by Jack Heath
There was—the police were looking for it. “When was this?” I ask.
“Tuesday morning.”
Probably straight after he ran from us at the college. “Where’d you take him?” I ask.
“Piney Point. He took the clothes and got into another car.”
“What kind of car?”
“Uh, it was gray. A pickup. A young woman was driving.”
“A blonde woman?”
“No. She was Asian.”
“Young, you said?”
“Shannon’s age,” she says defensively. “Maybe a little younger. But not a child.”
“And then what?”
“And then they drove off.” She sniffs. “He said he’d see me next week.”
“Well, he lied,” I say, getting up.
“All children lie to their parents.”
I can’t believe she’s still defending him. “Look, the only way you’ll ever see him again is if we catch him. If he contacts you again, you call us.”
She nods, but I can tell she won’t.
* * *
“Okay,” I say, pacing back and forth across the hospital waiting room. “Shannon is using his network to hide from us.”
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Thistle says. “Your voice sounds like Batman.”
Anyone else who knows me would have asked why I risked my life to save Francine. They would assume I had an ulterior motive. But Thistle hasn’t asked. She thinks there’s a decent person hidden somewhere inside me.
Maybe there is. I had no selfish reasons to rescue Francine. I just did it without thinking. It’s as if by believing I was good, Thistle made me good.
“I’m fine,” I say. “All those women Shannon had naked pictures of? They’re helping him. Whenever he needs a place to stay or a ride, he...” I think about it. “In fact, I bet he took the gray hatchback. He probably told the Asian girl to report it stolen, but not until he had a head start. That would be the smart play.”
“Well, he won’t stay off the radar long,” Thistle says. “His face is all over the news now. Someone will spot him soon.”
She pats the seat next to her. I sit down.
“Sorry I hit you with the door,” she says. “There was a lot of blood.”
Most of it probably belonged to the guy I bit. “I’m fine,” I say again.
“You’ve earned a break. And we’ve exhausted all our leads. Why don’t you let me take you home?”
“We’re not done,” I say. “We still don’t know who the blonde woman is, or Fred. And we’re not even a hundred percent on Luxford’s motive.”
“I know what it’s like to not want to stop,” Thistle says. “After I got shot—”
Her phone rings. She sighs, and answers. “Thistle.”
She listens for a while, and then says, “Got it, thanks,” and ends the call.
“We have a DNA match on the blond hair from Biggs’s car,” Thistle says. “It belongs to Armana Black. Houston resident, with a past conviction for prostitution. Units out looking for her now.”
A name at last. I heave myself to my feet. “Let’s go.”
“I’m taking you home,” Thistle says. “You need rest.”
“But—”
“You can talk to her when we bring her in. Okay?”
I nod. “Okay.”
I do have things to do at home. But rest isn’t one of them.
As we walk out, I glance through each door we pass. Most of the patients are old, but there’s nothing visibly wrong with them. Tubes go to their arms, but the more powerful drug is the TV flashing on the wall. The news babbles about another school shooting, this time in Missouri. The patients stare at the TV, anxious but motionless, somehow wound up and pacified at the same time.
As I pass one of the rooms, I see a young man. Most of his face is bandaged. Only one eye, his nose and part of his mouth are visible.
But I recognize him. He’s one of the three guys who attacked me. The one who found a severed hand in my pocket, right before I bit his cheek off.
His eye focuses on me, and widens. He screams. The movement pops his stitches, turning the bandages pink.
Thistle turns to look, alarmed. “Jesus,” she says. “What’s going on in there?”
“No idea.” I hustle her along the corridor. “Let’s get out of here.”
She slows down. “Maybe that guy needs help?”
“A nurse was already in there,” I say.
“I didn’t see a nurse.” But just at that moment, a nurse hurries past us and darts into the room with the screaming man.
“There, now he’s got two,” I say. “Let’s go.”
She allows me to shepherd her into the elevator. I push the button for the ground floor, and then stab the button to close the door.
Thistle shoots me a sympathetic look. “You don’t like hospitals, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say.
My breathing doesn’t return to normal until we’re out on the freeway and the hospital has disappeared in the rearview mirror.
* * *
My bathtub has never been so full.
Usually it’s just one body at a time, and only the parts I can’t eat without getting sick. Bones, brains, eyes, intestines. I cover them in a sulfuric-acid-based drain cleaner—lye would be quicker, but only if I can heat it—then I let them melt away to nothing while I stand in the corridor to avoid the fumes.
Today the tub is a tangle of limbs, mostly with the flesh still on. Daniel, Francis and Biggs. Dissolving them will take hours. It would be so much easier if I just...
No. I don’t do that anymore.
Thistle promised she’d call me if Vasquez managed to get anything off Luxford’s computer—apparently the jumble of letters on the Post-it note weren’t his password—or if anyone tracked down Armana Black, the woman whose hair was found in Biggs’s car. I’m hoping she’ll call me tonight, even if nothing happens with the case. Maybe just to check on me. I don’t think I’ve ever had someone call just to check on me.
I use a wood plane to strip off the muscle and fat, then I smash the bones with a framing hammer. The smaller the pieces, the faster they’ll dissolve. Carefully, dust mask on, I tip the jug of drain cleaner over them and watch them start to sizzle. I buy the cleaner from a different hardware store each time, and always pay cash.
These days, some funeral homes freeze the body with liquid nitrogen and vibrate it until it dissolves into a powder. Then they bury the powder—it’s supposed to be better for the environment than cremation. Maybe I could buy some liquid nitrogen next time, and—
No. There is no next time.
My hands are covered in blood. I force myself not to lick my fingers. Go over to the sink and scrub and scrub under scorching water.
My conscience is back. Thistle’s voice in my head: That blood’s never gonna come off.
“Sure it will.” I hold up my hands to the light.
I can still see it, she says. Can’t you?
I’ve left Biggs’s head in my freezer. I’m keeping my options open. At the moment, my working theory is that Shannon Luxford and Armana Black are working together, with Black possibly using the Fred alias. If there’s not enough evidence against Black, a severed head hidden somewhere in her home would go a long way toward a guilty verdict.
Once there are no body parts hidden anywhere in my house, maybe I can get it professionally cleaned. Get rid of that odor, which is back. I could smell it from outside.
I don’t have anything to do now. Normally I’d be eating. It’s weird, having nothing to keep me occupied while the remains are dissolving. The boredom makes me want to eat.
Going cold turkey is going to be harder than I thought.
I’ll take a walk, I decide. That sounds like something an adult might do. A noncannibal, nonvirg
in adult with a girlfriend. I check the mirror—no gore to be seen—and get dressed.
I’m about to put the phone Warner gave me in my pocket when I hesitate. It’s not a good time to do this. But there will never be a better one.
I dial.
Warner picks up herself, which is unusual. One of her flunkies must be indisposed.
“Blake,” she says. “What an unexpected surprise.”
“Is there any other kind of surprise?”
“I guess not.”
I can hear a man screaming in the background. The screams echo, like Warner is in a warehouse, standing quite a long way from the screaming man.
“I quit,” I say.
“I didn’t quite catch that,” Warner says. “Which gives you a second chance to decide what to say.”
“I quit.”
Dead air trickles down the line for a while. The screams have stopped.
“The FBI is not going to break me,” she says. “I know about their little task force. If you’ve decided to help them, it won’t go well for you.”
“That’s not it.”
“Then what? You angling for a raise?”
“You were right,” I say. “I don’t have the stomach for this work. I thought I did, but I don’t. I’ve dealt with the last of the clients you sent to me. But I don’t want more.”
“Well,” she says. “That is...disappointing.”
I can hear the man sobbing in the background.
“You don’t need to send anyone after me,” I say. “I’m not a danger to you. What little I know, I can’t ever say.”
More sobbing.
“You let Indigo quit,” I say. “The stripper you told me about, the one who hit a client. And nothing bad happened.”
There’s a long pause, and for a second I wonder if she made that story up. Then she says: “If I hear anything even resembling a rumor that you’re helping the police look into my business, then what’s happening to this guy will happen to you. And you don’t want to know what’s happening to this guy.”
“Understood,” I say. “Thank you.”
Another pause. I hate talking on the phone. I can’t read her at all.
“Are we done?” I ask finally.
“We’re done.”
The line goes dead.
I exhale. That went well.
I check the pickling corpses—still too solid to go down the drain—and then walk out my front door and triple-lock it behind me. It’s cold, but the sun is out. I stroll over and knock on my neighbor’s front door. The dog starts barking immediately.
Eventually the door opens a crack. Shawn looks out. “Uh, hi.”
I smile. “I’m doing an early New Year’s resolution,” I say. “Feel like going for a run?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
What word looks the same upside down and backward?
“So it’s like a fax machine?” I ask.
Shawn just laughs. “Man, you’re old.”
Actually, we’re both in our early thirties, although you wouldn’t know it to watch us run together. Shawn can jog uphill and hold a conversation at the same time. I can only talk on the downhill stretches, and even then I feel like I’m going to suffocate. Plus, my throat still hurts from the bleach. This was a terrible idea.
“I grew up,” I pant. “In a house. With a fax machine.”
“Really? Did you have a typewriter, too?”
Actually, we did. There was a typewriter at the group home, although it was missing the letter L. I had to fill it in every time I typed my name.
I guess one of the rare benefits of poverty is the way it connects you to the past. The poor kids of today live like the rich kids of the nineties, the poor of the nineties lived like the rich of the seventies, and so on.
“So it’s not,” I pant, “like a fax?”
“It’s not just like that,” Shawn says with the smoothness of someone who’s explained this a lot of times before. “Yes, you could use the app that way—take a picture of a document, type in the recipient’s address, hit the Print and Mail button. But it has all sorts of functions. It’s a fast, easy way to send custom postcards. Newsletters. Family photos. Christmas cards.”
This came up because I had asked Shawn if he used nTangle. Apparently he hasn’t, but he works in app development, too.
“Does anyone,” I gasp. “Still send. Christmas cards?”
“My family does. Not yours?”
“No family,” I say, and then remember my fictitious cousin.
Shawn doesn’t notice my mistake. “That’s a bummer, man. But hey.” He slaps me on the shoulder. “Maybe you’ll have one soon. That woman I saw hanging around your house? She looked like a keeper.”
I feel an excited little kick inside, distinct from the heart palpitations that are slowly killing me.
We jog past a row of trees, turned into skeletons by the snow. The fog hasn’t lifted—sometimes it lasts until noon. It’s a dangerous day to go running.
“What does she do, anyway?” Shawn asks.
“FBI agent.”
“Shit! For real?”
I nod.
“Man. She didn’t look like one.”
I wonder what he thinks an FBI agent looks like. “Well, she—”
“Your phone’s ringing, bud.”
He’s right. I didn’t hear it over my pounding heart. I check the screen. “It’s her.”
“Be cool,” Shawn says with a wink.
I answer the phone. “Hi,” I say, trying not to sound like a panting dog.
“Blake. You okay?”
It’s weird that we’re still not on a first-name basis. “Yeah. Just, uh, working out.”
Shawn gives me a thumbs-up.
“Uh-huh.” Thistle sounds skeptical.
“What’s up?” I gasp.
“We found Armana Black. Want to meet her?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The police call a man to tell him they have
found his wife’s body, and that he must come to the crime scene to identify her. When he arrives,
they arrest him. Why?
“This is costing me money, you guys,” Armana Black says.
She has blond hair cut short, with a tattooed neck and polyester clothes that are designed to look like leather. Maybe she cut her hair and added the ink when she heard the police were looking for a woman with long, blond hair. She’s also younger than I expected. Twenty-four, according to her license.
I don’t like going into the interview rooms. I’d rather see a suspect in their home or workplace, where their surroundings give me clues about them. And it’s hard not to imagine myself on the other side of the table, being interrogated by two suspicious cops. It could still happen. I may have turned over a new leaf, but old leaves have a way of blowing back onto the sidewalk.
The room doesn’t look like they do on TV. Black is seated on a cheap sofa next to a coffee table. Thistle and I are on hard plastic chairs opposite her. There’s no one-way mirror—just a camera in one corner, positioned to see the suspect’s face. The resolution and frame rate are good enough to catch all the microexpressions—a twitch at the corner of the lips, a widening of the eyes, a contraction of the pupils. Then computer software processes it to determine if the suspect is lying. But it’s another deep learning algorithm, and it’s not good yet. I trust my instincts instead.
“Well, the sooner you answer our questions, the sooner you’re out of here,” Thistle says.
“I know my rights,” Black says with the confidence of someone who doesn’t. “I get a free lawyer. And if you’re not gonna charge me, you have to let me go within twenty-four hours. That’s the fifth amendment.”
“It’s the sixth amendment, and it doesn’t specify a timeframe,” Thistle says. “Texas state law
says seventy-two hours. And the free lawyer only comes if we charge you.”
“Would you like us to charge you?” I add. “We’re happy to do it if it will speed this up.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Black says.
“You mean since last time.” Thistle flicks through a file. She’s pretending that it’s a rap sheet, but from this angle I can see that it’s only an old consent form. “I see here that you turned down a plea bargain when you were pulled in for solicitation last year.”
“They wanted me to testify against Charlie Warner,” Black says. “Would you have done that, in my position?”
Warner runs all the brothels in Houston, so it’s not too much of a coincidence that Black used to work for her. But it still makes me uneasy.
Thistle leans back in her chair. “Tell us about Shannon Luxford.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Uh-huh. You haven’t switched on a TV today? Seen a newspaper?”
Black’s throat bobs. We’ve caught her in a lie. “Oh, yeah. The Crawdad Man, right? He killed all those women.”
At the latest press conference, Zinnen was careful not to accuse Shannon Luxford of being a serial killer, something we still can’t prove. All we know for sure is that he abducted Abbey and raped Hope, he knew Biggs, and Biggs’s phone trail dead-ended at the dump, as did the phone trails of all those overweight white men. It’s not iron-clad. But the media has been happy to join the dots.
“Men,” Thistle is saying. “His female victims survived, at least the two we know about. Are you at all worried about what they might tell us?”
“Why? I don’t know those bitches.”
“You said we’re costing you money,” I say. “What do you do?”
“I run errands,” Black says.
“Like what?”
“Like whatever. Going to the post office. Picking up dry cleaning, or takeout.” She glances at her watch. “This is peak earning time, right here.”
She seems more anxious about this than about being under arrest, which makes her very smart or very dumb.
“Who do you work for?” I ask.
“Whoever. People hire me over the internet.” She looks at me like I wouldn’t understand this. I wonder how old she thinks I am.