I started looking for the corpse at the only place I could think of: the cemetery where David's birth mother, Evelyn, had been buried. Where her coffin had been exhumed. And where, later, it had been found to be empty.
Weird shit.
It was early the next morning when I pulled over to the side of one of those narrow cemetery roads and parked my Camry under an elm tree. I was tired but alert. I don't sleep well these days, and if I was a betting man, I would bet that I would probably never sleep well again.
The Forest Lawn Cemetery here in Burbank, on the other side of the infamous Griffith Park, is epic, covering an entire hillside. If I had to be buried anywhere, it would be here. Granted, I would want to be buried near my son, but I doubted he would want anything to do with me, even in the after life, and especially for all eternity.
There were a few others here. This is greater L.A., after all, with nearly 30 million people, and so one rarely, if ever, finds themselves alone. Anywhere. About seven or eight people were presently brushing off burial plaques or standing solemnly in the early morning light. I heard the faint sound of weeping from somewhere. Most were dressed in business attire, no doubt on the way to work.
Myself, I was here for work.
Sipping a latte something or other from Starbucks, I made my way through the cemetery, picking my way carefully behind grave markers. I've never put much stock into the supernatural (well, that is, until recently...long story), but walking over somebody's grave just seemed wrong. After all, everything they had ever done and everything they ever were was summed up into one spot of earth. The least someone could do was avoid walking over them.
Like a good investigator, I already had Evelyn's plot location in hand, and after studying a map of the grounds upon entering the cemetery, I had a fairly good idea where I was going.
Fairly. This was still confusing as hell.
My breath misted before me. Steam billowed up from that little hole in the Starbucks lid. Birds flitted overhead and the sun was rising to the east, casting my elongated shadow over the gently sloping hill. Hard to believe that within such a beautiful hillside were thousands upon thousands of corpses.
An old poem came to mind: The ghosts of the tribe/ Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire/ They try to remember the sunlight/ But light has died out of their skies.
But not on this hillside. Here, the morning sun blazed full force, galvanizing the dead.
I took in a lot of air and found breathing suddenly difficult. It was impossible for me to walk through any cemetery without thinking of the little boy I had condemned into one for eternity. My little boy.
When I found my breath again, I moved on, feet crunching over the dewy grass. Soon, after a handful of false starts, I found the correct row, and five minutes after that, I was standing over a freshly turned grave.
The casket, I knew, was gone. It was now marked evidence somewhere. Grave robbing is serious business. No one wants to think they're loved ones may not be where they're supposed to be. Although cranky and bitchy, I knew that Hammer was still approaching this case seriously. Except he was already overworked as it was. I wasn't overworked. I was underworked if anything. And Roxi was right. The last thing I needed was to take on a charity case.
Say that to my conscience.
I got into this business to help. To give back. To heal. To stop the pain. To ease the pain.
To be anything other than what I had been before.
A small wind, which flapped my loose jeans at my ankles, brought with it the subtler scents of nature. But mostly I smelled the freshly turned soil at my feet.
What the hell was going on here?
I knelt down and looked closely at the ground around me, picturing in my mind what must have happened here. Someone, or perhaps many someones, had dug up the body and removed it from this very spot. Later, the grave had been officially exhumed and found to be empty.
I considered the possibility that perhaps her body never made it to the grave site. Seemed a good question, and one that I would follow up on.
For now, though, I studied the grave site, noting where a tractor had recently sat. No doubt a small crane had been used to raise coffin. No doubt the caretakers also used some sort of backhoe to dig up the site. And, for all I knew, there was some sort of machine that could do both. The Ford Gravedigger 1000 or something. Digs, lifts and buries - all in one.
I stood and walked around the site, not sure what I was looking for, but keeping my eyes on the ground, looking for anything that stood out. Nothing stood out. No graverobbing business cards left behind. No broken-handled shovels. No deep shoe impression with, say, a rounded inside heel to indicate someone had recently walked through here with a noticeable limp.
I stood on the hillside and soaked in the sun. A bluish light seemed to dance before me, but that was probably just an odd refraction of the sunlight, the mist and the green grass.
The blue light was smallish, about the size of a little boy. It seemed to hover before me briefly, before I blinked and it disappeared.
If it had been there at all.