The Ways of the Dead (11 page)

The rain started
falling.

It had started slowly, before he got to the cemetery, a cold and desultory spattering. It fogged the visor; it dripped off the back of the helmet and landed on his neck and coursed down his back. He could feel the tires spinning the water up from the road onto his thighs.

By the time he reached Everlasting Cemetery—it was a good four miles outside the Beltway, way the hell out New Hampshire Ave., the northern edge of the burbs—it had picked up to a steady downfall and he was soaked to the bone. The graveyard was off to his right, at the crest of a long, slow hill. He downshifted into first, kept the bike as quiet as possible, eased toward the back of the place, and there it was. Two cars and a hearse pulled to a stop near a green awning, a hole yawning beneath. The casket, white, was raised on the bier.

A woman in a black dress and a stylish black hat and two men in suits were getting out of the cars. They were all beneath umbrellas. Sully pulled to the roadside and switched off the engine. He pulled his feet up onto the pegs and folded his hands across the gas tank.

The woman and the two men in suits went beneath the green awning. There were only the three of them. Until he saw one of the men produce a Bible, open it, and apparently begin to read, he didn’t realize the dynamic. There was a pastor and there was a cemetery official and there was Noel’s sister and there was no one else.

“Christ almighty,” he said. It was too goddamn sad to look at.

They all stood beneath the awning for a while. Then the woman and one of the men sat in the plastic lawn chairs the cemetery had provided. The other man in the suit, who did not sit, approached the casket and apparently pressed or pulled something. The casket slowly lowered into the ground, disappearing into the red dirt. The woman dropped long-stemmed roses into the hole after it. The pastor rose and held both of her hands, facing her. They prayed for several minutes. Then their hands released. The woman sat down again. The two men remained standing.

After a while, the woman stood. The trio stepped out from under the awning and raised their umbrellas and started back toward the road and their cars.

Sully took a deep breath, cursed, and cranked the bike. He rolled downhill slowly, until he was several yards behind the last car, and stopped the bike and killed the engine. Dismounting, he took off his gloves and then his helmet and put the gloves inside the helmet and then set it down on the roadway. He unzipped his jacket and walked forward and pulled a hand back over his hair, brushing it out of his face. The rain was coming down harder now. He hated himself for being here, for intruding in this way. He made eye contact with the men first, giving them a slight nod, and then he looked at the woman in the hat.

That it was Noel Pittman’s sister was beyond question. She was tall and had the same honey-brown skin. She had high cheekbones and straightened hair and deep brown eyes. She was looking at him.

“Pardon me, everyone,” he said, taking them all in with a glance, but then looking back at her. “Ma’am? My name is Sully Carter. I’m a reporter. I’ve been trying to reach Noel Pittman’s sister. If that’s you, Ms. Bradford, I apologize for just showing up, but I believe we exchanged phone messages.”

The trio stopped, the men looking at him and then, almost at the same time, back at the woman. She regarded him blankly. One of the men started walking toward him, a serious expression crossing his face. His eyes stayed on Sully but then his focal point shifted, a small tic, the scars, always the scars.

Sully did not back up. He returned his gaze to the woman.

“I recently called the number on a flier about Noel Pittman’s disappearance. A woman called back to my newspaper, but there was some confusion, and she wound up leaving a message with a different reporter. There was a number and I called back but didn’t get an answer. I left a message. Again, if that was you, Ms. Bradford, I would like—”

The man in the dark blue suit stepped directly in front of him, no more than a foot from his nose, breaking his eye contact with the woman. He had a good seventy-five pounds and two inches on Sully; the man had girth. “This is a private service,” he said in a hushed tone. “You’re going to need to get out.”

“Cemetery gates were open, and I’m not talking to you, mister,” Sully whispered back, meeting his gaze. “If the lady doesn’t want to—”

“What does he want, Mr. Robinson?” the woman called out. She was beneath her umbrella, and she had stopped walking. The man did not take his eyes off Sully, but moved his head slightly to the right. “He says he’s a reporter. He says he called you.”

She was still standing in the grass of the cemetery, not yet on the roadway. Her heels were sinking in the mud. She looked down at her feet, then at the pastor, and then back at Sully and Mr. Robinson.

“You the one who wrote the story in today’s paper?” she said. “About how she was found? Serial killer and all that?”

“I don’t think I said—well, yes. Yes, ma’am. I wrote most of that story.”

The pastor took her elbow and helped her onto the roadway. The rain fell harder. She walked over to him, beneath her umbrella, and looked up into his eyes. Her eyes dilated slightly, he noticed, the black expanding, the brown iris turning into a thin band, and he was about to register the depth of them when she spat into his face. He said nothing, only blinked the phlegm out of his eyes. He did not wipe his face. She glared, a foot away, and then she turned and started walking back to the limousine.

Mr. Robinson reached out with his right hand, formed a point with two fingers and, smiling, tapped Sully twice on the chest. His face was a smirk, a mixture of menace and contempt, and then he turned and left.

The light changed,
a couple of cars passed, and he turned left onto Princeton Place. He toyed with parking in the alley behind Doyle’s, but went up a couple of houses, parked between two cars, lifted his helmet from his head, and walked back, his feet heavy on the pavement.

The thing he should do was follow up on Jason’s tip and try to find someone to corroborate that Sarah’s throat had been cut after she was dead, to keep the heat off Jason if there was flak about it. It put the slaying in a different light and made it, in his estimation, far less likely that the three teenagers were the killers. They might have cut her throat in a moment of panic, or loathing, or brutality, but to tack it on after she was dead seemed calculated and impersonal.

And then he leaned forward and spat in the alley before turning the corner. Chris could get his own damn scoops. What he was going to do was push this story on the trio of killings, and Lorena Bradford and her spit could drop fucking dead. She was insulted her sister might have been the victim of a serial killer? Didn’t like reading about her dancing, her nude pictures? It amazed him, what people in this country thought was insulting or intimidating or humiliating or whatever.

So now he needed to know what Doyle Goodwin had seen the night Sarah was killed, or, actually, on any others.
If
the actual killer was still out there—and the killings
were
related—then the killer had been in or around his store, probably often. Psychopaths were creatures of habit, not impulse.

He pulled open the right side of the glass double doors, the little silver bells ringing at the top as he did so. The television blared and there was Doyle’s cousin Bettie, ringing up chips and soda for a teenager. He had almost forgotten what a pain in the ass she was, the beehive hairdo from the 1960s, the shrill voice, the soap operas blaring on the television behind the counter.

Making an excuse to kill time while the lone customer left, Sully walked up and down a couple of aisles, picked up a bag of M&Ms and a ginger ale, dawdling by the magazine rack, then came up front when the store was empty, nearly having to turn his shoulders to get down the narrow aisle.

“Hey, Bettie,” he said, smiling. “Sully Carter, from the paper? From last year, remember? Good seeing you again.”

Her plump face squinched together for a moment, and she peered at him through her glasses. “Well, hi, shug,” she said. “Did somebody drop you in a swimming pool?”

“No ma’am. It’s pouring. Got caught on it on the bike.”

“Well, bless your heart, you need to run right on home and get a hot shower and a good supper.”

“That’s right where I’m headed, but I was on the way home coming down Georgia there, and saw y’all were back open, and thought I’d stop in to talk to Doyle about it for a hot second.”

“Lord have mercy, did you know I was right here when all that happened? Maybe the last person on this earth to talk to that gal?”

“That’s what—”

“Why, it was just awful. Awful. And them three Negro boys running around in here the whole time. The police, now they saying they did it, and now everybody around here thinks I told on them. But I didn’t! I didn’t say anything like that! I don’t even know their names! They just run out the front door, that’s all I told the police because that’s all I know. But now nobody wants to come in ’cause they think we told on ’em!”

Sully put his items on the counter along with a ten-dollar bill, forcing a concerned look to his face, slumping his shoulders for emphasis. “That’s terrible!”

She made change, the talk never slowing, her eyes lighting up now. “Doyle’s back there, you want to try to talk to him, but he’s not going to say anything, not at all. He’s just been so upset. The police, just banging in here, keeping us down there at the station all night asking questions.”

“I guess they wanted the video of that afternoon,” Sully said, leaning against the counter and nodding toward the small surveillance camera suspended from the ceiling behind the register.

Bettie looked straight up, without turning her head.

“Oh, hon, those things haven’t worked since Jesus wore short pants. The repairman came and wanted all sort of money to fix it. It was the second time it had busted and Doyle figured—Doyle, c’mon out here, hon! That boy from the paper is out here again!—and Doyle, he figured they were just using us for a steady account, I guess to pay for their new golf cart at they country club.”

“So you just kept the cameras?”

“That’s right. That’s just exactly right. To make these little robbers and bad people think we’re watching everything on tape. It helps, I guess. We ain’t had a problem worse than shoplifting in years. People think it’s dangerous, a store like this in a neighborhood like this, but the people like us just fine, you ask me, they just—”

“Bettie.”

They both turned to the baritone coming from the back. Doyle Goodwin stood just inside the swinging metal doors to the back room. He was wearing khakis and a starched blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled with precision to the elbows. He had a narrow, weather-beaten face, his salt-and-pepper hair cut short and brushed neatly to the side, looking like the navy man he had been. What had been his rank? Something like storekeeper? He had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with a small bit of cloth.

“Hey there, Sully,” he said, softly. “I guess Bettie’s been catching you up on our little excitement.”

Sully nodded toward Bettie and walked over to Doyle, reaching out to shake his hand, to say hello. He had forgotten that the man was only about five foot seven. His chest and shoulders filled out the shirt, though, testament to some straight-up time in the gym, that military discipline.

“She has,” Sully said. “And I’m really sorry about everything. The minute I saw where it was, the store, I remembered coming up here and talking to you.”

“Appreciate that, Sully. I do. It’s been a terrible time. A terrible thing for that family, that little girl.”

“You mind if I just ask you a question or two about it?”

Doyle paused, then nodded his head to the back. “Come on.”

He pushed open the door and retreated into the storage room. Sully followed him, past the sign on the door that read
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. The overhead lights were off. Wooden shelves closed in from both sides, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of canned goods and a pallet of soft drinks and paper towels and paper plates and toilet paper. There was a narrow toilet off to the right, the light on. Doyle’s office was at the back. It had a little sign that read
OFFICE
.

Doyle pushed the door in and took two steps and sat down behind an old steel desk, the thing looking like it weighed as much as an aircraft carrier. It had an old computer and a monitor on top of it. There were clutters of paper and what looked to be a scattering of receipts and a stack of thin black accounting ledgers. Boxes of merchandise, holding individual units of macaroni or cans of soup or packs of gum.

Sully sat down in a yellow-and-brown chair that was almost touching the front of the desk.

“You got wet,” Doyle said.

“Got caught in it when I went up to Everlasting Cemetery, out in Colesville or some damn place,” Sully said, peeling off his jacket. “Ran up there for the Noel Pittman funeral.”

Doyle settled himself in the chair and touched some papers on his desk. He gave a slight shake of the head. “God and sonny Jesus. I guess we’re in a little bit of shock. I mean, thirteen years here and nothing serious and then this. Had a drunk pull a gun one night in the store, but he was just drunk. Then we get—we get these two things in the space of a few days.”

“Bettie was saying things are really slow since you opened back up.”

“About fifty, sixty percent off, I’d say. God-awful.”

Sully paused. This was always the tricky part of interviews like this. He tried to make them conversations, but the fact was that he was extracting information, like pulling a tooth. The touch was to do it while keeping people from feeling like that was what you were doing. “So you didn’t see Sarah Reese that day, I take it?”

“Well, now wait. Are we talking to put in the newspaper? Because, I don’t mind telling you, I don’t want to spend another night at MPD going over the same damn things with detectives fifty-eight times and looking at photo arrays until three in the morning. It was the one time I regretted bringing Bettie up here.”

“Why so?”

“Well, look, she’s my aunt, you know. Lost her job at the nursing home back home—we’re from just outside of Newport News—had to be five years ago now. Some cousins called me and put me up to offering her a job. She’s been fine, if you can get past the soap operas, but she was a damned embarrassment in the police station. Screaming and hollering and crying.”

“I imagine she was pretty scared.”

“She’s thinking those guys in the store, or their friends, are going to come in and shoot us to pieces.”

“It’s not totally paranoid.”

“No, but—” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Sully could see the slight bags around the eyes, testament that he wasn’t sleeping well himself. “But there’s a way things are done. You just don’t—well. You didn’t come here to listen to family woes. What is it you wanted?”

“Just to hear a little bit more about what happened. And to find out a little more about Noel Pittman, if you know anything. It’s her I’m actually writing about.”

“Pittman? I thought this was about Sarah Reese?”

“It’s a little bit about both. And about Lana Escobar, the young woman who got killed up on the baseball field last summer.”

Doyle did not look pleased.

“Okay, that was what you wrote in the paper that’s got everybody so upset. Look. We’re barely getting by here, and this thing is bad for us, bad for the neighborhood. I can’t have the store in the paper again, not like this. Bettie might lose what’s left of her mind.”

“Off the record. Just for my information, so I’ll have a better understanding of what’s happening.”

“It’s not going to help you much. You already know Bettie was the last to see the little Reese girl alive, except for whoever killed her, I suppose. The girl got scared of the three black kids. She ran out the back door, Bettie said. We didn’t know anything until, I don’t know, half an hour later, something like that, when the police came in.”

“Did she come past you here? In the office?”

“To get to the back door, she would have had to go through that walkway we just did,” he said, and put his glasses back on. “But I can’t tell you for sure. I was at home. I open the store in the mornings, Bettie comes in from about ten till seven or so, and I come back and work until closing. In the afternoon, I go home and take a break, a siesta, have a cold beer, something. I was down there—it’s just two blocks—when I heard all sorts of sirens. I walked the first block. When I got to the top of that rise, there at Warder, I could see all the police cars were here at the store. I ran the rest of the way.”

“So you didn’t know Sarah Reese at all?”

“Never saw her, to the best of my knowledge, till they showed me her picture at the police station.”

“What about Noel Pittman?”

He shook his head. “I read your story that said she lived here on the street, between my house and the store. But I don’t remember her any which way.”

“Lana Escobar?”

“You mean the prostitute? It’s possible if she was working out there on Georgia that she came in here to pee or get warm for a minute in the winter. I let the girls do it. Cost of doing business. But no, I didn’t know anything about her.”

“Hunh. So the day Sarah Reese got killed, nothing unusual?”

“Not until the police came banging in. It got pretty unusual after that.”

“Any creepy-looking guys, or maybe not so creepy, but guys that hang around a lot?”

“Not such as I’d call creepy. The neighborhood characters, you know. Why do you ask?”

“I got an idea, maybe those three guys didn’t kill Sarah, but maybe the killings in the neighborhood are related, something like what I wrote about, but I’m pushing it hard now. Don’t know if you saw—”

“I can’t put much to that. I mean, I just don’t know. We work right here every day, and we haven’t seen anything like that, like somebody stalking or anything.”

“Could you show me that alley back there? I don’t know exactly where they found her.”

Doyle looked at him, and Sully noticed a certain exasperation. “No, I’m sorry. You’re welcome to look yourself. I go back there to throw out the trash, and I leave through that door during the middle of the day to go home. There’s a sign that says an alarm will sound, but that’s just to scare off any shoplifters who sneak back there. So that’s all I know about the alley. I can tell you the police have put a new dumpster back there. They took the old one.”

“That stands to reason, I suppose,” Sully said, standing up. This was going nowhere.

Doyle stood with him. He ran a hand through his hair, then put his hands on his hips.

“Look, Sully, I don’t mean to be abrupt. I run a business, I keep my nose clean, and I don’t get into it with the city councilman or the neighborhood commissioner. I sponsor a kid’s basketball team in the city rec league. I don’t prosecute the shoplifting. It costs me a small fortune, but I don’t. And part of that has part to do with this . . . business right here. You know this as well as I do—Bettie and me are white witnesses, or whatever, against black teenagers in a murder case involving a little white girl. We don’t have a winning hand here.”

“I can see that.”

“Okay, so can you tell me what the police are saying? Do you think these guys’ friends, associates—whatever they call them, their crew—are going to come after us?”

“No, but you’re right to be careful. I bet in this case the cops must have DNA and other stuff, to have made those arrests so quickly. I bet those guys know they’ve got bigger problems to worry about than Bettie.”

Doyle nodded. He gave a brief smile that showed, at least to Sully, that he didn’t buy a bit of it. The man was, Sully thought, rattled to the bone, in a way they can’t teach you about in the military, when you have a gun and authorization to use it. Civilian life didn’t carry those kinds of comforts.