A figure that she recognized.
THIRTY-TWO
Twenty years of neglect and hard winters and frost heaves had reduced the Hilzbrich Institute’s private road to broken blacktop rippling with invading tree roots. Jane paused at thePROPERTY FOR SALE sign, her Subaru idling as she debated whether to drive down that ruined road. No chain blocked the entrance; anyone could enter the property.
Anyone could be waiting there.
She pulled out her cell phone and saw that she still had reception. She considered calling for a little local backup, then decided it would be a humiliatingly bad idea. She didn’t want the town cops laughing about the big-city detective who needed an escort just to deal with the scary Maine woods. Yeah, Detective, those skunks and porcupines can be deadly.
She started down the road.
Her Subaru slowly bumped along the fractured pavement, and encroaching shrubs clawed at her doors. Rolling down her window, she smelled the scent of decomposing leaves and damp earth. The road grew even rougher, and as she steered around potholes, she worried about broken axles and being stranded alone in the woods. That thought made her more uneasy than the far more dangerous prospect of walking down the street of any major city. The city she understood, and she could deal with its dangers.
The woods were alien territory.
At last the trees gave way to a clearing, and she pulled to a stop in an overgrown parking area. Jane stepped out of her car and stared at the abandoned Hilzbrich Institute, which loomed ahead. It looked exactly like the institutional facility it once was, made of stern concrete softened only by landscape shrubbery now surrendering to weedy invaders. She imagined the effect this fortress-like building would have on any family arriving here with a troublesome son. This looked like just the place where a boy would get straightened out once and for all, where there’d be no kid gloves, no half measures. This building promised tough love and firm limits. Desperate parents looking up at that unyielding façade would have seen hope.
But now the building revealed just how hollow those hopes had been. Boards covered most of the windows. Piles of dead leaves had drifted up against the front entrance, and brown stains streaked the walls where rusty water had dripped from clogged roof gutters. It was no wonder that Dr. Hilzbrich had been unable to sell this property: The building was a monstrosity.
Standing in the parking lot, she listened to the wind in the trees, the hum of insects. She heard nothing out of the ordinary, just the sounds of a summer afternoon in the woods. She took out the keys that Dr. Hilzbrich had lent her and walked to the front entrance. But when she saw the door, she abruptly halted.
The lock was broken.
She reached for her weapon and gave the door a gentle nudge with her foot. It swung open, admitting a wedge of light into the darkness beyond. Aiming the beam of her pocket Maglite into the room, she saw empty beer cans and cigarette butts littering the floor. Flies buzzed in the darkness. Her pulse kicked into a fast gallop and her hands were suddenly chilled. She smelled the ripe stench of something dead, something already decaying.
Let it not be Josephine.
She stepped into the building and her shoes crunched across broken glass. Slowly she swept her flashlight around the room and glimpsed graffiti scrawled on the walls.GREG AND ME 4EVAH! KARI SUCKS COCK!It was just typical high school crap, and she moved past it, turning her flashlight toward the far corner. There, her beam froze.
Something dark lay huddled on the floor.
As she crossed toward it, the stench of decaying flesh became overpowering. Staring down at the dead raccoon, she saw maggots wriggling, and she thought of rabies. Wondered if bats lurked in the building.
Gagging on the smell, she fled back outside to the parking lot and desperately washed out her lungs with deep breaths of air. Only then, as she stood facing the trees, did she notice the tire tracks. They led from the paved parking lot into the woods, where twin ruts cut across the soft forest floor. Crushed twigs and broken branches told her the damage to the vegetation was recent.
Following the ruts, she walked a short distance into the woods, where the tracks stopped at the beginning of a hiking path that was too narrow for any car. The trailhead sign was still posted, nailed to a tree.
THE CIRCLE TRAIL
It was one of the institute’s old hiking paths. Bradley loved the outdoors, Dr. Hilzbrich had told her. Years ago, the boy had probably walked this trail. The prospect of walking into those woods made her pulse quicken. She glanced down at the tire tracks. Whoever had been here was now gone, but he could return at any time. She could feel the weight of the gun on her hip, but she patted the holster anyway, a reflexive check to reassure herself that her weapon was there.
She started down the path, which was so overgrown in spots that occasionally she found she’d veered off and had to backtrack to find the trail again. The canopy of trees thickened, cutting off the sunlight. She glanced at her cell phone and was dismayed to find that she’d lost the signal. Glancing back, she found that the trees had closed in behind her. But ahead, the woods seemed to open up, and she saw sunlight streaming in.
She started toward the clearing, past trees that were dying or already dead, their trunks reduced to hollow stumps. Suddenly the ground gave way and she sank ankle-deep into muck. Pulling her foot out, she almost lost her shoe. In disgust she looked down at her muddied pant cuffs and thought: I hate the woods. I hate the outdoors. I’m a cop, not a forest ranger.
Then she spotted the shoe print: a man’s, size nine or ten.
Every rustle, every whine of a bug, seemed magnified. She saw other prints leading away from the trail, and she followed them, past a clump of cattails. No longer did it matter that her shoes were soaked, her pant legs soiled with mud. All she focused on were those footprints, leading her deeper into the bog. By now she’d completely lost track of where she’d left the main trail. Overhead, the sun told her it was now well past noon, and the woods had gone strangely silent. No birdsong, no wind, only the buzz of mosquitoes around her face.
The footprints turned and veered up the bank, toward dry land.
She paused, bewildered by the change in direction, until she noticed the tree. Encircling its trunk was a loop of nylon rope. The other end of the rope trailed into the bog and vanished beneath the surface of the tea-colored water.
She tested the rope and felt resistance as she tugged. Slowly the length began to emerge from the muck. She was pulling hard now, leaning back with all her weight as more and more rope emerged, tangled with vegetation. Abruptly something broke the surface, something that made her scream and stumble backward in shock. She caught a glimpse of a hollow-eyed face peering at her like a grotesque water nymph.
Then it slowly sank back into the bog.
THIRTY-THREE
It was dusk by the time the Maine State Police divers finished their search of the bog. The water had been only chest-deep; standing on the dry bank, Jane had watched the divers’ heads frequently popping up as they surfaced to get their bearings or to bring up some new object for closer inspection. The water was too murky for a visual search, so they had been forced to rake through the slime and decaying vegetation with their hands, a repulsive task that Jane was grateful she did not have to perform.
Especially when she saw what they finally dredged up.
The woman’s body now lay exposed on a plastic tarp, her moss-flecked hair dripping black water. So stained was her skin with tannins, it was impossible to distinguish her race or an obvious cause of death. What they did know was that her death was not accidental; her torso had been weighed down with a bag full of heavy stones. Jane stared at the tormented expression preserved in the woman’s blackened face and thought: I hope you were dead when he tied that bag of stones around your waist. When he rolled you over the bank and watched you sink into dark water.