Headlights(14)

The grass moves.

On the left.

I turn, whip the beam through the field.

No. Shit. My right.

I swing the light—

VOOM.

Darkness.

A crack. Behind me.

I smell something now, though I can’t say exactly what it is. Old, forgotten. Like … a memory just out of grasp. Bitter, maybe a little chemical.

VOOM.

Everett Brown’s screams, echoed on the wind. Surging, growing, stampeding.

I turn again.

“Shit, Stansfield!”

I turn back, heart thundering.

I’m far … so far from them. From the road. That can’t be right, can it? A hundred meters, more. It was just a few steps. I shine the light again, and …

That … pressure.

That sound.

Jack calls again.

I wait. Watch, and listen.

But there’s no sound, no rustling.

Just a gentle sway in the wind, throughout the field. Grass bowing under its sweeping weight.

Still … I take another step, away from Jack.

Something pulling. Wanting.

The night. Or something in it. It’s almost …

Alive.

“Stansfield! They found him!”



* * *



A drainpipe off the side of the highway ten miles northeast. DPD and FBI swarming the grass on both sides of the highway, blocking the whole thing off.

Jack stops on the road past the barricade to talk to the other detectives, assesses the scene.

I move to follow him, and someone’s hand is on my chest. I look down at it, then up at a young guy in a DPD jacket. “This is an active crime scene,” he says. “You need valid identification.”

The female agent next to him, older than me, shakes her head at the kid. She stares openly, lifts the corner of her mouth in a smile. I just step past them when she says to him, “You don’t know who that is?”

Low grass gives way beneath my boots, heading down into the muddy ditch beside the road, the ground slipping, shifting. Nothing visible beyond our floodlights. Whatever I felt in the field before didn’t follow us here. Or what I imagined in the field.

Here, now, beneath the crime scene tent, a small hunched figure crouches at the edge of the floodlight on the grass, maybe fifteen feet from the asphalt, a series of items laid in front of and beside her on two tarps on the ground. The crime scene photographer moves around, documenting the items, camera flashing at the tarp next to her, the yellow evidence markers. I’d looked for her, at the bar, but she wasn’t there. My chest tightens, seeing her now.

“Daphne,” I say. “Anything good?”

The woman’s head turns slowly until nearly black eyes land on my face. She’s changed her hair a little, has new glasses. But otherwise the same. She maintains her crouch and neutral expression and says, “Daniel is back, is he?” Doing her Gollum impression, one she does because it makes me uncomfortable. And because it also sometimes makes me laugh.

“For tonight, my precious,” I say.

The photographer steps over to talk to someone. I bend down beside Daphne, the familiar feel of her eyes on my skin, taking me in as though I were one of the thousands of insect specimens she keeps pinned to the walls inside her home. Always smelling faintly of chemicals and carrying in her purse at all times a cyanide killing jar in case she should happen upon something “wonderful.”

“Just pieces,” she says. Shreds of fabric and skin that she’s assembled on the cloth in front of her. She’s already bagged up a hand. The photographer steps in and snaps a few more photos. The shadows move. I feel her watching me again.

“We were told they’d found the body,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Just the hands and feet, a couple slivers of skin. And the killer’s clothes, I would guess. They said he was quite tall, at the bar. And these,” she says, indicating the body parts in front of her, “make me think the victim is smaller.”

“Only one set of clothing?”

She nods, eyes unblinking. She’s thinking.

Chaos, all around. Jack swearing, shouting at the cops. Saying they shouldn’t have said they found a body if they didn’t find a fucking body. Radio chatter, rerouted traffic.

We’re closer in now, nearer to houses and stores. Some kind of new residential development a handful of miles away. Their light bleeds through to us, at the edges of the night. Hanging even more otherworldly in this unusual fog.

Crickets in the grass. Too many voices.

A pile of items on a tarp, a couple feet from us. A Styrofoam gas station cup, food wrappers, a cigarette pack, small pieces of plastic. Tons of them. Shit that crowds the earth, multiplies faster than we do. Daphne’s made the pile, cleared every item of mud in her floodlight. Put the yellow markers beside them.

“This all come from the drainpipe?” I ask, bending down beside her.

She nods. “Just past it in the grass. They’re all looking for more now.”

Mud all over her gloved hands. “Where’d you dig?” I ask.

She glances to me. “Knew you’d be back. The others didn’t think so, but I knew.”

“I don’t know where I am,” I say.

“You used to be good at this.”

Anyone else, and I’d bristle. But it’s Daphne. “Maybe. Not now.”