Godfall, p.18
Godfall, page 18
And then he just sat there, turned awkwardly, cigar smoldering in the air, his face red and eyes wide and lip trembling.
“I’m trying,” David said.
Dale stood then, saying nothing, and led David to the door. In the doorway, Dale put a hand on David’s shoulder.
“You watch out, David. We can’t trust them.”
Who did he mean by them? The FBI? David had the sensation of being trapped in the midst of warring factions, except there was no way to discern one side from the other.
Driving back to town, as he reached the highway, he heard horns honking, one on top of another. The northbound lane of the highway had slowed to a crawl. A John Deere tractor pulling a tiller chugged along at twenty miles an hour, blocking the whole lane, dozens of vehicles choked up behind it.
Old Gentry Luwendyke. David flipped on his siren and guided his truck next to the tractor, waving at the old man to inch onto the side of the road, clearing room for traffic. Then David drove behind the Deere with his hazard lights on, waving vehicles past with his hand.
As the tractor peeled off of the highway, David continued on, starting his usual nightly patrol. He pulled an energy drink from the glove box, popped the tab, and swigged at it. His crowded thoughts jostled for preeminence. The case. The drugs. The cult.
For the first time in weeks, the volume of all that faded, and something new took prominence. Sunny. She would be coming. To see him. On a date. Was it a date? What if she didn’t feel anything about him? What if this really was just a secret meeting? But the way they connected . . .
He glanced into the rearview mirror, and a glare of lights fell over his eyes. Then he checked it again. Headlights behind him. Bright halogen glare. A truck, or maybe a jeep. The same one he’d seen before. The lights he had thought were following him.
No. There were hundreds of vehicles in the county now. Thousands. It was just a coincidence.
Yet, as he guided the truck through the memorized path of his patrol, those headlights remained behind him. One turn. Another. Another. Always hanging back, letting other vehicles come between them. Then reappearing.
His breath held in his lungs. His pulse thrummed.
He sped up, just slightly. Took another turn, this one not part of the routine, whipping to the right. Nothing. Nothing. Then . . .
The headlights, coming easily around the corner, following.
“Hell with this,” David said.
He flipped on the lights and siren and pulled over to the side of the road. Let them come, then. He stared at the mirror, unblinking.
The vehicle came closer. Closer. Then it turned off onto a side street, nothing rushed in the movement. He squinted. A jeep, dark in color. Then it was gone, but still David’s heart pounded.
* * *
|||
Charlotte had come to the house before, parking across the street and watching. Willing herself to go, to be done with it. Rip off the Band-Aid. What a shit metaphor that was. Those were her parents in there. The people who had read the note she left for them and did nothing. Didn’t try to find her. Didn’t tell her to come home. Didn’t tell her they loved her no matter what. They just let her go.
And then, years later, when she had called them at one of the lowest points of her life, in the vain hope that they could make peace, that she could come home to a safe space, that her parents could offer some comfort, they told her she was evil and that she should never contact them again.
All those years went by, and she didn’t even know the worst of it. That they had told the rest of the family that she was dead.
So no, Charlotte had not gotten out of her car. She hadn’t walked up to the house and knocked on the door. She hadn’t ripped off the Band-Aid. But now that was exactly what she was doing.
Because her parents had recognized her on the TV. Somehow, they knew. And they found her contact information and sent her a message telling her she needed to come and see them. Here she was.
Bonnie opened the door. She held it like a shield, crouched behind it. Ben Senior shuffled into view behind her. Charlotte had seen them at a distance at the funeral. Up close, they were all but unrecognizable. Bonnie had nearly doubled in size, her skin pale and waxy, her hair gray. Ben was almost totally bald, except with a few strands combed over and slicked in place. The features of his face seemed inflated; he looked like a Dick Tracy villain.
Charlotte clenched her arms to her side to stop them from shaking.
“Hi,” she said.
Bonnie sniffed sharply. She looked to Ben, indicating it was his job to speak. The oversize features of his face twisted, as if he held too many emotions and couldn’t land on one.
“You asked me to come. I’m here,” Charlotte said.
Ben cleared his throat.
“We told you that you aren’t welcome here. We didn’t want you here then. We don’t want you here now. Not after . . .”
He didn’t need to complete the thought.
“This town is my home.”
“No,” Bonnie almost hissed. “You aren’t our son. This is not your home.”
“I have to be here. For my job,” Charlotte pushed back.
Ben took a half step forward, and Charlotte instinctively stepped back. She’d been hit before. It had been years since the last time, but still she knew how to sense it coming. Ben stopped, though, unwilling or unable to follow through on the violence in his eyes.
“You have to leave,” he said. “Now.”
And then, in that moment, the tension ran out of Charlotte. All the anger and frustration and anguish she’d clenched in the pit of her for two decades just up and turned to vapor. These were not monsters. They were old people. Scared and confused and blind to the world. Blind to themselves. They weren’t to be feared. They were to be pitied.
“You were right,” Charlotte said. “I’m not your child. But that also means that you aren’t my parents. So do not ever think for one goddamned second that you get to tell me what I can and can’t do.”
She didn’t bother to stay and watch their expressions. Instead, she wheeled away and went back to her car, and during the drive back to her hotel she turned the radio to a pop station and cranked the volume and sang along to some inane song with the windows down, despite the chill in the air.
It was only once she was in the hotel lobby that the compulsion to check her phone struck her, and she saw the encrypted message, opened it, and looked at the photo. And then she screamed.
Twenty-Five
There was no lawyer this time. No producer. Just Charlotte, shivering and scared, sitting in David’s office at the new courthouse in the chair across from him, the desk he never used now an effective barrier between them.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Some part of him wanted to comfort her, the part that held onto the memories of the two of them growing up together. But then he remembered that she had made her choice. In the days since she revealed the killer’s message, the town had wound itself up even tighter. Parents were refusing to let their children out of the house. Asshole kids had started spray-painting the giant’s pattern on any open wall, as if in macabre celebration of the killer. And the case hadn’t moved forward one inch. He couldn’t hang all of that around her neck, but she sure as hell hadn’t helped.
He looked again at her phone, which sat on the desk in front of him. It showed a photo of Charlotte, taken mostly from behind, standing on the sidewalk in front of her hotel. A photo taken by the killer and sent to her. It had no message, but the message was clear. The killer knew where to find Charlotte, and he could sneak up right next to her with no one noticing. Whoever the hell he was, he was ghostlike—or so average and unassuming that he tripped no suspicions, the kind of face that moved past and was instantly forgotten.
“Maybe you should leave town,” David suggested, though he couldn’t manage to meet her eyes as he said it.
She inhaled hard, sucking in air, and then she started to sob. A loud, messy, choking cry that caught David off guard in its suddenness and intensity. He stood and came half around the desk, but he stopped short of her, caught between his compulsion to put a hand on her shoulder and the anger that refused to fully recede.
After a few seconds, her shoulders stopped shaking, and she wiped a hand across her face.
“I’ve always felt like I had a target on me,” she said. “But this . . .”
She looked up at him, calmed.
“I know what I did to you, David. Using you. It was wrong. I knew it when I did it. I just . . . I’ve been so long in this other world, and that’s just how everyone acts. You do whatever you can to get ahead. And you tell yourself it’s okay. But it isn’t. I’m sorry.”
He sat against the desk.
“I get it. The way the town is anymore, I feel like I’m losing myself.”
He glanced back at the photo.
“I’ll call the FBI. They’ll be able to protect you. If you want to stay, I mean.”
She nodded slowly.
He handed her back the phone.
“Maybe we can try to start over again,” he said. “Just no talk about the case.”
She smiled slightly. As she stood, she looked at the phone, and her brow crinkled.
“What is that?” she asked, mostly to herself.
David moved close to her, so that he could look over her shoulder. And there, on her phone, was a new message from the killer. A photo. As David looked closer, he recognized the door to his own apartment. And beneath it, a line of text:
Tell the sheriff. He isn’t chasing me. I’m chasing him.
David ran out of the office and through the hallway, hearing Charlotte’s voice echoing.
“What is it?”
He burst out of the front of the courthouse, into the broad, mostly empty parking lot, the farthest bounds of which were lost to the dark of night. His eyes searched, found nothing. Still, he knew it. He could feel.
He was out there. The killer.
Watching. Waiting.
* * *
|||
Erickson seemed to take the news in stride. He’d assign agents to keep an eye on Charlotte. They’d be in plain clothes, following at a distance. Maybe they’d be lucky, and the killer would try something. David found the thought far from reassuring.
Then Erickson said it was time to go to Site One.
He offered nothing more, but when they arrived in the meeting room of Building Seventeen, David understood. Conover, Priest, and Sunny already sat around the table, waiting. It was the middle of the night, but they all seemed as if they operated on some other calendar, where day and night didn’t matter.
David’s head pounded. The adrenaline that had surged through him at the new courthouse hadn’t abated, and as his brain coursed with fear and rage, his body burned through what little stores of energy it had left. He was on fumes.
“You got my message?” Erickson asked as they came into the room.
He took a seat, so David followed suit.
“We are up to date,” Priest answered. “Which means we know that you have failed to come any closer to ending this large-scale fuckup of a case.”
Erickson didn’t react.
“Any luck on breaking the news network’s encrypted communications?” he asked, his eyes on Priest. “He’s stalking David now. Him and the reporter. We crack that, this is over.”
Priest said nothing but shook her head slightly.
Erickson pivoted toward Conover.
“How about you? You planning on telling me about your rogue soldier that the sheriff here sniffed out?”
Conover’s face reddened.
“I ran the lead. It was a dead end. Private Chambers had a hard alibi for all of the murders. He was on duty when the first one was killed and at a poker game with other soldiers during the others. I didn’t want to waste your time.”
“Yeah, I bet not,” Erickson shrugged.
Sitting there, David realized for the first time that he had assumed all along that the government agents—these dark-suited bureaucrats—all stood in one united effort. But he saw it clearly now. Each had their own agendas and secrets, ones that didn’t align with the others’. It felt like seeing one skirmish in a vast, unseen conflict.
Sunny said nothing, keeping her eyes down. She and David didn’t belong here, among these people. Chance had swept them into this room, but they were nothing more than observers, ignored amid the tectonic collisions.
Priest clenched and unclenched her hand.
“Where does this leave us?”
“We’re still empty on forensics,” Erickson said. “No good soft information, either. He’s smart, our guy. Looking for opportunities with no witnesses—blind spots. He’s growing bolder. More performative. The dead drug dealers were staged in a way the others weren’t. And it’s pretty clear at this point that he’s making this personal with the sheriff.”
Erickson gestured at David, then back at the others.
“Most likely reason is that David is the only person to see the killer and live. He’s a loose string.”
A vision appeared of scissors reaching toward a dangling thread. Snip.
“You assigned a team to keep eyes on him?” Conover asked.
They talked about David as if he wasn’t there.
“We’ve been following him since the beginning,” Erickson said.
The words barely had time to register before the old agent continued in his raspy voice.
“Which is why we knew about his little adventure in the tiger den. Care to fill us in on the particulars of that, sheriff?” Erickson asked, finally looking David in the eye.
The faces all stared at him. Demanding. All except Sunny, whose eyes pleaded with him to stay quiet.
“I . . . I just thought there was something ritualistic about the killings. It was stupid, but . . .”
They all watched him, expressions studious. He shrugged and pushed ahead.
“I had to know. So I dressed like them and followed them inside, and . . . It’s strange. What they’re doing. It’s like they’re taking in these broken people and, I guess, comforting them.”
If Erickson knew any more, he said nothing.
Conover shook his head.
“Stupid? Yes. Jesus. It was fucking . . .” he searched for a word. “Imbecilic. That’s what it was. You could’ve exposed us. Not to mention, you could’ve ended up as dead as the rest of them. I’m assuming, since you came out alive, that’s another dead end.”
All eyes went back to him. David nodded.
Priest glowered.
“So. That’s where we are? Nowhere?”
They were all silent an interminable moment. David knew he needed to offer something, to redeem himself to the group.
“I, uh, read something about spree killers once, that they often go back to old crime scenes. I was thinking, I have these wildlife cameras—they’re small, motion activated. I could put them at the murder scenes. See if he shows up.”
Priest scrutinized him.
“You read something? Where exactly did you study law enforcement, Sheriff Blunt?”
Before he could answer, she continued.
“Don’t tell me. I already know. Western Nebraska Community College, where you amassed a GPA of 2.79. Please, sheriff, do share with us what you learned at that esteemed institution about the criminal mind.”
His face went hot, and as much as he fought it, he knew they all could see his skin redden, his eyes clench down, his body go rigid. She had pierced straight through him. As he seethed, he opened his mouth to fight back.
“That’s good. The cameras. Worth a try.”
Erickson spoke, cutting off the conversation. Protecting David from himself.
“I’ll go with you,” Erickson said. “If the killer is watching you, you need someone to have your back.”
David’s face still burned. All he could manage was a quick nod.
“I’m going, too,” Sunny said then, a bit too loud. Then, catching herself, she added, “I’m going stir crazy in here.”
As the others left, she pulled David aside.
“It’s Saturday, remember? The wake for Jason. Can I still come?”
Amid everything, he’d forgotten. Most of the time he didn’t even know what day it was anymore, all of life playing out as a too-fast scroll of moving images, of patrols and death, of sirens and threats. In spite of it all, he felt himself smile.
“Right,” he said. “Of course. Let’s go.”
* * *
|||
Sunny rode with David as they went from one site to the next, Erickson trailing after in his car, watching to make sure no one else followed. If the killer saw them placing the cameras, he’d said, they sure wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. David showed her how the cameras worked. They were small, weatherproof, recording in night vision once a motion sensor tripped. People used them around their livestock or out in the open prairie, mostly to see what predators came out in the night.
Once they were done with the other locations, David insisted on a final stop; he guided the truck south of town, across the river, and to the cemetery. There he led the way up the hill and to the family plot, staking down the small camera near the base of an ash tree so that it faced directly toward Jason’s grave.
As he worked at it, Sunny stood by the graves. Erickson paced farther down the hill. Once David was done, he joined her and saw that she looked down at his parents’ marker.
“The date,” she said. “It’s the same for both of them.”
“Tornado,” David explained. “I survived.”
That was always how he explained it. Three words. Enough to get the story across and few enough to make clear he didn’t want to say anything else. Sunny seemed to grasp this, and she asked nothing more.
She looked up at him, and her face seemed full of worry.
“Erickson said something. That the killer is stalking you. What does that mean?”
David tried to casually shake it off.
“He’s sending messages to the reporter.”
