Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  “None of this tells us where Shannon is now, though,” I say. “Or Fred. And we still don’t know why those dates were highlighted on the wall planner, or where the bodies are.”

  “Or why Shannon brought Biggs’s severed hand back to the college,” Thistle says.

  Shit. I forgot about that again.

  “We’ll get there, though,” Thistle says. She tops up her drink and holds the bottle over mine. “More?”

  “Aren’t you driving soon?” I ask.

  “You want me out of here.” Her voice is flat.

  I don’t know what to say.

  “I figured you out, Blake,” she says.

  My heart hammers my ribs. “You did, huh?”

  “Yeah. I believed you when you said I wasn’t your type. But don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been looking at me these past few days. And clearly you haven’t been pursuing anyone else.” She looks around at my derelict lounge room. “You’re just afraid of intimacy.”

  Not what I expected. “I’ve been trying to date,” I say.

  “Stop lying to me,” she snaps. “A guy like you would have a girlfriend if he wanted one.”

  I try to work out if that was a compliment.

  “I need you to be more professional,” Thistle says. “Get your head into the case. I don’t have time for this.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I say. Her anger is contagious. I rejected her to keep her safe, and now she’s giving me hell for it.

  “Bullshit. You’re not as good a liar as you think you are, Blake. You were scared of having sex with me, so you told a stupid lie. When I still wanted a relationship, you told another one. You lied to me again just now, when you said you’d been trying to date. You’re a virgin, and you’re terrified of sex.”

  My frustration and exhaustion and anxiety all bubbles over. “I’m not—”

  “It’s almost funny, given all the shit that doesn’t scare you.”

  “You’re better off without me,” I snap. “Can’t you see that?”

  We stare at each other in silence for a moment. She’s confused. I’m on dangerous ground, but I can’t stop myself. I’m just too tired to lie anymore.

  “I’m a bad person,” I continue. “I’m sick in the head, okay? The only good thing I ever did in my whole life was push you away.”

  “Oh, so this was for my own good?” She looks incredulous.

  “You have no idea how much I wanted you. But you’re a good person, and you don’t deserve to get stuck with an asshole like me.”

  Tears sting the corners of my eyes. I blink them away.

  Thistle is starting to look like she believes me, but that’s only enraged her more. “Did you ever stop to wonder if that was my choice to make? We both grew up in the same hellhole. You don’t think I have problems, too? I can’t sleep without Ambien. I take stupid risks. I can’t handle a normal job, or make friends with normal people. I have terrible taste in men, you included. I—”

  She has no idea what problems are. “You’re the only person I’ve known for longer than a week who doesn’t think I’m worthless,” I say. “No one else cares about me, and I don’t care about anyone else. If I hurt you, how the fuck am I supposed to live with myself? I’d rather live and die alone in this piece of shit place than take that risk.”

  She stares at me, amazed.

  “Sure, I’m afraid,” I say. “But not of sex.”

  She gulps down the last of her drink. Shrugs off her jacket.

  “Prove it,” she says.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I always follow my brother but you cannot see me, only him. You cannot hear him, only me.

  What are we?

  It’s not like I expect.

  For one thing, no one gets bitten. Thistle pulls me off the couch and pins me to the floor, her hips on mine. Unbuttons my shirt one-handed and rakes her nails down my chest while her other hand grips my hair. I couldn’t bite her if I tried.

  And I don’t try. That’s the other thing that shocks me. I let her hold me down as I lift her blouse, exposing her soft belly, and slide my hands up the smooth skin of her back, all the way to the nape of her neck. When she shivers and bends down to kiss me, the tang of Southern Comfort on her lips, it doesn’t even occur to me to bite down. I just close my eyes, not wanting the moment to end, and at the same time needing more.

  The sex itself goes wrong like all first times probably do. Thistle has condoms in her handbag but it’s a while before she finds them. I fumble with one until she exasperatedly takes over, rolling it onto me while I stroke her bare thighs and wonder where her panties went. When she tries to kiss me again I tilt my head the wrong way, bumping my brow against hers. It takes a lot of shifting and wiggling to find the right angle before she can lower herself down onto me, the electric feeling making me gasp. We go slow, because every time we accelerate, we can’t find a rhythm that suits each other. Her bounces don’t match my thrusts, and the whole thing keeps grinding to a halt. Her knees and my ass both get rubbed raw by the floor.

  But for the first time in maybe my whole life, I’m not thinking about food. Not thinking about anything, in fact. Timothy Blake has vanished, leaving only sensations. My hammering heart, the smell of her. The sweat everywhere except the scar tissue on her chest and throat, which stays dry and smooth. My hardness, her heat. Our ragged breaths. We stay semiclothed—her black mesh sports bra, my dirty jeans knotted around my ankles—but even so, there’s a lot of flesh on display. And I don’t want any of it, at least not in an unwholesome way. I’ve discovered a different sort of hunger. Maybe sex takes so much focus that there’s no room for my addiction.

  Or maybe it’s about her. Maybe I want her more than I want to eat.

  I finish much sooner than I intend to, throbbing and twitching as she clenches around me. When she rolls over, I try to get her across the line, but I can’t find the right spot. Eventually she nudges my clumsy fingers aside and works herself into a silent seizure, her teeth clenched, her brow furrowed. With her free hand she crushes mine. I watch, mesmerized.

  Soon we’re side by side on the floor, staring at the ceiling and breathing in unison, like a single creature with eight limbs. An octopus, legs tangled around each other. We lay there a long time.

  “So,” she says finally. “That happened.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “I didn’t do it for you.”

  We fall silent.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “For pushing you away.”

  She seems like she’s waiting for something more.

  Oh, right. “And for lying to you,” I add.

  “You should be,” she says, but I can hear the edge of a smile. “It was a dumb thing to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  She rests a hand on my bare chest. “Well,” she says. “I guess you’ve made up for it. No harm, no foul.”

  I stroke her shoulder for a minute, fascinated by the smoothness of her skin. Lightning flashes outside the window. Thunder a few seconds later.

  “You know, this doesn’t have to be a thing,” she says. I feel a hint of nervousness in the implied question. “If you don’t want it to be.”

  “I want it to be a thing,” I say. “I really do.”

  A pause.

  “Do you?” I ask.

  She lifts my hand to her lips, and gently kisses the spot where my thumb used to be. The contact sends a rush of warmth up my spine.

  “Right now I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  I love her. It’s the first time I’ve ever allowed myself to think those words. Before, the hopelessness of the idea would have flattened me.

  “Why me?” I ask.

  She looks at me and grins. “Fishing for compliments, much?”

  �
�Maybe,” I say. “But don’t act like you didn’t have other options.”

  She leans closer, and nibbles my earlobe. “You know, I used that app for a while. nTangle. But the guys I met, they always looked at me like I was a piece of meat.”

  I can’t help but glance toward the kitchen.

  “You hungry?” she asks.

  “No,” I say—and for the first time ever, it’s true. “You?”

  “I could eat.”

  Her phone rings. I look at the clock. It says four a.m., but I never changed it when daylight savings ended, so it’s five.

  “Hold that thought.” She crawls over to her handbag. I admire the view.

  She picks up the phone. “Can this wait, Vasquez? I’m in the middle of something.” She shoots me a wink, which stirs parts of me I thought were done for the night.

  Then her face changes. “Say again?”

  A pause.

  “Okay. We’ll be right there. I mean, I’ll find Blake and be right there.”

  She drops the phone. “We gotta go,” she says. “DNA came in. The severed hand we found? It doesn’t belong to Biggs.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Two girls are born on the same day to the same mother, and yet they are not twins. Why?

  “Run all that past us again,” I say.

  “Certainly.” Dr. Norman lays out all the DNA tests in a neat row on one of the morgue slabs. The numbers and graphs and percentages are meaningless to me.

  Thistle’s hair is still damp from the shower. She looks remarkably good for a woman who has had zero sleep. I don’t think I’ve pulled up so well.

  While Thistle was in my bathroom, the fear returned. I hovered outside the door, listening to the running water, picturing her bare feet on the worn surface of the tub and wondering if she could tell if a skeleton had recently dissolved in it. When it was my turn in the shower, I worried that she was looking in my freezer rather than reading a follow-up email from Vasquez. When we got to her place, where she picked up a change of clothes, I wished I’d asked her if we could both shower there.

  If this is going to work, long term, I need to do something about my house.

  “This is the DNA test from the blood in the severed hand,” Norman says, pointing. “It doesn’t match this test, which is the cheek swab from Hope. But it does match the blood group we have on file for Kenneth Biggs—O positive—and it does match this, which is the DNA test from the blood on the wall planner at the dump.”

  “So the hand doesn’t belong to Biggs,” Thistle says. “But it does belong to a middle-aged man, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And all the other vics were in their twenties. So there’s an extra victim we don’t know about yet. And it’s possible Biggs is still alive.” Thistle sticks her hands in her pockets and whistles through her teeth. “Lucky we didn’t tell the family, huh?”

  This doesn’t make sense. I know it’s Biggs’s hand, because I cut it off his wrist. Unless the body in my freezer isn’t Biggs. But if not, who the hell is it?

  I can’t tell Thistle or Norman any of that. So instead I say, “Why would the perp put Biggs’s wedding ring on some other victim’s finger?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of fucked-up ritual?”

  “Any chance you made a mistake?”

  Norman doesn’t look offended. “No.”

  “What about the flap of skin from Gomez’s house? Does that match anything?”

  “Impossible to tell. The skin had been treated with a preserving agent I haven’t yet identified. This prevented it from drying out or becoming brittle, but also wiped out any potential touch DNA.”

  “So it could have been removed quite a long time before it was delivered to Gomez.”

  “No more than a few weeks, I’d say. You can’t preserve skin forever, no matter what you use.”

  “What about the samples for Biggs’s apartment?” I say. “Hair and whatnot.”

  “Those took a while to gather,” Norman says. “So I’m still waiting on the lab report. I don’t know what they do or don’t match.”

  “What are you thinking, Blake?” Thistle asks.

  I’m thinking the body in my freezer sure looked like Biggs’s picture. “Maybe the hand came from Biggs’s brother, or his cousin.”

  “But it would have shared some DNA with Hope, then, wouldn’t it?” Thistle says.

  “That’s right,” Norman confirms. “The hand was unrelated to her, except that they shared a common ancestor 200,000 years ago, like we all do.”

  In that case, I can only see one other possibility.

  “We need to talk to Gabriela,” I say.

  * * *

  As we drive through the early morning, I catch a glimpse of my face in the side mirror. I’m not a virgin anymore. I don’t look any different, but something has changed beneath the surface.

  When I turned thirty, nothing marked the occasion. I told no one, and since I had neither friends nor family, no one asked. Alone in my house, I lit three candles, stuck them in some guy’s severed arm, and watched them burn. Thinking about how I was undoubtedly an adult now. Responsible for my own terrible choices.

  This feels like that. I’ve become a man in yet another measurable way. But the change is bigger. Thistle just showed me that it might be possible for me to have a relationship. Maybe we already have one. But I need to become the guy she deserves.

  When I get home I’ll destroy the bodies in my house—and not by eating them. Reese Thistle’s boyfriend wouldn’t do that. I’m going to melt them in acid and pour them down the drain. Then I’ll call Warner and tell her I quit. Today is the first day of my new life. I’m scared, but excited, too.

  Thistle and I drive in silence. I want to talk about last night, but I don’t know what to say. Is it too soon to ask if we can spend tonight together, too? Hopefully she’s wondering the same thing. I’ve almost worked up the courage to ask when we reach the apartment building, and the opportunity is gone.

  We pull into a parking space and walk through the cold to the door. Different doorman. Tall, black, balding, bearded, with three ear studs. We tell him the apartment number and he pushes the button without a word.

  Gabriela’s voice: “Hello?”

  “It’s Agent Thistle and Timothy Blake,” Thistle says. “Can we come up?”

  The door buzzes, and the doorman opens it for us. We ride the elevator up.

  By the time we get to the apartment door, it’s already open. Gabriela looks out at us worriedly, wearing a green and white kimono.

  “Have you found him?” she asks.

  “We’d like to talk inside,” Thistle says. “Is your daughter home?”

  “She got a call early this morning from a friend,” Gabriela says. “She just went out.”

  That’s a rare stroke of luck.

  “Kenneth Biggs isn’t Hope’s real father,” I say. “Is he?”

  Gabriela hesitates. “He raised her, didn’t he?” she says finally. “That’s real enough.”

  Thistle and I share a glance.

  “Hope gave us a DNA sample,” Thistle says. “So we could identify her father’s remains, if we found them. But if he’s not her biological father, then that sample is misleading.”

  “Did you find something?” Gabriela asks.

  “We did,” Thistle says softly.

  Gabriela staggers back as though she’s been punched in the gut. Her face crumples and she moans.

  Thistle and I step through the gap, and close the door behind us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I go up and I go down, to the sky and to the ground.

  I am present tense, then past, let us take a ride at last. What am I?

  “Did Hope know?” Thistle asks.

  She and Gabriela are sitting on the sofa in the loung
e room. I’m slowly making tea in the kitchen, out of sight, but not out of earshot. Thistle didn’t explicitly send me in here, but I could tell from her body language that it was what she wanted. It’s as if the sex has made us telepathic.

  “She has no idea,” Gabriela says.

  If this is true, it means Hope didn’t deliberately send us off track when she gave us the DNA sample.

  “Do you have to tell her?” Gabriela adds.

  “Not exactly,” Thistle says. “But now that we’ve found your husband’s remains, there are several ways she might find out. It might be a good idea to tell her yourself.”

  “I can’t,” Gabriela said. “She adored Kenneth. It would destroy her to find out she wasn’t his. And she would never forgive me.”

  That may be true. But I can’t imagine that Hope would be destroyed. Since the suicide attempt, she’s become stronger than her mother realizes.

  “If he raised her,” Thistle says, “she was his. Like you said.”

  I bring in the tea on a tray I found, the sugar spoon balanced on the edge of a saucer like a seesaw. Gabriela picks up her mug and sniffs it. The aroma seems to wake her up, like smelling salts. Her eyes brighten a little, her spine straightens. But when she sips it, she doesn’t react, even though I know it’s hot enough to burn her tongue.

  I should have made myself a coffee, to wake myself up. Still, I’ve never had such a good reason to be exhausted. It’s hard not to grin, which would be deeply inappropriate in front of the grieving widow.

  “Who was her biological father?” Thistle asks. The question is gentle, like she’s a counselor. But I know that she’s really checking if we have a new suspect. This unknown man may have had more motive to kill Biggs than Shannon did, especially if he still had feelings for Gabriela.

  “His name was Peter Rodman,” Gabriela says. “He was with the immigration police.”

  This surprises me. An undocumented immigrant falling in love with a border control agent would be bizarre, given how badly the latter usually treat the former, though it’s mostly incompetence rather than cruelty.