She could only nod her head. Her heart was beating so hard and she was shaking so badly that she couldn't formulate a reply.
"We will find her," he said. He kissed her on the lips and dashed away through the throng of oblivious passersby.
And then he was gone.
* * *
"Slow down," Trey said. He had to park the cruiser and press his free hand over his opposite ear to glean his sister's voice from the background noise. "Start again. From the beginning. I can't understand you. Are you crying?"
He rolled up his window so the only sounds were the purr of the engine and the whoosh of the air conditioner.
"Calm down, Vanessa. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened."
His sister explained everything that had transpired up to that point. Consciously, he was sure she was overreacting, and had she been anyone else, he would have told her so. Emma had been out of her sight for five minutes at the most. She was a bright kid and would surely realize soon enough that she couldn't find her parents and would work her way back to where she had seen them last. Warren was right on the mark with his plan. It was exactly what he would have told them to do. And yet still he had a sinking sensation in his gut.
Perhaps it was the fear in his sister's voice, or maybe just the fact that it was his niece who was lost somewhere in the seething crowd, but he couldn't shake the feeling that something was desperately wrong. He knew he was being irrational, that children wandered away from their parents' side all the time in places like this, where everything was new and exciting and promised the kind of fun they only envisioned in their dreams, and that they always returned. A stranger would find them crying and help them locate their parents, or someone would recognize them and stay with them until their terrified parents tracked them down. Jefferson was a small community. That was one of the things he liked most about it. Maybe everyone didn't know each other per se, but they were all bound to each other in a direct way.
"Listen to me, Vanessa," he said. "Stay right where you are. I'll check in with you again in five minutes. If you find her before I call you back, then you call me. If you haven't, then I'll contact the sheriff and the other deputies and we'll canvass the whole carnival. But trust me, sis...she'll be right there with you again in a matter of minutes. I'll bet she probably just saw something she'd never seen before and got distracted."
This seemed to pacify her to some degree, but he could still hear the tears in her voice.
At least he was the one charged with the security of the parking lot. There were all kinds of petty little things that could happen right under his nose, but sneaking past him with his own niece definitely wasn't one of them. Emma was down in that carnival somewhere. There was no doubt about it.
But still, something felt...wrong.
The muscles in his lower back were clenched. His grip on the wheel was too tight. And the tingling sensation in his gut had spread to his groin.
Just five more minutes, he told himself, and if Emma didn't turn up by then, he would take matters into his own hands.
But he also knew, far too well, that an awful lot could happen in five minutes.
* * *
Warren slalomed through the shifting maze of humanity, shouting his daughter's name. Everyone he passed looked exactly the same, their features washed out by the blinking lights. He shoved people aside, his ears deafened to their shouts and curses. Every child resembled Emma until he was right on top of them. He had never been so terrified in his life. If anything happened to his daughter, he would never be able to forgive himself, let alone live with the guilt. He should have been carrying her, or at least holding her hand, but one often adopted a false sense of security in such a small community, where everyone felt like extended family to some degree. Strangers stood apart the moment they entered town, yet it was the evil that hid behind a friendly face from which one always had the most to fear.
The big top rose above him, reaching high up over the surrounding forest canopy. Vendors blew by to either side, hawking everything from glowing necklaces to foil balloons. The ticket booth materialized through the crowd to his right. It stood lifeless and forlorn as the entire population now swarmed within the carnival's hastily erected fence.
He caught movement on the path across the field that led uphill to the parking lot. Two silhouettes of shadow against darkness. One tall, one much smaller. Holding hands. Walking fast.
"Emma!" he shouted.
He ran past the ticket booth. A voice from inside yelled something about a hand stamp as he sprinted out onto the path.
"Emma!"
The smaller shadow stopped. Even in the dark he could see the fringes of a dress at her knees. The larger figure urged her onward with a tug on her arm.
Warren swore he heard Emma's voice, calling to him from somewhere beneath the tumult.
"Stay where you are!" he yelled. "Wait for me right there!"
He forced his legs to run faster than they ever had before.
Focused solely on the smaller figure, he didn't see a third shadow emerge from the tree line to his right until it was too late.
A sharp impact to his chest.
A sensation of bitter cold in the right side of his chest, then heat.
Then searing pain.
His legs slid out from under him and he landed on his back.
He saw stars dotting the night sky. A quarter moon shrouded by clouds. They were eclipsed by the wild-haired silhouette of a woman's head. She screamed right into his face and the pressure in his chest momentarily abated.
A flash of reflected light on a long kitchen knife, already slick with blood.
Then it was gone and the pain in his chest intensified.
Another flash.
More pain.
His mouth filled with blood. He couldn't manage to breathe.
The woman vanished and he saw the stars again. They were now blurry and appeared to drift aimlessly.
His trembling hands pawed at his chest and probed through his tattered shirt until his fingertips slipped into the deep wounds, from which damp heat poured unimpeded.
He tried to call his daughter's name, but only produced a coughing sound and a rush of blood that drained down his cheeks and over his chin.
His thoughts were disjointed, murky, and yet he managed to focus on Emma, drawing strength from her image, a sense of purpose.
He rolled onto his side and struggled to all fours.
Blood poured from his mouth and chest.
His watery vision constricted.
Two large figures now held his daughter. One restrained her arms and silenced her with a hand clasped over her mouth. The other pinned her legs.
He recognized them now.
It wasn't my fault, he thought.
He saw them duck from the path into the dense forest.
And then he saw no more.
* * *
Barely four minutes had passed when Trey heard the first screams.
He hit the gas and sped straight toward the end of the central aisle. The path wasn't wide enough to accommodate the cruiser, but he didn't care. Branches scraped the sides of the Caprice, slicing through the paint before snapping off. With a resounding crack, his side mirror disappeared. The trees fell away and a small meadow opened to his left. He slammed the brakes and skidded to a stop on the gravel.
Dust settled over the car. Through the haze, he saw a clumped gathering at the edge of the field.
Screams tore the night.
He threw his door open and drew his pistol in one motion, and hit the ground running. Left arm extended, he forced his way through the small crowd.
A man knelt over a supine form. Gus Tarver. The lower half of his face and his arms, clear up past his elbows, were covered with blood. Hands clasped, he thrust his stiff arms down against the other man's chest. Over and over. Compressions, which only served to squeeze more blood out of the man's ruined torso.
Trey looked down at the man's waxen face and felt a sudde
n and deep sorrow.
Gus leaned down and closed his mouth over Warren's. Crimson burbled from the wounds as the ribcage rose once. Then again.
Trey walked around his brother-in-law's body and gently placed his hand on Gus's shoulder before he could resume compressions.
Gus toppled onto his rear end and smeared the blood from around his mouth with his sleeve.
Trey looked at the stunned faces surrounding the corpse. His stare latched onto one he knew nearly as well as his own.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered.
* * *
Vanessa screamed and threw herself toward what remained of her husband, but her brother stepped into her path and wrestled her backward. She hit his chest, the side of his head, begged for him to let her go.
He held her even tighter.
Over his shoulder, she saw the love of her life lying dead on the ground. Blood shimmered black on his face and torso, in a wide pool around him on the wet grass.
She moaned and felt her legs give out.
Trey managed to support her weight long enough to lower them both to their knees.
She screamed and he held her head against his, their damp cheeks pressed together.
"Where's Emma?" she sobbed into his ear.
She curled her fingers into fists in the back of his uniform shirt.
The crowd closed in on them.
"Where's my daughter?" she shouted.
"We'll find her," Trey said. "I swear to you. We'll find her and whoever did this to Warren."
Present Day
"Have you told anyone else about this?"
Trey stood and turned a slow circle. Murky, stagnant water surrounded him on all sides, save for the random islands that poked up over the surface of the bayou. They were packed with cypresses with lazy branches that draped down nearly to the water. Spanish moss bearded their boughs. Mangroves grew directly from the slough, their stained trunks memorializing the history of the water table. Clouds of insects swirled near the banks.
It had taken him nearly an hour by motorboat, winding a strange, circuitous route through shadowed channels where snapping turtles fought for basking space in the precious few rays of sun that reached the ground. The fact that the man standing uncomfortably at the edge of the sloppy bank had made this particular discovery at all was a stroke of luck.
"Not a soul," Gareth Ressler said. He wore that deer-in-the-headlights expression that underlined the truth of his words. He was a small man, and not the brightest by anyone's definition. His chest waders were crusted with mud, his flannel shirt patched at the elbows. There were so many wrinkles on his leathered face it appeared as though he hadn't spent a single day indoors in his life. He shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other, partially because of what he'd found, but primarily because of the gator he'd poached, Trey imagined. Its carcass was stashed twenty yards across the swamp under a pile of branches torn from the tree above it. Presumably, Gareth was going to return and collect it when no one was looking. Trey was going to have to leave it alone. For now. He had bigger problems at the moment. "I did exactly what you said. I waited right on this spot until you got here. Didn't touch a thing. Didn't speak a word to no one."
Trey nodded and looked Gareth directly in the eyes. The man's gaze darted unconsciously toward where he had concealed the gator, then back.
"Get out of here," Trey said. "There'll be a deputy waiting at your trailer to take your statement."
"Yes, sir, Deputy, sir."
"And don't you dare open your mouth. I hear you so much as told that wife of yours and you and I are going to have a long chat about our scaled friend over there."
Trey knelt in the mud, which released the vile stench of flatus. It soaked right through his khaki slacks, unnervingly warm against his skin. He should have brought his hip waders, but he hadn't been thinking clearly. When the call came in, he had flown out the door without a word to anyone. He'd been praying for any kind of development for the past two years, all the while fearing that this would be the one he got.
An outboard motor coughed and belched, and then with a buzz, it carried Gareth back toward town.
Trey looked down at the muck. The brownish crown of a skull breached the surface. There was a depressed fracture of the occipital bone from which jagged fissures originated. The cranial sutures were rough and sealed with mud, not thoroughly united. A scapula stood erect a foot away like a shark's dorsal fin. Other sections of bone were visible as well where the soil had begun to erode away from them. The posterior aspect of a calcaneus. The distal ends of the radius and ulna. The pebbles of the carpals. The spinous processes of the thoracic spine, like the spikes along an iguana's back.
Tears welled in his eyes, but he wiped them away before they could overwhelm his lashes.
The bones were so small, the growth plates only partially fused.
It was the body of a child.
* * *
Vanessa rolled over in bed so that the window was at her back. The sunlight speared through the gaps around the blinds as though sent solely to torture her. She couldn't sleep, and yet she didn't feel like getting up either. It was another day like every other. She inhaled Warren's scent from the pillow beside her. It had now faded to the point that it didn't so much smell like her husband, but rather conjured the memory of it. She couldn't bring herself to wash it any more than she could force herself to box up all of his belongings. His clothes still hung in the closet and filled his drawers. His medicine cabinet was still packed with toiletries. She hadn't been able to remove his stack of medical journals from the bathroom. His dresser-top was exactly how he had left it. A pile of change next to his comb. His stethoscope resting on the crumpled tie he had shed before changing for the last time.
She couldn't bear to look anymore and flopped onto her back. Everything, no matter how inconsequential, was attached to a memory. They were all good and she enjoyed reliving them, but they all inevitably led to that night at the fairgrounds, to the viewing at the funeral home, and finally to his interment. She could still feel the texture of the handful of earth she had thrown down onto his lacquered maple casket in her palm.
Buddy stirred at the foot of the bed. He released a single bark and scampered out of the bedroom. His nails clacked down the hallway toward the kitchen, where she knew he would lap water from his bowl and resume his slumber against the kitchen door where he could better monitor his territory.
The ceiling fan twirled slowly overhead, its shadow a rotating X that passed over eggshell-cracks in the plaster.
She heard a soft crunching sound.
Muffled. Subdued.
It almost sounded like someone eating popcorn on the other side of the wall behind her head. But beyond the second story wall there was only a five-foot gap of air between the siding and the branches of the trees.
The room again fell silent.
She stared down the length of her body toward the opposite side of the bedroom. The television was dark, the wall behind it lined with as many framed photographs as she could make fit. The three of them as a family. Her husband and her daughter. Smiling faces from a better time. From a different life entirely.
Her thoughts drifted to Emma. Where was she now? What was she doing? Did she remember her mother?
Was she even still alive?
Vanessa shivered at the thought. Emma was still alive. Somewhere. She had to be. A mother would be able to tell instinctively if her daughter was dead...wouldn't she?
The crunching sound resumed.
Vanessa listened more intently. It was more of a skritching, grinding noise.
She sat up and turned around to face the wall. The oak headboard rested against it. On the left side, a touch-lamp with floral-patterned glass. On the right, a jewelry box with ornate windows through which gold and silver glimmered. In the center, a glass display case containing the crumbling remnants of a teddy bear crafted from weeds and mud. She had decided to encase it in order to prolong degradation. It was the las
t thing her daughter had given her, and she would cherish it for as long as it lasted. It reminded her of a special moment she meant to separate from the night that followed. It was a part of Emma. The oils and microscopic flakes of skin from her hands were molded into the crusted dirt. She had tied kinetic energy into the knots in the graying grass. And she had infused it with imaginary life that came from a heart more radiant than the sun.
Vanessa leaned closer to the wall and tilted her head to the side to better isolate the origin of the sound.
More crackling.
Were there termites behind the drywall?
As she neared the plaster, she realized that the noise wasn't coming from inside the wall as she had initially suspected.
More skritching.
She looked down.
The crunching sound was coming from inside the glass cube.
She stared at the bear her daughter had made with her tiny hands. The outer layer of dirt was cracked and crusted, the grass bindings desiccated. Most were frayed. Some had snapped like guitar strings. The leaf-ears had folded forward and turned black.
Crackling.
Slowly, she raised her hand and pressed her fingertips against the glass.
The noise ceased.
* * *
Trey paced a ring around the crime scene techs as they worked the remains. The way he was wearing the ground, if they didn't finish soon there would be a trench around them. It had taken them more than three hours to get there from the Crime Scene Response Section of the Dallas Police Department. Trey could have had his own men collect the evidence and ship it to Dallas for a complete forensic workup, but he couldn't afford to take the chance of anything being mishandled or contaminated in transit. Not with this one. He couldn't risk a screw-up, not that he wasn't already confident of whose body it was. They needed to nail whoever did this, and they needed everything to be by the book. No way was he letting this monster get off on a technicality. This was Texas, and he wanted this son of a bitch to fry.
Brood XIX Page 2
