by Willow Rose
I grabbed the bars and started climbing. I jumped down on the grass, then helped Josie get to her feet again.
“I’m fine, Dad, really. I feel fine. You’re doing that worrying thing again.”
“Okay, just let me know if you feel faint or lightheaded or anything out of the ordinary, okay? Shortness of breath? This is important.”
I looked around us and into the dark cemetery. A sea of old tombstones was surrounding us.
“Okay, and where do we go next?”
She pointed.
“Right over here, come.”
Chapter 25
“Here,” she said and showed me the place, lighting it up with the flashlight on her phone. The beam slid over a tombstone.
“Timothy Wilson. Beloved father and husband?” I said, reading from it. “This looks like a normal burial place, Josie.”
“I know,” she said. “But I remember this stone from my dream. I was watching…she turned around and let the light shine on a stone behind us. “From over there, covered by that tombstone, hiding behind it. I remember my hands were shaking. I also remember hearing my ragged breath. I remember being scared,” she said and pointed with the light at the ground where I was standing. “Someone was standing here, and another man was with him. Then the first man pulled out a gun and shot him in the head. Three times. POP-POP-POP. I saw him fall to the ground, dead in a pool of blood. Next to where you’re standing, there was a big hole.”
“But this guy, Timothy Wilson was eighty-eight,” I said. “He died in two thousand and one.”
“Look at the ground,” she said and lit up the burial ground.
I knelt by it. I had to admit; the grass seemed very new on the grave. Much fresher than on the graves surrounding it, even though some of them were newer. There was also more dirt on it than the others. The grass was only partially covering the area.
It looked like it had been dug up not too long ago.
Josie knelt next to it, then dug her fingers into the dirt.
“What are you doing, Josie?” I asked.
She kept digging dirt up and moving it to the side.
“Help me,” she said.
I looked around us, feeling sweat prickle on my face. If I were caught here, it wouldn’t look good.
“This is vandalism, Josie,” I said. “Timothy Wilson’s family has paid for this place, for their beloved father and husband to rest in peace. You can’t just dig up a random grave.”
“Well, I don’t care,” she said. “I know what I saw is true, and I need to prove it to you. And to myself. Help me or not; I need to see what is down here under this dirt.”
I stared at her, contemplating whether I should yell at her and drag her home like a good father would at this point.
But something held me back…the part of me that wanted to know too.
“Josie, you have to stop. Stop it now,” I said. “You’re gonna get us both arrested, and I could lose my job.”
“Then help me so it’ll be done faster,” she said, panting agitatedly as she removed a huge chunk of dirt. I didn’t like her working herself this hard. She had to be careful and preferably be in bed, not out digging holes in some cemetery at night. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.
“Josie,” I said, exhaling, then knelt next to her and dug my fingers into the soft dirt as well.
Twenty minutes later, we had dug a small hole and were sweating like crazy.
“We’re not getting anywhere without a shovel,” I said, wiping my forehead with the back of my hand. “Maybe we should just call it quits.”
“No,” Josie said and continued. She dug in deep and pulled out a lot of dirt. Then, she stopped moving.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I think I touched something,” she said. She reached down and pulled away more dirt when something came to light. Josie’s face lit up, then her eyes turned terrified.
“I told you.”
She kept digging till the arm was completely free from the dirt, and soon I helped her dig a body out till the torso and waist were visible, and we could pull it the rest of the way out of the ground.
I let the light shine on the face, or what was left of it. Maggots were crawling in the empty eye sockets, and the body had started to liquefy like they tended to if they’d been in the ground in a wet environment for more than a month. Still, I could easily tell who it was, and as I realized it, my heart dropped.
Chapter 26
It was the ring on his finger that gave him away: a golden ring with a blood-red stone on the finger of his right hand, or the little that was left of it. I stared at the ring as the crime scene techs removed it from the bones and secured it for evidence, my heart sinking.
I had looked at that very ring so many times in my life when I had been in this man’s office. The mere thought brought tears to my eyes.
“Hunter!”
I turned and spotted Fowler as he came up toward me. The crime scene techs had put up lamps to light up the area, and I could see his face clearly. He held an evidence bag up with something inside it.
“They found his wallet,” he said. “It was in the jacket he was wearing when buried. It’s him, no doubt.”
I was the one who had called Fowler to tell him of our find. I thought he deserved to be the first to know. After all, he had known our former Major Wolfe better than any of us. Fowler had been Wolfe’s protégé, and his only natural successor once he retired eight years ago. Those two were like family. Heck, we all were. But those two had been closer than any.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I am so sorry.”
Fowler paused. He, too, was fighting to keep it together. He bit his lip excessively while looking at the body.
“Yeah, well…” He stopped and gazed up at me. “You know how it is.”
I nodded. “I didn’t even know he was missing. Had you heard anything?”
Fowler rubbed his stubble. “Yvette called me about two weeks ago. She told me they had split up a few months earlier and that she hadn’t heard from him in a while. He didn’t pick up when she called, and she needed some stuff from the house. I figured he was angry at her and told her to keep it cool for a little while. I knew the divorce would have been hard on him; you know how much he worshipped Yvette.”
I nodded. I did. She had been his everything. Yvette was French, and he had met her in Paris when they were both in their twenties. They had moved to Miami due to his career. But Yvette didn’t like Florida. She didn’t enjoy the lack of culture and history, as she put it, and she never grew fond of us Americans. Those two fought like cats and dogs, yet I always thought they loved each other deeply. It seemed like it. But apparently, it hadn’t been enough after all.
“Anyway…” Fowler said. “I never followed up on it. I tried to call him once but then forgot about it. It never occurred to me that something might have happened to him. And especially not…this.”
I nodded.
“So, what’s your take on it?” he asked, nodding toward the remains of our former boss.
I swallowed and took a deep breath. “Burying his body on top of another grave is a clever way to make sure no one notices. Few people actually stop to look at the grave, especially when the guy is old and has been dead for a long time. Most people won’t notice the new grass or that the dirt has been dug up. That’s why the killer believed it was okay to leave the ring and wallet there…because he assumed Wolfe would never be found in a place like this. Three very distinct holes in the skull tell me he was shot three times in the head. I’d say it was an act done in sudden anger.”
Fowler looked at the body and the crime scene techs who were taking photos and video of the scene. He then nodded.
“And you still stick to the story that it was Josie who led you out here?” he asked. “That she dreamt this because of her new heart?”
I nodded. “I know it’s hard to believe, but as I told you, according to the book I read about this, it’s been known to happen befo
re. Earlier cases are very similar to what she’s experiencing.”
“I still don’t quite buy it,” he said. “But you did find the body.”
“I’d also like to look into the death of Emilia and Jennifer García,” I said, knowing I was overstepping here. But I had to give it a go. “Josie says she believes they were murdered.”
Fowler chuckled and shook his head. “I think you have enough on your plate as it is. I can’t have you chasing ghosts. I’m not reopening the case because your daughter had some weird dream about the girl who gave her a new heart. Come on, Hunter. How would I ever explain it to my superior? Everyone would think I had gone nuts. The case is closed, and you should let it go too. I know you cared for Wolfe, but you’re too involved in all this. I’ll have Ferdinand take this one.”
I bit my lip, repressing my desire to get angry with him.
“Let it go,” Fowler said and placed a hand on my upper arm. “For your own sake and Josie’s.”
The way he said it, it almost sounded like a threat, and it threw me off. Fowler was gone before I could confront him about it.
Chapter 27
I know I was supposed to be doing something else. I was supposed to be working on a different case. Yet, there I was, defying all orders from my boss by being at the police impound, showing my badge to the guy at the window along with an evidence number I had taken from the García case file.
“Yeah, I know that one,” the guy behind the glass said and got up from his chair. “It’s right over here. Follow me.”
I did, and we walked through a carpark of impounded cars. Cars that had been parked in wrong places, cars that had been held back for evidence, and cars rusting away because no one knew what else to do with them.
He stopped by a rusty old green Ford Escort station wagon that looked like it had been young in the late nineties. The type you just didn’t see on the roads anymore. Rust was eating it up, and it hadn’t helped that it had been submerged underwater before being pulled out with two people inside of it.
Two people my colleagues assumed had killed themselves. Two people I had a feeling had been murdered.
“There she is,” the guy said. “Not much left of her, though.”
“It’s all I need,” I said. “Thank you.”
The guy gave a sniffle, then left me.
I stared at the old rusty car, while a million questions welled up in my mind. There was so much I needed answers for that I hadn’t gotten from reading through the case file. There was especially one thing I believed they hadn’t examined. Was the front door locked? No matter how much I had read through the files, it didn’t say anywhere. When they pulled it out of the water, did they have to break a window to get the bodies out? It didn’t say that either.
I reached over and grabbed the front door, then pulled it open. It sure wasn’t locked now. And no windows had been broken. Had the divers been able simply to open the front door and pull them both out?
And what about the keys? Had they been in the ignition? It didn’t say in the report, but they weren’t there now. I grabbed the case file in my hand and flipped through the pages, looking for my answer. And there it was, right in front of me in black and white in the forensics report.
The keys were found inside the mother’s jacket.
“How do you drive an old car like this one with the key in your pocket?” I mumbled and looked inside. I knelt by the driver’s seat and looked under the steering wheel. Two small wires were sticking out, and as an old Miami cop, I knew exactly what that meant.
The station wagon had been good old-fashioned hotwired.
I took a photo with my phone, then leaned inside and took a few more of the inside, while wondering about another thing, the very thing that had me puzzled from the first time I read the report.
I then grabbed my phone and called Detective Ferdinand.
“Yes?”
“How come they were in the back seat when they were found?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“The García files. It says in there that they were both pulled out from the back of the station wagon that had been arranged like a sleeping area because they lived in the car. It says both the mother and daughter were in the back when pulled out. Wouldn’t the mother at least be in the front if she drove the car into the harbor?”
Ferdinand sighed on the other end. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Of all the days, you choose today to bother me with this? Do you have any idea how busy we are right now with what you found last night?”
“I am very well aware,” I said, not backing down. I demanded answers now. “But this is important too.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I guess they were pushed back. That’s what one of the forensics techs suggested, that the mother could have been pushed back by the water when they went in.”
“What if that’s not what happened?” I said, staring at the station wagon in front of me. “What if someone broke into the car and hotwired it, then drove it to the edge, got out, and pushed it into the water?”
Ferdinand exhaled. “Listen, Hunter. I don’t have time for this. They were two homeless people; they drove into the harbor either to commit suicide or maybe by accident because the mother had taken drugs. I don’t know. But I do know the case is closed, and I suggest you leave it that way if you know what’s best for you and your family.”
With that, he hung up, and I stood back, feeling like I had once again been threatened by someone I thought I knew well.
What the heck was going on here?
Chapter 28
Jean had brought Camille into the kitchen and had her sitting in her chair. Harry had bought her a brand-new wheelchair, one that supported her head, so she could lean back now and then when she needed to rest or couldn’t hold it up properly herself.
Camille looked up at her, then smiled, using only one side of her mouth. It was all the gratitude she was capable of showing; Jean knew that much. She handed her a fork, then placed the cut-up meat in front of her and sat down. Camille struggled to put the fork into a piece of meat and missed a few times.
Josie was there too and stared at her mother while she fought to get just one piece of meat into her mouth.
“It’s crazy, right?” Jean said when seeing the sadness in the girl’s eyes. “How she has to learn everything from scratch again. Learn how to walk, how to eat, and one day, hopefully, talk again. But she’s making progress every day. I haven’t been here in a while, so I can really see the difference.”
Josie nodded, biting her lip. Jean could tell a lot was going on in the poor girl’s mind. It couldn’t be easy to see her mother like this.
“Will she ever be the same, the way she was before?” she asked.
Jean sighed and helped Camille guide the fork closer to another piece of meat. “Probably not exactly the same,” she said. “But she can get close.”
“It just takes so long,” Josie said.
It was Harry who had asked Jean to stay with Josie for a few hours today while he was at work. He didn’t want Josie to be left alone in the house with Camille after what they had discovered the night before. He felt she needed to be with an adult, and his father, old Pastor Bernard, was out of town for the day. Jean still felt a little strange being back in the house, and with Camille now being aware of her surroundings. It had destroyed her chances of ever being with Harry, but she was still happy for them that they had gotten their mother and wife back…or at least some version of her, that was.
Jean reached out and grabbed Josie’s hand in hers, then smiled warmly.
“Give her time. I know it seems like it’s going slowly but think of her as a baby who has to learn everything. It takes time. But I think she can do it. Your mom is strong.”
Jean looked at Camille, realizing she actually didn’t know how much Camille understood. She didn’t seem to be listening to what they were saying, but there was a tear in her eye that rolled down her cheek. Jean wiped it awa
y with a tissue, then squeezed Camille’s hand as she let go of the fork, and it fell to the plate with a loud clang.
“Are you tired, Camille?” she asked. “You look tired. I think it’s time for your afternoon nap. Here, let me help you with…”
She grabbed the napkin she had placed under her chin and tried to wipe Camille’s mouth with it, but Camille turned her face away and gave Jean a push. She then let out a wail of sorts, sounding like a wounded animal.
“What’s happening?” Josie asked.
“I think she’s upset.”
“Was it something I said? Was it because I said I thought it was taking too long, because I didn’t mean it, Mom. I’m just happy to have you back, really.”
Camille stared at them, shaking her head and torso violently from side to side.
“I think I’ll take you to your room to get that nap,” Jean said.
She grabbed the chair and rolled Camille to the small bedroom in the back that used to be Harry’s office, but now was the room Camille slept in, so they didn’t have to get her up and down the stairs. Just till she could walk them on her own, which Harry believed wouldn’t be long. Jean helped Camille get into bed, then put the covers on top of her and held her hand in hers while squeezing it.
“I know you’re in there, Camille, and I want you to keep fighting, okay? For Harry and Josie. They need you to get well. I know you can do this, Camille. You don’t get to give up, do you hear me?”
Camille lay still with her eyes open for a little while and groaned like she was trying to speak. It was something she did a lot. Earlier in the day, Jean had tried to hand her a pencil and a paper, thinking she might be able to write what she wanted to say, but so far, Camille hadn’t been able to hold the pencil still enough to write anything. If only there were some way for them to communicate.
“It’ll come,” Jean said. “The words. Just be patient, okay?”
With that, Camille closed her eyes and started breathing heavier. Jean rose to her feet and walked to the window to close the curtains when she spotted a car with someone sitting inside it on the street across from them and realized it had been there all morning.