the Woods (2007)

by Harlan Coben

  "And you think I will?"

  They did not bother answering.

  York's voice was as casual as a spring day. "You're a widower, Mr. Copeland, right?"

  "Right," I said.

  "Must be tough. Raising a kid on your own."

  I said nothing.

  "Your wife had cancer, we understand. You're very involved in some organization to find a cure."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Admirable."

  They should only know.

  "This must be weird for you," York said.

  "How's that?"

  "Being on the other side. You're usually the one asking the questions, not answering them. That's gotta be a little strange."

  He smiled at me in the rearview mirror.

  "Hey, York?" I said.

  "What?"

  "Do you have a playbill or a program?" I asked.

  "A what?"

  "A playbill," I said. "So I can see your past credits, you know, before you landed the coveted role of Good Cop." York chuckled at that. "I'm just saying, it's weird is all. I mean, have you ever been questioned by the police before?"

  It was a setup question. They had to know. When I was eighteen years old, I worked as a counselor at a summer camp. Four campers- Gil Perez and his girlfriend, Margot Green, Doug Billingham and his girlfriend, Camille Copeland (aka my sister) sneaked into the woods late one night.

  They were never seen again. Only two of the bodies have ever been found. Margot Green, age seventeen, was found with her throat slit within a hundred yards of the campsite. Doug Billingham, also seventeen, was found half a mile away. He had several stab wounds, but cause of death was also a slit throat. The bodies of the other two, Gil Perez and my sister, Camille, have never been found.

  The case made headlines. Wayne Steubens, a rich-kid counselor at the camp, was caught two years later, after his third summer of terror-but not until he murdered at least four more teens. He was dubbed the Summer Slasher, an all-too-obvious moniker. Waynes next two victims were found near a Boy Scout camp in Muncie, Indiana. Another victim was attending one of those all-around camps in Vienna, Virginia. His last victim had been at a sports camp in the Poconos. Most had their throats slit. All had been buried out in the woods, some before death. Yes, as in buried alive. It took a fair amount of time to locate the bodies. The Poconos kid, for example, took six months to be found. Most experts believe that there are others still out there, still underground, deep in the woods.

  Like my sister.

  Wayne has never confessed, and despite being in a super maximum-security facility for the past eighteen years, he insists that he had nothing to do with the four murders that started it all.

  I don't believe him. The fact that at least two bodies were still out there led to speculation and mystery. It gave Wayne more attention. I think he likes that. But that unknown, that glimmer, still hurts like hell.

  I loved my sister. We all did. Most people believe death is the cruelest thing. Not so. After a while, hope is a far more abusive mistress. When you live with it as long as I have, your neck constantly on the chopping block, the axe raised above you for days, then months, then years, you long for it to fall and lop off your head. Most believed that my mother ran off because my sister was murdered. But the truth is the opposite. My mother left us because we could never prove it.

  I wished Wayne Steubens would tell us what he did with her. Not to give her a proper burial or any of that. That would be nice, but beside the point. Death is pure, wrecking-ball destructive. It hits, you're crushed, you start to rebuild. But not knowing, that doubt, that glimmer, made death work more like termites or some sort of relentless germ. It eats away from the inside. You cannot stop the rot. You cannot rebuild because that doubt will just keep gnawing away.

  It still does, I think.

  That part of my life, much as I want to keep it private, was always picked up by the media. Even the quickest Google search would have brought up my name in connection with the mystery of the Vanished Campers, as they were quickly dubbed. Heck, the story still played on those "real crime" shows on Discovery or Court TV. I was there that night, in those woods. My name was out there for the finding. I was questioned by the police. Interrogated. Under suspicion even.

  So they had to know.

  I chose not to answer. York and Dillon didn't push it.

  When we arrived at the morgue, they led me down a long corridor. No one spoke. I wasn't sure what to make of this. What York said made sense now. I was on the other side. I had watched plenty of witnesses make walks like this. I had seen every sort of reaction in the morgue. The identifiers usually start off stoic. I'm not sure why. Are they bracing themselves? Or does a smidgeon of hope, that word again, still exist? I'm not sure. Whatever, the hope quickly vanishes. We never make a mistake on the ID. If we think it's your loved one, it is. The morgue is not a place of last-minute miracles. Not ever.

  I knew that they were watching me, studying my responses. I became aware of my steps, my posture, my facial expression. I aimed for neutral and then wondered why I bothered.

  They brought me to the window. You don't go into the room. You stay behind glass. The room was tiled so that you could just hose it down, no need to get fancy with decor or cleaners. All the gurneys save one were empty. The body was covered with a sheet, but I could see the toe tag. They really used those. I looked at the big toe sticking out from under the sheet, it was wholly unfamiliar. That was what I thought. I do not recognize the mans toe.

  The mind does funny things under stress.

  A woman wearing a mask rolled the gurney closer to the window. I flashed back to, of all things, the day my daughter was born. I remember the nursery. The window was much the same, with those thin strips of foil forming diamonds. The nurse, a woman about the size of the woman in the morgue, rolled the little cart with my little daughter in it close to the window. Just like this. I guess I would normally have seen something poignant in this, the beginning of life, the end of it, but today I didn't.

  She pulled back the top of the sheet. I looked down at the face. All eyes were on me. I knew that. The dead man was about my age, early to mid-thirties. He had a beard. His head looked shaved. He wore a shower cap. I thought that looked pretty goofy, the shower cap, but I knew why it was there.

  "Shot in the head?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "How many times?"

  "Twice."

  "Caliber?"

  York cleared his throat, as if trying to remind me that this wasn't my case. "Do you know him?" I took another look. "No," I said. "Are you sure?" I started to nod. But something made me stop.

  "What?" York said.

  "Why am I here?"

  "We want to see if you know"

  "Right, but what made you think I would know him?"

  I slid my eyes to the side, saw York and Dillon exchange a glance. Dillon shrugged and York picked up the ball. "He had your address in his pocket," York said. "And he had a bunch of clippings about you."

  "I'm a public figure."

  "Yes, we know."

  He stopped talking. I turned toward him. "What else?"

  "The clippings weren't about you. Not really."

  "What were they about?"

  "Your sister," he said. "And about what happened in those woods."

  The room dropped ten degrees, but hey, we were in a morgue. I tried to sound nonchalant. "Maybe he's a real-crime nut. There are lots of them."

  He hesitated. I saw him exchange a glance with his partner.

  "What else?" I asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What else did he have on him?" York turned toward a subordinate I hadn't even noticed was standing there. "Can we show Mr. Copeland here the personal effects?" I kept my eye on the dead man's face. There were pockmarks and lines. I tried to smooth them out. I didn't know him. Manolo Santiago was a stranger to me.

  Someone pulled out a red plastic evidence bag. They emptied it out onto a table. From the distanc
e I could see a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt. There was a wallet and a cell phone.

  "You check the cell phone?" I asked.

  "Yep. It's a throwaway. The phone log is empty."

  I wrested my gaze away from the dead man's face and walked over to the table. My legs quaked.

  There were folded sheets of paper. I carefully opened one up. The article from Newsweek. The picture of the four dead teens was there, the Summer Slasher's first victims. They always started with Margot Green because her body was found right away. It took another day to locate Doug Billingham. But the real interest lay in the other two. Blood had been found and torn clothes belonging to both Gil Perez and my sister, but no bodies.

  Why not?

  Simple. The woods were massive. Wayne Steubens had hidden them well. But some people, those who loved a good conspiracy, didn't buy that. Why had just those two not been found? How could Steubens have moved and buried bodies so quickly? Did he have an accomplice? How had he pulled it off? What were those four doing in those woods in the first place?

  Even today, eighteen years after Wayne's arrest, people talk about the "ghosts" in those woods, or maybe there is a secret cult living in an abandoned cabin or escaped mental patients or men with hook arms or bizarre medical experiments gone wrong. They talk about the boogey-man, finding the remnants of his burned, out campfire, still surrounded by the bones of children he'd eaten. They say how at night they can still hear Gil Perez and my sister, Camille, howl for vengeance.

  I spent a lot of nights out there, alone in those woods. I never heard anyone howl.

  My eyes moved past Margot Greens picture and Doug Billingham's. The photograph of my sister was next. I had seen this same shot a million times. The media loved it because she looked so wonderfully ordinary. She was the girl-next-door, your favorite babysitter, the sweet teen who lived down the block. That wasn't Camille at all. She was mischievous, with lively eyes and a sideways devil-may-care grin that knocked the boys back a step. This picture was so not her. She was more than this. And maybe that had cost her her life.

  I was about to head over to the final picture, the one of Gil Perez, but something made me pull up.

  My heart stopped.

  I know that sounds dramatic, but that was how it felt. I looked at the pile of coins from Manolo Santiago's pocket and saw it, and it was as if a hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so hard it couldn't beat anymore.

  I stepped back.

  "Mr. Copeland?"

  My hand went out as if it were acting on its own. I watched my fingers pluck it up and bring it to my eye level.

  It was a ring. A girls ring.

  I looked at the picture of Gil Perez, the boy who'd been murdered with my sister in the woods. I flashed back twenty years. And I remembered the scar.

  "Mr. Copeland?"

  "Show me his arm," I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "His arm." I turned back to the window and pointed to the corpse. "Show me his goddamn arm." York signaled to Dillon. Dillon pressed the intercom button. "He wants to the see the guys arm."

  "Which one?" the woman in the morgue asked.

  They looked at me.

  "I don't know," I said. "Both, I guess."

  They looked puzzled, but the woman obeyed. The sheet was pulled back. The chest was hairy now. He was bigger, at least thirty pounds more than he was back in those days, but that wasn't surprising. He had changed. We all had. But that wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking at the arm, for the ragged scar.

  It was there.

  On his left arm. I did not gasp or any of that. It was as if part of my reality had just been pulled away and I was too numb to do anything about it. I just stood there.

  "Mr. Copeland?"

  "I know him," I said.

  "Who is he?"

  I pointed to the picture in the magazine. "His name is Gil Perez."

  Chapter 2

  There was a time when Professor Lucy Gold, PhD in both English and psychology, loved office hours. It was a chance to sit one-on-one with students and really get to know them. She loved when the quiet ones who sat in the back with their heads down, taking notes as though it were dictation, the ones who had their hair hanging in front of their faces like a protective curtain, when they arrived at her door and raised their eyes and told her what was in their hearts.

  But most of the time, like now, the students who showed up were the brown nosers, the ones who felt that their grade should depend solely on their outward enthusiasm, that the more face time they got, the higher the grade, as though being an extrovert was not rewarded enough in this country.

  "Professor Gold," the girl named Sylvia Potter said. Lucy imagined her a little younger, in middle school. She would have been the annoying girl who arrived the morning of a big test whining that she was going to fail and then ended up being the first one done, smugly handing in her A-plus paper early, and using the rest of the class time to put reinforcements in her notebook.

  "Yes, Sylvia?"

  "When you were reading that passage from Yeats in class today, I mean, I was so moved. Between the actual words and the way you can use your voice, you know, like a professional actress'a"

  Lucy Gold was tempted to say, "Do me a favor, just bake me some brownies," but she kept the smile on instead. No easy task. She glanced at her watch and then felt like crap for doing that. Sylvia was a student trying her best. That was all. We all find our ways to cope, to adapt and survive. Sylvia's way was probably wiser and less self-destructive than most.

  "I loved writing that journal piece too," she said.

  "I'm glad." "Mine was about'a well, my first time, if you know what I mean'a" Lucy nodded. "We're keeping them confidential and anonymous, remember?" "Oh, right." She glanced down now. Lucy wondered about that. Sylvia never looked down. "Maybe after I read them all," Lucy said, "if you want, we can talk about yours. In private."

  Her head was still down.

  "Sylvia?"

  The girl's voice was very soft. "Okay."

  Office hours were over. Lucy wanted to get home. She tried not to sound halfhearted when she asked, "Do you want to talk about it now?"

  "No."

  Sylvia's head was still down.

  "Okay then," Lucy said, making a production of looking at her watch. "I have a staff meeting in ten minutes."

  Sylvia stood. "Thank you for meeting with me."

  "My pleasure, Sylvia."

  Sylvia looked as if she wanted to say something more. But she didn't. Five minutes later, Lucy stood at her window and looked down at the quad. Sylvia walked out the door, wiped her face, set the head high, forced up a smile. She started walk-skipping across campus. Lucy watched her wave at her fellow students, fall in with a group, and blend with the others until Sylvia became an indistinct part of the mass.

  Lucy turned away. She caught her reflection in the mirror and did not like what she saw. Had that girl been calling out for help?

  Probably, Luce, and you didn't answer. Nice work, superstar.

  She sat at her desk and opened the bottom drawer. The vodka was there. Vodka was good. You didn't smell vodka.

  Her office door opened. The guy who entered had long black hair tucked behind his ears and several earrings. He was unshaven, fashionably so, handsome in an aging-boy-band way. He had the silver stud in his chin, a look that always detracted, low pants barely held up by a studded belt, and a tattoo on the neck that said, "Breed Often."

  "You," the guy said, gunning his best smile in her direction, "look immensely doable."

  "Thanks, Lonnie."

  "Nah, I mean it. Immensely doable."

  Lonnie Berger was her TA, though he was her age. He was permanently caught in that education trap, getting a new degree, hanging on campus, the tell tale sign of age around the eyes. Lonnie was getting tired of the PC sexual crap on campus, so he was going out of his way to push that boundary and hit on every woman he could.

  "You should wear something th
at shows a little more cleavage, maybe one of those new push-up bras," Lonnie added. "Might make the boys pay more attention in class."

  "Yeah, that's what I want."

  "Seriously, chief, when was the last time you got some?"

  "It's been eight months, six days, and about", Lucy checked her watch "four hours."

  He laughed. "You're playing me, right?"

  She just stared at him.

  "I printed out the journals," he said.

  The confidential, anonymous journals.

  She was teaching a class that the university had dubbed Creative Reasoning, a combination of cutting-edge psychological trauma with creative writing and philosophy. Truth be told, Lucy loved it. Current assignment: Each student was supposed to write on a traumatic event in their lives, something that they would not normally share with any one. No names were to be used. No grades given. If the anonymous student gave permission on the bottom of the page, Lucy might read a few out loud to the class for the purpose of discussion, again keeping the author anonymous.

  "Did you start reading them?" she asked.

  Lonnie nodded and sat in the seat that Sylvia had occupied a few minutes ago. He threw his feet up on the desk. "The usual," he said. "Bad erotica?" "I'd say more like soft porn." "What's the difference?" "Damned if I know. Did I tell you about my new chick?"

  "No."

  "Delectable."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'm serious. A waitress. Hottest piece of ass I've ever dated."

  "And I want to hear this because?"

  "Jealous?"

  "Yeah," Lucy said. "That must be it. Give me the journals, will you?"

  Lonnie handed her a few. They both started digging in. Five minutes later, Lonnie shook his head.

  Lucy said, "What?"

  "How old are most of these kids?" Lonnie asked. "Maybe twenty, right?"

  "Right."

  "And their sexual escapades always last, like, two hours?"

  Lucy smiled. "Active imagination."

  "Did guys last that long when you were young?"

  "They don't last that long now," she said.