“I’m already dialing,” said Potash. We waited a moment, then heard him speak. “This is Potash. Do you have the notes from the police about that grief meeting?” Pause. “Read me the list of everyone who attended that night. Hang on a second, I’m writing them down. Delaney Anderson. Rose Chapman. Jude Feldman. Jared Garrett. Susan Roman. Is that all?” Pause. “We’re just following up a lead. I’ll call you if it goes anywhere.”
I already had the mortuary number tapped in and ready to go. I hit send and waited while it rang.
“Good afternoon,” said a woman’s voice, “and thank you for calling Cochran Mortuary. How may I help you?”
“I need to talk to Mr. Cochran,” I said. Like most mortuaries, this was a family business. We’d talked to Rudolfo Cochran before, in our official capacity as FBI; he knew we were investigating something, but he didn’t know it was an employee. He’d promised not to tell anyone, thinking it was a matter of high security, and I hoped he’d kept that promise—if Elijah got word that we were investigating him at all, and especially if he knew we were this close, he might run. We didn’t want to lose him. A minute later the call transferred to another line, and rang a few more times before Cochran picked it up.
“This is Rudolfo Cochran speaking.”
“This is John Cleaver from the FBI, we spoke last week.”
“Yes,” he said, “you were the young man?”
“Yes. We have some follow-up questions if you don’t mind, and I remind you that this is of the utmost secrecy.” Potash handed me his list, scrawled on the back of one of his hospital release forms. I read the names in order. “Have you had any business lately with a Delaney Anderson?”
“Let me pull up my records,” he said. I heard a few mouse clicks through the phone, and some tapping of keys on a keyboard. “Delaney?”
“Correct.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“How about Jude Feldman?”
More keyboard clicks. “We have a Feldman in our system from two years ago, but it’s not Jude.”
That might mean something. “How about Rose Chapman?”
Click click click. I heard a soft musical beep as the search command was sent, and then Cochran gave a small “Oh.” His voice grew more distant as he read the data. “Yes, we did a funeral about six weeks ago for a William Chapman, and Rose is on file as his wife. All the sales transactions were conducted through her.”
I felt a surge of excitement. I was right. “Can you give me her contact information?” He read it off and I copied it down, and then, just to be thorough, I had him search for the last two names on the list as well. There was another almost match, from nearly ten years earlier, but that was it. I thanked him and hung up. “He was there to see Rose Chapman,” I told the others. “He has her husband’s memories.” I gave Diana the address, and she changed course immediately. I did a search on my phone, finding a massive list of Rose Chapmans, and slowly narrowed it down to the one in Fort Bruce. I found her Facebook page and swore when I saw it.
“What’s wrong?” asked Diana.
I showed her the screen, but she glanced at it only for a second before shaking her head and looking back at the road. “I can’t look, just tell me.”
“Let me see,” said Potash.
I held the phone toward him. “I recognize her,” I said. “She showed up in our surveillance photos, in the set we shot at the grocery store.”
“The woman by the produce,” said Potash.
“Exactly,” I said. “He doesn’t talk to anyone, ever, but he had a three-minute conversation with Rose Chapman in the produce section.”
“He’s stalking her,” said Potash.
“He has her husband’s memories,” I said. “For all we know he thinks he is her husband.”
“If he stalks dead people’s families, why has that never shown up in our surveillance before?” Diana demanded. “This is the kind of thing that we’re supposed to catch, dammit.”
“Maybe it’s new,” I said. “Maybe he … I don’t know. Maybe he has rules.”
“Hurry,” said Potash, and started another phone call.
“What do you mean, ‘rules’?” asked Diana. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Rules to keep himself from hurting anyone.” I said. Did it really make as much sense as I thought it did, or was I seeing reflections of myself where there weren’t any? “After fifteen-something years at the mortuary, taking a new corpse’s memories every I-don’t-know-how-often, he’s bound to have personal connections to half this town—he’s somebody’s father, he’s somebody’s mother, he’s somebody’s brother and son and best friend. He’s literally surrounded by people he remembers being close to. But we’ve never seen him stalking anyone, except maybe Merrill, depending on your definition, and I guarantee that’s because he makes rules for himself to avoid contact with people he knows.” I thought about Marci, and what I’d do if some random person claimed to be her, returned from the grave. “He can’t talk to those people without freaking them out, so he keeps a night shift and never talks to anyone.”