Tell us who did all this killing,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Tell us how you want forgiveness,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
You don’t know we’ve got a witness,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la,
Talk to us, you’ve nothing to lose,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Why is blood upon your gym shoes?
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Want to make a good impression?
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
Make yourself a fast confession,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!
– Homicide unit Christmas song
Mostly for his own amusement, Donald Waltemeyer watches Mark Cohen watching the hole get deeper. The process-such as it is-consists of two distinct stages and Cohen’s disposition changes noticeably between the two. The first four feet with the backhoe are quick and painless, and Cohen barely squirms; the next eighteen inches require hand shovels, and Waltemeyer sees the lawyer’s face crease with something more than expectation.
Pale and wire-thin, with spectacles and curly blond locks, Cohen looks like an innocent straight man standing next to the side of beef that is Waltemeyer, a professorial, three-piece Hardy propped up beside a muscular, working-class Laurel. Cohen is a good man, among the best of the city prosecutors, and Waltemeyer can’t think of a better trial attorney for the sprawling colossus that began as the Geraldine Parrish murder-for-hire case. But Cohen is a lawyer, not a cop, and as the shovels work deeper into clay, he begins to look less and less comfortable. Mercifully, Waltemeyer gives him his out.
“Kinda cold out here,” the detective says.
“Sure is,” agrees Cohen, his collar turned up to the winter wind. “I’m going back to the car awhile.”
“You want the keys for the heater?”
“No, I’ll be okay.”
Waltemeyer watches Cohen negotiate his way across the muddy field, made worse by an inch or two of recently melted snow. The lawyer steps lightly in his L. L. Bean duck boots, both hands hiking up the seams of his slacks an extra couple of inches. Waltemeyer knows the cold isn’t the only thing the man is feeling: The stench-faint but foul in the frigid air-was there from about four feet down. Cohen couldn’t help but get a whiff of it.
At the sound of something solid, the detective turns back toward the hole, taking a step forward to peer down over the edge. “What was that?”
“That’s the top,” says the cemetery manager. “You got the top of the box right there.”
The two men in the hole concentrated their shovels on the edges of the wood, trying to free the top of the casket from the surrounding dirt. But at the first real stress, the pressed wood cracks and collapses.
“Just pull that shit up,” says the manager. “Don’t even mess with it.”
“Not much of a casket,” says Waltemeyer.
“I’m telling you,” agrees the manager, a gravel-voiced, pear-shaped man. “She buried the man cheap as she could.”
I’ll bet she did, thinks Waltemeyer. Miss Geraldine wasn’t about to be spending hard-won money on funerals, what with all the dearly departed she had to contend with. Even now, from inside the city jail, Geraldine Parrish was fighting hard to remain the sole heir of the Reverend Rayfield Gilliard’s money and property, with a civil suit by the reverend’s family still to be decided by a circuit court judge.
As for the good reverend himself, he is somewhere under this godforsaken mud slope, this potter’s field just below the city’s southern edge. Mount Zion, they called it. A consecrated cemetery; hallowed ground.
Bullshit, thinks Waltemeyer. The place is a small stretch of barren wetness running down off Hollins Ferry Road, owned and operated by one of the larger inner-city funeral homes, a volume business that can still scratch profit from even the cheapest burials. To the south is a low-income housing project, to the north, the Lansdowne Senior High School. At the top of the hill, near the cemetery entrance, is a convenience store; at the bottom, a polluted creek. Two hundred and fifty dollars gets the customer a plain pressed-wood box and a six-foot sliver of mud. If the body is unclaimed, if the state of Maryland has to serve as the sponsor, the price drops to a mere $200. Hell, thinks Waltemeyer, Mount Zion doesn’t even look like a cemetery-only a few headstones mark what had to be the graves of thousands.
No, Geraldine hadn’t exactly gone all out for her last husband, but then again, she had two more like him living with her over on Kennedy Street. The Black Widow’s last conquest got a cheap coffin, no vault and no headstone. Still, the cemetery manager seemed to have no problem finding the spot a half an hour ago, walking across the barren plain with an air of practiced certainty.
“Right here,” he said.
Row 78, grave 17.
“You sure it’s him?” asked Waltemeyer.
“It oughta be,” said the manager, surprised at the question. “Once you put ’em down there, they supposed to stay put.”
If, in fact, the grave held the remains of the right Reverend Rayfield Gilliard, age seventy-eight, then the doctors on Penn Street could still do something with this case. Even with a body that had been in the ground for ten months, an adulterant could still be detectable. Twenty prescription Valium, ground into a last meal of tunafish-yes indeed, Smialek told Waltemeyer as they agreed to get the exhumation order, if that’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we’ll find.
Still, the Reverend Gilliard had been in the ground since February and Waltemeyer has to wonder what’s even left down there. The cemetery manager said the winter burials would freeze in the ground, then decomp slower than those buried in warmer weather. It made some sense to the detective, but who even thinks about such things? Not Waltemeyer if he can help it. However much he enjoyed watching Mark Cohen squirm, he had to admit a private truth: This bothered him.
You find a body in the street and it’s a murder. You sketch him, take his picture, check his pockets, roll him over. In that instant and for a few hours afterward, he’s all yours, so much so that after a couple of years you don’t think about it anymore. But once he’s in the ground, once a preacher says some words and the dirt is on top of him, it’s just different. Never mind that this is nothing more than a muddy field, never mind that the exhumation is a necessary investigative act-for Waltemeyer, it’s still hard to believe that he has any right messing with a body in its final repose.
Naturally, his colleagues reacted to such doubts with all the warm sincerity for which Baltimore cops are known and admired. All the way through roll call this morning they had piled it on: Christ, Waltemeyer, what the fuck kind of asshole are you? We don’t have enough murders to deal with in this fucking town, you got to go prancing around the goddamn cemeteries like Bela fucking Lugosi, digging up skeletons?
And Waltemeyer knew they had a point: In terms of criminal culpability, the exhumation seemed a bit redundant. They had Geraldine and her contract killer, Edwin, on three homicides and the repeated attempts on Dollie Brown. They had Geraldine and another triggerman charged with a fourth murder in the death of Albert Robinson, the old drunk from New Jersey found by the Clifton Park railbed back in ’86. Waltemeyer had driven Corey Belt and Mark Cohen up to Bergen County for a few days to interview witnesses and nail down that charge. Four murders, five murders-at what point does another charge no longer matter?
Watching the gravediggers pry at the broken pieces of the casket top, Waltemeyer wonders whether it’s worth it. Miss Geraldine will be going to prison in any case, and what happens today certainly isn’t going to give Gilliard’s family any peace of mind. On the other hand, the detective has to concede that, like the doctors on Penn Street, he, too, is a little curious.
Tossing the curled, rotting wood out of the hole, the gravediggers stand against the edges of the box. Waltemeyer leans over and looks down.