Remote Witness

No part of the body was neglected by the crime scene photographer, no angle ignored. The vivid splotches of red that conspicuously relieved the death pallor made Corey Hamel wince. The body fell from view as Hamel dropped the eight by tens and rubbed his puffy eyes. Two Boston City detectives sitting across the small capstan table displayed the inhuman patience peculiar only to snipers, serial killers and cops.

The waves softly rocking the houseboat always soothed Hamel no matter what he was doing at the moment. The lapping tongue of the Atlantic made Salem Harbor the perfect venue for his needs. And, save for one notorious exception, virtually all of Salem’s high profile crimes were committed back in 1692.

Hamel greatly preferred white-collar crimes and marital infidelity cases these days, another advantage to living in quaint old Salem, Massachusetts. The potential for violence was nil to zip.

It was the police consultations that he hated. When his former colleagues at the Boston PD or, God help him, the FBI came knocking at his cabin door, Hamel knew that it wasn’t for his input on a purse snatching.

Today was no exception. But even ex-cops had to eat.

Boston Homicide detectives Wang and O’Leary continued displaying their almost inhuman patience. But the cracks in it were beginning to show through Wang’s fidgeting. He occasionally opened and closed his mouth like a mackerel out of water. Hamel didn’t know him. The burly black detective to his left he did.

Hamel forced himself to again look at the full-figure shot of the woman’s corpse. Every once in a while, he would rub the exhaustion out of his hazel-green eyes with the effect of shooing a persistent fly. The nightmares had played hell with him again last night and Hamel was dangerously close to buying a bottle of Nytol since the sandman had been on sabbatical these past three nights. The only reason he hadn’t was because he hated drugs of any kind.

Okay, down to business. As with any other such case, Hamel took stock of the abstract data that could be gleaned from the crime scene photos, autopsy reports, etc. Then, after determining the victim’s sex, ethnic background, cause of death, and so forth, he would whittle down the facts to the minutest detail, from the positioning and presentation of the body, if any, all the way down to biographical tidbits.

As a Quantico-trained profiler, Hamel could see right off that the body had been staged. Obviously, the Boston City Homicide boys knew that, too- they just couldn’t make heads or tails of the clues left by the killer.

Heads? Wait a minute… Hamel had been given a short reprieve from his exhaustion.

“Which way was her head pointing when you found her, Bill?”

Detective Sergeant Bill O’Leary reached across to retrieve the folder, allowing Hamel to see a small frown reflected in the immaculately polished brass center of the antique capstan table. Only part of the detective’s frown was attributable to thought. Part of it was also due to irritation. Hamel didn’t need psychic abilities to divine that the dyspeptic O'Leary was thinking, "Why the fuck doesn't he read the damned reports?" Ordinarily, he would’ve by now. But Corey Hamel wasn’t feeling very cooperative at the moment. Who would on four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two?

“The coroner didn’t come right out and say that the head was at one point of the compass or the other”, he replied, leafing through the report. But I seem to recall at the crime scene that when I was on her left… yeah, the sun was in my eyes, so…” Another quick check at the crime scene report confirmed this.

“…The woman’s head was turned to the right, or east.” Another peek at the crime scene photo and the golden light wasted on her dead face confirmed this.

“So, what does that mean?” asked Wang, his Asian inscrutability crumbling like a sandcastle at high tide.

Hamel decided to ignore the question for the moment. “Did the victim have a history of alcoholism?”

Wang glanced at O’Leary as if silently asking for permission to talk. O’Leary nodded almost invisibly and Wang simply replied, “Yes.”

Hamel nodded as if he was down to the final two pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. “Did she have a history of marital infidelity?”

Wang looked at his partner more sharply at this time but the black detective fielded this one. “Yeah, how’ja know that?” Looking slyly at his younger partner.

The ex-cop gently placed the last pictures ever taken of this woman save for the autopsy ones in front of his old friend.

“I think your killer is Muslim.”

The two detectives exchanged glances then turned them on Hamel. Even Bill O’Leary was taken aback.

“Muslim? You got that from a few Polaroids?”

“Uh huh. You see, the first thing that tipped me off was the staging of the body, particularly the head.”

“The body was obviously staged. We didn’t miss that,” Wang started defensively.

“I didn’t think so. What you guys wanted to know was why she was staged like she was.” Hamel kept referring to the victim as “she” because he’d pointedly refused to look at the case file. He didn’t want to know her name or anything about her that didn’t pertain to the investigation. Knowing this poor woman’s name wouldn’t help either him or the Boston cops one iota in solving her murder. “Look at her head. It’s pointed to the east…”

“…to Mecca,” said O’Leary. Light dawns on Marblehead.

“Exactly. I recall reading a while back that when they buried Malcolm X in ’65, they did so with his head turned to the east, so he’d look at Mecca for all eternity. That’s very much in keeping with Islamic funereal tradition.

“Next thing that tipped me off was when you told me that she was an alcoholic. I got an inkling of this by looking at her nose in the full facial shot. It was a little on the red side, even after lividity. Broken capillaries in the nose is a hallmark trait of the heavy drinker.”

“The ME said the toxicology showed large traces of alcohol in her bloodstream,” offered O’Leary. “But what does that have to do with her killer being Islamic?”

“Jesus, don’t you guys know anything about alternative religions? Bill, you really tell the Commissioner to hire more religious minorities.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it”, he said, plainly saying between the lines, Get the fuck on with it.

“Muslims are forbidden by their religion to drink alcohol. The guy that did her was probably incensed by her drinking habits.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the NOW generation. Women’s Liberation told millions of American females that they, too, may get lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver just the good old boys. Why her, though?”

“I don’t know, but when you said that she also had a history of marital infidelity, that probably set him off more than anything. Up until recently, female adultery in Islamic countries was punishable by death.”

O’Leary secretly smiled and Hamel knew that he was thinking of his own estranged wife, from whom he was petitioning divorce, for just that very same thing. Hamel imagined that O’Leary was fantasizing about LaTasha being lead to a chopping block, hands and ankles manacled and surrounded by angry men dressed like Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. He didn’t think that O’Leary would be including in his fantasy the lonely nights she’d spent at their Brookline home that would lead to her affair with a firefighter ten years younger than either of them. Had to hand it to her, though- LaTasha was consistent, having always adored men in uniform. While they were both cops, O’Leary would wonder aloud to Corey whether her declining interest in him when he made plainclothes detective was a coincidence. Hamel was always too tactful to answer in either the negative or the affirmative.

“Well, there are plenty of women out there that drink heavily and cheat on their husbands. Go to any gin mill between eight and two at night,” said Wang.

“True enough. I don’t why he targeted her. Perhaps it’s a personal thing.”

“What about the Jack the Ripper job on her?”

The disembowelment. Hamel had hoped that neither of them would bring it up again. It was the more sanguine aspects of police work that contributed to Hamel’s retirement. Well, the police shrink had some input, too.

“I don’t know about that.”

O’Leary gave him a look of utter shock. “So, that’s it? You tell us our guy is a Muslim and then just leave it at that?”

“Consider it a freebie, then. Look, Bill,” and he looked at Wang so he wouldn’t feel ignored, “I haven’t had two consecutive fucking hours of sleep in the last three days.”

“I told you to keep seeing the shrink, man. You know your insurance will cover it.” O’Leary knew about the nightmares. Hamel wondered if he’d told his new partner.

“The shrink didn’t do shit for me except sign the paper that got me out.” O’Leary had given Hamel some half-serious shit about copping out on a disability claim when he didn’t think that he was no more disabled than half the fuckups in the Greater Boston area.

“Alright, man, but it’s obvious that you’re not giving your all here.”

“I know that.” O’Leary was waiting for the real show to begin but Hamel wasn’t about to give it to either of them. Those days were over and done with. “Now, allow me to ask you guys a question- Why her? Robbery-Homicide must have at least twenty-five, fifty unsolved murders going on right now. What’s so special about her that you’re going to an outside consultant?”

Consultant. That was a good one.

“Well, if you’d read the reports,” Wang said, pushing the manila folder to Hamel, “you’d already know that.”

Shit. Hamel looked at the pristine folder, one that was just started yesterday morning mere hours after this girl’s body was found. Hamel would look at the box of empty folders near his desk at Robbery-Homicide and wonder whose death would fill them, and what horrors the clean, rigid quasi-cardboard of the folders were awaiting.

While consulting on cases, and they were always murder cases, Lt. Corey Hamel, Boston PD, Ret. would make it a point not to know the victim’s identity. By depersonalizing the victim in a way not unlike a serial killer, he could achieve some distance, some emotional objectivity that was far more conducive to ratiocination than familiarity. As far as he cared or knew, they were all named John or Jane Doe.

Hamel again looked at the folder proffered by Wang, whose first name he also didn’t care to know. The kid wore too much styling gel or mousse in his long crewcut hair, producing numerous tiny white bald spots on his head that Hamel couldn’t help staring at. He also had an arrogance and a confidence that should’ve worn off in his rookie year but that had, annoyingly, remained intact.

So Corey Hamel opened the envelope to find out why this victim merited his unique talents.

Name: Marissa Gonsalves-Malden. Second Generation Portuguese-American. Parents both from the Azores. No siblings, no children, married to Staff Sergeant Ronald Malden, USAF. Cheated on her husband a total of 12 times between June 20th last year and until 36 hours ago. Traces of semen could be found in her vagina, belonging to a tall, angular man with multiple tattoos, name… name… name… Edward Linehan. No, McClanahan. Lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Divorced, three kids, two girls, one boy, generally preys on single mothers and lonely housewives.

Marissa loved to walk along the beach, make love on the beach with both her husband and Edward, she would put shells to her ears and listen to the far-off waves and pretend that they were siren songs, knowing full well that they were merely distorted echoes of the pounding surf.

She was the daughter of a concrete contractor heavily involved in the Big Dig. Mr. Gonsalves was a friend of the Boston Police Commissioner. The killer’s face rushed to his own, the last thing Marissa Gonsalves-Malden ever saw…

Corey Hamel had never opened the folder. He screamed, pushed the chair back and stood up so fast the blood rushed out of his head.

“You bastards! Which one of you did this?!”

O’Leary looked at Hamel with genuine alarm then with suspicion at Wang.

“Steve, tell me you didn’t…?”

“I didn’t think he’d react like this. Frankly, I thought that nothing would happen. I always thought that psychometry was a load of horse shit, anyway.”

“You asshole! Didn’t I tell you never to do this to Hamel? There are rules to this, Goddamnit! Look, Corey, man, I had no fucking idea he was gonna pull this shit on you.”

“You took the folder from her apartment, didn’t you, Wang?”

“Y-yeah.” Looking with guilt more at O’Leary than Hamel.

“You fucking asshole… get out. The both of you…”

He was leaning on the capstan table now, more for support than anything. He waited for the blood to return to his head. He saw his own golden, distorted reflection now in the brass and hated what he saw. A weakling, unable to face a gift that God had given him. A weakling, unable to confront a curse given to him by the Devil.

O’Leary got up from the captain’s chair that was one of four surrounding the tiny table. Tugging on the sleeve of Wang’s jacket, all he said was “C’mon, man. Let’s go. Look, Hamel, for what it’s worth, dude, I had nothing to do with this. You know I wouldn’t have pulled a fast one on you like this. You know that. Right?”

Hamel didn’t give him the satisfaction of answering or even nodding his head. He’d hoped that his silent rage was enough of a signal to tell both men that it was time to go. Now. O’Leary was perceptive enough to take the hint.

Just as Wang opened the cabin door, Hamel blurted out, “The guy you’re looking for isn’t a serial. This is just a crime of passion. He runs a health food store in the Back Bay area, Cairo… Cairo Health Foods. He’s an Egyptain named Ahmad Yusef.” After giving them the address, obtained also from the Gonsalves personal property, Hamel simply said, “Get out.”

O’Leary knew better than to thank Hamel in his present state of mind. After collecting the tainted folder both men were gone to leave Corey Hamel to his own personal demons.

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