Resurrexit

This story was written for a Murder Mystery Challenge ... the story sentences had to start with the letter A and proceed through the alphabet, omitting X and Z.

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4:00 am
As San Francisco PD Homicide Inspector Dane Ramsey parked his Ford in a spot between a patrol car and the large forensics van, he tried to forget his disturbing lunch date with his partner, Inspector Samantha Green, and focus instead on the task at hand ... a murder in Golden Gate Park. Barring the entrance to the Steinhart Aquarium, yellow police-issue boundary tape fluttered gently in the late-night ocean breeze. Catching the tape in one hand, the Inspector ducked beneath it and walked through the open glass doors, giving his name to the uniformed officer who stood just within.

Dane strolled through the aquarium's foyer, glancing down into the swampy habitat of the crocodile pit that graced that room, before turning into one of the darkened hallways lined with fish tanks. Everywhere he looked, brilliantly hued denizens of the deep, both large and small, traversed their tanks with frictionless ease or simply hung, motionless, returning his stare with bug-eyed indifference. Fishsticks ... memories of the lunch-gone-wrong with Samantha at Neptune's Restaurant, once again drifted through Dane's mind, unbidden.

Glad enough to have another loner like Samantha as a partner, Dane had found it easy to keep an emotional distance from her, just as he had with everyone since his wife's death. He hadn't expected Samantha's lunch invitation and was even less prepared for the way she acted during their meal ... it was as though she needed to tell him something very important yet feared to do so ... she seemed to crave an intimacy he'd worked so hard to avoid. Ill at ease, he'd let her see his dismayed resistance and she'd left in the middle of the lunch, upset. Jarred, Dane felt the first of a series of cracks in his emotional defenses ... he didn't like the feeling.

Knitting his brows, Dane pushed these useless thoughts aside and noticed that the fish tank-studded corridor through which he walked was exiting into a large circular room holding a beautifully engineered rendition of a coastal tide pool. Left and right, around the room, forensic investigators crouched, collecting trace evidence, dusting for prints, snapping documentation photos ... Mark Douglas, a beat cop with whom Dane was acquainted, came forward upon seeing him, notebook in hand.

"Mark, what have we got?" Dane asked as he stepped over to the tide pool, glancing down. Numerous layers of kelp fronds swirled underwater, set in motion by the skittering of tiny hermit crabs ... barnacles and delicate sea stars clung to rocky outcropping. On the edge of one of those outcropping, half submerged in the tide pool, what looked like a ragged piece of scalp with short blond hair attached, lay bobbing in a diluted wash of blood.

"Pearson and I arrived here around 3:30 am," began Officer Douglas, flipping through his notes, "and found signs of a struggle in the tide pool and a DB in a tank in another part of the aquarium."

Quickly locating a forensic kit, Dane took out a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on before picking up the scalp fragment for examination. Repressing a sigh, he wondered if he'd ever become inured to such sights. Swallowing dryly, he carefully set the macabre particle back where he'd found it and turned to Douglas.

Tempering the desire to wipe the blood from his gloved hands, Dane said, "Let's see the body."

"Um, you here on your own?" Douglas asked, as he lead Dane through more labyrinthian tank-lined corridors to the location of the corpse.

Vague feelings of foreboding, roused by the mention of Samantha's absence, tugged at Dane's consciousness but he simply shrugged. "Well, I believe she had some personal business to attend to. You know how it is when ... "

As they approached a huge tank built into one wall, Dane's voice died away, his sentence unfinished, as he tried to make sense of the tableau before him.

Brown colored fish with red underbellies floated, torpid, in murky blood-tinged water, their half-foot long bodies bloated and engorged. Countless sea weeds near the bottom of the tank gently swayed and Dane caught a glimpse of a diver engrossed in some task. Digging down, the wet-suited figure grasped something and then rose above the sea weeds, dragging a skeletonized corpse along with him to the surface.

Eyeing the diver's grotesque burden, Officer Douglas shook his head, visibly disturbed. "For what it's worth, contrary to popular belief, it's not blood in the water that sends piranha into a feeding frenzy but the prey item's frantic efforts to escape ... when the killer threw our vic in that tank, he or she was still alive."

7:00 am
Graced with a smear of peppermint oil on his upper lip, Dane was still stunned by the pungent odor of the bony corpse on the autopsy table. He tore his eyes from the remains, focusing on the ME instead, as he asked, "Have you made a positive identification yet, Doc?"

Ignatius Morgan, pathologist and medical examiner for the city of San Francisco, shook his head as he bent over the body. "Just need some more time ... not a lot to work with here and it takes a while to match up dental records," he muttered, shaking his head.

Knuckling his eyes tiredly, Dane asked, "What dowe know?"

"Less than I'd like but, keeping in mind that some of this is guesswork, the bones of the skeleton tell me that this is a woman between the ages of twenty-one and forty, sixty-five inches in height and, thanks to the fragment of scalp recovered, Caucasian with blond hair."

Making a vain attempt to escape the body's stench by breathing through his mouth, Dane frowned, disappointed.

"Nancy Logan is coming in from the LAPD crime lab in a few days ... she's a forensic anthropologist," Morgan offered. "Once we apply the new computer program she's bringing along, we'll have a facsimile of our vic's face ... the program can reconstruct 3D facial images from lasar-scanned skulls."

Peering down at the ravaged corpse, Dane used his imagination to drape it in female flesh ... young, pale skin, short blond hair ... perhaps blue eyes like Samantha's. Queasy, he broke off that line of thought.

Reading something odd in Dane's mood, Morgan asked, "This is the second body from Golden Gate Park, isn't it?"

"Second ... yes. The first was found garroted and floating under the Moon bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden just a couple of weeks ago. Under questioning, I found one guy, Ed Hirsh, who looked good for the murder ... a groundskeeper at the park. ... but Samantha had mixed feelings about his guilt"

Vastly intrigued by this, the medical examiner peeled off his latex gloves and motioned to his assistant to prepare the skeletonized remains for refrigeration before he turned back to Dane. "Well, did you arrest him despite Samantha's misgivings, and if so, how could he have done this latest murder while incarcerated?"

Yawning, Dane rubbed a hand over his face and then apologized, saying, "Sorry, I've been up since 4:00 am. As it turned out, we didn't arrest the guy because he had an alibi for the time of the murder ... but Samantha was going over to the park late yesterday afternoon to try to shake him out of it." Capturing a tissue from a nearby box, Dane wiped the peppermint oil from his lip as he headed for the door.

"Dane, I meant to ask ... where isSamantha? Even when the going here gets as gruesome, she's usually the first to show up for an autopsy."

Frowning as he walked out the door, Dane said, "That's a very good question, Doc."

4:00 pm
Glancing around, Dane walked through the brick and wrought iron gates at the entrance to the Garden of Shakespeare's Flowers in Golden Gate Park. Here grew many of the flowers mentioned in the works of Shakespeare and Dane was aware of the irony of seeking a killer in this place of beauty and peace. Impatient, he strode down the brick walkway, past the large sundial, towards the back of the garden where he'd been told Hirsh was working, all the while worrying about Samantha ... she'd never turned up at work and her apartment had been empty. Just at the edge of a circular brick-paved area, he saw the man he sought, Ed Hirsh, shoveling earth around a newly planted rose bush.

Knocking damp dirt from his shovel, Hirsh looked up with a smile as Dane approached, asking, "What can I do for you, Inspector?"

Leaning against a tree in a forced effort at calmness, Dane crossed his arms over his chest and said, "I want to hear about your interview with my partner yesterday ... that, and where you were last night at about 3:00 am."

"Mind if I smoke?" asked the tall young groundskeeper as he took out a cigarette and lit up, inhaling deeply. "Nice looking woman, your partner, but I'm sure you don't need me to remind you of that fact ... big blue eyes, blonde hair and breasts that ... "

Ominous in his expression, Dane uncrossed his arms and stepped forward, effectively ending Hirsh's colorful description of Samantha.

Pausing to crush out his cigarette, Hirsh cut to the chase under Dane's cold stare, saying, "Yeah, she was here asking about my alibi for that killing in the Japanese Tea Garden."

Quietly, Dane prodded, "And ...?"

Raising nonchalant brows, Hirsh said, "I told her that my wife was my alibi ... that I was home at that time, in bed with her. Same thing's true for last night at 3:00 am."

"Tell me, did Inspector Green say where she was going when she left you?"

"Uh, let me think ..." began Hirsh, his smile back as he leaned on the shovel's handle.

Vague feelings of unease crystallized in a micro-second as Dane suddenly recognized the ring on on Hirsh's little finger ... it was Samantha's. With a curse muttered under his breath, the Inspector lunged at the groundskeeper, but the other man lashed out with his shovel and brought Dane to his knees. A second blow rendered the Inspector unconscious.

9:00 pm
Breathing irregular, heart thumping, Dane sat in his car, parked at the edge of Ocean Beach on San Francisco's west shore, afraid. Carried to the emergency room after Hirsh's attack, he'd spent wasted futile hours there, trying to find Samantha or Hirsh through others. Dane had then spent more hours, once released from the hospital, looking up Hirsh's cronies, hoping to find information leading to his whereabouts ... and had learned of this bolt hole Hirsh and his wife kept in the cliff caves near the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

Every beat of his wild heart caused a corresponding throb at the wound in his temple, but he didn't mind the pain. Focusing on that pain helped to dull the fear that kept him seated in the car when he should be searching the caves.
Grimly, he acknowledged that it wasn't a showdown with Hirsh he so feared, nor even the confirmation of his dread that Samantha was now lying, a corpse, in the morgue. He feared most of all that despite Samantha's interest in him, despite her death by murder, he'd remain unchanged ... that the numbness he'd so carefully nurtured since his wife's death would defy and outlast everything.

Impatient, finally, at his reluctance, he left the car. Just a few feet away, waves crashed against sand as the Inspector stalked the beach. Knowing he should hurry, Dane peered towards his goal through the gloom of a night fitfully illuminated by the moon ... the ruins of the Sutro Baths. Lauded in 1896 as the premier Victorian bathing palace, it had been built into the ocean cliffs, later to burn to ruins in 1966... now only the remnants survived ... deep sea-water filled pits and skeletal metal concrete beams.

Moving down the beach towards the ruins and the caves behind them, Dane unholstered his weapon, checking the magazine, moving a round into the chamber and snicking off the safety ... he wanted to be prepared. Nearing the ruins, he began to move behind them in an effort to skirt the rain-slicked treacherous pylons and deep water-filled trenches, but he'd barely made headway before he heard the soft spit of a silenced shot, watched a puff of sand explode at his feet ... Hirsh must have been watching for him.

Over the dunes, from the direction of the caves, a dark figure advanced on the inspector, still shooting his silenced weapon and, not trusting his aim in the dimness, Dane moved toward the ruins for cover. Positioned behind a concrete strut that jutted up from one of the watery trenches, he crouched low, holding on against the spray of the breaking waves, scanning the immediate area for Hirsh. Queerly, what met his gaze was not the figure of an armed man but that of a woman, sitting on one of the metal pylons, facing away from him ... Hirsh's wife ... or? Ruthlessly, Dane crushed the hope that it could somehow be Samantha.

Startled by the whine of a ricocheting bullet, the Inspector peered through the night until he saw another muzzle flash and took aim himself, popping off a few rounds. Then, not bothering to calculate the odds that the woman on the pylon was Hirsh's wife, set to trap him, Dane made a scuttling run for her position. Under the feeble light of the moon, Dane grabbed the woman and turning her, stared into a face he hadn't dared hope to ever see again ... Samantha's.

Very carefully, he pulled her to her feet on the slippery length of metal, keeping a concrete strut between them and Hirsh's position. When he'd finally finished just looking at her and opened his mouth to ask all his myriad questions, declare all his reborn passions, he felt the cold pressure of a pistol muzzle pressed into the back of his neck.

"You step away from her," Hirsh demanded from behind the Inspector, pulling Dane's weapon from his nerveless hand.

Acquiessing reluctantly, Dane cast a worried glance at Samantha and was stunned to see her approach Hirsh, to be enfolded in a rough one-armed embrace.

Before the Inspector could comment, Hirsh let go of Samantha and began pushing Dane backwards towards the end of the pylon where one of the deepest watery pits surged ferociously with the ocean's waves. Carefully balancing on the slimy narrow metal surface, Dane retreated step by step, all the while his mind spinning out one flawed plan after another, until he had nowhere left to go. Determined to at least die with his questions answered, he turned to Samantha as Hirsh raised his pistol.

"Evidently, I seriously misjudged the situation," Dane began, raising his voice to be heard above the pounding of the surf, "for I thought you and I ..."

Grim faced, Samantha just shook her head, dropped her eyes, clung closer to Hirsh.

Hirsh smiled nastily, apparently mollified by the woman's show of affection, and deigned to answer the Inspector's unasked questions. "It was I who killed that woman in the Japanese Tea Garden ... my wife lied for me about my presence at home."

"Just her ... was she your only victim?" Dane asked.

"Keeping honest, I'd have to say no. Last one was my wife ... banged her head against a rock in that tide pool and tossed her in the piranha tank ... the bitch had decided to turn me in when she found out about me and Samantha."

Making a last attempt with his partner, Dane said, "I'm sorry I wouldn't listen ... the other day at lunch ... I didn't realize ..."

"No more talk," Hirsh shouted, as he cocked his pistol, aimed at Dane and began to squeeze the trigger.

Observing events that seemed to flow in a kind of surreal slow motion, Dane stood breathless as Samantha hugged Hirsh close, coming away with Dane's captured pistol in her hand ... watched himself reach out and easily catch the pistol she threw to him ... watched Hirsh spin ever so slowly to Samantha and blow a hole through her midsection ... watched her fall gracefully into the surging ocean-filled trench. Painful as a slap in the face, time then seemed to snap back to normal and in a matter of seconds, Dane had shot Hirsh and dived into the trench after Samantha.

4:00 am
Quietus ... death. Recumbant on the sands of North Beach, Dane stared out into what was known of as the Red Triangle ... an area of the Pacific Ocean hunted by the great white shark ... and knew the search team would never find Samantha's body. Sadly, he wondered at a world where a murderer like Hirsh would live to stand trial, probably spending a long life in prison, while a victim of loneliness like his former partner would pay full price for one mistake. Then he sighed as words vaguely remembered floated through of his mind, brought forth by the turbulence of the last day ... wake up, arise from the dead... he promised himself and Samantha that somehow he'd do just that.

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