An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  “Same here,” Louis said.

  The three of them walked a few feet toward the back corner of the cemetery. Louis and Dalum had already cleared the dirt and weeds away from Becker’s marker, but it was powdered now with fresh snow and Dalum bent to brush it away. The numbers chiseled in the stone were clear: 6888.

  “Okay then,” Spera said.

  Louis and Dalum walked away, giving Spera room to work. The backhoe roared to life again and the digging started. Louis led Dalum farther away from the noise and as they walked, he noticed he wasn’t far from Claudia’s grave. And he tried to remember what number she was.

  “Your buddy’s here,” Dalum said.

  Louis looked up to see Delp coming toward them. He walked like he was drowsy, and his hair was flat on one side like he’d slept on it and hadn’t combed it yet. Louis stepped forward to meet him.

  “Did you bring them?” Louis asked.

  Delp put a hand inside his jacket and withdrew two items. One was a small manila envelope that Louis suspected held Becker’s dental records. The other was a single piece of white paper.

  “What’s the paper?” Louis asked.

  “You’re going to want to kiss me for this,” Delp said.

  “I doubt it. What is it?”

  “Becker’s booking sheet from Mason.”

  “And how does that do us any good?”

  Delp snapped the paper open. “It lists the distinguishing scars and tattoos, as you know.”

  “So?”

  “Becker has an eleven-inch scar on his right forearm.

  Just below the elbow from a broken arm he got as a teenager. It was a clean break of the ulna, and my guess is it’s still going to be visible on the bones today.”

  “Can I see that?” Dalum asked.

  Delp handed Dalum the paper, giving the X-ray envelope to Louis, then started to step around him. Louis grabbed his sleeve.

  “Give me your camera,” Louis said, putting out his hand.

  “C’mon, Kincaid. Quid pro quo. I gave you his dental records and I even threw in his booking sheet and I can’t even take a look?”

  “Look all you want, but give me your camera,” Louis said. “And you know the deal. If he’s in there, none of this ever gets written. This morning never happened.”

  Delp blew out breath laced with stale beer and slapped his camera into Louis’s hand. Then he wandered over to watch Spera.

  Louis pulled the small X-ray out of the envelope and held it up to the weak light. Becker had a full set of small, square teeth. On the lower right, there was a filling and on the upper right, there was a gap between the last two teeth.

  The X-ray had a sticker on the corner, with Becker’s name and a date. June 1962—before Becker was arrested. He hoped this was good enough.

  “This guy looks like he’s wound a little tight,” Dalum said, handing Louis the booking paper.

  The picture of Becker was black and white, shading the jail smock gray and Becker’s razor-cut hair almost black, but Louis saw that both his hair and eyes were listed as brown.

  Becker was twenty-two in the photo, and at first glance looked like a college student, with wireless glasses and a studious expression. But there was something about the way his thick brows formed a single line over his eyes, and the half smirk of his bowed lips that hinted at something darker.

  Louis folded the paper and stuffed it in his pocket, then turned up the collar of his jacket. Dalum had given him some gloves this morning, along with a clean sweatshirt emblazoned with I VISITED HELL MICHIGAN, but he was still cold.

  Suddenly, it was quiet.

  Louis and Dalum walked back to the open grave. There was still a layer of dirt in it and Louis could not see the concrete vault.

  “Normally, I got a crew who does this,” Spera said, coming up behind them and carrying two small shovels and black rubber gloves. “But you wanted to keep this secret, so I need a little help.”

  Spera held out the shovels and gloves. “You guys go ahead and shovel off the rest of the dirt, down to the vault lid. I’ll go get the hoist.”

  Louis took the shovels and Spera walked away. Louis looked at Dalum, then at Delp, who was standing on the other side of the grave.

  “I don’t do manual labor,” Delp said.

  Louis and Dalum eased themselves into the grave. “Wait,” Dalum said, reaching into his pocket. He opened a small jar of Vicks VapoRub and spread some under his nostrils. He handed it to Louis, who did the same.

  They started digging. The stench was awful, and was getting worse with every heap of dirt they tossed out. After a few minutes, Louis paused, his hand over his nose. He looked up at Delp.

  “You might want to back off, Delp,” Louis called.

  Delp grinned and whipped a small white painter’s mask from his jacket pocket.

  “You’re going to need more than that,” Louis said.

  Delp said something, but it was muffled behind the mask. From behind him, Louis heard the hum of another machine and saw Spera bringing the hoist into place.

  “I hit concrete,” Dalum said.

  Louis helped him finish up; then Spera and his son Andy climbed down again and lowered the chains into the grave. Louis and Dalum hooked them to the iron eyeholes on the sides of the concrete vault and climbed out, pulling off the gloves and walking as far away from the grave as they could. After drawing a full breath, Louis turned and watched as Spera operated the hoist, lifting the vault from the hole.

  The vault dripped muddy water as it rose into the air. And suddenly the smell was everywhere. Louis pulled his sweatshirt up over his nose. It wasn’t until Spera had the vault back on the ground and Andy was headed toward it with a crowbar that Louis forced himself to move forward.

  It took three good jerks of the crowbar, but the vault finally slid open, the heavy lid dropping to the grass. Louis’s hand came to his nose again.

  Aw, Jesus . . .

  Grave juice . . . that’s what cops called it. The wood casket was floating in a fetid brew of rancid, muddy water, dark with decomposed flesh.

  Louis heard a groan, and his eyes moved immediately to Delp. Delp had ripped off his mask and was hunched over, already in his second or third spasm of vomiting.

  “You want one of these, Louis?” Spera asked, holding out a gas mask.

  “Yeah,” Louis said.

  Spera gave one to Dalum, too, and then went about helping Andy slip straps under the casket. When he was finished, Louis and Andy took one side and Dalum took the other, and they lifted the casket from the vault. The wood was soft and warped, and the whole casket started to bow as they tried to get it up over the sides of the vault.

  “Steady!” Spera called.

  The casket gave a groan, and before Louis could do anything, the wood panel on the side split away, and the front end started to dip.

  “Hold it! Hold it!” Spera yelled.

  But it was too late. Just as they got the casket over the side, part of the bottom gave out, washing their feet and ankles with thick black water.

  “Damn it,” Louis hissed.

  Then the rest went, the wood ripping like wet newspaper, and the body fell to the ground with a thud.

  For a second, they were still; then Spera moved aside the straps and they stared at the body.

  It lay faceup, the arms extended by the fall. The clothes were intact, a plain shirt and dark trousers, both wet and muddy. The hands were black with decay and tapered into grotesque gobs of bumpy, dark mush. The hair was combed straight back, wet and speckled with mud.

  But it was the face Louis couldn’t stop looking at. The skin was waxy, flesh-colored, and except for a rotted black hole on the left side of the mouth and another one down the neck, the corpse looked almost normal. There were a pair of rusty, wire-rimmed glasses lying by the head.

  It was Becker, Louis knew. Older, fatter, and eaten with grave rot, but it was him.

  Louis looked up, meeting Dalum’s eyes behind the glass of the mask. Dalum knew
, too. Louis felt a hard rush of disappointment and he lifted his gaze up. Spera was coming back from his flatbed truck with a body bag.

  Louis moved forward to help slip Becker’s body into the bag. Parts of Becker’s hands and feet came off and by the time the bag was loaded on the truck, Louis’s stomach was turning.

  “If you guys will stay and keep an eye on all this,” Spera shouted through the mask, “I’ll go get a few of my guys and come back and clean it all up.”

  Louis nodded. Dalum nudged him and motioned with his head toward the pine trees near the gate. Ahead of them Louis saw Delp. He was standing upright, shivering, his hands covering his face.

  As Louis and Dalum passed, Delp stumbled after them. No one stopped until they got to Dalum’s car. Louis jerked off the mask and his gloves, tossing them to the ground. The air wasn’t great, even under the pines, but it was breathable. He glanced at Delp.

  “You okay?”

  Delp’s skin was wet and gray, and he was staring off toward Becker’s grave.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” Delp whispered.

  “Looked like it.”

  “How come he still had a face?”

  “It’s called adipocere,” Louis said. “It’s a chemical process that happens as the body fat is altered somehow, and the body doesn’t decompose.”

  “I’ve heard it called grave wax,” Dalum said.

  The smell was still strong and Louis looked down at his sneakers. Shit. They had the grave water on them. So did the cuffs of his jeans.

  “So,” Delp said, his voice stronger now, “where do we go from here?”

  Louis looked to his right, toward the trees and the hospital beyond them. He knew where they needed to go. They needed to go back to where the murderer had felt at home, the place he still haunted. E Building. That’s where they would find him, among the hundreds of records stacked in that musty little room.

  Louis wiped a hand over his cold, sweating brow.

  But there were so many records and the attacks spanned more than two decades. And there was no way a judge was going to give them a warrant to randomly search confidential files for a nameless and faceless killer.

  They had to narrow this down. They had to know what kind of man they were looking for. And that could only come from someone who worked in E Building for a long time. Someone who knew these guys better than they knew themselves.

  He looked at Dalum. “Chief, can we get a list of people admitted during a certain time period?”

  Dalum shrugged. “You mean just admission dates and names?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suppose we could. Nothing confidential about that,” he said. “That’s going to be a helluva list, Louis.”

  “I know. But we need it to narrow down the suspect pool.”

  “But all we’ll have is names,” Dalum said. “We won’t know anything about these people. It’ll take weeks, maybe years, of legwork to even start eliminating people.”

  Louis was staring at the point in the milky sky where a single red brick chimney could be glimpsed above the trees.

  “I know someone who can do it faster,” he said.

  CHAPTER 25

  Louis was slumped in a hard metal chair when Dr. Seraphin came out of the elevator. She stopped, her keys in her gloved hand, and looked at him in surprise.

  “Well, hello, Mr. . . .” she began.

  “Kincaid,” Louis said, standing and stretching. He had been waiting outside her office for the last hour.

  A smile creased her wind-ruddy cheeks. “Louis, right?”

  “Right. I need to talk to you, Doctor,” he said.

  “Well, I have someone coming in soon,” she said, shifting the strap of her black alligator briefcase up her shoulder.

  “It’s important,” Louis said. “We might have another murder victim at Hidden Lake.”

  Dr. Seraphin’s smile faded. “Good Lord.”

  “We found some bones buried in a shallow grave and we were able to trace them to a young woman who came to the hospital last year for outpatient help.”

  Two students passed them in the narrow hallway, giving Seraphin and Louis a strange look.

  “I think you’d better come in,” Dr. Seraphin said, unlocking the office door.

  Louis waited as she took off her gray cape and gloves, and slid her briefcase under the desk. When she motioned for him to take a chair, he sat down across from her desk.

  “So why are you here to see me?” she asked.

  Louis recounted everything he knew so far, including his talk with Millie Reuben and the fact that Rebecca Gruber had been burned. He told her also about exhuming Donald Lee Becker’s body. The doctor’s face remained impassive throughout, and Louis had the sense that she was taking this all in not as any woman might but as a psychiatrist would—with a calm, clinical interest.

  “We think whoever killed them is a former patient,” Louis concluded. “Someone probably released in recent years.”

  “Why recent?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

  “If this patient had been out for a long time, we would have other victims,” Louis said.

  “Maybe there are more and you just haven’t found them,” she said.

  Louis nodded. “That’s possible.”

  Dr. Seraphin leaned her elbows on the desk and clasped her hands in front of her face. “So what exactly do you want from me?” she asked.

  “Help in finding possible suspects.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows shot up.

  “There’s not a judge in the world who will grant me access to medical files,” Louis said. “And I don’t even know what I am looking for. He may not ever have been convicted of anything, so I can’t just look at criminal records.”

  Dr. Seraphin shook her head. “I’d like to help you, Mr. Kincaid, but as I told you, I left Hidden Lake a long time ago. If the person you are looking for was in fact released recently, I wouldn’t know him.”

  Louis stifled a sigh. She was right of course.

  “And while I am certainly not one to question the police’s logic, I think you could be wrong about this being a recently released patient,” Dr. Seraphin added.

  Louis sat up straighter in his chair. “Why?”

  “Well, most patients were released back in the seventies,” Dr. Seraphin said.

  “The seventies?”

  “It was part of a mass movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. The thinking was that the best approach was to integrate them into society rather than keep them locked up.” She shook her head slowly. “I’m not so sure now it was in fact the right thing to do. But then, the entire history of mental health is really nothing but trial and error when it comes down to it. There is a lot of—what is the sports cliché?—Sunday morning quarterbacking.”

  “Monday morning,” Louis said with a smile.

  She smiled back. “We’ve tried hard. But the public generally still thinks of mental health professionals as quacks or monsters.”

  “So why were all these patients released?” Louis asked.

  “Well, I’d have to put it in perspective for you.”

  Louis wasn’t sure if she was patronizing him or not. But he knew if he was going to get anything helpful from this woman, he had to appeal to her ego.

  “Your opinion could help me, Doctor,” he said.

  She leaned back in her leather chair. “I’d say you’d have to go back to the Civil War to get a clear idea of what has happened in mental health. After the war, many soldiers suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. But then, they just warehoused them in asylums so no one had to deal with them. The places were so overcrowded, doctors got desperate and went back to using restraints, shock therapy—and mass doses of opium.”

  Louis shook his head slowly.

  “By the turn of the centur y, asylums were opening up all across the country, most of them modeled after the Victorian design of a man named Thomas Kirkbride,” Dr. Seraphin went on. “He had the idea of putting th
e least disturbed patients closer to the center building to encourage interaction with the staff. But if the patients’ conditions worsened they were relocated farther away.”

  “Like in E Building,” Louis said.

  She leveled her sharp gaze at him. “You’ve seen E Building?”

  “I’ve been on the grounds.”

  “Well,” she went on, “then you know that Hidden Lake was like a small city. All the asylums like it were. They were very efficient communities with their own farms, dairies, greenhouses, transportation systems—and graveyards, of course. And most of the patients worked to support the ‘family,’ so to speak.”

  She paused, then opened a desk drawer. After a moment of rummaging through some files, she pulled out a small card and a yellowed newspaper clipping. “I kept these when I left Hidden Lake.”

  She handed them to Louis. The postcard was an old color-tinted photograph of the Hidden Lake grounds with people sitting on the grass around a lake with weeping willows in the foreground and the Victorian spires of the asylum in the background. The lettering said GREETINGS FROM HIDDEN LAKE. The newspaper clipping was from the Detroit Journal dated 1906. It was a cartoon showing a group of hobos gathered around a piano in a parlor singing. The caption said WELCOME TO HOTEL HIDDEN LAKE.

  “I don’t get it,” Louis said, looking at Dr. Seraphin.

  “Respectability,” she said with a small smile. “The postcards were sort of an early PR campaign, sent out so family and friends of the patients felt better about committing their loved ones.”

  She nodded to the clipping. “Respectability brought lots of new customers. Adult children who couldn’t cope with their aging parents would just commit them, thinking Mom or Dad would be just fine.” She let out a sigh. “And in the winter, the asylums would fill to bursting with the homeless who had nowhere else to go.”

  Louis remembered Alice’s explanation of the POGs, the “poor old guys.”

  “Many of the people in these places weren’t mentally ill at all,” Dr. Seraphin said. “But there were no real criteria for accepting or rejecting patients, so asylums became dumping grounds to just hide away anyone society didn’t want to deal with.”