The Gravedigger's Ball Read Online Free Page B

lost that phone,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at the phone’s screen, and a look of recognition swept over his face. “What did you say Mary’s sister’s name was?”
    “Lenore.”
    When Coletti said it, the storm clouds darkened, sucking the very sound from the air. Just as he’d heard almost nothing but his own breathing when he was searching among the cemetery’s crypts for the killer, Coletti could only hear a few sounds now. One of them was Mann’s voice, reading the next line of Poe’s masterpiece.
    “ But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken —”
    Mann’s voice was drowned out by the roll of thunder and the patter of the rain against granite headstones.
    The two of them walked quickly to Coletti’s car, where Lenore was waiting. When they got in, an alert tone came over the radio.
    “Cars stand by,” the dispatcher said. “Nine two one two, what’s your location?”
    Five seconds of static followed.
    “Car 9212, report.”
    Again, there was static, and with it, an almost palpable sense of dread. Coletti and Mann looked at each other, then at Lenore. A moment later, the radio crackled again.
    “This is 9210,” a cop said gravely. “I got 9212 near Reservoir Drive. The car’s running, but he ain’t in it.”
    *   *   *
    The dispatcher called for an assist—the highest priority in the department. It meant that a cop was in trouble, and this assist was much like any other. Once the call went out, chaos reigned.
    The radio was clogged with the voices of cops falling over each other to respond. The streets were filled with police cars flying recklessly through the park. The air was thick with the electric pulse of cops who were out for blood.
    They blocked Kelly Drive and brought civilian traffic to a standstill. As they did so, they tried to do the impossible—fight against the unspoken yet prevailing feeling that time had already run out.
    As rain poured from dark clouds that made the morning feel like night, the police used everything at their disposal to search for their comrade. There were K-9 units and SWAT teams, uniformed and plainclothes, and when word of the cop’s disappearance hit his former district—the ninth—a steady stream of police sped to the area from downtown.
    Lieutenant Sandy Jackson was among them. With cinnamon-brown skin and a beauty that belied her toughness, Sandy commanded officers in the sixth district. She’d served most of her career in the ninth, however, and the cop who’d disappeared was one of the few who’d helped her along as a rookie.
    As she whipped her car around Kelly Drive and past the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sandy glanced out the window at a golden statue of an armor-clad Joan of Arc and thought of her own days on the battlefield.
    She remembered how she’d fought to get promotions. She remembered how she’d battled sexism in the department. Most of all, she remembered that the officer who was now missing was one of the few male cops who’d helped her as she struggled for equal treatment.
    When her crass colleagues would leave pornography out at roll call to harass Sandy and the other female cop on the squad, it was Smitty who stepped up to make them stop.
    He never won any popularity contests because of it, and he never tried to do so. He simply did his job, and most of the time, he did it well. That was what led to his proudest moment—the arrest of two college boys who’d run a major meth operation out of their Center City apartment. On appeal, it all came crashing down when their parents hired the city’s top defense attorney to get their convictions overturned.
    When the smoke cleared, Smitty was portrayed as the bad guy, and by the time the media finished with him, the commissioner had no choice but to get him out of the limelight. Sandy watched sadly as he was transferred from the ninth district to the park, but she consoled herself with the belief that the new