Anstey revealed that news with disgust—it meant he had to treat me like a person, not a criminal. Although the hostility of his questions lessened, his voice still sounded like he wished he could use his baton on my skull.
The person who lingers around a crime scene is a perpetrator more often than not. I’d known that was what the cops would think. But if I’d left a print at the crime scene, they’d have found me fast enough, and they’d have grounds for getting the state to suspend my license if I didn’t report the crime.
I decided it was time to shift the ground. “What brought you here, Sergeant, on a night like this? Is Mount Moriah a regular part of your unit’s beat?”
“That’s right. We like driving around among the dead, cheers us up to think that we have peace and quiet to look forward to even if we’ll never be able to afford to retire.”
“Someone called you. I wonder why? Was it someone who wanted that body found, or had they heard me running through the grounds?”
Anstey paused, measuring me in the dark squad car. “Give Captain Mallory a call, see if he’ll tell you, because I certainly won’t.”
After that, Anstey turned to his computer and began clearing incident reports. When I started to make bright conversation, he ignored me, so I tried to leave, but he’d locked the back doors. He kept me in the car until his troops phoned that they’d found the body.
“Okay. Your turn to shine, Warshawski. Lead me to my team.”
Anstey unlocked the back door and pulled me out. His squad had used bolt cutters on the chain across the front gate, so at least we didn’t have to sidle through a hole in the fence.
The police spots sent a bright glow through the cemetery, which made it easy to pick out the remnants of the gravel paths. The rain had stopped again, and Anstey and I didn’t have any trouble getting to the crime scene.
Under the lights, the little temple looked like part of a movie set, maybe for something like In the Garden of Bad and Worse. It was an elaborate tomb, resembling an Italian cathedral. A carved frieze swung from the dome that had been planted on top of the columns. Like the columns and the shallow steps leading to the tomb, the dome and frieze were badly cracked and covered with lichen. The Saloman family, whose name was on the mausoleum, had put a lot of money into interring their dead, but now there was no one to care for the dead or the tomb, or even the graveyard.
The lights made it easy to see the space where the girls had performed their ritual. It wasn’t actually a clearing, just an area where tombstones had been placed flat into the ground rather than set at right angles to it. At one side, I saw a bottle of alcopop and hoped that wasn’t what the girls had been passing around. I didn’t call attention to it—plenty of drunks hang out in cemeteries, after all. People without a lot of options make love in them, too. Empties are a cemetery commonplace.
Sergeant Anstey dragged me up the shallow steps to look at the dead man. “This the guy you want me to believe was screaming in here? You put a spike through his chest as payback for dragging you through the mud?”
I didn’t respond to the gibe, just stared down at the man. He’d been around forty, a white man with thick, dark hair that was just beginning to turn gray at the sides.
What startled me was his peaceful expression. It seemed as though such a terrible murder should have left a trace on his face—shock, fury, some emotion. In the Middle Ages, people believed a dead person’s eyes would hold the image of his killer, and maybe I’d been expecting something like that. This man looked as though he’d lain down for a nap.
I put my hand on his neck again, wondering if I’d been mistaken before. His damp skin was already colder, stiffer than it had been when I’d found him an hour earlier.
“We know he’s dead,” one of the patrol officers said.
Blood loss had turned his skin a waxy yellow, so that he seemed more like a mannequin than a dead person. Even the blood that had leaked from under his windbreaker and pooled onto the floor didn’t look real.
“He couldn’t just have lain down there for someone to murder,” I said. “But that’s what it looks like. He must have been alive when the spike went into him for so much blood to have spilled, but—was he drugged? Did someone carry him here?”
“Yeah, when we need your guidance on how to run the investigation or the autopsy, we’ll get back to you,” Sergeant Anstey said. “Meanwhile, I think it’s time you answered a few questions about what you were really doing in here. Don’t tell me you knew nothing about this poor twerp.”
I was silent.
“Well?” he demanded.