Chapter 5 Rachel #2
“This plot wasn’t taken yet,” Julie pipes up, her voice meek. “There shouldn’t be a body there, that’s the problem. We don’t know who it is.”
“And Julie, are you quite sure this plot wasn’t already taken when the Richards family selected it?” Reverend Holland asks.
“I already told you,” Julie says. “I know this cemetery like my own backyard. There isn’t supposed to be a body in this plot. I’m positive.”
“Well, let’s see it,” Green says, gesturing to the hole several feet away.
They walk over to the excavation, Rachel and Green pulling blue rubber gloves out of their pockets as they go. When they reach the edge, they kneel. The late spring breeze lifts Rachel’s dark-brown bangs. The rest of her hair is tied back in a tight bun.
She takes in the sight and her heart falls.
“Not her,” Green mutters beside her.
“No. Not her.”
From the size of the skull and what they can see of the torso, combined with the narrow jawline, the remains are likely female. But they’re just bones. This body has been here for decades. It’s not Stacy Cooper.
“Shit,” Rachel curses.
“Yeah. My guess is administrative error,” Green says with a glance back in Julie’s direction. “Seems a bit scattered, jumpy. Probably not the most organized.”
Rachel gives him a sidelong scowl. She hates when people question whether women are good at their jobs.
She herself had more than enough of that from Bloody Mary when she was a child.
It was only ever her grandmother Dora, pausing over her blue-patterned Bicycle playing cards, who would praise Rachel for her successes.
Good game, little one. Your turn to deal.
“Except this body has clearly been here longer than Julie’s been running the cemetery office,” Rachel notes. She wants to snarl it at him, but keeps her tone calm.
“Bad record-keeping in the past, then, and not organized now. Think about it, Mackenzie: what are the odds that an unidentified body in a cemetery isn’t just an error?”
“Well, maybe, but isn’t that presumption also why it might be a perfect place to dispose of a body? Because the perp thought we would assume it’s an error?”
He shrugs. “But it’s in a casket.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“You can take lead on this one, Mackenzie.”
“What? Why?” Rachel says, heated. “Can’t you give it to Garrison? I’m still on the Cooper case.”
And I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.
“Except the Cooper case is solved,” Green says, anger threading his tone like coarse twine. “John Cooper—”
“I don’t want to do this with you, Gary, I really don’t,” Rachel interrupts. “But we still don’t have a body, there’re still too many unanswered questions.”
“Enough,” he snaps, and Rachel swallows as she sees Reverend Holland glance over out of the corner of her eye.
“Sir,” she begins again, feeling her face grow warm and silently cursing it.
“It’s done, Mackenzie. Let it go, for God’s sake. We’ll find Stacy Cooper’s body in the lake eventually. Give that poor woman some peace.”
Rachel’s mouth falls open but she catches herself, presses her lips together and raises her chin. She’s trying to give Tamara Cooper some peace by solving the fucking case, by giving her real information as to what actually happened to her daughter.
“Look,” Green says, with an exasperated sigh that makes Rachel know he’s hit the limit of how much so-called insubordination he’ll tolerate from her today.
How much truth, more like. “You say there’s still too many questions in the Cooper case, and there are.
I’ll give you that. But that’s true about any case,” he continues.
“This is your job, Mackenzie. Drop the Cooper case. You’re on this one now. ”
Rachel clenches her fist around her pen. “Yes, sir.”
“Start with the cemetery records. If we can tie this off as a mistake, I’d prefer it.”
Rachel bites her tongue so hard she worries she might taste blood. It’s his “preference” for how he wants his cases to turn out that makes him so difficult to work with. You don’t start with a conclusion and work your way backward.
“And tell them,” he adds, nodding darkly at Julie, Jake, and the reverend, “not to go spouting off about this to anyone. Especially today. Last thing we need is the news finding out a woman’s body’s been discovered.”
Rachel nods. She doesn’t want Tamara Cooper to hear about this, either. She’s had enough visits and phone calls with Stacy’s grief-stricken mother. Each one weighs more than the one before it, and this news might just about break her.
“Not sure what to do about that, though,” Rachel says, indicating the street along the only side of the cemetery that isn’t walled in with tall hedges, encasing it like a secret garden.
There are people out on the street in front of six of the ten houses, all watching curiously, drawing their own conclusions.
“As soon as they see us cordon it off as a crime scene, it’s game over. ”
Yellow tape around the trees, snapping in the wind.
She clears her throat, shakes the image away. Of all the horrendous things she witnessed that night nearly ten years ago, she’s not sure why the yellow tape has stuck with her.
“Well,” Green says with an impatient bite, “we can’t do anything about that but try to tell them it’s nothing.
I’ll go talk to ’em. You go into the office and get started on those records.
I’ll go back to HQ and send Stevens and Fisher over to help you.
And if that secretary”—he frowns in Julie’s direction—“can’t gather all the records because they aren’t organized, then I think we know what happened here, don’t we? ”
“Sure, sir,” Rachel says. She can’t say any more without getting in shit.
He smiles, smug. “I think this is good. It’ll finally get you off the Cooper case. It’s time you had another body.” He heads off in the direction of the onlookers, ready to give them a telling-off that will only spark more rumour and speculation.
Rachel watches him go, breathing deep to try to lessen the clenching sensation in her chest. She isn’t sure she’ll ever “get off” the Stacy Cooper case. Not until her body is found and they can deliver some real answers to the girl’s poor mother.
Rachel walks back over to the open hole in the earth, kneels and looks down on the remains of a person.
There isn’t a whole lot to see—most of the skeleton is encased in the battered remains of a cheap, splintered casket.
She’ll get a better look when the Ident team comes in to exhume it.
She’ll take notes and pictures, collate the questions that need to be answered.
And that’s when it really hits her: she’s been so tied up in the Cooper case, but this person here in the Millgate Cemetery is someone else’s unsolved case, their loss.
The tragedy they need answers to if they can ever hope to move on.
There could be some other Tamara Cooper out there waiting for the truth.
Rachel sighs heavily, and stands.
If there’s one thing she hates, it’s an unanswered question.