by Harlan Coben
“Human, right?”
“Definitely. In fact, the first thing we found was a skull. That’s when we stopped digging. The pros are excavating now.”
“How old are they?”
“What, the bones?”
“No, Barrett, that oak tree. Yes, the bones.”
“How the hell would I know? The coroner might have an idea. She’s at the site now.”
Muse hurried past him. Lowell followed. Up ahead she could make out big spotlights, almost like a movie set. She knew that lots of excavation teams used powerful voltage even when they were digging in the direct sunlight. As one crime-scene-unit guy had told her, bright lights help differentiate the flotsam from the gold: “Without the bright lights, it’s like judging how hot a chick is by being drunk in a dark bar. You may think you have something, but in the morning, you want to bite your arm off.”
Lowell pointed toward an attractive woman wearing rubber gloves. Muse figured it was another student—she couldn’t have been thirty years old. She had long, cave black hair perfectly pulled back, like a flamenco dancer.
“That’s Doc O’Neill,” Lowell said.
“She’s your coroner?”
“Yep. You know it’s an elected position out here?”
“You mean they have campaigns and stuff? Like, hi, I’m Doctor O’Neill, I’m really good with the dead’?”
“I’d make a witty comeback,” Lowell said, “but you city slickers are too clever for us yokels.”
As Muse got closer, she could see that “attractive” may have been understating it. Tara O’Neill was a knockout. Muse could see that her looks were something of a distraction to the crew too. The coroner is not in charge of a crime scene. The police are. But everyone kept sneaking glances at O’Neill. Muse stepped quickly toward her.
“I’m Loren Muse, chief investigator for Essex County.”
The woman offered the glove hand. “Tara O’Neill, coroner.”
“What can you tell me about the body?”
She looked wary for a second, but Lowell nodded that it was okay. “Are you the one who sent Mr. Barrett out here?” O’Neill asked.
“I am.”
“Interesting fellow.”
“As I’m well aware.”
“That machine works, though. I don’t know how on earth he found these bones. But he’s good. I think it helped that they ran over the skull first.”
O’Neill blinked and looked away.
“There a problem?” Muse asked.
She shook her head. “I grew up in this area. I used to play right here, right over this spot. You’d think, I don’t know, you’d think I would have felt a chill or something. But nope, nothing.”
Muse tapped her foot, waited.
“I was ten when those teens vanished. My friends and I used to hike out here, you know? We’d light fires. We’d make up stories about how the two kids who were never found were still out here, watching us, that they were the undead or whatever, and that they were going to hunt us down and kill us. It was stupid. Just a way of getting your boyfriend to give you his jacket and put his arm around you.”
Tara O’Neill smiled and shook her head.
“Doctor O’Neill?”
“Yes.”
“Please tell me what you found here.”
“We’re still working on it, but from what I can see we have a fairly complete skeleton. It was found three feet down. I’ll need to get the bones to the lab to make a positive ID.”
“What can you tell me now?”
“Come this way.”
She walked Muse over to the other side of the dig. The bones were tagged and laid out on a blue tarmac.
“No clothing?” Muse said.
“None.”
“Did they disintegrate or was the body buried naked?”
“I can’t say for sure. But since there are no coins or jewelry or buttons or zippers or even footwear—that usually lasts a very long time—my guess would be naked.”
Muse just stared at the brown skull. “Cause of death?”
“Too early to tell. But there are some things we know.”
“Such as?”
“The bones are in pretty bad shape. They weren’t buried all that deep and they’ve been here awhile.”
“How long?”
“It’s hard to say. I took a seminar last year on crime-scene soil sampling. You can tell by the way the ground has been disturbed how long ago the hole was dug. But that’s very preliminary.”
“Anything? A guesstimate?”
“The bones have been here awhile. My best estimate would be at least fifteen years. In short—and to answer the question on your mind—it is consistent, very consistent, with the time frame of the murders that took place in these woods twenty years ago.”
Muse swallowed and asked the real question that she’d wanted to ask from the beginning.
“Can you tell gender? Can you tell me if the bones belong to someone male or female?”
A deep voice interrupted, “Uh, Doc?”
It was one of the crime-scene guys, complete with the prerequisite windbreaker announcing such. He was husky with a thick beard and a thicker midsection. He had a small hand shovel and was breathing the labored breath of the out-of-shape.
“What’s up, Terry?” O’Neill asked.
“I think we got it all.”
“You want to pack it in?”
“For tonight, yeah, I think. We might want to come out tomorrow, check for more. But we’d like to transport the body now, if that’s okay with you.”
“Give me two minutes,” O’Neill said.
Terry nodded and left them alone. Tara O’Neill kept her eyes on the bones.
“Do you know anything about the human skeleton, Investigator Muse?”
“Some.”
“Without a thorough examination, it can be pretty difficult to tell the difference between the male and female skeleton. One of the things we go by is the size and density of the bones. Males have a tendency to be thicker and larger, of course. Sometimes the actual height of the victim can help—males are usually taller. But those things often aren’t definitive.”
“Are you saying you don’t know?”
O’Neill smiled. “I’m not saying that at all. Let me show you.”
Tara O’Neill got down on her haunches. So did Muse. O’Neill had a thin flashlight in her hand, the kind that casts a narrow but potent beam.
“I said, pretty difficult. Not impossible. Take a look.”
She pointed her light toward the skull.
“Do you know what you’re looking at?”
“No,” Muse said.
“First off, the bones appear to be on the lighter side. Second, check out the spot below where the eyebrows would have been.”
“Okay.”
“That’s technically known as the supraorbital ridge. It’s more pronounced in males. Females have very vertical foreheads. Now, this skull has been worn down, but you can see the ridge is not pronounced. But the real key—what I want to show you down here—is in the pelvis area, more specifically, the pelvic cavity.”
She shifted the flashlight. “Do you see it there?”
“Yeah, I see it, I guess. So?”
“It’s pretty wide.”
“Which means?”
Tara O’Neill snapped off the flashlight.
“Which means,” O’Neill said, getting back to her feet, “that your victim is Caucasian, about five-foot-seven—the same height as Camille Copeland, by the way—and yes, female.”
Dillon said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
York looked up. “What?”
“I got a computer hit on that Volkswagen. There are only fourteen in the tristate area that fit the bill. But here’s the kicker. One is registered to a guy named Ira Silverstein. That name ring a bell?”
“Isn’t he the guy who owned that camp?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you telling me that Copeland might ha
ve been right all along?”
“I got the address where this Ira Silverstein is staying,” Dillon said. “Some kind of rehab place.”
“So what are we waiting for?” York said. “Let’s haul ass.”
CHAPTER 35
WHEN LUCY GOT INTO THE CAR, I PRESSED THE BUTTON for the CD player. Bruce’s “Back In Your Arms” came on. She smiled. “You burned it already?”
“I did.”
“You like it?”
“Very much. I added a few others. A bootleg from one of Springsteen’s solo shows. ‘Drive All Night.’”
“That song always makes me cry.”
“All songs make you cry,” I said.
“Not ‘Super Freak’ by Rick James.”
“I stand corrected.”
“And ‘Promiscuous.’ That one doesn’t make me cry.”
“Even when Nelly sings, ‘Is your game MVP like Steve Nash?’”
“God, you know me so well.”
I smiled.
“You seem calm for a man who just learned that his dead sister might be alive.”
“Partitioning.”
“Is that a word?”
“It’s what I do. I put things in different boxes. It’s how I get through the craziness. I just put it somewhere else for a while.”
“Partitioning,” Lucy said.
“Exactly.”
“We psychological types have another term for partitioning,” Lucy said. “We call it ‘Big-Time Denial.’”
“Call it what you will. There’s a flow here now, Luce. We’re going to find Camille. She’s going to be okay.”
“We psychological types have another term for that too. We call it ‘Wishful or even Delusional Thinking.’”
We drove some more.
“What could your father possibly remember now?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But we know that Gil Perez visited him. My guess is, that visit stirred something in Ira’s head. I don’t know what. It might be nothing. He’s not well. It might be something he imagined or even made up.”
We parked in a spot near Ira’s Volkswagen Beetle. Funny seeing that old car. It should have brought me back. He used to drive it around the camp all the time. He would stick his head out and smile and make little deliveries. He would let cabins decorate it and pretend it was leading a parade. But right now the old Volkswagen did nothing for me.
My partitioning was breaking down.
Because I had hope.
I had hope that I would find my sister. I had hope that I was truly connecting with a woman for the first time since Jane died, that I could feel my heart beating next to someone else’s.
I tried to warn myself. I tried to remember that hope was the cruelest of all mistresses, that it could crush your soul like a Styrofoam cup. But right now I didn’t want to go there. I wanted the hope. I wanted to hold on to it and just let it make me feel light for a little while.
I looked at Lucy. She smiled and I felt it rip open my chest. It had been so long since I felt like this, felt that heady rush. Then I surprised myself. I reached out with both my hands and took her face in mine. Her smile disappeared. Her eyes searched for mine. I tilted her head up and kissed her so softly that it almost hurt. I felt a jolt. I heard her gasp. She kissed me back.
I felt happily shattered by her.
Lucy lowered her head onto my chest. I heard her sob softly. I let her. I stroked her hair and fought back the swirl. I don’t know how long we sat like that. Could have been five minutes, could have been fifteen. I just don’t know.
“You better go in,” she said.
“You’re going to stay here?”
“Ira made it clear. You, alone. I’ll probably start up his car, make sure the battery is still charged.”
I didn’t kiss her again. I got out and floated up the path. The setting for the house was peaceful and green. The mansion was Georgian brick, I guessed, almost perfectly rectangular with white columns in the front. It reminded me of an upscale fraternity house.
There was a woman at the desk. I gave her my name. She asked me to sign in. I did. She placed a call and spoke in a whisper. I waited, listening to the Muzak version of something by Neil Sedaka, which was a little bit like listening to a Muzak version of Muzak.
A redheaded woman dressed in civilian clothes came down to see me. She wore a skirt and had glasses dangling on her chest. She looked like a nurse trying not to look like a nurse.
“I’m Rebecca,” she said.
“Paul Copeland.”
“I’ll bring you to Mr. Silverstein.”
“Thank you.”
I expected her to lead me down the corridor, but we walked through the back and straight outside. The gardens were well tended. It was a little early for landscape lights, but they were on. A thick row of hedges surrounded the premises like guard dogs.
I spotted Ira Silverstein right away.
He had changed and yet he hadn’t changed at all. You know people like that. They get older, they gray, they widen, they slump, and yet they are exactly the same. That was how it was with Ira.
“Ira?”
No one ever used last names at camp. The adults were Aunt and Uncle, but I just couldn’t see calling him Uncle Ira anymore.
He wore a poncho I’d last seen in a Woodstock documentary. He had sandals on his feet. Ira stood slowly and put his arms out toward me. Camp had been that way too. Everyone hugged. Everyone loved each other. It was all very “Kumbaya.” I stepped into his embrace. He held me tight, with all his strength. I could feel his beard against my cheek.
He let go of me and said to Rebecca, “Leave us alone.”
Rebecca turned away. He led me to a park bench of cement and green wood. We sat.
“You look the same, Cope,” he said.
He’d remembered my nickname. “So do you.”
“You’d think the hard years would show on our faces more, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so, Ira.”
“So what do you do now?”
“I’m the county prosecutor.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “That’s kind of establishment.”
Still Ira.
“I’m not prosecuting antiwar protestors,” I assured him. “I go after murderers and rapists. People like that.”
He squinted. “Is that why you’re here?”
“What?”
“Are you trying to find murderers and rapists?”
I didn’t know what to make of that so I went with the flow. “In a way, I guess. I’m trying to learn what happened that night in the woods.”
Ira’s eyes closed.
“Lucy said you wanted to see me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want to know why you’ve come back.”
“I never went anywhere.”
“You broke Lucy’s heart, you know.”
“I wrote her. I tried to call. She wouldn’t call me back.”
“Still. She was in pain.”
“I never meant for that to happen.”
“So why are you back now?”
“I want to find out what happened to my sister.”
“She was murdered. Like the others.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
He said nothing. I decided to press a little.
“You know that, Ira. Gil Perez came here, didn’t he?”
Ira smacked his lips. “Dry.”
“What?”
“I’m dry. I used to have this friend from Cairns. That’s in Australia. Coolest dude I ever knew. He used to say, ‘A man is not a camel, mate.’ That was his way of asking for a drink.”
Ira grinned.
“I don’t think you can get a drink out here, Ira.”
“Oh, I know. I was never much of a booze man anyway. What they now call ‘recreational drugs’ was more my bag. But I meant water. They got some Poland Spring in that cooler. Did you know that Poland Spring comes to y
ou straight from Maine?”
He laughed and I didn’t correct him on that old radio commercial. He stood and stumbled toward the right. I followed. There was a trunk-shaped cooler with a New York Rangers logo on it. He opened the lid, grabbed a bottle, handed it to me, grabbed another. He twisted off the cap and chugged. The water spilled down his face, turning the white of his beard into something darker gray.
“Ahhhh,” he said when he finished.
I tried to get him back on track.
“You told Lucy that you wanted to see me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re here.”
I waited for more.
“I’m here,” I said slowly, “because you asked to see me.”
“Not here here. Here, as in back in our lives.”
“I told you. I’m trying to find out—”
“Why now?”
That question again.
“Because,” I said, “Gil Perez didn’t die that night. He came back. He visited you, didn’t he?”
Ira’s eyes took on that thousand-yard stare. He started to walk. I caught up with him.
“Was he here, Ira?”
“He didn’t use that name,” he said.
He kept walking. I noticed that he limped. His face pinched up in pain.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“I need to walk.”
“Where?”
“There are paths. In the woods. Come.”
“Ira, I’m not here—”
“He said his name was Manolo something. But I knew who he was. Little Gilly Perez. Do you remember him? From those days, I mean?”
“Yes.”
Ira shook his head. “Nice boy. But so easily manipulated.”
“What did he want?”
“He didn’t tell me who he was. Not at first. He didn’t really look the same but there was something in his mannerisms, you know? You can hide stuff. You can gain weight. But Gil still had that soft lisp. He still moved the same. Like he was wary all the time. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
I had thought the yard was fenced in, but it wasn’t. Ira slipped past a break in the hedges. I followed. There was a wooded hill in front of us. Ira started trudging up the path.
“Are you allowed to leave?”
“Of course. I’m here on a voluntary basis. I can come and go as I please.”