Criss Cross

Chapter 76

Quantico, Virginia

Drizzling rain and fog swept over small black gravestones engraved with alphanumeric codes set flush in the forest floor.

Darkness had long fallen on that remote and piney part of the Marine Corps base, an area not specifically denoted on any map of the vast federal property, an anonymous graveyard in the trees created for criminals whose pasts were so evil, their families had declined to claim their bodies for proper burial.

Mahoney, two other FBI agents, three cemetery workers, and I were there, all of us dressed in rain slickers and rubber boots and waving flashlights, looking for B157, the code on the marker above the supposed remains of Kyle Craig.

“Why aren’t they in order?” I asked.

One of the workers, an older man named Cecil who walked with a slight stoop, said, “The Marine commandant who authorized this burial ground after the Civil War wanted to make sure there would be no shrines to the dead here. Make them as difficult as possible to locate. Especially A-one.”

I took my eyes off gravestone C42. “Who’s under A-one?”

He hesitated, then said quietly, “John Wilkes Booth.”

I frowned. “Lincoln’s assassin? I thought he was buried in some cemetery in Baltimore under a blank gravestone that people cover with Lincoln pennies.”

Cecil shook his head. “Family didn’t want nothing of him. That headstone in Baltimore is over his sister’s grave. Booth’s here. He’s the reason for this unholy place.”

“Who else?”

“Can’t say, but a bunch. People think they’re buried somewhere else, and there are headstones and all, but the truth is, most cemeteries don’t want someone notorious or wicked defiling sacred ground. They send the real remains here. No one’s the wiser.”

I had never heard of this graveyard, not even during my days working on the base with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. I was fascinated. “C’mon,” I said, glancing around. “Who else is in these woods?”

Cecil looked away.

“I promise it will be between us.”

He hesitated but then said in a low voice, “You’re within about thirty yards of all that remains of Oswald and of Ruby.”

I gaped at him. “Lee Harvey Oswald? JFK’s killer? Here? And Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin?”

“John Wayne Gacy’s not far either. Real hall of shame.”

Before I could reply, Mahoney called out, “Here it is. I’ve got him.”

Ned was three rows away, crouched down and shining the beam of his Maglite at the ground. “Bring the big lights and the digger over.”

An FBI agent fired up a pickup truck carrying a bank of construction lights. Cecil crawled into a Bobcat earthmover with a backhoe arm.

I didn’t watch Cecil drive. I was looking all around as the fog swirled off on a stiffening breeze and the true rain came on.

Booth. Oswald. Ruby. Gacy.

And only God and Cecil knew who else was in the ground there.

As I walked to Mahoney, I admit it was disturbing — okay, downright eerie — to know that I was stepping over the bones of psychopaths, assassins, and other cold-blooded murderers.

A worker used a pinch bar to pry up the headstone and then set it aside. Cecil was a master of the Bobcat and soon had the blade and teeth of the bucket digging down through last year’s pine needles and into the wet red clay below.

It was pouring rain when the bucket hit metal, the heavy clank echoing up out of the hole. The other workers used a wooden ladder to climb down into the hole with a spade and two lengths of chain. In short order, they had the chains around a simple steel coffin and linked to the head of the bucket. Cecil toggled the controls. The box rose effortlessly, then swung and dangled above the hole.

“Small enough for a kid,” Mahoney said, shaking his head.

I flashed back to the last time I’d seen the man I believed to be Kyle Craig alive, just before his miserable life exploded and burned.

“There wasn’t much left of him,” I said. “Two charred arms and a leg.”