Three days later, I was in the cold, well-lit morgue trailer with all the yellowing and graying bones from the car trunks, including those they assumed belonged to my father and mother.
The remains were lined up on two long, wide tables, and the bones had been shaped into skeletons to some degree.
Me and Ronnie and Chief Dudley were all in the trailer with Jay and Shirley. We had our arms crossed against the chill.
Jay led us alongside the long tables and pointed to this and that and finally said, “Some things have turned out, shall we say, interesting.”
“How interesting?” Chief Dudley said.
“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
Jay said, “I think these bones are from graves and that the bodies were embalmed, but even that doesn’t keep a body forever. I think some of the cloth might be from burial shrouds, as you suspected, Danny. I think a lot of it is as you suspected. The only remains that don’t fit are those of your father and mother.”
“Shit, let’s go to the office. It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here,” Chief Dudley said.
We walked over to the office, and even that short stretch outside was stifling hot. When we were inside the office, it was cool but not freezing like the trailer. I felt as if I could have lived there, slept under the desk, had my coffee at the coffee table every morning.
When we were all seated, I said to Shirley, “I met your aunt.”
Her pink cheeks turned crimson. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to speak out of school.”
“It’s all right, considering the circumstances. I’m working for her now. Is there anything you found in the news morgue that’s worth telling us?”
“I think so. I was looking for ritualistic connections. And I’m a bear for research.”
Chief Dudley said, “I still don’t get it, about the rituals. I can’t see the sense of it.”
“Rituals are important,” Shirley said. “The Shriners with their hats and little cars, the Masons with aprons and swords and blood oaths, Boy Scouts with special handshakes and salutes, Girl Scouts with the same, the swearing-in of presidents, and the rising to acknowledge a judge. Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas presents and special church services. From eating black-eyed peas and cabbage for luck and money on New Year’s Day to shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July. Drinking grape juice and eating saltless crackers in the Baptist Church, wine and wafer in the Catholic. It’s supposed to be the blood and flesh of Christ. Some believe it literally transforms to that when it’s eaten as part of a religious ceremony. All rituals. You can slice and dice it to include other reasons, but the rituals themselves are the real reason. We like rituals. They please us. Crossing oneself against evil. Throwing salt over our shoulders. Wearing a graduation gown and becoming part of a parade of students to pick up our diplomas. All part and parcel of the same thing. Killers devise their own rituals. Not consciously but out of some inner need or past experience.”
“You need to get out from behind this desk, Shirley,” I said, “and go to work in law enforcement.”
“Considered it,” she said. “But even if someone is not murdering but stealing bodies, there’s some ritual in that. Going to all that trouble to dig up corpses and put them in car trunks. Why car trunks? What’s the personal connection? What are they trying to say?”
“Could just be an easy way of disposing of bodies after they’ve dug them up for whatever purposes,” Chief Dudley said. “Bottom of the lake is a good hiding place, long as we don’t have a drought.”
“Is it that easy?” Shirley said. “Finding cars, putting the bodies in the trunks, pushing them off into the water. That’s risky, and that’s why I think it’s ritualistic. And I found a series of suspicious deaths…here’s the list.”
She lifted a sheet of paper off her desk, handed it to the chief. He studied it briefly, placed it back on the desk. He said, “Okay. Enlighten us.”
“Some of these people are survivors of that flood or, in some cases, descendants of survivors. Some aren’t. Some are black, some are white. But there are more connections than differences.”
“Over how many years did these deaths take place?” Ronnie asked.
“Since the lake came into being up until now,” Shirley said.
“Jesus, kid,” Jay said. “You should know from working here, people die, and some mysteriously, but that doesn’t mean they’re all connected. A killer would have to have been doing this since he was young and would now be old as the hills and twice as dusty.”
“County here is big as some states,” Chief Dudley says. “I think you’re working too hard to make things fit, Shirley. Those deaths elsewhere in the county, what have they got to do with Long Lincoln, old or new?”
“I don’t know all the answers. But there are a lot of similarities. Most of the deaths seemed due to strangulation, but some of the bodies were too far gone to determine how they died. The one that I think is the initiating death is Julie George. Elderly lady that died from what was listed as old age, but the coroner, the man whose place you took, Jay, he thought it was suspicious. Said she had petechial hemorrhages in the eyes and her hyoid bone was broken. That indicates strangling or hanging. Another thing was, she was reported missing from the rest home, and it was searched thoroughly. Next day they found her dead in her bed. Where did she go? The coroner wrote it up as suspicious because he thought she had been taken out of a window at the rest home for some reason, killed, and returned.”
“That’s crazy,” Jay said.
“If someone did murder her, it’s like they respected her and put her back due to respect. What separates her from the other deaths is she was directly associated with the city council. She wasn’t one of the mainstays, but she was on the edge of local power and was close to the other members. She was certainly in their camp. She grew sick, and then she was dead. She left a sizable amount of money to the city council members in her will. Others associated with the council have done the same. Nothing fishy there—they had it put in their wills years before their deaths, as if it were some kind of tribute.”
“Now you really are reaching,” Chief Dudley said. “She could have wandered off, wandered back without being noticed, and died in bed.”
“She could only get around in a wheelchair, and back then there weren’t any motorized ones. That would have taken some wheel power, don’t you think? Coroner back then certainly thought so, but the city council had the final say, as they still do in this town.”
“Were there other bodies found in the lake?” I said.
“One or two. Maybe connected, maybe not. But with both of those, there was suspicion they died from strangulation. Coroner that kept having those suspicions was replaced after he reported suspicion on several deaths. There was one handpicked one, and then you, Jay.”
“Are you saying the council controlled these things?”
“Or picked people who they felt they could influence.”
“I wasn’t handpicked,” he said.
“They can’t win them all,” Shirley said. “But you’ve had a couple of deaths that were suspicious, right? What you thought might be strangulations.”
“Doesn’t mean they were ritualistic murders,” Jay said.
“True,” Shirley said. “Doesn’t meant they weren’t either.”
“But it wasn’t proved,” Chief Dudley said. “Proof matters.”
“No offense,” Shirley said, “but some of these murders were on your watch, Chief. Their names are on that list.”
“I noticed,” Chief Dudley said.
“Unless you were looking for murder, a dead body in the woods could be someone who wandered off, had an accident, a misadventure. You might have to be looking for murder to know it was murder.”
“Can I point out something?” I said. “If you’re looking to make this about ritual, why weren’t they in car trunks?”
“That’s just it,” Shirley said. “The bones in the trunks weren’t murders. The others could have been. Are they connected? I don’t know, but what a set of peculiarities. I think someone is digging up dead bodies, and someone else is murdering people. Or there’s more than one murderer, and they’re known to each other and are following the same ritualistic approach to murder.”
“That’s a lot of maybes and not a lot of facts,” Chief Dudley said. “Again, I think if you work hard enough, you can make anything fit. Maybe some of those bodies found were murder victims, but it doesn’t mean they’re all connected. No offense, but it sounds like one of those nutty conspiracy theories.”
“I don’t know about all the deaths, if they’re connected,” Shirley said. “But there are a lot I believe that are.”
“Is it okay I take this paper with the list of names on it?” I said.
“I have other copies,” she said.
“You’re buying this?” Chief Dudley said. “All these coincidences as related?”
“Just curious,” I said.
“And for the record,” Shirley said, “I want to emphasize that the bones in the cars and the murders may not be directly connected, but they are both ritualistic behaviors. It’s no coincidence. It’s patterns.”