Headlights(7)

There is a word he doesn’t want to say. The one the internet has so lovingly bestowed on the killers who walk the highways, wearing or dragging human skins. The one the public decided is bad luck. The word spreading on whispers, as if having a name could possibly make these murders worse. Drifters, they call them.

“Turn it off,” I say.

Jack reaches forward. The sound cuts. We don’t need to hear it.

Pete Noland, like all the rest, blacked out in the dark of the Colorado night. He came back to consciousness hours later on the side of a highway miles from where he started, naked and wearing the skin of a person he’d ostensibly never met before like a cloak. With a single brown hair tied around his tongue in a knot, a hair that did not belong to him, or his girlfriend, or the victim, or anyone else he knew, and which was an exact DNA match to every one of the hairs pulled out of every mouth of every one of the killers.

The victims’ blood under the Drifters’ fingernails, in every case. Eight killers and eight victims over the course of a year, six years ago. Eight strands of one person’s hair tied around their tongues, staying in place through the Drifters’ eating of the bodies, or tied there after eating. Or the Drifters aren’t the ones eating the bodies. We just don’t know. And the phones—both the victims’ and the Drifters’. We get a warrant with the cell phone companies. And every time, the data stops right around the time and location the Drifter would have intercepted the victim. Just glitches and goes black. Sometimes we find the phones with the victims’ bodies, sometimes with the Drifters’ and the victims’ clothes. But they never yield any information. All of it a shitstorm of we don’t know.

And everything coming to an abrupt stop five years ago, a year after the murders started.

Pete’s victim, the skin he carried, a forty-one-year-old single mother of two nurse practitioner who was walking home from work to relieve her ex-mother-in-law of babysitting when she was intercepted. Ramona Lopez, like the others, was skinned alive with an unrecovered knife—the striation marks on the skin matching those of a dull blade, like all the others—and tossed in a drainage pipe beneath the road about ten miles back from where Pete regained consciousness.

“You said there were two,” I hear myself say. Everything happening in a way that doesn’t quite add up with the natural progression of time, a delay between words and thoughts. A strange sort of pressure in the air. The déjà vu of being back in a place I never thought I’d ever step foot in again. Somehow suddenly being a person I never thought I’d be again.

Jack tosses me another file. Same story, more or less. Thirty-two-year-old highway patrolwoman came to consciousness wearing the skin of a fifty-eight-year-old male gas station attendant. Hair in her mouth tied around her tongue. Like all the others, like Pete, she was barefoot and naked, walking on the side of the highway, covered in blood. Her victim found just the same as Pete’s, skinned alive in a different drainage pipe on a different stretch of road. Both the killers’ and the victims’ clothing left piled near the body, just like all the ones before. Her dashcam and bodycam glitched out at the time of the murder, static and black screen, like seemingly every security camera and cell phone and electronic device within one hundred feet of the crimes.

Both cases look identical to the old ones, except—

“They didn’t eat the victims after they skinned them,” I say. Again, that strange delay.

“No.” Jack looks thoughtfully at the teenager through the glass. “This time they didn’t.”

He doesn’t have to say they don’t know why. Why these people would do this, why they wouldn’t remember any of it. Why it started, why it stopped, why it’s back again. We don’t know why is the whole of this fucking nightmare and has been from the beginning. The cannibalism of the corpses is public knowledge. Why would someone change it now, copycat or otherwise?

The one piece that is not public knowledge, the piece of evidence we’ve managed to keep under wraps even now, are the hairs tied around the killers’ tongues. I check the files even though Jack already told me. These two new hair strands are a match to all the ones from before.

Eight murders, all taking place in and just outside Denver. And eight dead bodies, seemingly random. No gender, age, ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic patterns. This thing, seemingly indiscriminate, both among the killers and the victims.

And then one day the murders just stopped. We knew nothing. And we had the families of sixteen victims as far as I was concerned, to deal with, not just eight. And there was the press. We couldn’t squash it, one true crime podcast picked it up and then suddenly the whole of the internet was taking it upon themselves to solve the case for us, muddling any information we may have found. Oliver Wright, the father of the first victim and a prominent real estate developer in town, put all his resources into making sure each case was taken to court and the Drifters were convicted and kept in jail.

And us, scouring the whole of the state to try and solve even some small piece of this puzzle. Nothing. This case that’s destroyed so many lives. Small pittance compared to what the others suffered, but it destroyed my marriage, any sense of self I’d cobbled together over the years. And then.

Just over a year after the last murder, and about a month after Josie left me for good, my parents and I were on our way to a show at Red Rocks, and a drunk driver in a semitruck smashed the left side of the car. The left side of the car where they both were sitting. By the time I woke up in the hospital, they were already gone.