Tilt-a-Whirl (The John Ceepak Mysteries)

  I do as I'm told.

  Just like in junior high gym class.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I've never seen a dead body before.

  Well, I saw my grandfather's at his funeral, but he was all dressed up in a suit and tie and lying in his coffin. He even had on make-up, something he wouldn't have been caught dead doing when he was alive.

  The weirdest part was his hair.

  Grandpa always had a crewcut flattop, a holdover from World War II. The funeral director didn't know my grandfather, so he slicked his bristly hair over to the side and grandpa didn't look like grandpa any more.

  I'm thinking about this stuff because I don't want to think about what's waiting for me down at the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  Reginald Hart's dead body.

  One of our guys, Sergeant Dominic Santucci, had snapped off the padlock on Playland's front gate with this humongous wire-cutter tool, so I didn't have to scale the fence. He's stationed at the gate to wait for the state police and the medical examiner and “the meat wagon,” as he called it. Santucci's a hardass and wants everybody to know it.

  I walk down the pathway. Past the Sunnyside Clyde garbage cans where you stuff your trash into Mr. Sunbeam's wide-open mouth. Past Pirate Pete's Pretzels. Past the Sea Dragon, past the Water Balloon Pistols, past the Knock ’Em Down.

  Down to the Tilt-A-Whirl and my first dead body.

  I've heard stories about how cops love to initiate rookies; love to bust a gut laughing while they watch the new guy lose his cookies when he sees his first fresh corpse. Santucci was cracking gum and smirking when he let me in the gate.

  “What'd you eat for breakfast, kid?” he asked. “Never mind. Don't tell me. We'll see soon enough.”

  Then he laughed his Dominic-the-Donkey laugh and cracked his gum some more.

  I come to the entrance to the Tilt-A-Whirl, wishing there was a long line ahead of me.

  There isn't. And I'm tall enough to ride this ride.

  “Ceepak?”

  “In here,” he says. “Careful where you step, Danny.”

  I'm sweating. My mouth is dry but sticky.

  Ceepak meets me on the pathway.

  “Danny?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I know you've never done this before. Never seen a dead body. But you don't have to act brave. Not for me, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He steps aside.

  Behind him, I can see a blue-faced man slumped in a green plastic seat. His eyes are wide open. His mouth, too. His shirt is splotched with red paintballs, only they aren't paintballs—they're bursts of blood.

  “This way,” Ceepak says.

  He grabs my elbow and hustles me back up the path, over to these bushes on the other side of the main walkway, over near an ice cream cart.

  I puke.

  Ceepak props me up when my knees go wobbly.

  If he wasn't there, I think I would fall face-first into my own vomit.

  “Her name is Ashley.”

  Five minutes later, I'm doing like Ceepak suggested. I'm staying “emotionally detached.” This isn't a dead guy, this is evidence. I'll save my emotions for later, for when we're hunting down the rat bastard who did this.

  “Ashley?” I say, my voice cracking a little.

  “Roger that.”

  Ceepak holds up his clue: a letter-block ID bracelet.

  “It was snagged on a bolt.” He points inside the Tilt-A-Whirl car.

  “Great,” I croak. “Good.” My voice sounds steadier.

  “You're doing fine, Danny.”

  I nod.

  My thighs aren't quivering any more, so I step back and study the Turtle-Twirl Tilt-A-Whirl.

  I think Sunnyside Clyde had this ride custom-made. Either that, or he bought it second-hand from Sea World. The seven cars are molded to look like giant green turtles sitting up on their haunches. Rounded fiberglass shells form the car backs; funny-face turtle heads jut out up top, making a little canopy.

  “She sat on the right-hand side,” Ceepak says. I nod. I think Ceepak just needs to say what he's thinking out loud so he'll remember it later.

  He's wearing lint-free gloves so he won't contaminate any evidence. He keeps the gloves tucked into the upper-right hip pocket of his cargo pants. Ceepak brought a box of these gloves to the station back in June and suggested that everybody “keep a pair handy.”

  Yeah. Right. Like any of the guys were going to wear sweaty gloves in the middle of the summer. I took a pair just because I knew Ceepak was watching. I think they're still in my sock drawer.

  Ceepak paces around the turtle. He starts mumbling.

  “‘That tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag, I got on it last night and my shirt got caught….’”

  He's sort of half-singing, half-muttering a snippet from Bruce Springsteen's 4th of July, Asbury Park. Today's the tenth of July, but I think the karaoke routine helps Ceepak think.

  “Interesting.” He's looking at the safety bar on the car. It's up.

  “What?”

  “Blood spray.”

  I look at the metal bar. I see red dots clustered in the area in front of Reginald Hart's slumped body like somebody flicked a wet paintbrush at it. The guy's body is riddled with bullets. I count five, six before I'm almost ready to run to the bushes again.

  Ceepak is sniffing the air.

  “Checking for transient evidence,” he says. “Smells don't last.”

  “When do you think … you know?”

  “Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. Of course, I'm merely speculating based on observable rigor mortis….”

  Ceepak leans inside the car and sniffs again, about six inches from the dead guy's head. I look the other way.

  “Vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood,” he says. “Fascinating.”

  “What?”

  “Young Ashley purchases her perfume from Victoria's Secret. Or….”

  “Someone else was out here?” I catch on quick.

  “We need the yellow tape. Digital camera. My crime-scene kit.”

  I stand there nodding, assuming that's what I'm supposed to do.

  “They're in the Explorer. Cargo hold?”

  “Great. I'll go get 'em.” Like I said, I catch on quick.

  “Danny?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “See if Cosgrove can cut loose some troops. We need to seal the site, cordon off the area. Streetside. Beachside.”

  “Right.”

  “And Danny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don't walk there. Could be latent evidence underfoot.” He points to the center of the asphalt trail winding from the Tilt-A-Whirl back to the main pedestrian pathway. “We go out the way we came in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I look down to see if we left any footprints on our earlier run for the shrubs. We didn't, so I improvise, gingerly lifting my legs and tiptoeing like I'm some kind of sneaky stork.

  While I hustle up to our vehicle, I remember how the Tilt-A-Whirl used to be my favorite ride—back before I discovered the fried food group and swore off any ride that involved stomach-churning centrifugal force.

  But when I was a kid, I loved how the Tilt-A-Whirl could surprise you. How it spun you around one way and the next time you hit the exact same spot, it spun you around some way completely different. Sometimes the cars would stutter between moves; sometimes they'd start swinging in one direction, then shift to another. You never knew what to expect next.

  I remember this day in math class.

  We'd all seen Jurassic Park hundreds of times and were asking for an explanation of the “Chaos Theory” Jeff Goldblum's mathematician character kept yammering about when he really should have been keeping an eye peeled for dinosaurs. Our teacher quoted this article by a guy named Ivars Peterson and told us about the Tilt-A-Whirl and its geometry of a circular platform with cars that pivot freely along a track of hills and how, if the operator keeps the whole thing going at the proper speed of 6.5 revolutions per minut
e, it's practically impossible to predict what will happen next as you spin around and around and around.

  The teacher called it “mind-jangling unpredictability.” Chaos Theory in action, for two tickets a ride.

  When I return with the gear and a couple rolls of “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape, Ceepak points at a wallet lying on the Tilt-A-Whirl platform.

  “It's Hart's.”

  He takes the digital camera and starts snapping pictures. Tons of them. Like our Reginald is the cover boy for Grisly Crime Scene Magazine.

  The wind starts kicking up.

  “Wind might contaminate the evidence,” Ceepak says. He retrieves a pair of surgical-looking tweezers from his crime-scene attaché case and bends down to pick up the wallet. There's a driver's license lying near it. He picks that up too.

  He places them separately into small paper bags he's taken out of his upper left cargo-pants pocket. He keeps a miniature magnifying glass in another pocket near his knee. He must need to reload his pants first thing every morning.

  “I thought police used baggies for evidence,” I say, trying to talk about anything other than the dead guy in front of us riddled with holes where his life leaked out.

  “Plastic sweats, and the moisture could contaminate the evidence. Paper is better.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “The perpetrator didn't take the credit cards, but he thought about it.”

  Ceepak points to a scruffy bush across from the footpath, about six feet from where he found the wallet. I think it must have been some shade of evergreen before the sun bleached out all the color. There's an Amex and two Visas stuck in the branches.

  “We can speculate, from the discarded driver's license and credit cards, that the perpetrator discovered his victim's identity.”

  Yeah. Reggie Hart. One of the richest men in the world.

  Ceepak tells me to tape off the area around the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  “We want to keep it clean for the State Boys.”

  The “State Boys” are the guys from the State Police Major Crime Unit. A town like Sea Haven, which I don't think has ever hosted a murder before, doesn't have all the people necessary to run a proper crime-scene investigation, so the state police send in the MCU when something major goes down.

  I try to figure out how to unroll and string the yellow tape without ruining evidence. I keep my eyes down on the dirt but look up now and then to see if Ceepak's watching, see if he's okay with my crime-scene tape-rolling technique.

  “Make sure you seal off down there.”

  Ceepak points to the chain-link fence where Playland meets the beach. Some kids and an old dude with a metal detector are up in the dune grass watching us. It's about 8 A.M. The kids carry bright red buckets and were probably looking for seashells. The old guy? Hunting for nickels, dimes, and Rolexes.

  “We'll want to canvass the beach,” Ceepak says. “Check for witnesses.”

  “Right.”

  I can see a little tunnel burrowed out of the sand under the fence. Must be where the Harts snuck in. I find it kind of funny.

  I mean, if Reginald Hart liked having early morning chitchats with his daughter in a Tilt-A-Whirl car shaped like a giant sea turtle, why didn't he just buy the damn ride and set it up in his back yard, like Michael Jackson?

  But I guess Hart got a buzz out of breaking the rules, doing things people said he shouldn't do.

  I step across the hole, sideways. It's pretty deep. I can see rocks and pebbles in the manmade gulley. On the other side of the fence, the hole ends under a sand-covered square of plywood. About two feet by two feet. It's a tunnel door—like in one of those prison escape movies.

  I turn to tell Ceepak what I see.

  He's on the pathway, holding a bright red beach bag with that big-mouthed monkey on the front like they sell at the fancy-schmancy shops on Ocean Avenue. I think the monkey's name is Julius. Anyway, the beach bag doesn't match Ceepak's shoes, so I figure it must be Ashley's.

  “It's Ashley's,” Ceepak says, confirming my hunch and holding up the bag's straps with a ballpoint pen. “She must've dropped it.”

  Can you blame the kid?

  Your father starts spewing blood like a berserk lawn sprinkler, you'd drop your beach bag too.

  Ceepak puts the bag back where he found it and looks toward the ocean.

  “Did they rake the beach this morning?”

  I turn to check the sand on the other side of the fence. It's all smooth, with furrows running in parallel lines.

  “Yeah. Looks like.”

  Sea Haven is very proud of its pristine beaches. That's how I know they call them “pristine”—it's the word they use on the back of every postcard.

  A few years ago, the town fathers bought a Surf Rake 600, a tractor-towed contraption that actually vacuums up the trash people dump on the beach and leaves the sand behind it smooth and silky. I know all this because my buddy Joe Thalken drives the tractor. Poor guy has to crawl out of bed around 5:30 so the early-morning joggers will have pristine sand to run on as advertised. I don't know when Joey T. sweeps this particular section of the beach, but I'm sure we'll find out. I see Ceepak making a note, and I know it says something like “Possible Witness: Beach Sweeper.”

  He looks down at the asphalt walkway ringing the ride and spots something. He gets down on his hands and knees and pulls out his magnifying glass. I don't think he's going to torture ants.

  Meanwhile, I need to find a place to pee.

  I'm not proud of this, but I need to take a leak.

  Now.

  I had grabbed a big tub of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts on my way to the police station to pick up the car this morning. Then I poured myself a thick half-cup from the stale pot the late shift must have brewed twelve hours earlier—it had been sitting so long, the glass bottom was kind of glued to the warmer plate. Plus, I had that coffee at The Pancake Palace.

  Like I said, I need to pee.

  I check Ceepak one more time.

  He's still on all fours, moving away, heading toward the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  Lucky for me, Sunnyside Clyde put up this big plywood portrait of himself behind the bushes across from the ride. I think it's there so you don't see whatever's hiding behind it.

  I crouch low and find a hole through the hedges.

  If I'm quick about it, I can relieve myself and Ceepak will never know.

  Now I see why they put the cartoon wall up: to block the dumpster. It's one of those rolling trapezoidal trash bins. You know—it's not square. Got that slanty part up front for tipping the load, like the big Rubbermaid tubs hotels use for rolling around dirty towels. This one's filled with black plastic trash bags, but the park porters must've been short on twist-ties: the bags are all hanging open.

  Flies are buzzing everywhere, dive-bombing the Hefties, searching for half-squeezed ketchup packs and sticky cotton-candy cones. I'm too busy swatting flies to unzip my shorts. I'm fanning the air around my head and looking down at the ground.

  I see boot prints.

  They look like the prints I make when I go to the mountains every winter.

  When I'm wearing my Timberlands.

  Who wears Timberlands in July? On the beach?

  “Ceepak?”

  There are broken syringes near the boot prints.

  I think I might've found something for Ceepak to look at with his magnifying glass.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dr. Sandra McDaniels is the Chief Crime Scene Investigator for the state's Major Crimes Unit. She's also a genius. At least that's what Ceepak says.

  “The lady wrote the book.”

  He means it.

  Ceepak studied her textbooks in criminology college and keeps one of her field manuals tucked into the little map pocket on his side of the Ford. Sandra McDaniels solved the famous Ocean Town Slasher case that almost closed down the casinos eight years back. She figured it all out with carpet fibers and fruit flies.

  “Forensic entomology,” Ceepak told me.

/>   McDaniels studied temperature readings to calculate the hatch time for fruit fly eggs found on a corpse, and that helped her pinpoint the time of death, and that sealed the Slasher's fate by blowing his alibi.

  Don't ask me how. McDaniels is the one who wrote the book, not me.

  Unfortunately, Dr. McDaniels is at her annual family reunion in Arizona, which is like three or four thousand miles away on the wrong side of the country to do us any good.

  So we pull somebody else.

  Somebody we can hear stomping around on the Tilt-A-Whirl platform.

  “Hello?” a voice hollers. “Hello?” Then the guy hocks a loogie. “Where the fuck are you guys?”

  We're busy back in the bushes, examining the needles and boot prints. You know how pine trees drop a carpet of brown needles in the fall? There's a tree back here that sheds hypodermics. They're everywhere.

  Ceepak told me the Timberland imprints I found back here match some muddy prints he noticed up on the platform. It hasn't rained in a couple days, but there's a puddle where they roll the trash bin in and out. The water comes from a broken lawn-sprinkler head that doesn't flick around like it's supposed to (otherwise the bushes ringing the walkway wouldn't look so dead): It just dribbles and makes a nice big puddle for mosquito eggs and bootprints.

  We hear a radio squawk on the other side of the shrubs. “Sea Haven? Come in. This is MCU. Who the fuck did you idiots post out here?”

  “At the crime scene?”

  I recognize our dispatcher's voice coming out of the guy's radio. It's the only way I do recognize her voice—squeezed through a tinny speaker.

  “Yes, the fucking crime scene. Jesus. I told you I'm with MCU.”

  “Officer Ceepak should be there now,” the dispatcher says.

  “Well, guess what? He isn't!”

  “Back here!” Ceepak calls out. “Just a second.”

  “Take your fucking time,” the guy says sarcastically. “I got all fucking day.” We hear the thud of metal hitting plastic, like he just tossed his walkie-talkie into one of the twirling turtles.

  Ceepak picks up one last dirty syringe with his tweezers. There's blood in it, like a junkie pulled out on the plunger right after he pushed in. I didn't write the book, but I gotta figure a tube with somebody's blood sample in it should give you some mighty fine DNA.