Rice sat on the bank. The wind had stopped. The water was quiet.
He had his cell out. His hands were shaking, palms smeared with black mud. He squeezed the phone just to feel something. Just to calm himself. His stomach flashed with heat and he turned and spit onto the earth.
Rice dialed a number.
“Yeah?”
“Black,” he said. “You’ve got to get over here. It’s Aldiss. Melissa Lee . . . she’s dead. She’s in the lake behind his house. I found—I found her. I found her and it’s all over. Did you hear me, Black, it’s all over.”
“I heard you,” the detective was saying. The man was running. Rice heard the rush of wind on his end, the snap of a car door, the sound being dragged out of the reception like a bag closing up and taking it away. Then he started the engine of his car and the phone jostled with the movement of him fighting the wheel.
“Get over here,” Rice was saying, his voice ruined and weak. “She’s here, Black. The woman is in the water. The son of a bitch hid her in the water and I’ve found her. I felt her hand. I . . . my God, I smelled her in his house.”
“Ten minutes,” Black was saying. “Ten minutes and I’ll be there. But you have to stay away from that house, Dean. He might still be there.”
“No,” Rice said. His voice was desperate now, breathless.
Black said nothing. He waited. He seemed even then to know.
“Richard Aldiss is gone,” Rice said. “He’s running.”
Then the call was cut and Dean Rice lay back and looked up at the sky, thinking about that hand. The way it had felt. The way it had seemed to grab on to him when he touched it, tried to pull him back. To pull him closer. To pull him under.