I go through the obituaries again, hunting out those who died in the days leading up to the girls’ disappearances. Two of these people are no longer in their coffins, and are lying on morgue tables in different stages of decay, their bodies waterlogged and bloated or decayed.
I look at the timeline. I think about Emily. I think about Bruce Alderman and about his father. Then I think about where I was two years ago and the difference I could have made. That was my chance to save these girls. Maybe Landry was right, and I am fucking everything up. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to find Emily.
My cellphone finally has a full charge. I go through the memory of incoming calls, put Landry’s number into the address book function, and then dial his phone. He picks it up after half a ring.
“I was about to call you,’ he says. ‘Your name just keeps on popping up. You need to stay the hell away from my investigation.’
“I can help.’
‘Help? You seen the news lately?’
‘Look, that isn’t…’
“I don’t mean that fuck-up you made last night. I mean the new one you’ve got on your hands today’
“I haven’t heard. What have I done now?’
‘Jesus, man, you must’ve really fucked off this Horwell chick at some point. What’d you do, sleep with her?’
‘Yeah, good one, Landry’
‘Turns out when people don’t like you, they really don’t like you. I guess I’m starting to see why’
‘There a point here?’
‘She interviewed Alderman this morning. Had to be sometime after he hit the bar, but looking at him it couldn’t have been long after. Didn’t seem to have many drinks under his belt.’
And?’
And it wasn’t good. It’s like she saw this fire burning inside him and just started throwing on more fuel. Hadn’t been for all those angles and splatter trajectories, even I’d be thinking you were guilty. Anyway whatever anger he had about you before, you can double it and double that again. Just keep an eye out.
And do us all a favour, huh? Stay indoors and turn off your phone until we get this thing nailed down. When it goes to court, we’re going to be looking at some defence lawyer pointing the finger at you and saying …’
‘Yeah — we covered this already’
‘Then why don’t I feel assured?’
I look down at the photographs and the newspaper clippings.
‘Look, Landry, I got something for you. You want to hear it or not?’
‘That depends on how you got what you got. Is this going to backfire? If you’ve got anything and you’ve obtained it illegally, I don’t want to know about it, right? Otherwise it’ll blow up in our faces.’
‘Okay’
He doesn’t say anything and I don’t add anything else, and he reads my silence accurately.
‘Jesus, Tate, you’re fucking unbelievable.’
‘You want the names of the other girls or not?’
‘Do me a favour and don’t tell me. There’s a hodine for information. Ring it anonymously and give it to them, okay?
Ring from a payphone or something. Anything you give me from an illegal search is poison. Fuck, Tate, you know that.’
‘I’m no longer a cop. Those same rules don’t apply’
‘Yeah, and this serial killer’s defence lawyer you don’t want me to keep reminding you about is going to …’
‘Right. No problem. So you don’t want my help.’
‘Help? Is that what you think you’ve been doing? I gotta go.
Make sure you …’
“I got something else.’
‘What? Jesus, Tate. You’re going to give me a fucking heart attack.’
‘Look, this is something good. It’s something you can say you came up with on your own, so you don’t have to …’
‘Come on, I know how to do my goddamn job.’
‘Rachel Tyler, before she died, visited Woodland Estates. Her grandmother died. It’s the same cemetery’
Landry doesn’t answer. I can tell he hadn’t made this connection.
I press on. “I think the others might have been there too.
I think that’s the connection. That’s what drew them to the killer.’
‘You got anything to back that up?’
“Not yet. But I’m …’
“No buts, Tate. You’re off this thing. Go ahead and make that call to the hodine, give us those names. Do it now.’
He hangs up without me telling him Alderman has my daughter.
And thats OK — I want to deal with Alderman myself.
The phone call I’m going to make will take most of their legwork out of play. It’ll mean the contents of the other two coffins are no longer up for grabs. But that call can wait. First I’m going to find Sidney Alderman and do what it takes to get my daughter back, and that’s something I don’t need Landry’s help for.
chapter twenty-one