He sat.
“You sure you have time for this?” Rodgers said.
“Bass Herman lets me come and go as I please. He about had an aneurysm when his photographer sold the only picture of the whole incident to a bigger paper, and Smythe leaving didn’t help. Now he wants to forget the whole thing, just like everyone else. I’m getting assignments to write about prospective tax plans, or even worse, the weather. I’m supposed to be an investigative journalist.”
“So you come out here and talk to me, because no one else wants to give you the time of day.”
“I come, what? Once a week?”
“Twice sometimes.”
The field behind the house lay fallow, the rows of dirt extending into the distance. With no obstructions the wind was as brutal as a club. It howled out of the northwest, slapping faces and numbing fingers. Rodgers dug into the bag he carried and came out with a piece of cooked meat. She knew he’d collected it over the past few days, the fatty part of steaks, the scrapings from a roast bone.
Rodgers looked at Cooper. “Stay.”
Cooper sat, and Laura held his collar.
Rodgers walked away, zigzagging, making sudden sharp turns. Occasionally, after big movements, he scuffed the dirt with his toe. He ended up about fifty yards away at the stump of a tree that had never been pulled up. Coming back, he was careful to walk precisely the same path, using the scuff marks as a crude map.
“Ready?” he asked Laura.
“Yep.”
“Okay then. Seek!”
Laura released the collar, and Cooper was off. He kept his nose pinned to the ground and moved in a circle around them. He’d seen Rodgers walk to the stump, but it didn’t seem to matter. He did it the same way every time, driven to complete the pattern, whether by his old training or by something ancient in his cells she didn’t know. Halfway around he found the scent of Rodgers’s trail but kept moving, completing a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pass.
Rodgers narrated. “Got to make sure it’s not a false trail.”
Cooper swung back to the trail and started following it. The blasts of air from his nose were so intense that they threw up tiny dust clouds. Sometimes he would paw at a place.
“Turns up scent, stuff that might be hidden.”
The bloodhound zigged and zagged, moving back and forth, always scanning for other clues. He reached the stump and steak, then threw back his head and bayed at the overcast sky.
“Good boy,” Rodgers shouted through cupped hands.
Cooper snatched up the chunk of meat and lumbered over to them.
“He’s still got it. I ever tell you about that time he found that boy down by the river?”
“Yep,” Laura said.
“How about that, Cooper?” He reached down and scratched him behind one ear. “I ran out of my own stories, now I run outta yours too.”
She dug into her coat’s other pocket and produced a thick sheaf of papers held together by an oversized paper clip. “Here, take a look at the coroner’s report.”
“What coroner’s report?”
“The one from the crime scene. From the cabin in the mountains.”
He let out a low whistle. “The one on Eugene Hobbes. Where the hell did you get that?”
“Timinski owed me a favor.”
“I thought the deal was you getting to write the story. He didn’t stop you.”
“He didn’t exactly help me, either. I called him that day, you know, and he was out chasing some dead end. I think he feels guilty.”
Rodgers stomped his feet. “Could be guilt.”
“What else?”
“You two seemed to get pretty close.”
Laura shrugged. “Who cares if he gives out copies of a little bit of paperwork? It’s a closed case. The whole thing will be public record soon enough.”
“In my experience, the feds don’t like things out in public until they are officially out in public, if you know what I mean. But you asked, and he did it anyway.”
“You jealous?”
That earned her another small smile. “Hell, I never had no federal agent do me any favors, not even small ones.”
Laura flipped through the pages until she found what she wanted. “Here, read.”
“Don’t have my glasses.”
“Suffer through it then.”
Rodgers sighed and used his teeth to pull off one glove so he could turn the pages. He held the paper unnaturally far from his face and started reading. After a few minutes he gave the low whistle again.
“Finished?”
“Yep.”
“Thoughts?”
“I think he’s better off without a face. Nice to read a story with a happy ending.”
“Did you read the part about his legs?”
Rodgers rolled the papers into a tube and tapped it against his leg. “It’s tough letting go of something like this. Believe me, I know. You’ve seen the back rooms in there.” He jabbed the tube over his shoulder toward the house. “Boxes everywhere I can fit them, just taking up space. Gathering dust. Look at Cooper out there.”
In the distance, the dog sniffed something on the ground, rolled over on his back, jumped to his feet, and kept moving.
“You notice how he moves his nose back and forth like a broom? Side to side, keeping track of the edges. A bad bloodhound doesn’t do that, and when they lose the scent, they have to go back and find it. It happens over and over, slowing them down. What happens to footprints when you walk across them enough times?”
She said nothing.
“That’s right.” His voice had dropped, like he was talking to himself. “They’re gone. Destroyed. Nothing left to find but your own breadcrumbs.”
He stared out at the dog, hands shoved deep into his pockets.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’ve read every box of files in that house a hundred times. I looted them for details until there was nothing left to find. Stare at the same spot long enough and you start to see things. A few days without sleep and you start to wonder if those things are real. A week without sleep, you stop caring. Real and unreal, those are just words. Obsession breaks you eventually.”
Laura reached out and took the paper tube from his hand. “How about we make a deal? You let me run it down for you, and then I won’t bring it up again.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“Okay, shoot.”
She smoothed the pages on her thigh. “You understand what they’re saying in here?”
“I was a cop for almost twenty-five years.”
“So then you agree: there’s no way he could have walked. He hadn’t walked in years.”
Rodgers took the report back and ran his finger down it. “Says extreme atrophy, fair confidence that he couldn’t walk.”
Laura frowned. “What would it take for them to be sure?”
“Maybe if they saw him attempt to walk.”
She snorted.
“I’m not joking,” he said. “You gotta understand, an autopsy doesn’t have all the answers. They usually do a pretty good job on cause of death, but you start asking questions about what a person was like when they were alive, all they can give you is best guess.”
“His legs were like twigs. He hadn’t used them in years.”
“Maybe. But the human body can do amazing things under stress. You always hear those stories about mothers lifting cars off their kids.”
“We’re not talking about a distressed mother.”
“So maybe he did it in a wheelchair.”
Laura’s mouth hung open.
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
Her jaw snapped shut. She gritted her teeth. Between them, she said, “Anything’s possible.”
“Not anything. But the possible is a large swath of territory. Very large.”
“I was out in that field. It was the middle of July, they’d planted soybeans, and the whole thing was covered in rows. Olive Hanson was posed more
than two hundred yards from any road. You’re saying he managed to get himself out there, and to carry a body along with him, and he did all that in a wheelchair?”
“They make ’em with big off-road tires. They make them electric too. Hell, he might have had an easier time than I would have.”
Laura threw up her hands. “There were no tracks!”
“There were no footprints neither,” Rodgers said.
“Well, the killer was careful.” She pointed to where Cooper had started digging near the base of the stump. “Like you leaving that trail for him to follow. One way in, one way out. He could have just raked them away on his way out.”
“Any reason a man with dead legs couldn’t have done the same to his wheelchair tracks?”
“I saw someone up there, and they weren’t in a damn wheelchair.”
Rodgers fumbled inside his jacket pocket and came out with a bottle. The liquid inside was brown and viscous; she could see it sticking to the glass.
“Drink?”
She said nothing.
“Suit yourself.” He took a pull, capped it, slid it back into its compartment. “For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Hobbes had nothing to do with Olive Hanson. What then?”
“Then I try to prove it.”
“But let’s get specific. How exactly are you going to do that?”
Laura just pressed her lips together and turned her face into the wind.
“To the rest of the world, the case is closed,” he continued. “Where’s the evidence to reopen it? Look, I know how difficult Teresa Mitchem was for you. You risked a lot going up there with that kid. To have it come back and bite you—that must be tough.”
Laura laughed, a short hard bark. “Yeah, tough.”
“You’ve got to accept it.”
“Accept what?”
He pulled out the bottle and drank again, weighing his words. “That she’s gone. You missed her.”
“There’s no body.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. His brown irises melted into their pupils, nearly black in the gloom. “There’s a lot of acres up there in the national forest, Laura. There’s never going to be a body. You have to let it go.”
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. On the screen, next to the text icon, appeared the words BASS HERMAN. She pressed her thumb against it, previewing the message. It was short enough that she could read the whole thing.
OFFICE ASAP. EMERGENCY.
Laura tried to remember ever getting a text from Bass, and couldn’t. It had never happened before. She looked up at Rodgers and raised an eyebrow.
“Speak of the devil,” she said. “Gotta go to work.”
CHAPTER
25
THE GAZETTE DIDN’T have a newsroom anywhere near the size of the Globe’s, but there still should have been the low murmur of voices on the phone, and of papers shuffling, and the clack of keyboards. There should have been faces visible above cubicle walls washed out by the ceiling lights’ halogen glow. Instead the room was dim, with only every fifth overhead light on, and completely silent. It was empty.
To her left, the door to the men’s room opened and Bass tottered out, one hand trailing along the wall next to him. He’d been splashing water on his face. Much of it had gotten on his white collar, soaking it though. He wasn’t wearing a tie, or his glasses.
“Bass, where is everyone?”
“Sent them home. We needed some space.” His voice quavered, like a low-frequency stutter murmuring in the back of his throat. He took a half step forward, still supporting himself with his arm.
“What’s happening?”
“Natalie’s in my office. We should speak to her.”
“Colin’s assistant?”
“She a floater now. She opens the mail.” He pulled his hand away from the wall and pointed himself down the row between the cubicles. Some jolt of electricity hit him, straightened his spine, and without warning he broke into a jog, headed for the back offices.
Laura watched him go. The darkness in the corners of the room seemed to close in, and a shudder snaked its way past her heart.
She opens the mail.
Bass looked like he’d seen a ghost, and there was only one ghost Laura could think of. She felt the unmistakable desire to pull a blanket over her head and hunker down, to conceal herself from whatever waited for her in the back office. She recognized the feeling: fear of the thing hiding under the bed.
She walked down the row, checking behind her every other cube.
Bass’s office smelled sharply of salt and grease, and in the corner Natalie sat in the guest chair with her knees pulled up to her chin. Where Bass had been dampened by sweat and sink water, Natalie appeared very dry and very cold. Her skin looked like cracked porcelain, with dark smudges around her eyes and furrows beneath them cut through her foundation. She’d been crying, but the tears had long since dried up.
“Natalie.”
Her gaze stayed fixed on a blank spot on the wall.
“Natalie.” Bass put a hand on her shoulder and gave it a shake. “Tell her what you told me.”
Natalie shook her head, turned back to stare at the wall.
“Never mind,” Bass said. “It’s in the conference room.”
He led her inside and hit the light switch. The overheads flickered and hummed, then sprung to life. A brown paper-wrapped package sat on the near edge of the table. Written across the top in neat block letters: LAURA CHAMBERS, C/O BASS HERMAN, and then the address of the Gazette.
“There’s no postage,” Laura said.
“Someone must have dropped it off.”
She glanced back at him. “Do I want to know what’s inside?”
Mention of the package’s contents twisted his face into an expression of seasickness. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if you do look, wear these.”
He pressed something rubbery into her hand.
“And be quick. We waited for you—waited before calling the police. But I need to contact them soon.”
Laura opened her hand and found a pair of powderless latex gloves. She took a deep breath before pulling them on, then peeled back the brown paper. Inside was a plain white shoe box. She pulled off the lid. Styrofoam packing peanuts spilled out onto the table, and nestled in the center lay an oddly-sized jewelry box, smaller and thicker than one used to hold a necklace but not nearly small enough for a ring. Steeling herself, she lifted the top.
Perfectly formed and carefully placed, it rested delicately on the box’s velveteen display pad, dry and clean, devoid of blood. Whorls of skin spiraled toward a dark hole in the center, a sickening nautilus shell of sinew.
It was another ear.
The fact that it had been sent to both her and Bass, the editor of a newspaper, was not lost on Laura. This was not a private message. An image splashed across her field of vision: Olive Hanson, washed and posed in the center of a field, on display, waiting to be found. The poor girl’s end had been only a means to an end, its final goal the elicitation of outrage and fear. Now he was doing it again. He was preening, the ear another corpulent feather in his plumage.
She forced herself to look at it again.
It wasn’t just another ear: it was another left ear. Teresa Mitchem’s left ear was secure in an evidence locker somewhere, and now another one had arrived. How was that possible?
“God,” she whispered. She knew. She knew how it was possible.
From behind her, Bass said, “Turn it over.”
She pinched the lobe between two fingers and flipped it. Letters dripped along the outside edge, coiling toward the hole in the center. Another tattoo.
“A name,” Bass Herman said.
“Yes,” she said. “A new one.”
* * *
No one answered the buzzer at Jasmine’s office, and she wasn’t picking up her phone. Laura drove to her apartment, slipped past someone coming out the front, and started knocking. The rusted black truck was parked out front. Sh
e had to be home.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Laura, let me in.”
“Just give me a moment.”
The door opened. Jasmine had on a terrycloth robe with a towel wrapped around her hair. Her cheeks were rosy. “Sorry, I was in the shower.”
Laura pushed her way inside and let herself down onto the couch, the same one she’d slept on almost six months ago. “He took another one,” she said, and put her head in her hands.
Jasmine didn’t ask who, didn’t need to be told what had been taken. She saw the look on Laura’s face, and that was all the explanation required. Laura told the doctor the story in fits and jumps, taking breaks when she needed, trying not to linger on the gory details. The ending was difficult.
“Another tattoo,” she finished. “A name: Samantha Powell.”
“Oh, no,” Jasmine said, and slumped back into her chair. She pulled the towel off her wet hair, twisting it between her hands.
“You know her,” Laura said, suddenly understanding.
“Yes. She’s a patient.”
“Tell me about her.”
Jasmine stood abruptly and pulled the robe tight across her chest. “I can’t discuss another patient. I shouldn’t even have told you that she’s been seeing me.”
“Even if it helps to find her? We could—”
She put a hand out in front of her. “Stop. Just stop. You’re not a cop, Laura. And if you’re really my friend, you’ll forget I ever said anything.”
“You’re right, I’m not a cop. That’s what Bass Herman is doing right now, calling the police. You and Bass and Don Rodgers want me to stay far away from this and let the police do their jobs. But there’s a problem with that: I’ve seen how the police do their jobs. Do you know I met with Sheriff Fuller this morning?”
Jasmine shook her head.
“I’ll give you one guess how that went.”
“But it’s different now. It’ll all be different now.”
“I hope you’re right. But my gut tells me he’s going to do everything in his power not to resurrect the Hanson and Mitchem cases. That’s two cleared off the books, two in the black. I looked in his eyes: he doesn’t want to carry the load.”
“So what?”
“He’ll call it a copycat. He’ll bury it.”
Last Girl Gone Page 21