“You know,” Kristen said. Her chin quivered. “For a detective, you’re not very observant, are you?”
Her grin was celestial as she held up her hand. On her left ring finger, Kristen wore a small band studded with twinkling diamonds.
Saffy could not name the despair. It was shallow, crude, the sour taste of milk gone bad. She registered it only long enough to twist herself, arrange her face into the appropriate expression of joy. Kristen let out an excited, shrieking squeal, and the bitterness cracked and fled as Saffy pulled her friend in for a hug. She let the smell of Kristen’s hair products engulf her, with the knowledge she’d harbored for a while now—Kristen was Saffy’s only family, and soon Kristen would not belong to her.
They talked through the evening. They forgot about the movie and about the pizza; it burned so badly that the kitchen filled with smoke and they could only eat the blackened pepperonis off the top. They fell asleep like they used to, head to toe, Kristen’s foot nestled warm beneath Saffy’s shoulder.
The obsession burrowed sometime in the night. Saffy woke up still wearing her jeans, her hand wedged between the couch cushions, that old smell lingering noxious in her throat. Marshy grass, sunscreen. Decomposing skin. The decay of those squirrels, little arms splayed helpless. Kristen was gone—at some point, Jake must have come home. As Saffy studied the detritus of their night, the bloody pizza stripped of its cheesy skin, Kristen’s wineglass greasy with fingerprints, she felt queasy.
Early Sunday morning, and the country roads were empty. Saffy rolled down the window of her patrol car, let the fresh air kiss her oncoming headache. The autumn sun blasted through the trees, dancing shadows along the pavement.
Finally, she reached the trailer park.
It was farther out from the rest of them, Olympia had told her. Like, all the way back. It didn’t look like there should be anything over there.
A mile from where they’d found the bodies, Saffy counted twelve mobile homes. They loomed in the morning mist, arranged in the vague shape of a V. She could hear a small dog yapping, a television murmuring. A phlegmy cough. Saffy climbed out of her car, creeping past a Rottweiler on a chain, its nose twitching at the crunch of her boots.
Olympia was right. At the very edge of the property, there was a single trailer, set fifty feet back from the rest, nearly invisible in the thicket of ruby red trees. Saffy walked circles around the plot, her badge clutched loose in her palm, still wearing her jeans and wrinkled top from the day before.
She took the creaky steps one by one. She cleared her throat. Rapped on the door.
It opened to a middle-aged man. He wore a pair of ripped boxer shorts and the scabbed face of an addict. She could see a television in the background, playing static noise, a table covered in old beer bottles, a cat that looked like it hadn’t been fed in weeks.
“Yeah?”
For an excruciating instant, Saffy inhaled stale smoke, sour breath. She did not know what she thought she’d find. Evidence of Ansel’s life, maybe. Something, anything. Her own cluelessness now felt distinctly dangerous.
“Hey,” the man called to Saffy’s back as she turned away. “What do you want?”
She ran.
When Saffy cracked the Hunter case, the captain had been thrilled. You’ve got something special here, he’d said to Moretti, congratulating. But Saffy had not felt special. She’d wanted to ask Moretti if every case would feel like this: the dizzying rush of surety, followed by a gnawing, feral fear. A fear that felt oddly addictive. There was something alive in Saffy’s cells, feeding hungry on such doubt—it was sick, tainted, and it had grown like a tree, curious as it twisted upward. It had driven her to the edge of ruin, all those years ago. It had driven her to police work; it had driven her right to this trailer park.
By the time she reached the highway, Saffy’s headache had turned splitting. She stepped on the gas, her hair falling in her face as the engine revved faster, until she had reached a hundred miles an hour and she was certain she had nothing left inside, until she opened her mouth to the blank highway and let out the deepest darkest blackest scream.
*
In the days that followed, Saffy lost control of her desk. The case swallowed her up, sucked her into its undertow. It had been a week since they’d found the bodies, and Saffy could not remember the last real meal she’d eaten. Drive-through fast food, days ago—she’d been subsisting otherwise on coffee and granola bars, her stomach growling at her desk late into the night. She’d returned to her apartment only twice, to shower and pack a duffel bag of clothes.