Cemetery Lake Read Free Page B

nobody to save. He has nothing else to do than watch the show, bury his
    hands in his pockets and keep me company. All of us are in that boat. He’s probably just hanging around until he gets the call that somebody is dead or dying, blood and limbs scattered across the highway of life that he’s cleaning up every day.
    The buzzing of a media helicopter approaching from the
    north sounds like a mosquito. I touch the outside of my trouser pocket and run my finger over the bulge of the wristwatch I stole from one of the corpses after we pulled it from the water.
    One of the medical examiners, a man in his early fifties who
    has been doing this for nearly half his life, comes out of the tent, looks around at the small crowd of people, spots me and then
    heads over to a detective. They talk for a few minutes, all very casual — the relaxed conversation of two men who have delivered and received many conversations about death. By the time he
    comes over he is sighing, as though being in the same graveyard with me is such tiring work. His hands are thrust deep into his pockets. There are small drops of rain on his glasses. I stand up but don’t move away from the ambulance. I have a pretty good
    idea what the examiner is going to say. After all, I spent some time with those corpses. I saw how they were dressed.
    ‘Well?’ I ask, clenching my jaw to keep my teeth from
    chattering.
    ‘You said there were three bodies?’
     
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘We’ve got two.’
    ‘The other one sank again.’
    ‘Yep. Bodies will do that. Bodies do lots of strange things.’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘Schroder said to throw you some basic facts, but nothing
    more. Just the same things he’ll be giving those vultures out there when he releases a statement in an hour.’ He points to the edge of the cemetery where the media are no doubt congregating behind
    the police barriers.
    ‘Come on, Sheldon, you can give me more than just the
     
    basics.’
    ‘Is that what you think?’
    Suddenly I’m not so sure. One day everybody is your best
    friend; the next you’re just a giant pain in the arse. ‘So, you’re going to make me guess?’
    ‘My guesses are supported by science.’
    ‘Well, science away.’
    ‘You saw the rope?’
    I nod.
    ‘I’d say they all had rope attached at one point. But not so
    much now.’
    “I don’t follow,’ I say.
    ‘You probably figured we’re not dealing with homicides,
    right?’
    ‘The thought crossed my mind.’
    ‘At least not in any traditional sense,’ he says. ‘Probably not in any sense at all.’
    ‘You want to clarify that?’
    ‘Why? You think this is your case now?’
     
    “I’m just curious. I’m allowed to be curious, aren’t I? I’m the one who found these poor bastards.’
    ‘That doesn’t make them yours.’
     
    ‘You think I want them?’
    ‘You know what I mean.’ He looks back at the tent covering
    the corpses. The wind has got hold of one of the doors and is
    snapping it from side to side like a sail. An officer gets it under control and secures it. ‘Okay, let me back up a bit here. First of all, the two bodies we’ve got. Only one of them is intact.’
    ‘That’s got to be one of two reasons, right?’ I ask.
    ‘Yeah. And it’s the good one. Nobody tortured these people
    or cut them up — at least that’s my preliminary finding. The
    worst one is simply coming apart from decomposition. He’s
    missing everything below the pelvic girdle, and what is there is held together mostly by his clothes. Hard to tell how long he’s been in the water, but it seems obvious that when we find the rest of him we’re going to find more rope. Could be piles of bones
    stuck in the mud down there. The thing is, Tate, going by the
    woman we found, I’m pretty sure these people weren’t killed and dumped in the lake. They were already dead. Dead and buried,
    I’d say. Don’t know what originally killed them, but we’ll get there. We’ll get some timeframes too.’
    I look past