A series by November

Chapter 91: Sparks on a Pinwheel

Weirton, WV
Three months earlier

“Copy,” Keith Daniels said into his radio as he did a U-turn on the deserted road. The wide harvest moon was high in the sky.

Daniels was a lanky man with sandy hair, with a mellow, sanguine demeanor that seemed at odds with being a cop, yet a cop he was. His speech was slow and with a slight southern drawl, but despite the sleepy appearance of his thick eyelids, his eyes were green and sharp, and did not miss a thing. Because the Chief’s cousin got the promotion to detective, he was still a beat cop.

It didn’t stop Daniels from detecting.

In the meanwhile, however, his job was to go to Smith’s and collect a drunk and disorderly. He had lived his whole life in this town and he knew that being a Wednesday night, the disorderly in question was about 97 percent likely to be Clive Kineeley.

Old Clive had gone to high school with his father, about a million years ago. He remembered sitting on Clive’s lap as a little boy at a cookout as the big man told the punch line of a dirty joke and shook with laughter. Clive always wore cotton plaid shirts, even to church, where he always carried a handkerchief, neatly pressed into a white square. Daniels had lived here his whole life and he had such residual memories about almost everyone.

The gravel parking area around Smith’s was lit by a wavering sodium light. It was unseasonably warm, and moths still wove circles around its pink glow. It was quiet, the bar closed and the jukebox silent, and he imagined he could hear the wings against the air.

He put his hand over his sidearm and went inside, eyes sweeping from side to side. Del Smith was at the bar, cleaning up, and he nodded toward the man in front of him. It was indeed Clive Kineeley, hunched over a cup of coffee.

“Del. How’s business?” Daniels moved lithely onto the stool next to Clive’s.

“Fair.” Del’s business was always fair. “You missed the fireworks.”

“Clive, what’s wrong tonight?”

Clive acknowledged Daniels with watery, red eyes. “Danny. Danny boy.”

“How much did you drink?”

“All of it.”

Del shrugged. “He was rip roaring when I got on at ten. Wound up breaking some of my beer steins, started yelling at some of the customers.”

“Anyone pressing charges?”

“Naw. Just collect him. You give him a come-to-Jesus talk, because it never works when I do it.”

“I can do that.” Daniels stood up. “Come on Clive. I’m takin’ you home.”

“I can’t leave my car here.”

“Well, shoulda thought about that before you got hammered.”

Del handed a set of keys across the bar. Clive reached for them, and in the process nearly toppled over. Daniels pocketed the keys and guided Clive toward the door.

“I can drive,” Clive muttered.

“Try driving like this and I’ll arrest you,” Daniels said casually. He felt Clive’s weight against him as he guided the man outside. He knew it was just an illusion, but Clive seemed to have shrunk. He seemed insubstantial, a bird with hollow bones.

He put Clive in the passenger seat of the cruiser. Chief would have his head for that, but then, Daniels thought, the wife-beating, cross-burning Chief could bend over and bite his ass. He belted Clive in like a mother hen would, and got behind the wheel.

“What’s eating you tonight, Clive?”

“Mutants. They’re killing them.”

Daniels felt the small hairs on the back of his neck shiver. He had suspected the same thing for some time.

“Where?”

“Down at the industrial park. They have a lab.” Clive’s speech was still garbled. He had calmed down, all the piss and vinegar out of his system, but he was still hammered. “They strap them down on the gurneys, operate on them, cut off their fingers, do open heart surgery, do all sorts of things. It’s all hush hush. It’s big money. They’ve got security out the ass up there. They’re kidnapping people, kids even, from as far away as Cleveland.”

“How do you know this, Clive?” Daniels asked carefully. His casual tone belied the hammering of his heart.

“They needed me to do electrical work up there. Made me sign a non-disclosure agreement. They can disclose this, right here. I know what they’re doing. They gave me some bullshit story about it being a correctional facility. Thought I was stupid. I may have been up in Belmont a few times, but I’m not stupid.”

“No, you’re definitely not that.” Daniels said as they approached a stoplight.

Clive looked at Daniels. Daniels looked back, and caught a fleeting glimmer of anger in Clive’s eyes. Clive thought he was being patronized. But then, the light turned green, and he looked hopeful.

“You believe me.”

“Actually, Clive, I do.”

He took Clive home to his run down house, a rented half-duplex with weeds in the yard and mylar pinwheels faded in the sun. The pinwheels were spinning in the warm October night, probably planted there ages ago by Clive’s grandchildren, glimmering in the moonlight. Daniels had the odd, disjointed thought that they shouldn't be able to spin without sunlight.

Clive's house smelled like must. Daniels sat Clive down at his kitchen table and pulled out his notebook, asked Clive to tell him everything. Clive talked until he was sober, and it was nearly dawn. Daniels put his pen away and finally left Clive on his couch, snoring softly under a gaudy yarn afghan.

.

Hours later, Daniels woke to the ringing of the phone. His day off. He blinked against the late-afternoon sun, squeezed his eyes closed tight, and let it ring. It was certainly the Chief, wanting him to come in and clean up someone else’s mess, he was sure of it.

He rolled over and slept for two more hours. Only after he pissed, and brushed his teeth, did he press play on his answering machine.

It wasn’t the Chief. It was his dad. “Keith. Keith, pick up. Just thought you should know if you didn’t already. Clive Kineeley died last night. Funeral’s Saturday. Call me.”

Daniels felt the presence of evil all along his spine, making his nerves hum and his heart race. He threw on a WVU sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and ran out the door.

He prayed that his ex-girlfriend would be on duty today. He drove the four miles to the medical examiner’s office, dread thickening in his throat, his eyes not really seeing the landscape. He badged his way past the security guard, a new guy in a buzz cut, and jogged down the stairs to the morgue.

He saw Darlene Ebersol working over an exam table. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath. Darlene looked up, and waved at him. Her hand was covered in bloody latex.

He kept walking, and to his relief saw Susan Teng behind the glass of the medical examiner’s office. She was looking intently at her computer monitor. Her hair was very black in contrast to her white lab coat. She was tiny and beautiful, a wisp of a woman. He was almost to the point where it didn’t hurt to look at her. Almost.

He tapped gently, and she looked up.

“Keith. What’s up?” She looked at him somewhat warily.

They had broken up four months prior, and though it was an amicable parting they still navigated around each other carefully, as if they might bump into each other and cut themselves.

“Hi Suzy. Um, Clive Kineeley.”

“Yeah. He came in this morning. We just finished posting him.”

“And?”

“Are you asking as a cop or a friend?”

Her stonewalling caused him a moment‘s annoyance. “I have reason to suspect foul play.”

“You do?” No matter what, Susan respected him, and this bombshell made her eyes widen.

“Yeah. You still have him?”

She nodded. “My preliminary COD is vomit aspiration secondary to alcohol intoxication. Why, what should we look for?”

Daniels walked into her office, uninvited, and shut the door. She seemed annoyed. He didn’t care. He moved a pile of pathology journals off of a chair and sat opposite her, deciding how much he should tell her.

“This isn’t official police business, is it?” Susan asked. Annoyance was floating behind her eyes and this pissed him off.

“It isn’t a social call,” he said tersely. “I scraped Clive’s ass off a barstool at Del’s last night around two. He had some things to tell me and I was off duty. I left his house around five. He was nearly sober. He was sleeping on his couch, and, for that matter, sleeping on his side.”

Susan’s forehead tensed. He knew that she was assimilating this information with what she had gleaned from Clive’s body.

“Time of death was around seven...” she pulled a file from her desk and studied some numbers. “Tox stuff of course won‘t be back for a week, maybe two. The officers found an old bottle of Paxil in the medicine cabinet, half full. No pill fragments in the stomach.”

“He wasn’t suicidal.”

“But he was upset.” Suzi had evidently heard about Clive’s outburst at the bar.

“He was sort of spent by the time I left him. He’d calmed down and he went to sleep, like I said.”

Susan studied him, and this unnerved him. She closed the file and set it on her desk and looked back to him. “Are you gonna tell me what you know?”

Keith sighed, and closed his eyes. “There have been a lot of kidnappings of mutants in the tri-state area. I have good reason to suspect that there is a medical research lab that’s experimenting on mutants. Clive knew about it. He knew where it is. He was drunk and rambling about it last night at Del’s. In public. I think someone got wind of him blabbing, and I think they iced him.”

Susan's eyebrow arched up behind her hair. He knew she would give him that look. “You’ve been watching an X-Files marathon again, haven‘t you? Mutant research?” Amusement flickered across her pretty features.

“Think about it, Suze.” Daniels said quietly, even though her door was shut. His speech was fast and to the point. He didn't sound like himself. “There are stories of fire starters, of telepaths, of all sorts of powerful physical anomalies. Credible stories. Why wouldn’t people want to exploit those things for commercial gain, or for military application? You have a rejected, marginalized population, a lot of whom are kids who are cast out by their families, and they are weak and ripe for the picking of anyone who can abuse them or exploit them.”

He knew that Suzi was thinking about the case of Rebecca Shepherd, a Steubenville girl who was found dismembered and sliced to pieces in a Kentucky landfill. The case was never solved.

Still, he could see that she was skeptical. “I’ve been doing some research of my own, too. Something’s going on. You know and I know that Clive was a drunk and depressed, but he wasn’t paranoid.”

“What is it you’re asking me to do?”

“Just take a closer look. Please.”

“You want me to declare this a homocide?”

“I didn’t say that. A murder investigation, if all this is true, might make things worse. And it might just be nothing. All I’m asking is for you to look. I’ll help.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

They went into the examination room. She pulled one of the metal drawers open. There were only five. At no time in his memory had more than three been occupied, and if there were more than that it was due to a multi-vehicle crash. It was a small town and the coroner’s office had few resources.

In small towns, a cop often sees corpses of people he knows personally. Daniels had never fully adjusted to this, and as Susan pulled down the sheet he braced himself. All he could think about was the moonlight shimmering on those tacky pinwheels in the overgrown grass, pinwheels probably put there by grandchildren long since grown.

Clive Kineeley's eyes were open and blue-gray, and the light they reflected was dead and colorless, like that of the pinwheels.

Kineeley’s face was contorted into a rictus. It bared his teeth and made him look savage. But here was fear there somehow as well, and Daniels felt it.

Fear, and sadness that resonated in him like the a sustained note vibrating in the depths of a cello.

“Nail scrapings?” Daniels asked, and Susan nodded. Clive was in rigor, and this made their work more difficult. He uncurled first one hand, and then the other, holding the fists open while Susan took fingernail scrapings. “He was right handed,” Daniels said, and she nodded.

They combed every inch of Clive’s arms and hands for defensive injuries. “I noted several bruises to his forearms but assumed they were from his outburst at the bar.”

“Livor mortis is concentrated on his right side.” Daniels noted.

“He was found lying that way.”

“He was that way when I left him. So the livor mortis could obscure bruising on his right arm, which was his dominant arm?”

“Possibly.” Susan took several photos of Clive’s hands.

They worked for several minutes in silence.

“Did he have any medical problems that you know of?”

“Not that I know. Mental problems. Depression, a few suicide attempts. But he wasn‘t crazy.”

Susan was quiet for a minute. “Oh my god,” she said. She had worked her way down to Clive’s feet.

“What?”

“It looks like a needle mark.”

.

Kineeley’s house showed no signs of forced entry, which in and of itself was meaningless. It was the kind of area where people often left their doors unlocked. However, in the living room, Daniels found the ugly afghan on the floor, and an ashtray knocked to the ground. Clive's daughter said that the scene was like this when she found him. This corroborated the signs of struggle found in the autopsy. Though it could also be explained by an antemortem seizure. Susan kept the cause and manner of death unknown, pending toxicology results.

Two weeks later she called him. Clive Kineeley had been laid to rest and buried for days. Her determination of death was that Clive died from an intravenous injection of digoxin, a heart medication that, in combination with the alcohol in his system, caused his heart to stop beating. At around the same time his heart stopped, the digoxin made him vomit, which he aspirated. The manner of death, she said, was definitively homocide.

Fingernail scrapings had been sent out for DNA testing and were in a queue for processing. Results could take months. A murder investigation was opened, and Kineeley’s medical records were obtained. He had a history of alcoholism, depression, and eczema, but no cardiac problems. The same doctor had treated him for twenty years, and he was never prescribed any medication remotely resembling digoxin.

Daniels drove around the countryside for several hours after learning this. He had seen murders before, but this nagged at him. It was the tip of a much greater iceberg.

His boss had chided him for making a mountain out of a molehill, for fabricating a murder when Clive Kineeley was just a drunk, pure and simple. The chief despised the weak, be they drunks, junkies, crazies, children.

He knew that nothing would come of the murder investigation. It tugged at him night and day. He kept seeing the dead, depthless light in his eyes. Nothing living. Sparks on a pinwheel.

A few weeks later he ran into Jerry Kinkaid at the Kroger supermarket. “Keith Daniels. How the fuck are you?”

Keith had never liked Jerry. He was the kind of guy who gave swirlies to freshman and tried to date-rape sorority sisters. He had gone away to college, reportedly either flunked out or was kicked out, went to California for a while, and had recently returned to Weirton.

“Jerry. Long time no see.”

“Right. They actually make you a cop?”

“Like five years ago. What have you been up to?”

“Doing security, down at the industrial park. Night shift.”

“No kidding? I get called out there a lot. Which building?”

“The last one, down by the woods.”

“Maybe I’ll come see you one of these days. I’ve been on nights, too.”

“All right man.” Jerry shook his hand, a little too hard, and Keith fought the urge to deck him.

He knew which building to watch.

A week later the Chief closed the Kineeley case for no apparent reason. Daniels went directly to a pay phone, and made a call to Westchester, New York. He asked to speak to Charles Xavier but instead got a man named Scott Summers.

Mr. Summers was very interested in his story, and they talked for an hour, while Daniels froze his ass off at the public phone.

A few days later, he met Jubilation Lee.