“I can check,” I tell her. “You’re thinking if the person who called was out here, they saw more than they said?”
“Or it was the killer himself. Sometimes they do that. Play games.”
I shudder, a fine little contraction of my insides, because she’s right. Melvin Royal was a game player; it amused him to no end to taunt the police with clues that led nowhere. But mostly what makes me uneasy is the mental image of someone—someone who is just a shadow right now—making that call, enjoying his moment, while the mother of two murdered children struggles in the back of his car, or his trunk. It’s horrible, but I’d rather think of her as abducted and endangered than complicit.
The coroner comes over, and Kez straightens up. Visibly putting on her professional demeanor. I don’t know if he notices. “We’re ready to drag the car out, Detective. I’ve got all the pictures, including the bank on all sides,” he says. “And we need room on the road to preserve and sort evidence, whatever the water’s left us. Going to have to move all these cars.”
Kezia nods. “Tow truck’s on the way. How long do you think the car’s been down there?”
“I’ll tell you once we get the bodies out, but not long. Couple of hours, maybe. Cold night. That’s good, but the faster we can get the victims out of the water, the better.”
I realize that my vehicle is the last-in-first-out piece of the traffic puzzle; they’ll need me gone to squeeze the tow truck into position. “Kez, I’ll do whatever I can,” I promise her. I’m still a step removed from this horror; I haven’t seen the bodies. I desperately don’t want to get closer, because dead children hold a special kind of trauma, of heartbreak. A heavy weight of responsibility for those who bear witness. “Call me later?”
She just nods. Her attention is back on the pond. The car. The babies hidden from view.
I imagine myself in her shoes: newly pregnant, with a boyfriend deployed on reserve duty. Facing this horror. I would have done anything for Kez before coming here, but now . . . now I’ll do anything and everything.
Because I know she will give this her whole heart and soul.
I back out carefully; it’s nerve-racking on the narrow gravel road, and I find myself holding my breath and praying I don’t put a tire in a ditch. It feels like relief when I spot a dirt side road, and I quickly three-point a turn so I have headlights to illuminate the way out.
Behind me, the pulsing red-blue glow of the flashers looks like the start of a forest fire, something that will consume everything near it.
Who could do this?
Why?
Like Kez, I want to know.
Whether the mother of those children is abducted or a killer, she still needs to be found.
3
KEZIA
The tow truck takes its sweet time getting here, but it finally arrives. I hate the sound of it, the shrill beep as the muddy old wrecker backs up. I know it doesn’t make any damn sense, but I wish it were a clean truck. This one is caked in weeks of filth. The driver of the truck is a tired-looking, big white man with a greasy trucker hat on, and he gives Deputy Dawg a hearty hey, but completely ignores me and Winston, the coroner. “What you want me to do?” he asks the deputy, who looks over at me. I step up.
“We need to get that car out of the pond,” I tell him, as if that isn’t completely obvious. “Carefully as possible. It’s evidence in a crime.”
He doesn’t like getting orders from me. Too bad. I hold his stare until he nods and looks away. “Gonna take a while,” he says. “Hope you like the cold. I damn sure don’t.” He pulls out a pair of hip waders from an equipment box on his rig and jams them on. “Could’ve waited for goddamn morning. Gonna need that car moved off down the road, far as possible.” He points to my unmarked sedan. I’ve already moved it to what I thought was a safe distance.
“It’s mine,” I say. “I’ll get it out of the way.”
“Well thank you, Officer,” he says. There’s a lot of sass in that, and I’m tempted to respond. I don’t. The South has never been friendly to my particular shade of folks, and bad things happen out here in the dark. I’m wearing a badge and a gun and I still feel it, like an ache in your bones when the weather shifts.
Last thing I need to do is start something. I need to focus on what’s important: those two little babies, and getting them justice. Ignoring another Klan-adjacent asshole is just part of the rural landscape.
I realize that I’m not being completely rational about this. That I’m prickly in all the wrong ways, noticing things too much and giving the normal way too much power over me. I don’t know if that’s hormones, or just awareness of the world I’m bringing a little miracle of a child into. Our child will be loved, at least. But safety is a long way off.
I move my car and drive it to the side road I spotted on the way in; I park it and leave the portable red strobe light on top, in case someone comes barreling down from up-mountain. I walk back. The tow truck operator, cursing under his breath, has already waded into the pond. “Gonna get that brain-eating amoeba shit being in here,” he says. I don’t tell him that he wouldn’t notice much of a change. Even if I don’t care for the man, he does seem to know his business; he attaches the chains, grimacing when he has to crouch down and immerse himself in the pond. He curses as devoutly as most people pray. He scrambles up the bank, and the deputy offers him a hand when he slips. We’ll have to document that shit, too, but there’s no help for it. The driver gets a dirty towel from his truck and dries himself off, not that it helps the green gunk clinging to him. He gets to the controls and starts the work.
He’s good at this. He balances the slow, careful drag against the weight of both car and water. Gears grind. I grit my teeth and have to bite the urge to tell him, Treat that car like your own babies are in there. I don’t even know what that would mean to him. I want some damn reverence in this nasty process.
My cell phone buzzes. I grab for it and check; it’s Javier. I let out a little sigh of relief as I accept the call, and then feel the weight of this place crush that relief flat. “Hey, Javi. I love you.”
Javier Esparza’s warm baritone voice glides through me like waves of summer heat, so welcome right now in this cold place. He sounds husky. “I love you too. You okay?”
It’s in my voice, the creeping dread. Must have been for him to ask. I make an effort to shove it away. “Yes,” I say. It sounds convincing. “Is it late for you right now, or early?” I don’t know where he’s deployed for his weeks of Marine Corps reserve training; I often don’t. Safer for him that way. He’s in the hands of the marines right now. They could have taken him anywhere.
“Querida, where I am, it’s late morning already. I forgot it would be so early, but this is my slot. We don’t get a lot of choices.” He’s been gone only a few days, and I already miss him so bad I feel he’s been gone a year. “Everything okay there? You sound like you’re outside.”
“I’m on a case,” I say. “I—” Tell him. But I’m weirdly reluctant now that he’s on the phone. I feel fragile and out of control and he feels so very far away. I glance at the deputy, who’s taken shelter again in his cruiser with the heater running. The coroner, standing by. I take a couple of steps away as the tow truck cranks gears again, metal on metal. My gaze fixes on the slow emergence of the car from the pond. The back bumper breaks the surface, and the roof of the car. Ripples flow sluggishly. “I need to tell you something,” I say. I walk off a little bit, farther from the noise, farther from the ears. “I’m not sure it’s the right time, but . . . I don’t want to wait. Javier . . . we’re pregnant.”