Lone Wolf
Page 25
“And in the meantime, someone got into the cemetery with the victim. How? The gates would have been locked.”
“They were. But the cemetery is bounded by a three-foot fieldstone wall. The front sections of the cemetery have four feet of wrought-iron spikes for additional security, but the back sections of the cemetery are just the original wall. You can’t drive in, but you can get close, park off the street and hop right over the wall. Our perp would have done it with the victim tossed over his shoulder or in some sort of bag to disguise her. If she was unconscious and still, no one might have thought twice about it. And assuming he went in after sundown, no one would have seen him.”
“The cemetery is closed at dusk,” Brian added, “but they know sometimes people are in there when it’s closed. They rarely have any problems because of it, and if Emergency Services finds them and ask them to leave, they usually do without any fuss. But this time, nobody saw anything.”
“So he came in with the victim,” Scott said, “found an open grave by chance, dug it up, put her in, and closed it again?”
“If he scouted out the area at all, then he would get a feel for how funerals work here.” Meg looked out into the darkness away from the blinding spotlights. “He’d know where the majority of recent burials are, and he’d know this section is where most of the War on Terror burials are located. He’d know how they handle closing the graves and how often graves are unfinished at the end of the day. He could just look like a mourner coming later in the day and leaving just at closing time, but he’d be scoping out his surroundings and making plans.”
“Convenient of the grounds staff to leave that truck right there overnight.” Lauren studied the truck and the landscaping equipment protruding from the back. “Although you have to think he must have had a backup plan.”
“Any folding shovel would have done the job, but why use something like that when you have professional landscaping tools right there. It wouldn’t have taken him that long if he worked fast. And I suspect we’re looking at someone with a certain amount of strength to be able to kidnap victims and carry them around like this.”
“It took you and me, what . . . around seven or eight minutes in total?” When Meg nodded, Brian continued. “One guy, relatively strong, maybe fifteen minutes max to dig it out and less to put it back. I never noticed traces of dirt on the grass around the grave, but you were already into digging when I got there and no one cared where the dirt went except for out. Did you notice?”
“I didn’t. Hawk and I were so focused on digging, we didn’t have time to take in our surroundings in detail.” She sighed, discouragement riding heavily on the mournful sound. “Maybe we’d have more information if we had.” She sagged back against the tree trunk. “I just can’t help but feel we could have done better. But how? If we’d found the dog earlier? Solved the riddle faster? Figured out its meaning right from the start? How could we have stopped this?”
“We couldn’t.” Meg looked up sharply, but Lauren kept her voice level and calm. Lauren was always the least emotional of the group, but Meg could sense she was shaken nonetheless. “We worked as fast as we could with limited information. And when that information was inconclusive, we split up to better our chances.”
“If we’d gone for Arlington right off the bat, we might have gotten here in time.”
“You can second guess yourself through every step we took tonight, but that’s not going to bring her back.”
“Lauren’s right,” Scott agreed. “Everyone did the best they could. The only thing we can do now is figure out how to do better the next time.”
“Because there will be a next time.” Brian’s tone was grim as his eyes traveled back toward the grave where death, old and new, lay. “Whoever he is, he’s not even close to being done.”