The Laughterhouse A Thriller

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Over the last year I feel like I’ve spent more time at the cemetery than I have anywhere else. There’s always something here pulling me back, it happens so often they should reserve a parking space for me. The second of the four men I’ve killed died out here by accident. I buried him and nobody knows about it except him, me, and the God both him and me stopped believing in. The third guy I killed was out here too, only that wasn’t so much an accident. Both men were killers. My priest was haunted by one of those men in real life, then murdered by the other. My priest so far is the only man to have died out here that I didn’t kill, though the police for a while blamed me for it. The pope ought to give me a medal.

There are no cars in the parking lot. No signs of any life. The gardens have a little less color than yesterday, the trees holding onto a few less leaves; many of those that have fallen are lying on the stone stairs to the church, many of them bunched up in the doorway. A few of them follow me inside. Father Jacob is practicing a sermon. He acknowledges me with a nod, but keeps practicing anyway. I guess it’s like being a stand-up comic—it’s all in the delivery. I walk down to the front and it’s not until I reach him that he stops.

“Theo,” he says, and he steps down from behind the podium and offers his hand. It’s cold. He smells faintly of cigarette smoke. “What can I help you with? You here to lighten the load?”

“Load?”

“When was your last confession?” he asks, his eyes flicking to the confessional booths off to the side.

“I have nothing to confess,” I tell him, which is a complete lie, and one that I’m not going to confess about.

“Everybody has something to confess.”

“Even you, Father?”

He smiles. “Shall we sit down?” he asks, sweeping his hand toward the front pew.

“I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry.”

“Too much of a hurry to sit down, huh? Well, then tell me, what can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a man. I saw him here last night, and he may come other nights too. I think he can help with our investigation.”

“Lots of men come here,” he says, his smile disappearing, being replaced by a frown, “and anything they tell me is confidential, you as much as anybody must know that, Theo.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not heading down that path. I just want you to tell me if you know him.”

“Hmm, I don’t know. It sounds like we’re on the border of priest-parishioner confidentiality.”

“Like I said, I’m not asking if he confessed anything. But it’s important. Three small girls were abducted last night and we believe he’s the man who took them.”

“Oh, oh, that is bad,” he says, which is as good a summation as any. “What’s his name?”

“I’m not sure. James, maybe.”

“Is that it?”

“He was here late last night.”

“I was asleep late last night,” Father Jacob tells me.

“He’s about six foot, weights around a hundred ninety points, around fifty years old . . .”

“It’s not helping,” Jacob says.

“He has scars on his face. Old scars, like he’s been beaten up severely.”

Father Jacob exhales loudly, then pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. He brings his elbow to his stomach while holding the pose and looks down. When he talks, he’s talking toward the palm of his hand. “I’m not technically breaking my word to him or God by telling you this,” he says, “but yes, there is a man who comes here some nights who fits that description.” He looks back up at me and removes his hand. “I had to help him find his wife what, five or six weeks ago,” he says. “She died fifteen years ago and he said he’d never been to see her grave. It was strange. Very . . . strange.”

“Fifteen years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Not nineteen?”

He shrugs. “I guess it could have been. My memory isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but I think he said fifteen. There was a child too. His daughter. He didn’t mention her, but I saw the grave.”

“Jesus,” I say, then, “sorry—that just slipped out.”

Jacob nods. “The dates were a few days apart. The daughter died, then the wife. I remember that, but can’t remember the dates. Maybe they were a week apart.”

“Can you remember the names?”

His face scrunches up as he fights to remember. “I wish I could, but no. I’m very sorry.”

“But you helped him find his wife. You saw their graves. You can take me there?”

“Yes, that I can certainly do.”

I follow him out the rear entrance of the church and into the cemetery. Other than the dead, the grounds are deserted. The trees more than yesterday resemble the bodies in the ground, skeletons without life. We walk through a pathway that twists between some big oak trees before hitting the first row of graves. We head deeper into them. I’m starting to build up a sweat. The last of the summer insects start biting at my arms, trying to store enough blood in their tiny bodies to get through the days ahead. The clouds are getting thinner, suggesting there may be some more sunlight today after all.

“I understand your daughter is out here too,” Father Jacob says.

I’m not sure how to respond, so I keep walking.

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to lose a child,” he says.

“There’s a man who’s about to lose three if we don’t hurry,” I tell him, and we break into a jog, row after row of the dead beneath us, and two minutes later when we reach the graves I’m out of breath and the back of my shirt is damp. Jacob, who’s at least twenty years older than me, is puffing nowhere near as much.

“This is them,” Jacob says, stopping in front of two graves that look like any other. Only they’re not like any other.

“Jesus,” I say.

“Theo,” the priest says, giving me a bad look.

There are no flowers in front of them and the grass needs to be clipped around the base of the headstones. I read the inscriptions on the graves. Next to them is an empty plot, probably reserved for the husband and father.

Reserved for Caleb Cole.

It all makes sense now.

All that blood from fifteen years ago . . .

I start running.

“Who are they?” Father Jacob calls out.

I don’t answer him because he’s already thirty feet behind me, with more distance gaining every second as I race back across the graveyard, my feet pounding over the ground, over the edges of other people’s graves. I pull out my cell phone to call Schroder, but before I can dial it rings anyway, Schroder on the other end.

“I got something,” he says, and he sounds excited.

“So do I,” I tell him. “Caleb Cole,” I tell him, and it’s all rushing back to me in detail. I remember standing in the snow, my feet freezing cold, Schroder was there too, so was Landry, so was a small dead girl sprawled out and covered in blood on the concrete floor. It’s all so clear that for a moment my blood runs the same temperature it felt back that day. There are good places to die and bad places to die, and the slaughterhouse was about as bad as it got. I remember the fear we were going to lose a conviction because the suspect had been beaten by a detective using a phone book.

“I know,” Schroder says.

“What?”

“The nineteen stab wounds. I just got off the phone with the ME. She ran a check. I mean, shit, we should have thought of it, right? But none of us did. Except her. We were looking for a connection to the past, right? So she looks for other victims that have come through the morgue with nineteen stab wounds, thinking there may have been something current, but what she got instead were two names from fifteen years ago.”

I have to slow down so I can talk. “Jessica Cole,” I say. “Was she one of them?”

“Yes. And the other was James Whitby. I’m still at Stanton’s office,” Schroder says. “Wait a moment,” he says, and the phone thuds in my ear as he puts it down on a solid surface. I can hear a large filing drawer being opened. He’s flicking through folders, his fingers sliding over the names. I can hear him talking to himself, he’s saying “come on, come on, where are you . . . ,” then a “yes!”

“Got it,” he says, coming back on the line.

“Let me guess—you just pulled a file for James Whitby?”

“Bingo,” he says. “Whitby was a patient of Stanton’s.”

“And Cole blames him?”

“Hang on, give me a second,” he says, and I picture him leaning over the file, reading it. “Shit,” he says. “Stanton was the doctor at Whitby’s trial two years before Jessica Cole was murdered,” he says, and I remember it clearly. James Whitby had abducted a young girl by the name of Tabitha Jenkins. He kept her for two days until he was caught. He went to trial. He was found not guilty because he was insane. He was confined for two years to a mental institution.

“What was Stanton’s role?”

“He testified that they could help Whitby, that it wasn’t his fault, but a result of an abusive upbringing.”

Other people have arrived since I showed up, and some stare at me as I jog past them. I have sweat dripping off my forehead, and they look behind me to see what is chasing me, but all that’s back there are two graves that have unlocked the mystery as to what the f*ck is going on.

“So Cole blames Stanton,” I say, because within a week of Whitby being released, he killed Jessica Cole. “What about the others?”

“I don’t know, but they must be involved in similar ways,” Schroder says. “One of them might have been Whitby’s lawyer. Just wait where you are. You might be closer than I am.”

“Closer to what?”

“Just wait. I’ll call you back.”

He hangs up on me. I’m at the car now. I have the urge to speed somewhere but I don’t know where. I tap my fingers against the roof. I’ve left Father Jacob somewhere far in the distance. I stare at my cell phone and wait for it to ring. I start talking to it, saying come on over and over.

For four minutes the mantra fails, but by the fifth one it works. I figure that’s worth knowing for the future.

“Caleb Cole was released from prison six weeks ago,” Schroder says. “I’ve just spoken to his probation officer. Cole’s been keeping all the appointments. Even got a job at the big tire factory in Brighton. We placed a call there but . . .”

“Hang on, hang on,” I say. “Six weeks ago?”

“Yeah. He didn’t show up for work today. I’ve got his address. I want you to check it out. Armed officers will meet you there. Okay? I’m at least twenty minutes away,” he says, and he gives me the address. I write it down.

“Okay. But if it was six weeks ago he was released, how come we didn’t come up with his name when we were going through the prison records?”

“Jesus, Tate, I don’t know, it’s not important,” he says, “just do your Goddamn job.”

“Uh, yes sir,” I tell him.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine,” I tell him. “And it’s going to take me ten minutes to get there.”

“Make it five,” he says. “You’ve got sirens, so go ahead and use them.”