“Fuck you.” He turns and starts toward the gas station.
I hold my ground, my heart pounding, and I watch as he reaches the office door, jams the key into the lock. “Vernon?” I call out.
He glares at me over his shoulder.
“Just so you know … the criminal statute of limitations on rape and sexual battery in Ohio is twenty-five years. Think about that while you’re trying to sleep.”
Muttering something unintelligible beneath his breath, he yanks open the door and disappears inside.
* * *
A cop does not take time off during a homicide investigation. Not one day. Not even a few hours. There’s too much to do. Too much going on. Always the concern that something will break when you’re not there. The investigation becomes your life and everything else is reduced to white noise. When Tomasetti showed up at the station and asked me to go for a drive, I almost refused. But there was something in the way he looked at me when he asked, and I sensed the importance of his request.
I didn’t know our destination. He kept the conversation light during the hour-long drive from Painters Mill to Cleveland. He’s thoughtful, pensive, preoccupied, and I let him be. Only now, as he makes the turn into the cemetery entrance, do I realize the significance of what we’re about to do.
I don’t have an aversion to cemeteries. I see them as peaceful, reflective places. Amish cemeteries are utilitarian and, of course, plain. They’re part of the landscape, a cornfield or pasture that was donated by a family generations ago and transformed to a place to bury the dead. Amish cemeteries are the kind of place you drive past every day and you think about someone who’s buried there. Someone you loved or knew or knew of. Maybe you miss them for an instant or you feel the tinge of that old ache. If enough time has passed, you don’t think of their death; you think of their life. If you’re lucky, for just a moment, you feel close to them. Sometimes, you feel close to God.
Populated with hundreds of century-old oaks, maples, and elm trees, Calvary Cemetery is a far cry from the quaint Amish cemeteries of Holmes County. It’s a solemn and regal setting with over three hundred thousand graves, some dating back to the 1800s.
Tomasetti doesn’t need a map or signs to find what he’s looking for. He’s been here hundreds of times in the past seven years. As we wend along the neat asphalt road and idle past dozens of stunning monuments, headstones of every shape, size, and scope, and trees with leaves that shimmer like new copper in the late-afternoon sunlight, he reaches for my hand.
He stops the Tahoe in a quiet section, the headstones dappled with sunlight, the granite specks glinting and winking.
“It’s pretty here,” I tell him. “Quiet.”
“I didn’t notice for the longest time.” Finally, he looks at me. “In three days, we’ll be married.”
Despite the solemnity of the moment, I feel a smile emerge. Holding his gaze, I squeeze his hand. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”
“Past time.” A smile plays at the corners of his mouth and then he looks through the windshield at the graves. “I thought this would be a good time for us to come here. For me to tell you about them.”
He releases my hand and gets out. He rounds the front of the Tahoe to open my door, but I’m out by the time he reaches me. We walk side by side to a large slant headstone with TOMASETTI engraved across the top. It’s a pretty stone, cut from blue-gray granite and sitting atop an equally pretty foundation. There’s a heart at the top, to the left of the name. Praying hands to the right. Lower, three names have been etched into the surface. NANCY JEAN, LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER. DONNA MARIE AND KELLY ANN, BELOVED DAUGHTERS. JOHN.
“I feel like I should know how often you come here,” I say. “But I don’t.”
He shrugs. “I used to visit every month or so.” He motions to a bench several yards away. “Spent the night on that bench once or twice, early on. I think it’s been about six months since I was here last.”
Healing, I think.
I nod, look at the stone, not sure what to say next, sensing this time is for him. For them. And my time to just … be.
“Kelly would have been sixteen. Donna seventeen.” He shakes his head. “Hard to believe it’s been seven years. Sometimes it seems like a hundred. Some days … like it happened yesterday and I’m getting the call all over again.”
Two years before we met, his wife and children were murdered by a career criminal during a vicious home invasion. Shortly afterward, Tomasetti left the Cleveland Division of Police and began his career with BCI. We met when he was assigned to assist me in the course of a terrible case in Painters Mill. Though two years had passed since he’d lost his wife and children, he was floundering, personally and professionally, and he was far from coping. He was drinking too much and mixing alcohol with prescription drugs. On the fast track to self-destruction or death—whichever came first. I hadn’t been doing much better and yet somehow, in the midst of all that turmoil, we managed to start a relationship.
“You’ve come a long way in the last few years,” I say.
“Had some help.” Grinning at me, he squeezes my hand.
He looks at the stone and sobers. “They were good kids. Just … little girls. They wore pink. They liked to swim and play teacher. Nancy was a good woman. A good mom. She was a good wife and I loved her.” He looks at me and for the first time in a long time, he lets me see the depth of his grief.
“I was unfaithful to her once,” he says after a moment. “I never told you. I was … ashamed. But I slept with a cop I was working with. It nearly cost me my marriage.”
I look at the stone, the etched name of the woman he’d loved. “Hopefully, you spent some time in the doghouse.”
“Oh, yeah.” He gives a self-deprecating laugh. “Took some time but we worked it out.”
“Just so you know … you’re one of the most loyal people I’ve ever known.”
“Not always,” he admits. “Lucky for me, I’m capable of learning from my mistakes.”
An uncomfortable silence ensues. I get the impression he’s struggling to tell me something else, so I give him the time to work through it.
“I worked a lot,” he says. “I drank too much. Didn’t spend enough time with my children. I didn’t appreciate them as much as I should have.”
“We don’t live our lives thinking our loved ones are going to be snatched away,” I tell him.
Lifting my hand, he brings it to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. “I wasn’t a very good husband. I wasn’t as good a father as I should have been.”
“So you say.”
“Just giving you fair warning.” He gives me a good-natured frown. “So you know what you’re getting into.”
“I know exactly what I’m getting into,” I tell him. “And I know everything I need to know about you.”
He starts to say something, but I raise my hand and press my finger to his lips. “Despite all those flaws, I love you.”
Blinking, he looks away, his jaw tight and working, stoic.
“It was good for me to come here,” I say. “To meet them.”