by Paul Cleave
But then she says “We don’t know when the body was put in there, Theo. She might have only been there a year.”
“I hope you’re right,” I tell her.
“You need to leave now, Theo.”
“Come on, Tracey, there’s got—”
“I’m serious,” she says, looking up. “You wanted to know if Martins was inside—well, now you know. That was the deal. You can’t look at this woman and think it’s become your case. All you can do by being here now is compromise the investigation.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“What? That you could have made a difference two years ago? I know the case, and you’re right. It could well be that you messed up and other girls have paid for it, but we don’t know that yet, and won’t until we know who this girl is and when she was put into this coffin. That aside, how many others are out there because you have taken bad people off the streets?”
“This isn’t about checks and balances.”
“I know that. Do you? And I know that you have to leave.”
“You think that’s what she’d want?” I ask, nodding toward the dead girl. “Or do you think she’d want as many people as she could get trying to find who did this to her?”
“Come on, Theo, it’s time to go. I’ll let you know if one of the bodies that turns up is Martins’s.”
“Yeah. Okay, do that,” I say as she walks me to the corridor.
The moment we step into it, her cell phone rings. She shakes it open and starts talking. I pat down my pockets, then turn them inside out. I mouth the word keys to her and point back toward the morgue.
“Make it quick,” she says, lowering the phone so the person on the other end can’t hear.
I walk back into the morgue. I stare at the dead girl and I wonder what she looked like before Death crammed her into this coffin, taking everything away from her in one brutal insult. Looking at this cheap imitation of her makes me feel ill.
Tracey is finishing up her phone call when I rejoin her in the corridor.
“They’ve found the one that sank again, and another one,” she says, slipping the phone into her jacket. “That’s four in total.”
“Any IDs?”
“They’re close to ID’ing one of them.”
“How’d she come up to the surface? The freshest one?”
“It was the cinder block,” she says. “Looks like the rope was tied around it, but those cinder blocks can have sharp edges. The block landed against another block down there, and it damaged the rope. It cut through it partly. Gas buildup in the body was enough to break it. Look, you really have to leave.”
“I get the feeling I’m going to be hearing that a lot over the next few days.”
“Then do yourself a favor and drop this thing,” she says, before turning away and heading back into the morgue.
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 & 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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Averageville. That’s where the Tylers live. All the houses on the street are well kept, but there is nothing special, as if any one resident was too scared to make their house stand out above another. No huge homes with giant windows, no expensive cars parked outside, no Porsches or BMWs suggesting a world of big money and high debt. No beat-up cars sitting on blocks, no car parts scattered across dying lawns. Doctors and lawyers and drug dealers live elsewhere. This is typical living in suburbia, where robberies are high, but homicides are low. It’s a pleasant place to live. Sure as hell beats some of the alternatives.
I slow down and glance at the mailboxes, getting an early idea how much further I have to drive. This wasn’t my case when the bodies floated up. It wasn’t my case when the caretaker took off. But it became my case the moment the coffin opened and Rachel Tyler’s body made a suggestion that there are others out there who could still be alive if not for my mistake. I glance at the geranium cocktail next to me, and for a few seconds I think about my wife. I like to think that I know what she would want me to do, but I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time since she gave me any advice.
I step out into the light rain in front of a single-story house that was mass-produced back at the start of the townhouse era. Things are tidy, but a little run down. The garden has a few weeds; the lawn is a little long; the entire house looks a little tired.
The door is opened by a woman in her late forties, early fifties. She looks like she has been on edge for the last two years, expecting news at any moment. She is like the house—tidy, neat, but tired.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Tyler?”
“Yes . . .”
I can tell she isn’t sure whether I’m here to sell her encyclopedias or God, or whether I’m here to bolster or destroy her hopes for her missing daughter. Slowly I reach into my pocket and take out a business card. Her eyes widen and her mouth drops slightly as I hand it across, and when she reads it her mouth firms back up. She doesn’t seem sure what to say. Doesn’t seem to know whether to be happy or scared that I’m on her doorstep.
“My name is Theodore Tate,” I say, “and I’m a private investigator.”
“That’s what the card says,” she offers, without any sarcasm.
“Can I have a few minutes of your time?”
“Do you know where she is?” she asks, already sure of the reason for my visit.
“This is about Rachel,” I say, “but not directly. Please, if we can step inside, I can tell you more.”
She fights with the beginnings of a sentence; perhaps the struggle is with the hundreds of questions trying to come out at once, a hundred different ways in which to ask if her daughter is still alive. I bet she’s rehearsed this moment time and time again, but the reality is crushing her, confusing her. She steps back and I move inside.
The hallway is warm and homey. There are dozens of photographs of Rachel on the walls, ranging over the nineteen years she spent in this world. There are pictures of her as a baby, her mother holding her tightly. The years have taken their toll on Mrs. Tyler. There are shots of Rachel next to a tricycle, in a sandbox, going down a slide. There is a man in some of them, holding Rachel’s hand, or swinging her at the park, or helping her blow out a cake with eight candles on it. Rachel gets older. So do her parents. Fashions change and the three grow older, but the smiles are always there, keeping the parents young. One of these photos should have been with her missing persons report, but probably Mrs. Tyler couldn’t part with any of them. I’m sure Rachel’s bedroom will be just as she left it, the same posters on the walls, her favorite stuffed toys waiting for her on her bed, maybe even a stockpile of Christmas and birthday presents from missed occasions. It’ll be like a time capsule.
Patricia Tyler leads me through to the lounge.
“Is your husband home?” I ask, praying she isn’t going to tell me they are separated or, worse, that her husband has died from the pain of losing his daughter to a mystery, that he has spent the last six or eight or ten months in the ground.
“He’s at work. He sometimes works late,” she says, sounding sad about it. I can’t imagine she ever sounds any other way. “Mostly, actually, these days. I should phone him, I guess. Should I?”
“If you’d like.”
“What . . . what am I going to tell him?” she asks.
“Perhaps we should sit down for a few minutes first.”
“Sure, okay, sure, I don’t know where my manners are. Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?” She starts to stand back up. “Anything, just name it.” She’s halfway out of the lounge when she pulls up short; then, fidgeting her hands, she slowly turns back to look at me. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says, and starts to cry.
She’
s not the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t come. I feel the urge to hold her while she cries and an equally strong urge to turn and run back down the hallway and get the hell out of this street. I end up standing still.
“Please, just tell me why you’re here,” she asks.
I can no more easily tell this woman her child is dead than I could show her pictures of the corpse. I cannot tell her about Cemetery Lake, about a woman whose decayed remains look like they belong to Rachel. I can’t mention the exhumation, can’t detail my swim with the corpses, can’t mention it’s the same cemetery I almost buried my wife in two years ago after the accident. I reach into my pocket and produce the small plastic bag with Rachel’s ring. She takes it without a word, then slowly sinks down into a chair opposite me. I sit down too. For a long time she says nothing.
“It turned up today in an investigation,” I say, and she finally manages to pull her eyes away from it and look back up at me. “Do you recognize it? Does it belong to Rachel?”
“Where did you find it?” she asks. “Who had it?”
“Nobody had it on them,” I lie, feeling bad and concerned with the way this is going. But of course what other way was there?
“But how, then?”
“Please, I need to ask you a few questions. The inscription, it says Rachel & David forever.”
“Was it David?” she asks, her voice raising. “Did he give you the ring?”
“No. Nobody had it. I found it.”
“Where?” she asks, almost demanding now.
“Please, Mrs. Tyler, can you tell me about David?”
“How did you know to come here?”
“The inscription,” I say, but then suddenly realize my mistake. The only reason I’d check missing persons would be if I believed the ring belonged to somebody who was dead. Mrs. Tyler, thank God, doesn’t make the connection. “Please, tell me about David.”
