Over Your Dead Body (18 page)

Four minutes gone from our Internet session.

“Derek Stamper,” said Brooke, reading over my shoulder. “I never knew his last name. It says he was their only child.”

The article didn’t say anything about other, similar murders, so I started searching for other towns we’d been in: “Baker murder.” “Baker cut to pieces.” I tried every combination I could think of, for every town we’d visited or traveled through, all the way back to Fort Bruce. “Fort Bruce murder,” unsurprisingly, got a ton of hits, but they were all for the deaths we already knew about. There didn’t seem to be any murders that fit the right profile, or indeed any profile, in any of the places we’d visited.
Eighteen minutes gone.
I checked the phrase “cut to pieces,” to see if it turned up any similar crimes, but all I got was a quilting blog and a bunch of murders in other countries.

Twenty-two minutes gone.

“There’s nothing,” said Brooke.

“Or nothing people know about,” I said. “Maybe he hides the bodies.”

“Derek was killed in his living room,” said Brooke, shaking her head. “He’d been there for at least an hour when his parents came home and found him. That’s plenty of time to hide the body if the killer had wanted to, but he didn’t.”

I glanced at her, surprised. Brooke didn’t usually talk so crisply about dead bodies.

I looked back at the screen. “Why so many pieces?” I asked. Nearly a hundred, the news had estimated, but the forensics team was still on the site. “Maybe the killer took some.”

“Gross,” said Brooke.

“We won’t know if anything’s gone until they do a full autopsy, and try to … put him back together.”

“Look for missing persons,” said Brooke. “If the other bodies were hidden, the stories we’re looking for will just be about runaways or kidnappings or something.”

I nodded and ran more searches for all the places we’d been, but none of them were reporting missing people, either.

Three minutes left.

“This doesn’t make sense,” said Brooke.

“So we look at what does,” I said. “The town of Dillon has no violent crime, no untimely deaths, and no real problems whatsoever for decades. Some high school kids getting drunk at a bowling alley, some graffiti in the abandoned movie theater, and that’s it. And then two days after we show up someone gets brutally, horrifically murdered.”

“So we’re the inciting factor,” said Brooke.

I shot her another glance; she was speaking more coherently than usual and the terror she’d shown earlier had been replaced with a calm professionalism. Was Brooke gone again? Who’d come in her place? And how long had it taken me to notice?

“Two minutes left,” said Brooke. “Search for … ‘Dillon murder Facebook.’”

“Why?” I asked, though I was already typing. The results loaded, and Brooke took the mouse from my hand and started scrolling.

“Because if the killer didn’t follow us to Dillon,” she said, “but our presence in Dillon precipitated the kill, then the only explanation that makes sense is that the killer was already in town before we got there, lying low. We can’t find evidence of a similar crime because the Withered we’re looking for hasn’t killed anyone in ages.”

“So what are we going to find on Facebook?”

“That,” said Brooke, and she clicked on a link. Corey Diamond—Derek’s friend from the drive-in—had updated his status just after midnight:

It begins.

“No way,” I said.

“We have to go back to Dillon,” said Brooke. “We missed a Withered.”

I nodded slowly, turning to look her in the eyes. “Who are you?”

“Who do you think?” she said, and her eyes showed a sign of hurt. “I’m Brooke.”

14

We didn’t want to be followed again, which meant we didn’t want any friendly drivers who could look at a photo and say, “Yeah, I remember giving them a ride.” Even if they didn’t remember us, they’d remember the dog.

I thought again about getting rid of Boy Dog, just leaving him here or, even better, out in the countryside. He was too recognizable, and that made him a huge liability. But I had rules, and they wouldn’t let me hurt an animal, even by neglect. Those rules kept me who I was. If I lost Boy Dog I lost my soul, so he came along.

We couldn’t steal a car, either, for obvious reasons. That would get us more attention instead of less. So we sat in the shade of the truck-stop wall and watched the vehicles as they came in, waiting for just the right one. When it came we gathered our bags of newly washed clothes and got ready to run. An old pickup with a couch in the bed, flipped on its back and tied down with ropes and a tarp. It had come from the direction of the city, which meant it was headed out of the city. We watched the driver carefully; he topped off his tank, left the truck by the pump, and went inside the building, probably to use the restroom. We ran across the open lot, hefted Boy Dog into the bed beside the couch, and climbed in after him, hiding under the tarp as best we could. If the driver saw us, he’d raise a stink and maybe even call the police; if he didn’t, he’d drive us away, and we’d be free.

We waited.

I was pressed almost chest to chest with Brooke, Boy Dog resting on top of us like a hundred-pound stuffed animal. He panted heavily, shifting to find a more comfortable spot, but he didn’t bark. Brooke raised her hand and let him lick it, whispering
shhhh
, almost silently. I checked our feet again, making sure they were tucked inside of the tarp, and then closed my eyes and listened. The highway roared like the ocean. A brake squealed. An engine growled to life and drove away. A mother called to a child: “Hold my hand, Noah, there are cars here!”

Pressure on my face: lips; the barest hint of a kiss on the side of my nose. I opened my eyes and saw Brooke staring back, her eyes a wet reflection in the half-light under the tarp.

“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help myself.”

I have never considered that a comforting excuse.

I closed my eyes again and listened as the wind whipped at the edges of the tarp, as another engine moved across the lot, as a pair of heavy footsteps clomped on the concrete. Brooke’s body went tense, and I knew she’d heard it too.

“Shhhh,” she whispered, and Boy Dog licked her hand.

The door clicked open. The truck jostled, rolling slightly to the side as the driver climbed in. I looked at Brooke. “Here we go.”

“Where?”

The engine started with a violent stutter, and the truck began to move.

“Doesn’t matter where,” I said. “It won’t be too far before a truck this old needs to refuel, so we’ll just wait ’til he stops, see if we can climb out in secret, and then start hitchhiking again, working our way back to Dillon. I don’t know how the FBI is tailing us, but if they can’t make the leap from Dallas to whatever random place we end up in, we might be able to lose them.”

“And then just pick them up again in Dillon,” said Brooke. “They’re bound to investigate this murder.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was getting hard to hear as we pulled onto the highway and wind shook the tarp like a drum. “But it’s like you said: they know it wasn’t us, because we were in Dallas when it happened.”

She flashed a wry smile. “Doesn’t mean they won’t be looking into it. We don’t know what we’re going to find there.”

“If we’re lucky,” I said, “whatever we find won’t know about us, either.”

Her face was right in front of mine, mere inches away. I could feel her hips and her legs; her feet and mine were almost laced together in the tight space. Even with Boy Dog falling asleep on top of us, it was too close, and I needed to move. I closed my eyes and ran through my number sequence: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three, three hundred seventy-seven …

Brooke exhaled, and I felt her breath on my face, warm and comforting like a pillow of air. I breathed deep, then shifted my legs and struggled to sit up, picking up Boy Dog with me. He flailed weakly in my arms, not fighting but simply looking for a new solid surface to replace the one he’d been sleeping on. I managed to maneuver him back into the slot I’d just risen from and crept toward the back of the truck, searching for fresh air.

The highway was full without being crowded, the cars and trucks and trailers moving seventy or eighty miles an hour at least, but nearly motionless in relation to each other. More vehicles were moving toward us from the side, another highway merging with ours, and I watched a bright orange semi glide toward us, growing larger and larger as it approached, until its road joined ours and we were right next to each other, barely three feet apart. I could see the pencil-thin scratches in the paint and read the tiny lettering on the signs and notices stuck to the side. The road behind us stretched out to the horizon line, a thousand cars in perfect formation.

An hour later they had all disappeared onto side roads and exits, and we were alone.

The truck drove for about five hours, all told, going deep into Arkansas. When he stopped again for gas and a restroom, we jumped out and hid, making sure he didn’t see us, just in case. After he drove away we took a quick pit stop ourselves, filling old water bottles from the drinking fountain by the restrooms. I waited while Brooke used the restroom again, and then we walked back out to the on-ramp of the northbound freeway, hoping to circle around and head back to Dillon. We stuck to the back roads, and spent the night in a town called Longbend, somewhere near the border of Missouri. It rained all night, and we huddled together under an old rail car, wrapped in our thin blankets and catching scattered bits of sleep whenever our exhaustion managed to overwhelm our discomfort. I thought about our showers from that morning, all that cleanliness and nonthreatening approachability washing away into the gravel. At least our clean clothes were still packed; I made sure to keep the bags dry.

In the end, though, I supposed it didn’t really matter. The people of Dillon had already seen us, if not at our worst then at least close to it. What would they say when they saw us? What would we say when we saw them?
Hi, we saw that dead kid on TV and rushed straight back just in case you didn’t have enough suspects
. We had a perfect alibi—the man at the gas station had seen us buy snacks and then hitchhike out of town the day before the murder—but would that be enough? Would they interrogate us anyway? If they asked for ID, and maybe even if they didn’t, they’d discover we were runaways. If they went so far as to fingerprint us, I was already in the system. Going back into this situation threatened to destroy every bit of secrecy and independence we’d managed to build up.

But staying away would mean letting a Withered keep killing. The local cops would be helpless—we’d seen that time and again. Killing a Withered took a different approach, soft and oblique, watching from the shadows until you discovered their secret and struck. Somehow we had prompted this Withered to kill after years of dormancy, and unless we could find a way to unprompt it, we had to assume it would keep killing. An object in bloodlust tends to remain in bloodlust. Cleaver’s First Law.

I didn’t like being the reason it had killed Derek. I refused to be the reason it killed anyone else.

“Do you think we can get all the way there tomorrow?” asked Brooke.

“Sorry,” I said, shifting slightly away to avoid bothering her. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I was already awake,” she said. “Scoot back, you’re warm.”

I had only moved a fraction of an inch, but now I moved back, as grateful as she was for the added body heat. We pulled the blanket tighter around our shoulders and listened to the rain clatter against the rail car above us.

“I think we can get there in one day,” she said. “If I’m remembering the map right, it’s not too far.”

“Kind of isolated, though,” I said. “But you’re probably right.”

“What’s your plan?”

I’d been puzzling over that myself. “If Attina is disguised as Corey Diamond, we need to find a way to talk to his friends.”

“You mean the ones you pulled a knife on?”

“His parents, then,” I said. “Or his teachers—someone who’s known him for a while. Somewhere in his past, probably in the last three or four years, there’ll be a moment when his behavior changed—when the real Corey died and a shape-shifting Withered took over. Honestly, it’s probably easier for the Withered to take over teen lives than adult ones; the real person’s likes and habits haven’t really been established yet, so any inconsistencies can be passed off as puberty.”

“That’ll help us find out if it’s really Corey,” said Brooke. “How do we find out how to kill him?”

“A speed-bump test,” I said, “if we can arrange without getting caught. Beyond that we just have to … get to know him really well.”

“I didn’t meet him,” said Brooke, “but I have really uncomfortable feelings about him.”

“He was pretty … uncomfortable,” I said. “He stayed in the background, analyzing us while his friends cracked jokes. Honestly, he kind of reminded me of me.”

“That’s giving him too much credit,” said Brooke.

“Talking to the other people first might give us an idea of how to talk to him,” I said. “But how to get into his inner circle after starting off on such a bad foot?”

“This is going to be another long one, isn’t it?” asked Brooke. “We’ll need somewhere to stay.”

“We’re almost broke.”

“We should go back to Sara Glassman’s house.”

I raised my eyebrow. “You think she’d feed us again?”

“I think she’d let us stay,” said Brooke.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why not?” she said. “She has that whole house with nobody else in it, and she loved us.”

“You, maybe.”

“You too,” said Brooke. “You’re more charming than you think you are.”

“I’m not charming.”

“Charming’s the wrong word,” she said, nodding. She shot me a quick sideways look. “It’s more of a … brooding loner thing.”

I started to protest and then laughed out loud. “You want her to offer us rooms or hit on me?”

She shrugged. “I’m just saying. She likes us and she’s a good person. She’ll want to help us. And we know she has a guest room because she had family staying with her right before we showed up.”