Kit had never been inside the police station, never wanted to. The law, for her, had retained its repellent charge after all these years, and she was conditioned to keep a safe distance. Today, she pulled open the heavy glass door and found Caleb sleeping at his desk like a kid in school. The other officers she knew of—Jackson, Alvarez, and the old-timer whose name she forgot—were either out on a call or getting ready to start a shift. She cleared her throat. Caleb slept on, and she could smell the bourbon in his sweat. She brought her hand down on the table like a mallet. He startled, wiped the spittle from his cheek.
“Oh, hey there,” he said. He looked embarrassed and smiled up at her. But the smile was quickly replaced with a different look, like he’d remembered something sad, and went cool. He stood up, tucked in his shirt, and cleared the sleep from his throat.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, more formally.
All the momentum she’d sailed in on just dropped away and she found it difficult to speak. She stood there on the edge of asking, as if gathering courage to step in an icy river.
“I need your help,” she said, her voice dusty and dry. The sound of the word help, a plea, opened a tender place, as if the act of asking itself intensified her need.
“I can’t find”—her throat tightened and she had to wrestle it open before she could finish—“my daughter.”
Concern appeared between his upturned brows then washed away. “When was the last time you saw her?” he asked. He seemed bruised and aloof in the way he wouldn’t make eye contact, the downbeat in his voice. The part of her that had grown to care for him was curious about what was making him act this way.
“Last night when we went to bed,” she said.
“That’s really not long enough for us to start worrying yet,” he said, again, so removed. “We can’t declare her a missing person until it’s been twenty-four hours. Then we can send out an alert and organize a search party. Give it some more time, I’m sure it’s fine.”
“She’s in trouble, I just know it. You have to do something,” she said, her breath shortening. “Ple—”
Kit’s plea was interrupted by the sound of a horn honking as a pickup parked astride the station’s entrance ramp. Judd Pruitt tumbled out and burst inside, all raspy and out of breath.
“I need to make a report or something,” he said. “There’s a body, a dead one.”
Caleb left Kit and waved his hands out in front of him.
“No need to get all worked up, Judd,” Caleb said. “You know you can call the county to pick it up—is it oversize? Livestock?”
“No, no, no.” The man was too flustered to talk.
Caleb looked around and whispered, “Is it a cattle mutilation?”
Judd’s face reddened, the veins on his temples bulging.
“Man, it’s a person!” he said and wrung his hat like a wet rag. “It’s a girl, Lord Jesus. It’s a human being!”
Caleb went still. Kit’s stomach flipped and her mouth went dry. She charged Judd and got in his face. “What do you mean? Who is it? Was it Charlie?” All of her senses were clogged up, like her head had been dipped in wax. She saw flashes of Charlie shot up with bullets, facedown in a bathtub, smothered under a pillow.
Judd hunkered like he was about to be hit. “No! No, ma’am, I don’t believe so.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?” She had him against the door by now. “How can you be so sure?”
Judd flinched and talked away from her.
“Charlie’s just a slight little thing, right?”
“She’s five foot four, a hundred and five pounds, hair black, eyes brown—”
“This was a f-full-bodied person,” Judd said, his hands cupped out as if holding something soft and round.
“Are you sure?” she shrieked, and he nodded furiously. She let go of Judd’s shirt and nearly wept with relief. Her breath returned. “It’s not her,” she whispered.
“Okay, there,” Caleb said, pushing his way between the two to give Judd some air. “That’s good. Glad we could sort that out. Now, Judd, I need to get a full statement from you. Let’s sit down here,” he said and led the man over to a chair next to his desk. Caleb poured him a cup of water and pulled out the padded rolling chair for him.
Kit leaned against a wall for support, then slid down and held her shins. She couldn’t be sure Charlie was safe, but perhaps she was not dead.
“Here,” Caleb said to Judd. “Have a cookie.” He opened a plastic tub of gingersnaps, took two for himself, and handed the rest to Pruitt. He folded back the top pages of a yellow notepad and wrote the date in the upper margin. “Tell me everything, and take it slow.”
Judd ate a cookie, dribbling crumbs all over the hump of his belly, then drank the water noisily.
“Now before I get into it, you have to understand, I been trespassing on Arlo Skinner’s property to go fishing for sixteen years and I ain’t about to stop, so . . .” He looked to Caleb for some assurance that his fishing would not be affected.
“Fine, okay, get on with it,” Caleb said.
“I will, but just so you know, he’s got a lake full of fish and no one controlling its numbers. They’d eat themselves alive if I didn’t come and thin them out.”
“Got it,” Caleb said, losing his patience. “Loud and clear.”
“Well, I mention it because from time to time, there’d be carcasses washed up and rotting on the edges of the lake, so I didn’t take note of the stench other than it was more pungent than usual.” He ate another cookie, washed it down. “It wasn’t until I had about sixty pounds of angry fish around my ankles that I noticed something yonder sticking out of the manger. A gray foot, kinda slender. I was thinkin’ maybe it was a doe or a coyote, crawled in the manger to eat and got trapped? But I got this feeling, right in my gut, that told me it wasn’t any such thing. Too much flesh upon it. I paddled ashore and banked the boat in the mud. I didn’t want to look, but I went ahead toward the manger, every step wishing I could turn back and forget I saw anything. When I got high enough on the hill I saw the rest of her. She was messed up, man.” He started to cry and took another minute with a tissue, pinching the tears from his eyes. “Maybe I should have gone to her, but all I could do was run.”
Kit grew heavy as she heard the details of Judd’s story. She had thought the death would be accidental, natural causes perhaps. A heart attack in an empty field. But this was malice. It was wicked. She gathered herself off the floor and interrupted the interview.
“Hey,” she said. “I need an answer, we’re wasting time.”
Caleb looked irritated.
“I’ll send out some feelers, but that’s the best I can do at this point,” he said, hands open as if to show they were empty, helpless. “Look, I mean it’s not the first time she’s run off, right?”
Kit’s eyes widened then narrowed, face flushed.
“Look, this girl’s dead,” she said. “You can’t save her now. But Charlie’s alive. You have to help her.”