Cemetery Lake: A Thriller Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “You’ve been following him for two months,” Schroder says. I keep staring at the hammer. My hammer. My hammer and Father Julian’s blood. I have this weird thought that maybe I got so drunk I picked up that hammer, drove to the church, and beat him to death. Only there’s no amount of bourbon in the world that would make me do that. Unless I thought he was guilty of something. Is that what happened? No. Of course not. But a small part of me is scared that maybe I’m capable of more when I’m drunk than when I’m sober.

  “You think he’s guilty of murder,” Schroder says, carrying on. “You were parked outside his church every day before the restraining order, and some days since. And you want us to believe you had nothing to do with his death.” He puts the murder weapon down slowly, as if carefully balancing a cup of water filled to the brim, which, suddenly, reminds me of the glass of bourbon sitting on my kitchen counter. He puts it in the center of the table so we’re all within reaching distance. Maybe he’s hoping I’m going to make a break for it. I’m sure Landry is. He’s hoping this can all end right now.

  “Where did you find it?” I ask.

  “Where you left it,” Landry answers.

  “I want my lawyer now.”

  “Yeah, guilty people always do,” Landry says to Schroder before turning back to me. “Come on, Tate, you know how it goes. You’ve seen it before and you used to hate it too.”

  “Hate what?”

  “When the perp keeps on denying it even after we’ve got so much evidence against him,” Landry says. “It’s pathetic. And in your case it’s downright embarrassing.”

  “You’ve got nothing,” I say.

  “Nothing? Are you kidding me?”

  “Tell us again why you were following him,” Schroder says. “Come on, Tate. If he was guilty, then let us help you. I mean, hell, if it turns out he killed those girls, we’ll probably end up giving you a medal,” he says, which is the biggest lie anybody has said inside this room. “Just tell us what happened. We’re all on the same team here.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I say, but my teammates don’t believe me. I want a drink.

  “Give us a few minutes alone,” Schroder says, and Landry looks angry, but I know it’s an act. I know they’ve cued up their conversation before coming in here and this is the point where Schroder becomes my friend. Landry shakes his head, then walks out without saying anything else. It’s part of their game.

  Schroder leans forward. He gives me a sympathetic smile. An I know how you’re feeling look, but he doesn’t know how I’m feeling. He never will. “You have to give me something here, Tate, or I can’t help you.”

  I figure it’s best if I play the game too. But before I do, I decide to give him something. “Father Julian knew who killed those girls.”

  “What?”

  “He told me he knew. And Bruce Alderman, he buried them. He told me that.”

  He leans further forward. “What? Why the hell didn’t you tell us that?”

  I explain to Schroder my conversations with the priest, detailing my pleas for Julian to tell me who had done it, even touching on the frustration I felt. I can see Schroder wondering how far he’d have pushed it if he’d known that Father Julian had been confessed to. I tell him about Bruce Alderman and what he said about dignity before elegantly blowing his brains out.

  It takes me ten minutes to tell him, and he goes through a different range of emotions, starting with anger and ending with much deeper anger. When I’m done he sits there staring at me. He’s no longer leaning forward, as if trying to protect himself from what he would do to me if I were in range of his fists. “You should have told us,” he says, his voice low and firm. “We could have convinced Julian.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “We could have done something, Tate,” he says, his voice raising. “Anything! But instead you let two months slide by and now it’s too late. That’s why you were outside his church, right? You weren’t following Father Julian. You were watching to see who came to see him! You were waiting in case the killer showed up, only you didn’t know who the hell you were looking for!”

  “I had to do something.”

  He bangs his hand down on the table. Hard. The noise bounces around the small room. “You fucked up,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “And now Father Julian is dead. And you’re in a world full of shit.”

  “It’s an abyss.”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Carl, you know me. You’ve known me for nearly twenty years.”

  “Which is why this is hard for me too,” he says, but I’m pretty sure it’s harder for me. “We found the hammer in your garage.”

  “And that’s why you’re going to let me leave.” It’s time to play the game.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got nothing to hold me here,” I tell him. He looks down at the hammer in such a way as to suggest maybe I’ve forgotten it’s there. But I haven’t. “You found it in my garage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, well, first of all you don’t even know if it’s my hammer.”

  “That’s not the . . .”

  “Second,” I say, and I hold up my hand and start counting off my points. “You’re going to print it and find my prints aren’t on it. You’re going to think a guy who used to be a homicide detective was dumb enough to clean off his fingerprints, but not the blood, was dumb enough to keep the weapon, was dumb enough to leave it in his garage for anybody to find.”

  “Not dumb, but drunk,” he says.

  “And that’s exactly my point.”

  “What?”

  “Three,” I say, counting off another point with my fingers. “And this one is the kicker. This is the reason I’m about to get up and walk out of here.”

  Schroder slumps slightly in his chair. Not much, but enough to show he knows what’s coming.

  “The time line,” I say. “See, we know the time line, Carl, but the problem is the guy who planted the hammer there didn’t.”

  Schroder says nothing. He knew I’d figure it out, but was hoping it wouldn’t be this quickly. Or he was hoping to rattle me enough that I’d give him something more, maybe tell him about Sidney Alderman.

  “You think he died around midnight,” I say, not because he told me, but because that’s when I saw the person leaving the church, the person who I thought was the priest. Only it wasn’t the priest, it was the man who killed him. The killer knew my car was there, but he didn’t see me because I was covered in ground fog. He probably figured I was passed out drunk in the front seat because that’s what I was used to doing. He stayed in the shadows where he thought he was out of sight.

  “But I didn’t make it home. Only the killer couldn’t have known that. He drove to my house and replaced the hammer he had stolen to kill the priest. He didn’t know I was following him. What he couldn’t know was that I would be involved in an accident. Your boys came and locked me up. My car was towed away, and after you found Julian was dead, you would have had it re-towed, this time as evidence in a murder investigation. You had it brought here and every inch of it has been gone over. No blood from Father Julian and, more importantly, no hammer, right? And it’s not like it got logged along with my wallet and cell phone. I didn’t have it on me. And you would have searched the area of the crash, would have searched the roads between the graveyard and the accident. You found nothing. Until tonight. So how’d I put it there?”

  “You could have dumped the hammer, picked it back up tonight. Maybe that’s why you’re covered in dirt.”

  “Why would I dump the hammer? I couldn’t know I was going
to crash. What would be the point of dumping it, just to come back tonight to retrieve it and hide it in my garage?”

  Schroder says nothing.

  “Then the whole tongue thing. Like I said earlier, why the hell would I cut it out? Because I didn’t want him talking? That’s the sort of message you want to leave when there are others who can still talk, right? A gang thing. But not in this case. This time it was designed to make me look guiltier. It would look like I was pissed at him for talking to you guys and complaining that I was following him.”

  He starts tapping a pen against the table in a slow, rhythmic pace. Then he leans forward and starts packing up the photographs.

  “So you know I didn’t kill him, but you haul me down here anyway,” I say.

  “Come on, Tate, you know how it is.”

  He’s right. I do know. There are two things that bug me. The first is, why plant the hammer in my garage and not the tongue?

  “Somebody still killed him,” Schroder says.

  “Uh huh.”

  “You can help us out there.”

  “You shouldn’t have jerked me around, Carl. You should have just asked for my help.”

  “Hey, don’t go playing the victim here, Tate. You almost killed a woman last night. Hell, maybe you still did—last I heard she was stable, but that don’t mean shit and you know it. Father Julian had to file a restraining order against you and you kept breaking it. You were there the night he died. You’re involved, Tate. Julian died, and if you’d been up front two months ago maybe he’d still be alive now. Sidney Alderman is nowhere to be seen and you’re acting like he’s dead. Same goes for Quentin James. You need to start giving me some answers. Look, you know that by keeping these from us,” he says as he touches the bags with the jewelry and the articles, “you slowed down our investigation. Things would be different. We might have looked further. We might not have pinned all our beliefs on Alderman. Fuck, Tate, we needed this one. There’s been so much shit lately with the Carver case, and that’s just the tip. You’d know that if you gave a shit, or if you read a newspaper.” He pauses, takes a pencil out of his shirt pocket, rolls it across his fingers, then snaps it in half. “Look, you get the point. We needed something to work out, not just for the victims and for their families, but for us. People don’t have faith in the police anymore, Tate, and it’s hard to blame them. That could have all changed, but you held back on us.”