A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [114]
Stratton followed at a distance. He was careful to stay in the grass so his steps would not echo. Arlington was nearly empty now. The trams had stopped running and the tourists had gone back to the city. The woman in black walked alone, no longer in the gait of a mourner. Her heels clicked sharply on the pavement, and the sound dominoed along the tombstones.
“Hey there!” Stratton called.
Self-consciously she slowed, then turned as Stratton ran up. She looked at him and smiled. “So there you are!”
“Linda!” Stratton said.
“How’d I do?”
“I like the dress. Black becomes you. What are you doing here?”
It was a pointless question. She knew. He knew.
She kicked out of her high heels and said, “These things are killing me. Come on, walk me to the car.”
“I can’t.”
She took his arm. “Come on, Tom, they won’t come at night. They’ll never find it at night.”
“You’re wrong, Linda. How did you know—”
“The same way you did. I had to play catch-up, that’s all. I should’ve listened to you before, Tom, and I’m sorry. I didn’t see what was happening—but even if I had, I’m not sure it would have made a difference.”
“Nobody would have believed it, least of all your boss.”
“Wang Bin was my case. The last couple of days I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I could have caught on sooner.” She did not tell Stratton about the foreigners’ morgue in Peking. She was afraid he had already figured it out.
“Are you here alone?” he asked.
“For now,” she said.
“Me, too. And I’m staying.”
He started back up the hill and she followed. “Tom!” she called. “I’m ruining my goddamn stockings. Slow down. Listen to me, they aren’t coming tonight. They think the coffin is in Baltimore—”
“They’ve beaten me twice already. This is my last chance.”
“Tom, be serious. I’ll have some people here tomorrow. When the bad guys show up at the gate, we’ll arrest them.”
“What makes you so sure they’ll use the gate?”
“Once they realize where the coffin is buried, they’ll give up on it. They’ll never try to dig this one up. Christ, it’s Arlington, Tom. They can’t possibly get away with it.”
“This way,” Stratton said, leaving the asphalt path and winding through a stand of tall trees. “I’ve got a good view from up here.”
Linda Greer sat next to him under the oak, tugging the black dress down to cover her knees. She had hoped he would notice, but he didn’t. He offered her a thermos of coffee.
“This is like summer camp,” she teased. “Are you really going to stay here all night?”
“Why not?”
Linda edged closer until her cheek touched his shoulder. “Might as well make the best of it,” she whispered. “It’s a soft night, isn’t it?” Stratton nodded but did not look at her. “Tom, relax—it’s like I’m snuggling up to one of those damn gravestones.”
“I’m sorry.”
Stratton trained his eyes on Kevin Mitchell’s plot. A lemon moon, nearly full, was rising behind the capital across the river. The silent cemetery became a sprawling theater of shadows; the crosses turned into tiny soldiers with arms extended, whole battalions frozen on the hillsides in calisthenic precision.
“I stopped at the Kennedy grave this morning,” Stratton said.
“Which one?”
“Both of them. That’s where all the tourists go. I’d never seen them before, only pictures.”
Linda said, “I took my little sister a couple of years ago. She cried.”
“Last year some guy fell into the flame and died,” Stratton said. “He got drunk and pitched face down into the Eternal Flame. They found him the next day, burned to death. When I saw the story in the paper, I had to wonder about that guy. What was he thinking about that night? Why did he come here, of all places? I could just see him standing there in front of the President’s grave, after all the goddamn tourists were gone. I could see him crying. Sloppy drunk tears. Staring at the flame and crying like a baby. Then it made sense. If you want to be sad, this is the place. Look out there, Linda. Look at them all. So many you can