Charlotte sat in her car in the high school’s parking lot and waited, eyes shifting from the clock to the front doors of the massive brick building to her phone, killing time by aimlessly drifting through social media and news updates. She found herself coming back again and again to Jason’s page. Post after post of people offering condolences and prayers, then older messages of jocular bonhomie between Jason and his friends. Photos that showed him always smiling, big and loud and arrogant, but not in the way of one who thrust that arrogance on others. He seemed arrogantly self-possessed, a man who knew just who he was and how to exist without second consideration.
Jason had changed a great deal over the two decades she spent away. He was taller and fatter—almost every photo showed a beer in his hand. But that confidence had been there from the start. He would always have some plan, some scheme. Something for the four of them to do together—Jason, David, Spady, and her. And then every outing, he would raise the stakes. It wasn’t enough that they took Dale’s Corvette without asking. They then had to go and see how fast they could drive in reverse, before popping the parking brake and whipping the car around.
Another memory came, unbidden. They’d been about fourteen. Jason had somehow enlisted them in an effort to catch a wild rabbit that they found next to the school during lunch break. Jason had tucked it into a pocket as they went back inside, then set it loose in the hallway. Charlotte could still see the kids shrieking with laughter as the teachers stumbled about, bumping into each other as the animal darted through their legs. That was Jason.
She hadn’t admitted to anyone that he was her cousin. With a straight and somber face, she went live on TV and reported that Jason had been murdered, that other details were hazy, that there were no known suspects or motives. Then she had gone back to her hotel room, buried her head in her covers, and sobbed. It felt as though something had been stolen from her, the chance to reconcile with him. But then there was also a degree of relief, that she would never have to face him with the truth. Feeling guilt at the honesty of that relief, she cried even harder.
The truth of her identity had been hers alone. There were those at the station who knew she was transgender. And now some who knew she grew up in Little Springs. But none knew that she had been Benjamin Blunt Jr. That she had created for herself a new gender and a new name and also a new history.
Except, now David knew as well.
He had tried so genuinely to reach out to her. But it had been too much, that day at the cemetery. She hadn’t known she was going up to the grave until she saw that all the cars had left. She thought she would be alone. Then, there he was, angry and confused. And she was torn in a million directions at once—grieving Jason, furious at her parents, overwhelmed talking to someone who knew the real her for the first time since she had left. Too much.
Over the years, she’d imagined how various reunions might play out. With David, it was always one extreme or another. Tears and a big hug or screaming and violence. This had been so quiet, so tentative. Maybe it could be the way that it was, finding again the easy connection they’d always held. But a warning inside her also sounded. He knew. And he could reveal her to others.
A bell rang, muffled from inside the building. Within a couple of minutes, the doors burst open and students streamed out in a rush, then a trickle.
She put away her phone and watched them from her car. So many faces. Different faces. Hair dyed in kaleidoscopic colors. Pierced noses and eyebrows and ears. Colorful, edgy clothing. A strange gender fluidity. Boys that dressed effeminately, girls with crew cuts. There were those she recognized as locals—white kids with traditional haircuts in jeans and T-shirts—but they were the minority.
It struck her most how comfortable they seemed in their own skin. An unexpected anger arose within her. If she had dressed like that when she was growing up, someone would’ve dragged her out onto the lawn and beat the shit out of her. And then she would’ve been the one in trouble. What did you expect, wearing that? How had these kids earned the right to live like this, to dress that way, in this town? In her town?
For seventeen years, she never crossed the boundary of normalcy. Never even approached it. She knew the truth about herself from early on. But show any of that? Mention it to anyone? No. She had boxed her true self up, spent years play-acting through life. Then one day, in her senior year of high school, she had woken up in the room she shared with David, and she knew that she couldn’t continue living the lie one minute longer. She made her plan while still lying in bed. She would take the car and the money she’d earned from her job at the grocery store and summers helping on the farm and she would go to Denver. She’d find a job, find a place to stay. Start to unbind her true self.
There had been part of her that wanted to tell David the truth. To explain things to him. She’d been sure that he would understand and support her. Almost sure. But what if he was angry? What if he told her parents? Bonnie and Ben Senior would lock her up, or send her to some kind of camp, or worse. One more morning of play-acting, then she was gone.
The crowd of students thinned out, going off in cars or in buses or on foot. Then teachers began to emerge from the building. Charlotte dredged herself up out of the memories and intently scanned faces. There.
She stepped out of her car and approached an overweight woman in her fifties who had brilliant red hair that had started to gray.
“Mrs. Holly?” Charlotte called out. “I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to talk to you about your husband.”
Charlotte hadn’t known how the woman would react, but once she explained that she was a reporter and that she was looking back through unsolved homicide cases, the woman immediately asked if they could sit in her car and talk. She cried a little as she talked about her husband, about their last morning together and how he cooked breakfast as he always did.
Then the woman’s face hardened. It wasn’t just that her husband had been murdered. The state police wouldn’t tell her anything. Nothing about how he was killed. Nothing about any evidence or suspects. There were no reports, not even an autopsy. The only thing she knew was what she’d been told by an airport employee who’d found him. Her husband had been cut all over his body.
Charlotte forced herself to stay calm, to be emotionally attuned to the woman, to share her grief. Inside, she felt an electric hum. She had found it. A void of information with a clear border—something big was being hidden.
Since Jason had died, it had nagged at her that his death didn’t make sense. There was too much that wasn’t being said. And then the FBI and state police had refused to release any reports. There wasn’t even an autopsy, at least according to the official record. Just like Sanjay Kapoor, the victim she’d reported about on her first day back.
So she had set out to digging. Who else had been murdered in Little Springs over the last year? And out of those cases, which ones were missing records?
As her conversation with Holly’s widow played out, her thoughts already raced ahead. Was this the work of a serial killer? Was that why the FBI was involved? If so, why were they hiding it?
This would be huge. A big exclusive. Constant coverage. The kind of story that makes a career. But she didn’t have enough to go on air. Not yet. She needed official confirmation. She needed someone close to it, someone who could be an anonymous source.
Charlotte thanked Mrs. Holly, stepped out of her car, and walked to her own. She knew what she would do. She needed David.
The sheriff’s truck sat in plain view along the highway, window open, speed gun angled out. The truth was, David didn’t want to catch any speeders. If he had, there were better places, spots where he could park just out of sight behind a road sign or on the far side of a hill, spots where drivers roared through and didn’t see him till it was too late. No, today he just wanted to sit and think in quiet, at least up until dispatch called him with some new horror.
The speed gun beeped to life intermittently as a vehicle went past. Fifty-nine miles per hour. Fifty-seven. Sixty-one.
It felt strangely foreign to him, his old, normal life. The everyday role of sheriff. Responding to calls and tipping his hat to locals. Acting as if there wasn’t a killer somewhere hidden in the town, a killer who could strike again at any time. But it wasn’t only the investigation and the secrecy around it. The veil had been lifted, if only partially. He had gone to the other side. To Site One.
That first day, when he had finally exhausted himself reading case files and poring over crime scene photos, he had left his new office and hoped that Sunny would be just leaving hers. But there was no sign of the scientist, and so he went to the hall, where he found a soldier waiting for him. Not the same one that had deposited him there. He wondered if they’d taken shifts, watching the door. Or if they had known he was leaving.
He could still see the two words Sunny had scrawled on the piece of paper: “they’re listening.” Erickson. Priest. Conover. Maybe all of them. Observing him, but why? Did they think he was hiding something? David thought again of Erickson’s warning about foreign agents trying to get inside Site One. They couldn’t think that David was some kind of Russian spy. Could they?
No. As much as his eyes had been opened, he was still an outsider in that world. They had pulled aside the curtain but only partially. He worked over Sunny’s explanation of how she became involved in the case. It didn’t make sense. The matching cuts on the victims had nothing to do with crystals. There was something else that they were hiding. The third door appeared in his vision. In Building Seventeen, one door led to David’s office, a second led to Sunny’s lab. And the third door led . . . Priest hadn’t even lied to him. She’d just moved past it, knowing David couldn’t get through. He could’ve asked, but he had better hope of breaking through the door than he did getting Priest to reveal anything.
Okay, he thought. So some of the information is missing. Work off of what is known.
Three men killed. Two outsiders, one local. Two involved in real estate, one a pilot. No useable forensic clues at any of the scenes. No hair. No DNA. No fingerprints that they could connect to the killer. No security camera footage. No witnesses.
The same weapon used each time and mostly the same pattern of wounds. Multiple deep stab wounds to the sternum area. And then the matching superficial cuts replicating the pattern on the giant, inflicted postmortem. But then each also had variations. Holly had been stabbed fatally from behind, as if he had been caught by surprise. Kapoor’s arm had been cut off. And then Jason.
David had stared at the folder containing photos of Jason for minutes on end before willing himself to open it. There were photos of the crime scene, which he flipped quickly past. He came to the autopsy photos, which showed Jason’s body naked and cleaned, the components reassembled on a metal table.
It helped, seeing it like that. He could imagine it wasn’t his cousin but some other corpse. Against the white skin, the damage screamed out in red lacerations and gaping holes. He’d forced himself to think back to that night. The window exploding out. The silhouettes. One more shotgun blast. No, two.
Jason had seen the attack coming. He’d had time to grab the gun—he kept it loaded, despite David always warning him not to—and fight back. Maybe that was why the injuries were so extreme. The killer had broken out of his ordinary method. There was no clear stab wound to the chest, just the diagonal slice that had sheared through Jason’s ribs and the clean horizontal cut that took off the top of his head.
Something about this killing had been different. The attack more desperate. He needed to go back to the courthouse. To walk through . . .
Beep-beep-beep
The speed gun shouted at him. Seventy-six miles per hour in a fifty-five zone. David looked up, hoping to see the recognizable vehicle of a local.
It was a maroon conversion van, the paint showing its age. Windows tinted. A Colorado license plate. Something off about it, his gut said. Hell.
David turned the key in the ignition and pulled onto the highway. He gunned it to close in on the van, then flipped the switch to activate his lights and siren.
For a moment, the van accelerated. But David easily kept pace, and it slowed, finally easing onto the side of the road next to a culvert, where there was almost no room on either side of the vehicle between the drop off on the right and the lanes of traffic on the left.
David grabbed the microphone and flipped on the truck’s loudspeaker.
“Keep moving. Move your vehicle forward until you can pull completely off of the road.”
Nothing from the van. Its engine still ran, though the driver had shifted into park. David could just see hurried movements through the driver’s side mirror. Hell.
David waited. That gut instinct flared again, telling him that if he stepped out of the truck, the van’s driver would wait until he was close, then drive away. He knew he wasn’t supposed to make assumptions, shouldn’t stereotype. But oftener than not, what his gut told him rang true.
He switched over to his radio, then spoke into the microphone again.
“Andrea. David here. I’ve got a speeder pulled over on ninety-two, over by that new Chevy dealership. He’s acting squirrely. Is Brooke free that she could come over and . . . Ah, shit.”
As he was talking, all at once the driver’s side door of the van flew open. A short, stocky Hispanic man flung himself out, right into the four lanes of the highway.
David started to open his door, then pulled it closed as a semi-truck roared by with a blast of its booming horn.
The van’s driver ran out into the highway, the truck just missing him.
David checked his mirror, saw an opening. He jumped out, darting to the shoulder in front of his truck just before more cars raced by.
He drew his gun and shouted.
The van’s driver was out in the middle of the highway. Vehicles zoomed around him. Horns blaring. The screech of brakes locking.
The man would jump forward, then hop back. Again and again, he was almost annihilated by an oncoming truck or car. Then, impossibly, his stubby legs took him all the way across.
David was still yelling. He lifted his hands to the oncoming traffic. Finally, vehicles saw him and slowed. By the time he made it to the opposite side of the road, the driver was gone, and all David could do was swear into the dirt.
It took an hour to get Jared Lloyd and his tow truck to hook up the van and drag it to the impound lot by the new courthouse. Since Jason’s murder, the old building had been shut down, so all county operations had moved to a faceless strip mall. In the first months after Gulliver landed, the federal government had constructed the building to house some of their operations. It had sat mostly empty after the Countryman Building was completed, and the feds offered it for free to the county.
The sheriff’s department now had a whole wing. An entry area. A suite of offices. They were going to be constructing some new holding cells. Mostly, it sat empty, except for Andrea, relocated to the largest room, sitting at a new desk. As always, David and Brooke worked out of their trucks, except for when David had to go to Site One.
Out in back of the strip mall was an area ringed with a tall chain-link fence, concertina wire spiraling along the top. They deposited the van there, then David pulled on gloves and went inside.
Some food wrappers and empty soda bottles. No registration in the glove compartment or console. He’d run the license plate and VIN soon enough. In the back, the vehicle had a row of seats that was folded down into a bed. It was only after disassembling the bed and removing it that David found the secret cache. A panel of flooring came up, and beneath lay a trove of packages wrapped in brown paper and plastic.
David had made enough drug busts to know by sight what he’d found. Cocaine. Heroin. Ecstasy. The usual shit.
Underneath the rest, he found a cigar box. He opened it and saw neat rows of clear baggies, each barely bigger than a postage stamp. And inside each bag was what looked as much as anything like bits of sugar. Except, as he held one baggie up to the sky, the contents shimmered unnaturally.
“What the hell are you?” David asked.