Quilla was waiting on her front steps, a cardboard box large enough to hold a case of wine was next to her. She waved at me as I came to a stop then grabbed the box and lugged it to the back door. I leaned over and opened it, then she put the box, which had no top to cover the contents, on the seat. I could easily see what was inside. In the five seconds it took Quilla to close the back door, open the front door and get inside I managed to see a few yellow tablets, several overflowing photo albums and a couple of smaller containers that resembled jewelry boxes.
“I like people who are on time,” she said as he strapped on her seat belt.
“I’m a Virgo. A Virgo is never late.”
She smiled excitedly. “I’m a Virgo too! What day?”
“August thirtieth.”
“I’m August twenty-ninth! No wonder we get along.”
I smiled. It was nice to see her happy. “Does your mother know about the meeting?”
“You kidding? Number one: I didn’t even tell her. Number two: even if I did all she’d do is give me grief about it.”
“Can I assume she doesn’t know you’re cutting school?”
“You can assume anything you like. I get good grades. I might look like a fuck-up, but I’m a card carrying member of the National Honor Society.” She cleared her throat. “I’m glad you’re gonna be with me. Whattya think will happen?”
“He’ll probably ask you questions. If he doesn’t ask you the right questions, you’ll have to guide the conversation. Volunteer information. Tell him everything. He can get only so much from her memorabilia.”
She sighed and in a glum tone said, “I just wish Greg Hoxey was involved.”
“Forget about Hoxey,” I blurted, a little too loud, a little too much hostility in my voice. I knew I had to be careful with what I said about Greg. “Understand something: a lot hinges on your conversation with Perry. You’re either gonna help him and pump him up or you’re gonna turn him off. Be nice. Be friendly. Behave in any other way and you’ll lose him and he’ll stick the case in an unsolved file and never look at it again.”
She spent about thirty seconds absorbing what I’d said, then without looking at me, in a subdued tone said, “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep him working on the case. I went through everything I had of Aunt Brandy’s last night. I brought the things that might be the most help.”
“Like what?”
“Pictures, photo albums, a calendar, scrapbooks, her journals. There’s not as much as I thought. I re-read what she wrote. It isn’t very interesting. I mean, it’s interesting for me because it helps me to understand who she was, but I don’t think it’ll be very helpful to Cobb.”
“You never know.”
Quilla tucked her feet under her legs and spun around, leaning against the passenger door. “Something about you has been bothering me.”
I glanced at her, wondering what was coming.
“You told me why you became a Funeral Director,” she said. “But I don’t understand why you continue to be one.”
“It’s the only thing I know how to do.”
She rolled her eyes. “You could do a lot of things. I mean, deep down Funeral Directors are like salesmen or counselors, right?” I nodded yes. “I don’t want to dump on your profession, but how you can surround yourself with so much death and sadness. Doesn’t it get to you?”
“Sometimes, but it’s the kind of job that desensitizes a person. See enough death and you’re immune to it.”
She tilted her head and smirked. “Why would you want to be immune to death?”
“What I mean is…I’m immune to having feelings about death. I have to shut down and turn everything off.”
“But, Del, that’s not a normal human reaction. If somebody dies it’s normal to feel bad. And I don’t think it’s normal to want to be around dead bodies and grieving people and coffins and graves and…”
“It’s all part of the job.”
“Maybe for somebody else, but not you. It’s a bad environment for you to be in.”
“That’s a little presumptuous, don’t you think?” I wasn’t sure why, but Quilla was starting to irritate me.
“Ever since you told me the story of how you tried to get your father’s ashes, I’ve been playing it over and over in my head and I think about how you’ve held onto the memory of Alyssa and how you’ve never been married and how you don’t have a girlfriend and based on everything I’ve learned about you, I keep thinking that, yeah, it’s understandable how he got into this weird business and, yeah, he’s nice-looking and smart and sensitive and he understands me which is a really hard thing to do and he’s intelligent enough to know that Gretchen is a woman worth pursuing and when I put all the pieces together I look at you and I say that there’s one thing missing.” She looked at me tenderly. “You don’t seem very happy.”
“You sound like a psychiatrist.”
“Good. It’s one of the careers I’m thinking of pursuing.”
“There’s only one problem with your profile of me. You’re leaving out one key factor.” She stared at me, eyebrow arched, waiting. “Did it ever occur to you that I might like my job? I help people get through the worst times of their lives. I make it bearable. I get a lot out of that.”
She hesitated for a moment. “If that’s the case, then I feel sorry for you.”
“Why? I’m making a contribution! And…do you have any idea how many people hate their jobs?”
“Yeah. I hear my mother and stepfather whining all the time about how horrible their jobs are. But they aren’t like you. Most people aren’t like you.” Tears started to form in her eyes. “You’re like Gretchen. Different. Special. You could be making a better contribution somewhere else.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s such a waste.”
I was about to respond, but we had arrived at the Dankworth Police Station. I parked in front. As we walked to the front door Quilla punched me lightly on my right arm and said, “Don’t mind me. I can be a real ball breaker sometimes.”
*****
Perry wasn’t there. The only ones around were Greg Hoxey and Lucy Delaine, the dispatcher.
Lucy was slender, almost petite, but dressed like a fat woman, favoring loose-fitting shifts from K-Mart with patterns that were either outrageously loud or depressingly bland.
“Is himself in his office?”
She shook her head. “Perry’s not back yet. He called in a few seconds ago. He’ll be here in no time flat.”
“What are you doing here?” said Greg to Quilla, totally ignoring me.
Quilla smiled when she saw Greg. He smiled back. “To meet with Perry,” she said sweetly, trustingly. Her demeanor suggested that she might have a crush on him.
“What about?”
“My Aunt’s murder case. I’m here to talk about leads and to find out how Perry’s investigation is coming.”
Greg looked at me dismissively. “Why are you here?”
“Perry wanted me,” I said abruptly.
“Does Perry have you on the case, Greg?” Quilla asked with such sincerity that it angered me to know that Greg wasn’t really on her side.
“Nah. He’s doing it alone.” He rolled his eyes.
“We have information that’ll blow this thing wide open.”
I cringed as the words came out of her mouth. Greg arched his left eyebrow and said, “What kind of information?”
Quilla was about to speak when I said, “Maybe you should wait to tell Perry first.” She and Greg looked at me. She with confusion, he with disapproval. “After all, he is the Chief and it might not be smart to supercede him. Isn’t that right, Greg? You know how Perry is about controlling things.”
Greg glared at me.
“What’s the difference?” said Quilla. “It’s not like Perry won’t tell Greg what we’ve found out.”
“We haven’t found out anything,” I said. “All we have is a theory.”
“Greg, does Perry tell you about theories?” said Quilla.
“All the time,” said Greg. “You can tell me what you know, Quil.”
Quil? I thought to myself. He calls her Quil? “But most of the crimes here in Dankworth are small time,” I said. “This is a murder case. Not only that, it’s the first murder case Perry’s ever had.”
“Perry tells me everything,” said Greg, his voice firm.
“Maybe so, but in this instance, I think Perry won’t be too happy knowing you know something before he does. Quilla, our meeting’s with Perry. That’s who we’ll talk to.”
Suddenly Lucy blurted, “Greg, just got a call I think you should take.”
Greg nodded. The telephone on Greg’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver and said, “Dankworth Police… If you have a cat stuck in a tree you shouldn’t call the Police. Call the Fire Department… ”
Quilla turned to me and between gritted teeth whispered, “Why are you giving Greg such a hard time?”
I glanced at Greg. He had turned away from us and was still on the phone. “You can’t tick Perry off. He’s a control freak. Perry can help you. Greg can’t. Look, based on what we figured out in the car, I have a stake in this. I don’t want to jeopardize it because you think Hoxey’s your buddy.”
“He is.”
I said nothing. I wanted to tell her then and there that Greg was Perry’s plant, but it wasn’t the right time. I wanted to meet with Perry, give him the information we came up with and hope that it would motivate him find out who the killer is, if it wasn’t too late.
The door to the police station opened and Perry sauntered in. He didn’t apologize for being late, saying only, “Let’s go into my office.”
Feeling protective of Quilla, I put my hand on her right shoulder and guided her behind Perry. As we walked, Greg, who was still on the phone and had cupped the receiver, said, “Perry, you want me in on this?”
There was enormous hope in his question. It was as if he wanted Perry to say a firm “Absolutely,” but Perry just shook his head and brusquely said, “No.”
“You sure, Perry?”
Perry looked at his watch, then said, “Lucy’s almost due for her break. You’ll have to man the phones.” He gestured to Quilla and me. “C’mon.”
Quilla looked at Greg, clearly feeling embarrassed for him because of Perry’s comment. She smiled sympathetically at him. He gave her a wink. Because I was growing fond of Quilla, it killed me that she seemed to be so taken with Greg. Sooner or later she would find out that he was spying on her and her friends on Perry’s behalf and she would resent him and she would have another male authority figure in her life to despise.
As I stepped into Perry’s office he said, “Close the door, Del.”
I did, then I sat down in one of the two wooden chairs across from Perry’s plain, metal desk. Quilla walked over to the only window in the small, cluttered office and leaned against the sill. Perry plopped his large hulk into a worn, but comfortable-looking leather chair.
Perry looked at Quilla. “Aren’t you gonna sit?”
“I think better on my feet,” she snapped.
“You’re not here to think,” said Perry. “You’re here to tell me everything you know about Brandy Parker.”
“Before I tell you about her, we have something else to say, something better, something so important that it’ll give you tons of information to go on.”
“What’s she talking about, Del?”
“Brandy Parker may not be the only murder victim.”
Perry didn’t move. “You don’t say.”
“Quilla and I were talking and a piece of information came up about the wife of Kyle Thistle. Evidently the body was never found.”
“So?”
“How can you be sure she was murdered?”
Perry leaned forward. “Because my father was convinced of it. It’s the only case he ever liked to talk about. There were two popular theories as to why the body was never found. Kyle Thistle either cut it into little pieces and scattered them in public trash cans all over the county, or he weighted down the corpse and sunk it to the bottom of Dankworth Lake.”
“Was the bottom of the lake ever checked?” asked Quilla.
“They dragged it three different times. Nothing.”
“So it’s not proven that it’s there,” she added.
“Back then the lake had lots of fish. Hungry fish.”
“And how did they know that the body was cut up?”
“They didn’t. That was a theory that came about because of a witness who saw Kyle Thistle dropping a black plastic bag into a public can.”
“What’s so bad about that?” said Quilla.
“People who live in their own homes don’t drive into town and dump garbage in public cans.”
“But there’s no concrete proof that what Kyle Thistle was dropping into the garbage were parts of his wife’s body.”
“Right,” said Perry.
“And was it proven a hundred percent that the guy the witness saw was Kyle Thistle?” said Quilla.
He adjusted himself in his chair. “What the hell is this leading to?”
“Okay,” I said. “Kyle Thistle’s wife disappeared twenty-four years ago. Brandy Parker disappeared nine years ago. And you may not even be aware of the person I’m about to mention, Perry, but… ” I caught myself. For an instant I couldn’t believe that I was about to speak of Alyssa as if she were dead. “Uh…another girl disappeared fifteen years ago. Alyssa Kirkland.”
Perry wrinkled up his face. “Doesn’t ring a bell. But I wasn’t on the force fifteen years ago. I was in college. Was there a missing person report filed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who was she?”
“His girlfriend,” blurted Quilla. “We suspect she might be another victim of the guy who killed my Aunt and Virginia Thistle. We think there might be a pattern.”
“You think?” Perry smirked. “Where’s the pattern?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Quilla. Every eight or nine years a woman disappears and is never heard from again.”
I considered telling Perry about the letter and postcard I received from Alyssa, but decided not to mention it just yet for fear of him latching onto it and trying to use it to diffuse the theory.
“This opens up all kinds of possibilities,” said Quilla. We think it’s possible that Del’s girlfriend and Gretchen’s mother might be like my Aunt — hidden in old mausoleums at the cemetery. Who’s to say that whoever the killer is didn’t hide all his victims there? In fact, if we’re right about the pattern, there might even be another woman in the last year or two whose family thinks she ran away from home when she’s really dead. For all we know there could even be a bigger pattern. Maybe the killer murdered a woman every five years or three or every year. There’s no telling how many women could be lying in mausoleums at Elm Cross cemetery.”
Her enthusiasm was bordering on overkill. I was afraid she would turn Perry off. “Quilla, maybe we should concentrate on the three victims for now,” I said.
“Maybe we should concentrate on one victim,” said Perry. “Brandy Parker. I’m not interested in a case that was over a quarter of a century ago or a case I never even heard of.”
“Perry, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job…”
“Then don’t.”
“I have a gut feeling about this. Please hear me out.”
“If this gut feeling starts to get boring, I stop listening. Go ahead.”
“Alright. I guess it would help to know if you have records of missing person or runaways.”
“This year alone we’ve had forty-one,” Perry said.
“That many in a town the size of Dankworth?” I said, incredulously. There were roughly twenty-five thousand people who lived here.
“You’d be surprised,” Perry said. He leaned forward and pushed a couple keys on the computer on his desk. A list of names appeared on the screen. “We have husbands who go on a weekend drunk. Wives who have affairs and run off. Lonely women who live with their bossy parents and get tired of it, so they run away with a trucker. Of course, it’s mainly teenagers. Kids from thirteen to nineteen are always disappearing for a weekend, a week, some for six months.” He looked at Quilla. “Any of your crowd ever take off?’
Looking embarrassed, she nodded yes, then said, “But only the ones with assholes for parents.”
Perry looked at the screen, then at Quilla. “In fact, I have two missing person complaints on you!” He shifted his glare to me.
“You can call them missing person complaints,” she snapped. “But my mother overreacted when I stayed away one weekend after my stepfather hit me. The other time I had a fight with her about sex. I stayed at my friend’s house. So if most of your missing person complaints are for kids who stay away a day or two, they don’t count. How many real calls do you get about kids who leave and never come back?”
“Hard to say,” said Perry. “That’s what’s so damn frustrating about runaways. If a kid’s parents are considerate they’ll call and say their son or daughter came home. If the parents don’t call us we call them in a couple days and most of ’em are back. Some get arrested in other cities or they get bored or lonely and they show up on mommy’s doorstep. Then there’s the ones who never return.”
He lowered his voice, and displaying a rare sense of consideration, said, “Like your Aunt. We had her down as a missing person/probable runaway. There wasn’t much we could do. Nine years ago we didn’t have the kind of technology we have now. And we didn’t have the manpower to do any serious searching for your Aunt. Once we found out that your Aunt was the woman in the mausoleum, I pulled out her file. Nine years ago a call was made to the FBI regional office. There wasn’t a lot they… I… we could do. Even the most sophisticated law enforcement operations can’t do much with a missing person case. There’s so little to go on.”
Perry was behaving so decently to Quilla it took me aback. I kept waiting for him to ruin the moment with some ill-timed barb. But he continued to be kind in his words.
“Once I learned the identity of your Aunt,” he said. “I studied her file. I have no details. Not one specific fact. And if you don’t give me something, I want to tell you up front that I can’t see this case ever being solved.”
“All the more reason to consider our theory about the disappearance of Del’s girlfriend and Mrs. Thistle,” Quilla said.
Perry shook his head. “As far as I’m concerned, the investigation my father conducted twenty-four years ago solved that matter.”
“But without a body how can you be sure?” she protested.
“Lots of cases are tried and convictions gotten without a body,” said Perry. “As for Del’s girlfriend, this is all news to me. What’d you say her name was, Del?”
“Alyssa Kirkland.”
Perry punched a few keys on the computer. “And she disappeared fifteen years back?”
Perry punched a few more keys. Something appeared on the screen and he read it out loud. “Missing person report placed by her mother. Presumed runaway.” Perry wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t remember any Alyssa Kirkland from high school.”
“She didn’t go to Dankworth. Her family moved here when we were Seniors. She was a freshman in college that Fall. I didn’t even meet her until the following summer when she came home for vacation. That’s when we were together.”
“Then one day she just disappeared?”
“Yes. I didn’t know she was gone. We’d stopped seeing each other. There was no contact. Then I got a note from her in which she apologized for leaving so abruptly and I just assumed she took off. Her parents got a note too.”
Perry frowned. He suddenly looked angry. “Then why the hell did her parents file a missing person report if she sent notes to them and you?”
“Her mother didn’t think it was like Alyssa to just take off.”
“Is that how you felt?”
“No. She hated Dankworth. Didn’t get along with her father. Couldn’t stand the college she went to. All the while we went out she talked about getting out of Dankworth.”
Perry frowned again. “Then why did her leaving come as a surprise to you?”
“It didn’t. I mean it did… but not really… ”
“What the hell are trying to say, Del? So far, you’re painting a picture of a girl who wasn’t especially happy living in our fair town, wasn’t looking forward to going back to college, didn’t have a happy home life, and had just ended her summer romance. Why would she stick around? She said to hell with everything and everyone and took off.” He looked at Quilla. “Does that make sense to you or am I missing something?”
Quilla was speechless. I think she was so surprised that Perry had asked for her opinion, she couldn’t talk. “I, uh,” she stammered. “But you’re leaving one thing out. Something Del said on the way over here. Alyssa broke up with Del. He hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks. In her mind, the relationship was over.” She looked at me. “But like you said, Del: why would she send you a good-bye note, apologizing for leaving so suddenly? She didn’t owe you an apology. She didn’t owe you anything. If I dumped a guy there’s no way I’d send him a fucking postcard.” Quilla bit her lower lip and seemed to be thinking, formulating the words she wanted to use, making sure she got the phrasing right. “What if the killer didn’t know that Del and Alyssa broke up?”
Perry was expressionless. I wondered where Quilla was going with this.
“And because the killer thinks Del and Alyssa are still a couple,” said Quilla. “He sends Del a note, figuring that the brief message will make Del not be suspicious.”
“But Del was suspicious,” said Perry.
“Not at first,” said Quilla. As she spoke, she turned her head back and forth between Perry and myself. “Even though they’d broken up, Del was still in love with her, so he probably wasn’t thinking straight. The chick who dumps him suddenly sends him a note? It gives him hope. And there’s nothing like hope when you’ve been dumped by someone you still love. I think Del was so blinded by hope that he couldn’t let himself believe that something bad had happened to Alyssa. A note and then a postcard a few months later and he was in limbo.”
“Postcard?” said Perry.
“I got a postcard six months later. So did her parents.”
“So why would he think Alyssa was missing or some kind of crime victim?” said Quilla.
Perry looked at me. “But now, after all these years, you’ve decided she was murdered?”
I took a second to answer. “Yes.”
“And all because of this theory about the same guy killing her Aunt and Thistle’s wife?”
“It’s the most logical explanation I’ve heard so far to explain the disappearances.”
“Three women vanish in the course of twenty-four years,” said Perry. “Twenty-four years! You call that a pattern?”
Quilla and I looked at each other. In her eyes I could see her saying, “See, I told you so.”
“If a woman disappeared every year or every two years or even every five years for twenty-four years, then I could see a pattern,” said Perry. “But not three disappearances spread out over two-and-a-half decades.”
“We don’t know that there weren’t more,” I said. “How do you know that some of those missing people who never came back weren’t murdered by whoever killed her Aunt?” Perry said nothing. “And how do you know that the killer only took women from Dankworth? If every police department around here gets as many missing person reports as you, there could be dozens of names of girls who never were heard from again.”
Perry pointed at his computer. “Any serious missing person report gets bumped onto the network. I might be able to give this more credence if there were more to the pattern than the three women over twenty-four years.”
“Whattya mean?” said Quilla.
“What were the ages of the three women?” he asked.
“Quilla’s Aunt was nineteen,” I said. “Alyssa was nineteen. And I’m not sure how old Virginia Thistle was.” I turned to Quilla. “Do you know how old Gretchen’s mother was when she disappeared?”
Quilla hesitated, her face flushed. Begrudgingly she said, “I don’t know.”
“Let’s check,” said Perry. He punched in a couple of keys on his computer. “We keep the closed cases in one file, active in another. I can understand how you might come up with ideas on who might’ve killed your Aunt. But rather than waste time trying to tie her death to an obscure case that’s officially been closed for nearly a quarter of a century, you’d be better off concentrating on remembering who your Aunt associated with before she
disappeared. Here we are. Virginia Thistle was thirty-two years old at the time of her murder. Two nineteen-year-olds and a thirty-two-year-old doesn’t sound like much of a pattern to me.” He leaned back. “Let’s let the Thistle case rest in peace and concentrate on Brandy Parker.”
“What about the Alyssa Kirkland case?” said Quilla.
“There is no Alyssa Kirkland case,” said Perry.
“Can’t you start an investigation now?” said Quilla.
“On whose complaint?” he said.
“Mine,” I snapped.
“An ex-boyfriend this long after the fact, filing a complaint?” said Perry. “With nothing except a remote hunch.”
“You’re a policeman,” said Quilla. “Are you telling me that if a person tells you that someone might’ve been a crime victim you’re not going to at least check into it?”
“If it’s within reason, sure. Based on what’s in the Alyssa Kirkland file, nothing happened.” He looked at me. “Del, I’m sorry to hear about this long lost love of yours, but you can’t expect to come in here fifteen years after she gave you your walking papers and want me to suddenly believe she’s a murder victim.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t want to hear anymore about things that happened so long ago. It’s gonna be hard enough for me to solve a murder that took place nine years ago.” He turned to Quilla. “The way I understand it, the purpose of this meeting was for you to tell me everything you know or remember about your Aunt. That’s what I want to talk about. Nothing else.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the cardboard box setting on the floor next to Quilla’s chair. “What’s in there?”
“Some personal things from my Aunt you should check.”
“Let’s take a look,” Perry said.
With a frown Quilla picked up the box and set it on Perry’s desk. She removed the items one at a time, setting them on the desk. Four photo albums overflowing with pictures, a calendar of the year Brandy Parker disappeared, five notebooks and a cigar box filled with knickknacks.
“There’s a lot of information here,” said Quilla. She picked up the notebooks. “These have her thoughts and feelings about things. It’ll take you a while to read them.”
“I’ll go over every line, believe me,” Perry said. “But what can you tell me about your Aunt that only you know?”
Quilla paused for a few moments, clearly unsure of where to begin. “Well…it’s like…I…”
“Tell him what you told me,” I said.
She looked at me, confused.
“About your Aunt and cemeteries,” I said.
She turned to Perry. “My Aunt was a cemetery buff.”
Perry looked at me, then back at Quilla. “You know that for sure?”
“I remember her talking about it. I didn’t understand what she meant because I was little and didn’t really understand cemeteries. She only started doing it near the time before she… near the end.”
Perry considered Quilla’s remark for a moment, then said, “This is good. Okay. What else?”
“You gotta understand that I was so young when I knew my Aunt… I didn’t understand… sex. So when she would say things to me about guys, I didn’t really know what she was talking about. But, after I started to read the stuff she wrote in her notebooks I was able to put things together. I think my Aunt really got screwed over by boys her age. I think she started to go out with older guys. Father figures. See, my grandfather, my Aunt’s and my mother’s father, was a real dork. When he died, nobody really cared. Not even my grandmother. And from what I’ve been able to piece together, he and Aunt Brandy didn’t get along. IIf I had to take a guess, whoever killed her might’ve been some older guy who she thought would treat her nice.”
“An older guy who might’ve also been a cemetery buff? Is that possible?” said Perry.
I shrugged. “Why not?”
Perry scribbled something down on a piece of paper, then said, “Do you think it’s possible that this ‘older’ man you think she might’ve been seeing is the one who introduced her to being interested in cemeteries?”
“There’s no way I could know that. Until Del mentioned the words cemetery buff I never even knew such a thing had a name.”
“Anything else I should know?” said Perry.
Quilla thought for a few seconds. “No.”
“Let’s see if I get any info from your Aunt’s things, then we’ll talk again.”
“Alright,” said Quilla.
“Del,” said Perry. “I need to talk to you for a second. Quilla, why don’t you wait out front with Greg?”
“Why should I be left out?”
“I need to ask Del about another matter.”
Clearly not believing Perry, Quilla blurted a suspicious, “Okay,” glared at me and walked out.
I looked at Perry as he began removing the possessions of Brandy Parker from the box.
“Who came up with this crap about three murders?” he said, lifting out a thick photo album. “Her or you?”
“Both of us.”
“I get the feeling you think that little shit’s a good kid.”
“She is. She’s troubled, but she’s okay. She’s honest and sincere.”
“This idea about Kyle Thistle’s wife and your girlfriend is so off the wall I’m not even gonna consider it.” He pulled out Brandy Parker’s notebook. “But what I will consider is what the kid said about her Aunt being a cemetery buff. I don’t know what it is about that, but ever since you mentioned it the day we found the body I’ve been haunted by it. I’ve felt that somewhere in it was the clue I need. And now that she says her Aunt was one, it places the victim in the cemetery.”
“She could’ve been killed somewhere else and brought to the mausoleum.”
“Or she could’ve been doing whatever cemetery buffs do, checking out a tombstone and the killer could’ve snuck behind her, killed her and hid her in the mausoleum. So I have to ask myself if the killer was a cemetery buff or not. And if he was… was he there with her, you know, like, on a date or something? Or was he just a stranger who popped into a cemetery to look at old tombstones and who saw Brandy Parker and maybe he knew who she was from her wild nights in bars… and maybe he thought she was sexy because she was wearing that tight ‘I’m A Virgin Islander’ T-shirt…and let’s face it, she was a babe. Only problem with this line of thought is what you said about the graves where she was hidden.”
“Whattya mean?”
“Nobody goes there to visit.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “We made a list of all the names on the headstones near the mausoleum.” I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the pieces of paper on which we’d written down the names and handed them to Perry. “We figured that maybe one of the names on the headstones might be the ancestor of the killer.”
“And?” said Perry as he picked up the sheets of paper and glanced at them without much interest.
“The idea being that even though it’s a low traffic area populated with graves of people whose relatives and friends are long since dead, perhaps the killer happened to be paying his respects nine years ago and… ”
Perry shrugged and tossed the list of names onto his desk dismissively. “I’m way ahead of you. I had Greg and Wendell check out all the names on those tombstones plus the dates that the people died and not a one was after Nineteen-twenty. I don’t know exactly how many years make up a generation, but let’s say it’s twenty, twenty-five. That means nearly five generations of people have lived and died since the last person was buried in that Section. And your theory is that the average person won’t visit a grave beyond his parents and grandparents.” He leaned forward and picked up the names again. “So these are all bullshit.”
What Perry said made sense, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I agreed with him.
“Then what’s your theory, Perry?”
“Try this on for size. Two perfect strangers, cemetery buffs, encounter each other over a grave. They fall into conversation. Maybe they actually hit it off because they’ve found this weird common bond. They spend time together, checking out old graves and maybe this is the first girl the guy’s ever met who had the same fascination with cemeteries as him. The guy hits on her, but she doesn’t want to. She screams. The guy panics. He didn’t want any trouble. He just thought he was gonna get lucky with this sexy fellow cemetery buff. She won’t stop screaming so the guy grabs her a little too hard and he doesn’t mean to hurt her. He just wants her to stop screaming. He puts his hand on her mouth and she’s struggling because she’s still scared and before you know it they’re on the ground and she hits her head on an old headstone and she’s dead. It’s not like the guy planned on it. It was an accident. If only she had stopped screaming. You think that could’ve happened, Del?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Now, the killer has a problem. Does he call the cops and tell them what happened? Hell no. He’s a decent guy. Just has a strange hobby. It’s not like he came there to kill anyone. But he knows that if he calls the police and tells them the truth they might not believe him. He might be arrested. Have to go to jail. Get a lawyer. Go to trial. Maybe he’s poor. Can’t hire a good attorney. Maybe he has a nice career going for himself. He’s watched enough TV and movies to know there might be some ambitious District Attorney who wants to nail him because it’s an election year or something. Our boy knows his ass is grass if he does the right thing and reports what happened. So he thinks, ‘If I hide the body, nobody will know what happened.’ And since he’s a cemetery buff he figures he’ll stash the body in a place that wouldn’t have a lot of people paying respects, so he looks for an old, out of the way mausoleum, breaks in, hides the body, seals it back up and he’s gone. And he figures the odds are in his favor that the body’ll never be found. And for nine years he guessed right. Bastard never figured that some teenagers would spoil his perfect crime.”
He looked to me as if he wanted my approval.
“You’re assuming she was murdered there. If she was killed somewhere else and brought to the cemetery it changes your theory completely.”
“That’s another scenario. All I can work with is something that sounds logical. What I just said sounds possible. But just to show you I can be open minded, let’s call mine Theory One. Now let’s talk about Theory Two. Del’s theory — that she was killed somewhere else. I’ll make this quick, because it’s real simple. For argument’s sake, let’s forget about the fact that Brandy Parker was a cemetery buff. Let’s say that on the day she was killed she picked up a guy in a bar. They went somewhere to do the dirty deed. For whatever reason, things get out of hand, and for whatever reason, he kills her. It’s late at night. Again, let’s assume the killer didn’t plan on killing her. It just happened. Just like our guy in Theory One, he has to decide whether or not to call the police. He says no way. He has to hide the body. Now this guy’s a cemetery buff. He figures he’ll take his chances and hide the body in the mausoleum. Bingo! That’s how she could’ve been strangled somewhere else and then brought to the cemetery.”
“You’re pretty much basing everything on the idea that the killer’s a cemetery buff.”
“Has to be. Or like I said to you the day we found the body it’s somebody who knows that cemetery inside and out.” Perry turned back to the computer, punched a couple of keys and watched as something came onto the screen. He pressed the Print button and in seconds out came a sheet of paper.
“I made of list of the employees of Elm Grove, your Funeral Home and DiGregorio’s. There’s a grand total of nineteen people, including you. Take a look.” He handed the sheet of paper to me. I read the list of names.
Inside
Mel Abernathy (Manager)
George Granger (salesman)
Joanne Linley (bookkeeper)
Patricia Aimes (secretary)
Outside
Alton Held (Head Groundskeeper)
Vaughn Larkin (Night Watchman)
Will Polk (Gravedigger)
Nat Jaspers (Gravedigger)
Tim Wallach (Gravedigger)
Del Coltrane (FD)
Lew Henderson (FD)
Clint Tristler
Nolan Fowler (Embalmer)
Elaine Whorley (Hair)
Tyler DiGregorio (FD)
Alphonse DiGregorio (FD)
Wilton Ging (Embalmer)
Elaine Whorley (Hair)
“Why do you have Vaughn’s name on the list?” I asked.
“Don’t get your balls in an uproar. I just put his name there when I listed all the cemetery employees. Far as I’m concerned, Vaughn’s the only person in this town who’s above suspicion. What about the other names? You know them all. Does any strike you as having a dark side?”
I looked at the names. Precisely because I did know them all I didn’t put much stock in the idea that one was a killer, but as I stared at the names one thing began to alarm me. If the killer was someone on the list, it meant that I knew him. And despite Perry’s refusal to consider the possibility that Brandy Parker had been murdered by the same person who killed Virginia Thistle and Alyssa, if the killer was on that list, it meant that someone I knew had killed the only woman I’d ever love.
“I can’t believe any of them are capable of it,” I said.
“My father never trusted Alton Held.”
“Alton’s a pussycat. What was not to trust?”
“His white trash southern accent bothered my father. He always had a hard on for people with any kind of accent. He did some checking up on Alton when he moved to town and found out he had a record back in Louisiana.”
“What was the crime?”
“Burglary, breaking and entering, passing bad checks, a bunch of drunk and disorderlies and assault and batteries.”
I wondered if Vaughn knew about Alton’s record. “Was he arrested for any serious crimes?”
Perry smirked. “No. But coincidentally, Alton’s been living here for twenty-five years.” I said nothing. “The guy comes out of nowhere with a record and hires on as a gravedigger, one of life’s great career moves.” He rolled his eyes. “Gets to know his way around the cemetery pretty well. Could even be a cemetery buff… and even if he wasn’t he probably sees some now and then. I’m thinking on my feet here, Del, so this might not be totally clear yet, but if your notion about one killer murdering three woman is right, the guy had to be around for all these years. Alton was and Lew, Alphonse, Mel Abernathy, Nolan Fowler and Wilt Ging.”
He leaned back looking satisfied with himself. “They were all around and they’re all suspects. All of ’em!”