“Uh-huh,” he said, adjusting his tinfoil hat. “Okay, so I’ve just killed my daughter…” He frowned. “I don’t have a daughter, Max. Does that make a difference?”
“No, it doesn’t, Dooley. Just imagine you’re Father Reilly for a moment, will you?”
He closed his eyes.“Okay, so I’m Father Reilly. I have white hair and I’m very, very old.”
“Father Reilly isn’t that old, Dooley. He’s probably younger than Gran.”
“He is? He looks old.”
“That’s because he has white hair. White hair makes people look old.”
“But Harriet has white hair, and she doesn’t look old.”
“Focus for a moment, Dooley. Don’t get sidetracked. You’ve just killed your daughter and then what?”
“Okay… so I want to roll her in a carpet.”
“No carpets, Dooley! Forget about the carpet!”
He was frowning intensely as he thought hard.“Is she heavy?”
“Who?”
“Well, my daughter. Is she very heavy? Cause I’m old and I’m not very strong, and now I have to carry… how much does a human weigh, Max? Just a ballpark figure.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I muttered. “Let’s just skip a couple of steps. Somehow Father Reilly managed to carry his dead daughter to the graveyard, where he proceeds to bury her in an unmarked grave. And it’s that grave we need to find, Dooley, you and me.”
“We do? But how?”
“We simply look around for freshly dug graves, and…”
“And?” he prompted.
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” I admitted. “But at least it’s a first step in proving that Father Reilly killed Angel.”
“If you say so, Max,” said Dooley, though he didn’t sound convinced.
It took us a little while, but finally we arrived back in town, and headed for the graveyard. I have to confess I’d never set foot in that graveyard before in my life—ever. Since it’s not a very happy place, see? Cats as a rule aren’t crazy about spending time surrounded by thousands of dead folks. Not that I believe in old wives’ tales about zombies or the walking dead or anything like that, but still—it’s not very pleasant to imagine being surrounded by the remnants of all of those people. And if you think I’ll ever set paw inside a pet cemetery, you’re very much mistaken, for the same principle applies.
“Okay, so now we spread out and start looking, Dooley,” I said.
“But I don’t want to spread out, Max,” said my friend. “I’m scared.”
“No need to be scared. It’s just a graveyard. No one here can harm you.”
“They might crawl out of their graves and try to bite me.”
“Oh, Dooley,” I said. “All right, so we’ll go look together.”
“We should have asked Harriet and Brutus to join us,” he said after we’d poked around a nice chunk of graveyard and had discovered exactly nothing. “We could have covered a lot more ground. Or Fifi and Rufus. They have great noses. They could have sniffed out Angel, even if she’s dead andburied.”
I blinked and stared at my friend.“You know what, Dooley? That’s a great idea.”
“You think?” he said proudly.
“It’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that? They probably still have Angel’s scent in their noses, and so all they would need to do is sniff around and lead us straight to her grave!”
“So can we go now, Max? This place gives me the creeps.”
It was a bit creepy, I had to admit. The moon had risen, and was casting a pale light on the old tombstones that stood scattered around us like broken teeth, and the gravel under our paws was making a crunching sound I didn’t enjoy. All in all not a fun place to hang out of an evening. Then again, your intrepid detective goes where he must, and this is where my intuition had led me, so I was bound to find something important—like Angel Church’s mortal remains!
But Dooley was right—we could spend all night wandering around and accomplish nothing.
So we set paw for the cemetery entrance when suddenly I became aware of voices where no voices should have been.
“It’s them, Max!” Dooley whispered as we both hid behind a tombstone in a reflex action.
“Aliens?” I guessed.
“No, zombies. Or yeah, maybe aliens.”
“Make up your mind, Dooley. Is it aliens or zombies?”
“Maybe it’s alien zombies?”
“It’s kids,” I said after a moment’s pause.
And indeed it was. We approached stealthily, and saw how a couple of kids were standing around what looked like an open grave, and one of them had jumped down into the grave and now said,“Looks like a fresh one, boys. Har har har.”
“Let’s dig her up,” said one of his buddies with marked glee.
All in all I counted no less than six of them. They were drinking from open containers of beer, sipping from liquor bottles, and looked drunk and getting drunker by the second.
“You see, Dooley?” I said. “No zombies and no aliens. Just stupid kids.”
A wheelbarrow stood nearby, and the kids now dragged something up out of the grave, and placed it on the wheelbarrow.
“Giddy-up!” said the kid who’d dug the grave. He crawled out and dumped the shovel.
And then they were off, maneuvering the wheelbarrow with its precious load, singing a merry tune all the while. They were zigzagging, but that was probably the alcohol.
“Grave robbers,” I said.
I found myself wondering if these were the same kids who were responsible for the skeleton in Blake Carrington’s field, especially since I now remembered the empty cans of beer lying around that area, and the remnants of a fire.
“Let’s follow them,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I want to know what they’re up to.”
And so we followed them at a safe distance, and soon we’d left the graveyard, and watched as they placed the remains of what must have been a human in the back of a car, then slammed the trunk shut and were off, the car swerving violently before it raced away at a very respectable rate of speed, the kids howling like timberwolves. A beer can came whizzing from the car window, hit Dooley’s tinfoil hat off his head, and rolled to a stop.
“Hooligans, Max!” said Dooley as he retrieved his little hat.
I gave the beer can a good sniff, and memorized the scent for later use.
What? If dogs can do it, so can we!
“And now let’s go and get Fifi and Rufus out here,” I said. “We have a murder to solve, Dooley, and the sooner we do it, the better!”
“All right, Max,” said my friend. So he straightened his hat, and then we were off.
28
“Chase?”
“Yeah, babe?”
They were in bed, and instead of reading a book, Odelia was studying some of the information her uncle had sent over about the girl whose skeleton had been found nearby.
“That girl—Serena Kahl?”
“Mh-mh?”
“She was exactly the same age as Angel.”
“Is that so?”
Chase looked up from the hard-boiled crime novel he’d been reading.
“Yeah, and there are other similarities. Listen to this. Serena Kahl was nineteen, same as Angel, she went to a Catholic school, her father was a pastor and her mother the school principal. She disappeared after a night out with her friends and she was never found. And also, when she disappeared there was a full moon.”
“There was a full moon last night?”
“Yep, there was.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Chase. “So you think…”
“Like you said, we could be dealing with a serial killer, Chase.”
Chase frowned thoughtfully.“We better dig a little deeper, and see if there haven’t been more of these mysterious disappearances.”
“You know what this means, though, right?”
“That Angel might be dead already.”
It was a sobering thought, and one Odelia didn’t like to dwell on, but it certainly was a thought that seemed all too plausible.