by Paul Cleave
So for me, manslaughter didn’t cut it. Didn’t come close. He got released on bail and he tried to get his car back, but for the first time ever they wouldn’t let him have it. They couldn’t—because people were outraged by the accident. They were angry at the system that allowed him to keep going free. So this time the courts weren’t giving his car back, not at least until the trial was over. It was as though the judge finally figured out that giving this guy his car back was like handing Jack the Ripper a scalpel, that in this case it couldn’t all be about revenue gathering. This time James would do time. That was for sure. They’d lock him away for two years in a cell that was a hell of a lot bigger than the coffin my daughter got locked in.
But everything worked out different. Quentin James never went to jail. My daughter is no longer in her resting place. The world has gone topsy-turvy and I don’t know what to do. I’m kneeling in the grass next to a mound of dirt and an empty coffin. Sidney Alderman has come along and dug up her grave in the same way his son dug up others. He has dug up and torn the stitches from the memories, and the pain of losing my daughter is as strong as it was the day Quentin James stole her from me. James is no longer around to direct my anger toward, but Alderman is, and I’m going to find the son of a bitch.
I stand up. I turn my back on the grave of my little girl. The sky has cleared even more and it looks like it could actually turn into a pretty good day. As good as it can get, weather wise. As bad as it can get in every other way. I start my car and drive to Alderman’s house. I’m tempted to drive right into it, just hit the sucker at a hundred kilometers an hour and shred the siding and plasterboard to pieces. Instead I bring the car to a fast stop up his driveway, skidding the shingle out in all directions and creating a thin cloud of dirt that drifts past the front of the car and toward the house. I get out and slam the door, wishing I had access to the gun the caretaker’s son used on himself. All I have access to is my anger—it should be enough. I think in the end anger will beat out sorrow on any given day. Even on a Tuesday.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The house still smells of alcohol and the air is damp. The furniture bugs me in a way that furniture shouldn’t be able to do. I want to set fire to the place. Pour gasoline all over the walls and floors and the clawed-up lounge suite and turn the whole fucking lot to ash. Preferably with Sidney Alderman in here. Preferably with him gagged and tied and very aware of what is going on.
Only he isn’t here. He’s off somewhere with my daughter doing God knows what. Burying her somewhere, I guess. Or dumping her in another lake or a river or an ocean.
The photo albums have all disappeared. It tells me Alderman knew I was here and was figuring I’d come back. I start looking through the house again. I go through his drawers and his cupboards, but I don’t find anything useful, because anything useful the police will already have found. I pull everything apart. I dump files and trash and books on the floor as I go, but there’s nothing. I push everything aside roughly, making a mess, enjoying the process of damage. It’s not enough to take away any of the pain, but for the short term it will have to do.
I head back out to my car and grab the charger for my cell phone. I plug it into a socket next to Alderman’s toaster and watch as my phone starts to power up. I leave it charging while I check the bedrooms. Bruce Alderman said the proof was under his bed, but he may as well have said that a year ago. The two bedrooms in use have completely distinct personalities. It’s obvious to see which one belongs to the old man and which to the son. The father’s bedroom has wedding pictures up on the wall. It has underwear scattered across the floor. It has a busted-up clock radio lying on a pile of old newspapers. There are booze bottles stacked along the windowsills. The curtains are grimy and old. The bed hasn’t been made; the pillow case is blackened in the middle from sweat and dirt and whatever product the old man once ran through his hair. The loss of his wife was so hard on the guy that he never recovered. He lost control of his own life, and ten years later he’s still losing control.
I walk into Bruce’s room. It’s like walking into a cheap motel room that prides itself on doing the best with what it has. The bed has been made. Books are stacked almost neatly on the bedside table. Three pairs of shoes are lined up beneath the window. Sneakers, dress shoes, work shoes. I look under the bed. Whatever evidence was there has gone. I check the closet and go through the pockets of whatever is hanging there. Then the drawers. I’m not tidier than the police. I pull the drawers all the way out and check beneath them for any taped-up envelopes or photographs he has hidden there. But there’s nothing. I pick up and riffle through the books. Nothing falls out of them. I check the titles on the spines. He read a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, but there doesn’t appear to be any serial killer novels or FBI handbooks about how to avoid getting caught. There are shoeboxes stacked in his wardrobe that are full of mostly junk—a Rubik’s cube, small plastic Smurfs, old coins, even some old shoes.
I check under the bed again, just in case, but there’s nothing there at all. Just dust. Which doesn’t make sense. People always squirrel crap away under their beds. Bruce Alderman has nothing, except the thick dust, and there are no clean patches where items have been removed. I drag the bed out from the wall.
The corner of the carpet is easy to pull up, because it’s been pulled up before. Plenty of times, I’m guessing, which is why he never stored anything under the bed, because then he would have had to drag stuff out and stack it up and then unstack it and push everything back, all of that to gain access to his secret hiding place. There are four A4-sized envelopes side by side under the carpet, each one very thin. I pull the carpet all the way back, but there is nothing else.
I spill the contents of the first envelope onto the bed. I open the other three. They’re all the same. Different articles cut from different newspapers, nearly twenty of them covering the different women. A separate envelope for each of the four girls. The dates begin two years ago and end two days ago. There are articles for the three girls I’ve identified, and for the fourth one I haven’t. Her name is Jennifer Bowen. I now know all four names.
Four women missing from Christchurch, but the world kept on spinning. Nobody took a moment to figure out what in the hell was going on. Four women from four different backgrounds, all of them young—born within five years of each other—and no one made the connection. They didn’t make it because they didn’t want to. The articles are full of suggestions. The girls were wayward. They were runaways. The articles about Rachel Tyler suggest she fought with her boyfriend. They hint that the boyfriend could have been responsible. They mention the dead grandmother and lead a path for the reader to believe she could have run away because she was upset. They suggest lots of things and confirm nothing, just throwing out ideas in the hope that if they cast a wide enough net they might cover something correctly.
I slide all the articles from all of the envelopes into the one. They don’t do much to back Bruce Alderman’s claim that he didn’t kill these women. All four of them could have died in here. And Emily? Did Bruce’s father bring Emily back here before driving her away? Did he carry her corpse and rest her on the couch while he packed some things together? No. He would have dumped her in the trunk of his car. He wouldn’t have been careful about it.
I take my phone and step outside. The lake, the church, the land of the dead—none of it can be seen from anywhere on this property, not unless I was to take the ladder out of the shed and climb up on the roof or scale the fence. I do the latter.
The property backs onto the cemetery. The police, the excavations, the canvas tents, and crime scene techies—these things don’t reach Alderman’s house. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a house where the view over your back fence was of trees and granite headstones. Surely it had to be disturbing. Surely it couldn’t have been healthy. I wonder if this environment is what made Bruce Alderman a sick man. Whether it made Sidney Alderman a sick man. Or whether it was the loss of the
ir mother and wife that made them so.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’m half expecting to find my house has been set on fire when I get home. Or the windows broken. Or, at the very least, to have murderer spray-painted across the garage door and fence. I pull into the driveway, stand next to my car, and stare up and down the street. I’m looking for Sidney Alderman, but he isn’t here. Nobody is. Not even Casey Horwell. All of my neighbors are off doing whatever it is that neighbors do. Mow lawns. Pull weeds. Cook food and watch TV. None of them are trying to figure out where their dead children are. I’m careful as I make my way inside. I had a gun pulled on me last night, and hours later a microphone, and I’m not eager to make either mistake twice.
I plug my cell phone back into the charger, then I bring the computer in from the car and set it up on the dining-room table. Bridget would not be pleased. I use the Christchurch Libraries’ database of newspapers to find more articles related to the ones Bruce clipped. I take on board as much as I can from them, and from the missing persons reports, and as much as I can about their lives and about their deaths—not that any of the articles say they are dead. But they sure read as though the journalists were all betting heavily on it. I print out a photo of the fourth girl, then line the pictures up in a row. Their killer certainly had a fondness for a specific type of girl.
I spend two hours reading all about the missing, and it’s hard, because my mind keeps returning to Alderman and Emily.
I search the obituaries for the weeks prior to the girls’ deaths, looking for the same last names to see if there was a reason for any or all of them to attend a funeral. I come up with nothing. It’s not a busted lead at this stage because it could be they still went to funerals of people outside their families, or family members with different last names. The only way to know for sure is to start making some phone calls, but right now talking to these dead girls’ families is the last thing I feel like doing.
I set the whiteboard up, propping it up on a chair and leaning the top against a wall. I’ve got nothing but a permanent marker to draw with, but go ahead anyway, starting with a time line. I figure that Henry Martins would have been buried two days after he died. If I add those days on to the date of his death, it matches up nicely. Henry died on a Tuesday and was buried on a Thursday. Rachel was last seen Thursday morning, and was reported missing by her parents the following Tuesday. But then I add the other missing girls to the time line, and find that the dates between disappearances are not that even. The first two girls went missing within a month of each other, then there was another eighteen months until the third went missing, and the last was less than a week ago. It doesn’t suggest that the murderer is escalating or slowing, and I’m not sure what that in itself suggests. Guys like this tend to start killing more often as the need overtakes the desire. Or there is something in their life that triggers the impulse to kill. I look at the time line and wonder what made this guy kill at these particular moments. Was it simply that the right type of girl came into his localized view of the world? Or did he go hunting for women to fit his type? There has to be more to it—I write Prison? on the board, wondering if the killer could have been in jail for eighteen months. It’s common for serial killers to get arrested for an unrelated crime.
I go through the obituaries again, hunting out those who died in the days leading up to the girls’ disappearances. Four of these people are no longer in their coffins, and are lying on morgue tables in different stages of decay, their bodies waterlogged and bloated or decayed.
I look at the time line. I think about Emily. I think about Bruce Alderman and about his father. Then I think about where I was two years ago and the difference I could have made. That was my chance to save these girls. Maybe Landry was right, and I am fucking everything up. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to find Emily.
My cell phone finally has a full charge. I go through the memory of incoming calls, put Landry’s number into the address book, and then dial his phone. He picks it up after half a ring.
“I was about to call you,” he says. “Your name just keeps on popping up. You need to stay the hell away from my investigation.”
“I can help.”
“Help? You seen the news lately?”
“Look, that isn’t . . .”
“I don’t mean that screwup you made last night. I mean the new one you’ve got on your hands today,” he says.
“I haven’t heard. What have I done now?”
“You must’ve really pissed off this Horwell chick at some point. What’d you do, sleep with her?” he asks.
“Yeah, good one, Landry.”
“Turns out when people don’t like you, they really don’t like you. I guess I’m starting to see why.”
“There a point here?” I ask him.
“She interviewed Alderman this morning. Had to be sometime after he hit the bar, but looking at him it couldn’t have been long after. Didn’t seem to have many drinks under his belt.”
“And?”
“And it wasn’t good. It’s like she saw this fire burning inside him and just started throwing on more fuel. Hadn’t been for all those angles and splatter trajectories, even I’d be thinking you were guilty. Anyway whatever anger he had about you before, you can double it and double that again. Just keep an eye out. And do us all a favor, huh? Stay indoors and turn off your phone until we get this thing nailed down. When it goes to court, we’re going to be looking at some defense lawyer pointing the finger at you and saying—”
“Yeah—we covered this already.”
“Then why don’t I feel assured?”
I look down at the photographs and the newspaper clippings. “Look, Landry, I got something for you. You want to hear it or not?”
“That depends on how you got what you got. Is this going to backfire? If you’ve got anything and you’ve obtained it illegally, I don’t want to know about it, right? Otherwise it’ll blow up in our faces.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t say anything and I don’t add anything else, and he reads my silence accurately.
“You’re unbelievable, Tate.”
“You want the names of the other girls or not?”
“Do me a favor and don’t tell me. There’s a hotline for information. Ring it anonymously and give it to them, okay? Call from a pay phone or something. Anything you give me from an illegal search is poison. Come on, Tate, you know that.”
“I’m no longer a cop. Those same rules don’t apply.”
“Yeah, and this serial killer’s defense lawyer you don’t want me to keep reminding you about is going to—”
“Right,” I say, interrupting him. “No problem. So you don’t want my help.”
“Help? Is that what you think you’ve been doing? I gotta go. Make sure you—”
“I got something else.”
“You’re going to give me a heart attack, Tate.”
“Look, this is something good. It’s something you can say you came up with on your own, so you don’t have to—”
“Come on, I know how to do my Goddamn job.”
“Rachel Tyler,” I say, “before she died she visited Woodland Estates. Her grandmother died. It’s the same cemetery.” Landry doesn’t answer. I can tell he hadn’t made this connection. I press on. “I think the others might have been there too. I think that’s the connection. That’s what drew them to the killer.”
“You got anything to back that up?” he asks.
“Not yet. But I’m—”
“No buts, Tate. You’re off this thing. Go ahead and make that call to the hotline, give us those names. Do it now.”
He hangs up without me telling him Alderman has my daughter. And that’s okay—I want to deal with Alderman myself.
The phone call I’m going to make will take most of their legwork out of play. It’ll mean the contents of the other two coffins are no longer up for grabs. But that call can wait. First I’m going to find Sidney Alderman and do what it takes
to get my daughter back, and that’s something I don’t need Landry’s help for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The church is bathed in sunlight on one side and shade on the other, the two halves separated by a thin line like good and evil. It looks like there’s probably a difference of twenty degrees between the two. The stained-glass windows look dull and fogged up with age. The concrete brick around the edges of the shady side has speckles of mold. The gardens have low-key and low-maintenance shrubs spaced out about a meter apart. There aren’t any weeds, but that’ll probably change now that Bruce is gone.
Mine is the only car out front, and there’s nobody inside the church either. Except, of course, for Father Julian, who appears from a side door to the right of the altar when I’m about halfway up the aisle. Maybe I passed through a motion detector. Maybe he’s been hanging out all day for the chance to trap some soul into a conversation about God. But the way he moves toward me makes me think he’s been waiting for me to show up.
“You’re here,” he says gravely.
“We need to talk.”
“You’re right. We do.” He looks paler than yesterday, as if a chunk of his faith has slipped away during the night. Or been stolen. “We need to talk about Bruce. Though to be honest I don’t know if I can. I don’t think I can talk to you.”
“Father Julian, please, you have to—”
“I don’t know, Theo,” he says, glancing at the large envelope in my hand. Some of the color is coming back to his face, and the look in his eyes suggests it’s coming back on waves of anger. “I remember what it was like for you two years ago.”
“It’s not like that now.”
“Do you remember I used to come around to your house?” he asks.
“Of course I remember. But this isn’t like that other time.”