Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  Soon I see shapes through the fog. Three young men, maybe on their way back to their dorms after a party. Two are staggering like zombies. Drunk. The other guy is practically skipping, still full of energy. Probably on Adderall.

  According to Agent Richmond, my former partner at the FBI, practically every college student is on Adderall. It helps them study all night without losing focus. Some take it to get ahead, so others take it to keep up. The drug screws with your liver and pancreas over the long term, and you need to take more and more to get the same effect. But by the time the negative symptoms show up, these kids will all have their degrees. They’ll be lawyers and politicians. People who can afford a drug habit, an upmarket rehab facility, a liver transplant.

  Some kids, though, don’t take it for study. They just want to be able to party all night and still hear what the teacher is saying in class the next day.

  I think this guy is one of those. I hadn’t counted on seeing anyone sober enough to remember me later.

  I don’t know if they’ve spotted me yet. I can’t turn and run, just in case they have. That would be so suspect that I’d have to abort. Go home.

  Instead I bend over, as though I’m out of breath, or stretching. I surreptitiously pick up a dented beer can. Then I straighten up and keep walking toward the three men. Not stumbling, that would be too obvious. Just walking.

  As the three men come within facial recognition range, I raise the can, like I’m saying, Cheers.

  One of the two drunkards says, “Eyyy!” like the Fonz. The other hasn’t seen me at all, and says, “What?” The third guy just nods.

  I keep walking.

  I’m not sure exactly what tips me off. Maybe it’s the scuffling of feet behind me. Maybe the movement of the air. Maybe it’s what Thistle said about the jogger who got attacked around here. But I duck.

  Too slow. A fist glances off the top of my head, hard enough to send me stumbling. As I fall, my hands fly out of my pockets.

  All three of them.

  Biggs’s hand hits the path and lands on its back, like a dead crab. I crash down next to it and grab it, hoping they didn’t see. I stuff it into the pouch at the front of my hoodie and try to stand.

  One of the drunkards kicks me in the chest, and I roll back, tucking my chin down just in time to avoid cracking my skull on the path.

  “See what he’s got,” the other drunk says. He sounds sober now. I can’t believe I fell for the act.

  The Adderall-looking guy—I wonder why he didn’t pretend to be drunk like the others—pins me down with one hand while he searches me with the other. His forearm is like a steel bar across my chest. My arms are trapped. He’s done this before.

  But this time he gets a surprise.

  His hand comes out of my pocket holding Biggs’s fingers. For a second the guy doesn’t know what he’s looking at. Then he says, “Oh, holy fuck!” and flings it aside.

  The pressure on my chest loosens just enough.

  I rear up and bite his cheek.

  He screams then, turns his face away. But I don’t release my grip, so the movement tears a strip of flesh from his face.

  He punches me, a desperate but surprisingly well-aimed blow to my left eye. I flop back down, my head full of stars and my mouth full of blood. It’s the freshest meat I’ve tasted in months.

  I need more.

  I sit up. The rest of my meal is running away, screaming. So are his two friends.

  I’m about to give chase when a light turns on in one of the buildings behind the fence. Someone is here, and awake. As I watch, another window goes bright.

  Panic suppresses the hunger. I look around frantically for Biggs’s hand. Those guys saw my face. Soon I’ll be wanted for assault. If I leave the hand here, that assault could be connected to Biggs’s murder.

  But the weeds on either side of the path are lush. I don’t know where the guy threw the hand, and I don’t have time to comb through the grass.

  “Hello?” a voice calls.

  I break into a sprint, in the opposite direction from the three would-be muggers. For the second time in two days, I find myself wiping gore off my chin with my sleeve as I hurry through a public place, hoping to get to my car before anyone spots me.

  I’m losing it. One day I’ll make a mistake that gets me killed.

  What scares me isn’t the idea that I just made that mistake. It’s the idea that I did it yesterday, or a month ago. Maybe I’ve been doomed for years and I just don’t know it yet.

  I reach my car and jump in. There are flashlights somewhere behind me. Too soon for cops; probably campus security, armed with Tasers.

  I drive just above the speed limit. Anything less is considered suspicious in Texas. A passing patrol car might conclude that I had been drinking.

  Finally I make it home, and lock the door. Safe, for now. Two hours later I’ve showered and washed my clothes, then showered again. I’ve brushed my teeth so hard the enamel hurts. I’ve shone a UV torch over the interior of my car, the radiation unraveling any DNA left behind. But I’m still on edge. I messed up, badly.

  You’re getting out of control. I push the thought away.

  I’m scrubbing the dirt off the soles of my shoes when my phone rings. I answer, forgetting to sound sleepy: “Yeah?”

  “Good, you’re up,” Thistle says. “I’m on my way to the field office. Want me to pick you up?”

  Probably a good idea, so Warner doesn’t track my car to the office. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “I’m hoping you can give me a hand with something,” Thistle says.

  * * *

  I stand at the window, waiting for Thistle’s car. I don’t want her walking up to my front door. She might smell Elliott’s corpse. Even after dissolving most of him in acid and freezing the rest in airtight containers, I still can’t get rid of the smell. Despite the cold, I’ve been leaving the back door open to air the place out. It hasn’t helped. In fact, the smell seems to be getting worse. You got a dead cat in there, or what?

  Maybe it’s getting worse because it’s only in my head. When I was a kid, all my clothes came from charity. Most of them smelled like urine no matter how many times I washed them, and I was never sure if anyone else could smell it. I don’t know much about brains—I don’t even eat them—but I think knowing about an odor might be the same thing as smelling it, neurologically. Like how hearing the word vomit puts a trace of it in your nose.

  On the phone, Thistle didn’t give me much information. Just that a severed hand had been found at the college, and she thought it belonged to Biggs. I got the feeling she knew more than she was saying. Hopefully that’s only because she wanted to tell me in person.

  Her Crown Vic slows down on approach, like she’s reluctant to stop. Can’t blame her, in a neighborhood like this.

  I slip out the front door, triple-lock it behind me and run down the path to the car. Thistle pushes the door open and I jump straight in.

  “Good morning,” she says.

  I clear my throat. “Good morning. I’m more awake now—you said something on the phone about a severed hand?”

  She zooms up my street and does a U-turn at the end. “I’ll let Dr. Norman fill you in on that. First let me tell you about Vasquez. He’s been digging through the data on Biggs’s computer. There’s some weird porn in the browsing history, but so far nothing else suspicious. No significant correspondence with anyone outside our suspect pool, no email receipts from transactions we didn’t already know about, no Google searches for ‘how to fake your own death.’”

  “How weird is the porn?”

  “Vasquez only said there was nothing illegal.”

  “But potentially embarrassing? Worthy of blackmail?”

  “I assume so. Biggs was married, with a daughter and a senior position at the college. The porn wouldn’t have to be too w
eird before it could be used for leverage. What are you thinking?”

  I rub my eyes. “Not sure. Probably nothing. How did Vasquez go with the dates marked on the wall planner?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Too much data to sift through?”

  “Too little.” Thistle takes a turnoff toward the field office. “He’s got some kind of machine learning algorithm working on it. It’s supposed to be good at spotting patterns, but only works with huge swathes of data. Twelve dates aren’t much.”

  She seems more relaxed today. Maybe she’s decided that me following her to the courthouse wasn’t too bad. Or maybe she’s just hiding her anger better. She could be counting down the hours until this case is solved and she never has to see me again.

  The thought is painful, and I force it out of my mind. “Well, we can’t give it more dates,” I say. “But can we give it clues for the sort of thing we’re looking for?”

  “I assume so. What are we looking for?”

  “Missing persons or violent crime within a hundred miles of the dump.”

  “If you’re thinking that Biggs was trying to tell us what was happening to him by pointing to similar cases, there’s no reason to assume they’d be local.”

  I drum my fingers on my knees. “If it was just similar cases, he wouldn’t know the exact dates offhand. And that wouldn’t help us identify his abductor.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Thistle says. “But if Biggs was pointing us to the past crimes of the perp, he wouldn’t know those dates, either.”

  “Not unless he and the perp were very close,” I say. “And had been for at least a year. Where are we at with Shannon Luxford?”

  “No sign of him anywhere—including in travel records. So he hasn’t left the country, but he might have left the state. His car hasn’t, though. License plate tracking hasn’t seen anything.”

  “Are his parents alive?”

  “Yup. His father installs security systems, his mother’s a homemaker. Some agents went to visit, but saw no sign of Shannon.”

  “Okay. What about the guy who fled the dump?”

  “Well, I’ve never had to put an APB out on a tractor before,” Thistle said. “So that was fun. Houston PD found it abandoned in a field near the edge of the city. We’re still looking for the driver, but I’m thinking he’s in the wind. We don’t know his name, and he’s had time to change clothes by now.”

  “You can’t get his name from Edwards’s employment records?”

  “Oh, that’s the other thing. The records are bogus. Full of made-up names and addresses.”

  I remember noticing all the Anglo-Saxon names in his files. Half the workforce was Latino—I should have figured the records were fake.

  “Let me guess,” I say. “A bunch of his workers were undocumented—including the guy who ran. Edwards is claiming he didn’t know, and that those were the details they gave him.”

  “Bingo,” Thistle says. “Half his employees didn’t show up for work today. We must have scared them off. Most of them were smart enough not to run in such an obvious way, though.”

  Maybe the guy ran because he thought we were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For undocumented workers, ICE is as frightening as the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. But it’s possible that this particular man had more reason to flee than the rest.

  “Serves Edwards right,” Thistle is saying. “The pay records are pretty shady-looking. Best guess, he was paying those workers much less than he said he was. The IRS is interested.”

  “And Biggs’s car?”

  “The crusher made it pretty much impossible to get fingerprints off the inside, and a lot of people have touched the outside. But the CSI techs found some blond hairs stuck to the headrest of the driver’s seat.”

  Interesting. “Long or short?”

  “Long.”

  “DNA?”

  “Most of the hairs seem to have been cut off rather than fallen out,” Thistle says. “But we got lucky—the follicle was still attached to one strand. We’re testing it now.”

  “Cut off” sounds like planted evidence to me. I stare out the window at the other cars. SUVs with no passengers, drivers staring like zombies at the brake lights ahead. One woman doing her makeup while she’s stopped at an intersection.

  “So I talked to Zak,” Thistle says after a pause.

  “Who’s Zak?”

  “My ex-husband.” She keeps her eyes on the road. “He didn’t introduce himself?”

  “No,” I say. “In my head I was calling him ‘the lumberjack.’ You know, because of the shirt?”

  She fights back a smile, but still doesn’t look at me. “So, anyway, he thinks you’re my boyfriend.”

  “I didn’t tell him that.”

  “No. He assumed it because of how you stuck up for me.”

  She looks at me.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “So I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have accused you of colluding with him.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I shouldn’t have been there at all. I should have mound my own business.”

  It’s something we used to say as kids—mound rather than minded, sprunt instead of sprinted. She laughs, and something inside me thaws a little.

  * * *

  “Agent Thistle,” Dr. Norman says. “You always bring me the best cases.”

  Norman is tall and pale, with a dry sense of humor and an unsettling way of looking at people, particularly me. I always feel like she can read my mind. She doesn’t like me much, but that’s not uncommon.

  Today her strawberry-blond hair is mostly tucked into a blue shower cap. As usual, she shows no sign that she can feel how cold it is down here in the morgue.

  The air smells bad. This meat is all too old to eat, and a lot of it has been pumped full of chemicals to preserve it.

  “What can you tell us, Doc?” Thistle asks.

  Norman takes a steel tray out of a big fridge and places it on a workbench. It’s covered with Saran wrap, like a plate of leftover sandwiches after a party. She removes the plastic, unveiling the hand. The wedding ring is gone.

  “Left hand of an adult male,” she says. “Midforties, judging by the elasticity of the skin. No tattoos, no burns and no calluses on the fingertips, which would suggest a white-collar job. Removed with a serrated blade. Possibly a hacksaw.”

  It was a bread knife, but whatever.

  Thistle glances at me. “At least we have Biggs’s prints now.”

  Looks like my plan worked, sort of. “How do you know it’s the right hand?” I ask.

  “It’s the left,” Norman says.

  Hilarious.

  “How do you know it belongs to Biggs? Plenty of men in their forties work white-collar jobs.”

  “Get this,” Thistle says. “A security guard at the university hears screaming from somewhere outside at four-thirty this morning. She has a look around. Finds nothing. Then, about two hours later, a jogger sees a pool of blood on the cycle path.”

  “I didn’t see a cycle path when we visited the school,” I say.

  “It’s outside the fence,” Thistle says. “But not far from the math department.”

  “So, no cameras?” I say. “That’s a shame.”

  Norman gives me a strange look. I fight the urge to touch my hair, checking it for crusted blood.

  “The jogger slows down,” Thistle says, “and sees a severed hand half-buried in the grass a few feet away. She calls the cops. When they show up, they can’t find the rest of the body. But they do take a wedding ring off the hand. The engraving on the inside says Love, Gabbi. And it has the date of Biggs’s wedding engraved next to that.”

  “That does sound fairly conclusive,” I say.

  “It’s theoretically possible the perp put the wedding band on someone else
’s hand,” Norman says. “I’d advise against telling the family until we’ve confirmed prints or DNA.”

  “I’d say they have a right to know,” Thistle says.

  “They also have a right to not be jerked around,” Norman says.

  “What do you think happened?” I ask Thistle. “Best guess.”

  Thistle folds her arms across her chest. “We’re being manipulated. My feeling is, the perp planted Biggs’s hand and his blood there to get our attention. Probably to lead us off track, although maybe he thinks he deserves to be caught, since he’s clearly unhinged. Violent impulses he can’t control, and maybe a loose grip on reality. There are a bunch of other possibilities, but that’s my gut feeling about what we’re dealing with here.”

  Thistle has caught plenty of killers, and she’s getting close to profiling me. Luckily, Norman distracts her.

  “Two things to note, Agent,” she says. “First, the hand was removed postmortem. So whoever screamed, it wasn’t Biggs.”

  “Huh.” Thistle deflates. “Well, this just officially became a homicide investigation. Can you get time of death?”

  “No more than a week ago. I can’t be more specific than that. Lividity is useless without the rest of the body, and I’m thinking the killer may have refrigerated the hand, though I’m not sure for how long.”

  It worries me sometimes, how good Norman is at her job.

  “What about the blood?” Thistle asks. “How fresh was it?”

  “Very,” Norman says. “And that’s the other thing. I compared it to a sample from the hand. They don’t match.”

  Makes sense. The blood was from the guy whose face I bit.

  I can sense Thistle getting excited. “Different DNA?”

  “I don’t have DNA results back yet. But blood group is a much simpler test—it takes ten minutes. The hand is A positive, the puddle is A negative. They came from different people.”

  “The victim and the killer,” Thistle says. “It’s gotta be.”

  “Maybe,” I say, thinking fast. I don’t want us chasing the wrong guy, but I also don’t want to implicate myself.

  Thistle ignores me. “If the killer was the one screaming, then who attacked him? And why?”