“Terrible thing about Bunner,” Harris said.
“Terrible,” Adam echoed. The orderly, Ben, gave Adam a thumbs up, meaning he’d wait with her until they were ready, not just leave her in the hall. Nice of him. They wheeled the gumey in, the doors closed, and Adam thought, Good luck, Ellen... good luck.
“You going to the funeral?” Harris asked.
“Sure.”
It would be his first chance to get a look at the lieutenant.
Adam stood at the head of the main aisle of Krane’s Funeral Parlor’s Rose Room. The carpet was rose, the wallpaper had roses on it, the vinyl seats of the wooden folding chairs were pink. The funeral was scheduled for 1:00, and it was only 12:30, but the room was crowded. Ken Nevins sat in the back row with his homely wife with the luminous gray eyes next to him. Adam remembered her from that blood-soaked night in the ER when Ken had slashed his arms to the bone.
She looked worried; Ken looked devastated. He’d lost his doctor and friend, the most competent partisan he’d probably ever have. But he knew the secret, could tell the next doctor, and the repetition would begin. It wasn’t your fault, you were only seven. It wasn’t your fault, you tried to save her. It wasn’t your fault, no one could have done more...
It wasn’t your fault would become Ken’s mantra and maybe by this time next year he’d start to believe it, thanks to her.
Adam watched Ken a moment, then looked around for a likely police lieutenant. Silly to think he could spot him just by looking, and he’d probably wind up asking El Harris, who knew everyone in town, but he looked anyway. No one in the line in front waiting to pay their respects to the family looked right. He went along the back, then down a side aisle, and spotted a dark man talking to a tall blond Adam recognized from news photos as Rich Kramer, chief of the Glenvale police. The other man was short and skinny, his cheap suit puckered at the seams, and there was a bulge at his belt line that could be a gun. He looked like a cop, was talking to another cop, and Adam hoped he was the one, because he didn’t look very prepossessing.
Adam went down the main aisle to the end of the condolers’ line.
The coffin was covered with white roses, lilies, and little waxy things Adam didn’t know the name for. It was closed because no embalmer’s art could repair what the Python had done to Bunner’s face. It had been, hands down, the most repulsive thing Adam had ever seen, and that included a pelvic exenteration he’d been roped into watching at Boston General. He had expected a small neat hole in the forehead and a mess in the back, but gases in the slug must have expanded under the skin; Bunner’s face had disintegrated before his eyes like burning film, and the back of his head had blown out and hit the windowpane with a hard, moist smack, like wet clay slapped on a potter’s wheel.
Adam had thought it was over and he was looking at the worst of it, then one of Bunner’s eyes had given a sudden twist and popped out on the end of a quivering stalk.
Adam got in line and looked down the row to where Mary Bunner and her sons sat. At last Christmas’s staff party, she’d been big, pretty, and much younger-looking than the forty-something she must be. Now she looked like a crackle-glazed figurine of a woman of seventy. Her face had fallen in and her blond hair, which had been shining with health, hung lankly under a black straw hat with a veil. The veil had come down and hung in a slant across her forehead, giving her a rakish look she’d never intended. But no one told her so she could tuck it back up.
Adam’s turn came and he stood before her, aware of Bunner’s flower-covered coffin behind him; it’d probably be years before Mary Bunner could stand the smell of flowers.
He didn’t take her hand or touch her because she must be sick of people kissing, clutching, and crying over her, then going home to their intact families when it was over.
He introduced himself and said how sorry he was. He tried to look into her eyes to see if he’d respond to her misery, but the crooked veil distracted him, and the hoarse whisper of her voice when she thanked him for coming sounded distant as he stared at the black dotted veil.
The kids looked as dazed as their mother. They wouldn’t care who he was or what he had to say, and he bypassed them and stopped at an elderly couple, whose skin looked like hide from too much sun. Probably on a golf course in Arizona or Florida. He knew Bunner’s folks were dead; these must be his in-laws. Adam made his short, neutral speech, then shook their liver-spotted hands and passed on to the side aisle.
The short, dark, lieutenant-candidate was in the condolers’ line and Adam sidled into the second row behind Mary and took a seat directly in back of her. By leaning forward as if the chair bothered his back he could hear what people said to her.
The short dark one’s turn came, and he made a short, very stiff little speech that didn’t sound like it came from a family friend. But maybe he’d been one of those childhood buddies who hadn’t fit in with Bunner’s adult life and they got together only sporadically, just the two of them. The possible lieutenant finished speaking, moved on a couple of paces, then came back.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bunner, but I gotta say this.”
Her hat tilted back as she raised her head.
“We’re gonna get this guy,” he said. “We’ve got leads and we’re gonna get him.”
That was crap, Adam thought. They had zilch. His luck had been phenomenal; he’d even found the spent slug in the parking lot, had actually stepped on it as he unlocked the LTD. It was now buried in a patch of soft earth on the state land across from his house and he doubted he could find it himself.
“I swear, we’re gonna get him,” the small dark man said.
Mary Bunner’s voice sounded like an old hinge. “I’m sure you will, Sergeant... and thank you.”
Sergeant, not lieutenant. He’d picked the wrong man and would have to find an innocent sounding reason to ask El Harris who the lieutenant was.
The line petered out; loudspeakers close to the ceiling crackled softly and “Sheep May Safely Graze” came through them. A nice selection.
He’d tell Harris that he’d read about the lieutenant in the papers and wondered if cops came to victims’ funerals. But that was too convoluted.
A man in a dark gray suit and a shirt so starched it looked like cardboard moved away the door stops with the toe of his shiny black shoe, and the doors started to swing shut.
He’d tell Harris that Bunner had mentioned David Latovsky and Adam wondered who he was. That was better.
The doors met, then swung in again, and a huge man came in with a girl about twelve. He said something to the man in gray, then took the girl’s hand and went down the main aisle to the front. He took the empty seat next to Mary, and the boys made room for the girl between them and their grandparents. Mary raised her head to look up at the man, who must be six four or better, and she started to cry for the first time since Adam had come in.
The man tucked the sagging veil behind the hat brim, and Mary sobbed. “We’re at his funeral. Oh, Dave, I can’t believe we’re at his funeral.”
Dave, as in David Latovsky.
“In the sure and certain hope...”
Adam watched Latovsky from across the pit they’d dug for Bunner. They’d put up an awning in case of rain, but the sky was clear blue, with little puffs of clouds, and enough wind to bend the heads of the daffodils around the grounds and keep the flies away.
The coffin sat in slats over the grave. Two men wearing greens came forward and slid the slats away as the pallbearers, Latovsky among them, grasped the straps on the coffin and started easing it into the ground.