The Woman in the Woods

“I’ll talk to him.”

  “Do that.”

  Moxie closed the paper, and turned it so that the story above the fold on the front page was facing Parker.

  “You been following this?”

  Parker had caught up on the discovery of the remains of a woman in Piscataquis County. Maine wasn’t immune from violent crime, and victims showed up from time to time. Perhaps it was the manner in which the body had been revealed—a thaw, a fallen tree—and its burial in a sackcloth shroud, but something about the case seemed to have captured the public imagination in the state, beyond the media’s stoking of the fire because it was a quiet time for news.

  “I don’t know any more than what I’ve read in the papers,” said Parker.

  “I do.”

  Trust Moxie. No tree fell unheard in a Maine forest, not with him around.

  “Homicide?”

  “Suspicious death for now. No obvious signs of external injury.”

  That in itself was unusual. So many forms of sudden death left marks, even on semi-skeletonized remains. A bullet might bequeath a hole, a knife a scratch mark on a rib or sternum. Strangulation fractured small bones in the neck. Drugs were subtler, but even their presence was registered. Bone marrow retained toxins, and the hair and nails recorded exposure to narcotics. The body found ways to memorialize its end.

  Parker knew that Moxie wouldn’t have brought up the subject of the woman if he didn’t have information he wanted to share.

  “But?”

  “The autopsy suggests she gave birth shortly before she died, and late in the final trimester. Something to do with the position of the pelvic bones, but the police also believe they may have found the placenta and umbilical cord in the same state of semi-preservation as the body.”

  “How long after she gave birth was she put in the ground?”

  “Hard to say, but no more than a day or two. Could be even less. The presence of the cord and placenta suggests it might have been hours.”

  “Did your contact give you an estimate on her age?”

  “Mid-twenties.”

  “So not a teenager.”

  This might have been the twenty-first century, but it was still depressing to Parker how many teenage girls felt compelled to hide their pregnancies out of shame, or fear of parental anger, until the time came to give birth, alone and unattended, with the worst potential consequences for both mother and child.

  “No,” said Moxie, “although adulthood is no guarantee against having a baby away from a hospital or home, either intentionally or by accident.”

  “Then where’s the child?”

  “If it died, then presumably it would have been interred with the mother. It might have survived.”

  “Unless it’s buried somewhere nearby,” said Parker.

  “Why bury it away from its mother?”

  “Or was taken by animals.”

  “Then why not feed on the mother, too?”

  “You want to go into that over breakfast?” An infant body, Parker knew, would be easier to consume.

  “I’m not hearing anything about animal damage to the mother’s body,” said Moxie.

  “So the mother dies,” said Parker, “either from complications arising out of childbirth or at the hands of another, and the baby is kept by whoever put the mother in the ground?”

  “Or dropped off somewhere: a hospital, a charity.”

  Sooner or later the police would start chasing down records of abandoned infants. A more exact estimate of when the young woman had died would help, but abandonments weren’t so common anymore. For the moment, though, they’d be operating on the assumption of infant remains buried in proximity to those of the mother.

  Parker sat back from his food and signaled for more coffee. It came, and he waited until both their mugs were refilled before he spoke again.

  “So why does this interest you?” he asked.

  “The state police are keeping some details back.”

  It was not uncommon for the police to hold off on revealing evidence found at a scene, especially anything that might be known only to someone intimately connected with a crime, particularly the individual responsible for its commission. It was a way for the police to test for false confessions and accusations, as well as weed out time wasters and the insane.

  “And you know what these details are?”

  “Correct, although only one of them is relevant to me.”

  Parker waited.

  “It’s a Star of David—not carved into the fallen tree by the grave, but on another nearby, facing it.”

  “It doesn’t mean that the star and the body are connected.”

  “No, but if there’s one subject on which we’re not short of experts in this state, it’s trees. It’s all still approximate, but the star was probably carved at around the same time that body went into the ground.”

  “And you’re sure it’s a Star of David?”

  “It was carefully done. I don’t believe there’s any doubt.”

  “Has anyone mentioned hate crime?”

  “It came up. The ME is still waiting on toxicology results. They’ll take another five weeks to appear, but I don’t recall hearing about many hate crime poisonings. And it’s just a Star of David: no swastika alongside it, no anti-Semitic indicators. The star looks to be a marker, even a memorial, and nothing more.”

  Parker glanced again at the bag by Moxie’s side.

  “Torah glasses,” he said.

  “Torah glasses,” Moxie echoed, raising a hand for the check. “It may surprise you, but I tend to believe the best of people. It’s because I mostly see the worst, and being an optimist is the only way I can keep getting out of bed in the morning. I think someone buried that woman but held on to her child, and I’m hoping it was for a noble reason. Whether it was or not, the person or persons responsible will be getting very worried right now. When the police find them—and my feeling is that they will be found, because someone who takes the time to carve a Star of David as a makeshift memorial doesn’t strike me as a professional disposer of bodies—they’re going to need advice and representation. Call it my service for the dead woman. Yours, too, although in your case you’ll also be paid for your time.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ve exhausted my source. I’ve found out all I’m going to, for now.”

  By this Parker guessed that Moxie’s contact was someone close to the ME’s office rather than the state police.

  “I don’t have many friends in Augusta,” said Parker.

  “I’m a lawyer—I don’t have any at all. Learn what you can. Shadow the investigation. I want to believe that child is alive.”

  “Against the odds.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The state police may not like me riding their coattails.”

  “This isn’t a homicide—not yet, maybe not ever. The only crime that’s been committed so far is an unregistered burial.”

  The check came. Moxie paid in cash, and tipped generously.

  “So?” he asked Parker.

  “I guess I’m hired.”

  Moxie grinned.

  “That’s my boy,” he said. “It’s just a shame that your more unusual skill sets won’t be required for this investigation. Hell, you probably won’t even have to raise your voice . . .”

  CHAPTER

  XXIII

  It had taken Holly Weaver’s father two days to return to his home outside Guilford, two days during which Holly had died a thousand deaths, a hundred of them alone in the hours after the discovery of the body in the woods. Owen Weaver drove a big rig for a living, and was down in Florida when the woman was found. At forty cents a mile, that represented good money—the best he’d earned in a while, because the winter months were always slow, and her father preferred to work in New England when possible. But then, winter was bad for a lot of folks in Maine. Holly worked as a secretary and receptionist for a medical supply company in Dover-Foxcroft. She’d be
en lucky to hold on to all her hours in January and February—lucky to hold on to her job—while waitressing work on the weekends gave her the chance to squirrel away some cash without the IRS biting. At least Daniel was in kindergarten now, which made things a little easier. She wasn’t paying as much in childcare, wasn’t—

  What if they found out? What if they arrived with their flashing lights and took Daniel away?

  She’d die.

  Make those a thousand and one deaths.

  She’d been so frightened that she hadn’t even used her own phone to call her father after the body was found. They listened in to calls, didn’t they: the police, the CIA, the NSA? Holly had a vision of endless white rooms filled with people, all with headphones clamped to their ears, flicking between conversations, waiting for keywords: ISIS, explosive, murder, body, found, shallow, grave. She knew it probably wasn’t like that in reality. They had computers programmed to pick up on phrases. She’d read about it somewhere, or thought she had. Surely they could spy on pay phones too? But at least with a pay phone some prospect of anonymity existed. If you were dumb enough to talk about bad stuff on your cell, you might as well put the cuffs on your own wrists and wait for them to come by and arrest you.

  So she left her cell phone by the TV before emptying the nickels and dimes from the little milkmaid money box that she kept on the mantelpiece: her “treat fund,” she called it, even though she was often forced to raid it for new clothing or shoes for the boy, he was growing so fast.

  A thousand and two deaths.

  She put all the coins in an old sock, secured Daniel in the child seat in case of an accident—

  A thousand and three.

  Enough.

  —and headed to the gas station, where there was a pay phone she could use. Rain was falling, and the wipers left streaks on the windshield. They needed to be replaced, but she didn’t have the money for it, not this month, and she didn’t want to ask her father, because he already gave her too much. Sometimes Holly suspected that her father kept working only because of her and Daniel, although he assured her that he enjoyed being out on the road. He claimed to double-clutch down hills even while sleeping in his own bed at home, and he used a truck logbook as a diary.

  Her father was part of a subspecies with its own rules, and its own language. She’d grown up listening to him talk of the “chicken chokers,” who moved animals, and the “suicide jockeys,” with their loads of hazardous materials. But he was also different from so many of his kind, who drifted like tumbleweeds through life: no home, or not much of one beyond a mildewed apartment; no family, or none with whom they were in contact; no money, or none beyond what they could keep in their wallets; and no future, or none beyond the next job. Owen Weaver wasn’t one of the wanderers, and if he valued the freedom of the road, he treasured his daughter and grandson more. Yet he still loved that damn rig, and the solitude of his cab, and the conversations at truck stops that always began with the same question: “Whatcha driving?”

  But Owen Weaver was past sixty, and his back hurt like a bitch after nearly forty years behind the wheel of various semis. Holly supposed she could have sold the house that she and her son shared, and gone to live with her father next door, but the house was all she had, and pride prevented her from parting with it—pride, and the knowledge that much as she loved her father, and much as he cherished his daughter and Daniel, he wasn’t a man to share his space easily. Two wives, one of them her own mother, could have attested to that.

  Holly missed her mother. She’d died too soon, at thirty-five, and her father had remarried too soon in the aftermath, perhaps out of panic at being left alone to care for a young daughter. He’d realized the error of his ways quickly enough, as did his second wife. They’d parted amicably but irrevocably, and since then only a few women had shared Owen Weaver’s bed, although none lingered. Until Holly left school, her father took only local haulage jobs, mostly managing to be home in time for dinner, and often before. Holly had always known her father would do anything for her, anything at all.

  Even before the “Woman in the Woods,” as the newspapers and TV reports were already calling her—which gave Holly the creeps, because it was almost as though they’d read the story she’d written for Daniel, the one she should never have committed to paper.

  She dialed Owen’s number, put in the total required for three minutes, and listened as the phone rang at the other end, over and over, until her father’s voice came on the line requesting that she leave a message; and she almost lost it then, wanted to scream and shout, but somehow she held it together for long enough to recite the pay phone number and ask him to call her back right away. She returned to the car because the rain was still falling and the wind had picked up, but she kept the window down and the radio off for fear of missing the phone ringing, even though Daniel complained about the cold, and the boredom. She snapped at him, and he began to cry, and she didn’t want him to cry, not ever, and she didn’t want him to be sad, not ever. All she wanted was for him to be happy, and to know he was loved, and to call her “Mom,” always.

  The phone started to ring. A man emerged from the restroom, and Holly caught him looking at the phone even as she stepped from the car. She waved at him to show that the call was for her, but she wished he could have just stayed in the damn can for a few seconds longer. She didn’t want anyone to remember her face, or the make and license number of her car, or the child crying in the backseat. It was why she’d held herself apart for so long; why she lived in a little house out by the woods; why she didn’t mix with the other mothers at Daniel’s school; why she hadn’t slept with a man since before Daniel’s birth; why she was alone.

  So she wouldn’t be noticed, so she wouldn’t have to answer any questions.

  She picked up the phone.

  “Holly?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “What’s wrong? What number is this?”

  “It’s a pay phone. Listen, I need you to come home, just as soon as you can.”

  “Why? Has something happened to you, to Daniel? Are you both okay? Are you hurt?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. Please take a look at the local news up here. Can you do that?”

  Holly knew that her father never went far without his iPad. It kept him company on his trips. He watched movies on it, read books, everything.

  “Sure. I’ll pull it up right now. I’m going to put you on speaker to free up my hands.”

  “I’ll hold on.”

  Holly heard the sound of movement, followed moments later by what might have been an intake of breath, and the voice of a news anchor familiar to her from Channel 6 in Portland. It was the same report she’d watched barely two hours earlier. She let her father absorb it without interruption, until the segment ended, to be replaced with silence.

  “You understand?” she said, at last.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Holly looked at her car. She could see Daniel monitoring her through the windshield. He was no longer crying. He just seemed as though he were concentrating very hard on what he was witnessing in an effort to interpret it, the way he did when they played games of animal charades.

  “I’m not going to let them take him from me,” she said.

  “Holly—”

  “I’m telling you, that’s all. It’s not going to happen.”

  “It won’t. I’ll start for home first thing in the morning.”

  “Drive carefully.”

  “I will. And Holly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything will be all right. What we did—”

  Holly hung up. She didn’t want him to say it aloud.

  In case they were listening.

  CHAPTER

  XXIV

  Parker’s relationship with Detective Gordon Walsh of the Maine State Police was no longer as amicable as it once had been, in large part because Walsh believed Parker to have colluded
in the killing of a man in the town of Boreas almost a year earlier.

  This was not entirely true: Parker would have preferred if the man in question had lived, if only so he could have faced trial for his crimes, but circumstances dictated that Parker’s preferences didn’t much enter into it. The soon-to-be decedent had arrived with a gun, and every intention of using it to end Parker’s life. This was a course of action to which Parker, not without some justification, had certain objections. As it turned out, Louis shared these objections, and had therefore been forced to put a rifle bullet in the man’s head from long range before drifting back to New York in order to avoid any awkward questions that might otherwise have been directed at him. Meanwhile, the extent to which the victim had been lured into a trap remained a matter for moral philosophers—well, moral philosophers and Detective Gordon Walsh of the MSP’s Major Crimes Unit.

  So it was that Parker was not entirely unsurprised to see Walsh’s face cloud as the policeman emerged from Ruski’s on Danforth just as Sunday afternoon was fading into evening. It hadn’t been difficult to find him: Ruski’s was a popular spot for cops, both local and state, and Sunday afternoons often saw the creation of an informal bullpen at the bar, mostly to talk and let off steam, but also to facilitate the discreet exchange of information. Parker generally avoided Ruski’s on Sundays—it wasn’t the day or place for a private investigator to arrive seeking assistance—but he knew Walsh was one of the regulars, and buttonholing him on the street would save Parker a trip. Perhaps he also hoped that a couple of beers might have mellowed Walsh a little. If so, he was destined to be disappointed.

  “Go away,” said Walsh, as soon as Parker drew near.

  “But you don’t know why I’m here.”

  Walsh spoke as he walked, but Parker kept pace with him, which didn’t seem to bring Walsh any obvious joy.

  “I do know why you’re here: it’s because you want something. You always want something.”

  “Everybody always wants something.”

  “Who are you now, Plato?”

  “I don’t think that’s Platonism, just reality.”