The Occupied Read online

  Just beyond the plateau there was a thick vortex of smoke winding its way up into the sky. The irony was hard to miss. “So, open-field burning of animal carcasses, that’s supposed to be more eco-friendly?” I said sarcastically.

  Ashley shook her head. “I think it’s Manitou’s way of sticking it to the protesters. But don’t quote me on that.”

  She took a turn off the road and headed down a drive that led toward the front of the incinerator. Two county sheriff’s squads were already there, with their lights flashing, parked in front of the mammoth entrance to the cement incineration tower. I also noticed an EMT vehicle and a red fire truck parked off to the side.

  “Gang’s all here,” Ashley said, and she slammed the Dodge into park. “Wait by the car while I check in.” Ashley stepped over to the two uniformed deputies and spoke to them.

  My eyes wandered, and I noticed to my right there was a white sign with the hours of the landfill and incinerator operation printed on it in black letters, but a line had been carefully painted through the hours for the incinerator. Some protester had scrawled a message in red on the sign, and an effort had been made to paint over it with a thin coat of white paint, but the message was still legible underneath: The devil doesn’t recycle. He burns instead.

  I was distracted by a black fly that was buzzing around me. I swatted at it. Then swatted at another. And another. In a matter of minutes they were coming in squadrons. The air was filled with fat, buzzing flies.

  Before I could duck back into the car, Ashley turned around and waved for me to join her. As I left the swarm of flies behind me and hustled to catch up to her, the two deputies led the way.

  I followed Ashley into the cavernous interior of the building, which was roomy enough for garbage trucks to roll in and then dump their loads into a concrete pit. High above the pit was a three-pronged industrial claw hanging from a hydraulic arm that would have been used to grab the garbage, then swing it over to the spot where it would be dumped into the furnace. I could see a glass enclosure up above the pit, probably a control booth for the whole operation.

  But over to the right, I spotted the reason we were there: Three firefighters in their helmets and bulky jackets were huddled together. They were talking to an EMT. Even from my position across the room I could see why they were grim-faced. Lying at their feet was a form. It looked as if it had been human once, and it was curled up, as black as coal. Next to it was a rubber body bag, zipped open, ready for loading.

  Ashley told the deputies to hang back, and she summoned me to follow her with a flip of her index finger. As she approached the firefighters and the EMT, she said, “I’ll take it from here, guys. I’ll meet you outside when I’m done.”

  After they left, Ashley bent down to study the blackened, incinerated form on the cement floor that no longer bore any recognizable features.

  As she studied it with forensic detachment, I looked on with horror. I could faintly hear the charred corpse hissing internally from the smoldering heat.

  Ashley looked up at me. “Who would kill themselves this way?”

  After examining the remains of this poor soul, who had been reduced to black cinder, she stood up. A forensics officer shuffled in with his camera, and Ashley directed the angles that he was to capture, then led me toward the open garage door, talking as we walked.

  “The landfill engineer was outside at the time,” she explained, “and he caught a glimpse of the deceased entering the building. Apparently the guy used to work here,” she said. “Must have known how to get in, and how to kickstart the incinerator, which he did from the glass control booth. Once the furnace was fully fired up, he climbed over to the chute . . .” Ashley turned to point out the top of the metal chute, where garbage would be dumped into the furnace. “Looks like he slid down the chute right into the belly of the fire. The engineer had run into the building just in time to see the guy take the plunge. He ran up and shut off the furnace, then called the fire department and the EMT.”

  Instead of leading me out of the building, she took a right turn. “The dead man has a deep gash running in a linear fashion up his right forearm. Even in his charred state, that part is visible. A bloody knife was found up at the control booth. There’s a blood trail leading up there. The trail started here.” She stopped about fifty feet down the corridor, at a spot with police tape marking the cement floor, where it looked like something had been written on the floor in blood. There was a single word scrawled there: Judas. The victim apparently cut himself, and then wrote this one-word message on the floor in his own blood before igniting the furnace and jumping in.

  Ashley started toward the open garage door, and by the time we got there, one of the deputies approached us holding a fat wallet in his hand. “Detective, this is from the car that’s parked around back. A 1997 Chevy Blazer. Presumably the deceased’s. We’re checking the registration now. The wallet’s packed with hundred-dollar bills.”

  While Ashley was checking the contents of the wallet, I looked around the incinerator. Somehow my former hometown had morphed into something horrible. A place belonging to the lower circles of hell.

  But then the circles began to descend even lower. Ashley plucked the driver’s license out of the wallet, held it up to my face, and asked if I knew this person. At first I couldn’t answer. I had to blink several times and look closer and closer at the picture ID on the driver’s license until I was finally willing to accept the reality of it. I was staring at the name and face of my high school friend and former band member Augie Bedders.

  30

  My head was reeling. I tried to give Detective Ashley a short course on my friendship with Augie, including how Dan Hoover had tried to look Augie up but couldn’t find him. Augie had been more or less off the grid.

  When we were seated next to each other in the black Dodge, Ashley asked, “What do you think the word Judas meant to Augie Bedders?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  She had a second question. When she asked it, the smiles were gone and the dimples weren’t showing. It was the tough girl instead. “Augie and Bobby Budleigh were friends of each other and also friends of yours. Now they’re both dead. And here you are.”

  I waited for the shoe to drop.

  She asked, “How are you involved in these deaths?”

  Even after being kidney punched by the sight of Augie’s incinerated body, and hit with the reality that people I knew and cared about were dying around me—despite that—I didn’t miss her point. The triangulation of Bobby-Augie-me. Then, right in the middle of their two deaths, I sail into Manitou with uncanny timing.

  “Here’s how I’m involved,” I replied. “Two of my friends are gone. I’ve been kicked in the stomach. And now I get the feeling that you’re trying to implicate me in this.”

  “Have you told me everything you know?” she asked.

  “Everything you need to know.”

  That didn’t sit well. She shot back, “We’ll be returning sometime to your evasive answer. But meanwhile, I don’t want to hear any crap about demons from you. Just the facts.”

  “I’ll give you the facts,” I replied. “But the rest of it is up to you.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “The rest of the story, which you’re probably not going to like. That the real message behind the death of these two men could have a postmark from hell.”

  Another of my responses that Ashley didn’t like. She pulled into the ice cream stand where my car was parked and slammed her car to a stop. By that time it was early evening, though customers were still lined up at the window. “Don’t leave town without telling me first,” she ordered.

  I nodded and climbed out, but needing to stay on the case, I took a shot. “Am I still a consultant? I’d like to see some of your investigative leads. I could help. With Bobby’s death and maybe even Augie’s too.”

  “Good day, Mr. Black,” she replied, and drove off.

  On the way back to my hotel, I sized
up the unpretentious female detective with the pretty yet subtly scarred face, wondering why she had just turned on me.

  I had nothing to hide, and yet, things being as they were in my life, concepts like evidence, logic, and objective thinking didn’t always prevail. Things unseen can trump the visible.

  As I parked my rental and crossed the hotel parking lot toward the lobby, dark clouds were building, and off in the distance there was a quick flash of brilliant light in the sky, but no rumble. The storm must have been a ways off at that point. I trudged into my hotel room, dumped my suitcase, and dropped into bed. I toyed with ordering a delivery pizza, but I had no appetite for food, so I mindlessly clicked through the TV menu of programs.

  I landed on a reality show about survivalists in Alaska. A bearded loner named Big Jim Torley was trying to figure out a way to keep the brown bears and the wolves away from his food stash of elk meat, which he had hanging in several bags from a tree.

  Feeling fatigued and emotionally gutted, I clicked off the TV and the light next to my bed. But in the darkness my mind kept whirling. About my mission in Manitou. And how the events in that town were making no sense. At least Big Jim Torley knew who his Alaskan predators were. I didn’t. Not precisely.

  And then there was the image that I couldn’t shake. Augie’s charred corpse, curled up in the fetal position, like the dead of Pompeii who had been buried under the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius.

  The air-conditioning unit on the wall was buzzing loudly. I fiddled with the control knob but couldn’t fix it. I lay in bed listening to the rush of air blowing out of the air conditioner and the intermittent sound of vibrating metal. After flip-flopping in bed, I fluffed the semi-starched pillows under my head and then shuffled them like a deck of cards, looking for the right combination.

  Eventually my body relaxed and my eyes closed. A few minutes passed. But then a flash of light. The curtains in my room faced the parking lot and were parted a few inches, letting in the flashes of lightning in the distance. I was too tired to get out of bed and close the curtains the rest of the way. I would be asleep soon anyway.

  Then thunder the next time with another flash of lightning. Followed by darkness and quiet. Then another flash. Between the curtains, I saw a jagged trace of white electricity wriggle across the sky and then disappear. I turned over to face the door to my room before shutting my eyes again. Another streak of lightning crackled across the sky.

  Instinctively I half opened my eyes. But when I did, something was illuminated near the door of my room. A half second later the room was in blackness again. It looked like a shape by the closet area. I listened for a noise. An intruder? But I heard nothing. I lay there waiting.

  Then a big flash of lightning with a bang. That was when I saw it. An outline, like a man in the shadows. But not a man, because in his head there were eyes like two burning lasers, and where the mouth should have been, a red glowing orifice in the shape of a smile. I bolted upright in bed and yelled for the creature to show himself.

  Then I clicked on the nightstand light. But there was no one in my room. No evidence of him by the door, nor by the closet, nor anywhere else. Nothing, except for the smoldering odor of the fires of the Manitou landfill.

  31

  I lay in bed with my eyes open until the lightning stopped and I could no longer hear the distant pounding of thunder in the sky. When exhaustion took over, I dropped into sleep. But I never turned off the light.

  The next morning, I dangled my feet over the edge of the bed until I had enough energy to fire up the cheap one-cup coffeemaker. When my Styrofoam cup was filled, I sat down at the round mini-table and slurped down my coffee. When I was younger, I used to take it straight black, but over the past few years, I’d started taking my coffee with creamer and sugar substitute. Life had enough bitterness. I didn’t need it in my coffee.

  I had some reading to do. Ever since Elijah had given me his Bible, I had kept it with me. From New York to Ocracoke Island. And then to Manitou. I would dig into it whenever I could. Flipping through it in the hotel room, I considered the one-word message left on the incinerator floor—Judas—that had been written in the blood of the man who dumped himself into a furnace. After checking out the Gospel accounts about Judas, I saw a sobering explanation for it.

  Bobby’s death was obscenely cruel and unfair. But the double tragedy was the thought plaguing me at the time—that Augie may have killed himself so shortly after Bobby’s murder because he felt responsible in some way.

  I regretted that I hadn’t kept in contact with both of them over the years. Yet I also knew that those thoughts were a dangerous quicksand. Years go by, and people change. Things go inexorably bad, and before you know it a friend does something desperate and incomprehensible.

  I could beat myself up, but ultimately I wasn’t in control. Even in all the mud and mire through which we plow, there is a benevolent heavenly Father holding us up with an invisible hand, guiding our ends from our beginnings and nudging us toward the light rather than the darkness. Giving us a thousand chances to make a thousand good choices if we will only take them. And yet, despite that, people make terrible choices all the time. I’ve made my fair share.

  The day I arrived in Manitou was the day that Bobby Budleigh was being buried in Denver. He left his wife, Vicky, and a ten-year-old son. I chose not to fly out to Colorado for the funeral, deciding to hunt down his killer instead. Perhaps that was yet another regret. But if it was, I had to shuck it off, sweep it away like a wasp. Because if you leave it clinging to you, it will sting you and keep on stinging you. Besides, I think Bobby would have wanted me to get to the truth, whatever it was.

  I telephoned Detective Ashley Linderman, got her voice mail, and left a message. It wasn’t a long one, but enough to let her know that, as a result of my Bible reading, I might have had a kind of “revelation” about Augie and his death and the message on the incinerator floor, and we needed to talk as soon as possible. There was a chance that my use of the word revelation might put her off, but it was too late to worry about that. Besides, it was time for Ashley Linderman to know what I believed.

  I hung around the hotel room for an hour, but no call back from Detective Linderman. I knew that Dan Hoover might still be down in Chicago. It was about a three-hour drive from Manitou, depending on traffic. Maybe four. I toyed with the idea of driving down to see Dan if I didn’t hear back from Ashley soon. But I would have to break the news to Dan about Augie first.

  32

  It was late afternoon, and I was driving south on I-94 toward Chicago when I remembered her warning me about not leaving town without telling her.

  So I left another message on her voice mail.

  “Hi, Trevor Black here again. I’m trying to be cooperative. Thought you would like to know that I’m on my way down to Chicago to catch up with a friend of mine. But I haven’t checked out of my hotel room yet, because I plan on returning to Manitou tomorrow and staying for a while. If you have some problem with my plans, you need to call me soon, because in about an hour or two I will be crossing into Illinois.” After a slight pause I added, “I would like to stay in contact. Can you call me?”

  But she never did. Not that day.

  I had connected with Dan Hoover via text messages and told him I’d stop by the club where he was playing, which was on Hubbard, not too far from the Chicago River. I had missed seeing him perform with his group back when I was in New York. Of course, back then I was drowning in my own sea of troubles. But now it was time to catch his music, and I was looking forward to it. He texted me back, saying he would be playing two sets in the second slot, from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., and that I should make sure to catch his second set at eleven thirty.

  I tried to call Dan personally and tell him about Augie, but when I received his voice mail I was forced to leave a message. “Dan, sorry to add more bad news to our reunion, but it’s about Augie. I found out as soon as I arrived in Manitou. We’ll talk. Bad stuff happening. I’ll see
you tonight.”

  In Chicago I checked into my hotel room at the Courtyard on Hubbard across the street from the club. By the time I dropped my bags off, took a quick shower, changed my clothes, and made it to the big yellow awning that read Live Jazz, it was almost time for Dan’s set to begin. Dan told me to introduce myself when I arrived, which I did, and as he had promised, a little place had been reserved for me near the front, squeezed in among the other tables.

  After ordering some bar food, against my better judgment I put in for a glass of Dark ’N Stormy, a concoction of dark rum and ginger beer. For the last several months I had been drying myself out and feeling good about it, but somehow I figured it wouldn’t hurt now to fudge a little. The drink came before my food, and I downed it straightaway, so on an empty stomach and coupled with my physical exhaustion, it did a number on me quickly.

  To the left of the stage was a neon lighted sign that proclaimed Wall of Fame over a scad of framed pictures of music celebrities who have played the club. As I studied the photos, I wondered if Dan was in one of them by now, and if not yet, then soon. And yet I also thought about the lives of others that I knew and how things had changed radically in the last few decades. And how, given enough time with the passage of the years, the flesh sags, marriages can fail or go cold, businesses can go bust, health fails, and then the end comes. I must have been in the clutches of the Dark ’N Stormy view of life.