A dark figure knelt in the distance. It was a woman, dressed in a black gown. Oddly, for the day was already warm, she wore a dark, broad-brimmed hat with a long black veil.
He got closer and saw she was kneeling on Betty Jo Dean’s grave. She stood up. ‘The child is not at rest,’ she said.
Mac knew that voice. ‘Abigail?’ He couldn’t see her face through the veil. ‘Abigail Beech?’ She’d worn the same sort of costume, minus the hat and the veil, at the Bird’s Nest.
‘The child is not at rest,’ she repeated. ‘Her face is wrong.’
‘She’s being exhumed today.’
‘Her face… it’s wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
She said nothing, and started toward the gate.
Doubt clawed at him as he watched her walk away. Perhaps he hadn’t the right to set loose the men and machines that would rip into the ground to get at Betty Jo Dean. Perhaps he hadn’t the right to call forth reporters who would resurrect details of her death and likely invent lurid new ones about her life. Perhaps he had no damned right at all to create a spectacle that drew the likes of Abigail Beech, murmuring behind a black veil.
For the first time since Judge Tinley’s courtroom, he was grateful that State’s Attorney Powell and Jimmy Bales demanded he be barred from the exhumation. He didn’t want to watch. He didn’t want to be seen.
He hurried back to his truck.
Two men drove a large stake truck into the cemetery at seven o’clock. They stopped well back of Betty Jo’s grave and unloaded long metal poles. They built the skeleton of a temporary fence, unrolled long gray plastic tarps and stretched them between the poles. The tarps would shield the site from the road.
Two Peering County sheriff’s cruisers rolled up at seven-thirty. The first drove between the gates and continued up to the blue temporary fence. The second stopped at the entrance and a deputy got out to stand guard. Only authorized people could get in now.
Through the wrought-iron fence, Mac saw Jimmy Bales and State’s Attorney Powell get out of the first cruiser. Bales’s uniform was rumpled, as though he’d already wilted in what was sure to be a very hot day. Powell wore a crisp, blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit that would never look wilted. They disappeared behind the gray plastic wall.
Big flatbed trucks drove into the cemetery ten minutes later and pulled close to the gravesite. The first carried a backhoe. The digger got out, pulled down a ramp and offloaded the yellow diesel machine.
The second truck was fitted with a high, long I-beam that ran from its cab back past the rear bumper. A winch with a thick cable was mounted at the tail end. It would be used to hoist out whatever was in the ground, should there be anything solid enough to lift.
Several private cars arrived next. Most appeared to be reporters, and were denied entrance. Only two men shouldering big camera bags were allowed inside. Mac guessed they were state photographers, there to record the exhumation.
Jen Jessup arrived in her blue Neon. She got out and marched up to the gates like she belonged. Mac waited for her to be stopped, but she never even slowed. She flashed a smile at one of the deputies, he touched the brim of his Smokey hat with a forefinger in a small salute, and she walked right into the cemetery. One of the reporters who’d been denied access swore.
Reed Dean arrived in his red Mustang at the last possible minute. He parked on the road outside the fence. He wore jeans as always, a starched dark shirt and a bright red NASCAR cap, as if for courage. Spotting Mac, he gave a faint wave and walked through the gates to watch what remained of his sister being dug up.
The diesel backhoe fired at precisely eight o’clock, sending up big puffs of black smoke from behind the gray screens. Mac watched through the side window of his truck, imagining the spongy ground being torn open by the long steel teeth of the backhoe’s bucket. The backhoe labored for twenty minutes before the smoke thinned, and its engine lapsed into a soft, loping idle. Then it went silent.
Mac shut his eyes, not wanting to think that, behind the gray screen, the sheriff, the state’s attorney, the diggers, the hoisters, the photographers, Jen Jessup and Reed Dean were looking down at nothing but bits of rotted pine amid a jumble of skeletal parts.
Another diesel started, different, quieter. He watched the gray tarps for black smoke, but none rose up. It was a good sign; it was not the backhoe, filling the hole back in. It was the truck with the winch.
Ten minutes passed, then ten more. And then, with a clash of gears, the truck carrying the hoist rumbled through the cemetery gates and onto the road. It turned north toward Grand Point.
On it rested a coffin-shaped rectangle, covered in blue plastic secured with silver tape. A vault.
Jimmy Bales and Roy Powell followed in the sheriff’s cruiser. Jen Jessup walked out with the official photographers.
Reed Dean came out last, walking faster than Mac had ever seen him move. His forehead was glistening. He came over to Mac’s truck. ‘Cement vault,’ he said. ‘Solid, no cracks. She’s been preserved.’ He hurried to his Mustang.
Mac waited for Reed to pull onto the road, then followed him north to where they were taking his sister.
FORTY-NINE
The four big overhead doors were raised. Thirty people milled within the high metal garage – sheriff’s deputies and state police officers; a damp Jimmy Bales talking to the ever crisp Roy Powell; photographers and reporters and the simply curious who’d drifted in to see what had become of Betty Jo Dean. A man in cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt waited by an open-topped orange tool cart. In the corner, half hidden in shadow, Jen Jessup stood talking to the city clerk.
The truck rigged with the huge I-beam and winch was the only vehicle inside. A man stood on its flatbed. He’d removed the blue tarp and was attaching the hoist cable to a four-pointed sling wrapped around the damp, mud-encrusted vault.
One of the photographers waited behind a video camera mounted on a tripod. He’d aimed it at a square canvas tarp spread out on the floor, behind the truck.
There were no deputies guarding the door. Mac eased in to where Reed was pressed against a far wall.
‘They’ll take her out of the vault here,’ Reed said, ‘drive her to Rochelle for X-raying and bring her back to the county’s medical examining room next door.’
Bales had spotted Mac. He left Powell and hurried over. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here.’
‘Doc Farmont took off.’
‘He left on a planned vacation.’
‘He put his boat in the water with its paint still wet.’
‘Get the hell out of here, Mac.’
‘I’m filling in for Rogenet,’ he lied. ‘Besides, this seems to be open to everybody,’ he said, pointing to the reporters and locals watching the two men working to lower the vault.
Bales worked up a smile. ‘You’re satisfied with your little diversion?’
‘Little diversion?’
‘Shifting the focus from your own difficulties?’
‘I’m downright excited at the prospect of uncovering something that points to Betty Jo Dean’s killer.’
Bales walked away.
The winch on the flatbed groaned as the cable tightened around the concrete vault. ‘Easy does it,’ the worker by the tool cart yelled.
The man on the flatbed nodded, raised the vault slowly until it was a foot off the truck bed, pivoted the hoist and lowered the vault gently onto the tarp.
The man on the floor took a thin crowbar from his cart and began scoring the vault’s lid to loosen any grit that might hold it closed. When he’d gone all the way around, he grabbed a hammer, inserted the blade end of the crowbar into the seam and went around again, gently tapping into the seam. Finally, he inserted a larger crowbar into the seam at a corner and struck it hard. A crack like a gunshot boomed off the metal walls as a piece of the lid broke off and bounced to the tarp.