Read After I'm Gone for Free Online

all those years later, which had to be a good ten, fifteen miles from her car. Not buried or concealed in any particular way, just left out to rot. It killed civilians to hear that. People in urban areas couldn’t believe how long a body could go undetected, but it happened all the time. Leakin Park was twelve hundred acres, much of it heavily wooded, and it wasn’t legal to hunt there, so the odds of people walking through the rough, overgrown areas was pretty remote. The city had created a trail that, theoretically, could be followed all the way into the heart of downtown if one was willing to hike or bike through some sketchy areas, but that was on the other side of a stream from where the body was discovered. Julie’s remains might not have been found at all if it weren’t for a rambunctious dog that led a young couple on a chase.
    Sandy couldn’t help wondering about them, incidental as they were to the story. One of the things he loved about the show Law & Order —and he loved almost everything about it, particularly the fakeness—were the discoveries that started every episode. New York City had, in real life, maybe eight hundred homicides a year, which was nothing per capita. Baltimore’s rate had fallen back from the almost one-a-day that he had seen in his glory days, but it was still one of the highest in the country. Yet, if you watched Law & Order , and he had done quite a bit of that in the four long months that it took Mary to die, it seemed as if everyone in the city must have tripped over a body here and there. He thought those people deserved a show of their own. He wanted to write the producer a letter and suggest that as a spin-off. Law & Order: The Discoverers. There was probably a better title, but that was the drift. A young couple out on a date. Was it a first date? Which one owned the dog? Was the dog running away, or was it off-leash in that sneaky way people used so they could avoid cleaning up? (Sandy lived near a small park and he had taken to eye-fucking anyone who looked like they might not clean up after a dog.) Finding a dead body on a date seemed a pretty bad omen, but he and Mary had hit a deer on their second one, and that had turned out great. The date, if not Mary’s parents’ car.
    He started to head down the hill. Damn. It was muddier than he had anticipated, capable of seriously screwing up a man’s loafers. He retreated to his car to see if he had anything he could use. Nada, zip, nothing.
    The houses here were big and rambling, although most had been cut up for apartments. As the reporter had said, the neighborhood had been something once. The Gottschalk home, per the property tax records, stayed in her family until 1977, when it was sold for $19,000, not much more than they had paid for it in 1947. Sandy wasn’t clear if there had been a death or if her parents had downsized. He might need to run them through vital stats at some point. They weren’t part of the file, and not even Bambi had been interviewed after Julie’s body was discovered.
    Yet Julie had ended up a few hundred yards from here, near the house where Bernadette “Bambi” Gottschalk had lived until her marriage on December 31, 1959. It was a date Sandy knew well, for his own reasons. Sandy had arrived in Baltimore a year later, almost to the day. People talk about having nothing but the clothes on their backs, but for Sandy that had been literal. It was part of the reason that he used to be fastidious about his clothes, even by the standards of a murder police, which was a pretty high standard. He looked at his shining loafers. They were old, but extremely well cared for, exhibit A in the wisdom of buying quality. He knew mud wouldn’t destroy them, but it seemed unfair to subject such good shoes to a muddy hillside. He looked around. The sidewalks were littered with newspapers in plastic wrappers, the weekly freebie thrown by the increasingly desperate Beacon-Light . He liberated two of the papers and