A Vermont driver's license looked nothing like one from Maine. In the first place, there wasn't a photograph. The one time Zephyr had convinced Trixie to go to a bar, she'd used a Vermont license as fake ID. “Five foot six is close enough,” Zephyr said, although Trixie was four inches shorter. Brown eyes, it read, when she had blue.
Fawn Abernathy lived at 34 First Street in Shelburne, Vermont. She was nineteen years old. She was the same exact height as Trixie, and Trixie took that as an omen.
She left Fawn her ATM card and half of the cash. But she slipped the American Express card and the license into her pocket. Then Trixie hurried out of the Vermont Transit Bus terminal and threw
herself into the first cab at the side of the curb. “Where to?” the
driver asked.
Trixie looked out the window. “The airport,” she said.
* * *
“I wouldn't be asking if it wasn't an emergency,” Bartholemew begged. He glanced around Venice Prudhomme's office, piled high with files and computer printouts and transcripts from court testimony.
She sighed, not bothering to look up from her microscope.
“Mike, for you, it's always an emergency.”
“Please. I've got a hair with a root on it that was found on the dead kid's body, and I have Trixie's blood preserved all nice and neat in her rape kit. If the DNA matches, that's all I need to get a warrant for her arrest.”
“No,” Venice said.
“I know you've got a backlog and . . .”
“That's not why,” she interrupted, glancing at Bartholemew.
“There's no way I'm opening up a sealed rape kit.”
“Why? Trixie Stone consented to having her blood drawn for it already.”
“As a victim,” Venice pointed out. “Not to prove she committed a crime.”
“You've got to stop watching Law and Order.”
“Maybe you ought to start.”
Bartholemew scowled. “I can't believe you're doing this.”
“I'm not doing anything,” Venice said, bending over her scope again. “At least not until a judge says so.”
* * *
Summer on the tundra was dreamlike. Since the sun stayed out until two A.M., people didn't sleep much in Akiak. Kids would cluster around bootleg booze and weed if they could get it, or leave behind the skins of their candy bars and spilled cans of pop if they couldn't. Younger children splashed in the foggy green water of the Kuskokwim, even though by August they would still lose feeling in their ankles after only a few moments of submersion. Every year, in one of the Yup'ik villages, someone would drown; it was too cold for anyone to stay in the water long enough to learn how to swim.
The year Daniel was eight, he spent July walking barefoot along the banks of the Kuskokwim. A wall of alders and willows lined one side of the river, on the other, sod sloughed into the water from a tenfoot-high embankment. Mosquitoes beaded on the planes of his face every time he stopped moving; sometimes they'd fly into his ears, loud as a bush plane. Daniel would watch the fat backs of king salmon rise like miniature sharks in the center of the river. The men
in the village were off in their aluminum fishing boats, the ones that had been sleeping on the shore like beached whales all winter. Yup'ik fish camps dotted the bank: single-celled cities made of whitewalled tents, or knobby poles nailed together and covered with blue tarps that flapped like the aprons of flustered old women. On plywood tables, the women cut kings and reds into strips, then hung them on the racks to dry as they called out to their children: Kaigtuten-qaa? Are you hungry? Qinucetaanrilgu kinguqliin! Don't try to provoke your little brother!
He picked up a crusted twig, a fan belt, and a binder clip before he saw it - a pitted peak jutting out of the silt. It couldn't be ... could it? It took a trained eye to look past the soaked driftwood to pick out an ivory tusk or a fossilized bone, but it had happened, Daniel knew. Other kids in school - the ones who teased him because he was
kass'aq, who laughed when he didn't know how to shoot a ptarmigan or couldn't find his way back from the bush on a snow-go
- had found mastodon teeth along the banks of the river. Crouching, Daniel dug around the base, even as the river rushed into the hole and buried his progress. It was an honest-to-God tusk, right here, under his hands. He imagined it reaching past the water table, bigger even than the one on display in Bethel. Two ravens watched him from the bank, chattering a play-byplay commentary as Daniel pulled and heaved. Mammoth tusks could be ten or twelve feet long; they might weigh a couple hundred pounds. Maybe it wasn't even a mammoth but a quugaarpak. The Yupiit told stories of the huge creature that lived under the ground and came out only at night. If it was caught above the ground when the sun was up - even the slightest part of it - its entire body would turn into bone and ivory.
Daniel spent hours trying to extricate the tusk, but it was stuck too firm and wedged too deep. He would have to leave it and bring back reinforcements. He marked his site, trampling tall reeds and leaving a hummock of stones piled onto the bank to flag the spot where the tusk would be waiting.
The next day, Daniel returned with a shovel and a block of wood. He had a vague plan of building a dam to stave off the flow of water while he dug his tusk out of the silt. He passed the same people working at fish camp, and the bend where the alder trees had fallen off the bank right into the water, the two ravens cackling . . . but when he came to the spot where he'd found the tusk yesterday, it was gone.
It's said that you can't step into the same river twice. Maybe that was the problem, or maybe the current was so strong it had swept away the pile of rocks Daniel had left as a marker. Maybe it was, as the Yup'ik kids said, that Daniel was too white to do what they could do as naturally as breathing: find history with their own two hands.
It was not until Daniel reached the village again that he realized the ravens had followed him home. Everyone knew that if one bird landed on your roof, it meant company. A tiding of ravens, though, meant something else entirely: that loneliness would be your lot, that there was no hope of changing your course.
* * *
Marita Soorenstad looked up the minute Bartholemew entered her office. “Do you remember a guy named David Fleming?” she asked. He sank down into the chair across from her. “Should I?”
"In 1991, he raped and attempted to kill a fifteen-year-old girl
who was riding her bike home from school. Then he went and killed someone in another county, and there was a Supreme Court case about whether or not the DNA sample taken for the first case could be used as evidence in the next case."
“So?”
“So in Maine, if you take a blood sample from a suspect for one case, you can indeed use it for subsequent tests in a different case,” Marita said. “The problem is that when you took blood from Trixie Stone, she consented because she was a victim, and that's very different from consenting because she's a suspect.”
“Isn't there some kind of loophole?”
“Depends,” Marita said. “There are three situations when you're talking about an individual sample that was given based on consent, as opposed to based on a warrant. In the first, the police tell the individual the sample will be used for any investigation. In the second, the police tell the individual the sample will be used only for a certain investigation. In the third, the police obtain consent after saying that the sample will be used to investigate one particular crime, but they don't make any mention of other uses. You with me so far?” Bartholemew nodded.
“What exactly did you tell Trixie Stone about her rape kit?” He thought back to the night he'd met the girl and her parents in the hospital. Bartholemew could not be entirely sure, but he imagined that he said what he usually did with a sexual assault victim: that this was going to be used for the purposes of the rape case, that it was often the DNA evidence that a jury would hang their hat on.