by Adam Johnson
We were coming off our dinner break on a rainy Saturday when the call came in that a dogwalker had discovered a dead body on one of the trails that winds through the town. From the location I knew it was close to a homeless camp that had set up in the late summer and dug in despite numerous official attempts to close them down or move them. If one of the homeless residents had gotten himself killed, that was going to complicate things for all of them.
I told the dispatcher we were on our way and there was a long pause on the radio.
“Jay?” Rhonda said, “be advised the guy who called it in says it’s bad.” She lowered her voice on the word “bad” to let me know it was serious.
I looked over at Erin. She looked skeptical. “Bad,” she repeated. I shrugged. Animal attacks aren’t unknown on the trails—I’d seen coyotes slinking around, and bobcats too. Even a pack of raccoons could mess someone up and they were all over town, rummaging through trash cans and killing cats. I hoped we weren’t dealing with a rabid animal situation.
As it turned out, we weren’t.
***
Crime scenes are bad enough during the day, but at night, with all the sinister shadows cast by the work lights, they look like bad, low-budget horror movies. To make things even more macabre, it had begun raining, so all the first responders were wearing dark rain capes that made them look like cartoon vampires or giant ravens.
Vernee, the department’s lone CSI tech, was leaning against her car smoking a cigarette when we pulled up. She looked shaken and in the greenish light her face looked drawn. That was my first clue that Rhonda hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the spectacle waiting for us was bad. Vernee had been deployed in Afghanistan and had “seen some shit.” If she was shaken, this was very bad indeed. Vernee straightened up and ditched her smoke when we got out of the car. “You okay?” I asked and Erin gave me the side-eye. Because of course, it was a stupid question.
“Yeah,” Vernee said. “Come look.”
We followed her a little way off the trail, where blackberry vines wove together to create a thorny, almost impassible barrier.
As we got closer, I could see why Vernee had been so shook. You know how when a plane goes down the accident always leaves a debris field—a trail of parts and bits and pieces that can extend for miles?
We were looking at an organic debris field with only one recognizable element—the male victim’s head. All his other body parts were either shredded or pulverized. He looked like he’d gone through a wood chipper feet first.
“That’s Chester Dawson,” I said, shining my flashlight into his face. Or what’s left of him.
“I know,” Erin said, thin-lipped. We’d arrested Chester maybe half a dozen times over the past six months. Disturbing the peace. Animal abuse. Desecrating a cemetery.
Chester and I had gone to high school together, even double-dated a couple of times. Back then, he’d been a trouble-maker, but more inclined to pranks and hijinks than anything really bad. Then, the summer after we graduated high school, he and his best friend Jorge stole a car and took it on a joyride that ended when Chester slammed the car into a telephone pole and killed Jorge. Chester was left with a brain injury and although he physically recovered, his brain was broken and never got put back together right.
The last time we’d had to arrest him was because he’d gone crazy on a kid in a local bar, claiming he’d made a pass at him in the bathroom. He’d put the boy in the hospital, and we’d arrested him for a hate crime. My kid brother is gay, and I don’t take kindly to homophobic assholes.
I looked back down at Chester’s face.
“What do you think happened here?” I said, more musing out loud than asking an actual question.
“Looks kinda like he was hit with a suicide bomb,” Vernee said. “They often leave the head intact.” I didn’t question how she knew that.
“Even with a suicide bomb, limbs are usually intact,” Erin said. “The torso takes most of the explosion.”
“Wasn’t that Iranian general we knocked off identified by his hands?” Vernee asked. “Everything else was blown apart but his hands.”
“Yeah, he was still wearing a ring,” Erin said. “Big, gaudy thing with a red stone.”
Vernee shuddered. I’d always wondered what made her take up forensic medicine when she got out of the army. Her dad was a dentist up in Bellingham, and I knew he’d tried to convince her to come into his practice.
I’d asked her about it once and all she’d said was, “you know dentists have the highest rate of suicide than anyone else in the medical profession?”
I figured that was answer enough.
“This wasn’t an animal attack,” Vernee said, “but look here.” She bent down and pointed out a bloody bone fragment. I wasn’t sure which bone I was looking at. “Those are teeth marks on that rib.”
“Hmm,” I said, looking at the bone again. “So he was killed by something else and then the scavengers got to his body?”
Vernee shrugged. “I’ll know more when I get him into the lab.”
I looked around at the scattered parts. I wondered if she was going to have to reconstruct Chester the way NTSB investigators put crashed planes back together—one piece at a time. I didn’t envy her the job.
I was about to say something when I saw the paramedic truck pull up. Randy Paneak got out and looked around for Vernee. When she saw him, she went to him and he hugged her tight, whispering words meant for her ears alone. Nobody looked at them sideways. They’d been sweet on each other since grammar school.
After we talked to the dogwalker who’d found the body, we got back in the cruiser. I turned on the heater but didn’t start the car.
“What the fuck was that?” I said.
Erin just shook her head. Little droplets flew off. I fished around in the back seat for a towel I keep there and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said, and started drying her hair, pulling it out of its pony tail so it tumbled past her shoulders. The dampness had made it curlier than usual. I wanted to reach out and take one of those curls and wrap it around my finger. She was upset, I could tell.
“That’s not something a civilian should see,” she said. Or a dog either, I thought. The animal had been confused and agitated, whining and pulling at his lead. I didn’t blame him. The crime scene smelled like blood and shit and I don’t have canine senses.
“Ever see anything like this in Detroit?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
I hadn’t really expected her to say that. But she didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride, and when our shift was over, she left without saying good night.
Later she sent me a text saying that she wasn’t herself and asking if she could buy me breakfast in the morning.
I texted back—pancakes?—and she sent back a stream of emojis I took to mean yes. I had thought a lot about what I’d make her for breakfast if she ever stayed over. My mother hadn’t been much of a cook, so breakfasts for me was mostly some kind of cereal—raisin bran in the summer, oatmeal in the winter—with a glass of orange juice. My dad made pancakes on weekends and he’d taught me at least fifty variations on the recipe. My favorite had always been banana bacon with home-made cinnamon brown sugar syrup. I was hoping they’d be Erin’s favorites too if I ever got the chance to serve them to her.
Curious about what Erin had seen back in Detroit, I cracked a beer when I got home and sat down with my laptop to google it. When the articles started coming up, I was surprised I hadn’t heard about the killings before. They were just the sort of murders made for click-bait.
Six people had been slaughtered; their bodies mangled. All of them men who had criminal records ranging from sex trafficking to attempted murder. The headlines screamed, “Vigilante on the Loose!” One of the articles quoted Detective Erinys Alecto as saying the department was requesting information from the public, which is code for they didn’t have squat. A reward was posted but neve claime
d. When the killings stopped, the media speculated the killer had either left town or died. After I scrolled through everything I could find online, I made some calls. It was late in Detroit, but I got a tired-sounding detective on the phone who was happy to give me an earful abut Erin and her handling of the case.
“She fucked it up, buddy,” he said bluntly.
I hate being called “buddy,” and I wasn’t too crazy about the way he was talking about my partner.
“How so?” I asked.
He was quiet for a minute, reading my annoyance. “You fucking her?” he said.
“Fuck you,” I said. There was another pause.
“Okay. I get it,” he said. “It’s your funeral.” And then he laid out a series of conjectures and guesses and theories he’d cobbled up, mostly resting on the coincidence that the murders had stopped when Erin had moved away.
“That wouldn’t stand up in court,” I said when he was finished.
“Like it would ever get to court,” he said. “If anyone tried, they’d probably end up with their entrails strung out from here to Canada.”
I thanked him for his time, though what I really wanted to say was “fuck you” again, and ended the call.
***
By the next morning, the story of Chester’s murder was all over town. When I sat down at the diner to wait for Erin, my waitress asked me if it was true all that was left of him was his face. I waved off the question, but knew I would hear it again.
Erin came in as I was about to take my first sip of coffee. She shook the rain off the Smokey Bear hats we wear and came over to the booth where a cup of coffee was already waiting for her with a little pitcher of real cream because I knew she hated the fake stuff.
“Thanks,” she said when she saw the coffee and then neither of us said anything as she poured about half the pitcher in her cup and stirred until the liquid was the palest brown possible.
“So last night,” she said.
“Last night,” I echoed.
“You go home and google the Detroit murders?”
“I did.”
“Any theories?”
“Were the victims you saw—” I searched for a word. “Annihilated like Claude was?”
“They were,” she said.
“And there were how many victims?”
She looked at me with her honey-gold eyes. “Officially? Six.”
“And unofficially?”
“Around a dozen.”
“Around?”
“We found more than one person’s worth of body parts at one crime scene.”
“But only one head?”
She nodded. “There were extra teeth, two colors of hair.”
I drank the rest of my coffee and thought about that until our pancakes came. Erin’s had come with extra butter and two jugs of syrup on the side. We eat here a lot. The waitresses know she has a sweet tooth.
I watched as she spread the butter evenly and then poured a layer of syrup over everything.
I thought about how I’d like to lick the syrup off her body and then have her do the same to me.
I waited for her to take a bite, chew and swallow.
I picked up a strip of bacon, cooked chewy like I like it, and dipped it in my own jug of syrup. “I read the pathology reports on the victims,” I said.
“Great breakfast conversation,” she said, but ate another bite of pancakes anyway.
“The M.E. sounded kind of crazy.”
“You mean that part where he suggests a supernatural force was responsible,” she said. “He got put on two weeks leave for saying that out loud in front of a reporter.”
“I saw the article.”
She shook her head. “Werewolves.”
“I took a course in college. Comparative mythology,” I said. “Lot of people think that the werewolf myth developed as a way of explaining serial killers.”
“I never heard that,” Erin said, “but it makes sense. People killing every month. Something has to trigger it. Why not the full moon?”
“A werewolf didn’t kill Chester,” I said.
“No,” she said, putting her fork aside and wiping her mouth daintily, “of course not.”
She had one of those mouths. Full and plump and rosy, without any need for lipstick. I wanted to kiss those lips until they were bruised. I wanted her to punish me with kisses.
“I didn’t know Erin was a nickname,” I said. “I saw your full name in one of the articles. Erinys. It’s unusual.”
“It’s Greek,” she said.
“I know.” She looked surprised. “That comparative mythology class,” I explained. “It was pretty comprehensive.”
She went very still then.
“You’re a Fury,” I said. “One of the Erinyses.”
For a moment, a red light blazed up in the irises of her brown eyes, then the fire died. “I am a furious woman,” she said at last.
“Alecto,” I said. “Erinys Alecto. You’re the one who punishes moral sins.”
“Yes,” she said. “I always knew you were smarter than you pretend to be.”
“Nobody likes a smart aleck.”
She picked up her cup and drained her coffee.
“Why’d you leave Detroit?”
“I was tired of killing,” she said. “I’ve been doing it a long time.”
“So you thought coming to Shasta View would be what, kind of a vacation?”
“Something like that.”
“What made you come out of retirement?”
“Are you asking me if I killed Chester?”
“I know you killed Chester. I want to know why.”
Just as she was about to answer, our waitress stopped by to top off our coffee and ask if we needed anything else before she brought the check.
“We’re fine Taylor,” Erin said and smiled, handing over her credit card like she was just a regular human being buying breakfast for her boss.
“I caught him burying a dead dog out near the waterfall,” she said as Taylor walked away. She poured some cream into her fresh cup of coffee. “He had blood on his hands.”
I thought about that for a minute and smiled as Taylor returned with the bill for Erin to sign. When she walked away, I looked Erin straight in those honey-brown eyes and asked, “How?”
She looked down at her hands, drawing my attention to them as well. Her fingers were long, strong. “With these,” she said. The image that brought to mind was from another myth I’d read, the one about the goddess Diana sending her hounds to tear a man apart. The Furies were goddesses too, and equally implacable, at least, according to the stories. I felt my mouth go dry. I wondered if I was in danger.
“Anyone else on your hit list?”
“Why?” she asked, with an edge in her voice. “You plan to stop me?”
“I couldn’t stop you if I tried,” I said. Which his true. I’m not an alpha male and she—she was very definitely something far stronger than I’ll ever be. That excited me.
“I don’t want to stop you,” I said. “I’ve got a name of my own.”
For a moment her eyes blazed again. I swear I could almost feel the heat of the fire behind her gaze.
“My mission is not revenge,” she said.
“This isn’t revenge,” I assured her. “It’s justice.”
She took another sip of coffee and waited.
We don’t have a lot of crime in Shasta View but every so often a kid goes missing. Usually it’s a parental kidnapping or a runaway situation. Sometimes kids swimming in the river get caught in the current and drown, only to be found months later. Sometimes they play where they aren’t supposed to and get hurt and can’t find their way out of the woods.
In 1998, when I was thirteen, and she was sixteen, Lacey Winters disappeared. Her mother said good night to her at ten-thirty and went up to her room to watch Sex and the City. The next morning, she went into Lacey’s room to wake her up and fo
und her bed empty and her bedroom window wide open. Lacey was gone.
Lacey had not run away. She had not been kidnapped by her mother’s ex-husband. I know this because the Winters lived next door to us, and I had a crush on Lacey and spied on her every single night from my own bedroom window. She’d caught me watching a couple of times and instead of busting me, she’d just blown me a kiss and waved. I was mortified but secretly thrilled.
The night she disappeared; I saw a car pull up to the curb and flash its headlights. Lacey’s mom’s bedroom was on the back side the house. She wouldn’t have seen it. But Lacey had been looking for it. She climbed out her bedroom window and ran to the curb wearing a dress I was pretty sure her mother didn’t know she owned. It was red and sparkly, cut high on her legs and low in front. She was so beautiful that night.
The guy behind the wheel leaned across the seat and opened the door for her. I saw his face then. He was older, like college boy older, and when she kissed him, my heart was broken.
That was the last time I saw Lacey.
She didn’t come home that night. The next morning, her frantic mother called my parents to see if they knew anything, and that’s when I told them I’d seen the guy who drove off with her. My dad took me down to the police station and I told my story. I knew who he was because he’d been a local football star in high school. His name was easy to remember because it was two first names—Nick Lucas.
On my say-so the cops questioned Nick Lucas, but his lawyer made a persuasive case that I was a lovestruck kid with an overactive imagination. He was never charged. The cop who initially interviewed me told me he believed me and promised he wouldn’t close the case. He died a year later. Nick Lucas transferred to Willamette College in Oregon, and he stayed away for ten years. By the time he came back, I was already a deputy sheriff and I had a copy of Lacey’s case file in the safe in my bedroom. My goal in life was to prove Nick Lucas killed Lacey even though most people in town seemed to have forgotten what had happened.
Every time I saw him—in Walgreen’s or McDonald’s—I looked for a sign of guilt on his face. It was never there, just a sort of permanent smirk that told the world he thought he was smarter than everyone else. Lacey’s mother had died a year ago. Breast cancer. She’s buried next to a memorial marker for Lacey., whose body was never found.
