The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Sit down,” he said, offering her a chair.

  She was wearing a denim skirt, her hair fixed close to her head. Sixty-five, give or take.

  “I didn’t know who else to tell,” she said, then flashed her eyes out the open door, at the station house. “They told me to wait . . . that you—”

  “They’re real comedians at eight in the morning,” Kupier said. “I think it’s the donuts, something in the sprinkles.”

  The woman hid her eyes and clenched her chin into a prune.

  “You have to understand,” she said. “I started out just watching birds—”

  “Ms. . . . ?” Kupier led off, his pencil ready.

  “Lambert,” she said. “I’m married.”

  Kupier wrote into his notebook Tuesday.

  “Now,” he said, leaning forward like he was interested, “birds?”

  Mrs. Lambert nodded, wrung her hands in her lap. They were already red and chapped from it. The bench outside Kupier’s office was wallowed out like a church pew.

  “It’s a logical progression,” Mrs. Lambert said. “You start out just wanting to know the name of one you think has unusual coloring, a unique call, and then every time you see that bird, you say its name inside and it feels good, Detective, familiar, but now the rest of the birds in the park have names too, so you learn them too, and then it’s trees, what kind of trees the birds are in. It makes the world more . . . more alive, Detective. Instead of birds and trees, you have elms and chinaberries and grackles and thrushes and—and—”

  Kupier nodded, knew not to interrupt.

  “And then, one day, one day you . . . you see it.”

  “It?”

  Mrs. Lambert tightened her mouth, embarrassed, but amused with herself too, it seemed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  Kupier said it again, though: “It?”

  “Them,” Mrs. Lambert corrected, then started to say whatever she’d come to say but stood to go instead, suddenly unsure how to hold her purse.

  Kupier let her get almost to the door. “It, Mrs. Lambert?”

  Mrs. Lambert stopped, a mouse.

  Kupier smiled, could almost hear her eyelids falling in defeat.

  “Pellets,” she said. “Owl pellets. Detective.”

  Kupier tapped the eraser of his pencil on a file before him, the James one, and tried to place it, attach it to the right dead body. But there were so many. “Owl droppings?” he said.

  Mrs. Lambert settled back into her chair. She shook her head no. “Pellets, Detective.” She sounded like a piano teacher. “When an owl catches the smaller rodents, it sometimes, it doesn’t chew them. But that doesn’t mean it can digest them whole, either. So it, it spits the undigestibles back up a few hours later. The hair, the bones, teeth.”

  Kupier pictured it. “Think I’ve collared a few of those,” he said.

  It was supposed to be a joke.

  Mrs. Lambert nodded. “It’s the only way we can see them, Detective. The owls, I mean.”

  “Because the park after dark is no place for a young woman.”

  The blood seeped up to Mrs. Lambert’s cheeks.

  “Tuesday,” he said aloud.

  “Detective?”

  Kupier waved it off, asked her about these owls, then. She corrected: the pellets. He’d been playing this game for twenty-five years, now.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m . . . ” Mrs. Lambert started, stopped, finished: “ . . . that I eat cat food or anything. Just because I collect—”

  “It’s under-rated,” Kupier said. “Cat food.”

  Mrs. Lambert finally smiled, God bless her.

  “After you collect the specimen,” she said, “you soak it in a pie tin of water, Detective. And you can see the little animal that was there.” She held her hands up under her jaw, in imitation, and probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

  Kupier didn’t look away. “Okay,” he said, dragging each syllable, leaning forward to make this thing easy for her. “But you’re not here because of the little animals, Mrs. Lambert. That’s a different division.”

  Mrs. Lambert nodded, looked down, then reached into her purse. For a moment Kupier had no control of, he wondered if she’d made it back here with a gun somehow—the mother of some years-ago collar—but then it wasn’t a gun she laid on the table, but a plastic sandwich container. It sloshed after she set it down.

  “I don’t think this was an owl, Detective,” she said, patting near the container instead of the container’s lid. It was something to note.

  “You saved the water,” he said back.

  “Forensic evidence,” she said. “I watch the shows.”

  Kupier smiled. Of course she did.

  In the silted water in the container was a human finger bone. That someone had thrown up in the park.

  Tuesday, Kupier said to himself again. Tuesday. By lunch he had it down, but he wasn’t hungry anymore either.

  That afternoon he walked alone to the park, to the place near the dying elm by the two benches that Mrs. Lambert had explained for him. He’d looked it up after she was gone, Lambert. It meant grey, featureless. Kupier pictured her husband in his easy chair with the remote control, his wife ten feet away under the kitchen light, watching the fragile bones of mice and voles resolve in a disposable pan.

  The scene was two days old already. There was nothing, just a bird Kupier didn’t have a name for.

  “See anything?” he asked it.

  It flew away.

  The lab came back two days later, that it had been human saliva in the water, not canine.

  Kupier got out another manila folder.

  There were still three years until retirement. The rest of Homicide-Robbery was leaving him alone for it, mostly. Since the cancer.

  On the tab of the folder he wrote GREY OWL. It sounded like a comic book name though, or an Indian, so he changed it to FINGER, R. RING: J DOE. They didn’t know if it was male or female, just that it was adult. And bitten off. A specialist was supposed to be making a cast of the teeth; he was working off striations in the bone. Kupier told his captain this wasn’t a trophy-thing, he didn’t think. Maybe self-defense.

  “Go home, Koop,” his captain told him. “It’s six o’clock, man.”

  The next morning Kupier was watching the steam roll off his coffee and waiting for Animal Control to pick up their phone. Their number had been on his door when he’d walked up; the note was stamped with two other precincts already. It had taken a while to find him.

  “Yeah,” the voice on the other end said. There were all manner of dogs in the background. Or maybe a lot of the same dog, but all saying different things.

  “This is Detective Kupier,” Kupier said. “You called about a finger.”

  The man on the other end paused, paused, then told Kupier yeah, yeah, the finger. What took them so damn long?

  “How long’s it been?” Kupier asked. A door closed somewhere far away and the steam of his coffee eddied back down into the cup.

  “Three days,” Animal Control said. “She’s going to die, maybe.”

  Kupier switched the phone to his other ear, held it closer.

  “Say again,” he said.

  “Penny,” the man said, being attacked by a cat, it sounded like. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  Kupier didn’t answer, just got the address from the front desk, went down to motorpool to check out a car.

  “Thought you just went out on Tuesdays?” the officer at the window said, and Kupier signed his name, took the keys from the drawer, walked through the garage; didn’t answer.

  Animal Control was a loud place. There was no one at the front desk, just a list of animals that had been run over and collected over the last two weeks. There was one column for dogs, one for cats, with tight, ten-words descriptions of each. Someone had gone through with a pencil and circled all the Labrador-type dogs, but missed one in the second row.

  Behind the front desk in a cage was a green parrot
. It didn’t say anything. Finally Kupier walked around the desk, past the bird—nodding to it because maybe it understood more than just words—and into the tombs, or catacombs, or bestiary, or whatever they called it down here. It was full of animals, anyway.

  The man he found was in a wheelchair, spraying out cement kennels with a high-pressure hose, the water running back under him to the drain. The floor sloped down to it.

  “This is about Penny,” Kupier said.

  The man winked at him, shot him with his finger gun, and said to follow him. His tires left thin wet trails; Kupier walked between them deeper into the place. Far off, someone was whistling.

  They stopped at a stainless steel examination room.

  “Not the owner, right?”

  Kupier shook his head no.

  “Just making sure,” the man said, and did a wheelie-turn to a bank of files. On the wall behind him was the memo for their mandatory sensitivity training. It had just been last week.

  What he pulled out was the temporary file on the Penny dog. She was a copper-colored Irish setter, and she was dying. The man held her film up, getting the light behind them, and nodded.

  “This is her,” he said.

  Kupier took the X-ray, held it up too, closer to the light. It was the color of motor oil.

  Lodged in Penny’s stomach was the radiation shadow of another finger.

  “This common?” Kupier asked.

  “Maybe,” the man said. “We don’t shoot film on them all.”

  “Why this one, then?”

  “Her.”

  “The dog,” Kupier said.

  The man shrugged, reached into Penny’s cage. She nosed into his sleeve and he buried his fingers in her red hair, came up with a silver, bone-shaped tag with hearts engraved into the corners.

  Kupier nodded: somebody might actually come get this dog. At least for the collar.

  “You say she’s dying?” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you if you had that in there like that?” the man said, cocking his own finger against his stomach.

  “Well,” Kupier said. “Is she going to?”

  “Without surgery, yeah, maybe,” the man said.

  “I thought somebody was coming to get her,” Kupier said.

  The man shrugged. “X-rays are sixty bucks,” he said. “And her owner’s machine says they’re skiing. They say it all at once, together, the whole family.”

  “Must have taken them awhile to get it right,” Kupier said.

  The man nodded, had somewhere else to be now.

  Kupier stared down at Penny. “We need that finger,” he said.

  “You could just,” the man said, “y’know. Wait.”

  Kupier nodded. Both his hands were in his pocket.

  “We need it now,” he said, and turned directly to the man. “Can that be arranged?”

  The man leaned back in his wheelchair, in thought, then shrugged what the hell, fingershot Kupier again. Kupier took the invisible bullet like he’d taken all the rest.

  “You okay?” the man said, leading Kupier back to the waiting room, and Kupier just watched the missing dogs smear by on either side and wondered what it was like here at night. Whether they left the lights on or off.

  Two nights later Kupier was eating alone at the Amyl River. It wasn’t a cop place, just a bar. The preliminaries on the finger bone from Animal Control was that it wasn’t an index like the one from the park. So it could still be from one person. Kupier crumbled his cornbread into the glass of milk he’d ordered. It was dessert; his wife had always only let him have it on Sundays. He left the spoon in his mouth too long. It wasn’t Tuesday anymore, just Thursday or Friday or some other day. Behind him a dart thumped into its board, money changed hands, a woman met a man. Kupier stared into his glass.

  Earlier in the day he’d looked up Mrs. Lambert’s record. She was clean, and her kids were clean, and her husband was clean. Kupier was glad for them. He was already calling them the Grey family, picturing them standing in order from tallest to shortest. He was glad for them.

  The dinner crowd left to the patter of falling coins, and Kupier moved from milk and cornbread to rye and water. It was all the detectives drank in the movies. He didn’t want to have a taste for it, but he did, and that was that.

  In the pocket of his jacket was the plaster cast of teeth the department had contracted out for. Teeth, Kupier kept saying to himself. It was the first case of his career that had to do with bite patterns. They were useless, though—a glass slipper he couldn’t ask anybody to try on. All they told him was that whoever they belonged to wasn’t missing any from the front. The real trick now would be to see if they fit into the bone from Animal Control. Kupier looked at his own finger, rotated it in the half light.

  “So we know it’s not you,” a man whispered over Kupier’s shoulder.

  It was Stevenson. The transplant from Narcotics.

  Kupier shrugged. Stevenson sat down anyway. “So this is where the old guard hangs,” he said. “You on stake-out for the rat squad or what, man?”

  “What are you doing here?” Kupier asked. They were both carrying their pistols in their shoulder holsters, the only two men at the bar with their jackets still on.

  Stevenson lit a clove. The bartender scowled over.

  “You know this guy?” he asked, nodding at Stevenson.

  “We’re buddies,” Stevenson said. It was the precinct joke. He was already drunk, maybe more. He whispered to the bartender that they were on stake-out, too. Kupier stared at the bottles lined up before him, watching in the mirror as the bartender calmly removed the clove from Stevenson’s lips, doused it in the dregs of an abandoned beer.

  “Thought this was a cop place,” Stevenson said.

  “It is,” Kupier said.

  Stevenson laughed through his nose at the insult. They drank and stared and stared and drank, and then, deeper into the night, Stevenson smiled, tugged at the elbow of Kupier’s jacket.

  It was a man at the other end of the bar. He’d just walked in. One of his sleeves was empty. It made him carry his shoulders different.

  “Your one-armed man,” Stevenson said.

  Kupier looked away. He should have stayed at the office, or gone home. Or to the park again.

  At ten o’clock Stevenson left suddenly, like he’d just realized he was missing something. Kupier followed him out with his eyes. As he passed the one-armed man he turned to Kupier, pointed down at the man, his gestures drunk and overdone. Kupier nodded just to have it done with, and the one-armed man nodded back, raised his beer.

  Instead of walking, Kupier took a cab. He wasn’t committed to going back to the office yet, but wasn’t going home either, and was two blocks away from the Amyl River before he recognized the one-armed man, lodged in his head. Goddamn Stevenson. He didn’t even dress like a homicide detective, didn’t walk like he had a shoebox full of crime scene photos tucked away in the top of his closet for his grandchildren to find someday.

  Kupier stood on a corner trying to figure it all out, what he was thinking—the fingers, the one-armed man—and then a bus hissed up for him, unfolded its doors. Three gaunt faces looked down at Kupier from three separate windows.

  Kupier recognized one of them from somewhere, the way the teeth fit into the mouth, or didn’t. Kupier wanted to give him a cigarette for some reason, even touching his chest pocket for where they would have been, but then the bus driver had his hands off the wheel in impatience and Kupier waved him on.

  Eric, his name was Eric.

  Kupier said it to himself as he walked—Er-ic, Er-ic, Er-ic—and the easy rhythm of it almost hid his beeper, thrumming at his belt. He palmed it, aimed it at his eyes, called Dispatch back. This time it was the twenty-seven tiny bones of the wrist. They’d been found in a public toilet, floating in a latex glove that had passed through a body. Kupier looked from the phone booth back in the direction of the Amyl River, and then he got it, what he’d been thinking: this was only the beginning.

>   He stepped out of the cab a block down from the bar with the unflushed public toilet. So he could walk up, compose himself. Pretend he had less alcohol in him than he did. The wind was supposed to be bracing.

  Forensics was already there, crowded into the stall with their tweezers and microscopes. The sign on the restroom door said PLACE YOUR ORDURE HERE. Kupier felt like Mrs. Lambert must have felt: untethered from any recognizable decade. Cannibalism? Kupier said it to himself now so that no one could catch him off-guard with it later.

  He stayed there questioning regulars until last call, but nobody’d seen anything.

  Kupier called his captain, told him that they should pull the liquor license at that place, because they were serving bad alcohol. It was blinding the clientele. The captain didn’t laugh. Tomorrow was Saturday; it was three in the morning.

  Kupier escorted the wrist bones to the lab, walked with them from table to table then woke suddenly in his office at noon. What he was picturing now was a museum skeleton, where they stain all the missing bones black for display. Only this skeleton wasn’t from the Pleistocene, or whenever.

  The next day Kupier went to church, sat in the back rolling and unrolling a newspaper. There was nothing in it about a hand surfacing bone by bone from under the city, reaching up like it was drowning.

  On Monday they had a briefing about it, Homicide-Robbery. The table was small and Kupier sat with his back to the window. It made Stevenson have to stare into the sun with his already-red eyes.

  The lab had rushed the bones overnight for two nights. They went together, more or less. It was supposed to be a male, now.

  “A one-armed male,” Stevenson said.

  Kupier leaned forward, out of the sun.

  “This is my case, right?” he said to the captain.

  The captain nodded, said of course, of course.

  “Thought you had chemo on these days,” McNeel said, making a show of squinting, as if not believing his eyes that this could be Kupier, here, alive.