Over Tumbled Graves

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Book: Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jess Walter
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wrenched in pain. Caroline cranked on his arm and hair. She slammed his face into the fireplace. Jay’s knees buckled and he fell away from her. Caroline stood above him, still holding a patch of his curly brown hair.
    Sergeant Lane and a uniformed officer grabbed Caroline and pulled her away, then shoved her in the direction of the front door. She lurched to a stop and stared at the clump of hair in her hand. The baby was whimpering again on the couch, as loudly as he had in the back bedroom. Finally, she dropped the hair and looked at Jay, whose nose was bleeding, but who otherwise appeared fine.
    Another pair of hands pushed her in the back again, out the door, and Caroline found herself on the porch steps. She slumped down against the side of the house and listened to the rusty squeak of the baby inside the house.

9
     
    Dupree’s first thought when he was called to the river that afternoon was that a fishing boat had finally bumped into the bloated body of Kevin Hatch. But as he drove downstream from the dam into Peaceful Valley, listening to Lieutenant Branch explain the situation over the cell phone, he realized this was something else, a thing he had theorized but never encountered before, a rare, natural phenomenon—the criminal equivalent of a black hole, a thing that at once proved and dwarfed his roundabout conclusion that violence was contained in self-sustaining streaks, in seasons of dark and light.
    “In my professional opinion?” Lieutenant Branch was saying on the other end of the phone, “I think we got us a bad guy.”
    The new body had been found in the same wash where Rebecca Bennett’s body was discovered the day before. The evidence technicians had spent most of the night processing that crime scene and had gone away after midnight, leaving the area marked by police tape stretched around the trees and guarded only by the routine patrols of uniformed officers. But when the lead detective on thecase, Chris Laird, returned the next afternoon, he found another woman’s body in the same position, in the same clearing, under the same cover of branches where Rebecca Bennett had been found. It was as if her killer had been angry that the police had disturbed the grave and had restocked it. The man’s brazenness struck Dupree dumb. This was a killer so cocky, so adept at killing, that he returned to an active crime scene to dump a second body.
    “I just don’t know about this week—” Dupree began.
    “—amazing,” Lieutenant Branch finished his thought. “We’ve racked up so much comp time, I ain’t gonna have anyone to work, come fall.”
    But Dupree had been contemplating something else, the unfathomable four homicides in two days—five if the pawnshop owner died. Dupree was thinking of critical mass, of black holes, areas with so much density and gravity they cave in on themselves, warp time and space, alter physical laws, create their own energy. People tend to look at violence as an aberration, as something wrong, unnatural. But what could be more natural than violence? And like any law of nature, couldn’t violence be factored out to its extreme, a state in which it was capable of sustaining itself, increasing in weight and density and speed, spinning off into itself?
    Dupree had left Spivey at the cop shop, ostensibly to work on a teletype describing Lenny Ryan. But the other reason was that the kid was driving him crazy. Dupree knew some dense cops, but he’d never met one with less understanding of irony and complexity. As he parked his car above the riverbank, next to Laird’s car, Dupree thought about talking to Branch about his black hole theory, but it would be pointless.
    “All right,” Dupree said into his phone. “I’m here. What do you want me to do?”
    “I need you to run this thing.”
    As he spoke into the phone, Dupree rubbed Vicks VapoRub on his upper lip to prepare for the smell. “I thought this was Laird’s case.”
    Dupree could hear Branch search for a

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