“He sure as hell found something,” Aidan said.
The young woman, Maureen Deauville, spoke quietly then.
“Rollo is— Well, he’s really a sight hound, but—” She paused, glancing around. “He’s never wrong. Richard Highsmith is nearby,” she said. “The, um, rest of him.”
Aidan looked at her, then at the headless body by the tomb. Ms. Deauville seemed very certain. In a second, he’d pulled on a pair of neoprene gloves.
Then he stepped forward.
There was an iron gate that guarded the tomb. Beyond that was some kind of heavy metal door.
Aidan pulled at the gate; it creaked, but gave.
He pushed at the iron door. It groaned on its hinges but opened.
Taking a penlight from his pocket, he flashed it over the inside of the vault. He saw a stone sarcophagus or tomb in the center.
And on the stone tomb, a body. In a suit.
“This, I think,” Aidan said, rigidly controlling the emotion that ripped through him, “is Richard Highsmith.”
2
Purbeck looked in and sighed. “Back out, everyone but Mahoney, Van Camp and Voorhaven. I don’t want evidence compromised. Get the M.E. and the crime scene people here,” he ordered.
Aidan followed him, then carefully stepped through.
He threw the beam of his flashlight over the stone floor. No hope of prints, since the stone was bare of dust. He walked carefully toward the body, touching nothing, keeping his light trained on the corpse.
Aidan wasn’t an M.E., but it seemed to him that the head had been cleanly severed with great strength and probably a single blow. Highsmith hadn’t been killed in the tomb; there wasn’t much blood. And, of course, Aidan couldn’t know if he’d been killed and then decapitated—or killed by decapitation. He found himself reminded of a history lesson: Queen Anne Boleyn asking Henry VIII for a headsman from France so her execution would be swift and clean.
Purbeck had come in behind him. He, too, touched nothing and studied the body.
As the two detectives—Van Camp and Voorhaven—also walked into the tomb, Aidan put down his flashlight and checked for Highsmith’s wallet with gloved hands. He found it in his pocket, just as he’d expected to.
“Anything in there?” Van Camp asked him.
“Wallet, keys...”
Carefully, Aidan checked Highsmith’s other pocket. Lint—and a matchbook. He held it up to Voorhaven’s flashlight glare.
“From some place called Mystic Magic,” he said.
“Whoa,” Van Camp muttered.
“It’s a new strip club down close to Irving,” Voorhaven explained.
“Doesn’t sound like Richard Highsmith,” Purbeck said.
Voorhaven produced an evidence bag, but Aidan briefly held on to the matchbook, flipping it open. He wasn’t surprised to see that Highsmith had scribbled something in it. “‘Lizzie grave,’” he read aloud.
“Odd name for a stripper,” Van Camp commented.
“I doubt it’s a stripper’s name,” Aidan told the others.
“Then what?” Van Camp asked.
“Maybe it has to do with a dead woman named Lizzie. Lizzie’s grave,” Aidan said impatiently, dropping the matchbook in the evidence bag.
Voorhaven snorted. “Ah, hell! Do you know how many Lizzies have died and been buried here over the last several hundred years?”
Purbeck shook his head. “Let the M.E. and the crime scene techs in now,” he said, turning to leave the vault. He paused at the door. “We have another victim out there—and another head to find.”
Aidan stayed behind for a minute, his gloved hand resting lightly on Richard’s arm. Rigor had come and gone; he’d been dead awhile. He’d probably been killed soon after he disappeared.
“Old friend,” he murmured. “I’ll get whoever did this to you.”
The young woman, Maureen—or Mo— Deauville, had not come in. She stood with her dog just outside the gates and Aidan felt her eyes on him, even though he was darkness and shadow.
He exited the tomb and approached Maureen just as Purbeck came up beside her. The place was now crawling with people. Voorhaven and Van Camp were by the corpse that had been so strategically arranged to look like a host—welcoming them, inviting them to enter the tomb. They had to discover the identity of this woman. Her death was as great a crime, as great a tragedy, as Highsmith’s.
“I know Van Camp already mentioned this, but are we sure it’s not a name? Lizzie Grave?” Purbeck asked Aidan. “Not necessarily a stripper’s name. Maybe someone he met?”