Cemetery Lake: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  The first call I answer is from Detective Inspector Landry, asking me to head into the station to provide a formal statement. He probably figures he can do the world a favor by keeping me squirreled away for a few hours running over all the exact reasons that added up to my being in a cemetery with dead bodies that can’t be accounted for. When I ask him if they’ve tracked down the caretaker, he tells me they’ll inform me when they do, and we both know it’s bullshit.

  The next two calls are from reporters. I knew some of them would recognize me as I was driving away. Reporters are quick like that. I go further back than yesterday’s news, and these guys have long memories. I hang up on their questions before they can finish asking them.

  Then my mother calls me, telling me she saw me on TV sitting in the back of an ambulance and wanting to know what has happened to me. Clearly the police didn’t have the cemetery as well cordoned off as they thought. I tell my mother that I fell into the lake, that was all, and that I still have all my limbs. She tells me to be careful, that I shouldn’t go swimming with so many clothes, and that she and Dad are worried. Bridget, my wife, she points out, would be worried as well.

  When I manage to hang up, the phone rings again and another reporter asks me whether I’m back on the city’s payroll. I decide to switch my phone off, which is a pretty good decision considering the alternative of rolling down my window and throwing it into the elements.

  I put both hands on the wheel and start thinking about the three bodies, wondering if there are more. I start spinning the possibilities around in my mind, but it isn’t long before I have to concentrate less on the corpses and more on trying not to become one as the traffic becomes thick with SUVs blocking intersections.

  My office is in town, situated in a complex with a hundred other offices, most of them belonging to law and insurance firms, from whom I get most of my business. Following cheating husbands for divorce settlements and photographing people scamming their insurance providers allows me to pay the rent, and occasionally I even get to eat. Now I’m digging up coffins and swimming with corpses and the pay is the same. I park in my space behind the building and, still shoeless and saturated, run inside to the elevators and ride eight stories closer to Heaven.

  Because most of my clients are in the same building, and any other business I attract comes through phone calls and word of mouth, I come and go as I please, allowing my answering machine to be my secretary. I have enough computer skills to type up my own reports; I know how to file; and I know how to make coffee. A maid comes in once a month and drags a vacuum cleaner and a duster around, but the rest of the time I take care of the spic-and-spanning myself. Private eyes working out of dumpster offices, armed with fedoras and cigarettes, live only in the minds of scriptwriters these days. My office has nice art, nice plants, nice carpet, nice everything. In fact it’s so nice it’s a struggle to afford it.

  I unlock my office door and switch on the light. The air is warm and has held the smell of this morning’s coffee, probably because half of it got spilled across my desk by accident. The smell kicks my energy level up a few notches. The room itself is not large, and my desk takes up a quarter of it, backing onto a view of Christchurch that sometimes inspires me and sometimes depresses me. On the opposite side there’s a whiteboard standing up on an easel that I often use to sketch ideas on in an attempt to connect the dots. The carpets and walls are mixtures of fawns and grays that sound like they are named after types of coffee. There are files stacked on my desk, a computer in the middle, and a bunch of memos I need to take care of.

  I glance out at the city. It doesn’t make me feel nostalgic enough to head back to ground level into the rain to see what I’m missing. I start playing with my cell phone. I turn it back on. It starts ringing. I pop the battery out and sit both pieces under the lamp to dry out.

  I move into a small bathroom en suite and clean up. I have a spare outfit hanging on the back of the door, there for the day I fall into a lake of corpses or get shot in the chest. I get changed and ball the wet stuff into a bag, taking the watch I found out from my pocket first. Though perhaps found isn’t as accurate as stole. It’s an expensive Tag Heuer, an analog, and it’s still working. Batteries in these things normally last around five years, and they’re waterproof to two hundred meters. I look at the back: there is no inscription. But already a time frame is beginning to take shape.

  My computer is a little slow and seems to take a minute longer to boot up for each year older it gets. I begin hunting through old news stories online, using search engines to narrow down my browsing, looking for any mention of coffins being reused to make money; but if it’s happened in this country nobody has ever found out.

  I run the caretaker’s name through the same search engines and find other people with the same name doing other things in other parts of the world, covering occupations and religions and culture and crime. I find a link that takes me through to a newspaper story about the caretaker’s father. He retired two years ago after forty years of graveyard service.

  I use the online newspaper database of Christchurch City Libraries to go through the obituaries, seeing who died last week and who would fit the description of the woman from the water. I end up with four names, but can’t narrow it down any further because the obituaries don’t give descriptions or locations for the funerals. I wonder if Detective Schroder has already figured out an ID, and decide he probably has. Simple when you have the resources. He’s probably circulating a photo of her body to morticians around the city; or, easier still, he’s got the priest from the Catholic church at the cemetery to take a look. If they’ve identified her, then they’ll be in the process of getting a court order to dig up the grave she was taken from. I look at my watch. It’s after five thirty: everybody will be pushing into overtime, but it will get done today.

  I put my phone back together and drop it into my pocket. It’s a ten-minute drive from my office to the hospital, but it takes me thirty in the thick traffic and constant stream of red lights. Christchurch, during peak-hour traffic and bad weather, is always at its worst. I imagine most cities are. Cars are backed up and blocking intersections, and the gutters are starting to flow with rainwater. I have to take a detour when the flow of traffic is blocked by a bus that has driven into a set of traffic lights, squashing them beneath fifteen tons of metal and a few tons of commuters, putting the intersection out of commission. People are tooting at each other, but the rain stops them from winding down windows and yelling.

  The hospital is a drab-looking building with no appeasing aesthetics and a design that would equally suit a prison. I park around the back, head to the side Authorized Personnel Only door, use the intercom, and, a moment later, get buzzed inside. I have to sign a log book and make idle conversation with a security guard while doing it. I’m starting to feel pretty cold again, and the idea of seeing the coffin and then having it opened in front of me isn’t warming me back up. The elevator seems to take forever to arrive, making me wonder exactly where it’s rising from. When the doors finally open, I ride it down to the basement.

  The morgue is full of white tile and cold hard light. It’s like an alien world down here. There are shapes beneath sheets and tools with sharp edges. The air feels colder than the lake. Cabinets are full of bottles and chemicals and silver instruments. Benches and gurneys and trays hold items designed to strip a body down to the basics.

  The coffin looks older beneath the white lights, as if the car ride aged it by a quarter of a century. Plus it’s more busted up than I first thought. There are cracks along the side, and the top is all dented in. The whole thing has been brushed down before being delivered, but it hasn’t been cleaned. There is dirt and mud caked to the edges of it, and there are also signs of rust. It’s resting on a knee-high table, which puts the lid of the coffin a little below chest height.

  I tighten my hands in a failing effort to ward off the cold. My headache has become my sidekick; it beats away with varying tempos. I wi
sh it would leave. I wish I could leave too. The smell of chemicals is balancing on a tightrope between being too overpowering and not overpowering enough to hide the smell of the dead. I can never remember the smell—all I can remember is my reaction—yet for those few minutes, whenever I used to come down here, I thought I’d never be able to forget it. The bodies aren’t rotting, they’re not decaying and stinking up the place, but the smell is here—the smell of old clothes and fresh bones and old things that can no longer be.

  The lid on the coffin is still closed, and it’s easy to imagine there ought to be a chain wrapped around it with one of those big old-fashioned padlocks attached. I can barely make out my smeared reflection in places, especially on the brass handles, my face broken up by pit marks made of rust. I run a finger across the shovel marks that the digger and truck drivers pointed out to me earlier. They’re right in the middle of a long concave dent.

  “She’s been opened before,” the medical examiner says, stepping out of her office and into the morgue behind me, and even though I knew she was there her appearance still startles me. “I wonder what’s inside.”

  “Or what isn’t inside,” I say.

  I put my hand out, expecting hers to be cold when she shakes it, but it isn’t. “Good to see you, Tracey.”

  “What’s it been, Tate? Two years? Three?”

  “Two,” I answer.

  “Of course,” she says. “I should have known that.”

  I smile at her and let go of her hand. I look her over without appearing to look her over. Though Tracey Walter must be my age, she looks ten years younger. Her black hair is pulled back and tied into a tight bun; her pale complexion is bone white in the morgue lights; her green eyes stare at me from behind a set of designer glasses. I think about the last time I saw her and know she’s doing the same thing.

  “Sure got busted up falling off that truck,” I say, looking at the long cracks. “Caretaker was in a hell of a hurry.”

  “You’ve never seen an exhumed coffin before, have you?”

  “Yeah? You can tell that?”

  She smiles. “Movies don’t show how much weight coffins are under once they’re in the ground. Often it’s enough to do serious damage. Part of this is from falling off the truck, but most of it will be from the pressure of being in the ground. Six feet deep means six feet of dirt piling up on top—like I said, that’s a lot of pressure.”

  I start nodding. A lot of pressure. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. “So, is there anything you need me to do?” I ask.

  “Just sign this and you can go,” she says.

  “You’re not going to open it while I’m here?”

  “It was only your job to be at the cemetery, Tate. It was never meant to extend beyond that.”

  “Uh huh, but my job was to make sure Henry Martins made it here, and those shovel marks on the coffin suggest otherwise.”

  She sighs, and I realize she knew all along she would never be putting up much of an argument.

  “Put these on,” she says, and hands me some gloves and a face mask. “The smell isn’t going to be pretty. But you better not tell anybody you were here for this.”

  We shift a little closer to the coffin, and suddenly I don’t want to see what’s inside. This is a topsy-turvy world where corpses bubble up from lakes and coffins are full of empty answers. I pull on the latex gloves and slip the mask over my nose and mouth. If Henry Martins is inside, his fingernails may or may not be blue. If he isn’t inside and the coffin is empty, then Martins is one of the bodies on the bank of the lake, or deep within its belly.

  Tracey sprays some lubricant into the hinges before shifting a small crowbar into place and pushing down.

  The coffin lid sticks because of simple physics. They were designed to take people into the ground, not to bring them back out and, like Tracey pointed out, the structure of this coffin has been altered with all that dirt pressing down on it for the last two years. I lean some weight onto the crowbar to help. It starts to groan, then creak; then it pops open. From inside, darkness escapes—along with it the smell of long-dead flesh that reaches through the pores on my mask and right up into my sinuses. I almost gag. Tracey lifts the lid the rest of the way open. I stand next to her and stare inside.

  It isn’t at all what either of us is expecting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Christchurch is broken. What didn’t make sense five years ago makes sense now, not because our perspectives have changed, but simply because that’s the way it is. All of us are locked into a belief of how this city should be, but it’s slipping away from us, nobody able to keep a firm grasp as Christchurch slowly spirals into full panic mode. Pick up a newspaper and the headlines are all about the Christchurch Carver, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the city for the last few years. The police hate him, the media love him. He’s a one-man money-making industry who is stretching the resources of the police—and the best they can do, it seems, is run ad campaigns on TV in an attempt to enlist new recruits. But the numbers don’t add up. They can’t, because the police can’t keep up with the Carver, let alone the rising crime pandemic.

  There are few solutions—but at least there are some, and that’s where people like me come into the picture. Some of the smaller jobs get contracted out—the smaller things where a police presence isn’t required—and in the beginning people complained. They no longer do.

  So yesterday when one of the law firms on the next floor up contacted me with the job, it seemed like easy money. Crime fighting has come a long way since Batman and Robin: now it’s all about the lawyers and, sometimes, even the law. And in this case nobody needed a cop to stand in the cold while a coffin got dug out of the ground. Cops were getting paid to get put to better uses. They were out there trying to stem the flow of violence, to push back the tides and fight the good fight. So I got paid to be there—a professional making sure the chain of evidence remained intact.

  But nobody is paying me to be here in the morgue with a dead girl in another person’s coffin.

  And the police resources are about to get stretched even further.

  I struggle to focus my thoughts. They cover a whole range of possibilities, as well as emotions. I feel sorrow and pain for whoever this woman is, and can’t see any reason other than a bad one for her to be in this coffin. I’m thinking about hoaxes and jokes, and hoping like crazy this is one of them; and as much as I like to think there could have been an elaborate setup, I know it is much more than that. This is real. I shouldn’t be looking at a woman, she shouldn’t be dead, shouldn’t be in a coffin that isn’t hers—yet here she is, all laid out in front of me.

  Tracey leans over the coffin. “This isn’t Henry Martins,” she says, not to be funny, not to state the obvious, but matter-of-factly, in a way that doesn’t suggest the same disbelief I’m feeling, but that the cold part of her mind she must engage to do this job is now fully in control. Tracey’s emotions have been locked away.

  “She’s decomposed, but not badly. Decomp comes down to temperature, soil, depth of the coffin, and how long she was exposed to the air before being put in here. No way to tell what age at this stage.”

  I’m hardly listening to her. My heart is racing hard as I look down at the body. There are areas where chunks of flesh have shrunken and dried, and other areas where it’s completely disappeared. What she has looks like a shell, so that if I was to poke her with my finger she would turn to dust. The few patches of skin remaining are almost transparent, doing nothing to hide the storm cloud–colored bones that for the most part are exposed. Her face and eyes have gone, just dregs of dried-up skin and flesh and scalp hanging onto her skull. Her teeth look too large with nothing to hide them. Her hair is swept out fanlike beneath her body; it is long and dark brown and I imagine it was once well kept, that she liked to run her fingers through it, that it smelled of shampoos and conditioners, and it would brush against her lover’s face as they held each other as one day became another. Her fingers
are only bone; one rests across her chest, the other by her side. Resting between her palm and her thigh is a small diamond ring that in the light of the morgue refuses to sparkle. I figure it came loose when her fingers rotted away, and got shaken free when she fell off the back of the stolen truck.

  Her clothes don’t seem to line up right; her short dress is twisted and the buttons on her blouse are out of line, as if she dressed in a hurry or somebody else dressed her after she was dead. I dig my hand into my pocket and start playing with my car keys, wrapping them into my handkerchief over and over as my mind races.

  Tracey looks up at me. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I can feel sweat starting to slide down the side of my body. It has to be near freezing in here and I’m sweating.

  “There were other people in the water, Tracey,” I say, and the words are hard to form. “Maybe that means other girls, and if there are . . . Jesus, I screwed up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Two years ago. I should have dug Henry Martins up two years ago and we would have found this girl then. We would have known we were looking for a killer. We might have got him before he killed others.”

  Tracey looks at me, but doesn’t know what to say. She can’t tell me the world doesn’t work that way, because we both know that it does. She doesn’t say anybody could have made that same mistake. She doesn’t try to tell me it isn’t my fault. All that happens is that her shoulders sag a little and she looks away, unable to maintain eye contact with me.