The Gravedigger's Ball (27 page)

“The detective’s right,” O’Hanlon said softly. “For a long time I didn’t know anything about Lenore. She was born after I had an affair, and when the smoke cleared, my life was ruined. I had a wife who wanted to kill me. I had a daughter who didn’t even know me. I had six other children who hated me because I’d hurt their mother so badly.

“I was a hypocrite, and I can see that, now that I’m seventy with only a few months to go before the cancer takes me. It’s amazing that when you’re old your eyesight gets bad, but your vision gets a whole lot clearer. When I look back, I see a life that was basically wasted. So I didn’t just call you here to tell you about the ten thousand dollars. I called you here so I could make things right.”

O’Hanlon grabbed a crumpled pack of cigarettes from amidst the pills on the end table.

“Do you think you should be doing that, Mr. O’Hanlon?” Kirsten asked worriedly.

“Doctor says I’ve got three months,” he said while searching for a light. “I might as well die happy.”

Coletti took a lighter from his pocket and leaned over to light the old man’s cigarette for him. Kirsten gave the detective a dirty look, but Coletti didn’t care. He understood where O’Hanlon was coming from. In a decade, that could be him.

“So, what is it that you need to make right?” Coletti asked.

The old man took a short drag on the cigarette. He exhaled the smoke and coughed a few times. Then he reached over to the end table for his glass. He took a swig of whiskey and savored it for a moment before leaning back in his chair and looking from the reporter to the detective.

“Lenore’s mother was my wife’s best friend,” he said, his tone neither proud nor ashamed. “She lived a few blocks away, and she was at our house most days, talking to my wife or helping with the housework, or babysitting the kids. The affair happened over time, and when my wife found out about it she was hurt in ways I can’t even explain. Even then, she was willing to forgive me, but when the town found out things got a lot harder.”

“So, how did the town find out?” Coletti asked.

O’Hanlon puffed his cigarette and took another sip of his drink, grimacing as the alcohol burned in his chest.

“They found out because Lenore’s birth was unusual,” he said.

“You mean the veil?” Coletti asked.

O’Hanlon took another puff of his cigarette. “No, I never heard anything about a veil. Of course, it’s possible that she was born with one—they didn’t let fathers in the room back then, and even if they did I wouldn’t have been there, since I was married.”

“So what about her birth was unusual?” asked Kirsten.

He took another swig of his whiskey and swallowed hard as his eyes went vacant.

“Lenore came out bleeding. Turned out she was anemic, and she needed a blood transfusion. Her blood type was AB negative, which is very rare, so they did a big push for blood donors to save her—had it on the news and everything. When it turned out I was the only person in the entire Scranton-Dunmore area with that blood type, everyone started to suspect that I was the father. It didn’t help that she looked just like me.

“My wife and I divorced right after that. She took our kids and moved in with her parents on the other side of town. Her friend took Lenore and made sure I never had a chance to be a father to her. When all my kids were old enough, they left town, and only two of them have ever come back.”

He looked at Coletti as he spoke. “Mary came back to work at the state police barracks, probably just to torture me. She didn’t just blame you for what happened to her in that cathedral when she was a child, Detective Coletti. She blamed me.”

“Blamed you for what?” Kirsten asked.

“She was raped,” said Coletti. “I caught the guy who did it. It was one of my first arrests, but they said his confession was coerced and they let him go.”

“Mary blamed Detective Coletti for that,” O’Hanlon explained. “But she blamed me even more. If I hadn’t been distracted by the affair, if I would’ve watched her when she went in that bathroom in the cathedral, if I would’ve lived right, if I would’ve loved my wife … Mary gave me plenty of ifs over the years, and when she came back, she gave them to me again. She hated me for what happened to her, and I think that hate is the reason she turned out the way she did.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, digesting what Sean O’Hanlon had shared.

“Who was the other kid who came back?” Kirsten asked.

O’Hanlon took a drag of his cigarette. “Lenore.”

“Lenore?” Coletti said, sounding confused. “She told me she never knew you. She said she’d never talked to you before.”

“That was true until about a year ago,” O’Hanlon said. “But last fall she came back to Dunmore and showed up on my doorstep.”

“And what did she say she wanted?” Coletti asked.

“She wanted to know who her father was,” O’Hanlon said as tears sprung to his eyes. “I couldn’t believe this person I’d only seen in passing a few times—this little girl I’d thought about every day for almost thirty years—had come back to Dunmore to find me.”

O’Hanlon wiped his eyes and took another swig of his whiskey. “It seemed like we talked forever, catching up on everything about each other. She told me she had a master’s degree and that she was married to John Wilkinson. She said she was interested in charities and history. She told me she’d met a group of women from Philadelphia who loved Poe, just like she did.”

A chill went up Coletti’s spine as he thought of everything Lenore had told him. She’d said that she wasn’t interested in national historic landmarks. She’d feigned ignorance about the writings of Poe. She’d told him that she’d just met Clarissa Bailey for the first time. They were lies—all of them. But Coletti couldn’t figure out why.

“Did the two of you stay in contact after that?” he asked.

“No, but she left something behind,” O’Hanlon said, reaching into his pocket and unfolding two pieces of paper.

He laid them out on the coffee table for both Kirsten and Coletti to see. Kirsten was baffled. Coletti wasn’t.

On one sheet of paper was the original of the map that Clarissa Bailey had scanned into her computer. On the other was the cryptogram and its answer.

“So I guess you’re going to question Lenore now,” O’Hanlon said sadly.

“Yes, we are,” Coletti said with a sigh. “But first we have to find her.”

“What do you mean?” O’Hanlon said as Kirsten looked at Coletti with shock etched on her face.

“Your daughter’s missing, Mr. O’Hanlon. She disappeared from her hotel room about an hour ago.”

CHAPTER 14

Police fanned out across the city to find Lenore. Bus stations, train stations, and the airport were checked. Calls were placed to Princeton and Manhattan. They called every number her husband had left, and neither John nor Lenore was anywhere to be found.

Commissioner Lynch could deal with many things, but incompetence wasn’t one of them. As Mann, Sandy, and a team of homicide detectives pored over the material they’d collected over the course of the investigation, Lynch had the officers who’d been assigned to Lenore brought into an interrogation room in homicide. When they got there, he was waiting.

Lynch watched as cops from internal affairs brought the two patrolmen inside. One of the patrolmen was young and fresh-faced, with wide eyes and a nervous smile that he flashed to hide his fear. The other was older, more seasoned, and he wore the cynical expression of a man who’d been a cop too long.

“Have a seat, gentleman,” Lynch said to the patrolmen.

Both of them sat in scarred metal chairs that were normally reserved for suspects. The cops from internal affairs stood silently at the door as the commissioner sat on the edge of the table and looked down at the patrolmen’s faces.

“Officer Thomas,” Lynch said, reading from the older patrolman’s name tag. “When did you realize that Mrs. Wilkinson was missing?”

“Had to be about an hour ago,” he said easily. “We were stationed outside her hotel room, and we were checking on her every ten minutes. The last time we went in to check, she was gone.”

“Just like that?” Lynch asked. “She just disappeared into thin air while both of you were on your posts?”

The young one licked his lips nervously as Officer Thomas explained. “I’m sure she didn’t disappear into thin air, sir, but I know we didn’t leave our posts.”

Lynch’s eyes bored into Officer Thomas. “Her room was on the twentieth floor, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So she couldn’t have jumped out the window, could she?”

“No, sir.”

“And it wasn’t a suite, so there was only one way in and one way out, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So if she didn’t jump out the window, and she didn’t get out through an adjoining room, one or both of you must’ve left your posts. Otherwise, it would’ve been impossible for her to simply walk away.”

Thomas shifted nervously in his chair. “I know it sounds crazy, Commissioner, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my twenty years on the force, but—”

“Put your badge and gun on the table, Officer Thomas,” Lynch said.

“Commissioner, I—”

“Do it now!” Lynch shouted.

The old cop looked at the young one. Then he looked at Commissioner Lynch, and with a heavy sigh, he plucked his badge from his uniform, took his gun from its holster, and laid both on the table.

“Consider yourself fired,” Lynch said. “And depending on what I find out, you might want to get ready to go to jail, too. The sergeant will escort you out.”

Officer Thomas shot a look in the direction of the young officer, his eyes begging him to do anything but talk. The young cop refused to meet his gaze. He’d already seen enough.

When the door closed behind Officer Thomas, Lynch turned his withering stare on the young cop. Everything about the cop was new, from his uniform to his wedding band to the look in his bloodshot eyes.

“Officer Green,” the commissioner said, reading from the young man’s name tag, “I’m going to give you one chance to tell me the truth. If you do, I’ll try to help you avoid jail time. If you don’t, all bets are off.”

Lynch paused and looked the young cop in the eye before posing the question directly. “Where’s Lenore Wilkinson?”

The cop twisted his wedding band around his finger. He wanted to weigh his options, but he knew he didn’t have any. After a long moment he looked up at the commissioner with plaintive eyes.

“No jail time?” he asked.

“As long as nobody hurt her, no jail time.”

Officer Green looked over his shoulder at the remaining cop from internal affairs. Then he allowed his gaze to rest on the commissioner. He sighed deeply before he began to speak.

“She came to the door and told us she wanted to go home,” he said quietly. “I knew we couldn’t hold her against her will, but I wanted to at least call it in to let someone know. She didn’t want us to do that, though, so she offered us two thousand dollars each to look the other way. I wasn’t going to take it at first, but Thomas, well, he said no one would ever know, and I believed him.”

Lynch exchanged glances with the cop from internal affairs. Then he turned to the patrolman and asked the question they all wanted answered. “Where did she go when she left?”

“I don’t know,” Green said. “She just walked away.”

The commissioner glared at the young cop, despising him as much for his stupidity as anything else. “Leave your gun and badge on the table,” he said.

The cop did as he was told, and when he was escorted out, there were tears in his eyes. Lynch hated watching a young cop’s career end before it began, but what he hated even more was the fact that it was avoidable.

Mann knocked on the door and walked in with a laptop. Sandy and the captain were with him. Lynch tried to hide his troubled expression from them, but they all knew the case was getting to him. It was getting to all of them.

“They told us you were down here,” the captain said. “Did you get what you needed?”

“I got what I didn’t need,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Lenore Wilkinson paid off the guys on the detail to let her walk away.”

“I’m not surprised,” Mann said. “Coletti just called on his way back from Dunmore. He talked to Lenore’s father and apparently almost everything she told us was a lie. She knew Clarissa. She knew about Workman’s theories. She knew everything.”

“Did she know the killer?” the commissioner asked.

Mann opened the laptop and spoke as it booted up. “I’m not sure if she knew him or not,” he said as he clicked on a pictures folder. “But my contacts down at Penn sent these over. These are the guys who were in the MFA program over the last two years.”

They all looked at the pictures. There were two black men and three Asian men. Of the four white men, none of them had black hair.

“I don’t see a match,” the commissioner said.

“Neither did I,” Mann said. “Not at first. But the National Park Service came through with the surveillance video from the Poe house. They e-mailed it about fifteen minutes ago. Take a look.”

He clicked on another folder, and the first of three surveillance videos popped up. In it, a young man with black hair and a mustache walked in behind Clarissa Bailey. In several shots, they walked through the house on the tour, seemingly unaware of one another. But in the final shot their proximity was so close as to be familiar. They appeared to know each other.

“That’s interesting,” Sandy said, “but we still don’t know who he is.”

Mann smiled. Then he took a still from the video and opened Adobe Photoshop. He superimposed the video still over the headshot of an unsmiling young man with blond hair and blue eyes from the master’s program. It was a match.

“Dyed hair and contact lenses do wonders,” Mann said. “This is our guy. According to my contacts at Penn, he never took a class with Workman, but the professor took him under his wing. His name is Lance Griggs, and he dropped out of the program after his wife was murdered. Nobody’s seen Lance in months.”

“Until today,” the captain said.

The commissioner brightened. “Good work, Mann. What’s his last known address?”

“With all due respect, Commissioner, I don’t think his last known address is where we’ll find him. This whole thing came down to the map of the cemetery, and that’s where I think he is.”