“Prepare for transmission.”
Kerri Wilson wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t asleep. She was staring up at the ceiling in her bedroom and biting at the edge of her comforter. An image of Dale Wilson’s fury flashed through his daughter’s mind. His face was reddened, his eyes wide and angry. Spittle shot from his mouth. Barnes cringed and shrank into himself on the hospital bed. Earlier that evening, Kerri had knocked into the entertainment center while doing a pirouette. The TV had rocked back and then fallen forward, almost crushing her. A porcelain giraffe from the nearby shelving unit had fallen and broken at the neck.
Mom rushed for the superglue.
“I didn’t mean it,” the girl said, crying. Her tears fell hot and wet on Barnes’s cheeks.
Dad stopped screaming and held her close. He told her he was sorry for yelling, but that she needed to be more careful. She clutched her arms around his neck, gripping her own elbows. On the hospital bed, Barnes hugged a circle of air.
The girl’s mind flashed to a new scene. She was walking down the sidewalk, holding hands with another young girl. Barnes felt the other girl’s hand in his own, warm and sweaty. He could smell fallen leaves, scratch-and-sniff chocolate, and diesel exhaust. An engine revved. Kerri looked back to see the yellow school bus pull away from the curb. A few kids sporting backpacks were skipping away from it in the opposite direction, laughing and smiling. As Kerri watched, a dark-blue sedan sped around the bus and cut it off, forced the bus driver to jerk to a halt. The bus driver shook a fist. As the sedan flew past the girls, the driver honked his horn and waved.
“He’s a maniac,” the other girl said lightly, waving at the receding sedan. She shook her head. “I can’t believe I did that.” She smiled devilishly and hunched her shoulders. “Don’t tell your mom. I’ll get in trouble.”
“Cross my heart,” Kerri said.
Barnes drew an X on his chest.
Kerri Wilson sat up in bed. She checked the wind-up alarm clock on the nightstand. The glow-in-the-dark minute-and-hour hands told her it was 4:03 a.m. She picked up a flashlight and went to the window in her bare feet. She set her chin on the cold windowsill and looked out, tugging at the carpet pile by scrunching her toes. Her eyes found the blank back window of a house on the street behind her own, kitty-corner to her backyard. Come on, Carla. Be awake. She placed the flashlight on the sill and pointed at the other window. She began clicking the light on and off. Three times on, a pause, and then three times on again.
Come on, come on.
Three times on, a pause, three times on again. Her breath was fogging up the glass. A cracking sound turned Kerri’s head. She tuned an ear for the noise, imagining a big green monster with fangs and claws stalking through the house. She thought she heard movement. She tiptoed back to bed and hopped in, threw the covers over her head, clicked on her flashlight. In her mind the monster was coming down the hall, dragging slime and staggering. She’d read a short story by Stephen King once, where at the end of the story the boogeyman revealed himself and said, “So nice, so nice,” in a putrid voice. She heard that horrible voice in her head now, saying, So nice, so nice as the monster approached. She heard a whump and the bedsprings squeaking in her parents’ room. It was similar to the squeaking she’d heard earlier, only there was less rhythm this time, just a shuddering of metal like kids jumping down off a cyclone fence.
Now footsteps.
Now another whump.
The boogeyman is killing Mom and Dad.
Kerri threw back her covers and ran to the closet. Barnes’s legs churned. She dropped to her knees inside, closed the door behind, and put a palm over the flashlight, turning her fingers red.
The boogeyman came into her room. Through the horizontal slats in her closet door, and with help from her seashell nightlight, she could see its outline. It wasn’t a slimy monster, but a tall thing in all black, with a skeleton’s head. The PA Man. Detroit’s real-life version of the Slender Man. His leather-handed grip sounded off against the wooden object he held—squi-squi-squick. Dark drops fell from the object’s heavy end, fell mutely against the carpet. The PA Man turned toward the closet and stared.
The room strobed with three flashes of light. Carla signaling back.
Kerri screamed when she saw the reflection of his eyes deep inside the skull’s dark holes.
The killer took two steps across the room and yanked open the closet door.
Kerri Wilson closed her eyes. She pushed her mind to a different place. A place of fields and flowers, of pastures and barns. A place where the boogeyman doesn’t exist—her grandparents’ dairy farm in the Upper Peninsula. They visited every summer, had been there only a month before. There were cows, of course, but also horses, goats with oddly shaped horns, and pecking chickens. She especially liked the sheep, the way their lips reached out from behind the split-rail fence to take a piece of carrot.
Barnes screamed through his bit when the pickax broke Kerri’s clavicle. He saw stars on the inside of her closed eyelids, felt the tickle of the ax’s thin blade embedded near his right kidney. The weight of it leaned her forward like a discarded doll.
“Little piggies shouldn’t scream,” Calavera said.
Kerri Wilson opened her eyes to the sound of his voice. She looked up. She had dropped her flashlight. Its ambient light cast upward and lit the skull from beneath like a camp counselor telling a ghost story.
Again, the room strobed with three flashes of light.
Kerri smelled pee and poop, wondered whether it was her own. The killer gripped his tool and dragged her body behind him, across the bedroom floor and into the hallway. Barnes felt the tug of the ax inside his chest, felt the carpet sliding beneath him, burning at his skin. They stopped in the hallway. From her new vantage point Kerri could see into her parents’ room. Mom was lying on the carpet. The back of her head had been chopped away like a scoop from a carton of ice cream. Kerri tried to scream again, but with two punctured lungs she only managed a painful gurgle.
“So sorry, Barnes,” Calavera said.
Barnes?
“The girl upped my timetable with her screaming. I wanted to say you have all the clues now. Just one more thing for me to do.” He leaned in close to the girl’s eyes. Her vision was fading, darkness at the edges. “Enjoy the altar.” He picked her up by the underarms.
Barnes felt the sensation of being lifted. Kerri thought, Light as a feather, stiff as a board. She’d kissed Jimmy Dykes on the night she and her friends had played that game. Later, in bed, she’d formed her hand into his lips and kissed him over and over again.
Calavera placed Kerri against the wall, against the mirror. She felt the flashlight being placed back into her hand. One ankle was grabbed, her leg moved. The other ankle was grabbed, the leg moved until her legs were wide open. She heard her mother’s voice in her mind: “Close your legs and act like a lady.” Sirens wailed in the distance. Kerri watched the PA Man peel back the carpet. He started writing on the plywood beneath the padding. Barnes smelled the harsh scent of Magic Marker. After he was done, the killer replaced the carpet, tucking it under the trim against the wall.
The sirens grew louder.
The PA Man turned to Kerri. He moved in close and said, “Don’t be sad. Be joyful. Ten-three, good buddy.”
Isn’t it supposed to be ten-four?
Darkness and silence.
“End of transmission.”
The Vitruvian Man test pattern.
Please Stand By.
7
Barnes sat on the edge of the hospital bed. There was a cotton ball and a Band-Aid in his right elbow pit. He flexed his arm, felt the sting where the needle had been inserted. He rolled his sleeve down over the wound. His collarbone throbbed where Calavera’s pickax had struck Kerri Wilson. He struggled to breathe with her punctured lungs. His body shuddered like that of a person trying not to cry. His head felt numb from the blows her parents had received. The center of his back tingled, felt out of alignment. He recalled Kerri Wilson’s memory of the
bus pulling away. On the back emergency door there had been some numbers: 334 in the middle, and what appeared to be a phone number across the bottom. Barnes half-heartedly wrote the numbers in his notebook.
“Get anything good?” Warden said. He was busy wrapping up the machine’s tubes and needles.
Barnes looked up at Jeremiah Holston, who was sitting on a stool at the far edge of the room. Barnes said, “We’re done here.”
“How do you feel?” Holston said.
“I feel fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Bye-bye, Holston,” Franklin said.
Holston sighed, wrote in his notebook, and closed it. He stood, tipped his baseball hat to everyone in the room, flipped off Franklin, and left.
Barnes waited a beat after the door closed. He turned to Franklin. “He said we have all the clues now, that he has one more thing to do. He also said, ‘Enjoy the altar.’ I’m assuming he meant a Day of the Dead altar.”
Franklin shrugged. “Sounds about right. ‘Ten-three’ again?”
“Yep.”
“I thought it was ten-four?” Martinez said. She was sweeping the technical lab floor with a broom in one hand, a long-handled dustpan in the other.
“Better hit the books, kid,” Barnes said. “Ten-four means acknowledge.” He went over and picked up his shoulder holster, cringed from psychosomatic pain as he put it on. He picked up his jacket. “Ten-three means stop transmitting. It’s Calavera’s sign-off. He’s showing us he knows a thing or two about the machine, about our methods.”
“Go back to school and learn something, squirt,” Franklin said.
“Ten-four,” Martinez said. She cracked a smile.
Franklin laughed. The sound filled up the lab wall to wall. His delight cheered Barnes, like a kitchen light scattering cockroaches in his mind.
“You’re all right,” Franklin said, pointing a big finger at Martinez, whose smile was already fading back to a stern countenance. Franklin nodded toward Warden. “Make sure this punk don’t keep you down.”
“Everyone starts out sweeping the floors,” Warden said.
Barnes put on his jacket and headed toward the door. He noted that the woman who had been on life support was gone now, taken away while he was a Wilson.
“Where we going?” Franklin said.
“To talk to Carla,” Barnes said. But his voice was off-timbre to his own ears. Too high-pitched. Not his own. Kerri Wilson’s.
Franklin cocked his head. “Talk to who?”
Barnes stopped. He closed his eyes. He fought against the blinks and managed to hold off a shiver as he pushed Kerri Wilson back.
“Shhh.”
He said, “To talk to the girl’s friend.”
The Montgomery house shutters were black, though years of weathering had cracked the paint to show that they were once green. Franklin knocked on the door. Barnes did a scan of the nearby trees. He noted a cedar behind another house, half a block down on the other side. A woman answered the door in a pink terry-cloth robe, pajamas, and slippers.
“Can I help you?” the woman said.
Barnes could barely hear her over the TV blasting in the living room. On the set some trendy-looking couple was being shown their home after it’d been renovated. They were gushing about how beautiful everything looked. Hands slapped cheeks beneath bugged-out eyes. There were long, startled intakes of breath.
“Hello, ma’am.” Franklin used his booming voice, typically meant to put God’s fear into fleeing suspects. He showed her his badge. Barnes did, too. “Detroit Homicide.”
She nodded and pushed the storm door open. Franklin had to move down the steps to give the door room to swing.
“Can you turn that TV off, please?”
She nodded again and went for the remote. While her back was turned, Barnes checked his watch: 1:00 p.m.
The TV stopped.
“Thank you,” Franklin said. “I’m Lieutenant Detective Franklin, and this is Detective Barnes.”
“Ma’am,” Barnes said.
“Beatrice Montgomery.”
They sat down in the living room, a pure replica of the Wilsons’, save that the couches here were faux leather and plenty beat-up. Barnes could smell pasta, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil, as well as the scent of things left to blacken, crisp, and eventually flake off an electric stovetop. There was a ceramic bowl balancing on one of the couch pillows, pale spaghetti noodles inside, a fork sticking out.
“Can I get you anything?” Beatrice said. She took one step toward the kitchen, stood there like a crosswalk sign. “Some coffee or tea?”
Barnes had smelled the woman’s breath at the door. Vodka. Cheap. There was a coffee cup on the end table next to the couch. He wondered how many fingers she had poured, felt a pang of thirst for it. He shook his head no.
Franklin said, “We’re fine.”
Beatrice moved her half-eaten meal to the end table and picked up her drink. She gathered up her robe and sat on the couch opposite the two detectives. She took a sip from her cup. Her eyes were glassy. Barnes knew the look, knew her afternoon of drinking was just getting started. To worsen matters, the sides of her head were shaved. It’d been no more than a day since she’d hooked in, judging by the stubble.
“You’re Carla Montgomery’s mother?” Franklin said. His pen was poised above his notepad.
“Yes.”
“Who have you been?” Barnes said.
Beatrice turned to Barnes. “Excuse me?”
Barnes tapped his bald temple.
“What does that have to do with—”
“Who?” Barnes said.
Beatrice held his gaze for several seconds. Eventually she turned away. “Someone who’s got it better than me.”
Franklin said, “Your daughter was friends with Kerri Wilson?”
“Best friends.”
The voice had come from the hallway. Barnes and Franklin looked to see Carla Montgomery standing at the corner. One of her hands was gripping the wall, her fingertips as white as the paint beneath. Barnes felt a rush of affection for the girl, the same affection Kerri Wilson had felt for her friend. He was suddenly aware that the two girls had once kissed each other, each closing her eyes and promising to pretend the other was a boy. Kerri had pretended Carla was Jimmy Dykes, a fifth-grade boy with blue eyes and brown hair. Through Kerri’s residual memories, Barnes saw the boy in a cool-kid stance—back against the bricks of the school, tips of his fingers tucked into crisp, clean jeans.
“No school today?” Franklin said.
Carla shook her head. “Because of what happened.”
“Would you like to talk with us?”
Carla nodded. She moved across the living room and sat near her mother, maintaining a distance from the woman. She put her hands on her knees. Beatrice Montgomery reached out and placed a hand over one of Carla’s, patted it. The girl looked away from her mother, rolled her eyes so only the detectives could see. It was apparent she’d been crying.
Barnes saw Carla not just in the reality in front of him but also through Kerri Wilson’s mind. The two girls were sitting on benches at the edge of a school playground. Barnes heard the squeal of rusty swings, chattering birds, laughing children. He smelled tar from the hot blacktop beneath their feet, and he heard Carla say, “She shaved her head after Dad left. All she does is drink. She’s such a loser.”
Franklin checked his notes, where he’d written down everything Barnes told him about the Wilson family on the ride over. He said, “Mrs. Montgomery, we’re—”
“Ms. Montgomery,” she corrected.
“Excuse me. Ms. Montgomery, we’re going to ask Carla some questions of a personal nature. Would it be okay if we spoke to her alone for a moment?”
“She can stay,” Carla said. “I have nothing to hide from her.”
Barnes scrunched his toes inside his shoes, gripping his socks, marginally aware that it was one of Kerri Wilson’s nervous tics.
Franklin said, “You r
ecently told Kerri Wilson, ‘I can’t believe I did that.’ What did you mean?”
The girl’s eyes widened. Franklin stared at her with flat satisfaction. The machine provided these choice moments, like the aftermath of a street magician’s performance when some idiot bystander pulls an ace of spades from his own ass.
Carla regained a measure of poise. “I missed the bus yesterday,” she said, “so I got a ride.”
“You took a ride from a stranger?” Beatrice Montgomery said. She looked at her daughter with overacted horror.
“Like you give a shit,” Carla said.
Beatrice’s hand moved off her daughter’s knee. It came halfway up into a slapping motion and stopped. She used it to brush stringy bangs away from her eyes, smiling nervously at the detectives.
“Unlike some people,” Carla said, again rolling her eyes toward her mother, “Kerri’s parents were super protective of us. She was supposed to look out for me, and me for her. I missed the bus yesterday because I was”—she glanced at her mother—“making out with a boy. I knew Kerri liked him. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“What boy?” Franklin said.
Barnes said, “Jimmy Dykes.”
Carla’s eyes shifted to Barnes. Dumbstruck.
Franklin smirked. “What about the ride?”
Carla stayed stuck on Barnes.
Franklin snapped his fingers in the air.
Carla blinked. “Um . . . I started running home, hoping I could get to the bus stop before Kerri’s mom got worried. She likes to see us coming down the street together, you know? Kind of like a buddy system. The bus goes all through a bunch of other subs before it comes to ours on the way back. I figured I could make it if I hurried.”
“So what happened?” Franklin said.
“Some guy pulled over and offered me a ride, so I took it.”
“What color was his car?” Barnes said.
“Blue.”
“What make and model?”
“Huh?”
“What kind of car?”
The girl dropped her head. “Ford.” She glanced sidelong at her mother. “Focus.”
“Jesus Christ,” Beatrice said. “You are so freakin’ grounded.”
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