A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  I was so startled when he shouted back in what sounded like Russian, I didn’t have a comeback. He kept yelling, I think cursing at me, as I walked down the hill to find an argument in English. It didn’t take long.

  “Help with the crowd,” I yelled at Deputy Walker as I pointed at a group pushing against the tape. “Over there! Keep them away from the tape and segregate any witnesses for me to talk with. And you two—” I shoved an angry finger first at SA Givens, then Captain Keene. Truth be told, I was glad they were there. I needed to be angry with someone and they were good targets. “Get out of my scene.”

  I turned away then ducked under the tape to approach the body. She was tiny, death having rendered what probably had been a vibrant body into a kind of vacant frailty. It’s easy to think of bodies as houses. The one she left behind was already showing the weakness of its construction. Her brown skin was mottled and mostly the color of wheat left to rot in the field. She had long black hair that probably swept around her when she walked. Lying in the shore rushes it clung wetly to her face and draped like soggy spider’s web over the weeds.

  She had to be Sartaña, the girl who had disappeared with Dewey Boone. If it wasn’t her, it was one of the other girls from the Starry Night Traveling Salvation Show. There just were not that many young girls, who looked like they belonged in the mountains of Peru running around Taney County.

  Chapter 9

  Silent lightning tracked through creeping, dark clouds, turning them into city-sized Chinese lanterns. Depending on the density of the cloud and the placement of the lightning within it, the color was rendered in pale whites or bright blues. Distant charges, the ones that streaked into the tops of invisible thunderheads, pulsed in purples and yellows. Those were not silent, but the gentle bowling alley rumbles came as much as a minute later.

  I stood on the lip of the shore, looking down at the body of Sartaña. I wanted to draw out the scene but I’d left my notepads in the truck.

  Footsteps, loud and angry came tromping up behind me and I knew who was there without looking.

  “Who do you think you are?” Keene asked me sounding like he had rehearsed the question since I had walked away from him.

  I turned around in time to see Givens put an arm on Keene’s shoulder in a restraining gesture. It was gesture only. Keene shrugged it off, “This is part of an ongoing, multi-agency, federal investigation. And we will have cooperation.”

  “Or what?” I asked and it was almost sweetly. “What are you going to do? Share information? Tell me what you’re here for?”

  The two men looked at each other and it was one of those smug, we’re-in-the-club-and-she’s-not, looks I hate so much.

  “That can’t happen,” Givens, the designated reasonable guy, said.

  “Then you’re going to take over my investigation?” I asked, again so sweet I could have attracted bees.

  “If we have to,” Givens answered.

  “In a heartbeat,” Keene added.

  “Exactly what investigation would that be? I’m investigating the murder of a young girl.”

  “A foreign national,” Givens said. “An easy, federal jurisdiction takeover.”

  “How did you know she was foreign?”

  Both of their faces turned to stone masks.

  “I thought so,” I said. “And if you take over? What then? Will you do as well finding her killer as you did protecting her?”

  “That wasn’t our responsibility.”

  “You’re cops aren’t you?”

  Neither of the men looked at me. But Captain Keene perked up at something. I turned to follow his gaze up the hill to where the sagging RV was still idling. The driver was standing outside now pacing and smoking. He slapped the flat of his hand on the side of the vehicle and shouted at someone inside. Again, it sounded like Russian.

  “Is that one with you?” I asked the pair.

  They both turned seeming to find the lights racing over the dark water suddenly very interesting. I looked back at the frantic Russian just in time to see another man come from behind the RV and talk with him. Given the light and the distance I couldn’t swear—but I knew—it was Mike Resnick.

  It’s a funny thing. Many people assume, when you’re a criminal investigator, you must be the kind of person that loves a mystery. They think of old Sherlock Holmes movies or books about murders on speeding trains. I’ve met a few cops who like those books. Never have I met one that likes those kinds of unanswered questions in real life. We get enough of that from the criminals we deal with every day. All of them think they’re smarter than us. All of them think they tell a good lie.

  The worst thing though, and not funny in any sense, is when the cops start pulling the mystery crap on each other.

  When I turned around to face Givens and Keene, I had a finger on the crescent of scar around my eye. They were looking at me like I was something ugly and dangerous in a zoo. I had a bit of the same sense, that I was behind bars and they were reaching in with pointed sticks to see what they could provoke.

  “What’s the connection?” I asked. I took the finger from my scar and missed the contact immediately. “A girl from Peru and two federal investigations. I’m guessing there’s nothing direct, am I right? What is her life to you? A distraction? A complication?” I could hear the rising anger in my voice but I didn’t seem to be able to curb it. If I’d thought through what I was hoping for, it would have been to make them a little angry and maybe draw a few careless words out. Instead, I had shown up angry and simply kept wrapping myself up in my own ire. Had I any sense at all I would have shut up and let all of us stew a bit. I didn’t have that kind of sense. “Exactly what does a murdered girl mean to your federal investigation? Or what about to you?” I looked right at Givens. Then I turned to the other one. “Or to you, Captain Keene? Does a dead girl mean anything to either of you at all?”

  “That’s not fair,” SA Givens complained.

  “You’ve got a rep,” Keene said, his voice as flat and flavorful as Kansas.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  He ignored that and went on. “You don’t like the way things get done. Big picture things. They say it has to be about you.”

  “If they’re saying that, then it must be about me,” I hit back.

  “They say you try to make everything personal.”

  “No. Just the stuff that already is personal. Murdered girls—that’s personal to normal people.”

  “What about rape?” he asked me. His eyes had gone to match his voice, flat and without features other than the disconnect you see in some people. It was a sniper’s stare.

  “Rape?” I got a little bit in his face. “Is that the personal thing they talk about?”

  “You were in a hot zone and bad things happened. It’s pretty fucked up but it is what it is. You’re a woman. You had no business there in the first place.”

  “I wasn’t dragged off by insurgents or captured by militia to be made an American punching bag. I was taken by superior officers who simply hated women.”

  That was the last conversation I wanted to be having. It had already been a bad day—days—and I’d be the first to say I didn’t handle murdered kids very well. Add to that, yet another Army officer questioning my experiences in Iraq. My vision was tunneling. It was focusing down until the world was a sharp but distant image framed in a cone of blowing dust.

  At the exact center of that backward telescope vision was Keene’s grin. He had big, yellow-white teeth in a dark-skinned face.

  “That’s exactly what they say,” he continued. “You never let it go. Major Reach told me about you. How he investigated. How there was no evidence. Your word against theirs. But they had alibis, didn’t they?”

  “They had friends.”

  “And you didn’t.” His voice even though without new inflection, still managed to get hard.

  “No one likes a new lieutenant,” I said. “No one wanted a woman around.”

  “And you pro
ved the reasons for that didn’t you?” Every word was a wrecking ball battering the back of my skull.

  “Screw you.” Dust closed in my sight even more. It crawled out of my vision and my memory moving in serpentine curves under my clothing—under my skin. I was feeling buried.

  “That’s it,” he said. A gleeful punch of sound. “Your answer to everything. Screw your problems. You’re what’s wrong with women in the military or any real hard-assed work, you want to fuck your way through the job but you still want to be the lady.”

  He was pushing me. I barely heard my own thoughts in the swirling wind that buffeted inside my head. Everything was a bled out brown and there was danger in the dusty fog.

  He knows what he’s doing.

  The thought didn’t help me. I reached back and put a hand on the telescoping baton clipped to my belt.

  “Admit it,” Keene said. His voice had become part of the wind. “You liked it. A lonely girl, far from home.”

  Baiting me. He wants me violent.

  They say knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but self-knowledge wasn’t about to keep me from being a dangerous person. When I was a child, my father told me that I had a goat in me. He said almost everyone does and it was an animal of balance. The almost about it was the problem. There weren’t enough goats in the world to go around and someone was always wanting to take mine. If they did, it meant I lost balance and they gained it. I don’t know how many times in my life growing up he told me not to let anyone get my goat.

  Keene wanted me out of balance. He wanted me to act violently and knew exactly what buttons to push. I was in danger of handing over my goat and my badge would probably go with it.

  I may as well have been blind. My eyes saw Keene but my mind only saw a mist of blowing dust. I could hear as well but the only sound that mattered was the roar of Humvee tires on cracked asphalt.

  “Everything will be all right.”

  “The hell’re you talking about?” Keene asked from beyond the roar and dirt.

  I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud. Despite the reassurance I’d given myself, it was hard to breathe. The dust storm in my mind was tearing the air right out of my lungs and I was getting close to panic.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said again searching for the moment the words echoed.

  After I’d been assaulted by two American officers and left for dead in the dirt of Iraq, and after I had been discovered by a truckload of militia who wanted to shoot me like a feral dog in a ditch, I was rescued by a patrol and taken into the back of a Humvee. It had been my only care or safety through the ordeal or for a long time after. That was the moment I tried to hold onto. The moment Billy Blevins looked at me with kind eyes and said, “Everything will be all right.”

  “Everything okay here, Hurricane?” The voice was right but the words were wrong. It was like a dream moment when you know suddenly you are asleep and all you have to do is wake up to make the world right again.

  “Just breathe,” Billy’s voice told me.

  I didn’t know if it was real or not but I didn’t care. I grabbed onto the sound and followed it.

  “You’re safe,” he said. “Everything is going to be okay, just relax and breathe through it.”

  When I’d calmed enough to be aware of the real world around me I was sitting in the muddy shore weeds way too close to the body of Sartaña. Billy was sitting beside me with a hand on my back. Givens and Keene were nowhere to be seen.

  “You hyperventilated,” Billy told me.

  “No,” I shook my head and kind of moaned the word. “I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did,” he said emphatically. “You got angry with those feds and just got a little dizzy.”

  “You were there,” I said on the edge of tears. “Thank you.”

  “No, I’m here now and helping you breathe.”

  “In the back of the Humvee. You told me—”

  “Hurricane,” he said it hard, a call to attention. Then softer, he said, “Katrina.”

  I looked at him, the then-Billy not the long ago, might-have-been Billy.

  “You weren’t in a Humvee,” he explained carefully. “Not this time. You hyperventilated. Just a hard day. You probably haven’t had dinner have you? If anyone asks about it, remember that.”

  “Asks about it?”

  He looked over past the tape perimeter at Riley Yates standing beside a departmental cruiser taking notes.

  “Hyperventilated,” he said again. “No dinner.”

  I nodded and said, “Help me up.”

  As soon as I was on my feet Billy held out his hand. “Give me your keys.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll put Calvin in a cruiser at the park entrance and bring your truck down closer. You’ll want your note pad and a dry place to sit I imagine.”

  Billy knew my routine. We always have photos, but sketching a crime scene is more about seeing than recording. Even though it was dark there were enough lights to get my images down on paper. There was something else about sketching. It was a way to look busy and unapproachable but required little concentration. At least at my skill level.

  I handed over my keys.

  As soon as Billy started walking to get Calvin, Riley Yates was at the tape.

  “You okay?” he asked in that casual way even small town news people have. Casual until it wasn’t.

  I nodded.

  “You looked a bit put down there,” he said. “Those other fellas went off in a huff too. Anything I might be interested in?”

  “Which part?” I asked. “Them or me?”

  “Pretty much anything I can get that won’t show up on someone’s blog first.”

  “Does anyone blog about the goings on in Taney County?”

  “You’d be surprised what people find to put on the internets.”

  “ ‘Net,” I corrected. “There’s only one.”

  “Youth does not always know more than experience,” he answered.

  I was still trying to figure the meaning of that when he pointed sideways with his index finger and bobbled it in the general direction of Billy’s back. “What do you think about our friend, Billy Blevins?”

  “Think?” I imagined my eyebrows had pretty much shot off the top of my face. Then I tried to pull them back in my own attempt at a casual act. “What are you asking?”

  “What do you think I’m asking, Hurricane?” He jumped on that question like a stray dog on a dropped hamburger. “Is there more to the story than I know?”

  “I don’t even know what the story is,” I said with my recovered straight face on. “I can’t know anything more.”

  “Uh-huh,” Riley nodded. He looked at me like he was reading his own headlines right through my skin. “Sheriff Benson said he talked to you.”

  I understood. “You’re asking about the idea of Billy running for sheriff.” If idiot was a liquid, I would have been the same super-sized cup that Billy kept full of soda.

  “What were you talking about?” The nod of Riley’s head, which at first seemed knowing, now seemed a little more educated.

  “Nothing,” I answered lame as a clubfoot duck. “It’s been a bad day. Busy. I missed dinner . . .”

  Riley laughed. It was big and loud and entirely out of place at a murder scene. I felt a lot better hearing it.

  “Should I print that?” he asked, still chuckling.

  “No. But why aren’t you asking about what’s going on here?”

  “Detective Williams, what can you tell me about this investigation?”

  Again, I felt like an idiot. “We don’t have any comment at this time,” I answered. “Got it. But what are you going to say about Billy?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what people say to me about him. The sheriff thinks he’s the right choice above others with more experience.”

  It was my turn to nod knowingly. “Like me.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Don’t bothe
r dancing,” I told him with a smile. “Can you imagine me running? Can you imagine anyone who knows my record on the job voting for me?”

  “People tend to find their places in life,” he said. “Like water always finding downhill.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I think you are the kind of person who views herself through other people’s lenses.”

  “You’re going to have to be a little straighter than that, Riley. I’m just a cop.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. You’re a good cop. It doesn’t mean you should want to be the boss or would make a good one. And you’re right, you have a bit of a history around here. But it serves the people of the county.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Everyone tends to keep their head down around a loose cannon.”

  “I’m a loose cannon?”

  Riley grinned. “What do you think about Billy? The right choice?”

  I considered what the sheriff had said and what I knew. Then I thought hard on what I didn’t know so much as feel. My feelings were much more aware than my mind sometimes. I couldn’t say what kind of recommendation that was, but we are who we are I guess.

  As I mulled the question, working through the messy mental diagram of my history with Billy Blevins, I saw a silent pulsing of light in the sky. High, and distant, the lightning illuminated the anvil shape of a stacked thunderhead.

  From the sky I looked down, right into Riley’s eyes. “He’s the only choice I can imagine.”

  “You don’t think older hands will have issues with a deputy stepping right on up into the sheriff’s job?”

  “Who cares?” I asked him with a smile. “That’s the beauty of an elected position. Citizens make the call. I would be proud to work for Billy Blevins.” I nodded over in the direction of my approaching truck and added, “He’s on his way back if you want to talk to him.”

  “Not just yet,”

  “Good,” I said pointing into the dark sky. “A storm’s coming.”

  On cue, a falling-barrel, rumble rolled out of the distance and new flowers of light bloomed in the black sky. Billy parked my truck and walked my notepad to me.