Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER TWENTY

I’m half expecting to find my house has been set on fire when I get home. Or the windows broken. Or, at the very least, to have murderer spray-painted across the garage door and fence. I pull into the driveway, stand next to my car, and stare up and down the street. I’m looking for Sidney Alderman, but he isn’t here. Nobody is. Not even Casey Horwell. All of my neighbors are off doing whatever it is that neighbors do. Mow lawns. Pull weeds. Cook food and watch TV. None of them are trying to figure out where their dead children are. I’m careful as I make my way inside. I had a gun pulled on me last night, and hours later a microphone, and I’m not eager to make either mistake twice.

I plug my cell phone back into the charger, then I bring the computer in from the car and set it up on the dining-room table. Bridget would not be pleased. I use the Christchurch Libraries’ database of newspapers to find more articles related to the ones Bruce clipped. I take on board as much as I can from them, and from the missing persons reports, and as much as I can about their lives and about their deaths-not that any of the articles say they are dead. But they sure read as though the journalists were all betting heavily on it. I print out a photo of the fourth girl, then line the pictures up in a row. Their killer certainly had a fondness for a specific type of girl.

I spend two hours reading all about the missing, and it’s hard, because my mind keeps returning to Alderman and Emily.

I search the obituaries for the weeks prior to the girls’ deaths, looking for the same last names to see if there was a reason for any or all of them to attend a funeral. I come up with nothing. It’s not a busted lead at this stage because it could be they still went to funerals of people outside their families, or family members with different last names. The only way to know for sure is to start making some phone calls, but right now talking to these dead girls’ families is the last thing I feel like doing.

I set the whiteboard up, propping it up on a chair and leaning the top against a wall. I’ve got nothing but a permanent marker to draw with, but go ahead anyway, starting with a time line. I figure that Henry Martins would have been buried two days after he died. If I add those days on to the date of his death, it matches up nicely. Henry died on a Tuesday and was buried on a Thursday. Rachel was last seen Thursday morning, and was reported missing by her parents the following Tuesday. But then I add the other missing girls to the time line, and find that the dates between disappearances are not that even. The first two girls went missing within a month of each other, then there was another eighteen months until the third went missing, and the last was less than a week ago. It doesn’t suggest that the murderer is escalating or slowing, and I’m not sure what that in itself suggests. Guys like this tend to start killing more often as the need overtakes the desire. Or there is something in their life that triggers the impulse to kill. I look at the time line and wonder what made this guy kill at these particular moments. Was it simply that the right type of girl came into his localized view of the world? Or did he go hunting for women to fit his type? There has to be more to it-I write Prison? on the board, wondering if the killer could have been in jail for eighteen months. It’s common for serial killers to get arrested for an unrelated crime.

I go through the obituaries again, hunting out those who died in the days leading up to the girls’ disappearances. Four of these people are no longer in their coffins, and are lying on morgue tables in different stages of decay, their bodies waterlogged and bloated or decayed.

I look at the time line. I think about Emily. I think about Bruce Alderman and about his father. Then I think about where I was two years ago and the difference I could have made. That was my chance to save these girls. Maybe Landry was right, and I am fucking everything up. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to find Emily.

My cell phone finally has a full charge. I go through the memory of incoming calls, put Landry’s number into the address book, and then dial his phone. He picks it up after half a ring.

“I was about to call you,” he says. “Your name just keeps on popping up. You need to stay the hell away from my investigation.”

“I can help.”

“Help? You seen the news lately?”

“Look, that isn’t. .”

“I don’t mean that screwup you made last night. I mean the new one you’ve got on your hands today,” he says.

“I haven’t heard. What have I done now?”

“You must’ve really pissed off this Horwell chick at some point. What’d you do, sleep with her?” he asks.

“Yeah, good one, Landry.”

“Turns out when people don’t like you, they really don’t like you. I guess I’m starting to see why.”

“There a point here?” I ask him.

“She interviewed Alderman this morning. Had to be sometime after he hit the bar, but looking at him it couldn’t have been long after. Didn’t seem to have many drinks under his belt.”

“And?”

“And it wasn’t good. It’s like she saw this fire burning inside him and just started throwing on more fuel. Hadn’t been for all those angles and splatter trajectories, even I’d be thinking you were guilty. Anyway whatever anger he had about you before, you can double it and double that again. Just keep an eye out. And do us all a favor, huh? Stay indoors and turn off your phone until we get this thing nailed down. When it goes to court, we’re going to be looking at some defense lawyer pointing the finger at you and saying-”

“Yeah-we covered this already.”

“Then why don’t I feel assured?”

I look down at the photographs and the newspaper clippings. “Look, Landry, I got something for you. You want to hear it or not?”

“That depends on how you got what you got. Is this going to backfire? If you’ve got anything and you’ve obtained it illegally, I don’t want to know about it, right? Otherwise it’ll blow up in our faces.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t say anything and I don’t add anything else, and he reads my silence accurately.

“You’re unbelievable, Tate.”

“You want the names of the other girls or not?”

“Do me a favor and don’t tell me. There’s a hotline for information. Ring it anonymously and give it to them, okay? Call from a pay phone or something. Anything you give me from an illegal search is poison. Come on, Tate, you know that.”

“I’m no longer a cop. Those same rules don’t apply.”

“Yeah, and this serial killer’s defense lawyer you don’t want me to keep reminding you about is going to-”

“Right,” I say, interrupting him. “No problem. So you don’t want my help.”

“Help? Is that what you think you’ve been doing? I gotta go. Make sure you-”

“I got something else.”

“You’re going to give me a heart attack, Tate.”

“Look, this is something good. It’s something you can say you came up with on your own, so you don’t have to-”

“Come on, I know how to do my Goddamn job.”

“Rachel Tyler,” I say, “before she died she visited Woodland Estates. Her grandmother died. It’s the same cemetery.” Landry doesn’t answer. I can tell he hadn’t made this connection. I press on. “I think the others might have been there too. I think that’s the connection. That’s what drew them to the killer.”

“You got anything to back that up?” he asks.

“Not yet. But I’m-”

“No buts, Tate. You’re off this thing. Go ahead and make that call to the hotline, give us those names. Do it now.”

He hangs up without me telling him Alderman has my daughter. And that’s okay-I want to deal with Alderman myself.

The phone call I’m going to make will take most of their legwork out of play. It’ll mean the contents of the other two coffins are no longer up for grabs. But that call can wait. First I’m going to find Sidney Alderman and do what it takes to get my daughter back, and that’s something I don’t need Landry’s help for.