by DB Gilles
Perry frowned. He suddenly looked angry. “Then why the hell did her parents file a missing person report if she sent notes to them and you?”
“Her mother didn't think it was like Alyssa to just take off.”
“Is that how you felt?”
“No. She hated Dankworth. Didn't get along with her father. Couldn't stand the college she went to. All the while we went out she talked about getting out of Dankworth.”
Perry frowned again. “Then why did her leaving come as a surprise to you?”
“It didn't. I mean it did... but not really... ”
“What the hell are trying to say, Del? So far, you're painting a picture of a girl who wasn't especially happy living in our fair town, wasn't looking forward to going back to college, didn't have a happy home life, and had just ended her summer romance. Why would she stick around? She said to hell with everything and everyone and took off.” He looked at Quilla. “Does that make sense to you or am I missing something?”
Quilla was speechless. I think she was so surprised that Perry had asked for her opinion, she couldn't talk. “I, uh,” she stammered. “But you're leaving one thing out. Something Del said on the way over here. Alyssa broke up with Del. He hadn't spoken to her in three weeks. In her mind, the relationship was over.” She looked at me. “But like you said, Del: why would she send you a good-bye note, apologizing for leaving so suddenly? She didn't owe you an apology. She didn't owe you anything. If I dumped a guy there's no way I'd send him a fucking postcard.” Quilla bit her lower lip and seemed to be thinking, formulating the words she wanted to use, making sure she got the phrasing right. “What if the killer didn't know that Del and Alyssa broke up?”
Perry was expressionless. I wondered where Quilla was going with this.
“And because the killer thinks Del and Alyssa are still a couple,” said Quilla. “He sends Del a note, figuring that the brief message will make Del not be suspicious.”
“But Del was suspicious,” said Perry.
“Not at first,” said Quilla. As she spoke, she turned her head back and forth between Perry and myself. “Even though they'd broken up, Del was still in love with her, so he probably wasn't thinking straight. The chick who dumps him suddenly sends him a note? It gives him hope. And there's nothing like hope when you've been dumped by someone you still love. I think Del was so blinded by hope that he couldn't let himself believe that something bad had happened to Alyssa. A note and then a postcard a few months later and he was in limbo.”
“Postcard?” said Perry.
“I got a postcard six months later. So did her parents.”
“So why would he think Alyssa was missing or some kind of crime victim?” said Quilla.
Perry looked at me. “But now, after all these years, you've decided she was murdered?”
I took a second to answer. “Yes.”
“And all because of this theory about the same guy killing her Aunt and Thistle's wife?”
“It's the most logical explanation I've heard so far to explain the disappearances.”
“Three women vanish in the course of twenty-four years,” said Perry. “Twenty-four years! You call that a pattern?”
Quilla and I looked at each other. In her eyes I could see her saying, “See, I told you so.”
“If a woman disappeared every year or every two years or even every five years for twenty-four years, then I could see a pattern,” said Perry. “But not three disappearances spread out over two-and-a-half decades.”
“We don't know that there weren't more,” I said. “How do you know that some of those missing people who never came back weren't murdered by whoever killed her Aunt?” Perry said nothing. “And how do you know that the killer only took women from Dankworth? If every police department around here gets as many missing person reports as you, there could be dozens of names of girls who never were heard from again.”
Perry pointed at his computer. “Any serious missing person report gets bumped onto the network. I might be able to give this more credence if there were more to the pattern than the three women over twenty-four years.”
“Whattya mean?” said Quilla.
“What were the ages of the three women?” he asked.
“Quilla's Aunt was nineteen,” I said. “Alyssa was nineteen. And I'm not sure how old Virginia Thistle was.” I turned to Quilla. “Do you know how old Gretchen's mother was when she disappeared?”
Quilla hesitated, her face flushed. Begrudgingly she said, “I don't know.”
“Let's check,” said Perry. He punched in a couple of keys on his computer. “We keep the closed cases in one file, active in another. I can understand how you might come up with ideas on who might've killed your Aunt. But rather than waste time trying to tie her death to an obscure case that's officially been closed for nearly a quarter of a century, you'd be better off concentrating on remembering who your Aunt associated with before she
disappeared. Here we are. Virginia Thistle was thirty-two years old at the time of her murder. Two nineteen-year-olds and a thirty-two-year-old doesn't sound like much of a pattern to me.” He leaned back. “Let's let the Thistle case rest in peace and concentrate on Brandy Parker.”
“What about the Alyssa Kirkland case?” said Quilla.
“There is no Alyssa Kirkland case,” said Perry.
“Can't you start an investigation now?” said Quilla.
“On whose complaint?” he said.
“Mine,” I snapped.
“An ex-boyfriend this long after the fact, filing a complaint?” said Perry. “With nothing except a remote hunch.”
“You're a policeman,” said Quilla. “Are you telling me that if a person tells you that someone might've been a crime victim you're not going to at least check into it?”
“If it's within reason, sure. Based on what's in the Alyssa Kirkland file, nothing happened.” He looked at me. “Del, I'm sorry to hear about this long lost love of yours, but you can't expect to come in here fifteen years after she gave you your walking papers and want me to suddenly believe she's a murder victim.” He glanced at his watch. “I don't want to hear anymore about things that happened so long ago. It's gonna be hard enough for me to solve a murder that took place nine years ago.” He turned to Quilla. “The way I understand it, the purpose of this meeting was for you to tell me everything you know or remember about your Aunt. That's what I want to talk about. Nothing else.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the cardboard box setting on the floor next to Quilla's chair. “What's in there?”
“Some personal things from my Aunt you should check.”
“Let's take a look,” Perry said.
With a frown Quilla picked up the box and set it on Perry's desk. She removed the items one at a time, setting them on the desk. Four photo albums overflowing with pictures, a calendar of the year Brandy Parker disappeared, five notebooks and a cigar box filled with knickknacks.
“There's a lot of information here,” said Quilla. She picked up the notebooks. “These have her thoughts and feelings about things. It'll take you a while to read them.”
“I'll go over every line, believe me,” Perry said. “But what can you tell me about your Aunt that only you know?”
Quilla paused for a few moments, clearly unsure of where to begin. “Well...it's like...I...”
“Tell him what you told me,” I said.
She looked at me, confused.
“About your Aunt and cemeteries,” I said.
She turned to Perry. “My Aunt was a cemetery buff.”
Perry looked at me, then back at Quilla. “You know that for sure?”
“I remember her talking about it. I didn't understand what she meant because I was little and didn't really understand cemeteries. She only started doing it near the time before she... near the end.”
Perry considered Quilla's remark for a moment, then said, “This is good. Okay. What else?”
“You gotta understand that I was so young when I knew my Aunt
... I didn't understand... sex. So when she would say things to me about guys, I didn't really know what she was talking about. But, after I started to read the stuff she wrote in her notebooks I was able to put things together. I think my Aunt really got screwed over by boys her age. I think she started to go out with older guys. Father figures. See, my grandfather, my Aunt's and my mother's father, was a real dork. When he died, nobody really cared. Not even my grandmother. And from what I've been able to piece together, he and Aunt Brandy didn't get along. IIf I had to take a guess, whoever killed her might've been some older guy who she thought would treat her nice.”
“An older guy who might've also been a cemetery buff? Is that possible?” said Perry.
I shrugged. “Why not?”
Perry scribbled something down on a piece of paper, then said, “Do you think it's possible that this 'older' man you think she might've been seeing is the one who introduced her to being interested in cemeteries?”
“There's no way I could know that. Until Del mentioned the words cemetery buff I never even knew such a thing had a name.”
“Anything else I should know?” said Perry.
Quilla thought for a few seconds. “No.”
“Let's see if I get any info from your Aunt's things, then we'll talk again.”
“Alright,” said Quilla.
“Del,” said Perry. “I need to talk to you for a second. Quilla, why don't you wait out front with Greg?”
“Why should I be left out?”
“I need to ask Del about another matter.”
Clearly not believing Perry, Quilla blurted a suspicious, “Okay,” glared at me and walked out.
I looked at Perry as he began removing the possessions of Brandy Parker from the box.
“Who came up with this crap about three murders?” he said, lifting out a thick photo album. “Her or you?”
“Both of us.”
“I get the feeling you think that little shit's a good kid.”
“She is. She's troubled, but she's okay. She's honest and sincere.”
“This idea about Kyle Thistle's wife and your girlfriend is so off the wall I'm not even gonna consider it.” He pulled out Brandy Parker's notebook. “But what I will consider is what the kid said about her Aunt being a cemetery buff. I don't know what it is about that, but ever since you mentioned it the day we found the body I've been haunted by it. I've felt that somewhere in it was the clue I need. And now that she says her Aunt was one, it places the victim in the cemetery.”
“She could've been killed somewhere else and brought to the mausoleum.”
“Or she could've been doing whatever cemetery buffs do, checking out a tombstone and the killer could've snuck behind her, killed her and hid her in the mausoleum. So I have to ask myself if the killer was a cemetery buff or not. And if he was... was he there with her, you know, like, on a date or something? Or was he just a stranger who popped into a cemetery to look at old tombstones and who saw Brandy Parker and maybe he knew who she was from her wild nights in bars... and maybe he thought she was sexy because she was wearing that tight 'I'm A Virgin Islander' T-shirt...and let's face it, she was a babe. Only problem with this line of thought is what you said about the graves where she was hidden.”
“Whattya mean?”
“Nobody goes there to visit.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “We made a list of all the names on the headstones near the mausoleum.” I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the pieces of paper on which we'd written down the names and handed them to Perry. “We figured that maybe one of the names on the headstones might be the ancestor of the killer.”
“And?” said Perry as he picked up the sheets of paper and glanced at them without much interest.
“The idea being that even though it's a low traffic area populated with graves of people whose relatives and friends are long since dead, perhaps the killer happened to be paying his respects nine years ago and... ”
Perry shrugged and tossed the list of names onto his desk dismissively. “I'm way ahead of you. I had Greg and Wendell check out all the names on those tombstones plus the dates that the people died and not a one was after Nineteen-twenty. I don't know exactly how many years make up a generation, but let's say it's twenty, twenty-five. That means nearly five generations of people have lived and died since the last person was buried in that Section. And your theory is that the average person won't visit a grave beyond his parents and grandparents.” He leaned forward and picked up the names again. “So these are all bullshit.”
What Perry said made sense, but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I agreed with him.
“Then what's your theory, Perry?”
“Try this on for size. Two perfect strangers, cemetery buffs, encounter each other over a grave. They fall into conversation. Maybe they actually hit it off because they've found this weird common bond. They spend time together, checking out old graves and maybe this is the first girl the guy's ever met who had the same fascination with cemeteries as him. The guy hits on her, but she doesn't want to. She screams. The guy panics. He didn't want any trouble. He just thought he was gonna get lucky with this sexy fellow cemetery buff. She won’t stop screaming so the guy grabs her a little too hard and he doesn't mean to hurt her. He just wants her to stop screaming. He puts his hand on her mouth and she's struggling because she's still scared and before you know it they're on the ground and she hits her head on an old headstone and she's dead. It's not like the guy planned on it. It was an accident. If only she had stopped screaming. You think that could've happened, Del?”
“It's possible,” I said.
“Now, the killer has a problem. Does he call the cops and tell them what happened? Hell no. He's a decent guy. Just has a strange hobby. It's not like he came there to kill anyone. But he knows that if he calls the police and tells them the truth they might not believe him. He might be arrested. Have to go to jail. Get a lawyer. Go to trial. Maybe he's poor. Can't hire a good attorney. Maybe he has a nice career going for himself. He's watched enough TV and movies to know there might be some ambitious District Attorney who wants to nail him because it's an election year or something. Our boy knows his ass is grass if he does the right thing and reports what happened. So he thinks, ‘If I hide the body, nobody will know what happened.’ And since he's a cemetery buff he figures he'll stash the body in a place that wouldn't have a lot of people paying respects, so he looks for an old, out of the way mausoleum, breaks in, hides the body, seals it back up and he's gone. And he figures the odds are in his favor that the body'll never be found. And for nine years he guessed right. Bastard never figured that some teenagers would spoil his perfect crime.”
He looked to me as if he wanted my approval.
“You're assuming she was murdered there. If she was killed somewhere else and brought to the cemetery it changes your theory completely.”
“That's another scenario. All I can work with is something that sounds logical. What I just said sounds possible. But just to show you I can be open minded, let's call mine Theory One. Now let's talk about Theory Two. Del's theory--that she was killed somewhere else. I'll make this quick, because it's real simple. For argument's sake, let's forget about the fact that Brandy Parker was a cemetery buff. Let's say that on the day she was killed she picked up a guy in a bar. They went somewhere to do the dirty deed. For whatever reason, things get out of hand, and for whatever reason, he kills her. It's late at night. Again, let's assume the killer didn't plan on killing her. It just happened. Just like our guy in Theory One, he has to decide whether or not to call the police. He says no way. He has to hide the body. Now this guy's a cemetery buff. He figures he'll take his chances and hide the body in the mausoleum. Bingo! That's how she could've been strangled somewhere else and then brought to the cemetery.”
“You're pretty much basing everything on the idea that the killer's a cemetery buff.”
“Has to be. Or like I said to you the day we found the bo
dy it's somebody who knows that cemetery inside and out.” Perry turned back to the computer, punched a couple of keys and watched as something came onto the screen. He pressed the Print button and in seconds out came a sheet of paper.
“I made of list of the employees of Elm Grove, your Funeral Home and DiGregorio's. There's a grand total of nineteen people, including you. Take a look.” He handed the sheet of paper to me. I read the list of names.
Elm Grove Cemetery
Inside
Mel Abernathy (Manager)
George Granger (salesman)
Joanne Linley (bookkeeper)
Patricia Aimes (secretary)
Outside
Alton Held (Head Groundskeeper)
Vaughn Larkin (Night Watchman)
Will Polk (Gravedigger)
Nat Jaspers (Gravedigger)
Tim Wallach (Gravedigger)
Henderson’s Funeral Home
Del Coltrane (FD)
Lew Henderson (FD)
Clint Tristler
Nolan Fowler (Embalmer)
Elaine Whorley (Hair)
Digregorio'S Funeral Home
Tyler DiGregorio (FD)
Alphonse DiGregorio (FD)
Wilton Ging (Embalmer)
Elaine Whorley (Hair)
“Why do you have Vaughn's name on the list?” I asked.
“Don't get your balls in an uproar. I just put his name there when I listed all the cemetery employees. Far as I'm concerned, Vaughn's the only person in this town who's above suspicion. What about the other names? You know them all. Does any strike you as having a dark side?”
I looked at the names. Precisely because I did know them all I didn't put much stock in the idea that one was a killer, but as I stared at the names one thing began to alarm me. If the killer was someone on the list, it meant that I knew him. And despite Perry's refusal to consider the possibility that Brandy Parker had been murdered by the same person who killed Virginia Thistle and Alyssa, if the killer was on that list, it meant that someone I knew had killed the only woman I'd ever love.