her spirit, only the presence of a lingering evil that hovered over the clearing, its power so tangible it was almost as if it murmured to me, daring me to listen more closely. But I was not cowed. An unexpected power had filled me as I stood watch, a certainty that I had not been brought here to regret. I had been brought here to atone. I don’t know what sent me the knowledge, or why it chose that moment to come into being, but a faith flowed through me as I stood watch in the night. I knew that I was supposed to be there. I knew that I had been called upon to bear witness to this cruelty for reasons I did not yet know. And I knew what I had to do next.
Alissa had led me here for the living, not for the dead girl sprawled before me. She had led me here because the man she had once loved was in prison for her murder while her real killer roamed free, still killing. The body before me was proof. My job was to stop him. I was dead, but I was still a detective. I had found my quest at last.
I would begin with what had happened to Alissa and the connections between her death and the one before me now. The death scenes were identical. I remembered it all with a vividness that my dispirited vision had missed the first time around: Alissa’s hair displayed in the grass, the broken body presented to the elements as if it were an offering, the curve of the legs, an arm outstretched and beseeching, the rows of precise slits in the flesh, deliberate decorations of torture, like runes designed to bring forth evil spirits.
Seeing the crime repeated so precisely before me, I finally understood the power of human need. Both bodies had been arranged according to a desperate vision, the dump sites staged so some dark, unimaginable compulsion could play out to its end.
These were not crimes of passion, I realized. That had been my first mistake. These were crimes of privation, fed over time, triggered by an insatiable need that incubated slowly, nurtured by a conflation of despair and dispossession. Whoever had killed these young women treasured his need to torture as others treasured their gold. He reveled in his need to maim and kill.
The sudden clarity of my wisdom was breathtaking. I knew it all with a certainty: it would take unspeakable cruelty to create a human being capable of such evil. If I had understood that when I was alive, when Alissa was murdered, I’d have known that the man I put in prison for her death could never have reached such a point, would never have felt such a need.
I would have known he was the wrong man.
But what could I do about it now? There was little I could do but wait until the body was discovered.
The night passed and a new day dawned, the miracle of it unnoticed by most of the living. Alissa reappeared with the light and waited with me, the dead watching over the dead. She was either unwilling or uninspired to communicate with me and I felt no need to change that. She had played her part. She had brought me here. The rest was up to me.
Humans came and went in the distance as we stood watch in the clearing, keeping the dead girl company. The morning progressed and students hurried along the brick path far below us, unaware of the struggle between life and death that had been fought—and lost—so close to their own lives. It could have been any of them.
I wondered where the dead girl’s essence had gone, why she did not join us in keeping watch, whether she was trapped as I was, on some plane that was neither here nor there. Or had she gone beyond me already, leaving me behind, and would I ever know?
There was little for me to do except to ponder the role I’d had in the young woman’s death. I thought of the unalterable chain that led from my own indifference as a detective to an innocent man sitting in a prison cell, doing time for a murder he had not committed, while the real killer continued to kill.
If I had known how a single action could trigger a lifetime of consequences, how it could change other lives profoundly and forever, I would have been more careful