An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  Also by Bernard Schaffer

  The Thief of All Light: A Santero and Rein Thriller

  Superbia

  Guns of Seneca 6

  Grendel Unit

  The Girl from Tenerife

  Whitechapel: The Final Stand of Sherlock Holmes

  AN UNSETTLED GRAVE

  BERNARD

  SCHAFFER

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I - ROAD DOGS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  II - PEOPLE WHO DIED

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  III - LOCKED DOORS

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  IV - WHERE WERE YOU?

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  V - SENECA FALLS

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Bernard Schaffer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2019932237

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-1725-2

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: August 2019

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1726-9

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-1726-0

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2019

  To Bill Thompson,

  the first to say author,

  and

  to Cliff Laing,

  an uncle when one was needed.

  I

  ROAD DOGS

  CHAPTER 1

  Out in the long stretches of road beyond the lights of the supermarkets and shopping centers, she drove. True darkness waits in the places with no streetlights. Her high beams dissolved into the fog. Monica Gere wiped the inside of her windshield with her palm, doing nothing but smearing wetness across the glass, and turned up her defroster. It was fall. The days were still warm but the nights turned cold. Sweat cooled on her bare arms and legs and left her shivering. She turned up the heat on the defroster, hoping it would help her see better. It didn’t.

  Monica went slow. Her headlights connected with eyes along the side of the road. Deer turned their heads, staring as if they might leap in front of her car at the last second to make a run for it. She had a fear of hitting a deer at high speed. A friend of hers hit one and it came barreling through the windshield. The damn thing kicked and thrashed, all antlers and hooves, destroying the car and slicing her friend into a bloody mess. Deer were stronger than they looked. They were large, powerful animals. She passed two others and slowed down even more.

  She crossed over the double-yellow lines into the oncoming lane, giving the animals a wide berth. It was ten o’clock at night and she hadn’t passed another car since she left the gym. Out here in the woods, cruising under a canopy of thick nighttime cloud and fog, she thought she could have driven in the left lane the entire way.

  Unknown to her, the vehicle behind her moved as she moved, changing from lane to lane and closing in. Its engine whined as it raced to catch up to her, never turning on its headlights as it cut through the fog. Monica squinted into the rearview mirror, trying to see what was making the noise. As she looked, brilliant white light blossomed inside the glass and blinded her.

  The car behind her activated its high beams, and a light bar mounted across its roof spun to life with dizzying red and blue LEDs. The driver aimed a spotlight at her side mirror, and its glare reflected straight into her face. Monica raised a hand to shield her eyes and skidded to a stop.

  She put her car in park and heard someone coming up behind her. She could not see him. Only a shadow, the shape of a man, blocking out the light between his car and hers. In his silhouette, she saw the bright crimson flare of a cigarette. The man flicked it away, sending it into the grass beyond Monica’s car.

  She rolled down her driver’s side window. A flashlight activated inches from her face, the LED burst of a thousand lumens blinding her. Even when she flinched and clenched her eyes shut, all she could see was its white halo.

  “Please,” she said, but he spoke over her, commanding her to hand over her license and registration.

  Monica reached across to undo her glove compartment and fumbled for the paperwork. “I’ve only had this car a few months,” she said. “I’m not sure where anything is.”

  She could see the flashlight waving around the interior of her car, checking, no doubt, for drugs. It lingered over her chest and stomach, shining against the droplets of sweat above her sports bra. Looking to see if I have my seatbelt on, she thought. Good thing I do. The hand holding the flashlight came in through the open window and aimed downward, straight down at her lap, so bright it revealed the fibers of her yoga pants. The stitching of the seam that ran up her crotch. She closed her legs together, telling herself he was checking to see if she’d tried hiding any weapons.

  Cops, she knew, had every reason to be cautious. Night after night, in some part of the country, a police officer was murdered, just because he was doing his job.

  Monica handed over her license and the pink registration paperwork marked temporary. She smiled politely and said, “I’ve never owned a new car before. Is this because I went into the other lane? I was trying to go around the deer. They’re everywhere.”

  The officer stepped out of view, his flashlight still aimed at her face while he read her information. “Have you been drinking tonight?”

  “No, I’m coming home from the gym,” she said.

  He went behind her car, standing off to the side of the road, out of view. She heard him say, “Can you check that again for me? Make sure you have the spelling right. Monica Gere, with a G.”

  She couldn’t hear anyone respond, but then he came back to her window, his flashlight back to her face. “Ma’am, are you aware there’s a warrant for your arrest?”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  “It may be just some procedural error,” he said. “Sometimes the computer gets mixed up.” He read her info back to her, making sure he had the right name and date of birth and address.

  “Yes, that’s all correct.”

  “Well, apparently, there’s a drug warrant out for you. Did you get any paperwork in the mail?”

  “What kind of paperwork?” Monica asked. Had there been? She normally threw out anything that looked like junk mail. Would she have even recognized an envelope from some kind of court appearance? “No,” she said. “I don’t think I did. Listen, this is crazy. I’ve never done drugs in my entire life. There has to be a mistake.”

  He reached for her door handle and opened it. “Ma’am, step out of the car.”


  “No, wait a second,” Monica said. “I run marathons and work out five nights a week. Do I look like I do drugs?”

  “Ma’am, don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

  He reached for her arm and she yanked away, saying, “Listen to me, sir. Just listen for a second. I respect the police, and I know you have a job to do, but this doesn’t make sense. I do not have any warrant.”

  “Get out of the car now!” he shouted.

  It was the tone of absolute authority. An angry school principal. An irate father. A boss with his employee’s financial security in the palm of his hand. She got out of the car.

  He spun her around and pressed her, face first, against the door. “Spread your legs,” he said, pulling her hands behind her back. “Do not move. Understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” she said, trembling. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He grabbed her by the back of the hair, making her gasp. “Say that again. Say that one more time, and see what happens.”

  She felt the handcuffs cinch down, crushing her wrists until she cried out, begging him to let her go.

  He kicked her feet apart wider with his boot. His hands went to her hips, fumbling with her waistband, coming up along the sides of her ribs, rubbing across her chest. He yanked her sports bra up, exposing her breasts to the cold air, and squeezed them. “What are you doing? You can’t do that!” she shouted.

  He smacked her across the back of the head, cracking her so hard she felt dizzy. He shoved her toward the back of the car. She stumbled, trying to get away. He threw her down on the road, holding her handcuffed wrists and twisting. The metal cuffs ground against her bones.

  He grabbed the back of her yoga pants at the waistband and yanked them down from her backside, revealing her, and spread her open. She screamed, her voice echoing through the woods, but the road was empty and the fog was thick. He raped her while pressing her facedown into the dirt, telling her he was the cop and he had the power and it was what she deserved.

  * * *

  She lay in the darkness, unable to move, not remembering when the man had left. The night air was cool against her bare, exposed flesh. She heard a car coming and couldn’t lift her head. The car stopped. Doors opened. People came running toward her, their voices panicked.

  What happened to her?

  My God, I think she’s been raped.

  Someone dropped a sweatshirt on top of her half-naked body, and someone else said, Call the police.

  “No,” Monica moaned, forcing the sound from her throat. She could hear the police dispatcher on the other end of the phone asking, what’s your emergency?

  “No!” she screamed, trying to roll over and get away, but they held her down and told her it was going to be okay, the police were already on their way.

  CHAPTER 2

  No matter how early Carrie Santero went to bed, the phone call in the middle of the night jarred her. It angered her, always intrusive and surprising, when it came. She’d lie on her pillow, staring in confusion at the brightly lit, vibrating thing on the nightstand, unable to comprehend why it was making so much noise. Sometimes, one of her arms would be numb from the way she slept, and she’d struggle to get it to move.

  The question on the other end was always the same, no matter which of her new coworkers called. “Are you awake?”

  “I am now.”

  She’d done four weeks straight of being on call, covering for the older, more senior Vieira County detectives. She’d covered during a fishing trip to Alaska. A real illness brought on by strep throat. A fake illness brought on by the oldest county detective being denied four days off and calling out sick. They called that The Blue Flu. As the youngest and most inexperienced cop ever brought over to the county dicks, and the first female ever bumped up to so lofty a position, she would cover a hundred on-call shifts and never complain. A thousand, even.

  The extra on-call pay wasn’t bad, either. She’d taken a pay cut to leave her uniform police job at Coyote Township.

  As a patrol officer, she’d dreamed of the day when she’d get to work big cases. Being a cop in a small town meant you did everything from covering school crossings to settling arguments between neighbors about someone’s tree dropping leaves on the other person’s front lawn. “Someday, I’ll be a detective and not have to handle this bullshit,” she used to tell herself.

  No one warned her what it was going to really be like.

  For one thing, the county detectives’ area of responsibility extended far beyond the limits of Vieira County itself. There were vast unincorporated areas far away from the municipalities she was familiar with, places out in the mountains that extended toward West Virginia and forests that stretched across the Ohio border.

  The Vieira County District Attorney’s Office covered that region under a wide-spanning mutual aid agreement. The few small police departments scattered throughout those places were generally not worth a damn. The DA preferred sending his county detectives out to handle important investigations out there, rather than let the locals screw them up.

  The position had its benefits, though. A take-home car. Topnotch training. And most importantly, they were the elite investigative agency in the county, given the most serious Part One crimes: murder, rape, and robbery. Major investigations were theirs for the taking. For everything else, it was on a request basis. If the local chief of police had an investigation that was too much for his team to handle, he could contact the newly appointed chief of county detectives, Harv Bender, and ask for help.

  At least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Two weeks ago, Carrie had been called to a burglary scene at four in the morning. She drove out to a farmhouse at the outer edge of the county, deep Pennsyltucky country, she called it. When she got there, the owner was flapping his hands on the front porch, weeping, “They got Bertha! Oh, they got her! Those sons of bitches!”

  She went around the side of the farmhouse and found a local cop standing in the backyard, his enormous gut hanging over his zipper. Wearing his Smoky the Bear campaign hat with the circular brim bent and crinkled, he was taking pictures of a chicken coop in the rear of the yard, trying to get the camera to focus in the dark.

  “Hey,” Carrie said.

  “Hold this,” he said, handing her his flashlight while he worked the camera.

  Carrie looked at the empty chicken coop while he snapped photos. She started to get a sick feeling. “Tell me you didn’t.”

  He spat a mouthful of black tobacco juice on the ground, splattering some of it on his gut. “What?”

  Carrie pressed her fist against her forehead. “Tell me you didn’t call me out here for a goddamn burglary of a goddamn chicken coop.”

  “But they got Bertha,” the cop said.

  “Is that right?” Carrie asked. She held the flashlight upright like a runner’s baton, cocked it over her head, and hurled it as far into the field beyond as she could throw it.

  “Hey!” the cop said, watching her turn around and head back to her car. “What you do that for?”

  “If you ever call us out here for something like this again, the next time, it’s going up your ass!” she shouted.

  The next day, she was ordered to write a letter of apology to that department’s chief and reimburse them the cost of the flashlight. The next time anything like that happened, she’d be fired. She wrote the letter, wrote the check, and scribbled Fuck Bertha on the check’s memo section. Before she dropped it into the envelope, she crossed that part out.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes after the latest phone call, Carrie stumbled into Wawa, yawning against the back of her hand as she made her way toward the coffee island. The heavyset, dark-skinned cashier’s head shot up. “My blond-haired American princess! Back again tonight?”

  “Hi, Gangajat,” she said, waving over her shoulder.

  He hurried down the aisle, snatching the pot of hazelnut away before she could grab it. “That’s been sitting out for too long,” he said
. “I’ll make it fresh.”

  “I can just get something else,” she said, looking down the row of other coffees.

  “No! It won’t take more than a few seconds. Are you in a hurry?”

  “Not, like, drive a hundred miles an hour through the fog hurry, but I have to get somewhere,” she said.

  “Another case? One of the bad ones?”

  “Can’t a girl just come in here to see her favorite Wawa guy?”

  His round face stretched into the widest smile she’d ever seen, and he said, “My mother would not let me ever bring home a white girl, no matter how beautiful.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Carrie said. “I guess I’ll just have to settle for your wonderful coffee, then.”

  He brought over the fresh pot and poured it for her. “But then again, my mother is sick, so both of us must be strong and patient, okay?”

  Carrie laughed as he handed her the cup of steaming coffee, and she fixed it with milk and sweetener. From the corner of her eye, she could see Gangajat wiping the counter, singing to himself in Hindi, his voice low and strong, dancing between each note.

  She knew he wouldn’t take her money, so she stuffed a few dollars into the Fight Childhood Leukemia donation bin next to the register. He kept singing, his voice following her out the door like lengths of luxurious colored fabric in a Bollywood movie. Gangajat waved to her through the window, holding his hand to his heart, still singing, his face filled with warmth and softness for her.

  Carrie backed her car out of the parking lot, reaching down to double-check the pistol on her hip. She did not wave back, because the time for singing and soft things was done now.