Hal pried his eyes from the flag. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
And with that, he had gone to face his classmates, to wait for one of them to mention his father, steeling himself for the fight. There had never been a single word.
Hal jumped at the sound of his name.
“Wake up!” Roger shouted.
Hal sat up, blinked, then rubbed his eyes.
“That’s why I pace,” Hailey told Roger. “Otherwise I end up asleep.”
Hal stood and stretched. “What is it?”
“Nicholas Fredricks’s print is on the button,” Roger said.
Of course it was. They’d known it, hadn’t they? He rubbed his eyes.
“Again,” Hailey said. “We’re waiting for results from the letter.”
Just then, a bell rang from the computer.
“We’ve got a match,” Roger announced.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve won,” Hal added, trying to shake off the heaviness he always felt thinking about his father.
Hailey made room for him behind Roger’s chair, and they stared at the computer screen where a small hourglass emptied and filled and emptied again.
“Come on,” Hailey whispered.
The screen went black and a name appeared in bold, white letters.
Roger clapped. “Well, look at that. It’s your dead guy again.”
Hal stepped back. Hailey cursed.
The screen read “Nicholas A. Fredricks.”
Nothing. Again. Hailey was hoping for a new lead. “Guess we’re going to be digging up a dead guy today. I better go change my clothes.”
Hailey closed her eyes with the look of someone considering the possibility of not opening them again.
Hal knew exactly how she felt.
They needed a break in this case.
Chapter 5
Hal drove toward the cemetery while Hailey sat beside him, silent. They had reviewed the case that morning, but there was nothing new to go on. Dwayne Carson was still being held at the station. There was no word from his attorney, Martin Abbott—if Abbott was really his attorney.
Officer Shakley remained in critical condition from yesterday’s gunshot. The dead gunrunner had been identified as Jeremy Hayden. The records department was running a full background check on known associates.
As Hal turned in through the cemetery gates, Hailey struggled to focus on something that felt so distant, so far in the past. Abby and Hank Dennig had died fourteen months ago. Hailey could still picture Tom Rittenberg with his cane at John’s funeral, a gentle giant moving through the services. It was obvious that his grief was still raw. She had interviewed him in the course of the investigation, and he’d been earnest and forthright, anxious to help. More than a year later, they still had nothing. She owed him some answers.
When Hailey thought of the Dennig murders, she thought of John. Their deaths had happened so close together. Hailey thought about the Dennigs’ orphaned girls. Where were those girls now? Who took care of them?
At least Hailey’s girls had Liz and Jim. The Dennigs’ kids had their grandfather. She hoped Tom Rittenberg would make sure they were cared for.
At their morning department meeting, Captain Marshall had been relatively quiet. That was never good news. Usually, he started meetings with a little banter, shooting the shit about the game the night before.
Not today.
This morning, Marshall made sure to remind the team that closing the case had been Hailey’s error, one that he was giving her a chance to fix. He also expressed that the case belonged to her and Hal. At the conclusion of the meeting, Marshall held her and Hal back. “I don’t think anyone needs to know about Senator Wyatt.”
Hailey and Hal reviewed the case file on Nicholas Fredricks, starting with his emigration from Germany when he was fourteen. He was an average student in Brooklyn and had no formal education past high school. Other than an arrest in 1970 for the use of explosives during a riot against gun maker Smith & Wesson, he had a clean record. When the police couldn’t prove the explosive device belonged to Fredricks, the case was dropped.
Fredricks spent his early adult career working in the administrative offices at the New York City Police Department. According to the records, he quit abruptly after about fifteen months, just ten days after a veteran NYPD officer shot a sixteen-year-old black kid on a school playground. The officer claimed he had drawn a weapon, but no weapon was ever found on the scene. He then moved to Washington to work for a liberal senator of New Hampshire.
Fredricks’s involvement in the riot against Smith & Wesson linked him loosely to one of the other victims, Colby Wesson, although Wesson didn’t join the family business until after Fredricks was killed. But even if Fredricks and Colby Wesson had crossed paths somehow, the two would have been opponents. How did it make sense that they would be victims of the same killer?
As always, that was where both Hal and Hailey got stumped. And the Fredricks case file, after twelve years, was as cold as they came.
The inspectors who had originally handled the case were both retired now, and neither remembered anything noteworthy. They spoke to two witnesses in the days following the shooting, both residents of the street where Fredricks died. One man said he saw a black man shoot the victim. The other said it was a couple of young white kids.
The houses on the street where Fredricks was killed were all set up from the street, like Jim and Liz’s. One of the witnesses lived in a house that was twenty-six steps off the sidewalks. She had been looking out her bedroom window on the second floor. The other was working in his study, which was on the third floor of his home. Both were over sixty and admitted to being nearsighted.
In terms of potential eyewitnesses, Fredricks couldn’t have met death on a worse street. Not to mention that he died before the days where everything was filmed—no traffic cameras, no bystanders with their cell phones recording.
And the investigators hadn’t gotten anywhere with Fredricks’s clients either. They had searched his recent correspondence, interviewed a number of the politicians and their staff. There was no evidence that anyone had a beef with Fredricks. One politician, one of his opponents, had been quoted in the murder file. “Nick knew the rules of the game and he played it well. Even if you didn’t agree with him, you respected the way he thought.”
Hailey had a call into the New York Police Department to ask about the circumstances of Fredricks’s abrupt departure from his job, but she wasn’t hopeful.
Hal parked against the curb and turned to her. “You ready?”
She nodded, fingering the albuterol inhaler in her pocket. Exhumations were never pretty, but this one was unavoidable. When a corpse left fingerprints at crime scenes, it never hurt to check out the casket. Was the body even in there? Or did the killer have a stash of old anti-NRA buttons with Fredricks’s prints on them? They were about to find out.
Through the windshield, a hill in the distance rose like a phantom through the fog, tombstones standing on its rise like little gray soldiers. When she stepped outside the car, the smell of wet grass and musty, turned earth filled her lungs.
Together they crossed the wet cemetery grass to join the three men from the crime scene unit who were disinterring the body. Hailey recognized two of the three, though she didn’t know either well. On the far side of the gravesite, Shelby Tate was working at the back of the unit’s van, probably readying their kits for evidence collection.
Fredricks’s headstone, a simple rectangle made of granite, lay off to the side. Its inscription offered no clue as to who might have paid for it. The etching, in simple, clean script, said only his full name: Nicholas Adam Fredricks, and the dates of his life: November 19, 1951 to April 2, 2004.
He had lived to be fifty-three. John had only made it to thirty-four. What would those nineteen years have brought them? Would John have gone into politics? Would their marriage have survived that?
Hailey picked up one of the shovels from a stack and helped dig. Her efforts were awkward,
the shovel nearly as tall as she was, but she didn’t stop. There was something soothing about the continuous motion.
For those moments, she could stop thinking. This was why people ran. She needed to get more exercise. John had always run. She hated running.
Beside her, Hal stopped shoveling. “Hailey?”
“What?”
“Uh, we might be quicker if you don’t help. No offense—”
She returned the shovel to the stack and stood in the grass, stomping her feet to stay warm. The ME, Shelby Tate, was still occupied at the van.
Hailey’s cell phone rang. Bruce. She didn’t answer.
A few minutes later, her cell rang, unanswered again.
Surrounded by the cemetery’s cold, dank smell, Hailey felt John’s presence, the way she sometimes did when the house was perfectly still, the only sound a lonely creak from inside the old walls or a car passing on the road below. She lay in bed silent and unmoving, focusing on the sounds and searching out a rhythm, like a Morse code she could translate if she listened hard enough.
She had promised to call Bruce, but the last twenty-four hours had been nuts, and standing in the cemetery—so close to where John was buried—Hailey couldn’t bring herself to phone him.
As the men dug, she felt as though she was holding her breath. The exhumation of Fredricks’s body would inevitably cause a renewed media storm around the murders. If this dig didn’t lead them to any usable evidence, Tom Rittenberg and his family would have to relive the Dennigs’ deaths without the investigation team gaining a damn thing.
The wind lashed its icy hand across her neck. For several minutes, she didn’t move, allowing the dampness to seep into her bones. It was oddly comforting, the cold numbness.
Across the lawn, the massive tires of a backhoe dug into the gravesite, while mud squished through the tread like the innards of thousands of earthworms. They were supposed to have help from the cemetery, but the cemetery’s workers were busy digging new graves and had no time to help the police dig up an old one.
The men shoveled in rhythm, each digging his corner of the plot, the dirt making whooshing sounds as it slid off the shovels and landed with a crunch, striking the cold grass.
Whoosh crunch, whoosh crunch.
No bodies were buried in San Francisco County—the land was too valuable to hold the dead, though it still produced them. Instead, the bodies came to Colma. About ten miles south of San Francisco, Colma was a city of cemeteries—one after the other, and new ones going up all the time.
Dead people were a rising commodity in San Francisco.
Hailey was all too aware of the number of murders in her city. So far, this year’s homicide rate was the highest in a decade, and gangs were primarily to blame. The increase made life in Homicide busier and more stressful. The spotlight burned hot on them to solve the murders the moment they happened.
The guys on CSI did it, why not SFPD?
There was nothing unusual about the gun dealer they’d found dead in the closet. His rap sheet was standard for guys like him. So Hailey had focused on the white guy who’d gotten away. She sat with a police artist to create a composite, but she didn’t think the image would yield any suspects. He was too far away, her glance too quick. All Hailey saw was white skin and a brownish red beard. At best, she was narrowing it down to a white man, but the suspect could have been a woman in disguise.
Her cell phone buzzed and she pulled it from her pocket with stiff, frozen fingers, her teeth chattering slightly as she answered. “Wyatt.”
“I want to see you this week. No excuses.”
Hailey shoved her hand into her pocket and fingered her inhaler. “Okay. Maybe a drink tonight.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“At my house?” he asked.
She pictured Bruce’s house, as it had been the few times she’d been there since John died. The black leather Danish couch, a steel coffee table, a geometric-patterned rug, and two large pieces of modern art. Everything was always in its place, so totally opposite of her own home. For the first six months, Hailey hadn’t allowed herself in. They talked on the phone often—sometimes two or three times a day—but she’d refused to visit. Worse, Hailey was unable to express her worst fear—the one that was ridiculous when she thought of saying it out loud.
Hailey worried John would see them.
Then, two months ago, Jim and Liz had taken the girls to their home in Sea Ranch for a long weekend, and Hailey had stayed to work. Bruce and Hailey had met up for a drink at Bix, a bar not far from his house. It was the first time they’d met in public—ever—though it no longer mattered.
Hailey was a widow. Even if people thought it was early for dating, surely a drink with a man wasn’t a cardinal sin. And the chances of running into anyone from the department were close to nil. Bix wasn’t a police bar. Too fancy, too far from the department. They had ended up spending the night at his house, two nights in a row, and she hadn’t been back since.
“Hailey?” he pressed.
“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” Just then a shovel struck the casket with a loud thwack. “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I’m back in the department.” Hailey paused, about to hang up. “Still there?”
“Yeah.”
“I think your house will be okay.” As she hung up, though, she had no idea why she had said that. Lifting the evidence kit off the wet grass, she moved toward the hole as the men cleared the dirt off the coffin.
“Move back, boys,” the cemetery guy yelled and Hal and the others stepped away from the hole. He joined her at the periphery as the worker brushed his hands off on gray overalls and climbed back into the forklift. They watched as he maneuvered the machine with ease, lowered it into the ground and after a few jerky motions, returned to the surface with the casket, setting it gently on the damp grass. She stepped forward, snapping latex gloves over her icy hands before pulling the camera from her evidence bag and aiming it at the casket, a solid deep brown box with elegant curves.
Hal whistled. “Look at that beauty.”
“You know something about caskets?”
“I know mahogany. We priced it when Dad died. No way I could afford that. I bet not many folks could.”
Hailey stared at the wood, picturing John’s casket. She’d never considered the cost of it. It was just another thing Jim had managed. “I wonder who paid for this.”
“Good question.”
Hal reached forward to unlatch the box but stopped when the cemetery worker jumped out of the forklift. “Hang on,” he shouted, pulling a cell phone from his pocket and punched. “The director’s coming out. He needs to be here when we open it.”
“Then he should’ve been here,” Hailey said.
“He’s real busy. We’ve got six burials today.”
“We’re pretty busy too,” Hal said.
A long black town car parked at the curb a few minutes later. A man in a dark suit stepped out of the driver’s side. Though he wasn’t much taller than five-ten, he had to weigh north of two-fifty.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Dubavich. I truly am,” he said, talking into a tiny phone held in his pink, fleshy hand. “I am available for whatever you need.” He nodded without looking up. “Yes, absolutely. I think Lipetsky Brothers do a wonderful job. I am certain that’s the right choice.” He waited, nodded, stopping just feet from them. Hailey started toward him, but he put a hand up to stop her. Hal arrived beside her and the director gave him a quick glance before putting up a single finger and adding a forced smile, as though to plead with Hal not to strike him. “Yes, Mrs. Dubavich. I will call you tomorrow morning to make the final arrangements. Good-bye, then.” He slid the phone into his inside coat pocket and looked up, scanning Hal and the other men before settling his gaze on her.
“I’m Inspector Hailey Wyatt. We spoke earlier. This is my partner, Inspector Hal Harris.”
“Hailey and Hal,” he said, drawing out the words. “Department a
lliteration. How fun.” His lips formed a tight knot, and one brow arched into an unnatural point.
Hal and Hailey exchanged a glance, but the director paid them no attention. He smiled, lips only, a show of politeness from someone studied in the art of dealing with unhappy people, then nodded to his employee. “Go ahead, Miguel.”
Miguel hesitated just slightly before reaching for the lid.
“Whoa,” Hal interrupted. “We need to do that.”
Handing the camera to Hal, Hailey stepped forward and held up her gloved hands. “If I may.”
Miguel looked to the director, who nodded. “Of course.”
As Hailey lifted the lid of the casket, the hinges keened like a cornered cat.
The director let his breath out, blowing the bitter smell of onions and something spicy, like sausage or pepperoni, over her shoulder. “See,” he said. “It’s just as I thought. Totally undisturbed.” He turned to Miguel. “Let’s get it back in the ground.”
“Not so fast,” Hailey said. From the corner of her eye, she saw Hal give the director a sideways glance that said as plainly as words that he should stay out of Hailey’s way. The inside of the mahogany casket was covered in heavily padded walls of off-white satin, small buttons adorning the spots where the fabric was attached to the wood with perfect pleats. Spores of mold covered the surface.
“The mold is all quite normal,” the director said.
It was true. In Homicide, Hailey had seen plenty of mold on bodies, buried or not. The casket was still in good condition, as was Fredricks’s corpse. Though the layers of fat had deteriorated, Fredricks’s skin remained undamaged. The result was that the skull appeared to be covered in thin, tanned leather, and the eyeballs protruded like smooth golf balls, still in their sockets. The almost transparent eyelid lay like a sheet of wax paper molded over them. Bits of greenish-gray mold encircled his mouth and the lower edges of his eyes. Hailey had seen corpses only hours old in much worse condition. The corpse was still there, which meant there was still the question of how Fredricks’ fingerprint ended up on those buttons, but seeing the casket and the embalming raised a new set of questions.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 35