What She Found in the Woods

I lean forward as well and press on before he can get clearance from her. ‘I’m here because I want to know everything you know about him.’

‘Most people would say that he doesn’t exist,’ Grandpa says cautiously.

I lean away and echo his sphinx smile right back at him. ‘We’re not most people.’

A laugh lives and dies in his breath. ‘No. I guess not.’ He glances at Aura-Blue, and she shrugs. Given the semi go-ahead, he starts talking.

‘He was always out in front of any drug. Always knew how to grow it and refine it if it was an organic, or make and manufacture it simply and quickly if it was a chemical. And he did it before we even knew what the drug was. He made ecstasy before we knew what to call it. Meth. Molly. Fentanyl. Always out front. He’s a genius.’

Mr Tanis goes on to tell me a story.

I know stories, and this one is about a detective who was no Sherlock, but who followed the footprints anyway. He stumbled over bodies and saw the same pattern over and over, but never laid eyes on his Professor Moriarty. After listening for half an hour, I see the patterns as clearly as he did. Dozens of women fell asleep and never woke up. All of them were addicts. All of them tried recovery, failed, and then disappeared.

‘Why doesn’t anyone believe you?’ I ask and, a moment too late, realize how insulting that was. ‘Sorry,’ I say, cringing and looking down. ‘But someone must have seen him,’ I say, laughing to cover the fact that I know someone who had seen him. Gina. But she won’t talk. ‘Someone must have come forward.’

‘Couldn’t get one person to go on the record,’ he says sadly. ‘Too scared.’

‘What do you know about him? Any personal details at all?’ I ask.

‘He’d be late forties now. Caucasian. Fair. Quiet type. Strange.’ The old sheriff shrugs. ‘He had a son who’d be about your age.’

‘That’s it,’ I say, leaning forward. ‘If you know he had a son, then he must be on record somewhere. A birth certificate, at least. Who had his son? What was her name? What hospital?’

Mr Tanis smiles at me. ‘You’d make a good cop,’ he tells me. He’s wrong, of course, but I don’t correct him. ‘It was a home water birth,’ he says. ‘The woman went by the name Aurora. She took the name from the sleeping princess in that Disney movie. We never found out who she really was, and we only knew about the boy because ten people overdosed in one night. The sole survivor told us it was a bonfire to celebrate a birth. Before she sobered up and conveniently forgot.’

I sit back. I look out the window. Every detail makes it worse. A strange, genius dad and an Earth Mother woman have a baby in the woods just when Bo was born. It’s too close, but I can’t accept it.

‘So you have people dying in droves in this area, but no one will believe you when you say it might be a mass murderer?’ I raise an eyebrow at him. ‘No one from one of the big agencies – the FBI or the DEA – would even hear you out?’

‘Oh, they heard me. But they wrote us off as a town with a drug problem.’ His brow furrows as he thinks of how to explain. ‘Drug dealers get caught for a few reasons. Most of them have to do with money. The FBI follows the money, right?’

I half nod, half shrug. I really don’t know.

‘Well, they do. People make drugs to make money, and then they have to launder that money somehow, right?’ He leans forward. The gleam in his eye gets an unstable edge to it. ‘The FBI came here before. They could never find the money. Never. No money, no drug dealer. Dr Goodnight became a joke.’

Mr Tanis shifts in his seat and looks out the window. I look at Aura-Blue as his agitation builds. She leans in and touches his arm.

‘Grandpa, it’s OK,’ she says, trying to soothe him. That only makes it worse.

‘OK?’ he scoffs. ‘Do you know how many people he’s killed?’

Aura-Blue sits back, her lips a thin line. I glance over at the orderlies. They aren’t making a move yet, but their radar is on. Mr Tanis seems to know he’s running out of time, or maybe he knows he’s past the sweet spot in his meds when he’s calm and charming, and he tells me the rest in a rush.

‘The reason we could never find him is because he didn’t make the drugs to make money. That’s where the FBI went wrong. That’s why they can’t find him and why they don’t believe he’s real. It was never about the money. Not for Dr Goodnight. It was about killing. But something’s changed. Twenty years of sleep and now blood. He never chopped people up before!’

By this point, Mr Tanis has jumped out of his chair and he’s pacing. Two orderlies are coming towards us.

‘Is that why the FBI are back?’ I ask, standing and pacing with him so I don’t miss a word before he disappears into anger. ‘Do they believe you now?’

‘No!’ he screams. ‘It’s all wrong! They’re still girls, and the killings happened on his turf, so it has to be him. But . . . the blood! He likes things clean.’

He laughs as the orderlies grab him. He feigns weakness for a moment and then surges with strength and breaks free, charging at me again.

‘They can ignore dead junkies who overdose, but those bodies . . . What he did to them. They can’t ignore that.’ The orderlies grab him just before he can grab me, and Mr Tanis struggles and screams at the ceiling as he’s carried out.

The orderlies get him through the door and carry him off to the never-never-land of his room.

1 AUGUST. MORNING