Cemetery Lake: A Thriller Read online

  Suddenly the door I used to enter the church opens up, then closes. The muffled sound of a voice drifts down the corridor toward me, followed by high-squawking radio chatter. I duck down behind Father Julian’s desk and turn off my flashlight. There is more radio chatter; I hear the word backup; and I know the officer parked outside has asked for it because for some reason he’s decided to do his job and walk around the building and he’s found the security tape over the door has been tampered with.

  I move to the side of the desk so I can see into the corridor. The beam of a flashlight is bouncing from the floor to the walls. It’s getting brighter. I pull back just as the officer reaches the office. The light hits the wall behind the desk. It moves over it and then moves on. He takes a step into the room and then takes a step back out of it. He carries on to the next room. I figure I have about two minutes to get the hell out of here.

  I get out from under the desk and move to the door. My feet are silent on the cold floor. I listen to the officer making his way further along the corridor. Then I look around the door frame. He’s further down the corridor toward the rectory. He goes around a corner, and as soon as he’s gone I start back toward the chapel for my clothes. I reach the end of the corridor. A second flashlight, this one moving around the pews, suddenly moves across the room and hits my body. I look away before it can hit my face.

  “You! Hey, you! Stop!”

  But I do the opposite. I turn and run toward the exit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I’m out of shape. I can feel it in the first few strides. My socks slide on the floor and the chase is almost over before it begins. I can hear the officer behind me, and a moment later the first one I saw appears at the other end of the corridor, running toward me. I pull the door; it opens into the corridor and blocks the path of at least one of my pursuers. Then I grab the basin of holy water and throw it in the opposite direction. It clatters on the ground without hitting anybody, but a moment later there’s a sliding sound and then the man behind me yells “Shit!” as he slips and falls. It forces his partner to slow down. I keep running.

  I hit the line of trees as the two men burst from the building behind me. I change direction and keep running, not slowing when my feet crash into tree roots or get punctured by pieces of bark and acorns and stones. I can hear them following me, closing the distance. I make a left and a right, and keep making them. I can see the beams of their flashlights falling on me, on trees around me, but then they appear less frequently. The rain is pouring down heavily, drowning out all sounds of pursuit. I keep running, altering direction through the trees. Suddenly I’m out of the trees, heading across the cemetery between gravestones and graves. I have no idea where I am, and the best I can hope for is that a cemetery at this time of night in this kind of weather is a hard place in which to follow anybody.

  A car comes toward me from the road and I duck down behind a gravestone. It passes me by. There is yelling and confusion. I look out and see one of the officers is only a few meters away. He comes toward me and I duck back down. He passes me and keeps going. He’s making quick ground. I crawl toward another grave and then another, staying hidden for a few more seconds. I look back up—the officers are now twenty meters away. I stand up and run deeper into the cemetery. My feet sink slightly into the grass. Another car travels along the road and I have to hide again. The cold air makes it harder for me to breathe, and I start sucking down oxygen in deep lungfuls that burn and make me dizzy. I hide behind a tall grave marker and look back in the direction I’ve come from. I can see flashlights moving around the trees and graves not far from me. I’m unsure now of what direction to run.

  I stay low and move further away, putting more grass and graves and meters between me and the flashlights. More patrol cars arrive—I can see their headlights, hear doors banging. I reach another cluster of trees and rest for thirty seconds or so. My feet are aching and probably bleeding, but I don’t want to look. I check back in what I believe, though am not certain, is the direction of the church. I panic for a moment about whether my wallet or keys are in the jacket I left behind, and I quickly check. My keys are in my pants pocket, and my wallet—I remember now—is still at home. I stick with the direction I was heading. I’m aware of more cars arriving, and rest for a few more seconds behind another grave marker to watch the show. Their pooling location shows me where the church is. There are no sirens sounding, but there are plenty of flashing blue and red lights from patrol cars through the trees and from others moving through the cemetery grounds. I keep running. And running. I think about the extra weight Schroder told me I’d put on, and I can feel every kilogram of it slowing me down. The contours of the land change. I head up and then down and then up again, hitting slight slopes that feel steeper than they really are, and they soon make it difficult to see anything behind me. I reach another section of the cemetery, but still have no idea where I am. I forge ahead, trespassing over the dead. I keep looking back. No more light. No more patrol cars. Not that I can see. More trees ahead of me, another stretch of graves. I burst through another patch of bushes and grass, then suddenly I’m at a fence line. I want to scale it, but I can’t, not yet, not for a few more moments, not until my heart rate slows some and my body is convinced enough to keep going.

  The fence backs onto somebody’s house, an old clapboard home with a huge gap between the house and the garage. I drop down into the backyard and I run for the gap. There is no other fence. I reach the road and look left and right. I know where I am. There is a bus stop a few meters away from me. I walk down to it and then decide it’s a bad place to be waiting. I cross the road and sit down behind a hedge. I take some slow, deep breaths in an effort to bring my heart rate back to normal.

  I start back toward the car, ready to duck down behind a tree or a bush or whatever else I can find at the first sign of any other cars or people. Ten minutes later I’m heading along the same road as the cemetery. I can see lights and commotion way up ahead, but the car is a good two blocks short of it. I unlock it and duck into the driver’s seat, traipsing mud and leaves and blood into the car floor. I set the envelope of photographs on the passenger seat. It’s been a bit bent out of shape, but is mostly dry except for two of the corners. I start the engine, but leave the lights off until I’ve rounded the first corner. I think about the shovel in the trunk and I figure tonight wasn’t the best night to go digging anyway. Besides, there’s something unnerving in the thought of returning Dad’s car to him after it’s been used to drive a corpse around. That hadn’t been on the agenda when I borrowed it.

  By the time I get home I’m bordering on exhaustion, though I don’t feel tired. It’s sensory overload. Without the benefit of alcohol to keep things running smoothly, without sleep, I know I’m going to crash and burn.

  I take a quick shower and check my banged-up feet. They’re grazed, but not as bad as I’d expected. Then I take the pictures from the damp envelope and separate them so they can dry out. I don’t look at them closely. Not right now. I can’t. But I can’t leave them out either in case Landry or Schroder show up. I wipe them dry with a hand towel, then put them into a fresh envelope and throw out the old one. In the corner of my bedroom I lift up the carpet, figuring that since it worked so well for Alderman and Julian, it’s got to work well for me too.

  I hit my bed and fall asleep without even willing it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Nobody comes to my house during the night. I reckon the police will have narrowed down last night’s visitor to the church to one of three people—me, the killer, or a reporter. They’ll have found my jacket and my shoes, but even if they recognize them there’s nothing on them to say they’re mine, only DNA, and that’ll take weeks to arrive. Landry and Schroder will undoubtedly be thinking of coming to talk to me; they’ll be wondering if they can bluff me into admitting I went into the church, though they’ll know they can’t. I know the game. And anyway, all I have to say is the same person who planted the murder we
apon in my garage also planted my clothes to try to complete the frame job, and that’s also what I’ll be saying in two months’ time when they get DNA from hair follicles caught in my jacket. Landry will have gone through all of this, hitting it from all sorts of different angles, without coming up with one that will help him cement a case against me. I’m betting that in the end he’ll know his argument and he’ll know my argument, and he’ll know that mine is stronger.

  Of course all of this is moot if I can’t get back into the cemetery and dig Alderman up before Monday.

  The overnight rain has stopped and for the moment the clouds are mainly dispersed. I open up the curtains and dump my sopping clothes into the washing machine. It seems that getting messed up at night is becoming a habit. Then I make coffee, wondering at what point in the human evolution coffee became such an important ingredient, and I figure if nothing else in this world, no matter what happens in the future, coffee will sure as hell be around a lot longer than religion. I carry the photographs I’ve pulled back out from under the carpet into my office. I go through them all again, but recognize only Bruce among the various boys and girls. Then I turn them over. They all have names and dates on the back. Just first names. The dates go back twenty-four years. I start flicking through them, the names rushing out at me from the past month, the names connecting the dots.

  I put the photos down. I stand up and start to walk around my office, my breath quickening. Excitement is starting to build, the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time, not since working homicides in my previous life, not since the thrill of feeling things coming together and knowing you’re heading for the finish line.

  There are five girls in these pictures. Four of them share names with the dead girls who’ve been found. I have no idea where the fifth girl is, but I have a first name. Deborah. There are three boys too: Bruce, Simon, and Jeremy. I have no idea where Simon and Jeremy are either.

  I go back to Rachel’s photo and turn it over. I remember the other photos I’ve seen of her on the wall of her parents’ house. Then suddenly I’m back in Father Julian’s office. Bruce was like a son to me, he’s telling me. Like a son. Were all these people like sons and daughters to Father Julian? I think they were. I remember looking at the pictures of the missing girls a month ago and thinking how similar they were, how their killer had a type. I was right and wrong. His type wasn’t based on characteristics the girls shared, or body type or age. It was based on who these people were. It was based on genetics. These people were targeted specifically because of who they are. Brothers and sisters. All of the victims, including Bruce, are related.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The house looks a little tidier than the last time I was here. I figure their lives are no longer on hold. The news they’d been dreading has arrived, and though they’re struggling with it, they’re starting to move forward.

  “I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,” Patricia Tyler says, and she really seems to be trying hard to make up her mind.

  “Can I come in? Please, it’s important.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “The truth is I hardly know what to think anymore.”

  I pull out the photograph from Father Julian’s collection. The rest are in the envelope, tucked inside my jacket pocket. I hand it over. I know immediately that she recognizes it. Her knuckles turn white as she holds it ever tighter.

  “Where did you get this?” she asks, though I’m pretty sure she already knows.

  “Please, can I come inside?”

  She takes a step back for me to move in, and leads me down the hallway.

  “Michael isn’t here,” she says, then pauses. “Thankfully.”

  The photographs on the wall are all the same as the last time I was here, but I see them a little differently now. Michael Tyler, who is holding her hand when she is maybe five years old, doesn’t appear in any earlier photographs.

  We sit down in the lounge. Patricia Tyler offers me a drink and I tell her I’d like some water. She gets up and returns a minute later, carrying two glasses. She sets them down carefully on a pair of coasters and I ask the question I came here to ask.

  “You’re right,” she says. “It all seems like a lifetime ago. Longer, when I think about it really hard. Rachel was four when I met Michael and six when we got married. It was like starting a new life. I could only hope that Michael would one day look at Rachel as if she was his own.” She takes a sip of water. “He did see her that way too. He loved her, and the past years—well, they’re killing him as much as they’re killing me.”

  “And Father Julian, he was Rachel’s biological father,” I say, and it isn’t a question.

  “It’s been over twenty years, and you’re the first person to ever ask me about him.” She looks back down at the photograph. “I remember this moment,” she says. “It was the day Rachel turned two. I was leaving work early. My mother would look after Rachel while I was at work. She made a cake and we had a party, but Rachel didn’t understand the occasion.”

  I remember a similar party for my own daughter. I remember getting carried away and buying too many gifts. Emily was excited tearing them open, but her concentration would drift from her new toy to the wrapping paper the toy had come in, and she would run around the room as if she was on a sugar high while friends and family watched and laughed and played with her. She would have five more birthdays. Rachel Tyler had seventeen more.

  “This moment,” she says, and she twists the photo toward me for the briefest of seconds. Rachel is sitting in the corner of a room with her head resting on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her eyes either half-open or half-closed. “It was at the end of the day. I was getting ready to take her back home and she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with my mother, because she thought that it meant there would be more presents tomorrow.”

  She pauses, and I have the feeling her mind is traveling down a path of a possibility not taken. She’s thinking that if she’d left her daughter at her mother’s house on that day nearly twenty years ago, Rachel would still be alive.

  “I don’t even know why I took the photo,” she says. “I mean, I remember taking it, and I remember asking her to smile, but I don’t really know why I went about it. I’d already taken lots that day. I sent it to Father Julian. He’d asked for one. This, this is all about Father Julian, isn’t it? You having this photo. You took it from him. And he’s dead and Rachel’s dead and there’s something to that, isn’t there? That’s why you’re here.”

  “What happened after you had the baby?”

  “Things were already in motion before Rachel was born. We both knew I could never have an abortion. He wouldn’t allow it, and anyway, it wasn’t something I would have considered. I also knew he couldn’t be with me. I was going to be a single mother, but it wasn’t going to be the end of the world. I had to give up work for the first year and a half. Stewart told me he would support me. We set up bank accounts. Once I got married, Stewart didn’t have to pay as much, but he did keep paying. I never asked him for anything more, and he never asked to see Rachel.”

  I think about this for a few moments, sure that there is something else here. If Julian did father those other children, was he paying child support to all of them? If so, how did he get the money? I keep the conversation moving along, but make a mental note to come back to this.

  “Did Rachel know?” I ask.

  “When she was old enough she figured out Michael wasn’t her real dad. She asked who her father was, but I never told her.” She takes a drink. “I could really do with something stronger. Can I get you something?”

  “Water’s fine,” I say, and I take a sip to show just how fine it is.

  “I guess water’s fine for me too. I know how it sounds, getting pregnant by a priest of all people, but, well, I don’t regret it. Things were different back then. Father Julian . . . Huh, it sounds so funny when I call him that, doesn’t it? The father of my child, and here I am ca
lling him Father Julian instead of Stewart. I wonder if that means anything.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at me, I’m starting to ramble.”

  “No, please, it’s all important.”

  “Back then . . . Stewart,” she says, managing to use Father Julian’s first name, “was a young man, and he was very, very striking. Almost insanely handsome. I think women were going to church just to see him, not to hear what he had to say. He had this—well, this magnetism—and it was more than just his looks. Everybody liked him; he was very charming, very likeable. But he was also lonely, really lonely, and seemingly vulnerable, and somehow that made him even more appealing. One day that loneliness became too much for him, for me, and we, we . . . Well, you know the rest. Anyway, he would always be quiet after we . . . you know, after we were together in that way. He was intense too, and even though he knew he was making a mistake, neither of us could help ourselves. He would tell me that when he was around me it was like somebody else was taking over, like he was a different man. I think he was a good man trapped in the wrong profession.”

  “Did you ever tell him that?”

  She smiles again. “More than once. But he said the priesthood was a calling, that he could help people, that he could do more good with a collar than without one. It was hard to watch. He was so dedicated to the church, it pained him every time we were together. In the end, I finished it, I had to. I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? It was tearing him apart. A month after we stopped seeing each other, I found out I was pregnant.”

  “What happened when you told him?”

  “He wanted to do the right thing, only the right thing didn’t fall in line with his big picture of right things. It was like every day he was fighting a personal war within himself. I think that war was there his entire life. He was never going to leave the priesthood to be with me, and he couldn’t stay being a priest if others found out. So we both agreed to keep it quiet. I also stopped going to church.” She dabs her knuckles into the bottoms of her eyes and pulls away some tears before taking another sip of water.