'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
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 last 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
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.
His stomach roiled. Again he managed to quell the revolt of his last meal. Not because of what he saw, but because he knew what he would have to do soon enough and it was tearing him up inside. He was going to have to tell his big sister that her child was dead. He was going to mercilessly crush her hopes, destroy the only thing that gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And then he was going to have to watch her slowly die of a broken heart. The only thing he would be able to offer her was retribution, which wouldn't forestall her eventual
