The Body in the Woods

  And suddenly it came to him.

  From a drawer, he took out the jeweler’s loupe and put it to his right eye. He picked up a pair of tweezers. From a jumble of objects he kept in another drawer—cigarette lighters, watches, belt buckles—he selected what looked like a thumb drive.

  Humming “Greensleeves,” he set to work.

  Alas, my love, you do me wrong,

  To cast me off discourteously

  For I have loved you well and long,

  Delighting in your company.

  CHAPTER 21

  THURSDAY

  ALL OF THEM GONE NOW

  “Me and the SAR team are in the OREGONIAN today,” Nick told his mom and Kyle. He sat down at the dining room table and reached for the orange box of Wheaties. “They took a picture of us yesterday after we completed the evidence search. For that murder investigation.” Nick might be three years younger than his brother, but here he was, playing an integral part in something as serious as a murder investigation.

  Neither his mom nor his brother were exactly morning people. His mom nodded as she leaned against the kitchen counter and drank her coffee. She was a cashier at Fred Meyer, a regional supermarket chain. Kyle shrugged, his eyes at half-mast. He was slumped over his cereal bowl. One hand propped up his head, and the other held his phone. He was checking his texts while his Wheaties turned to mush. In the evenings, he took classes at Portland Community College, and during the day he sorted packages for UPS. Sometimes on weekends Nick and Kyle played first-person shooter video games together, but other than that, he was completely off Kyle’s radar.

  “So?” Kyle said. “Who reads the paper anymore?”

  Unfortunately, he had a point. This morning, Nick had gone looking online for the picture. But he didn’t know anyone who actually read a physical copy of the paper, or even checked it out on the Web. Certainly not anyone his own age.

  “The photo’s online, too.” It sounded lame. Everything was online, so nothing was special. Their photo was competing against videos of impossibly cute kittens and crazy skateboarding tricks.

  After looking at the Oregonian website, Nick had tried going to Miranda’s Facebook page, but because of the way she set her privacy settings, all he’d been able to see was her profile photo. It had been so weird to look at her smiling face, her cigarette, and her circlet of flowers, and to think that all of them were gone now. The flowers compost, the cigarette crushed, the girl dead.

  Kyle started typing a message with one thumb. With a sigh, Nick added milk to his cereal.

  The coffee maker hissed as his mom pulled the pot free while more fresh coffee was still trickling in. She dumped the few ounces into her mug and slid the pot back. She never ate breakfast, but always insisted that they did.

  “Are you sure you should be doing this?” She pressed her lips together. “You’re only sixteen. When I signed the permission slip, I thought it was going to be about rescuing lost people in the woods.”

  Nick realized that he had better recalibrate, and fast. There was no point in trying to make Kyle think he was cool. In attempting to make him realize that, even though Nick couldn’t remember his dad, he was the one who was going to follow in his footsteps. Nothing he did had ever impressed his older brother or would ever impress him in the future. If Nick said that yesterday he had fought off a serial killer and saved a beautiful girl, Kyle would just shrug and go on scrolling through his phone. On the flip side, if his mom got too freaked out about SAR, she could pull him out.

  “There are kids in SAR younger than me.” A couple of the guys were fifteen, although neither of them had turned out for the search yesterday. “It was fine. To be honest, it was kind of boring. Spending hours on your hands and knees, staring at the ground, flagging little pieces of trash that the wind blew in. Next time I hope we get called out to help someone.”

  Her lips folded in on themselves. “I hope so, too. Because spending a bunch of time where that poor girl died doesn’t seem healthy.” More coffee burbled into the pot, but she left it alone, so he knew she was serious.

  “I think it’s helping my ADHD,” Nick improvised. “It’s, like, teaching me to concentrate.”

  Kyle shot him a sharp look. Nick wondered if he was actually paying more attention than he was letting on. It might still be worthwhile to try to get him interested. Just not when their mom was around.

  “I don’t understand why they don’t have real cops doing something like that.” She finally noticed the new coffee and poured it into her mug, then added another splash of milk.

  “They did have a detective there to check out what we found. But if they put fourteen cops on their hands and knees for a day, then they wouldn’t be out on the street writing tickets or catching bad guys. And we don’t cost anything.”

  “Still, you had to miss school to do it. If your grades drop, you’re going to be out of there.” She tossed back the rest of her coffee and put her mug in the dishwasher.

  “I know, Mom. You said that already. Don’t worry.” This hadn’t gone at all the way Nick had imagined it would. All it had gotten him was a shrug and a lecture. He couldn’t wait to get to school. He started shoveling in his cereal.

  * * *

  At school, all anyone could talk about was Jericho Jones, the best quarterback Wilson High had ever seen. Only last night Jericho had been driving around with Robbie Bellflower, who had dropped out last year. Robbie had pulled a gun and robbed some guy at a bus stop. Both Robbie and Jericho had been arrested, and Jericho was probably going to be suspended as well, maybe even expelled. Apparently it didn’t really matter that the gun had turned out to be an Airsoft that shot only BBs, not bullets.

  Still, Nick tried to work the evidence search into conversation at every opportunity. Before the bell rang for first period, he turned around and talked to Kylie Milani, a blond girl who sat behind him and who was railing about the unfairness of Jericho’s fate.

  Nick saw an in. “They don’t think it was a gun that killed that girl in Forest Park, but we had to keep an eye out for one anyway yesterday when we were searching for crime scene evidence.” He tried to hew to SAR’s rules. “Our orders were to look for anything God didn’t put there. I found something that was so important that they pulled everyone off the field so the homicide detective could check it out. I can’t say what it was, though.”

  He closed his mouth meaningfully and waited for her to ask. But it was like he was invisible.

  “Without Jericho, our team is going to suck,” Kylie said. “And it wasn’t even a real gun.”

  * * *

  As he was finishing lunch, Nick saw Sasha Madigan carrying her tray to the garbage and hurried so they arrived at the same time.

  “I don’t know if you saw the paper today, but they’ve identified that dead girl whose body we found in Forest Park the day before yesterday. Her name’s Miranda Wyatt. She went to Alder Grove Academy. I helped the cops with the evidence search yesterday.”

  Sasha was staring at him, balancing a pink wad of gum between her front teeth. He had imagined kissing her so often, but a lot of times she didn’t even answer his texts.

  “The homicide detective thinks that I might have found a key piece of evidence.”

  Nick waited for Sasha to ask him what he had found. Maybe he might even tell, after swearing her to secrecy.

  Instead she said, “Wait. You were crawling over where her body was? Like, on the exact same spot?”

  “Yes. The same spot.” Well, close enough.

  Her nose wrinkled. “Gross! Like, did it smell or anything?”

  “What? No. I don’t think she had been dead very long when we found her.” He wasn’t even supposed to say that, but Sasha still didn’t seem interested.

  * * *

  When he was in biology, a voice came over the intercom. “Nick Walker, Nick Walker, please report to the office.”

  From the back of the room came a few catcalls. A guy’s voice singsonged, “Nick’s in trouble!”

>   Could he be in trouble? As he got to his feet, he reviewed everything he had said so far today. He had basically stuck to what the Oregonian had printed. He hadn’t given anything away. Not really. But what if someone had called the sheriff’s office?

  In the office, two girls were sitting on the bench informally known as the “bench of doom” because it was where you waited to talk to the vice principal. Josie Karl had eyes outlined in black eyeliner a half inch thick. She looked exotic, like some cross between a lemur and a girl. And Becca Berry was wearing a skirt so short she really shouldn’t be sitting down in it.

  Not that Nick was complaining.

  “I’m Nick Walker,” he told the office lady, Mrs. Weissig. With over a thousand students, the only people whose names she really knew were kids like Josie and Becca. Kids who spent a lot of time on the bench of doom.

  She pressed her lips together, and he forgot all about Becca’s skirt. “Nick, a Detective Harriman just called. He wants you to come down to police headquarters.” Her face was stern.

  His heart seized. Oh, crap. When would he learn to think before he spoke? Was he going to get kicked out of SAR? Would this screw up his joining when he turned eighteen?

  Her next words interrupted his internal monologue. “The detective said they have a suspect they want you to look at.” She nodded meaningfully.

  He realized that she was impressed. Mrs. Weissig, who had seen everything. Twice.

  It was like a gift. Nick raised his voice. “So you’re saying the Portland police want me to come down and identify a murder suspect.”

  She nodded, her double chins wobbling. “That’s what they said. Except for the murder part.”

  Her correction didn’t matter. Because Josie and Becca were already whispering.

  Nick Walker. Key witness in a murder investigation.

  CHAPTER 22

  THURSDAY

  IN A DARKENED ROOM

  Ruby found a parking spot only two blocks from the Portland Police Bureau’s Central Precinct. Her heart was beating fast. If they wanted her to look at a suspect, then it must be one of the people they had met on the trail.

  Her parents still didn’t know she had taken part in the evidence search. This morning she had set the alarm for early and smuggled the newspaper to her room where she had hidden it. Last night, Ruby had played the Good Student, a role she had found her parents particularly liked. She had claimed to be studying at the library and had even come home with a stack of books she had checked out before class.

  As she walked toward the police station, Ruby ran through what she knew about lineups. There were two kinds: photo and live. And there were two ways to conduct each kind: simultaneous and sequential. Sequential was the most accurate. In a simultaneous lineup, human error could creep in. A witness viewing a group of potential suspects might pick the one who looked most like the person who had done it. But “most like” was not the same as “the one.” The Innocence Project had freed hundreds of wrongfully convicted prisoners, and most of them had been sent to prison by witnesses who had misidentified an innocent person as the bad guy.

  On TV, it was always a live lineup, probably because that was more interesting visually. Ruby felt a little shivery as she imagined herself in a darkened room, peering through one-way glass, watching a group of men shamble in and then turn and face her.

  “Got any money?” a guy asked, startling her. He was only a few feet away, dressed in a dark hoodie and jeans. His cheeks were hollow, and his backpack was covered with layers of patches. Even though he was clearly a street person, Ruby thought he was her age, at most a year or two older.

  “No,” she said. “Sorry.” And bit her lip so she wouldn’t add that he smelled. Her mom was always reminding her not to make any personal observations that might be perceived as negative. The only exception was if the person could remedy the situation immediately. But the reek hovering over this guy like a cloud seemed sort of permanent.

  Central Precinct’s lobby was a soaring circular space, empty except for a directory set in green granite. The floor was made of alternating squares of pink and white marble laid on the diagonal. Uniformed cops walked quickly past Ruby, their steps echoing. On either side of the room, stairs curved upward in perfect symmetry, flanked by shining silver handrails. They looked like they belonged in some movie from the thirties, the kind Ruby’s grandma liked to watch. As if two matching sets of chorus girls dressed in feathers and spangles would soon come high-stepping down either side. But the stairs were empty.

  Posted on the wall was a notice that visitors had to check in at the front desk. She finally found it in a narrow, low-ceilinged hallway tucked behind the lobby. On the other side of a thick sheet of Plexiglas sat three clerks. Ruby leaned close to one of the round silver grilles. Next to her, a Hispanic man pressed a torn scrap of paper against the glass and muttered, “I need to talk to this guy.”

  “I have an appointment to see Detective Harriman.” Her breath was coming faster. Was the man next to her an informant? A wanted man?

  After checking a list, the woman took a pen from behind her ear. Ruby was momentarily distracted, thinking about an old episode of 30 Rock she had watched the night before. In one shot, Kenneth had had a pen behind his ear. But when the camera showed him from the front, the pen hadn’t been there.

  The clerk slid the pen and a red and white badge under the Plexiglas. It read VISITOR with a line underneath for a name. Ruby printed her name and then stuck the badge to the front of her jacket. She pushed back the pen, but didn’t know what to do with the backing she had peeled off the tag. The clerk’s blank expression offered no clue. Would it be rude to give it back? Finally she folded it up and put it in her coat pocket. The microphone buzzed and snapped when the clerk pressed a button and spoke to her in a monotone. “Go to the end of the hall and wait by the elevator doors.” Ruby did as she was told.

  The doors slid open, and Detective Harriman stepped out, holding a file folder. He shook her hand, his face unsmiling. His hand was warm and dry, and she hoped her own didn’t provide too much of a contrast.

  “I have some photos I’d like you to look at,” he said as he pressed the button for the elevator so that it opened again. “To see if you recognize any of the people as being in Forest Park on Tuesday.”

  No live lineup. Ruby felt a pinch of disappointment. Oh well. It was enough to just be here. “Is there a particular person you’re looking for?” she asked. “We saw several.”

  “Just tell me if you recognize anyone in the photos.” He sighed. “That’s all you need to do.”

  After they stepped off the elevator, he walked her past fabric-walled cubicles that buzzed with ringing phones and dozens of conversations. They went into an interview room. There wasn’t much to see—blank walls, a square table, and two chairs that didn’t match. One was on wheels and one not. She guessed he would take the one on wheels, and he did. The wheels meant that he could change the space between himself and a suspect in a second, rolling up close to coax a confession in a near whisper.

  Ruby could feel her pulse in her ears. How many people had confessed in this room? What dark deeds had been revealed? She looked around. “Where’s the one-way mirror?”

  Detective Harriman sighed again. “Those are all gone, except for on TV shows. These days it’s just a video feed that can be watched on a monitor.” He laid the file folder between them. “Now, see if you recognize any of these people as someone you saw on the trail on Tuesday. I’m going to show them to you one at a time. They aren’t in any order. With each one, I want you to tell me if you recognize the person. And it’s possible that none of the photos I’m about to show you belongs to anyone you saw. You need to be sure. It’s just as important to protect the innocent as it is to find the guilty.”

  He opened the file folder. Inside was a stack of photos facedown. He turned over the first. A white man, about thirty, with a round face. “Do you recognize this man?”

  Ruby had never seen him bef
ore. She shook her head and then said no, in case this was being recorded.

  The detective turned the photo back over and picked up the next one. Superficially this man bore some resemblance to the first guy—white, around thirty, a full face.

  So that was the type of person they were looking for. Ruby ran through the people they had met while they were looking for Bobby. The guy running with his dogs had been a little older and thinner. The bird-watcher was much older and had white hair and a beard. The homeless guy had darker skin and dreads. The guy on the mountain bike had been younger and had a little goatee. Of course, it was easy enough to change the appearance of your hair or for a man to shave, but your age and the shape of your face would be harder to alter. Still, Ruby thought they must suspect the man with the duffel bag.

  He showed her two more photos, neither of which she recognized. Even though she was half expecting it, Ruby still sucked in her breath when Detective Harriman turned over the fifth photo.

  He froze, looking at her.

  “It’s him. I saw him on the trail. The guy with the blue duffel bag. He told us he hadn’t seen anybody.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Of course I am. I remember those little eyes and the way the bridge of his nose looked fat, like it had been broken once.”

  Detective Harriman grunted. “I still have to show you the rest. We just have to be sure.”

  “You can, but there’s no point. I’m certain.”

  “It’s part of the procedure, Ruby.” He turned over one photo and then another.

  She said no twice and then he was finished. “How about the other people we saw?” she asked. “Have you contacted them, too?”