Robert and Ted stood at the gates of the cemetery as Stu ran over to the cruiser and Hillman knelt next to a black box on the ground. From this angle, the tall saguaros behind and to either side of the graveyard looked like alien sentries standing stiffly at attention.
The halogens suddenly snapped off, leaving Robert's now off-center beams the only illumination. The powerful white spots shone strongly on the left portion of the cemetery, making the larger right part of the graveyard seem even darker. There were shadows within shadows, oddly formed sections of blackness amidst the rubble and de bris. A moment later, the cemetery floodlights came on. They were indeed as poor as Hillman had indicated, mounted on the fence at regular intervals and weakly shining on small segments of ground with a faded yellowish glow.
Robert walked slowly through the wrought-iron gates into the cemetery.
All of this in an hour? It was unbelievable, but he had no doubt that Hillman had been speaking the truth. Whatever else he might be, the caretaker was not a liar.
That's what was so frightening.
Robert looked carefully around, stunned by the thoroughness of the desecration. Between the time Hillman had closed the gates and called the station, nearly a him dred gravesites had been torn apart, their contents unearthed and discarded. The partial skeleton of what appeared to be a small child lay atop the dirt mound in front of him.
The not-quite-decomposed body of an old man lay folded over itself to his side.
He continued forward, skirting the holes, rounding the mounds, Ted and Stu following. Stu had brought a flash light from the car, and he shone it randomly about. The most horrifying thing was that Robert recognized several of the corpses. Lying atop an irregular pile of chunked dirt he saw Connor Pittman, the contours of his young face still visible even after the years of degeneration, the patchy filaments of his hair a parody of his once long blond locks. When the boy had died of a freak heart attack on the school track, Robert had come with the ambulance and helped load the body onto the stretcher.
Connor had seemed dead to him then, his body nothing more than a discarded vessel from which the soul had fled. But looking at him now, seeing echoes of the teenager he had been in the staring fright mask of a face, Robert was struck by what little change death had really wrought. He found himself thinking morbidly that perhaps there was no such thing as a soul, no mystical invisible essence of being that left the body at the instant of death. Perhaps whatever it was that made a living thing alive died when the body died and simply lay used and spent within the decomposing form of its biological host.
His gaze moved on, and he saw Putter Phillips and Lavinia Bullfinch and Terry Feenan. The most jarring sight to him was Sally Hicks. Or rather, her head. Sally had died of a heart attack a few years back, and her family had insisted on an open casket funeral. He'd hated to admit it, but she'd looked nearly as good in death as she had in life.
Now her head, rolled onto its side, sat alone near the base of a century plant, skin peeling off in patchy flakes, black lips curled over her once beautiful mouth in a permanent gap-toothed sneer.
There were low, scuttling sounds in the darkness, but whether they were caused by lizards and beetles or by the slight breeze that blew from the north, Robert didn't know. He did know that the breeze was not strong enough to dispel the odor of death, decay, and mortuary chemicals that hung thickly over the cemetery. He, Stu, and Ted all had their hands over their noses, but the stench had so heavily permeated the, air that they could taste it. Stu, to his left, spit continuously. Ted closed his eyes, trying bravely not to let the smell affect him, but was soon gagging. A moment later he bent over and threw up loudly next to a spiny cholla.
Robert felt like retching himself, but he willed himself not to. He turned around, looking for Hillman, and saw the caretaker standing just inside the gate, next to one of the lights. He was about to walk back toward the old man, when he looked down at the broken red-finished wood of a smashed coffin and the realization suddenly hit him: all of the graves had been dug up.
All of them.
His head jerked instantly to the left, his eyes easily picking out the familiar spot, even with the altered topography. There, in the far corner, next to two smashed caskets, a broken skeleton had been tossed over a thin, partially clothed wraith. '
Dad and Mom.
He took a step toward that section of the cemetery, then stopped.
Fingers still pinching shut his nostrils, he took a deep breath, tasting death. He did not want to get any closer. He did not want to see. Already the familiar, healthy figures of his parents, so lovingly preserved in his memory, were being superseded in his mind by the two callously mistreated corpses in the dark corner of the desecrated graveyard,
He stood there trembling. The sanctity of his parents' memory, the dignity of their deaths, the privacy of his own feelings had been violated, and the fear he had felt was replaced by anger and outrage..:: Whoever had done this was going to pay.
He knew he should call Rich, let him know what had happened. But he didn't want to call his brother. He wanted to protect him from this, to spare him, although he knew that was impossible.
He closed his eyes. When they were little, he ten and Rich five, he'd found the dead body of their cocker spaniel Roger in the ditch in front of their house one morning. Roger had obviously been hit by a car and had dragged himself out of the road and into the ditch, where he'd died during the night. The dog's black and white fur was matted with drying blood, blood so red that it looked like . catsup, and there was a wet streak of smeared dirt on the road where the dog had pulled himself forward.
The loss of Roger had hit him hard, and he'd wanted to run back inside and tell Morn and Dad and have them somehow make everything okay, but he'd known that, this time, everything would not be okay, cod not be okay, and he'd sat down on the edge of the ditch and cried, for Roger, for himself, for his parents, and, mostly, for Rich, who'd loved the dog more than anything else in the world.
He had buried the dog himself, not telling his parents, not telling Rich, preferring to let them think that Roger had simply run away. He'd placed branches and dead leaves over the dog's twisted lifeless form in the ditch that morning and had returned at night alone, picking up the hard bony body, the gluey blood sticking to his hands, and carrying the dog out to a spot in the surrounding desert near a particularly large saguaro where he'd already !idug a hole.
He had never told anyone the truth, and forever afterward Rich and his parents had believed that Roger had run away and had not come back because he had found another friendly family to live with. They had never given up the hope of getting Roger back, had always thought they would run into him someday in town or hear his bark from someone else's backyard, for years had even made weekly pilgrimages to the small corral behind the vet's that passed for a pound in Rio Verde, but of course they had never found the dog. He had successfully spared them the horrible truth of Roger's death.
But he could not spare Rich this.
Robert opened his eyes, glanced back toward his men. Ted, especially, looked stricken, and Robert remembered that the young patrolman had lost his own mother a few years back.
She was doubtlessly one of the disinterred corpses now littering the landscape.
'Ted?' he asked. 'You want to take a breather?'
The patrolman shook his head. 'I'm fine.' He ran a hind through his short brown hair. 'Who you figure'd do something like this?
I ::' 'I don't know,' Robert admitted.
Stu looked toward them, the flashlight pointing down at his feet.
'Where do we start? I mean, do we dust the tombstones for fingerprints?'
'We look for tire tracks in the road. We take soil samples.
Footprints should be our best bet. Whoever did this had to walk out of here. He had to step on this dirt somewhere.'
'Unless he flew.' Stu's voice was quiet.
'Knock that crap off.' Robert looked from Stu to Ted.
Both were pale, frightened. They were just kids, he realized Hell, out of all his men, only he and Ben had any life experience to speak of. The rest of them were just... babes in the woods.
He was just being overprotective. Equally young cops in inner cities dealt with worse things than this all the
