The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  “Had to be about an hour ago,” he said easily. “We were stationed outside her hotel room, and we were checking on her every ten minutes. The last time we went in to check, she was gone.”

  “Just like that?” Lynch asked. “She just disappeared into thin air while both of you were on your posts?”

  The young one licked his lips nervously as Officer Thomas explained. “I’m sure she didn’t disappear into thin air, sir, but I know we didn’t leave our posts.”

  Lynch’s eyes bored into Officer Thomas. “Her room was on the twentieth floor, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So she couldn’t have jumped out the window, could she?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And it wasn’t a suite, so there was only one way in and one way out, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So if she didn’t jump out the window, and she didn’t get out through an adjoining room, one or both of you must’ve left your posts. Otherwise, it would’ve been impossible for her to simply walk away.”

  Thomas shifted nervously in his chair. “I know it sounds crazy, Commissioner, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my twenty years on the force, but—”

  “Put your badge and gun on the table, Officer Thomas,” Lynch said.

  “Commissioner, I—”

  “Do it now!” Lynch shouted.

  The old cop looked at the young one. Then he looked at Commissioner Lynch, and with a heavy sigh, he plucked his badge from his uniform, took his gun from its holster, and laid both on the table.

  “Consider yourself fired,” Lynch said. “And depending on what I find out, you might want to get ready to go to jail, too. The sergeant will escort you out.”

  Officer Thomas shot a look in the direction of the young officer, his eyes begging him to do anything but talk. The young cop refused to meet his gaze. He’d already seen enough.

  When the door closed behind Officer Thomas, Lynch turned his withering stare on the young cop. Everything about the cop was new, from his uniform to his wedding band to the look in his bloodshot eyes.

  “Officer Green,” the commissioner said, reading from the young man’s name tag, “I’m going to give you one chance to tell me the truth. If you do, I’ll try to help you avoid jail time. If you don’t, all bets are off.”

  Lynch paused and looked the young cop in the eye before posing the question directly. “Where’s Lenore Wilkinson?”

  The cop twisted his wedding band around his finger. He wanted to weigh his options, but he knew he didn’t have any. After a long moment he looked up at the commissioner with plaintive eyes.

  “No jail time?” he asked.

  “As long as nobody hurt her, no jail time.”

  Officer Green looked over his shoulder at the remaining cop from internal affairs. Then he allowed his gaze to rest on the commissioner. He sighed deeply before he began to speak.

  “She came to the door and told us she wanted to go home,” he said quietly. “I knew we couldn’t hold her against her will, but I wanted to at least call it in to let someone know. She didn’t want us to do that, though, so she offered us two thousand dollars each to look the other way. I wasn’t going to take it at first, but Thomas, well, he said no one would ever know, and I believed him.”

  Lynch exchanged glances with the cop from internal affairs. Then he turned to the patrolman and asked the question they all wanted answered. “Where did she go when she left?”

  “I don’t know,” Green said. “She just walked away.”

  The commissioner glared at the young cop, despising him as much for his stupidity as anything else. “Leave your gun and badge on the table,” he said.

  The cop did as he was told, and when he was escorted out, there were tears in his eyes. Lynch hated watching a young cop’s career end before it began, but what he hated even more was the fact that it was avoidable.

  Mann knocked on the door and walked in with a laptop. Sandy and the captain were with him. Lynch tried to hide his troubled expression from them, but they all knew the case was getting to him. It was getting to all of them.

  “They told us you were down here,” the captain said. “Did you get what you needed?”

  “I got what I didn’t need,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Lenore Wilkinson paid off the guys on the detail to let her walk away.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Mann said. “Coletti just called on his way back from Dunmore. He talked to Lenore’s father and apparently almost everything she told us was a lie. She knew Clarissa. She knew about Workman’s theories. She knew everything.”

  “Did she know the killer?” the commissioner asked.

  Mann opened the laptop and spoke as it booted up. “I’m not sure if she knew him or not,” he said as he clicked on a pictures folder. “But my contacts down at Penn sent these over. These are the guys who were in the MFA program over the last two years.”

  They all looked at the pictures. There were two black men and three Asian men. Of the four white men, none of them had black hair.

  “I don’t see a match,” the commissioner said.

  “Neither did I,” Mann said. “Not at first. But the National Park Service came through with the surveillance video from the Poe house. They e-mailed it about fifteen minutes ago. Take a look.”

  He clicked on another folder, and the first of three surveillance videos popped up. In it, a young man with black hair and a mustache walked in behind Clarissa Bailey. In several shots, they walked through the house on the tour, seemingly unaware of one another. But in the final shot their proximity was so close as to be familiar. They appeared to know each other.

  “That’s interesting,” Sandy said, “but we still don’t know who he is.”

  Mann smiled. Then he took a still from the video and opened Adobe Photoshop. He superimposed the video still over the headshot of an unsmiling young man with blond hair and blue eyes from the master’s program. It was a match.

  “Dyed hair and contact lenses do wonders,” Mann said. “This is our guy. According to my contacts at Penn, he never took a class with Workman, but the professor took him under his wing. His name is Lance Griggs, and he dropped out of the program after his wife was murdered. Nobody’s seen Lance in months.”

  “Until today,” the captain said.

  The commissioner brightened. “Good work, Mann. What’s his last known address?”

  “With all due respect, Commissioner, I don’t think his last known address is where we’ll find him. This whole thing came down to the map of the cemetery, and that’s where I think he is.”

  Lynch looked at the captain, who, along with Sandy, nodded in agreement. They all knew Mann was right. They simply needed Lynch’s approval.

  “Do it,” Lynch said, and within a half hour, they were ready to hit the Gravedigger where he lived.

  * * *

  Four teams of homicide detectives walked in through Fairgrounds’ various entrances, and did so with a single purpose. Follow the map to wherever it led them, and bring back whatever they found.

  Mann and Sandy, joined by two M16-toting officers from the SWAT unit, made up team number 1. Teams 2 through 4 were also composed of detectives and SWAT officers. Between them, they had enough firepower to neutralize whatever they encountered, but as the teams got into position, the cemetery grew ever more still.

  Pale yellow light filtered onto the cemetery grounds from the streetlamps along Kelly Drive. A sliver of moon and a smattering of stars shone dimly through the clouds.

  The result was a graveyard that was darker than it should be. Occupied police cars sat at every entrance. Crime scene tape blocked off the empty grave where Clarissa’s body had been found. Fallen leaves swirled in the night breeze.

  Mann led Sandy and the others to the spot beneath the evergreen tree where Mary Smithson was buried. Sandy shone her flashlight on the tiny grave marker while shaking her head at the irony of the map’s beginning there.

  “Team 1 in position,” Ma
nn whispered into his handheld radio as Sandy unfolded the map.

  The other three team leaders parroted those words, and flashlight beams stabbed through the darkness as Sandy and Mann began walking through the graveyard.

  They followed the winding path laid out on the map, traversing mausoleums, headstones, and other monuments to the dead. When they reached the end point of the map, they looked down into the grave where they’d found Clarissa Bailey. There was nothing there.

  For a full minute, they stood, staring into the hole as the darkness wrapped itself around them. Sandy bent down for a closer look, leaning in with her gun in one hand and her flashlight in the other. There was a swishing sound above their heads, almost like that of flapping wings. They all pointed their flashlights skyward in an effort to find out what the sound had come from.

  When they didn’t see anything, they returned their attention to the empty grave, and as Mann watched Sandy stare down into the hole, Poe’s words came bubbling to the surface.

  “Deep into that darkness peering…”

  He tried to shake the phrase from his mind, but it was quickly followed by another.

  “Long I stood there, wondering, fearing…”

  Again, they heard the flapping of wings, this time punctuated by the deep croak of the raven. They looked up, all of them, with their weapons and flashlights aimed at the sky. When nothing appeared, Mann wasn’t sure what he’d heard or seen. It was as if Poe’s next line had come to life.

  “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…”

  It was quiet now. The breeze was still, their guns were silent. Everything seemed to stop. Everything, that is, except for Mann’s mind, which recalled the lines he’d looked up that morning while standing near that very spot.

  “But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

  “And the only word there spoken was the whispered word ‘Lenore’…”

  As soon as the thought of Lenore’s name entered his mind, the raven dove from the sky with a deep, loud croak, and went for Sandy’s face. She rolled left and the bird’s sharp claws ripped through her soft leather jacket, scratching her upper arm. The raven tried to attack again, but Sandy rolled away once more.

  A SWAT officer fired three shots in rapid succession, obliterating the bird and the ground beneath it. As blood and black feathers mingled with the dead grass and earth, a flurry of voices flooded their radios and the teams ran toward Mann and Sandy’s position.

  When Sandy rose to her feet, Mann took her by the hand. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. Then she looked at the dead raven and a chill went through her, because every time the raven had showed up that day, a body was not far behind.

  By the time the three other teams reached them, Sandy was stepping away from the dead bird, and a quiet rumbling sound was bubbling up from the ground. Every cop in the cemetery listened as the sound grew steadily louder. In mere seconds it reached an ear-splitting volume, and the ground beneath Sandy’s feet gave way. With Mann holding on to her, they both fell into the grave.

  By the time the rumbling stopped, they were flat on their backs. They were startled, but neither of them was hurt. Sandy scrambled to her feet and pulled Mann upright. They both reached up so the other officers could grab their hands and pull them out. As they did so, the ground beneath them shook as if a heavy truck had driven by on the road. Suddenly the shaking became more violent. The officers who were standing over the grave fell backward. A chunk of earth came loose beneath Sandy and Mann, opening a hole that tunneled down into the earth.

  By the time the ground stopped shaking and the other officers got to their feet, Mann and Sandy were no longer visible. They’d both been swallowed by the grave.

  A homicide sergeant who commanded the second of the four teams jumped down into the grave with his back against the side, trying desperately to avoid the hole that had taken Mann and Sandy.

  “Charlie!” he called into his handheld radio. “Lieutenant Jackson, come in!”

  There was static on the other end. The sergeant leaned forward to look into the hole. He didn’t see any signs of life, but approximately forty feet down he saw a faint blue light that brightened and dimmed, almost like the light from a gas-burning stove. As the ground started to shift again and the members of his team pulled him out of the grave, he felt like he’d just peered into hell.

  “Call for an assist,” he said as he caught his breath. “We’ve gotta get them outta there.”

  * * *

  The harrowing slide through the deep, dark hole felt as if it would never end. They tumbled into and against one another for what seemed like forever, hurtling through a rock-strewn nightmare. When they came out the other end, some forty feet under the graveyard’s surface, they slammed into the muddy wall of a much larger tunnel before landing in a bloody heap.

  They both lay still for a few seconds, trying to reorient themselves. Once they both realized that they were still alive, they felt along the ground for their weapons. They retrieved them and struggled to their feet, thankful that the muddy wall had helped to break their fall, and anxious about their prospects for getting out.

  Mann tried his radio, but it didn’t work beneath the ground. Both of them tried yelling, but they couldn’t hear anyone answer. The noise they made drew interest, however. The blue light from around the bend reflected in the eyes of gathering rats.

  They each readied their weapons and checked their injuries. Mann’s left arm was bloody and raw from the slide through the rocky tunnel. Sandy touched her left wrist and winced, realizing then that it might be broken.

  “You gonna make it?” Mann asked.

  “I’m breathing,” Sandy said. “I’ll be all right.”

  That was the optimistic view, because breathing had already become more difficult. The air in the tunnel was nothing like the air aboveground, and though neither of them said it aloud, they knew they couldn’t survive in the tunnel for long.

  “Come on,” Mann said, walking cautiously toward the blue light that shone from around the bend.

  Sandy followed him as rats scurried and squealed at their feet.

  As they got closer to the curve in the tunnel where the blue light shone most brightly, they both held their guns out in front of them, and their breath came faster as adrenaline pumped through their veins.

  They rounded the curve with a mixture of fear and excitement as the pulsing blue light shone brighter, and when they walked into the makeshift room that housed the source of the light, they were each shocked into silence by what they saw.

  A small wooden chair held a laptop that had been left open. Its blue screen saver was pulsating, and Mann and Sandy both thought the same thing: the laptop’s owner must be close by. They gripped their guns tightly and waited for someone to emerge from the shadows.

  Aided by the light from the computer, they surveyed the small room that had been carved out of the dirt. They could see that it was a hub of some sort, with three other tunnels leading out.

  “You hear something?” Sandy whispered.

  At first he didn’t, but when Mann listened more closely, he could hear the rumbling sound returning. It was coming from somewhere behind them, and it was getting closer. They looked back into the tunnel they’d just come from and saw that its ceiling was giving way.

  The collapse was moving quickly in their direction, so Mann grabbed the laptop from the chair and they ran to another tunnel, coughing and squinting from the dust that filled the air. When it settled, they could see that the room they’d just left had been obliterated.

  That was when the voice spoke up. “Welcome,” the killer said from somewhere in the darkness.

  Both Mann and Sandy aimed their weapons in the direction that the sound had come from.

  “Who are you?” Mann asked. “Lance?”

  They could almost feel the Gravedigger’s shock when Mann spoke his name. He didn’t speak, but it felt as if he’d stopped breat
hing. This was no ordinary silence. It was a silence that was filled with grief.

  “Lance, I know you’re there,” Mann said.

  “Lance is dead!” the Gravedigger shouted from somewhere in the darkness, and then he was silent again.

  His voice was still echoing through the tunnel when there was a sudden movement near the wall directly across from them. Both Mann and Sandy fired in that direction. Seconds later the rumbling began anew. Dust shook loose from the ceiling of the tunnel. It felt as if another collapse was imminent.

  “What do you want?” Sandy asked.

  “You know what I want,” the killer said as his voice moved closer. “I want the secret. That’s why I agreed to do this.”

  “Agreed?” Mann said. “Agreed with who?”

  “Come and see,” the Gravedigger said, his voice so close they could almost feel him.

  Mann raised his weapon to fire, but the Gravedigger knocked it out of his hand. Mann swung and caught him with a right that somehow found its mark in the darkness. Sandy heard the killer stumble, and she shot once in his direction. As the sound of the gunshot echoed through the passage, the rumbling in the tunnel began anew, and the Gravedigger ran away.

  Mann and Sandy gave chase, but they were at a distinct disadvantage. The Gravedigger knew these mazelike passageways all too well. Mann and Sandy didn’t know them at all. They banged into the dirt walls as they chased the sounds of footsteps and grunting, but as the killer rounded a curve and ran up a steep incline toward a room with dim yellow light, his silhouette emerged from the shadows. Sandy took aim. The Gravedigger dove toward the lighted room. Sandy fired once, and the killer dropped to his knees. Then he rolled onto his back in agony.

  The Gravedigger remembered this scene from his dream. This was different, though. This time it wasn’t the cavalry soldier standing over him and watching him die. This time it was two cops.

  He winced as the wound began to throb, but he refused to let pain defeat him. Pushing himself along the tunnel’s dirt floor with his forearms, he struggled to make it to the room. He told himself that if he believed in the secret the bleeding would stop; if he believed in the secret he’d see his wife again; if he believed in the secret his benefactor would fix it, just as he’d said he would.