mike turned, smiled in spite of the turmoil he was feeling inside. “Hiya, Danny.” His old partner, Danny Glaus, stood leaning against a light pole, taking a drag on his smoke, looking up at Mike. He wore a light blue short-sleeved shirt with suspenders, a black beret with “TPD” emblazoned on it, and jeans with runners. His heavy black baton hung loose from a holster on his pants.

He walked up and shook Mike’s hand. “You a detective already? Way to go.”

“Thanks.” Mike looked down at his former partner. “It was an incentive to get me to come back across.”

Danny took one more drag then flicked the smoke away, nodding. “Thought as much. Never struck me as anything like a game of cops and robbers anytime I talked to someone from over on
your
side.” The accent was deliberate, Mike knew.

Danny tossed a stick of gum to Mike, who caught it and grinned. Cinnamon: made Danny feel a little more grown up, rather than chewing the bubble gum so popular on this side. He unwrapped it and started chewing, felt some memories rush back with the shot of flavour gently burning his tongue.

After putting a stick in his own mouth, Danny walked around to the driver’s side of his car, face grim. “Climb in.”

Mike stood and looked at the car for a second, feeling a bit flustered. He either didn’t remember the car being this small, or else himself being this big. Feeling like a clown at the circus, he opened the door, slid the seat back as far as it could go, then squeezed himself in, knees halfway up to his nose and his back bent at a peculiar angle. It was then something of an operation to reach out and close the door.

Danny fired up the little two-stroke engine, and the car jumped away from the curb, rattling and roaring as it went, little bouncing-head dinosaur doing a sympathetic shimmy from its suction-cupped location on the dash. Inside, it smelled of tobacco and cinnamon, a strangely sweet aroma after having lived on the other side of the Line.

Mike thought about asking questions regarding the crime scene, but between the noise and his currently squished diaphragm, he decided it would be prudent to wait. Instead he watched the town go by, remembering the sights, looking at billboards advertising new toys or imported G-rated flicks, viewing with wonder the tiny buildings that had once seemed a normal part of his life.

He turned and looked at Danny out of the corner of his eye. His former partner still looked thirteen, something that seemed a bit weirder now that he’d gone to the other side of the Line and seen kids that age who still acted like kids. Danny had been this age for most of his life, grown into it and then just hit a holding pattern, some parts of his mind and emotional makeup maturing, but still remaining basically a kid. He took his job with the Templeton Police Department seriously enough, although Mike remembered so many of the days where it had all seemed a game to them. And it had been, really just playing at cops and robbers, no domestics or rapes or murders ever happening, ever needing to be dealt with.

And now there was Derek Hayes, lying dead near the clocktower. No game this.

There weren’t many cars on the streets, but that was normal for Templeton. Instead, Mike watched as they roared past bicycles and skateboards and scooters and pedestrians, even some smaller kids riding metal or plastic trikes. It was close to the end of the day, so he imagined most of them were coming home from work or school right now.

A billboard on the side of one of the buildings advertised two old Shirley Temple and Jackie Coogan movies playing at the art house theatre, a retrospective from when they had first quit acting and moved into directing, sharing that bill with adult directors on the other side of the Line—a procedure no longer in vogue. Coogan was dead now, had crossed over and aged a couple of decades ago. But Temple, Mike knew, lived still, hiding in her suite uptown, tucked away like a miniature version of Garbo, unwilling to face or deal with anyone in the town that carried her name.

He watched several heads turn sharply as they went by, and he knew he was seeing looks of shock on some of the faces as they realized what the passenger in the cop car was. He’d never seen such a sight himself, all the years he’d lived in Templeton, so he could imagine just how bizarre he looked.

Danny cut the motor and let the little car roll to a halt in the middle of the road. Mike managed to pry open the door with a moderately paralysed hand and then practically fell out of the car and to his knees, thinking this was a great way to start as he stood and brushed dirt and gravel from his pants.

There was a crowd standing near the yellow tape, about three dozen kids, looking anywhere from five to fifteen years old. As he approached they all stepped back, almost as one, staring up at him. It was an unsettling feeling, combined with everything else that was happening; he knew he’d gotten taller since leaving Templeton, but looking down at them and seeing just how much most of them had to crane their necks to look back up at him, the changes he had gone through hit home that much harder.

“Through here,” said Danny, lighting up another smoke and lifting the tape to walk under. Mike just waited until he was through, and then he stepped over it.

He recognized the building they were at; it was an apothecary on the main floor, run by Sandy Hancock, and then some low-rent apartments up above. A uniform Mike only half-recognized nodded at them and held open the door to the pharmacy and Danny led the way in, Mike stooping just a bit to clear the doorjamb.

Inside he found he could stand up straight, as long as he was careful around the light fixtures, which were just the right height to clip him a good one. He looked to make sure he had a good fix on where all of them were and then turned his eyes and his mind to the business at hand. There were several cops inside, three guys and a girl who knew enough about forensics to do the job when needed, and he nodded at each one briefly before following Danny.

At the end of the aisle Danny turned, then pointed to the counter. “Over there.”

Mike stepped up to the counter and leaned over to have a look. Lying on the floor were two bodies, which was a surprise: Sandy Hancock, face up, eyes wide open and the back of her skull bashed in; and, sprawled on top of her, curled up in a fetal position, an adult male with even more dents and furrows in his skull. Derek Hayes. Blood was spattered everywhere.

“Eeuuw.” He could feel two urges, fought to keep them both down: the desire to puke and the complete fascination with seeing two dead bodies.

“No kidding,” said Danny. His voice seemed a little shaky. “Here’s where you get to start. We’ve already dusted for prints and taken photos, and Doc Baird is ready to move the bodies, but we wanted you to have a look first.”

Mike moved around to the other side of the counter, bent down and looked at the man’s wounds without touching anything. “Find a weapon yet?” He was already feeling out of his league here. The closest he’d come to a murder investigation was when he was a cadet, a visit to the crime scene after the body had been removed so that they could watch the forensic team do their work.

“I’ve got guys checking alleys and garbage bins and the like,” said Danny. “Nothing yet.”

Mike popped his head up and looked for the head of the forensics team. “Any interesting prints, Jim?”

Jim peeled off a glove and scratched his head. “I don’t know, uh, Mike. We’ve got a bunch of adult and kid prints here, but I don’t know what to make of it. I mean, it was so weird having
him
here,” he gestured at the body, “it just goes beyond making any sense to me that we might have had another adult in here, too.”

“So do you figure these prints are all his, or do some of them look like they might not match up?”

Jim shrugged his shoulders. “Oh yeah, Mike, like we’re experts at this.” With a start Mike realized that Jim looked frightened, that they all did. “Nobody I know’s ever been murdered before. We play good guys and bad guys.” He paused to catch his breath, shuddered. “But nothin’ like this. We don’t know how to do this stuff.”

Mike stood and walked over, put his hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Sounds like you did good finding the adult prints. If you can get them together for me so I can take them back over the Line when I’m done here, that would be great.”

Jim nodded and smiled up at him, looking every inch the ten-year-old boy that he was. “I’ve already lifted and marked them all and have them ready to go. Just ask Marie for the baggies when you leave.”

“What else do you have for me, Danny?” he asked, walking back to where his former partner was lighting up yet another cigarette. A sure sign just how nervous he was feeling.

“Up the stairs, but I haven’t had much of a chance to look yet.” He turned and headed through the back door and on up, Mike following close behind.

It wasn’t too tight a fit, but it was small and mildly claustrophobic, and when they came to the top of the stairs he saw that this room must have been where Sandy combined her office and living quarters, small even by Templeton standards. He quickly walked over to the half-open window and knelt down on the floor, eyes closed and breathing in fresh air until he felt his shoulders lift a bit.

“The bed,” said Danny.

Mike looked and grimaced. He couldn’t help himself then, and all his years in Templeton came bubbling up to the top. “Oh, yuck!”

Danny smiled. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what we all were thinking.” He pointed his smoke at the fresh stains on the sheets. “Doc had a quick look up skirts and in pants, and what you’re thinking is right. Sandy Hancock and Derek Hayes were bumping uglies, man and child, right here in Templeton.”

“Son of a bitch,” whispered Mike. “You hear stories on the other side of the Line, and I know sometimes they’ve caught some pathetic fucker thinking about crossing over, but I never heard about both sides being in on it. That’s sick!”

“Besides being illegal. Most of us think the same, Mike. There’s still some people who don’t think it’s sick, though.”

Mike shrugged. “I think you can safely rule out everyone who’s under, say, ten or twelve. This beating seems a little much to have been done by a little kid. Plus, Derek was not only an adult, he looked to me to be a pretty big guy. That would be a tough fight for anyone, most of all a kid.”

“Unless he was caught by surprise.”

“The only thing that makes that guess difficult, Danny, is that he was on top of Sandy. We’ll go back down and ask Jim if he thinks he was moved, but I doubt it. So that means that he got it after Sandy, which makes the element of surprise that much less likely.”

“Oh.” Danny took another drag, then stubbed out the cigarette in an empty ashtray. “Sounds like you’re learning lots as a grownup.”

Mike smiled. “I have to. It’s a big and ugly and exciting and dangerous place. Not that I’ve really had a chance to use any of that training yet.”

“Good a time as any, hey?”

“Guess so.” Mike leaned down to push up off the floor, caught a glimpse of something and stopped, stumbling back to his knees. “What the hell is that?” he asked, now lying down on the floor and reaching under the bed.

Danny was down on his knees beside him, leaning over and looking. “What? What do you see?”

The bed was big compared to others he knew of in Templeton -- no question why, now—and so Mike even had to get his head partly under the frame before he could reach it. He could have just picked up the bed and moved it out of the way, but he reasoned to himself that the work involved would have been greater, this room being so crowded they would be moving furniture every which way to make space.

He rolled onto his back and then sat up facing Danny. In his hands was a small ornate yellow and orange box, a thick blue rubber band wrapped around it to hold the lid in place. Written on the side in black felt pen were the letters “SH.”

“Sandy Hancock,” said Danny.

“You still have a keen grasp at the obvious, my friend,” responded Mike, grinning. He frowned then, set the box down on the floor, realizing he wasn’t completely prepared for handling the crime scene. “Got any gloves?”

Danny jumped up, looking eager to help. “Downstairs,” he said, running out to pilfer some from someone on the forensics crew.

He returned and handed a pair of latex gloves to Mike, but they were made for extra-small hands, and kept pulling at the hairs on the back of his hand. Finally, Mike snapped the glove off and handed both over to Danny. “Easier if you do the honours.”

Gloves on, Danny peeled back the rubber band and lifted the lid, leaning over so he could see inside. “Me too,” said Mike, pushing his shoulder. Danny grinned and tilted the box so they could both see.

Cotton balls. “Pull them out, gently,” said Mike.

Danny did so, and about halfway down he felt something hard and cylindrical. He pulled it out and held it up to the light: a finger-length glass vial with a black stopper on top, dark green liquid inside.

“Holy shit,” said Mike. It was barely a whisper. “Anything else?”

Danny pulled back some more cotton, and then very carefully removed a small syringe. “Drop it back in,” said Mike. He pulled out a larger evidence bag, and Danny slid the whole box inside.