Falin nodded, looking skeptical.
“Small world,” she said, shoving her phone back into her pocket. “That was Remy Hollens’s car. The police are holding the scene for us. I guess we have our lead.”
? ? ?
Derrick didn’t accompany us to the scene but said he had some things to look into. As we had before, Falin and I drove separate from Briar, but this time we arrived together. I’m not sure what I was expecting, probably an abandoned car left somewhere obscure. What I was not expecting was to arrive at the scene of a multiple-car wreck.
The accident had traffic backed up for miles. Despite Briar and Falin both being told the best roads to take to reach the accident, we still hit terrible congestion as soon as we left the Magic Quarter and crossed over the Sionan River toward town. Even with official strobes for the vehicles, it took an agonizingly long time to reach the scene. The sun was well above the horizon by the time we arrived, offering me plenty of light to take in every terrible detail.
Three vehicles were involved in the accident: Remy’s red sedan, an old pickup truck, and a small hatchback. From what I could gather, Remy’s car had been driving erratically—based on the timeline, after fleeing my house. It merged into the pickup, which caused the car to spin out, hitting the hatchback. The red car then ricocheted into the concrete barricade nose first. The driver of the hatchback had been seriously injured and rushed to the hospital. The pickup driver had less severe injuries, though he still required transport to the hospital, but he’d been able to answer some questions before he’d been packed off in the back of an ambulance.
According to the officer who’d taken the man’s statement, the man said that two women had been in the red car. After the vehicle had finally come to its violent stop, the passenger, who’d been ejected from the car at some point, had hobbled over to the car and tried to drag the driver out. That hadn’t worked, as the driver’s legs had been pinned. The passenger had then limped away, but the man swore she shouldn’t have been able to. He said her body was twisted from the impact, and at least one bone in her arm had been jutting through the skin, one leg dragging behind her as she made her way off the highway. The other girl had yelled after her, begging her not to leave her until suddenly, she’d collapsed face forward into the steering wheel and not moved again.
The officer looked up from his notes. “The man had lost a decent amount of blood, and based on what he said, I’m assuming he had a head injury.”
I glanced at Briar. After seeing the decaying creatures in the clearing still up and moving around, I wasn’t so quick to discount the pickup driver’s story.
Whatever Briar’s thoughts were, she kept them to herself as she thanked the officer for his report. Then I followed her and Falin toward the scrap metal that had once been a car. I didn’t want to go near it—I could feel the grave essence rolling out of the vehicle from a dozen yards away. As we approached, the reek of decay wafted out of the smashed vehicle. This was going to be bad.
Tow trucks were already loading up the hatchback and pickup, trying to clear more lanes of the interstate, but barricades had been erected around the smashed red car. It didn’t appear that rescue workers had made any attempt to remove the woman’s body from the driver’s seat. Of course, one look at her would have been enough to see that she was beyond help. Putrefaction had set in strong, making her flesh dark and bloated. Foul liquid leaked from her slack mouth, and fluid-filled blisters had lifted on her exposed skin. As I stood there, a clump of hair fell from her head, taking flesh with it and making a wet sound as it hit the leather seat.
I turned away, breakfast rolling in my stomach, threatening to rebel. I wasn’t going to lose my breakfast a second day in a row. I refused.
Neither Briar nor Falin had the same reaction. They stepped closer, examining the body. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Not being able to see her anymore wasn’t even enough, because I could still smell her, and I could feel the call of the grave reaching from her. It whispered the kind of secrets the grave always told me, like that she’d been young, maybe late teens or early twenties, and that she’d been dead for almost two weeks. That last part should have been a direct conflict with the fact that she’d clearly been driving the car only hours earlier, but walking corpses were no longer a shock in this case.
I knew better than to take a deep breath to try to calm my stomach—I’d made that mistake one too many times at crime scenes, I’d learned my lesson. It would not help with this much decomposition in the air. Instead I closed my eyes, gave myself a moment, and then walked past the barricade without turning back.
I started heading toward the car but then turned, heading in the direction where the pickup driver had said the passenger had limped away from the scene. Two lanes of traffic had opened again, but the drivers were all slowing down to rubberneck at what was left of the accident, so I had little trouble making it across the interstate. Two officers were on the shoulder of the interstate, taking pictures of what I assumed was the trail the woman had taken.
“Any luck finding the passenger?” I asked, approaching the closer of the two.
He looked up and gave me a quick once-over from feet to head before saying, “Miss, this is a crime scene. I’m going to have to ask you to move on.”
“We’ve been invited to this scene,” Falin said, stepping up behind me. I hadn’t even heard him cross the street. He flashed his badge at the officer and said, “So what is the update on locating the passenger?”
The man let his camera drop to swing around his neck and straightened slightly at the sight of Falin’s badge. “We’ve got an alert out to local hospitals, and we’re sweeping the shoulder and the woods beyond, but the dogs can’t get here for a few hours.”
Falin nodded, an obvious dismissal, and the man took it, turning away and hurrying to go photograph evidence at a marker much farther away. When he was out of earshot, Falin turned to me.
“What are you doing? Why’d you head here?”
“I couldn’t be any help back there.” I jerked my head in the direction of the wreck without actually turning to face it. “But I can help look for the passenger.” I didn’t add that I would have gotten ill if I’d stayed by the corpse any longer.
Falin scanned the tree line beyond the shoulder. There was no obvious path where the passenger had gone, and emergency vehicles had clearly pulled off onto the shoulder before anyone realized there was a missing injured party, so the ground was torn up with tire tracks and footprints.
“How?” he asked after a moment.