Lover Avenged(179)

FIFTY-THREE




As a cold day dawned and clouds dappled across a milky blue sky, José de la Cruz drove through Pine Grove Cemetery’s gates and wound around rows and rows of headstones. The tight, curving lanes reminded him of Life, that old board game his brother and he had played when they were kids. Each player got a little car with six holes and started with one peg to represent himself. As the game rolled on, you moved around the road track, picking up more pegs to represent a wife and kids. The goal was to acquire people and money and opportunity, to plug the holes in your car, to fill those voids you started out with.

He looked around, thinking that in the game called Real Life, you ended up plugging a dirt hole by yourself. Hardly the kind of thing you wanted your kids to know right out of the box.

When he came to where Chrissy’s grave was, he parked his car in the same place where he’d been until around one a.m. the previous night. Up ahead, there were three CPD police cars, four uniforms in parkas, and a stretch of yellow crime scene tape that wound from gravestone to gravestone in a tight box.

He took his coffee with him even though it was lukewarm at best, and as he walked over, he saw the soles of a pair of boots through the circle of his colleagues’ legs.

One of the cops looked over his shoulder, and the expression on the guy’s face forewarned José about the condition of the body: If you’d offered the uni an airsick bag, he would have blown out the bottom of the damn thing. “Hey…Detective.”

“Charlie, how we doing?”

“I’m…good.”

Yeah, right. “You seem it.”

The other guys glanced over and nodded, each one of them wearing an identical my-balls-are-in-my-lower-intestine look on his puss.

The crime scene photographer, on the other hand, was a woman known for having issues. As she bent down and started snapping, there was a little smile on her face, like she was enjoying the view. And maybe going to slip one of the candids into her wallet.

Grady had bitten it hard. Literally.

“Who found him?” José asked, crouching down to examine the body. Clean cuts. A lot of them. This had been done by a professional.

“Groundsman,” one of the cops said. “’Bout an hour ago.”

“Where’s that guy now?” José got to his feet and stepped to the side so the cock-sogynist could keep doing her job. “I’m going to want to talk to him.”

“Back in the shed having a cup of coffee. He needed it. Shook up bad.”

“Well, I can understand that. Most of the bodies ’round here are not on top of the graves.”

All four of the unis looked at him as if to say, Yeah and not in this condition, either.

“I’m done with the body,” the photographer said as she put the cap on her lens. “And I already snapped the stuff in the snow.”

José walked around the scene carefully so he didn’t disturb the various prints or their little numbered flaggings or the path that had been made across the ground. It was clear what had happened. Grady had tried to run from whoever had gotten him and failed. Going by the blood streaks, he’d been injured, likely just to incapacitate him, and then moved over to Chrissy’s grave, where he had been dismembered and killed.

José went back to where the body was and took a gander at the headstone, noticing a brown streak that ran from the top down the front. Dried blood. And he was willing to bet it had been put there on purpose and when it was warm: Some of the stuff had dripped down inside the inscribed letters that spelled out CHRISTIANNE ANDREWS.

“You get this?” he asked.

The photographer glared at him. Then uncapped, snapped, and recapped.

“Thank you,” he said. “We’ll call you if we need anything else.” Or find any other guys hacked up like this.

She glanced back down at Grady. “My pleasure.”

Obviously, he thought, taking a drink from his coffee and grimacing. Old. Cold. Nasty. And not just the photographer. Man, station-house java was the absolute worst, and if he hadn’t been at a crime scene he would have ditched the swill and crushed the Styro cup.

José looked around the scene. Trees to hide behind. No lights other than on the road. Gates locked at night.

If only he’d stayed a little longer…he could have stopped the killer before they castrated Grady, fed the SOB his last meal, and no doubt enjoyed watching him die.

“Goddamn it.”

A gray station wagon with a county crest on the driver’s door pulled up and stopped, a guy with a little black bag getting out and jogging over. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No problem, Roberts.” José clapped palms with the medical examiner. “We’d love to get an estimated time of death whenever you can.”