front of the older of the two furnaces. He swung open its heavy door. From a jacket pocket he pulled out a flashlight the size of a ballpoint pen and shone it into the furnace’s maw.
“Pretty clean,” he said.
I thought he was acting exactly like a civil servant. I did my best to play along. “Didn’t Kalendar burn some of his victims in there?”
“That he did.” Pohlhaus swung shut the furnace door and began to do his tiptoeing-through-the-tulips act again with the antique bloodstains. He turned his little pocket flashlight on the floor, and when the narrow beam of light fell on the stains, they seemed to turn purple, as if they were molten at the core.
I said, “You wouldn’t think there’d be color like that in thirty-year-old bloodstains.”
“They aren’t that old,” he said. “Some of them might be ten years old, but most of them were deposited more recently.”
“How could that be?” I asked, still not getting it.
“Joseph Kalendar didn’t spill this blood,” Pohlhaus said. “Your friend Ronnie did. This is where he brought some of the boys he abducted. Your brother suspected that we would find something like this. That’s why he couldn’t face the idea of coming along.”
I looked at the floor in horror.
“The next question is, Where did he bury the bodies?”
The faces of dead boys stared up at me from a few inches beneath the concrete.
“Not down here,” he said. “This whole surface is uniform and intact. We have to check outside.”
I must have looked stunned, because he asked me if I was all right.
He pulled out his cell phone as we walked up the stairs. Half of what he said into it was code, but I understood that he was asking for a crime-scene unit to be detailed to Michigan Street, along with two pairs of officers.
“You look a little off your feed,” Pohlhaus said. “If you’d like to go to your brother’s house while I do this, I’d understand. Or if you’d like to go back to the Pforzheimer, I’ll have one of my officers take you there.”
I told him I was fine, which was stretching a point beyond recognition.
“I won’t send you away if you still want to help out here,” Pohlhaus said. “But your family was involved, and this might be hard for you.”
“My nephew is okay.”
“Your brother doesn’t seem to share your opinion.” Pohlhaus scanned me with his hunter’s eyes. I was sure that he had no doubt as to Mark’s fate.
“Philip gave up as soon as Mark vanished. He couldn’t bear the anxiety of wondering if his son was still alive. So he quit wondering.”
“I see.”
“He buried his own son. I’ll never forgive him for it.”
“If your nephew is okay, where is he?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
We were standing at the top of the basement stairs, just inside the door to the kitchen. Some of those footprints in the dust were Mark’s, and some of them were another’s.
Pohlhaus said, “Let’s go out in back.”
We went outside onto the broken steps. Insects buzzed in the tall grass. “We have dogs that can sniff out bodies, but for the moment let’s see what we can do by ourselves, all right?”
“Look at those weeds,” I said. “Nobody’s been buried back here, at least not recently.”
“You could be right, Mr. Underhill.” He stepped down into the waist-high tangle of weeds and grasses. “But he did kill his victims here, at least some of them. And given his reverence for Joseph Kalendar, I think this yard is still a good bet.”
I stepped down beside him and pretended to know what I was looking for.
The trail beaten down by Mark and Jimbo, then by Mark alone, straggled toward the wooden steps and the kitchen door from the lawn on the south side of the house. There were no other signs of passage through the backyard.
“If he carried the bodies out here, there’d be beaten-down grass, there’d be some kind of trail.”
“Don’t give up so soon,” Pohlhaus said. He loosened his tie and wiped his handkerchief across his forehead. In spite of this gesture he still looked impervious to the heat. My hair was glued to my head with perspiration.
“Do you know how you can always tell if you’ve found a place where someone stashed a corpse?”
I looked at him.
“Push in a shovel. A stick does just as well. All you need is an opening. The smell builds up underground, waiting to jump out at you.”
“Swell,” I said. “I still say he couldn’t have buried anything back here. We’d be able to see his tracks.”
Pohlhaus began ambling along toward the back of the yard and the big fence. He was moving slowly and keeping his eyes on the ground. I shuffled here and there, positive I would find nothing. After a little while, I realized that Pohlhaus was moving in a straight line for about six feet, then turning on his heel and reversing himself along the path he had just taken. In effect, he was creating a grid, which then could be linked to other grids until every inch of the weedy ground had been inspected.
“You can leave, if you want to. In another couple of minutes, we’re going to be drowning in cops here.”
I said if he wasn’t going to give up, neither was I.
The forensic team showed up, and after introducing me, Pohlhaus went inside to show them the basement and the bloodstains. The patrolmen rolled up and were organized to put up crime-scene tape and keep civilians away.
“At this point, you’d better stand down, Mr. Underhill,” he told me.
Two uniformed men I remembered seeing in Sherman Park divided the front half of the yard between them. They were wasting their time, I knew. I wanted to see Pohlhaus admit he’d been wrong.
A criminalist named Gary Sung, who had been introduced to me as a trainee from Singapore, popped out of the back door, waved Pohlhaus toward him, and engaged in a brief conversation that required his pointing several times toward the wall. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I ignored it. I was leaning against the side of the house, just at the edge of the overgrown yard.
The two officers I had seen in the park, Rote and Selwidge, looked at something and called for Pohlhaus. He walked up to them and stared down at whatever they had discovered. He waved me toward them. When I got there, I saw what the height of the grasses had until then kept from view. Someone, having decided to clear a long strip of ground about three feet wide and running the length of the property from fence to fence, had overturned the earth in that strip a thousand times, breaking up the surface, softening the ground, and leaving a nice fat stripe of brown earth, through which only a few weeds had begun to protrude. It had been cultivated, that little strip of land.
“I wonder,” I said. “If that’s it, how did he . . .?”
“If I’m right about what Gary Sung told me, any minute now we’re going to see him pop up out of the ground right over . . .
He had just spotted exactly what he had been hoping to see.
“Out of the ground?” I asked. Then I understood: I knew what he had known for the previous twenty minutes or so.
There came a groaning noise, and the sound of earth and pebbles clattering into a hole. Exactly at the few square feet of ground where the sergeant was pointing, a panel of weeds and grass swung up into the air and fell away, revealing the sweaty, smiling face of Gary Sung.
“It’s
I moved toward his head, which by stages rose out of the ground as he climbed up the steps built into the earth.
“Do you believe this madman?” Sung sprang out of the hole, waving an entrenching tool. “He dug a tunnel and hid it behind a daw you can’t see!”
Mark had not noticed the door in the basement wall; Sergeant Pohlhaus and I had failed to see it; only Gary Sung had seen it, and he was transported with pleasure. “So now we know,” he said. “Gotta be careful.”
