twenty-one

“I doubt anyone has been installing sophisticated electronics on our grounds without my knowledge.” Stephen Manfred, superintendent of the Hillsdale Cemetery, was a thin man in a business suit. He appeared to be roughly sixty years old but had a full head of brown hair I suspected was not currently displaying its natural color. “That kind of underground construction would require permits and those permits would have to come through me.” I assumed he meant that he had the authority to grant or seek out those government documents and not that he would pass them through his body.

Ms. Washburn, Manfred, and I were walking from the path where Mike had parked his taxicab the night before toward the headstone marking Melanie Mason’s grave. Mike had given me instructions regarding the locations where I should seek out the wire mesh indicators that audio speakers were being used in the area. It would still be difficult to find such small mechanisms under full-grown and groomed grass.

“I expect that the people who did this did not ask you for permission.” We reached the gravesite. I knelt in the spot I thought I’d seen Mike do the same the previous night. Very carefully I ran my right hand over the grass, bending back the blades so the soil beneath could be seen. Initially I did not see the type of mechanism Mike had described. “I believe the necessary electronics are small and wireless, making them fairly easy to install surreptitiously.”

Ms. Washburn did not kneel beside me to look, which was certainly acceptable. This was a very delicate search. Having two people do it might actually make the task more difficult. She stood with Manfred to my left and behind me.

“To get any decent level of sound quality, wouldn’t that kind of thing be awfully expensive?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter because the things aren’t there,” Manfred insisted. “There’s no paperwork on it at all.”

“It would be a relatively high-end system, yes,” I told Ms. Washburn as I meticulously moved my hand slowly over the grass and watched its progress. “I imagine the people who did this had a decent amount of money to spend and are hoping to do better.”

“You think this is all about money?” Ms. Washburn said.

“Most killings, even robberies gone wrong in the street, are about money or domestic issues,” I said without citing the statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that had helped me form that understanding. “William Klein’s death might have been an accident or it might have been about his wife, but Brett Fontaine’s was almost certainly about money. Ah!”

My fingers felt the small disc before I saw it. It was as Mike had said: round, flat, and covered in the kind of wire mesh one sees on a microphone head. It couldn’t have been more than four centimeters in diameter and it was planted flush with the ground. No one who wasn’t searching for the mechanism would have made note of it. I mentally noted Mike’s ability to observe and notice things. I had asked him to join the staff at Questions Answered (although it would have been difficult to find the funds to pay him a salary in addition to Ms. Washburn’s and my own) but Mike preferred driving his taxicab, saying he enjoyed the rides and never knew what the next day would bring.

I pulled lightly on the disc but it was difficult for my fingers to close on its sides because it had embedded itself very snugly in the plot of earth. I did manage to pull on it successfully after seven attempts and it was not hard to extract the disc—and what was under it—from the ground.

“What’s that?” Manfred asked. He sounded shocked.

I stood and extended my hand for him and Ms. Washburn to see the mechanism. Underneath the disc I had pulled from the ground was a short wire which no doubt acted as the sensor for the audio signal being sent from a remote location nearby. “It is a receiver and an amplifier,” I said. “Someone broadcast a voice to this gravesite from an area near here.”

Ms. Washburn turned to look behind her, which appears to be the natural impulse for someone who feels she is being watched. “Where?” she asked.

“It is difficult to say at this moment,” I told her. “I will have to do some research to determine the range of a device like this one.” I looked toward Manfred. “Is there Wi-Fi access in the cemetery?”

“Of course not,” he answered. “This is not a coffee shop.”

“But your office is less than three hundred yards away,” I noted. “Do you have Wi-Fi there?”

“Sure.”

“They could be transmitting through that signal,” I mused aloud.

“It can’t be,” Manfred insisted. “There’s no authorization.”

“I believe whoever planted this device installed others as well,” I said. I knelt again and began a search approximately one foot to the left of the area where I had discovered the disc. “In my opinion they are in violation of your regulations, Mr. Manfred.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. His head was shaking at the very thought. The fact that a man had been murdered did not seem as astonishing to him as an infraction of his cemetery’s stated rules.

Within twenty-three minutes I had located four more devices identical to the one I had first unearthed. I left them in their positions so as not to alarm the people who had made such an elaborate effort to convince us—and no doubt others—that Melanie Mason was speaking from another realm of existence. One of the devices was embedded in a tree behind the gravestone. I assumed there were a number of others in the immediate vicinity that I did not uncover, as the sound the night before was not localized. It had not seemed to emanate strictly from beneath my feet.

Ms. Washburn and I returned to the cemetery office with Manfred, thanked him for his time, and got back into Ms. Washburn’s Kia Spectra to begin the next leg of our day’s travels. I sat beside her as she drove and this time in the car her silence seemed more distant than usual; it was not simply about paying attention to the road. In fact, once I had to point out to Ms. Washburn that a traffic light had changed its signal from red to green.

When we were stopped in a similar situation I asked, “Is something bothering you, Ms. Washburn?” It is not usually my habit to start a conversation in the car but her expression was somewhat troublesome to me. It seemed like she was preoccupied with a topic other than safety behind the wheel.

“I’m okay, Samuel.” The light illuminated green and she began to drive again.

I said nothing more until Ms. Washburn had parked the Kia Spectra in the parking lot of the Union Police Department. Detective Monroe, when we’d telephoned, had flatly refused to see us so we bypassed that part of our planned agenda and went directly to the authorities who would have records of the automobile accident that claimed Melanie Mason’s life.

But before we opened the car doors, I said, “I have noticed that you are somewhat less animated than usual. Are you concerned about your safety?”

Ms. Washburn, who had been reaching for the door handle on her side, stopped and turned toward me. “Sure I’m concerned,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s changing the way I’m acting. I’m just tired, Samuel.”

“Was the bed not comfortable?” Ms. Washburn had indeed spent the night in my attic apartment, protesting all along that she, as the guest, should be on the sofa in the den. But Mother and I had prevailed in that argument. I had slept on the sofa with only a slight difficulty relaxing. It had never occurred to me that Ms. Washburn might not have slept well.

“No, it was fine,” she answered. “There’s a lot going on right now and I have trouble turning my mind off at night. Do you understand what that means?”

I smiled. “Better than most, I imagine.”

Ms. Washburn smiled in return. “Then I don’t have to explain further.”

“I suppose not. Why don’t we go inside and see what we can find out. Perhaps we can answer this question today and you can return to your apartment.”

We entered the building, a roomy, modern facility that offered a noticeable contrast to the building in which Detective Monroe worked on a daily basis. When Ms. Washburn explained our request to the officer behind the desk in the reception area, we were directed to the Motor Vehicle division. That unit would have kept records of traffic incidents rather than crimes.

There, Officer Joanna Johnson said most records for Rt. 22, being a state highway, would be kept by the New Jersey State Police, but copies of those reports pertaining to the municipality in question would be retained. I told her the date and location of the incident that claimed Melanie Mason’s life and she did a search on her desktop computer.

“That accident was investigated because of the loss of life,” she reported. “But it was pretty straightforward. No indication of foul play. The driver of the other vehicle walked away with minor injuries. It was the fire, not the impact, that killed that woman.”

“May we get a copy of the incident report and any subsequent filings on the collision?” I asked.

“It’s public record. Printing out now.” She pointed to a printer in the enclosed space behind her where other uniformed officers were milling about with their work of the day. One was pouring a cup of coffee for himself. Officer Johnson stood and pressed the security code into a keypad to open the door, then walked in and picked up the pages from the printer tray. She brought them back out to the area where Ms. Washburn and I stood.

I briefly scanned the top page she handed to us for the name of the police officer who had first arrived on the scene of the incident. “Is Officer Palumbo still stationed here?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s him right there.” Officer Palumbo was the coffee drinker among the group.

“Can we speak to him?” Ms. Washburn said.

Officer Johnson considered the question. “In what capacity are you guys here, again?” she asked. “Are you private investigators or something?”

Before I could explain Ms. Washburn said, “We’ve been asked by a member of the family to look into it. Nobody thinks anything was wrong with the report. We’re just looking for a little extra detail than we’re going to find in the document.” Given that the report we’d been handed was only two pages long, I believed Ms. Washburn’s assessment was valid, even if we had not been employed by any member of Melanie Mason’s family.

The officer took a moment to think and said, “I’ll ask him.” She did not wait for a response and returned to the glass-paneled area, where she walked to Officer Palumbo and spoke briefly to him, once pointing in our direction. Palumbo took on a neutral expression, shrugged, and followed her out into the waiting area.

“I’m Nick Palumbo,” he said, not extending a hand to be shaken. “That accident was a few years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Three years,” Ms. Washburn answered.

Officer Palumbo appeared to be focusing more favorably on Ms. Washburn than on me. I had seen this happen before when she and I had encountered male interview subjects. He smiled. “I don’t know how much I can help you. It was pretty routine and I’m not sure how much I remember that isn’t in the report.”

“Is there somewhere we can sit for a moment?” Ms. Washburn asked. She smiled back at Palumbo in a way I had also witnessed before. Quite often we were able to get more complete information from the person we interviewed after she had done so. It was not a smile she had ever shown me personally.

Palumbo led us to a separate waiting area where there were seven seats, none of which was occupied at the moment. He sat next to Ms. Washburn and I sat on her opposite side. “We haven’t had a chance to read the whole report yet,” Ms. Washburn said.

“I have,” I interjected. “And there are a few questions I would like to ask.”

Officer Palumbo scowled a bit, taking his attention away from Ms. Washburn. “Like what?” he asked.

“With only a wedding band, how was it possible to positively identify the body?” There was little point in leading up to the most important question I would ask. It was better to divert Officer Palumbo from his scrutiny of Ms. Washburn.

“There were a few other items. You’ll see them listed in the report.” I had in fact noticed that section and had been unimpressed. Among the evidence Palumbo was citing were the ashes of a paperback book and the melted remains of a cellular phone so badly burned even the manufacturer could not be identified.

“Yes, I saw those,” I said with what I hoped was a pleasant tone in my voice. “They wouldn’t conclusively identify Melanie Mason.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But there was a fingernail that apparently held a shade of polish Mason actually made herself. She didn’t sell it and she didn’t give it away; she kept it all for herself.”

“That is persuasive but hardly definitive,” I suggested. “There are scenarios under which the fingernail could have broken off days before. How could you be certain the woman in the car you finally recovered was Melanie Mason if such utter destruction was visited upon the body?”

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Hoenig.” Palumbo had ceased examining Ms. Washburn’s face and focused his gaze upon me with a much different expression upon his face. “If that woman wasn’t Melanie Mason, who was she? No other woman of that general age or size was reported missing in this county for weeks before or after the accident. If Melanie Mason was somewhere else, why didn’t she come forward and let us know she wasn’t dead? She would have had no money, no car, her bank accounts and credit cards would have been canceled, her marriage would have been basically over. How come we haven’t heard about the missing woman or Melanie since then?”

Ms. Washburn, who had initiated this conversation but had looked slightly perturbed when Palumbo was staring at her, cleared her throat. “Those are very good questions, Officer,” she said. “But I think what my colleague here is saying would be that you have circumstantial evidence to show that Melanie Mason died in that car crash. Was that enough, in terms of procedure, to close the case and decide against investigating any further?”

Officer Palumbo put his hands down flat on his thighs and produced a slapping sound that I’m not sure was his original intention. He looked at me still, not Ms. Washburn. “Are you saying that I didn’t do my job?” he demanded.

“I am suggesting no such thing,” I answered. “Obviously you have done and continue to work as a police officer in the borough of Union. And as you pointed out, the investigation of the incident was left to the State Police and not this department. I am attempting to answer a question and Melanie Mason’s death is somehow central to the research Ms. Washburn and I are doing in the pursuit of that answer. What I am trying to understand is how certain those who investigated the collision—from the time you first arrived on the scene to the time the State Police decided to discontinue questioning the incident—were in determining that Melanie Mason is indeed dead.”

Palumbo squinted at me like Clint Eastwood in many motion pictures. “Do you have any evidence that she isn’t?” he asked.

“Last night I had a conversation with a woman who said that she is the ghost of Melanie Mason,” I told him.

The officer blinked twice and blanched a little. “It happened to you too?”