“Why?”

“Captain, I got goods news and bad news.”

“Good news first.”

“The autopsy went well.”

“And the bad news?”

“We dug up the wrong guy.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, I’m serious.”

“Jesus.”

Eugene Dale. Some poor soul who had the misfortune to be chucked into the same potter’s field at about the same time as the Reverend Gilliard. Now he’s down on a gurney on Penn Street, looking a little worse for the day’s events. Not much in this world can truly upset a homicide detective, but for Waltemeyer, disturbing the slumber of the innocent dead comes damn close. Waltemeyer wonders whether this Dale has relatives. And that name: Why does it sound familiar?

“You got the wrong guy?” asks a detective from Stanton’s shift, working overtime on a court appearance. “Who’d you get?”

“Some poor bastard named Eugene Dale.”

“Eugene Dale?”

“Yeah.”

“D-A-L-E?”

Waltemeyer nods.

The other detective points at the board and the last couple of names under Rodger Nolan’s section. “That’s the same name as Edgerton’s suspect.”

“Who?”

“Eugene Dale.”

“Who is?” asks Waltemeyer, still confused.

“The guy that Edgerton locked up for killing the little girl,” says the detective. “He’s got the same name as the guy you just dug up.”

Waltemeyer looks at the board. “Eugene Dale,” he says, reading the black ink. “I’ll be damned.”

“Where’s Edgerton now?” asks the other detective.

“Off today,” says Waltemeyer, absorbed in thought. What the hell does it matter who they dug up? It isn’t Rayfield Gilliard; they know that much. Waltemeyer listens impassively as the other detective gets Edgerton on the phone and then runs through the preamble.

“Harry, was your guy a junior? Was his name Eugene Dale, Jr., or Eugene Dale the third, or something like that?”

The other detective nods, listening to the answer. Without hearing a word, Waltemeyer can imagine Edgerton’s confusion.

“And did Dale’s father die recently… Yeah, like February or so… Yeah, right… Well guess what, Harry, you’re not gonna believe this, but Waltemeyer just dug up your suspect’s father and had the guys at the morgue cut him open… Yeah, I’m serious.”

Enough, thinks Waltemeyer, walking out of the coffee room. I’m not about to sit around here all day listening to this crap. Never mind that Edgerton is on the other end of the phone line absorbing this bizarre coincidence and fantasizing about a fresh trip to the city jail. Never mind that Edgerton imagines himself confronting the younger Dale with the information that the Baltimore Police Department dug up his father and played with him for no reason other than his son killed a little girl and lied about it. Never mind that Stanton’s detective will be running over to Mark Tomlin’s desk at the shift change, telling Tomlin about Waltemeyer’s morning so Tomlin can draw one of his cartoons that every so often grace the coffee room wall. Never mind all that.

This, to Waltemeyer, is not funny.

Leaving the other detective on the phone with Edgerton, Waltemeyer borrows a Cavalier and takes another ride to Mount Zion.

“You back?” asks a gravedigger at the Hollins Ferry entrance.

“I’m back,” says Waltemeyer. “Where’s Mr. Brown right now?”

“He’s in the office.”

Waltemeyer walks across the driveway toward a small, one-room caretaker’s shack. The cemetery manager, on his way out the door, meets him halfway.

“Mr. Brown, you and me got some talking to do,” says Waltemeyer, looking at the ground.

“Why’s that?”

“Because that body you dug up and gave us this morning…”

“What about it?”

“That was the wrong man.”

The manager doesn’t miss a beat. “Wrong man?” he says. “How could they tell?”

Waltemeyer hears that and thinks about grabbing the old man by his throat. How could they tell? Obviously, the manager figures that after lying in the ground ten months, one corpse looks a lot like another. Just so long as you pull the lid off and it ain’t wearing a dress, right?

“He had an ID bracelet from the hospital,” says Waltemeyer, fighting his temper. “It says he’s Eugene Dale, not Rayfield Gilliard.”

“Jesus,” says the manager, shaking his head.

“Let’s go inside and have a look at whatever records you got.”

Waltemeyer follows the old man into the shack, then watches as he pulls three sets of 3-by-5 cards from a metal file drawer-January, February and March burials-and begins thumbing through them.

“What you say the name was?”

“Dale. D-A-L-E.”

“Not in February,” says the manager. He begins checking the March burials, stopping at the fourth card in the pile. Eugene Dale. Died March 10. Buried March 14. Section DD, Row 83, Grave 11. Waltemeyer picks up the February cards and finds Rayfield Gilliard. Died February 2. Buried February 8. Section DD, Row 78, Grave 17.

Not even close. Waltemeyer gives the manager a hard stare.

“You were five rows away.”

“Well, he ain’t in the right place.”

“I know that,” says Waltemeyer, his voice rising.

“I mean, we was at the right place, but he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”

Waltemeyer looks at the floor.

“I didn’t work that day,” says the old man. “Someone else messed up.”

“Someone else?”

“Yeah.”

“You think if we dig where Eugene Dale is supposed to be, we’re gonna find Gilliard?”

“Maybe.”

“Why? They’re buried a month apart.”

“Maybe not,” the manager agrees.

Waltemeyer picks up the burial cards and begins sorting through the lot, looking for burials on or near the eighth of February. To his amazement, the names are strangely familiar. Every other card seems to correspond to a 24-hour report.

Here is James Brown, Gilbert’s murder, that kid who got stabbed to death on New Year’s. And Barney Erely, the old drunk Pellegrini found bludgeoned in the alley off Clay Street a few weeks after Latonya Wallace, the derelict killed when he chose the wrong place to defecate. And Orlando Felton, that decomp from North Calvert Street, the overdose that McAllister and McLarney handled back in January. And Keller’s drug killing from March, that homeboy with the unlikely last name of Ireland who made a bucket of money selling east side dope. Christ, all that cash and his family just dumps him in a potter’s field. Dunnigan’s drug murder from the Lafayette Court projects… the three little babies killed in Steinhice’s arson case… Eddie Brown’s fatal shooting from Vine Street. Waltemeyer reads on, both awed and amused. This one was Dave Brown’s, this one was Shea’s. Tomlin handled this one…

“You really don’t know where he is,” says Waltemeyer, putting down the cards, “do you, Mr. Brown?”

“No. Not exactly. Not right now.”

“I didn’t think so.”

At that moment, Waltemeyer is ready to cut his losses and give up on Rayfield Gilliard; the medical examiners, however, are still insistent. They have a probable homicide and an exhumation order signed by a Baltimore County judge, and therefore Mount Zion is obligated to find the body.

Three weeks later they try again, digging down into the mud a full six rows from the spot where the state reburied Eugene Dale, Sr., in a better box than the one it tore apart. This time Waltemeyer does not ask for the logic behind the manager’s insistence on the new location, in part for fear that there is no logic. They use the same backhoe, the same gravediggers, the same ME’s attendants, who haul the second, heavier corpse to the surface, then check the wrists carefully for any identification.

“This one looks more like him,” Waltemeyer says with hope, checking the photograph.

“Told you so,” the manager says proudly.

Then the ME’s man pulls a sock from the left foot to reveal half of a hospital toe tag. W-I-L are the only visible letters. Wilson? Williams? Wilmer? Who knows and who the hell cares if it isn’t Rayfield Gilliard?