I press the power button on the RadioCOMMAND and the room fills with prayer: a gospel choir singing about the promised land in lush layers of harmony, transmitting up to God and out over a 600 MHz band. I picture a church somewhere, barricaded doors, blackout shades over the windows, a hungry happy congregation singing and singing till the day arrives. Till the promised land. I press SCAN and find someone claiming to be the president of the United States of America, proudly announcing that the whole thing was just a test of the resiliency of the American people, and—good news—we passed the test. It’s okay now, though, folks. Everything is fine.
I change the station. I change it again. Flickering voices, bursts of static, “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED,” and then a tipsy ecstatic teenager: “I don’t know where y’all motherfuckers are at, but we all motherfuckers are in the Verizon store at the Crestview Hills Mall in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, bi-zatch! Anyone looking to par-tay get on fucking I-75…”
It’s foolish to keep listening to strangers. I should preserve the battery; I should preserve my time. I press the SCAN button just one more time, the last time, and find a quiet and urgent voice, and I have to move right up close to the speaker to hear it.
“I repeat, I am in my car and I am driving south on Highway 40, if you get this and you still love me, I will be in Norman by five tomorrow, that’s tomorrow… I repeat, I’m in the car, I’m on the highway, and I love you. I, uh…”
The voice trails off into silence, the rush of highway wind. I wait a moment holding my breath and then I turn it off, just as the jackhammer starts up again at last, steady and sure from Cortez’s end of the hall. He fixed it. He’s got it.
It remains hard to fathom, hard to believe, that this is what the world has become. That this, of all possible worlds and times in which I could have been born, could have been a policeman, that this is the world and time that I got.
“We got ripped off, Nic,” I walk back over to my sister, look again at her face, the savaged flesh of her neck. “We got ripped off.”
I start to pull the tarp up over her head but then I stop, I just hold it there like a blanket.
It’s the wound. It’s her throat.
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough out in the woods, maybe I was distracted or maybe it’s that just now I’ve had the experience of sitting and staring at Jean for half an hour, watching her talk, looking at her throat. Out there in the woods, at first glance, it was clear to me that these two wounds were the same: two girls, throats slashed, victim one and victim two, wound one and wound two.
But it’s not so. Nico’s injury is worse—much worse. Which makes sense, of course, because she’s dead and Jean isn’t. I lean in close, trace the line of the assault with the tip of a finger. Looking closely I see it’s not a cut but a mass of cuts, a cluster of overlapping lacerations, forming a rough V below the victim’s chin, pointing down. With the other wound there was blood, there was the raw pinkness of the exposed muscle, but now here with this second victim it goes deeper than that—below all the blood of the jugular and the shredded layers of throat there is the shell color of bone, the off-white piping of the trachea. The depth of the wound and its messiness suggest that she was struggling, moving the whole time, trying to defend herself, get free from what was happening.
I blink back to Jean’s wound, the one I was just staring at while she stumbled through her story, a less messy wound—a single slash, suggesting little struggle or no struggle, contrary to the bruising and lacerations on her face.
So—then—so—I stand up, pace in a tight circle—so she fought back, Jean fights back but is captured and subdued. Let’s say a pill or pills, let’s say the assailant pushes something into her mouth, covers her nose with his hands and forces her to swallow.
No—stop—I stop, smack the wall with my hand, think faster, Palace, think better. We’re in a fast-moving scenario here, victim two—Nico—is already sprinting off into the woods, I’m the killer and I’ve got to catch her, can’t let her go. I hit her with something. Knock her down. Jean’s in the dirt—unconscious?—gets her with one quick smooth slice to the throat and then I’m off and running after victim two, after Nico Palace tearing breathlessly in her sandals through the woods.
But I checked Jean’s body, while she was asleep, when she was still Lily, I checked her scalp for blunt force trauma, surely I did.
She was, though, she was still. Pills or an injection or the blow of a hammer to the side of the head, she wasn’t moving when she was cut and Nico was.
I find that I’m panting, pacing, horrified. It’s out there, it’s up there, the dark heart of the sky, coming in fast.
Focus Palace but I can’t but I have to. Keep going.
Killer catches up to poor Nico in that second clearing, gets on top of her and pins her down, and she’s terrified, she’s awake, she’s writhing, and he grabs her from behind and slashes her throat until it’s open.
I am trembling, like I’m there, like I’m in the scene, like I’m cutting or being cut.
There’s something else, too. I turn around, away from the window, look at her one more time, wiping tears out of my eyes, feeling my knife hand clenching and unclenching. There’s something else.
Among the messiness and the gore of the wound there is something—I crouch—lean forward, take out my measuring tape, and murmuring apologies to Nico, after all that she has suffered, murmuring “holy moly” and then “holy shit,” I peel back small portions of her lacerated skin, one-tenth of a centimeter at a time, and I keep discovering them—smaller cuts within the larger, lines as small as insect legs. I move my magnifying glass across the neck and confirm that these smaller cuts are regularly spaced at quarter-inch increments along the whole line of the wound.
Parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound. Dr. Fenton would say that nothing is certain, that certainty is for schoolchildren and magicians, but that parallel superficial incisions on the upper and lower skin margin of the wound strongly indicate that the weapon used was a serrated blade.
I burst out of the dispatch room and run down the hallway, hands spread out to either side like an animal wingspan, fly down the corridor to the kitchen to confirm my snapshot memory of the knives on the rack behind the kitchen. Butcher’s blade; paring knife; cleaver. Nonserrated.
Back in Dispatch I run it down for Nico, explain to her about her wound, the parallel superficial incisions and what they mean. I remind her, furthermore, that the only serrated blade I am aware of, in the context of this investigation, is the sawtooth buck knife noticed by Atlee Miller, hanging from Astronaut’s belt.
“Policeman.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
Cortez. Tentative expression, narrowed eyes. Looking at me like I’m not actually okay.
I clear my throat. “I’m fine. Did you crack it?”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I am. Did you get us down?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the tarp.
“Palace,” he says. “Is that her?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s her.”
I give it to him fast, the thumbnail sketch only. “The sleeping girl, whose name is Jean Wong, originally of Lansing, Michigan—her memory of the incident in question is very uneven, essentially empty, but she was able to lead me directly to a field in the woods where I located the body. Cause of death is a deep wound to the throat with a serrated blade. That’s about—that’s about what we’ve got. So.”