Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

He doesn’t follow it up, and I know what he’s found. There’s silence for five seconds. Then he comes back on the line.

“How the hell do you know about this?” he asks.

“Father Julian was recording the confessions. He was blackmailing people.” I look in the mirror and see Egg Carton Guy walking toward me. The mirror makes him appear closer than he actually is. “Since you hadn’t found it already, I reasoned the tape recorder was hidden. What better place to hide it?”

“That’s why you were following him? Fuck, Tate, why couldn’t you have told us? You sure as hell could have saved us a lot of work and a lot of pain. And finding out this way, man-it doesn’t look good. It looks like you put it there when you broke in last night.”

“I didn’t break in. All I knew was the tape recorder had to be there somewhere, and anyway, I only just found out. Look, Julian recorded his killer, right? He knows who killed those girls. Is there a tape in the machine?”

“Yeah.”

“Then listen to it. Could be the night Father Julian died, if he took a confession first. It could be the last voice you hear on that tape is his killer.”

“You need to come down to the station, Tate.”

Egg Carton Guy stretches out the bottom of his shirt and starts using it to wipe down the side window of my car, my father’s car. Egg Carton Guy moves his shirt in circular motions, but it isn’t the kind of detailing my dad would have in mind. I roll the window an inch and hand him a couple of dollars. He says something, but I don’t quite hear him, then he wanders away.

“Tate? You still with me?” Landry asks.

“Play the tape.”

“I’ll play the tape when I’m done with you.”

“Maybe Julian referred to him by name.” I say. “Maybe he did that because he knew what might be coming up.”

“I’m sending somebody to pick you up.”

“I’m not even home.”

“How can that be? You’ve lost your license. You out walking?”

“Besides, you’ve got something more important to take care of,” I tell him.

“Yeah? You got somewhere else for me to go?”

“There’s another girl.”

“What is it with you? Everywhere you go people are showing up dead, or never showing up again.”

“She may not be dead,” I tell him. “But you need to find her.”

“Tell me.”

I lay it out for him. Not all of it, but most of it. And not all of it truthfully. I tell him about the photographs of Father Julian’s children, telling him Bruce gave them to me, but that I only just figured out the connection. I tell him how four of the girls are dead and there is still one out there. I tell him about the key Bruce left for me, and the tapes that I found, along with the log.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he says when I’m done. “You know you’re in for a world of shit now, right? Going into that bank like that? You should have just called me.”

“There wasn’t time, and like I said, I had a key,” I say, not mentioning the court order. That will come later.

“You’ve been holding out on me for the last two months, slowing down my investigation, and you’re telling me there wasn’t time?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault I’m ahead of you. And you should be thanking me. Most of what you have is because of me. If anything, I’ve sped up your investigation.”

“Fuck you, Tate. DNA would have told us those girls were related. We’d have figured out the rest.”

“Yeah, maybe you would have, maybe not, but you wouldn’t even be looking yet. Not until those results came in.”

“I’m coming to your house. Now. I want you to be there, okay? I’m coming to get all this stuff. And we’re going to have a nice long chat, just the two of us.”

He hangs up before I can debate the issue.

I drive back home and have barely gone inside when Landry pulls up. He looks furious. He has an edge to him that makes me wonder how many times he’s looked into the abyss.

“Where are they?” he asks. “The tapes?”

“You first. You listen to the one you found in the confessional?”

“Yeah. I did. There’s nothing on it of any use. Fact is, none of these tapes are going to be any good. You know we can’t use them. Even if it was us who found them. Can you imagine the kind of shit storm we’ll have if the public ever finds out about them? There are going to be lots of confessions of people cheating on their husbands and wives, cheating with their taxes, cheating in all the possible ways the human race can cheat. There’ll be more too. Who the hell knows whether the sanctity of the confessional extends to a tape recording? Or is it limited only to the priest?”

“So you’re going to keep them quiet.”

“We’ll listen to them, that’s for sure, but I don’t imagine we’re going to be making any arrests from them. And if our killer is on these tapes-”

“He is.”

“Then we gotta find a way of working around it. We mention these things and we’re handing him a defense.”

I lead him into my office and hand over the log.

“Money comes in from blackmailing,” he says, “and money goes out for the kids. Looks like our Father Julian was a busy man. It’s probably a miracle he lasted as long as he did without anybody finding out.”

“Miracles are in his line of work,” I point out.

“Maybe not in the end.”

“I think Henry Martins knew.”

“What?”

I fill in the Martins connection. He absorbs it, but like me he doesn’t know what to make of it.

“His body was too decomposed from the water,” he says. “There was no way to get any toxicology from him. No way to tell if he was murdered.”

“What about the new husband? The one who started all of this?”

“Who?”

“The one who died and made you want to dig up Henry Martins.”

He starts to pile the tapes into the evidence bag. “His death was accidental. Turns out he was being exposed to some toxin through his job that he shouldn’t have been exposed to. I don’t know, it wasn’t my case. Lead paint or something. It was fairly prolonged. Weird how it’s all led to this.”

Weird . I’m not so sure that’s the right word for it, but it’ll do for now. It’s getting close to eleven o’clock, and suddenly I feel exhausted. All I want to do is get Landry out of my house so I can go to bed.

“Was this his? It looks new,” he says, picking up the small tape recorder.

“I just bought it today. I have a receipt.”

“Yeah, well, I’m taking it. Consider it your first step in cooperating with the police. Enough of those small steps might go a long way to helping you out, Tate. What’ve we got now-and I don’t mean the drunk-driving charges. We’ve got breaking and entering-”

“No you don’t.”

“We’ve got interfering with a criminal investigation. We’ve got-”

“Look, I get the point, okay?”

He picks up the photographs. “This them?”

“Yeah.”

He says nothing for a few seconds, and then, “I really should be taking you in.”

“Look, Landry, I’m about to crash here, okay? I’m beat. And I’ve told you everything I know, and I’ve given you everything I have. Go and do your job and figure out who this maniac is before he kills Deborah Lovatt.”

“The fifth girl.”

“Yeah. The fifth girl.”

“Okay, Tate. For once I believe you. But I still gotta take you in.”

“Look, if you take me in, then what? You’re going to want to listen to all those tapes first, and you’re going to want to run down everything I’ve told you about. So all you’re going to do is sit me in an interrogation room for twelve hours before you even speak to me. It’s pointless. Let me stay here, let me get some sleep, and if you want me tomorrow you’ll know where to find me.”