The Dispatcher Read online

  She has not seen Donald’s El Camino pull to a stop in front of his mobile home yet, which means it’s still early, but the time has to be approaching. In another hour, maybe two or three, but surely no more than that. Then she will find out whether Donald will be eating with Beatrice or alone. Usually he eats alone in his mobile home and Beatrice eats alone here, or eats at the card table down here with Maggie, and Maggie is counting on the same tonight. She doesn’t want to have to wait another day to make her escape. She wants out of here.

  Now that she has tasted the air outside she cannot stand the claustrophobic prison of the Nightmare World.

  She is counting on it: her escape will be tonight.

  Donald will drive up to his mobile home and disappear inside. He will do whatever he does in there for several hours before coming over for a plate of food, and by then Maggie will already be gone. Beatrice will have come downstairs with a plate for her and Maggie will have been waiting beneath the stairs. By the time Donald comes over Beatrice will be lying on the concrete floor in the basement in a pool of her own blood and Maggie will be in the arms of her daddy.

  She looks outside at the shadows. It’s only mid-afternoon but evening is coming.

  And with it, escape.

  Gripping the weapon in her hand, Maggie nods to herself.

  Soon.

  Diego drives north on Main Street. He’s on his way to the library on the corner of Wallace and Overhill. The librarian, Georgia Simpson, is having some trouble with Fred Paulson’s kid. Junior’s apparently passed out drunk in the children’s section and Georgia doesn’t want to go anywhere near him. He’s got puke on his boots and down the front of his shirt. Diego doesn’t blame her for wanting nothing to do with him. He’s dreading having to deal with the little shit himself. He’s so useless his own dad won’t hire him, so Junior simply wanders around getting drunk and causing trouble.

  Diego’s just passing the summer-abandoned high school when a dog, one of Pastor Warden’s dachshunds, runs out of the woods to his right and into the street.

  ‘Shit.’

  Diego stomps the brake and the car screeches to a stop, the rear end sweeping left a quarter turn before the whole thing rocks on its springs and stands still. Diego’s heart thumps in his chest and his hands grip the wheel tightly. He swallows and looks to the street in front of him, but the dog is not there. He knows he didn’t hit the thing. He’d have felt that.

  He looks around for it—catching it in his periphery.

  It’s now in the school’s football field on the west side of the street.

  Diego pulls the car to the dirt shoulder of the road, kicking up a cloud of summer dust that hangs in the air a moment before thinning into nonexistence. After a truck rolls by he swings open his door and steps from the car, a greasy paper bag hanging from his fist. In the greasy paper bag, leftover fried chicken he bought from Albertsons yesterday morning. As he jogs into the football field, a sorry thing since last year’s chinch-bug infestation, he pulls a piece of chicken from the bag and calls to the dog.

  It’s halfway across the field, but when Diego calls, it turns and looks at him, deciding whether it’s interested, Diego thinks. There is something in its mouth. A bone maybe.

  Diego whistles.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ he says, sitting on his haunches and holding out the piece of chicken.

  The dog walks toward him.

  The bone or whatever it is in its mouth is large. Too big to belong to a squirrel or a gopher or a rabbit. But every once in a while someone will hit a deer with their car, and it could be a leg bone from one of those. Not a full-grown one, but still.

  Three years ago Carney Dodd, now stuck in a wheelchair as a result of a different accident, slammed his pickup truck into a monster buck must have weighed a quarter ton, and Carney, never one to wear a safety belt, was propelled through the windshield. According to his own version of the story he landed on the asphalt twenty feet away, hitting it face first, and he had the skin missing from the bridge of his nose and his forehead to prove it. As soon as he landed, though, again according to him, he got to his feet and stomped to his truck and pulled out his Remington 1100 and finished the fucking thing off with a deer slug to the face. ‘Take that, y’son of a bitch.’

  Maybe somebody other than Carney Dodd hit a deer that didn’t die immediately, that made it out into the woods before dropping, and maybe this little floppy-eared dachshund found it and decided to take a piece.

  That’s what Diego thinks at first.

  But as the dog approaches a seed of dread sprouts in his belly.

  The bone is white and meatless. On one end, a knot. A few black strings, maybe tendons, maybe plant matter, hang there like tassels. On the other end, though, Jesus fuck, a small hand. A small human hand. The ends of the first three fingers are eaten away to the bone, and in fact part of the first finger is gone altogether, but black skin or decomposed muscle, or something, still clings in places to the rest of the hand like a driving glove.

  When the dachshund reaches him he grabs it by the scruff of its neck and pulls it to him and pries the jaw open. He doesn’t think; he just knows that he must get this small limb out of this dog’s mouth. After a moment of prying it falls to the grass. It does not look real lying there on the ground. It cannot be real. Real arms are attached to people. This thing just lies there like a discarded beer bottle after a drunken Friday night.

  He picks up the dog and gets to his feet and looks down at the arm on the ground.

  It cannot be real, but it is.

  The dog struggles against him and tries to nip at his face. Diego pulls his head back just in time, and then carries the dog to his cruiser. He puts it into the back with the windows cracked, and then pops the trunk. He finds a pair of gloves and a large plastic bag, puts on the gloves, and walks back into the field.

  He feels strange approaching it. A bodiless arm lying on the football field behind Bulls Mouth High School. He picks it up and puts it into the plastic bag. He has to bend the fingers down to get the bag sealed.

  When he returns to his car he sets the bag on the passenger’s seat and grabs his radio.

  Diego steps into the woods with a roll of yellow tape in his right hand. He feels sick to his stomach. He’s been a cop for six years now and this will be his third body. If he can find it. The Deans own a decent chunk of land and there’s no telling how deep into it the body might be. Of course, if someone killed a child and simply used the woods as a convenient place to dispose of it it’s probably no more than twenty or thirty yards from Main Street, just far enough into the trees that a person could park on the shoulder of the road, carry a corpse and a shovel, and dig a shallow grave without being seen by anyone driving past. People’s cars break down all the time. No one would think twice about someone’s old banger sitting on the shoulder of the road. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it unless it belonged to someone they knew.

  He thinks about how small that arm was. A child’s arm. A five- or six- or seven-year-old. And it was just bone but for a few scraps of leathery flesh or muscle. Dead a long time.

  Somewhere a mother weeps.

  Diego doesn’t have children of his own, but he has spent the last four years raising his nephew Elias, now nine. Elias’s parents, Diego’s baby sister and her husband, died in a car accident that the child survived. Diego and Cordelia are his parents now, and over the last several years Diego’s gotten used to that idea. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel if Elias went missing and, some time later, someone discovered his dry bones clenched in the jaws of a dog.

  He can’t imagine.

  As he walks through the woods he rips pieces of yellow tape from the roll in his hand and ties them to tree branches to mark his path. He remembers getting lost in the woods as a boy and being terrified. He was only lost for an hour and a half, an hour and a half of panic before he realized he could hear cars passing by and ran out to the street, but it was the longest ninety minutes of his life.r />
  Even now, twenty yards into the woods, the street has vanished behind him and the light below the canopy is gray save a few blades that have managed to stab their way in between the branches and leaves, and the air is cooler than out on the street by several degrees.

  Twigs break beneath his feet. The ground is softer here as well, feet collapsing the composted leaves that cover the earth. He tries to avoid poison oak and ivy as he makes his way deeper into the woods.

  Five minutes ago he thought he was on his way to flirt with Georgia Simpson while she shelved Louis L’ Amour and Zane Grey novels. Now he is hunting a corpse. It doesn’t seem much of a trade off. A lot can happen in five minutes.

  He swallows. His heart beats rapidly in his chest. He knows there’s no reason for that, but he knows, too, that a man doesn’t have much control over his heart.

  He tells himself all that was left was the bone. He tells himself there’s no chance the person who did the murder, if it was a murder, is still out here. No chance at all.

  But still his heart beats rapidly in his chest.

  Something scurries past to his left and he spins toward the sound and draws his SIG.

  A squirrel disappears behind a tree.

  Diego laughs at himself and reholsters his weapon. He continues walking.

  But fifty yards or so from the street he stops again. Something on the ground makes him stop. He looks at it and swallows. A thatch of hair lying amongst the dead leaves. The hair is very dirty, small pieces of leaf and dirt ground into it, and there is a blue barrette clipped onto it, holding it together. A blue barrette with a small piece of cut glass like a jewel glued to its center. The barrette is somehow worse, more affecting, than anything else. The hair is just hair, but the barrette—Diego can imagine a small girl standing before a mirror and clipping it into her hair and smiling at herself and how pretty she looks. The hair is blond. Might once have been, anyway.

  He ties a piece of yellow tape around a fallen twig and stabs the twig into the ground near the thatch of hair. Then continues on.

  In another fifteen or twenty yards he comes across a black shoe with a silver buckle. Poking from the black shoe is a white sock with a small pink bow sewn to it. The white sock has a hole eaten through it, and at the edges of the hole what might be black blood. Perhaps some insect ate the bloody part of the sock away. Diego picks up the shoe. Within it is a foot. The remains of a foot: nothing but dry bone, the rest long ago eaten by flies and beetles and such. He can easily hold the shoe in the palm of his hand without either end of it touching air. The girl it belonged to could not have been older than two. The girl it belonged to was smaller than the girl or boy whose arm is even now lying bodiless in Diego’s police cruiser.

  There is more than one body out here. He is sure of it.

  He sets the shoe back down and ties yellow tape around a nearby rock.

  And continues walking.

  A hundred yards into the woods he comes across a piece of tattered, rotting fabric.

  And twenty yards beyond that, disturbed ground. The floor of the woods has been uniformly covered in a blanket of decomposing leaves from which small plants are growing—weeds, and mushrooms like boils, and young trees—but here the ground is disturbed, the leaves clawed aside, and it is here that he—

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  It is impossible to tell how many bodies are here, as only parts of them have been uncovered. An arm jutting from the soil here. A foot there. A scrap of yellow fabric. One human eye socket staring out of a white skull, all the soft parts long destroyed by time.

  He walks to a tree and leans against it. He stares down at the ground. The ground spins.

  After a moment he begins to cordon off the area. It takes him only a minute or two, and when he’s done he starts making his way back out to the street, following the yellow flags he left on his way to this bone-scattered nightmare. The boys from the sheriff’s department will be arriving soon, and he’ll have to lead them to the crime scene.

  As he walks he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and dials Ian.

  Ian pulls the headset off and gets to his feet. He picks up his cup of cold coffee and takes a swallow, just to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He walks out to the police station proper.

  Chief Davis is sitting with the phone to his ear, saying, ‘Well, goddamn it, just let her do it then. I don’t know why you call and ask if you don’t care. All right. Goddamn it. All right. I love you too.’ He hangs up.

  ‘Chief.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘We got a situation, maybe related to my daughter.’

  Chief Davis takes off his glasses, cleans them with a Kleenex, and sets them back onto his narrow nose, blinking at Ian.

  ‘What’s the situation?’

  ‘Couple corpses in the woods.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘So Diego found the owner of the arm?’

  ‘Looks like. Plus more.’

  ‘And it might be related to your daughter?’

  ‘Little girls.’

  ‘Diego didn’t say one of them might be,’ he licks his lips, ‘might, uh, be your . . .’ Chief Davis lets it trail off and finds a thread on his shirtsleeve that needs to be pulled.

  ‘He doesn’t think so.’

  ‘He say why?’

  ‘There’s nothing left but bones and a little bit of hair and fabric.’

  ‘But little girls?’

  Ian nods.

  ‘Sheriff ’s boys on the way, yeah?’

  ‘They are. Might even be there. Nance was in town to go over the case with Finch.’

  ‘I should be heading down too. And you wanna go?’

  ‘There might be something there to lead us to Maggie.’

  ‘All right,’ Davis says, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get Thompson on the phones. You wanna ride with me or take your own car?’

  Ian pulls his Mustang to a stop on the side of the road. All he can think is that this might bring him one step closer to finding his daughter. He knows that girls’ bodies were found, two at least, and he knows that’s sad. But he doesn’t feel anything like sadness right now. He doesn’t even feel anything that might live on the same street as sadness. Each body was once someone’s daughter but none of them is his daughter. His daughter is alive while they are dead. His daughter is alive and he will find her and bring her home safe. If these bodies help to make that happen, then—well, he denies the fleeting thought that these deaths were then worth it. He tries to deny that thought. But even as he shoves it into the darkest corner of his mind, out of the light of conscious thought where he might be shamed by its ugliness, his heart believes it. Every beat speaks the truth of it.

  A hundred bodies sacrificed would be worth it, a thousand, if in the end he got his daughter back.

  As he and Chief Davis step from their vehicles Ian looks at the line of cars. There are two from the sheriff’s department here already. They’re parked behind Diego’s car, and behind them is Chief Davis’s car, behind which Ian’s car is parked. Deputy Kurt Oliver, who works out of the Bulls Mouth office, sits on the hood of one of the county vehicles. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted toward the afternoon sun.

  Chief Davis says, ‘Detective already here?’

  Oliver opens his eyes and turns to look at them lazily. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘John Nance, down from Mencken—and Bill Finch is here too.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Sheriff’s on his way.’

  ‘Coroner?’

  ‘Not here yet.’

  Chief Davis nods. ‘Where they all at?’

  Oliver nods toward the line of trees. ‘Follow the trail of yellow tape. It’ll lead to the bodies.’

  A dog barks from the back seat of Diego’s cruiser.

  Chief Davis puts a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Let’s see what we got,’ he says, guiding Ian toward the woods.

  ‘Hey, Oliver,’ Ian says, ‘why don’t you drive that dog up t
o Pastor Warden’s place before this heat kills it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I just said, so this fucking heat don’t kill it.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’

  ‘Because I’m going to the crime scene. You’re sitting here useless. For fuck’s sake, Oliver, get your head out of your ass and drive the goddamn dog up—’

  ‘Pastor Warden’ll give you ten bucks if you take that dog to him.’

  Deputy Oliver slides off the hood of his car. ‘No shit?’

  Davis nods.

  ‘Well why the fuck didn’t you say so?’

  A few minutes later Ian and Chief Davis arrive on the scene. One of the sheriff’s detectives, John Nance, has cleared out a large hole, or a few small ones, in which the bones from three bodies are piled. Three female bodies, if the rags hanging on them is any indication. And young. The one that still has hair, just a snatch of it hanging from the bone, has blond hair. They are all in decomposing dresses.

  ‘Not waiting for the coroner or forensics?’ Chief Davis says.

  ‘I’m not disturbing nothing. The insects took care of most of this a long time ago. Forensics guys can play with hair and teeth and bloodstains . . . if they ain’t too badly degraded.’

  ‘Were they buried all at the same time?’ Ian says.

  Nance looks over to him. ‘That’s outside my expertise, but I’d say no.’

  Ian nods.

  Nance is in his late forties or early fifties, with gray hair and a face like melted wax. When he’s standing he looks like pulled taffy sagging under its own weight, shoulders slumped, arms hanging down, cheeks droopy. But he is not standing. He’s sitting on his haunches over a row of skeletons and piles of seemingly random belongings: shoes, clothes, toys. The belongings were once in bags, but two of the bags have disintegrated, leaving behind unrecognizable fragments. Nance pulls a dirt-covered hair brush from a pile beside the oldest corpse and lays it down on a sheet of plastic he or Finch spread across the ground to his left. He sets it next to other items he’s already pulled from the earth: a bracelet, a pair of empty shoes, a bunch of small dresses, a one-eyed doll.