The Narrows(69)

That evening, Mike Keller had gone with Ben down to Crossroads where they tilted back a number of beers. “Don’t think less of me for saying this, Ben,” Mike had told him while perched on a bar stool beside him, “but that was just about the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I feel like crying about it a little, too, but it feels like my insides are all dried up.”

That’s how Ben felt now—as if his insides had all dried up.

Brandy returned with her brother’s T-shirt wadded into a ball. She tossed it onto the passenger seat. “Maybe there’s fingerprints on it or something,” she said, and he felt miserable hearing the hope in her voice. “Like they find in those cop shows.”

She’s just a goddamn kid. Life is so unfair.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Thanks again.”

“You got it.”

Brandy shut the door and Ben turned back out onto the road. When he got out of eyeshot of the Crawly residence, he pulled onto the shoulder and put the cruiser in Park. Reaching over, he grabbed the T-shirt off the seat and flapped it open so that it draped itself down the front of the steering wheel.

The front of the shirt looked fine. There was nothing wrong with it.

Chewing again on his lower lip, he turned the shirt over. The small holes in the fabric running down the back of the shirt caused a slight tremor to course through him. Distantly, he felt his left eyelid spasm.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered. His words seemed to shatter like glass as they came out of his mouth and his whole face felt like it was on fire. On the radio, Springsteen sang about going down to the river, as if it were some sort of baptism, a holy rite. “What’s going on around here?” Ben muttered, his breath fogging up the windshield.





Chapter Eleven


1


Ben’s discomfort only intensified by the time he returned to the station. He carried with him the balled-up T-shirt Brandy Crawly had given him—the T-shirt with the peculiar but all-too-familiar series of puncture marks down its back—and a sense of nonspecific apprehension.

Blessedly, the Batter’s Box was empty. He went straight to his desk, flipped open the case file on the unidentified boy, and set the T-shirt down on his desk. As he looked over the photographs in the file, he flattened out the shirt and spread it out along his desktop. The line of tiny, frayed holes along the back of the shirt stared up at him. A tasteless lump formed at the back of Ben’s throat.

There it was—one of the photos of the unidentified boy. Mike Keller had taken these pictures, crouching down over the bloated and pallid corpse and snapping shots like a consummate professional. (It wasn’t until later, knocking back those beers at Crossroads, that Mike told him just how much he had been affected by the boy’s body, and how he was sure to lose much sleep over what he’d seen.) He’d taken photos of the body just as they’d found it—facedown, one bony arm crooked in a nest of reeds, one leg partially submerged in the brown, brackish water. Looking at the photo now, Ben could see the twin shoulder blades at the child’s back…the S-shaped curve of the boy’s spine…the bloated hubs of the boy’s buttocks…

There were four small puncture marks trailing down the boy’s back, the first one starting from just between the shoulder blades while the final one ended just above the boy’s buttocks. Peculiar little holes drilled right into the fishy flesh…

Ben examined Matthew Crawly’s T-shirt again. Smoothing it out along his desk, he counted one, two, three, four holes running vertically down the back.

There was a connection here…

He just didn’t know what it was.

Fifteen minutes later, he was listening to the telephone ring a number of times before John Deets of the county coroner’s office picked up.

“John, it’s Ben Journell over in Stillwater.”

“You sound panicked.”

“Christ. Is it that obvious?”

“What is it?”

Ben closed his eyes, attempted to catch his breath. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer and more decisive. “First off, is there any news on the whereabouts of the boy’s body?”

“No. No one saw a thing. No one had even come in here in the two days before the body went missing. It’s an anomaly, Ben. I’m really embarrassed about all this, you have no idea.” John Deets laughed nervously on the other end of the line. “It’s like the f*cking thing got up and walked out on its own.”

Again, Ben closed his eyes, then said, “Those marks on the boy’s back. Do you remember?”

“Yes. Circular puncture marks.”

“Did you get a chance to identify them before the body went missing?”

“Officially?” Deets sighed like a locomotive. “No.”

“Unofficially?” Ben prompted.

“Unofficially, they looked like the kind of wound a scorpion makes with the stinger on the end of its tail.”

“A scorpion?”

“Yeah,” Deets said, “if the f*cking scorpion was the size of a grizzly bear.”

Ben made a clicking sound way back in his throat.

“I never got a chance to do an autopsy, Ben. Nothing I can tell you has any scientific backing. You understand that, right?”

“How deep did those puncture wounds look? Like, could those have been the cause of death?”