Then there was the hair. Had there been enough of it there to completely cover a child's head? With the complete dissolution of the flesh, there had been no scalp to confirm that the hair had ever been attached to the body. Was it possible that the teeth and hair had been planted in order to make the identification of the remains so simple that no one ever bothered to investigate the skeleton itself? The bones had been so badly broken in so many places that there had been no reason to delve deeper. The cause of death been had fairly apparent, but had the child really died from the beating, or was the condition of the body just another part of the deception like the teeth and hair? Even if this burgeoning theory held water, why would anyone go to so much trouble to hide the identity of a different dead child? Why take the risk of abducting another little girl if only for her hair and teeth? And none of this implied that Emma was still alive. For all he knew, she was buried somewhere out there in the bayou, as well, with larvae feasting on her carcass and gnawing the marrow out of her bones.
The phone on his desk rang. He recognized the number on the Caller ID and had it to his ear before the second ring.
"Walden."
"What do you know that we don't?" Packard asked.
"Not a thing. I was following a hunch. I take it you were able to compare the DNA from the bones."
"Yeah."
"I'm too tired to play Twenty Questions. Out with it already."
"Let me ask you a question first. Remember how the right knee was misshapen?"
"You mean that crater that looked like it had started to rot where it was broken?"
"We weren't paying close enough attention. Usually, some of the best DNA samples can be extracted from a slice of the femur. We cut just above the crater and exposed a generous portion of the cortex and cancellous bone, which clearly revealed that it wasn't a traumatic fracture. What do you suppose it was?"
"I have no idea."
"Neoplastic cells with osteoblastic differentiation."
"In English."
"A tumor, Walden. A massive osteosarcoma. Did your niece have cancer?"
"Not that any of us were aware of," Trey whispered. He was already running through the implications in his mind.
"You would have known. A tumor like that? She would have been in a great deal of pain. The survival rate of a cancer like this is only about two in three, even with aggressive chemo and radiation treatments."
"What about the DNA?"
"The bone didn't match the hair. As far as an ID, I can't tell you who it is without another sample to compare it against, but I can definitely tell you who it isn't."
There was a long moment of silence. Static crackled across the distance.
"The body isn't Emma's," Trey finally said.
"Nope."
"So where in the name of God is she? Why would someone stage the burial to make us think the remains were hers?"
"We need to start with whose body it really is. Now, let me give you something else to chew on. The broken bones? The lack of periosteal reaction suggests that the breaks were inflicted postmortem. This girl was already dead before someone decided to kick the crap out of her corpse. What kind of monster throws a dead child on the ground and stomps every bone in her body, boots her in the face, and dumps her in the swamp with another child's teeth and hair?"
"If she was dead before all of this happened, do you have a formal cause of death?"
"Without the viscera, it's purely theoretical."
"But?"
"We x-rayed the rest of the bones and found them riddled with mets."
"The cancer killed her."
"Probably, but not very long before someone set about destroying what was left of her."
"To make it look like Emma's body and that she'd been bludgeoned to death."
Trey thanked Packard, hung up, and stared at the ceiling. He suddenly had more questions than answers, the most urgent of which was where was Emma?
Was it really possible that she was still alive?
* * *
Vanessa clicked through the previously viewed pages while the cicadas crawled over the top of the monitor, the keyboard, and the desktop. All of the sites her husband had visited prior to his death related to palliative, end-of-life, and hospice care for patients in the terminal stages of cancer, specifically for children with osteosarcoma. He appeared to have been working on placing one of his patients at the Children's Cancer Center at the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas. But why? Wasn't that the responsibility of the patient's parents? As a physician, it was his job to follow through on a referral, not go to such lengths on his personal time to do it for them. Why had he taken it upon himself rather than coaching the child's family through the process? The problem was that Warren believed so strongly in a separation of his personal and professional lives that he very seldom talked to her about it, and on those rare occasions when he did, his sour mood had haunted him for days before she had finally been able to pry his frustrations out of him.
And most importantly, on which patient's behalf had he been doing the research?
As one of two general practitioners in Jefferson, he treated roughly half of the population. That was more than a thousand patients right there, and surely more than a quarter of them were children.
Vanessa couldn't see the immediate connection between her daughter and another child dying of cancer, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she had been led here, to this computer and these websites, for a specific reason.
She brushed several of the large insects off of the cordless phone and lifted the handset of the separate line he used to handle his work affairs from home. The service had been terminated years ago, but as she had never found the courage to even attempt to clear out Warren's belongings, the phone itself had never been unplugged. She scrolled through the memory of the Caller ID. The most recent numbers all had the same area code and prefix. She wrote them down on a dusty sticky-note and compared them to the sites he had viewed. They matched the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
She contemplated calling the numbers to find out if they remembered her husband's calls or the name of the proposed patient, but even on the off-chance that they were able to recall the details from more than two years ago, the rules of confidentiality prohibited them from sharing.
So what was the significance? Why had she been guided to this information?
She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. The emotional upheaval had taken a physical toll. She was beyond exhausted. Her head ached. Her body ached. Her brain ached. Maybe if she just managed to slip in a few hours of sleep, things would make more sense. Maybe---
The cicada song grew louder.
Her eyes snapped open. All of the insects were clinging to the computer screen and producing as much sound as they possibly could. But they alone couldn't account for the sheer volume, which felt like needles driven through her tympanic membranes. She turned toward the window that afforded a view of the front lawn and the street beyond. At first, she thought a storm must have rolled in, that a thick bank of clouds blocked out the moon and the stars. But no clouds could smother the light from the streetlamp.
And then she noticed movement. The darkness outside shifted like a black sea viewed from underwater.
She rose from the chair and crept hesitantly toward the window. As she neared, her eyes drew contrast. Cicadas covered the window from the outside, pressed so tightly together that not a single ray of moonlight penetrated their ranks. She raised her hand and touched the glass. It vibrated with the ferocity of their song.
Vanessa recoiled and hurried out of the room. The cicadas that had been in her husband's office followed her, swirling around her head, tapping her cheeks. She ran down the hallway, descended the stairs, crossed the living room, and threw open the front door.
The sound that accosted her was like leaning the side of her head against a jet engine. Her vision trembled.
She stepped out onto the porch and turned in a circle.
/> The entire front of the house, the hedges lining the front façade, the pecan tree beside the walk, the dogwoods at the edge of the driveway...everything was covered with cicadas. The air was alive with swarming insects.
And then as one they took to the air and the song ceased, replaced by a furious buzzing sound. They swirled around her like a tornado before exploding upward and outward.
The entire swarm hung over the street for a long minute, then funneled down the lane to the east.
After a moment's hesitation, Vanessa started off after them.
* * *
Trey needed answers, but he didn't know exactly where to start. The first priority was to figure out whose body had been buried in the swamp and why someone had gone to so much trouble to conceal its identity. He prayed that Emma was still alive out there, somewhere, and not just waiting to be discovered in another shallow grave. Worse was the alternative. He imagined his niece being forced to kneel on the mildewed earthen floor of some dank cellar beneath the copper glare of a lone exposed light bulb, connected to the exposed joists overhead by swaying cobwebs, one faceless shadow yanking out clumps of her hair by the roots while another punched her repeatedly in the face to knock out her teeth. The image was more than he could bear. When he found whoever was responsible---and he would find them---he was going to take immense pleasure from returning the favor.
He hoped that Warren had left boxes of files or access to some computer database that he would be able to search in hopes of finding the child with the osteosarcoma diagnosis. Maybe Warren hadn't treated her personally. If that was the case, then his partner, Dr. Gerald Montgomery, must have. Of course, that assumption was predicated on the belief that the dead child had been treated locally. Trey had to believe as much for now. Otherwise, that child could have come from anywhere in the country, and with four hundred new diagnoses every year, the odds of pinning down one were poor. With any luck, Vanessa would be able to help him access the records and it would be easy enough to find the right child. If not, then he had no problem banging on Montgomery's door and dragging him out of bed and down to his office.
Something was wrong.
He recognized it the moment he pulled to the curb in front of his sister's house. The front door stood wide open, the light from the foyer stretching across the porch and onto the lawn. The second-story window of Warren's office was illuminated and he knew his sister barely ever opened the door, let alone went inside. He threw the Jeep into park, bounded out onto the asphalt, and ran toward the front door.
"Vanessa!" he called as he passed through the entryway and into the living room.
He glanced into the kitchen. Light on. Empty. The living room, dining room, and main floor bathroom were vacant as well. No one in the family room.
"Vanessa!"
He charged up the stairs into the hallway. The light was on in Emma's old room. Same with the bathroom across the hall. The next doorway on the right was open. Light flooded into the hallway from a room in which he hadn't set foot since Warren's passing.
"Vanessa?"
Still no response.
He ducked his head into her bedroom to confirm that she hadn't passed out in bed, so overcome by grief that she didn't realize she had left the front door open, then returned his attention to the study. Vanessa wasn't in there either. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialed his sister's mobile, and listened to it ring as he stepped into the room. A pall of stirred dust hung in the air. A screensaver scrolled across the computer monitor on the desk. The mouse rested slightly askew from the pattern of dust that had accumulated on the mousepad around it.
Vanessa's voice answered on the fourth ring, but it was only a recording asking him to leave a message.
Nothing else in the room appeared to have been disturbed.
He leaned over the desk and tapped the mouse to kill the screensaver. The screen flashed black, and then a web page opened.
"Jesus," he whispered. How the hell had she found out?
There was no way Vanessa could have known that the child they exhumed had osteosarcoma. He had barely heard the news himself maybe fifteen minutes ago. No one from the CSRS would have called her directly. He was certain of that. So how had she figured it out?
He paused and stood stock-still with the dust settling on his shoulders and hair.
She couldn't have. No one could have told her. She didn't know that the victim had cancer, so she obviously had to have come to that conclusion from a different angle. He tried to focus, tried to imagine his sister entering a room she had treated as a sanctuary and opening a website on a computer that didn't look like it had been used in years. What could have drawn her in here? Why tonight? Why right now?
It was Warren's office.
Warren was a physician, a general practitioner who treated adults and children alike.
It hit him like a blow to the gut.
Warren had treated the dead girl in the bayou.
And now Vanessa was missing.
The front door had been standing ajar and half of the lights in the house were still on. He hadn't seen any signs of a struggle. If she had taken her car, the garage would have been open instead.
That left only two options.
Either she had set off on foot or someone had come for her and split in such a hurry that there hadn't even been time to close the door. Maybe she was just taking a walk to clear her head. It had been a rough day for her after all. But that wasn't how his sister worked.
He looked again at the monitor.
No. The osteosarcoma link ruled out the possible element of coincidence. Vanessa had made some sort of breakthrough that he hadn't yet. She had known the body in the swamp wasn't Emma's long before he did. She had been convinced that her daughter was still alive, and if she'd somehow figured out the true identity of the corpse or that of Emma's abductor, she would have done whatever it took to find her daughter and bring her home again.
Vanessa was in terrible danger. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach.
She had told him Warren didn't keep any files at home for legal reasons, but Trey tossed the room anyway. He pulled the boxes out of the closet and dumped them, knocked every book off of the bookcase, and scanned the computer for anything resembling patient records.
He was wasting time.
His sister was out there somewhere, and possibly in desperate need of help.
He never should have left her alone in the first place.
Never.
Trey dialed Vanessa's cell phone again and sprinted for his car.
He couldn't hear the muffled ringtone from inside the purse on the corner table.
* * *
Vanessa walked on the sidewalk until it eventually gave way to a dirt shoulder narrowed by the proliferation of the impregnable forest. Spanish moss hung from the branches of trees packed so tightly together she rarely saw the hint of moonlight reflecting from the stagnant marsh beyond. Somewhere nearby, amphibians croaked and predatory birds shrieked, but there was no way she could hear them over the deafening song of the cicadas. They filled every tree and every inch of airspace over the gravel road. Buzzing around her head, between the cypresses. Groups of them lagged behind and then raced back ahead of her and waited in the boughs for her to catch up. She had never seen a million of anything, yet she was certain that there had to be at least that many cicadas. The world around her had become a living swarm, as though the individual molecules of oxygen had been replaced by the red-eyed bugs.
They guided her onward into the night, swept up like a drowning body carried out to sea by the tide. No headlights pierced the roiling darkness, not that she expected to see any. Not this late at night, and not in this unincorporated area. The tracts of land out here were all multi-acre lots situated primarily on marshland, designed for complete privacy. Rutted dirt drives forked from the road every half-mile on the right hand side. To the left lay nothing but uninterrupted bayou that stretched clear to Louisiana. The houses out here were a mixtu
re of ramshackle trailer homes set into the deep woods and sprawling estates that were so secluded from one another as to negate the socioeconomic differences. These were reclusive families that valued nothing more than isolation and wouldn't soon be organizing any neighborhood picnics. Vanessa knew several people who lived out here, but hadn't visited enough times to recognize their patches of wilderness in the dark.
She wondered why she was even out here. Why in the world was she following a swarm of locusts anyway?
The answer was simple.
Hope.
Maybe she had finally relinquished the slippery grasp she held on her sanity. The rational part of her mind, now a distant voice calling from the bottom of a deep well, insisted that she turn around and abandon this absurd course of action, but her heart was persistent. It demanded that she try anything, no matter how irrational, if there was even the slightest chance of finding her daughter. It forced the blood into the legs that carried her onward of their own accord, diverting it from the brain that struggled to make sense of the senseless.
She had lost track of time. There was only the darkness and the shrill cacophony of cicadas. She didn't know how long she had been walking when the swarm closed in upon her so tightly that she was forced to stop and cover her head with her hands to shield it from the insects. After a moment, they again ascended and buzzed off down a shadowed driveway into the forest. The mailbox at the junction was dented and rusted along the metal creases. It bore only five numbers. No name, just 10782.
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