I sat in the grass beneath the lion and leaned back until my head rested against the stone. Out across the way, Harrison’s weeder buzzed and his shoulders swung back and forth methodically. What a place for a murderer to work.
That thought took me back to Harrison’s apartment, to the night Ken and I had made our initial visit and Harrison first told us he worked in a cemetery, told us that it suited him. Ken’s response—how unsettling.
“How unsettling.” I said it aloud and laughed. Man, what a line. How unsettling. I laughed again, softer this time, an under-the-breath chuckle, and then I laid my head back against the stone again and closed my eyes and tried to find a moment of peace. It was there, sitting upright in a graveyard with my head on a piece of granite, that I finally fell asleep.
__________
I woke only minutes later, but it felt longer than that, and I came around slowly, like that moment of awakening was at the end of a long, difficult climb. When my eyes opened it took me a second to place myself, and then I realized that Harrison was out of view and I could no longer hear the sound of his machine. I pushed off the stone and looked around and saw him not ten feet away, standing with his arms folded across his chest, watching me.
“Hello, Lincoln,” he said. “I’m going to assume this is not a coincidence.”
I thought about getting to my feet, but what was the point? Instead, I just leaned forward, rested my arms on my knees, and looked up at him. “Great place to work.”
“I like it.”
I nodded up at the lion above me. “Hell of a cat, too.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“Daykin?” I shook my head.
“A railroad man,” Harrison said. “Specifically, a conductor. He was one of the conductors on Lincoln’s funeral train. John Daykin. This is one of my favorite monuments in the cemetery.”
“You know them all?”
“More than you’d think,” he said.
“You keep the graves clean,” I said, “and Mark Ruzity carves them. Can you explain that?”
“Alexandra taught us the importance of honoring the dead. Mark took up the carving as his way of doing that. By the time I left Whisper Ridge, he’d met people out here, and got me the job. Not so sinister, really. I hate to disappoint you.”
“You know that he’s talked to Sanabria?” I said. “There’s a photo of it, Harrison. Ruzity and Sanabria together around the time your beloved Alexandra and Joshua disappeared. You were on the phone with Sanabria then, yourself.”
He didn’t respond. I looked away from him and out across the sea of weathered stones left to mark lives long finished.
“They haven’t made an arrest in Ken’s murder yet, Harrison.”
“If I could tell them who to arrest, I would.”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you here? Why would you sit here and watch me work?”
“I need an answer,” I said, “to just one question, Harrison. There are so many questions I think you can answer, but I need just this one: Why me? Why did you have to come to me? I ignored your first letter, so you wrote me more. I ignored those, so you came to see me. Why?”
“You’ve already asked me that.”
“I know it. This time I’d like you to tell me the truth.”
He sighed and lowered his weed trimmer to the ground, straightened again, and took a rag off his belt and ran it over his face and neck, soaking up the sweat from the morning’s rapidly rising heat.
“It was the truth then, and it will be the truth this time, too,” he said. “I came to you because of what I’d read. Because of what I hoped you would be.”
“What was that?” I said. “Supposing I believed you, which I do not, what was it that you thought I would be, Harrison?”
“Someone who knew how to see the guilty.”
“What?”
“Not how to find the guilty, Lincoln. How to see them. How to . . . consider them. The people behind the crime. I’m a murderer. I get that. Well, Joshua Cantrell was murdered, and not by me. I wanted to know who did it—and why.”
“That’s not what you asked me to do.”
“No, and that was my mistake. I held on to the truth when I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to get you to the house.”
“Why was that so damn special? Why did I have to see the house?”
He spread his hand, waved it around us. “You see all these stones? What are they?”
I sat and stared up at him, searching his face and trying, yet again, to come to a judgment about him. I wanted to believe him.
“What would you call them?” he said. “These stones.”
“Graves.”
“That’s beneath the stone. What are the—”
“Markers, monuments.”
He nodded. “Joshua Cantrell has one. You’ve seen it. That house is his monument. She left it for him, Lincoln. Something to sit in his memory.”
It was the same comparison Ken Merriman had made. The sort of comparison that came easily when a house had been outfitted with an epitaph.
“Home to dreams,” I said.
“Yes. Dreams she’d shared with her husband. It’s important to remember the dead. Alexandra understood that, and so do I. It’s why I work here, Lincoln—and before you ask the question, yes, I think of the man I killed. I remember him. Every single day, I think of him, and of what I took from him and those who loved him. It’s important to remember.”
“You know that she left the house so Joshua would be remembered. You’re sure of that.”
He nodded.
“Do you know who killed him?”
He shook his head. I watched for the lie and couldn’t find it.
“I wanted to know,” he said. “That’s why I came to you. You wish I never had, and I’m sorry about that. I picked you because I hoped you’d see past my prison sentence, see past my crime. The police can’t do that. Neither could you, and that’s all right. I took a chance with you. It didn’t work out. Sometimes they don’t.”
“It didn’t work out for you? Ken’s dead, Harrison.”
“That wasn’t me. I’m sorry about it, more sorry than I can probably make you believe, but it was not me who killed him.”
A car passed on the road, circling slowly through the cemetery, and neither Harrison nor I spoke until it was gone.
“Why were you talking to Dominic Sanabria?” I said.
“When?”
“Any of the times. You called him when Cantrell was killed, you called him when the body was found, you called him just before Ken was killed.”
He hesitated before saying, “At first I was trying to get information out of him. Trying to get in touch with Alexandra.”
“What did you tell him the day before Ken was killed?”
“I told him that you were done with the case. He’d called me earlier to say that his sister and her memory needed to be left alone. That was when I asked you to quit. I was worried for you, and I didn’t want to be the one who put you in harm’s way. I didn’t trust Dominic.”
“All of that might be believable, Harrison, but there’s one call missing in that explanation. Why did you call him when the body was found? When it was found and before it was identified.”
He looked uncomfortable, failed to meet my eyes for the first time. “I really can’t speak of that.”
“You piece of shit.” I shook my head in disgust. “You know things that could help, and you won’t say them. You don’t really want to see anything resolved, don’t give a damn about Ken or Cantrell or anybody else. It’s all some sort of sick game to you.”
“It’s not that at—”
“Then tell the rest of it!” I got to my feet, shouted it at him.
He stood in silence and watched me. I waited for him to speak, and he did not. After a few minutes of staring at him, I shook my head again.
“I made a promise,” he said, his voice very soft, “to someone who mattered more to me than anyone I’ve ever known. Can
you understand that? I gave my word.”
“To Alexandra? She’s gone, Harrison. Gone, and maybe dead. She’s been gone for twelve years. You want to let your promise to her prevent justice?”
No confirmation, no denial, no response.
“Why do you have such loyalty to that woman?” I said, weariness in my voice.
He didn’t answer right away. I stood beside the Daykin monument, resting one hand on the lion’s side, and I waited. Finally he spoke.
“It’s never really quiet in prison,” he said. “People think of it as a quiet place, solitary, but it’s not. Doors bang, and guards walk around, and the other prisoners talk and shout and laugh and cough. It’s loud all the time. Even at night, you hear sounds of other people. You’re never really alone.”
He paused, and I didn’t say anything. Another car drove past.
“You’re never alone,” he said again, “and it’s not an easy place to be. It shouldn’t be, right? It’s a place where you’re sent to be punished, a place that’s supposed to painful. You walk around with other murderers, with rapists, drug dealers. Some violent people, some crazy people. You’re one of them, and you’ve got a role to play. You’ve got to seem more violent and more crazy than them. You got to be the craziest man in the place, understand? Because otherwise you will not survive.”
He wet his lips, shifted in the grass.
“I’d been in for four years before I decided I couldn’t finish. I just gave up, knew there was no way I could make it to the other side. There was a cleaning detail, and I got assigned to that, and I started stealing Drano. They had a big bottle, I knew I’d never get that out, so I emptied toothpaste tubes and filled them with the stuff, brought them back to my cell. You have any idea how hard it is to fill a toothpaste tube with Drano? Takes dedication, I assure you. I waited until I had three of them filled. I did not want to have too little to do the job. I thought there would probably be enough in those three tubes to kill me.”
“You’re still here,” I said. “So it wasn’t enough?”
“I think it would have been. I didn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“It got quiet,” he said. “The night I was going to take it, the place got quiet. For one hour. I can tell you that almost exactly. I was waiting, and I was scared, and then it got quiet. I had one silent hour. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody was talking, or moving, or screaming, and in that hour I remembered, for the first time in a long time, that this was not all that I was. I’d killed somebody, and it was a terrible thing, and I was in this terrible place and I would be for years to come, but that was not all I was. If I committed suicide in there, though, if I died in that place, then it would be different. That would be my identity, all the world would ever know or remember about me, that I was another murderer who died in the place where murderers belong.”
He took the rag off his belt again, ran it over his face, soaked up the fresh sweat on his forehead.
“I told that story to Alexandra Sanabria a few weeks before I was released,” he said. “She put out her hand and took mine, and she promised me that we would take that one hour and make it my life. That everything I had been and pretended to be aside from it would no longer matter.”
He squeezed the rag in his hand, and drops of sweat fell into the grass.
“She kept her promise, Lincoln. So I’ll keep mine. I’m sorry, but I’ll keep mine.”
PART THREE
HONORS AND
EPITAPHS
34
__________
The summer went down quietly. The heat broke and the humidity dropped and the kids went back to school. The Indians put together one of their classic late-season runs to ensure you’d spend the winter with that bitter oh-so-close taste in your mouth. The gym attracted a few new members. The PI office stayed closed and locked.
Joe came back to town in the middle of September. He’d been gone for more than nine months without a single trip back, and when he opened up his house and stepped inside and looked around, I couldn’t read his feelings.
“So much dust,” he said. He’d left Florida at the end of August but headed west instead of north, making the drive to Idaho with Gena. Just keeping her company on a long drive, he’d said. He spent two weeks there, though, and I wondered if it had been a scouting trip of sorts. He’d told me the two of them had not made any future plans but had also not closed any doors. I left it at that.
We reopened the office on the last day of September and devoted a morning to cleaning and reorganizing. We’d share the background check duties and the profits. It wouldn’t be enough to support both of us, but that was okay—we each had a supplemental income, mine through the gym and Joe’s through his police pension. The screenings provided extra cash as well as something to do.
By mid-October we’d developed a comfortable rhythm, spending a few mornings a week in the office together, processing reports and requesting local court record checks where we needed them. It felt good to have Joe back, good to exchange some of our old jabs and barbs. What we were doing was not detective work, not in any sense that I’d come to know, but it was important, too. We routinely discovered applicants with criminal charges in their histories, from misdemeanors to felonies. These were the kind of people you didn’t want in your employ, the sort who could bring real problems inside the walls of your company. In some circumstances, the charges were very old—ten, fifteen, twenty years—but we recorded them just the same. Old charges or not, there was a risk factor associated with the hiring of those people, and our new employer didn’t want to take that risk. Couldn’t afford to, they told us. Not in this day and age.
It was late October when I heard from Quinn Graham. He called the office and seemed surprised when I answered.
“I thought you’d quit.”
“Just case work. We’ve got some other things on the table.”
“I see.”
“What’s up, Graham? You got something?”
“No,” he said, and I could hear embarrassment in his voice. “Not the sort of thing you’re looking for, at least.”
“Then what is it?”
“Thought you might like to know that Joshua Cantrell’s parents won their case yesterday.”
“Alexandra’s legally declared dead?”
“Yeah, that happened a few weeks back, actually. Yesterday they came to a settlement. The house is going to be claimed by the estate and sold.”
“Money split between them and Sanabria?”
“No. Sanabria’s attorneys showed up and said he wanted no part of it. Went through whatever legal process they had to for him to waive his interest. It all goes to the Cantrells now.”
At least that bastard wasn’t taking the money. It wasn’t much, but it helped.
“They going to put the house on the market soon?” I asked.
“Immediately, is my understanding.”
We talked a little while longer, and he told me that a few weeks earlier he had made an arrest in the case of the murdered girls that he’d been working that summer. The perp was a thirty-year-old graduate student at Penn State who was working on a thesis about pornography. I was glad Graham got him. I was glad he’d told me about it, too. It was good to know these things.
Two days later a short article ran in the newspaper. It wasn’t much, but it explained the legal situation and announced the pending sale of the house. Asking price hadn’t been set yet but was rumored to be around four million. The Cantrell family was considering subdividing the land, though, so there would be a delay in the sale while they studied their options.
The morning the article ran, I stopped in the office and asked Joe if he could handle a few days without me.
“Where you going to be?”
“Sitting in the woods with binoculars and a camera.”
He looked at me for a long time without speaking.
“I know you’ll think it’s crazy,” I said, “but I want to watch that house.”
&nbs
p; “The Cantrell house? You want to watch it?”
I nodded. “I want to see who shows.”
“What makes you think anyone will except a Realtor?”
“Because that place is sacred to people, Joe. Was, at least. I’d like to know if anyone comes to say goodbye.”
“Alexandra?”
“I don’t know. There might be a chance. Or maybe Dominic. Or Harrison. Or somebody else entirely.”
He frowned. “Even if someone does—and I have trouble believing that anyone will—what the hell will that tell you?”
I didn’t answer that. Couldn’t. Still, I wanted to see it. I was remembering Ken Merriman’s remark that day on Murray Hill. She had a damn epitaph carved beside the door. That place means something to her. So let me tell you—if she’s alive, I bet she’ll come back to see it again.
“If you feel it’s worth a shot, then knock yourself out,” Joe said. He paused, then said, “Hell, maybe I could take a day or two at it with you. Been a while since I did any surveillance. Old time’s sake, why not, right?”
We logged a full week at it. I spent more time there than Joe, rising early each morning and sitting until dusk each night, but he put in plenty of hours. I didn’t think it was wise to sit inside the gate, so instead we parked up the road and watched.
In the first two days, there was a decent amount of activity, but it was casual interest, people who drove up to the gate and then pulled back out and went on their way. The newspaper story had sparked some curiosity, that was all.
On the third day, someone drove a black BMW up to the gate, unlocked it, and drove through. I was intrigued by that one until the driver stepped out of the car, and then I recognized him as Anthony Child. Checking on the property one last time, maybe, before it was taken out of his care. He would probably be glad to see the hassle go.
The next afternoon there were more visitors. An old van arrived just after one and parked at the end of the drive. I watched through my long-range camera lens as the doors opened and two men stepped out—Parker Harrison from the passenger side and a rangy, gray-haired guy I’d never seen from the driver’s seat. The gray-haired guy was carrying a bouquet of flowers. He kept them in his hand as he and Harrison walked around the gate and began to fight their way up through the woods, just as I had in the spring. I snapped a few pictures before they disappeared into the trees, including one clear shot of the van and the license plate.
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