Return: A Reed Investigation

Return – Excerpt

CHAPTER TWO

Highway 43 was empty. Reed rode with her hands aching inside her gloves, the Derion’s engine settling into its highway register, the vibration steady through her thighs where the bite marks were still warm. The cold was the kind that came through leather and denim both, the kind that found the gaps at your wrists and your collar and worked inward from there. She kept the speed just under sixty. The road looked dry but the temperature had been dropping since sunset and black ice was a possibility she respected without being able to see.

The city thinned behind her. Storefronts gave way to low commercial buildings, then to chain-link fencing around lots that had been cleared for development and never developed, then to open land. The streetlights ended a mile back. Out here the only manufactured light was the Derion’s headlight, a cone of white that swept across the asphalt and gravel shoulder and the dark margin of frozen grass beyond. The moon was up. The sky was clear. The kind of January night where the cold had a sound to it, a high tight silence that pressed against the helmet and made the engine seem louder than it was.

Reed’s shoulders still ached from the rope. A good ache, the kind that sat in the muscle and reminded her she had a body, that the body had been used, that for an hour in Lane’s bedroom she had not been a detective or a liar or a woman who kept the heat low in an apartment she was never in. She rolled her shoulders once inside the jacket and felt the pull across her upper back and thought about nothing. The road ahead was straight and dark and she was twenty minutes from home.

The headlight caught it at the edge of the field.

Not all of it. A shape. Pale where nothing should have been pale, low to the ground, sixty or seventy yards from the shoulder. The light swept across it and past it in the time it took the front wheel to cover ten feet, and in that fraction of a second the image registered as a series of impressions that had not yet organized themselves into meaning: paleness, horizontality, stillness, the wrong kind of shape for a bag or a deer or anything else that belonged in a frozen field at 1:34 in the morning.

Reed was braking before the image assembled. The Derion slowed and she pulled onto the gravel shoulder and stopped. She killed the engine. The silence was immediate. No traffic behind her, none ahead. No wind. The field stretched flat and black to the east, the grass frozen stiff enough to hold its shape, the horizon a dark line against a darker sky.

She sat on the bike. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Her breath made short clouds inside the helmet that fogged the visor and cleared. The bite marks on her thighs pulsed against the seat with her heartbeat. The ache in her shoulders was still there, still good, still anchored to Lane’s bedroom and the rope and the consensual transaction that had ended less than an hour ago. That world was behind her now. Forty minutes behind her and getting further away with every second she sat on this shoulder looking at something in the grass that she already knew was a body.

She took off her helmet and set it on the tank. The cold hit her face and her ears and the back of her neck. She got off the Derion.

The field began where the gravel shoulder ended. No fence. No ditch. Just the edge of the road and then the grass, frozen into stiff pale rows that crunched when she stepped onto them. Reed walked into the field. She did not take out her phone. She did not use it as a flashlight. The moonlight was enough, and she did not want to create a light source visible from the road. She did not think this in words. She thought about it like black ice, as a condition she adjusted for without stopping to name.

The grass crunched under her boots. Each step was a small brittle sound, louder than it should have been, and she could hear the rhythm of her own breathing, steady and even, the breathing of a woman walking toward something she could not yet fully see but could already read.

At thirty yards she could make out the shape. At twenty she could see the arrangement.

Arms above the head. Extended, not reaching. The posture of a body that had been dragged by the wrists and released. The legs were together, angled slightly left, fallen.

Naked from the waist down. The clothing above the waist was intact except at the collar, where the fabric was torn in a line consistent with a hand that had grabbed and pulled. Not a precise tear. The tear of someone who had grabbed what was closest.

No purse. No phone. No shoes. No visible weapon. Nothing that explained how a woman ended up in a field in January.

Reed stopped. Close enough. The details were specific and irreversible, and every second she stood here added to the inventory of things she would have to either explain or conceal.

The frost around the body was disturbed. A broken perimeter of frozen white, and then the trail her own boots had pressed into the frost from the road. Visible. Legible. She had already made herself a problem.

Her first coherent thought was not about the woman on the ground.

It was about Marian Pruitt. Sixty-three years old. 14 Beech Lane, West Coldford, Ohio. Found on her kitchen floor with her wrists bound with lamp cord and her face beaten until the bones underneath shifted. Reed was fourteen. She had gone to Marian’s house to return a cake pan her mother had borrowed, and the back door was open, which was unusual, and the kitchen smelled like pennies, which was blood, which she did not know yet because she was fourteen and had not yet learned the smell. She put the cake pan on the counter and saw Marian on the floor and called 911 from Marian’s wall phone and sat on the back step and waited for the police to arrive and did not go back inside.

Sheriff Dale Henrys arrived in a brown cruiser with mud on the fenders. He was fifty-one years old and had held the office for nine years and he stood in Marian Pruitt’s kitchen for four minutes before he came outside and looked at Reed the way no adult had ever looked at her. The way a man looks at a thing he has decided is his to solve.

“What were you doing here?” he said. Not a question. An accusation with a question mark balanced on top.

Reed told him about the cake pan. He wrote it down. He asked her to tell him again. She told him again. He asked her a third time and she told him a third time and the story did not change because it was not a story. It was what happened.

Henrys did not believe her. Not that day and not any day after. A man named Paul Wicker confessed to the murder two weeks later. He had broken in to rob her. Marian confronted him. Wicker beat her with a ceramic lamp from the hallway table and tied her wrists with the lamp cord and took eighty dollars from her purse and a VCR from the living room and left through the back door, which was how Reed found it open. Wicker confessed in detail. The physical evidence matched. He pleaded guilty and went to prison.

Henrys kept coming.

He told Reed’s parents she had no business being at that house. He told them her story had inconsistencies, which it did not. He told the principal of West Coldford Middle School that Reed was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation, which she was not, but the principal did not know that and the word traveled through the school the way words travel through schools, which is to say completely and without context. Reed’s mother stopped answering the phone. Her father had a conversation with Henrys on the front lawn that the neighbors watched through their curtains and that ended with her father’s voice loud enough to reach the street.

It did not stop. Henrys came to the house. He came to the school. He requested Reed’s records from the guidance counselor. He told a reporter from the West Coldford Gazette that he had not closed his investigation, and the reporter printed it, and the sentence sat in the local paper next to Reed’s name, which was a juvenile’s name, which he had given to the reporter anyway. She was fifteen the first time a classmate called her a murderer to her face. She was fifteen the second time. She stopped counting after that.

Henrys lost the next election. His opponent ran on competence and the Pruitt case was Exhibit A of its absence. Henrys lost by six hundred votes and cleaned out his office and went home and kept calling Reed’s parents from his personal phone. He had no badge. He had no authority. He had a fixation that had outlasted his career, and the fixation was a girl who had found a body and called for help and been punished for it with a thoroughness that two years of her life could not absorb.

Reed left West Coldford at sixteen. Her mother drove her to her aunt’s house in Columbus with a suitcase and a box of books and did not explain why, because the why was a man who had decided that finding a body was the same as making one, and explaining that to a sixteen-year-old required a language that her mother did not have and Reed did not need. She understood it already. She had understood it since the second time Henrys came to the school. The lesson was not complicated. The lesson was: the person who finds the body becomes the body’s problem. The person who calls it in becomes the suspect. The person who does the right thing on the worst night of someone else’s life does not get thanked for it. They get examined, and the examination does not end when the examiner runs out of evidence. It ends when the examiner runs out of interest, and some of them never do.

Reed stood in the frost six feet from a dead woman in a field off Highway 43 and the lesson was nineteen years old and it was as solid as the frozen ground under her boots.

She looked at the woman’s face.

Young. Mid-twenties. Her features were still, composed by the absence of everything that animates a face. Eyes closed. Skin pale in the moonlight, drained of the warmth and color that would have told Reed something about who she had been before she became this. Lips slightly parted. She did not look peaceful. She did not look tortured. She looked like a body. She looked like the thing a person becomes when the person leaves and what remains is a problem for someone else to solve.

Reed saw her. One beat. She registered the woman as someone who had been alive tonight. Who had gotten dressed and left a house and expected to come home. Who had a face that was specific to her, that people recognized, that someone somewhere was not yet worried about because it was the middle of the night and worry hadn’t started yet.

She held it. Then she let it go.

The math was already running. Not a decision. A calculation that had started the moment the headlight found the shape in the grass and was now finishing itself without her permission. She was on Highway 43 at 1:34 AM. She was a homicide detective with the Drayton Police Department. She was next on the rotation. If she called this in as herself, she would be the reporting witness and the lead investigator and the woman who happened to be riding past a field in the middle of the night where a woman happened to be dead, and she knew with the certainty of a person who had lived through it once already what happened to women who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

There was more. She had been at Lane’s. Lane had a girlfriend named Petra Hoff who did not know Reed existed in Lane’s life the way Reed existed. If Reed reported this as herself, the timeline would require accounting for: where she had been, why she was on this highway, what she had been doing at 12:45 AM on a Tuesday in January. The accounting would reach Lane. Lane would be a footnote in a case file, read in a cubicle, referenced if the defense ever needed to establish that the lead detective had been conducting her personal life in a way that invited scrutiny.

None of this would help the woman on the ground.

Reed turned and walked back toward the road. She did not look at the body again. The grass crunched under her boots and her breath clouded in front of her and the highway was a dark line ahead with nothing on it. She walked at a steady pace. Not fast, not slow. The pace of a woman who had been here before and knew exactly how to leave.

She reached the Derion and put on her helmet. She checked the road in both directions. Empty. She started the engine, which caught on the second try and sounded obscenely loud in the silence, and she pulled onto the highway heading south.

The Speedy Gas station was three miles down Highway 43. Reed knew it. She knew the layout of the lot, the position of the pumps, the placement of the lights. She knew it had no exterior cameras because she had noticed their absence the way she always noticed. Exits in restaurants. Sightlines in parking garages. Blind spots in ATM vestibules. The information had been inert until now. A habit that looked like paranoia but was actually just attention, the kind a woman develops when she spends her adolescence being watched by a man with a badge and a theory.

The station appeared on her left. The sign was dark except for the price board, the lot was empty, and a single fluorescent tube buzzed over the pumps, throwing a thin circle of blue-white light that didn’t reach the edges. There was a payphone at the far end of the lot, bolted to a metal post near the air pump. Reed pulled in and parked near the phone, engine off.

She walked to the payphone. The receiver was cold in her gloved hand. She dialed 911 and listened to it ring once, twice, and then the operator answered, a woman’s voice, calm and procedural.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s a body in the field off Highway 43, east side. About a quarter mile north of the Speedy Gas station. Off the shoulder, sixty or seventy yards into the grass.”

“Can I get your name, ma’am?”

Reed hung up. She held the receiver for a moment, then wiped it with her glove and set it back in the cradle. The fluorescent tube buzzed above her. The lot was empty. The payphone stood on its metal post and waited for the next person who needed to say something without being known for saying it.

She walked to the Derion and rode out of the lot without headlights until she was back on the highway, and then she turned them on and rode south toward the city. The time was 1:56 AM. The 911 call would generate a dispatch. Patrol would respond. They would find the body and secure the scene and someone would call Homicide, and the rotation would determine the lead, and Reed was next on the rotation.

The ride home took twenty-two minutes. The streets of Drayton were empty at this hour, the traffic lights cycling through their colors for nobody, the storefronts dark, the sidewalks bare. Reed parked the Derion in its spot outside her building on Church Street, a six-unit complex with no security cameras in the lot because the landlord was cheap and the tenants hadn’t pushed it. She went upstairs and unlocked her door and stood in the kitchen in the dark.

The apartment was cold. She kept the heat low when she was out, and she was always out. The counter was clean. The bourbon was on the shelf where she’d left it. The cast-iron pan was on the stove, seasoned and dry.

She took off her gloves and her jacket. She unlaced her boots and lined them up by the door. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her hands flat on the surface and nothing in front of her. Reed waited.

Her phone would ring. She did not know when. She knew the machinery: the 911 call generating a dispatch, patrol responding, the officers confirming what she already knew, the call going up the chain to Homicide, the rotation list checked, and her name at the top. It could take thirty minutes. It could take an hour. The bureaucracy of death moved at its own speed and did not adjust for the woman standing in a dark kitchen who already knew what was coming.

Reed’s thighs ached. Her shoulders ached. Her wrists, where the rope had been, carried a faint tenderness that she pressed with her thumb, testing the soreness, confirming the body was still hers, that it still carried the marks Lane had put there, that the last hour at Lane’s was real and the hour in the field was real and both of them lived in her now without canceling each other out.

She thought about the frost and whether it would hold until the scene was processed. She thought about her boot prints in the grass and whether the patrol officers and the techs would trample them into the general mess of an outdoor crime scene in January. She thought about Marian Pruitt on the kitchen floor with the lamp cord around her wrists and the cake pan on the counter and Dale Henrys standing in the doorway with the look that had followed Reed out of West Coldford and across so many states and into a career where she found bodies professionally, on purpose, and nobody questioned why she was there because the badge answered that question before it was asked.

The badge was the answer. It had always been the answer. It was the reason she had become a cop in the first place, though she had never said this to anyone and would not have said it in these words. The badge meant she could be at a scene and the scene would not consume her. The badge meant she could find a body and the finding would not become the story. The badge was the thing Dale Henrys had, and she had watched what it did when it was held by a man who used it as a weapon, and she had spent her adult life carrying one as a shield.

Tonight the shield had a crack in it. She had been at a scene before the scene existed. Her boots were in the frost. Her headlight had swept across a dead woman’s body at 1:34 in the morning on a highway she was riding because she had been in her lover’s bed, and if she told the truth the truth would look exactly the way Dale Henrys had always said it looked: like a woman who had no business being where she was.

Reed checked her phone. No calls, no messages.

She did not go to bed. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her phone in front of her and waited. The building settled around her. The pipes ticked. A neighbor’s television murmured through the wall, the low blue sound of someone else’s insomnia. The cold pressed against the windows and the bourbon was gone and the marks on her body were fading and the woman in the field was dead or dying and the phone had not rung yet.

Reed waited. She was good at waiting. Waiting was not patience. Waiting was what you did when the machinery was running and you could not reach the controls.

The phone rang at 2:47 AM.

Reed picked up before the second ring. She listened. She said she understood. She said she would be there in twenty minutes.

She put on her jacket and her boots and her gloves. She walked downstairs and started the Derion and sat on the cold seat and let the engine warm up. The streets of Drayton were empty and dark and the traffic lights cycled through their colors for nobody.

She pulled onto the road and rode north toward the field.

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