“They were already dead.”
“I saw a friend of mine once,” Maureen said. “Well, not a friend, really, a woman I worked with. In a bar. In New York. She’d drowned. I mean, she was drowned. Murdered. I identified her body at the morgue.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Preacher said. “I didn’t know that.” He waited a moment before he continued. “But, again, she was already gone when you saw her. Having them go under your hands, no matter who or what they were, that’s a different thing. Believe me.”
“She was a killer. Those other bodies I saw here in New Orleans, she’s the reason for them. She and that razor she obviously used on herself. On top of someone else’s grave. A lunatic. A sick thing is what she was. Afraid to answer for what she’d done.”
Preacher said nothing, looking at the ground. He hitched up his gun belt. “Let’s have a cigarette, you and me, before we get down to business securing this scene. We’ve warned off the EMTs. Leary ain’t going anywhere.”
“You know what somebody called me once?” Maureen said. She felt light-headed. Preacher went in and out of focus. “A little redheaded angel of death. You believe that? Some people. The things they say.”
“Let’s go to the ambulance,” Preacher said.
“I’m fine.”
“I know you are,” Preacher said. “I believe you. But let’s get your hands clean. You’ve got blood up to your elbows.”
16
As crime scene techs got to work on the scene under Preacher’s watchful eye, Detective Atkinson and Maureen walked along the main path leading through the heart of the cemetery. Waiting for the detective to speak first, Maureen walked with her hands jammed in the pockets of her leather jacket, which was zipped to her chin. She had her NOPD knit cap pulled low on her head. And she was chilled to the bone. Atkinson walked with her big hands clasped behind her back, no hat, her down coat open. Maureen was embarrassed to be struggling with the weather. Here she was the born-and-bred New Yorker zipped up tight while the native New Orleanian strode along comfortably. Maureen knew, though, it was more than Atkinson’s roots that made her the tougher of the two.
They were flanked by the larger, more ornate tombs and crypts as they walked, the stone structures with columns carved in the marble at their corners, with wreaths and Bible verses carved in their walls and with gorgeous white weeping angels draped across their lintels. Everyone inside those temples—and some of the structures bore plaques with more than a dozen names—everyone inside was as dead as any poor slob buried in a potter’s field, Maureen thought. As dead as Madison Leary. As dead as Tanya from Staten Island. As dead as Sebastian, who had killed Tanya and dumped her in New York Harbor. She wasn’t sure what the display and posturing was for, or supposed to mean. Comfort for the living, she figured, and not the dead. What did the dead care?
Would she and her mother, she wondered, do anything for her father when the declaration came through? And why would they? Here was an instance where the living didn’t care, either. His death would be a matter of paperwork. A few clicks on a keyboard. Like getting a driver’s license or a new credit card. No real proof the man was dead would exist. No body. No ashes. Certainly no marble temple. Except for me, Maureen thought, there wasn’t much extant physical proof he’d been alive, either. Having him declared dead was about the future, anyway, she thought, not the past. And it’s about my mother, she thought, not me.
“It’s good to see you back in uniform,” Atkinson said.
“Not as good as it feels,” Maureen replied. “Thanks for saying that. It was a long six weeks. I’m glad to put them behind me.”
“So you put the time to good use, then?” Atkinson asked.
Maureen’s heart stopped for a moment. There was no way Atkinson could know what she’d been doing at night. No, no way. She chewed the inside of her cheek. This is why you don’t do shit like that, running around causing trouble and breaking promises, she thought. A guilty conscience gives everything a double meaning. It eats your insides alive.
“If I was having any doubts about where I want to be and what I want to be doing,” Maureen said, kicking aside dead magnolia leaves, “I’m cured. The time did that much for me.”
“I was pulling for you,” Atkinson said. “Still am. Like I said when the shit started going down, you can be an exceptional cop if we can keep you out of jail.”
Maureen hung her head and grinned. “Skinner said something similar. I’m looking to steer clear of any more trouble in the department. I’m content with the DC forgetting who I am for a year or so, until I’ve earned a promotion.”
“You know why we haven’t spoken before now,” Atkinson said.