4.
“It’s probably a possum,” says Cortez, breathing hard as we charge like maniacs through the woods. “Stupid dog probably wants to show you a squirrel.”
It’s not a possum. It’s not a squirrel. That much I can tell from the way that Houdini is hurtling forward, all sparked up, racing and bounding despite that limp, a distinct stutter step as he careens through the undergrowth. We run after him, Cortez and I, through the dense woods that back up against the police station, crashing through the brush like the world is on fire. It’s not a possum or a squirrel.
We tumble down a westward slope, along the muddy bank of a small creek, deeper into the woods, and then at last we come out in a small clearing, a leafy mud-specked oval maybe twenty-five feet around. Cortez and I step over a line of high bushes to get in there while Houdini noses under, tearing new cuts in his hide, not caring. Cortez has a hatchet clutched tightly in one fist, and there is, I know, a sawed-off shotgun in the deep inside pocket of his long black coat. I draw my own weapon, the SIG Sauer, and hold it out ahead of me two-handed. The three of us form a semicircle at the edge of the clearing: man, dog, man, all panting, all staring at the body. It’s a girl, facedown in the dirt.
“Christ,” says Cortez. “Christ almighty.”
I don’t answer. I can’t breathe. I take a step into the clearing, steady myself. The image disappearing, reappearing, my vision clouding and unclouding. The girl is fully clothed: Denim skirt. Pale blue top. Tan sandals. Arms thrown out in front of her as if she had died swimming, or reaching for something.
“That her?” Cortez says quietly. In three strides I’m across the clearing to the body, and by the time I get there I know that it’s not—the hair is wrong, the height. My sister has never worn a jean skirt. I manage the word: “No.”
My body floods with relief—and then, immediately, guilt, crashing in like a second wave while the first is still ebbing. This girl is not my sister but she is somebody’s sister, or daughter, or friend. She is somebody’s something. She was. Facedown in the dirt in the woods, arms extended. Caught after a chase. Six days to the end.
Cortez steps up next to me, the hatchet clenched like a caveman’s club. We’re a quarter mile into the stillness of the forest and you can no longer see the one-story police station behind us, or the small town of Rotary that is down the hill on the other side of the woods. We might as well be miles deep into timberland, lost in a green-brown fairy world, surrounded by wildflowers and mud and the curled yellow leaves that have drifted down to coat the forest floor.
I kneel beside the body of the girl and roll her over, gingerly brush the dirt and wood chips off her cheeks and out of her eyes. She’s Asian. Pretty. Fragile features. Black hair, pale cheeks. Thin pink lips. Small gold stud earrings, one in each ear. She’s been in a fight; her face shows multiple lacerations and bruises, including a black eye, the right eye, swollen almost shut. And the girl’s throat is cut from end to end, one side to the other, a terrible slash beginning at a point just beneath her right ear and traveling in a curved line to a point just below her left. The sight is flatly horrific, the red vision of her throat’s insides, wet and raw, gashed out of the pale white flesh. Blood is dried in clustered drips along the length of the wound.
Cortez takes one knee in the mud beside me and murmurs: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I glance at him questioningly and he looks up, smiling but uneasy.
“I know,” says Cortez. “I’m full of surprises.”
I’m looking at the corpse, at her neck, thinking about the rack over the kitchen sink, butcher’s knife, paring knife, cleaver, everything splattered and stained with blood, and then I am about to stand up and she breathes—a tiny but distinct movement of her chest, and then another. Rise and fall.
“Whoa—” I say, “Hey—” and Cortez says “What?” while I scramble to find her pulse point, inches below her Adam’s apple, under the horrible wound. There it is, the faint cry of a pulse, a thready gallop under my fingertips.
She has no business being alive, this kid, throat slit and lying in the woods, but there you go, here she is. I bend my head down close and listen to the shallow breaths. She’s desperately dehydrated, tongue thick and dry and lips cracked.
Very carefully, very gently, I lift the girl and arrange her weight in my arms, supporting her head in the crook of my arm like a newborn baby’s.
“It’s my fault,” I whisper, and Cortez says, “What?”
“It’s all my fault.”
We’re too late. That’s the feverish understanding that’s burning its way up my neck and my face, standing here cradling this victim: whatever happened out here has already happened and we missed it and it’s my fault. We took too long to get here from Concord, made too many stops, always my decision, always my fault. A girl, ten miles outside of Seneca Falls, she came screaming out of the woods beside the roadway: she and her brother had been trying to free the animals from the local zoo, the poor beasts were trapped and starving, and now a tiger had cornered the brother and run him up a tree. All of this one long terrified rush of words, and Cortez said it was a trap and to keep driving the cart—we were in a golf cart, we found it at a country club in Syracuse—but I said I couldn’t do that, I said we have to help her and he asked why and I said “she reminds me of my sister.” Cortez laughed, opened his door with the sawed-off trained on the girl. “Everything reminds you of your sister.”
The episode with the tiger cost us half a day, and there were more, too many more, red towns and gray towns. In Dunkirk we pulled a family from a burning apartment building in the fiery wreck of downtown but then we had nowhere to take them, no way to offer them assistance of any kind. We just left them on the firehouse steps.
It’s spitting rain, ugly and cold. Late morning. The dog is moving in anxious circles among the trees, the dirt, the clumps of yellow leaves. I hold the sleeping girl close in my arms like a honeymooner, start the walk back to the police station. Cortez goes ahead of us, swinging the hatchet, clearing brush and branches from the path. Houdini limping along behind.
5.
We called it Police House because that was the name the kids picked for it, a big isolated country house in western Massachusetts, near a dot on the map called Furman. A bunch of cops and retired cops and their kids and friends have banded together there to live out the last run of days in relative security, in the company of like-minded individuals. That’s where I was living, along with Trish McConnell and her kids, along with a handful of other old friends and new acquaintances, before I left to find my sister.
Among those in residence at Police House, on the top floor, is a tough old bird with close-cropped gray hair named Elda Burdell, known as the Night Bird, or just the Bird. Officer Burdell retired at the rank of detective sergeant two years before I joined the force; at Police House she has eased into the roles of unofficial dean and resident sage. Not the leader, but the person who sits in the attic in her armchair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a stack of cases she showed up with, dispensing advice and wise counsel about everything. The kids ask her which berries are safe to eat. Officer Capshaw and Officer Katz had the Bird settle a bet about what the best lures are for catching trout out of the fast-moving stream a quarter mile from the house.
Late on August 23, the day after my trip to Concord to visit Abigail, I took the long walk up the stairs to the attic to discuss a couple of matters related to my planned departure.