The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  He didn’t move.

  “Can you tell me who these men in the photo are?”

  Again, no response. I rang Ms. Learner, and she came in and I asked her if she knew who the people in the photo were. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Family members. Brothers or cousins or something, I think.”

  I set the picture back down and made a note to ask Walt about his extended family and if any had access to the truck. I took one last glance at Richard, now sleeping peacefully, his breathing ragged and loud, and followed the nurse out. Verification is what we needed, so at the very least, we had that—Richard Tuckman was definitely not out and about cruising around and abducting children.

  13

  * * *

  Gretchen

  I OPENED MY EYES slowly the next morning to see a blurry brown flower that slowly came into focus as the stilled fan in the center of the ceiling. I turned over and looked out the window beside my bed—­another gray day taking shape, the skies filled with smoke and ash again. The wind must have shifted, I thought, blowing the smolder from the fires in the park back into the valley, just like the day before last, when we worked the dig.

  The dig. Two days ago. And two days since Jeremy vanished, I considered. Then I looked again. The gray skies weren’t laden with ash; they were blanketed in gunmetal clouds. Rain, I thought. It might finally rain.

  Excitement for something so simple shot through me and I sat up quickly to peer out my window, but suddenly I noticed my head ached fiercely in my temple, a different spot than usual. Instead of the pinpricks of shooting pain that started above my left ear, my temple felt thick and tender on the right side, almost as if I’d been hit. I hopped out of bed and ran into the bathroom to look in the mirror.

  Near my right eyebrow, I had a thick scratch and a patch of swelling skin. Several thin lines of blood spidered down the side of my face. “Shit,” I said, bringing my hand to it. I scolded myself for not getting out my sleeping bag and mittens the night before. I had gotten home late after looking at files in the office, and that was after visiting the park twice in one day. Completely exhausted, I had practically fallen into bed and not only didn’t grab my bag or mittens but didn’t even turn on the fan.

  Terror shot through me, my fears rising up in me like flames snaking up a dry tree. What had I done? I ran into the living room to look, but nothing was altered. I checked my front and back doors to find them still both locked. I ran to my closet, fetched the footstool, and took stock of my bedroom and closet. Everything was as I usually kept it. I hurried back out, went through the dining room and into the kitchen, bringing the footstool with me. No furniture was moved around in the dining room or kitchen either. I placed the stool before the fridge and climbed up to check for my key. I was relieved to find it in the usual spot in the jar.

  I climbed down, took my stool back to the closet, and went to look in the mirror. I studied the wound, touching my temple with two fingers and wondering how I had hurt it. I could have run into the corner of my dresser or opened a kitchen cabinet into my face. I ran some warm water, grabbed a washcloth, and gently dabbed at the dried blood. I rinsed it, watching the red trickles separate and run down the side of the sink, knowing that any potential for my own recollection of what happened was as lost as the blood spiraling down the drain.

  In the kitchen, I put some ice in another washcloth and held it to my temple. Sometimes I could remember every detail of a dream, even ones that I walked in, like with Figment Man. And other times, my sleep and my dreamscape became a black hole. I decided I would make an appointment with my doctor first thing and promised myself I’d definitely sleep with my bag and mittens tonight. No laziness, I thought as I leaned against my kitchen counter.

  • • •

  At work, I called Detective Carson Belson from the county sheriff’s office and asked if I could swing by for a visit. He was retired and living in Bigfork, a small town on the northeast corner of Flathead Lake. On the phone, his voice was low and had a smoky quality to it that reminded me of my father’s. I briefly wondered if my dad was taking on the same ruddy look I recalled Detective Belson having. My dad would be sixty-two now and I missed him the most of all of my family members. He was always my hero, intelligent, strong, witty, and he wore all of the parts of his personality gracefully—they intermingled like the finely tuned strings of an instrument. He had an intense interest in a variety of subjects—science, music, art, history, architecture—and he had an appetite for life in general. He always pointed out the beautiful systems of things: how the currents of the ocean worked, how the universe expanded, how the trees in the forests were connected through their root systems, how one person could make a difference.

  I always thought of him as a strong person—a Viking—but what I’d done would break anyone, even a Viking, and in the end, even he couldn’t sew up the deep gash I’d sliced through our family. They divorced by the time I turned eighteen, both of them forever changed. He was right; one person could make a difference. One person could destroy everything.

  It was still early in the morning when I arrived, and Belson offered me coffee, but I declined, so he took me for a walk around his property instead. Other than looking a little older—I figure he was at least seventy now—he was exactly as I remembered. He still had the same quintessential mountain-man look. He was proud of the tree farm he was managing since he’d retired, but upset that it had been so dry for the past years. “Growing full spruce for Christmas trees isn’t easy under these conditions,” he said.

  “I can imagine,” I said. Squirrels scurried here and there and other small birds darted from tree to tree. “Well, looks like we might finally have a storm brewing.”

  Belson looked to the sky. “Much needed.”

  Several ravens flew around us and perched in a few trees above, squawking sharply. “Don’t mind them. They’re my buddies. They’re just saying hello. Smart buggers, they are. Other day, I saw them playing hide-and-seek with each other. I’m not kidding. One would fly off and hide a twig behind a tree under some dirt and the other would go and find it and bring it back to him and then they’d cackle. You just have to take the time to watch ’em, observe ’em, something most people don’t do.”

  “And I’m sure you have more time to do that now that you’re not doing detective work.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “You miss it?”

  “Nah,” he said. “It sucks the life out of you. Like the case you’re here wanting to know about, the Erickson boy.” He shook his head and scuffed the ground with the toe of one of his boot-clad feet. “I’m happier now not being faced with such tragedy all the time. Ignorance is bliss, especially in small communities like this. I used to go get soup in a few local cafés around and invariably, there’d be someone I knew who’d done something awful—some guy who’d just beaten his wife or kids two days before, but kept his wife too scared to press charges, or some great community member who you know has been embezzling money, but you can’t prove it, and too many other things to repeat. Tends to make you bitter,” he said.

  “Mr. Belson, do you remember much from the Erickson case?”

  “Of course, every detail. Still have nightmares about the damn thing once in a while because we should have made some connection, gotten some lead, but we had nothing to go on.” We walked down the rows of trees and back to the porch in front of his house and took seats in two lawn chairs. “As usual, at first we thought he had just run away—was coming into some rebellious years, but still, we took it seriously, since the parents insisted he wouldn’t do that. The search,” he said, “was huge, like the one you’ve probably got going on now with that boy in the park. We had helicopters, policeman, county deputies, divers, dogs, and volunteer searchers combing the neighborhoods, the woods, the river, and the surrounding fields in all directions. We weren’t sure exactly where he was taken, but we figured he was picked up from a neighborhood a
little south of Columbia Falls when he was walking home from a friend’s house in the evening. It was July.”

  “So, no leads at all?”

  “No, none. Nobody saw anything, no vehicle, nothing strange. We canvassed the area, banged on doors, questioned everyone. Nobody knew anything. We figured unknown assailant, possibly a summer tourist who lured him into their car to look for a lost dog or something, then just drove off with him.”

  “But you found the body.”

  “We did. We got lucky, if you can call it that,” he said in a low voice. “A guy out hunting grouse with his dogs by the foothills.” He pointed up the mountain range marching toward Glacier Park. “North past the gas station near the cutoff to Kalispell, toward Columbia Falls and off Highway 206. Anyway, the dogs sniffed the shallow grave out, dug it up, kind of made a mess of it. To make matters worse, by the time we were called and got to it, it had rained, and not just a sprinkle. It had poured buckets—big summertime drops that pelted the windshield and gave everything a good soaking. The kind of storm that looks like it might build up today.” He turned his head to the clouds covering and spreading out from the mountains with their white and silver tops and purple undersides.

  “What did forensics find?”

  “Fortunately, that was the one break. They were able to narrow down TOD based on insects and body temperature. The boy hadn’t been dead for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “And the boy disappeared on July seventh?”

  “That’s right. The monster kept him for five days, and that definitely made us think it was no random tourist—that the assailant was local. He or she spent some time with the kid, kept him around for his pleasure for that long, then killed him, or desperately tried to keep him, but something went wrong, maybe the kid tried to escape.”

  “Why do you think he wanted to keep him?”

  “He or she, I said. It happens more than you know. It’s one of the prevailing profiles we’re taught to look for: middle-aged females who’ve lost a child somehow and who want to replace that kid, women who suffer many miscarriages and can’t have their own. Twelve was a little old for that scenario, but it’s happened before. It’s rare, but we have had cases where a husband has been talked into bringing a child home for the wife. But that was a stretch for this case because of the boy’s age. Usually if the assailant is male and he’s going for a young teen, he’s a pedophile.”

  The detective grew silent for a moment, letting what we all had already imagined anyway settle on us like a heavy, dirty net. “Hey, are you sure you don’t want some coffee or tea or something?”

  “No, no, I’m good,” I said, my stomach feeling a little topsy-turvy. I wasn’t usually the one asking questions, and it made me feel strange. I should be in the lab or on some crime scene, I thought, not digging around in cold cases. My forehead began to throb and itch in the hot morning sun. I put my fingers to the new bump and scratched, but quickly stopped because of the tenderness.

  “How’d you get that cut?”

  “It’s nothing. Just bumped into my dresser. It doesn’t pay to be short.”

  He smiled, inspecting me with narrowed eyes, perhaps wondering if I had addiction issues or an abusive husband.

  “So, the rain destroyed most of the trace evidence?” I asked.

  “That’s right. I mean, the report said the usual. Tox screen was negative, so he wasn’t drugged or drunk. He was covered in mud and other outdoor usual stuff: dirt, pollen. Hell, I don’t need to tell you.” He smiled and lackadaisically swatted at a bee that swarmed around us.

  “Do you remember if the dirt and mud was consistent with the soil composition around the foothills?”

  “Yes, obviously the dirt in the burial was. Again, the trace was washed clean with the rain, so forensics couldn’t get a good read of the samples.”

  “Yeah, that fits with what I read in the file. No footprints?”

  “A few blurry ones that were run over by the dogs, nothing distinctive. A handful matched the hunter’s, and he definitely had an alibi. The dogs tracked through most of the mud. The site was a damn mess by the time we got to it. There were obviously hairs and saliva from the canines, and I think we found a stray hair or two on the inside of the kid’s clothes that matched the mother’s. We figured she did the laundry.”

  “No DNA, no fingerprints or anything?”

  Belson shook his head. “All the blood matched the kid.”

  “No semen or saliva?” I could feel my brow furrow.

  “No. I know, I know.” He held up a callused, weathered hand, which had a slight tremor, probably caused by age. I was glad for his retirement and his tree farm. He seemed content. “The swabs came up clean—no sperm. That’s one of the reasons we considered abduction for the replacement of a child. It was odd not to find semen on the kid if the assailant was a pedophile, but it’s possible he made the kid bathe before he killed him.”

  “What about the boy’s clothes? Anything on the underside that wasn’t exposed to the rain?”

  “No, your department taped them for possible debris, but like I said, mostly the local soil stuff came up. But even the underside was a muddy mess. I’m telling you, it rained hard and for hours that day.”

  “Lucky bastard,” I said. “And the head injury?”

  He took a deep breath as if he was hoping I wouldn’t ask, then said, “Yeah, that was the worst part.” He pointed to the left side of his head, and made a line with his finger from below his ear all the way to the back of his skull. “Split right open. It was awful, especially when with the parents wanting to see him. The pathologist did the best he could to cover that part of the head, and luckily the front of his face wasn’t completely disfigured from it like the side of his head. We figured the boy turned to the side to avoid being struck and got it in that part of his head. Tell me, why exactly are you here? Do you think this nine-year-old case has something to do with the missing boy in Glacier?”

  “Not necessarily. It would be a long shot, but there’s something else.” I told him about the shallow grave in Essex, about the trauma to the victim’s skull, up higher near the temporal region, but still a cleaved separation. I told him the boy was about the same age of the Erickson boy and about the time frame Lucy had given us.

  “But that’s, well, that’s a long time before 2007. At least ten years.”

  “I know, but I’m wondering, Mr. Belson, what you thought about a trauma like that on the skull?”

  “Coroner deemed it the cause of death.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just think it’s odd. It’s such a similar skull wound.” The bee had come back over and buzzed in my face, near my forehead, sniffing out the trace of blood. I shooed it away, more aggressively than Belson had.

  Belson studied me. “Yeah, odd. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. I wish we’d found whoever killed that poor boy. I can’t even think about what it did to his family without getting depressed. I’m haunted by the gash in the poor child’s head.”

  I didn’t say anything, just sat still, feeling a new warm breeze brushing against my face when my phone buzzed and startled me. I pulled it out of my pocket. It was Ridgeway. “Excuse me, sir, I’ll need to grab this.”

  “You go right ahead,” he said.

  I stood up and took a few steps away. “Sir,” I answered.

  “Another job, Gretchen.”

  “Where?” I asked. We hadn’t been this busy in a long time.

  “We need you out at a farm east of Kalispell, toward the foothills. They think they’ve located the truck that the witness suggests might have picked up the boy.”

  “I’m out that way now. I’ll get Ray to bring the van and meet me.”

  “You got a pen for the address or should I text it to you?”

  “Text would be great.”

  We wrapped up the call, and I went back to Belson to t
hank him for his time.

  “Happy to chat,” he said. “If you have any more questions for me, feel free to call. Anytime.”

  I said I’d do that and walked to my car, the bee finding me again and following me, swirling and diving around my head as I walked. I turned back to wave and saw Belson watching me.

  “Hope that cut heals soon,” he called, smiling empathetically, as if he knew I had something much more aberrant and mysterious going on than a casual run-in with the corner of my armoire.

  • • •

  I called Ray first to make sure he got everything we needed and told him I’d meet him out at the site. Then I called Wendy, who was at home, to see if Kyle had made it home yet. He hadn’t and she’d been up all night, but said she still wanted to work—if she didn’t have something to do, she’d go crazy. “Are you sure?” I asked her.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “He’ll come home when he’s ready. The waiting is the worst.”

  She said she’d go straight to the lab, and wait to hear from me. We were going to need to get every fingerprint and trace possible from the truck.

  When I arrived, a crush of officers swarmed around the farm. I moved through them, many familiar since they worked for the county. I waited outside the tape cordoning off the carport for the county’s white CSI van. I wondered if Monty was around, but I didn’t see him.

  Ali came over when she spotted me and asked why I was alone without the van. I told her about already being on this end of the valley and needing to wait for Ray with the supplies, that he’d be along any minute. She didn’t look at all happy that I wasn’t ready to dive in, but without suiting up and having my equipment, I could do nothing until he arrived.