Stephen Small is lying in a curled ball, like a fetus.
He isn’t moving.
An EMT kneels down next to him, placing two fingers on his neck, searching for a pulse from the carotid artery. Another EMT leans next to the hole, ready to help.
After only a few seconds, the EMT closest to Stephen looks at the agent in charge and shakes his head.
“He’s dead,” the EMT says.
Danny’s legs go wobbly. He feels like he could throw up. He begins taking deep breaths—long and slow—trying to get himself under control.
Then it occurs to him. What he’s doing—breathing deeply—was exactly what Stephen Small couldn’t do. Danny had buried a man underground and he had suffocated.
The EMTs step away from the hole, and a new process begins. This is no longer a rescue mission—it is a homicide scene. Detectives begin photographing the body. Others start taping off the perimeter.
The agent in charge approaches Danny. He’s furious. Danny can tell by looking at him. But there’s something else in his expression too. Sadness. They’ve solved the crime, but it’s too late. There’s no satisfaction in the resolution, only anger and sorrow and confusion about why this had to happen at all.
The agent takes Danny by the arm and leads him close to the grave.
“Take a good look,” the agent says. “I want you to see what you’ve done.”
Stephen Small’s skin is gray. His milky eyes are vacant, staring at nothing. His loafers are in the corner of the box, and his bare feet are contorted with the toes curled up. Up until this moment, Danny had thought perhaps the EMTs were wrong. He had thought there was still a chance that Stephen Small might sit up, yawn, and look around with sleepy eyes.
But seeing the body this close, there is no mistaking it. A dead man looks different from someone who’s sleeping. There is no air inflating his lungs. There is no blood pulsing through his veins.
Stephen Small is not asleep.
The man Danny kidnapped is gone forever.
Another officer approaches them, holding up a length of PVC pipe.
“This diameter is way too narrow for how long it is,” the agent says to his colleague. “There was no way for him to expel his carbon dioxide out of the box. And no way to pull in adequate oxygen from the outside. We’ll have to wait on the autopsy, but judging by the rigor mortis, I’d say he’s been dead for at least a day. I doubt he survived more than a few hours with this ridiculous contraption.”
The agent looks at Danny. “He might have been dead before you ever made the first phone call to request a ransom.”
With that, the agent walks away, getting back to work.
“What made you think he had forty-eight hours of air?” the agent in charge asks Danny.
Danny stares at the body of Stephen Small.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Danny says, and it seems to him that it’s a blanket statement that could describe the ill-conceived air pipe as well as the whole kidnapping scheme. It is a statement that might encompass his entire life, practically every decision he has ever made.
I don’t know what I was thinking.
“How does it feel to be a murderer?” the agent asks Danny.
“I never meant to kill him,” Danny says. “I’m no murderer.”
“Even now,” the agent says, gesturing to the body, “you’re unwilling to take responsibility for your actions. Unbelievable. You, Danny Edwards, are the most reprehensible human I’ve ever met.”
Danny doesn’t argue.
“You and your accomplice,” the agent adds.
“Accomplice?” Danny says.