They were there before any other deputies from Brady’s station house arrived, and Brady turned the scene over to Jessica Chambers, a stout forty-ish woman who had competence written all over her freckled face.
“You sure you don’t want to help with this?” she asked, watching as her agents started taking the women aside to interview. It was a hard slog—so many children to contend with, most of them whimpering or outright screaming with upset.
Brady raised his eyebrow. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
She turned a rueful face toward him and then registered his expression. “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
So he told her. About the phone, about his sheriff’s refusal to investigate, about Brady’s threat to call the CBI—about all of it, and Jessica Chambers got a look of motherly concern that almost made Brady cry.
“Got it,” she said softly. “Yeah—we’ll investigate him. I’ll call you when I need information. What will you do?”
He shrugged and gave his best “aw shucks, ma’am” impression. “Well, here I was when suddenly the FBI just showed up. They must have picked it up over the airwaves somehow. I have no idea how they heard.”
Jessica nodded, but she didn’t look appeased. “Brady, we can offer you protection here. Are you sure you don’t want to take it?”
Brady thought of Arlen’s cutting words—and the homophobic slur—and shuddered.
Yes, a part of him was ready to be quit of this whole scene. He’d come here to be part of some exciting new law enforcement and had found himself embroiled into the same ol’ white boy corruption.
But… but… hestilldidn’t know why the crime wasn’t worse around here. Itshouldbe worse around here with Arlen Cuthbert in charge.
But it wasn’t.
“There’s something… odd about this area, Agent Chambers,” he said thoughtfully. “And a part of me loves it a lot. I think I’ll hang out for as long as possible. I’ve got some questions I need to answer, you know?”
“Fair, Deputy. Just… you know. Keep my number on speed dial. And let me know if any other developments in this case run by your desk, okay?”
Brady nodded his head, feeling a little like a secret agent.
At that moment, two squad cars from his department rolled up, sirens on full, humiliating blast.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I need to go lie to my fellow deputies.”
A Pond of Sand
HIS NAMEmay have been Eric James Christiansen on his driver’s license, passport, registration, and the deeds to three of his properties in the United States and Canada, but it wasn’t the name he was born with. Sometimes he liked to think he didn’t know the name he was born with—nuh-uh, couldn’t remember, no such person ever existed, who were we talking about again?
But then everything in his chest and brain would become rootless, unfocused, a foggy wasteland without a point of reference.
He’d be forced to backtrack through each name, each identity, each kill in order to clear the fog, to make everything hard-edged and crystal in his mind and heart, or he’d be lost in the past and he’d forget his namenow.
It was easier to simply keep that past on the periphery and know he could go there if he was ever forced to again.
But it wasn’t his past that he was obsessing with today.
No. Today, it was whether he should put his bright and shiny name on the new, unfurnished house that he was currently pirating water, electricity, and sewage from via illegal RV hookups.
Pensively, he pondered the neighborhood as he sat on the steps of the RV itself, pushing at the six- and seven-toed kitten who kept trying to flounder his way out the door.
“No,” he said, hoping his voice was firm. It was hard to be firm when you were talking to a special-needs black cat. Black cats as a whole were stompy and loud and perfect, and whilethis one could barely walk, he was no less stompy and loud and perfect.
“Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow…,” his little friend complained, pushing his nose against Eric’s back.
“I wouldn’t let you out even if you had four toes,” Eric told him crisply. “This isn’t a special needs thing, this is a ‘I don’t want you to become a coyote’s dinner’ thing. Give it up….” He floundered for a name. He’d told people it was Oliver, but somehow that wasn’t sticking right now.
“Eddie,” he said, inspired. A fragment of his education—both the one he’d had in high school and the one he’d subjected himself to so he could appear cultured and well-read—drifted through his consciousness. Something about “clubbed feet.”
Oedipus.
