Cemetery Lake: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Goddamn, buddy, you okay?”

  The question sounds like it is coming from the other side of the lake, and I’m not sure which one of them asked it. Maybe all three of them in unison. I lean over my knees and start coughing. I feel like I’m choking. I’m shivering, I’m angry, but mostly I feel embarrassed. But none of the men are laughing. They’re all leaning over me, looking concerned. With two floating corpses nearby, it’s easy to understand why nothing here is a joke.

  “There’s something else you need to know,” the digger operator says when I’ve stopped coughing enough to hear him. “I was trying to tell you before,” he says, slipping that last part into the conversation as if each word is its own sentence, and his face screws up slightly as if each word has its own taste too, and none of them good. He makes it sound like whatever he has to say is going to be worse than what just happened, and I can think of only one thing that could possibly be.

  “Yeah?”

  “Marks. On top of the coffin,” he says.

  “How did I know you were going to say that?”

  Now it’s his turn to shrug. He doesn’t come up with any suggestions of mind reading. “Thin lines,” he says. “Like cuts. They look like shovel cuts,” he says.

  “From a shovel,” I tell him. He gives me a funny look. I ignore it. My mind is running a little slow from the swim it just took. “You think this coffin has been dug up before?”

  “I’m not just thinking it, I’m saying it. There are definitely marks on the coffin that nobody here caused. Shit, I wonder if she’s empty.”

  She. Like a plane or a boat, because the coffin in a way is a vessel taking you somewhere.

  We walk over to it. The coffin has survived the fall pretty well. There’s a large crack running from the bottom corner along the side from the impact, but we can’t see into it. I’m tempted to open her up, see what cargo she has or if she’s been plundered, but the approaching sirens kill the idea.

  I watch as the two police cars arrive, along with an ambulance and a pair of station wagons.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There is a natural progression to things. An evolution. First there is a fantasy. The fantasy belongs to some sadistic loser, a guy who eats and breathes and dreams with the sole desire to kill. Then comes the reality. A victim falls into his web, she is used, and the fantasy often doesn’t live up to the reality. So there are more victims. The desire escalates. It starts with one a year, becomes two or three a year, then it’s happening every other month. Or every month. Their bodies show up. The police are involved. They bring doctors and pathologists and technicians who can analyze fibers and blood samples and fingerprints. They create a profile to help catch the killer. Following them is the media. The media spins the killer’s fantasy into gold. Death is a moneymaking industry. The undertakers, the coffin salesmen, the crystal-ball and palm readers, then eventually the digger operators and the private investigators: we’re the next step in the progression, standing in the rain and watching as one travesty of justice reveals another.

  I have shrugged out of my wet jacket and wet shirt, dried off using a towel an ambulance driver gave me, and pulled on a fresh windbreaker. My shoes are still sleeping with the fishes and my pants and underwear are soaking, but I’m safe from pneumonia. Nobody is paying me any attention as I sit on the floor of the ambulance with my legs hanging out, looking over the scene of, at this stage, an indeterminable crime.

  The graveyard has been cordoned off. The two police cars have become twelve. The two station wagons have become six. There are roadblocks covering the main entrance, as though the police are preparing to fight back an upsurge of angry corpses. There are two tarpaulins lying across the ground; on each one rests a well-dressed but decomposing or decomposed body. A canvas tent has been erected over them, protecting them from the elements. Somebody has strung some yellow Do not cross tape around the tent. It keeps the corpses from going anywhere. There are men and women wearing nylon suits studying the bodies. Others are standing near the lake. They look like divers preparing for some deep-sea mission, only there are no divers here. Not yet, anyway. There are open suitcases containing tools and evidence beneath the tent. The rain is still falling and the long grass ripples with the wind. The digger has been taken away, and the coffin has been taken to the morgue.

  I tighten my windbreaker and reach around for a second blanket. The inside of the ambulance is messy, as if it’s sped over dozens of bumps on the way: God knows how the paramedics ever know where anything is. I wrap the blanket over my shoulders and let my teeth chatter as I watch the few detectives who have shown up. More will arrive soon. They always do. So far there hasn’t been much for them to do other than look at two bodies and a lot of gravestones. They can’t go canvassing the area because all the neighbors are dead. They have no one to question other than the caretaker, but the caretaker is off somewhere in a stolen truck.

  The wind has picked up. Acorns are still falling, flicking off the tombstones and making small, metallic dinging noises as they hit the roofs of the vehicles. All this extra traffic, yet no other bodies have risen up from the watery depths of whatever Hell is down there. I glance over at the ambulance driver. He has nobody to save. He has nothing else to do than watch the show, bury his hands in his pockets, and keep me company. All of us are in that boat. He’s probably just hanging around until he gets the call that somebody is dead or dying, blood and limbs scattered across the highway of life that he cleans up every day.

  The buzzing of a media helicopter approaching from the north sounds like a mosquito. I touch the outside of my trouser pocket and run my finger over the bulge of the wristwatch I stole from one of the corpses after we pulled it from the water.

  One of the medical examiners, a man in his early fifties who has been doing this for nearly half his life, comes out of the tent, looks around at the small crowd of people, spots me, and then heads over to a detective. They talk for a few minutes, all very casual—the relaxed conversation of two men who have delivered and received many conversations about death. By the time he comes over he is sighing, as though being in the same graveyard with me is such tiring work. His hands are thrust deep into his pockets. There are small drops of rain on his glasses. I stand up, but don’t move away from the ambulance. I have a pretty good idea what the examiner is going to say. After all, I spent some time with those corpses. I saw how they were dressed.

  “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 no
t 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.

  “We?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We’ll start with the woman. She should be simple. Then work backward.”

  I glance past the examiner toward the tent that shelters the dead and the wet. The wind chill seems to have dropped by around five degrees, and picked up an extra twenty-five kilometers an hour. The sides of the tent are billowing out. The blanket around me no longer feels warm.

  “So how do . . . ?”

  He raises his hand to stop me. “Look, Tate, your colleagues know what they’re doing, and I’ve already told you more than I should have. Leave it to them.”

  He’s right and wrong. Sure, they know what they’re doing, but they’re no longer my colleagues. I think about the watch in my pocket, hoping it will have one of those To Doug, love Beryl inscriptions on it. Then it’s just a matter of finding a gravestone belonging to a Doug who was married to a Beryl. With luck, that gravestone is here. With luck, these people were given proper burials by proper priests under the proper conditions, and not autopsied and dressed up by some homicidal maniac in his basement.

  A four-wheel drive pulls up next to the tent. Two guys climb out and walk around to the back of it. They each pull out a scuba tank, then reach further in for more gear.

  “Look, Tate, I’ve told you what I can. It doesn’t involve you, but if you think it does, then take it up with one of your old buddies. I have to get back to work.”

  I watch Sheldon as he moves back to the tent. The helicopter is still buzzing back and forth, the rotor blades sound like the beginnings of a deepening headache. I can imagine what the journalists are saying, what they’re coming up with, and there is no doubt they’re thriving on it. Bad things happening to good people always makes the greatest news.

  CHAP
TER FOUR

  I hate cemeteries. I don’t have a fear of them—it’s not a phobia like someone who is too scared to fly, but must fly anyhow. I just don’t like them. I can’t really say they represent all that is wrong with this world, because that wouldn’t be a fair comment. Not logically. But I feel that way. I think it’s because they represent what happens to all the people in the world who have been wronged, and even then they only speak for the ones who are found. There are others out there in shallow graves, in creeks and crevasses and oceans, or held down by chains, who cannot be spoken for with gravestones, only by the memories their loved ones have of them. Of course, that isn’t a fair statement either. That would be like assuming all of the graves out here belong to victims of crime, and of course only a few do. Most belong to people too old to live, too young to have died, or simply too unlucky to keep living.

  The rain is getting stronger and the sky is getting darker. My cell phone rings every minute or so as I drive away and I’m lucky the thing still works after going in the drink. Salt water would have been a different story. As soon as I get past the gates I hit the blockade, where police cars are parked on angles across the road to prevent other people coming to mourn the dead, or to prevent the dead from escaping and mingling with the mourning. I weave my way through them into the media blockade. It’s the circle of life out here. Vans and four-wheel drives with news-channel logos stenciled across the side and satellite dishes mounted on top are parked at haphazard angles, the rain no deterrent for the camera crews and reporters trying to look pretty in the drizzle. I manage to get past, pretending I can’t hear the same questions yelled at me from every interviewer.

  After them comes the first wave of get-home traffic that creates a blockade in the city at this time of the day. My wet jacket and shirt are in the back seat along with the borrowed windbreaker. I have the blanket draped over my seat so my clothes don’t soak into the upholstery. With the heater blasting on full, moisture forms on the windshield that the air conditioner can’t keep up with. Every half minute I have to wipe away the condensation with my palm. I turn on the radio. There’s a Talking Heads song on. It suggests I know where I’m going, but that I don’t know where I’ve been. I turn the radio off. Talking Heads has got it wrong in my case.