The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  The two detectives stood there for a moment before Coletti took his notepad from his pocket and handed it to Mann. “We found a piece of paper near the body. I copied down what it said. Does it ring any bells for you?”

  Mann looked at the notepad. Then he took out his iPhone. “Deep into that darkness peering…” he said as he typed the words into a Google search. A second later, the results popped up. “It’s a line from ‘The Raven,’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “I gotta get me one o’ those phones,” Coletti said.

  “I bought you one two months ago. Where is it?”

  “I’ve got it somewhere,” Coletti said, sounding like a school kid telling a lie. “Besides, my old phone still works and I can send texts and get e-mail on it, so … anyway, what does the line from the poem mean?”

  Mann stared at Coletti for a few seconds. “I can’t believe you lost that phone,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at the phone’s screen, and a look of recognition swept over his face. “What did you say Mary’s sister’s name was?”

  “Lenore.”

  When Coletti said it, the storm clouds darkened, sucking the very sound from the air. Just as he’d heard almost nothing but his own breathing when he was searching among the cemetery’s crypts for the killer, Coletti could only hear a few sounds now. One of them was Mann’s voice, reading the next line of Poe’s masterpiece.

  “But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken—”

  Mann’s voice was drowned out by the roll of thunder and the patter of the rain against granite headstones.

  The two of them walked quickly to Coletti’s car, where Lenore was waiting. When they got in, an alert tone came over the radio.

  “Cars stand by,” the dispatcher said. “Nine two one two, what’s your location?”

  Five seconds of static followed.

  “Car 9212, report.”

  Again, there was static, and with it, an almost palpable sense of dread. Coletti and Mann looked at each other, then at Lenore. A moment later, the radio crackled again.

  “This is 9210,” a cop said gravely. “I got 9212 near Reservoir Drive. The car’s running, but he ain’t in it.”

  * * *

  The dispatcher called for an assist—the highest priority in the department. It meant that a cop was in trouble, and this assist was much like any other. Once the call went out, chaos reigned.

  The radio was clogged with the voices of cops falling over each other to respond. The streets were filled with police cars flying recklessly through the park. The air was thick with the electric pulse of cops who were out for blood.

  They blocked Kelly Drive and brought civilian traffic to a standstill. As they did so, they tried to do the impossible—fight against the unspoken yet prevailing feeling that time had already run out.

  As rain poured from dark clouds that made the morning feel like night, the police used everything at their disposal to search for their comrade. There were K-9 units and SWAT teams, uniformed and plainclothes, and when word of the cop’s disappearance hit his former district—the ninth—a steady stream of police sped to the area from downtown.

  Lieutenant Sandy Jackson was among them. With cinnamon-brown skin and a beauty that belied her toughness, Sandy commanded officers in the sixth district. She’d served most of her career in the ninth, however, and the cop who’d disappeared was one of the few who’d helped her along as a rookie.

  As she whipped her car around Kelly Drive and past the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sandy glanced out the window at a golden statue of an armor-clad Joan of Arc and thought of her own days on the battlefield.

  She remembered how she’d fought to get promotions. She remembered how she’d battled sexism in the department. Most of all, she remembered that the officer who was now missing was one of the few male cops who’d helped her as she struggled for equal treatment.

  When her crass colleagues would leave pornography out at roll call to harass Sandy and the other female cop on the squad, it was Smitty who stepped up to make them stop.

  He never won any popularity contests because of it, and he never tried to do so. He simply did his job, and most of the time, he did it well. That was what led to his proudest moment—the arrest of two college boys who’d run a major meth operation out of their Center City apartment. On appeal, it all came crashing down when their parents hired the city’s top defense attorney to get their convictions overturned.

  When the smoke cleared, Smitty was portrayed as the bad guy, and by the time the media finished with him, the commissioner had no choice but to get him out of the limelight. Sandy watched sadly as he was transferred from the ninth district to the park, but she consoled herself with the belief that the new assignment took him out of harm’s way. Her belief was wrong.

  Her memories of Smitty were set aside as Sandy maneuvered around police cars and wagons at the scene. Her thoughts turned to Charlie Mann. He was, after all, the man who mattered most to her, and it had been that way since they’d begun seeing each other three years before.

  He’d made her smile when others couldn’t. He’d become someone with whom she could see a future. But things had changed between them since Charlie’s last case, right after he shot and killed a murder suspect and a serial killer. Though both shootings were justified, Charlie had become withdrawn and introspective, and while he never said it aloud, Sandy felt as if a piece of him had died that day as well.

  Parking her car, Sandy donned her cap and raincoat and tried to put Charlie out of her mind. That wasn’t so easy.

  When she got out of the car, however, and saw the scene before her, any thoughts of the man she loved disappeared in the urgency of the moment.

  There were barking dogs and shouting voices along with the steady hiss of rain. Flashlight beams stabbed through the darkness between the trees. Yellow raincoats and blue jackets moved in every direction, frantically searching the woods for any sign of life.

  A hundred yards in front of her, in the middle of the winding road that ran along the edge of the woods, there were hastily erected barricades. Beyond them were news vans and cameras, satellite dishes raised high on hydraulic lifts, and reporters fighting for space on the rain-soaked tarmac.

  Information was still scarce, but the media knew two facts for sure. They knew that Clarissa Bailey, one of the richest women in Philadelphia, had died at the Fairgrounds Cemetery in what could very well be a homicide. They also knew that a police officer had disappeared in the woods while searching for the suspect in Mrs. Bailey’s murder.

  Even as Sandy watched them, bits and pieces of information were posted online, and in minutes, the news went international. “Cop Missing in Search for Heiress’s Killer” was the lead story on Yahoo. “Fairgrounds Cemetery” became the most searched item on Google. “Cemetery Ghoul Kills Socialite” made its way onto AOL. But the one that stuck was the headline that was posted on TMZ.com: “Gravedigger’s Ball Starts Early.” It was linked on Twitter and tagged on Facebook, and while Internet sites repeated every rumor, the conventional media struggled to catch up.

  TV reporters at the scene did stand-ups in the pouring rain. Cameramen pressed against the barricades in an attempt to get past the police. Writers shouted questions at every commander within earshot. All of them hoped to be the first to report whatever the cops brought out of the woods.

  Sandy could see that it would take more than a few cops to handle the media contingent, so she got on the radio and directed sixth district officers toward the barricades. That was when she saw the commissioner arrive.

  He was all broad shoulders and stern demeanor, and even in the rain, she could see the stress in his eyes when he got out of his car.

  Kevin Lynch had already lived through more than his share of dead cops, with a string of them killed on duty in the past year. He wasn’t looking forward to experiencing it again, and he was in no mood to answer questions. As he watched his officers engage in a frenzied search fo
r one of their own and listened to the media shouting queries from beyond the barricades, Lynch’s brown face clouded over.

  “Commissioner, what’s the next step after the officer’s body is recovered?” shouted a reporter from a national news Web site.

  The assumption that Smitty was dead angered Lynch, and when he turned to the freckle-faced reporter and saw the young man grinning sarcastically, the commissioner felt himself poised to explode. Then Lynch saw Sandy looking pointedly at him, her eyes begging him not to be goaded into a confrontation. That look said that the reporter wanted him to lose it, to yell, to give in to his most base instincts. That look said that Lynch mustn’t do that, lest he give that reporter the chance to portray him as hotheaded and inept.

  That look was right.

  Lynch took a deep breath, held in the obscenities that were perched on his lips, and walked across the wet, winding road to talk to Sandy.

  He’d come to know her during the search for the Angel of Death, and he’d learned to admire her instinct and toughness. Sandy, after all, was much like himself—a cop who had faced all manner of naysayers both inside and outside the department. Like him, she’d managed to survive—to thrive, even—in a job where the brightest stars had to dim their own lights in order to avoid flaming out.

  “I’m glad you didn’t say what you were about to, Commissioner,” she said when he was close enough so only the two of them could hear.

  “I’m glad you stopped me,” he said, smiling quickly and humorlessly before his sad, angry expression returned. “Did you just get here?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said as sadness flashed across her face. “Smitty was—I mean, Smitty is—one of my favorite guys in the department. We go way back.”

  She looked embarrassed at her flub, but Lynch knew as well as she did that she was probably right to speak of him in the past tense.

  “Let’s hope he’s all right,” he said, feeling as disingenuous as he sounded.

  As Lynch spoke, the captain of the ninety-second district walked slowly toward them, his eyes vacant and his face devoid of color. He didn’t have to say a word. The grief on his face said it all.

  “They found him,” the captain said, his voice barely audible in the rain.

  Neither Lynch nor Sandy responded. They simply waited for him to finish.

  “He was, um, in a hole maybe two hundred yards into the woods. We probably would’ve missed him, except his gun was close by and the rain washed away the leaves that had been brushed over the hole.” The captain sighed and shook his head, the grief on his face rapidly giving way to anger. “I’m no expert, but from the looks of it, I’d say he was buried alive.”

  “Okay,” the commissioner said, turning to look at the media contingent. “Lieutenant Jackson, get me a few more cars from the sixth to secure those media barricades.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sandy said.

  The commissioner looked once more at the bank of cameras. Then he started down the hill that led into the woods.

  “Where are you going, Commissioner?” asked the captain from the ninety-second.

  “If one of my men is dead,” Lynch said with smoldering eyes, “I’m going down to see him for myself.”

  * * *

  Mann and Coletti never made it to the assist. They couldn’t with Lenore in the car, so they drove back to headquarters, listening to the radio transmissions that ended with the discovery of Smitty’s body.

  Lenore heard it all, and as she sat in the backseat, watching Coletti cast furtive glances in the rearview mirror, she knew, just as they all did, that the murders of Mrs. Bailey and the officer were connected. Lenore’s senses told her something more than that, though. They told her that Coletti was right; sometimes people can be involved in things and not even know it.

  Coletti called the office to find out if anyone had been able to reach Mrs. Bailey’s husband. They hadn’t, so he turned his attention back to Lenore, who was busily dialing her cell phone to leave a message for her own husband.

  When they arrived at the police administration building, Coletti and Mann escorted her into the oddly shaped figure eight known locally as the Roundhouse. They walked her down a series of curved halls and into a quiet interview room whose pale fluorescent light made most people look sickly. They marveled that it didn’t seem to do that to Lenore.

  With the exception of a scraped knee from hitting the ground after the gunshot, she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a magazine. Her cashmere scarf was draped over her shoulder and held in place with a diamond brooch. Her lamb’s wool skirt was accented by Italian leather boots, and when she sat in one of the rickety chairs and crossed her legs, they could see a hint of her thigh. It was smooth and supple.

  Her hair, blond and shoulder-length, was pulled back in a simple coif that highlighted her eyes and cheekbones. Her skin was flawless except for a sprinkling of freckles. Even in this light, she was stunning, and while she closely resembled Mary, Lenore was a much more beautiful version.

  She sat at the battered metal table in the middle of the room, examining the chipped paint on the cinderblock walls and the broken clock above the two-way mirror.

  With stale air being piped in through the vents and the smell of sweat lingering from past interrogations, the room felt stuffy and crowded. Coletti liked it that way. It helped to temper the uneasiness he felt about Lenore.

  “Can I get you some water or something?” he asked her as Mann looked on.

  “No, just ask your questions,” she said, sounding as annoyed as she looked.

  “Actually, I don’t think we’re going to ask many questions,” Coletti said. “You’re a witness, so we just need you to give your version of today’s events.”

  “Including the murder of the police officer?”

  Coletti looked at her with a stone-cold expression. “How could you know anything about that? You were with us when it happened.”

  “But that isn’t stopping you from suspecting me, is it?”

  Coletti paused. “For now, let’s forget what I suspect. We just need to know what happened in the time leading up to Mrs. Bailey’s death.”

  “And if I tell you that, will you change your opinion about my involvement?” she asked, more curious than afraid.

  “I don’t have an opinion yet.”

  She looked at him, and her mouth curled up in a smirk. “Yes you do.”

  The two of them stared at each other, sizing each other up. Then Mann jumped in.

  “I’m going to tape this,” he said, placing a small digital recorder on the table. “It’ll make it easier to transcribe it later. Now, if you’ll just state your full name, age, occupation, and address, we can get on with it.”

  She looked at Coletti for a few seconds more, her eyes filled with intense curiosity. Then she turned to Mann and smiled pleasantly before she spoke.

  “My name is Mrs. Lenore Wilkinson. I’m twenty-nine years old, and I don’t have an occupation. I’m married to John Wilkinson, so my job is finding causes and events where our money can best be used. That’s part of the reason I was at the cemetery this morning.”

  Mann and Coletti exchanged knowing glances. Like everyone in America, they’d heard of John Wilkinson. He was a Manhattan real estate magnate and one of the wealthiest men on the East Coast. In their minds, that made Lenore a trophy wife who spent her days by the pool and her nights being ravished by a husband twice her age.

  “Have you spoken to Mr. Wilkinson today?” Coletti asked.

  “I’ve left several messages for him,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “He had a business trip to London, but I’m sure we’ll talk soon.”

  Lenore saw the skeptical looks on their faces. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. She told herself she didn’t care.

  “Why don’t we get back to how you came to be at the cemetery this morning,” Coletti said, sensing the tension in the air.

  “Of course,” Lenore said, smiling nervously. “Mrs. Bailey reached out to me about s
ix months ago. She knew about the fund-raisers I’d run in Manhattan, and she needed a generous sponsor who could raise the profile of the Gravedigger’s Ball. I didn’t respond at first, because I didn’t know her, and frankly, a fund-raiser to save a cemetery—even a historic one—just wasn’t on my to-do list.”

  “So what changed your mind?” Coletti asked.

  “You did.”

  Both Mann and Coletti looked confused, until she began to explain.

  “In the days after my sister died, there were all kinds of reports about the awful things she’d done. The murders in the churches, the boys she strung out on heroin, the priest she set up for the Confessional Murders. And the thing that struck me in all those stories was that they said she did it to punish you, Detective Coletti. She blamed you for everything that ever went wrong in her life, but after she died, you never said a word against her, no matter how many times they asked you to.

  “Mary’s mother and my father, on the other hand, did interviews with every network and disowned her in front of the world. I couldn’t blame them, I guess. Every time they showed Mary’s picture on the news, or showed the bodies in the churches, or interviewed the victims’ families, I disowned her a little bit, too. I’d never met her in real life, so I got to know her through those stories, and from what I could see, she was a monster.

  “Then I saw a story about her burial. It was just a two-paragraph sidebar to a New York Post article that rehashed the things she’d done. And in that little sidebar, it said someone had anonymously paid to have her buried in the Fairgrounds Cemetery.

  “I knew her family didn’t do it, and I knew she didn’t have any friends, so I called Mrs. Bailey and asked if she could tell me the name of the person who’d paid for Mary’s burial. She said she couldn’t give me a name, but if I’d agree to come to Philadelphia and talk about the ball, she’d try to arrange for me to meet my sister’s benefactor.”

  Lenore paused as Mann turned to look at Coletti, who was staring into space, as he often did when Mary’s name was mentioned.

  “Maybe it was a coincidence that I chose today to visit,” Lenore said. “Maybe it was chance that you were standing there when I asked Mrs. Bailey to show me where Mary’s grave was. But whether it was chance or not, I know I was meant to meet you today, Detective, because I needed to see that there was at least one person who loved her. The only thing that surprised me was that person turned out to be you.”