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“I don’t know how to …” I began and then faltered. “I can’t …”
“Can’t what?”
“Think of Bree as gone,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s like my heart can’t believe it. I didn’t even get to say good-bye. I wasn’t there to tell her how much I loved her, how she made everything in my life so …”
“Whole?” Sampson said softly.
“Anchored,” I replied.
It was the perfect word for what Bree had done in my life; she was the person who anchored me, grounded me, kept me from washing away.
“We don’t have DNA results yet,” Sampson said.
“I’ve been telling myself that.”
“And you keep telling yourself that, you hear?”
It started to rain. Sampson turned on the wipers, and the slapping sounded like nails being pounded by one of those air guns. I closed my eyes, reached up, and started rubbing at that spot on the back of my head where the junkie had hit me with a piece of pipe.
“Headaches still as bad?” Sampson asked.
“Getting better,” I said, though that was an overstatement.
“You need to get that checked out again, Alex,” Sampson said. “It’s been, like, six days and you’re still hurting. You should see a neurologist.”
“Doctors said to expect the headaches,” I said. “Part of the healing process. They could go on for months. And right now? I don’t need another doctor to tell me the same thing.”
My partner looked ready to argue, but then he spotted a sign ahead in the light rain that read Pritchard’s Farm: Specialty Pork.
“There it be,” he said slowing and turning.
We drove up a long dirt driveway bordered on both sides by trees that looked brilliantly green, all wet and new. It was spring, a time of rebirth. But it felt like November to me when we rolled into an orderly farmyard that reeked of a stench I can’t even begin to describe.
As we climbed from the car, we heard a squealing din coming from a huge low-roofed building that sat on a bench of earth about a quarter mile from a picture-perfect farmhouse that looked recently built.
“Pork bellies been good to someone,” Sampson observed.
A weathered woman in her forties wearing a green rain jacket, rubber gloves, and calf-high rubber boots over her jeans came around the side of the house. She carried a pitchfork and revealed smears of soil on her right cheek when she pushed off her hood and brushed back graying hair to look at us.
Sampson already had his badge out. “Mrs. Pritchard?”
“You here about the skull and the bone?” she asked.
“We are,” I said.
“Expect you better talk to Royal about that, my husband,” she said, gesturing up the hill with the pitchfork. “He’s on up to the barn. It’s feeding time. That’s the reason he found them bones, feeding time, but I expect he’ll be wanting to tell you that himself.”
CHAPTER
14
WE FOUND ROYAL PRITCHARD out on one of several catwalks that crossed above the industrial pigsty. There were thousands of young pigs, or shoats, jammed into a pit that was easily a football field long and a quarter again as wide. A short, stocky guy in muddy rubber boots and Carhartt work clothes, Pritchard had a lit cigar in his mouth as he worked a set of hydraulic controls bolted to the railing of the catwalk.
Responding to the pig farmer’s manipulations, a long line of feeders crossed above the sty from left to right, dropping corn in a steady, drenching stream. The pigs were going berserk in response, all trying to follow the rain of food, squealing and grunting so loud that it changed the pounding in my head, made it like the inside of a bell that was tolling.
Sampson got Pritchard’s attention, and the farmer shut down the feeding system, which sent the pigs into a howling, squealing rage that seemed to join with the gonging in my head, speeding it, amplifying it, until I just couldn’t take being in there any longer, and I ran blindly for the door.
Five seconds later, I burst out of the pigsty and ran on out toward the tree line in the rain, trying to control the excruciating pain that crackled from the base of my skull up. But the pain wouldn’t stop, and I felt my stomach roll and thought I might be violently sick.
