A black wrought-iron gate normally barred access to Forest Park Cemetery after dark, according to the sign Mason saw mounted on the gate as it hung open, tapping against a stone wall with each gust of wind. He pulled up to the entrance, his headlights shooting bright streamers into the cemetery that spread out like buckshot before dropping harmlessly in the distant darkness. The entrance into the cemetery was wide enough for two cars. Mason parked the Jeep squarely in the middle, hoping to make it impossible for another car to pass on either side.
He found a padlock hanging from a chain looped through the gate. The lock had been smashed until it had given way. Though the lock was tarnished from years of exposure, it bore fresh scratches and dents, evidence of the pounding it had absorbed before yielding. There were also fresh scrapes on the rails of the gate, as if the assailant hadn't been able to stop after simply breaking the lock.
Mason found a woman's white cotton glove lying in the snow at the foot of the gate, stained with fresh blood. He got the message. Whoever had opened the gate was out of control, and anyone that got in the way was going to take a beating.
The main road through the cemetery had been scraped, leaving a bottom layer of packed snow and ice harder than the underlying asphalt. Mason stayed on foot, following tire tracks illuminated only by the moon. Snow had drifted against many of the tombstones, all but burying them. Some heirs and mourners had erected taller monuments to the deceased, capped by crosses that reached through the snow toward heaven.
Mason's footsteps slapped against the packed snow, a hollow sound in a silent theater, his shadow a poor accompaniment to a night owl passing overhead, its moonlit silhouette leading Mason deeper into the cemetery. A rasping, grating, fractious noise drew Mason off the main road along a winding path among the dead, until he crested a small rise and looked down on a pair of graves.
Amy White was bent over one of the headstones, her back to Mason, flailing at it with a hammer, cursing the rock, the ground, and the bones beneath. Her car was stuck nose down in the snow on an embankment opposite where Mason stood, its engine running, headlights glowing beneath the snow. A woman he assumed was Cheryl lay nearby on her back, making angel wings in the snow with her arms.
"Amy," Mason called to her.
Amy wheeled around, her face twisted with exhumed rage, her movement revealing Donald Ray White's name engraved on the stone. Her cold skin was paler than the moon, colored only by flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth.
Amy raised the hammer above her head as if to throw it at Mason, then spun back to her mad work, striking another blow against her dead father. The head of the hammer flew off, knifing into the snow as the handle shattered, spearing her hand with a jagged splinter. She clamped the splinter with her teeth, yanked it from her fleshy palm, and spat it out.
"I knew it would be you!" she screamed.
Mason walked down the hill toward Amy, keeping his hands in plain view in an effort to calm her down. "How could you know it would be me?"
Amy gulped air and wiped her bloody hand against her jeans. "That day in the parking garage, when I asked for your help-I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew you thought I was just Billy Sunshine's toady. That I just wanted to protect his precious goddamn career."
"You're right," he told her. "That is what I thought. But I was wrong, wasn't I? You wanted me to find your file, not the mayor's."
Amy heaved, gradually catching her breath, forcing her madness back into a genie's bottle. "If you had told me where the mayor's file was, I would have found mine," she said. "Then everything would have been fine, except I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew you wouldn't let it rest until you found out."
"Until I found out that you killed your father, not Cheryl; that you used the same gun to kill Jack Cullan."
Amy threw her head back. "How did you know about the gun?"
"You told me that Cullan had wanted Blues's liquor license brought to him on the Friday night he and Blues had argued at the bar, but that you put him off until Monday. Howard Trimble told me that he gave you the file that same night. Yet you didn't give the file to Cullan, and I couldn't figure out why. Then Trimble told me what your father had done to Cheryl, how your mother had hired Cullan to defend your father and then to defend your sister."
"My father was a hell-born bastard that deserved to die!"
"That's what a jury would have said, Amy. Especially since the police reports showed that you shot him in self-defense. The cops found a gun in your father's hand. Your mother said that he'd fired a shot and threatened to kill all of you. Her mistake was calling Jack Cullan before she called the police."
Amy slumped to the ground, her back against her father's tombstone. "I don't remember very much after I shot him. My mother and I were screaming. We didn't know what to do."
