Nightcrawlers

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The spades sinking into wet earth sounded like axes into soft necks. They rose and fell, shoveling out dirt and exposing roots, stones and worse things.

As the rain kept coming down, Kenney leaned under the overhang of the old farmhouse and watched the crime scene techs in their dark utilities and yellow rain slickers poking the earth, prodding it, digging into it like farmers working some grim harvest. He dragged off a cigarette and felt the chill and hated everything about it.

He thought: Eight of ’em so far, eight goddamn bodies.

They were laid out under plastic tarps next to the holes they’d been pulled from. Five women, two men, one child. So far. So far. Those two words kept ringing in his head. Eight bodies and here in a rural Wisconsin farmyard of all goddamn places. When he closed his eyes, he saw their ravaged faces that sometimes weren’t faces but discolored, fleshless canvases of bone. And that was all bad enough, mind you, until you factored in the condition of the bodies, the marks on them, and then it became considerably worse.

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