Cemetery of Angels (29 page)

“Don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t know because I can’t see inside your head. But I sure would like to. And there are ways.” He paused. “Since there’s a criminal case involved, this might even be easier to arrange.” There was a slight hesitation then the doctor asked, “Rebecca, have you ever been hypnotized?”

She was astonished.

“Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You want to hypnotize me?” Dr. Einhorn shook his head.

“Not me personally. I wouldn’t. Hypnotism is a specialty. It has to be done carefully by a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnotherapy. There are a handful of doctors in Los Angeles whose practices center around such things.” Rebecca looked at Melissa, then back to the doctor.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to think that my head is scrambled enough already.”

“This might be your finest opportunity to unscramble it,” Dr. Einhorn said. “A hypnotist can get at something that’s lurking even deeper than your reaction to recent events. A hypnotherapist can get right down to what’s beneath the surface.” He paused again. “You’d be amazed at what we might find.”

“I might be frightened at what we might find,” Rebecca answered. Dr. Einhorn laughed slightly then frowned, tiny spidery lines furrowing his small forehead.

“Why do you say that?” he asked. Rebecca threw up her hands.

“I don’t even know why I said that,” she said. He looked at her soberly.

“All the more reason, Rebecca,” he said. “You’ll get to know yourself much better, as long as you go into this in a positive frame of mind.”

“May I interject a question?” Melissa asked.

“Of course,” the doctor answered.

“What if there’s something subconscious about the disappearance?” Melissa said. “I didn’t mean that Rebecca did anything to her kids. What I mean is… “

“Might we explore that avenue?” Einhorn asked. “Might we prowl around for something that’s useful in that direction? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes,” Melissa said.

“That would be fifty percent of our objective,” Henry Einhorn said. “If there were a chance in a hundred that we could find something that way, something you might have seen subliminally, I would think you would leap at the opportunity.”

Rebecca looked to Melissa who gave it a thumbs-up gesture. Then she looked back to the doctor.

“Who would the hypnotherapist be?” she asked.

“The best hypnotherapist in the city is at UCLA Medical in Westwood. Dr. Chang Lim. I’ll call his office if you’ll permit me.”

Rebecca looked to Melissa for support. Melissa gave her an enthusiastic nod.

“As I said,” Dr. Einhorn continued, “I’ll call his office. But if I were you, I’d get in touch with him right away. If this can have a positive solution, the sooner the better.”

Rebecca nodded again. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

In a different part of Los Angeles, at exactly the same hour, Ed Van Allen stood at his desk and picked up the results of a fingerprint inquiry. He had a clear thumb impression of both Mr. and Mrs. Moore, as well as a forefinger print for Bill Moore. Both had been taken from the photograph of Van Allen’s son Jason that the detective had pulled from his wallet. Van Allen carried an extra photo for exactly that purpose.

He had run the prints through the LAPD’s detective bureau on Friday morning. The results had come back near 1:00P.M. There was no linkage of the Moores’ fingerprints to any known criminal activity in Southern California.

Double A came by Van Allen’s desk and saw him looking at the results.

“So?” Alice asked. “Are the Moores like in a cult of devil worshipers?” she asked.

“You think they’re clean, don’t you?” he asked, raising his eyes. Double A was wearing a light blue shirt and tan slacks today. To Van Allen’s tired eyes, Alice carried a heavy fox quotient, an especially high one for a member of the detective bureau. But Van Allen stuck to business.

“I still don’t like something about them,” Van Allen said. “There’s something wrong somewhere. I don’t know whether it’s with him or with her. Their story doesn’t work. They’re telling me that their kids disappeared without leaving the house.”

Double A shot him a skeptical glance. She took the finger print report from him and glanced at it.

“Don’t believe me, huh?” Van Allen asked.

“I’m like just not following your line of investigation, okay?” Van Allen reached for some coffee.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “If they had a walk-in freezer in that house, I’d want to look in it.”

Van Allen took the prints back from Alice and left the room. He faxed the prints to the FBI crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. Double A disappeared to work a competing case, a housebreaking in Los Feliz. A local TV producer’s apartment had been cleaned out a week after he had done a thirty-minute special on burglary prevention.

That evening, Van Allen drove by 2136 Topango Gardens on his way home. Rebecca was at home again with Melissa. Bill Moore was still at work at 5:30 P.M., and the detective was starting to entertain the notion that Mr. Moore was avoiding him.

If so, he wondered, why?

He would have liked to have slapped fulltime surveillance on Moore — instinct yet again — but instead had to settle for keeping Rebecca under occasional scrutiny.

This evening, as was the case on other evenings, it was Van Allen’s responsibility to inform her that no new leads were apparent in the case.

Left to his own devices, Van Allen would also have liked to have gone into 2136 Topango Gardens with a search warrant. The more he thought about it, the more he would have loved to attack with some sledgehammers and take the house apart. The thing was, he thought to himself, the LAPD’s German Shepherds had already sniffed all over the place and found nothing.

Van Allen hung around the house for several minutes. By pre-arrangement, Alice Aldrich came by, dropped off by another female detective, and they rendezvoused there. They kept looking for any sign of digging—a new rose garden or a newly planted tree — that might have been used to cover a pair of small graves or some sort of renovation under the basement.

But nothing was apparent. And when Van Allen thought about such things within the house, an uneasy buzz settled upon him. It was almost as if some unseen voice was telling him he was off on the wrong track.

“Fine,” he eventually mumbled to himself. “Then what’s the right track?”

No answer came to that question.

He and Alice Aldrich ran a small gauntlet of reporters as they departed. Van Allen shrugged and told them there were no new developments in the case. Then they left together in Van Allen’s car. They tossed around some possibilities.

“Of course,” Van Allen growled to Double A, “if those kids are buried in six feet of concrete, no dog with a sophisticated snout is going to find them, either.”

Alice might have offered a pretty sharp comment in her own right, but the case perplexed her just as much. They rode in silence for several seconds. A police radio crackled under the dashboard of his car, but he ignored it.

“Know what?” Van Allen finally said. “Got a couple of minutes? I got that other case right in this area.”

“Which one?”

“Cemetery of Angels. The grave robbery.”

He glanced at his watch. It was late in the day. Five-fifty. Martinez should have been just closing the yard.

“I have time,” Alice said.

San Angelo Cemetery was just a few minutes away, and Van Allen had been correct. As daylight died, the old caretaker was hanging around the gates, anxious to put a chain and padlock on them. Most of the light at this hour came from streetlamps.

Ed Van Allen wished he had a C-note for every time in his life he had had to use the phrase, “no new development.” As in the case of the Moore disappearance, he had nothing new in the Billy Carlton tomb desecration, either.

Martinez stood by the front gates with chain and padlock in hand, listening patiently as Van Allen told him all this. Then Alice chatted him up for a few moments, while something within the cemetery caught Van Allen’s attention.

Standing way back in the yard, about fifty yards away near where Billy Carlton had lain for decades, there was a man in a white shirt facing the entrance of the cemetery.

Van Allen was surprised to see him. His gaze settled upon him with intense curiosity. The detective squinted, because the figure was in shadow-laced light from a streetlamp. His image was almost flickering.

Then the figure near the Carlton grave raised a hand and waved. A friendly wave, not one of beckoning. Van Allen waved back. Then he took his eyes off the figure and turned to Martinez. “Who’s that?” he asked. “You got a crew working?”

“What?” Martinez asked.

“Who’s that?” Van Allen asked again, motioning with his head.

“Who’s who?” Martinez asked again.

Van Allen turned his head and looked again where the figure had been. He found no one.

“There was someone there a second ago,” Van Allen said. “A man waved to me.”

The old Mexican grinned.

“You finally loco,” he said. “We the only people in the yard.”

“Horsecrap!” said Van Allen. “You got at least one visitor back there whether you know it or not.”

Martinez looked in the direction that Van Allen indicated. His grin turned to a scowl. Like Van Allen, he couldn’t see anyone.

“You got better eyes than me? So you find someone,” the caretaker challenged. Sometimes Martinez sounded like Chico Marx. Now was one of those times. Van Allen glanced toward his partner.

“Okay, you wait here,” he said to Alice. His suspicion was piqued. Who would play hide-and-seek among tombstones, he wanted to know. “If anyone comes hustling out of here, detain him.”

Alice nodded. “Cool,” she said.

Moments later, Van Allen limped across the thick grassy carpet of the graveyard, walking directly toward Billy Carlton’s tipped stone. His strained calf muscle was irritating him again. He approached the fallen angel, itself. Its arm was still upraised but now, tipped over; it pointed into the soil of the graveyard.

The soil of the graveyard. The soul of the graveyard.

Those phrases turned themselves over in Van Allen’s mind, permutations of words he couldn’t control. He was feeling weird these days. He passed the fallen granite marker. Who in heaven’s name had tipped that thing, Van Allen mused as he walked past it. Better yet, who was going to pony up the dough to set it right? Not the city or state: both were broke. Not the penny-pinching trustees of the cemetery.

Something invisible tapped at Van Allen’s shoulder as he passed the granite angel. Van Allen brushed at the spot and couldn’t find it, but he did see, or thought he saw, a dragonfly a few feet away. He brushed again.

“Bugs,” he muttered. There was no second tap. The dragonfly whirled away.

There was no one near the grave. Or any other grave. Van Allen stood and let his eyes wander all through the forlorn old stones in the back quadrant of the cemetery. He let his eyes adjust to the shadows and the dim light. He wandered a few feet to improve his line of view, trying to see if anyone could have crouched behind a tombstone. Then he had an idea. He used his cell phone to call Alice and asked that she join him. He asked that Martinez remain in place.

Alice jogged to him, the movements of a fit woman in her thirties.

“I know I saw something, Double A,” he said.

“‘Something’ huh? Like what?”

“Oh, stop treating me like I’m a head case and help me out on this,” he snapped. “There’s been trouble in this cemetery and there were two children who disappeared just over that cemetery wall. Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Not really.”

“Thanks.”

“You asked me for my thoughts? Those are them.”

“Keep your hand on your weapon, and cover me, okay?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to walk to the rear wall of the yard,” Van Allen said. “I want to see if someone is hiding back there.”

“Convenient if we shoot someone,” she said. “We can bury him right here and no one other than the old Mex has to know.”

“Very funny.”

“Not meant to be, Ed.” Van Allen glowered at her.

“Now who’s the psychopath?” he asked. She smiled sweetly and his irritation took wing.

“You’re sure you saw something, aren’t you, Ed?” she asked, turning a little more serious. He looked at her as if she had suggested that he was insane.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“Then I’ll cover you.”

“Thanks.”

Alice drew her weapon and held it by her side. Van Allen spent a quarter hour wandering among the old stones. Night and darkness tightened its grip on the yard. His leg was murdering him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Martinez standing near the gates, arms folded across his chest, waiting. Cemetery of Angels, Van Allen mused. He would welcome a little help from the angels right now. For starters, he could use a new set of legs. Bionic ones this time, please.

Then there was a surreal aspect to the inspection of San Angelo. Shadows seemed to move and flutter as he approached. He wished that he had a flashlight, a big heavy one with a solid beam. But he didn’t. And he didn’t find anyone lurking in the yard, either.

In the end, he hunched his shoulders to Double A, indicating that he was giving up. Martinez stood by the gates, arms still folded across his chest, anxious to go home.

“I couldn’t find anyone,” Van Allen announced.

“Told you,” Martinez said.

“Yeah, well I know I saw something,” the detective snapped with uncharacteristic anger. His gaze swept the shadows for a final time.

“I don’t know what going on. But I looked. If you get vandalized again tonight, don’t blame me.”

Van Allen and Double A stood outside the gates. The chains clanked on them as Martinez closed the aging iron portals.

“Aah,” the old man said as he set the lock, “those walls. Only eight feet high. People climb over all the time. In out, all night. Kids, they use the yard as a place to do sex and drugs. Piss off all the spirits, right?”

“Yeah. Right,” Van Allen grumbled. For a moment it disturbed him that teenagers were popping in and out of San Angelo, using it as a casual place of assignation, while his own sex life was on the back burner. Then he fought off the thought.