The bite of his response seemed to amuse her. Was she playing with him? Did she know how badly he felt for her? Perhaps not; women were often stupid that way. Or perhaps she just didn’t care.
She wandered to the window, disheveled in her nightgown, groggy and kicked out of sleep by dreams as he had been. He felt magnetized by her; he always had. Her prettiness poured over him like fluid. Her hair was disarranged, her nightgown crooked and creased, but she was even pretty when she was a mess. He smiled to himself, wishing he could kiss her, and wondering what she might do if he did.
Quite abruptly, she opened the window and stuck her head out. Kurt sank in his seat, still haunted by the undertow of his dream—he wanted to push her away. Had she seen something?
“No, it’s beautiful. Crystal clear and so still. You can see every single star.”
Her voice sailed away in a fading echo. Suddenly dimensions seemed to extend, the room stretching a hundred feet long, and she was tiny at the end of it. He imagined himself walking the entire length of the room, summoned by a foreign yet curiously unsurprising impulse. She would turn, sensing his approach, a soft and knowing smile on her lips. Their eyes would meet, and they would embrace in desperate happiness. His fingers would slide through her hair and down her shoulders, connecting her to him by touch. They would be carried through an interstice of timeless avowal, where feelings transcended words, and love reduced all the flaws of the world to grains of sand. /
“Those people are all dead, aren’t they?”
“What?” he said. The muse fell to bits, a seductive lie. Nothing was perfect.
She had turned and was facing him now. The lamplight reached out wanly, barely surfacing her from the shadows. “Doug Swaggert, that man and his daughter who lived in the trailer, those two high school girls. Are they dead?”
“Probably.”
“Murdered, in other words.”
His nod was grim, pauseless.
Silence unfurled around them, like smoke. Something solemn seemed to descend on her; the empty incomprehension of innocence filled her eyes. “When do you think the killers will be caught?”
“Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Maybe never. So far there’s no traceable evidence. There’s nothing we can use to maintain an investigation. All we can hope for is some luck, at least for the time being.”
“The time being? You mean until someone else gets killed.”
Kurt didn’t comment. Her words hissed cynicism, even ridicule. Was she accusing the police of inaction? Was she blaming
“Every time something’s happened, he’s been around.”
“Not those two girls,” Vicky countered. “It said in the paper that their car was found in Bowie.”
“Sure, but what you’re forgetting is that Bowie is right alongside us; actually, the car was discovered less than a mile from where Glen was working that same night. And to make matters worse, he says he caught two girls in a silver sedan trespassing on Belleau Wood a couple of nights earlier. He ran them off and logged their tag number—”
“And the tags were the same?”
“Right down to the last digit. Which means that Glen came in direct contact with the missing girls just a few nights before they disappeared.”
She came forward, the angles of her face sharp from negation. “So you suspect Glen, too?”
“No, no,” he said. “Relax.” In fact, he felt good that someone else agreed with his certainty of Glen’s innocence. He yawned and went on. “Chief Bard was born with a pair of blinders on his face. No offense to the man, now, but he seems to be a little bit wrong about everything. He’s on the right track, just barking up the wrong tree. He’s got Glen pegged as the constant, but there’s one other thing that all the disappearances have in common.”
“What’s that?”
“Belleau Wood.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Whizz that one by me again,” Bard was requesting of the phone when Kurt came in. The chief sounded confused; he held the phone as if it were antiquated, a burden to use. “An autopsy preliminary… I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said into the phone. Now his jowls were tensed, like corded suet.
Kurt sat down to wait. He didn’t know why he’d come; boredom, he supposed, had directed him here. The station office was dazzling in the clear light of late morning; it made him feel hot, edgy. Coffee bubbled like pitch from an old burner atop the file cabinet. Its stenching aroma hovered about the office, irritating and stiff as tear gas.
“What, right now?” Bard said. “But I don’t have anyone available right n—” He shot a glance to Kurt. “Strike that. I’ll have a man there in twenty minutes,” and then he rang off.
Kurt frowned. “Who was that?”
“South County. The M.E.’s got an autopsy report for us. Your duty of the day is to go and pick it up.”
“They found the bodies of those two girls?”
“No,” Bard said.
“Then what did they do an autopsy on?”
“I don’t know, and neither did the musclehead on the phone. He just said they had an autopsy report for us. So go and get it.”
Kurt’s stomach began to remember the last visit. “Look, Chief, I hate to stand in the way of police business, but I’m on suspension, remember? I’m not getting paid—”
“That situation can be arranged permanently, if you like.”
“Come on, seriously. I don’t want to go there again. The place makes me sick. Why should I go to a place I don’t want to go for no pay?”
“Because I told you to.”
“Read my lips, Chief. I-don’t-want-to-go-to-the-goddamned-county-morgue.”
“Read
“So that’s the game. Employer-employee blackmail.”
Bard grinned. “’Fraid so, my boy. I’m too busy with all this paperwork to go myself.” ·
“Yeah, I can see that.” Bard’s desk, of course, was clear, save for April’s
“I can’t send Higgins. He took Glen down to county CID in Forestville about an hour ago.”
“CID? Why?”
“They’re putting Glen on the box,” Bard said.
“No, they just
