Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER SIX

The elevator is chilly, as if it sucked in most of the cold air when the doors opened. Outside it’s only slightly warmer again. I think the sun could be melting the city into a pool of lava and I’d still feel this way after coming out of there.

It’s still raining. Of course. On the way to my car I take the dead woman’s diamond ring out of my pocket and begin to study it. There is an inscription on the inside, and I have to squint in the weak light of the parking garage to make it out. Rachel amp; David forever. It could have been a wedding ring. It reads like an adolescent inscription carved into a tree. The three stones are not diamonds, which could be why the ring was still by the woman’s hand and not sitting in some pawnshop gathering dust. They’re glass, cloudy-looking glass that for some reason seems to make the poignancy of what happened to her that much more awful. Somebody bought this for her; he couldn’t afford real diamonds, but she didn’t need real diamonds. Maybe they had a promise that when things got better, when the money started flowing from some plan he would one day hatch, he would buy for her any stone she wanted.

If Tracey spotted the ring, then pretty soon she’s going to realize it’s gone. The question is what she’ll do about it. Call me? Or call somebody else about me? I should never have put her in that position.

This time when I get back to my office I slip in behind my computer and boot it up, studying the ring while I’m waiting. If the ring had been expensive, or custom made, it might have been easy to track down. I surf onto a secure missing-persons site accessible only to the police and social workers and a handful of private investigators. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a list of missing Rachels. I set the parameters of the search to go back two years, figuring she died after Henry Martins was buried.

I end up with two names, and one of them is from the same week Henry Martins died. Her name is Rachel Tyler and she was nineteen when she went missing. The second Rachel is ten years old and went missing two months ago and wasn’t who I just looked at. The woman I was looking at in the coffin was Rachel Tyler. I’m sure of it. It’s like a punch to the stomach. Two years-if it’s her, then she was probably placed into that coffin not long after she went missing. It means two years ago I could have made a difference.

I print out Rachel Tyler’s details. She was reported missing by her parents. I don’t remember the case, and I guess that’s because she was one of many girls believed to have run away. I also had a lot of other stuff going on two years ago. The reality is people in this country go missing every single day. Sometimes they turn up: they’re broke and high and living in a single-room motel, having burned off all their cash in casinos betting on red instead of black. Sometimes they’re being pimped out, forced into prostitution to pay back money for gambling or drugs or as a form of self-abuse. Other times they’ve left their wife or husband for somebody with a bigger bank account or a bigger house or a younger body. Other times they don’t turn up at all.

The photograph of Rachel was taken at a moment of sourness, either faked or real, and it sure beats seeing a happy and outgoing girl holding ice creams or diplomas or helping the sick and elderly. She would be twenty-one now if somebody hadn’t killed her, then jammed her into a coffin.

I study the photograph. Her brown hair is darker than when I saw it less than an hour ago; her blue eyes in the picture are bright and alive. I read through the file. The conclusion was that she ran away, that she fought with her parents or her boyfriend and couldn’t take it anymore.

I look up Rachel’s parents in the phone book and find that they are still at the same address. I wonder if they’re still married and what kind of state they are in. I wonder how many nights they sit watching the door, waiting for her to stroll inside and tell them everything is going to be okay.

I slip the ring into a small plastic bag and drop it into my pocket. Then I look again at the watch I took from the body in the lake. I compare the time to my own. It’s out by only a few minutes, but it could be the Tag Heuer is accurate and mine isn’t. Its owner must have died in the same six-month period we’re in now, between October and March, because the watch is set for daylight saving time. The date is out by fourteen days.

I grab a pen and start doing the addition. Every month an analog watch goes to thirty-one days, regardless of what month it is, and the user has to adjust it manually in the other five months when there are fewer. I work out that those five months would add up to seven days a year that the watch would be off by if it wasn’t adjusted. That means this watch hasn’t been touched in two years. So. It is now nearing the end of February. The guy who owned this watch was put in the ground sometime after the beginning of December and before the end of February two years ago.

I pick up the file with Henry Martins’s details on it. He died on the ninth of January. Could be his.

I grab the phone. It takes half a minute for Detective Schroder to answer it.

“Come on, Tate, you know I can’t answer any questions,” he says when he hears my voice. “This has nothing to do with you. And soon it won’t have anything to do with me either. I’ve got too much on my plate to chase after this one too.”

“You’re working the Carver case?”

“Trying to. Unless I retire. Which I might.”

“One question. The body that floated up without the legs. Is that the oldest one?”

I hear him exhale loudly. “Look, Tate, seriously, I can’t. .”

“Just one question, that’s all,” I tell him.

“That’s all?” he says. “Is that a promise?”

“For now,” I tell him.

“The ME said it’s hard to tell who went in first, but he’ll figure it out. He said it looked like the two of them went into the water fairly close to each other. Why?”

“Can you let me know when he’s told you?”

“No. Good-bye, Tate,” he says, and hangs up.

I look at the watch. It’s been on the wrist of a dead guy for two years, but not necessarily in the water for two years. It depends on how long he was in the ground before he went in the drink. Either way, it looks like two years is the outer perimeter of the time line.

I check the missing persons reports, but immediately the list of names coming up becomes too long, and there is no way to narrow it down until I know whether the killer had a type. Could be all the girls are similar ages, or have similar descriptions. Or it could be the other coffins don’t have girls in them at all, but men.

I grab my dry cell phone and the printout of Rachel Tyler, and head back down to my car.

I’ve barely left the parking lot when I think better of my initial impulse. It’s the wrong time of the day to show up at somebody’s house to tell them their daughter is probably dead. Most people would think there never is a right time-but there is. It’s the sort of thing you want to do earlier on so they can call friends and family who can come over to console them. Anyway, it may be Rachel’s ring, but it doesn’t mean it’s her corpse.

I drive toward the edge of the city and park my car outside a florist that is open every weeknight until seven. I need to replace this darkness with some light, yet the first thing I think about is how flowers and death have been mixed together over time as much as flowers and love.

“Hi ya, Theo.” An extremely pretty girl with an easy manner smiles at me as I go in.

“How’s it going, Michelle?” I do my best to smile back.

We make the usual chitchat, then she asks me if I’m after the usual. I tell her I am.

“Your wife must really love flowers,” Michelle tells me, and I slowly nod.

Michelle picks out a bunch she thinks Bridget will like, wraps some cellophane around the stems, and hands them over. She writes down the amount in a small book behind the counter. At the end of the month, like every other month, she will send me a bill.

“Say hi to Bridget for me,” she says, and her smile is infectious. Sometimes I think I could just watch this woman smile for ages.

I head back to my car and rest the flowers in the passenger seat, careful not to crush them. I glance at my watch. Bridget won’t be in any hurry to see me, so I change my mind and decide maybe I can pay a visit to Rachel Tyler’s family after all. I do a U-turn and drive back in the opposite direction, taking with me a bunch of already dying flowers and a whole lot of bad news.