Headlights(25)

The three recent murders deviated from those before the hiatus in that the killers did not eat the skinned victims before walking down the side of the road. And then there comes Hannah with a dead man’s tongue in her mouth. Hannah, alive, the first in all this.

I’ve visited every family of every victim and killer from before, their places of work, interviewed their colleagues, friends, exes, bosses, neighbors. Stepped inside their homes, seen their cars and pets and children and lives. Lives that are over now, every one of them put away forever, or put in the ground.

Geese honk as they waddle down the street outside the detention center. The city is overrun with them. I read that recently the goose populations have gotten so out of control that the city is now feeding the birds to the ever-growing unhoused human population. This city somehow sprawling with new homes, and more and more people who don’t have one.

I pull into the jail parking facility. Josie is calling. I hesitate, consider not answering, but then … I clear my throat. “Josie. Hi.”

“Wow,” she says.

“What?” I say.

“You sound like before.”

I sigh. “What do you want?”

“I think we should talk.”

“About?”

“You know what about.”

Her voice still makes my heart do something stupid in my chest. And maybe, as a goose waddles out into the street in front of my car, as the evening grows colder in a town I’d rather do fucking anything than be in, maybe I feel resentment in this moment too.

I put the car in park.

“I gotta go, Jo,” I say. And I force myself to hang up.



* * *



Everett Brown sits in the chair across from me, large ears, slightly unkempt hair. Dark circles. He looks as haunted as the others before him did, but there’s an air of acceptance about him, surrender. He’s thin, thirty-six years old, just two years older than me. We probably grew up on the same shows, same ads, same prom playlists. But while I’ve been training, strategizing, running and lifting and investigating, he’s been in libraries, in classrooms, theorizing, learning. I wonder if that’s more the life my parents envisioned for me. Doesn’t matter now.

“You doin’ okay in here?” I ask.

Everett nods. His hands are shaking, just a little. Of course he’s not okay.

“Good,” I say and lean back in my chair, think about the terror on his face in the bar. This guy who taped Hannah Lawrence and the John Doe to the bed. This man who’s been in those chat rooms. “I know my colleague already came in and interviewed you,” I say. “But do you mind if we just start over, from the beginning?”

“I dunno, got a lot of important places to be,” he says. Then, after a second, “Sure.”

“Could we start with what you remember from that night?”

His eyes go distant. He rubs his ear.

“Um, I was on an evening walk,” he says. “After getting back from work, before dinner.”

“Four days ago,” I say.

“I … I guess so. I don’t know.”

“Says here it’s what your wife said.”

“When can I see her again?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say. “You went for a walk straight out your front door.”

He nods, defeated. “I was just a few streets over, on Sagebrush. It was just at the beginning. I do it every night.”

“How long do you normally walk for?”

“Thirty minutes, sometimes an hour.”

“And you stay in your development normally?”

“Yeah.”

I nod. “Okay. You’re walking on Sagebrush. Then what?”

“It was like … Have you ever read any of that stuff about time and space being a fabric and theoretically it could be folded and changed the way we perceive it? Or move us somewhere else entirely? Not linear and not fixed points, you know, but it can be … adjusted. It’s not my area of expertise. I don’t know if it makes sense, but that’s the best I can do, I guess. To explain it. That’s what it felt like.”

I turn his answer over for a moment, let it hang.

“What is your area of expertise?” I ask.

“Organismal ecology. Basically the way living organisms relate to each other.”

“And you’ve always wanted to do that?”

“I was in cellular biology, before. It was the wolf reintroductions that got me interested.”

“That what made you hit a cop? That stuff gets pretty heated.”

He blinks. “No, that was … No.”

“So … the wolves. It’s been controversial?”

He lets out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”

I watch him.

“When settlers got here,” he says, “they immediately killed off all the bison and elk, shipped ’em back east. That was the wolves’ food source. Those same men brought in livestock, stuck penned-in cows on the plains. Wolves had to eat, and now they had nothing else. And the trappers needed a frontier enemy, besides Native folks—and we all know how the Europeans treated them. The wolves became that. The emblematic epitome of the wild. If the frontiersmen could dominate the wolves, then they’d have proven to the world that they’d beaten the West into submission. The land was officially theirs. They strung up the wolves’ carcasses by the hundreds. Next thing we know, gray wolves—the most widely distributed predatory mammal in the world, this keystone animal—we shrank their territory to nothing, and they became the villains in our storybooks and the trophies on our mantels. Otherwise, just a distant memory.”