Chapter 18 Cursed #2
Nothing like my biological mother, who was masquerading as a member of a happy family.
I knew better. She was a sociopath. She carried the Lyssa variant, the genetic mutation that I suspected drove much of my father’s psychopathy.
I carried it, too. I refused to believe that biology was destiny, but with her…
How could she have abandoned me at twelve like that? How could she have sent me away without a second thought, to create a new life? I wanted answers from her. I knew I would never get them.
The dreams I was having stung. They showed me a version of my mother that I wanted, someone who was softer, who didn’t hate me for being my father’s daughter. In those dreams, I felt like I was her daughter, too. That maybe she loved me, just a little bit.
But I couldn’t trust those dreams. They were so different from what I knew, of her coldness and her abandonment.
There were no answers. It wasn’t as if I could ask her. Even if I did, I was certain she would lie to me, just as she did decades before.
—
I awoke to my phone ringing.
“Koray,” I answered muzzily. I rolled out of bed to take the call away from Nick, who was still sawing logs. Gibby snuffled at me and burrowed under the covers.
BEEP. “El-Tee, it’s Detwiler. Got a crime scene here at the quarry that might be of interest to you.” He sounded a little green, which didn’t bode well for the nature of the crime.
“Copy that. Send me the directions?”
“Done.”
It was then that I realized I didn’t have a car. “Um, can you also do me a favor?”
“Shoot, El-Tee.”
“Can you please get Vice to drop a car off for me?”
“Sure thing.”
BEEP.
Ugh. The new comm system’s beeping was like a bullet to the brain.
I got dressed and headed out to the driveway, wondering what the fuck was going down at the quarry.
Vice had apparently already come and gone, leaving me with the El Camino that smelled like cigars.
Well, it was certainly better than nothing, but I was sure they were cracking up at the fact that they’d hung some pink fuzzy dice from the rearview mirror. So retro.
As I left, Kapp’s Automotive called to tell me that the SUV was ruined. I asked them if they thought it could have been sabotaged. They couldn’t definitively say that, but they told me that the car would cost more to fix than it was worth.
I sighed. I’d miss the SUV. I patted the El Camino’s dashboard. “You and me are gonna be friends for a while longer, old girl.”
Detwiler met me on the road to the quarry, a favorite local swimming hole.
Once upon a time, limestone was mined here, and it had since filled in with deep water.
It wasn’t the sort of place where you’d take children swimming, more the kind of place that teenagers would sneak out and drink at.
It was usually littered with beer cans, and the occasional lost swimsuit.
We’d also fished a couple suspicious vehicles from the depths.
Detwiler had set sawhorses up as a roadblock, and he let me in via an access road overgrown with weeds. “Nice ride, El-Tee.” He nodded at the El Camino through my open window.
I made a face. “Whatcha got?”
“Two men, late twenties. Kind of old to be in the party scene, found floating on their inner tubes this morning by a couple teen girls.”
“What were the girls doing here?”
“One of them left her cell phone here last night. Apparently there was a party.” Detwiler lifted a shoulder.
I liked Detwiler, but he was way too square to know about parties. As a kid, he was working on his Eagle Scout badge when his classmates were toking up. “Gotcha. Are the girls still here?”
“They’re with another deputy, on the far side of the quarry, out of sight of the bodies.”
“Understood. Thanks, Detwiler.” I cranked up the window and headed down the road.
A narrow gravel trail, wide enough for only one car, opened to a stone beach.
I parked close to the gravel, not wanting to get the rear-wheel-drive El Camino stuck.
The back of the quarry was cliffs, from which people often made ill-advised dives.
The water level was lower than I remembered it ever being, owing to the drought.
I saw a patrol car there, as well as a white sedan and a black SUV.
Two girls were sitting in the air-conditioning in the back of the patrol car, looking distressed.
In the distance, I spied two orange inner tubes. I could make out two sets of feet, toes up. I wondered how Detwiler had arrived at the conclusion that these men were dead and not just hungover and passed out, but my suspicious were confirmed when the breeze pushed the inner tubes around.
Both bodies were headless.
“All right, then,” I breathed.
I went to the patrol car, nodded at the deputy there. “How are the girls holding up?”
The deputy looked overwhelmed. “They’re freaking out. I tried to calm them down. I took their phones away to keep them from sharing evidence, but I called their parents.”
“They’re minors?”
“Both seventeen, and terrified about being busted for underage drinking.”
“So, they found the missing phone?”
The deputy handed me two phones. One was in a purple-glitter case, and the other one was jet-black, with a cracked screen.
“Okay. I got this. You wanna call Dive, Forensics, and the coroner’s office?”
“Will do.”
I popped open the back door to speak to the sobbing girls. “Hi. I’m Anna. What are your names?”
“Teresa.”
“Evie.”
“Teresa, Evie, I want to make it clear that you’re not in trouble here, okay?”
Teresa rubbed her eyes. “My parents are gonna kill me if they think I’ve been drinking.”
“Well,” I amended, “there’s not much I can do about that. What I can do is say that I’m not gonna charge either one of you with any wrongdoing if you tell me what the heck went on here last night.”
The girls nodded tearfully.
“So, do you know those guys?”
Evie shook her head. “No. Not really. We went with some friends to just have some beers and relax, you know? We wanted to take some videos, since it’s creepy here after dark.”
“Friends your age?”
“Um, yeah.”
“I’m gonna need names.”
The girls exchanged glances, then coughed up a list of five high schoolers.
“Okay. You and your friends were here, drinking and hanging out. What was the deal with these guys?”
“We didn’t know them. They showed up after. They were real gross, asking to take pictures of the girls.” Teresa made a face. “They were old.”
“How old?”
“I dunno…old.”
“Okay. Did either of them touch you or your friends?”
“No. We bailed.”
“Show me the video you took.”
I handed the girls their phones, and they showed me a video of two men, who looked to be in their late twenties, leering at the young women around a campfire.
“Can you send me that?”
“Sure.”
“What time did you leave?”
“I dunno. We left when it started raining.”
“Understood. I need to get your contact information for further questions.”
I scribbled that info down, and took the phones just in case there was more information on them than the girls had shared. I had Patrol escort the girls, in their car, out to the road to meet their parents, leaving me alone on the beach.
I took pictures of the debris there. There were dozens of beer cans, and maybe there was some DNA on the rims worth testing. I found one flip-flop, a broken bong, and a soggy sandwich covered with ants.
Next to the SUV, I found a duffel bag. With gloved hands, I opened it. Within were men’s shoes, jeans, and T-shirts. I was betting these belonged to the men on the water. There were cell phones and wallets, too. I cracked open the wallets and looked at the drivers’ licenses.
Amos Lister, twenty-nine.
Patrick Lister, twenty-seven.
My eyebrows lifted. There weren’t that many people with that last name in the county.
A Google search coughed up a social media picture of Mark Lister standing with the two men at a family reunion.
Judging by the names and the resemblances, I was pretty sure they were at least cousins, maybe half brothers.
I did some poking around on social media, and identified the men as Mark’s second cousins on his father’s side.
I radioed the car’s plates in, and they came back registered to Patrick Lister.
Gravel crunched. Forensics and the coroner’s van rolled in. The coroner’s van stopped beside me, and the county coroner herself, Dr. Navarro, hopped out.
“Hi, Doc. I thought we kept you busy enough to keep you chained to your desk.”
Dr. Navarro sighed. “Everyone’s on vacation, so it’s all-hands-on-deck, Koray. Though that floater you sent me was interesting.”
“Anything you can share?”
She leaned against the side of the van. “Quentin Sims’s cause of death was drowning, though I noted a number of wounds on the body that weren’t consistent with the kind of accident he was in.”
“I did see some at the scene, and I wasn’t sure what to make of them.”
She pulled out her phone, showing some pictures of the corpse. Deep scratches trailed along Sims’s ribs and arm, long gashes in the pale flesh. “Here.” She advanced to a shot of the corpse’s head, revealing claw marks at the back hairline and along his neck. Bone glistened. “And here.”
“Weird.” I counted five stripes. “Looks almost like a hand, and those are fingers.”
“Sure, but humans don’t grow knives on their fingers, and there’s nothing in the river that does.”
“Maybe they were inflicted before the accident?”
“I don’t think so. The vascular damage and blood pooling aren’t consistent with that. Pragmatically, I’d be really surprised if there was a swimmer in the water with a knife at the time of drowning. Very surprised.”
“No ideas what that is?” Viv was off my list of suspects for the near drownings and Sims’s death. But I imagined Fred Jasper swimming with a knife in the dark and stifled a shudder.
“None. You bring me a tool, and I’ll compare. I didn’t find any inorganic material, like metal burrs, in the wounds, either.”
I exhaled. “Weird.”