Page 2 of Never Stay Gone
She was the freshest of the corpses. The easiest to identify too. Her picture had been plastered across the entire state—stapled to telephone poles even as far south as Big Bend, taped to the glass doors of the food mart and the diner and the truck stop—and her description played on the radio at least five times a day, pumping from the public radio repeater out of Fort Stockton.
In life she’d been girl-next-door pretty, in that gentle way Texas girls can be. Sun-warmed honey hair, a smile that was both demure and playful. She’d been young, a recent college graduate, and some of the photos that went out on her “MISSING” flyer had been of her in her Texas Christian University cheerleader’s uniform.
In death, she was battered and bruised, mottled and marbled with spreading putrefaction. Black veins stuck out from her discolored, swollen skin. Livor mortis discolored her right side from her naked breast to the torn skin of her thigh. Deep, uneven bruises ringed her neck. Her stomach had bloated and changed colors, swollen with decomposition. A dark wash of black blood—decayed blood—seeped from her nose and open mouth, flowing toward the ground where her head was turned to the side. She lay mostly on her back, angled to her right, one hand carelessly flung over her head as if she were modeling in a magazine. Her lips were blue and parted, the edge of a tooth—broken—visible against dirty skin. She was naked, stripped bare, unlike the bodies beneath her. While some of the clothes had rotted or been torn off the others, Shane could see scraps of fabric clinging to what looked like a shoulder or maybe a thigh. Not the girl on top, though.
“Well,” Heath had said, “I guess we’re going to have to call in some help.” They’d taken more pictures—wide angles and close-ups and as much detail as they could get without disturbing the bodies—and then another of her face, hopefully useful for a preliminary identification. “I’ll have to take this all back to the office. Do you want me to call someone else out?”
Someone had to stand watch over the crime scene until it was processed, deemed of no further evidentiary value, and released. Six bodies didn’t end up in a single grave in their spit of desert on accident. Someone put them there, and now it was going to be the department’s job to find whoever that someone was. And, ideally, put them away. Lock them up and destroy the key.
To get to that point, someone needed to secure the crime scene now, until help arrived.
Shane had thought through the sheriff’s department roster in his mind. He knew it well. Making it was one of his jobs as the chief deputy. The six other deputies ranged from fresh-faced and still battling teenage acne to a middle-aged woman with three kids in college. Between the uptick in traffic accidents thanks to tourist season and requests for mutual aid from the border patrol, their little department was already exhausted. This murder investigation would strain them to the ragged ends. “I’ll stay. I don’t mind.”
He didn’t. He never minded the solitude.
He hadn’t for thirteen years.
Heath nodded once. “I’ll bring you back some coffee and dinner from Jo’s. Anything in particular you want?”
It would be a ninety-minute drive back to Rustler, the county seat where their headquarters was located. Another hour-plus, most likely, for Heath to put the request for aid out to Texas DPS—the Texas Rangers—and to El Paso, which provided their department with technical aid on those rare occasions they needed it. Things like professional crime scene technicians, forensic processing, and autopsies.Another ninety minutes to drive back.
Shane shrugged. “Whatever you get is fine.”
Heath had taken his Stetson off earlier, to cool down in the breeze. He didn’t need the brim to shade his eyes. He had the look of a man who had spent long days in the sun, had gotten used to the punishing brightness. Now he grabbed the hat from where it dangled off the handle of his shovel, pushed tip-down into the earth. It took a powerful man to do that, to cleave the parched desert ground hard enough to leave a shovel standing up on its own. Whoever had dug the grave had been strong too. Shane’s back was killing him, and fire dug deep into his arms, his hands, had even worked its way beneath the skin on his palms, where blisters were beginning to form.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Call if there’s trouble.” Heath nodded to Shane and then set off back to his truck, parked a hundred yards away in a low patch of creosote.
Shane kneeled at the grave’s edge again. His eyes traced the line of humerus to collapsed scapula to snapped clavicle. One lower jawbone on one of the worse-off bodies had come unhinged and lay half buried in the earth, the other half nestled against the purple, mottled cheek of a different body. Strands of mangy hair—blonde, brunette, red—waved around knurls and joints.
He tipped his chin down to his chest. Breathed in and tasted decay and putrescence on the back of his tongue.
Shane parked his truck oblique to the grave, close enough he could turn on the headlights as the sun went down and illuminate the whole damn thing but not so close he was destroying evidence, if there was any still to find. The wind and the weather would have taken care of any tire tracks after a day, and he hadn’t seen any boot prints either. Before Heath showed up, he’d walked a quick spiral search outward from the grave. Nothing.
Shane rolled down his windows and settled back in his seat, turning the radio to static and the volume low. It was like a bee buzzing behind his ear, something he could feel more than he could hear. Enough to make his mind hum, stop his thoughts before they had a chance to get started.
He stretched his right leg as far as he could, trying to work out the stiffness in his knee. It acted up all the time, without rhyme or reason. In the heat and before it rained, when he was off it and he was on it. It just hurt, sometimes all day long, and maybe he should get it looked at again.
But he didn’t like looking back. Not at his knee, not at football, and certainly not at high school.
A jagged path ran from then to now, from when he’d thought he had the entire world in the palm of his hands to him sitting alone in his truck, massaging his aching knee as he stared at a grave overflowing with decaying bodies.
Once, he didn’t spend his nights alone. He didn’t sit in a truck and listen to static, and he didn’t count stars as they winked into view. Once, he’d had someone to share the dark with, and they’d been so wrapped up in each other—arm against arm, skin against skin, body lying next to body—that he’d never noticed the way the night closed in and how time seemed to stop, teetering on the edge of moving forward until he thought he was going to scream.
Wherewashe? Where had he gone?
Thoughts Shane couldn’t think. He turned the volume up, letting the static roll through him and carry his memories out into the desert. Far in the distance, smeared on a horizon that never seemed to end, the purple outline of the haunted Chinati Mountains pushed against the last of the day’s light.
And then the light was gone. Darkness shrouded the world. A single coyote howled, the lonesome wail high and strained, bouncing between the steep sides of the mesas and the arroyos. The grave was a gash in the ground, a puddle that absorbed his truck’s headlights. He stared into the darkness and let his thoughts go as thin as the static.
Even so, the name rose inside him like a smoke signal, winding up and around his heart and into every part of him like it always did. The name he hadn’t spoken aloud in over a decade.
Shane closed his eyes.Dakota.
Dakota.
Chapter Two
Goddamn it.
