Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“Sorry, Tate, I just don’t have the time to give you any information. Finding those bodies, hell, you couldn’t have picked a worse time.”

“Who for? Them or you?”

He exhales heavily. “It’s this fucking Carver case,” he says, talking about the Christchurch Carver who, at this rate, seems will never be caught. “Man, it’s like every step we take this guy is taking two steps. I don’t know what the hell it is, but we’re struggling. We’re so understaffed, I don’t know, we just need more man power. It’s that simple.”

“You offering me a job?”

“Good one, Tate. You’re even funnier than I remember. Especially after last night’s performance.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You’re slipping. It looked bad, man, really bad. Friends in the department? Jesus, why’d you say that?”

“What are you. .” But then it comes to me. I run my hand over my face and pinch my chin. “Shit.”

“Yeah. You got that right.”

“I haven’t seen it, but I’m guessing she stitched me up, huh?”

“There’s a copy if you wanna take a look. Media room’s free.”

The media room is big enough to hold four people if none of them is overweight, and its walls are lined with computers and monitors. News reports are kept as part of the database involved in ongoing cases; those that go to air are stored on hard drives. Schroder cues it up.

“It was on this morning,” he says. “They played it at seven o’clock, eight, and nine. They’re probably waiting till twelve to play it again if they don’t have anything more.”

I’m standing next to my car, coming forward to meet the reporters. From their perspective they couldn’t have picked a better time to film me. From mine, they couldn’t have picked a worse one. There is blood on my shirt and on my face, and pieces of what I guess might be bone or brain matter in my hair. My skin is pale and sallow and there are dark smudges beneath my eyes. I look like I might have been one of the finds in the coffins, and now I know where the phone guy recognized me from.

The reporter is talking to me, and I’m talking back, but you can’t hear any of what I’m saying because the conversation has been muted. All you can hear is Casey Horwell’s voice-over as they move from a shot of me outside my house to scenes of the graveyard. The shots go back and forth as she talks.

“. . used to be a detective for the Christchurch police, but for the last two years has been struggling as a private investigator. He offered to speak to us outside his house where he filled us in on some aspects of the case, but when we asked him why he was coming home and not being held in custody until the killing of Bruce Alderman was further investigated, he was unsure how to answer.”

The interview is still showing me talking. But there are no words. Just the chitchat of me asking them to move their van, telling them I have no comments, and whatever else I said to get rid of them, but it looks like we’re sharing an in-depth discussion. Then I disappear from the frame, and Casey Horwell is standing there, the only background is her van, and I bet they pulled over the moment they got around the next corner to film her.

“Two years ago the man linked to killing Theodore Tate’s daughter disappeared and has never been seen again, and though the investigation is still open it appears nobody is making any effort to learn what really happened. The man’s disappearance led to Detective Tate being dismissed from the police. Last night Bruce Alderman was violently killed inside Theodore Tate’s office and again it looks like he is being dismissed. One can’t help but wonder what forces are in place to allow a man like this to still be out on the streets instead of being held accountable for his actions. . ”

The segment cuts back to me, still standing in front of my car. I know what’s coming up before I hear it. It’s the line. My line. And she has placed it perfectly.

“I still have a few friends in the department. They do what they can.”

The segment stops and Schroder turns off the monitor.

“That was bullshit, Carl.”

“You don’t think I know that? Horwell’s a classic case of somebody who threw away a promising career and is grabbing at straws trying to get it back. But you’re slipping, Tate. Two years ago you’d never have made that mistake. And it doesn’t matter what you said, she made you look guilty, man, just getting out of your car with all that blood on you-you looked like a monster. Can you imagine the shit that’d be raining down right now if you were still a cop?”

I can feel the anger building up inside. “I know, I know,” I say, and Carl is the wrong person to be angry at. I’m the one who messed up. “But what was I to do? Just drive past and not even go home?”

He walks me back to the elevator. “That’s exactly what you could have done. Did you even think of that?”

“You still on the case?” I ask.

“Landry’s taking over. I’m still on the Carver.”

“Has he identified the woman who was in the water?”

“Yeah. An elderly woman who died and was buried last week,” he says.

“And the coffin? When you identified her, you pulled up the corresponding coffin, right? What was inside?”

“Why do I think you already know the answer to this?”

“Something Bruce Alderman said.”

“Yeah. We got a girl who went missing six days ago.”

“Six days ago? Who was she?”

“Oh, well, her name was. . Oh, wait, hang on a second. You don’t work here anymore, do you?”

“And there was a girl in Henry Martins’s coffin too, wasn’t there?”

He nods. “Come on, Tate, stop pretending you’re only just figuring it out.”

“You identify her yet?”

“Almost. We’re taking what we know about the girl from last week and making the same assumption. We’re figuring the girl in Henry Martins’s coffin went missing around the same time he was buried.”

“Seems like a safe assumption.”

“Safe, but not confirmed.”

“And the other two?”

“The other two are going to be damn difficult to identify, and it’s not like we can just start digging up coffins for the hell of it.”

The elevator arrives and the doors open. I don’t move.

“We could have made a difference,” I tell him.

“What?”

“Two years ago. Remember?”

He stares at me for a few seconds, no expression at all, no movement of his head, then slowly he starts to nod. “I know,” he says.

“You’re going to find more girls.”

He says nothing. He already knows. I wonder if this is why he’s telling me so much.

“We could have made a difference,” I repeat.

As the doors of the elevator close, Schroder keeps standing where he is, staring at me.

Instead of driving to my office, I take a detour to the morgue. I figure if Tracey had noticed I’d stolen the ring she’d have called by now.

She’s a little rushed off her feet and doesn’t seem real glad to see me. Nor does Sheldon West, the ME I spoke to at the cemetery. But Tracey decides to accommodate me after I tell her things will be quicker for her if she helps me out rather than having me hanging around for the next two hours asking her the same questions over and over.

“You’re a real pain in the ass,” she tells me.

“You just need to spend more time with me, that’s all. Get to know me a little better.”

“Less time, Theo. That’s why I’m agreeing to show you. Oh, and by the way, that was a nice job you did last night. You should try to get a job on TV.”

“That’s real funny.”

She rolls Rachel Tyler out of a huge metal drawer and starts pointing things out as if she were Death showing a prospective client a neat way to die.