The Myths of Living Read online

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  Dunn and Pumares returned -- Dunn more urgent, Pumares more terrifying -- but neither of them was ruffled. Astrid, on the other hand, felt off-balance and undressed since her camera had gone missing. Now she sat on the edge of her chair, her hand searching under the seat while feeling an invisible hand twisting her spine like a tourniquet lever, tightening every muscle in her torso. When Dunn began to speak, Astrid took refuge in the animation of his face, the pulsating motion of his cheeks, the Adam’s apple drumming out the rhythm of his voice. All those words coming at her. She could feel them pinging against her brain, as if her mind had pulled a corrugated, metal door over the inside of her forehead. Dunn’s words rattled against that door, but enough of the words got through to allow Astrid to understand the gist of the message: an arm in a field behind a church in Biloxi, a thigh in the woods behind a mosque in Ann Arbor, a knee joint in the corner of a historic church graveyard in Philadelphia. The head…

  That was when the sound cut out on Dunn, when the picture of his moving face was replaced by the face of Peter. How she wished she had let him be here, to listen and absorb what Special Agent in Charge Albert Dunn was saying about Simon. Then she was looking at Simon’s face. Her entire visual range focused on that image in front of her. It was like a still from a movie that networks used to use for technical glitches when she was a girl. She saw Simon, unmoving but whole, like the Simon she knew, the Simon she married. She looked down at his hand and counted the five fingers before focusing on the one finger and the thick band of gold. She smiled and curled her own hand around that finger, trying to grip the ring, but the positioning was awkward. She turned the hand over to slip her fingers into its palm and that hand closed over hers, holding on tight the way Simon did when he sensed her need. She lifted the hand and smiled, bouncing it off her knee, looking again for the ring, finding it, but only then realizing the hand she held was not Simon’s. Astrid looked up. Dunn and Pumares appeared to be on the other side of a window slicked with rain that splashed onto her cheeks, and when she looked down at the hand again, she saw a drop fall onto the skin, just to the left of the gold band. Astrid loosened her grip, reluctantly, watching the hand slip away from hers before moving her own hands to her face and wiping her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Dunn smiled. “No problem, ma’am. What I told you wasn’t easy to hear. But the good news is that we’ve recovered the body, and once we finish our investigation, we’ll release it to you. Just make the arrangements with the funeral home of your choice and call Pumares with the information. We’ll take care of the rest.”

  Astrid nodded

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” Dunn rose to his feet and Pumares followed.

  They walked to the door with Astrid trailing two paces behind. Pumares had the door open when Astrid asked, “Is he complete?”

  “Ma’am?” Dunn said.

  “My husband. Simon. Is the body fully recovered?”

  Pumare’s face went dark to his temples.

  “Almost,” Dunn said. “Nearly all.”

  “What hasn’t been found?”

  “The genitals, Ma’am.”

  It took a beat for this to sink in. “Who did this?” she asked.

  “We have a pretty good idea,” Dunn said. “We hope your husband’s body can tell us for sure. Regardless, everyone I spoke to during this investigation, especially the people in San Miguel and Suelo, said he was a great man. Several even called him a savior. I suspect, in their own twisted psyches, the perpetrators thought of him the same way.”