He thinks about how small that arm was. A child’s arm. A five- or six- or seven-year-old. And it was just bone but for a few scraps of leathery flesh or muscle. Dead a long time.
Somewhere a mother weeps.
Diego doesn’t have children of his own, but he has spent the last four years raising his nephew Elias, now nine. Elias’s parents, Diego’s baby sister and her husband, died in a car accident that the child survived. Diego and Cordelia are his parents now, and over the last several years Diego’s gotten used to that idea. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel if Elias went missing and, some time later, someone discovered his dry bones clenched in the jaws of a dog.
He can’t imagine.
As he walks through the woods he rips pieces of yellow tape from the roll in his hand and ties them to tree branches to mark his path. He remembers getting lost in the woods as a boy and being terrified. He was only lost for an hour and a half, an hour and a half of panic before he realized he could hear cars passing by and ran out to the street, but it was the longest ninety minutes of his life.
Even now, twenty yards into the woods, the street has vanished behind him and the light below the canopy is gray save a few blades that have managed to stab their way in between the branches and leaves, and the air is cooler than out on the street by several degrees.
Twigs break beneath his feet. The ground is softer here as well, feet collapsing the composted leaves that cover the earth. He tries to avoid poison oak and ivy as he makes his way deeper into the woods.
Five minutes ago he thought he was on his way to flirt with Georgia Simpson while she shelved Louis L’ Amour and Zane Grey novels. Now he is hunting a corpse. It doesn’t seem much of a trade off. A lot can happen in five minutes.
He swallows. His heart beats rapidly in his chest. He knows there’s no reason for that, but he knows, too, that a man doesn’t have much control over his heart.
He tells himself all that was left was the bone. He tells himself there’s no chance the person who did the murder, if it was a murder, is still out here. No chance at all.
But still his heart beats rapidly in his chest.
Something scurries past to his left and he spins toward the sound and draws his SIG.
A squirrel disappears behind a tree.
Diego laughs at himself and reholsters his weapon. He continues walking.
But fifty yards or so from the street he stops again. Something on the ground makes him stop. He looks at it and swallows. A thatch of hair lying amongst the dead leaves. The hair is very dirty, small pieces of leaf and dirt ground into it, and there is a blue barrette clipped onto it, holding it together. A blue barrette with a small piece of cut glass like a jewel glued to its center. The barrette is somehow worse, more affecting, than anything else. The hair is just hair, but the barrette-Diego can imagine a small girl standing before a mirror and clipping it into her hair and smiling at herself and how pretty she looks. The hair is blond. Might once have been, anyway.
He ties a piece of yellow tape around a fallen twig and stabs the twig into the ground near the thatch of hair. Then continues on.
In another fifteen or twenty yards he comes across a black shoe with a silver buckle. Poking from the black shoe is a white sock with a small pink bow sewn to it. The white sock has a hole eaten through it, and at the edges of the hole what might be black blood. Perhaps some insect ate the bloody part of the sock away. Diego picks up the shoe. Within it is a foot. The remains of a foot: nothing but dry bone, the rest long ago eaten by flies and beetles and such. He can easily hold the shoe in the palm of his hand without either end of it touching air. The girl it belonged to could not have been older than two. The girl it belonged to was smaller than the girl or boy whose arm is even now lying bodiless in Diego’s police cruiser.
There is more than one body out here. He is sure of it.
He sets the shoe back down and ties yellow tape around a nearby rock.
And continues walking.
A hundred yards into the woods he comes across a piece of tattered, rotting fabric.
And twenty yards beyond that, disturbed ground. The floor of the woods has been uniformly covered in a blanket of decomposing leaves from which small plants are growing-weeds, and mushrooms like boils, and young trees-but here the ground is disturbed, the leaves clawed aside, and it is here that he-
‘Oh, fuck.’
It is impossible to tell how many bodies are here, as only parts of them have been uncovered. An arm jutting from the soil here. A foot there. A scrap of yellow fabric. One human eye socket staring out of a white skull, all the soft parts long destroyed by time.
He walks to a tree and leans against it. He stares down at the ground. The ground spins.
After a moment he begins to cordon off the area. It takes him only a minute or two, and when he’s done he starts making his way back out to the street, following the yellow flags he left on his way to this bone-scattered nightmare. The boys from the sheriff’s department will be arriving soon, and he’ll have to lead them to the crime scene.
As he walks he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and dials Ian.
Ian pulls the headset off and gets to his feet. He picks up his cup of cold coffee and takes a swallow, just to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He walks out to the police station proper.
Chief Davis is sitting with the phone to his ear, saying, ‘Well, goddamn it, just let her do it then. I don’t know why you call and ask if you don’t care. All right. Goddamn it. All right. I love you too.’ He hangs up.
‘Chief.’
‘Uh?’
‘We got a situation, maybe related to my daughter.’
Chief Davis takes off his glasses, cleans them with a Kleenex, and sets them back onto his narrow nose, blinking at Ian.
‘What’s the situation?’
‘Couple corpses in the woods.’
‘No shit?’
‘None.’
‘So Diego found the owner of the arm?’
‘Looks like. Plus more.’
‘And it might be related to your daughter?’
‘Little girls.’
‘Diego didn’t say one of them might be,’ he licks his lips, ‘might, uh, be your. .’ Chief Davis lets it trail off and finds a thread on his shirtsleeve that needs to be pulled.
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘He say why?’
‘There’s nothing left but bones and a little bit of hair and fabric.’
‘But little girls?’
Ian nods.
‘Sheriff ’s boys on the way, yeah?’
‘They are. Might even be there. Nance was in town to go over the case with Finch.’
‘I should be heading down too. And you wanna go?’
‘There might be something there to lead us to Maggie.’
‘All right,’ Davis says, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get Thompson on the phones. You wanna ride with me or take your own car?’
Ian pulls his Mustang to a stop on the side of the road. All he can think is that this might bring him one step closer to finding his daughter. He knows that girls’ bodies were found, two at least, and he knows that’s sad. But he doesn’t feel anything like sadness right now. He doesn’t even feel anything that might live on the same street as sadness. Each body was once someone’s daughter but none of them is his daughter. His daughter is alive while they are dead. His daughter is alive and he will find her and bring her home safe. If these bodies help to make that happen, then-well, he denies the fleeting thought that these deaths were then worth it. He tries to deny that thought. But even as he shoves it into the darkest corner of his mind, out of the light of conscious thought where he might be shamed by its ugliness, his heart believes it. Every beat speaks the truth of it.
A hundred bodies sacrificed would be worth it, a thousand, if in the end he got his daughter back.
As he and Chief Davis step from their vehicles Ian looks at the line of cars. There are two from the sheriff’s department here a
lready. They’re parked behind Diego’s car, and behind them is Chief Davis’s car, behind which Ian’s car is parked. Deputy Kurt Oliver, who works out of the Bulls Mouth office, sits on the hood of one of the county vehicles. His eyes are closed and his head is tilted toward the afternoon sun.
Chief Davis says, ‘Detective already here?’
Oliver opens his eyes and turns to look at them lazily. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘John Nance, down from Mencken-and Bill Finch is here too.’
‘Anyone else?’
He shakes his head. ‘Sheriff’s on his way.’
‘Coroner?’
‘Not here yet.’
Chief Davis nods. ‘Where they all at?’
Oliver nods toward the line of trees. ‘Follow the trail of yellow tape. It’ll lead to the bodies.’
A dog barks from the back seat of Diego’s cruiser.
Chief Davis puts a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Let’s see what we got,’ he says, guiding Ian toward the woods.
‘Hey, Oliver,’ Ian says, ‘why don’t you drive that dog up to Pastor Warden’s place before this heat kills it?’
‘What for?’
‘I just said, so this fucking heat don’t kill it.’
‘Why don’t you do it?’
‘Because I’m going to the crime scene. You’re sitting here useless. For fuck’s sake, Oliver, get your head out of your ass and drive the goddamn dog up-’
‘Pastor Warden’ll give you ten bucks if you take that dog to him.’
Deputy Oliver slides off the hood of his car. ‘No shit?’
Davis nods.
‘Well why the fuck didn’t you say so?’
A few minutes later Ian and Chief Davis arrive on the scene. One of the sheriff’s detectives, John Nance, has cleared out a large hole, or a few small ones, in which the bones from three bodies are piled. Three female bodies, if the rags hanging on them is any indication. And young. The one that still has hair, just a snatch of it hanging from the bone, has blond hair. They are all in decomposing dresses.
‘Not waiting for the coroner or forensics?’ Chief Davis says.
‘I’m not disturbing nothing. The insects took care of most of this a long time ago. Forensics guys can play with hair and teeth and bloodstains. . if they ain’t too badly degraded.’
‘Were they buried all at the same time?’ Ian says.
Nance looks over to him. ‘That’s outside my expertise, but I’d say no.’
Ian nods.
Nance is in his late forties or early fifties, with gray hair and a face like melted wax. When he’s standing he looks like pulled taffy sagging under its own weight, shoulders slumped, arms hanging down, cheeks droopy. But he is not standing. He’s sitting on his haunches over a row of skeletons and piles of seemingly random belongings: shoes, clothes, toys. The belongings were once in bags, but two of the bags have disintegrated, leaving behind unrecognizable fragments. Nance pulls a dirt-covered hair brush from a pile beside the oldest corpse and lays it down on a sheet of plastic he or Finch spread across the ground to his left. He sets it next to other items he’s already pulled from the earth: a bracelet, a pair of empty shoes, a bunch of small dresses, a one-eyed doll.
Bill Finch stands over Nance with a small mini-DV camera and records the process. ‘Want me to get some still pictures too?’
‘No need yet.’
‘Right.’
Diego, who’s been standing several feet away rolling a cigarette, tucks the cigarette behind his ear and walks over to Ian.
‘They’re all too young,’ Diego says.
Ian nods. ‘I know.’
‘But look at them. Maggie was only seven when-’
‘But they’re not her.’
‘No,’ Diego agrees. ‘They’re not. You should come look at the clothes. Some of the stuff that was buried looks the wrong size for any of these three. I think maybe the killer came back out here and buried some of her stuff.’
‘Yeah?’
Diego nods.
‘Why would he do that?’
‘I dunno. People do weird things.’
‘You think some of it might have been Maggie’s?’
‘Maybe.’
Ian walks around to where the plastic’s been laid out, to where various dirt-covered items lie, looking like the results of an archeological dig: this is what the late twentieth and early twenty-first century will look like to the aliens when they finally arrive and find human civilization beneath a pile of ash. Ian silently scans the items, looking from one to the next. A strange numbness at his core as if his middle had been hollowed out and replaced by stone.
‘That’s my daughter’s.’
He points to a pink nightgown folded into quarters and covered in dirt and leaves. There are a few drops of what looks like blood near the collar. She was hurt.
Nance looks up from the hole. ‘Your daughter’s?’
Bill Finch says, ‘That’s Ian Hunt.’
‘We met once a couple years ago,’ Ian says.
‘And that’s your daughter’s?’ Nance says, nodding at the nightgown.
‘It is.’
‘You sure?’
Just after dinner the night Maggie was kidnapped and Ian was sitting at the table going over their taxes. Debbie was in the back getting dressed and Maggie was in the bathroom. She called to him. He walked to the bathroom and pushed open the door and she was standing in the middle of the room, skinny little-girl body dripping water onto the tiles while behind her the bathtub drain made gurgling noises.
‘What?’
‘I forgot a towel.’
‘And?’
‘And can you get me one?’
‘Can I get you one what?’
‘A towel.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Can you get me one, please?’
‘Can I get you one what, please?’
‘Dad.’
‘Okay.’
He walked to the linen closet and pulled out a towel for her. He tossed it to her.
‘And a nightgown.’
‘Did you forget to wash, too?’
‘No. Well.’
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t wash behind one of my ears.’
‘Why?’
‘Experiment.’ She grinned a wide, gap-toothed grin.
‘What kind of experiment?’
‘Mom said if I didn’t wash behind my ears I’d grow broccoli there.’
‘She did?’
Maggie nodded.
‘But you didn’t believe her?’
‘I don’t know. It’s an experiment.’
‘But you washed everywhere else?’
‘Duh. I’m not gross.’
‘Okay. Let me get your nightgown.’
‘The pink one!’
Three drops of blood next to the collar like an ellipsis. Covered in dirt and dead leaves. Lying on a sheet of plastic beside things he’s never seen before. Things that belonged to other little girls, now dead.
‘Yeah,’ Ian says. ‘I’m sure it’s hers.’
‘All right,’ Nance says. ‘If we got someone alive, the daughter of one of our own, your daughter, then I say let’s kick this with both feet.’
Chief Davis blinks several times. ‘What do you have in mind, detective?’
‘Well, I think we should move on the most obvious suspect before he has time to prepare. Ask questions, imply we got more than we do, see how he reacts.’
‘The most obvious suspect?’
‘Whoever owns this land.’
‘Henry Dean,’ Ian says.
‘We should get Sizemore to approve it, and-’
‘I don’t work for Sizemore,’ Chief Davis says.
‘But the sheriff’s department handles murder cases because we got the murder police,’ Bill Finch says. ‘Nance is murder police. This ain’t Fred Paulson crashed his car into a tree. It’s a multiple homicide.’
Davis squints silently at Finch for a moment, then says, ‘Fair enough.’
‘So we get the okay from Sizemore,’ Nance says, ‘and we bring Henry Dean in for questioning, intimidate him as much as we can, see if he cracks.’
‘It’s close to Main Street, though,’ Diego says. ‘Anybody could have dumped the bodies.’
‘But you don’t get nowhere until you pick a destination,’ Chief Davis says. ‘Can’t drive to every place at once.’
‘Exactly right,’ Nance says.
‘I think both departments should be in on this,’ Chief Davis says. ‘I know Henry Dean, known him since first grade, and I know what buttons to push.’
‘First grade?’ Nance says.
‘Yup.’
‘You think he’s our guy?’
‘Could be.’
‘I mean based on his personality.’
‘Who knows? In my experience you never know who’s capable of what till they gone and done it and you’re catching flies in your open mouth.’
Nance nods at that, then turns to Bill Finch. ‘Where was the sheriff at last time you-’
‘My ears are burning.’
Sheriff Sizemore moves toward them, his big belly swinging in front of him like a wrecking ball.
‘Sheriff,’ Nance says.
‘I want to go to the Dean house,’ Ian says as he, Chief Davis, and Bill Finch walk toward the street. Diego stayed behind so he could tell the coroner exactly how he came upon the bodies and give him the legal time of death.
Chief Davis shakes his head. ‘No chance, Ian. You’re too close to this.’
‘It’s my daughter.’
‘Now, Ian-’
‘I’m going,’ Ian says.
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Finch says. ‘Sizemore just wants us to bring him to the station so he or Nance can question him.’
‘Things might get hairy,’ Ian says.
‘I’ll bring Deputy Oliver.’
‘Deputy Oliver couldn’t blow his nose with a stick of dynamite. My daughter might be in that house, Finch. You might’ve got your fingers in every part of my life, but it’s still my life. My fucking family.’
‘Now hold up,’ Finch says. ‘I know Maggie might be in there. I know you love her. But look at you, man. You’re already worked up and we don’t know if he’s done a damn thing. You’re not going. You’ll just cause trouble.’
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