Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FORTY

I pin the photocopies of the newspaper articles up on the wall in my office and stare at the spot where my computer used to be until knocking at the front door breaks me out of the fugue. I think about ignoring it, but it just keeps going. I head into the hallway and swing the door open. Carl Schroder is there holding two pizza boxes in his arms. Suddenly he really is my best friend.

“Thought you might do with some food,” he says.

“I’m in the middle of cooking something.”

“I looked in that fridge of yours, Tate. What in the hell could you possibly be cooking?” He braces the pizzas in one hand, a bottle of Coke under his arm. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out my keys. “Might make it easier for you getting in and out. Saves breaking more windows.”

“Seriously, Carl, this isn’t a good time for me,” I say, taking my keys off him. The small key I got from Bruce Alderman is still attached to them.

“Spare me the bullshit. This place hasn’t had any food in it for a long time. Except for this kind. You’ve got enough pizza boxes stacked in your kitchen to build a fort.”

My stomach starts to growl and my mouth waters.

“I was going to bring beer,” he says, reaching under his arm and grabbing the Coke, “but something told me that was a bad idea.”

“You’re a real funny guy.”

We move through to the dining room. I grab some plates and a couple of glasses. The pizza has a range of different types of meat on it, so between that and the Coke I reckon I’ll get the nutritional value I need for the day.

“So why are you here?” I ask him.

“Look, Tate, Landry can be a real asshole, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point.”

“Which is?”

“The fact you’ve become a real mess.”

“I’m in the process of changing that,” I tell him.

He looks around the room, absorbing the comment. “I guess you are.”

“That’s what life-changing moments will do to you.”

“And what was that?” he asks.

“What do you think?”

“The accident,” he says, and he’s right-it was the accident more than it was being taken into the woods, or being framed for murder.

“It’s kind of ironic,” he adds.

I know what he’s getting at. He’s saying that if it hadn’t been for me driving through that intersection and hitting that car, I would now be in jail. I’d have been arrested for murder. He’s saying that picking up the bottle and getting hammered was the only thing that kept the frame job on me from being complete. It all comes back to that word: luck.

“Did you really think I did it?” I ask.

“Sure we did. Until the weapon showed up. That threw a wrench in the works. Or a hammer, I guess, in this case. It messed everything up. So you were lucky.”

“I shouldn’t have needed to be lucky. I didn’t kill the guy and that should have been enough.”

“Come on, you know sometimes that isn’t enough,” he says, which is a really depressing thought.

“So why are you here?” I ask. “Other than to make sure I’m eating okay?”

“How long’s it been since we hung out, Tate?”

“Probably around the same time you stopped calling me. Hell, it was the same time everybody stopped. If I remember correctly, it was around when Emily died.”

“That had nothing to do with it.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was Quentin James,” he says. “Nobody believes he ran. We all know you killed him. But without a body, without any proof. .”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Hey, I’d have killed him. Any one of us would have-and that’s why none of us looked real hard into finding him. It just sucked that it had to be you. And none of us wanted to hear you say it. What would have happened if over a few beers one night you told me what you’d done? What then? No, none of us could call you, Tate. It was the only way. It was safer. And not just for you, for us. It may not have been what you wanted, but it’s the way it had to play out. It was the way you made it play out.”

I don’t answer him. I’m not sure if he’s made a valid point or whether he’s just made up an excuse that sounds believable. I guess if I were in his situation I’d have done the same thing.

We sit in silence for a few minutes, eating our pizza and getting through our Cokes. The Coke tastes different without bourbon added to it.

“Tell me something,” I say, finishing one slice and getting ready to start another. “Bruce Alderman. Did you ever look at him for the murders?”

“We looked at everybody.”

“Yeah, but how much did you look at him?” I ask.

“Not as much as his father.”

“Which father?” I ask.

“If you’re trying to get at something, Tate, just spell it out.”

“I didn’t mean his priest.”

He sets down his pizza. “Who told you?”

“That Bruce and Sidney weren’t related? I’ve known from the beginning. Do you know who the real father is?”

He picks up his slice and starts back in on it. “Tracey told you, that’s what I think. Probably recently too. Maybe today. No way you could have known from the beginning.”

“How’d you figure it out?” I ask.

“Probably the same way you did. You want to share first?”

“Come on, Carl. You wouldn’t have come around unless you had something for me.”

“And you need to stop reading things into situations that aren’t there. I don’t have anything for you. I came around to check in on you.”

“I appreciate that,” I say, “but come on, just give me that one thing. You know we screwed up two years ago. You know we could have stopped this, and three more girls would still be alive for it. I can’t let it go.”

He sets his pizza back down. “I’m surprised it took you this long to play that card,” he says.

I don’t answer. I just wait him out and he carries on.

Like I said, we were looking at everybody, right? A case this big, all those girls-we’re gonna run all the DNA we can get hold of. Absolutely we’re gonna do that.”

“And Alderman agreed to that?”

“No, he didn’t agree. He didn’t even know. He came down to identify his son’s body. When he took a swing at you, he hit the wall, right? That gave us his blood. We threw it into the database we were building.”

“And?”

“And the results are still out on DNA. Come on, Tate, this shit still takes a couple of months to get back to us. Nothing has changed there. But we’ll know any day now. Blood tests proved the two Aldermans weren’t biologically related.”

“Why’d you test?”

“Like I said, all that stuff just gets done, right?”

“What about Father Julian? You checking to see if his DNA shows up anywhere it shouldn’t?”

“How did I know you were going to ask that?”

“Well?”

“You’ve had plenty of opportunities to tell us about Father Julian, Tate. You kept refusing. But, like I say, we’re still waiting for DNA results.”

“Father Julian was Bruce’s real father, wasn’t he?”

“What makes you say that?”

I think about what Father Julian said about Bruce being like a son to him. “A hunch.”

“Don’t know. It’s quicker to disprove parenting through blood comparisons, which we’ve done. But it’s going to take longer to confirm. We’ll know soon.”

“How soon?”

“We’ll know when we know. That’s just the way it is.”

I wish testing were as quick as it is on TV. It’s not. It’s about eight weeks of sitting around waiting while the specimens are sent out, tested, retested, and sent back. Like Schroder says, it’ll be any day now.

“You’re going to compare the DNA you’ve been collecting against the samples found at the crime scene in the church?” I ask.

“Gee, why didn’t we think of that? I didn’t realize the impact of you leaving the force.”

“Yeah, good one, Carl.”

“You fucked up,” Schroder says.

“What?”

“This whole thing. You fucked up. And it’s only a matter of time until we find Sidney Alderman.”

“When you do, can you ask him about Father Julian? Maybe he knows something.”

“Yeah, I’ll make sure I do that. I’ll wrap his hands around a crystal ball. See if that’ll help the conversation. It sure has to be better than this.” He swallows the last of his drink, then stands up.

I walk him to the door.

On the step he turns around and faces me. “You know his wife died in an accident, right?”

He knows I do. I found the article online and printed off a copy. It was pinned to my wall with all the others.

“What of it?”

“With everything that’s going on, some bright spark had the idea that maybe there was something more to her death.”

“You’re kidding,” I say, suddenly worried about where this is going.

“Nope. It’s bullshit, right? It’s a stupid idea. But the decision has come down from the top. One of those dot the i’s and cross the t’s that’s going to cost time and money and get no result. The upshot is we’re digging her up on Monday.”

My stomach lurches upward, and I’m worried the motion is strong enough to knock me off my feet. My future flashes in front of my eyes. It starts with me throwing up all over myself. Then it skips forward to another exhumation that goes horribly wrong. It’s two-for-one Monday at the cemetery-it’s not just one Alderman being dug up, but two. Then it ends with handcuffs and another ride in a police car, interrogations and trials, then jail time. Lots and lots of jail time.

“Don’t you need something more to be able to do that?” I ask.

“The gun Bruce shot himself with,” he says, ignoring my question. “Do you know where he got it?”

“I always wondered,” I say, and the visions are still happening. Two dead Aldermans and me in jail getting the shit kicked out of me by two guys I arrested years earlier.

“It belonged to his father,” Schroder says. “I mean it belonged to Sidney Alderman.”

“And?” I ask, not sure where he’s going with this.

“And Alderman bought that gun years ago. He bought it the same week his wife died. About two days before she suddenly jumped out in front of a car by accident. Hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“You think he bought the gun to kill his wife and pushed her in front of a car instead?”

He shrugs. “I’m not saying anything,” he says. “But you remember what happened last time we started digging up bodies? I’m telling you, Tate, it’s going to be a long week. And take some advice-get yourself a good lawyer, man. These drunk-driving charges aren’t going to disappear, friends in the department or not. You’re going to be doing some time. Get yourself sorted, start jogging-you’ve put on what, three, four kilos in the last month? Get your life back on track. Do anything else but this case, man. I know we could have made a difference two years ago, but you have to let it go and let the rest of us take care of it.”

His cell phone starts to ring.

“Hang on, Tate.” He talks quickly into it, then hangs up. “I gotta go,” he says, and rushes to his car.

All I can do is watch him as he speeds out of the street, and all I can think about is what they are going to find buried in the dirt when they exhume Sidney Alderman’s wife on Monday.