I reach another cluster of trees and rest for thirty seconds or so. My feet are aching and probably bleeding but I don’t want

to look. I check back in what I believe, though am not certain, is the direction of the church. I panic for a moment about

whether my wallet or keys are in the jacket I left behind, and I quickly check. My keys are in my pants pocket, and my wallet — I remember now — is still at home. I stick with the direction I was heading. I’m aware of more cars arriving, and rest for a few more seconds behind another grave marker to watch the show.

Their pooling location shows me where the church is. There are no sirens sounding, but there are plenty of flashing blue and red lights from patrol cars through the trees and from others moving through the cemetery grounds. I keep running. And running

I think about the extra weight Schroder told me I’d put on, and I can feel every kilogram of it slowing me down. The contours

of the land change. I head up and then down and then up again, hitting slight slopes that feel steeper than they really are, and they soon make it difficult to see anything behind me. I reach another section of the cemetery but still have no idea where I am. I forge ahead, trespassing over the dead. I keep looking back. No more light. No more patrol cars. Not that I can see. More trees ahead of me, another stretch of graves. I burst through another patch of bushes and garden, then suddenly I’m at a fence line. I want to scale it but I can’t, not yet, not for a few more moments, not until my heart rate slows some and my body is convinced enough to keep going.

The fence backs on to somebody’s house, an old weatherboard

home with a huge gap between the house and the garage. I drop

down into the back yard and I run for the gap. There is no other fence. I reach the road and look left and right. I know where I am.

There is a bus stop a few metres away from me. I walk down to

it and then decide it’s a bad place to be waiting. I cross the road and sit down behind a hedge. I take some slow deep breaths in an effort to bring my heart rate back to normal.

I start back towards the car. Ten minutes later I’m heading along the same road as the cemetery. I can see lights and commotion way up ahead, but the car is a good two blocks short of it. I unlock it and duck into the driver’s seat, traipsing mud and leaves and blood into the floor-well. I sit the envelope of photographs on the passenger seat. It’s been a bit bent out of shape but is mostly dry except for two of the corners. I start the engine, but leave the lights off until I’ve rounded the first corner. I think about the shovel in the boot and I figure tonight wasn’t the best night to go digging anyway. Besides, there’s something unnerving in

the thought of returning Dad’s car to him after it’s been used to drive a corpse around. That hadn’t been on the agenda when

I borrowed it.

By the time I get home I’m bordering on exhaustion, though

I don’t feel tired. It’s sensory overload. without the benefit of alcohol to keep things running smoodily without sleep, I know

I’m going to crash and burn.

I take a quick shower and check my banged-up feet. They’re

grazed, but not as bad as I’d expected. Then I take the pictures from the damp envelope and separate them so they can dry out.

I don’t look at them closely. Not right now. I can’t. But I can’t leave them out either in case Landry or Schroder show up. I wipe them dry with a tea-towel, then put them into a fresh envelope and throw out the old one. In the corner of my bedroom I lift up the carpet, figuring that since it worked so well for Alderman and Julian, it’s got to work well for me too.

I hit my bed and fall asleep without even willing it.

chapter forty-four

258

Nobody comes to my house during the night. I reckon the police will have narrowed down last night’s visitor to the church to one of three people — me, the killer or a reporter. They’ll have found my jacket and my shoes, but even if they recognise them there’s nothing on them to say they’re mine, only DNA, and that’ll take eight weeks to arrive. Landry and Schroder will undoubtedly be thinking of coming to talk to me; they’ll be wondering if they can bluff me into admitting I went into the church, though they’ll know they can’t. I know the game. And anyway, all I have to

say is the same person who planted the murder weapon in my

garage also planted my clothes to try to complete the frame job, and that’s also what I’ll be saying in two months’ time when they get DNA from hair follicles caught in my jacket. Landry will

have gone through all of this, hitting it from all sorts of different angles, without coming up with one that will help him cement

a case against me. I’m betting that in the end he’ll know his

argument and he’ll know my argument, and he’ll know that mine

is stronger.

Of course all of this is moot if I can’t get back into the cemetery and dig Alderman up before Monday

The overnight rain has stopped and for the moment the

clouds are mainly dispersed. I open up the curtains and dump my sopping clothes into the washing machine. It seems that getting messed up at night is becoming a habit. Then I make coffee,

wondering at what point in the human evolution coffee became

such an important ingredient, and I figure if nothing else in this world, no matter what happens in the future, coffee will sure as hell be around a lot longer than religion. I carry the photographs I’ve pulled back out from under the carpet into my office. I go through them all again, but recognise only Bruce among the

various boys and girls. Then I turn them over. They all have names and dates on the back. Just first names. The dates go back twenty four years. I start flicking through them, the names rushing out at me from the past month, the names connecting the dots.

I put the photos down. I stand up and start to walk around

my office, my breath quickening. Excitement is starting to build, the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time, not since working homicides in my previous life, not since the thrill of feeling things coming together and knowing you’re heading for

the finishing line.

There are five girls in these pictures. Four of them share names with the dead girls who’ve been found. I have no idea where the fifth girl is, but I have a first name. Deborah. There are three boys too: Bruce, Simon and Jeremy. I have no idea where Simon and

Jeremy are either.

I go back to Rachel’s photo and turn it over. I remember

the other photos I’ve seen of her on the wall of her parents’

house. Then suddenly I’m back in Father Julian’s office. Bruce was like a son to me, he’s telling me. Like a son. Were all these people like sons and daughters to Father Julian? I think they

were. I remember looking at the pictures of the missing girls a month ago and thinking how similar they were, how their killer had a type. I was right and wrong. His type wasn’t based on

characteristics the girls shared, or body type or age. It was based on who these people were. He targeted them specifically because they were all related.

chapter forty-five

The house looks a little tidier than the last time I was here. I figure their lives are no longer on hold. The news they’d been dreading has arrived, and though they’re struggling with it, they’re starting to move forward.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,’ Patricia

Tyler says, and she really seems to be trying hard to make up her mind.

‘Can I come in? Please, it’s important.’

“I don’t know. The truth is I hardly know what to think any