That evening, Mike Keller had gone with Ben down to Crossroads where they tilted back a number of beers. “Don’t think less of me for saying this, Ben,” Mike had told him while perched on a bar stool beside him, “but that was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I feel like crying about it a little, too, but it feels like my insides are all dried up.”
That’s how Ben felt now—as if his insides had all dried up.
Brandy returned with her brother’s T-shirt wadded into a ball. She tossed it onto the passenger seat. “Maybe there’s fingerprints on it or something,” she said, and he felt miserable hearing the hope in her voice. “Like they find in those cop shows.”
She’s just a goddamn kid. Life is so unfair.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Thanks again.”
“You got it.”
Brandy shut the door and Ben turned back out onto the road. When he got out of eyeshot of the Crawly residence, he pulled onto the shoulder and put the cruiser in Park. Reaching over, he grabbed the T-shirt off the seat and flapped it open so that it draped itself down the front of the steering wheel.
The front of the shirt looked fine. There was nothing wrong with it.
Chewing again on his lower lip, he turned the shirt over. The small holes in the fabric running down the back of the shirt caused a slight tremor to course through him. Distantly, he felt his left eyelid spasm.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered. His words seemed to shatter like glass as they came out of his mouth and his whole face felt like it was on fire. On the radio, Springsteen sang about going down to the river, as if it were some sort of baptism, a holy rite. “What’s going on around here?” Ben muttered, his breath fogging up the windshield.
Chapter Eleven
1
Ben’s discomfort only intensified by the time he returned to the station. He carried with him the balled-up T-shirt Brandy Crawly had given him—the T-shirt with the peculiar but all-too-familiar series of puncture marks down its back—and a sense of nonspecific apprehension.
Blessedly, the Batter’s Box was empty. He went straight to his desk, flipped open the case file on the unidentified boy, and set the T-shirt down on his desk. As he looked over the photographs in the file, he flattened out the shirt and spread it out along his desktop. The line of tiny, frayed holes along the back of the shirt stared up at him. A tasteless lump formed at the back of Ben’s throat.
There it was—one of the photos of the unidentified boy. Mike Keller had taken these pictures, crouching down over the bloated and pallid corpse and snapping shots like a consummate professional. (It wasn’t until later, knocking back those beers at Crossroads, that Mike told him just how much he had been affected by the boy’s body, and how he was sure to lose much sleep over what he’d seen.) He’d taken photos of the body just as they’d found it—facedown, one bony arm crooked in a nest of reeds, one leg partially submerged in the brown, brackish water. Looking at the photo now, Ben could see the twin shoulder blades at the child’s back…the S-shaped curve of the boy’s spine…the bloated hubs of the boy’s buttocks…
There were four small puncture marks trailing down the boy’s back, the first one starting from just between the shoulder blades while the final one ended just above the boy’s buttocks. Peculiar little holes drilled right into the fishy flesh…
Ben examined Matthew Crawly’s T-shirt again. Smoothing it out along his desk, he counted one, two, three, four holes running vertically down the back.
There was a connection here…
He just didn’t know what it was.
Fifteen minutes later, he was listening to the telephone ring a number of times before John Deets of the county coroner’s office picked up.
“John, it’s Ben Journell over in Stillwater.”
“You sound panicked.”
“Christ. Is it that obvious?”
“What is it?”
Ben closed his eyes, attempted to catch his breath. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer and more decisive. “First off, is there any news on the whereabouts of the boy’s body?”
“No. No one saw a thing. No one had even come in here in the two days before the body went missing. It’s an anomaly, Ben. I’m really embarrassed about all this, you have no idea.” John Deets laughed nervously on the other end of the line. “It’s like the fucking thing got up and walked out on its own.”
Again, Ben closed his eyes, then said, “Those marks on the boy’s back. Do you remember?”
“Yes. Circular puncture marks.”
“Did you get a chance to identify them before the body went missing?”
“Officially?” Deets sighed like a locomotive. “No.”
“Unofficially?” Ben prompted.
“Unofficially, they looked like the kind of wound a scorpion makes with the stinger on the end of its tail.”
“A scorpion?”
“Yeah,” Deets said, “if the fucking scorpion was the size of a grizzly bear.”
Ben made a clicking sound way back in his throat.
“I never got a chance to do an autopsy, Ben. Nothing I can tell you has any scientific backing. You understand that, right?”
“How deep did those puncture wounds look? Like, could those have been the cause of death?”
“I can’t really say for sure. I examined one of the wounds and it looked like it went straight through the tissue down to the vertebrae. Maybe the kid fell on a two-by-four that had some nails poking up from it.”
“Why’d you say it looked like a scorpion’s wounds?”
“Hell, Ben,” Deets said, and Ben could tell the coroner was already regretting having made the comment to him. “It’s just the first thing that came to my mind.”
“Why?” he pressed.
“Because when I used to live in Albuquerque, a neighbor’s kid got stung by a scorpion on the back of his hand. The wound looked identical to the wounds on the back of the kid you shipped over to me—the entry small and hooked, not straight in, and the surrounding area of flesh irritated, red, puffy…Christ, Ben, I don’t know…”
He was staring at Mike Keller’s photos of the dead boy in the case file. “Okay. You’ll call me if you hear anything else?”
“You know I will.”
“Thanks, John.”
“What’s going on out there, Ben?”
He drummed his fingers on the photographs of the dead boy. “I don’t know,” he told the coroner. “I don’t know.”
2
What had been seated at the back of John Deets’s mind during his discussion with Sergeant Ben Journell was the comment Dougie Overland, one of the morgue attendees, had made after being questioned on the whereabouts of the unidentified boy’s body. Dougie, who was in his twenties and had blue-dyed hair and gold hoop earrings, had assured Deets that no one had come into the facility the night he was on duty, which happened to be the night the boy’s body disappeared. What bothered Deets—and what he found himself unable to relay to Ben, lest he feel like a complete fool—was what Dougie Overland had admitted to later that evening: that he swore, on a few occasions, he could hear muted thumping sounds coming from the room where they kept the bodies in their steel drawers. “It was like someone was trying to get out,” Dougie had said.
3
After he hung up with Deets, Ben went into the dispatcher’s office where Shirley monitored the phones. On the console, a small television set showed one of Shirley’s soap operas.
“Hey, Ben.”
“Hey, Shirl. You got the chief’s personal cell number handy?”
Both of Shirley’s eyebrows arched. “His
personal
cell?”
“I want to bring him up to speed. I’m not…I’m a little overwhelmed here, hon. Know what I mean?”
She leaned forward and lowered the volume on her portable TV. Sliding her bifocals down her stubby nose, she stared hard at Ben. “People are saying we got some wild animal killing off livestock around town,” she said. It was not a question. “People are saying it could be a bear or a cougar or something. Other people, they’re saying it might even be something else.”
“Something else?” Ben said.
She gave him a look that suggested she knew more than she was willing to let on. “Did something eat all of Porter Conroy’s cows this past weekend? Be honest with me.”
“Something got at them,” he acknowledged. “Ted Minksy’s goats, too.”
“People are starting to worry, Ben.”
So am I,
he felt like adding.
Shirley scribbled Chief Harris’s personal cell phone number down on a Post-it and handed it over to Ben. He looked at it then folded it up and stuck it in his pocket. He knew Harris would be annoyed at the interruption in his vacation with his wife, but things were getting out of hand.
One of the phones lit up and started ringing. Shirley’s sharp eyes lingered on him for a moment longer before she turned to address the telephone, picking it up and pressing it to her ear. Into the receiver, she said, “Stillwater Police Department,” then went silent as she listened to the caller on the other end of the line.
Ben went out into the hall and stared for a time at the shafts of daylight that angled in through the wire-meshed windows. He thought he heard someone moving around at the far end of the hall. He went down there and peered into the chief’s empty office, one of the supply closets, and eventually into lockup. Three jail cells lined the far wall, and the first two were unoccupied. A slovenly dressed figure sat hunched over on the bench in the third cell, a mane of iron-colored hair draped down over the man’s face.
Ben walked up to the cell, taking in the familiar, unwashed scent of the lockup’s most frequent visitor. “Hello, Pete.”
Pete Poole, more infamously known as Poorhouse Pete to the guys at the station, looked up at Ben. The man’s face was blotchy and haggard, his eyes red-rimmed and moist. Whitish beard stubble looked like it had been hastily applied with a paintbrush.
Pete shook like a tuning fork. “Hi, Ben.”
“How come you’re still here? You haven’t sobered up yet, bud?”
“Ain’t come in drunk,” Pete advised him. “Not this time.”
“Then what are you doing in here?”
“Knocking over trash cans on Hamilton.”
“Why would you do that, Pete?”
“Wanted to get arrested.”
Ben dragged over a wooden chair from behind one of the desks and sat before the cell. “And why would you want to do
that?
It’s not that cold out yet.” Once the weather grew cold and winter came, Ben could always count on Pete Poole to act up and cause a scene with hopes of getting locked up and thus be given a warm place to sleep and some hot meals. Everyone knew the routine and, last year, Shirley had even bought Pete a Christmas present—a knitted cap and some gloves—which she’d placed in the cell while awaiting the man’s inevitable Yuletide arrival.
“Don’t wanna be out there on them streets tonight,” Pete said. His long hands shook fiercely in his lap. “Things are fallin’ apart out there, Ben, and I’m gettin’ a little scared.”
Ben leaned closer to the bars of the cell. “What’s falling apart, Pete? Tell me what’s going on out there.”
“It’s not something I can see,” Pete said, also leaning toward Ben. “I can feel it, though. I feel it the way some animals feel it when a storm’s coming. It’s in my bones.”
“What is?”
“Uneasiness.” Pete placed one hand against his abdomen. “Makes me sick to my stomach.”
I know the feeling, old friend,
Ben thought.
“Can I tell you something…without you thinking I’m crazy?” Pete asked.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
Pete shuffled his feet beneath the bench. He was wearing scuffed boots with high laces, the cuffs of his pants tucked into them. “First off,” the man began, “I wasn’t always this guy sittin’ here. You know what I mean? I came from someplace else and had things in my life, Ben. You’ve known me as old Poorhouse Pete—”
“Now, Pete—” Ben began.
“—and that’s just fine, but that ain’t who I always been.” Pete cleared his throat and Ben could see his eyes welling up. When he opened his mouth again to speak, his lower lip quivered. “I once was married, did you know it? Way out in a different part of the country. I was much younger and damn if some ladies didn’t think I was a fine-looking fellow.”
Ben smiled sadly at the man.
“We had a daughter and she lived to be five years old,” Pete said. “She was a beautiful child and the light of my life.”
Ben felt his body go numb. “Oh, Pete. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Was struck and killed by a drunk driver right out in the street where she was playing,” Pete said. “Right in front of our house.” Pete looked at him, his colorless eyes like chunks of granite, his complexion as ruined and asymmetrical as a topographical map of the Sahara Desert. “Well, as you can see, a tragedy like that breaks a man down. People say men are stronger than women, and maybe in some regards that’s even true, but not when it comes to the people we love being taken away. My Holly. My little girl, Holly.” He made a quavering, paper-thin sound. “Maybe I’m weak because I wound up here, all the way at the opposite end of the country, covered in filthy clothing and drinking too much whenever I have enough money to do so. Maybe that makes me weak, Ben. I don’t know.” He held up one crooked finger. The fingernail was black. “But what I
do
know…”