Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“Well?” I ask, clenching my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

“You said there were three bodies?” the medical examiner says, and his tone is depressing, the kind of tone you wouldn’t want to hear on a suicide hotline if you’re calling and wanting to be told things are going to be okay.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“We’ve got two.”

“The other one sank again.”

“Yep. Bodies will do that. Bodies do lots of strange things.”

He’s right. He’s seen it a lot over the years and so have I. “What else?”

“Schroder,” he says, and he glances back at the detective he was talking to, the same detective I called, “said to throw you some basic facts, but nothing more. Just the same things he’ll be giving those vultures out there when he releases a statement in an hour.” He points to the edge of the cemetery where the media is no doubt congregating behind the police barriers.

“Come on, Sheldon, you can give me more than just the basics.”

“Is that what you think?”

Suddenly I’m not so sure. One day everybody is your best friend; the next you’re just a giant pain in the ass. “So, you’re going to make me guess?”

“My guesses are supported by science,” he says.

“Well, science away,” I tell him.

“You saw the rope?”

I nod.

“I’d say they all had rope attached at one point,” he says. “But not so much now.”

“I don’t follow,” I say.

“You probably figured we’re not dealing with homicides, right?”

I nod again. “The thought crossed my mind.”

“At least not in any traditional sense,” he says. “Probably not in any sense at all.”

I stop nodding. “You want to clarify that?”

“Why? You think this is your case now?”

“I’m just curious,” I tell him. “I’m allowed to be curious, aren’t I? I’m the one who found these poor bastards.”

“That doesn’t make them yours.”

“You think I want them?”

“You know what I mean.” He looks back at the tent covering the corpses. The wind has got hold of one of the doors and is snapping it from side to side like a sail. An officer gets it under control and secures it. If the wind gets stronger out here things might start taking flight. “Okay, let me back up a bit here,” he says. “First of all, the two bodies we’ve got-only one of them is intact.”

“That’s got to be one of two reasons, right?” I ask.

“Yeah. And it’s the good one. Nobody tortured these people or cut them up-at least that’s my preliminary finding. The worst body is simply coming apart from decomposition. He’s missing everything below the pelvic girdle, and what is there is held together mostly by his clothes. Hard to tell how long he’s been in the water, but it seems obvious that when we find the rest of him we’re going to find more rope. Could be piles of bones stuck in the mud down there. The thing is, Tate, going by the woman we found, I’m pretty sure these people weren’t killed and dumped in the lake. They were already dead. Dead and buried, I’d say,” he says, and I think of the coffin with the shovel marks. “Don’t know what originally killed them, but we’ll get there. We’ll get some time frames too.”

I look past Sheldon to the grave markers all around us. There are a few things going through my mind. I’m thinking that somewhere out there is an undertaker or mortuary assistant saving money by reselling the same coffins to different families. Coffins are expensive. Use them once, dig them up, dump the bodies in the water, rinse down the woodwork, spray some air freshener in, and make it sparkle with a coat of furniture polish. Then it goes back on the market. Brand new again. None of those signs saying As new, only one owner, elderly lady, low mileage . One coffin could do dozens of people.

“You know you could buy a car for the same amount as a coffin?” the medical examiner muses.

“That’s not it,” I realize.

“What?”

“This isn’t about reselling coffins,” I say.

“What makes you so sure?”

One thing that makes me sure is the watch in my pocket. If it was about making money, that watch would never have gone into the water with its owner. But I can’t tell him that. Instead I tell him an even better reason. “Why throw the bodies into the lake? Why not just throw them back into the ground? Or switch the coffins with budget ones? No, it’s not about that. It’s about something else.”

“Yeah. . maybe. I guess.”

“I wonder how many more bodies are down there.”

He shrugs. “We’ll know soon enough.”

If there are more bodies in the lake, the divers will find them. I’ll be gone by then. It’s unrealistic to think somebody will keep me informed-I’ll learn the numbers from the papers. One thing I learned in the years before I left the police force is that life and death are all about numbers. People love statistics. Especially nasty ones.

“How old do you think this cemetery is?” I ask.

He shrugs. He wasn’t expecting the question. “What? How the hell would I know that? Sixty, eighty years? I don’t know.”

“Well, the lake has always been here,” I say. “It’s not like they built the cemetery first and imported the lake to make it scenic. Which means this might not even be a crime scene. Except maybe one of criminal negligence.”

“You want to elaborate?”

“It’s not a stretch to imagine some poor management and attempts at utilizing space means some of these graves are too close to the water. Maybe some of the coffins have rotted from water damage and the bodies have been pulled into the lake, or there’s an underground stream sucking some caskets along. Maybe they’ve floated up to the surface before, and the way the caretaker here dealt with it was to tie cinderblocks to them to hide them away.”

Sheldon shakes his head. “Not in this case.”

“You sure?” I ask, but I can tell he’s sure.

“The woman makes me sure,” he says. “She’s been in the water only a couple of days. No time for your rotting-coffin theory. There are signs of mortician tricks that suggest she had a funeral, which is why I’m confident these people were once buried. In fact, she’s the reason we’re all here. She’s the catalyst here-fat stores and gases brought her to the surface, and she brought the others up with her.”

“She’d do that, even if she was embalmed?”

“She wasn’t embalmed.”

“I thought that. .”

He starts nodding. “I know what you thought,” he says. “You thought that everybody has to be embalmed, that it’s law. But it’s not. Embalming slows the decomposition for a few days so the body can be displayed-that’s all it’s for. It’s optional.”

“Can you tell if anything else has been done to the bodies?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s not about reselling coffins and none of this is a result of nature, so these people were dug up for something, right? Have they been used for anything? Experimented on?”

“No way I can know that right now. But one thing I can tell you is one of the victims was wearing rings and a necklace. You can rule out grave robbery.”

Grave robbery. I feel as though I’ve slipped back into a Sherlock Holmes novel. Holmes, of course, would find some logic in this. Often he would solve a case only by remembering something he read in some textbook ten years earlier, but in the end he’d get there, and he’d make it look easy. Looking around, I’m not sure if the evidence is here for anyone to deduce whether the person who did this was left or right handed, or worked as an apprentice shoemaker. Only Holmes would. He was one lucky bastard.

“Any way we can ID them?” I ask.