“Shit! The sat phone!” Geoffrey Burns smacked himself on the head and tore across the field toward the Burnses’ Land Rover.
Karen, her face twisted, yelled, “Hurry, Geoff, hurry!” She turned to the rector. “Digital satellite phone. So we can reach clients or the office no matter where we are.”
Reverend Clare raised her voice. “We’re going to have to walk the woods. I want everyone to spread out at the rear of the field, in front of the stone wall. Leave several feet between yourself and the person to your right or left.” She did not, Hadley noticed, specify “everyone who’s helping search.” Her assumption paid off when the crowd, St. Alban’s people and reenactors alike, began to shuffle into a raggedy line.
Geoff Burns reappeared, panting and clutching a brick-shaped phone that looked like it had been left over from 1987. He thrust it toward the rector. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something, then shut it. “Call nine-one-one,” she said. “We’re going to want the Search and Rescue team and their dog handler. I think she lives in Saratoga.” She shook her head, as if dislodging irrelevancies. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll handle that.” Something caught her eye. “Shoot,” she said, under her breath. “Mr. Hadley.”
Hadley followed her gaze and sure enough, there was Granddad, stumping off to join the search party, as if hiking through the woods in 84-degree heat wasn’t any different from walking the treadmill at his therapist’s.
“Mr. Hadley!” Reverend Clare called, at the same time Hadley yelled, “Granddad!” They jogged over and boxed him in, a woman on either side.
“Granddad, you can’t do this,” Hadley said. “Look at you, you’re already all red and sweaty.” She clapped a hand to his forehead. “You’re overheated. You need to sit in the shade and drink something cold.”
“I ain’t one to sit on my fanny while a little kid’s out there wandering through the woods,” he said, sounding grumpy and short of breath.
Reverend Clare spoke up. “Mr. Hadley, we need someone responsible to stay here and meet the Search and Rescue volunteers. Could you be our coordinator? You’ll have to tell them we’re walking a simple straight-line pattern, and that we don’t have any whistles or signaling devices.”
He ran a palm over his bald head. Peered at both of them. “Well. Okay, Father. If that’s where you need me.”
Hadley shot the rector a look of gratitude. She got her grandfather into a chair by the ice chest, hollered at Hudson and Genny to behave themselves, and then trotted toward the human chain that now stretched to either end of the Muster Field.
Reverend Clare cupped her hands on either side of her mouth and paced down the line. “Walk slowly,” she said, projecting her voice so that it echoed off the gravestones. “Keep another searcher within sight on either side. That way, you’ll be sure you’re not missing anything. If you find the boy, pass the news down the line and return to the Muster Field. The search-and-rescue team is on its way, so if you hear three loud whistles, return to the Muster Field. Do not, under any circumstances, wander off alone! We don’t want two people lost in the woods.”
By the time she finished, she was at the other end of the field from Hadley. A ripple of words flowed through the line. The woman to Hadley’s right said, “Let’s go,” Hadley passed it on to her left, and they all stepped over the low stone wall more or less in unison.
It was no-tech compared to the last search in the woods she had undertaken, but despite the lack of topo maps, flashlights, walkie-talkies, and whistles, it was fundamentally the same—walking in line, a flare of excitement when you saw a human-shaped bump on a log, disappointment and the dawning realization that one piece of forest looks pretty damn much like another. People yelled “Cody!” instead of “No soy del I-C-E,” and they had the benefit of sunshine turning the air beneath the trees green, but otherwise it was that night in April all over. Hadley hoped they would be more successful this time.
The line drew thin as men and women responding to the forest’s size spread apart to cover the maximum amount of acreage. It wavered and drifted out of plumb as differing terrain—open, brushy, thickly forested—forced some to slow and let others pick up speed. Hadley stopped, and halted the woman to her right, when she noticed the man to her left had disappeared. She was about to bring the line to a standstill when he reappeared from behind a cluster of young pines, zipping his fly and looking abashed.
They walked past slim birch and alder, past immense maples and oaks. They parted the heavy black-green spill of hemlock boughs to look underneath, and they peered and poked at fallen and half-rotted eastern pines. The pine needles and humus beneath their feet, the tock-tock-tock of woodpeckers and the whine of mosquitoes, the shaded and broken light—they walked forward and forward and forward, but it never changed. Hadley began to lose her sense of time and distance. She found herself checking again and again to make sure her search partners were well in sight. She had never understood the whole “lost in the woods” thing; she always figured, just walk out the way you walked in. Now, though, if someone had challenged her to find her way back to the Muster Field on her own, she didn’t know if she could have done it. How far north and east did this piece of the Adirondacks go? Two miles? Two hundred?
Another ripple of words, excited, flowed down the line from the right. The calls of “Cody! Where are you?” fell silent as searchers passed the message like a relay torch. Hadley was already feeling a sense of relief—God, she’d be half out of her mind if she was the kid’s mom—when the woman to her right turned toward her and said, “They need Officer Knox at the other end of the line.”
Hadley stopped in her tracks. Officer Knox?
The woman made a shooing gesture. “Pass it on.”
“Uh.” Hadley felt as much of a fraud as she ever did when she said it. “I’m Officer Knox.”
The woman could tell she was a fake, because her eyes bugged out and she said, “You’re a police officer?”
Hadley didn’t bother responding. She called to the guy on her left to move into her place, and took off for the other end of the line. What the hell could they need her for? Her mind pulled a blank. The other searchers, reenactors and St. Alban’s parishioners alike, stared at her as she hiked past them. Hadley Knox, imitation police officer. No one would have questioned Kevin Flynn if he had been here. Maybe she should start pumping iron. Except the last time she’d tried that, getting into shape between Hudson and Genny, she’d started to look way too much like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. That wasn’t going to buy her any cred, either.
The line strung out almost to the breaking point. Past the last remaining searcher, she could see four or five people clustered together. Reverend Clare was among them, head up, looking toward Hadley, but the others were all focused on the ground. Her stomach churned. Oh, my God, please don’t let anything have happened to the baby. The fear sizzled up her spine as she recognized Anne Vining-Ellis, an emergency-room doctor, among the grim-faced group. Hadley forced her sneakered feet into a jog. She didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t stand the waiting to find out any longer.
“What is it?” she asked, before she could see. “What is it?”
They all looked up. Stared at her. Moved aside. Expecting to see a toddler sprawled on the ground, Hadley at first couldn’t make sense of the jumble of dirt and dead leaves and ivory and . . . and . . .
The ivory was bone.
“We’ve found a body,” Reverend Fergusson said.
II
“Another one, huh? Somebody got tired of planting corn?” Doc Scheeler grinned at his own wit, his teeth flashing whitely in his black beard.
Russ pinched the bridge of his nose. “Christ only knows.” He glanced around at the Muster Field, which looked like a cross between a municipal parking lot and a circus: ambulance and morgue wagon, three squad cars and a state K-9 cruiser, canvas tents and portable grills, SUVs and trucks and station wagons and sedans, people dressed for hard work in the woods, for a picnic, for a revolution.
At 4 P.M., the late-spring sun was only just starting to slide into the western sky, and it was still hot enough to make Russ wish it were possible to project authority in shorts.
Scheeler hefted his kit over his shoulder. He was one of those dressed for the woods, in ripstop cargo pants and a hunter-orange vest over his shirt. Russ was thankful Emil Dvorak, their usual pathologist, was passing on most of the criminal cases these days. He couldn’t have handled the trip into the forest with his bum leg. “Let’s go,” Scheeler said.
“I’m going to let Officer Knox take you over,” Russ said. “I’ll meet you there. I need to get updated on the search for the missing boy.”
“I’ll want to talk with whoever found the body. As, I’m sure, will you.”
Russ waved his hand. “Dr. Anne Vining-Ellis is one of them, but I have no idea where she is right now. Probably treating poison ivy and picking deer ticks off people.”
Scheeler nodded.
“Reverend Fergusson is another. She’s—” He scanned the crowd of humans and vehicles, zeroing in on her head, her hair like raw honey falling out of its twist. She was talking with Lyle MacAuley, the Burnses pressed in close, listening, for a change. “There.” He pointed.
“Sharp eyes,” Scheeler said.
Russ grunted. It wasn’t his eyes that made him uncomfortably aware of Clare’s location. His head was still screwed up around his wife’s death, but the rest of his body was quite sure he was a free man again.
“Wait a minute. Reverend Fergusson. Isn’t she the same minister who called in the last John Doe?” Scheeler sounded incredulous.
“I know, I know. If trouble were a winning lottery ticket, she’d be a multimillionaire by now.” Russ was saved from going into Clare’s turbulent history by the arrival of his newest officer. The pathologist wasn’t the sort to do a double-take, but his eyes widened at the sight of Hadley Knox filling out a T-shirt and cutoffs. The reflective MKPD vest she wore didn’t do much to lessen the impact.
“Officer Knox.” Scheeler took her hand. For a second, Russ thought he was going to kiss it. “Miller Kill’s finest.”
“Doc Scheeler.” Russ was beginning to recognize that quashing tone in her voice. “Drink any urine lately?”
“I’ll leave you two to it,” Russ said, keeping his amusement to himself, “and catch up as soon as possible.” He strode off to join MacAuley. And Clare. And, God help him, the Burnses. He was still a good bow shot away when he picked up Geoff Burns’s voice, ragging on Lyle. He thought the listening part was too good to last.
“—put out now!” Burns sounded like he was going to pop an aorta. “He could be halfway to Canada already!”
“Mr. Burns—” Lyle began, then spotted Russ. Whatever he was going to say became, “Here comes the chief now.”
The Burnses turned to face him. Even under these circumstances, Geoff Burns’s bantam-cock rage set him on edge, but the sight of Karen Burns, red-eyed and puffy-faced, reined him in. Whatever he thought of them personally, these two were going through a parent’s worst nightmare. “Geoff,” he said. “Karen.”
“Your deputy says there’s no use calling in an Amber alert for our son,” Burns snarled.
“I explained that an Amber alert is for suspected abductions.” Russ could tell Lyle was trying to remain patient. “Not for a child lost in the woods.”
“Who’s to say he didn’t wander out by the side of the road and get picked up? Who’s to say there’s not some goddamned pedophile lurking in the woods behind the Muster Field? Everybody knows this place is a picnic ground!”
Russ held up a hand. “Lyle,” he said, “radio our Amber alert contact. Give ’em all the information.” Lyle looked at him skeptically. “It can’t hurt. And it’s not like they can say we’ve overtaxed the system. This’ll be the first one we’ve called.” He looked at the Burnses. “It would help if we had a picture, but I suppose that’ll have to wait until we’ve gotten to a fax machine.”
“Wait!” Karen Burns clutched at Lyle’s sleeve. “I have pictures saved on my cell phone. If we drive down to where I can get a signal, I can send them.”
Russ nodded. “Go.” She didn’t need more encouragement than that. Russ turned back toward her husband. “There are two dogs out there right now, and another on the way. John Huggins called me while I was on my way over; he’s already alerted the Plattsburgh and Johnstown search-and-rescue teams. They’re standing by. We’ll find your son for you, Geoff. There’s a limit to how far even the most active two-year-old can hike.”
If he hadn’t fallen into a crevasse or found a mountain creek. Russ wasn’t going to mention any of those possibilities to a father who appeared to be one word away from a complete meltdown. Instead, he nodded to the woman who had been standing behind the Burnses. “Reverend Fergusson.” Through sheer willpower, he managed to not picture her naked.
“Chief Van Alstyne.” Her greeting was directed to a point two inches below his chin.
“Oh, for God’s sake, just call each other by your first names,” Burns exploded. “It’s not like everybody doesn’t know about you two already.”
“Geoff,” Clare said, “it looks like another group is ready to head out.” She gestured with her chin to where a gaggle of volunteers had been teamed with one of Huggins’s men. “Maybe you should join them. You’ll feel better if you’re doing something.”
Amazingly, Burns took her suggestion. He stomped away like a pint-sized Godzilla looking for Tokyo.
“Sorry about that,” she said, still talking to Russ’s Adam’s apple. “He’s very emotional right now.”
“Mmm.” Apparently, they weren’t going to discuss if what Burns said was true or not. He was happy to take a pass. “I’d like you to take me to the body.”
That earned him an actual look in the eye. “I should help with one of the search teams.”
“It won’t take long. I’d like to hear your impressions. Please?”
She looked down at her Keds for a moment. “Okay.” She wheeled and headed for the stone wall separating the field from the forest.
“I do a pretty good Scarlett O’Hara,” she said.
“Not that kind of impression.” He stepped over the wall. “Did you find him?”
“What makes you think it’s a him?”
“Just a habit of speech. Saying it always sounds—I dunno, disrespectful.” The temperature decreased beneath the forest cover, an advantage balanced by the increase in mosquitoes.
“One of my parishioners, Tim Garrettson, was near the right—I mean, near the northeastern end of the line. He stumbled over him.” She swatted a mosquito on her arm. “Literally.”
“Damn.”
“He backpedaled right quick, as you can imagine. Fortunately, Dr. Anne was close by. She and I came over, and as soon as I saw what it was”—she shot him a glance—“saw him, I sent for Hadley Knox. We kept everyone else away.”
“Good girl.”
She smiled one-sidedly.
His uniform blouse—the same short-sleeved one he had worn to the rectory two nights ago—had already started sticking to the middle of his back. He found his eyes drifting up to the branches of the trees. Looking for snipers. He shook his head and forced himself to keep his gaze close to the ground. “Tell me what you noticed,” he said.
“I think he had been buried.”
He stepped over a moldering log. “Buried? Why?”
“He was just upslope of a big old pine that had toppled over. You know how they do sometimes, roots and all?”
He nodded.
“It looked like when the roots went, a portion of the top-soil slid into the hole. That’s why Tim had gone around to take a look at it; he thought Cody might have gotten in there. Instead, what he got was a partially uncovered body—well, what was left of it.”
“The description I got was ‘partially skeletonized.’ ”
“That was Dr. Anne. She said she’s no expert, but she thought it must have been in the ground since maybe las
t fall.” She hmmed in consideration. “Hunting season.”
He found himself scanning the high cover for a Dragonov SVD-63. There aren’t any snipers in these woods. Snap out of it. He focused on what Clare was saying. “Somebody got mad at their brother-in-law and took the opportunity to settle his hash during deer season? Maybe.”
“You don’t sound very convinced.”
He held a pair of birch saplings aside and let her past. “We don’t have any outstanding missing persons that might support that theory. Lyle got records back from the whole county. There’s nothing but the usual assortment of troubled teens and deadbeat dads skipping out on child support.”
“There are people who can disappear without setting off any alarms. A homeless old or mentally ill person. Someone who’s easy pickings for a predator.”
“Don’t go there.”
“Go where?” She stepped wrong and skidded in the loose, dry pine needles. He caught her arm and steadied her.
“We do not have a predatory killer in Washington County. Don’t even start thinking it.”
“Well, it would certainly explain—”
“No. It wouldn’t.” He heard a noise. Faint. Far away. Shouting? “Did you hear that?”
She stopped beside a barrel-trunked oak. Cocked her head. When the radio at his belt squawked, it startled them both. He unhooked the mic.
“Van Alstyne here,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Huggins here,” the voice said. “We found him.”
“Oh, thank God,” Clare said. “Thank God.”
Russ found the heat and humidity and unwelcome memories were suddenly much less oppressive. “That’s good news,” he said. “Where was he?”
“Looks like he tried to climb a maple and got stuck in the crotch. He was sittin’ in there suckin’ his thumb when the dog caught his scent. We’re taking him back to the Muster Field now.”
“Thank your dog handler for us. She’s just made a lot of people real happy.”
“Roger that. Over.”
Russ grinned at Clare. “Damn, I like a happy ending for a change.”