Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I try to figure out what he’s saying. I don’t even know when last night was. Technically it’s just been; it’s after midnight now. But he doesn’t mean today. He means yesterday. Technically. He’s talking about twenty-four hours ago. A lot has happened since then. It feels like two days have passed since I followed Father Julian from the church, but it’s only been one. Hell, it’s probably only a few minutes either side of that.

“What?”

“You’re going to need to come with us, Tate,” he says.

I look down at my towel. I look at my dirty feet and the lines of blood on my chest. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Landry looks me up and down. “No?”

“No.”

“You’re saying even though he had a restraining order against you, even though you were picked up at the church the morning of the day he died breaking that order, even though you were caught on film there yesterday evening, and even though you crashed your car, drunk, a few minutes from the church around the same time Father Julian died, that you had nothing to do with it?”

I don’t bother answering. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re wearing only a towel. But I figure Landry or one of his buddies must have been dropping by the house on and off all day since I was signed out of the courthouse in the afternoon. That means Julian wasn’t found till around then at the earliest. Any earlier and I’d never have been released.

“Put on some clothes, Tate. You’re coming with us.”

“I’m calling my lawyer.” I think of Donovan Green, but can’t really imagine him being happy to take my call.

“Get him to meet you at the station.”

I have nothing to put on except a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that have been building up dust in the corner of the bedroom. Everything else is in the washing machine. I throw on a jacket and my running sneakers. We step outside. It’s cold. I can see faces in neighboring windows.

I’m put in the back of the car and driven away, and this time I’m handcuffed. Landry stays behind with some others to go through my house. At the station I’m reacquainted with the interrogation room. They lock me in, and the call I get to make to my lawyer isn’t brought up again, but that’s okay. I haven’t been having a good day with lawyers. I rest my head on my arms and close my eyes, knowing I’m going to be waiting here a while.

Landry comes in an hour later, and he has Schroder with him. That means one of them is going to be my friend while the other puts on the pressure. I already know who will play which role, and I figure they know I’ll know that too. They set up a video camera and point it so it covers all three of us. I can hear it recording. Schroder sits opposite me and Landry stands. It’s pretty cold in here, especially as I’m dressed for summer.

Schroder sits a folder on the table and opens the cover. There are photographs of Father Julian in there. His head has been beaten in, blood all over his face and neck. His clothing is disheveled. One eye is open, but the other is closed because of the way his face is pressing against the floor. He doesn’t look like he died easy. Not like I could have earlier on today out in the woods. His open eye has a tiny pool of blood in it. Schroder starts to lay the photos out on the table. There is a close-up of Father Julian’s mouth. His lips are open; his teeth are exposed and bloody. Behind them is a deep darkness.

“Some ground rules first,” Schroder says. “You know how this goes, you’ve been on this side of the table, so we’re not going to try and play you,” he says, trying to play me. “We’re just gonna lay out the facts and you’re gonna get to state your case. That sound good to you?”

I shrug. “Sure. What about my lawyer? You think it’ll sound good to him?”

“You can have a lawyer if you want one. We’re not going to feed you that bullshit line about only guilty men wanting them,” he says, which is his way of feeding me the line anyway.

“Let’s just get this over with then.”

He slides a piece of paper over to me. “Just sign this,” he says.

I don’t read it over. I just check a few of the words to make sure it’s the same form I used to slide over the table to people. It’s a waiver, saying I’m happy to talk without a lawyer present.

“What’s the problem?” Landry asks. “You decided maybe you’ve got something you don’t want to share with us?”

I sign the form. The alternative is to phone Donovan Green and get him down here.

The form disappears back into the folder. The photographs of Father Julian remain.

“The message is clear,” Landry says.

“What message?”

He looks at Schroder and shrugs, as if he really can’t believe what he just heard. Schroder lays out a few more photographs.

“You didn’t want him to talk,” Schroder says. “And you wanted to leave him a message. That’s why you cut out his tongue.”

“Hang on a second,” I say, leaning forward.

“Why are you in such a mess?” Landry asks. “You’re covered in blood. In dirt. What have you been doing? You’ve been burying something?”

“I was in an accident last night.”

“And you were cleaned up. All the clothes you were wearing today are in your washing machine. They all have blood on them too?” Schroder asks.

“You’d have been better off dumping them, Tate,” Landry says. “All those years busting people for this same kind of shit, I’d have thought you’d have learned more.”

“When the hell did you make it a law that a man can’t start cleaning up after himself?”

“The way you’ve been lately,” Landry says, leaning against the wall, “we’ve all thought it was a law you’d made.”

I look at their positions. One sitting. One standing. One my friend, the other my enemy. The acting is going to be a stretch for only one of these men. Soon Landry will pace behind me, in and out of view, then he’ll lean over me. The game they said they wouldn’t play they’re already playing. They have to. They don’t know how to do it any other way.

“Why don’t you tell us about Julian?” Schroder asks. “Why were you following him?”

“I haven’t been following him, and I certainly didn’t do this to him. First of all, if I was trying to leave a message by cutting out his tongue, the only person that message could be for would be you guys, right? It’d be stupid of me to have done that.”

“Listen to him,” Landry says, looking at Schroder, but really talking to me. “He thinks there’s some sense in all of this.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Try selling us another story,” Landry says. “Nobody in this room has any false pretenses about what you’re capable of, Tate. We know you’re the reason nobody has heard from Quentin James in two years.”

“Look, Tate, cut us some slack here, okay?” Schroder says. “You know how it works. You can sit there all night stonewalling us, but in the end we’ll learn what we need to from you. Why don’t you save us all some time?”

I look at the photos of the dead priest. There are eight of them. “Why? So you can pin this bullshit on me?”

“If you didn’t kill him, then what’s the problem?” Schroder asks. “The evidence will prove that.”

“Depends on how you’re going to look at the evidence,” I say. “Seems to me you’re already looking at it and don’t have a clue how to read it properly.”

“We’re wasting our time,” Landry says. “I say we lock him up and tell his fellow prisoners he used to be a cop. Let them loosen him up.”

“Yeah, good one, Landry.”

“Why were you following him?” Schroder asks.

“Like I said, I wasn’t following him.”

Schroder presses on. “What were you doing before the accident?”

“I wasn’t following him.”

“We need to show him a few things,” Schroder says, then he stands up and walks out of the room. Landry doesn’t fill the empty seat. He pushes his hands against the top of it and leans forward.

“You used to be one of us,” he says. “What in the hell happened?”

“What do you think?”

Before he can answer, Schroder steps back in. He has a cardboard box full of plastic bags. I can’t tell how many there are as they all blend into one. He starts laying them out on the table.

“The watch,” he says, “used to belong to Gerald Weiss. He was buried with it two years ago. So how is it you’ve come to own it?”

“I found it.”

“There are two ways you could have got it,” Landry says. “Either you stole it off a dead man when you were in the water, or you stole it off a dead man when you were pulling him out of his coffin.”

“Even you’re doing a shitty job of trying to believe that,” I say, and Landry looks pissed off. “You’re trying too hard here. And one day that’s going to come back and kick you in the ass. You’re going to try too damn hard, and people are going to suffer for it.”

“You’re either a thief or a killer,” Landry says firmly, as if they are one in the same. “I think that’s why you were so damn keen to help out with the exhumation of Henry Martins. You knew who was going to be in there. You wanted to try and control the situation. But the problem was the corpses, right? They floated up. If they hadn’t, we’d never have known about the others.”

“Look, cut the routine or I’m gonna change my mind and ask for my lawyer.”

Schroder slides over another bag. It has the newspaper articles I found in Alderman’s bedroom. “You’ve been holding back on us,” he says, adding the printouts I made when sketching out the time lines of obituaries and the missing girls. “You knew long before us who was in the ground.”

“That’s because I used to do this too,” I say, and it’s true. I used to do this, and between the times I did and the times I haven’t nothing really has changed. Violent acts are still a huge part of this city, as are the gray skies and the rain waiting at the threshold of every cooling hour. Bad things happening to good people. There are kids in this city being born, being loved, growing up into the choices that make them good or bad. There are kids out there without any chance at all. Some will become good, some will become evil, some are born and tossed into dumpsters. I was part of the world that tried to correct all of that, the world that tried to keep some of it in check. But somewhere along the way I lost track of it all. I fell into the abyss.

“Nobody seems to have forgotten that as much as you, Tate,” Schroder says. “You’re nothing like the man you used to be. You used to be a real stand-up guy. And now you’ve got a DUI hanging over your head; we’ve got you for theft, for stalking, and you’re looking real good for murder.”

“Without any evidence you can’t hold me here without charging me. That means I’m here on my own merits. That means I’m free to get up and leave.”

“No, you’re not free until I say you’re free,” Schroder says. “We’ve got a techie going through your computer files. You’ve been following Father Julian since the day Sidney Alderman went missing. And these newspaper articles. How is it some of them are originals? To me, that suggests they were cut out as the girls went missing. How’d you get them?”

“Bruce Alderman gave them to me. He left them in my car when we drove to my office.”

Schroder slides another plastic bag over. It has a small envelope inside with my name written across it. There are bloody smudges across it. For a brief moment I’m back in my office, the smell of burning metal and blood in the air, a pink mist creating a cloud over the caretaker’s head that has just been distended by a bullet.

“What was in here?” Schroder asks. “The articles? See, the articles aren’t folded up, and they’d need to have been folded to fit in this envelope.”

“I can’t remember.”

“We found writing samples at the church,” Schroder says. “This is Bruce Alderman’s handwriting.”

“So?”

“So what else have you stolen?” Landry asks.

“I haven’t stolen anything. That envelope has my name on it, so whatever was in there was mine.”

“He wrote you a letter? A confession? A suicide note?” Schroder asks.

“No.”

“Thought you couldn’t remember what was in there?”

“I can’t.”

“But you can remember what wasn’t in there.”

“Memory is a funny thing.”

“Cut the crap, Tate,” Landry says.

“It was the watch, okay?” I say, and it sounds believable enough. “Alderman had the watch. I don’t know how he got it, and when he gave it to me I didn’t know who it belonged to.”

“Bullshit,” Landry says.

“Then you ought to shut up until you can prove otherwise.”

“Out of all the people in this city, why’d he come and see you?” Schroder asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I think it was because I was the face he connected to what was going on. I was the one who found the bodies. I was the one who came along with the exhumation order and started all of this.”

“You kept things from us,” Schroder says. “You stole evidence that would have helped us piece things together quicker. That ring you took from Rachel Tyler-let’s not forget you took the ring from Rachel Tyler. The time line would have changed. We’d probably have caught the person who started all of this.”

It’s true. But the moment that coffin opened and I saw a dead girl, I had no choice. There were other dead girls because of me, because of a decision I failed to make correctly two years earlier. How could I not take the ring? It led to suicide. It led me to murder. It led me to drunk driving and to being taken into the middle of nowhere where I should have been left.

“All these innocent girls,” Schroder says, spreading out the articles, one bag for each girl. “Do you even care?”

“Of course I do.”

“He doesn’t,” Landry says, “otherwise he’d be helping us.”

“You’ve turned one of your rooms into an office,” Schroder says. “Into a command post.”

“You’re charging me with that too?”

“Just tell us, damn it,” Schroder says, getting angry now. “You were following Father Julian for a reason. What do you think he did? You think he killed Sidney Alderman?” He leans back in his chair. “No, I don’t think that’s it,” he continues. “You wouldn’t be following him for that. You wouldn’t care about one angry old retired caretaker getting taken out. So there’s more to it. You were following him because you think he had something to do with the dead girls. Your office is dedicated to that case, and to Father Julian. You have pictures and articles pinned up all over the walls. You think the two go hand in hand. We were looking at Sidney Alderman as a possibility. And more so after he disappeared. We thought he ran. But not you. You kept looking at Father Julian. He was on our radar simply because everybody connected to the graveyard was on it. Only Alderman made a bigger blip, and when he disappeared his blip overshadowed everybody else’s. So we kept looking for him. It’s as though you knew something. It’s as though you gave up looking for Sidney Alderman because you didn’t think there was a point. Either you thought he was innocent or you thought he would never show up again. It’s just like two years ago with Quentin James. Which is it?”

“You tell me.”

“You think Julian killed those girls,” Schroder says. “We’ll know soon whether your thoughts have any foundation. In the meantime, tell us what happened to Sidney Alderman.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you knew to stop looking for him,” Landry says. “Why did you focus on Father Julian?”

“I wasn’t focusing on him.”

“Why did you kill him?” he asks.

“I didn’t.”

“This is going nowhere,” he says. “Show him the weapon,” he says to Schroder.

“The weapon?” I ask, immediately confused.

A smirk appears on Landry’s face. “The weapon, Sherlock. Like I said earlier, you really learned nothing from your years on the force. We searched your house, remember? What, did you think we wouldn’t find it?”

Schroder lifts the last plastic bag from the box and puts it on the table. Inside is my hammer from home. It’s covered in blood. And I already know it’s going to belong to Father Julian.