Over Your Dead Body (23 page)

“Being a cop’s more interesting anyway,” said Marci, but Jessica’s face fell so fast when she said it that I knew Marci had made some kind of blunder, tripping over some invisible Dillon trip wire.

Officer Glassman’s eyes darkened—his eyebrows knit together and his eyeballs appeared to get darker in their shadow. “You got a problem with the state police, missy?”

“Marci,” said Marci, and Glassman and I both stared at her in shock—he was already getting angry and she’d corrected him, blunt as could be. But even as he was starting to snarl out a protest, she laughed out loud—high peals of laughter that seemed to shake her whole body. She covered her mouth with her hand and raised her eyebrows, trying to stifle the laughter, and then started spewing out a high-speed apology: “Oh, I’m so sorry I’m so sorry, I thought you were saying my name and so I was telling you it was Marci, I’m
such
an airhead, I’m so sorry, please, um, please—” She looked as apologetic as a person could look while trying not to laugh, and her laughter was so infectious that Glassman and Paul both started chuckling with her. None of the rest of us did, though I tried to smile to keep the general atmosphere going.

“No harm done, Marci,” said Glassman. He hesitated a moment, thrown so thoroughly off his guard that he didn’t know what to say next. “You, um, here for ice cream?”

“What flavor do you recommend?” asked Marci, recovering her composure just slowly enough to make the laughter look sincere. She wiped a tear from her eye to complete the effect.

“Raspberry,” said Glassman. “Dillon’s famous for its raspberries.”

“Awesome,” said Marci, and she jumped up from her seat on the scratched red table. “Thanks! Come on guys.” She motioned to us with her head, sticking her fingers in the back pockets of her jeans, and turned her back on Glassman to walk to the ice cream counter.

The rest of us took our cue and followed Marci, while Glassman just stood dumbly and watched, completely outmatched in Marci’s verbal chess game. He didn’t try to stop us—the conversation had arrived at his own dismissal so naturally he couldn’t protest it. I waited the longest, letting the rest bunch up in the line while I watched Glassman’s face. The last one to go was Jessica. As she turned, she dropped her phone. She stopped to pick it up, grimacing in fear that she’d somehow broken the spell, but all Glassman could see was her butt, bent over and pointed right at him, perfectly displayed in her tight shorts. He stared at it, and I saw him swallow and clench his fists. I looked away, not wanting him to see that I had seen him. When Jessica walked past me I moved directly behind her, cutting off Glassman’s view.

At the bar, we all made pointless small talk, not daring to look back. After a minute or two, I glanced back as discreetly as I could, hoping not to see him still standing in the same place. The truth was almost as bad—he was across the street, sitting in his squad car and staring.

I couldn’t say for sure at that distance, but I’d have bet anything he was staring right at Jessica.

“Thanks for getting rid of him,” said Brielle. “And please teach me how to do that.”

“He’s not gone yet,” said Corey. I hadn’t even seen him look. Jessica turned and looked at the squad car.

“Frickin’ Cuddles,” said Paul. “That guy gives me the creeps.”

“You’re not the one he was undressing with his eyes,” said Brielle.

“I take it he does that a lot?” I asked.

“That’s the rumor,” said the kid behind the counter.

“He was always pretty touchy-feely,” said Brielle. “But after he left Dillon to join the state police we heard about a girl in another town—”

“Crosby,” said Paul.

“No,” said the kid behind the counter, “it was Taylorsville.”

“It was somewhere,” said Brielle. “Nobody knows exactly what happened, but he’s totally a skeeze.”

“Sounds like an urban legend,” I said.

“It definitely happened,” said Paul. “I met a guy who knew the girl he attacked.”

“If it definitely happened he wouldn’t still be a cop,” said Marci. Her father was a cop. “They hate pedophiles more than anything.”

“Maybe,” said Jessica. She didn’t seem convinced.

“You saw the way he was looking at us,” said Brielle. “Even if there wasn’t a girl in Crosby or wherever, there’s going to be one someday. Somewhere.” Glassman started up his police cruiser and pulled out into the street, driving away. Brielle watched him go, her eyes cold. “If he comes after you, Jess, I’ll kill him.”

17

It started with a scream. Distant, it sounded like, but nothing in Dillon is all that distant. I learned later that it was only a few blocks away from our guest room in Ingrid’s house, which isn’t that far for a scream to carry. Pretty far to wake someone up, though. I was lying on the floor and opened my eyes, not even sure what had woken me. Brooke was asleep on the bed; I didn’t let myself look, but I listened, and her breathing was soft and steady. Boy Dog was snoring on the floor. I was in front of the door, blocking Brooke from leaving, and anyone else from entering. The house was quiet, as was the town. The light of a pale quarter moon drifted through the slats in the window blinds.

And then someone screamed again.

You would think, after the kind of life I’ve lived, that I’d be some kind of expert on screaming—that I could tell from a single cry at least the gender of a screamer, if not the age and some other details. Maybe that happens eventually, but if all the screams I’ve heard aren’t enough, I certainly don’t want to know how many it would take. Extreme pain and extreme terror have a way of blending all voices into one primal sound, as if there were only one scream, and we just tapped into it now and then.

I sat up straighter, listening, wondering what I should do. Run out and find them? And then what? I was useless in a direct confrontation; at best, I would give myself away to Attina, letting him know exactly who was hunting him and ruining all my future attempts to gather information. At worst, he’d kill me too.

And it had to be Attina causing the screaming, right? This town had gone for decades without a violent attack, and now they’d had two in less than a week. There was no way that was a coincidence. But Derek Stamper had been killed slowly and in private, and no one had known until the body was found more than an hour later. Did that mean this was a different killer? Or a different situation? What had changed in the circumstances to prompt such a marked changed in the Withered’s methods?

I stood up, shucking the blankets I’d been wrapped in and walking to the window. The floor creaked under my feet, but only softly. I moved a slat in the blinds and looked outside; the world was empty and dark, colorless in the moonlight. I saw trees and houses and parked cars, all motionless in the silence. There wasn’t even wind. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, certainly not some transformed demon killing someone right in front of the—

Another scream, longer than the others. Was the pitch different? I couldn’t tell.

What if it wasn’t a Withered at all? What if it truly was a coincidence, two attacks in less than a week, and this one was just a mugging or an assault, and I could stop it and was too afraid to do so? But I had reason to be afraid, maybe more than anybody else in the town, because I knew what could happen if I was right. I’d seen Withered kill. I’d seen the aftermath, and I’d seen it up close. Worse than the violence, I’d seen glimpses of the minds behind it, tortured by time and warped over ten thousand years. I’d seen them not just take lives but take them over, stepping into people’s shapes and faces and living their lives for them.

Stopping them was what I did. It was my entire life. But running out headfirst was not how I did it.

I waited by the window, watching and listening, but the screams were done. Three short cries, and a life was over.

A few minutes later I heard an engine, then two, three, and who knows how many more. I could see red-and-blue reflections on the houses across the street, but not the lights themselves. Voices shouting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A light came on in the house across the street, and then another in the house next to it. I looked at the round clock face on the bedroom wall, squinting to see it clearly in the dark. 1:30 in the morning. There’d be hours before we knew the truth.

Was it worth it to go out and look? Now that the police were there the danger—probably—was gone. And I knew I wouldn’t be the only one stepping out in the middle of the night to rubberneck whatever grim cleanup the police were trying to do. It might even serve as an alibi, in case suspicion ever turned to us—
obviously I didn’t do it, I was right there with you instead of running away.
Or it might just as easily create suspicion where none had existed, causing the police to remember me when they thought about the crime scene. Guilty parties showed up at their own investigations all the time—not enough to make it suspicious, but certainly enough to remove it as an alibi. More than anything, though, if I went I’d have to take Brooke with me, or risk her waking up in confusion and wandering away. She needed sleep, especially now that she had a real bed for the first time in a week, and she needed to not be traumatized by the sight of another dead body. Better to stay here and wait.

I waited by the window, watching for any new information.

All night long.

*   *   *

Brooke was still Marci when she woke up the next morning. I explained what had happened, as briefly as I could, and she said I’d made the right decision to stay inside. I don’t know if she believed it or not, but it was kind of her to say. We got dressed, staring at opposite walls in the pink, fluffy room. When we got to the kitchen to help with breakfast, Ingrid was already there, in her bathrobe and curlers, holding the phone and crying.

“Mercy,” she said. “Mercy, mercy.”

“Is everything okay?” asked Marci. She glanced at me, both of us knowing what the phone call was probably about.

Ingrid shook her head.

I stepped closer, trying to sound helpful instead of curious. “Is there something we can do?”

Ingrid looked at the phone in her hand as if were a museum curiosity, a bizarre object that had somehow transported itself magically into her hand. I saw that the screen was blank and black; whatever call she’d gotten was long over, and she’d been too shocked to put it down.

Marci sat next to her at the kitchen table. “We heard something last night,” she said. “Police cars, some kind of trouble. Did someone tell you what it was?”

I would have asked the same question by saying that I’d heard screaming, but I could see instantly that mentioning the police cars was the smarter move. Marci was filling Ingrid’s mind with the most acceptable, approachable part of the story: someone trying to fix it. Mentioning the screams would only have made the story more horrible.

What would I do without Marci?

Ingrid nodded slowly, still sobbing into her hands. She wiped her eyes and sniffed, trying to regain her composure. “You met them yesterday, right? The Butler girls?”

No, I thought, please no. “We did,” I said, nodding slowly. “Are they okay?”

“Jessica,” said Ingrid, and she broke down sobbing again. We could barely understand the next three words: “Just like Derek.”

Marci put her hand on Ingrid’s back, looked at me silently, then wrapped her arms around Ingrid, who hugged her back, and Boy Dog walked toward them, sitting down on Marci’s feet in a gesture of fat, furry devotion. I watched them, thinking.

Why Jessica? Both victims were people we had talked to, the night after we’d talked to them. Was it a message to us? Or was someone actively hunting us, and kept missing? I didn’t know what kind of tracking system might result in that kind of repeated mistake, but Withered powers were virtually impossible to understand without knowing exactly how they worked. The people they killed and their reasons and methods always had perfect internal consistency—even when you disagreed with what they did, you could understand how they got there. They made sense. All you had to do was find the thing that made them all make sense—that secret, supernatural decoder ring that made all the clues click into place. Without knowing how their powers worked, though …

We’d talked to several people while we were in Dillon. Why had the Withered killed these two, specifically? What set them apart? They were both teenagers. They were both people we’d talked to on the street.
They were both …
And then I felt a sudden rush of relief, realizing a key difference between the two victims: I’d wanted to kill Derek and felt a sense of guilty responsibility ever since I’d learned that he’d died, as if I’d somehow helped to cause it. But I’d never wanted to kill Jessica. Even better, I was actively
planning
to kill Corey, and he was fine. If my plans for violence had been the root of these attacks, Jessica would have been untouched. I was off the hook—

—well, at least in part. It was still my responsibility to stop this Withered before he killed again.

“I need to call Sara,” said Ingrid, clutching Marci tightly for a few more seconds before pulling away and reaching for her phone again. “She’ll be a wreck.”

“Did she know Jessica well?” asked Marci.

“Oh dear,” said Ingrid, taking Marci’s hand. “I was so broken up I didn’t even tell you about Luke.”

“Her brother?” I asked.

“He tried to save her,” said Ingrid. “He was a hero.”

“Wait,” I said, sitting at the table across from her. “What was Officer Glassman doing with fourteen-year-old Jessica at 1:30 in the morning?”

“He was a hero,” Ingrid insisted, her voice turning hard and angry. “He got cut up too, trying to save her.” She picked up the phone, and I caught Marci’s eye and nodded toward the living room. I left the kitchen, and she followed me.

“What do you think?” I whispered.

“No way Jessica was out there with him willingly,” said Marci.

I nodded. “Do you think…? I don’t know. Can you remember any Withered who were pedophiles?”

She frowned. “You think it’s Glassman, now?”

“I still think it’s Corey,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s weird and creepy and that ‘it begins’ looks awfully suspicious. But. None of that is hard evidence, and both victims were teenagers, and Officer Glassman was leering at Jessica like crazy just a few hours before she died. So it’s at least worth a mention.”