Free Blue Stew (Second Edition) by Nathaniel Woodland Page A

still not happy about that. But, you went through a lot. You saw much worse than anyone should ever have to see. How are you getting along?”
    Walter said convincingly—because it was true—“Honestly, as good as always.”
    Officer Corey might’ve winced before he said, “Good.”
    Officer Corey loaded his mouth with an impressive forkful of meatloaf. Once he managed to overpower it and bring it down, he turned to his wife, “Thank you, Mel. This is just what I needed after a long day.”
    The opportunity came sooner than Walter had expected, and—with the most offhand tone he could muster—he pounced, “Long day? Anything doing with the investigation?”
    Officer Corey nodded, “Yes, in fact.”
    “Anything new?”
    “Well,” and Officer Corey, never one to beat around the bush (or concern himself with big city terms like “due process” when it came to official criminal investigations), explained promptly what they had found earlier that day in the unused hayfield.
    Walter eagerly tackled every detail and extracted Officer Corey’s best speculation. More succinctly than he had for Eugene, Officer Corey found himself outlining his new best theory, in which Sutherland had been the unlucky host of the final act of a suicide cult of before-now unprecedented lunacy. He said, with a glimmer of pride, how the detectives had responded favorably to his new theory, once they themselves had combed over the surprisingly innocuous ground zero and found no indication of coercion or physical struggle.
    “Were there any traces of drugs in or around the cars?” Walter asked, before Officer Corey had even touched on this aspect of the theory.
    “Yes. Well, no, not there , but the detectives said that the results of the blood work they were having done came back, and that there appeared to be some kind of . . . painkiller mixture in all their systems.”
    “From the bottle you found in the Jeep?”
    “That’s not clear.”
    Walter was on the verge of saying something to the effect of, “I can’t imagine doing shit like that on downers,” but then didn’t, and instead he just nodded. It would be too obvious, he felt, that the sentiment came from first-hand experience.
    It was true, at any rate. Every time Walter had had a chance to pop painkillers, he would invariably become something of a delirious slug—far removed from a rampaging madman. Alternately, if Officer Corey had said that they’d found heavy doses of a methamphetamine mixture in their systems, that probably would’ve sealed the deal in Walter’s head right there; convinced him of the validity of this new suicide cult theory.
    As it was, at the end of the dinner, Walter left with some sense of a missing link, though he had zero idea what that link could be.

Chapter 6 – The Three-Scarred-Man
     
     
    T he next day, Walter couldn’t decide if his nagging discontent with Officer Corey’s theoretical scenario was real or just a subconscious invention. He was aware of his bias: Walter did not want the intrigue of the wild night to dry up anytime soon, and a sound explanation that initiated no further investigation was his worst-case scenario.
    Walter hadn’t thought about it, not yet, but the truth was he had not drank a single alcoholic beverage or ingested any illicit substances—or generally done anything too reckless—since the fateful night. The thrill of the mystery had provided an adequate—if supremely unlikely—diversion from his usual methods of escaping his deep mental ruts.
    Like most novice addicts, Walter was in denial of many things, one of them being that he’d been avoiding returning to his dreary abode, owing to the temptations he had stored in his fridge and, especially, in a Ziploc bag under his bedside drawer. Unfortunately, that day at work, Walter kept thinking about the path Officer Corey had started laying out, leading towards a clean resolution . . . which would allow the night, before too long, to fade into the