Mike Wilson and Emily Stanton had met at college, the article said, and they had become good friends-the newspaper of twenty years ago would not have said “lovers,” but most of its readers would figure it out for themselves. They had decided to hike the Appalachian Trail together as a chance to get to know each other better, and to see if they could work well as partners. Mike liked the idea of roughing it in the wilderness to toughen himself up for the military. He had not been armed, though. Back in those days no one thought that the Appalachian Trail was a dangerous place. Hikers knew to give snakes a wide berth, and they were assured that black bears were not really a threat to people, as long as you didn’t menace them or try to approach the cubs. No one gave much thought to human predators in those innocent days.
She was only nineteen that night. She had been dead for twenty years. Spencer tried to picture Emily Stanton growing old, fading from a radiant beauty into an aging woman. Either way, he reasoned, that pretty young girl would not exist any longer, but at least she would have had a chance to become somebody else. He wondered if she had been robbed of a happy future or spared a more protracted tragedy.
At least he could try not to compound the tragedy by letting an innocent man go to his death. But how could he investigate the case at such a remove? The fading documents in this manila folder were all he had to go on. The physical evidence had long since been destroyed. A few months or years after the trial, the blood samples, the hair and fiber evidence, the clothing exhibits, and all the other mementos of the tragedy would have been incinerated in the interest of space management. After all, a small sheriff’s office could not keep everything, just on the off chance that it would someday be needed again. The state had won its conviction. Clear out the detritus of that investigation and move on to the next. Don’t look back.
Besides, physical evidence deteriorates. Even if the Wake County Sheriff’s Department had managed to keep the samples, the results from a retesting would not be reliable, and surely they would not be accepted as new evidence by the court. There was no DNA testing at the time of the Trail Murders. Perhaps then he would have known for sure; now he must investigate with only uncertainty to guide him-that, and his will not to let any mistakes be made.
Spencer leafed through the rest of the contents of the folder. He had the crime scene photos-that was encouraging, but beyond them, he had only his notes to go on, and a short list of witnesses. He wondered how many of them were still alive, and if their memories of that night had faded with time. He would have to find out.
Spencer took out the photos. Some of them had been taken with the department’s Polaroid, a state-of-the-art camera back then, and an excellent device for producing fast shots of the crime scene. Had he known then of their impermanence? He could barely make out the images in the faded prints. Heat and age had long since neutralized the developing chemicals of the instant camera, making the prints as imperfect as memory. The 35-millimeter shots were better preserved, but the exposures were inexact, a testament to the inexperience of the photographer, who had been himself.
He had been called to the crime scene by Willis Blaine, the forest ranger for their district. The sequence of events was all there in the witness statement that he’d typed himself so long ago but now could only dimly recall. Spencer scanned the lines of faded type.
The call came in well past midnight: two hikers found dead, but not on the Appalachian Trail, which was federal land. A couple of firemen from Alabama had decided to spend their two weeks’ vacation hiking the North Carolina/east Tennessee section of the Appalachian Trail. They were nearly at the end of their journey, and that night they had gone off the trail to spend Friday night at a beer joint. At 11:20 P.M. they were making their way back through the fields to their campsite when they stumbled over something soft and sticky in a moonlit clearing.
Emily Stanton.
The startled firemen had stopped just long enough to determine that the victim was past any efforts at rescue. That decision had taken only a few seconds. They checked for breathing and a pulse, but really they had known it was useless the moment they touched her. “Dead people’s skin doesn’t feel like flesh,” one of them said at the trial. “It feels like lunch meat wrapped in plastic.” The journalists had omitted that comment from their stories out of consideration for the families, and because it served no purpose to make a good guy sound silly in the newspaper when they already had a surfeit of villains: the Harkryders.
The two hikers hadn’t lingered to investigate further. They ran down the path in the moonlight, back to the beer joint to call the forest ranger.
A body?he’d said, a little disbelieving. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone tried to play a telephone prank on a forest ranger.Where?
In the woods at the edge of a field, they told him. Just down from the Appalachian Trail, across the dirt road from the white frame church. The snake handlers’ church.
Yes,he told them. He knew the place. It wasn’t a snake handlers’ church, of course, but the trail has its own mythology, and it wasn’t important that he should correct their theology. He knew the place they meant. Would they wait for him in the parking lot and lead him to the scene of the accident? No point in calling it murder, yet. It wasn’t his call anyhow. If the hikers had described the site correctly, that clearing was a couple of hundred yards west of the Appalachian Trail, not federal land. It was in Wake County.
He got in his truck and drove to the roadhouse. The hikers were easy to spot. They were slender young men in their early twenties, huddled together in a pool of light beneath an electric pole, shivering in flannel shirts, although the night was warm. When he parked in the gravel lot and began to walk toward them, they backed away, darting glances toward the open door of the roadhouse, where jukebox music spilled out into the darkness. At last they noticed his ranger’s uniform, and they rushed toward him, both talking at once.We’re not armed, they told the ranger.Whoever did that might still be there. The ranger nodded. He showed them his pistol and told them that there was a shotgun in the truck. They could bring it along if it would make them feel any easier. Then they were willing to lead him to the site. They were trained to handle emergencies, and they were already getting over the shock of their find.
Willis Blaine took his flashlight out of the truck and followed them down the road to the church, and then up the dirt road, past the field, and into the woods.
When he aimed the spotlight at the clearing, his mind registered several things at once. Homicide. Not a fight or a failed robbery, this one. A very sick individual was loose out here. Young adult victims, one female, one male-their clothing indicated that they were probably hikers from the trail, but they were no longer on it.
I have to secure this crime scene,he told the young firemen. They nodded. They knew about crime scenes.You need to go back to the roadhouse and make another call. Wake County Sheriff’s Department. Tell them Willis Blaine sent you. Tell them where I am. Tell them it’s murder.