Demon Wind

9

Jack Stark spent all night trying to shake the uneasy feeling that there was more to what had happened last night than was clearly obvious. Dogs do not simply vanish into thin air. Rachel had said that she heard the snap of its neck when Josh had twisted it. She said she had seen it fall limply on Josh as he blacked out, and that she had rolled it off of him so she could try to tend to his needs. He was standing in the exact same spot he had stood that previous night. The rain had washed away any and all traces of blood, and anything else that might have been evidence. He remembered, vividly, where Josh had lain on the ground. If he closed his eyes, he could see Josh, head in Rachel's hands as she knelt next to him. He saw the blood stains on the grass. There was nothing else.

Jack started to pace. He knew there was something that he was missing. He just could not wrap his mind around it. He had spoken to everyone that worked for the city from this garage as they arrived for work this morning, and had instructed them to stay away until he was done. He was there before any of them had arrived, so he knew none of them had been out here snooping around and removing evidence. His gut told him, no it screamed at him that something was here last night, and that something was no longer here. Logically, it was either washed away by the rain or in the three hours between when he left last night or returned this morning someone had come and taken it.

What was this it? He stopped pacing and returned to the spot he knew he had stood in upon arriving on the scene last night. He went over it again in his mind, eyes closed. He had seen this work with witnesses to terrible crimes before. You needed to be calm, close your eyes and walk yourself through the events. Sometimes the mind would recall the smallest detail subconsciously that the conscious mind did not find important.

He decided to sit down in this spot, to better immerse himself in the experience. He took a deep breath to clear his head. He had gotten there, it was pouring, lightning was flashing, thunder booming. There were Josh and Rachel. He had taken a quick look around with his flashlight. That was the moment he had seen there was no dog near. He furrowed his brow, concentrating harder. There, off to the left of Rachel was something. It had no form. It was a black mass, no a puddle.

His eyes snapped open and he stood. He took the few steps over to where that puddle had been the previous night. There was no evidence of it any longer. Kneeling down he used his pen to poke into the ground. He pushed it down until his fingers rested against the dirt. When he pulled the roughly four inches of pen back up, he noticed two different shades of dirt on the pen. This could be due to different soils existing at different deepnesses. He had seen that doing work around his house. Three inches under the topsoil he ran into clay. The only reason he took such interest in this color difference was the fact that last night there had been a large black puddle in this spot.

Jack jumped up and trotted over to his cruiser, the trunk was open already. He went to his duffel bag and removed a small clear plastic container with a lid. He also grabbed a small blue plastic scoop. He trotted back to the spot and started to dig down. Once he had dug deep enough to find the much darker dirt, he took a generous sample and placed it in the plastic container. Securing the lid, he made his way back to the cruiser. They did not have anything sophisticated enough at the St. Albans barracks to analyze this. He knew he had to make his way to the Montpelier state police barracks, and quickly. He radioed dispatch, flipped on his lights and siren and started to make his way to Montpelier. Under normal driving conditions it was an hour away, he was determined to cut that time in half. He was on the southbound lane of interstate eighty-nine in less than three minutes and had hit one hundred miles an hour seconds later.

10

Josh and Rachel were well on their way to Burlington the meet with Father Cornelius. They had been on the road for a little more than thirty minutes, so they were getting near to exit fourteen W, which would lead them to downtown. They were traveling at the posted limit of fifty-five miles an hour. Josh glanced in the rear-view mirror and his eyes went wide. Flying up behind them was a police car, lights and siren ablaze. He started to pull over, but the cruiser simply flew by them and kept on going.