Crowbones

CHAPTER 96

Grimshaw

Earthday, Novembros 11

Grimshaw met Captain Walter Hargreaves at a truck stop located between Sproing and Bristol. As usual, Hargreaves had arrived ahead of him.

Not many customers at this time of the morning, which was what he’d expected—and the reason he’d asked Hargreaves to meet him on an Earthday.

“I ordered the breakfast special for you,” Hargreaves said.

“Thanks.” He slid into one side of the booth moments before the food arrived.

The waitress distributed the plates and poured coffee before hustling to check on the customers in the other occupied booth.

“Read your report,” Hargreaves said, applying butter and syrup to his pancakes. “You going to stand by it?”

“I am,” Grimshaw replied.

Hargreaves nodded and focused on his meal for a minute. Then he drank his coffee, waited for the waitress to come by with a refill, and said, “Now tell me what really happened.”

Two days earlier

Fear was a powerful motivator, especially when Sanguinati paid a call on government officials and police chiefs received phone calls from sources who didn’t supply any names, just a list of catastrophic consequences that would happen in the Northeast Region of Thaisia if police in other towns didn’t help the police in Sproing find out about two humans named Richard Cardosa and Ellen Cardosa Wilson.

The information supplied wasn’t new, but it was confirmation of what Grimshaw and Julian and Ilya had already put together.

Richard and Ellen Cardosa were siblings as well as sophisticated predators who had a taste and talent for psychological brutality and emotional torture that sometimes included physical abuse. Children went missing. Children were found in shallow graves in another part of the Northeast. And some survived Ellen’s form of maternal care to become her “monstrosities” and carry out their own forms of brutality—brutality enhanced by drugs Ellen provided as rewards.

Richard didn’t want the messiness of living with his subjects, but working at colleges gave him access to youngsters who were the right age for his experiments—and gave him access to the terra indigene youth who were drawn by curiosity or hunger to that herd of malleable humans. That was where the contamination of Crowgard and Sanguinati started, but Cardosa always moved to another college in another town before a connection was made between him and the violence and suicides taking place among students.

Grimshaw’s insistence on knowing where new residents had lived before coming to Sproing put pressure on Ellen Cardosa Wilson, especially after the Elementals locked down the entire area to prevent the Trickster Night visitors from leaving. Suddenly her “monstrosities,” whom she had summoned to Sproing, were trapped and were not only colliding with some of Richard’s subjects—they were colluding with them. That had infuriated her enough to give her boys a hefty dose of gone over wolf and send them out to eliminate her rival.

Richard Cardosa was Deceased, Location Unknown, and that DLU form was sent to the last college where Cardosa had worked, as well as to the authorities in that town who would have the futile task of finding and informing next of kin.

Ilya pointed out that they had circumstantial evidence that supported what they believed about Ellen Cardosa Wilson, but where could she stand trial, and for what specific crime? Since Ellen often claimed Theodore became ill after eating something from the diner or the Pizza Shack, she could say that her ravings when Julian entered her house were due to distress that her son had eaten cookies and had an allergic reaction. They couldn’t find a convenient box of poison to prove she’d intended to kill the neighbor’s dog.

They couldn’t prove she had snatched children and disappeared with them over and over, always moving to set up in a small village and play her manipulation games with business owners and neighbors. They couldn’t prove Tom Saulner and his friends had been youngsters that Ellen had released from her care because they were damaged enough, and still dependent enough, to commit atrocities to please her.

They couldn’t prove anything. They’d even asked Paulo Diamante, the village’s human attorney, to review the material. He was appalled by what they had found, but he agreed that it was all circumstantial, and he couldn’t see Ellen Wilson successfully being convicted of any crime in a human court, especially if she went into court sounding like an emotionally unhinged woman with a tenuous grasp on reality.

They couldn’t keep her in the cell in Sproing, and the other towns where she had lived vehemently refused to keep her in their jails, not with the lockdown of Sproing being fresh in the mind of every human official.

Nothing they could do but let her go and watch her move on.

That was what Grimshaw, Julian, and Ilya believed.

That was when the phone in the police station rang and Grimshaw answered it.

He knew those voices. They crept into his dreams some nights.

“Grimshaw.”

“Griiiimshaw.”

He wrote down the instructions—the roads, the route, the place where he was supposed to leave Ellen Wilson. The place where she would receive a different kind of justice.

Saying nothing to Julian and Ilya, he left Osgood in charge, put Ellen Wilson in the back of his police cruiser, and drove away from Sproing.

He followed the roads, the route, recognizing where it would lead. He was complicit in what was about to happen, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Human law had checks and balances, and that was right and necessary. But sometimes it failed when viewed through the eyes of the terra indigene. One or many? Not the first time he’d made a choice, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time he’d made such a choice about someone he knew by name, even if he didn’t like her.

As he drove, she talked and talked and talked, her voice finding the crack in his resolve and working it open, working it open, telling him what he already knew—that delivering her to the Others wasn’t a human, or humane, thing to do. She should be punished for not taking better care of Theodore. She should go to prison.

Talking and talking and talking, and he couldn’t keep that voice out of his head. It drilled into his brain until he finally saw reason. She needed to go to a human prison and be punished in a human way.

When he was within sight of one of the prisons, he put on the flashers and turned off the cruiser, resisting the urge to drive right up to the gates. While Ellen Wilson demanded to know what was going on, Grimshaw opened the back door and said, “End of the line.”

She got out, a look of triumph in her eyes.

Uneasy, he got back in the cruiser, locked the doors, and turned back the way he’d come, leaving her standing in the middle of the road.

Something wrong. That look of triumph in her eyes.

He wasn’t supposed to leave Ellen C. Wilson within sight of a human place. He was supposed to take her on a long ride into the wild country. This wasn’t the bargain he had made with the Five.

Talking and talking and talking, her voice like a drill piercing his brain and changing his intentions, leaving him to explain why he had defied the instructions he’d received from Elders.

He was a strong-willed man, but she’d gotten to him, had found that tiny chink of doubt that he was doing the right thing by handing her over to a brutal justice.

If she could wear him down enough for him to alter his intentions in just the time it had taken to drive to this place, what could she do with all those prisoners in a few weeks’ time? And how many people would die because of what she might do here?

He stopped the cruiser and watched her in the rearview mirror. Watched her marching up the road toward a place that was considered neutral ground.

Grimshaw opened his door, stepped out of the vehicle, and shouted, “That female stole human children and killed them.”

He got back in the cruiser and let the vehicle roll forward as he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror.

He never saw what snatched Ellen Wilson off the road and took her into the trees. All he saw was her dress and coat as a blur of color before she disappeared.

The terra indigene didn’t kill their young unless a youngster became warped in a way that threatened the rest of their kind. For them, what Ellen Wilson had done made her the very worst kind of human, and the Elders who guarded this road and kept watch on the humans had done what human justice couldn’t do.

And in the end, he had done what the Five had told him to do in order to protect the people in Sproing.

Present, Earthday

Grimshaw drank coffee turned cold.

“Hard decisions,” Hargreaves said quietly.

“Yeah. But easier to live with than doing nothing and having a hundred other people die,” Grimshaw replied. “Possible contamination brought in by these newcomers. A threat to the terra indigene settlement at Lake Silence.”

“Some of those newcomers are going to run back to wherever they came from.”

He nodded. “I imagine some are already packing up after seeing how fast a place like Sproing can be cut off from everything human.”

Hargreaves studied him. “It was easier for you being on highway patrol.”

“In a lot of ways. But the hardest thing about all this will be calling Theodore’s family. Julian Farrow, Ilya Sanguinati, and Paulo Diamante are going through the information other police stations have sent, and they’ll find the boy’s parents. Then I’ll have to call those people and tell them we found their son, but not in time.”

Grimshaw took some cash out of his wallet and set it at the end of the booth to pay the bill. “Those people will grieve again for what they lost, but if they understand what a DLU form is and what it means, I think they’ll take some comfort in that.”