The Narrows(39)

“Hey, Ben,” Mike said, tossing the handball at him. “Where you been?”

“Over at the Crawly place. Eleven-year-old kid’s gone missing.”

“Wendy’s kid?” Eddie asked.

Mike blinked. “Missing? Like…gone?”

“His mother and sister haven’t seen him all day. I guess he could be at a friend’s house.” In the breast pocket of his uniform was the sheet of paper on which Wendy Crawly had scribbled the names of her son Matthew’s friends—a depressingly short list, Ben had noted. Ben didn’t think that was such a bad thing; in Stillwater, the fewer friends you had, the less amount of trouble you were apt to get into. He fished the slip of paper from his breast pocket and dumped it on Mike Keller’s desk. “First thing tomorrow morning, give the folks on this list a call. See if they’ve seen Matthew Crawly. I’ve just come from the Dandridge house so you can skip them.”

“Roger.” Mike picked up the folded sheet of paper and looked at the names on it. Mike Keller was a chunky officer in his early forties with thinning blond hair and a cherubic, pleasant face. A lifelong resident of Stillwater, he used to dress as Santa Claus every Christmas down at the Farmers’ Market on Calvert Street, when there still had been a Farmers’ Market.

Ben tossed his campaign hat onto one of the empty desks. He sat down in one of the chairs with a huff and began unlacing his boots. His feet ached. “Where’re Haggis and Platt?”

“Out at the Shultz farm,” said Eddie. “Maureen says she ain’t seen old Marty all afternoon and was worried he’d gotten into a car wreck or something out on 40. My guess is he probably went out hunting with some Gentleman Jack and passed out in a tree. Prob’ly wind up falling out of it and breaking his neck.”

Ben sighed. “Wonderful.” At Maureen Shultz’s insistence, Ben had gone out into the woods to look for her husband before, and wound up finding him in a state not dissimilar to what Eddie had just described.

“Anyway,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair, “did you hear that old Eddie has finally figured out what happened with Porter Conroy’s cows? Isn’t that right, Ed?”

Pulling off one of his boots, Ben looked at Eddie and said, “Yeah?”

Eddie waved a hand at him. “Forget it. He’s pulling your leg.”

Mike Keller laughed. “Show him,” he chided. “He solved the case, Ben. Big goddamn detective. Come on, Eddie!” Before Eddie could respond, Mike was out of his chair and digging through the stack of magazines on Eddie’s desk. Eddie slapped his hands away, looking wholly disgusted. “Show him,” Mike insisted.

“Go sit the f*ck down,” Eddie told him.

Snatching one of Eddie’s magazines off his desk, Mike flipped through it as he carried it over to where Ben sat. Chuckling, he folded the pages back and handed the magazine to Ben. It was one of Eddie’s horror magazines, Ben saw, and this particular article detailed the recent killings in a small Mexican village by a creature called the chupacabra.

“What the hell is this?” Ben asked, scanning the article.

“Sure,” Eddie said, “you guys make fun, but that stuff is real.”

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“A Mexican vampire. Eats livestock. The descriptions of the attacks are just like what we saw at Porter Conroy’s farm last night.”

Ben tossed the magazine aside. “We’re not in Mexico, Eddie.”

Eddie sat up straight in his chair. “That’s just what they’re called. Who says they can’t come north? Read the article.”

“I think I might head out to Full Hill Road instead,” Ben said.

“You still worried about what Maggie Quedentock said last night?” Eddie asked. “Ben, you spent half the day today checking out those woods. There’s no one there. She didn’t hit anything. And if she did, it was just a deer, and the f*cking thing already bounded off through the woods.”

Ben nodded absently, frowning. He was thinking about Matthew Crawly.

Shirley Bennice, the dispatcher, appeared in the doorway. She was a squat woman in her sixties who had the pleasant, comforting face of a grandmother even though she had no children or grandchildren of her own. “You boys afraid of the rain or something?” she said, walking down the aisle of cubicles.

“Hey, Shirl,” said Eddie. “Do me a favor and tell Ben here how he’s gotta keep an open mind to things.”

“Arguably, he kept an open mind when he had the chief hire you,” Shirley responded without missing a beat. She stopped before Ben’s cubicle and handed him a yellow Post-it note.

“What’s this?”

“Deets over at the county morgue in Cumberland called for you earlier. He said to call him back when you got in. He said he had a possible ID on that kid that was found in Wills Creek.”

Indeed, John Deets’s number was scrawled in Shirley’s handwriting on the Post-it. “No kidding? Great. Thanks, Shirl. Anything else going on?”

“Cumberland sent over some new equipment. Well,” she added quickly, “new for us, anyway. Some handhelds, boxes of ammunition, and a vehicle-tracking GPS.”

Mike laughed. “For all the vehicular tracking we do, huh?”

“They’re freebies,” she said. “I ain’t turning my nose up at charity from the county.”