Page 40 of The Map Home
Moving his mouse back and forth, Ben woke up the computer. A grainy picture on the screen morphed into a heap ofsomething in a snowy field. Dakota peered closer. What the fuck was he looking at?
“What the hell?” Dakota exclaimed, finally figuring out what he was seeing. “The bears have been torn apart? What kind of sicko fuck would do that?Whywould someone do that?”
The stuffed bears he could make out in the photo had been shredded, their synthetic innards spilled out across the frozen lumps of grass and dirt. A teddy bear serial killer at work.
“Dunno,” said Ben, logging off his desktop and grabbing a set of keys out of the drawer. “Let’s go find out.”
Ben drove, which was good because Dakota found himself growing angrier and angrier the closer they got to the scene of the crime—and it was better than thinking about Tad. He’d been five years old the first time his mom took him to the community center of wherever they’d lived at the time to pick out a toy for himself. He’d picked a stuffed dog or something like that. It had been lost in one of their many moves, Dakota recalled, but he’d loved it while he’d had it. And he hadn’t cared that the gift came from a stranger.
“People are fucked up,” he said for the third or maybe fourth time.
As had often been the case, Ana had been unemployed at the time and there’d been no money for gifts. At least, that’s what she’d told him. Dakota was starting to doubt everything about Ana. But Ana wasn’t a factor today. What was important was that some asshole was trying to ruin the holidays for a bunch of innocent kids.
With a few exceptions, there were two kinds of people in the world: assholes and assholes. Tad’s travel cup was, in fact, perfect, he realized. He and Tad didn’t exchange gifts often, but Dakota seriously needed to come up with a gift for him.
“They are,” Ben said agreeably. “Can’t trust any of us with nice things.”
Ben stoppedthe cruiser alongside an empty pasture fifteen minutes outside of town. In the distance was a large, single-story rambler surrounded by trees planted to protect it from the wind, leaving just the driveway exposed.
“Is this the Pickering land?” Dakota asked, looking around.
The house had an abandoned feel even from over a hundred yards away.
“I think that’s what Gloria told me. Why?”
“I heard somebody bought it and wants to build a housing development.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“The annual last bonfire of the year at the Gillespies’ last week. Burl and Kit were talking about it, I think, but Waylon seemed to have heard something too.”
Ben snorted. “I bet that isn’t going to go over well. There haven’t been any reports in the news yet, and you’d think this would be all over town. Maybe it’s still in the works.”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
Dakota looked around again. In one direction, the Tetons rose majestically from the valley floor. In the other, the meadowland stretched out to the east, slowly lowering to where it met juniper shrub-covered hills dotted here and there with ponderosa and whitebark pines and eventually cascaded down to Collier’s Creek.
Out here, it was impossible for Dakota to feel hemmed in. As much as he’d thought Piedras Island and the damn Pacific Ocean were beautiful, the mountains and plains of Wyoming felt like home. He could breathe here.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
Each of them donned gloves and grabbed the plastic trash bags from the stash in the cruiser’s trunk, then Dakota and Ben climbed over a ditch full of frozen mud to survey the scene of the crime. It looked worse in real life.
“Is this all of them?” Dakota asked. “Do we know how many were taken?”
Ben shrugged, looking as depressed as Dakota currently felt.
“Could be. I’d guess it’s close anyway.”
Without further conversation, the two of them set about taking more pictures, retrieving the evidence, and stuffing the bear remains into the plastic bags. Dakota was pissed off. If the thief, or thieves, had stolen the toys because they needed them, that would be one thing. But obviously, they had just wanted to be assholes. One of the two kinds of people in the world.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Ben said, stuffing the last headless bear into a bag. “Were they looking for something?”
Dakota hadn’t thought of that. He’d been too mad about how some unfortunate kids would feel when there was nothing to open on Christmas Day.
“Like inside the toys?” He considered that idea. “Drugs?”
Ben shrugged. “I mean, I’ve seen weirder.”
