Friends Like These(21)
“Park up on the right,” he says, pointing with his flashlight. “It’s flooded. Watch your step.”
Past the RV, I can see the news crews. I’m not a fan of reporters. They surrounded our house for weeks after Jane disappeared, hungrily consuming our grief and spitting out our bones. In the end, I’d given them exactly what they wanted, racing out of our front door screaming my head off when they finally found Jane. Six days of searching in rain that would not let up, and finally my sixteen-year-old sister’s decimated body had been located, her pretty face so badly smashed they had to rely on dental records to identify her. The photos of eight-year-old me running barefoot in the dark had been splashed across the front page of every local paper, and inside many of the national ones.
Or so I’d been told. It’s not just the Ace Construction renovation that’s faded from my memory. Jane’s murder erased whole swaths of my childhood, my memories of everyone and everything hopelessly blurry— my parents, my friends, Bethany. Only Jane is still painfully crystal clear.
But despite what Dan thinks, my refusal to listen to The River isn’t proof of anything, except me being a rational human. One of the biggest arguments we ever had was about him listening to it. I’d have considered it in bad taste even if he didn’t know me or Jane. Dan and Jane weren’t friends in school— Jane was in the cool crowd, Dan the nerdy kid looming in the shadows, keeping tabs on everybody. But they did know each other.
“If you don’t want me to check it out, I won’t, obviously,” Dan said at the time. “But, I mean, I do think . . . shouldn’t somebody? Just in case?”
“What? You going to find the murderer, Mr. Supersleuth?”
Dan’s gaze was unwavering. “That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it.”
“Listen if you want. If that’s your kind of thing,” I’d said as I pulled my shirt off over my head. The quickest way to end this conversation was to have sex. Dan was nothing if not linear in his thinking. “I don’t care.”
I did suspect that Dan meant well. That he was trying to help. He’d offered on many previous occasions to go back through Jane and Bethany’s files with me. I’d always refused. Because what if I finally tried to solve Jane’s case— really tried, instead of just rushing through— and I still failed? As it was, I could still pretend Jane was mine to save.
As I pull past the reporters to park, I feel their eyes on me. I turn off the car and put a hand to the ring hanging on the chain at my neck, tucked as usual safely out of sight under my shirt. I press the ring against my skin until I feel the reassuring sting. I’d love a way out of my car and into the scene without walking past the reporters. But the woods look too thick in that spot, not to mention too wet to cut through. I have on lace-up boots, but they’re not very tall, and it swamps quickly around here.
I take a breath as I finally climb out of the car, my heel slipping instantly. I have to grab onto the side of the car like a fool to avoid hitting the ground. Shit. Chuck was right.
“You okay?” a young female reporter calls out, high-pitched and shrill, as she charges over. She’s very thin and wearing way too much makeup, even for TV.
I raise a hand like a stop sign and look away. I am screwed if she recognizes me. “I’m good.”
She closes in fast anyway. “Detective, we’ve heard this is now a homicide investigation. Can you confirm?”
Goddamn it. Seldon will decide it’s my fault that word of that’s gotten out, even if it was on Dan’s watch. Unforced error number one. I won’t get many more.
“No comment,” I say, keeping my eyes straight ahead as I brush past her.
When I finally make it back to the smashed Audi SUV in the woods, Dan is standing a few feet away, arms crossed, boots covered in mud. He’s tall and well-built— a good-looking guy, for sure. Dan is watching a crime scene tech in a zipped plastic suit dig around the back seat. The car is badly crushed on one side, headlight shattered. The two front doors are hanging open, interior of the car aglow in the lights that have been set up. The body has been removed. Dan glances my way, then points his chin in the direction of the car.
“There’s arterial spray on the far side of the driver’s seat and the dash. Uniforms on the scene didn’t see that at first. Dark interior, light wasn’t great.” He uses his flashlight to point. “Anyway, that’s why I called. Thought you should see for yourself.”
To his credit, Dan could have kept this from me and tried to run with this case on his own. Seldon certainly wouldn’t mind. But Dan isn’t doing that. Because he’s too decent. It’s kind of aggravating.
“Yeah, thanks,” I say, a little begrudgingly. “What did the ME say?”
“On a quick look, he found two neck wounds. Left side, deep, irregular shape. Not sure of the weapon, but probably not a knife. Also, he’s not sure about the face.”
“What do you mean, not sure?” I ask. “Isn’t it from the crash?”
“Apparently the car would have to have been accelerating a lot to do that much damage,” Dan says carefully. “And that would have completely destroyed the car, not just smashed the front. So it’s possible someone did that, too, after the fact.”
I keep my eyes on the car, but I can feel Dan staring at me. He knows about Jane’s face. Thanks to The River, everyone knows that Jane was finished off with some unidentified object to the face. A signature, the podcast fans like to speculate. There was a well-known and never-caught serial killer at the time who had a similar MO. Was it theoretically possible that Jane and Bethany were among his victims? Sure. But only because anything was possible. Is it possible the smashed face here is the work of that same guy, all these years later? Seems pretty unlikely to me, especially because it’s not that uncommon for a killer to disfigure a victim’s face. Damn, the pod people would love that kind of sick connection.