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“So, should I get a piece of paper for all these things?” Teddi wondered aloud.
“What things?”
“All the things you seem so hellbent on not talking about with me. We’ve got our history,” she started counting them on her fingers. “Your life, the fact that Autumn called and you assumed that we’re dating.”
She bristled. “I don’t assume anything. That’s your business and I’m not making judgments.” There was that metallic taste of lies.
“No, of course not. That would be crazy. Vera Aguilar making assumptions about shit? Absolutely unheard of.” She didn’t need to look at her to know she rolled her eyes, the sarcasm thicker than syrup. “We were friends with benefits. Were, as in, the past. As in not anymore and won’t be again.”
Vera ground her teeth against the foolish relief she felt.
“I’m trying to do a job here. Nothing more, nothing less. Can you handle us doing it together or do you need to rehash every single thing that’s ever happened?”
Teddi huffed a laugh. “Oh, I can handle it but the real question is, can you?”
Vera slowed, letting her get a few paces ahead as she bit the inside of her cheek. Teddi had no idea how much she could handle and not break. This investigation wasn’t going to be the thing that took her down and neither was she.
The further they walked, the dimmer the world became. Dense foliage surrounded them on every side until it looked like twilight rather than midday. Following a tight curve in the trail, a thick shaft of grey light cutting through the forest caught Vera’s eye to the left.
“Over here.” She veered off the path without waiting. Stepping over a bramble of bushes and vines, curiosity pulled her like a leash. Treading quietly, she found what the misplaced sunlight pointed towards.
Between the massive Douglas fir trees, the forest gave way to a circular glade. The high sparse grass that would normally be brown with the season, was charcoal black as if it’d been burned, some parts of it muddy and flattened. The land was wide open, about thirty yards in diameter. A near-perfect row of trees, each one at least three feet wide and equidistance apart, formed the tree line, encasing it in a tight wall. Side to side, the thick trunks had grown so close that Vera had to angle her body to slide between them. In the center of the open land was the flat rock from the photos, standing at least four feet tall. She could make out the reddish-brown stains of blood as she got closer.
“Oh god, what is that?” Teddi buried her nose in the crook of her arm as she winced. The space was choked with sharp rot, the lip-curling stench of decay intertwined underneath. Vera was intimately familiar with the smell of dead bodies and the pungent stench was layered in with something more. A sharp note that rivaled a bag of food left out in the sun. The thick spoiled smell coated her throat with each inhale.
“Smells like decay and maybe something from the land. It’s almost…” She inhaled, making her nostrils sting, “burnt.” She panned around for the source. The air stank but there was something heavier hanging in the space. Walking further into the glade, she weighed out the sensation.
The space was open but more than that there was a hollowness to it. A carving out of its insides that went beyond the lack of flora.
It was silent.
As if the world had pushed out all the air from its lungs and never breathed again. No birds or small animals made a peep. Even the sound of her boots on the grass sounded quieter than normal, almost muted.
“Do you feel that?” She wondered quietly. It was like trying to catch smoke between her fingers. Something ethereal, something not quite there but not entirely gone.
“It’s…” Teddi’s brow furrowed. “It’s heavy. The air feels heavier. Morbid as it may be, this does seem like an ideal place for a murder,” she remarked as she looked around. Just her squinted eyes were visible above where her nose still dug into the crook of her arm.
“The question is why would they risk getting caught doing it so close to the path? Judging by the amount of blood on the stone I think it's safe to assume they did the mutilations and murders here. Considering the noises the victims may have made, anyone could hear them while walking the trail.” It was too obvious a choice for such a well-maintained hiking path. The killer could have wanted the bodies to be found quickly, which they had been. Or they wanted to get caught. Both options suggested premeditation.
She stood a few feet from the widest end of the elongated rock and took it in. The stained stone. The matted grass. The circular glade shored up by the trees. It was an encased area. Hidden but not to those who needed to easily access it. Empty and yet full of something unnameable.
Pulling out her copy of the printed crime scene images, Vera flipped through the stack until she found the wide-angle shot. What the photographer failed to record were the smaller stones formed in a circle around the largest one. Each one was shaped into a near-perfect triangle with the narrowest angle pointing at the rock. Approximately twelve inches long on every side, they looked just big enough to sit on. Walking the circumference of them, Vera counted seven in all. She snapped images with her phone of each one.
Holding the crime scene photo up, she matched the edge of the land with the one in the photo. It made it look as if Adam Maller’s body was in front of her, still positioned on the stone.
“You know in the UK they have stone circles,” Teddi murmured as she kneeled, casting her eyes over the scene. Almost half of the flat stones were obscured by the chaotic grass.
“What, like Stonehenge?”
“That's just one of many and they don’t really know what most of them were used for. The Orkneys off the coast of Scotland had a set called the Standing Stones of Stenness. Some people think it was an altar. Inverness has its own Clava Cairns but they think the Picts used them as burial sites.”
J had said the killings were ritualistic as well, but she wasn’t so quick to agree. There were differences in the wounds as well as the victimology, short of them both being male and from Sylen. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions, especially when it came to bringing the occult into it. It got too much flack that it never earned. And mentioning the esoteric in small towns often ignited a kind of moral panic that overshadowed the real problem at hand.
“You’re with J on it being ritualistic then?” She asked, looking for Grennan’s photo to compare.
Teddi stood. “Just saying sometimes monuments mean things and sometimes they’re just rocks sticking out of the earth. I don’t want to rule it out. They do seem perfectly spaced though.” Coming to stand next to her, they looked from left to right, up and down. Two of them were closer together than the others, leaving the rest evenly spaced around the large rock like the hours on an incorrect clock.
She was right. Sometimes rocks just stuck out of the ground for no reason other than that’s where they ended up. But the precision of the stones’ edges and the angle on the three corners defied natural creation. It didn’t sit right. Too perfect, too evenly spaced. She’d bet her last paycheck someone had cut and measured each one, laying them intentionally around the large rock. “There aren’t usually perfect angles in nature.”
