‘Open it up,’ DCI Whitestone said.
The yellow bulldozer’s diesel engine howled as its digger sank into the surface of the old doctor’s grave.
The lights of the CSIs encircled the site and drenched it in a dazzling white glare. Uniformed officers and the blue-suited CSIs hung back behind the lights, all of them staring at the grave. The top part of the bulldozer turned sideways, thick clumps of earth falling away from the overflow, and dumped its load of soil to one side. Already a hole was opening up in the grave. The bulldozer emptied another load. And then another.
And then it slowed and stopped.
Ropes were lowered into the grave.
A coffin was lifted out.
Shockingly, the wood was untarnished and the brass handles still gleamed like a picture in an undertaker’s brochure. It still looked brand new.
Whitestone did not look at me. It was impossible to look away from the grave that was being opened up before our eyes.
‘Don’t be wrong, Max,’ she told me, still not looking at me.
I stepped to the edge of the open grave. Six feet deep but showing nothing but earth. The bulldozer moved forward again, struggling for traction on the cemetery’s steep sloping path. It sank its digger into the open grave and clawed away only a scraping of dirt.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘We need shovels.’
Whitestone gave the nod and two suited CSIs in their facemasks and blue nitrile gloves and boots eased themselves into the grave with their shovels. They tossed just a few loads of dirt on the side of the open grave and paused.
‘There’s something down here,’ one of them said.
And now we were all at the edge of the open grave.
All of us staring down at what had been buried beneath the coffin.
A patch of white plastic, picked out by a dozen torchlights.
‘Get back!’ one of the CSIs was shouting, suddenly furious, and then they were pulling the soil away with their gloved hands until what was revealed was another kind of coffin.
We don’t call it a body bag.
We call it an HRP – a Human Remains Pouch – and this one had black webbing handles that the CSIs used to pull it away from the earth that held it. More hands reached down to help take the load.
The HRP was pulled from the open grave.
And Whitestone looked at me again.
‘This was never just an abduction, Pat,’ I said. ‘This was always a hit. The plan was never kidnap. The plan was always murder.’
And then Frank Lyle was pushing through the crowds, his face drained of life under those pitiless lights.
‘Jessica!’ he said. ‘Jessica! What did they do to you? What did they do?’
I took him in my arms.
‘Listen to me,’ I said, but there was nothing to say to him, and there was nothing reassuring for him to hear.
And so I held him close and I let him weep, and he pressed his face into my chest so that the world would not witness his tears.
And as the CSIs carried the white plastic HRP down to the waiting mortuary van with its blacked-out windows, the black van looking self-consciously staid surrounded by all the swirling blue lights of our vehicles, I was grateful that this broken man would be spared one last horror.
The task of identifying his daughter.
Because by this time there would no longer be enough of a beloved daughter for him to identify. It had been too long. That young woman had gone forever. Dental records and DNA would be enough to spare them from that terrible goodbye. The parents of Jessica Lyle would not be asked to look upon her face one last time.
How long had she been gone?
It was less than a month but it felt like more than a lifetime.
‘Everyone loved her,’ her father said.
‘I know they did, Frank,’ I said.
And as I held Frank Lyle against me, his face buried in my chest, I could feel the metal in my jacket pocket, the keys to the secret life of Ruben Shavers, digging deeper into my flesh.