The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

“No,” Kupier said, instead of Tuesday.

  McNeel held his hands up in apology.

  The rest of the briefing was the usual parade of forensic pathologists and criminal psychologists. At one point someone clapped ponderously.

  Two weeks later it was an ulna.

  Kupier didn’t tell his two grandchildren about it. His daughter had left them there with him for the afternoon. They were Rita and Thomas; Thomas was named after Kupier. He took them to the park, bought ice cream all around. They called him Grandpa K. The other grandfather was Grandpa M, probably, for Marsten. Thomas was ten, two years older than Rita. Grandchild R and Grandchild T. Kupier kept both of them in sight at all times.

  “Do you know about owl pellets?” he asked them.

  They looked up at him.

  He sat them down and had to explain first about owls at night, and then about mice, scurrying, their whiskers sensitive to the least shift in the air, and then about the owls stumbling out of the sky, vomiting bones into the wet grass.

  Thomas looked up into the four o’clock sky when Kupier was done.

  Rita asked about Mrs. Lambert.

  They were standing by the dying elm.

  “I don’t know,” Kupier said.

  The last time he’d seen Rita and Thomas had been in the hospital, before remission, and they’d had goodbye cards for him, drawn with pictures of him and Grandma K in heaven. They’d never met her, though, so she was just a woman with white hair and glasses. He still had the pictures.

  “More ice cream?” Thomas said.

  They knew they were at Grandpa K’s.

  He ushered them through the line again, watched the sidewalk for their mother. She was late, her body full of bones. There was no message from her on the machine, either. Just Stevenson, asking if he should say this on the recorder then just saying it anyway, that the high end of the ulna had been a green fracture, which doesn’t happen so much with dead—

  The tape ran out there. Rita and Thomas were standing at Kupier’s legs.

  “Like with trees,” Thomas said, using his interlaced fingers to show the way a limb will break when it’s alive.

  Kupier turned on cartoons for them and stood at the window. He could hear the children’s teeth rotting, and wanted to lead them into the bathroom, stand there while they brushed.

  “Where is she?” Rita asked.

  Kupier turned back to her and said their mom had probably just stopped for dinner. It wasn’t the first time. Rita asked where. Kupier looked past her to his beeper, by his keys on the counter. It was dancing across the Formica.

  It was McNeel, calling from the bullpen.

  “I can’t,” Kupier said.

  In the cartoon, a tall robot was shooting flame from his hand at a column of water. It steamed away.

  “Who can?” McNeel said back.

  There was a tibia at the fair.

  Kupier stood at the phone for a long time, his finger on the plunger, the dial tone in his ear, and then shrugged into his jacket. No gun, though. Not with the children.

  They took a cab out past the city limits, and the neon ferris wheel rose out of the horizon, spreading the children’s mouths into grins. They were sitting on the other side of the car from Kupier, because he’d stood on the curb behind them, guiding them in, making sure the door was closed.

  “How many tickets can we have?” Thomas asked.

  “As many as you want,” Kupier said.

  The cab driver was humming something ethnic.

  The sanitation engineer was waiting for them at security booth. “This way,” he said, studying the children, then just led the way to the long bank of port-a-potties. Trash was blowing from blade of grass to blade of grass, strands of cotton candy drifting through the air. A clown stepped out of the fifth of the plastic outhouses, his red hair frayed up into the night, thin, vertical diamonds of greasepaint bisecting his eyes. The engineer pointed two down from him, to the third. It was cordoned off, out of service.

  “Usually it’s just vitamins and coins and the odd pair of glasses,” he said. “But this . . . ’

  In the fiberglass collection tub under the floor was a human tibia.

  The skeleton in Kupier’s mind got less black.

  “He had to carry it here,” Kupier said.

  “It wasn’t there before,” the engineer said. He was holding his hat on, curling it around his temples. They were upwind.

  “I’ll send them to get it,” Kupier said.

  “Take the whole thing if you want,” the engineer said, indicating an iron hoop at the apex of the outhouse, and then looked over Kupier’s shoulder at something. Kupier turned. It was the fair. Thomas rode the Ferris wheel six times in a row while Kupier stood holding Rita’s hand at the gate. Kupier wondered if they’d learned tibias yet in the second grade, or third.

  They took another cab back to the city, both children falling asleep, their lips stained blue.

  Waiting on the stoop was Ellen.

  “Where were you?” Kupier asked.

  “Where was I?” she asked back.

  One of the buttons on her blouse was still undone.

  After she was gone, two twenties stuffed into her hand, Kupier sat in the living room. The cartoons were still on, muted. He dialed in the number from the photocopy of Penny the dog’s tag, but didn’t get the machine like he wanted, the voices all in sing-song unison.

  “Yes?” the father said. “Hello?”

  In the cartoon one character was whirling another over his head like helicopter blades.

  “Penny,” Kupier said, unsure.

  “Who is this?” the father asked, his voice cupped into the phone, away from whatever living room or dinner table he was standing over.

  “Just checking,” Kupier said, eyes closed, and hung up.

  What kept him awake some nights were the bones they weren’t finding, that they were supposed to have found. Because if they didn’t have a humerus or clavicle or zygomatic arch to fit into their skeleton, maybe the killer would have to supply them with one. With another one, one they could find.

  Stevenson said it wasn’t like that, that there was just one victim, tied up in a cellar. He explained how the gauchos in the nineteenth century used to carve steaks from the cattle they were working, then rub a poultice into the wound, slap the cow back into the herd. He was slouched in Kupier’s doorway, a cigarette threaded behind his ear.

  “That all?” Kupier said.

  Stevenson shook his head.

  “You should at least pretend to try,” he said, clapping his palm on the metal doorjamb in something that was probably supposed to look like restraint. “Set a good example for us rookie types.”

  “Because you’re taking notes, right?” Kupier said.

  Then the labs came back.

  The blood type from Mrs. Lambert’s pie tin, mixed in with the saliva, was O-positive, another glass slipper—good in court but useless until then—but the fragments of genetic markers from the two fingerbones and the wrist bones and the ulna and the preliminaries on the tibia, they seemed to share more than they didn’t. Which was statistically unlikely, narrowing the victim profile to an ethnic subgroup maybe, or an extended family. Kupier sat in his office the rest of the afternoon. It was Tuesday again. Kupier was still saying Eric in his head, tapping his pencil with it, and then he got it: Eric from Group.

  He’d been the only one in Cancer Support who still smoked. In public at least. They’d made him sit by the door because of it, even. Kupier had always watched him sitting there and thought of scuba divers from television, how they sat the same way on the edges of boats before they rolled out: knees together, hands on their thighs.

  At first, Kupier had watched him because he wanted to go with him, into the picture Rita and Thomas had drawn of heaven, but then he’d lost the drawing for a few frantic days, and when he finally found it again the James Case had been open—a woman poisoned in her own kitchen—and he couldn’t just leave it, her, so he didn’t.
r />   The tibia had striations, of course. Like the ulna. Gnaw marks. And, because it was the fair, the public, the newspapers got hold of it. Kupier had three years left, and a cast of teeth in his pocket. At the airport earlier, dropping Ellen and the kids off for a weekend trip to see their father, the teeth showed up in security as dentures. The guards were too young to know any different.

  Kupier checked the car out everyday now, drove the street for bones.

  He drank rye and water at the Amyl River and waited for the one-armed man.

  He read the news before dawn. On the third day he was named in the C-section, second page, and the next day there was the picture he’d had in his head, of the blacked-out skeleton. That afternoon Dispatch fielded one hundred and twenty two calls about bones. They were in rain gutters, bird nests, untended lots. All but four were bogus, and one of those turned out to be another finger joint, only this one was from a funeral urn, the ashes all blown away. Kupier walked away from it to the other three. It took eight days, total. It was a twelve-year-old boy with a cardboard box and an encyclopedia set. He’d reconstructed the bones he’d found over three weeks into a fibia, a calcaneous, and most of the bones of the foot. He said ants had eaten the rest. Kupier asked him where, and the boy pointed four lots down and two weeks back, to before a foundation had been poured for a new house. Kupier stood in the frame of what was going to be a kitchen. It smelled like pine. In the trunk of his car, caulked together into the shape of a lower leg just like the illustration in the encyclopedia, were the bones. The boy’s mother said she’d thought he was just gluing animal bones together to look like a foot, or a leg, or whatever.

  Kupier ran the boy’s non-existent sheet too, and everyone on the block, and none of them came up as registered cannibals or former serial killers.

  Stevenson sent him a copy of a page from a book, about a man who, over the course of a year, had eaten a bus, piece by piece.

  Kupier wrote pelvis into his notebook.

  The next morning was his six month check-up. He was clean, still, but didn’t feel like it.

  “You sure?” he asked the oncologist.

  The oncologist stopped on his way back into the hall. “Alright,” he said. “Not supposed to lie to the police, right?” He smiled, his eyes golf balls, his voice going mock-solemn. “You’ve got seventy-two hours, Thomas.”

  Kupier’s hands played along, trembling on the buttons of his shirt.

  The oncologist looked at his watch when he passed Kupier, walking out through Emergency. It was too loud to do anything else. Kupier smiled with the outside corners of his eyes, stepped out the double doors, and then the world flashed silver and his hand fell to his gun, and he had it out before he could stop himself, even when he knew it was a photographer.

  “You’re Detective Cooper, right?” the photographer asked. “Working on the Maneater case?” He was wearing running shoes.

  Kupier lowered his weapon.

  Behind the photographer, a pair of paramedics were holding a patient on a stretcher, the aluminum gurney rolling away behind them, down the slope to the parked cars. The patient wasn’t moving. Still thought he was being saved, maybe. That this was that kind of world.

  “Detective?” the photographer was still asking.

  Kupier turned back to him. “Maneater?” he asked.

  The photographer shrugged, disappeared.

  The following morning, Kupier just sat in his office, waiting to get thrown up against his own door. He didn’t have to wait long. His captain unrolled the paper on his desk, smoothing it with deliberate strokes. In the picture, Kupier was an old, frightened man. With a gun.

  That night he went back to Group for the first time in months. The poster someone had brought and taped up on the wall over the coffee machine read (re)MISSION, and the shadow the uppercase letters cast was a cross. Kupier wasn’t sure what it meant. The people in the group smiled sidelong smiles at him but didn’t approach. Because he might run off again, huddle around the memory of chemo in his apartment alone. He didn’t ask where the other missing people were. Of the new people, one was on crutches, her sweatpants tied up at the middle of her missing thigh. Kupier held his breath and eased out the door, into the Amyl River.

  “Where’s your friend?” the bartender asked.

  Kupier pretended to cast around for Stevenson, then looked at his watch and did the math on accident: sixty-one hours left until the doctor’s joke could be funny. He tried to say remission the way it had been on the poster, with a cross behind it, and when he finally got the door open to his house—sure that a great, grey owl was gliding soundless down the street for him—he found Rita and Thomas sleeping on his couch, their mouths stained red from Popsicles. The television wasn’t on, which meant they’d been carried in already in their blankets. Kupier wrote Cooper into his notebook and slept in the chair, his gun nosed down into the cushions.

  Ellen didn’t come back for the children until noon. Kupier didn’t say anything, just listed what they’d eaten, what they hadn’t.

  “You’re working on that investigation in the papers,” she said.

  Kupier nodded as little as possible.

  “You were named for your mother,” he told her.

  She looked away, blinked.

  “You going to find him?” she asked.

  “Eventually.”

  He didn’t get to the station house until three-thirty. There was a package on his desk, all the labels printed on a printer. The brown paper was grease paper, and it was tied with brittle twine. He opened it with a pair of pliers, expecting hair matted with blood, a sternum, a scapula, but it was just a twenty-five year plaque with his name on it, and a handful of Styrofoam peanuts. He asked his captain about it.

  His captain held his head in his hands and stared down at his desk calendar.

  “That wasn’t supposed to come to you,” he said. “It was for you, but not to you, see?”

  “Surprise,” Stevenson said, suddenly in the room.

  Kupier didn’t know what to do with it.

  His teeth were still powdery from the children’s toothpaste the children had said he had to use if they had to. It was like plaster, like he had the cast in his mouth. He brought it up from his pocket and looked at it. Nobody had asked him for it because it was already no good—not fitted for the ulna, the tibia.

  The assumption was that the soft tissue was getting digested.

  Stevenson had sent another memo, too. This one was an entry on hyenas. The passage highlighted was about how the hyena didn’t have an m.o. like a lion or a leopard—teeth to the throat, the skull—but that it simply ate its victims until they were dead. Which could take awhile, Kupier thought. If you did it right.

  After the dayshift was gone, Kupier thumbed through Stevenson’s per-

  sonnel file, but he was clean too. No proclivities for human flesh, anyway. He almost laughed: next he’d be running his own sheet.

  Night came, and with it another package.

  It was the second set of labs Kupier had requested. They were in an oversized brown envelope. He sat on the pew outside his office and read them and then read them again: the DNA from the blood from the saliva from that first fingerbone matched the genetic workup of the bones themselves.

  Kupier leaned back. Across the room from him, on the board, was a diagram of a human skeleton. The bones they’d found so far were blacked out, and the ones that were missing were grey, presumed missing, just not found yet. The tacks stuck into the blacked-out bones were color-coded to the map alongside the skeleton—where they’d been found—and there was yarn trailing from two of the tacks, from where McNeel or somebody had tried to luck into a pattern, a pentagram or arrow or happy face or something. The drop sites were random, though, all over the city. But Kupier was looking at the skeleton, again. It was one person now. No longer a body the killer was building, but one he was taking apart. All the blacked-out bones were from the right side, too.

  Kupier looked down at his own han
d in a new way, spread his fingers so that the tendons pushed against the skin.

  Twenty-five years, Kupier said to himself.

  That night it was another homicide, unrelated. It was in a sprawling parking lot; there were witnesses, even. Evidence to bag. Kupier stood in the middle of it all and surveyed the endless series of trash cans. They were spaced twenty parking slots from each other, staggered every third row. In one of them there would be more evidence.

  A uniform approached, asking what Kupier wanted him to do.

  Kupier shrugged, his hands in his pockets.

  He gave them McNeel’s home number.

  In the park later he walked until the dead elm was silhouetted against a streetlight, and then he drew his shoulders together once, twice, and on the third time his dinner came up. He leaned forward, walked his hands down his legs to the ground. Was this how it was with the killer?

  When the tree shifted with the wind, the streetlight pushed through, and Kupier’s hands were spattered with blood. His mouth, his lips. Like before. He started laughing around the eyes and then convulsed with it, and when he stood there was a figure watching him across the grass. Thin, gaunt—at first he thought it was the woman from the parking lot, risen to accuse him, then it was Mrs. Lambert, a pie tin in her hand for his vomit, but then it was neither of them. Just somebody with a cigarette. Eric. From group. He inhaled his cigarette and the end glowed ashen red, and then he breathed in again, deeper, and Kupier could feel it in his own chest.

  Eric turned, flicking the cigarette away, and Kupier followed.

  It was too late for the Amyl River, so they went to one of the all-night cafeterias instead. They sat across from each other.

  “So,” Kupier said.

  “Why are you following me?” Eric asked. His hands were balled in the pockets of his jacket.

  “I’m not,” Kupier said.

  Eric looked away. “I wasn’t at Group,” he said. “I saw you go in, though.”

  Kupier wiped his mouth: no blood.

  Eric smiled.

  “You too?” he said.

  “What?” Kupier said back.

  “Re-lapse . . . ” Eric said, drawing it out, making it into a happy, benign song.