by Rachel Caine
She just nods. Her attention is back on the pond. The car. The babies hidden from view.
I imagine myself in her shoes: newly pregnant, with a boyfriend deployed on reserve duty. Facing this horror. I would have done anything for Kez before coming here, but now . . . now I’ll do anything and everything.
Because I know she will give this her whole heart and soul.
I back out carefully; it’s nerve-racking on the narrow gravel road, and I find myself holding my breath and praying I don’t put a tire in a ditch. It feels like relief when I spot a dirt side road, and I quickly three-point a turn so I have headlights to illuminate the way out.
Behind me, the pulsing red-blue glow of the flashers looks like the start of a forest fire, something that will consume everything near it.
Who could do this?
Why?
Like Kez, I want to know.
Whether the mother of those children is abducted or a killer, she still needs to be found.
3
KEZIA
The tow truck takes its sweet time getting here, but it finally arrives. I hate the sound of it, the shrill beep as the muddy old wrecker backs up. I know it doesn’t make any damn sense, but I wish it were a clean truck. This one is caked in weeks of filth. The driver of the truck is a tired-looking, big white man with a greasy trucker hat on, and he gives Deputy Dawg a hearty hey, but completely ignores me and Winston, the coroner. “What you want me to do?” he asks the deputy, who looks over at me. I step up.
“We need to get that car out of the pond,” I tell him, as if that isn’t completely obvious. “Carefully as possible. It’s evidence in a crime.”
He doesn’t like getting orders from me. Too bad. I hold his stare until he nods and looks away. “Gonna take a while,” he says. “Hope you like the cold. I damn sure don’t.” He pulls out a pair of hip waders from an equipment box on his rig and jams them on. “Could’ve waited for goddamn morning. Gonna need that car moved off down the road, far as possible.” He points to my unmarked sedan. I’ve already moved it to what I thought was a safe distance.
“It’s mine,” I say. “I’ll get it out of the way.”
“Well thank you, Officer,” he says. There’s a lot of sass in that, and I’m tempted to respond. I don’t. The South has never been friendly to my particular shade of folks, and bad things happen out here in the dark. I’m wearing a badge and a gun and I still feel it, like an ache in your bones when the weather shifts.
Last thing I need to do is start something. I need to focus on what’s important: those two little babies, and getting them justice. Ignoring another Klan-adjacent asshole is just part of the rural landscape.
I realize that I’m not being completely rational about this. That I’m prickly in all the wrong ways, noticing things too much and giving the normal way too much power over me. I don’t know if that’s hormones, or just awareness of the world I’m bringing a little miracle of a child into. Our child will be loved, at least. But safety is a long way off.
I move my car and drive it to the side road I spotted on the way in; I park it and leave the portable red strobe light on top, in case someone comes barreling down from up-mountain. I walk back. The tow truck operator, cursing under his breath, has already waded into the pond. “Gonna get that brain-eating amoeba shit being in here,” he says. I don’t tell him that he wouldn’t notice much of a change. Even if I don’t care for the man, he does seem to know his business; he attaches the chains, grimacing when he has to crouch down and immerse himself in the pond. He curses as devoutly as most people pray. He scrambles up the bank, and the deputy offers him a hand when he slips. We’ll have to document that shit, too, but there’s no help for it. The driver gets a dirty towel from his truck and dries himself off, not that it helps the green gunk clinging to him. He gets to the controls and starts the work.
He’s good at this. He balances the slow, careful drag against the weight of both car and water. Gears grind. I grit my teeth and have to bite the urge to tell him, Treat that car like your own babies are in there. I don’t even know what that would mean to him. I want some damn reverence in this nasty process.
My cell phone buzzes. I grab for it and check; it’s Javier. I let out a little sigh of relief as I accept the call, and then feel the weight of this place crush that relief flat. “Hey, Javi. I love you.”
Javier Esparza’s warm baritone voice glides through me like waves of summer heat, so welcome right now in this cold place. He sounds husky. “I love you too. You okay?”
It’s in my voice, the creeping dread. Must have been for him to ask. I make an effort to shove it away. “Yes,” I say. It sounds convincing. “Is it late for you right now, or early?” I don’t know where he’s deployed for his weeks of Marine Corps reserve training; I often don’t. Safer for him that way. He’s in the hands of the marines right now. They could have taken him anywhere.
“Querida, where I am, it’s late morning already. I forgot it would be so early, but this is my slot. We don’t get a lot of choices.” He’s been gone only a few days, and I already miss him so bad I feel he’s been gone a year. “Everything okay there? You sound like you’re outside.”
“I’m on a case,” I say. “I—” Tell him. But I’m weirdly reluctant now that he’s on the phone. I feel fragile and out of control and he feels so very far away. I glance at the deputy, who’s taken shelter again in his cruiser with the heater running. The coroner, standing by. I take a couple of steps away as the tow truck cranks gears again, metal on metal. My gaze fixes on the slow emergence of the car from the pond. The back bumper breaks the surface, and the roof of the car. Ripples flow sluggishly. “I need to tell you something,” I say. I walk off a little bit, farther from the noise, farther from the ears. “I’m not sure it’s the right time, but . . . I don’t want to wait. Javier . . . we’re pregnant.”
The time lag feels like it has extra weight this time. Like he’s speechless, not just far away. “Wait, what? We’re—Kez! Oh my God!” The delight in his voice fills me up, drives away the cold and the desolation. I feel it like I’m standing in sudden sunlight. “Kez, baby. We’re going to have a baby.” His voice goes shaky on that last bit. Big strong marine, reduced nearly to tears. “You okay? Really? Damn, I wish I was there. I wish I could just be there.”
“You will be,” I tell him. “I’m okay. So’s the baby. I’m setting up a doctor’s appointment in the next couple of days. I’ll send the sonogram to your phone so you can see it when you get to turn it on again.” For now, his phone is off. Safety reasons, again.
“Kez.” He sounds more somber now. “You don’t sound that happy. Are you? Happy?”
“Very,” I say, and I hear the emotion in the single word. “I want this so much. It’s just . . . it’s a bad one, this case. It’s hard to be completely happy right now like I should.”
“Sweetheart. I’m sorry. You do what you gotta do, Kez. I love you. Always.”
“I love you too.” I let the silence run a bit, warm and sweet, then see the tow truck’s finally got the right tension, and the back wheels of the car are starting to come up the slippery side of the pond. “Be safe, Javi. For me and the baby.”
“You be safe too. Get some rest if you can—” The connection drops in the middle of the last word. I’m used to that; communications from some of the places he goes are difficult. I’m just lucky he was able to connect at all.
The predawn morning is colder with him gone. I exhale slowly, trying to avoid that ghostly puff of mist, and watch the tires as they roll up the bank. The sedan is finally out of the water. The tow truck driver is better than we probably deserve to have, out here at this hour. He manages to get it completely out, on the road, and then unhooks and backs his rig away. “You want me to wait?” he asks. Not me, of course. The deputy.
“Please,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”
He shrugs. “They pay me by the hour.”
Water cascades from open windows and runs in streams f
rom the door seals. All four doors are shut. I force myself not to look in the back as Winston adjusts the lights around the new site, and I focus on the exterior. It’s not a new car, but it looks well kept. No damage. It’s a pale beige, a color most people avoid these days, but maybe I’m unkind—maybe it’s more of a light gold. Hard to tell in the work lights, which are harsh for a reason.
The deputy and coroner both look at me. I step up and help Winston unroll a clean blue tarp that we position on the driver’s side so it’ll catch anything that comes out; he gives me paper foot covers I snap on over my shoes. I glove up and approach the leaking bucket that was once a vehicle.
I lean in the open window to take a look at the seats. There’s still at least a couple of feet of murky water trapped inside.
“Help me with the mesh trap,” the coroner says, and I hold my end of the fine net; he rolls it under the car, holds his side, and uses a gloved hand to carefully pop the passenger side door open as I open the driver’s side. Swamp comes out in a firehose gush, but is quickly down to a muttering trickle. He pulls the net to his side carefully to preserve any potential evidence that will have been trapped in it, and takes it off to the side to go pick out anything that might decompose if left damp: paper, particularly. I move the work lights so they shine on the interior of the car. I still don’t look in the back, though it pulls at me like a magnet; I can see the unfocused pallid forms out of the corner of my eye, but I know that once I look at them directly, I won’t be able to look anywhere else.
I focus on the front.
The seat’s pulled up, which means a shorter person was driving. On the passenger-side floorboard, drowning in muck, is a woman’s brown purse. It’s a hobo-style, shapeless thing that seems stuffed. I mark and photograph the bag in situ and put it up on the seat. This doesn’t look good at all. No driver, no mom, purse left behind. My instincts immediately bend toward abduction.
I carefully open the bag, and though the contents are wet they’re not completely saturated, which gives me a good guess how long it’s been in the water. I tease out a wallet and flip it open. “Sheryl Lansdowne,” I say out loud, though why it would matter to anyone else in earshot I don’t know. I lay the wallet out and take a photo of the driver’s license. Sheryl’s twenty-seven years old, slender and delicate and mildly pretty. Blondish hair worn in shoulder-length, soft curls. Skin tone’s pale but burnished by a tan. Not the worst DMV picture I’ve ever seen. I open my notebook and write down the name and address. That needs to be my next stop. I’m already bracing myself for the relatives.
There’s nothing else in the front seat of any relevance. The upholstery looks clean, and if there was any blood, it’s been soaked away by the pond. Forensics will go over it for trace evidence. I pop the glove box, then take out the wet documents inside and give them to Winston to lay out for preservation. Looks like standard stuff: insurance paperwork, registration, car manual.
I’ve run out of distractions, and I feel a knot of tension wrapping up in my chest, tighter and tighter.
I take a deep breath and turn my head to focus on what’s in the rear seat.
My first thought is, They’re so pale. White babies, yes, but they’re an unnaturally luminous color now. One has her pale-blue eyes open like a little doll, but she’s not a toy, and the wrongness of it moves deep in me like an invisible snake. The other, eerily similar girl next to her has her eyes closed, thin lashes beaded with water. Their identical little pink outfits are stained from the green water.
They’re so still.
Even seasoned cops lose their stomach over something like this. But I can’t. One wrong step, and the deputy won’t shut up about the black woman who couldn’t hold her nerve. It’s not just me I’m holding together. It’s a line of women coming up behind me.
“No sign of obvious injuries,” I say. I can’t look away, now that I’m staring. Limp hair plastered against their soft little heads, probably blonde when it dries. One has a little yellow ribbon tied in her hair, but the other doesn’t. Maybe that’s how the mother tells them apart; I can’t really spot any other differences. I swallow hard. “Winston?”
The coroner steps closer. “Foam at the mouth and lips,” he says, “but don’t put money on it yet.”
He’s telling me he thinks they drowned, and that’s . . . worse. These babies strapped in, helpless and crying while the car rolls and splashes into this pond. While cold water spills in through the windows and around the door seals. While the compartment fills up.
Someone wanted these children to suffer. Or, at the very least, didn’t give a shit if they did.
There’s nothing else to see here, but I can’t stop staring. The one with closed eyes looks like she’s just fallen asleep, except for the water dripping from her hair, from the feet of the pajamas she’s in. I was shopping for baby clothes earlier. I saw some just like these.
My mouth feels sour when I step away, and the air smells filthy and close. For a second I feel perilously dizzy, and I find my hand pressed to my stomach. I don’t know if I’m trying to soothe myself, or the child still hidden deep in there.
“You okay?” Winston asks.
“Sure,” I lie. “Call me when you get ready to proceed.”
“Gonna be a while,” he warns me. “I got two suspicious deaths came in earlier this afternoon.”
I meet his gaze and hold it. “Those cases can wait.”
He pauses for a second before he says, without a flicker, “Okay. You sure you want to observe the autopsies? Pretty tough. I could just get you the report.”
Somebody needs to be a witness, I think. These two girls died alone, not even their momma by their side. Alone, cold, terrified. The least I can do is stand that lonely watch. “I’ll be there,” I say. “Call me when you’re ready to start.”
Winston nods. The deputy climbs out of his car and says, “I’ll secure the scene. Y’all want the pond searched?”
“If there’s so much as a tadpole in there, I want it,” I tell him. “You’re here until relief comes. Don’t leave for nothing.”
He nods, miserable, cold, and unhappy as hell, but he knows better than to cross me on this. Or should.
I head down the road while Winston loads the two limp bodies, still in car seats, into the coroner’s van. Once I’m in my car with the door safely shut, I just sit and shake and breathe for a while. It feels like I’m decompressing after walking on the bottom of a very deep sea. I find myself sucking in short, shallow gasps, and force them slower. My hands are too tight on the wheel.
I need to go to Sheryl Lansdowne’s address in Valerie. Someone will be waiting there, I hope—a husband, a father, a mother. Not that I’m looking forward to breaking the worst news of their lives. Fact is, every day in this job I see people at their lowest points, but nothing’s as difficult as delivering news of a death.
Like attending the autopsy, it isn’t something I can turn away from. Not and stay the person I want to be.
I put the car in gear and go.
4
GWEN
I get home again before dawn, but not before Sam’s up; I hear him in the shower as I enter. I dump my purse and coat and move off down the hall; I check the kids and find them still sleeping soundly before I get to my office. Kez’s unease haunts me, and however tired I am, I can’t lay myself down and catch an extra half hour. I can’t keep Lanny from taking stupid risks, but maybe if I can help ease Kezia’s burden, even a little, that will make me feel less helpless.
I open my laptop and log in to the office’s mainframe. One of the less-than-comfortable perks of my job is the ability to trace cell tower pings on a number, and sometimes, sometimes, trace the movements. It’s only quasi-legal, one of those services that’s a loophole if you know which buttons to push. It’s an open back door for people like me if they know how to navigate it.
Kezia’s sent me a written transcript and an audio file. I transfer both to my laptop and pull them up. I read as I listen.
&n
bsp; “911, what is your emergency?” It’s a marvel to me how most emergency operators sound bored and impatient. Male or female—and this one is a deeper male voice—they share a detachment I sometimes envy. “Hello?”
The second voice is fainter, but I think that it, too, has a deeper timbre. Male? I think. “Y’all need to send somebody out to Crease Road and Fire Road Twelve,” he says. “Something’s goin’ on up there.” The most important impression I have is that the accent is fake. Very fake. Definitely a bad actor’s version of the rural South. Not even Vee Crockett—with the most backwoods accent I know—would sound like that.
“What’s going on, sir?” The operator sounds like he couldn’t possibly care less. But at least he’s asking.
“There’s a car up in there stopped. I heard a scream. Woman driving out here alone, bad things can happen. You’d best send someone.” I tense up. The caller hasn’t said anything about a woman until now. A scream, yes. But still, it seems off the way he phrases it. So does the tone . . . almost flat, which seems odd.
“Sir, can you describe the car, or the driver—” Maybe the operator’s picked up on it, too, because suddenly he sounds engaged and interested.
But the caller hangs up. I listen to the operator try a callback. No one answers. But the operator did manage to snag a number, and I look at the entry on the transcript. Bingo. Kez was almost certainly right, it’s likely a burner phone, but at the very least I can trace other towers where the cell pinged, if the caller keeps it on.
I log in to the J. B. Hall system and access the proprietary program; it’s plugged into all carriers in the area, and it works like a charm. Like I said: Not exactly legal, but not illegal either. It’s a dark shade of gray that sooner or later will be completely erased by new legislation, but the government moves too slowly to keep up with a lot of innovation in the tech industry. Private investigators don’t need warrants, just access agreements since we’re paying for the data use.
