'Jed, shouldn't we be there by now?' the governor's voice sounded again.
Jed eyed his boss in the rearview mirror. Governor Feuer was looking out the windows. He was looking at his watch.
'In about two minutes, sir,' Jed replied as his chest got tight.
He picked up speed, following Pine the wrong way. He took a hard right on Oregon Hill Parkway which ran him into Cherry Street where the ivy-draped cemetery fence on the left embraced and welcomed him like the Statue of Liberty.
Jed followed the fence, passing the hole in it and the Victory Rug Cleaning sign. He drove through the cemetery's massive wrought-iron front gates that Lelia Ehrhart had made sure would be unlocked for them. He passed the caretaker's house and business office, following Hollywood Avenue. Jed would have rolled up on the statue in a matter of moments had he not turned onto Confederate Avenue instead of Eastvale.
It was clear to Brazil why the media, the unimaginative, the insensitive, the resentful, and those citizens not indigenous to Richmond often trivialized Hollywood Cemetery by referring to it as the City of the Dead.
As Brazil and Weed walked deeper into having-no-idea-where-they-were, Brazil's respect for history and its dead was greatly diluted by fatigue and frustration. The famous cemetery became nothing more than a heartless, unhelpful metropolis of ancient carriage paths, now paved and named, that had been laid out by first families who already knew where they were going.
It wasn't possible to find sections or lot owners or the way out unless one had a map or an a priori knowledge or was lucky as hell. Brazil, sad to say, was heading west instead of east.
'Is it hurting?' Brazil asked his prisoner.
Weed had cut his chin when Brazil tackled him. Weed was bleeding and Brazil's day had just gotten worse, if that was possible. The sheriff's department would not accept a juvenile who was visibly injured. Weed would have to get a medical release, meaning Brazil would have no choice but to take Weed to an emergency room where the two of them would probably sit all day.
'I don't feel nothing.' Weed shrugged, holding one of Brazil's socks against his chin for lack of any other bandage.
'Well, I'm really sorry,' Brazil apologized again.
They were walking along Waterview to New Avenue where Weed stopped to gawk at tobacco mogul Lewis Ginter's granite and marble tomb. He couldn't believe the heavy bronze doors, Corinthian columns and Tiffany windows.
'It's like a church,' Weed marveled. 'I wish Twister could have something like that.'
They walked in silence for a moment. Brazil remembered to turn his radio back on.
'You ever had anybody die on you?' Weed asked.
'My father.'
'Wish mine was dead.'
'You don't really mean that,' Brazil said.
'What happened to yours?' Weed looked up at him.
'He was a cop. Got killed on duty.'
Brazil thought of his father's small, plain grave in the college town of Davidson. The memories of that spring Sunday morning when he was ten and the phone rang in his simple frame house on Main Street were still vivid. He could still hear his mother screaming and kicking cabinets, wailing and throwing things while he hid in his room, knowing without being told.
Again and again the television showed his father's bloody sheet-covered body being loaded into an ambulance. An endless motorcade of police cars and motorcycles with headlights on rumbled through Brazil's head, and he envisioned dress uniforms and badges striped with black tape.
'You ain't listening to me,' Weed insisted.
Brazil came to, shaken and unnerved. The cemetery began closing in, suffocating him with its pungent smells and restless sounds. The radio reminded him that he should call again for a 10-25, but he wasn't going to do it. Brazil was not going to let the entire police department, including West, know he was lost inside Hollywood Cemetery with a fourteen-year-old graffiti artist.
They headed out again on New Avenue. It eventually curved around the western edge of the cemetery and turned into Midvale, where in the distance they could see what appeared to be a long black hearse traveling toward them at a high rate of speed.
Cemetery monuments and markers and holly trees streamed past Governor Feuer's tinted windows as he ended another phone call, having by now lost all patience and willingness to give second chances.
Jed was driving too fast. It was taking longer to find Jefferson Davis's statue than it had probably taken to paint it. The unmarked Caprices and their EPU drivers were nowhere to be seen.
'Jed.' This time Governor Feuer hummed down the glass partition first. 'What happened to our backups?'
'They went on, sir.'
'Went on where?'
'Back to the mansion, I believe, sir. I'm not sure, but I think Mrs. Feuer needed to run an errand or something.'
'Mrs. Feuer is on her way to the Homestead.'
'I hear that's quite a resort, up there in the mountains with spas, unbelievable food and skiing and everything. I'm glad she's going to relax a little,' Jed prattled on nervously.
'Where the hell are we, Jed?' Governor Feuer restrained himself from raising his voice.
'There's a lot of detours, sir,' Jed replied. 'From funerals, I guess.'
'I don't see any funerals or any sign of them.'
'Not on this street, no sir.'
'In fact, I haven't seen another car,' the governor said testily.
'This is for through traffic, sir.'
'Through traffic? Through to where? There is no through. There's only one way in and out of the cemetery. If you went through, you'd end up in the James River.'
'What I meant, sir, was that this isn't a funeral route,' Jed explained, slowing down a bit.
'For God's sake, Jed.' The governor lost his cool. There's no such thing as a funeral route in a cemetery. The cars go where the person's being buried. You don't bury people along routes. We're lost.'
'Not at all, sir.'
'Turn around. Let's go back,' Governor Feuer said as a cop and a little kid suddenly flowed past his right window.
Governor Feuer turned around in his seat, staring out the back window at a uniformed officer and a boy dressed like the Bulls. They were walking slowly and unsteadily, as if their legs would go out from under them any minute.
'Stop the car!' Governor Feuer ordered.
Jed slammed on the brakes, sending newspapers sliding across the carpeted floor.
The scene behind Kmart was slowing down and thinning out. The medical examiner's van was en route to the morgue where Ruby Sink would be autopsied later this day, and uniformed officers had begun to scatter, returning to the streets.
Detectives sought out witnesses and Miss Sink's next of kin while the media tried to get there first. The fire department was long gone, leaving West and two crime-scene technicians to finish up.
So far, dozens of latent prints in addition to the three nine-millimeter cartridge cases had been recovered from inside the car, which soon would be carried off in a flatbed truck for further processing by forensic scientists in the shelter of a bay. Eventually, firing pin impressions would be scanned into ATF's computer system to determine if they matched those recovered from other crimes.
Prints would be run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System known as AFIS. Hairs, blood and fibers would go to DNA and the trace evidence labs.
'We need to get this out of the sun, or the blood and any other biological evidence are going to start decomposing really fast,' West said to crime-scene technician Alice Bates, who was taking photographs of the inside of the Chevy Celebrity.
'We've got it covered,' Bates said.
A second technician named Bonita Wills was focusing on the scattered contents of the victim's pocketbook that were strewn on the floor of the passenger's side. West leaned inside the open driver's door to look, her suit jacket brushing against the frame.