The Gravedigger's Ball Read online

  “What are you saying, Kirsten? What did you see?”

  Kirsten looked at Lynch, and the officers around the commissioner edged closer, especially Sandy Jackson. Sandy knew what it was to see something that her mind couldn’t explain. It was a helpless feeling, one that generated its own special fear. Sandy had experienced it when she saw the Angel of Death. She wondered if it would be the same for Kirsten.

  “He was so close to me that I could smell him,” the reporter said as Sandy looked on. “It was an odd smell, almost like the stench of something that had been buried. When I saw him standing there next to me, I thought that I was about to be buried, too, so I screamed. Then I closed my eyes and told myself that if he was going to kill me, I wasn’t going to watch him do it. A second later I felt this breeze, and I heard something like flapping wings. When I opened my eyes, he was gone, and there was a black bird flying away. It was a raven, Commissioner, and as crazy as it sounds, when that raven flew away, I think that man might have flown away, too.”

  * * *

  At eleven forty-five, Coletti and Mann walked into homicide with Lenore, and the room was nearly empty. Almost every cop in the city was on the street looking for the man who’d killed one of their own. Of the three detectives who remained in the office, two were on their way out the door, and the third was busy shuffling papers.

  The three detectives stopped what they were doing when they saw Lenore. They’d heard that Mary Smithson’s sister had been at the scene, but hearing about her and seeing her were two different things.

  Coletti and Mann tried to ignore their stares. Lenore did, too, but as they walked through the room, Lenore’s presence filled everyone’s minds with recollections of Mary, and the memories were anything but good.

  Coletti pulled out a chair for Lenore next to his battered desk. Everyone was so quiet that the scrape of the metal legs against the floor sounded like an earthquake. He booted up the ancient desktop he refused to relinquish and checked for Clarissa Bailey’s e-mail that the cemetery manager had promised to forward to him. It wasn’t there.

  Mann sat down at his desk, as well. He turned on his laptop and plugged his digital tape recorder into the USB port. As he fiddled with the mouse pad, a voice spoke up from across the room.

  “She looks just like her,” one of the detectives whispered as he looked at Lenore, but as quietly as he tried to say it, the words were like a shout against the silence.

  With those five words, he had reaffirmed the history between Mary and Coletti and had caused every detective in the office to replay it. They could still remember Mary coming into that very room just two months before and cracking Coletti’s tough exterior with brash talk and blue eyes. She’d confronted him about his attitude toward Mann and forced him to backtrack. No one had ever made Coletti back off of anything. That was how his colleagues had known, even before it happened, that Coletti’s and Mary’s fast friendship would develop into something more. What they didn’t know was that the woman who seemed so genuine was really something else altogether.

  They’d watched Coletti lose when he gambled on loving her, and though most of them would never say it aloud, their hearts broke with his when Mary betrayed him. Because Lenore was Mary’s sister, they viewed her through the prism of those memories, and, fairly or not, at least one of them believed that Lenore would eventually prove herself to be just like Mary.

  Lenore tried to keep her focus straight ahead as she watched Coletti fill out the incident report from that morning’s shooting, but it was hard to do so with everyone staring. She occupied herself by making a call on her cell. When there was no answer, she disconnected and put the phone in her bag. Soon after, one of the detectives—a biker type who’d transferred from northwest detectives just three months before—came over to Coletti’s desk.

  “I guess you heard they found Smitty,” he said to Coletti while continuing to stare at Lenore.

  Coletti felt uncomfortable. He’d never worked with this new guy, but he didn’t like him. He was tactless in the squad room and reckless in the streets. Guys like that were accidents waiting to happen.

  “Yeah, we heard about Smitty,” Coletti said with a sigh as he continued to write. “It’s a shame what happened to him, but right now we’re trying to work through Clarissa Bailey’s case. Has anyone reached her husband?”

  “We’ve sent a couple cars by the house, but no luck yet,” the detective said, still looking at Lenore. “We haven’t talked to Smitty’s wife yet, either, but maybe it’s for the best.”

  Coletti looked up at the detective, his eyes warning the man to stop. The new guy either didn’t get the hint or didn’t want to.

  “I’d hate to have to be the one to tell Smitty’s wife he was buried alive,” the detective said as he glared at Lenore. “I’d never want her to know that they pulled him out of the mud with his mouth wide open like he died gasping for air.”

  Lenore tried to be strong, but the image brought tears to her eyes. She quickly reached up and wiped one of them away, but that tear was immediately followed by another.

  Coletti saw her crying and stared at the detective with a look that carried bad intentions. “Mrs. Wilkinson’s been nice enough to cooperate. So if you care so much about what happened to Smitty, why don’t you run along and find his killer instead of harassing my witness?”

  “Maybe I’ve found the killer’s accomplice right here,” the detective said, his eyes glued on Lenore.

  “Or maybe you haven’t,” Coletti said slowly. “Now leave.”

  “Or?”

  “Or somebody’ll be doing paperwork on you,” Mann said, standing up and looking him in the eye.

  The detective’s eyes shifted from one man to the other. Then he raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay,” he said, backing up with a smirk on his face. “I’ll hit the street. Just remember what happened last time you brought a lady in here, Coletti.”

  Coletti jumped up to go after him, but Mann held him back.

  “Ignore him,” Mann said as the detective left with his partner. “It’s not you, it’s him. He doesn’t know how to handle what happened to Smitty.”

  Mann was right. When a police officer was murdered, it made each cop consider his or her own mortality. It let them know that each day could be their last, and for many, that realization was quickly followed by anger. Both Mann and Coletti had seen it often after the deaths of numerous officers in recent months: enraged police beating suspects in the streets; cops’ wives enduring violence at home; and officers walking around like ticking time bombs, their tempers ready to flare at any moment.

  Smitty’s death was just another in a line of on-duty incidents that dredged up the underlying danger in the job. Every officer handled the pressure differently, but most handled it, nonetheless. Coletti preferred to work through it, while others liked to play.

  The detective who’d stayed behind waddled over to Coletti’s desk, his large belly pointing the way. “I’m Tommy,” he said to Lenore, who wiped her eyes once more before reaching up to shake his proffered hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m sorry about the tears. It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone die, much less have someone try to blame me for it.”

  Tommy put down the papers he was carrying and leaned his ample butt against the side of Coletti’s desk. “If my colleagues aren’t treating you right, my dear,” he said with a ridiculous, Jim Carrey–like smile, “I will.”

  “You finished, Tommy?” said an irritated Coletti.

  “Not quite.” Tommy turned his attention back to Lenore. “I just want you to know that I like horseback riding, walks in the park, and listening. And I know it might not look like it, but I’m into weightlifting and mixed martial arts, too. Call me.”

  He winked and dropped his card on the desk.

  Lenore chuckled. “I’m afraid I’m married, but thank you. I’m flattered.”

  Tommy reached down, grabbed her hand, and kissed it. “I don’
t care how great you think your husband is, honey. Once you go fat, you never go back.”

  Lenore laughed. Mann did, too. Coletti smiled in spite of himself. “Now you see what happens when the captain isn’t around,” he said. “People start losing their minds.”

  “Actually, we use our minds,” Tommy said with a grin. “You’d see that if you checked out those papers I put together for you when I heard about Mrs. Bailey’s untimely demise.”

  Coletti picked up the documents Tommy had placed on his desk. As soon as he began to thumb through them, he saw that they told a story all their own.

  “Excuse us for a minute,” he said to Mann and Lenore as he beckoned for Tommy to follow him into the captain’s adjacent office.

  They went inside, and Coletti closed the door behind them. “So, how long ago did her husband file for divorce?” Coletti asked as he looked through the petition.

  “I think he served her with the papers about a month ago.”

  Coletti grunted as he looked at Ellison Bailey’s signed affidavit. “Loss of companionship, huh? That means she stopped sleeping with him.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, “but I think that’s probably because he was a bum.” He pointed to a section in the divorce petition that listed Ellison Bailey’s occupation. “Says here he’s a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. I’d be guessing, but I’d say he doesn’t make a mint doing that.”

  Coletti nodded. Then he flipped through the rest of Ellison’s divorce petition, which requested, among other things, alimony payments from his wife, who served as CEO of Bailey, Inc., a publicly traded jewelry firm with a billion dollars in assets.

  “I see she filed a counterclaim,” Coletti said as he went through the rest of the papers.

  “Yeah, she not only denied that there was any loss of companionship, she was apparently going to fight him on the alimony, too. And take a look at this.”

  Tommy showed him paperwork from two six-year-old civil suits that had been filed against Ellison Bailey by women in Florida and California. Suddenly, the picture became clearer.

  “Thanks,” Coletti said, snatching the door open and quickly crossing the floor to his partner and Lenore.

  “Charlie, we’ve gotta track down Clarissa Bailey’s husband,” he said. Then he looked at Lenore. “I hope you’re going to stick around.”

  “I’d already reserved a room at the Loews. I planned to stay for a few days anyway,” she said. “It’s like I told you earlier, there’s something I need to do here. I’m not leaving until I find out what it is.”

  Coletti’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that it was Kirsten Douglas, the reporter from the Daily News. He pressed ignore. A moment later his desk phone rang. He picked it up, ready to scream at the reporter for harassing him, but it wasn’t Douglas. As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, his mouth pressed together in a pale thin line. He jotted down some notes on his pad.

  “Thanks,” he said before hanging up, a troubled expression on his face.

  Both Mann and Lenore looked at Coletti, waiting for him to explain.

  “We’ll have someone take you over to your hotel,” Coletti told Lenore. “And we’ll assign you a security detail until we can make some other arrangements for you.”

  Lenore looked from Mann to Coletti with fire in her eyes. “I can take care of myself,” she said defiantly. “I don’t need protection.”

  “I’m afraid you’re wrong,” said Coletti. “That was the crime scene unit on the phone. They found a handwritten note stuffed in Mrs. Bailey’s mouth along with the mud that killed her.”

  “What did it say?” Mann asked.

  Coletti looked at them both before reading the five words from his notepad. “It said, ‘I’ll be back for Lenore.’”

  CHAPTER 4

  By noon, the rain had stopped, and the raven was perched high in a tree that loomed nearly six stories over Sedgley Woods. Most of the tree’s dead branches had fallen off long ago, but the trunk remained. It was split in two, like a divining rod stretching toward the sky.

  But unlike the rods men used to detect trinkets in the ground, the tree was used by the raven to detect power in the air. Most men didn’t believe in such power. Oh, they said they believed, even wrote of it in their most holy scriptures, but only something that lived in the air could see it.

  The raven was such a creature. He spent his life in the air, stretching his wings and gliding on gusts that carried with them all the good and evil in the world. He lived in the air, where words of love and hate escaped the lips of men and floated skyward, coming apart and releasing themselves into the universe.

  There was power in words. The raven knew that intuitively, but men did not. That was why the raven’s master needed him. The bird could go beyond finding the power in words. He could unleash that power.

  Perched on the tree, standing two feet tall, his eyes filled with intelligence and his neck feathers fluttering in the breeze, the raven himself looked powerful. His wings, which spanned four feet across when he was in flight, were pressed tight against his body. His claws, sharp and strong, sunk deep into the tree’s damp wood. His sturdy bill looked more like a weapon than a mouth. In fact, his entire body was a weapon. It was set off by a word that held more power than most. “Lenore.”

  That word was the reason for the raven’s existence. It was the task for which he’d been trained. It was the thing that had driven him back to Fairgrounds Cemetery time and time again. That word was nothing less than his destiny.

  For a year, the raven had been trained to recognize that word and the woman to whom it was assigned. He was taught to identify her face, her walk, her scent, and her voice. He was starved each time he failed and rewarded with treats of bloody lamb hearts each time he triumphed. The meat fed the raven’s need for flesh, and the bird’s resultant obedience fed the master’s lust for power.

  The two of them now depended upon each other. The man, for his part, was the raven’s provider, and the raven was the man’s enforcer and protector. He was an extension of the man himself.

  The raven watched from the top of the tree as the scene in Sedgley Woods took shape. He saw Kirsten Douglas, still shaken, being led from the woods by police. He saw the media contingent, their ranks swollen by bloggers, YouTubers, and curious passersby. There were flashing lights and angry voices, aggressive cops and determined reporters, all scrambling forward for a glance, a video clip, or a snapshot of Officer Frank Smith’s body being carried to a waiting police van.

  The raven could see the confusion taking shape below as one cameraman, then two, broke through the barricades to get shots of the spectacle. Police pushed back and a brief melee ensued, but even after it was quelled, there was an undercurrent of unrest among the media and a feeling of anger and grief among the police.

  Cops darted in and out of the streets surrounding the park, searching for the man who’d wreaked havoc that morning. The cars moved in fits and starts, and the men and women who drove them did so with their heads on swivels. There was something inherently aggressive in their posture. The raven saw all of it, but he didn’t see the woman he’d come to find. His master, who watched from afar, couldn’t locate her, either, but what he saw through his live satellite feed was enough to pique his interest.

  As he sat in a dank chamber with rats squealing and scurrying on the dirt walls and floors, the man closed his coal-black eyes and allowed his laptop’s azure light to wash over his face. When he opened his eyes and the secure connection revealed what the satellite filmed from overhead, the man smiled at the sight of police scrambling around the park. He wondered what they’d do if they knew he was watching.

  The man sat back, his black coat draped over his rickety wooden chair. Like his hands, shirt, and tie, the coat was encrusted with the soil he’d used to choke his victims to death. His mind, however, was clear. He knew his purpose, he knew his goal, and he didn’t care how many people he had to kill to achieve it.
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br />   If it meant spending the night with filth and vermin, he was willing to endure it a thousand times. The treasure that lay beneath Fairgrounds Cemetery was more valuable than anything the world had to offer, and he was going to find it, no matter what it took.

  There was a buzzing sound in the pocket of his greatcoat. The killer reached in, extracted a phone, and looked at the screen. There was a simple text message that read, “Proceed to phase 2.” The killer read it with a measure of resentment. He didn’t plan on taking orders from anyone, no matter how much money they offered to pay.

  He pocketed the phone and opened another window on his laptop so he could switch from the overhead view of the park to a live feed from CNN. He watched closely as the police commissioner and a group of commanders approached a bank of microphones near the media contingent. The reporters pressed closer and hoisted their cameras high in the air. The raven left his perch and landed twenty yards from the microphones. The killer sat in his dank hiding place, hoping to see or hear something in the anger and angst of the moment that would tell him when and where to resurface.

  As everyone pressed forward to listen, Lynch took a deep breath and began to speak.

  “Today, a woman was killed at Fairgrounds Cemetery,” Lynch said, pausing as the boisterous crowd grew silent. “Though her identity has already been revealed by several media outlets, we won’t be sharing her name publicly until we can notify her next of kin.”

  Looking around at the assembled media, the commissioner tried to be businesslike, but it was clear that he was agitated. “Here’s what we know so far. Shortly after 9:00 A.M., one of our detectives was already on the scene when a gunshot was fired at the Fairgrounds Cemetery.”