She gasped. “We didn’t kill him; we didn’t know he was there!”
“Those are the kinds of questions the police will ask, and they won’t believe your answers. They’ll keep talking to you all night long, until you say something they want to hear. So get over that wall.”
She nodded bleakly and let me push her to the top. I waited a minute but didn’t hear any sounds of pursuit from the other side.
As I stood there, rain pouring under the hood of my jacket, I wondered about the girls. Tyler and her friends were twelve and thirteen, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out how a girl that young could persuade a man to lie on his back, arms outstretched, waiting passively for a blow to the heart.
I didn’t really believe these girls had killed the man in the temple. It was far more likely that they hadn’t been aware of the violence taking place just steps from where they were dancing and preening. But why was Tyler unwilling to admit she’d seen someone earlier? She’d cried out that she’d seen a vampire—but perhaps, on reflection, she’d recognized the figure, and didn’t want to identify him. Or her.
I’d have to talk to all the girls in depth, which sounded exhausting. Or turn them over to the police, which seemed callous. In the meantime, I needed to talk to the police myself. There were risks inherent in presenting myself to them, but there were bigger risks in staying away. I turned around and started working my way west again.
2.
IN THE GARDEN OF BAD AND WORSE
IT WAS SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE I WAS ABLE TO JOIN THE GIRLS at the Dudek apartment. I hadn’t been foolish enough to think the cops would let me show them the crime scene and take off, but they put me through a longer process than I’d expected.
By the time I’d retraced a path through the undergrowth to the Leavitt Street side of the cemetery, rain had pounded through my jacket and I was soaked to the skin. My scarlet frock was cut from silk faille; I sincerely hoped it would survive tonight’s abuse.
I slithered through the hole in the fence I’d used to enter and walked down Leavitt to the cops. Four squad cars were parked there, their lights flashing so brightly that I could see the people in the apartments across the street peering at us through the cracks in their curtains. Most of the officers were already in the cemetery. I told the man left to watch the street that there was a dead body in one of the tombs.
“That doesn’t seem too shocking, miss,” he said and smirked. “It’s a graveyard.”
“Right.” I grinned sourly. “A murdered body. Can you call your team and tell them? If they come back for me, I can show them the location.”
He asked me—a thinly veiled order—to get into the back of his squad car and wait to talk to Sergeant Anstey. The sergeant arrived within a couple of minutes and moved me to his own car to hear my story.
“You want to phone your team, tell them to wait for me? It would make their lives easier if I went with them,” I said. “I know where the victim is.”
“They’re big boys and girls; they can find that tomb thing on their own. Tell me again what you were doing in an abandoned graveyard in a thunderstorm.”
I repeated my story. “I was on my way home when I thought I heard someone screaming inside the cemetery. I followed the sound, but then I tripped on a chunk of marble and landed in the mud. By the time I got back on my feet, the screams had stopped; I poked around and found the dead man, but whoever killed him managed to take off without my spotting him.”
Anstey snorted. “You really expect me to believe a woman goes alone into an abandoned cemetery in the middle of a thunderstorm? Why didn’t you call 911?”
“I know what kind of backlog this district has on Saturday nights—my dad used to work out of the Twelfth.”
“This is about a lover who dissed you, isn’t it. Or was it a drug deal gone bad?”
“Just a South Side street fighter who forgot for a minute that she was fifty, not fifteen.” I rubbed my arms, hoping to get some blood moving in them. “If I’d known you were going to give me a hard time, I would have made an anonymous call about the vic to 911, but I thought you would appreciate help in locating the body.”
Anstey phoned in to the station and got a report back on me. The CPD file said I was a private eye with a track record, both for results and for a chip on the shoulder. I couldn’t argue with either claim. The file apparently also included a note that a senior officer, namely Captain Bobby Mallory, was a personal friend. And that my dad really had been a cop.