Hunt was well north of town when Cross called. He answered on the second ring. “What have you got?”
There was a moment of silence on the phone, static, then Cross said, “You’d better come down here.” Another pause, voices faint in the background.
“What is it?” Hunt asked.
“First body just came out of the ground.”
“Not Alyssa.” Hunt felt the blackness spread.
“Not Alyssa.”
“Then-”
“It’s Alyssa’s father.” A breath. “Johnny’s father.”
Hunt pulled to the side of the road. The tires dropped off the tarmac and the world tilted. “Are you sure?”
Cross said nothing. In the background, Hunt heard raised voices, shouting, then Cross, yelling as well. “No reporters, no reporters. Get him out of here. Now. Get him out.”
“Cross?”
Cross came back on the line. “You heard that?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d better get down here.”
Hunt looked down the narrow road. Heat devils rose in the distance and he saw a battered truck turn onto the blacktop. It seemed to hold perfectly still, its lower half dissolved in the shimmer.
“Detective Hunt…”
Johnny’s dad.
“Detective?”
“Lock it down,” Hunt said. “I’m en route.”
He turned back onto the road, wheel hard over. What he’d been told made no sense.
Spencer Merrimon was dead.
Katherine’s husband.
Dead.
Hunt blinked in the sun. None of it made any sense, but then, suddenly, it did. Hunt understood, and he felt pity rise in his throat, sorrow and certainty. He shook his head, while behind him, asphalt faded to metal, to a bright silver haze where the distant truck seemed to float.