Ben picked up the skeleton.
“I think this is definitely an adult, Molly.”
From his shoulder, she bent down, and tried to reach it with her open beak.
“No.”
He looked up out the window and towards the den light that was still on. Off to the right was Gabe’s room which remained dark.
“Well, at least he’s not a child killer.”
Not that Ben thought he was any sort of killer. But, the fact remained that there was a skeleton lying in some brambles a quarter of a mile away from where Gabe had his bike accident. And, lying only thirty feet from the body was a gun with the initials GH engraved in the handle, the same inscription on Gabe’s other revolvers. “And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Ben could imagine the district attorney animatedly addressing the panel, “this is the same gun that the defendant usually carried when he went biking but could not be found after his accident. Coincidence? The same gun which was missing two bullets from its chamber and was found lying on the ground beneath the skeleton.” This last piece of evidence was pure speculation on Ben’s part as he had no idea about the location of the two missing bullets. Ben hoped that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation which forensics could quickly sort out. But, Gabe’s run-in with the DA two years back did not bode well for a judicious account being reached. Gabe and the District Attorney had butted heads over gun rights and the carrying of a concealed weapon and after fifteen rounds Gabe came out the victor on a technicality. The DA was not happy and Ben was sure he would have a field day with these circumstances. Quadriplegic or not, the DA would probably try to make Gabe’s life as miserable as possible, as if it wasn’t a fairly close second to that at the moment.
Ben wanted to talk with Gabe yesterday about everything he found down in the creek bed, but everyone was beat and Gabe was really having trouble concentrating. Mornings were the best time to communicate with him when he was well rested and feeling the least amount of pain. Of course, the fact that Gabe remembered nothing from that day created quite a challenge. In the meantime, Ben thought he would do some research and maybe come up with something that might be of use when they talked.
Molly nibbled on his ear again, but this time, instead of seeking a belly rub, she seemed to be trying to re-focus Ben’s attention to the computer.
“Hey,” he quietly muttered as he gave her a quick rub before dedicating both hands to the keyboard. He searched for missing persons from ten months back and clicked on an FBI link that filled the screen with thumbnail portraits of faces ranging in age from toddlers to men in their sixties with every race, gender and age in between. Some of the missing went back more than fifteen years. The ones that made Ben’s hair stand on end were those who’s missing date were within the past month or two, as if they were just standing next to him a moment ago and then, just like that, they vanished. Just like in combat, life suddenly disappeared, he was reminded all too easily. The eyes, the smiles, all those faces. Ben was taken aback by the number of photos. Again ambushed.
He clicked on a young attractive looking woman with straight blonde hair. She looked even prettier in the full-sized shot and his heart skipped a beat when he saw the “last seen” date – almost exactly a year ago. Could he have been that lucky – was lucky the right word? – to have stumbled upon the identity of the remains that quickly? Reading further, she was last seen in a state that was several hundred miles away and her shoe was found on the side of the road. That wouldn’t fit…or would it? He assumed that he needed to look for a missing person from the area, but a woman could have easily hitched or traveled down from another state. Or, Gabe could have met the woman out of state and…It seemed too preposterous. Why was he even pursuing this line of thinking? Ben prided himself in his ability to read a person. It seldom failed him and he felt he knew Gabe. Still…
He went back to the thumbnails, looked at the pictures again and then at the hand on the desk. He shook his head in dismay at the assumptions he was allowing himself to fall prey. That was his other characteristic that not only served him well but saved his life and the life of others over in Iraq; never assume anything. Yet, here he was assuming that the skeleton was female. The hand, and what he saw of the lower arm bones, seemed slight and thin. A quick search of the skeleton web sites revealed that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between male and female from a hand, the radius or ulna. If he really wanted to determine the sex of the skeletal hand in front of him, he would have to dig up the pelvis, and even that wasn’t a hundred per cent guarantee.
Ben opened a new window and entered Gabe Hartnett. This wasn’t the first time he Googled Gabe. When offered the job ten months earlier, Ben wanted to have a good idea who he would be so intimately involved with on a daily bases. As happened on his search the first time, Gabby Hartnett, the legendary catcher for the Chicago Cubs in the 1930s, occupied the top line. Gabe’s dad was a huge fan of the Cubs and was thrilled to share the same last name as the star catcher. As Gabe told the story, his dad couldn’t wait to marry and have a son so he could name the offspring Gabby, but his wife wouldn’t go for it so they comprised on Gabe. The most prized possession of his father’s was a baseball glove autographed by Gabby Hartnett which Gabe still had. It was mounted in a glass case that hung on the wall next to a photograph of Hartnett signing a baseball for Al Capone, the same photograph Ben was looking at on the computer; it was hard to tell who was more intrigued with whom. Further down on the screen, another link caught Ben’s eye.
“Huh. Look at this, Molly.”
She leaned in and gave a playful touch of her open beak against his face.
Ben clicked on a Gabe Harnett, missing the middle “t,’ that had been murdered three years ago.
“I didn’t see this last time.”
The murdered Gabe was only twenty-one and the death was drug related. There was an eerie quality staring at the young man, as if somehow this was Gabe’s alter ego, a life of Gabe’s that was waiting to emerge. Even more chilling was the fact that the murdered Gabe was also from Chicago.
Ben moved on to links related to the Gabe Hartnett living next door. Most articles cited his arrest and trial of the gun charges. He perused through them to see if there was anything he may have missed the first time around, something that gave a deeper insight into his past. Nothing stood out. His wishful thinking had him hoping to stumble across a link that would reveal any affairs Gabe had and listing all the women with whom he had been involved; the only list of adulterers were limited to famous people.
As expected, there was no link that revealed Gabe’s work as a software developer for the military. Ben had only learned of that after he started working for him. Nothing especially hush-hush about it, Gabe explained; mostly efficiency software that helped move shipments of all sorts from one place to another in the shortest amount of time. But, when Ben asked him further details, Gabe moved on to another subject as if suddenly realizing that he breached a privacy agreement. It was easy to do, Ben thought. Every quadriplegic he knew was on a slew of drugs and a loose tongue was hard to control.
With some effort, Ben did find a link taking him to the work that made Gabe independently wealthy. After contracting with the government, he turned to the private sector developing software that coordinated elevator cars in large office buildings and hotels. Instead of just pressing the up or down button, a person pressed the floor he wanted to go to and a read-out flashed which car the person should take; it cut waiting by at least fifty percent. Simple, but brilliant. Though, not flashy enough to warrant an easy find when Googling Gabe Hartnett.
All very interesting, Ben thought, but getting him nowhere. He went back to missing persons and searched within the state at a different link. Another page of smiling faces who were missing for years and years to just a few days ago. And then, just shy of ten months. Last seen the day before Gabe’s accident. A young woman. Twenty-six. Alexa Brantley. From a small town just down the road.
Ben rolled the name around in his mind. “Alexa Brantley,” he said softly, repeating it silently and waiting for it to register.
“Why does that name sound familiar, Molly?”
She responded by tugging at his ear and he reached up and stroked her head while he continued staring at the screen at the fuzzy photo of Alexa who stared back from behind a somewhat unkempt mop of shoulder length brown hair, intense dark brown eyes set in a slightly rounded face but with a prominent chin and a gaze that did not approve of being photographed.
“Alexa Brantley,” Ben uttered again.
He picked up the skeletal hand and placed it on his upward facing left palm, thumb to thumb, wrist to wrist, fingers to fingers, its weight barely perceptible. He looked from the hands to Alexa and back to the hands, thinking of the skeleton in the brambles, thinking of Gabe and wondering what kind of mess he was getting himself in. How easy it would be to discard the hand, throw the gun in a lake and that would be the end of it.
“What do you think, Molly?”
She craned her head toward the computer, opened her wings so that the left one pressed up against Ben’s head and let out a loud squawk.
“All right,” he said, going back to the keyboard and resuming his research.
Copyright © 2012 Philip Zweig
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