The Gravedigger's Ball (22 page)

But on the inside, its charcoal gray-cloth seats and interior were soaked with the blood of its dead owner, and so were the Gravedigger’s hands.

As he crossed back into Philadelphia, the killer knew, even as his sanity continued to crumble, that he’d need the help of his benefactor. When he received the text message saying a car would be waiting at Ogontz and Limekiln Pike in thirty minutes, he was grateful, but he was also afraid. In the slow-moving after-work traffic, he risked being spotted, so he set out to get off the main streets.

He drove the labyrinth of one-way streets and twisting avenues on the Philadelphia side of the border, looking for a place to hide. Before long he was in a place where his heart had gone too many times over the last year, a place where he’d refused to go physically until now.

He drove along the stone wall that so often plagued his daydreams. He felt intensely lonely as he passed beneath the bare branches of the tree-lined street, and then he felt crippling sadness.

As he drew closer to the location where he knew his heart would take him, tears he hadn’t cried for a year began streaming down his face. When finally he arrived there, with the raven circling above, he parked the car and told himself he desperately needed to leave. He sat there and chided himself for mourning all he’d lost. He looked at his hands and cursed himself for killing so many people. Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the tears stopped, and he turned to look at the spot in Northwood Cemetery where he’d buried his wife a year before.

“I came back to see you, Helen,” he said through trembling lips. “Did you miss me? Because I missed you more than you’ll ever know.”

He dried his eyes with his hands, streaking dirt and blood across his face. The red and brown smears looked almost like camouflage, which was fitting, because in the killer’s mind, he was at war. He was fighting against himself, he was fighting against his grief, and he was fighting against the urge to simply kill everyone and everything in sight. Even as he continued to lose his tenuous grip on his sanity, though, he knew he couldn’t totally lose control. There was a plan, after all, and that plan would allow him to get back the only thing that would make the pain go away. That plan would allow him to bring back his wife.

“I know you must be lonely, Helen,” he said as the tears began anew. “I’m lonely, too. But it won’t be that way for long. When I’m finished, we’ll be together again.”

The sobs began, softly at first. Then they rapidly grew into uncontrollable shrieks. He pounded his fists on the dashboard. He stomped his feet on the floor. He rocked back and forth in his seat. He gave in to his anger.

His tirade was visible from outside the car. It caught the attention of neighbors who watched him from their homes and called police. When a cruiser rolled slowly down the street and crept toward the car, the killer stopped and looked in the rearview mirror, and everything he’d worked for flashed before his eyes. He wasn’t going to let it end this way, so he did what he had to do. He wiped the tears from his face once more, mouthed a silent good-bye to his wife, and put the car in gear. Then he gunned it.

The skidding of the tires was instantly followed by the sound of lights and sirens. As the black Ford and the cop car flew south on the residential street, the police officer reported the chase to radio, and every unit within five miles headed in that direction.

The Ford screamed down the road that ran along the perimeter of the graveyard, then skidded onto a two-way street that ran between the graveyard and a school. By then, two more police cars had joined the chase, and all four vehicles were traveling at nearly a hundred miles per hour.

The Gravedigger looked nervously in the rearview mirror as the police cars closed in. Then he glanced at the blood on the seat. He knew he had to escape from them in order to have a chance to fulfill his promise to his wife. He would either succeed or die trying. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, pushing the black Ford around yet another corner and skidding on the blacktop as he barreled down a series of small, one-way streets with names like Bouvier and Gratz.

He sideswiped dozens of vehicles and barely missed a man and a woman who were returning home from work. As the chase intensified and police cars crisscrossed the tiny streets in an effort to cut him off, mothers herded their children inside. Teens dodged the speeding cars. The sound of wailing sirens filled the air.

The killer made a sudden right and hit the long block of Sixty-seventh Avenue that led toward Broad Street, barely missing an old woman as she disembarked from a bus. The policeman that was behind him wasn’t so fortunate. He drove into the woman, knocking her twenty feet into the air, and skidded to a stop as other cars continued the pursuit.

As the killer approached a winding street called Old York Road, a police car came from the right and screeched to a halt, blocking the car’s path. The killer skidded and swerved, clipping the front of the police car before heading south.

Police radios blared as commanders tried to give orders to break off the pursuit. But the calls for assistance drowned out the orders, and the police cars moved even faster.

The killer couldn’t outrun them, but he knew he had to make it to Ogontz and Limekiln Pike, so he did the only thing he could to stop the chase. He began targeting pedestrians. He drove onto the sidewalk and hit a man. He swerved back into the street and hit another. And as the casualties began to pile up in his wake, the commanders’ orders finally took hold.

The police broke off the pursuit. Five minutes later, they found the black Ford, but the Gravedigger was gone.

CHAPTER 12

Though Workman’s home was still standing, the fire department wasn’t sure if it was structurally sound. That was bad news for Coletti, because he wanted to see if there were things in the house that would indicate what else Workman had hidden when they talked.

As the fire marshall set about deciding when to let the police into the house, Coletti stood amidst spinning dome lights on the manicured lawn that encircled Workman’s property. The stench of smoke still filled the air, and smoldering embers floated on the autumn breeze. Cheltenham Township police were on the scene, as were several fire companies from Philadelphia, Cheltenham, and La Mott.

The news media were there, too, including the woman who’d been hounding Coletti throughout the day. He tried to avoid Kirsten Douglas by standing far away from the gathered media, but it was hard for him to do so. She was yelling his name from beyond the perimeter, and her voice was louder than all the other reporters combined. For that reason alone, he was obliged to turn around and talk to her. He hadn’t heard a woman yell his name in quite some time.

As crime scene officers busily took pictures and measurements, documenting every inch of the scene, Coletti walked to the edge of the crime scene tape that extended the length of Workman’s property. He lifted the tape and made his way over to Kirsten. When the other reporters saw him, they flocked to the spot where Kirsten stood.

“I’ll give you guys a statement in a few,” Coletti said. “I need to talk to Ms. Douglas first.”

Undaunted, the remaining members of the media followed Coletti, shouting questions as he calmly walked Kirsten to his car, which was parked at the end of the driveway. The reporters reversed course like camera-wielding lemmings when a township supervisor showed up to give a statement to a television station.

Kirsten and Coletti got into the car, and he turned to her with a weary grin. “Okay, the commissioner told me I should talk to you,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

Kirsten knew he had no intention of helping her, and she understood from the numerous times she’d interviewed him over the years that he wouldn’t tell her anything that wasn’t in his own self-interest. Still, she had to ask him something, so rather than waste her time on questions he wouldn’t answer, she asked him the one question she knew he would be officially free to address.

“Do the memories still haunt you?” she asked.

Coletti was taken aback. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mary Smithson. The Angel of Death. Do your memories from that case affect the way you’re handling this one?”

“This is on background, right? No names?”

Kirsten nodded.

“Okay, then I’ll answer it this way. Every case is different, including this one.”

“So are you saying that what happened with Mary has no bearing on how you view Lenore?”

“I’m saying when someone’s killed, we gather evidence, build a case, and take it to prosecutors. That’s what we do. Anything that happens before or after that doesn’t matter.”

“All right,” Kirsten said, her frustration mounting. “Let’s go totally off the record.”

“Okay.”

“What I’m asking you is whether Mary’s crimes affect how you view her sister. And if they do, should you really be working on this case?”

Coletti took a deep breath and looked out the car window at the crime scene. He considered his answer before he spoke.

“Look at all those people over there, Kirsten. They’re all here for their own little piece of the pie. The politicians want to talk tough and make people think they’re on top of things. The cops want to catch a killer. The firefighters want to put out fires. The reporters want to tell stories. All those people, no matter what their job, bring their own experiences with them. Some bring heartbreak, others bring loss, or grief, or fear. The one thing those people share is their humanity. Their experiences affect the way they see their jobs, so here’s my question to you: Should
they
be working on this case?”

“You’re trying to cloud the issue, Detective. Their connections to this aren’t personal.”

“How do we know that?” Coletti shot back. “And if we really want to be fair about it, the only person working on this case who has a definite personal connection is you, Kirsten. You even went on CNN and talked about how it affected you. Does that personal connection keep you from doing your job?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what makes you think it would stop me from doing mine?”

Kirsten wanted to come back with a snappy answer, but she couldn’t, so she turned and looked out over the crowd of cops and reporters who were milling about outside the house. She also looked inside herself.

“I guess I should consider myself corrected,” she said with a wan smile.

“No, you should consider yourself lucky to be alive.”

“I do,” she said seriously. “I guess that’s something we have in common.”

Coletti looked at his watch. “Do you have any other questions for me?”

“Just one.”

Coletti looked at her expectantly.

“Have you heard anything from Lenore’s family?”

“You mean her husband?”

“No, I mean her family—her father especially.”

“We’ve been trying to reach her father, but we haven’t heard anything from him.”

Kirsten smiled. “I have. He called the paper about an hour ago and asked to speak to me.”

“Okay,” Coletti said anxiously. “I need to speak to him, too. How do I reach him?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t reveal my sources,” she said coyly.

“But you can get locked up for obstructing an investigation.”

Kirsten’s smile broadened. “Do you really want to go through the freedom-of-the-press thing and turn this into an even bigger media circus? There’s an easier solution than that.”

“What is it?”

“We can go up to Dunmore together.”

Coletti stared at her, knowing that Clarissa Bailey had made several calls to Sean O’Hanlon in the days before her death. Coletti had to speak with him, and if Kirsten could make that happen, he’d gladly deal with the fallout later.

“All right,” Coletti said. “You can do a ride-along to Dunmore, and if Sean O’Hanlon’s okay with it, we both sit in on the interview. But after that we go our separate ways. Agreed?”

“Okay,” said Kirsten.

Suddenly there was a tap on the car window. Coletti looked up and saw the lead detective from Cheltenham Township. Cheltenham had jurisdiction over the Workman scene, but the detective was an old friend who’d once worked with Coletti in Philadelphia’s homicide unit. Coletti expected no contentious turf battles from him. But Coletti didn’t know what to expect from his trip to Dunmore with Kirsten Douglas.

As the two of them got out of the car, Coletti was unsure what their unholy alliance would yield. But as Kirsten returned to her corner of the world and Coletti returned to his, he knew that they could learn more together than they could apart.

“You having a little one-on-one time with Kirsten?” Coletti’s old friend asked while they watched the reporter walk away.

Coletti laughed it off. “I need that like I need a hole in my head,” he said as they shook hands. “They finished with the scene yet?”

“Just about.”

The two of them walked toward the line of trees where the bodies had been found, reminiscing about the days when they worked together in homicide.

“I still remember the time you had that foot pursuit down in South Philly,” the detective said with a smile. “You were running so slow it looked like you were moving backwards.”

“I was moving backwards,” Coletti said. “I tricked the guy into thinking he was fast so you could catch him.”

Their laughter faded as they walked between the trees, stood at the edge of more crime scene tape, and looked down into the shallow grave. The sight was grisly.

Workman’s one remaining eye bugged out from his skull and stared up at them with a steadfastness that was sickening. There were third-degree burns over most of his body. The woman who lay on top of him had no such burns, but her smashed face and mutilated chest were covered with blood.

“We don’t get much of this out here,” said the Cheltenham detective.

“I wish we didn’t either,” Coletti said with a sigh. “If I was smart, I would’ve left for the suburbs, too.”

As crime scene officers took pictures and blood samples, Coletti squinted and looked hard at Workman’s dead body.

“I’m willing to bet that missing eye was gouged out with the same thing that made those gashes in his face,” Coletti said.