by Dan Wells
‘Come on in!’ they shouted at us, though I had a feeling they were thinking more about the girls than about me. The girls ignored them, so I did the same. The guys saw another group up the shore and slogged towards them through the reeds, leaving us alone again.
Brooke sighed. ‘What are you guys gonna do?’
‘Just hang around, I guess,’ said Marci. ‘See who shows up; see who’s with whom.’
‘Did you see Jessie Beesley?’ asked Rachel. ‘I wonder what happened to Mark.’
‘Not that,’ said Brooke. ‘I mean, what are you gonna do with your lives? With the future?’
Marci laughed. ‘You’re very cute when you’re deep, Brooke.’
‘What, you don’t have dreams?’ asked Brooke.
‘Oh, I’ve got dreams,’ said Marci, ‘believe me. And they have nothing to do with Clayton County.’
‘I’m getting out of here so fast,’ said Rachel. ‘A town with only one movie theatre barely counts as civilisation.’
I stared at the lake, remembering the dead body the demon had sunk below the ice in November.
‘Are you going anywhere specific?’ I asked. ‘Or just running away from here?’
‘College,’ said Brooke. ‘Travel. The world.’
‘Nobody wants to stay here,’ said Rachel.
‘I don’t mind the summers,’ said Marci. ‘But sometimes I wonder how we got here in the first place.’
‘The logging industry,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but why us?’ asked Marci. ‘Why are we here and not somewhere else?’
‘It’s not that bad,’ said Brooke.
‘It’s worse,’ said Rachel.
‘Who were the first ones?’ asked Marci. ‘Are we all just children of children of millworkers, who grew up and lost their dreams and got stuck here forever? Somebody came here first, when there was nothing else, and they built a city in the middle of nowhere and made money out of nothing and they did it.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘I guess I just don’t understand, if that’s the kind of people we come from, why we all just sit here doing nothing.’
Rachel opened her mouth to answer, but a shriek cut her off - loud and piercing, and just up the shore. We spun around to look, Brooke tightening her grip on my shoulder, and saw the two guys from before splashing frantically out of the water. The group of girls they’d been flirting with was backing up in terror, and now all of them were screaming. Brooke jumped down and ran towards them, and I followed close behind.
‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’
More people were coming now, from all around through the trees. It looked as if the group by the shore was backing away from a wild animal, as if they were afraid of being bitten, but as we drew closer I could see what they’d been screaming about - there was a rotted log half in and half out of the water, surrounded with reeds, and poking out from beneath it was a human arm and hand.
‘Call the police!’
‘She’s dead!’
‘I’m going to be sick!’
As soon as we saw the hand Brooke stopped, hanging back, but I kept moving forward. When I reached the line of retreating students I paused, wary, then made up my mind and broke through to the inner circle. It was just me and the hand.
It was a woman’s hand, her body floating just below the surface and hidden in the reeds. Somehow the boys had jostled the log and dislodged her, and the arm had popped out into the air. Her hand was poking up, twisted like a claw; her chipped, broken nails were painted bright red.
It’s the new killer, I thought.
There was a voice behind me - deep, a man’s voice. It seemed to echo through a vast, empty room.
‘What do we do?’
I had to see it; I had to know if it was covered with the same little wounds as the others. ‘She might be alive,’ I said, splashing into the lake. ‘We’ve got to check.’ The exposed hand was soggy and covered with flecks of mud and rotten wood; there was no way she was alive. ‘We’ve got to pull her out.’
There was another splash behind me, faint and distant. It was hard to hear with my own heartbeat suddenly roaring in my ears.
I grabbed the arm and pulled; it shifted, but it was heavier than I expected. Another pair of hands, rough and old, reached in next to me and we pulled again. The body shifted and the arm rose further out of the water, stiff and pale.
‘It’s been weighted down,’ I said.
‘She’s pinned under the tree.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the body slides too easily to be pinned. Don’t try to pull it up, just drag it sideways towards the shore.’
We heaved together, guiding the body into shallow water where it could float closer to the surface. It was indeed a woman’s body, stark white and naked except for a few bright nylon cords. The nakedness didn’t bother me - dead bodies never did. I pulled on one of the cords, lightly at first, then harder as I tested the resistance. It was very heavy. With two hands I heaved it up and found a cinder block tied to the other end.
I looked at the person helping me. It was Mr Verner, the Social Studies teacher. The shore behind him was lined with students and other teachers, many of them turned away from the dead woman bobbing in the water. Beyond them I could see the bonfire raging, distant and bright.
‘What do we do?’ asked Mr Verner again. Of course he was asking me; I knew more about this situation than anyone here. Did they know that? Was I revealing something secret?
‘Call the police,’ I said. ‘Call Agent Forman of the FBI; he has an office in the Police Department.’
The body was twisted like a sculpture, its limbs stiff and crooked. ‘This is rigor mortis,’ I said. ‘It means it’s only been dead a few hours, maybe a couple of days at the most.’ There were red marks on the wrists, and cuts and blisters on the chest and back, just like what we’d heard about the other bodies. ‘Did you call Agent Forman?’
Mr Verner shouted to the shore. ‘Who has a phone?’
Rachel waved her hand and pointed at Marci, standing next to her with her cellphone to her ear. ‘She’s on the phone with her dad,’ said Rachel. Marci’s dad was a policeman. I looked at them, more directly now than I had all night, then looked back at the dead body, bobbing obscenely in the wavelets coming off the lake. It shouldn’t be easier to look at it than at the girls, but it was.
Someone had fetched a blanket. Mr Verner waded over to get it, then brought it back and draped it over the body.
‘Come in to shore,’ he said, putting a hand on my arm.
I stumbled in, leaving the body in the water. The party had become a loose web of chaos, with some students pulling back, others dumbstruck and motionless, and still others crowding forward for a better view. Teachers were trying uncertainly to herd them in a knot of different directions.
Brooke met me at the top of the ridge, white as a corpse. ‘Who is it?’ she asked.
‘Do you have your phone?’
She nodded mutely and fished it out of her pocket. I dialed Agent Forman’s cell number and sat stiffly on the ground, breathing slowly.
‘This is Forman,’ said the voice on the other end, crisp and direct. There were sirens in the background.
‘You’re already on your way?’ I said.
‘Dammit, John, are you tied up in this?’
‘Rigor mortis,’ I told him, ignoring his question. ‘The body was fully rigid. That means it’s been dead at least twelve hours, maybe more. The lake’s pretty cool and that might have slowed it down.’
‘What are you doing, John?’ Forman asked. ‘You’re not a cop; you’re not an investigator.’ He paused. ‘And yet you’re always the one who finds the bodies first.’
‘Someone else found it,’ I said, closing my eyes. I could see the contorted body in my mind, stippled with angry red blisters. Had she been burned? ‘I’m just here by coincidence, Forman. The entire school is here, and everyone in town has known for weeks that we would be. If he left the body here recently, right here by the bonfire, he knew we’d fin
d it. I think he wanted us to find it.’
‘Who’s “he”?’ asked Forman.
‘The guy who killed it,’ I said. Was it a man or a demon? ‘There’s no missing body parts,’ I said, staggering to my feet, ‘and no major lacerations that I could see. I’m going to look again.’
‘No, John, leave it—’
Before he could finish, something hit me from behind, slamming me between the shoulders, and I tumbled to the ground. I rolled onto my back and looked up: it was Rob Anders.
‘What is wrong with you?’ he said. ‘You dive in there like it’s Christmas morning, you haul her right out where everyone can see her, you know the damn FBI agent’s phone number by memory . . .’
‘What?’ I asked, still shaken.
‘Nobody innocent acts the way you act,’ he said. ‘Nobody normal knows the things you know. What’s all that crap about rigor mortis?’
He was shouting, red-faced, waving his arms. He was far angrier than I would have expected. Why was he so upset? Think, John, think like a person with empathy. Maybe he has a connection to the victim.
‘Did you know her?’ I asked.
‘What kind of a sick question is that, you freak?’
‘Leave him alone, Rob,’ said Brooke, stepping in to help me to my feet. Rob shoved her away, knocking her to the ground - and I snapped.
I leaped up at Rob, taking him by surprise and knocking him down, pinning him under me. I’d never been in a fight - not with anyone who could fight back, at least - but I’d winded him, which gave me a moment to raise my fists and slam them clumsily into the top of his head. He then swung a punch that hit me right in the eye and threw me off the side. I staggered to my feet, ready for another swing, but Mr Verner and another teacher were already there, separating us by force.
‘It’s okay,’ Brooke told me, pulling me back. ‘he’s just a jerk - ignore him.’
I turned to face her, realising what I’d done: she’d been threatened, and instead of trying to help her I had attacked the assailant. Just like I did with the demon. I didn’t even help her stand up.
What’s the right answer? I thought. When do you help the good guys, and when do you stop the bad guys? I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know which one I am.
I felt light-headed and sat down, finding Brooke’s phone on the ground where it had been jolted out of my hand.
‘He’s a part of this,’ Rob was saying, arguing with Mr Verner as he pulled him away. ‘He’s a sick freak. He might even be the killer!’
I held the phone to my ear; Forman had already hung up.
‘Call your dad,’ I said, handing Brooke the phone. ‘Tell him you’ll be home late. This is going to take a while.’
Chapter 10
I spent all night trying to talk to Forman, but instead we were shuttled from cop to cop, giving our testimony over again for each one. At last I was handed a sheaf of carbon-copy papers and asked to fill out an official witness report; I spread it flat on the trunk of a police car and completed it as thoroughly as I could, being sure to include the times and locations of my own actions as far back as school that day. Any more would have looked like I was trying too hard to appear innocent. When I was done I turned it in and sat down by the dying bonfire, waiting to be excused. It was 11.30 p.m.
They wouldn’t let us anywhere near the body, so I studied my memory of it as closely as I could. The wrists had been scratched and red - more ropes, maybe? But the ropes around its body hadn’t left the same marks, so the ones on its wrists must have been there longer, probably before it died. Someone - the killer, I assumed - had kept it bound. How long?
And the rest of the marks: red welts and blisters on pale white skin. There may have been deeper cuts as well, slices and stab wounds, though the water had long since washed the blood away. There were none of the huge, feral gashes that had marked the Clayton Killer’s victims. Could it be a new demon? One whose fingers turned to flame instead of claws, who left its victims scarred and mutilated but whole? Did demons work that way? Did they follow any rules at all?
I had seen one demon, or whatever it was, but that didn’t mean that everything was connected to them. Humans were more than capable of murder all on their own. It was stupid to try to make this a demon when I knew so little. I needed to be patient - once she was in the mortuary, I could examine the wounds in detail and read everything they had written about her in the file from the Coroner. If only I could get to Forman, find out what he knew . . .
‘I’m all done,’ said Brooke. ‘They told us we’re free to go.’
I looked up and saw her standing above me, her arms folded tightly around her stomach, wrapping herself in her thin jacket. Her long legs were stippled with goose bumps, and she was shivering.
‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘They don’t want to talk to us any more?’
‘It’s almost midnight,’ said Brooke. ‘We’ve been talking to them for hours.’
‘But they haven’t told us anything yet.’
‘I don’t think they’re going to,’ said Brooke. She picked up the fire-tending branch and poked the coals, sending up sparks and exposing the bright red heat beneath.
‘Don’t put it out,’ I said, stopping her. It was something Mr Crowley had said once: ‘I never kill a fire, I just let them go out by themselves.’ He’d killed ten people, maybe countless people in his life, but he wouldn’t kill a fire. What was he, really?
‘Are you ready to go?’ asked Brooke.
I stared at the blackened firepit, a bank of half-dead coals in a six-foot circle of burned-out wreckage. It had been great once, massive and hot and glorious, but it had burned itself out early, and now it would linger for hours. Most of a fire’s life, maybe 80 per cent, was just this: a long, slow death.
‘Can we watch it a little longer?’ I asked.
She stood, silent, limned with soft orange light. After a moment she set down the branch and took a seat next to me, cross-legged on the ground.
We watched for another hour, until the cops cleared the scene, put out the fire, and sent us home.
They announced the dead woman’s name on TV the next morning: Janella Willis. She’d gone missing eight months before, somewhere on the east coast, but no one had any theories about how she ended up dead in Freak Lake. My guess about the time of death turned out to be pretty accurate. She’d died almost exactly twenty-four hours before she was found, and had spent most of that time in the lake, under the log. The police and the news came to the same conclusion I had - that the body had been left there deliberately for us to find, but I began to suspect something more. It seemed increasingly likely that the body had been left specifically for me.
The first two bodies had been left in places that were easy to find; the second was even in a spot directly connected to the previous killings. So we knew the killer wanted them to be found, and we knew he was trying to say something. Now we had discovered a third body, carefully placed in a location that, on that one specific night, had a greater concentration of people than anywhere else in town. It was obvious that the killer wanted it to be found. But more than that, it was a place full of teenagers - a place and time where I was guaranteed to be. If the bodies were messages from one killer to another, this last one had practically been left on my doorstep.
Messages on a doorstep. I felt my skin grow cold as soon as I thought of it. I’d left Mr Crowley a long series of messages, trying to scare him and put him offguard, to draw him out and let him know he was being hunted. These bodies were exactly the same thing. The first corpse said, ‘Here I am’; the second corpse, found at the scene of an earlier slaying, said, ‘I am a part of what happened here’; the third, left where I was certain to find it, said very clearly, ‘I know who you are.’
I was being hunted.
School was out now, so I had nowhere to go, and I spent the entire day in my room poring over what little evidence I had. If I was being hunted, I needed to know who it was, and what they wanted.
I didn’t have much to go on, but you could learn a lot from even a single corpse - if you knew what to look for.
The central question of criminal profiling is: what did the killer do that he didn’t have to do? This killer had tied up the victims, before death and after death. Were the two facts related - some kind of psychological need to bind people? That would be a control issue, which pointed, at least simplistically, to a serial killer. Or were the two tyings simply pragmatic - a way to keep her imprisoned before death, and weighted down after it? She’d been missing for eight months before she died, so the imprisonment theory had merit. So why put weights on her when it would have been so much easier to just leave the body in the mud on the shore? If you want your victim to be found, why go through the pretence of hiding it in the first place?
