The time lag feels like it has extra weight this time. Like he’s speechless, not just far away. “Wait, what? We’re—Kez! Oh my God!” The delight in his voice fills me up, drives away the cold and the desolation. I feel it like I’m standing in sudden sunlight. “Kez, baby. We’re going to have a baby.” His voice goes shaky on that last bit. Big strong marine, reduced nearly to tears. “You okay? Really? Damn, I wish I was there. I wish I could just be there.”
“You will be,” I tell him. “I’m okay. So’s the baby. I’m setting up a doctor’s appointment in the next couple of days. I’ll send the sonogram to your phone so you can see it when you get to turn it on again.” For now, his phone is off. Safety reasons, again.
“Kez.” He sounds more somber now. “You don’t sound that happy. Are you? Happy?”
“Very,” I say, and I hear the emotion in the single word. “I want this so much. It’s just . . . it’s a bad one, this case. It’s hard to be completely happy right now like I should.”
“Sweetheart. I’m sorry. You do what you gotta do, Kez. I love you. Always.”
“I love you too.” I let the silence run a bit, warm and sweet, then see the tow truck’s finally got the right tension, and the back wheels of the car are starting to come up the slippery side of the pond. “Be safe, Javi. For me and the baby.”
“You be safe too. Get some rest if you can—” The connection drops in the middle of the last word. I’m used to that; communications from some of the places he goes are difficult. I’m just lucky he was able to connect at all.
The predawn morning is colder with him gone. I exhale slowly, trying to avoid that ghostly puff of mist, and watch the tires as they roll up the bank. The sedan is finally out of the water. The tow truck driver is better than we probably deserve to have, out here at this hour. He manages to get it completely out, on the road, and then unhooks and backs his rig away. “You want me to wait?” he asks. Not me, of course. The deputy.
“Please,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”
He shrugs. “They pay me by the hour.”
Water cascades from open windows and runs in streams from the door seals. All four doors are shut. I force myself not to look in the back as Winston adjusts the lights around the new site, and I focus on the exterior. It’s not a new car, but it looks well kept. No damage. It’s a pale beige, a color most people avoid these days, but maybe I’m unkind—maybe it’s more of a light gold. Hard to tell in the work lights, which are harsh for a reason.
The deputy and coroner both look at me. I step up and help Winston unroll a clean blue tarp that we position on the driver’s side so it’ll catch anything that comes out; he gives me paper foot covers I snap on over my shoes. I glove up and approach the leaking bucket that was once a vehicle.
I lean in the open window to take a look at the seats. There’s still at least a couple of feet of murky water trapped inside.
“Help me with the mesh trap,” the coroner says, and I hold my end of the fine net; he rolls it under the car, holds his side, and uses a gloved hand to carefully pop the passenger side door open as I open the driver’s side. Swamp comes out in a firehose gush, but is quickly down to a muttering trickle. He pulls the net to his side carefully to preserve any potential evidence that will have been trapped in it, and takes it off to the side to go pick out anything that might decompose if left damp: paper, particularly. I move the work lights so they shine on the interior of the car. I still don’t look in the back, though it pulls at me like a magnet; I can see the unfocused pallid forms out of the corner of my eye, but I know that once I look at them directly, I won’t be able to look anywhere else.
I focus on the front.
The seat’s pulled up, which means a shorter person was driving. On the passenger-side floorboard, drowning in muck, is a woman’s brown purse. It’s a hobo-style, shapeless thing that seems stuffed. I mark and photograph the bag in situ and put it up on the seat. This doesn’t look good at all. No driver, no mom, purse left behind. My instincts immediately bend toward abduction.
I carefully open the bag, and though the contents are wet they’re not completely saturated, which gives me a good guess how long it’s been in the water. I tease out a wallet and flip it open. “Sheryl Lansdowne,” I say out loud, though why it would matter to anyone else in earshot I don’t know. I lay the wallet out and take a photo of the driver’s license. Sheryl’s twenty-seven years old, slender and delicate and mildly pretty. Blondish hair worn in shoulder-length, soft curls. Skin tone’s pale but burnished by a tan. Not the worst DMV picture I’ve ever seen. I open my notebook and write down the name and address. That needs to be my next stop. I’m already bracing myself for the relatives.
There’s nothing else in the front seat of any relevance. The upholstery looks clean, and if there was any blood, it’s been soaked away by the pond. Forensics will go over it for trace evidence. I pop the glove box, then take out the wet documents inside and give them to Winston to lay out for preservation. Looks like standard stuff: insurance paperwork, registration, car manual.
I’ve run out of distractions, and I feel a knot of tension wrapping up in my chest, tighter and tighter.
I take a deep breath and turn my head to focus on what’s in the rear seat.
My first thought is, They’re so pale. White babies, yes, but they’re an unnaturally luminous color now. One has her pale-blue eyes open like a little doll, but she’s not a toy, and the wrongness of it moves deep in me like an invisible snake. The other, eerily similar girl next to her has her eyes closed, thin lashes beaded with water. Their identical little pink outfits are stained from the green water.
They’re so still.
Even seasoned cops lose their stomach over something like this. But I can’t. One wrong step, and the deputy won’t shut up about the black woman who couldn’t hold her nerve. It’s not just me I’m holding together. It’s a line of women coming up behind me.
“No sign of obvious injuries,” I say. I can’t look away, now that I’m staring. Limp hair plastered against their soft little heads, probably blonde when it dries. One has a little yellow ribbon tied in her hair, but the other doesn’t. Maybe that’s how the mother tells them apart; I can’t really spot any other differences. I swallow hard. “Winston?”
The coroner steps closer. “Foam at the mouth and lips,” he says, “but don’t put money on it yet.”
He’s telling me he thinks they drowned, and that’s . . . worse. These babies strapped in, helpless and crying while the car rolls and splashes into this pond. While cold water spills in through the windows and around the door seals. While the compartment fills up.
Someone wanted these children to suffer. Or, at the very least, didn’t give a shit if they did.
There’s nothing else to see here, but I can’t stop staring. The one with closed eyes looks like she’s just fallen asleep, except for the water dripping from her hair, from the feet of the pajamas she’s in. I was shopping for baby clothes earlier. I saw some just like these.
My mouth feels sour when I step away, and the air smells filthy and close. For a second I feel perilously dizzy, and I find my hand pressed to my stomach. I don’t know if I’m trying to soothe myself, or the child still hidden deep in there.