Tim Curran
NIGHTCRAWLERS
1
The spades sinking into wet earth sounded like axes into soft necks. They rose and fell, shoveling out dirt and exposing roots, stones and worse things.
As the rain kept coming down, Kenney leaned under the overhang of the old farmhouse and watched the crime scene techs in their dark utilities and yellow rain slickers poking the earth, prodding it, digging into it like farmers working some grim harvest. He dragged off a cigarette and felt the chill and hated everything about it.
He thought: Eight of ’em so far, eight goddamn bodies.
They were laid out under plastic tarps next to the holes they’d been pulled from. Five women, two men, one child. So far. So far. Those two words kept ringing in his head. Eight bodies and here in a rural Wisconsin farmyard of all goddamn places. When he closed his eyes, he saw their ravaged faces that sometimes weren’t faces but discolored, fleshless canvases of bone. And that was all bad enough, mind you, until you factored in the condition of the bodies, the marks on them, and then it became considerably worse.
Chipney trod through the muck, said, “Eh, Chief, don’t take it so hard. I was supposed to get married tomorrow. I had the week off. You think I’ll get it now?”
“Not likely, Chip,” Kenney said, blowing smoke into the wind. “Way things look, none of us are gonna be seeing any time off here.”
Rain ran down the plastic bonnet of Chipney’s hat, dripped off the tip of his nose. “Lieutenant… Lou, shit, I didn’t see the bodies and I don’t plan on it either. But, you know, people here are talking. They’re saying things.”
“What things?”
“You know, about the bodies.”
Kenney flicked his cigarette away. It died in the rain like a shooting star. “What about ’em?”
“Well, that they’re not… whole.”
Kenney looked dire. “They’re not.”
“And that they look like they’ve been eaten.”
Kenney felt bile bubble up his throat. “Chip, we’ll discuss things later. For now, just get back out on that road. Keep an eye on those cops. Any goddamn newsies make it in here and I’ll personally shove ’em up your ass.”
“I think you might at that,” he said.
It was a personal joke and they both smiled.
Chipney stalked off into the rain, the night and wind.
The area was cordoned off. So far, nobody was really paying attention… but come morning?
The cops and techs raced around out there like spiders, backlit by flood lamps; the air reverberating with the diesel thrum of the generators.
Kenney stood there, thinking, thinking. Six hours before he’d been planning on a typical night—a takeout pizza and Monday Night Football—and then the phone rang. Wisconsin Electric had an easement from the county to run a new set of power lines to replace the old string that dated from the 1950s. This new run would cut right through a western fork of the Pigeon River State Forest outside Haymarket and continue across a stretch of abandoned farmland out on Bellac Road. Bellac was a lonesome stretch of abandoned fields, thickly wooded hollows, and gray ramshackle farmhouses and barns falling into themselves, all long abandoned. As the big dozer cleared a path through one particularly blighted field, the blade began to turn up bodies.
And that’s when Kenney was dragged into it.
2
“Hey!” a voice called out. “We got another one over here!”
Kenney felt his heart drop into the swill pit of his stomach. Of course they did. Before this was over, God only knew how many there would be. Rain in his face, he started over there. The field was a hive of activity, and hour by hour the search perimeter was being widened. Fifty people here now. Seventy by tomorrow… and by next week? Kenney didn’t want to speculate; it made his ulcers flare.
Rain fell down and cold mud sluiced and the crime scene was a misty, wet envelope of muck. Contact zones were staked and tarped with black plastic sheets. They snapped in the wind, the rain speckling them. Evidence techs were muttering amongst themselves and dropping tagged body parts into cold cans. Photographers were taking still pictures and videos of the carnage. Forensic specialists were collecting dirt and leaves and scraps of material that might have been clothing from the graves, sealing them in evidence bags. It was cold, wet, thankless work.
Kenney felt something like grease surge in his belly as he approached the young sheriff’s deputy who’d sung out. He was one of about twenty state and local cops who were making a systematic grid search of the area for evidence. In a lateral line, using metal rods, they walked and sank them into the earth until they found a hole or depression.
Kenney got there quick as he could; wondering why the novelty of discovery hadn’t worn off by now. Moving through that mire was like crossing quicksand. The ground sucked your feet in and if you hit a low spot, you’d go right up to your knee in the mud.
Spivak, the county pathologist, beat him to the scene.
Used to suicides and car accidents, Spivak was like a kid in a candy store. A small, sparse woman with auburn hair going gray at the roots and a pale face spattered with freckles, she looked outlandish in her rubber hip waders and black rain slicker.
When Kenney got there, she was carefully removing mud from a rib cage and pelvic girdle. Wearing plastic gloves, she worked carefully and meticulously, a tech assisting her. There was a dank smell in the air like rotting leaves.
“What do you got?” Kenney asked after she was pawing in there ten or fifteen minutes.
“Incomplete,” she said. “No skull, missing vertebrae. I don’t see an ulna here or a clavicle.”
Kenney squatted down by her.
She held a grayed femur in her hands like a precious antiquity while the tech measured the zones. She rolled it over with her fingers. It was only partial, shattered at midline. Kenney could see the indentations in it like somebody had been working it with an awl.
“Teeth marks?” he said, before someone else did.
She nodded. “The smaller marks… could be rats. It’s really hard to say. But these larger ones… well, I’ve never seen dentition like that before. Not animals in my experience.”
“Human?” he said, a sickness rising in him.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Human teeth couldn’t gouge like that, at least I don’t think so.”
Kenney didn’t ask any more questions because he already had the answers. The marks were not from any animal she was familiar with. And she’d seen human bones gnawed and pawed by most predators and scavengers in this region—there was something about a human corpse they couldn’t refuse.
Kenney wiped cold rain from his face. “People are gonna be asking questions,” he said in a low, even voice. “Do you have anything? Even something preliminary?”
She gave him a blank stare, almost as if she was afraid to say what she was thinking.
Kenney sighed, staring off in the distance, at the cemetery crowning those low hills across Bellac Road, and thinking that there were more bodies here than over there.
It was not a very comforting thought.
3
The fog held.
Stirred up by the rain, it drifted in gaseous plumes and near-phosphorescent blankets of white, moving through the fields and forests, spreading and encompassing. An hour after it started, it was thick and almost suffocating and nobody could see ten feet in any direction.
“You gotta love this soup,” Deputy Riegan said, guiding the patrol car down a twisting, wooded lane, the headlights like glimmering white swords stabbing into the mist. “Can’t see a thing.”