The Gravedigger's Ball (6 page)

There were a few minutes of radio silence before one of the cops spoke up. “This is 9215. We found her. She’s a little shaken up, but she’s fine. She’s about twenty-five yards in front of you, sir.”

Lynch saw a group of officers huddled around a tree. Then he saw a woman stand up. Even as one of the cops draped her shoulders with a poncho to shield her from the rain, she looked deathly afraid. That was odd to Lynch, because the closer he got to her, the more clearly he saw her face. He’d never seen Kirsten Douglas afraid of anything before.

Holstering his gun, he walked up to her. “Forget about what you’re doing down here,” he said, his brow furrowed in annoyance. “We’ll get to that later. What did you see?”

She looked up at him with a mixture of fear and confusion, as if she were unsure how to explain. “There was a man,” she began, but she stopped mid-sentence as a chill ran through her body.

“What did he look like?” Lynch demanded. “Which way did he go?”

She tried to answer, but she felt very cold. The rain seemed to have soaked through to her very bones. It wasn’t the rain that made her cold, however. It was what she’d seen, and more than that, it was what she hadn’t seen.

“He was white,” she whispered. “Too white. It was almost like he didn’t have any blood at all. And he was wearing a black coat—a coat like you’d see in an old war movie.”

“Okay,” Lynch said, turning to his men. “That’s the same description from the cemetery. I want these woods searched and I want him found. He can’t be far away.”

The officers began to fan out, and Kirsten watched them with curious resignation. She knew they wouldn’t find what they were looking for, but she was afraid to tell them that. Not out of fear for her safety, but because she was afraid for her sanity.

“Did he hurt you?” Lynch asked.

Kirsten shook her head slowly from side to side, her eyes unfocused and staring straight ahead.

“Then why did you scream?”

She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. After a few seconds, she looked up at the commissioner.

“I came through these woods, hoping to see why you were taking so long to give us information about the missing officer,” she said. “But along the way, I thought I saw someone behind me, so I ran the last twenty or so yards until I got to this spot. I probably should’ve just kept running, but when I saw your men moving the body, I guess my reporter’s instincts took over. I stopped, took a picture, and posted it online. When I turned around, the man who’d followed me was standing right next to me.”

“And that’s when you screamed?” Lynch asked.

She nodded.

“Where did he go after that?”

Kirsten shook her head and sighed. “He went up,” she said, not sure if she believed it herself.

“What do you mean, he went up?” Lynch asked. “Did he climb a tree? Did he run up a hill?”

Kirsten looked into the distance and spoke as if she were in a dream. “You know, Commissioner, I’ve spent my entire professional career dealing in facts. Who, what, when, where, and why. Every time I wrote a story I could ask myself those questions, along with the other ones I learned in journalism school. Is it timely? Is it unusual? Is it news? And for more than twenty years, I could always answer all those questions, but not now. Not here. Not today. For the first time in my life, I’m not sure that what I’m dealing with is fact. And that scares me, Commissioner. It scares me more than some man standing over me in the woods.”

“What are you saying, Kirsten? What did you see?”

Kirsten looked at Lynch, and the officers around the commissioner edged closer, especially Sandy Jackson. Sandy knew what it was to see something that her mind couldn’t explain. It was a helpless feeling, one that generated its own special fear. Sandy had experienced it when she saw the Angel of Death. She wondered if it would be the same for Kirsten.

“He was so close to me that I could smell him,” the reporter said as Sandy looked on. “It was an odd smell, almost like the stench of something that had been buried. When I saw him standing there next to me, I thought that I was about to be buried, too, so I screamed. Then I closed my eyes and told myself that if he was going to kill me, I wasn’t going to watch him do it. A second later I felt this breeze, and I heard something like flapping wings. When I opened my eyes, he was gone, and there was a black bird flying away. It was a raven, Commissioner, and as crazy as it sounds, when that raven flew away, I think that man might have flown away, too.”

*   *   *

At eleven forty-five, Coletti and Mann walked into homicide with Lenore, and the room was nearly empty. Almost every cop in the city was on the street looking for the man who’d killed one of their own. Of the three detectives who remained in the office, two were on their way out the door, and the third was busy shuffling papers.

The three detectives stopped what they were doing when they saw Lenore. They’d heard that Mary Smithson’s sister had been at the scene, but hearing about her and seeing her were two different things.

Coletti and Mann tried to ignore their stares. Lenore did, too, but as they walked through the room, Lenore’s presence filled everyone’s minds with recollections of Mary, and the memories were anything but good.

Coletti pulled out a chair for Lenore next to his battered desk. Everyone was so quiet that the scrape of the metal legs against the floor sounded like an earthquake. He booted up the ancient desktop he refused to relinquish and checked for Clarissa Bailey’s e-mail that the cemetery manager had promised to forward to him. It wasn’t there.

Mann sat down at his desk, as well. He turned on his laptop and plugged his digital tape recorder into the USB port. As he fiddled with the mouse pad, a voice spoke up from across the room.

“She looks just like her,” one of the detectives whispered as he looked at Lenore, but as quietly as he tried to say it, the words were like a shout against the silence.

With those five words, he had reaffirmed the history between Mary and Coletti and had caused every detective in the office to replay it. They could still remember Mary coming into that very room just two months before and cracking Coletti’s tough exterior with brash talk and blue eyes. She’d confronted him about his attitude toward Mann and forced him to backtrack. No one had ever made Coletti back off of anything. That was how his colleagues had known, even before it happened, that Coletti’s and Mary’s fast friendship would develop into something more. What they didn’t know was that the woman who seemed so genuine was really something else altogether.

They’d watched Coletti lose when he gambled on loving her, and though most of them would never say it aloud, their hearts broke with his when Mary betrayed him. Because Lenore was Mary’s sister, they viewed her through the prism of those memories, and, fairly or not, at least one of them believed that Lenore would eventually prove herself to be just like Mary.

Lenore tried to keep her focus straight ahead as she watched Coletti fill out the incident report from that morning’s shooting, but it was hard to do so with everyone staring. She occupied herself by making a call on her cell. When there was no answer, she disconnected and put the phone in her bag. Soon after, one of the detectives—a biker type who’d transferred from northwest detectives just three months before—came over to Coletti’s desk.

“I guess you heard they found Smitty,” he said to Coletti while continuing to stare at Lenore.

Coletti felt uncomfortable. He’d never worked with this new guy, but he didn’t like him. He was tactless in the squad room and reckless in the streets. Guys like that were accidents waiting to happen.

“Yeah, we heard about Smitty,” Coletti said with a sigh as he continued to write. “It’s a shame what happened to him, but right now we’re trying to work through Clarissa Bailey’s case. Has anyone reached her husband?”

“We’ve sent a couple cars by the house, but no luck yet,” the detective said, still looking at Lenore. “We haven’t talked to Smitty’s wife yet, either, but maybe it’s for the best.”

Coletti looked up at the detective, his eyes warning the man to stop. The new guy either didn’t get the hint or didn’t want to.

“I’d hate to have to be the one to tell Smitty’s wife he was buried alive,” the detective said as he glared at Lenore. “I’d never want her to know that they pulled him out of the mud with his mouth wide open like he died gasping for air.”

Lenore tried to be strong, but the image brought tears to her eyes. She quickly reached up and wiped one of them away, but that tear was immediately followed by another.

Coletti saw her crying and stared at the detective with a look that carried bad intentions. “Mrs. Wilkinson’s been nice enough to cooperate. So if you care so much about what happened to Smitty, why don’t you run along and find his killer instead of harassing my witness?”

“Maybe I’ve found the killer’s accomplice right here,” the detective said, his eyes glued on Lenore.

“Or maybe you haven’t,” Coletti said slowly. “Now leave.”

“Or?”

“Or somebody’ll be doing paperwork on
you
,” Mann said, standing up and looking him in the eye.

The detective’s eyes shifted from one man to the other. Then he raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay,” he said, backing up with a smirk on his face. “I’ll hit the street. Just remember what happened last time you brought a lady in here, Coletti.”

Coletti jumped up to go after him, but Mann held him back.

“Ignore him,” Mann said as the detective left with his partner. “It’s not you, it’s him. He doesn’t know how to handle what happened to Smitty.”

Mann was right. When a police officer was murdered, it made each cop consider his or her own mortality. It let them know that each day could be their last, and for many, that realization was quickly followed by anger. Both Mann and Coletti had seen it often after the deaths of numerous officers in recent months: enraged police beating suspects in the streets; cops’ wives enduring violence at home; and officers walking around like ticking time bombs, their tempers ready to flare at any moment.

Smitty’s death was just another in a line of on-duty incidents that dredged up the underlying danger in the job. Every officer handled the pressure differently, but most handled it, nonetheless. Coletti preferred to work through it, while others liked to play.

The detective who’d stayed behind waddled over to Coletti’s desk, his large belly pointing the way. “I’m Tommy,” he said to Lenore, who wiped her eyes once more before reaching up to shake his proffered hand.

“Nice to meet you,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m sorry about the tears. It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone die, much less have someone try to blame me for it.”

Tommy put down the papers he was carrying and leaned his ample butt against the side of Coletti’s desk. “If my colleagues aren’t treating you right, my dear,” he said with a ridiculous, Jim Carrey–like smile, “I will.”

“You finished, Tommy?” said an irritated Coletti.

“Not quite.” Tommy turned his attention back to Lenore. “I just want you to know that I like horseback riding, walks in the park, and listening. And I know it might not look like it, but I’m into weightlifting and mixed martial arts, too. Call me.”

He winked and dropped his card on the desk.

Lenore chuckled. “I’m afraid I’m married, but thank you. I’m flattered.”

Tommy reached down, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. “I don’t care how great you think your husband is, honey. Once you go fat, you never go back.”

Lenore laughed. Mann did, too. Coletti smiled in spite of himself. “Now you see what happens when the captain isn’t around,” he said. “People start losing their minds.”

“Actually, we
use
our minds,” Tommy said with a grin. “You’d see that if you checked out those papers I put together for you when I heard about Mrs. Bailey’s untimely demise.”

Coletti picked up the documents Tommy had placed on his desk. As soon as he began to thumb through them, he saw that they told a story all their own.

“Excuse us for a minute,” he said to Mann and Lenore as he beckoned for Tommy to follow him into the captain’s adjacent office.

They went inside, and Coletti closed the door behind them. “So, how long ago did her husband file for divorce?” Coletti asked as he looked through the petition.

“I think he served her with the papers about a month ago.”

Coletti grunted as he looked at Ellison Bailey’s signed affidavit. “Loss of companionship, huh? That means she stopped sleeping with him.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but I think that’s probably because he was a bum.” He pointed to a section in the divorce petition that listed Ellison Bailey’s occupation. “Says here he’s a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. I’d be guessing, but I’d say he doesn’t make a mint doing that.”

Coletti nodded. Then he flipped through the rest of Ellison’s divorce petition, which requested, among other things, alimony payments from his wife, who served as CEO of Bailey, Inc., a publicly traded jewelry firm with a billion dollars in assets.

“I see she filed a counterclaim,” Coletti said as he went through the rest of the papers.

“Yeah, she not only denied that there was any loss of companionship, she was apparently going to fight him on the alimony, too. And take a look at this.”

Tommy showed him paperwork from two six-year-old civil suits that had been filed against Ellison Bailey by women in Florida and California. Suddenly, the picture became clearer.

“Thanks,” Coletti said, snatching the door open and quickly crossing the floor to his partner and Lenore.

“Charlie, we’ve gotta track down Clarissa Bailey’s husband,” he said. Then he looked at Lenore. “I hope you’re going to stick around.”

“I’d already reserved a room at the Loews. I planned to stay for a few days anyway,” she said. “It’s like I told you earlier, there’s something I need to do here. I’m not leaving until I find out what it is.”

Coletti’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that it was Kirsten Douglas, the reporter from the
Daily News
. He pressed ignore. A moment later his desk phone rang. He picked it up, ready to scream at the reporter for harassing him, but it wasn’t Douglas. As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, his mouth pressed together in a pale thin line. He jotted down some notes on his pad.