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"You get this look when you talk about Alaska," Marty says. They’re in the car on the way to a crime scene, three years to the day since Ledoux went down with a bullet in his head. The other detectives at the CID have made a point of congratulating them on the anniversary. Marty smiled and laughed with the best of them, but he doesn’t much like it. He feels more secure just doing his job than thinking about how things went down. "Like you’ve been through a war."
"Maybe it’s something similar," Rust says, looking out the window. He barely said a damn thing at the station, only nodded and spoke just enough that no one would hassle him about it. Monosyllables. In the car, apropos of nothing, he talked for a half hour about bow-hunting before Marty cut him off.
"Bullshit," Marty says. Rust has mentioned that his father was in Vietnam—he should know better than to compare war to anything. Marty’s own father, he never said a thing about his time in the service. But it leaves a mark on you. There’s an echo of that in Rust, and Marty doesn’t know how else to describe it. "You can’t know war unless you’ve been in it."
"Yeah," Rust says. "I guess you’re right."
They don’t talk again until they get to the crime scene, and even there, it’s only the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. It’s the day more than anything else, Marty thinks. Makes them both edgy. They did what they had to, three years back, and Rust doesn’t regret killing those two bastards any more than Marty does. He’s sure of that. But Marty keeps thinking of those two kids on the mattress in that dim room, and it eats at him.
Back in the car, Rust says “You ever get the feeling—”
"I don’t know what you’re going to say, but the answer is no," Marty says. He’s exasperated out of habit and worn thin by realities both present and past. Rust stops, closes his mouth, braces his shoulder against the window. Then he starts again.
"You ever get the feeling, looking at DBs, that they’re all the same person?"
Marty’s hands tighten on the wheel.
"Yeah."
"Who’s yours?"
"First real tragedy I ever saw." Marty exhales slowly. "Girl by the name of Harriet Stanley. Sixteen. Her older brother took an axe to her because he didn’t like the boy she was going with. So he said." The body was a mangled mess, and the back of her head was mostly gone but he’d left her face intact. Marty can still remember her half-closed eyes: green speckled with brown. She’d been a pretty girl, based on the pictures they trotted out for her obituary. Plump and freckled. Marty only remembers those empty eyes and the exposed meat of her.
"Mine was in Alaska. I saw her when I was twelve." Marty looks away from the road, over at Rust. Explains some things.
"Jesus Christ. I’m sorry, man."
"She couldn’t have been much older than me. It was out in the woods. Hunting." So that was what he’d been leading up to earlier. "My pop and me, we were within a half-mile. But not together. Too much noise would spook the game." Marty doesn’t want to hear this, honest to God, but he can’t very well tell Rust to shut up now that he’s in the middle of it. "She was—" Rust pauses, swallows. "I should’ve checked for a pulse, but I didn’t. I just ran. Didn’t tell another living soul."
"Not then, or not ever?" Marty doesn’t like the idea of being Rust’s confessor.
"Not then. Not until years later. I thought my pop might have done it, so even after the police found her, I kept my mouth shut." Rust smiles, and Marty can see it out of the corner of his eye. Bitter.
"He didn’t, did he?" Marty feels stupid for asking, but the way Rust turned out, it does beg the question.
"Fuck no. And if I’d stopped to think about it, I’d have known he couldn’t have. Logistically speaking. But I knew it was a man that did it, and I didn’t really know any other grown men."
"How do you figure?"
"I knew animals. Tracks, bite marks. The only predator that could have done that to her was human." Marty glances over again, and Rust’s mouth is a tight thin line. He’s a little bit relieved that he’s not going to get the details. Doesn’t stop him from thinking about it, though, whether or not he wants to. A small body in the frozen north; blood sinking into a bed of pine needles. Northern lights. The only Alaska Marty has in his mind’s eye is the kind in calendar photos.
"They ever catch him?" Marty hears himself say, but he knows the answer.
"Course not. That kind of man almost never gets caught."
"We caught us a one," Marty says. That’s why it came up today. Must be.
"We killed us one," Rust corrects. "But there’ll always be more."