CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Standing in Greenmount Cemetery, twenty feet from an unmarked grave, a cocktail of dread was bubbling in Ella’s gut. She had to wonder if this was how Ed Gein felt right before he dug up the remains of the dead. To make matters worse, the midday sun had chosen this moment to intensify.
‘Do you know the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery?’ Ella asked.
‘No,’ Ripley said as an excavator rolled noisily across the grass toward its destination, ‘and I don’t care. Dark, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’
‘Why? What are you expecting we’ll find? A nailbomb?’
‘This isn’t my first grave robbery, and of all my previous grave robberies, none of them have ever gone well.’
‘There’s a first time for everything.’
The excavator settled over the plate in Section C, and a man in a hi-vis vest waved it back a few inches with two fingers.
Ella watched it all with half nerves and half admiration, because she had signed the last piece of paper barely two hours ago and here was a machine on the grass and a crew rigging boards and a woman from the medical examiner’s office laying out tools on a folding table.
The whole apparatus of opening the dead had been assembled while the morning had only just ticked over to afternoon.
Hibbert and two officers were watching the proceedings from the other side of the grave.
‘Even if there is a notebook in that grave, what are we expecting it to say? And how would our killer – who, by the way, isn’t in that coffin – how would our killer know if this dead guy had made some kind of hit list before his execution?’
‘I’m not expecting any of that. I’m expecting it to show who visited Thomas Greaves in prison, and there’s a good chance one of those people is our killer. I know murderers get obsessives from all over the place, but someone this dedicated has to have had personal contact with Greaves.’
‘You’re not wrong, but still.’ Ripley checked her watch, then gestured at the foreman. ‘These guys are efficient. I’ll give them that.’
Ella took in the whole scene while the crew worked their magic.
The cemetery was a few acres of grass with low walls and nothing by way of security.
There were a few hundred gravestones, most of which had names, but Ella had noticed some unmarked ones, which she assumed were MCI Jessup’s more irredeemable inmates.
Thomas Greaves’s tombstone, however, was fully marked.
Across the way, the prison itself was visible as a mere gray blob.
‘Just another day at the office for these guys,’ Ella said. ‘Apparently, digging the hole isn’t the problem. The hard part is cracking open the casket.’
‘Okay, William Burke.’
The forensic anthropologist had come over from his car with his bag in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
Doctor Park, he had introduced himself as on the gravel an hour ago, Maryland OCME.
He was wearing a polo shirt with the office crest on the breast pocket and a pair of cargo trousers, and he had a small notebook open in his palm that he wrote in every minute or so.
‘Agents, we’ll cut the topsoil in a square at five by seven,’ Park said.
‘Then we go down by spade until we hit a hard surface. The federal coffins are pine over a steel frame, so we’ll know the lid by the sound.
We expect the lid at five feet six. We won’t go down the sides until we’re sure of the orientation.
I’ll be photographing every six inches. I have your signatures on the chain-of-custody.
The casket stays closed until I open it, and I’ll do the dental confirmation on the spot from the records I brought. ’
‘Roger that,’ said Ella. ‘Thanks for getting this done so quickly.’
‘Don’t mention it. This is a walk in the park for my guys. We excavate things every day. Not usually bodies, but still.’
‘Of course.’
‘When we open the casket, I need to ask that you mask up and keep well back. I’m sure you know that corpses aren’t the cleanest things in the world.’
‘Understood.’
Park turned to the excavator driver and gave him a thumbs up. ‘Right, we’re going in. Stand back.’
The excavator did most of the early work, and it did it without ceremony.
The bucket came down and peeled the turf back in long strips, and then it went deeper and the strips became spadefuls of dark Maryland clay that the machine stacked to one side in a heap that rapidly grew.
The smell came up out of the ground with the digging. Wet earth hit back of her throat.
Ella stood with Ripley behind the line of boards the crew had laid, far enough back to be out of the way and close enough to see down into the cut as it opened.
Doctor Park had positioned himself at the lip of the grave with his camera, and every so often he raised a hand, and the operator stopped the machine, and Park leaned in and photographed the bare soil, then waved the machine on again.
It was patient work and it gave Ella too much room to think.
She did not believe in much, but she found herself making the closest thing to a bargain she had in her.
Let it be here. Let there be a notebook in a box in the ground, let it have a name in it.
Three people were already gone. The fourth was alive somewhere this afternoon, eating lunch, answering email, standing in a queue, with no idea that a giant had them on their hitlist. Everything Ella had done for two days came down to whether a county groundsman’s standing arrangement with a public cemetery had put Thomas Greaves in the ground with his property like Roy had said it would.
If it had not, she was a federal agent who had dug up a dead man on the strength of a gift-shop painting, and she would deserve the paperwork that came after.
The bucket stopped going down. The operator had felt the change through the machine and he backed the arm off and killed the engine. The cemetery went quiet except for birdsong and the road beyond the wall.
Two of the crew dropped into the cut with hand spades and went the rest of the way down on their knees. Ella heard the scrape of the steel on the lid before she saw the lid, and Park went down on his haunches at the edge and called the depth and wrote it in his book.
‘The lid’s intact,’ one of the men said, looking up. ‘No collapse. She’s sound.’
‘Then clear the long sides,’ Park said. ‘I want to see the whole of it before anyone lifts anything.’
It took another ten minutes, and Ella spent every one of them not speaking.
The crew dug out the sides of the coffin and brushed the clay off the lid with a hand brush, and the pine came up grey-brown and water-stained, banded with the steel frame that the federal contracts used, and it looked smaller in the ground than a box that had held a six-foot-eight man had any right to look.
‘Strapping’s on,’ the second man said. ‘Two points. You want them off?’
‘Off,’ Park said. ‘And then everybody up out of the hole. I open it.’
The men worked the buckles loose and handed the straps up and climbed out, and they stood at the heap of spoil and wiped their hands on their trousers. Park fitted a fresh mask, snapped his gloves at the wrist, and lowered himself down beside the lid.
He got his fingers under the lip at the head end where the men had cleared it. He looked up once, at Ella, and she gave him the nod he was waiting for.
He lifted.
The lid came up with a sound that was mostly the suck of wood letting go of wet earth, and it came up further than Ella expected, on a hinge that had survived better than the rest of it, and it stood for a second at the top of its travel and then Park let it rest back against the side of the cut.
‘Here we go,’ Ripley said. ‘Masks on.’
Ella pulled out her mask and snapped it on. The man nearest the foot of the grave had been leaning in to look, and he straightened up and looked at the man beside him, and that man looked into the box and then looked at Park.
Park didn’t move at all.
He crouched there with one hand still on the open lid, and his head tilted down into the coffin, and he didn’t call a name and/or reach for his dental records like he said he would.
‘Uhh…’
‘What?’ Ella shouted. ‘What’s in there?’
Park didn’t answer.
Ella thought to hell with the bacteria, ran over to the open grave and dropped to a crouch at the head end opposite Park.
She looked into the casket.
At the stained quilting on the inside of the lid. At the dark orange satin lining.
She looked at the long, clean, empty bed of it, foot to head.
The coffin was empty.