And then his hands fell to his sides. The pencil and the notepad fell from his hands.
Next to the evergreens at the end of a snow-covered mound, Spencer O’Malley saw two black boots poking up out of the snow.
No, he thought. No. He staggered on the path. No, they weren’t boots. He was too far away. They were just black rocks, or hats, or bags, or junk left on the side of the road. He slowly made his way down the hill.
They’re just black stumps. My imagination. It’s working overtime. It’s been a long day and I need a drink. He stood ten feet away from the mound and stared at the boots. Oh, God. Oh, shit. No.
Spencer liked the way Dartmouth Hall looked in wet weather, its sterling whitewashed walls highlighted by the wide ebony shutters, the building peeking through the soggy green trees like snow in spring. It was Dartmouth Hall that had gotten his attention when he first laid eyes on Hanover.
But in the wintertime, all Spencer saw was the black shutters peeking out of the snow, much like the black boots before him.
The shutters, however, didn’t startle him, didn’t frighten him, didn’t reduce him to a derivative of a detective, of a human being, of a man. When he saw those boots, Spencer realized in an instant of self-loathing and fear that he wasn’t a man, he was just a boy playing detective and hoping no one would catch him.
Spencer crossed himself and silently said two Hail Marys.
Fell was calling down to Spencer from the path. Spencer motioned him to come. They stood side by side. ‘Did you bring the sheets?’ Spencer said hoarsely and then cleared his throat.
‘Yes.’ He handed one sheet to Spencer. ‘Do we need it?’ He looked impassively at the mound.
Spencer laid the sheet out in front of the mound and then searched in his pockets for the notebook, and for a tissue. ‘I think we may have found a body, Fell,’ he said.
Fell looked closer. ‘We did?’ he said with surprise. ‘Where?’
Spencer didn’t find a tissue. His notebook was still on the ground up the hill. ‘Ray,’ he said. ‘Do you see a pair of boots in front of you?’
‘Boots?’ He looked again. ‘Is that what they are?’
‘Well,’ said Spencer slowly, ‘what do they look like to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fell replied. ‘Is that what Milton was pointing to? I kind of looked where he pointed but didn’t see anything.’
‘No, I guess you didn’t,’ said Spencer. ‘Look, make sure no one comes down here and go up and wait for me.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Just wait for me up there, Ray.’
Spencer stood motionless for a few moments and then slowly walked on top of the sheet to the mound. Up close, the boots were strikingly black against the white snow.
Everything else, however, looked to be in its natural place, and the mound looked like a snowdrift. Spencer instantly became convinced it was a snow-drift. He then recalled someone on Main Street wearing similar black boots a few days ago, and he squatted down to the mound, breathlessly relieved. It’s not her, it’s not her.
Spencer put on his leather gloves and started to scrape away at the snow. First slowly, then faster and faster, he frantically dug through the mound. He couldn’t feel anything except hard old snow, and he was thinking, it’s nothing, it’s just boots, somebody played a bad joke, and then he felt something that wasn’t snow.
Shutting his eyes, he brushed the snow away and felt a human hand through his gloves. His heart sank and he opened his eyes, emitting a low groan of pain.
It was Kristina’s hand. Long fingers, stiff and unyielding, no jewelry. The beautiful nails were broken, the red nail polish chipped. The hand was neither clenched nor relaxed, just stiff in the deep freeze, like ice, or like meat. Spencer’s head made a shuddering, jerky motion. He was unable to control it and was vaguely embarrassed by it, as he was by all things uncontrollable. He knew his head made that motion only under extreme duress. He knew now was the time to have his wits about him. Except for the jerking of the head, Spencer was outwardly composed.
He slowly took off his gloves, lifted her icy arm, took her hand into both of his, and held it.
Another anguished moan escaped his dry throat.
He gently laid her hand down and stood up. His head shuddered again.
Spencer stood in the woods with his arms at his sides and tried not to blink. He wished the crowd would move away. And Fell would leave too. Spencer wanted a little privacy with her. Before the examiner and the coroner and the undertaker saw her, before Concord and the major crimes unit at Haverhill saw her. Before the ground would see her, or the oven. His knees were shaking. Please, dear God, he whispered. Please let me take this like a man, let me do my job like a man. I know I can do this, he said. I know I can, and I will.
He willed himself to steady, and then listened to the woods. What had happened?
Not a branch out of place. Not an evergreen leaf, not a bush, and the snow covers everything. I mean, what did she do? Come here to die? Did she just walk over, lie down in the snow, and die? Did she stumble, did she hurt her head and lose consciousness, and then freeze to death? The mound is perfect and symmetrical. Only nature in blizzards blows mounds like this and then leaves them serene for the sun.
But the footsteps barely covered by snow showed that someone had been near her as recently as yesterday afternoon. Spencer squinted into the snow, trying to see better. To the right side of the shoe prints were other tracks. These were small, round, four-toed, and shoeless.
Spencer breathed deeply, nodded to himself, and went back up the hill to Ray Fell.
‘What’s going on there?’ Ray was antsy.
‘There’s a – ’ Spencer paused to get his voice on even keel before he continued. ‘ –a body down there, Ray. Please go and immediately call Will, the hospital, and the funeral home. Oh, and bring me back a camera and several more sheets.’
Having recognized Kristina’s hand, he realized there was no hope anymore, and he wanted her out of the snow as quickly as possible.
‘A body?’ Ray gasped, and immoderate excitement shone in his eyes. ‘My God! Wow.’
Spencer gritted his teeth. ‘A body, Ray,’ he said loudly. ‘Do you understand what that means? It means someone has died. Wonder if you’ll say wow when you have to call her parents and tell them their little girl is dead.’
Embarrassed and red, Ray said, ‘I’m sor –’
‘Please go to the car, call Will and everyone else, and bring me the camera.’
Ray looked befuddled.
‘Raymond, the camera?’ Spencer asked.
Fell was not in possession of the camera he was supposed to carry with him in the patrol car at all times. Something about the cold and not wanting to leave it out in this kind of weather and something about an aunt wanting to see the camera used during crime investigations.
Spencer waved at Fell impatiently and said, ‘Go to the car and get me more sheets. You have those, right? Your aunt didn’t want to see those too, did she?’
‘No, sir,’ said Ray Fell. ‘Do you want me to call Will right away or bring you the sheets right away?’
‘Both, Ray, both,’ said Spencer, turning away from him and going to pick up his notebook and pen from the ground nearby. Damn Ray.
He jotted down the time of his own arrival, what he’d seen, what the mound looked like, the black boots, the footprints, the paw prints, the hand. And then went to talk to the students.
‘Which one of you is Milton Johnson?’
The small, thin guy in the back raised his hand as if he were in class.
Spencer sighed, motioning him to come closer. ‘You don’t have to raise your hand,’ he said. ‘Just speak up. You are…’
‘Milton Johnson,’ the boy said, timidly looking away from Spencer.
‘Milton, do me a favor, and please look at me when you talk to me. All right? We have a body here, and when you don’t look at me, I can’t help it, I think you have something to hide
. Okay?’
The obviously frightened Milton blinked rapidly, unable to stop his teeth from chattering, but managed to look up at Spencer.
‘Now, Milton, when did you notice something?’
‘Just a f-f-few hours ago,’ stammered Milton.
‘What did you notice?’
Milton pointed up to the second-floor windows of Feldberg. ‘I was just sitting on the sill on the second-floor stairwell, taking a break from studying. Looking out the window. Not studying. Avoiding studying, avoiding it, you know.’
‘I know,’ said Spencer helpfully.
‘Anyway, anyway…’ continued Milton, his body now a mass of tics and fidgets.
‘Are you an engineering major, Milton?’
‘Engineering, yes,’ Milton quickly replied. ‘That’s why I was at Feldberg, the engineering library. Plenty of room. Quiet.’
‘Go on, Milton,’ said Spencer.
‘Oh. Yeah. Okay, okay.’ Milton scratched the side of his face and then his hair under his coat hood.
Spencer was glad his own only physical nervous habit was an involuntary shuddering of the head. Maybe engineers could get away with being a mass of nerves. He couldn’t imagine a cop having those physical tics.
‘So anyway, there I was, sitting, and out the window, you know, it’s kind of nice out, sunny, and I’m looking down and at the trees, kind of absent-mindedly, you know?’
‘I know,’ said Spencer. ‘Go on.’
‘And I noticed something, I don’t know. From the second-floor windows it was hard to tell what it was, but I kept looking and looking, and for some reason, I just became a little, I don’t know, obsessed with figuring out what it was, you know?’
‘Go on. What did you think it was?’
‘That’s the whole thing. I couldn’t tell. I mean, strangely, it looked like… well, it really did look like tips of boots. Even from up there.’ Milton pointed.
‘So you went downstairs.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I walked around back, carefully, and then came to about here’ – Milton pointed a few feet away from where they were standing – ‘and I looked down, and it kind of still looked like boots to me. Plus now, on this angle, I noticed there was a mound. Like maybe there was someone under there. So I called the police. I said I didn’t know what it was.’
‘Yes, you did, Milton, and we appreciate your call. How close did you say you came to the mound?’
‘Just down to here.’ He pointed to about four feet away, still on the beaten path.
‘Okay. You’ll have to come down to the police station to make a statement. Okay?’
Milton became a nervous tic again. ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’
‘Milton, one last question,’ said Spencer, jotting the last of the conversation down on the notepad. His hands were cold and moving slowly. ‘Do you have a dog?’
The other students chuckled. Milton scratched his neck, then his hand, then his other hand. He looked small and sickly.
‘No, sir, I don’t have a dog.’
‘Milton is allergic to dogs,’ said the girl in the black wool coat.
‘Milton is allergic to everything,’ someone else chimed in, and Milton, as if to prove just that, broke into a scratching frenzy.
‘I see,’ said Spencer, smiling lightly. ‘Milton, do you come into contact with a lot of dogs?’
‘No, sir. Well, you know Hanover, sir. They’re everywhere, the damn things. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.’
‘Smart move, Milton,’ agreed Spencer, checking his notepad. ‘You live in Mass Row, see a lot of dogs there?’
‘No, sir. We’re not allowed to have dogs on campus.’
‘Ahh,’ said Spencer alertly. ‘Any students disobey the rules?’
‘Plenty,’ said the girl in the black wool coat. ‘It’s one of those rules hard to enforce. Too many people break it.’
‘One more question, Milton,’ said Spencer. ‘Did you come down here yesterday, by any chance?’
‘Yesterday? No, uh-uh.’ Milton shook his head, and then couldn’t stop shaking it. ‘I didn’t come to Feldberg yesterday,’ he said, his head still shaking. ‘Too many classes. Studied in my room. Why? You think I was here?’
‘Unless you were here, Milton, no, I don’t think so. Relax. You can go back home if you want to. Someone will call you later today, all right?’
‘Yeah, sure, no problem,’ Milton said, trying to sound brave, but his hands twitched.
Spencer waited impatiently for Ray.
After Ray returned with the sheets, he and Spencer took the police tape and spent several minutes taping around a twenty-by-twenty-yard area surrounding the mound. Spencer tried to concentrate on the sticky tape and not think of anything else, POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS read the black letters on the tape, which, except for the letters, looked much like the yellow sticky fly traps that hung from the ceiling of Spencer’s mother’s kitchen.
As they were rolling the yellow tape around the makeshift posts they cobbled together with twigs, Spencer felt his feet break through a crust of ice and sink deep into the snow, up to his knees. For a brief, unreal moment, Spencer wondered if the black boots kept Kristina’s feet from being wet and cold.
Spencer looked at their tape work. To get the tape around the trees, they had to break some of the branches, which were now lying on the ground, marring the impeccable white blanket that covered the earth. With their police tape they created more disarray than death had made.
After they were done, they went under the yellow tape into the crime scene and spread two more sheets down on the ground to protect the evidence.
‘Careful,’ Spencer told Fell in an irritated voice when he saw him step on the snow. ‘See the tracks?’
Fell stepped back on the sheet and squatted. They were about five feet away from the mound.
‘Kind of,’ he said slowly. ‘But they look old.’
Spencer, also on his haunches, turned to him. ‘Fell, that’s a good thing. We want them to be really old.’
‘Old?’
‘Very old. She –’ He stopped. ‘The body,’ he corrected himself, ‘has not been here since just this morning. It’s covered by snow. You remember the last heavy snow?’
‘Well,’ said Fell uncertainly, ‘it snowed last night.’
‘Yes, it did. Did it snow enough to cover a person?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fell replied coolly. ‘I wasn’t out last night.’
Straightening up, Spencer said just as coolly, ‘Ray, you were on the four-to-midnight shift. What do you mean, you weren’t out last night?’
Fell became flustered. ‘Yes. I meant out walking.’
‘You didn’t see the snow from inside your car?’
‘Yes. I saw. It snowed.’
‘Yes. Not much, though,’ Spencer said, backing away. ‘This morning on the radio, they reported an inch and a half. Do you think an inch and a half is enough to cover a person?’
Averting his gaze, Fell said archly, ‘No, sir.’
Spencer nodded. ‘Good. Neither do I. So what was I saying? Be careful of the tracks.’
The snowstorm before Thanksgiving was enough to cover her, he thought, looking at the mound. The snowdrifts alone reached six feet in places around town. A chill passed through him. Has she been here since before Thanksgiving? He surreptitiously crossed himself, his head jerking. It just can’t be.
Spencer’s thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of his partner, Will Baker, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical examiner, and two ambulances.
‘Did we need two ambulances?’ said Spencer to Will, a balding, paunchy man with a goatee, who came under the tape and stood next to Spencer.
‘Ray wasn’t specific on the phone. He didn’t know how many bodies you’d found.’
Spencer shook his head. ‘There’s only one body,’ Spencer said testily. ‘She doesn’t need the entire hospital.’
Will studied Spencer. ‘What’s the
matter with you? And how do you know it’s a she?’
‘Well, unless the man once had fine, long, well-polished nails, it’s a she,’ said Spencer.
‘You touched the body?’ Ray Fell said, sounding slightly repulsed.
Spencer considered him briefly before ignoring him. ‘Can you go and question the other students, Ray? Get their phone numbers.’
Stretching his hand out to Will, Spencer said, ‘Where’s the camera?’ Will handed him a Nikon 28-85. The two men hunched down in front of the mound. ‘So what do we have here?’ Will asked quietly.
‘A dead girl,’ replied Spencer.
‘I see.’ Will fell silent. ‘Trace, who dug her hand out of the snow?’
Spencer thought before answering. ‘I did.’
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t know it was a body until I saw the hand.’
Will looked sideways at Spencer. ‘The boots didn’t give you an idea?’
‘No,’ said Spencer, not elaborating further. ‘Look,’ he said to Will, pointing at the prints next to the mound.
Will looked carefully. ‘What do you think of these?’ he asked.
Spencer replied, ‘Someone was walking a dog and stumbled onto the body.’
‘You think it was a dog?’
‘As opposed to what? A wolf? A cougar? A fox? How often are they walked around here? The paw prints are right next to the boot prints.’
‘Boot prints?’
‘Good winter shoe. Very fashionable. Deep grooves, thick lug sole with the trademark single lug in the heel. Doc Martens. About size ten. A little big for a girl. Probably a guy, five ten or so. Medium-pressure impression. He’s not too heavy, maybe one-sixty.’
As Spencer was talking, he noticed something else. At the side of the right boot, he saw a small hole, maybe three inches deep, clawed out with some urgency, as if the animal was desperately trying to get to whoever was underneath the mound. Spencer almost heard the whine of the animal. Brushing the snow back from the hole, Spencer noticed skid marks on the icy crust where the reluctant animal had been pulled away.
He stood, trying to control his head, to no avail. ‘Not just a dog,’ said Spencer. ‘But her dog.’