Every day that passed, David expected another call. Another body found. He couldn’t fall asleep anymore, sure that the radio would crackle to life. He didn’t want to sleep. When he did, the dreams were unspeakable. Mostly, he patrolled the town endlessly, the same loops again and again, time running past in a way that felt exactly as if it was sand running out of an hourglass. He tried to visit Samuel every evening, but the old man could tell that David’s thoughts were elsewhere. Some nights, David just sat there silently while his grandpa read through his research.
There were times, usually at night, while David was driving around the town that he would become convinced that someone was following him. The same headlights—a truck, he thought—would linger behind him, going in and out of traffic, for long stretches. It’s just the lack of sleep, he told himself. Don’t be paranoid.
When things were quiet and Brooke could handle the patrols, he would go to Site One. The FBI had added copies of Jason’s county real estate records, as well as reports and photos of the murdered drug dealers.
Just as there had been nothing to connect Holly, Kapoor, and Jason, now there was nothing to connect the two latest victims. The kid by the car was Enrique Goncalves, twenty-one years old. The one behind the building was Henry Salazar, nineteen. They both had last known addresses in Denver. Each had a couple of drug-related arrests. Nothing major. There were photos of their tattoos in the reports, showing how the iconography marked them as cartel. But they were bottom feeders.
David had asked Erickson for the report from the drug seizure, trying to think through how that might connect. The van he’d pulled over was listed to someone in a Denver suburb, though they said they’d sold it for cash a few months before. Fingerprints didn’t hit against any records.
He read through the catalog of seized drugs, types and pounds and ounces of each. But there was something missing. He recognized everything, connected it to the mental tally he had made at the time. There was no mention of whatever had been inside the cigar box, the small baggies full of what looked like sugar crystals.
There was a knock on the door, and this time it was Sunny, tapping with her foot. She held a cup of coffee in each hand. Underneath her white lab coat, she wore a Misfits T-shirt. She set the cups down on the table.
“I didn’t know how you take it,” she said as she fished out a fistful of sugars and creamer packets from the pocket of her lab coat.
“Don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said, smiling for the first time in longer than he could remember.
“You’d probably fall asleep on your feet,” she teased.
They sat next to each other. David ran a hand through his messy hair.
“I look that bad?” he asked.
“I mean . . . Yeah. Pretty rough,” she said with a laugh.
He found himself laughing back. There was something about her that immediately took away the tension he always clenched inside. He mixed a cream and two sugars into the coffee and took a drink.
“Thanks,” he said. “For the coffee. Not for telling me I look like shit.”
“How’s the case coming?” she asked. “I heard about the others.”
Right. She was in the loop. He could let his guard down.
“I’m totally lost,” he admitted. “It’s just one thing after another that doesn’t make sense. There’s no link between the victims. No pattern in the dates of the murders or the locations. They would all seem completely random if it wasn’t for the way they were killed. And all the time I’m in here spinning my wheels, he’s out there, just waiting to attack again.”
He sighed and took another drink of coffee.
“What about you? Made any breakthroughs?”
She shook her head slowly, her long bangs falling across her face as she did.
“Studying this thing, it’s like trying to write literary analysis about a book written in a language I don’t know. There are times I can’t even describe what I’m looking at, let alone explain it.”
“You’re actually studying him?” he asked.
“Pieces of him, anyway. The samples are all pieces that broke off on entry. Pieces that the army recovered.”
David thought back to that day. Overhead, the giant lit up with energy, as if lightning shot along its skin. Then it began its slow descent through the atmosphere, and flaming arcs rained down from it. Debris, breaking off of the giant, rocketing down toward the earth.
In the days that followed, the army had blanketed the county, searching for any of those lost pieces. There were rumors that some had been missed. That locals had found pieces. It was illegal to possess any, let alone to sell them. But there was talk that a black market existed.
“You have pieces of the giant through there?” David asked, nodding behind them, toward Sunny’s lab.
“Just little bits,” she said. “And some of the spire, too. They’re similar, with the same base structure, but different. Different in color and with slight differences in the shapes of the individual crystal cells. It’s not the same thing, but I would say it’s sort of like how a human is similar to a fish in a lot of ways, but we’re different species.”
David shivered. He tried not to imagine the implications of it. That there were things like Gulliver out there in the universe. And that there were other things. Bigger, scarier things. Things that could kill the giant.
“What are you trying to figure out?” he asked. “Sorry, that’s probably a stupid way of saying it.”
“No, not at all,” she said. “It sounds a lot simpler than it is, but I’m working on forming a model of how the giant works.”
She looked down at the coffee in front of them, then grabbed a sugar packet and tore it open. She poured the contents down onto the table, forming a small pile of sugar crystals.
“So, life on earth is made up of individual cells. But the giant is made up of individual crystals, when you break the pieces apart. They’re each about the same size as a sugar crystal, actually. Right now, the crystals just sit there, inert.”
Sunny dragged her hand through the sugar, creating a straight line.
“At some point, when it was alive, there was some force that connected all the individual crystals.”
She worked with both hands, shaping.
“Just like our cells form bones and tissue and organs, the crystals formed into the giant. Trillions and trillions of individual crystals, all linked.”
She pulled her hands back. On the table, the sugar had been shaped into the rough outline of a man.
“The problem is,” she continued, “the giant doesn’t emit any electromagnetic energy or radiation or anything. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that connects the crystals to each other.”
“But it’s dead, right?” David asked. “Maybe the connection stopped.”
“If so, its body should crumble apart basically into a giant pile of sand,” she said. “The more I study it, the more incomprehensible it becomes.”
“Well, it can’t be that. There aren’t degrees of incomprehensibility.”
He looked over at her with a grin, one that she matched.
“And you’re the word police now?”
“Grandma was the town librarian,” he explained. “You abused the language, boy, it didn’t matter if you were family.”
They each took a drink.
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a punk,” David said, gesturing toward her shirt.
She grinned, her cheeks flushing just a little.
“Promise you won’t make fun of me?” she asked, cryptically.
He nodded.
“My parents were pretty stereotypical high achievers,” she said. “We were in Pasadena, outside of LA, and they wanted to be that perfect family. Which meant I had to get straight As, and I had to either become a doctor, a scientist, or a lawyer. And I had to do piano and violin and ballet and all that bullshit. And I hated it. Then in high school, there was this group of kids at my school that were into skateboarding, and I became friends with them really just because I knew my parents would hate it.”
“Skateboarding?”
“It was ridiculous. I chopped up my hair and dyed it and I’d wear, like, Clash shirts, even though I’d never listened to them. And we would skate all over town, and my parents were exactly as pissed as I expected. I only skated for a few years, but by the end of it, I’d actually started to listen to punk and got into it.”
David drank down the last of his coffee. He looked back to the mountain of case files in front of him. For a few minutes, anyway, he’d forgotten about them. He’d been looking at the Holly case again earlier, and he remembered now that something had bothered him about it.
“The first murder. Jim Holly, the pilot. When I was talking to the state police, they said that the FBI was on the scene.”
She tensed. Her hands played with her coffee cup, spinning it slowly.
“Right,” she said.
“I was just wondering how they knew,” David continued. “There hadn’t been any other deaths, so there wasn’t a reason to think it was a serial killer. The state police hadn’t even figured out what the pattern was before the FBI showed up.”
He let it go at that. Her hands trembled just a little. She looked at him, her eyes imploring. Don’t ask anything else.
“I don’t know,” she said then, smiling in a forcibly nonchalant way. “Maybe you should ask Erickson.”
She left him alone. Just David and the small sugar man on the table. He stared down at it, and the thought struck him again of the small baggies he’d found in the cigar box, and the iridescent crystals inside, and how they’d looked almost like sugar. But not quite.
David waited on the road that led into Tabby’s neighborhood. He left the truck’s heat off, using the cold to keep himself awake. He still had almost nodded off when the silver Tesla rolled silently past.
He turned on the engine and pulled out behind the car. He could’ve just flashed on his brights. Instead, he turned on the lights and siren. The Tesla pulled over. He cruised to a stop just behind it, turning off the siren but leaving the lights running.
Brian rolled down the window, his face showing the strain of maintaining a smile.
“David. I don’t think I was speeding. Did I miss a turn signal?”
David leaned down over the window.
“Impeccable driving, Brian. This isn’t about that.”
Brian let the smile drop.
“You could’ve just come over.”
“I thought this conversation should just be between the two of us.”
“Next time, call. So? What is it?”
David tilted up his hat, so Brian could see his eyes.
“I made a drug bust the other day. Pulled over this van for speeding, and the driver ran off. I didn’t get him. But inside the van, I found a whole pharmacy of shit.”
Brian raised his hands, his eyes pleading.
“How many times have I told you? I don’t bring weed across the state line. I have nothing to do with anything illegal.”
“I’m not blaming you or saying you’re involved. And this isn’t about weed.”
“Then you know I can’t help you,” Brian insisted, lowering his hands.
“There was something else,” David said, insistent. “Something in with all the other shit, something I’d never seen before. Looked almost like sugar. Tiny doses of it. I don’t mean to cause any trouble. You’re just the only person I know in that world. So, I’m just asking if you’ve heard any rumors. Anything that might help me figure out what the hell is going on.”
Brian stared forward, revealing nothing.
“People are dying out there, Brian. This might be tied into it.”
Brian sighed. His eyes stayed dead ahead as he spoke.
“Our operation is clean, okay? Nothing illegal. But because marijuana used to be illegal, there are still some people in the business from that world. Acquaintances. And they talk. Nothing concrete. But I have heard there’s something new. And I don’t know anything more than that, but one guy was saying that almost all of it goes to the same buyer.”
Brian paused to swallow.
“He said it’s the Tigers. The cult.”
Of course. Of course, it would be them.
David had taken a step back to his truck when he remembered something and looked back through the window, catching Brian as he’d half rolled it up.
“Oh, Tabby told me the news,” David said. “Congratulations.”
“Uh huh. Thanks,” Brian said as he rolled the window the rest of the way up.
David had only just gotten into the truck and fired up the heater when his phone buzzed. Erickson’s number. He read the message.
Get to your office now. Your cousin knows.