Brood XIX (3 page)

She screamed and he held her head against
his, their damp cheeks pressed together.

"Where's Emma?" she sobbed into his ear.

She curled her fingers into fists in the back
of his uniform shirt.

The crowd closed in on them.

"Where's my daughter?" she shouted.

"We'll find her," Trey said. "I swear to you.
We'll find her and whoever did this to Warren."

"Have you told anyone else about this?"

Trey stood and turned a slow circle. Murky,
stagnant water surrounded him on all sides, save for the random
islands that poked up over the surface of the bayou. They were
packed with cypresses with lazy branches that draped down nearly to
the water. Spanish moss bearded their boughs. Mangroves grew
directly from the slough, their stained trunks memorializing the
history of the water table. Clouds of insects swirled near the
banks.

It had taken him nearly an hour by motorboat,
winding a strange, circuitous route through shadowed channels where
snapping turtles fought for basking space in the precious few rays
of sun that reached the ground. The fact that the man standing
uncomfortably at the edge of the sloppy bank had made this
particular discovery at all was a stroke of luck.

"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
skritching
, grinding noise.

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
skritching
.

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
deterioration.

The techs had excavated the scene like
archaeologists. They had carefully used trowels to clear the mud
from the bones. The decomposed tissue formed a black corona where
the flesh had once been, a process that had been expedited by the
larvae that teemed in the soil. The corpse had been buried
facedown. Not laid to rest, but hurled down into a shallow grave.
The techs estimated the grave had maybe been two feet deep based
upon the erosion patterns of the surrounding bayou. A rush job,
they had called it. But it hadn't been for fear of being caught in
the act. Not out here. It had been the final insult to injury, of
which there had been more than any child should have to bear. There
were multiple fractures of the tibias and fibulae and the femora.
One of the knees was deformed. A portion of the bone had broken
away to reveal a coarse black crater. The entire pelvis was
shattered. The spinal column was crooked and broken, the rib cage
cracked along the lateral margins so that it collapsed in upon
itself, the jagged ends clasped like interlaced fingers. The humeri
were fractured in multiple places, the forearms snapped through and
through in such a way that the hands were no longer attached.

They had photographed, documented, and
removed the intact sections one by one until all that remained was
a child-size indentation in the earth that would soon enough be
washed away by the elements until there was nothing left of her at
all. The worst had been when they extracted the cranium. It had
come away like half of a broken vase, leaving the fragmented
remains of the face behind. The facial bones had been destroyed,
broken into hundreds of pieces that would be nearly impossible to
reconstruct. Chipped teeth pocked the sludge. Despite the
obliteration of the maxillae and the mandible, the techs were
confident they would be able to mold the teeth into a cast to
compare against dental records. They would also be able to extract
DNA from the long black hair they had teased out of the mud. They
understood the personal nature of the situation and promised to
expedite matters from their end. The law enforcement community took
care of its own.

Trey didn't have to ask how the body had come
to be in such a state. It was obvious to all. Whether peri- or
postmortem, the child had been kicked repeatedly. Over and over
with such ferocity that the bones had snapped. Children's bones are
designed for resilience, to bend significantly before breaking,
almost like rubber. For them to have snapped like this, an
inordinate amount of force would have to have been applied, the
kind of force that can only be generated in the heat of a blinding
rage.

He wandered away from the site, trying to
appear nonchalant, and vomited into a shrub once he was out of
sight. His eyes blurred with tears and he fought the urge to scream
at the top of his lungs. He had never felt so helpless, so useless.
So victimized. So furious.

They had interviewed everyone in attendance
at the carnival that night two years ago. They had funneled them
through an interview bottleneck that had kept all of the deputies
busy until the first hint of dawn graced the sky. Those that
remembered seeing Emma hadn't witnessed any signs of duress. No one
had seen a struggle or heard her scream. The only detail that had
stood out was the mention of a giant sucker that her mother had
insisted they hadn't bought for her, but they had raised Emma not
to be lured away by strangers with candy, which could mean only one
thing.

Emma had been abducted by someone she knew,
someone she trusted.

And it was his fault. He had been on duty and
he had failed the only family he had.

He imagined the expression of horror and
betrayal on his niece's face as an unknown man with a familiar face
set upon her, kicking and kicking, until there was nothing left of
her but a ruined sack of bruised flesh filled with jagged bone
fragments like broken glass.