IMAN CLOSED THE lid of her laptop, listening to the gentle purr of its hard drive winding down. She’d emailed Motes to tell him she wasn’t feeling well and would be out of the office for a day or two. Writing it took the better part of two hours, punctuated with hand-wringing and compulsive parsing of words and phrases, her finger hovering over the track pad. The message was innocuous, a mere two lines, yet admission of what she’d seen seemed to leak into the text. It clung to serifs and dripped from descenders, a mephitic glaze that no amount of deleting and retyping could purge. When she’d finally closed her eyes and pecked send with a trembling index finger, she felt as if she’d just run uphill beyond the limits of her endurance.
Setting her laptop aside, she slithered beneath the covers of her bed, her eyes sour and stinging with sleeplessness. The events of last night played out in a continuous loop, a grim palimpsest scrawling its ugly image across her ceiling. She dimly remembered Brian’s entreaties that he tell her what she saw, the gentle weight of his hand on her back, the worried gaze from the bathroom doorframe as she vomited every scrap she’d eaten into the toilet. Eventually, with much insistence from her—dimly remembered but earnest, as well as she could recall—he left for school, insisting she call him if she needed anything.
She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, willing the mild ache to recede. What she’d witnessed in Motes’ back yard was clearly impossible, yet every rational explanation she could think of broke against the anvil of her certainty. The only answer was that she’d hallucinated the whole thing, but then why did everything coming before and after feel so normal? Surely one couldn’t ascend from the foggy depths of such delusion into clear-skied lucidity without some haziness in between.
Longing for distraction, she grabbed her phone and keyed in the Niagara Falls Review. The homepage headline read: Police Officers Among Those Killed in Savage Animal Attack.
Iman read the article, her fingers too numb to feel the screen of her smartphone. She scrolled on anyway, processors humming, blankly transferring data from corneas to ocular nerves to brain. There seemed to be no flavour to the information, no editorial colouring by her higher faculties. She was a fax machine transmitting signals, seeing the shapes but blind to their meaning.
Four officers from the Niagara Regional Police Department had a bizarre and tragic encounter with a wild animal last night. Duty officers Melissa Myers and Dan Nichols responded to an anonymous report of an animal attack in Firemen’s Park. They arrived on scene to find the bodies of Brock University students Bryce O’Connor and Sally LeChance in O.Connor’s vehicle. The bodies were badly mutilated. Paramedics called to the scene were dismissed, as the duty officers contacted homicide detectives David Moore and Walter Pulaski, who have been investigating the wave of similarly brutal attacks occurring over the last few months.
The attack left Detective Pulaski and Officer Nichols dead. Detective Moore was taken to Niagara Falls General Hospital with serious injuries. Officer Myers was unharmed in the incident but has gone on paid administrative leave. Chief Aldo Delduca insists the leave is voluntary.
“Officer Myers faced a horrendous situation bravely and competently and has our full support. The moment she sees fit to return to active duty, we’ll be behind her one hundred percent.”
A pool of saliva collected at the base of Iman’s tongue. They know. Whatever it is I saw, they saw it too. Her belief in this fact was absolute. She held it the way a shipwrecked sailor clings to debris, white-knuckled and desperate to stay afloat.
Sweat prickled her palms. She wiped them on the seat of her pants one by one, her free digits dutifully scrolling through the story. She needed to talk to these people. To warn them about Motes. To share what she knew. But most of all, to look another human in the eyes and see the small nod, the signal of affirmation that said, “Yes. I saw it too.”
Or they’ll ship you off to the funny farm. That’s always an option.
Iman dismissed the warning with a shrug. If she was wrong, if they’d experienced nothing more than an attack from a bear or a mountain lion, let them commit her. It would probably be the right call. She continued reading.
Detective Moore declined to speak to reporters, citing a need to recuperate. Officer Myers could not be reached for comment.
Iman grunted. Otherwise known as ‘go fuck yourself.’ Myers was out. She could be anywhere, and even if Iman could somehow get hold of her address, she seriously doubted the woman would want to speak to her. The press would be beating down her door hard enough already.
Moore, on the other hand, had a fixed location, at least for the next little while. And the beat reporters would likely hold off on him until he was out of the hospital, out of fear of reprisals if not professional courtesy. A young relative, on the other hand, might just be able to sweet-talk her way past reception.
Iman wondered what the odds were that Detective Moore was brown. Probably not that great. I doubt he’s that kind of moor, har har.
A niece by marriage, maybe? Yeah. She liked the sound of that.