Cemetery Lake: A Thriller Read online

  I tuck the cell phone into my pocket and sprint to my car.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Why can’t I get hold of Schroder?” I ask.

  “He’s busy, Tate,” Landry says. “He’s got his own case he’s working on. I was about to call you anyway. Where are you?”

  “He did it,” I say. “David Harding killed Henry Martins first. Then Rachel. Then the others.”

  “What the hell? Are you drinking?”

  “He did it, Landry. He absolutely did it. He found Henry Martins and confronted him about leaving, and when he learned the truth, when he learned from Martins that his real father was Father Julian, he used that university education of his and killed him, but first he got the list of names. Martins knew about Julian’s bank accounts. That’s how Martins found out Julian was having those affairs. It might even be why he started to suspect his own wife. He knew the list of names and he gave them to David before he died.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Listen to me, Landry. David Harding—”

  “No, you listen to me. Where the hell are you?”

  The city is dark now. The cloud cover is thick, but the occasional flash of sky comes through and shows a quarter moon or a few stars before shrouding back up. Sunday night is kicking in, and Christchurch is getting ready to watch primetime TV before falling asleep and starting the week all over again.

  “Answer me, Tate. Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m out and about.”

  “I told you to stay the hell out of the way. Where’s Horwell?”

  “What?”

  “She just phoned her producer a few minutes ago. You’re in some deep shit.”

  “What?”

  “You need to come into the station.”

  I pull the car over and cut the ignition. “What the hell is going on, Landry?”

  “Horwell made the call. Somehow she got to her cell phone. She says you abducted her and you’re going to kill her. She said everything she suspected about you was true, and you found out. She said she had proof you killed Quentin James and Sidney Alderman, and also Father Julian. And she gave us a location.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Come down to the station,” he says.

  “Have you found Deborah Lovatt?”

  “Stop making things harder for yourself.”

  “It’s David Harding. He’s doing all of this.”

  “You’re wrong about Harding. I have a good bullshit meter, Tate, and Harding didn’t even make a blip on it.”

  “That’s because the guy’s a sociopath,” I say. “It was an act. Come on, Landry, you need to trust me.”

  I pull back out and start driving fast. I steer around a corner a little too quickly and my dad’s car fishtails. I drop the cell phone while I gain control of the car.

  “What the hell?” Landry asks when I pick the phone back up. “Where are you going?”

  “When is Father Julian getting buried?” I ask him.

  “What? He got buried today.”

  “Nobody gets buried on a Sunday.”

  “Yeah, well, God or somebody made an exception. It was all part of the service. It was Julian’s church, so it made sense somehow to have the funeral today. Look, Tate, you need to calm down and think about what you’re doing. You hurt Horwell, and you’re—”

  “I don’t have her, Landry. You’re being used, don’t you get that?”

  “Used? Explain that to me?”

  “Figure it out yourself. Look, I’m on my way to find Deborah Lovatt. I know where she is. She’s—”

  “She’s at home, Tate. She spent the weekend with her boyfriend, and she left her cell phone behind. She’s home and we’ve spoken to her.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever is going on, Tate, is going on inside your head. Now listen to me, you need to . . .”

  But I’m not listening to him. Deborah is at home? It doesn’t make sense.

  “. . . some serious shit,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I gotta go,” I say. I hang up. A moment later my phone starts ringing. I put it on mute and ignore it.

  If Deborah Lovatt is fine, then who is David meeting today?

  The cemetery is like a magnetic pull. It’s so strong that even if I drove all night in the other direction somehow I’d end up arriving back here. The entire graveyard is one huge shadow. My headlights fight back the darkness as I drive into it. There are no police cars parked anywhere and I figure that’s all part of David Harding’s plan. The night of the funeral of a murder victim, the police normally have the grave under surveillance. It’s standard procedure, because killers often like to come back. But not tonight. David Harding has led them all away in a different direction, probably about as far away as he can get them from the cemetery. He’s using Casey Horwell and me as bait, and it’s working.

  The sky is overcast, no slivers of moonlight, and as I start to run to the church the rain begins again as if to cleanse the night. I think about how that conversation between David and Henry went, and decide it would have started badly and only got worse. I can only assume he was David’s first kill. I wonder what he thought, how he felt, and I wonder if in that we are similar. I felt nothing after killing Quentin James. I certainly felt no desire to do it again, even though I have done. I wonder if killing Henry Martins was like scratching an itch for David, or whether it was an experience that created an urge.

  I reach the church. There is nobody around. No cars. No sign of life. But eight hours ago things were different. Eight hours ago all the crime scene tape was pulled away from the chapel and the pews were full of people. Father Julian came back to the church one final time for one final service. Friends and family and his parishioners prayed over him. They sang, they shed tears and told stories, and they put tokens and photos on his coffin. Some would have felt relief. None of them truly knew the man they were burying.

  I make my way inside the same way I did the other night, and walk through the chapel and to the front of the church, my flashlight leading the way. The place still feels like it has a presence—maybe it’s Father Julian. I scan through the registry and find it’s already been updated with the Sunday funeral of the priest. I study the map of the grounds and figure out the location.

  I carry the small Maglite with me as I walk among the dead, and the images of what happens in horror movies when people like me walk through places like this suddenly seem real. Hands digging up through the ground, the rotting dead back to some semblance of life with bony fingers as they claw their way from the dirt that has kept them captive. I shake the images away and they’re replaced with David Harding, a man far scarier and far more real.

  It takes me ten minutes to reach the other side of the cemetery. Running through the gravestones and the trees is like running around in a maze. There could be a dozen other people in here and I’d completely miss them. Given the amount of time I’ve spent in the cemetery lately I ought to know the place like my own backyard, because that’s what it’s become. Maybe if I started drinking it’d all come back to me. The rain starts to ease up again, and the soft ground sucks at my feet. When I get to the section of plots I want, I don’t even know for sure that I’m in the right place. Everything looks the same.

  I start scanning the headstones. Names and dates start flashing by as I begin running between them, hardly slowing down as the flashlight lights up the inscriptions. Birthdays, death days, messages from the dead, from the living, beloved by all, by some, by few—they blend into one as I move between them, my feet threatening to slip on the grass with every step. I start looking for freshly turned earth.

  There are thousands of graves out here. But only one of interest.

  It doesn’t take long to understand that I’m lost. Dark trees and dark graves, and nothing to help me get my bearings. Even when I start to backtrack my steps, I don’t know where they are. The grave I want could be any
where. The church could be anywhere.

  Then the world rushes up as my feet drop away, and suddenly I’m falling. Six feet down to be precise. I get my arms halfway up my body, but not all the way, and my face hits the opposite edge of the grave wall; my head snaps back, my shoulder smacks into the edge of the coffin lid, one leg goes into the coffin, and the other is shunted against the dirt wall. For a few moments I can’t move as the darkness settles in around me. I have no idea what has happened. The world has gone dark and my mind is spinning.

  Slowly this land six feet down from the rest of the world shifts into place and it isn’t pretty. I can feel a hand beneath me, pressing into my chest. My face is wedged up against the side of the coffin. I manage to roll onto my side, and suddenly the light appears again as my body shifts off of the flashlight. I pick it up.

  I’m the only person in the grave. The coffin is open, the pink lining clean except for a sprinkling of dirt, and the entire thing is wet. And blurry. The entire coffin is blurry, and when I hold my hand out ahead of me and point the flashlight at it I see both hand and flashlight are blurry too. I reach up and touch my forehead, and my fingers come away wet with blood.

  I grab the edge of the coffin to try to pull myself up, but my hand slides across it and I slip back. I kill the flashlight and let the darkness settle over me, and for a moment I have fallen far deeper than the depth of the coffin, and into another world that light or life has never touched. I listen to the night, but can’t hear a thing—not at first—then I begin to make out a soft murmuring. It disappears, and I begin to convince myself it was only the wind when it starts again. I turn the flashlight back on for a second to orientate myself, then I make my way to the end of the coffin and step onto it, balancing myself by pushing my hands into the damp walls of the grave. I think about Sidney Alderman, and then I think about all the policemen and policewomen I’ve known over the years, and all the cops in movies and TV and books who say they never believe in coincidences. I think of Quentin James and I think of the man I became. I think all those cops who don’t believe in coincidences need to live a little more.

  I reach up and brace my arms over the ground and kick at the cold wall of dirt as I make my way up. Every day above ground is a good day, so the saying goes, and suddenly I know whoever came up with that got it dead right. I listen for the sound again, but can’t hear anything. I point the flashlight at the temporary gravestone and highlight Father Julian’s name. There are no other inscriptions—they’re being saved for the real gravestone.

  There’s a mound of dirt piled up about a meter away from the coffin. A large tombstone ahead of it must have blocked my view of it before. I stay low to the ground and look around, but all I can see are dark shadows across a landscape of black. I creep a few gravestones along, then squat down. I reach into my pocket for my phone, only to find that it’s been busted in the fall. Maybe God is trying to tell me something about cell phones.

  I drop down to my knees and I listen as hard as I can. I close my eyes and wait, and after a few seconds the noise returns—just briefly, but it’s enough for me to get a fix on the direction.

  I move a short distance away from the grave.

  I take the flashlight out of my pocket. There is a dark shape on the ground. I crouch and turn on the flashlight. A girl, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, is naked, her skin scuffed up with mud. Her hands are bound behind her, her ankles bound too. The same duct tape binding her has also been placed across her mouth. The rain has swept the blood from a cut in her shoulder over her chest. She is shaking. Her face is so pale she looks as though her body has been completely exsanguinated. Her dark eyes are wide with fright as she stares at me. She tries to pull away. All she can see is the flashlight, and I realize she thinks I’m the one who did this to her. I have no idea who she is, what sister she could be. I turn off the light and take off my jacket to put over her, and then the sound of a car comes crashing through the silence.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”

  The flashlight is still off, so I can’t tell whether she looks as though she believes me or not. But I’m sure her mind will grip tight to the or not bit when I tell her what’s going to happen next. I have put my jacket back on.

  “I’m going to leave you tied up, okay?”

  She starts whimpering.

  “I need him to think he’s here alone with you.”

  The headlights wash toward me, and I duck down on the other side of the gravestone to where the girl is lying. The car comes to a stop, and I figure David has just dumped Father Julian in the lake. David is following the same routine, even though he didn’t start it.

  “Don’t let him know, okay? If he lets you speak, don’t tell him. You have to be calm. I’m a police officer, I’m going to help you get through this, but you have to trust me. You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

  The lights are no longer pointing in my direction, but rather at the grave I fell into. David keeps them on, but shuts off the engine. He steps out of the vehicle and crosses the path of the beams, and I can see he’s dressed completely in black. Maybe he’s mourning his father. There is another change that has taken place since the last time I saw him, but then I realize it isn’t a change at all, that the man I am looking at is the David Harding he has been for the last two years since he found out the woman he loved was his sister. The man I saw two months ago was the impostor, the grieving David Harding who stared at the ring and who looked like his heart had just been torn open. I move out from behind the stone and duck behind another one five graves away.

  He looks out over the graveyard and I wonder if he’s looking for me. He pauses when his eyes come to rest on the girl. There is enough ambient light for him to see her. He shrugs his shoulders back as if to get rid of a crick in the middle of his back, then walks forward. He isn’t holding anything in his hands. When he reaches her he crouches down.

  “This isn’t your fault,” he says. “Really there is only one person to blame, but if it makes you feel any better, he’s taken responsibility for his actions.”

  The girl murmurs. There is enough light to see the absolute fear in her face. Enough light to see it’s not the girl from the photographs—it’s not Deborah. Her hair is tangled up and sticking to her cheeks. David reaches forward and brushes it aside.

  “You’re probably wondering how I can be doing this,” he says, “and sometimes I wonder the same thing. I think about it a lot, you know. Ever since Rachel. She was your sister too. I think how things might have been different, but you know what? They’re not different, are they? They’re exactly as they are.”

  He grabs her arms and starts dragging her toward the grave. She slides easily over the wet ground. I still have no idea who this girl is.

  She tries pulling away from him, but she’s too weak, too cold, and probably in too much shock to be able to fight him. He gets her next to the grave. He lays her alongside the hole and crouches over her.

  I start circling around the edge of the light toward him.

  The girl’s murmurs grow louder.

  “Sshh,” he says, “sshh. It’s going to be okay now. It’s going to be okay. Things are going to be easier for you than the others.”

  He unzips his jacket and takes it off. He undoes his belt and pulls it from his waist. He undoes the button and the fly, and starts to lower his jeans.

  He hears my footsteps as I run toward him. He looks over his shoulder, but he can’t move because his pants are halfway down his legs, and when I hit him he’s in no position to defend himself. We fly into the grave and he lands heavily on the coffin with me on top of him, just like it was with Sidney Alderman. There is a loud cracking sound of bone breaking, but if it’s mine I can’t feel anything.

  It’s not dark down here like it was last time, and I’ve a better idea of the geography of the place now, so I’m able to right myself before he does. I pull him up by the front of his shirt
and swing my fist at him as hard as I can, and this time the sound of breaking bone comes from my hand as it connects with the side of his face. He falls backward, and I start to shake my hand, unsure of how many fingers I’ve just busted.

  I get to my feet and back away.

  David Harding lies unconscious, his arm twisted on a strange angle and his face lolled into the corner of the coffin.

  I make my way out of the ground the same way I did last time, only a little slower now and in a lot more pain. The girl is staring at me. There is a small blood spot in her left eye, perhaps from a burst blood vessel. I pull the tape from her mouth and she sucks in a deep breath. I grab my keys and try using the longest one to cut through the duct tape around her wrists, but it won’t make a start.

  “Wh-where is . . . is he?” she asks, her teeth chattering and her eyes darting back and forth like a wired-up junkie’s.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “That’s . . . that’s what he said.”

  I try picking at the edge of the tape, but my fingers are too cold on one hand and busted up on the other.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Stacey.”

  “Listen to me, Stacey, it’s going to be okay. My name is Theo and I’m here to help you. You just have to wait here for a few seconds.”

  “No, no, don’t leave.”

  “I’ll be ten seconds.”

  “Please.”

  It hurts to ignore her cry, but I do it. I open the door to David’s car and pop open the glove box. I find a pocketknife in there that makes fast work of the duct tape.

  She sits up and folds her arms in front of her.

  “Okay, Stacey, here’s what I want you to do. We’re going to get you to your feet and into the car,” I say, taking off my jacket. “It’s dry and warm in there,” I say as I wrap the jacket around her, “and I want you to drive away from here. You know how to drive, right?”

  “Where do I go?”