Headlights(54)

“How’s Tess?” I ask. I’d always liked her girlfriend.

Daphne’s face darkens, and we’re handed our drinks. “Cheers,” she says.

“Cosmo?” I ask.

“Mocktail,” she says. “I don’t drink anymore. Three years in about a month.”

“Wow,” I say. “Congratulations.” I think that’s the appropriate response?

She snorts a laugh. “Thanks. It’s been the right move for me.”

“What prompted it? Or … if you don’t want to—”

“Tess isn’t—” She clears her throat. “We’re not, um…”

“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

The waiter appears, and I lift the menu. I’m still not hungry, am about to say as much when Daphne says, “She died.”

I lower the menu and look at her. The waiter pauses.

“It was sudden,” Daphne says. “Some genetic thing we didn’t know about. She died, and my life sucked. Really bad. And I drank too much, and that’s why I … stopped. After a while.”

“When?” I say. “When did she—”

“About a month after you left,” she says.

“I’m gonna give you two a minute,” the waiter says. I drop the menu to the table.

“Daphne, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you…?”

She shrugs again. “You weren’t here, and it was pretty clear you didn’t want to be.”

Fuck. “I’m sorry,” I say again. How can I ever say it enough?

We talk about life. About everything I missed. About what a shit friend I am and how much I miss her, and Jack, and everything about life before it all fell apart. She gets cold, and I give her my jacket. It’s not the same. I can feel that a part of her has shut me out, and may not ever let me back in. Has maybe shut the world out. But who could blame her?

“What’s the latest?” she asks, and I know she means the case.

“Um, I have a thought,” I say. “But I don’t know if I’m crazy.” I pull out my phone. “Look at this.” I hand it over to her.

“I am looking at … meat.”

“Right. Ribs, actually, just close up. I took a bite, and I saw it, and…”

“You’re thinking of the teeth thing.”

“Yeah. Why didn’t we pursue that more? I always had a feeling about it. Or I mean … it always seemed like something to follow.”

“Well, because it only definitively applied to some of the bodies, and because bite mark forensics are a pretty imprecise science at best.”

“But did we ever call in to any dentists, or—”

“You mean start calling all the dentists in the greater Denver area and asking if they’ve got a client with one chipped or veneered canine?”

“No, I mean getting the dental records of each of the Drifters and then maybe going beyond if that doesn’t yield anything.”

“Yeah, if you want to pursue that, you can, but even if one of them matched, it’s not enough to convict them. And they’re already convicted, or at least detained indefinitely, the ones who haven’t killed themselves. What you’d need is to see if anyone else’s teeth marks match, if some outside party lost or broke a canine right then—but that leads us back to how would you begin to narrow down a whole city, maybe a whole state, to someone who went in for dental work around that time. Assuming they would go to a dentist. Assuming we know that they had the tooth the whole time up to that point. Assuming it’s all the same outside person who ate all the bodies, maybe the one who the hair belongs to, but it’s just assuming so much that—”

I rub my hands over my face. “Yeah, I get it,” I say. “Bad lead. Not a lead, I guess.”

“Makes sense,” she says. “Hoping. Sometimes life makes it hard. But it’s good to do it.”

I nod. “I’m so sorry, Daphne,” I say.

She toys with her fork. “I look at dead people all day long, and I never really got it. Till Tess. Feels like someone turned off a light switch, and I’m just stumbling around in the dark trying to find it, to flip it back on. But it just … can’t be flipped back. This thing, it just happens once and then it’s done. Forever. It’s so unimaginably cruel. And then you just think like, who could be shitty enough to flip it off in the first place? Who would ever do that? To find your person, that one person you want to spend your whole life with, who gets you and completes you, and then…”

The Linger Eatuary sign flickers, and everyone around us eats and laughs and talks and thinks and feels. This restaurant and this city and this state and this world. The dark of Denver night, hovering beyond the glow of this rooftop.

“Look,” she says. “I don’t mean to be … You know what, screw it, grief makes you just say stuff. If I’m being honest, I never thought Josie was your one. Like if there is a one, she just … I mean, she’s great, but like. I don’t know. She’s always gotten the brighter parts of you, but there’s a lot of you that’s—”

“Dark?”

“Yeah. Kind of. It’s not a bad thing. Some of us are just … We’ve just been places, is all. Or maybe we’re just wired a way to begin with. But she and Tillman make sense to me. I think when you’re ready you’ll find someone new. Maybe someone you don’t have to try and be like a version of yourself with. But just … you.”