Headlights(52)

* * *



South of Denver, near the giant Cabela’s and the hospital that now sit just up the highway from the Happy/Wander Inn, is a new restaurant overlooking I-25 and all the surrounding new developments. A higher-end establishment than has ever been here before. Steel beams, brick, and glass perched on the side of the hill, a glass wall in front of me looking over the highway, the land around it. All the new identical houses. The lowering sun casts its orange glow over the sea of brown rooves, the perpetual sprawl.

I think of Oliver Wright. He’s got every resource, maybe he could coerce the Drifters into killing, promise them massive payouts, pull their families out of debt or ensure healthcare or who knows what.

But twice now—in Mama Tried and in the Happy Inn—this thing has seemingly targeted me specifically. Could it be because I was assigned to the Drifter murder investigation and didn’t save his daughter in time the night she was taken? But I was assigned to the case long after her body was found and after the next murder had taken place. It was a DPD issue before we deemed it serial, and FBI wasn’t a part of it. And why the pageantry of Hannah and the motel?

I sit down at a brown leather and redbrick booth in the brown leather and redbrick restaurant. The place seems to say, we are cattlemen, and we talk around oil deals in our ostrich boots over dishes that probably all have meat in them even if it doesn’t say it on the menu. I ask the waitress for a beer and whatever food she thinks is best here. A shadow comes to the table with her, waits close behind as she writes down my order. I look up, and my eyes catch on the round metal industrial candelabras. They almost look like giant leghold animal traps.

I search to see if Oliver Wright owns this property too, and all I can find is another LLC. All these people who have everything, finding loopholes and ways to own it all, to hold no liability and pay taxes like they own none of it. I think of Everett Brown, walking around Rock Creek. What is it to own anything when we die after eighty years and it just goes to someone else? We’re renting it for the duration of our time here. Pretending that we can own land. As if it wasn’t here millions of years before us and won’t be here millions of years after. As if we’re not all living on borrowed time. No matter how much concrete and brick we pour on it.

I get a message from Frazier. Pete Noland’s girlfriend, Lucy Wheely, has been calling us nonstop. Says Pete was the only person taking care of his grandmother, wants someone to go make sure she’s okay. Sorry. She’s been really persistent.

I text back. Send me the info I’ll take care of it.

The waitress sets a plate and a glass down in front of me, and I thank her. She’s given me barbecue ribs and some sides. I take a sip of the beer and look out over I-25, try to remember if I can recall being on this stretch of the highway. We would have driven it so many times, Rose and me, going between the Happy Inn and the city.

Mom on the rock in the river, unpacking our picnic.

I love you, my Danny boy. You know that, right? You know how much I love you?

I blink. What is this memory? Where were we? Why is it—

I take a breath, press my palms to my eyes. Am I just hallucinating things now that never happened?

I pick up a rib and make myself take a bite. They’re beef ribs, thick. It takes a big bite to get through. Everett and Mona Brown and the chat room, Wizdumteller. All the killers, all the victims. How could any one of them know about my life before? Why would they care?

The resignation on Everett’s face, the pain on Pete Noland’s. My stomach turns, and I set the food down. Pete Noland sitting alone in a cell shit-terrified about his grandmother, about everything. Kimberly Chen in another one no longer able to call her brother every night. To be with her cat.

Claire Wright murdered in the most brutal way possible at fourteen years old. Oliver left alone having to face every day with that understanding.

What I want is liquor. What I want is to never have come here at all. Denver, Whileago. If I remove myself, does it all stop? It started again when I was in Salt Lake, when I was about to leave for California. Was it because I was about to leave? Someone wanted to draw me back here, and now that they’ve got me … for what? What could they possibly want? And how could they have known what my plans were?

I take another deep breath. I gotta get home and listen to the recording of Tillman and Mona Brown’s interview. See if there’s anything salvageable from it. I text him, remind him to send it to me.

I call over the waitress for the check, that shadow following her, and she asks me if I want a box for the food. I automatically say yes, glance down at it.

And—

The meat on the rib.

The bite I’ve taken out of it. I stare, and gears start turning, ideas moving, memory, thought.

What’s always bothered me about the photos of the bite marks. Those last two bodies before the hiatus, bite marks that showed a long string of meat to the right of the middle of the bite. As if one tooth just didn’t sink in all the way. That one sliver of meat hanging on. A missing or broken canine. My bite here, clean.

I take another, look at it. Clean. Another. On another rib. Look at it.

Frank Wheely and the photos of the cows. Wolf depredation.

Teeth marks.

I know it doesn’t mean anything, that we deemed it a dead end. And maybe I’m just grasping. Of course I am. But … the way the meat just hung on, just one or two bites where we could see it, on each of the last two bodies.