Bad Moon Rising by Ed Gorman Page A

just wants to get it over with.”
    â€œWell, will you please give him this message, Marsha? The police have found Neil Cameron’s body in a shed in back of that old Skelly station on the edge of town.”
    Her gasp—and it was indeed a gasp—surprised me. “Oh, my Lord.”
    â€œAre you all right, Marsha?”
    â€œHe was such a nice boy. I liked him so much.”
    She was reacting as if a close friend had died. “Did you know him pretty well, Marsha?”
    â€œHe was around here a lot. Sometimes Vanessa would invite him over, but by the time he’d get here some other boy would have picked her up and taken her off. I cared for Vanessa but she was very cruel to boys sometimes. He’d look so sad I’d talk to him. Every so often, if I wasn’t busy and nobody else was around, I’d talk to him for quite a while. My own son is in his thirties and lives in Michigan with his family. I suppose I kind of adopted Neil a little bit. I know he was upset, but I don’t for a minute believe he murdered poor Vanessa—you can tell that to Mr. Mainwaring for all I care—and I just can’t imagine him killing himself, either. I’m sure you think I’m being naïve, but those are my feelings.”
    â€œI’m pretty sure what they’re saying is his suicide will close the case.”
    â€œNot for me it won’t. Nobody’ll ever convince me he did either of those things. Oh, there’s the doorbell. People have been sending flowers to the house. I wish they wouldn’t. We’ll just have to drag them all to the funeral home and the church. You’ll have to excuse me now.”
    By the time I got back to the Skelly station, the onlookers and reporters had gone. Potter was standing next to a large metal box where his officers had been putting the evidence bags they’d been filling. Potter was talking to two of his men so I had time to scan the plastic bags. A quart of Hamm’s beer, a half-finished sandwich of some kind, a pair of white socks with blood on the toe of one of them, a stadium blanket of deep blue with horizontal yellow stripes, a Greyhound bus schedule, a Swiss army knife, and a small black flashlight. There were many more items beneath these but I assumed Potter wouldn’t be real happy if he saw me pawing through his evidence bags.
    â€œAny sign of a note?” I asked Potter when he walked over to me.
    â€œNo, but there might be a good explanation for that, Sam. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to write with.”
    â€œIt’s still strange.”
    â€œIt’s strange if you want it to be strange. Otherwise it’s as simple as my explanation.”
    I nodded to where the ambulance had been. “The doc say anything unexpected?”
    â€œJust that it looked like a suicide. He wanted to get Cameron on the table before he said it officially, but he said any other explanation was unlikely.”
    â€œAll the evidence in the bags—will his sister get his belongings at some point?”
    â€œAt some point, yes. I imagine this thing’ll end at the inquest. So it shouldn’t take long. He killed himself.”
    From what Sarah Powers had told me, Neil Cameron had been a confused and angry man after he came back from Vietnam. The deaths he’d seen—and the lives he’d taken by mistake—had alienated him from not only others but himself as well. He’d come to rely on romance to redeem him, but when that had failed him, failed him because of his own obsessiveness and possessiveness, he’d started getting into even more trouble than he had previously. Then he’d met Vanessa and became even more desperate. Some of these facts would make their way into the inquest. They would convince everybody present that he’d been a prime candidate for suicide. He’d murdered his true love because she wouldn’t have him and then in remorse taken his own