Chapter 3
Henry was right, like he usually was. She couldn’t ignore the buzz that started up in her skull when he suggested she have a look at the latest crime scene.
“If you tell me tomorrow you’re not in a place to take the lead, fine, I’ll handle it,” Henry said, getting to his feet. “Besides, getting you to today’s crime scene is mostly why I dared to awaken the beast from her slumber.”
“It was a smart move.” Raegan pulled her freshly charged voice recorder from a drawer, though she doubted anyone would let her get them on record. She shoved a notebook and two pens into her pockets before dry-swallowing some ibuprofen for her migraine. “You’re thinking if you let me get a taste, I probably won’t be able to let go.”
“It’s possibly the first serial around these parts in some time.” Henry sounded amused despite the dark topic, skirting around her statement.
Raegan stood, searching for her press badge. She almost never used it—didn’t usually need to with her work in features—but it might help her not get kicked out of an active crime scene. Or it would definitely get her kicked out, depending on which cops were at the location.
“It’s a fucked up killing method,” she said, trying to focus on the story, seeing if it would distract her from the other tale that she ached to tell this time of year. “They’ve been trying so hard to pass it off as a series of oddly similar accidents, I almost started to believe it. I mean, drowning? In puddles? And these men, yes, they’re vulnerable due to being unhoused, but they’re not small.”
“The guy this morning was 6’2” apparently, well over two hundred pounds,” Henry said, leaning against the half-wall of her cubicle. “Even if the victims were drugged or otherwise incapacitated, they shouldn’t be drowning.”
“I think the puddles are deeper when the attack occurs,” Raegan said, reaching around to the back of her waistband to make sure her knife was there. “And then they dry up. Or something.”
Raegan could feel her mind pivoting, less a dark sea and more a dagger, all her frantic energy finding something to settle on. She loved journalism because it could devour her completely and she wouldn’t have to poke her head out into her personal life for days, maybe weeks. She’d more or less won awards for being obsessive and antisocial.
“I meant what I said,” Henry began, breaking her train of thought. “If you can’t take it on... I . . . I just know this time of year can be tough.”
Raegan set her jaw. “Yeah.” Her mind threatened to lose its focus on things that were not her life, the hard-won mask slipping for a moment. “Serial killer drownings will certainly lighten it up.”
Henry hesitated, a pained look crossing his face. “Hey, I’m sorry?—”
“No,” Raegan said, waving her hand. “It’s fine. That was supposed to be a joke.”
He smiled. “Well, unfortunately, it wasn’t very funny.”
“Do you have the address of the newest crime scene?” she asked, shoving anything that wasn’t work-related out of her head.
“Already emailed it to you.” Henry beamed at her like he had just sent her a particularly cute video of a puppy, not the location of a dead body.
Raegan was already refreshing the email app on her phone. Despite her hesitation, the thrill of the hunt began to sing in her body like an old hymn.
“I’ll see if they’ll tell me anything real,” she said, pulling her coat back on and grabbing her bag from the ground.
“You do have a way with people,” Henry called after her. “It’s kind of creepy but usually effective.”
She looked over her shoulder and flashed a grin, a real one for once, before disappearing around the corner.
***
Raegan had known the second she saw the address that it was going to be weird. People who struggled with homelessness did turn up dead in her city but not usually in wealthy neighborhoods. The places that got their streets plowed first during blizzards for no reason other than median income could not be expected to bear the unsightliness of housing inequality, much less an actual crime scene.
In the slanting morning light, the alley off Delancey Place looked more like a European side street than a crime scene. Wisteria vines draped across whitewashed brick arches, and moss grew thick and lush between the mortar. But there was the crime scene tape all the same, and a man about her age in a medical examiner’s jacket bent over a clipboard.
“Excuse me,” Raegan said, turning on her smile. “I’m a reporter and was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what’s going on.”
“I’m sorry,” the man replied without looking at her. “I’m not supposed to talk to the press.”
Before she could reply, he threw a cursory glance over his shoulder. Only then did he turn, tucking away his pen and considering Raegan, eyes sliding down her frame. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to help you , trust me.”
Internally, Raegan shrugged. She could work with that, at least.
“Oh, I totally understand,” she said, letting out a sigh and fiddling with her notebook as if she had never opened one before. “I’ll go see who else I can speak with. I’m just hoping for some context, not a quote. And my editor said an experienced medical professional like yourself would be the best, since this is apparently . . . strange.”
He considered her, and she let him look at whatever he wanted to. “If you’re not quoting,” he began, taking a step closer. “I can see why you wouldn’t want a random officer giving you a rundown.”
“No quotes,” Raegan confirmed, smiling. Her face hurt.
“It’s bizarre,” the medical examiner murmured. “The guy drowned. Like, lungs full of water, pulmonary distress, blue skin. But we found him in a puddle. A tiny, shallow puddle, and there’s no indication the body was moved.”
Raegan studied him carefully, wanting to make sure he wasn’t bullshitting her.
“I’m dead serious,” he told her, holding up his hands. “I’m out here because we need to collect about a million samples to figure out how this happened.”
“Weird,” Raegan conceded. “Thanks.”
The medical examiner was digging in his pocket for his card, encouraging her to give him a call if she needed “anything at all” in a tone Raegan did not like, when two police officers rounded the corner. One of them was, of course, Detective Bartley.
“Shit,” she exhaled through gritted teeth, the smile gone, her voice dropping an octave back to its natural tone.
“Miss Overhill? Is that you?” the detective called. “Raegan Overhill!”
His voice alone made her nauseous, the sound of it like a siren call for old memories to stir and sit on her shoulders, their weight heavy and taloned.
“Hey, Detective,” Raegan replied even though her head swam. She walked over to where the detective stood closer to the sidewalk, leaving the medical examiner dangling his card.
“They got you doing crime?”
“They do,” Raegan replied. “Vincent has to get his gallbladder taken out. I don’t know how long I’ll be on this. It’s uh . . . something, isn’t it?”
“You know I can’t comment just yet,” Bartley told her, “but yeah, it’s weird. I can set you up with the press liaison for something more concrete.”
Raegan considered. Some journalists would be relieved to know a member of the police who didn’t think they were a vulture or a piece of shit, but nearly twenty years ago, Detective Winsome Bartley had been in charge of the case surrounding her father’s disappearance.
He never found a goddamn trace of Cormac Overhill.
And so it seemed the detective felt he owed some kind of personal debt to Raegan. She was fine with working people and getting what she needed from them. But she didn’t cross lines and she didn’t want anyone to think a cop did her favors because she’d lost her daddy.
It didn’t help that Raegan was staunchly of the opinion that if the cops liked her, she wasn’t doing her job right.
“Oh, I can reach out for that later, but thank you,” she replied, crossing her arms and looking at him a little harder. “I was hoping an officer on the scene might be willing to give me something short. I’m worried this is going to freak people out, you know, impossible drownings with Halloween coming up.”
“How’d you know they were impossible?” Bartley asked, drawing himself up and staring down at her, the warmth seeping out of him like a cloud passing over the sun.
“I mean, I don’t, technically,” Raegan said, uncrossing her arms since he’d already given her the confirmation so easily. “But we’re in an alley in Society Hill and there’s a drowning. So. Impossible, yeah?”
Bartley relaxed then and let out a chuckle. “Okay, you’ve got me there. I guess it does seem pretty spooky, huh?”
“It sure does, Detective,” she answered.
“Well, let me get you a brief statement,” he said, motioning for Raegan to wait. While she did, she texted Henry that she was getting something—not very much, no more than a breaking news item, but something.
Another officer came by to tell her what she’d already suspected: the victim was unhoused. No one in the neighborhood recognized him, not the folks at the corner liquor stores or the outdoor cafés, so no ID yet. This was presumably not his usual haunt. His cause of death hadn’t been determined yet.
“But a suspected drowning?” Raegan pushed.
“No,” the cop told her. “I mean, there’s some medical signs of that, but obviously that couldn’t have happened, so we’re not referring to it like that.”
“No, of course not,” Raegan said. “Hey, have you ever seen anything like this?”
The officer weighed her up, his bushy brows furrowed as she held his gaze. “No,” he admitted slowly. “No, ma’am, I have not. But I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.”
“Sure,” Raegan said with a noncommittal shrug. “Well, thank you for your time.”
She double-checked the spelling of the officer’s name, begrudgingly gave Bartley a wave, and then headed back to the subway. Her platform was oddly deserted despite the busy morning hour, and she dropped her weight into the cold fiberglass seat with a thud. The memory of the earlier subway ride—the ecstasy that had crept through her, the way her blood had hummed upon seeing the stranger—threatened to resurface, so Raegan kept her eyes trained on her phone. She scrolled through social media and was treated to photos of a high school acquaintance’s wedding. Everyone looked happy and normal.
Raegan kept staring at her phone even when the reception cut out in the bowels of the tunnels, willing her own reflection in the small black square to not betray her. Someone across the car from her dropped their bag loudly on the ground. Another passenger at the other end was singing a song she thought she knew. Raegan focused on remembering the title, or maybe the artist, or even just conjuring an image of the album cover.
When her cell service returned and the subway pulled out of the deeper tunnels, a text from her ex-girlfriend appeared. Raegan inhaled and then exhaled so slowly that her vision swam for a minute. Swallowing, she tapped the text alert.
Hey, Layla had written. Thinking of you. I know this time of year is hard.
Raegan snorted, tried to run a hand through her hair, and got a ring caught in her curls for her trouble. Once she had painfully extracted her hair from the setting of the ring’s stone, Raegan almost succeeded in telling herself to just say “thanks” to Layla and move on. She had almost succeeded in reminding herself that she didn’t have to answer at all.
But Colin’s reaction to her taking the lead on the drownings and the way the medical examiner suddenly wanted to help when she played a silly girl and the useless guilt that wracked Detective Bartley’s face every fucking time he saw Raegan all came flooding back, buzzing in her skull like a thousand wasps that would only quiet once some venom was expressed.
How noble of you , Raegan typed back as the subway pulled into her station, to check in on someone who is - how did you put it - so hard to love.
Raegan banished her phone to the farthest recesses of her coat’s deep pockets and exited the subway car. Despite her empty train, the station was packed and she was forced to file slowly toward the escalator. When Raegan finally stepped onto it, she pulled her notebook and a pen from her pocket, intending to scribble down some notes while the escalator moved at its glacial pace.
Instead of making notes, Raegan chewed on the top of her pen, apparently working her jaw too hard because the ink exploded everywhere. She cursed under her breath the entire way to the station’s bathroom. As she did her best to scrub the ink off her mouth and neck, then off her hands, she caught a glance of herself in the dim lighting. Dark circles had invited their kin over for supper beneath her eyes. Black ink dripped from her mouth. It was familiar, somehow. Goosebumps rose across her skin as her mind keened. She choked on her next breath, hands flying to grip either side of the dirty sink.
Raegan held herself there for a moment, harsh coughs shaking her shoulders, eeriness coiling in her gut. For a second, she felt sure that if she looked at the mirror, she would not recognize her own face. A feverish chill traced its fingers up her spine.
But then the moment passed, quick as an autumn shadow. Raegan scrubbed the rest of the ink off her skin, and the thoughts of Layla and Bartley and her father from her mind. She would focus on the crime scene, on the story, on the facts .
There was probably a reasonable explanation why a six-foot-two man had drowned in a tiny puddle. That’s what the officer had said. But the crime scene had felt just like that old story her father used to tell, and Raegan knew better than anyone that sometimes things just happened with no reasonable explanation. And sometimes, with no explanation at all.