“The call came in about an hour ago,” CO Sherman said. “Lady thought it was a deer that had washed up on the shore overnight.”
“She didn’t come down to check?” Hud said. The deputy and coroner stood guard over the girl. Neither had offered to join in the conversation.
“Obviously not.”
“How often does that happen?”
“A phone call like that?”
“No, a dead deer washing ashore.”
Sherman shrugged. “I guess I might’ve seen it once in thirty years. But there’s more deer around here now than there ever was before. I didn’t rush right over, but I headed this way once the call came in. I was curious. I found her just like this.” He nodded over to the girl.
Hud didn’t follow the CO’s gaze but watched his every move. Who knew what the truth was? It was a skill he’d acquired a long time ago—maybe even before he knew it was a skill. Don’t make any assumptions. Question everything. “You talk to the caller?”
“She didn’t leave a name. Dispatch said it was a local call, but the ID was blocked or didn’t exist. Probably one of them pay-as-you-go phones that you can buy for a few bucks down at the Walgreens.” There was disdain in the CO’s voice, a recognizable dislike of technology, of how things had changed. It was a middle-age disease that Hud was uncomfortable with but could feel metastasizing under his own skin. Change came too fast.
Hud looked over his shoulder, away from the CO, down the lakefront for as far as he could see. It was lined with cottages. He knew he’d have to canvas the whole cluster of them before the day was over, might have to employ the kickboxer to help, or call in some of the reserves for backup. If this wasn’t cause for that, nothing was. “But it wasn’t a deer?” he finally said.
“Nope,” Sherman said. He shook his head and looked at the ground. “A girl, mid-twenties, a single gunshot to the back of the head.”
“Execution style?”
“Could be I suppose. I didn’t think about that.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
The CO led him to the girl. Hud had nothing to say to the two men who stood in wait. His eyes were to the ground, looking, searching, for anything out of place. He stood above her for a long five minutes, just listening to the wind skim across the lake, the three men breathing, road noise in the distance, behind him. He finally leaned down and shined a pen-sized flashlight into the girl’s brown eyes, then looked up at the coroner. “How long you figure she’s been dead?”
“Hard to be exact, but she’s stiff as a board. Between twelve and twenty-four hours. I don’t think she was in the water long, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Turtles hadn’t got to her yet.”
The coroner, Bill Flowers, was old enough to be Hud’s father. Flowers’s family had owned a couple of funeral homes in the county for as long as anybody could remember. He was a tall, thin man, rickety with arthritis, and he had the coldest hands Hud had ever encountered.
Flowers also held the biggest and best Fourth of July party on the lake. Fireworks, a hog roast—a big pig cooked in the ground, luau-style—music that played deep into the night and floated across the dark, smooth lake. There were more beautiful women at those parties, tanned from worshiping the summer sun, than you could shake a stick at. Hud had never been invited to any of the Flowerses’ parties but his mother had. Of course his mother had. He’d only listened to the music alone in a boat, smelled the food as it wafted on the breeze toward him, and dreamed about all of the pretty girls, especially Goldie, the coroner’s only daughter, the princess of the lake. He’d had the biggest crush on Goldie, but she acted like he didn’t exist, even when Hud tried to talk to her at school. She became his fantasy girl. The thing he couldn’t have. The face he saw in the middle of his hard, lonely teenage nights. All he’d ever wanted was a chance to show her what he could do, how he could make her feel.
“So you think she was dumped here?” Hud said.
The deputy, Bob Varner, stood back out of the way with a glare on his face. He was a stranger to Hud and hadn’t said two words to him after their initial greeting. More animosity. The air was thick with it.
“Hard to say,” Flowers said. Tiny pebbles of moisture had collected on the coroner’s black lapel like they belonged there. “They could’ve dropped her right here with a high-powered rifle. Doesn’t look like a point blank shot to me, but again it’s going to be hard to say for certain until I get her in and conduct the autopsy. Strange things turn up that we can’t see right away once we’re under some lights and can pull back the skin. I don’t see any obvious powder burns, residue that would be left behind from a close shot.”
Hud stood up. He restrained himself from showing any sign of agreement, though he knew the man’s words to be true. The coroner’s speculation about the rifle didn’t sit well with him. The girl had on jogging shorts, a T-shirt, and no shoes. She wasn’t dressed to be outside on a day like this. He thought she’d been dumped there, even though there was no sign on the ground that suggested such a thing. “You get the pictures we need?” he asked the coroner.
Flowers nodded.
“Good. Let’s get her covered up.” Hud stared at Bill Flowers, waited for the man to get on with it.
Instead, Flowers just stood there and stared back at him petulantly, like a stubborn child refusing for the pleasure of it. “I was sorry to hear about your grandmother. Are you staying at the house?”
“No,” Hud said. “I’ve got a room at the hotel.”
“That place is going to fall down on itself one of these days.”
Hud nodded, turned away from the girl, and headed back up the path, the way he’d come down. His grandmother had requested to be cremated at an unknown and untested funeral home two counties over. She’d never had any use for Bill Flowers or his kind.
Chapter Three
By the time the ambulance arrived, a small crowd had started to gather against the yellow police tape. They were mostly older, retired full-timers, lips closed tight, hiding their stained and crooked Social Security teeth, more scared than curious. It was a weekday. Any kids or teenagers who lived nearby would still be in school—or should have been. Two overweight EMTs struggled to get a gurney down the path to the lake. They looked angry, as if they’d been pulled away from a video game against their will. Hud watched them disappear, then started toward his car for a fresh notepad. The crowd would be easier to canvas than knocking on the doors of vacant cottages.
“Who’s in charge here?” It was a woman’s voice.
Hud stopped just in time to hear the kickboxer say that he was. Without any hesitation at all, the woman, hair as gray as the sky, eyes as black as the lake at night, pushed the tape out of the way and headed straight for him.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” the kickboxer yelled.
The woman paid her no mind, and Hud didn’t either. “What’s the matter?” he said, reading the panic on the woman’s face.
“The boy, he’s missing.” She stopped inches from Hud. She was wearing a morning housecoat and smelled of cigarettes and canned tuna. Her feet were bare, save the faded blue slippers that looked thin as a newspaper and old as the scratched up wedding ring on her finger.
“What boy?” Hud asked.
“Hers.” The woman nodded toward the lake.
“How do you know that?” Everything around Hud had ceased to exist. He was in a vacuum, focused entirely on the woman and what she had to say, on what she had to show him.
“Has to be her, the way she lives. Men in and out at all hours of the night and day. Not too many others around here these days anyways.” The woman stepped forward, craned her neck upward to inspect Hud a little more closely. She was a little bug-eyed. “You’re that Matthews boy, ain’t you?”
Hud’s instinct was to step back, react to the invasion of his personal space, but he held fast and nodded. “I am. What’s your name?” The muscles in his face were as hard and petrous as the ground he stood on
.
The woman eyed him suspiciously. “Danvers. Harriet Danvers. I knew your grandmother. And your mother, too. Such a shame about Georgia Mae. Sorry about them both. That why you came back?”
Hud steeled himself. He had known he was going to have to face an inquiry sooner or later. More than once. This was just the start. “The boy, ma’am. What about the boy?”
“They never found her? Your mother? They never found any sign of her, did they?” the woman continued, ignoring Hud’s question. Her eyes were glazed over, her mind in the past, her trembling right hand in the present.
No, you crazy old bitch, they never found her. Not one fingernail, nothing. Is that what you wanted to hear? Luckily the words stayed where they belonged: under his tongue, in the pit of his soul. He’d had plenty of practice at keeping his mouth shut.
Hud shook his head slightly, then looked up at a rattling ruckus that was heading his way. The EMTs were having a harder time coming back up the path than they had going down. “Can you identify the girl? Can you tell me who she is, where she lived? It’ll help us find the boy, if he’s really missing.”
“Things have a way of disappearing around here, in that lake. It’s deeper than people think it is,” the woman said. “Divers went down into it ’bout thirty years ago, said there was catfish as big as men. Monsters. Maybe one of ’em crawled out and did this ugly deed. Wouldn’t surprise me none at all. No sir, it wouldn’t surprise me none at all to have monsters walking among us.” She stepped back and followed Hud’s gaze to the closed black body bag on the stretcher. “I’ll see her if she’s not too bad to look at. I know it’s that Pam girl. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.”
“She’s just dead, not very much blood,” Hud said.
“All right. I’ve seen that before. I’ve seen dead before,” Harriett Danvers said.
The kickboxer’s name was Joanne Moran. She said Hud could call her Jo, but he wasn’t interested in being on a first-name basis with her. He needed backup. That’s all. Nothing more. Deputy Moran it was.
He followed Harriet Danvers to the trailer where she said the girl had been staying with her eight-year-old son. It was old, probably manufactured in the late 1950s or early 1960s, ten feet wide and about fifty feet long, the color of a dead oak leaf: dull rusty brown and just as fragile. Black rain streaks reached down from the roof in thin, gnarled fingers. Holes in the screens were big enough for a bat to fly through. Two fifty-five gallon drums sat at the rear door and overflowed with trash that had yet to be burned. If it hadn’t been for the rainy mist, the flies would’ve been feasting on week-old chicken bones and getting drunk on the fermented sugar left behind in the empty soda bottles.
Hud had instructed Harriet Danvers to give the other deputy a description of the boy and to stay away from the trailer. Surprisingly, she’d given in, stood back like a submissive dog, and done what she had been told to do.
He stopped next to the screen door of the trailer, raised his .45 to the ready, and listened for anything out of the ordinary. He preferred the .45 to the Glock 9mm Burke had wanted to issue him. Hud liked the reliability of the Colt, the history of the government-issue 1911 design. He didn’t trust plastic.
“You don’t even know that that woman was telling you the truth,” Deputy Moran said in a low whisper. Her tan windbreaker was soaked with a thin layer of mist. It didn’t seem to bother her. She held a black Glock, hadn’t had the choice he’d had. Hud wondered if she was any good with it. He hoped her ambitions were true.
Hud shook his head, dropped his voice to meet hers. “Doesn’t matter. If she lied about a child in peril, there are consequences for that. You want to take the time to check out everything she said first?”
“The boy can’t be far if he ran out on his own.”
“You don’t know much about eight-year-old little boys do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
Silence returned between them with a chill and a glare. Hud regretted his words as soon as he said them. Animosity had been replaced with a distant but raw hurt. He looked away from Moran and caught a whiff of something familiar, a mix of chemicals that couldn’t be mistaken once they’d been smelled. “Somebody’s been cooking meth.”
The deputy shrugged. “No surprise there. It’s an epidemic here.”
“It’s an epidemic everywhere.” Without any further hesitation, Hud pushed inside the trailer with as much muscle as he could, leading with the barrel of his gun. “Police! Everybody down!”
Moran pushed by him, leveling the Glock, sweeping the small front room as she went. It was empty save the trash on the floor. There were no living beings to be seen. No roaches, no mice; nothing.
The trailer rocked under their feet, unstable, out of balance, not leveled. A burning sensation immediately assaulted Hud’s eyes and throat, but he hustled to the back of the trailer, yelling and kicking open what few doors there were as he went. Moran checked closets and under beds.
Five minutes felt like a lifetime trapped inside a toxic cloud, but that was all the time Hud could take. His lungs felt like they’d been soaked in drain cleaner, and he feared if he stayed inside the trailer another minute his skin would start to peel off. Moran followed him out the door.
They both crumpled to their knees coughing, choking, gasping for air like unlucky fish yanked out of water. Their state drew Deputy Varner to them. “You all right?” He spoke directly to Moran, ignored Hud completely.
She nodded and coughed. “It’s empty.”
Hud got his breath, stood up, and tried to get his bearings. He looked beyond the trailer, tried to remember what lay beyond it, even though he didn’t want to. “The Dip still up the road?”
“No one’s there,” Varner said. “It’s been closed for a few years.”
“What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Where was he?”
“Dead. He died before I was born. All I had were pictures and a story of a perfect whirlwind romance. You could see it, even in black and white. She loved him and he loved her.”
“How did he die?”
“A car wreck. She was with him; carried a scar on her ankle and up the back of her calf for the rest of her life. It was all she had left of him. The car burned up. She was lucky to be alive. She told me that a million times.”
“And you believed her?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Chapter Four
The Dip was one of those places that had popped up after World War II, almost instantly becoming an institution. The onslaught of vacationers had made it a viable enterprise for fifty years, selling soft-serve ice cream cones and penny candy to kids, and cigarettes and bags of ice to their parents. It was a destination not to be missed on any visit to the lakes, but now it stood, unsurprisingly, in disrepair. The roof had buckled inward, waiting for the next heavy snowstorm to come along and cave it in the rest of the way. Orange and white paint, in alternating stripes, was faded, peeling off the cement-block building in flecks and bits. It looked like a million miniature leaves had fallen from the roof to the surrounding ground. Hud was surprised the place was still standing.
He and Moran had walked up to the Dip from the meth trailer, navigating the road slowly, cautiously, eyes peeled, just like on the path to the lake, for a sign of certain evil or something out of place. He wasn’t sure if he was heading in the right direction or not, but if he were an eight-year-old boy, he would head for the allure of ice cream, or at least the promise of it, maybe find a place to hide in the old lion’s cage. A kid would know about the place. Hud was sure of it.
The road was bordered by a popcorn field on one side. It was flat and harvested; only stubble remained, poking out of the brown ground like the remnants of a giant’s beard. The other side of the road was nothing but of collection of driveways that led back to cottages and ultimately to the lake. Most were marked Private. Hud stopped and examined every piece of litter along the way.
“I thought you were in a
hurry,” Moran said, halfway there.
Hud let her words drift away into the mist unanswered. He was concerned about the boy, but he was in no hurry to revisit the Dip, no matter the reason.
The road sloped down into a deep ravine, dropped off like the first hill of a roller coaster, flattened out briefly, then climbed back up the other side so the ground was even with the initial drop off.
The little ice-cream shop sat at the bottom of the ravine, squarely in the middle of the dip in the road. It was a clever name with the placement of the business, especially since it was located on the main road that skirted the lake, guaranteeing a steady flow of traffic at the height of the tourist season. But it was what was behind the cement block building that had caused most of the vacationers to really stop to visit. For an extra quarter, vacationers could visit a small zoo that stood behind the building. Only it hadn’t actually been a real zoo, just a haphazard collection of freestanding cages holding an old male lion, a female tiger, and three ostriches. Ducks, Guinea hens, and peacocks roamed the grounds untethered. Old gumball machines dispensed dry dog food, a nickel a handful, to feed the tame fowl. Starlings and a variety of sparrows hung around for a free meal. They’d made a nice living. So had the hawks.
The thought of the ostriches made Hud smile. They had escaped once, wreaked havoc on the nearby cottages, eating geraniums, pecking at anyone who approached them, then chasing the pampered little barking dogs. The birds had finally been rounded up by a couple of horsemen who looked as if they had ridden straight out of a cowboy movie. Everyone had feared the lion would get out sooner or later, and it wasn’t long after the great ostrich escape that the little zoo had been closed down. The price of an ice-cream cone doubled overnight.
Hud stopped as the road began to slope down. Moran eased up next to him. “My dad used to bring us here. How about yours?”
He shook his head. “I used to live over there.” He pointed to the first house on the other side of the ravine. It was empty, too; in a little better shape than the Dip, but not much.
Where I Can See You Page 2