“Yeah,” Jude said on a yawn. “Lizbet wasn’t feeling well last night. Something disagreed with her tummy. We spent half the night soothing her and the other half cleaning up after her.” Jude shivered. “She and Cope were sleeping peacefully when I left. I’m gonna need a nap before the day is over, that’s for sure. What are we doing with the kids today?”
“We can always spend the day in the pool,” Fitz said. “Call out for pizza or sandwiches and just stay close to home.”
“We could also take the kids to the stores on Essex Street. There are a bunch of cute souvenir shops, and there’s Count Orlock’s wax museum.” Ronan had taken Ten when they’d first moved to Salem, and it was an easy way to kill an hour.
“Do you think the monster figures will scare Aurora?” Fitz nibbled his bottom lip. “Or give her nightmares?”
“You know what, yeah, that’s a good point. They have the Universal Monsters, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Wolfman in the first gallery, which aren’t so scary, but then there are other rooms with Freddy Krueger and the creature fromAliens. Might be better to avoid that place.”
“There’s always the beach,” Fitz suggested, not sounding overly excited about the idea.
“Not with Lizzy B feeling off and with Cope and I barely sleeping. Maybe spending the day at the pool is the best way to go. The kids will be penned in, and you guys won’t mind if Cope and I are home with the baby or sleeping.”
“That works for me,” Ronan said while Fitzgibbon nodded along. He moved to the stove and turned on the gas burner beneath the cast iron skillet.
“You said in your text that you got the autopsy for Kotter Brighthouse.” Jude walked to the coffee pot and poured himself and Fitz a cup. He dumped several teaspoons of sugar into his before returning to the table with the two mugs.
“It’s pretty bare-bones like we suspected it would be.” Fitz pulled out his phone and started tapping the screen. “Brighthouse suffered extensive broken bones, as you’d expect in a fall from approximately two hundred feet. He landed face-first, which cracked his skull open like an egg.”
“Hey, I’m making scrambled eggs here!” Ronan snorted.
“Moving on.” Fitz rolled his eyes. “The manner of death was ruled suicide, with the cause of death being blunt-force trauma.The blunt object in this case was the asphalt.” He paused to take a sip of coffee. “Just what we were expecting, right?”
“Right.” Ronan turned from the stove to see Fitzgibbon’s eyes light up. “You’ve got something, don’t you.” He walked back to the table with his eyes on Fitzgibbon’s screen.
“I do.” Fitz turned back to his phone and pulled up a picture. “This is the autopsy diagram. The doctor’s comments are a bit hard to read and again are what you expect from a fall, with the exception of this.” Fitzgibbon centered on the diagram of the back of the deceased’s body and zoomed in on the head/neck area. “There are two marks here, behind Brighthouse’s left ear, that no one bothered to investigate.”
Ronan knew instantly what those dots were. “Please tell me there’s a photograph of these marks.”
Fitzgibbon grinned. “There are, but I gotta warn you, this shot is pretty gruesome.” He flipped through a few more pages of the report and turned the phone around.
Gruesome was right. The picture was a shot of the back of Brighthouse’s head, or what remained of it. The skull was caved in like a week-old Halloween jack-o’-lantern, and the brain sat in a bowl to the right of the body. It wasn’t the head Ronan was focused on but the two equidistant red dots. “Either Kotter Brighthouse was bitten by a vampire, or he was tased.”
“Exactly,” Fitzgibbon agreed before passing the phone to Jude.
Ronan walked to the kitchen drawer utensil drawer and grabbed a fork. He pulled out the chair next to Fitzgibbon and took a seat. “This is how Brighthouse and his mystery guest would have sat in the Ferris wheel car.” Holding the fork like a weapon, he moved it toward Fitzgibbon’s neck, but the tines didn’t line up with the mark on Brighthouse’s skull. “Damn, that’s not it.”
It was Jude’s turn to grin. “Hey, Fitzy, look at the escaped elephant.” Jude pointed, and Fitzgibbon turned his head to the right.
“Bingo,” Ronan said, again gently striking the back of Fitzgibbon’s head with the fork. “With Brighthouse’s attention diverted to something else, he wouldn’t have seen the Taser coming.”
“When the body jerked from the electricity, it would have made it that much easier to push Brighthouse out of the top car,” Jude added.
“It would have been even easier if the co-conspirator set the ride in motion, which would have jerked the car, giving the body a bit of forward momentum.” Ronan grabbed Fitz’s left bicep and gave him a shove forward.
“Who are our suspects?” Jude asked.
“I’ve got Mary Lou at the top of my list. I would imagine it would have been easy for her to get him in the car for a romantic ride on the Ferris wheel or for old time’s sake. Kotter Brighthouse wasn’t a big, strapping man, so she could have tased him and pushed him out all by herself.” Fitzgibbon sounded like a lot of thought went into his theory.
“If Mary Lou was in the car with Brighthouse, who the hell started up the ride?” Jude asked.
“Could have been anyone.” Ronan shook his head. “Maybe a worker in the park who had a secret Mary Lou was privy to. A drug problem. An affair. Gambling debts. All the second person had to do was start the ride when Mary Lou and Kotter sat down in the car, stop it at the top, and then start it again on full speed when they saw the electrical arc of the taser.”
“Going with Ronan’s theory of ‘it could have been anyone,’ how do we narrow the list down?” Jude asked.
“In order to buy or carry a Taser in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you have to have a gun permit and a permit to carry. All we’d have to do is get a list of park employees and run background checks to see who has a gun permit,” Fitz said.
Ronan shook his head. “That’s a great place to start, but you don’t need a gun permit or a concealed carry in the state of New Hampshire. Live free or die.”
