by Dan Wells
* * *
Agent Mills knocked on our door the next morning and let himself in as I squinted and straightened in my chair. I’d fallen asleep and dreamed about nothing.
It was the best dream I’d had in ages.
“Rise and shine,” said Mills. “Time to get on the road.”
“Where are we going?” asked Nobody.
“Iowa,” said Mills. “Just kidding, we’re going to DC. You’re both going to be debriefed by some very important people before we decide what to do with you.”
“We need to go to Dillon,” I said.
“To interrogate witnesses?” asked Mills. “To solve an unsolvable crime?”
“We just want to get our dog,” I said, “but sure—we can interrogate people while we’re there, if you want to. Let’s start with Officer Glassman.”
“He’s already been questioned,” said Mills.
“Not by anyone who knows what they’re doing,” said Nobody.
“I’m offended,” said Mills.
“Did you ask him about the bigfoot reference?” I asked.
Mills put his hand on his chest. “I might be the only law enforcement representative who will ever take him seriously about that,” said Mills. “So yes, I thought asking about bigfoot was the least I could do. And I believe him, too; whatever attacked him was huge and inhuman. Despite what the dead girl says, I do know how to question somebody effectively, and I know how to interpret their answers.”
“Good,” I said. “So did you ask him how he survived?”
Mills frowned. “What do you mean? His harrowing tale of violence and bravery is all he wants to talk about. He doesn’t have a great answer about whatever he was doing there in the first place, but when the monster came for the girl he fought with it, sustaining multiple injuries to his arms before it knocked him aside and killed her.”
“But does that add up for you?” I asked. “Why did the Withered target Jessica and not Glassman? Every other victim was male. Every other victim was in his room alone. Every other victim was someone I wanted to kill.”
“You’re admitting that pretty freely,” said Mills.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “You said serial killers are your specialty, right? So you’ve been trying just as hard as we have to put together a psychological profile that explains all three murders and the arson, but you can’t. We don’t have enough data yet. Jessica’s death doesn’t fit.”
Mills stared at me a while, then looked at Nobody. “He’s very intense.”
“And he’s taken,” said Nobody. “Hands off.”
Mills looked back at me, sucking on his teeth. He sighed. “I’ve been studying you too long to deny that you’re good at this job. If I can buy you two days, can you figure something out?”
“Sometimes it takes months,” I said.
Mills shook his head. “Two days.”
“Three,” I said. “Keep us here through Sunday at least.”
“Why Sunday?”
“Because nobody started dying until we went to church,” I said. “And now the church burned down.”
“As I told him last night,” said Nobody, “he has a very attractive mind.”
Mills brought in a female police officer to watch Nobody while she changed; he and I waited outside, and he bought me some peanuts from the vending machine for protein. A few minutes later the officer emerged with Nobody, Brooke’s wrists handcuffed behind her back, and we walked outside to Mills’s black SUV, which was dinged up from the accident in Dallas.
“No armed marines?” I asked.
“Your psychological profile suggests that you’ll avoid a physical confrontation at any cost,” said Mills, opening the back door of his car. “It also suggests that you distrust authority figures enough to believe any unfair thing they tell you. Made you pretty easy to keep in line.”
Was I really that easy to fool? I glanced at the familiar license plate: 187 RCR, Mills County. My head snapped up to look at him, cheerfully helping Brooke into the car: Agent Mills. I considered him with new wariness and got in the backseat without speaking.
Mills put Nobody in the passenger seat, where he could keep an eye on her, and cuffed her to the door handle. He chatted idly as we drove, asking my theories about the church and its relationship to the killings, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t think the church itself was a part of this at all, aside from the simple fact that it was the one thing, in all of Dillon, Attina had decided to burn. That meant it was important to him somehow, but I didn’t believe there was anything beyond that. I’d only mentioned it to Mills because I knew it would pique his interest, and I wanted to stay in town as long as I could.
Put that in your psychological profile, smart guy.
We arrived in Dillon about two hours later and Mills took us for a spin past the burned-out hulk of the church before doubling back to the police station. The whole church lot was blocked off with wooden barriers and police tape, and the singed grass was covered with stacks of recovered hymnals and chairs and anything else that hadn’t burned. I recognized several people from the town picking through the wreckage: Sara, Ingrid, Paul, and even Beth, though she was too frail to walk through the debris and had been relegated to sitting on the sidelines, pointing at things with her cane. She participated in everything, in spite of her age. I wondered about Paul: what had brought him to the church to help, without Brielle? Presumably she was still mourning for her sister somewhere, but if Paul was her boyfriend, why wasn’t he with her? And why wasn’t he in mourning for Corey?
“What do you do when a friend dies?” I asked out loud.
Mills looked over his shoulder at me, curious. “You … cry, I guess. Give your condolences to the family. I don’t know, why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t react the way other people do,” I said, “so I don’t know if what I’m seeing is strange behavior or not.”
“What are you seeing?”
“Paul was back there at the church,” I said. “Corey and Derek were his best friends, and yet he’s right there, plugging away.”
“That’s not … automatically weird,” said Mills. “A lot of people deal with grief by throwing themselves into manual labor. Or helping others. Paul’s doing both, that’s … probably healthy.”
“So where’s Brielle?” I asked.
“Some people don’t do service and labor,” he said. “I don’t think you can catch a murderer just by looking at who turns up for a recovery project.”
“Are you sure?” asked Nobody. “How many murderers have you caught?”
Mills didn’t talk for the rest of the trip.
20
Agent Mills walked us straight to the front desk of the Dillon police station. “Hi,” he said, flashing his badge, “I’m Agent Peter Mills with the FBI. I need to speak with Officer Glassman.”
The receptionist looked at him, then at Nobody and me—me looking completely disheveled, and Nobody in handcuffs. She looked back at Mills. “What is this about?”
“Just some follow-up questions to Jessica Butler’s murder,” said Mills. He waved at us dismissively. “Don’t worry about them, just give Glassman a call or … whatever you do to summon him.” He wiggled his badge again, as if to underline his authority.
The receptionist sighed in relief. “It’s about time we got some help around here. Are there more of you coming?”
“Soon, I hope.”
“Best news I’ve heard all week.” She dialed, and we waited.
She cocked her head, listening, then hung up the phone again. Her voice was painfully apologetic. “I’m afraid he’s not answering, and that’s the only number I have for him. Do you want me try … I don’t know, anything else? Just say the word and you’ve got it.”
The cops in Fort Bruce had hated working with our team, feeling like we were stepping on their toes and throwing our weight around, but this station seemed practically overjoyed to have Mills.
Mills smiled. “Was that his home phone or his
mobile?”
“Mobile,” said the receptionist. “His home is in Tulsa. He’s staying with his sister while he’s in Dillon—ooh, let me call her.”
“Thanks,” said Mills. We waited, but after a while she shook her head again.
“No answer there, either.”
“We know his sister,” I said. “Let’s go look in person.”
Mills smiled at the receptionist a final time, thanked her for her help, and led us back outside. “Is it close?” he asked. “We could just walk.”
“You’ve got my best friend in handcuffs,” I said. “You don’t get to parade her around like a freak show.”
“Your best friend is a demon?” he asked.
“Well look who’s Judgy Judgerson all of a sudden.”
“I don’t mind the cuffs,” said Nobody.
“I do,” I said, shooting her a quick, worried glance before looking back at Mills. Was she getting depressed again? “You take them off, or we go in a car.”
“Car,” said Mills, and prodded us back toward his SUV. “The demon and I aren’t best friends yet.”
We drove the four blocks to Sara Glassman’s house, and I was surprised to see two cars in the driveway: Sara’s little sedan, and a police car. I glanced at the clock on the SUV’s dashboard. “10:27,” I said.
“Does that mean something?” he asked.
I looked at the cars again, and then at the house. “It means they’re not asleep—maybe one, maybe, but not both. And we didn’t see them at the church cleanup project.”
“They could have walked somewhere,” said Nobody.
“And if we’d walked we could have walked past them,” said Mills.
“Coulda shoulda woulda,” I said, stepping out onto the sidewalk. The house looked quiet, the windows were closed, leaves on surrounding trees rippled softly in the wind. I walked up to the porch, not waiting for Mills to uncuff Nobody from the car door; if I was quick, I might have a chance to talk to the Glassmans before Mills caught up. I knocked loudly and listened for footsteps. No one came. Mills and Nobody walked up the front walk, and I knocked again. They climbed the stairs and stood beside me, and Nobody held up Brooke’s cuffed wrists.
“At least they’re in front,” she said. “I can catch myself if I trip.”
“I can change that if I need to,” said Mills.
No one came to the door.
Nobody leaned forward and tried the door handle; it pushed right open. “That’s lucky,” she said.
“Is it?” I asked, and I stepped inside. The whole situation was looking more and more ominous.
“We’re with the FBI now,” said Nobody. “Can we go in there without a warrant?”
“He can’t,” I said, scanning the room quickly. “You and I are not currently employed by a law-enforcement agency.” The living room was mostly how I remembered it—not messy, but full of organized clutter.
“Ms. Glassman?” called Nobody, stepping in behind me.
Mills stepped in as well. “Seriously, guys. I’m pursuing two teenage fugitives through a town where three people have been murdered—I have enough probable cause to start breaking down walls if I want to, let alone come inside and look around.” He picked up a newspaper. “Yesterday’s date.”
“I didn’t see a new one on the porch,” said Nobody. “They must have already—” Something soft and small thudded into the porch, and she glanced outside. “There it is. Paper boy’s passing on his bike.”
“They wouldn’t leave their door open overnight,” said Mills, “so obviously they opened it up this morning and went for a walk.”
“Through the close-knit neighborhood that thinks he’s a pedophile,” I said, moving into the hall. “Somehow that doesn’t seem high on the list of possibilities.”
“Neither is a twisted double murder,” said Mills. “You jump to your conclusions, I’ll jump to mine.”
I turned the corner into the kitchen, and there they were: him in his uniform, her in a blouse and skirt, seated at the kitchen table—face down in their plates of food. Their hands hung limply at their sides. I stepped closer and looked at the dish on the table: some kind of casserole, brown and dried out. They’d been here since dinner last night, at least.
“Holy mother,” said Nobody, rounding the corner behind me.
“What did you find?” asked Mills as he stepped into the doorway behind her. “Oh, eff this whole thing.”
“Eff?” I asked, and I touched Sara’s arm, testing the movement in the joints; she bent easily at the elbow and shoulder.
“We don’t all talk like we’re on The Wire,” he said. “Stop touching them, this is a crime scene.”
“That’s why I’m touching them,” I said, letting go of the arm. “Rigor mortis has already come and gone; they’ve been here fourteen, maybe only twelve hours.”
“Rigor mortis takes longer than that,” said Mills.
“Not in this heat,” I said. “Trust a mortician.” I bent down to look at their heads, but straightened immediately when I saw Mills pull out his phone. “Don’t call it in yet.”
“Of course I’m going to call it in.”
“This is our only chance to examine the bodies,” I said. “And no, don’t say that the police have a forensics team to do that for us, because you know they won’t find everything we will. They don’t know about the Withered, or anything supernatural—they might skip over a dozen vital clues because they don’t know what they’re looking for.”
Mills held the phone in front of him, then sighed and put it away. “Fine,” he said. “You’ve got twenty minutes.”
“You can give me way more than that,” I said.
“Every house on this street saw us park and come inside,” he said. “If there’s more than twenty minutes between us entering and us calling the police, it’s going to look suspicious as hell.”
“Easy,” said Nobody. “This isn’t The Wire.”
Mills sneered at her, and I looked back at the bodies. Twenty minutes.
Come on, bodies. Talk to me.
I was never more comfortable than when I was around dead bodies. They were calm, they were predictable, they were everything that put my mind at ease. Trying to decipher the vagaries and intricacies of human interaction was exhausting, like running a marathon with your mind. But puzzling over a dead body was relaxing, like a crossword or Sudoku. What were these bodies telling me?
They were face down in their plates—not just head down, but literally face down, as if they were looking at their plates when their heads lowered. Sara’s plate was covered with the cascade of her hair, black streaked with gray; I lifted some strands of it and saw that her head and plate seemed the same as her brother’s. There didn’t seem to be any force of impact on the food, which you might have seen if their heads slammed down. So they lowered their heads slowly, and straight forward.… I repeated the motion with my own head, seeing how it felt. “They fell asleep,” I said.
“Why?” asked Mills.
“I’m working on that.”
Nobody lifted Officer Glassman’s arm. “Why are their arms hanging straight down?”
“Because they’re … ah—” I almost said because they’re asleep, but that only described the current position, not how they got in that position. What had their hands been doing when they fell asleep? No one eats with their hands straight down at their sides; they’d be up on the table, or maybe resting in their lap. I looked at the silverware—it was scattered across the table, like it had been dropped haphazardly. Two knives, two spoons, and a fork. “Where’s the other fork?” I lifted the other side of Sara’s hair, but it wasn’t under there.
“Here,” said Nobody, stopping to pick it up from the floor under Sara’s chair. She handed it to me with her cuffed hands and scrunched her nose into a sniffing scowl. “It smells.”
I held it close to my nose; it smelled strongly of chemicals, like maybe a cleaning solution. “It’s not bleach, but it’s something like that.”
&nb
sp; “Poison in the food?” asked Mills.
“The smell’s too strong,” I said. “They’d have known it was there.”
“Unless the food was smellier than the chemicals,” she said. She leaned in over the table, looking closer at the casserole. “Fish? And curry powder.” She sniffed again. “Pakistani.”
“How can you possibly know that?” asked Mills.
“I’ve been Pakistani a couple hundred times,” said Nobody. “Whoever used the curry didn’t know how, though. It smells awful.”
“That happens when you lace your curry with detergent,” I said. I grabbed Officer Glassman’s head and raised it, revealing his face covered with flecks of rice and herbs and his mouth full of a thick, white froth.
“Drain cleaner,” said Mills. “I’ve seen that effect before. There’s no way they would have just dozed off like this, though—swallowing drain cleaner is horrifically painful. It eats you apart from the inside.”
“Then there’s probably a sedative in there as well,” I said. “One drug to knock them out, another to kill them, and strong, smelly food to cover it all up.”
“Why would a Withered kill with poison?” asked Nobody. “Doesn’t he have claws or … maybe teeth? Jessica and Derek were cut to ribbons.”
“But Corey was hit with a truck,” said Mills. “It’s different every time.”
“More to the point,” I said, “why would he use poison when I never would?”
“Not everything is about you,” said Nobody.
“But almost everything here has been,” I said. “Jessica’s death stood out because it was the one idea that didn’t come from me. Now neither does this. I think we have to consider the possibility that we’re looking at two unrelated cases.”
“A Withered that’s reading your mind,” said Mills, “and a pedophile hunting little girls. Which makes this a revenge killing.”
“Murder-suicide?” asked Nobody. She looked at the scene, frowning. “Sara gets fed up with his crap and decides to take them both out, out of guilt for not stopping him earlier?”
“You have a one-track mind,” I said. “There’s no way this is suicide.”