“It’s been a long day.”
“Tell me about it. I was bawling like a baby in the meat locker. The tears were all frozen on my face when the Rangeman guy broke in.”
“How’d they get the door open?”
“The little guy, Eugene, had an electronic gizmo that figured out the combination. The whole operation was freakin’ impressive. Rangeman had an EMT truck and medics waiting for us when we got out.”
“Thanks for staying with Morelli.”
“No problem. I guess you’ll take over now.”
I nodded. “I’ll wait here.”
“That would be great. I think I pissed my pants when I got shoved into the freezer. I wouldn’t mind going home and throwing these clothes away. I don’t want anything that reminds me of tonight.”
It was a couple more hours before I got to take Morelli home. We went to his house because Rex and Bob were there and so I didn’t have to worry about finding leftover pieces of Orin. Morelli was zonked out on painkillers, and I was so fatigued I was vibrating.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LULA AND CONNIE were already at the office when I rolled in Monday morning. Connie had a birthday cake on her desk.
“Whose birthday?” I asked.
“No one’s,” Connie said. “We’re celebrating that you’re not dead.”
“It was touch and go,” I said. “Saturday isn’t going down as one of my better days.”
“Yeah, but you got a lot accomplished,” Lula said. “You got a whole shitload of bad guys killed.”
I scooped some icing off with my finger and ate it. “True. And I found Cubbin and Pitch.”
Connie and Lula exchanged glances.
“What?” I asked.
“Turned out when they unzipped those bags one of them was Pitch but the other one was some homeless guy.”
“That’s impossible. What happened to Cubbin?”
Lula and Connie did shoulder shrugs. They didn’t know what happened to Cubbin.
I called Morelli. “I just got in to work and I’m hearing it wasn’t Cubbin in the body bag.”
“I was briefed on it two minutes ago,” Morelli said. “It was Pitch and a John Doe.”
“So where’s Cubbin?”
“Don’t know. Right now we can’t confirm that he’s dead.”
“What did Nurse Kruger and Craig Fish have to say?”
“Kruger was found on the floor in her apartment, foaming at the mouth from an overdose. She’s locked down at St. Francis. She’s expected to live, but we haven’t been able to question her yet. Craig Fish is in custody but he isn’t saying anything on advice of his lawyer.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It hurts like a bitch.”
“I’ll kiss it and make it better tonight.”
“It’s going to take more than a kiss, Cupcake.”
Lula and Connie were watching me as I disconnected.
“So?” Lula said.
“Kruger and the doctor aren’t talking. That means they can’t confirm that Cubbin is dead. That means we don’t get our bond back.”
“I was counting on a bonus from that bond,” Lula said. “I need new tires on the Firebird.”
“Good thing Vinnie isn’t here,” Connie said. “He’ll be doubling up on his blood pressure medication. That was a huge bond.”
I sliced off a piece of the birthday cake and sat down to eat it. “Let’s think about this. We’re pretty sure they had Cubbin. We saw the Yeti push something out in the laundry hamper. And the Yeti said he was looking for Cubbin’s money, so obviously Cubbin talked to him. If Cubbin escaped he would have gone to the police. At the very least he would have tried to access some of his money. If he didn’t escape, he’s dead. He wasn’t in the freezer. And he wasn’t in the rest of The Clinic. So he must be . . .”
Lula and Connie stared at me.
“In the cemetery,” I said. “That’s where they disposed of the bodies.”
“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “I’m not liking this turn of events. I like cemeteries even less than I like hospitals.”
I finished my cake and thought about taking a second piece. Not a good idea, I told myself. I’d go into a sugar-and-lard-induced coma.
“I’m going to the cemetery to take a look around,” I said. “Anyone want to come with me?”
“I guess I need to make sure you don’t get into more trouble,” Lula said. “The one day I’m not with you all hell breaks loose what with crazy people getting exploded in your foyer.”
A half hour later I turned off Route 1 into Sunshine Memorial Park. It looked a lot less sinister during the day, but it would never win any awards for beauty. The first couple acres were flat. No trees. No shrubs. No flowers. Just small headstones sunk into the ground. I followed the road to the part of the park that was undeveloped. There were some hills there and an occasional tree. The grass was scrubby. I drove past the large excavated pit that Sunshine and the Yeti had tried to bury me in. The grass around it was trampled from police and emergency vehicles. The pit was still open. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered on stakes in the ground.
I parked and Lula and I got out and walked to the hole in the ground.
“This had to be scary as snot,” Lula said. “It’s creepin’ me out and it’s not even nighttime.”
“I was okay until I got pushed into the hole.” I left the grave site and returned to the road. “Cubbin hasn’t been missing all that long. If they buried him here the ground would still be freshly disturbed. You look on one side and I’ll look on the other.”
After a couple minutes Lula called out that she’d found some freshly dug dirt.
“Me too,” I said. “I have two potential grave sites here.”
“How’re we going to know which one of these is Cubbin?” Lula asked.
“I guess we have to dig them all up.”
“Nuh-uh. Lula doesn’t dig up dead people. You get cooties like that. And they don’t like being disturbed. They get pissy and put the whammy on you. You don’t want to do it either. You get in enough trouble all on your own. You can’t afford to have the whammy.”
“If I go to the police it’ll take forever. They’ll have to get special permission and court orders and grave diggers. And I need the money. I just ran my credit card over my limit sending Tiki back to Hawaii.”
“What we need is our own grave digger,” Lula said.
“And I know just such a person.”
“You’re thinking about Simon Diggery,” Lula said. “I’d rather dig the grave myself than have dealings with Diggery. Last time we went to his crap-ass trailer you opened a closet door and a twenty-foot snake fell out.”
Simon Diggery was a wiry little guy in his fifties. His brown hair was shot with gray and usually tied back in a ponytail. His skin was like old cracked leather and he had arms like Popeye’s. He lived in a raggedy double-wide in Bordentown with his wife, his six kids, his brother Melvin, Melvin’s pet python, and their Uncle Bill. They were like a bunch of feral cats living in the woods, and Simon Diggery was Trenton’s premier grave robber.
“I have a shovel in the trunk,” I said. “We could start digging.”
“Okay,” Lula said. “I was bluffing. Let’s go talk to Diggery.”
I was bluffing too. I didn’t have a shovel in the trunk.
It took almost forty minutes to find Diggery’s trailer. It was off Route 206, down a winding two-lane road filled with potholes. The rusted-out cankerous trailer was up on cinderblocks and held together with duct tape.
I knocked on the door and Lula stayed about ten feet behind me with her gun drawn.
