He gasped in, sucking breath, inhaling a rotten egg smell…
Sulfur
.
He wheeled in place, staring around him.
Nothing but piles of gravel and crushed concrete, tangled heaps of rebar.
After a long moment he turned back to the dead flowers. He fumbled his digital camera from his backpack and snapped a few shots, then took a plastic evidence bag from a side pocket of the bag and broke off several of the burned flowers, slipping them into the plastic sheath. He stepped back and scanned the dirt road. It was criss-crossed with tire tracks, an amorphous mess, but he pulled a handful of colored flags from the pack and flagged the brown scorch marks in the grass, and the multiple tire marks in the sand of the road.
On his way back toward the body, he stopped a tech beside the parked crime scene unit van and pointed out the flags he’d placed. “Get impressions of the treads in that area. And there are some burn marks in the grass—get some photos of those, too.”
Landauer met him on the road, his big face flushed red with heat despite the chill, and sucking smoke from probably his fifteenth Camel of the day. “See no evil, speak no evil,” he grumbled, exhaling and jerking a thumb back down the road toward the office trailer. He lit a second cigarette from the one he had burning, carefully dropping the butt into a metal Band-Aid box he carried around at crime scenes for that precise purpose. “These bozos don’t record names or plates, just vehicle size and classification of load. ‘Sanitation Truck, Pick-Up, Trailer, Truck, Dump Trailer.’ ‘Refuse, Stumps and Brush, Concrete, Rebar, Dirt/Asphalt, Brick.’ The attendant doesn’t even leave the trailer—just eyeballs the load through the window, weighs the truck on the in and out, and collects the cash. Next time I got a body to dump, I’m a comin’ here too.”
“How many customers today?
Landauer grimaced. “They average 2,250 a day.”
Garrett’s heart sank. “So this morning…”
“Over nine hundred by noon. Got a patrolman getting Closed Mouth Mary to write down every make, model and color she can remember, but we’re not talking rocket scientist here. And yeah, she collected a few checks, but it’s mostly a cash business. I don’t think we’ll be pulling devil-boy’s name and coordinates off one of those stubs.”
The big detective paused, puffed in smoke. “There is something, though.” He exhaled a noxious cloud and nodded up the trash mountain in the direction of the body. The sun was sinking in the sky, throwing long shadows over the hills. “That whole area was scheduled to be capped this morning. They bulldoze dumploads of dirt, cover it up, level it off.” He indicated a high heap of dirt on the flat road above the trash pit. “Thing is, this morning the front-loader broke down, threw the schedule off.” He pointed to the gigantic vehicle next to the pit.
“So she would have been completely covered if there hadn’t been that glitch,” Garrett said slowly.
She wasn’t meant to be found. And that means carving the numbers and symbol was a private ritual, not done for anyone else to see
.
“He’s familiar with the operation and schedule of this particular landfill, then,” he said aloud with cautious excitement. “A worker, or landscaper or contractor.”
“That’s the best case,” Landauer nodded. “The catch is, a lot of these loads that get emptied are from Dumpsters that get picked up all over the city. Someone coulda just tossed her in the nearest one of those, it gets picked up, and she gets dumped out with the rest of the trash. The Dumpster trucks back up to the pit and are emptied hydraulically, so the driver wouldn’t even see what he was dumping.”
Garrett fought a wave of disappointment. “What about the guy who found her?”
“Worker who came up to repair the dozer.”
Garrett’s eyes immediately traced the distance between the bulldozer and the body far below.
A hundred yards, minimum
.
Landauer watched him calculating.
“Guy’s got good eyes,” Garrett said slowly.
“Says he saw seagulls fighting over something.” Landauer offered, his voice flat.
Garrett glanced at his partner sharply. “You don’t believe him?” In fact the gulls were still circling above, hoping to return to their interrupted meal.
Landauer spat. His face was neutral. “Guy’s skittish, is all.”
Garrett found the mechanic in the office trailer. He sat in front of a raggedy corkboard bristling with invoices and flyers, his hands tearing apart a whitefoam coffee cup a precise quarter inch at a time. He was short and built like a bull, with dark copper skin and an Aztec nose. He hunched in the metal folding chair as if trying to disappear into it.
Garrett’s Spanish was serviceable, but the bilingual version of Severo’s story was identical to what Landauer had related in English. Landauer was right, though; the Mexican was decidedly jumpy—eyes shifting around the room, sweating profusely even in the cold of the underheated trailer.
“
Tienes calor
?” Garrett asked.
Are you hot
? The lone space heater was on the other side of the room; Garrett couldn’t feel any heat coming from it at all.
“
Poco
,” the mechanic said, and his eyes shifted away again. His fingers found the cross at his neck.
“
You seem nervous
.” Garrett remarked in Spanish.
The mechanic half-shrugged. “
It is a terrible thing
,” he answered.
“
It is
,” Garrett agreed. “
Una infamia
.”
An outrage
. It was one of the first Spanish words he’d learned on the street and it seemed to express what he felt better than any English word that existed.
“
Pero—es todo
?” Garrett pressed.
Is that all
? The mechanic dropped his eyes. Garrett looked at the litter of white chips at the man’s feet.“
I think you are afraid
.” Garrett challenged.
The mechanic stiffened, but said nothing.
“
Porque
?” Garrett demanded.
Why
?
The mechanic glanced toward the screened front window, in the direction of the trash hill. The sun was a bloody crimson ball on the horizon.
“
Bruja
,” he mumbled, and Garrett’s flesh rippled again.
Witch
.
* * *
Keep reading for a preview of
THE HARROWING
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Prologue
The memorial was buried deep in an oak grove in the heart of campus. A graceful circle of trees, and the curved marble bench.
On this late November day the grove was dark and hushed, just a whisper of rain that dripped from the thick canopy of branches, leaked down onto the aged marble, streaking the stone with black, like tears.
Vines and brambles had crept over the path, cutting off access to the quiet circle, leaving the bench all but forgotten now, like the students whose names it bore.
Above the layer of rotting leaves covering the seat, they were cut into the marble like names of a tombstone. Five names, a date, and a simple epitaph:
IN MEMORIAM
Five students dead, so long ago.
What could it matter now?
Chapter One
It had been raining since possibly the beginning of time.
In the top tier of the cavernous psychology hall, Robin Stone had long since given up on the lecture. She sat hunched in her seat, staring out arched windows at the downpour, feeling dreamily disconnected from the elemental violence outside, despite the fact that every few minutes the wind shook the building hard enough to rattle the glass of the window panes.
In milder weather Baird College was the very definition of pastoral. Wooded paths meandered between ivy-swathed stone buildings. Grassy hills rolled into the distance, dotted by trees, all unmarred by the slightest sight of civilization.
But now the old oaks lashed in the wind under roiling dark clouds that spilled icy rain on the deserted quad. In the bleak light of the storm, the isolation seemed ominous, the campus hunkered down under the pelting rain like a medieval town waiting for the siege.
The cold of the day had sunk into Robin’s bones. The wind outside was a droning in her ears, like the hollow rush of the sea. Inside, Professor Lister’s soft German accent was soporific, strangely hypnotic, as he spoke of Freud from the wood-planked dais far below.
“
The state of sleep involves a turning-away from the real, external world, and there we have the necessary condition for the development of a psychosis. The harmless dream-psychosis is the result of that withdrawal from the external world which is consciously willed and only temporary
…”
Robin’s moody reflection stared back at her from the window: dark-eyed, somewhat untidy, elfin features framed by a tumble of nearly black hair. All in all, a chance of prettiness if she weren’t so withdrawn, guarded.
She pulled away from the glassy ghost of herself, blinked around her at a sea of students moored behind tiers of wooden desks.
People were shifting restlessly, looking up at the clock above the blackboard. A little before three, Wednesday. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving, and everyone was impatient, anxious to escape for the holiday. Everyone except Robin. The four-day weekend loomed before her like an abyss.
Thanksgiving, right. Thanks for what
?
At least there would be no roommate.
She say with the thought of no Waverly for four days, and felt a spark of something — not pleasure, nothing so life-affirming as that — but a slight relief, a loosening of the concrete band that lately seemed to permanently encircle her chest.
No mindless, venal chatter. No judging cornflower blue eyes.
And no one else either
, Robin reminded herself.
No one at all
.
The anxiety settled in again, a chill of unnamed worry.
Four days in creepy old Mendenhall, completely alone…
The professor’s soft voice whispered in the back of her head. “
In psychosis the turning-away from reality is brought about either by the unconscious repressed becoming excessively strong so that it overwhelms the conscious, or because reality has become so intolerably distressing that the threatened ego throws itself into the arms of the unconscious instinctual forces in a desperate revolt
.”
Robin glanced down at the professor, startled at the confluence of thought. She wrote slowly: “
Reality has become so intolerably distressing
…”
She stopped and quickly scribbled over the words, blackening them out.
Somewhere close another pen scratched furiously across paper. Robin glanced toward the sound.
Across the aisle from her a slight, intense, bespectacled young man was hunched in his seat, scribbling notes as if his life depended on it. A mini-tape recorder on the desk in front of him recorded the lecture as well, in the unlikely event that he missed something.
Robin has seen him a few times around the dorm: pale skin and hollow circles under his eyes behind his glasses, shoulders hunched under the weight of an overstuffed backpack, always scurrying to or from class, as scattered and distracted as the White Rabbit.
He looked younger than the other students. and older, too. Probably skipped a grade or two and rushed into college early, full-throttle, driven by parents or some inner demon of his own. Robin knew something about that.
She studied him, feeling relief in concentrating her attention on something outside herself.
There was a coldness about him, an ancient guardedness that she recognized as unhappiness. His face always set and unsmiling — if possible, more tense and miserable than Robin herself. Yet there was something luminous about him as well, almost holy, something like a monk in his ascetic intensity.
She thought these things with detachment, as from a great distance, merely observing. It did not occur to her to speak to him, or smile, or communicate in any way. It did not seem to her that they were on the same dimensional plane; she watched him through glass, as she watched the storm.
So she was caught completely off guard when the young man turned and looked her straight in her eyes.
She stared back, startled.
The young man immediately blushed behind his glasses and quickly dropped his gaze to his yellow pad.
Robin sat, flustered. The bells in the clock tower above the main plaza outside struck once, sounding the three-quarter hour. A hollow sound, reverberating over the campus.
On the podium below the white-haired professor paused, listening to the bell. The chime died, and he turned back to the class.
“But while Freud contended that the forces which drive us come from within us, our own unconscious, his disciple and colleague, Jung, believed there was a
universal
unconscious around us, populated by ancient forces which exist apart from us, yet interact with and act upon us.” He paused, looked around at the class.
“So who was right? Do our demons come from without, or within us?”
He half-smiled, then closed his binder. “And on that cheery note, we’ll end early, since I know you’re all anxious to get away.”
The class collectively surged to its feet, reaching for coats and notebooks and backpacks in an orgy of release. The professor raised his voice over the tide. “I’ll need all of you to discuss your term paper topics with me, so please make appointments by email. Have a good Thanksgiving.”
Robin closed her notebook and stood, feeling as if she were rising through water, but only part way. The surface seemed far above her. She was drowning in herself.
Nothing
but
herself, for the next four long days.
Do our demons come from without, or within us
?
* * *