Cross Kill

Chapter 19

Pale morning fog shrouded much of the cemetery from my view. The fog swirled on the wet grass, the melting snow that remained, and the gravestones. It left droplets on the pile of wilted flower bouquets and empty liquor bottles and remembrances that had to be moved before the backhoe could begin its work.

The last item was a baby doll, naked, with lipstick smeared on the lips.

Shivering against the dank March air, I zipped my police slicker higher and pulled on the hood. I stood off to one side of the grave with Bill Worden, the cemetery superintendent, alternately looking at the baby doll and watching the backhoe claw deeper into the soil. A baby doll, I thought, recalling a real baby tossed through the air with total indifference, if not cruelty.

Someone brought that doll here, I thought. In celebration. In reverence.

That’s just sick. How could you worship that?

I glanced at the headstone Worden dug from the ground after I’d brought him an order from a federal judge in Trenton. The grave marker was simple. Rectangular black polished granite.

“G. Soneji” was etched in the face, along with the date of his birth. The date of his death, however, had been chiseled away. That was it. No mention of his brutal crimes or his disturbing life.

The man six feet under the headstone was all but anonymous.

And yet they’d come. The Soneji. They’d chipped away at the gravestone. Spray-painted the grass to read “Soneji Lives.” I took pictures before the backhoe destroyed it.

“How many visit?” I asked over the sound of the digging machine.

Worden, the cemetery superintendent, tugged his hood over his head and said, “Hard to say. It’s not like we keep it under surveillance. But a fair number every month.”

“Enough to leave that pile of flowers,” I said, eyeing the baby doll again.

Worden nodded. “For some it seems almost like a pilgrimage.”

“Yeah, except Mr. Soneji was no saint,” I said.

Drizzle began to fall, forcing me deeper into the collar of my jacket. A few moments later, the backhoe turned off.

“There’s the straps, Bill,” the equipment operator said. “I’ll hand-dig the last of it.”

“No need,” Worden said. “Just hook up and lift, brush the dirt off later.”

The backhoe operator shrugged and got out cables, which he attached to the bucket. Then he got down into the grave and clipped the cables to the rings of stout straps that had been left after the casket was lowered.

“They’re not weakened by being in the dirt ten years?” I asked.

Worden shook his head. “Not unless something chewed through them.”

The superintendent was right. When the backhoe arm rose, the straps easily lifted the casket of a man I helped kill.

Wet dirt slid and cascaded off the top of the casket as it came free of the grave and dangled four feet above the hole. The wind picked up. The casket swayed.

“Put it down there,” Worden said, gesturing to one side.

I was fixated on the casket, wondering what was inside, beyond the charred remains I’d seen placed in a body bag beneath Grand Central Station a decade before. He was in there, wasn’t he?

Every instinct said yes. But...

As the casket swung and lowered, I happened to look beyond it and between two far monuments. The wind had blown a narrow vent in the fog. I could see a slice of the graveyard between those monuments that ran all the way to the pine barrens that surrounded the cemetery.

Standing at the edge of the woods, perhaps eighty yards from me, was a man in a green rain slicker. He was turning away. When his back was to me, he pulled off his hood, revealing a head of thinning red hair. Then he raised his right hand, and pointed his middle finger at the sky.

And me.