28
ANSON
I woke to Paul shaking me, his hair floppy and uncombed. “Hey, get up. Something’s happening.”
It took a moment before I realized where I was.
For one brief second, I thought we were back in our bunks at Finicky’s, but unlike Finicky’s, no light streamed through the windows.
I didn’t hear the clatter of the girls downstairs or Vincent down the hall.
The air was different, too. The air at the farmhouse had been looser, somehow—cooler.
The air here felt thick, trapped. Like air kept in a bottle.
Paul snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “Get with it, Bishop. You still got one foot in la-la land.” He threw some clothes at me from the carefully folded stack I had pilfered last night from the same storage room where we’d found pajamas.
“What’s going on?”
“Twill came and got Vincent a few minutes ago, all quiet like, but she looked scared. I didn’t think that girl did scared. Hurry up, get dressed.”
I tugged into the t-shirt, jeans, and my tennis shoes, and chased after him down the hall.
We took the steps to the first floor quickly, falling in line behind a few other people we didn’t know heading in the same direction.
They gave us a hurried glance, but said nothing.
There was a general buzz in the air, something heavy, and whatever it was, word spread fast. From the market downstairs, we spotted the back of Stash’s head as he rounded a table covered in junk jewelry.
He pushed through one of the exterior doors marked “Emergency Exit Only” with others following behind him.
I expected an alarm to sound, but none did.
When Paul and I went through the same door, I saw why—the wires on the sensor up top had been clipped and twisted together.
Father told me once if you did that, you bypassed the circuit and the system registered the door as closed even when it wasn’t.
He’d also taught me how to fool those sensors with a pair of magnets.
We were in some back alley with a loading dock and a bunch of cops.
“Shit.” Paul froze at the sight of them and I nearly ran into his back.
They didn’t see us. They were too busy putting up crime scene tape while attempting to hold back the other twenty or so people who got out there before us. I shrunk back anyway, tucking behind Pudge, who was standing so still, he might have been a wall. He towered over the rest of the crowd.
Paul sidled up on the other side of him. “Hey, Pudge, what happened? Can you see?”
The big kid looked around for a second, bewildered, like he wasn’t sure who spoke to him, then he spotted Paul cowering down below.
This look crossed his face, like he wasn’t sure if he should pet him or swat him away.
He did neither and instead kept watching the police as he mumbled, “Another body. Looks like a boy this time.”
“Somebody said it’s Andy.”
This came from an older woman to my right. Her frizzy gray hair was pulled back and tied in a loose knot over her left shoulder. She wore a flowered dress and well-worn pink sandals.
“Who’s Andy?” Paul asked.
“Gutter rat,” the woman said. “Been missing for two nights, from what I heard.”
Pudge let out a soft grunt. “Andy’s my friend.”
“I want to get closer,” I told Paul, then I slipped out from behind Pudge and started through the crowd before he could object, because I knew he’d object.
No eye contact, Champ. Casual movement. No faster than those around you, no slower.
People are predators at heart; they pick up on the slightest movement that doesn’t belong.
As long as you belong, you blend, and if you blend, you can vanish in a crowd.
Eye contact is key, though—avoid that. You lock eyes with the wrong person, someone on the opposite side of that crime scene tape trained to watch for anomalies, and you might as well jump up and down waving your hands.
There’s no unringing that bell once it chimes.
If there’s a body up on that loading dock—and I’ve got no reason to believe there isn’t—the police expect whoever put that body there to be in the crowd watching.
Keep your head down so they don’t get a good shot of you in the pictures, because you can bet they’ve got someone taking photos of the whole crowd right now.
You end up in just one of those photos and there’s no telling who might see it—who might come looking for you.
There’s something else you’ll want to think about—all that string you laid out on the wall last night, all those victims?
The person responsible might be standing right next to you.
They’re surely somewhere in that crowd. Think you can spot them?
I know I could. Mother, too. Just one of the many reasons I loved that woman.
Father was still going on when I found a small opening on the right side of the loading dock, only two rows back from the tape. Close, I know, but I wanted to be close. I wanted to see. I wanted to take it all in.
There was a body, and he was, in fact, young.
“Andy,” Pudge had said.
“A gutter rat,” the old woman had called him.
Andy the Gutter Rat was sitting prone. His back was slumped against the brick wall to the side of the large metal loading dock door, his legs stretched out before him.
Although his eyes were open, they saw nothing.
His pupils were dilated wide and black, covered in a thin milky film.
His lips were parted slightly, caught in an exhale that would never end.
His left arm was folded awkwardly behind him while his right reached straight out.
The sleeve of his plaid shirt was rolled up, and a rubber tube was twisted loosely around his bicep.
A needle stuck out from just below the fold of his elbow.
Several people crouched around him in CSU windbreakers, their gloved hands carefully collecting samples and photographing Andy’s body from all angles.
There was a woman, too. Maybe early thirties.
Some sort of detective. She wore a gray pantsuit.
Her chestnut hair in a bun. Several strands had broken free, and she blew them from her face without touching them.
I watched as she gently took Andy’s head and leaned him forward.
I had no doubt she was looking for a hole at the base of his skull like the one I’d seen on Emily, like the one on the others.
It was obvious when she found it—her eyes narrowed and she tilted Andy ever so slightly to get a better look, but then she did something I didn’t understand.
She leaned him back against the wall with no mention of what she found to the CSU techs.
Instead, she straightened up and dismissed them.
I don’t know what she said—I couldn’t hear her—but they immediately stopped whatever they were doing and walked off.
A moment later, two came back with a body bag and got Andy inside.
Zipped it up. All while she watched. None of that was right, of course.
Police detectives don’t bag bodies, and neither do crime scene techs—that was a task left to the medical examiner’s office after they examined the body on site, and as best I could tell, the medical examiner hadn’t arrived yet.
I was thinking about this when I realized her gaze had fixed on me.
I didn’t mean to look back. Lock eyes with her. I should have turned away and vanished in the crowd, but I didn’t. I looked directly at her.
On some level, I’m sure Father let out a disappointed groan. I didn’t hear him, though. I had bigger problems.
Someone grabbed my shirt and jerked me back.