I think about the extra weight Schroder told me I’d put on, and I can feel every kilogram of it slowing me down. The contours
of the land change. I head up and then down and then up again, hitting slight slopes that feel steeper than they really are, and they soon make it difficult to see anything behind me. I reach another section of the cemetery but still have no idea where I am. I forge ahead, trespassing over the dead. I keep looking back. No more light. No more patrol cars. Not that I can see. More trees ahead of me, another stretch of graves. I burst through another patch of bushes and garden, then suddenly I’m at a fence line. I want to scale it but I can’t, not yet, not for a few more moments, not until my heart rate slows some and my body is convinced enough to keep going.
The fence backs on to somebody’s house, an old weatherboard
home with a huge gap between the house and the garage. I drop
down into the back yard and I run for the gap. There is no other fence. I reach the road and look left and right. I know where I am.
There is a bus stop a few metres away from me. I walk down to
it and then decide it’s a bad place to be waiting. I cross the road and sit down behind a hedge. I take some slow deep breaths in an effort to bring my heart rate back to normal.
I start back towards the car. Ten minutes later I’m heading along the same road as the cemetery. I can see lights and commotion way up ahead, but the car is a good two blocks short of it. I unlock it and duck into the driver’s seat, traipsing mud and leaves and blood into the floor-well. I sit the envelope of photographs on the passenger seat. It’s been a bit bent out of shape but is mostly dry except for two of the corners. I start the engine, but leave the lights off until I’ve rounded the first corner. I think about the shovel in the boot and I figure tonight wasn’t the best night to go digging anyway. Besides, there’s something unnerving in
the thought of returning Dad’s car to him after it’s been used to drive a corpse around. That hadn’t been on the agenda when
I borrowed it.
By the time I get home I’m bordering on exhaustion, though
I don’t feel tired. It’s sensory overload. without the benefit of alcohol to keep things running smoodily without sleep, I know
I’m going to crash and burn.
I take a quick shower and check my banged-up feet. They’re
grazed, but not as bad as I’d expected. Then I take the pictures from the damp envelope and separate them so they can dry out.
I don’t look at them closely. Not right now. I can’t. But I can’t leave them out either in case Landry or Schroder show up. I wipe them dry with a tea-towel, then put them into a fresh envelope and throw out the old one. In the corner of my bedroom I lift up the carpet, figuring that since it worked so well for Alderman and Julian, it’s got to work well for me too.
I hit my bed and fall asleep without even willing it.
chapter forty-four
258
Nobody comes to my house during the night. I reckon the police will have narrowed down last night’s visitor to the church to one of three people — me, the killer or a reporter. They’ll have found my jacket and my shoes, but even if they recognise them there’s nothing on them to say they’re mine, only DNA, and that’ll take eight weeks to arrive. Landry and Schroder will undoubtedly be thinking of coming to talk to me; they’ll be wondering if they can bluff me into admitting I went into the church, though they’ll know they can’t. I know the game. And anyway, all I have to say is the same person who planted the murder weapon in my garage also planted my clothes to try to complete the frame job, and that’s also what I’ll be saying in two months’ time when they get DNA from hair follicles caught in my jacket. Landry will have gone through all of this, hitting it from all sorts of different angles, without coming up with one that will help him cement a case against me. I’m betting that in the end he’ll know his argument and he’ll know my argument, and he’ll know that mine is stronger.
Of course all of this is moot if I can’t get back into the cemetery and dig Alderman up before Monday
The overnight rain has stopped and for the moment the